Sept. 2022 News

Editor's Choice: Scroll below for our monthly blend of mainstream and alternative news and views in September 2022. This Part 1 covers Sept. 1 to Sept. 24. News after that date is in Part 2.

Sept. 24

Top Headlines

New York Times, War Crimes Were Committed in Ukraine, U.N. Panel Says in Graphic Statement
New York Times, Ukraine Updates: Russia Begins Orchestrating Staged Voting in Occupied Ukraine Territories
New York Times, The line at Georgia’s border with Russia is 2,000 cars long, as some Russian men flee to avoid a call-up of troops
Euroweekly News, Putin changes law to make it simpler for foreigners to gain citizenship if they fight for Russia
World Crisis Radio, Historical commentary: To neutralize Putin’s thermonuclear threats to NATO, US must launch crash program for strategic anti-missile defense using lasers & particle beams, Webster G. Tarpley
Associated Press, Puerto Ricans seething over lack of power days after Fiona
New York Times, Protests Surge in Iran as Crackdown Escalates

Investigations

New York Times, Investigation: They Were Entitled to Free Care. Hospitals Hounded Them to Pay, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie Thomas
New York Times, Investigation: How a Hospital Chain Used a Poor Neighborhood to Turn Huge Profits, Katie Thomas and Jessica Silver-Greenberg
New York Times, Investigation: Paul LePage, running for Maine governor, benefited from tax breaks reserved for permanent Florida residents, records show, Alyce McFadden and Michael C. Bender
Washington Post, Investigation: Jan. 6 Twitter witness: Failure to curb Trump spurred ‘terrifying’ choice, Drew Harwell

Trump Documents Scandal

Trump Probes, Disputes, Rallies, Supporters

Washington Post, Trump lawyers argue to limit White House aides’ testimony to Jan. 6 grand jury
Washington Post, Opinion: The two Howard University women on Trump’s trail, Colbert I. King
Politico, Judge dismisses Arizona GOP chair lawsuit to block Jan. 6 select committee subpoena
Politico, Opinion: Trump Made N.Y. Attorney General’s Fraud Case Virtually Unbeatable, Renato Mariott

More On Ukraine War

World News, Human Rights, Disasters

New York Times, British Government Goes Full Tilt on Tax Cuts and Free-Market Economics
New York Times, Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door
Washington Post, Italy’s election will likely bring the far right to power. Here’s why
Associated Press, As Ukraine worries UN, some leaders rue what’s pushed aside
Associated Press, China dials down Taiwan rhetoric; US, Canada transit strait
Washington Post, Videos show Iran security forces opening fire on protesters
Washington Post, It is the deadliest accident to date as thousands flee Lebanon's escalating economic meltdown

U.S. Politics, Elections, Economy, Governance

Washington Post, GOