Three months ago, a group of lawyers in Aotearoa New Zealand called for a first-of-its-kind inquiry into New Zealand spy agencies over whether they have been helping Israel’s war in Gaza.

In a letter to the chief of intelligence and security (IGIS) on 12 September 2024, three lawyers argued that the country was in danger of aiding international war crimes.

Inspector-General Brendan Horsley, who had previously indicated he would look into conflict-related spying this year, confirmed he would consider the request.

• READ MORE: Behind settler colonial NZ’s paranoia about dissident ‘persons of interest’
• Other SIS security reports

At least one of the lawyers was confident of a positive response.

“I’m actually very optimistic,” noted University of Auckland associate professor Treasa Dunworth in a media interview about their argument that New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) and Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) intelligence might be making its way to Israel via the US, “because our request is very, detailed, backed up with credible evidence, [and] is very careful.”

But she got a disappointing result. A month later, on October 9 — just seven weeks before the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Foreign Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity — Inspector-General Horsley ruled out an inquiry at this time.

He said he didn’t want to “stop-the-clock” and tie up his office’s meagre resources while armed conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine were currently “active and dynamic”.

Rapid deterioration
Yet rapidly the 15-month Israeli war has deteriorated since then with Israel’s main backer President-elect Donald Trump due to take office later this month on January 10.
As the humanitarian situation in Gaza worsens with intensified attacks on hospitals and civilians, a breakdown of law and order at the border, and more than 50 complaints filed against Israel soldiers for war crimes in multiple countries, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has urged medical professionals worldwide to sever all ties with the pariah state.

I urge medical professionals worldwide to pursue the severance of all ties with Israel as a concrete way to forcefully denounce Israel’s full destruction of the Palestinian healthcare system in Gaza, a critical tool of its ongoing genocide.#FreeDrHussanAbuSafiya https://t.co/qzZ7CqufI6

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) December 30, 2024

Ironically, the New Zealand intelligence “debate” has coincided with the publication of a new book that has debunked the view that the SIS and GCSB have been working in the interests of New Zealand. The reality, argues social justice movement historian and activist Maire Leadbeater in The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of the State Surveillance in Aotearoa/New Zealand is that these agencies (now combined) have been working in the interests of the so-called “Five Eyes” partners, including the United States.

Her essential argument in this robust and comprehensive 427-page book is that New Zealand’s state surveillance has been part of a structure of state control that “serves to undermine movements for social change and marginalise or punish those who challenge the established order. It had a deeply destructive impact on democracy.”

As she states, her primary focus is on the work of New Zealand’s main intelligence agencies, the SIS and the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) “and their forerunners, the political police”.

The author explains that she is not concerned with the “socially useful work of the contemporary police in the detection of criminal activity, including politically motivated crime”. She notes also that unlike the domestic spies, police detection work is subject to detailed warrants, there is due process over arrests and the process is open to public scrutiny.

Leadbeater points out that while New Zealand experience with terrorism has been limited, neither of the country’s two main intelligence agencies were much help in investigating the three notorious examples — the unsolved 1984 Wellington Trades Hall bombing that killed one, the 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace environmental flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland that also killed one (but the casualties could easily have been higher), and the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings that murdered 51.

The regular police were the key investigators in all three cases.

Also, there is the failure of the SIS to discover Mossad agents operating in NZ on fake passports.

Working for ‘Five Eyes’ interests
Instead of working for the benefit of New Zealand, the intelligence agencies were set up to work closely with the country’s traditional allies and the so-called “Five Eyes” network — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

An example of this was Algerian professor and parliamentarian Ahmed Zaoui who arrived in New Zealand in 2002 as an asylum seeker after a military coup against the elected government in his home country. Within nine days of arriving, his confidentiality was breached and he was falsely branded by The New Zealand Herald as an “international terrorism suspect”.

He was jailed for two years without charge (part of that time held in solitary confinement) because of an SIS-imposed National Security Risk certificate and this could have have led to “deportation of this honourable man” but for the tireless work of his lawyers and a well-informed public campaign, as told by Leadbeater in this book, and also by journalist Selwyn Manning in his 2004 book I Almost Forgot about the Moon: The Disinformation Campaign Against Ahmed Zaoui.

Set free and granted asylum, he later became a New Zealand citizen in 2014. (However, on a visit to Algeria in 2023 he was arrested at gunpoint in a house in Médéa and charged with “subversion”).

Leadbeater says a strong case could be made that New Zealand’s democracy “would be stronger and more viable without the repressive laws that currently support the secretive operations of the SIS and the GCSB”. The author laments that the resources and focus of the intelligence agencies have focused too much, and wastefully, on ordinary people who are perceived to be “dissenters”.

“Dissent is the lifeblood of democracy but SIS operations targeted many of our brightest and best, damaging their personal and professional lives in the process,” Leadbeater says.

Among those who have been targeted have been the author herself, and others in her “left-wing family milieu” — including her late brother longtime Green Party foreign affairs spokesperson Keith Locke, as well as her parents Elsie and Jack, originally Communist Party activists prior to 1956.

The core of the book is based on primary sources, including declassified police records held in the National Archives and the declassified records of the SIS which have been released to individual activists – including her and she discovered she had been spied on since the age of 10 due to state paranoia.

At the launch of her book in Auckland last November, guest speaker and retired First Union general secretary Robert Reid — whose file also features in the book — said what a fitting way the narrative begins by outlining the important role the Locke family have played in Aotearoa over the many years.

The final chapter is devoted to another “Person of interest: Keith Locke” – “Maire’s much-loved friend and comrade.”

“In between these pages is a treasure trove of commentary and stories of the development of the surveillance state in the settler colony of NZ and the impact that this has had on the lives of ordinary — no, extra-ordinary — people within this country,” Reid said.

“The book could almost be described as a political romp from the settler colonisation of New Zealand through the growth of the workers movement and socialist and communist ideology from the late 1800s until today.”

Surveillance stories and files
Among others whose surveillance stories and files have been featured are trade unionist and former Socialist Action League activist Mike Treen; Halt All Racist Tours founder Trevor Richards; economics lecturer Dr Wolfgang Rosenberg’s sons George and Bill; Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) organiser Murray Horton; antiwar activist and Peace Movement research Owen Wilkes; investigative journalist Nicky Hager; Dr Bill Sutch, who was tried and acquitted on a charge laid under the Official Secrets Act in 1975; and internet entrepreneur and political activist Kim Dotcom.

State paranoia in New Zealand was driven by issues of peace, anti-conscription, anti-nuclear, decolonisation, unemployed workers and left trade unionism and socialist and communist thought.

Leadbeater reflects that she had never accepted that “anyone in my family ever threatened state security. Moreover, the solidarity, antinuclear and anti-apartheid organisations that I took part in should not have been spied on. Such groups were and are a vital part of a healthy democracy.”

At one stage when many activists were seeking copies of their surveillance files in the mid-2000s through OIA requests or later under the Privacy Act, I also applied due to my association with several of the protagonists in this book and my involvement as a writer on decolonisation and environmental justice issues.

I merely received a “neither confirm or deny” form letter on the existence of a file, and never bothered to reapply later when information became more readily available.

But I have had my own brushes with surveillance and threatened arrest as a journalist in global settings such as New Caledonia, including when I was detained by soldiers in January 1987 for taking photographs of French military camps for a planned report about the systematic intimidation of pro-independence Kanak villagers.

This was perfectly legal, of course, and the attempt by authorities to silence me did not work; my articles appeared on the front page of the New Zealand Sunday Times the following weekend and featured on the cover of Fiji’s Islands Business news magazine.

Watched become the watchers
The structure of The Enemy Within is in three parts. As the author explains, the first part focuses on the period from 920 to the end of the First World War, and the second on the impact of the Cold War and the Western anti-communist hysteria between 1945 and 1955.

The final part covers the period from 1955 to the present, when the intelligence and security services have been under greater public scrutiny and faced campaigns for their reform or abolition.

As Leadbeater notes, “the watched, to some extent, have become the watchers”.

Because of my Asia-Pacific and decolonisation interests, I found a chapter on “colonial repression in Samoa” and the Black Saturday massacre of the Mau resistance of particular interest and a shameful stain on NZ history.

As Leadbeater notes, it was an “unexpected find in the Archives New Zealand” to stumble across a record of the surveillance of the “citizens who mounted an opposition to the New Zealand government’s colonial rule in Samoa”.

She pays tribute to the “vibrant solidarity movement” in the late 1920s and early 1930s, inspired by the peaceful Mau movement and its motto “Samoa mo Samoa” — Samoa for the Samoans — in their resistance to New Zealand’s colonial project.

This solidarity movement was in the face of a “prevailing attitude of white settlement” and its leaders were influenced by the Parihaka resistance of the 1880s.

Leadbeater is critical of New Zealand media, such as The New Zealand Herald, for siding with the colonial establishment and becoming “positively hostile to the Mau movement”.

New Zealand administrators under the League of Mandate to govern Samoa following German rule were arrogant and regarded Samoans as “inferior” and were “aghast” at Samoan and European leaders collaborating in resistance.

Black Saturday massacre
On 28 December 1929, what became dubbed the “Black Saturday massacre” happened in Apia. A peaceful Mau procession marches to the Apia wharf to welcome home exiled trader Alfred Smyth.

Police tried to arrest the Mau secretary, Mata’ūtia Karaunu, but the marchers protected him. More police were despatched to “assert colonial authority”, shots were fired at the crowd and in the upheaval a police constable was clubbed to death.

A police sergeant the fired a Lewis machine gun from the police station over the heads of the crowd, while other police fired directly into the crowd with their rifles.

Paramount chief Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III, dressed in white and calling for peace, was mortally wounded and at least eight other marchers were also killed. The massacre was chronicled in journalist Michael Field’s books Mau and later Black Saturday: New Zealand’s Tragic Blunders in Samoa.

Protests followed and the Mau Movement was declared a “seditious organisation” and the wearing of Mau outfits or badges became illegal.

A crackdown ensued on Mau activists with heavy surveillance and harassment and in New Zealand public figures and community leaders called for an “independent inquiry into Samoan affairs”.

Eventually, the Labour Party victory in the 1935 elections changed the dynamic and the following year the Mau was recognised as a legitimate political movement.

After the Second World War, New Zealand became committed to self-government in Western Samoa with indigenous custom and tradition “as an important foundation”. However, full independence did not come until 1962.

Four decades later, in 2002, Prime Minister Helen Clark formally apologised to the people of Samoa for the “inept and incompetent early administration of Samoa by New Zealand”.

She cited officials allowing the “influenza” ship Talune to dock in Apia in 1918, and the Black Saturday massacre as key examples of this incompetence.

However, Leadbeater notes that the “saga of surveillance and sedition charges” outlined in her book could well be added to the list. She adds that Samoans remember the Mau Movement and its martyrs with “pride and gratitude”.

“For New Zealanders, this chapter in our colonial history is one of shame that should be far better known and understood. The New Zealand Samoa Defence League was ahead of its time, and thankfully so.”

Leadbeater notes in her book that the SIS budget alone in 2021 was about $100 million with about 400 staff. Yet the intelligence services have been spending this sport of money for more than a century looking for “subversives and terrorists” — but in the wrong places.

This book is an excellent tribute to the many activists and dissidents who have had their lives disrupted and hounded by state spies, and is essential reading for all those committed to democracy.

Following her section on more contemporary events and massive surveillance failures and wrongs, such as the 2007 Tūhoe raids, Leadbeater calls for a massive rethink on New Zealand’s approach to security.

“It is time to leave crime, including terrorist crime, to the country’s police and court system, with their built-in accountability procedures,” she concludes.

“It is time for the state to stop spying on society’s critics.”

• The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of State Surveillance in Aotearoa/New Zealand, by Maire Leadbeater. Potton & Burton, 2024. 427 pages.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The Adani group chairperson, once Asia’s richest businessman, was named alongside his nephew Sagar R Adani, the executive director of the group’s renewables arm Adani Green Energy Ltd (AGEL) and Vneet S. Jaain, managing director and CEO of AGEL for wire and securities fraud and allegedly agreeing to pay bribes worth $250 million to Indian government officials to secure solar energy deals. American prosecutors stepped in because the ports-to-power conglomerate had tried to obtain financing from US investors for their renewable energy projects (including those for which bribes were paid) based on reportedly false and misleading statements about the firm’s anti-corruption and anti-bribery efforts.

This is not the first time that the Adani group’s allegedly shady dealings have come to light. In January last year, US-based short seller Hindenburg Research had published a report accusing the group of accounting irregularities, round-tripping of funds and stock-price manipulation, wiping off over $150 billion in the group’s market value.

At that time, Alt News had done a deep dive into how the news was reported by major Indian news outlets and found a serious gap in publication and reportage on the issue. In this report, we attempt a similar analysis of how (and to what extent) several mainstream media outlets covered the news.

There are two reasons why such analyses are crucial. One, the Adani group is a massive enterprise with presence across most sectors including construction, ports, energy, airport infrastructure, FMCG, media and commodities. So, the reporting of such allegations can result in a major plunge in stock prices and lead to losses for investors and the company as it is an index heavyweight. For instance, the latest news sent stocks of Adani group’s flagship firm Adani Enterprises falling over 20% in two days. On November 21, shares of Adani Green opened nearly 20% down and by November 27 they had hit a 52-week low. Conversely, when such major incidents are underplayed or underreported by the media, the magnitude of losses can be checked. Two, Adani has majority stakes in three major news outlets, leaving one wondering about its role in shaping the country’s perception of major news events. Opposition leaders and several others have also questioned the alleged closeness between the business tycoon and the country’s Prime Minister, which they believe is the reason the group has been in the clear, from a regulatory and media scrutiny standpoint, despite many red flags.

How The News Unfolded In The Digital Sphere

The US Securities and Exchange Committee’s press release on the indictment was published on its website at around 2:18 hours IST on November 21. It is possible that the SEC statement and the ruling was issued to media houses slightly ahead of being made publicly available. The following morning, just around the time Indian markets began trading, the Adani group notified stock exchanges that it was cancelling a proposed bond offering considering the latest US ruling. Then by afternoon, it issued a statement denying the charges.

“The allegations made by the US Department of Justice and the US Securities and Exchange Commission against directors of Adani Green are baseless and denied. As stated by the US Department of Justice itself, ‘the charges in the indictment are allegations and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.’ All possible legal recourse will be sought,” the spokesperson’s statement read.

While the indictment and the following developments were likely too late for Indian print media to carry in their newspapers the following day, let’s look at how digital media fared in their reporting of the matter.

The earliest post on X (formerly Twitter) on the ruling was by Beijing-headquartered China Global Television Network (CGTN) Europe at 2:14 hours IST on November 21 (or 20:44 hours GMT, November 20). Most major international news outlets and agencies such as CNBC, Bloomberg, The Guardian, and Reuters caught up soon. Wires were issued, reports quickly written up and posts on X followed suit.

BREAKING: Gautam Adani, the chair of India’s Adani Group and one of the world’s richest people, has been indicted in New York federal court with other defendants in connection with an alleged multi-billion-dollar fraud scheme, authorities said Wednesdayhttps://t.co/A5dv5MU1hd

— Dave Agar (@dave1agar) November 20, 2024

Bloomberg and Reuters had their reports and X updates published within the first half and hour of the breaking of the news.

Meanwhile, on X, there was hardly any mention of this by most major news outlets until morning. At 5:54 hours IST on November 21, X user Sanjay Dutt (@thesanjaydutt) posted about the Adani indictment, sharing a report by The Hindu on it.

On looking at the HTML code for the article, Alt News was able to determine that The Hindu had published the news by around 3:00 hours IST, roughly an hour after the SEC made it public.

Bengaluru-based news Deccan Herald’s report was up on its site at 2:29 am. Similarly, Telangana Today published its report at 4:26 hours IST. The daily’s editor Srinivas Reddy K shared it on X at 4:31 am. Subsequently, The Times of India published their report at 6:24 hours IST and Hindustan Times at 8:12 hours IST.

Business publications, such as Moneycontrol—part of Reliance-owned Network18—and Mint published the news at 6:44 hours IST and 10:39 hours IST, respectively.

India Today, News18, and Zee News shared the latest developments on X around 8:30 hours IST on November 21, while Times Now and its Hindi counterpart Times Now Navbharat followed at 9:45 hours IST and 11:15 hours IST, respectively. Among news outlets Aaj Tak, Republic, ABP News and India TV, the issue was largely underplayed. The first post on X from Aaj Tak’s handle was on the dip in Adani stocks. An hour after this, it shared a post detailing Adani group’s cancellation of its upcoming bond issuance. Likewise, ABP News posted about Adani stocks plunging at 10:30 hours IST and got into the reasons for this plunge two hours later.

The first post from Republic’s official X account on the incident was at 14:25 hours IST, an hour after the business group issued a statement denying the charges.

Quiet since the news broke, news channel NDTV posted its first report on the matter only at 14:39 hours IST, citing the group’s official statement denying the claims. Meanwhile, the first X post from the channel’s business news arm, NDTV profit, was at 11:07 hours, IST but this too was centered around AGEL’s decision to cancel its bond issuance following the indictment. The report only briefly mentions the charges levelled against the group in the US.

It’s important to mention here that the Adani group wrested control of NDTV from Prannoy Roy and Radhika Roy in December 2022. Since then, the channel has undergone several changes with many key faces including news presenters, editors and reporters quitting. This was the group’s second major acquisition after buying 49% stake in Quintillion Media, which operates the news outlet BQ Prime that was previously Bloomberg Quint, in May 2022.

Among Indian wire agencies Asian News International (ANI), Press Trust of India (PTI) and Indo-Asian News Service (IANS)—that many Indian news organisations subscribe to and are dependent on for news reports—we noticed an interesting pattern. While PTI’s wire went out around 4:30 am on November 21, their first post on X  was not until 9:11 hours IST even though its X handle was active from 7:16 hours IST that day. Posts from its account were mostly reshares of tweets posted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi about his visits to other countries and pollution in Delhi. Below are a few instances.

Similarly, news agency ANI posted its first tweet on this only at 9:48 hours IST, after stock markets opened, despite their website having the news report on the issue by 7:00 hours IST. ANI’s X handle was active when the news broke. Following are a screenshots of the some of the posts from ANI’s handle even as X was abuzz with the news of the indictment.

ANI’s first X post on the issue was not the news of the indictment but instead the Adani group’s letter to Indian bourses notifying them about the cancellation of “proposed USD denominated bond offerings” in the view of the allegations levelled against the conglomerate. It did not even post its own report (available on its website) on X. On checking the website of the National Stock Exchange, we found that Adani’s clarification on the bond offerings was sent to the exchanges at 9:29 hours IST.

US prosecutors charge Gautam Adani and others in alleged Solar Energy contract bribery case

Adani Green says, “The United States Department of Justice and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission have issued a criminal indictment and brought a civil complaint,… pic.twitter.com/uoBDJPuhOE

— ANI (@ANI) November 21, 2024

On November 21, eleven hours after the news broke, the Adani group released a statement on its official X page, labelling the allegations “baseless”.

Know more: https://t.co/uNYlCaBbtk pic.twitter.com/fQ4wdJNa9d

— Adani Group (@AdaniOnline) November 21, 2024

The first report by IANS was the group’s denial of the charges. Note that the Adani group has a controlling stake in IANS too. It had acquired an over 50% stake in December 2023 and upped this in January through its subsidiary AMG Media Networks.

Coming to state-sponsored DD News. Its first post on X was at 5.41 hours IST, a few hours after the statement from the Adani group was released.

#5KiPanchayat | Videshi Toolkit
Thiraktey Rahul!

Billionaire #GautamAdani indicted in #UnitedStates over role in alleged bribery, fraud.#RahulGandhi demands arrest of Gautam Adani.

Watch experts discuss in ‘5 Ki Panchayat’ with @RheemaParashar.

Watch Here:… pic.twitter.com/C3tFstaNXf

— DD News (@DDNewslive) November 21, 2024

Apart from their own websites, news organisations do rely a fair bit on social media platforms, especially X, to amplify and disseminate important news updates quickly. On these platforms as well as their websites, publications compete over speed, accuracy and drawing more readers as a result of putting out information first. The contents and timing of their posts are thus crucial when the matter is of this nature, which is why such delays raise concerns.

Indian Prime Time Television

Most mainstream TV channels, including India Today and its Hindi counterpart Aaj Tak, featured the news of the Adani indictment in their prime-time segments (between 20:00 and 23:00 hours). But how some of these debates actually unfolded deserves a closer look.

News18’s debates ‘Goonj’ and ‘Aar Paar’ hosted by Rubika Liyaqat or Amish Devgan did not carry the developments but in the segment ‘Desh Nahi Jhukne Denge‘ hosted by Aman Chopra, the case was mentioned as part of the news round-up for the day. The channel, however, chose to focus on how the allegations of bribery against Adani, which Congress and its leader Rahul Gandhi was trying to draw attention to would backfire against the Opposition. That’s because many of the states mentioned in the indictment where the bribery allegedly took place were governed by Congress or its allies. Chopra added that this was yet another attempt by Rahul Gandhi to tarnish Prime Minister Modi’s image before ending the section with tributes to Modi and his international presence.

In Republic’s ‘Debate With Arnab’ segment, host Arnab Goswami’s monologue at the beginning of the show  goes on about how the indictment by an American court is proof that the US is “very insecure” about India owing to the strength of “the Indian infrastructure machine“. He also brings up conspiracy theories by “Deep State” actors who are keen on disrupting the success of the Adani group. The debate was largely centered on the conspiracy.

India TV’s Rajat Sharma briefly covered the ruling in his prime-time segment ‘Aaj Ki Baat’. Questioning the timing of the indictment, he wondered aloud whether it was a coincidence or larger conspiracy as the Hindenburg report released in 2023 was just before a Parliament session and had similarly resulted in Adani stocks crashing. He says that Rahul Gandhi’s attempt to find a Modi factor in it has failed because the states mentioned in the indictment were governed by Congress and allies.

A similar argument on the rogue timing of the indictment also featured in DD News‘ debate ‘5 Ki Panchayat’. Show host Reema Parashar, in her opening presentation, says how each time just before the start of a Parliament session, an agenda arises or is deliberately introduced to cause disruptions in the House proceedings to show the government in poor light.

ABP News’ prime-time programme ‘Mahadangal’ hosted by Chitra Tripathi, discusses Gandhi wanting to bring a George Soros-type model to the Indian market and is likely targeting Gautam Adani for his role in the fast-growing infrastructure of India. George Soros, a Hungarian-American investor and founder of the Open Society Foundations, is involved in funding democracy and human rights initiatives, and has been accused of influencing global politics through these. Soros has also been a critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In February 2023, he also criticised Adani after the Hindenburg report was published. This combined with Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s jibes against the PM and his comments on the closeness between Modi and Adani has led the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government to link Gandhi with Soros. The BJP has also accused the Congress leader of attempting to destabilise the Indian government.

Rahul Gandhi was also the centre of debates on Times Now’s Nation Wants To Know and India Upfront. The channel’s Hindi counterpart, Times Now Navbharat, discussed the US ruling in its show Sawal Public Ka hosted by Navika Kumar. But the segment was titled “As the Parliament session approaches… has the ‘toolkit gang’ become active again?” Needless to say, the focus was on the leader than the gravity of the charges and what it could mean for the conglomerate. .

A Gap in Reportage?

Hours after the indictment news was made public, Kenyan President Willian Ruto announced the cancellation of deals with the Adani group. Kenya had agreed to hand over control of a key airport to the conglomerate for a 30-year lease in exchange for a new runway and upgrading the passenger terminal there. The country also has several energy deals with the Adani group.

Ruto said that the decision was made based on the new information provided by investigative agencies and partner nations. The news of Kenya cancelling the deals, worth over $2.5 billion, broke around 18:00 hours IST on November 21. However, this crucial information was not part of majority of the prime-time segments of TV news channels. Times Now Navbharat, Times Now, India TV, ABP and DD News did not mention the development at all in their prime-time debates while Republic showed a clip of the Kenyan President cancelling the Adani deals without any commentary.

India ranks 159 on the Press Freedom Index. Partisan coverage of many events has been a rising concern. With some of the largest businesses backing news outlets and their alleged closeness to the governing regime, honest and unbiased journalism and reportage face multiple threats. The media analysis of the Adani indictment is just one case in point.

The post How Indian media reported Adani group’s US indictment appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Oishani Bhattacharya.

On Thursday, federal prosecutors announced they are charging New York City Mayor Eric Adams for a bribery and wire fraud scheme spanning nearly a decade. Adams allegedly accepted illegal campaign contributions from corporations and foreign donors, including the Turkish government. Adams is accused of manipulating regulators for the Turkish Consulate and not recognizing the Armenian genocide in exchange for campaign donations and lavish gifts. According to prosecutors, “the mayor knew, accepted and actively sought illegal donations from foreign sources,” says George Joseph, an investigative reporter for The Guardian. “This is a generational-level scandal for New York City.” The unsealed indictment is raising pressure on the mayor to resign. “It is impossible for the mayor to perform his duties,” says Zohran Mamdani, a New York state assemblymember, who may himself run for mayor. “The same mayor who is now being alleged to have received over $100,000 in bribes was just last week praising New York police officers for opening fire on four New Yorkers at a subway station over the crime of stealing $2.90 of a subway fare.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

• Special counsel Jack Smith filed a narrowed indictment against Donald Trump in his 2020 election case after Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.
• President Joe Biden’s top Middle East adviser held talks in Doha with senior Qatari leaders today, focusing on efforts to finalize a cease-fire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas.
• The UN’s top weather agency issued a stark warning this week about climate change endangering lives and livelihoods in South Pacific island nations.
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed senior Biden administration officials pressured Facebook to censor certain COVID-19 content during the pandemic.
• California’s ‘Closing the Digital Divide’ task force discussed proposed legislation that could soon ban students from using phones and social media in the state’s schools.

The post Special counsel Jack Smith files narrowed indictment against Donald Trump in 2020 election case – August 27, 2024 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, issued the following statement in response:

“New Hampshire was able to indict Kramer because the robocalls aimed to deter people from voting. Almost every state makes it illegal to undertake fraudulent efforts to deceive people into not voting. New Hampshire also makes it illegal to impersonate a candidate on a telephone call.

“However, most political deepfakes misrepresenting candidates and aiming to defraud voters will not run afoul of existing law – unless lawmakers and regulators act. Eighteen states and counting have passed laws to prevent political deepfakes. Congress is moving slowly on the issue, with no guarantee of action. And the Federal Election Commission is, at best, slow walking the issue.

“The New Hampshire deepfake robocall should have been a wakeup call to policymakers across the country. Most hit the snooze button, but today’s indictment is the alarm sounding again: The American people need you to act now to prevent deepfake chaos in November. No one benefits from deepfake chaos and the problem is preventable. If policymakers fail to act, we should expect chaos to ensue.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1977, Emanuel was one of a handful of Native students at school. He spent summers visiting family in Robeson County, North Carolina, the cultural center of the Lumbee Tribe, or People of the Dark Water, where he played outside with other children, occasionally exploring a nearby swamp, one of the many lush waterways that slowly wind through the region, with a cousin. Today, Emanuel visits those swamps to conduct research. He describes them with an abiding, sometimes poetic affection, such as one spring day when he stands calf-deep in swamp water, admiring white dogwood flowers floating on the dark surface as tadpoles dart underneath. 

But that affection lives with tension. Emanuel describes trying to collect “reeking” floodwater samples from a ditch after 2018’s Hurricane Florence. In Emanuel’s retelling, a nearby landowner — a white farmer who uses poultry waste as fertilizer — threatens to shoot Emanuel. The sampling, the man believes, would threaten his livelihood, which is wrapped up in North Carolina’s extractive animal farming industry — a system of giant, polluting “concentrated animal feed operations” overwhelmingly owned and operated by white people, and exposing mainly racial minorities to dirty air and water. They are a sharp contrast to the small backyard farms and truck crops grown by Emanuel’s aunties and uncles back in Robeson County a generation ago. As the man holds his gun and lectures about environmental monitoring, Emanuel reflects silently that they are standing on his ancestors’ land. Ever the researcher, he later finds deed books from around the Revolutionary War showing Emanuels once owned more than a hundred acres of land in the vicinity. Still, he holds a wry sympathy for the man, who, he notes, is worried that environmental data will jeopardize his way of life in a place his family has lived for generations. 

Eastern North Carolina is a landscape of sandy fields interwoven with lush riverways and swamplands, shaded by knobby-kneed bald cypress trees and soaked with gently-moving waterways the deep brown of “richly steeped tea,” Emanuel writes. In addition to water, the region oozes history: It includes Warren County, known as the birthplace of the environmental justice movement, where local and national civil rights leaders, protesting North Carolina’s decision to dump toxic, PCB-laden soil in a new landfill in a predominantly-Black community, coined the term “environmental racism.” It’s also the mythological birthplace of English colonialism, Roanoke Island. On the Swamp draws a through line from early colonization of the continent to ongoing fights against environmental racism and for climate justice, with detailed stops along the way: Emanuel’s meticulous research illustrates how the white supremacism that settlers used to justify colonialism still harms marginalized communities — both directly, through polluting industries, and indirectly, through climate change — today. 

With convoluted waterways accessible only by small boats, and hidden hillocks of high ground where people could camp and grow crops, the swamplands of eastern North Carolina protected Emanuel’s ancestors, along with many other Indigenous peoples, from genocide and enslavement by settlers. Today, with climate change alternately drying out swamplands or flooding them with polluted water from swine and poultry operations, it’s the swamps that need protection, both as a geographic place, and an idea of home. The Lumbee nation is the largest Indigenous nation in the eastern United States, but because the Lumbee Tribe gained only limited federal recognition during the 1950s Termination Era, its sovereignty is still challenged by the federal government and other Indigenous nations. Today, federal and state governments have no legal obligation to consult with the Lumbee Tribe when permitting industry or development, although the federal government does with Indigenous nations that have full federal recognition, and many industrial projects get built in Robeson County. 

In writing that’s both affectionate and candid, On the Swamp is a warning about, and a celebration of, eastern North Carolina. Though the region seems besieged by environmental threats, Indigenous nations including the Lumbee are fighting for anticolonial climate justice. 

Grist recently spoke with Emanuel about On the Swamp.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

Q. What motivated you to write this book? 

A. Many years ago, I thought that I wanted to write a feel-good book about celebrating the Lumbee River and the Lumbee Tribe’s connection with it, and talking about all the reasons why it’s beautiful, and amazing, and important to us. So I thought that I would write this essentially nature story, right? But as my work evolved, and as I started thinking more critically about what I actually should be writing, I realized that I couldn’t tell that love story about the river without talking about difficult issues around pollution, climate change, and sustainability, and broader themes of environmental justice and Indigenous rights. 

Q. Could you tell me about your connection to place?

A. I have a relationship to Robeson County that’s complicated by the fact that my family lived in Charlotte, and I went to school in Charlotte, and we went to church in Charlotte. But two weekends every month, and every major holiday, we were in Robeson County. And so I’m an insider, but I’m also not an insider. I’ve got a different lens through which I look at Robeson County because of my urban upbringing, but it doesn’t diminish the love that I have for that place, and it doesn’t keep me from calling it my home. I’ve always called it home. Charlotte was the place where we stayed. And Robeson County was home. 

I can’t see the Lumbee River without thinking about the fact that it is physically integrating all of these different landscapes that I care about, [and] a truly beautiful place. 

Q. In 2020, after years of protests and legal battles, Dominion Energy and Duke Energy canceled the Atlantic Coast pipeline, which would have carried natural gas 600 miles from West Virginia to Robeson County. In On the Swamp, you note that a quarter of Native Americans in North Carolina lived along the proposed route of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. What was the meaning of the Atlantic Coast pipeline project for Lumbee people?

A. That was an issue very few Lumbee people paid attention to, until they saw the broader context to the project and realized that such an outsized portion of the people who would be affected by the construction and operation of that pipeline were not only Native American, but were specifically Lumbee. I think that’s what generated a lot of outrage, because for better or for worse, we’re used to being treated like a sacrifice zone. 

The Atlantic Coast pipeline gave us an easy way to zoom out and ask questions like, “OK, who is going to be affected by this project? Who’s making money off of this project?”

It was also a way to engage with larger questions about things like energy policy in the face of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. [It] brought up philosophical questions of how we feel about the continued use of fossil fuels and the investment in brand new fossil fuel infrastructure that’s going to last 30, 40, or 50 years, at a time when everybody knows we shouldn’t be doing that. 

Q. At the end of the day, the Atlantic Coast pipeline didn’t happen. What do you think is the main reason?

A. The collective resistance of all of these organizations — tribal nations, committed individuals, grassroots organizations — was enough to stall this project, until the developers realized that they had fallen into the Concorde fallacy. Basically, they got to the point where they realized that spending more money was not going to get them out of the hole they had dug in terms of opposition to this project. 

But as long as [developers] hold on to those [property] easements, there’s certainly a threat of future development.

Q. You write that people can physically stay on their ancestral land and still have the place taken away by climate change, or by development projects. Can you talk a little bit about still having the land but somehow losing the place?

A. The place is not a set of geographic coordinates. It’s an integration of all the natural and built aspects of the environment. And so climate change, deforestation, these other types of industrialized activities, they have the potential to sweep that place out from under you, like having the rug pulled out. All of the things that make a set of geographic coordinates a beloved place can become unraveled, by these unsustainable processes of climate change and unsustainable development. I think that the case studies in [On the Swamp] show some of the specific ways that that can happen. 

Q. Could you talk about your experiences as a researcher going out in the field, navigating modern land ownership systems, and how that connects to climate change?

A. I don’t know if it’s fair to say that I have to bite my tongue a lot, but I kind of feel that way. When I hear people talk about their ownership of our ancestral lands — I’m a mix of an optimist and a realist, and I understand that we’re not going to turn back the clock. And frankly, I’m not sure I want to, because Lumbee people are ourselves a product of colonial conflict, and we wouldn’t exist as the distinct nation that we are today, if it were not for the colonial violence that we survived. We might exist as our ancestral nations and communities, but we definitely wouldn’t be Lumbee people. So this is a complicated issue for me. 

When we think about the front lines of climate change, we don’t often think about Robeson County, North Carolina. But because our community is so attuned to that specific place, we’re not going to pick up and move if the summers get too hot, or if the droughts are too severe. That’s not an option for us. So I think that some of the urgency that I feel is not too different from the urgency that you hear from other [Indigenous] people who are similarly situated on the front lines of climate change.

Q. Something else that you make a really strong point about in this book is that something can be a “solution” to climate change, but not sustainable, such as energy companies trying to capture methane at giant hog farms in Robeson County. How should people think about climate solutions, in order to also take into account their negatives?

A. The reason why people latch onto this swine biogas capture scheme is if you simply run the numbers, based on the methane and the carbon dioxide budgets, it looks pretty good. 

But a swine facility is a lot more than just a source of methane to the atmosphere, right? It’s all these other things in terms of water pollution, and aerosols, and even things like labor issues and animal rights. There are all these other things that are attached to that kind of facility. If you make a decision that means that facility will persist for decades into the future operating basically as-is, that has serious implications for specific people who live nearby, and for society more broadly. We don’t tend to think through all those contingencies when we make decisions about greenhouse gas budgets. 

Q. What are some ways that the Lumbee tribe is proactively trying to adapt to climate change?

A. Climate change is not an explicit motivation [for the Lumbee Tribe]. If you go and read on the Lumbee Tribe’s housing programs website, I don’t think you’re going to find any rationale that says, “We’re [building housing] to address climate change.” But they are.

Getting people into higher-quality, well-insulated and energy-efficient houses is a big deal when it comes to addressing climate change, because we have a lot of people who live in mobile homes, and those are some of the most poorly insulated and least efficient places that you could be. And maybe 40 years ago, when our extreme summer heat wasn’t so bad, that wasn’t such a huge deal. But it’s a huge deal now. 

Q. What is the connection between colonialism and climate change for eastern North Carolina, and why is drawing that line necessary? 

A. The one sentence answer is, “You reap what you sow.” 

The longer answer is, the beginning of making things right is telling the truth about how things became wrong in the first place. And so I really want this book to start conversations on solving these issues. We really can’t solve them in meaningful ways unless we not only acknowledge, but also fully understand, how we got to this point. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In a debut book, a love letter to eastern North Carolina — and an indictment of colonialism as a driver of climate change on May 17, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Maya L. Kapoor.

This article was produced in partnership with the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, formerly a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, and The Marshall Project. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The right to an attorney is fundamental to the U.S. justice system. Yet, in a small Mississippi court off the interstate between Jackson and Memphis, that right is tenuous.

The two judges in Yalobusha County Justice Court appointed lawyers for just 20% of the five dozen felony defendants who came before them in 2022, according to a review of court records; nationally, experts estimate that lawyers are appointed to at least 80% of felony defendants at some point in the legal process because they’re deemed poor. In this court, the way these two judges decide who gets a court-appointed attorney appears to violate state rules meant to protect defendants’ rights. A few defendants have even been forced to represent themselves in key hearings.

Despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee that everyone gets a lawyer even if they’re too poor to pay for one, most felony defendants in this court went without any representation at all before their cases were forwarded to a grand jury, according to a review of one full year of court files by the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, The Marshall Project and ProPublica. (Read more about how we analyzed the court’s appointment rate in our methodology.)

“That is a huge problem,” said André de Gruy, who leads a state office that handles death penalty cases and felony appeals but has no power over local public defense. “I believe almost every one of those people would like a lawyer and is unable to afford one.”

For decades, civil rights advocates and legal reformers have complained that Mississippi is among the worst states in the country in providing attorneys for poor criminal defendants. It’s one of a handful of states where public defense is managed and funded almost entirely by local governments, and the way they do so varies greatly from county to county. Defendants in some places see appointed lawyers quickly and remain represented thereafter; elsewhere, sometimes right over the county line, defendants can wait months just to see a lawyer or can go long periods without having one at all.

The Mississippi Supreme Court, which oversees how state courts operate, has issued several rules in recent years that were intended to drive improvements. But it is up to locally elected judges to carry out those mandates, and there’s no oversight to make sure they’re doing it right.

Much like Mississippi, Texas places primary responsibility for public defense on counties. A state commission in Texas investigates the counties with low appointment rates; a felony appointment rate below 50% would raise serious questions about a county’s compliance with state law, according to current and former officials there. In Mississippi, state officials don’t even know how often judges appoint attorneys.

When people are arrested on felonies in Yalobusha County, a rural area in north Mississippi with just 12,400 residents, many have initial hearings in the county’s Justice Court. Judges there primarily handle misdemeanors. But when a felony defendant appears in their court, it falls to Judge Trent Howell and Judge Janet Caulder to deliver on the Sixth Amendment’s promise.

Caulder handles many initial hearings, where she’s required by state rules to find out whether a defendant is too poor to afford an attorney and to appoint one if so. Although Caulder informs defendants of their right to an attorney, she said she doesn’t ask if they can afford one and appoints one only if they request it.

“I don’t question them. I don’t try to force indigency on them,” she said. (Neither she nor Howell would comment on their appointment rate.)

Caulder and Howell are supposed to operate by the same rules as judges in circuit court, who handle felony cases from indictment through trial. But that doesn’t appear to be what’s happening: 15 of the cases that Howell and Caulder handled in 2022 are now in circuit court; just four of those defendants were appointed attorneys in Justice Court, but 13 were provided with lawyers when their cases moved to circuit court.

I don’t question them. I don’t try to force indigency on them.

Explaining why he is sometimes reluctant to appoint an attorney, Howell told the news outlets that he has a “fiduciary duty” to spend taxpayers’ money wisely. He said he’s more likely to provide a lawyer if a defendant is in jail because a lawyer can seek a lower bond to get their client released.

On the other hand, Howell said, “If they’re arrested on a felony and they’ve made bond, I’m not too quick to pull the trigger on a public defender — particularly if they’ve made a high bond.” State rules don’t allow Howell to consider whether someone made bond when he decides if he will appoint an attorney, but he said that doing so was just “human nature.”

That’s what happened when Kayla Williams, a single mother with no stable job, came before Howell last summer on a charge of shooting and wounding her stepfather in a tussle. Williams, whose mental health issues include bipolar disorder, has been arrested three times in the past year or so after confrontations with others. In two hearings related to the shooting charge, Howell refused to appoint an attorney even though she said she couldn’t afford one, according to Williams, as well as a lawyer who observed one hearing and a reporter who observed another.

In an interview, Howell defended his decision, which he made without asking a single question about Williams’ finances: “She just didn’t strike me as an indigent person.”

Though Mississippi doesn’t have any guidelines for how judges should decide who is poor enough to get a court-appointed lawyer, a half-dozen legal experts who reviewed the facts of Williams’ case said she appears to qualify and that her constitutional rights have been violated.

Problems getting a court-appointed lawyer began soon after she was arrested.

On June 12, Williams’ elderly stepfather, whose name is Lawyer Crowder, was pulled over by a Yalobusha County sheriff’s deputy because he was weaving slowly down a rural road. Crowder, whose leg was bleeding, told the deputy that his stepdaughter had shot him. He had the pistol she used with him.

Around the same time, Williams called 911 and said she had shot Crowder after he hit her, according to a dispatch log. Deputies arrested her and charged her with aggravated assault against a family member, a felony with a possible prison sentence of 20 years. (While Crowder told the news outlets that Williams started the fight and that he believes she meant to shoot him, he said: “I don’t want her put away. I want her to get some help.”)

At Williams’ first court hearing a couple of days later, Caulder told her she had a right to a court-appointed lawyer, but the judge didn’t ask Williams if she could hire one herself. The state’s rules required Caulder to make a decision that day: “The determination of the right to appointed counsel, and the appointment of such counsel, is to be made no later than at the indigent defendant’s first appearance before a judge.”

Caulder did gather the facts of Williams’ finances to set conditions for her release from jail — the same sort of information that judges use when deciding whether to appoint a lawyer. According to court records, the judge knew the 22-year-old mother had no job at the time and no place of her own to live.

What I witnessed in the courthouse in Water Valley that day was not a judge carefully exploring the ability of a defendant to afford a lawyer. … What I saw was an immediate rejection of her request for assistance without any inquiry whatsoever into her ability to pay.

That should have been enough to prompt Caulder to appoint a lawyer, said de Gruy, the head of the state public defense office. Caulder, however, said she believes she complied with court rules because she told Williams of her rights. She always does that, she said, and she’s always willing to consider a request for a lawyer.

Caulder shouldn’t force defendants to ask for a lawyer, said William Waller, a retired chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court who helped write the state’s court rules. That “is absolutely not right,” he said, because many defendants don’t know how or when to ask. “The judge makes the inquiry” to learn whether a defendant can afford an attorney, he said.

Williams’ friends and family paid a bail bond company to post a $7,500 bond to get her out of jail. Her next opportunity to get a lawyer came a month later, when she walked into Howell’s courtroom in Water Valley for a hearing.

Cliff Johnson, a civil rights attorney and law professor, happened to be in the courtroom that July day doing pro bono work for an animal shelter. Williams asked for a lawyer more than once, Johnson said. Howell said he wasn’t going to appoint one at that time.

“What I witnessed in the courthouse in Water Valley that day was not a judge carefully exploring the ability of a defendant to afford a lawyer,” Johnson said. “What I saw was an immediate rejection of her request for assistance without any inquiry whatsoever into her ability to pay.”

In an interview, Howell defended his decision in that hearing and a subsequent one: “I think that what I did at this particular point for this lady was within my discretion and proper.” He suggested that hearings in his court aren’t as critical to the outcome of a case as those in circuit court. However, the state’s rules say poor defendants must have a lawyer throughout the process.

Howell did tell Williams she could ask for a preliminary hearing, an optional hearing that defendants can request to force a prosecutor to show that there was probable cause for an arrest.

That’s how Williams found herself the following month in a crowded conference room that served as a courtroom, sitting at a table with the deputy who arrested her and the prosecutor handling her case. The prosecutor asked if she had an attorney.

“No, because the judge has not provided me with one,” Williams replied. Howell didn’t respond. After a brief exchange, the judge said he was ready to proceed with the hearing.

His decision to hold that hearing for a defendant who didn’t have a lawyer was particularly egregious, according to law professors, civil rights attorneys and a legal consultant. The U.S. Supreme Court requires that appointed counsel be present with a poor defendant at key hearings, called critical stages, at which the defendant’s rights could be impaired. Experts agree that a preliminary hearing in Mississippi is considered a critical stage.

“That is clearly a violation” of her rights, said David Carroll, who has studied Mississippi’s defense system as executive director of the Sixth Amendment Center, a Boston-based nonprofit research center.

Without an attorney, Williams handled the hearing herself. She stammered as she cross-examined the deputy, who acknowledged that the case hinged largely on the stepfather’s account. “I’m nervous,” she said.

After the deputy testified, Howell told Williams there was no need for her to testify. Anything she said could be used against her later, he said, and he was prepared to rule that the case could move forward.

“I want to tell my side of the story,” Williams said.

“You’re going to testify over my recommendation,” the judge responded.

Williams did testify, stressing her belief that the gun was fired by accident. Testifying was a risky move, one that a defense lawyer likely would have prevented, said Jonathan Rapping, who runs the national nonprofit public defender training organization Gideon’s Promise. Williams’ hearing, he said, was “a textbook example of why you need a lawyer.”

After Howell ordered that Williams’ case could proceed to a grand jury, she made a direct appeal: “Can you appoint me a lawyer? Because I can’t afford one.”

Howell said that if she were eventually indicted, a judge in circuit court would decide whether she would be eligible for appointed counsel. But that might not happen, the judge said, until the next grand jury was convened in December, four months away.

Months later, as Williams waited for an update on that case, she had a different experience in another county. She had been arrested on two felony counts of arson after she acknowledged lighting two small fires in a homeless shelter she was staying in, according to a police report. Within 48 hours, she had a lawyer in Tupelo Municipal Court, which, unlike Yalobusha County Justice Court, employs a full-time public defender.

She had seen for herself what criminal justice reformers have long argued is a key problem with Mississippi’s locally controlled public defense system: While some local courts swiftly deliver lawyers to poor criminal defendants, others delay and deny representation for months without any oversight by the state. Multiple commissions and task forces have tried to address shortcomings in the public defense system over the years, but the Legislature hasn’t acted. So the state Supreme Court has wielded its authority over the courts below it.

Though its rules are mandatory, Mississippi’s Supreme Court relies on judges across the state to implement them. Those local judges don’t have a good track record, the Daily Journal, The Marshall Project and ProPublica have found.

In 2017, the Supreme Court put all Mississippi courts under the same rules. Among them: Judges in each court would have to write down how they provide attorneys for poor defendants. The Supreme Court would review those policies and approve them.

Six years later, the first of the state’s 23 circuit courts complied. Since then, just two more have filed plans.

A similar lack of compliance emerged last summer, when the court took action to address poor defendants being left without legal representation between their initial court hearings and an indictment, a period that often lasts months and sometimes years.

We don’t hear from many places other than Mississippi of judges simply ignoring or deferring the question of whether the right to counsel applies.

A revised rule aims to eliminate that gap in representation — which critics have called the “dead zone” — by preventing a lawyer from leaving a case unless another has already taken over. On the eve of last summer’s deadline to comply, many local officials told the news outlets that they were unaware of the rule or contended they didn’t need to change their current practice.

But it’s not the Supreme Court’s role to go out and make sure judges follow these rules, a justice told legislators last fall. Although an individual defendant can petition to have their case dismissed if they have been denied a lawyer, the only way, outside of a lawsuit, to hold judges accountable for their actions is to file a complaint with a state judicial commission. The commission hasn’t publicly sanctioned any judges for denial of counsel in at least a decade.

In 2014, Mississippi’s Scott County was sued for practices similar to those in Yalobusha’s Justice Court. The county settled the suit in 2017 and, without admitting fault, agreed to hire a chief public defender and ensure that when people were arrested on a felony charge, they were provided with the paperwork to request a lawyer.

“We don’t hear from many places other than Mississippi of judges simply ignoring or deferring the question of whether the right to counsel applies,” said Lisa M. Wayne, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Johnson, the civil rights law professor, was among those who argued for the Supreme Court’s recent move to address the dead zone. He has argued that there’s important defense work to be done as defendants wait to be indicted, a view that puts him at odds with many judges and lawyers in Mississippi. The Supreme Court’s rule change went into effect in July; about a week later, he saw Howell deny Williams’ requests for an attorney.

“My fear is that this happens far more often than we know,” Johnson said. “I was reminded quickly that change comes hard in Mississippi.”

Howell, however, said he wants to go back to what he called “the old way,” to a time when the Supreme Court hadn’t spelled out so many procedural steps to follow before an indictment.

His view on the change that Johnson argued for, meant to ensure that a poor defendant always has a lawyer from arrest to trial? “Hopefully,” he said, “the Supreme Court will come down and modify that rule.”

Sometimes I get overwhelmed, but most of the time I’m just numb. … I’m tired. I’m only 22, but I feel like I’m 55.

Williams hasn’t gotten any updates on the case involving her stepfather since she saw Howell last summer. After repeatedly calling Yalobusha County officials, she recently learned that she hadn’t been indicted by the December grand jury there. It’s unclear when, or even if, she will be. Prosecutors in Mississippi face no deadline to seek an indictment, and the grand jury in that part of Yalobusha County typically meets three times a year. By the time the most recent grand jury met this month, she was in jail on the latest charges and couldn’t call anyone to check on last summer’s case.

“Sometimes I get overwhelmed, but most of the time I’m just numb,” Williams said. ”I’m tired. I’m only 22, but I feel like I’m 55.” If she had an attorney, Williams said, “I would understand more and have more trust” in the legal process.

But after she appeared in Tupelo Municipal Court on the arson charges, she said, “I actually had a lawyer this time.” In all the months she had been speaking to the news outlets, it was the first time she felt that the court system had worked the way she thought it was supposed to. In an interview from jail, she said that the public defender had explained what would happen in court and argued for a lower bond, which was eventually set at $30,000. “He was really informative,” she said, “and made things seem a little bit better and like I wasn’t by myself.”

The state of Mississippi does not collect data on how often judges provide an attorney to criminal defendants who are too poor to afford their own. Many counties don’t know that information either, even though each controls its own public defense system.

A task force that met from 2015 to 2018 found that it could not fully evaluate public defense in the state without knowing how often attorneys were appointed to indigent defendants. State officials surveyed circuit clerks, asking them to estimate their appointment rates. Circuit court clerks in 53 of 82 counties responded; the vast majority, including Yalobusha’s, estimated appointment rates of 75% or more in circuit court.

However, people arrested on felony charges make their first court appearance in lower courts, where judges are required to evaluate their ability to pay for an attorney and appoint one if needed. These courts handle only hearings that precede an indictment, after which cases are transferred to circuit court. In Yalobusha County, people arrested for a felony can have a first appearance in Water Valley Municipal Court or the county Justice Court.

To understand how frequently judges in Yalobusha County’s Justice Court appointed lawyers for defendants, a reporter traveled to the court clerk’s office and pulled the files for every felony case that was opened in 2022. We chose cases from 2022 because it was the most recent full calendar year and every case had had at least one opportunity to be presented to a grand jury for a possible indictment. We also reviewed files in another clerk’s office and billing records for attorneys appointed in Justice Court. We found 63 cases in which court records indicated that defendants appeared before a judge in Justice Court.

For each case, a reporter logged various facts, including the defendant’s name, the charge, hearing dates, the judge or judges that heard the case, and whether the file included an indigency affidavit, a judge’s order appointing an attorney or a letter from a lawyer stating that they had been retained in the case.

We counted the number of defendants who were provided counsel in Justice Court. (Defendants who appeared in court multiple times were counted once, even if they appeared on unrelated charges.) This number was used to calculate an appointment rate for 2022: 20%. In the majority of cases — 61% — the defendant had no attorney at all. (In a couple of cases, they waived their right to an attorney.)

In a few cases, notes in case files say that defendants told a judge they had hired an attorney or intended to, but there are no records showing they did so. We counted those defendants as privately represented, based on the case notes.

We excluded two cases from our analysis because we could not determine whether the lawyer listed had been appointed or hired.

Our reporter also checked Mississippi’s online court database to see how many of the 2022 cases had been moved to circuit court and how many of those defendants had been appointed lawyers there.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Caleb Bedillion, The Marshall Project.

Aleksei Navalny's family and close associates have confirmed the Russian opposition politician's death in an Arctic prison and have demanded his body be handed over, but officials have refused to release it, telling his lawyers and mother that an "investigation" of the causes would only be completed next week.

"Aleksei's lawyer and his mother have arrived at the morgue in Salekhard," Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh wrote on X, referring to the capital of the region of Yamalo-Nenets, where Navalny's prison is located.

"It's closed. However, the [prison] has assured them it's working and Navalny's body is there. The lawyer called the phone number which was on the door. He was told he was the seventh caller today. Aleksei's body is not in the morgue," she added.

Yarmysh then said in a new message: "An hour ago, the lawyers were told that the check was completed and no crime had been found. They literally lie every time, drive in circles and cover their tracks."

But in a third message, she said, "Now the Investigative Committee directly says that until the check is completed, Aleksei’s body will not be given to relatives."

Navalny associate Ivan Zhdanov, who currently resides abroad, said that Navalny's mother was told her son had died of a cardiac-arrest illness.

"When the lawyer and Aleksei’s mother arrived at the colony this morning, they were told that the cause of Navalny’s death was sudden death syndrome," Zhdanov said.

Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila, who traveled to the Yamalo-Nenets region some 1,900 kilometers northeast of Moscow, was earlier informed that the Kremlin critic died at the "Arctic Wolf" prison on February 16 at 2:17 p.m. local time, according to Yarmish.

Vadim Prokhorov, a lawyer who has represented Russian human rights activists, told Current Time that "what is happening is not accidental."

"The Russian authorities will do everything not to turn over the body in time or certainly not to conduct a forensic medical examination," Prokhorov told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.

The penitentiary service said in a statement on February 16 that Navalny felt unwell after a walk and subsequently lost consciousness. An ambulance arrived to try to revive him but he died, the statement added.

Navalny, a longtime anti-corruption fighter and Russia's most-prominent opposition politician for over a decade, was 47.

His death sparked an immediate outpouring of grief among many Russians, while leaders around the world condenmed the death of Vladimir Putin's staunchest critic, blaming the Russian president directly for the death.

Group of Seven (G7) foreign ministers meeting in Munich on the sidelines of a security conference held a minute's silence for Navalny on February 17. The G7 consists of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States.

In a joint statement released by Italy, the ministers expressed their "outrage at the death in detention of Aleksei Navalny, unjustly sentenced for legitimate political activities and his fight against corruption."

Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said that "for his ideas and his fight for freedom and against corruption in Russia, Navalny was in fact led to his death."

"Russia must shed light on his death and stop the unacceptable repression of political dissent," he added.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the death of Navalny showed that it is impossible to see Putin as a legitimate leader.

"Putin kills whoever he wants, be it an opposition leader or anyone who seems like a target to him," Zelenskiy told the Munich Security Conference on February 17.

Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, an expert on Central and Eastern Europe, told RFE/RL in Munich that Navalny will be remembered as someone who sacrificed his life for his country.

"Putin wants to be remembered as a ruler of Russia. But Navalny will be remembered in a different way because Navalny died for his country rather than for killing other people."

"He tried to show that other things are possible [in Russia] and we'll never know what kind of leader he would have been," he added.

Navalny's vision for change in Russia will be kept alive by his team, his spokeswoman Yarmysh said. "We lost our leader, but we didn't lose our ideas and our beliefs," Yarmysh told Reuters via Zoom, speaking from an undisclosed location.

Navalny's death was a "very sad day" for Russia, and must lead to international action, the wife of a former Russian agent killed by radiation poisoning said on February 17.

Marina Litvinenko, whose husband Aleksandr died of radiation poisoning in 2006, three weeks after drinking tea laced with polonium at a meeting with Russian agents at a London hotel, told AFP she had sympathy for Navalny's wife, Yulia.

The Kremlin, which Navalny said was behind a poison attack that almost killed him in 2020, has angrily denied it played any role in Navalny's death and rejected the "absolutely rabid" reaction of Western leaders.

Inside Russia, people continued to mourn the death of the anti-corruption crusader despite official media paying little attention to his death and efforts to remove any tributes to him.

At least 340 people have been detained in 30 cities and towns in Russia on February 16 and 17 after they came to pay tribute, include laying flowers, to the memory of Navalny, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors political repression in Russia.

On February 17, police blocked access to a memorial in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and detained several people there as well as in another Siberian city, Surgut, OVD-Info said.

In Moscow, people came to lay flowers at the "Wall of Sorrow" memorial on the avenue named after Soviet physicist and dissent Andrei Sakharov on February 17. Riot police immediately moved in and more than 15 people were arrested, the Sota news outlet reported.

In St. Petersburg, an Orthodox priest was detained on February 17 after he announced he would hold a memorial service for Navalny.

Grigory Mikhnov-Vaitenko was detained near his home as he was going to the Solovetsky Stone memorial dedicated to Soviet victims of political repression.

He was remanded in custody and was to be presented to a judge on February 19, the site 24liveblog.com reported.

However, a memorial service was performed by a different Orthodox priest at the site, in the presence of several people, some of whom were detained after the service was completed.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Janine Jackson interviewed the University of San Francisco’s Stephen Zunes about the indictment of Sen. Robert Menendez for the September 29, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Major news media outlets have been putting out numerous stories on the federal indictment of Robert Menendez, Democratic senator from New Jersey and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Those stories are overwhelmingly on details of the charges of suspect dealings—interesting, important information—and on the support, or lack thereof, from other congressmembers, also undoubtedly meaningful information.

New York Times (9/26/23)

The September 27 New York Times explained that

Mr. Menendez was charged on Friday with using his power as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee to assist the government of Egypt and businessmen in New Jersey in exchange for bribes that included bars of gold bullion, a Mercedes-Benz convertible, exercise machines and more than $500,000 in cash.

That sentence says a little more than it says, in that it reflects US media’s evident prioritizing of details of the alleged corruption—What did he get? Gold, halal meat?—over interest in the impact on human beings who are not Robert Menendez or his wife or her friends, or any businesspeople who got cut a sweet deal—anyone who might be affected by this assistance to the government of Egypt.

We are still in the midst of it, of course, but so far, anyway, media seem more interested in what the Times called the “deepening crisis Mr. Menendez faces” than what it means for anybody else.

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. His most recent book, co-authored with Jacob Mundy, is Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution, out now in an updated, expanded edition from Syracuse University Press. He joins us now by phone from the Bay Area. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Stephen Zunes.

I am absolutely going to ask your thoughts about the indictment and its implications, but I wanted to do just a little history first, because it hasn’t been front and center in current coverage, and that context is important.

You wrote back in January of 2021, when Democrats selected Robert Menendez as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that that decision “rung alarm bells for advocates of peace, human rights and international law.” So why was that true already then, and were there particular issue areas that drew concern?

Stephen Zunes: There are quite a number. I mean, the brazenness, the jaw-dropping nature of the charges against Senator Menendez, as you noted, are great tabloid fodder. They’re quite extreme. This is not just the official corruption, legal corruption, we see, especially since the Citizens United decision at the Supreme Court, of influencing politicians. This is really old school, in terms of the cash, the gold bars and everything else.

And he’s had something of a reputation in New Jersey politics for the corruption. He was indicted some years ago on corruption charges, and it ended in mistrial with a hung jury. But despite this, the Democrats named him chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Sen. Frank Church (holding poison dart gun) with Sen. John Tower (Levin Center).

But my concern back then, as with a lot of us, was not on just the corruption per se, but he is one of the most hawkish, hard-line Democrats in the United States Senate. And he was put in the very powerful position of being head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Now, historically, the Democratic heads of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have actually tried to curb excesses and militarism, excesses in terms of supporting human rights violators and the like. We think back to J. William Fulbright, who was the leading critic, not just of Nixon, but of Lyndon Johnson, in terms of the war in Vietnam. We think of Frank Church in the 1970s, challenging the abuses by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. We think of Claiborne Pell and others, in terms of checks and balances, which unfortunately there are not a lot of in foreign policy, but at least to some degree, we could have it through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when the Democrats have been in charge.

But in choosing Menendez, Schumer and the Democrats went in the opposite direction—someone who has been to the right of even these centrist Democratic presidents.

So Menendez was one of only two senators, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer being the other one, to vote against the Iran nuclear agreement. He attacked Obama from the right, in terms of his attempts at normalization of relations with Cuba.

Stephen Zunes: “Menendez…has been one of the most vocal supporters of US support for authoritarian right-wing governments.”

The latter is particularly ironic, because Menendez has been obsessed with the authoritarianism and human rights abuses under Cuba’s Communist government, but he has been one of the most vocal supporters of US support for authoritarian right-wing governments with far worse human rights abuses, including that of Egypt.

I think the big thing that the mainstream media are really missing here is not just that he apparently received bribes from a foreign government, but one that has a particularly nasty human rights record. And even without the apparent illegal activity, why in the hell is the United States supporting this government in the first place?

Let’s remember that Egypt gets more US foreign aid, more arms and ammunition and security assistance, than any country in the world, save for Ukraine and Israel.

And the government of Egypt is one of the absolute worst in terms of its human rights abuses. Since Sisi seized power nearly a decade ago, literally thousands of demonstrators have been slaughtered in the streets.

There are over 60,000 political prisoners, one of the highest, if not the highest, number of political prisoners anywhere in the world. And these aren’t just Islamist radicals or anything else, far from it. Many of these people are nonviolent, liberal, secular activists, the very people who led the nonviolent uprising in 2011 against the previous US-backed dictator, Hosni Mubarak.

We’re talking about torture on an administrative basis, not to mention corruption up the wazoo. This is a horrific government.

And yet, for years, we’ve had bipartisan support, both in Congress and in successive administrations, for supporting this regime. Now, there has been some growing concerns in some circles, particularly among progressive Democrats, but even among a handful of Republicans and others. But why the hell are we supporting this kind of regime?

And Menendez, as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, while occasionally giving lip service to human rights, has been steadfast in supporting this kind of aid. And, indeed, part of this indictment appears to be that in return for some of these lucrative gifts, he worked to lift a hold on $300 million worth of military aid that was being temporarily withheld on human rights grounds.

But the problem here, again, is not just the bribes and corruption by Menendez, but the very question that we really need to be asking is, why are we supporting this regime in the first place?

New York Times (9/14/23, 7/26/18)

JJ: Absolutely. Well, let me just add to that, frankly, because I looked at a headline from September 14 of this year from the New York Times, “Choosing Security Over Rights, US Approves $235 Million in Egypt Aid.” And it was, “Secretary of State Blinken overruled congressional restrictions on US military aid tied to Egypt’s dismal human rights record.”

OK, that’s interesting. But then I see another headline, “Despite Egypt’s Dismal Human Rights Record, US Restores Military Aid,” and that headline is from 2018. So there’s been this kind of yes/no/but, and it still has added up to millions of dollars of aid.

SZ: This is all too familiar. Some of us can think back to the 1980s, when the Reagan administration would claim they were concerned about human rights, and were pushing for human rights reforms in various Latin American dictatorships that were promoting death squads and the like. This is the same kind of thing.

But the problem is, is that a lot of Democrats, even liberal Democrats, who have been willing to raise human rights concerns when Republicans are in the White House, seem to be rather quiet when there’s a Democrat in the White House. So there’s this feeling we see, and I certainly find this in online discussions and elsewhere, that so much of the criticism about the Biden administration from the right is so silly and outrageous, and given a very real threat of authoritarianism from the Republicans, people are so reluctant to say anything negative about Biden, that much of the left liberal wing of the spectrum of this country seems to be ignoring the kinds of abuses that would’ve mobilized people, were they being supported by Republicans.

And, again, it’s not just Egypt, and this is really important. Menendez, as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been a fanatically strong supporter of the Netanyahu government in Israel and the Israeli occupation. He has attacked the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, virtually anybody who dares document or investigate violations of human rights or international humanitarian law by the Israeli government.

And most Democrats at this point are starting to be, though very pro-Israel, more on the J Street end of the Zionist spectrum—that is, those that strongly support Israel as a Jewish state, but oppose the occupation and settlements. But Menendez is aligned with AIPAC and the Republicans, the right wing of the Zionist movement, in a totally unapologetic way, which is way, way to the right of average Democratic public opinion, in terms of the rank and file voters.

But it’s not just Israel. He supports the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara. He is one of the few who’s openly supported Trump’s recognition of Morocco’s annexation of the entire nation of Western Sahara, along with Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights. And here’s a guy who talks about, “Oh, Russia cannot unilaterally change international borders. They cannot expand their territory by force,” in reference to Ukraine. That’s certainly true. But then he says, it’s OK if a US ally does it.

And just like his statements on human rights, criticizing them in Cuba and other left-leaning countries, but excusing them or even supporting them in terms of right-wing US allies, his attitude on international law is the same way. Violations of international legal standards, the UN charter, that’s a horrible thing if a country we don’t like, like Russia, does it. But if it’s an ally, like Israel and Morocco, it’s OK.

And this is not what most Americans, especially most Democrats, want. Again, if you look at the public opinion polls, a vast majority of Americans, particularly on the Democratic side, believe that international law should be enforced consistently.

Just as you would not want a Democratic attorney general to only prosecute Republicans, or a Republican attorney general to only prosecute Democrats, same thing with international law. Law is the law. You can’t pick and choose, depending on the political or geostrategic orientation of the offender.

JJ: Right. Well, against that backdrop, I think the fact that Menendez—who, as we’re recording on September 28, has pled not guilty; we’re still in medias res—but he says that the federal prosecutors are “misrepresenting routine congressional work.” And in the context of what you’ve just said, I feel like that should set off an alarm for an independent press corps, that he’s even comfortable saying, “Well, this is just what you do when you’re a congressperson.”

SZ: Yes. It is concerning that, even without this apparent illegal activity, even without its rather brazen nature, the fact is that it is really a scandal that the United States continues to support repressive regimes like Egypt, like Bahrain, like Saudi Arabia, like United Arab Emirates, like Morocco. They continue to support the Israeli/Moroccan occupations. We can go down the list.

There’s probably no single issue in foreign or domestic policy where public opinion and US policy is so widely differentiated. Most Americans really do feel pretty strongly about human rights.

Indeed, it’s what we hear all the time. It drives me crazy to hear the mainstream media, without irony, talking about how Biden is standing up for human rights, or standing up for international law, without mentioning that the United States arms 57% of the world’s dictatorships, 57% of the world’s authoritarian regimes receive US military aid or arm sales. And this doesn’t even count the countries that are nominally democracies, like Israel and India and others, which are also engaging in human rights abuses.

Syracuse University Press, 2023

So I think that the scandal, on the one hand, shows a failure of the mainstream media to recognize the larger structural problem. But on the other hand, I think it provides an opening for those of us who do care about human rights, who would like to see US foreign policy as actually more consistent with our stated values, to raise these issues and to challenge, not just these corrupt politicians like Menendez, but the whole system that ends up supporting these autocrats and occupiers, and the kind of system that would put a man like Menendez in charge of our foreign policy in Congress, the Democrats’ de facto foreign policy spokesperson, in that kind of position in the first place.

JJ: I’m going to end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Stephen Zunes, professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. His most recent book, co-authored with Jacob Mundy, is Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution, out now from Syracuse University Press. Stephen Zunes, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SZ: My pleasure. Thank you.

The post ‘Most Americans Really Do Feel Pretty Strongly About Human Rights’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

New York Times (9/27/23)

This week on CounterSpin: You can’t say elite US news media aren’t on the story of the federal indictment of Robert Menendez, Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But articles like the New York Times’ “As Menendez’s Star Rose, Fears of Corruption Cast a Persistent Shadow” represent media embrace of the “great man of history” theme: The story is mostly about the political fortunes of an individual; the huge numbers of less powerful people impacted by those compromised decisions are, at best, backdrop.

When they try to tighten it into a “takeaway,” it can get weirder still: That Times piece’s headline included the idea that “the New Jersey Democrat broke barriers for Latinos. But prosecutors circled for decades before charging him with an explosive new bribery plot.”

Come again?

If elite media’s takeaway from the Menendez indictment is that some people over-favor their friends and like gold bars—that’s a storyline that leads nowhere, calls nothing into question beyond the individual actors themselves. Is that the coverage we need? What does it even have to do with foreign policy?

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. His most recent book, co-authored with Jacob Mundy, is Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution, out now in a revised, updated edition from Syracuse University Press.

We talk with him about what’s at stake in the Menendez indictment beyond Menendez’s “political fortunes.”

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the FCC and the 1973 Chilean coup.

The post Stephen Zunes on Menendez Indictment appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

When a Georgia court unsealed the grand jury report on the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the first name on its recommended indictments was predictable: President Donald Trump. 

It’s the second name on the list that jumped out: Cleta Mitchell. 

The grand jury recommended charging Mitchell for soliciting election fraud, witness interference, making false statements, and a host of other offenses. 

As a Trump adviser and election attorney, Mitchell played a central role in the effort to stop the certification of the election in Georgia and beyond. She was one of the principal players on the infamous call in which Trump implored Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find the 11,780 votes he needed to claim victory. And Mitchell brought lawyer John Eastman in to support the fringe legal theory that state legislatures could override the will of their voters. “A movement is stirring,” she wrote to Eastman. “But needs constitutional support.”

Yet, when Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis unveiled her sprawling RICO case against Trump last month, Mitchell wasn’t one of the 19 people facing charges. 

The district attorney was under no obligation to follow the grand jury’s recommendations. Willis’s office did not respond to a request for comment, and legal experts can only theorize why Willis didn’t charge Mitchell. 

Mitchell is arguably the most central player in the attempt to steal the election who isn’t facing prison time.

Regardless, while much of the energy around the grand jury report has focused on the recommendation to indict three senators since its release Friday, Mitchell is arguably the most central player in the attempt to steal the election who isn’t facing prison time. Eastman hasn’t been as fortunate; neither has Mitchell’s colleague Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff who was charged for his role in the call with Raffensperger, despite being far less vocal.

Mitchell’s escape from prosecution has far larger implications than her personal freedom: Unencumbered by a fierce legal battle, Mitchell remains one of the most influential people in the movement that’s undermining American democracy. 

“Cleta Mitchell played this key role in trying to overturn the 2020 election and is now working to shape the rules and practices in 2024 and beyond. To me, that’s the most concerning thing in all of this,” said Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of the investigative research group Documented, who has tracked Mitchell’s activities.

“She’s in a place where she’s connected with the election-denying grassroots,” Fischer said, “continues to have an open door with elected officials, and can move significant financial resources toward backing the latest election conspiracy projects.” 

Cleta Mitchell, partner at Foley & Lardner LLP, speaks during an event marking the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment ratification with President Donald Trump in the Blue Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 18, 2020.

Mitchell’s work goes far beyond the ins and outs of election law. She helped the former president covertly send $1 million to finance the farcical Arizona audit in 2021, as Documented’s research has shown. More recently, she worked with lawmakers in her adopted home state of North Carolina to craft a law that would make it harder to vote, and she’s now leading an effort — through her Election Integrity Network — to train partisan activists to use AI to search for voting irregularities. 

And she’s doing all this with the backing of two institutions that have quickly risen from relative obscurity to support and finance the anti-democratic movement in the United States. 

Mitchell is a senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Initiative, which has established itself as a sort of headquarters for the insurrection, employing people like Meadows, indictee and former Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, and immigration hawk Stephen Miller. CPI’s growth has been breathtaking, jumping from $1.7 million in revenues in 2017 to $45 million in 2021, the last year for which there are tax filings.

With that money, CPI is building a massive amalgamated MAGA institution — with podcast and video studios, a training compound and a waterfront estate on the Eastern Shore of Maryland — poised to endure long after Trump. It houses Mitchell’s “Election Integrity Network.” And, among other projects, it is creating freedom caucuses — modeled after the House Freedom Caucus — in state legislatures across the country. A number of current state caucus members participated in fake elector schemes or attempted to get their legislature to flip the voting results for Trump. 

At the same time, Mitchell sits on the board of the Bradley Foundation, a family foundation in Milwaukee that’s emerged as one of the principal funders of the “Big Lie” ecosystem.

Mitchell declined to answer any questions for this story. “We don’t need to talk, but thanks for calling,” she said before hanging up.

In an interview with The Federalist published Monday, Mitchell said she faced hours of questions during the grand jury proceedings and that she knew coming out of it “that the whole thing was a loose cannon.” 

“They were definitely going to recommend indicting basically all the Trump allies — it was a completely political situation — nothing to do with the law. NOTHING,” she said.

Chris Timmons, a former prosecutor in Georgia’s DeKalb and Cobb counties who has worked with the type of grand jury overseeing the Trump case, said he assumed Mitchell had cut a deal for immunity with prosecutors because the grand jury was so clear that she should be charged and she appeared so central to the conspiracy. But Mitchell’s comment to The Federalist changed his mind. 

“I’m kind of surprised,” he said. “I would’ve thought she had a deal in place. But if she’s out there saying this is a witch hunt, either she’s not very bright or doesn’t have a deal — or used to have a deal.” Timmons said he now believes Mitchell either didn’t fit into Willis’s RICO case or wasn’t charged for some other reason “that I haven’t even thought of yet.”

Mitchell appeared before what is known as a special purpose grand jury, a type of proceeding for long, complex investigations. The grand jurors ultimately recommended indictments against 40 people in the scheme, and Willis brought charges against 19. Among those targeted by the grand jury who escaped indictment are Sen. Lindsey Graham and former Georgia Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.

All told, the group recommended charging Mitchell for her involvement in three different aspects of the plot: the phone call with Raffensperger, the fake electors scheme in Georgia, and the broad effort to overturn the election in Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. 

The January 2, 2021, call came as the Trump campaign raced to stop the certification of the election on a number of fronts. Much of the talking on the call was done by four people: Trump, Mitchell, Raffensperger, and his general counsel, Ryan Germany. While Trump relentlessly pressured the officials to swing the election, even issuing a threat of criminal repercussions at one point, Mitchell was more careful and focused.

She zeroed in on three claims at the heart of Trump’s argument: That close to 5,000 dead people voted in the election, thousands more had voted illegitimately, and an election worker at State Farm Arena awarded Joe Biden 18,000 votes. Mitchell requested records and investigations related to those claims, with Trump frequently interrupting her.

Raffensperger and Germany repeatedly told Trump and Mitchell their claims were just wrong — that their office, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, or the FBI had investigated those claims and found they didn’t have any merit.

“You have data and records that we don’t have access to. And you keep telling us and making public statements that you investigated this and nothing to see here. But we don’t know about that,” Mitchell said at one point. “All we know is what you tell us.”

In the end, secretary of state officials volunteered to share some information but said that they were legally barred from sharing other records the campaign sought. 

The grand jury unanimously recommended four charges against Mitchell for the call: influencing a witness, making false statements or concealing facts when interacting with state government agencies, soliciting election fraud, and intentionally interfering with the performance of election duties. 

The panel recommended the same four charges for Trump, with one of the jurors voting against. Trump ultimately was charged by the district attorney for willfully making a baker’s dozen of false statements on the call — including some of the claims Mitchell pursued. Meadows, too, was charged for the call: for soliciting a public officer to violate their oath. 

The grand jurors wanted to indict Mitchell for two additional charges related to the call — for soliciting false statements and certificates from officials — but were more split on those charges, with 12 voting yes, five voting no, and one abstaining. Only one juror voted against those charges for Trump. 

Additionally, the grand jury recommended charging Mitchell and others in connection with the fake electors scheme and for commissioning a crime in their attempts to overturn the election in Georgia and other states across the country.

Mitchell addressed the phone call and grand jury investigation in a June speech to a conservative women’s group. Mitchell came across as genteel and lawyerly, but she went on to line her speech with sarcastic remarks about “crazy socialist leftists” and the media.

“I debated about whether I should talk about this because it’s the subject of a grand jury — supposedly — a grand jury investigation,” she said. 

“Now, I will tell you that I did not think that phone call was a good idea, and I expressed that view,” she said. Mitchell said at that point she’d already been frustrated by state officials after trying to work with them for six weeks.

In the face of all the scrutiny around her actions around the 2020 election, Mitchell maintained to the crowd that she did have the evidence to prove the results in Georgia were illegitimate. She emphasized to the crowd that she didn’t ask Raffensperger to find the votes. “We had already found those votes,” she said. 

But before she did that, she turned to a line she’s relied on for years. She introduced herself as “consigliere to the vast right-wing conspiracy.” 

She was joking, but a Georgia jury will likely soon decide whether her one-liner is a statement of fact — whether her boss was indeed the head of an organized crime racket.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Andrew Donohue.

Revs. Jeff Jones and Dave Dunn at the construction site of Cop City during a direct action in protest of the planned police training compound on Sept. 7, 2023. Photo: Courtesy of The People’s Stop Work Order

Five participants of the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement broke into the construction site of the planned police training compound known as “Cop City” on Thursday morning and chained themselves to a bulldozer. This is by no means the first direct action Stop Cop City protesters have taken to halt construction of the vast facility, but it carries renewed significance just two days after Georgia prosecutors announced extreme and overreaching racketeering charges against 61 other movement activists.

The charges, filed Tuesday under Georgia’s expansive Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO, are an effort to chill the movement and paint one of the most resilient anti-racist, environmentalist efforts in history as a criminal enterprise. In response, activists on the ground are choosing solidarity and standing their ground.

The stakes are high. For one, activists want to ensure that Cop City — which would be the largest police training facility in the nation and would decimate crucial forest land in a majority Black community — will never be built. Thursday’s action also makes clear that efforts to criminalize whole social movements will only invite further resistance.

All five protesters, including two Unitarian Universalist clergy members, have been arrested by the DeKalb County Police. “Those five people have been taken into custody and we are working with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation regarding charges on these individuals,” the department said in a statement to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This is just the latest example of Georgia law enforcement treating typical acts of civil disobedience with a heavy-handed, multiagency response.

Police also downed and confiscated a drone belonging to a documentary crew attempting to film the construction site protest, in a possible infringement on press freedoms.

“Despite the repressive tactics of authorities who wish to disenfranchise the community and charge protestors with domestic terrorism and RICO, people of faith will continue to act to resist the militarization of our society,” said Rev. Dave Dunn, who was among those arrested, in a statement released by organizers.

Thursday’s action offers a defiant lesson in how movement participants can choose to respond when faced with state repression — and the efforts by police, government leaders, and prosecutors to crush the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement have indeed been extraordinary.

“The domestic terrorism and RICO charges against protesters are meant to scare us, or else to orient all of our energy and resources around supporting protesters who have been arrested,” Darcy, an Atlanta resident and movement participant told me. Darcy, like many others in the movement, withheld their last name for fear of law enforcement retaliation — an understandable choice, given how weak grounds for arrest and serious charges have been.

“By shutting down Cop City construction today, clergy and students showed that everyday people can take bold actions to block this facility from being built,” they said, “and that our biggest protection against repression is a movement that wins.”

The sweeping, 109-page RICO indictment paints the decentralized and diverse movement as a criminal enterprise, citing social justice activities such as “mutual aid,” writing “zines,” and “collectivism” as proof of criminal conspiracy. Dozens of people named in the indictment also face malicious state domestic terrorism charges, based on flimsy grounds.

Others facing RICO and money-laundering charges did little more than raise and distribute donations to support arrestees and provide materials for engaging in First Amendment activities, like making protest signs. Also named in the indictment are individuals previously arrested on felony charges for handing out flyers that named a police officer connected to the killing of Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, a forest defender who was shot 57 times during a multiagency raid on the Atlanta Forest protest encampment in January.

Whether the RICO, domestic terrorism, or other extreme charges stick, the prosecutions alone are chilling. If the Stop Cop City movement has offered a model for intersectional, abolitionist, environmentalist, and diverse anti-racist struggle, the charges participants now face present a blueprint for a totalizing approach to repression.

It is no accident that the RICO indictment lists the start of the alleged racketeering conspiracy as the date of George Floyd’s murder by police — May 25, 2020 — which predates the announcement of plans for Cop City. The indictment is explicit in tracing the birth of the Stop Cop City movement back to the 2020 Black liberation uprisings in order to treat any involvement in these connected struggles as grounds for criminal prosecution.

The activists involved in Thursday’s action delivered what they called “The People’s Stop Work Order” against Cop City construction. In a statement, they noted that activists who have attempted to use official, democratic routes to oppose Cop City have been consistently stymied by undemocratic government actions.

“The construction of this project and the destruction of the South River Forest have continued despite over 100,000 Atlanta residents signing a ballot initiative calling for a referendum on the issue,” organizers said. “The city of Atlanta has fought the referendum with lawsuits and technical obstructions.”

Participants in Thursday’s action engaged in just the sort of activity that the government is attempting to cast as criminal conspiracy with the RICO indictment: civil disobedience with a civil rights movement legacy, especially in Atlanta. In the face of such authoritarian responses, ongoing and widespread movement action that uses a range of protest tactics undermines government and police efforts to delegitimize a popular movement. Solidarity rallies and marches have already been organized in over a dozen cities and towns nationwide.

“As we see in the indictment, the act of mutual aid, the acts of our connectedness, are seen as a threat,” Mary Hooks, an Atlanta-based organizer and activist in the Movement for Black Lives, told me. “But these things are exactly what we need for our safety and what we need in the face of rising fascism.”

“Hopefully today does give hope,” she said. “Afraid? Yes we are, but we will choose courage over fear every day in the face of repression and oppression.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Natasha Lennard.

President Joe Biden awards the Presidential Citizens Medal to Fulton County, Georgia, election worker Ruby Freeman in the White House in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2023.

Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Ruby Freeman and Misty Hampton had a few things in common. They were both from Georgia, and both were election workers in their hometowns. But their paths sharply diverged when Donald Trump began to push his fraudulent claims that he had won the 2020 presidential election and pressured officials in key swing states, including Georgia, to illegally change the outcome.

As part of their unrelenting pressure on Georgia officials in the weeks after the November 2020 election, Trump and his allies launched a vicious campaign of harassment against Freeman, ginning up crazy conspiracy theories about her and falsely accusing her of altering the vote count in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, where she served as a temporary election worker. Trump’s supporters even tried to trick Freeman into falsely admitting that voting in Fulton County was rigged in favor of Joe Biden. Freeman refused to give in.

Misty Hampton, by contrast, was seduced by Trump’s election lies. She decided to help him try to overturn the election in Georgia by illegally giving his supporters access to voting equipment in rural Coffee County, where she was election supervisor.

The two women’s choices in the crucial days after the 2020 vote have now permanently altered their lives. Ruby Freeman is the undisputed hero of the 98-page indictment filed against Trump this week, while Misty Hampton is one of 18 co-conspirators charged in the case. The stories of Freeman and Hampton underscore how the illicit campaign by Trump and his allies to break the American democratic system came close to succeeding in part because they were aided by local collaborators in crucial states — but ultimately failed thanks to the courage of a handful of people in key positions. They were people like Al Schmidt, a Republican member of the municipal election board in Philadelphia who refused to go along with Trump’s post-election demands in Pennsylvania; Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman, who diverted rioters during the January 6 insurrection; and Ruby Freeman.

Intimidation Campaign

When Trump tried to overturn the election in Georgia, he and his supporters quickly sought to discredit the vote count in the Democratic stronghold of Fulton County. In an attempt to concoct lies about the election process there, they zeroed in on Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, both temporary election workers. They were Black women working in an urban county, which made them perfect targets for the racist conspiracy theories spread by Trump and his supporters.

The indictment filed against Trump and his co-conspirators in Fulton County this week (Trump’s fourth since April) details their efforts to harass and intimidate Freeman and get her to lie about the voting process in the county.

The latest indictment says that on December 10, 2020, Trump lawyer and adviser Rudy Giuliani claimed at a Georgia House of Representatives committee hearing that Freeman, Moss, and an unidentified man were “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine … to be used to infiltrate the crooked Dominion voting machines.” Giuliani alleged that between 12,000 and 24,000 ballots had been illegally counted in Fulton County to help Biden win.

On January 2, 2021, Trump called Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, demanding that Raffensperger find more votes for him so he could win Georgia. During the call, which is now a central piece of evidence in the Fulton County case, Trump repeatedly mentioned Freeman, claiming that she was a “professional vote scammer and known political operative.” Freeman, her daughter, and others were responsible for fraudulently awarding 18,000 ballots to Biden, he said, adding that Freeman “stuffed the ballot boxes,” the indictment states. The attacks from Trump, Giuliani, and others led Trump supporters to barrage Freeman with vitriolic phone calls and messages; they even showed up at her home.

When the harassment didn’t work, Trump and his supporters tried more direct intimidation, backed by lies.

The Publicist’s Scheme

On January 4, 2021, Trevian Kutti, a Trump supporter and a former publicist for Kanye West and R. Kelly, traveled from Chicago to Atlanta to try to meet Freeman, according to the indictment. Kutti had been recruited for the job by Harrison Floyd, the head of Black Voices for Trump, who has also been charged in the case.

Kutti went to Freeman’s house in Atlanta; when she couldn’t find her, Kutti told Freeman’s neighbor that she was a crisis manager trying to help. Later that day, Kutti, according to the indictment, reached Freeman by phone. She said that Freeman was in danger and that she should meet Kutti at a police station in suburban Cobb County. Once there, Kutti and Floyd, who joined the meeting by phone, told Freeman “that she needed protection” and that they could help her. The indictment charges Kutti, Floyd, and Stephen Lee, a right-wing minister, with conspiring to “solicit, request and importune” Freeman, and for “knowingly and unlawfully engaging in misleading conduct” to get her to make false statements about the vote counting in Fulton County.

Freeman resisted and has since been vindicated. In January, Biden awarded her and Moss Presidential Citizens Medals at the White House. They have sued Giuliani for defamation over the comments he made about them, and in July, Giuliani made a remarkable admission in that case: He acknowledged that he had made false statements about Freeman and Moss. The mother and daughter have already reached a settlement in another libel case against the right-wing One America News Network.

Vote Tampering

Misty Hampton took a very different path; while Freeman resisted Trump, Hampton embraced him. Hampton, the Coffee County election supervisor, illegally offered to give Trump and his allies access to the county’s voting systems.

Trump’s supporters jumped at Hampton’s invitation to pull apart the state’s voting equipment so they could make wild claims about it. Now Hampton — along with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, Georgia Republican operative Cathleen Latham, and Atlanta-area bail bondsman Scott Hall — have all been charged in connection with a conspiracy to tamper with the election systems in Coffee County and commit election fraud. Powell allegedly hired an Atlanta cyber contracting firm, SullivanStrickler, to send employees to Coffee County to gain access to the election equipment, while Hampton, Latham, and Hall “aided, abetted and encouraged” SullivanStrickler employees to tamper with the equipment inside the Coffee County election office, according to the indictment. 

On January 7, 2021 — the day after the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. — Latham, Hall, and employees of SullivanStrickler traveled from Atlanta to Coffee County, where Hampton gave them access to the election office and voting systems. 

That timing is a sign that Trump and his co-conspirators were relentless in seeking to overturn the election, even after the failed insurrection.

Hampton resigned as Coffee County election supervisor in February 2021, but that wasn’t the end of her work on Georgia elections. This past April, Georgia state investigators seized the election computer server of rural Treutlen County after discovering that Hampton had been hired to work on a special election there. Treutlen officials claimed not to know about the controversy surrounding Hampton’s work in Coffee County, about 60 miles away.

“At that particular time, we did not have a clue what had been going on over [in Coffee County],” said Treutlen County manager T.J. Hudson, who hired Hampton. Hudson, a Republican, said he knew Hampton “through an informal network of county election officials in Georgia.”

Ultimately, Hampton got her wish. Eager to help Trump, she is now inextricably linked to him under Georgia law.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by James Risen.

In his fourth, inglorious indictment in Georgia's Fulton County - historic home to Martin Luther King, John Lewis, Raphael Warnock, Stacey Abrams and other luminaries of the "cradle of the civil rights movement" - Trump was charged, along with 18 other crooks, liars and co-conspirators, with a sprawling conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and the will of the people. The "exceptionally detailed," sweeping, 98-page document - in contrast to Jack Smith's purposefully narrow dossier - accuses 19 defendants of a 161-act criminal conspiracy encompassing 41 felonies under Georgia’s RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, including racketeering, forgery, computer theft, computer trespass, filing false documents, tampering with voting machines, influencing witnesses, impersonating a public officer and conspiracy to defraud the state, acts that together "constituted a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged (in) criminal activities in furtherance of the conspiracy." Those associates include a laundry list of shady sidekicks and lawyers, from the habitual - Giuliani, Meadows, Eastman, Ellis, Powell, Clark, Chesebro - to lesser-known Georgia GOP pols. Despite the broad net, the driver of the clown car remains the tiny-fingered Trump - charged with 13 felonies, damningly mentioned over 100 times.

This "gorgeous justice" was crafted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who launched her investigation after the infamous audio of Trump urging Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have" - a conversation Trump persists in calling not just "perfect" but "even more perfect" than his mob-style 2019 call to Zelenskyy asking for the "favor” of investigating Biden, 'cause thugs are gonna thug. Willis’ indictment meticulously lays out a step-by-step chronology, starting days before the election with Trump saying he planned to declare victory even if he lost - "an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy” - ending with a slate of fake electors and Jan. 6. Willis based her charges on the findings of a special grand jury that wrapped up its work in February after interviewing over 75 witnesses and findingby unanimous vote that "no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election." They lacked the authority to issue indictments, but did offer six pages of recommendations on whom to indict for what. From their work, Willis begat what Charlie Pierce dubs "an epic, the Odyssey of ratfucking." Added to the sweetness: The fact that Willis, like most of those who've called Trump to grave legal account, is a Black woman. (Pierce again: "Sing to me, o Muse").

For starters, fulfilling many Americans' dreams, Sheriff Pat Labat has promised a mugshot as for any other perp: "It doesn't matter your status - we'll have a mugshot ready for you." He said Trump will undergo other standard procedures - intake, fingerprinting, medical screening - at the "unhygienic," "overcrowded" Fulton County jail - not a lofty courthouse like other cases. Also unlike New York and D.C., the ruination will be televised: Georgia law requires cameras be allowed in court with a judge's approval, typically granted unless a minor is involved, "to promote access to and understanding of court proceedings." Delightfully, Georgia also has very strict bail laws that only allow a court to release someone if they pose no risk of flight, committing another crime, or "intimidating witnesses or otherwise obstructing...justice" - which Trump has already boisterously, repeatedly done in other cases. Finally - thanks to corrupt 1930s Gov. and KKK Grand Titan” E.D Rivers, who sold so many pardons he kept pre-signed blanks with him - Georgia is one of only a few states where the governor has no pardon power, that being entirely in the hands of an appointed Parole Board with especially strict guidelines: A pardon can only be granted to offenders who've served their time, face no "pending charges," and for five consecutive years after sentencing have "remained free of criminal involvement."

Besides, even a (God forbid) GOP president's pardon power can't touch a state case, and a defiant Gov. Brian Kemp, who re-certified Georgia's votes for Biden after even the GOP legislature refused to certify fake Trump electors, would be unlikely to pardon the sore loser who's been bad-mouthing him ever since - and whose ongoing losing streak in the state has seen the victories of Warnock and Ossoff, the GOP lose the Senate, the survival of Kemp and Raffensperger, and the debacle that was his endorsement of a moronic Herschel Walker. In one final blow, Kemp resurfaced this week to give him yet another finger. "The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen," he tweeted after the indictment landed. "For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward (and) prove anything in a court of law...“Our elections in Georgia are secure, accessible, and fair and will continue to be as long as I am governor. The future of our country is at stake in 2024 and that must be our focus.” Still, the GOP whining and wailing took off. Mike Davis, a school board member or coach or entrepreneur who somehow got on TV, ranted Kemp should pardon Trump and never mind stupid laws: "It is only illegal to object to elections in Third World Marxist hell-holes and now in New York, DC and Atlanta."

The rest of the MAGA clan didn't make much more sense. Ever-aggrieved Ted Cruz, who once called Trump an "utterly amoral... pathological liar" and "mobster" with a "pattern of inciting violence" and being "surrounded by sycophants" but who in 2020 voted, sycophant-like, to overturn the election in a historic abuse of power, raged about Democrats' abuse of power. "I'm pissed," he yelled. "We've never once indicted a former president (except the last three times)..It is an abuse of power by angry Democrats who've decided the rule of law doesn't matter anymore." Jenna Ellis, a co-conspirator and much-censured lawyer now crowdfunding for her legal fees after Trump angrily refused to give her "one penny" (not that he would anyway) for supporting DeSantis, asked God to save her. Atop a flowery "wine-mom-font" declaring "Even so, it is well with my soul," she decried Democrats and vowed, "I am resolved to trust the Lord and I will simply continue to honor, praise, and serve Him." Online heathens had thoughts: "The Lord sayeth do not racketeer bigley and haveth remorse for worshipping Orange Him." Also, any vile evangelical homophobe who trashed the victims of the Pulse shooting as non-Christians "now reaping the consequences of eternal damnation" can go fuck herself and reap the consequences of eternal damnation.

Then there's the all-caps, still-seething Trump. On Truth Social, "the saddest site on the Internet," the spewing hasn't stopped. Earlier, "I UNDERSTAND (that) PHONEY (sic) FANI WILLIS WANTS DESPERATELY TO INDICT ME...I DIDN’T TAMPER WITH THE ELECTION! THOSE WHO RIGGED & STOLE THE ELECTION WERE THE ONES DOING THE TAMPERING, & THEY ARE THE SLIME THAT SHOULD BE PROSECUTED!" After the indictment: "The Witch Hunt continues! 19 people Indicated (sic) tonight, including the former President of the United States, me, by an out of control and very corrupt District Attorney." There is slimy dog-whistling on Willis, a "young racist" having an affair with a gang member (not), and dog-whistling beyond dog-whistling with a cringey, "They never went after those that Rigged the Election. They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!.” There is a desperate, imaginary, “large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT" on election fraud that "will be presented by me at a major News Conference" - sorry shades of Four Seasons Landscaping - on Monday at Bedminster. “Based on the results of this CONCLUSIVE Report, all charges should be dropped against me & others," he screeches. "There will be a complete EXONERATION!" Finally, there is flagrant, frenzied, ongoing witness tampering in real time. MSNBC's Katie Phang: "This is going to go so very badly for Trump." Oh please, oh please.

Cartoon by Gary Larson, The Far Side

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation with Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior and was authored by Andrea Chalupa & Sarah Kendzior.

We’re joined in Atlanta by LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, to discuss Donald Trump’s latest criminal indictment. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is charging Trump and more than a dozen of his allies with plotting to steal Electoral College votes during the 2020 presidential election. “There was an attempt to disenfranchise voters in the state of Georgia,” says Brown, who also describes Trump’s targeting of poll workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss and how Georgia’s status as one of five states where the governor cannot grant pardons will affect the upcoming trial. “If he is convicted in the state, he is going to jail.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The post January 6th Indictment One Step Short of the Full Case Against Trump appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ralph Nader.

On Thursday, former President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to trying to overturn the results of his 2020 election loss. Trump appeared before a magistrate judge in Washington’s federal courthouse two days after he was indicted. A key part of the election interference charges Trump faces relates to a Civil War-era rights law that protects the right of citizens to have their vote counted. We speak with Carol Anderson, author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy and ​_White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide_, about Trump’s attempt to wipe out the votes of Americans of color and the intimidation of Black voters and election workers. “This is the kind of terror that is reminiscent of what happened during Reconstruction that led to the KKK Act that Trump is charged with,” says Anderson. “That kind of terror was the intimidation of Black people who were exercising the right to vote.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation with Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior and was authored by Andrea Chalupa & Sarah Kendzior.

Jeffrey Clark, then assistant attorney general for the environment and natural resources division at the U.S. Department of Justice, speaks during a news conference in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 14, 2020.

Photo: Susan Walsh/AP

The man with no pants is the unnamed star of Donald Trump’s latest indictment.

Jeffrey Clark was an obscure government lawyer in the waning days of the Trump administration when he very nearly seized control of the Justice Department to help the president overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Clark is not identified by name in Thursday’s indictment, which accuses Trump of being at the heart of a conspiracy to fraudulently upend the election and prevent Joe Biden, the legitimate victor, from taking office. But the 45-page indictment’s description of “Co-Conspirator 4” matches Clark, who comes across as the most cinematic villain in the latest criminal conspiracy laid out by special counsel Jack Smith. (Filed in federal court in Washington, the indictment is Trump’s third this year.) Clark’s hunger for power and his contempt for democracy drip from the indictment’s pages.  

The first time most Americans ever saw Jeffrey Clark, he was in his underwear. When the FBI raided his house in July 2022 in connection with the criminal investigation into Trump’s attempts to stay in power, Clark was only half dressed; he asked if he could go put some pants on, but they ordered him to come outside immediately while they searched his house. Videos of a Clark standing in his doorway and then his driveway, wearing a blue dress shirt and what appeared to be black boxer briefs, were all over cable news.

Clark was a top environmental lawyer in the Justice Department during most of the Trump administration but was clearly eager for bigger things. After the election, when Trump was pressuring top Justice Department officials to cooperate with his efforts to overturn the vote, Clark saw his opportunity to move up. While his bosses at the Justice Department refused to get involved with Trump’s scheme, Clark went directly to the president behind their backs with a brazen scheme designed to weaponize the Justice Department to help reverse Biden’s victory.

The indictment offers an astonishing, blow-by-blow account of Clark’s attempt to help Trump and, in the process, help himself by hijacking the Justice Department while leaping over his superiors to become acting attorney general.

On December 22, 2020, Clark began to secretly conspire with Trump without the knowledge of his superiors at the Justice Department, according to the indictment. He met that day with Trump at the White House, but “Co-Conspirator 4 had not informed his leadership at the Justice Department of the meeting, which was a violation of the Justice Department’s written policy restricting contacts with the White House to guard against improper political influence.”

On December 26, Clark spoke on the phone with Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and lied about the circumstances of his meeting with the president, “falsely claiming that the meeting had been unplanned,” according to the indictment. Rosen told him not to have any further unauthorized contacts with the White House, and Clark promised he wouldn’t.

But the next day, according to the indictment, Clark talked to Trump on the phone. That afternoon, Trump called Rosen and Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general, and told them: “People tell me [Co-Conspirator 4] is great. I should put him in,” suggesting that he was considering putting Clark in charge of the Justice Department. At the same time, Trump followed up on his earlier efforts to pressure Rosen and Donoghue to use the Justice Department to help him overturn the election results, telling them: “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”

On December 28, Clark sent a draft of a letter to Rosen and Donoghue for them to sign. The letter was addressed to officials in Georgia, but he proposed sending versions of the same letter to officials in other key swing states as well. The letter stated that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states,” and claimed that two valid slates of electors had gathered and voted at the legally required time and place, and that both sets of ballots had been sent to Congress. That was Clark’s way of claiming that the Justice Department considered that fake slates of electors, created illegitimately by Republicans in states Trump had lost, were actually valid and should be accepted by state officials.

“Co-Conspirator 4’s letter sought to advance [Trump’s] fraudulent elector plan by using the authority of the Justice Department to falsely present the fraudulent electors as a valid alternative to the legitimate electors,” the indictment says. The letter also called on state legislatures to hold special sessions to choose fraudulent electors who would vote for Trump in the Electoral College instead of Biden.  

As soon as he read the proposed letter, Donoghue emailed Clark and told him it was filled with lies. Rosen and Donoghue once again told Clark not to have any further contact with the White House. But once again, Clark disobeyed.

On December 31, Trump called Rosen, Donoghue, and other Justice Department officials to the White House and repeated that they were overlooking widespread voter fraud, adding ominously that he was thinking about a leadership change at the Justice Department.

On January 2, Clark raised the pressure on his bosses. He told Rosen and Donoghue that Trump was considering making him acting attorney general, but that he would turn down the job if they would sign his proposed letter to the states. They refused, according to the indictment.  

On January 3, Clark met with Trump at the White House again, and accepted the president’s offer to become acting attorney general.

Right after that meeting, Patrick Philbin, the deputy White House counsel, told Clark not to accept the job and to drop his attempts to use the Justice Department to overturn the election, warning Clark that doing so would lead to “riots in every major city in the United States.” The indictment says that “Co-Conspirator 4 responded: “[W]ell, [Deputy White House Counsel] that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

Later that day, Clark met with Rosen and told him he was taking over as acting attorney general. Rosen shot back that he would refuse to accept being fired by him, and immediately called the White House and scheduled a meeting with Trump for that night. 

During that meeting, Rosen and other Justice Department officials told Trump that if Clark were named acting attorney general, there would be mass resignations from the Justice Department. Clark was sitting right there with them in the meeting when they issued their warning, the indictment says. Trump finally backed down and agreed not to turn the Justice Department over to Clark.

But Clark persisted; during the same meeting, he said that the Justice Department could issue an opinion saying that Vice President Mike Pence had the power to change the election outcome during the certification proceedings on January 6. When another Justice Department official said the department shouldn’t do that, Trump interrupted. “No one here should be talking to the Vice President,” he said, according to the indictment. “I’m talking to the Vice President.”

That ended the conversation, and Jeffrey Clark’s reach for power. The next time Clark was heard from, he was trying to reach for his pants.    

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by James Risen.

We unpack the explosive new criminal charges against Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, marking his third indictment in four months as he continues to campaign for reelection in 2024. The four-count indictment unveiled Tuesday by special counsel Jack Smith alleges Trump conspired to defraud the United States by preventing Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory, pushing fraud claims he knew to be untrue, pressuring state and federal officials to alter the results, and inciting a violent assault on the Capitol. The most serious charge against Trump carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, and he is set to appear in federal court later this week for his arraignment. “Donald Trump tried to strip away, from all of us, our democracy and our individual rights to vote to protect himself and remain in power,” says Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. We also speak with former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut, who says this case could represent a turning point even among Republicans and reassert the rule of law. “Presidents are not kings,” says Aftergut.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

RNZ Pacific

The deposed Papua Governor Lukas Enembe has been indicted this week on charges of bribery, allegedly over about US$3 million.

The amount of bribes in this indictment is far greater than the Corruption Eradication Commission’s initial allegation, when naming Enembe as a suspect at the end of 2022.

The commission’s public prosecutor alleges that the money was given to the defendant in  an act that went against his duties.

• READ MORE: Critical D-day over Papua governor Lukas Enembe’s legal nightmare?
• Other Governor Enembe reports

However, Enembe and his legal team strongly deny the allegations.

The defence team said no credible evidence had been presented.

Enembe’s declining health has been a constant concern for his supporters, who claim the outspoken leader’s arrest in January was politically motivated.

Earlier this week, Asia Pacific Report correspondent Yamin Kogoya reported that Enembe faced a critical “D Day” hearing about his controversial case as he had been seen as a critic of the Indonesian administration in Papua.

“His drawn out ordeal has been full of drama and trauma,” reported Kogoya.

“There has been indecisiveness around the case and the hearing date has been repeatedly rescheduled — from 20 more days, to 40 more days, and now into months.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The post On the Trump Indictment appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mel Gurtov.

The majority of former President Donald Trump’s charges for mishandling classified documents stem from the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law that has often been used to silence dissent and go after whistleblowers. We speak with Chip Gibbons of Defending Rights & Dissent, who calls for reforming the Espionage Act. Regardless of Trump’s conduct, the Espionage Act is “basically unconstitutional” and should not be used as it is currently written, says Gibbons, and notes Trump himself used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers when he was in office.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

In a Saturday speech to the Georgia GOP, Donald Trump characterized the entire American justice system as deployed to prevent him from winning the 2024 election. “These people don’t stop and they’re bad and we have to get rid of them. These criminals cannot be rewarded. They must be defeated.”

Trump is demanding once again that Americans choose sides. But in his deranged mind, this “final battle” is not just against his normal cast of ill-defined villains—Democrats, communists, socialists, Marxists, the “Deep State,” the FBI, and any Republican politician who dares cross him.It is between those who glorify him and those who detest him.

It will be a final battle over… himself.

“SEE YOU IN MIAMI ON TUESDAY!!!” he told his followers Friday night in a Truth Social post, referring to his arraignment today in Florida.

It was a chilling reminder of his December 19, 2020, tweet, “Be there, will be wild!”—which inspired extremist groups to disrupt the January 6 electoral vote certification. Calls are already circulating online for a gathering outside the federal courthouse in downtown Miami.

At the Georgia Republican Party convention on Friday night, Arizona Republican Kari Lake—who will go to Miami to “support” Trump—suggested violence. “If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me and you’re going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me,” Lake exclaimed to roaring cheers and a standing ovation. “Most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA,” the National Rifle Association gun lobby. “That’s not a threat, that’s a public service announcement.”

Most Republicans in Congress are again siding with Trump rather than standing for the rule of law. A few are openly fomenting violence. Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins tweeted, “This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS [a reference to the real president of the United States] has this. Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all,” suggesting guerilla warfare.

Most other prominent Republicans—even those seeking the Republican presidential nomination—are criticizing President Biden, Merrick Garland, and Special Counsel Jack Smith for “weaponizing” the Justice Department.

All this advances Trump’s goal of forcing Americans to choose sides over him.

Violence is possible, but there will be no civil war.

Nations don’t go to war over whether they like or hate specific leaders. They go to war over the ideologies, religions, racism, social classes, and/or economic policies these leaders represent.

But Trump represents nothing other than his own grievance with a system that refused him a second term and is now beginning to hold him accountable for violating the law.

In addition, the guardrails that protected American democracy after the 2020 election—the courts, state election officials, military, and Justice Department—are stronger than before Trump tested them the first time.

Many of those who stormed the Capitol have been tried and convicted. Election-denying candidates were largely defeated in the 2022 midterms. The courts have adamantly backed federal prosecutors.

Trump’s advocates are having difficulty defending the charges in the unsealed indictment—that Trump threatened America’s security by illegally holding (and in some cases sharing) documents concerning “United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack,” as well as sharing a “plan of attack” against Iran.

Many Republicans consider national security the highest and most sacred goal of the Republic. A large number have served in the armed forces.

Bill Barr, Trump’s own former attorney general, said on “Fox News Sunday”: “I was shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were, frankly … If even half of it is true, then he’s toast. I mean, it’s a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning. And this idea of presenting Trump as a victim here, a victim of a witch hunt, is ridiculous.”

None of this is cause for complacency. Trump is as dangerous as ever. He has inspired violence before, and he could do it again.

But I believe that many who supported him in 2020 are catching on to his lunacy.

Trump wants Americans to engage in a “final battle” over his own narcissistic cravings. Instead, he is likely to get a squalid and humiliating last act.

In These Times is a 501(c)3 organization and does not support or oppose candidates for public office.

A version of this story also appeared at Common Dreams.

This content originally appeared on In These Times and was authored by Robert Reich.

In a Saturday speech to the Georgia GOP, Donald Trump characterized the entire American justice system as deployed to prevent him from winning the 2024 election. “These people don’t stop and they’re bad and we have to get rid of them. These criminals cannot be rewarded. They must be defeated.”

Trump is demanding once again that Americans choose sides. But in his deranged mind, this “final battle” is not just against his normal cast of ill-defined villains—Democrats, communists, socialists, Marxists, the “Deep State,” the FBI, and any Republican politician who dares cross him.It is between those who glorify him and those who detest him.

It will be a final battle over… himself.

“SEE YOU IN MIAMI ON TUESDAY!!!” he told his followers Friday night in a Truth Social post, referring to his arraignment today in Florida.

It was a chilling reminder of his December 19, 2020, tweet, “Be there, will be wild!”—which inspired extremist groups to disrupt the January 6 electoral vote certification. Calls are already circulating online for a gathering outside the federal courthouse in downtown Miami.

At the Georgia Republican Party convention on Friday night, Arizona Republican Kari Lake—who will go to Miami to “support” Trump—suggested violence. “If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me and you’re going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me,” Lake exclaimed to roaring cheers and a standing ovation. “Most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA,” the National Rifle Association gun lobby. “That’s not a threat, that’s a public service announcement.”

Most Republicans in Congress are again siding with Trump rather than standing for the rule of law. A few are openly fomenting violence. Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins tweeted, “This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS [a reference to the real president of the United States] has this. Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all,” suggesting guerilla warfare.

Most other prominent Republicans—even those seeking the Republican presidential nomination—are criticizing President Biden, Merrick Garland, and Special Counsel Jack Smith for “weaponizing” the Justice Department.

All this advances Trump’s goal of forcing Americans to choose sides over him.

Violence is possible, but there will be no civil war.

Nations don’t go to war over whether they like or hate specific leaders. They go to war over the ideologies, religions, racism, social classes, and/or economic policies these leaders represent.

But Trump represents nothing other than his own grievance with a system that refused him a second term and is now beginning to hold him accountable for violating the law.

In addition, the guardrails that protected American democracy after the 2020 election—the courts, state election officials, military, and Justice Department—are stronger than before Trump tested them the first time.

Many of those who stormed the Capitol have been tried and convicted. Election-denying candidates were largely defeated in the 2022 midterms. The courts have adamantly backed federal prosecutors.

Trump’s advocates are having difficulty defending the charges in the unsealed indictment—that Trump threatened America’s security by illegally holding (and in some cases sharing) documents concerning “United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack,” as well as sharing a “plan of attack” against Iran.

Many Republicans consider national security the highest and most sacred goal of the Republic. A large number have served in the armed forces.

Bill Barr, Trump’s own former attorney general, said on “Fox News Sunday”: “I was shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were, frankly … If even half of it is true, then he’s toast. I mean, it’s a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning. And this idea of presenting Trump as a victim here, a victim of a witch hunt, is ridiculous.”

None of this is cause for complacency. Trump is as dangerous as ever. He has inspired violence before, and he could do it again.

But I believe that many who supported him in 2020 are catching on to his lunacy.

Trump wants Americans to engage in a “final battle” over his own narcissistic cravings. Instead, he is likely to get a squalid and humiliating last act.

In These Times is a 501(c)3 organization and does not support or oppose candidates for public office.

A version of this story also appeared at Common Dreams.

This content originally appeared on In These Times and was authored by Robert Reich.

Donald Trump is set to surrender today at the federal courthouse in Miami to face charges for retaining and mishandling classified documents, including top-secret information about U.S. nuclear weapons programs. Trump’s supporters, including many prominent members of the Republican Party, have threatened violence and suggested revolt in response to what they see as a politically motivated targeting of the former president, while Trump himself has claimed to reporters that he is innocent of wrongdoing. His capture of the Republican base is the work of a “cult leader,” argues Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascism and authoritarianism, adding that today’s GOP is an “autocratic party operating inside a democracy.” Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, also discusses the death this week of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who she says helped to mainstream far-right extremism in Italian politics.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

We speak with The Nation's Elie Mystal about the Justice Department's unsealed, sweeping 37-count indictment of former President Donald Trump for retaining and mishandling classified documents, including top-secret information about U.S. nuclear weapons and secret plans to attack a foreign country. Trump is the first U.S. president to face federal criminal charges. He has denied any guilt. The new indictment joins his indictment earlier this year in New York, where he is accused of committing financial fraud.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Did you celebrate the long awaited federal indictment of Trump? That's perfectly fine to do, even if history has shown Trump has gotten away with decades of corruption, and our legal system favors the rich. At the very least, Trump may be knocked out of the presidential race with the help of the indictments, and they're reportedly throwing him into a rage. But the long term outlook requires caution. That, Tucker Carlson's dark Twitter video, George Santos' bail woes, how to help a loved one sucked into a cult, and more are discussed in this week's bonus episode for our listeners subscribed at the Truth-teller level and higher on Patreon.

To join our community and submit questions to our regular Q&As, sign up and support the show at Patreon.com/Gaslit!

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation with Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior and was authored by Andrea Chalupa & Sarah Kendzior.

Republican Rep. George Santos of New York, whose brief tenure in Congress has been dominated by scandal, was arrested by federal authorities Wednesday on a slew of criminal charges including money laundering, wire fraud, theft of public funds, and lying to Congress.

The 13-count indictment, unsealed by the U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday, accuses Santos of masterminding "a scheme to defraud supporters of his candidacy for the House and to obtain money from them by fraudulently inducing supporters to contribute funds" to a company "under the false pretense that the money would be used to support [Santos'] candidacy."

The indictment alleges that Santos actually spent the money on personal expenses such as "luxury designer clothing and credit card payments."

Santos was also charged for fraudulently obtaining more than $24,000 in unemployment benefits.

In response to the news of Santos' arrest, the progressive advocacy group Stand Up America said the New York Republican "must resign or face expulsion."

"George Santos should resign immediately," said Christina Harvey, the group's executive director. "He lied to voters about nearly every aspect of his life, and now we know that he broke the law numerous times and stole from the American people by falsely claiming employment benefits that should have gone to struggling New Yorkers. Santos' constituents deserve real representation in Congress, not a morally bankrupt and now indicted fraud."

"If Santos refuses to step down, Speaker McCarthy and House Republicans must remove him from office," Harvey added. "Continuing to shield Santos as a member of the slim Republican majority would be a betrayal of McCarthy's oath of office and the ultimate act of cowardice by the Republicans who now control the House."

The House GOP leadership has yet to publicly demand Santos' resignation, though some rank-and-file Republicans have said they would support the New York congressman's removal.

Santos, who has been facing calls to resign since he admitted to lying about his background following his election to Congress late last year, is expected to appear in federal court in New York later Wednesday.

"This indictment seeks to hold Santos accountable for various alleged fraudulent schemes and brazen misrepresentations," Breon Peace, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement. "Taken together, the allegations in the indictment charge Santos with relying on repeated dishonesty and deception to ascend to the halls of Congress and enrich himself."

"He used political contributions to line his pockets, unlawfully applied for unemployment benefits that should have gone to New Yorkers who had lost their jobs due to the pandemic, and lied to the House of Representatives," Peace continued. "My office and our law enforcement partners will continue to aggressively root out corruption and self-dealing from our community's public institutions and hold public officials accountable to the constituents who elected them."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Prosecutors at the U.S. Department of Justice have filed criminal charges against Republican Congressman George Santos of New York, sources familiar with the matter told multiple media outlets on Tuesday.

Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York filed charges against the freshman lawmaker, who is expected to appear in court as soon as Wednesday, according to CNN—which was first to report the news. The nature of the charges against Santos will not be known until he makes his first court appearance.

The FBI and Justice Department public integrity prosecutors in New York City and Washington, D.C. are investigating accusations that Santos lied in his campaign finance filings, among other allegations.

"George Santos needs to resign or be immediately expelled from the House."

Last December, Nassau County, New York District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly—a Republican—also announced that her office was investigating Santos, then a congressman-elect, over his myriad lies.

"The numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-elect Santos are nothing short of stunning," Donnelly said at the time.

From intrigue surrounding how his net worth skyrocketed from almost nothing to $11 million in less than two years; to demonstrable lies about his education, employment history, residence, and purported Jewish heritage; to allegations of fraud perpetrated in Brazil and against a U.S. combat veteran and his dying dog, Santos' lies have dominated his short congressional career.

While he has admitted to lying about his life, Santos has denied any criminal wrongdoing. Earlier this year, he vowed to serve out his term despite growing calls for him to resign—including from Republican officials in his own district.

Those calls mounted anew following news of Santos' impending indictment.

"We are waiting to see the charges, but we all knew this was where things were heading," said Rep. Nicole Maliotakis (R-N.Y.).

"The sooner he leaves," she added in reference to Santos, "the sooner we can win the seat with someone who isn't a liar."

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.)—who three months ago introduced a resolution to expel the congressman that more than 40 Democratic lawmakers endorsed—tweeted that "George Santos needs to resign or be immediately expelled from the House."

"Today's news that federal prosecutors are filing criminal charges against George Santos makes it crystal clear that we must act," he added.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Donald Trump is the first American president to be indicted. No matter where you see yourself on the political spectrum, that is a very big deal.

Although the initial criminal case against Trump is being handled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for what some see as relatively minor business-fraud crimes committed in connection with the payment of hush money to a porn star, it won’t be the last. By late spring or early summer, the ex-president will likely be charged with more consequential offenses in Georgia and in federal court for plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election; inciting the Jan. 6insurrection; and absconding to Mar-a-Lago with a trove of top-secret documents. While Trump will be shielded with the presumption of innocence as the wheels of justice turn, the available public evidence suggests he is in serious jeopardy of being convicted of multiple state and federal felonies.

Trump also faces liability in two pivotal civil trials in New York. A defamation/rape lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll is currently underway. In addition, Trump is slated to go on trial in October in a massive fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

But even as we anticipate the sweet sound of jury verdicts read in open court, we would do well to reflect on the broader implications of prosecuting Trump for the future of American democracy. There are, on close analysis, both obvious benefits and inherent limitations to what can be achieved through litigation.

On the positive side, there can be no question of the need to hold Trump accountable for abusing women, grifting his way to the Oval Office in 2016 and, more critically, for his attempts to cling to power after losing the 2020 campaign by more than 7 million votes. We have all heard the cliché that “no one is above the law,” but prosecuting Trump has given the adage new life and content.

There is no good reason to accord Trump, now a private citizen, the kind of legal immunity that the Justice Department unfortunately decided, as a matter of discretionary policy, to afford Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton when they were sitting presidents. Other democracies around the world, including France, Germany and Portugal, have prosecuted their political leaders for corruption with no enduring ill effects. There should be no room for American exceptionalism when it comes to our own leaders.

At the same time, we should be under no illusions that taking Trump down will cure all that ails our democracy. Trump is the head of the Republican Party and a political movement that has morphed into a form of 21^st-century fascism. Prosecuting Trump, and even sending him to prison, will not extinguish the movement he unleashed.

Fascism, as I have written before, is an emotionally loaded and often misused term, but it is as real today — as a political and cultural force, as a set of core beliefs and mode of governance — as it was when Benito Mussolini founded the Italian Fascist Party in 1919 and declared himself dictator six years later. It is on the rise once more across the globe in the Philippines, India, Western Europe, Russia and here at home.

Many instructive discussions of fascism can be found in the works of scholars such as Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanely and Henry Giroux. Of all the definitions of the term, perhaps the most incisive appears in Robert Paxton’s classic study “The Anatomy of Fascism” (Harvard University Press, 2004). “Fascism,” Paxton writes,

may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

After hesitating to call Trump a fascist when he initially took office, Paxton changed his views after Jan. 6. “I resisted for a long time applying the fascist label to Donald J. Trump,” he wrote in Newsweek, “[But] Trump’s incitement of the invasion of the Capitol…removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosse[d] a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”

Giroux offered even more powerful observations in an essay, “Fascist Politics in the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism,” cross-posted earlier this month by CounterPunch and LA Progressive:

An upgraded form of fascism with its rabid nativism and hatred of racial mixing is currently at the center of politics in the United States. Traditional liberal values of equality, social justice, dissent and freedom are now considered a threat to a Republican Party supportive of staggering levels of inequality, white Christian nationalism and racial purity.

It is by no means clear that the U.S. can withstand the existential threat posed by the upgraded form of fascism we face today. Combating fascism requires a coordinated and concerted political response. To quote Giroux again:

Confronting this fascist counter-revolutionary movement necessitates creating a new language and the building of a mass social movement in order to construct empowering terrains of education, politics, justice, culture and power that challenge existing systems of white supremacy, white nationalism, manufactured ignorance and economic oppression.

Seen in this light, the effort to bring Donald Trump to justice is the beginning of a much longer struggle, not the end.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Bill Blum.

The unsealed indictment states that on Tuesday, April 18, 2023, a federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida, levied charges of “conspiring to covertly sow discord in U.S. society, spread Russian propaganda and interfere illegally in U.S. elections.” While no evidence of conspiracy, propagandizing, or interference has been presented, the APSP and its members have the right, as all U.S. citizens do, to freely criticize U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

Not since the Palmer Raids of the early 20th century, nor since the indictment of W.E.B DuBois in 1951, or the confiscation of Paul Robeson’s U.S. passport during the anti-communist “McCarthyist” era, has there been such a hysterical response to African people asserting their rights and freedom of speech in the United States. This renewed attack against anti-imperialist Africans, framed within the absurd notion of “Russian influence,” comes as capitalism decays and U.S. global hegemony loses its hold on the world. The attacks on the APSP and the Uhuru Movement are part of a historical tendency to align African political activists with U.S. “adversary” states to marginalize African internationalism (including solidarity with Cuba and Palestine, for example) and to suppress Black radicalism.

It is also an assault on the efforts of Africans organizing against the violence and murders suffered at the hands of the U.S. state. Indeed, Africans do not need Russia to tell them they are suffering the brunt of violence in the heart of the U.S. empire!

BAP demands the indictment be dismissed, and Uhuru must be free!

For further reading on this case, please read BAP’s July 30 statement that commented on the initial FBI raid of the APSP’s properties.

Struggle to win,

BAP Coordinating Committee

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Black Alliance for Peace.

The unsealed indictment states that on Tuesday, April 18, 2023, a federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida, levied charges of “conspiring to covertly sow discord in U.S. society, spread Russian propaganda and interfere illegally in U.S. elections.” While no evidence of conspiracy, propagandizing, or interference has been presented, the APSP and its members have the right, as all U.S. citizens do, to freely criticize U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

Not since the Palmer Raids of the early 20th century, nor since the indictment of W.E.B DuBois in 1951, or the confiscation of Paul Robeson’s U.S. passport during the anti-communist “McCarthyist” era, has there been such a hysterical response to African people asserting their rights and freedom of speech in the United States. This renewed attack against anti-imperialist Africans, framed within the absurd notion of “Russian influence,” comes as capitalism decays and U.S. global hegemony loses its hold on the world. The attacks on the APSP and the Uhuru Movement are part of a historical tendency to align African political activists with U.S. “adversary” states to marginalize African internationalism (including solidarity with Cuba and Palestine, for example) and to suppress Black radicalism.

It is also an assault on the efforts of Africans organizing against the violence and murders suffered at the hands of the U.S. state. Indeed, Africans do not need Russia to tell them they are suffering the brunt of violence in the heart of the U.S. empire!

BAP demands the indictment be dismissed, and Uhuru must be free!

For further reading on this case, please read BAP’s July 30 statement that commented on the initial FBI raid of the APSP’s properties.

Struggle to win,

BAP Coordinating Committee

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Black Alliance for Peace.

Lawyers for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit against U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, who as chair of the House Judiciary Committee has launched numerous attempts to interfere with the prosecution of former Republican President Donald Trump.

The lawsuit was filed a week after Bragg's office charged Trump with 34 felony counts stemming from his alleged "hush money" payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential election.

Jordan responded to the charges by issuing a subpoena to a former investigator in Bragg's office, Mark Pomerantz, calling on him to provide the Ohio Republican's committee with a closed-door deposition about the probe into Trump's alleged crimes.

The subpoena amounted to a "brazen and unconstitutional attack" by a close ally of Trump who is intent on waging a "transparent campaign to intimidate" the district attorney's office, Bragg's lawyers said in the lawsuit, which was filed in the Southern District of New York.

Bragg is seeking to bar Jordan from enforcing the subpoena and from demanding testimony from anyone else, including the district attorney himself.

"Rather than allowing the criminal process to proceed in the ordinary course, Chairman Jordan and the committee are participating in a campaign of intimidation, retaliation, and obstruction," reads the lawsuit.

In addition to the subpoena, Jordan—along with Reps. James Comer (R-Ky.) and Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), who respectively chair the House Oversight, and Administration committees—sent letters last month to Bragg's office demanding documents regarding the investigation into Trump, claiming the House Judiciary Committee has the authority to oversee the case.

"Usually Republicans want a weak federal government," Maya Wiley, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Tuesday. "Seems now they want a centralized system."

Jordan is also planning to hold a "field hearing" on April 17 in New York to investigate whether Bragg has inappropriately focused on prosecuting Trump—a 2024 presidential candidate—while failing to address crime in the city, which is down this year according toThe New York Times.

"House Republicans' attempts to interfere in the prosecution of their political ally Donald Trump by a local DA are unprecedented and dangerous," said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "It's good that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is not taking this lying down."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

The post The Indictment, Sleaze, and Trump’s World appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Warner.

Donald Trump's indictment for criminal behavior has no precedent in American history. How could a functioning democracy choose such a man as President?

There's the rub. Trump was not elected in a functioning democracy. Ronald Reagan and a toxic Supreme Court signed its death warrant years ago.

In his manic neoliberal drive to deregulate the economy Reagan suspended enforcement of the anti-trust laws. The resulting frenzy of mergers and acquisitions concentrated every American industry into a small handful of titanic corporations. Supreme Court decisions endowed these corporations with Constitutional rights of personhood, and declared spending money a form of free speech. As the 20th century faded, consequently, a tsunami of corporate money defeated American democracy, displacing it with a de facto corporate oligarchy—which then retained the Republican Party as its champion.

The money flows in two channels: corporate campaign contributions precondition elected officials to be friendly and accommodating listeners, and then corporate lobbyists articulate the detailed requests. As a result public policy today systematically favors corporate interests, over the welfare of the American people.

Yes, a veneer of democracy remains. We vote people into office, but who controls the policy outcomes? It wasn't the will of the people to repeal Glass-Steagall in the 1990's; the Wall Street banks were delighted. It wasn't the will of the people to invade Iraq in 2003; the oil and armaments industries were delighted. It wasn't the will of the people to cut the corporate tax rate by 40% in Trump's Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017; every corporation in America was delirious. In every case the nation suffered, as massive wealth was shifted upward.

The wellspring of corporate oligarchy was the "Powell Manifesto," written by corporate attorney Lewis Powell, and published in 1971 by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Manifesto was a neoliberal creed, condemning government interventions in free markets and praising the efficacy of private enterprise. It was so appealing to corporate America Joseph Coors immediately founded the Heritage Foundation with a grant of $250,000, the Koch Brothers doubled that in setting up the Cato Institute, and a moribund rightwing research shop was transformed into the American Enterprise Institute. Since then these three think tanks have dominated the thinking, policy positions, and even staffing of Republican Administrations. They also demonstrated the appeal of neoliberalism in presidential campaigns The Democratic Leadership Council embraced neoliberalism in 1992 and put Bill Clinton in the White House, to announce "the end of welfare as we know it" and "the era of big government is over."

The Powell Manifesto, then, succeeded in normalizing and popularizing neoliberalism. But corporate oligarchy was not yet possible: corporations were prohibited from contributing to political campaigns, by the Tillman Act of 1907.

Lewis Powell was up to the challenge.

In 1972 President Richard Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court. Four years later the Court heard the case of Buckley v. Valeo. Powell voted with the majority, to establish in law that candidates spending money for political campaigns is a form of free speech, protected by the First Amendment. Two years later, in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, Powell wrote the majority decision: speaking freely by spending money is the Constitutional right of corporations as well.

But corporate oligarchy was still beyond reach, because corporations in America were very small, very many, and very much in competition with each other, industry by industry. Few of them could afford to spend much on political campaigns, or lobbying.

Until Ronald Reagan encouraged them to buy up their competitors, aggregating pools of financial resources of unprecedented magnitude. Corporate oligarchy blossomed and brought with it the disastrous consequences: a shrinking middle class, hunger, homelessness, a floundering healthcare system, unending warfare, crumbling public education, savaged labor unions, a climate crisis, a tiny stratum of obscene wealth and growing poverty for everyone else.

The drivers and the history of corporate oligarchy are well known and documented and have been for years. In 1992 William Greider pioneered the alarms, with his book, Who Will Tell the People? The Betrayal of American Democracy. David Korten's book followed in 1995: When Corporations Rule the World. In 2004 Lisa Duggans' book appeared: The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. More recently Daniel Lucks' work appeared: Reconsidering Reagan: Racism, Republicans, and the Road to Trump, in 2020. Thom Hartmann's book in 2019 is entitled, The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of American Democracy. A companion volume followed in 2022, The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and How to Restore Its Greatness.

Such books, and periodicals, radio talk-shows, and progressive websites have developed a groundswell of resistance intent on restoring democracy.

Trump's indictment is an optimistic sign. It constitutes an inflection point, the first direct challenge to corporate oligarchy. The Republican Party is more than outraged: it is terrified, and so are the party's masters, the billionaire and corporate oligarchs.

Donald Trump is critical to their prosperity and to their future. Ever more clearly the Republican Party is pushing the country into fascism, and to be firmly implanted fascism requires, indispensably, a charismatic demagogue. Donald Trump displayed his genius as such in his campaign for the White House and in his subsequent and frequent rallies. No one visible in the country today can match him: Trump must survive. For the Republican Party and its benefactors, losing Trump means losing the ballgame.

The ballgame is in jeopardy. Almost certainly Trump's indictment on the hush-money issue presages more indictments to follow, on far more serious charges, at the hands of Fani Willis in Georgia and Special Counsel Jack Smith at the Justice Department. The trials will stretch on for months, exposing Trump's actions and his persona to public scrutiny day after day: his support is far more likely to erode than to expand.

This is fortunate; the 2024 presidential election looms, and it will be arguably the most critical in modern history. We will not likely see Trump in the White House again, and hence will escape a charismatic demagogue and full-strength fascism. But any of Trump's Republican competitors, if elected, will cement corporate oligarchy in place.

If the resurrection of democracy is to proceed, a Republican Administration is unthinkable.

Heads up.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Richard W. Behan.

The post Indictment and Electoral Defeat: The Right Suffers Devastating Setbacks in the US appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ashley Smith.

Seeing Trump arraigned in New York on Tuesday was satisfying even if the outcome of the trial cannot be foreseen and he has a presumption of innocence. There is obviously evidence that he falsified his business records for the purpose of hiding material facts from the American people in October 2015, so as to defeat Hillary Clinton even after the release of the Billy Bush interview in which he boasted of grabbing random women by the genitals. Major Republicans began peeling away at that point, and the revelation of the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal affairs (while Melania was pregnant with Baron) would likely have finished him off.

The new American comfort with indicting former presidents, bringing the U.S. into line with European democracies, however, is bittersweet, since there are past presidents who should also have sat in a court looking stony-faced and bitter.

1. In some ways similar to Trump, Grover Cleveland, who had two non-consecutive terms in the nineteenth century, raped a woman he was courting, Maria Halpin. He threatened to ruin her with a lawsuit if she ever revealed the rape. She banished him from her life, but then found she was pregnant. When news that he had fathered a child emerged during his next campaign, Cleveland had his flacks bury Halpin in smears as a fallen woman, so that she could not get a hearing. Trump and his people are capable of such smear campaigns, too, but nowadays they have the “catch-and-kill” technique for shutting women up. Interestingly, part of Tuesday’s indictment mentioned that Trump paid a doorman $30,000 to shut him up after he claimed to know about a child Trump sired out of wedlock. As with Cleveland, Trump has been accused of rape, as well. In the me-too era, Grover Cleveland might have had to contend with Ronan Farrow and might have ended up like Harvey Weinstein.

2. George W. Bush should have been impeached or at least indicted for lying the country into the Iraq War. Trump probably managed to kill more people with bad health and environmental policy than Bush did with his Iraq misadventure, but Bush’s crime was still epochal. Congress passed a law in 1996 allowing trial of any US national who breaches the Geneva Conventions, so I think there could theoretically be a lot of charges against Bush if the DOJ wanted to bring them.

3. Ronald Reagan sold US anti-tank weapons to Iran while that country was on the State Department’s terrorism list. There was no Congressional appropriation. Essentially, the weapons were stolen from the Pentagon storehouses and sold to a dummy corporation in Switzerland that then sold them to Iran. The money Iran paid for these weapons was kept in off-the-books black accounts and used to support the right wing death squads in Nicaragua. The latter was in defiance of the Boland Amendment, which was US law. Reagan shredded the constitution, armed the Ayatollah, and backed armed paramilitaries that violated the Geneva conventions every which way from Sunday.

4. Richard Nixon committed so many crimes it would be hard to know where to start with indictments. He was forced out of office for having ordered the covert ‘plumbers’ group to burglarize the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. Most people no longer remember that he did this twice. More important than Watergate was Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia, revealed by the Pentagon Papers. President Gerald Ford made an error in pardoning Nixon, since that act set up an expectation among later presidents that there would never be any accountability.

5. Warren Harding helped his Interior Secretary, Albert Fall, usurp from the Navy control of two key oil reserves, Elk Hill in California and Teapot Dome in Wyoming. Fall then took hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks and bribes to lease these oil fields to private companies. It is not clear that Harding himself had his palms greased, but he knew very well what Fall was up to, and neither interfered nor reported it to anyone. I’d say he was clearly an accomplice. Fall went to jail, but Harding was never charged.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Juan Cole.

At the criminal court in downtown Manhattan today, nothing important happened. Believe me. I was there. There were no meaningful occurrences of true consequence. Certainly nothing worthy of a claim on your limited attention. I wouldn't bring it up at all, except that I fear that my friends and I in the media may be about to gleefully poison this nation, one more time.

One thing about New York City is that it is home to a large population of reporters, of which I am one, that will reliably turn up at any spectacle. Not out of any nefarious motives. We do this for the same reason that residents of small towns turn up at the county fair: It's something to do.

Media is a two-way entertainment business. In order to entertain our audience, we must first be entertained ourselves. Spectacles, therefore, are irresistible. This is okay, even amusing, until the weight of a spectacle grows so large and monopolizes so much of the available energy that it starts feeding itself, investing itself with undue importance purely because everyone is paying it so much attention. Such was the case with the media circus around the arraignment of former President Donald J. Trump over hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Like drinking an entire bottle of vodka, this can all seem like great fun, until you wake up and find that everything around you has been broken.

On Tuesday morning, the east side of Collect Pond Park across the street from the courthouse was lined with tents, each one home to a camera crew from a different national news organization. Many of those cameras were trained on a guy in a breakdancing-style track suit who was spinning a basketball on top of a pole holding an American flag, as he danced back and forth in Rollerblades chanting "Donald. J. Trump. Not. Guilty!" He seemed to be the most newsworthy thing out there.

The park itself, which was ostensibly the site of a protest, was jammed with a crowd that was about 80% press, 15% police and 5% people who had come to protest or counterprotest on one side or the other. Any lunatic who wanted to don a MAGA hat or wave a "FUCK TRUMP" flag and make their way downtown was likely to be photographed and patiently interviewed by multiple power-suited TV newspeople who would nod and maintain a look of professionalism, no matter how stupid the words flowing from the person's mouth were. One man wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and a rubber Trump mask told a reporter, with great seriousness, "I don't really give interviews, because I don't sound like him." We, the press, were all here, and we needed content. There was no one to blame but ourselves.

Even the Proud Boys and antifa, usually reliable telegenic opponents on the field of pointless political battle, did not bother showing up to this event, leaving the desperate reporters crowding around a single guy with a Trump hat on his head and a small dog in a cart at his side.

At last, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the bombastic Georgia fool (and Republican House representative), showed up to give her speech. Or so I was told. Though I was only feet away from her alleged location, I could not see her through the tightly packed forest of cameras, and I could not hear her thanks to one determined opponent who continually blew an orange plastic whistle as long as she was speaking. Eventually her security detail pushed through the chaotic crowd and the person I assume to be Greene left the park, trailing a cloud of media like a comet's tail.

After that, there was nothing much left except the freaks and predators astute enough to come and sponge up the free press. New York Rep. Jamal Bowman was there, saying some things, along with a performance artist who smeared white paint all over her skin and screamed "Fuck white people!" until the police strongly encouraged her to leave the park.

Here and there, some die-hard MAGA people who had come in to support their pagan god milled about, looking a little aimless. I asked two women from Texas wearing Trump t-shirts where else they planned to go in the big city after the rally. "Probably nowhere," one said. "I'm not risking my life to be out in New York City. You all have rapes, murders, right in the streets here, with Bragg letting all the criminals go." This was pure delusion. It's true that waltzing around New York in a Trump hat puts you at risk for public humiliation, but other than that, it's a pretty safe city. It's easy to lay this sort of thinking at the doorstep of Fox News, but if we are being honest, your local news can produce this same sort of fearful hallucination on a local scale.

There are plenty of important things happening in America right now. Florida has just effectively banned abortion. Vital elections are taking place in Chicago and Wisconsin. In Los Angeles, a labor dispute threatens to shut down Hollywood. All of these things will have a profound material impact on millions of people's lives. The hundreds of reporters in Manhattan today were not covering any of these things. They were covering the guy on rollerblades instead. We will never know how many more important stories did not get told because we were all out in this park full of cretins.

Some will say, "Isn't the historic arraignment of a former United States President important as well?" And I say to you: No. It's not. Not really.

Donald Trump walking in and getting his mug shot taken is not important in the same way that a woman in Florida being forced to have a baby she doesn't want due to the brutal and cowardly actions of her state's elected leaders is important.

A single pool reporter with a notebook and an iPhone could cover the Trump arraignment just as effectively as dozens of CNN satellite teams can, because there is not really very much happening, when you get right down to it. I don't want to be an old crank here. I like spectacle. I am a reporter on the far margins of national news, and that is where spectacle belongs.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Hamilton Nolan.

We review the details of the Stormy Daniels case and the other crimes for which he should be charged, among them, sedition, abuse of the pardon power, obstruction of justice, rape, election interference, racketeering, and much, much more – and we note the terrible precedent it sets that crimes affecting national security and public safety (like, say, fomenting a violent coup!) go unpunished, opening the door for a successor to commit them. We discuss the media’s continued role as a PR outlet for Trump and the loss of publicly available archives that make it easier for the public to forget his other crimes. We also break down why Bragg was the first prosecutor to finally indict him when so many others – Mueller, Garland, Comey, Vance, etc – have failed, and speculate on what will happen in other state and local investigations. There is a LOT to unpack in this episode so be sure to tune in!

For our bonus episode, available to subscribers at the Truth-Teller level and higher, we answer questions from our Patreon subscribers on secessionist movements, the media outlets stoking civil war, whether Trump poses a flight risk, how 1980s militias and crime cults shape today’s politics, and much more! We have another bonus dropping later this week so make sure to sign up. Patreon members now have the opportunity to win a free copy of our upcoming graphic novel Dictatorship – It’s Easier Than You Think! We will be giving away one copy each month to a subscriber selected at random.

Gaslit Nation is a 100% independent podcast made possible by listener support. If you like us, please spread the word, as we are shadowbanned on Musk’s Twitter and often cannot even post links to our own show! Happy indictment day!

SHOW NOTES:

• Opening clip: https://twitter.com/brenonade/status/1641555295926099969?s=20

• Closing clip of Comedian Michael Rapaport confronting Marjorie Taylor Greene https://twitter.com/MovieEv/status/1643321452400197632?t=AOSICEsvfZlVLpInMOrvrg&s=19

• Twitter is convinced Melania Trump looks 'scared to death' as she meets Vladimir Putin https://finance.yahoo.com/video/twitter-convinced-melania-trump-looks-184142266.html

• Mueller referred evidence of 14 other potential crimes to federal officials. Only two of them are publicly known https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/mueller-evidence-14-potential-crimes-only-two-publicly-known.html

• Mueller She Wrote on Twitter on Trump Indictment Originating from Mueller Investigation:  https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1641620212066967552?t=hMmwg-URW82BOM5sR4QIBA&s=19

• Donald Trump indicted by Manhattan grand jury on more than 30 counts related to business fraud https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/30/politics/donald-trump-indictment/index.html?utm_source=twcnnbrk&utm_content=2023-03-31T00%3A17%3A15&utm_term=link&utm_medium=social

• Trump loses bid to narrow rape accuser E Jean Carroll’s defamation case https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-e-jean-carrol-defamation-b2310975.html

• New York Young Republicans Statement on Trump Indictment: https://twitter.com/AndreaChalupa/status/1641876783409553429

• Viktor Orban, the Ron DeSantis of the European Union, released a statement of support for Trump on Twitter, writing: “Keep on fighting, Mr. President! We are with you.” https://twitter.com/PM_ViktorOrban/status/1642819156880785408/photo/1

• Ricky Vaughn Indictment: https://twitter.com/EDNYnews/status/1641902845413711874 

• PEN America on Ricky Vaughn Indictment: https://twitter.com/PENamerica/status/1641983670465486848

• Trump faces 4 investigations. Here’s where they stand https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/your-guide-to-all-of-the-investigations-into-trump

• Donald Trump Faces Several Investigations. Here’s Where They Stand. https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-investigations-civil-criminal.html

• Donald Trump Has Been Indicted. Don’t Get Your Hopes Up. | The Nation

• Inside the government’s racial bias case against Donald Trump’s company, and how he fought it - The Washington Post

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation with Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior and was authored by Andrea Chalupa & Sarah Kendzior.

This is a developing story... Please check back for possible updates.

Former U.S. president and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Tuesday pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts involving alleged multiple hush money payments during the 2016 election in bids to cover up sex scandals.

Trump surrendered to police and was fingerprinted before appearing in a Manhattan courtroom for his arraignment on charges related to six-figure payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal during the 2016 presidential election in attempts to silence allegations of extramarital affairs, as well as a $30,000 payment to a former Trump Tower doorman who claimed to have a story about a child Trump had out of wedlock.

The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg Jr. published the indictment against Trump. According to a summary from Bragg's office, the former president is being charged for allegedly "falsifying New York business records in order to conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election."

The summary continues:

During the election, Trump and others employed a "catch and kill" scheme to identify, purchase, and bury negative information about him and boost his electoral prospects. Trump then went to great lengths to hide this conduct, causing dozens of false entries in business records to conceal criminal activity, including attempts to violate state and federal election laws.

The charges are all Class E felonies—the lowest level in New York—each carrying a potential prison sentence of four years per count.

"The people of the state of New York allege that Donald J. Trump repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal crimes that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election," Bragg said in a statement.

"Manhattan is home to the country's most significant business market," he added. "We cannot allow New York businesses to manipulate their records to cover up criminal conduct."

U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said in a statement following the arraignment that "Donald Trump has consistently proven that he was a lawless president and unfit for public office. History will remember Donald Trump not only as the first president to be impeached twice, but the first president to be indicted on criminal charges."

"Falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments is only the beginning of the crimes Trump has committed. He must also be held to account for conspiring to overturn an election, inciting a fascist insurrection, and fueling white supremacist violence," she continued.

"Today, the law has finally caught up with Donald Trump and his corrupt and reckless behavior," Tlaib added. "No one is above the law, no matter how rich or powerful they are. The American people deserve to see accountability handed down. Let justice be served."

"He must also be held to account for conspiring to overturn an election, inciting a fascist insurrection, and fueling white supremacist violence."

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, who has covered Trump for decades, toldDemocracy Now! Tuesday morning that "hopefully this is the beginning of a revival and a renewal of American democracy."

"There is an enormous amount of people in America, across the political spectrum, who believe that we have one set of laws for the rich and powerful, and one set of laws for them," Johnston continued.

"This shows that we are making further progress toward the far-from-fulfilled promise of equal justice under law," he added. "And this will not be the last indictment of Donald Trump."

An unnamed law enforcement official toldRolling Stone that Trump declined an offer for a low-profile arraignment, opting instead for a midday booking at the Manhattan courthouse.

"He wanted a perp walk; he wanted daylight hours," the official said. "He wants to get out of the vehicle and walk up the stairs."

"This is a nightmare for Secret Service, but they can only strongly suggest—not order—that Trump enter through the secure tunnels," they said. "Trump wants to greet the crowd... It's kind of a Jesus Christ thing. He is saying, 'I'm absorbing all this pain from all around from everywhere so you don't have to'... If they can do this to me they can do this to you,' and that's a powerful message."

While most defendants are keen to avoid publicizing their arrest photos, Trump's team created a fake mugshot for fundraising purposes.

The advocacy group Free Speech for People issued a statement following Tuesday's arraignment arguing that Trump's "many other serious crimes have yet gone unpunished."

These include "crimes releated to the January 6, 2021 insurrection and the events leading up to it; crimes related to Trump's January 2, 2021 phone call demanding that the Georgia Secretary of State 'find 11,780 votes'... the obstruction of justice crimes identified by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the second part of his report; crimes identified by the inspector general of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence related to Trump's attempts to extort Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy; and others."

The group called upon U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland "to establish an independent DOJ task force to coordinate these investigations while insulating them from political interference."

Some observers noted that Trump—who followed through on a campaign promise to "bomb the shit out of" Islamic State militants and "take out their families in Iraq and Syria—and other U.S. presidents responsible for war crimes including illegal invasion, mass murder, and torture will likely never face accountability.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

As former President Donald Trump is expected to be arrested in New York on charges related to paying hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign, we speak with The Nation's justice correspondent Elie Mystal, who says the case against Trump is far from a slam dunk. Trump is reportedly facing about 30 criminal counts related to business fraud, but Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has yet to release the exact charges, which reportedly include at least one felony. Mystal says it's clear that Trump “did the deed,” but the timing of the charges could undermine the case, due to the statute of limitations that may have elapsed and because of the looming 2024 election campaign. “Why wasn’t he held accountable for that earlier, when it might have been easier to do so?” asks Mystal.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Last Thursday’s big news story was the indictment of Donald Trump, with banner headlines in all the papers that still print on paper. The phrase I saw most often was “uncharted territory,” (and occasionally “unchartered territory”), which is somewhat true: we’ve never had a former president, much less one seeking election, under indictment. But, truth be told, it seems like these waters were fairly easy to predict. It’s been obvious for many years that Trump disregarded rules and laws, acted on whims and appetites, and was a greedy skinflint; him ending up in trouble for tax evasion to cover up an affair with a porn star seems unlikely only in its details.

The truly novel story came out a few hours earlier on Thursday, with the publication of Nature. The magazine is one of the world’s two pre-eminent scientific journals, and it emerges weekly from its London base with the latest in carefully peer-reviewed research. This week it carried one of the most important installments in the most important saga of our time, the rapid decline of the planet’s physical health. It was in the form of a dispatch from the Antarctic, where researchers found, to quote their title, clear evidence of “Abyssal ocean overturning slowdown and warming driven by Antarctic meltwater.”

One understands why that was not quite as easy to put into headlines as Trump’s arrest. But translated from the scientific, it’s the rough equivalent of “South Pole to Planet Earth: Drop Dead.” As The Guardian explained, in the best summary of the research I’ve seen, the study shows that “melting ice around Antarctica will cause a rapid slowdown of a major global deep ocean current by 2050 that could alter the world’s climate for centuries and accelerate sea level rise.”

If greenhouse gas emissions continue at today’s levels, the current in the deepest parts of the ocean could slow down by 40% in only three decades.

This, the scientists said, could generate a cascade of impacts that could push up sea levels, alter weather patterns and starve marine life of a vital source of nutrients.

Basically, as melting ice pours fresh water into the ocean around Antarctica, it dilutes the salinity of the sea; that reduces its density and it’s no longer heavy enough to sink, pushing out the water that’s already there. The decomposing organisms that have dropped to the sea floor thus remain locked there, as the whole vast conveyor belt begins to slow. This phenomenon has already been observed in the Arctic, where melting water pouring off Greenland and from melting sea ice has slowed the Arctic Meridional Overturning Current, or AMOC; the Australian scientists behind this new study have confirmed that the same thing is underway in the antipodes. The water that once flowed north, carrying nutrients to the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans will stagnate in place. Other studies have predicted additional problems as these currents decline, including moving rainfall bands by a thousand kilometers from their present position. As one scientist put it, the Antarctic current is “on a trajectory that looks headed towards collapse,” and not on a scale of centuries, or even century. On a scale of decades and years. We’re as far from 2050 as we are from Bill Clinton denying he’d had “sexual relations” with “that woman,” which is to say not very far (and also reminder that embarrassing presidents are not in themselves a new phenomenon, even if Trump took it to an entirely new and endlessly more dangerous level).

The scale of the systems we’re now affecting is almost incomprehensible—the flow of the Arctic current is a hundred times larger than the Amazon river. And the speed is incomprehensible. “In the past, these circulations have taken more than 1,000 years or so to change, but this is happening over just a few decades,” one of the study’s authors said. “It’s way faster than we thought these circulations could slow down.”

But that’s because we’ve built a new planet, one with a markedly different atmosphere. Which changes everything. Even before the epochal news from the Antarctic, the earth’s oceans had been sending distressing signals this spring. In late March, scientists reported that the temperature of ocean waters around the planet was rising abruptly, reaching record levels in recent weeks.

Around mid-March, ocean-temperature monitoring data shows that average surface water temperatures surpassed 21 degrees Celsius (about 70 degrees Fahrenheit) around the globe, excluding polar waters, for the first time since at least 1981, when the data set originated. That is warmer than what scientists observed at this time of year in 2016, when a strong El Niño drove the planet to record warmth.

This time those records are being set in the latter phases of a La Nina cold cycle—though it’s becoming clear that a new El Nino is in the process of forming and should be here by late summer or early fall. The chances are growing that it will be an extremely strong version of the Pacific warm current, and if so it will drive the climate crisis into a new gear—Jim Hansen, the planet’s greatest climatologist, has suggested we could see temperatures pass, at least for a time, the 1.5-degree temperature mark. In political terms, this means probably the last spurt in aroused global fear, translating into the last chance for widescale emissions reductions, during the period when we still have some hope of really limiting temperature rise. After that, we may well be in territory where only truly terrifying interventions like solar geoengineering will suffice.

“The longer we go on with higher rates of greenhouse gas emissions, the more changes we commit ourselves to,” said one of the Aussie scientists who brought us this week’s grim and vital news. That’s been true for decades now; the question as always is if we’ll react to the latest warning. The crime that history will remember Trump for is almost certainly withdrawing from the Paris climate accord. But they got Al Capone on his taxes too.

In other energy and climate news:

+New York governor Kathy Hochul seems poised to do something really dumb, undermining New York’s climate laws at the behest of the fossil fuel industry, largely by introducing an accounting trick on the way we figure the warming impact of methane. New York enviros are fighting back. Follow the Twitter feed (sigh) of New York Communities for Change for the latest updates

+You can sign a petition asking state treasurers to do the right thing and back climate and indigenous rights in this spring’s round of shareholder meetings at big companies. Meanwhile, thanks to Senator Ed Markey and Reps Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib for introducing legislation that would cut off the flow of financing from big banks to the fossil fuel industry. A strong argument for this law comes in a Seattle Times oped from Third Act organizers Lisa Verhovek, Mary Lou Dickerson, and Bobby Righi:

In light of the recent upheavals in the banking sector and the greater concentration of deposits in the large Wall Street banks, we need more than ever to demand that these banks use their enormous power to invest responsibly. We can expect our banks to manage both financial and climate risks, and to this end encourage people to contact their own banks and credit unions to review both the stability of the bank, FDIC insurance coverage and whether they are funding fossil fuel development.

+Jeff Goodell, one of the world’s great climate reporters, has come back with a haunting dispatch from the Okavango Delta, where oil companies have begun drilling in yet another remarkable corner of the earth.

The Okavango Delta is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and for good reason: It is one the world’s last wild places. It’s not a savanna or a rainforest or a jungle. It’s at the northern edge of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana — a desert formed of the wind-blown fragments of some of the oldest rocks on Earth. But at certain times of the year, water comes flooding down from the highlands of Angola, a gently rising plateau north of Botswana and Namibia that was the site of bloody conflicts for the last three decades of the 20th century. Out of these battle-scarred hills, this land of strife and suffering, runs the water that makes up the delta.

The water in the delta is beautiful and clear, unpolluted by chemicals or sediments. For wildlife, this water is a lifeline, a paradise, a refuge. Hippos and crocodiles thrive in the shallow channels and pools. More than 500 species of birds flash through the skies. It is a landscape of ancient baobab trees (one baobab in Namibia is estimated to be 2,100 years old) and riverbanks of papyrus, the plant from which Egyptians learned to make paper 4,000 years ago. It is an unfenced, undomesticated place that still moves to the rhythms of nature, where the big animals that populated your childhood imagination live and hunt and die without human interference.

+An old friend—and truly veteran solar campaigner Sajed Kamal—offers an essay detailing his hopes for a move from mutually assured destruction to an era where climate cooperation offers some hope for peace. It includes a reminder of a quote from former Exxon CEO (and Trump secretary of state) Rex Tillerson: “My philosophy is to make money. If I can drill and make money, then that’s what I want to do.”

+Many thanks to the Wall Street Journal (whose news side is different from its editorial side) for pursuing the “mystery” of who hired a global hacker to spy on opponents of Exxon. The hacker is in a New York jail, not talking. Bonus is a picture of yours truly, since my account was one of the ones he was after.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Bill McKibben.

Faith leaders pray over President Donald Trump during an Evangelicals for Trump campaign event held at the King Jesus International Ministry on Jan. 3, 2020, in Miami, Fla.

Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by James Risen.

Stormy Daniels reacted Friday to the criminal indictment of former U.S. President Donald Trump with a play on his infamous taped remarks seemingly confessing to sexually assaulting women.

"This pussy grabbed back," Daniels—the porn star paid $130,000 by Trump fixer Michael Cohen in return for silence about an alleged 2006 sexual encounter with the future president—told TheTimes of London in a paywalled article.

One month before the 2016 presidential election, a 2005 recording of Trump telling "Access Hollywood" host Billy Bush that "when you're a star," women let you "do anything" to them," including "grab 'em by the pussy" surfaced.

More than two dozen women and a 13-year-old girl have accused Trump—a 2024 Republican presidential candidate—of sexual misconduct, including assault.

"Trump is no longer untouchable," Daniels continued in the interview. "A person in power is not exempt from the law. And no matter what your job is, or what your bank account says, you're held accountable for the things you've said and done, and justice is served."

Daniels called Trump's indictment—which reportedly involves over 30 as-of-yet unspecified counts stemming from the $130,000 payment—a "vindication."

"But it's bittersweet," she added. "He's done so much worse that he should have been taken down [for] before. I am fully aware of the insanity of it being a porn star. But it's also poetic."

Trump is both the first president to be impeached twice and the first ex-president to face criminal charges.

Daniels said she learned about the indictment while she was out riding her horse, whose name is Redemption.

"There's something really ironic and hilarious that I got the news about the indictment while I was sitting on a horse named Redemption," she said, adding that she used some of the $130,000 hush money payment to buy a horse trailer.

Daniels said the indictment will "divide people" and questioned whether Trump would ultimately be held accountable, noting that he has "already gotten away with inciting a riot."

"Whatever the outcome is, it's going to cause violence, and there's going to be injuries and death," Daniels warned. "There's the potential for a lot of good to come from this. But either way, a lot of bad is going to come from it, too."

However, Daniels says she's undaunted by the prospect of facing Trump in court.

"I've seen him naked," she explained. "There's no way he could be scarier with his clothes on."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

On the heels of former President Donald Trump's historic indictment, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office on Friday told three top Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House that their "attempted interference with an ongoing state criminal investigation—and now prosecution—is an unprecedented and illegitimate incursion on New York's sovereign interests."

U.S. Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), James Comer (R-Ky.), and Bryan Steil (R-Wis.)—who chair the House Judiciary, Oversight, and Administration committees, respectively—initially wrote to Bragg last week demanding documents and testimony. In response, the general counsel for Bragg's office, Leslie Dubeck, called their requests an "unlawful incursion" into state sovereignty.

A second letter from Jordan, Comer, and Steil—public allies of Trump—prompted the six-page response from Bragg's office on Friday, less than 24 hours after the New York grand jury convened by Bragg over a hush money payment to a porn star voted to indict the former president and 2024 GOP candidate, who is expected to be arraigned Tuesday.

"You and many of your colleagues have chosen to collaborate with Mr. Trump's efforts to vilify and denigrate the integrity of elected state prosecutors and trial judges and made unfounded allegations."

"Your first letter made an unprecedented request to the district attorney for confidential information about the status of the state grand jury investigation—now indictment—of Mr. Trump," Dubeck wrote to the lawmakers. "Your second letter asserts that, by failing to provide it, the district attorney somehow failed to dispute your baseless and inflammatory allegations that our investigation is politically motivated. That conclusion is misleading and meritless."

"We did not engage in a point-by-point rebuttal of your letter because our office is legally constrained in how it publicly discusses pending criminal proceedings, as prosecutorial offices are across the country and as you well know," the general counsel continued. "That secrecy is critical to protecting the privacy of the target of any criminal investigation as well as the integrity of the independent grand jury's proceedings."

The letter lays out why the congressmen's committees "lack jurisdiction to oversee a state criminal prosecution," and declares that "based on your reportedly close collaboration with Mr. Trump in attacking this office and the grand jury process, it appears you are acting more like criminal defense counsel trying to gather evidence for a client than a legislative body seeking to achieve a legitimate legislative objective."

Dubeck also took aim at their "vague and shifting legislative purpose." Only noting it in the second letter suggests "your proposal to 'insulate current and former presidents' from state criminal investigations is a baseless pretext to interfere with our office's work," she wrote. "Even if you were seriously considering such legislation and had the constitutional authority to enact it (which you do not), your request for information from the district attorney and his former attorneys concerning an ongoing criminal probe is unnecessary and unjustified."

After highlighting that the lawmakers' initial rationale for the inquiry related to the use of federal funding, the letter notes that over the past 15 years, the DA's office has helped the federal government secure over $1 billion from asset forfeiture and the office itself "receives only a small fraction of those forfeited funds."

Dubeck disclosed that from October 2019 to August 2021, approximately $5,000 of the federal forfeiture money was spent investigating the former president or the Trump Organization; most of those costs were related to a case that led to the conviction of Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg and two Trump business entities, and "no expenses incurred relating to this matter have been paid from funds that the office receives through federal grant programs."

The letter explains the DA office's current participation in federal grant programs, then forcefully calls out the congressmen:

Finally, as you are no doubt aware, former President Trump has directed harsh invective against District Attorney Bragg and threatened on social media that his arrest or indictment in New York may unleash "death and destruction." As committee chairmen, you could use the stature of your office to denounce these attacks and urge respect for the fairness of our justice system and for the work of the impartial grand jury. Instead, you and many of your colleagues have chosen to collaborate with Mr. Trump's efforts to vilify and denigrate the integrity of elected state prosecutors and trial judges and made unfounded allegations that the office's investigation, conducted via an independent grand jury of average citizens serving New York state, is politically motivated. We urge you to refrain from these inflammatory accusations, withdraw your demand for information, and let the criminal justice process proceed without unlawful political interference.

Dubeck asked that if the lawmakers won't withdraw their request, they agree to a meeting and provide a list of questions for Bragg as well as a description of documents they believe could be turned over to Congress "without violating New York grand jury secrecy rules or interfering with the criminal case now before a court."

"We trust you will make a good-faith effort to reach a negotiated resolution," she concluded, "before taking the unprecedented and unconstitutional step of serving a subpoena on a district attorney for information related to an ongoing state criminal prosecution."

The latest letter from the DA's office "is really a work of art," independent journalist Marcy Wheeler said in a series of tweets on Friday. "It was a joy to read. Bragg is not fucking around and... well, Jimmy Jordan is."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

The Trump campaign and the former president's Republican allies wasted no time attempting to turn Thursday's indictment news into a lucrative fundraising opportunity, appealing to their right-wing supporters for cash on live television and in a flurry of late-night emails.

"We are living through the darkest chapter of American history," blared one email that the Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee fired off after a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict the former president on criminal charges related to an alleged hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election.

"With your support, we will write the next great chapter of American history—and 2024 will forever go down as the year we saved our Republic," the email, which was attributed to Trump himself, continued. "Please make a contribution—of truly any amount—to defend our movement from the never-ending witch hunts and WIN the WHITE HOUSE in 2024."

A subsequent email with the subject line "Holding a shirt just for YOU" called Alvin Bragg "George Soros' bought-and-paid-for Manhattan D.A." and said Trump was indicted for "committing NO CRIME."

The email then transitioned to a sales pitch for Trump campaign shirts, which supporters were informed they could receive for "free"—in exchange for a $47 donation.

"What better way to show your support for President Trump and our incredible movement during this dark chapter in our nation's history than to proudly wear the brand-new 'I Stand with President Trump' T-shirt," the appeal declared.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), meanwhile, used his appearance on Sean Hannity's live-audienceFox News show Thursday night to plead with Trump supporters to "give the president some money to fight this bullshit."

"He's spent more money on lawyers than most people spent on campaigns. They're trying to bleed him dry," said Graham, one of many Republican lawmakers who rushed to Trump's defense following Thursday's news.

Republican members of Congress also sent out urgent fundraising emails Thursday night in an attempt to capitalize on news of Trump's indictment.

"Contribute to our OFFICIAL TRUMP DEFENSE FUND to STAND WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP against this SCAM INDICTMENT," read an email sent by the campaign of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the chair of the House Republican Conference.

The Trump campaign said it raked in at least $2 million in donations in the week after the former president predicted on his social media platform earlier this month that his arrest was imminent.

Trump is expected to turn himself in to New York authorities early next week. The former president is reportedly facing more than 30 criminal counts of document fraud, though the indictment and exact charges remain under seal.

MSNBC's Steve Benen wrote Friday that "in theory, it might seem impossible for a scandal-plagued politician to turn a criminal indictment into a grift."

"In practice, the relationship between Donald Trump and his followers is not normal," Benen added, noting that the Trump campaign has successfully raised money off impeachment proceedings, efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, and supposed post-election campaigns to "secure" future contests.

The latter fundraising ploy yielded millions of dollars for Trump's PAC—but that money was reportedly funneled toward the former president's travel costs and other expenses, not the election battles donors were promised.

"Common sense might suggest that the public would see these developments, learn about the former president's underhanded tactics, and his fundraising would dry up—especially in the wake of a criminal indictment," Benen wrote Friday. "His schemes have been exposed. His willingness to exploit his supporters has been well documented. All of this should start closing wallets. But Trump’s hold on his followers is strong—so the grift continues."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

A New York Grand Jury empaneled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has indicted the former president, Donald John Trump. I give all three of Trump's names because that is usually how the felons are referred to in the press.

Some have complained that of all the illegal and destructive things Trump did, this indictment focuses on a relatively minor and tawdry little crime. This complaint derives from a failure to realize that everything about Trump is trivial and always has been.

Just Security has the timeline. Trump was concerned in October 2016 that Stephanie Clifford a.k.a. Stormy Daniels might go to the tabloid press for a big payout for her story about how she and Trump had sex in July 2006 at Lake Tahoe. Ms. Clifford has acted in pornography films, and Trump promised her an appearance on his Apprentice television show. Trump appears to have gone outside his home for sex in 2006 when his wife Melania was pregnant with their son, Baron. That June, he had also approached Playboy model Karen McDougal for sex, and she agreed but says she declined a proffered payment, saying "I'm not that kind of girl." So that liaison, which continued for some time, probably falls under the heading of an affair. Trump was wary of her telling her story, too. Cifford had attempted to sell her story before, but had been thwarted when Trump threatened to sue for libel. Her story became potentially a big draw after the leaked Billy Bush tape of Trump talking about grabbing random women by their genitals.

Trump arranged for his attorney, Michael Cohen, to pay Ms. Clifford $130,000 to tell her story only to The National Enquirer in return for her signing a non-disclosure agreement. The Enquirer, owned by a friend and backer of Trump, David Pecker, in return simply did not print the "Stormy Daniel" scandal. This way of proceeding buried the story and left Ms. Clifford unable to peddle it elsewhere.

A similar deal had already been done with Karen McDougal.

Trump repaid Cohen for the expenditure in installments, either through Trump, Inc. and Alan Weisselberg or from his own private account.

NPR reports that Trump categorized the payments for tax purposes as "for legal services." This was, of course, incorrect, unless it is a new euphemism for having sex at resorts with porn stars and then buying their silence.

It is illegal in New York to misreport on your tax statements the purpose for which money has been spent. This is a crime.

This crime was minor, but it was committed to further another crime, which was to pay hush money for the purposes of a political campaign. In New York, you get felony charges for committing one crime to further another crime.

And that is the case against Trump. Some observers think it may be a case difficult to prove in New York law.

German-American political philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the term "banality of evil" as the subtitle of her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. She depicted the Nazi mass murderer as a bland and ordinary bureaucrat, just trying to get ahead by blending in. He wasn't a criminal mastermind. He wasn't evil in a brilliant way, as Milton's Lucifer was. He was banal, and his vapidness killed lots of people.

Trump is, of course, also banal. But more than that, he is trivial. He inherited capital from his father as well as know-how concerning the cut-throat real estate markets in the run-down neighborhoods of Queens. He parlayed those advantages into being a billionaire or at least very wealthy. But Queens real estate isn't intrinsically interesting. Trump and his father both had slumlord tendencies, and were probably mobbed up. For all of its mystique, organized crime is also trivial. It is based on primal emotions like fear and greed in our lizard-brains, and it has no vision and builds nothing. It is parasitical. No wonder it ends up making money on garbage. Even its violence just reduces complex human beings full of aspirations to trivial garbage.

Likewise, Trump's television show "The Apprentice" was trivial. If it had never been on television, it wouldn't have mattered. Now that it is no longer on television, it doesn't matter. It was just another phony "reality" show. It may well have involved a scam, as Jose Paglieri at the Daily Beast reported. Lawyers for four angry entrepreneurs looked at The Apprentice outtakes in 2021:

"lawyers for four scorned entrepreneurs know what they're looking for: anything that shows Donald Trump and his kids knew that they were duping would-be investors by leading them to ACN, a multi-level marketing company based in North Carolina.

Trump and his kids—Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric—were the top recurring characters of The Apprentice, playing the role of business judges. During the show, the family featured ACN as a promising investment, even having celebrities compete to produce a commercial for the company's supposedly high-tech new video chatting phone, the "Iris 5000." In reality, the tech was a dud and the company was facing financial turmoil—but viewers weren't told that."

In other words, the Trumps on The Apprentice may have just been conning people. Trump is a ponzi scheme based not on invested capital but invested confidence. Trump is a set of serial shakedowns.

Trump's presidency was trivial, having no accomplishments but one giveaway of billions to his cronies in the form of a tax cut. It was so predictable. He seems to have sat around all day in his pajamas watching Fox Cable News and spewing out nonsensical tweets. He spent a third of his time playing golf, and went out on the Hastings telling his 30,000 trivial lies.

Trump has never been important enough to be banal. He never had the discipline for banality. His mind has all the focus of a butterfly in a hurricane. He flits from one triviality to another.

Trump's vulgar gyrations with a sex worker whom he flimflammed with the promise of a television appearance that would never happen were trivial. This indictment is a fitting commentary on our century's "Mr. Griffith." Haven't heard of "Mr. Griffith?" That's because he was trivial.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Juan Cole.

Donald Trump has been indicted.

You’re going to hear three basic criticisms of this indictment. Let me rebut each in turn.

1. It sets a dangerous precedent.

Rubbish. In order for the justice system to work, there must be trust that the system will not play favorites or ignore the wrongdoing of the powerful.

Donald Trump has done everything possible over the last seven years to destroy that trust for his own political gain.

Since the basic issue here is one of accountability, this case could actually open the way for the other, more serious ones.

It is true that no former president has ever been indicted, but no former president has done what Donald Trump has done — repeatedly defied laws and disregarded the U.S. Constitution. America never quite recovered from Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon for all crimes he might have committed.

The Framers of the Constitution explicitly provided that presidents could be charged after leaving office. Article I Section 3 states that a president impeached by the House and convicted and removed from office by the Senate “shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.”

The fundamental idea that no one is above the law is only true if we make it so. Holding our leaders accountable is vital to maintaining trust in our legal system, and the survival of our democracy itself.

2. The indictment plays into Trump’s claims that he’s the victim of a witch hunt and will further rile his core supporters

Irrelevant. Undoubtedly some Trump supporters will be upset by this. The indictment will confirm for them that Trump is not only being prosecuted but also being persecuted.

But Trump has used every move against him so far — whether by the FBI, the Justice Department, Congress, or even opponents in the Republican Party — to claim he’s the victim of a witch hunt. This indictment is not fundamentally different from all the other charges and allegations. His entire campaign is founded on variations of this same grievance.

But in this case, a grand jury has found that he broke the law. It will be harder to cast an independent grand jury composed of ordinary people as part of a “deep state” witch hunt.

3. This is the weakest of the cases now being prepared against Trump

So what? To be sure, paying hush money to cover up something embarrassing during a presidential campaign is not nearly on the same level as asking Georgia’s secretary of state to “come up” with the exact number of votes needed to reverse the outcome of Georgia’s presidential election, or fomenting an attack on the U.S. Capitol.

And it may be true that an allegation like this is usually treated as a misdemeanor rather than a felony.

None of this alters the fact that a grand jury had enough evidence in this case to decide that Trump broke the law. That’s the critical point. A federal judge can decide whether the case rises to a felony or is more appropriately treated as a misdemeanor. The overriding issue is that no person is above the law, not even a former president.

Indeed, since the basic issue here is one of accountability, this case could actually open the way for the other, more serious ones. Prosecutors in Georgia and Washington won’t have to bear the burden of justifying an action that had never been taken before. Their more serious charges would come to a public that had already adjusted to the phenomenon of a Trump indictment.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Robert Reich.

Wowza. It seems the Manhattan grand jury's indictment of lifelong grifter and twice-impeached, way-past-time-for-him-to-be-gone former pretend president Trump charges him with 34 counts related to business fraud, which must cover more than just hush money to Stormy, the porn star who may have saved America. Trump is expected to appear in court Tuesday. Until then, Twitter is going berserk with glee at the possibility justice will finally be done. Gwyneth freed, Trump indicted: What a country.

News of the apparently greater-than-expected number of charges - the indictment remains sealed - suggests the grand jury may have targeted more than the $130,000 payment Trump made via Michael Cohen to Stormy Daniels to ensure she didn't tell anyone about his sad little mushroom dick. The possibilities for other charges are nigh-on endless: As the New York Times notes in its usual bloviating fashion, "Mr. Trump had for decades avoided criminal charges despite persistent scrutiny and repeated investigations, creating an aura of legal invincibility that the indictment threatens to puncture." Let's hope.

Meanwhile, Trump was furiously ranting on Truth Social, complete with all-caps screeds and unfortunate spelling mistakes. "These thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just INDICATED (sic) the 45th President of the United States of America, and the leading Republican candidate, by far, (which he never tires of noting) for the 2024 nomination," he shrieked. "THIS IS AN ATTACK ON OUR COUNTRY, THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE," also one of his fave phrases. On the right-wing Rumble, the boy his dad never loved echoed his sense of grievance, calling it “communist level-shit."

But Twitter was ecstatic. On multiple hashtags - #TrumpIndictment, #LockHimUp, #TrumpForPrison - people celebrated a long-awaited reckoning for an evil buffoon two years out of office yet still making tawdry history. The response by Yusef Salaam, New York City Council candidate and member of the Exonerated 5 - previously the Central Park 5, for whom Trump decades before took out a full-page ad calling for their deaths before they'd even been tried - resonated for many: "For those asking about my statement on the indictment of Donald Trump - who never said sorry for calling for my execution - here it is: Karma."

There were brutally hilarious memes, happily vengeful photos, Obama and Hillary references, Home Alone plugs, and congrats to Gwyneth Paltrow, because at least someone had been found innocent. There was gratitude to Daniels, and there were many wisecracks: "Hard to believe Trump having sex resulted in something worse for him than Don Jr.," "Liza Minnelli has outlived the long wait for Trump to be indicted," "I heard Killary ate 3 babies for breakfast," "I wonder if Jim Jordan would have any objection to being indicted simultaneously" and, "Let the unraveling begin." Above all, there was a weary, bittersweet solace, a sense that justness may yet prevail. "Lock him up," read a sign in New York. "Throw away the key." Please.

Lock 'em all up, please.Twitter meme.

Melania at work.Twitter meme.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

Yusef Salaam, one of the five New York teens wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for the 1989 rape of a jogger in Central Park, issued a brief statement following Thursday's criminal indictment of former U.S. President Donald Trump—who called for bringing back the state's death penalty to execute the defendants and never apologized after they were cleared.

Salaam tweeted: "For those asking about my statement on the indictment of Donald Trump—who never said sorry for calling for my execution—here it is: Karma."

Trump spent $85,000—over $200,000 today—on a full-page ad that ran in all four of New York's major newspapers calling for the restoration of capital punishment so that the Central Park Five could be executed.

The ad read, in part:

Mayor [Ed] Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer... Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will... How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits?

The five Black and Latino teens—Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Salaam—were beaten and coerced by New York City police into falsely confessing to the rape. They spent years behind bars for the horrific crime that they did not commit.

Salaam, who was 15 years old when his life was upended, was imprisoned for six years and eight months before his exoneration.

In a 2019 interview with the BBC, Salaam—who is now a motivational speaker—said that "I look at Donald Trump, and I understand him as a representation of a symptom of America."

"We were convicted because of the color of our skin. People thought the worst of us," he added. "And this is all because of prominent New Yorkers—especially Donald Trump."

In a statement, National Action Network founder and president Rev. Al Sharpton said that "it's not lost on those of us who were there in 1989 that Donald Trump will likely walk into the same courthouse where the Exonerated 5 were falsely convicted for a crime they did not commit."

"Let's not forget that it was Donald Trump who took out full-page ads calling for these five Black and Brown young men to get the death penalty," Sharpton continued. "This is the same man who's now calling for violence when he has to go through the same system. The same man will have to stand up in a courtroom and see firsthand what the criminal justice system is like."

"All I can say is, what goes around comes around," he added.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Jeffery Lamar Williams — the celebrated Atlanta trap recording artist better known as Young Thug — walked into Fulton County Jail in May to a standing ovation.

The arrest was an event. The jail, on Rice Street, shut down the intake of other arrestees to process him in. Atlanta’s city-contracted wrecker service diverted all its trucks to haul his many cars out of the rented property in Buckhead where police found him May 9. The entire city paused to take inventory on the massive gang arrest, with 27 other people — including a second superstar rapper, Sergio “Gunna” Kitchens.

Previous Fulton County prosecutors have been reluctant to invoke the law, concerned about the abuses of mass incarceration and its power to stigmatize Black defendants. But Atlanta today faces a rash of violence that distorts policies and murders good intentions.

While official claims about gang culpability for street violence ought to be taken with a grain of salt — such figures are often pulled out of thin air — Young Slime Life, the gang Williams is alleged to lead, left a trail of very real bodies, the victims of a seven-year gang feud.

Fulton County Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis in her office on Tuesday, Jan. 4, 2022.

Photo: Ben Gray/AP

Should Black criminal enterprises be immune to drawing a RICO charge? The idea is fundamentally insulting.

Rapper YFN Lucci performs on Jan. 5, 2021, in Atlanta.

Photo: Paras Griffin/Getty Images

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“The statutes are stacked against us.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by George Chidi.

The U.S. has now reached the once unthinkable toll of 1 million deaths from COVID-19. How could this happen in the wealthiest country in the world?

In a word, because of poverty—and the policy choices that perpetuate it. Our task now is to make different choices.

It's not just that the poor have suffered. Equally important is that the very richest Americans have seen their wealth skyrocket.

Americans across the country have suffered during this pandemic. But new research by the Poor People's Campaign strongly suggests the poor and low-income have suffered the most. Even controlling for vaccination rates, they found that COVID-19 death rates in poorer U.S. counties were nearly double those in wealthier counties. During the deadliest phases of the pandemic, it rose to five times as many.

White Americans still make up the largest share of America's poor and those who've died from COVID-19. But Black, Hispanic and Indigenous Americans are significantly overrepresented in America's poorest counties, and COVID-19 casualty rates run significantly higher for many communities of color.

Poor Americans are hit hardest for many reasons. Since they make up a large share of low-wage, frontline workers, they're more exposed to the virus and often lack paid sick leave if they contract it. They're also more likely to lack health insurance and suffer from pre-existing conditions.

But it's not just that the poor have suffered. Equally important is that the very richest Americans have seen their wealth skyrocket.

As of this May, America's billionaires' collective wealth had ballooned by $1.7 trillion since the pandemic began, according to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Americans for Tax Fairness. Elon Musk alone saw his wealth increase more than tenfold.

That's not all. In 2020, more than half of America's largest low-wage employers bent the rules to give CEOs enormous pay raises even as their essential workers suffered cuts. On average, CEOs at these firms made over $15 million—more than what their median employees would make in eight centuries.

And now, those who've benefited the most from this pandemic are trying to pull the rug out from those who've suffered the worst. They're spending big to undo some of the most important public policies our country has seen in generations.

President Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan made testing and vaccines nearly universally accessible. It also delivered stimulus payments, expanded unemployment insurance, made the Child Tax Credit more generous and increased assistance for everything from food to health insurance.

These life-saving provisions got hundreds of millions of Americans vaccinated and helped millions more weather an extremely difficult time. The expanded Child Tax Credit alone reduced child poverty by 30 percent—a stunning, if incomplete, achievement.

But billionaires, executives and corporations who've seen their fortunes flourish have poured money into the campaign coffers of politicians who oppose these measures. When Democrat Joe Manchin joined every Senate Republican in opposing the renewal and expansion of these programs—and was showered with campaign cash in return—they withered on the vine.

Now child poverty has surged, rising wages have failed to keep up with inflation and millions are at risk of losing their health insurance. So far, Congress has even failed to continue funding COVID-19 research, vaccines and testing.

Politicians catering to the extremely wealthy at the expense of the 140 million Americans who are poor or low-income is precisely what made the pandemic so deadly in the first place. We shouldn't compound the tragedy of 1 million COVID-19 deaths by letting it continue.

With midterms looming, Congress should act quickly to pass a "billionaires tax" and a windfall tax on pandemic profits—especially on industries, like oil companies, that keep hiking their prices. Lawmakers could use this money to help families meet their basic needs.

Congress should also support COVID-19 vaccination efforts at home and abroad, to prevent both needless suffering and new COVID-19 variants.

Even if Congress won't act, President Biden can. He can issue executive actions to relieve student loan debt for 43 million borrowers, lower prescription drug costs, give workers raises by increasing the overtime eligibility threshold and make it harder for companies with obscene CEO-worker pay gaps to get federal contracts.

Finally, we need a multiracial, moral movement to make the voices of real people heard over the rustling of dollar bills. On June 18, the Poor People's Campaign and thousands of supporters will rally on the National Mall for a Moral March on Washington and to the Polls on June 18. You're invited.

This pandemic has caused almost incomprehensible loss in our country. One thing we must never lose is our determination to treat its pre-existing conditions.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, Tope Folarin.

JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday scored a landslide victory in a primary race for leadership of the ruling Likud party, giving the embattled leader an important boost ahead of the country’s third election in less than a year.

The strong showing by Israel’s longest-serving leader could give him another opportunity to form a government following the March election, after falling short in two previous attempts this year. By easily fending off Likud lawmaker Gideon Saar, Netanyahu also kept alive his hopes of winning immunity from prosecution after being indicted last month on a series of corruption charges.

“A giant victory,” Netanyahu tweeted early Friday, just over an hour after polls closed.

“Thanks to the members of Likud for the trust, support and love,” he added. “God willing, I will lead Likud to a big victory in the coming elections.”

In a tweet, Saar congratulated Netanyahu and said he would support the prime minister in the national election. “I am absolutely comfortable with my decision to run,” he added. “Whoever isn’t ready to take a risk for the path he believes in will never win.”

Official results released by Likud showed Netanyahu capturing 41,792 votes, or 72%, compared with 15,885 votes, or 28%, for Saar.

While removing any doubts about Netanyahu’s standing in the ruling party, the primary is likely to prolong Israel’s political uncertainty. Netanyahu will remain at the helm of Likud through the March elections, and his lingering legal troubles could again scuttle efforts to form a government after that.

In September’s election, both Likud and its main rival, the centrist Blue and White party, were unable to secure a parliamentary majority and form a government on their own.

The two parties together captured a solid majority of parliamentary seats, leaving a national unity government as the best way out of the crisis. But Blue and White has refused to sit in a partnership with Netanyahu when he is under indictment.

Opinion polls predict a similar outcome in the March election, raising the possibility of months of continued paralysis. The country already has been run by a caretaker government for the past year.

Netanyahu, who has led the country for the past decade, maintained his position atop the political right by cultivating an image as a veteran statesman with close ties to U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and other world leaders.

His refusal to make any concessions to the Palestinians was rewarded after Trump took office, as the U.S. began openly siding with Israel on several key issues, validating Netanyahu’s approach in the eyes of many Israelis and adding to his mystique.

Netanyahu’s hard-line approach to Iran has also proved popular. He was a staunch opponent of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which has unraveled since Trump withdrew from the agreement. A wave of Israeli strikes on Iran-linked targets in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq has burnished Netanyahu’s claims to having protected Israel from its enemies.

His fortunes have nevertheless waned over the past year, after he was unable to form a government following the unprecedented back-to-back elections in March and September. His party came in second place in September, leading many observers to view the vote as the beginning of the end.

In November, Netanyahu was indicted on charges of fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes, the culmination of three long-running corruption investigations. Netanyahu vowed to remain in office, dismissing the indictment as an “attempted coup” by hostile media and law enforcement.

Reuven Hazan, a political science professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said the victory for Netanyahu would have no impact on the general election.

“It simply means that he’s managed to maintain control of the party,” he said. “It just means that the faithful have circled the wagons. It means nothing for the elections except that he looks good. He looks strengthened.”

Netanyahu appeared rejuvenated in recent weeks as he hit the campaign trail, doing several live events a day where he rallied supporters in small gatherings and face-to-face meetings.

“The Likudniks have witnessed an astonishing event play out in the past two weeks, in which a 70-year-old leader who has had his fill of terms in office has thrown himself at every last registered party member,” Israeli columnist Ben Caspit wrote in the Maariv daily.

The approach appears to have paid off and may serve as a template for a more effective general election campaign. In the meantime, Israel will remain in limbo for at least another two months.

Netanyahu, who also served as prime minister in the late 1990s, is desperate to remain in office, where he is best positioned to fight the corruption charges. Israeli law requires public officials to resign if charged with a crime. But the law does not apply to sitting prime ministers.

As long as he remains in office, Netanyahu can use the position as a bully pulpit to criticize his prosecutors. He also can offer political favors in hopes of rallying a majority of lawmakers who favor granting him immunity from prosecution.

“His game is to be prime minister because that is a shield from indictment,” Hazan said.

Despite the victory, Netanyahu has many hurdles ahead.

The Supreme Court is set next week to begin considering whether an indicted member of parliament can be tasked with forming a new government. Its decision could potentially disqualify Netanyahu from leading the next government. It’s not clear when a ruling would be handed down.

The political uncertainty has led the Trump administration to delay the release of its long-anticipated Mideast peace plan.

The Palestinians have already rejected the plan, saying the administration is hopelessly and unfairly biased toward Israel. They point to Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, to cut off virtually all aid to the Palestinians and to reverse longstanding opposition to Jewish settlements in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 war.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has said Israel is on the cusp of securing U.S. support for the annexation of large parts of the occupied West Bank — but only if he remains in power.

That would virtually extinguish the Palestinians’ hopes of one day establishing an independent state, but it would cement Netanyahu’s legacy as perhaps the most successful right-wing leader in the country’s history.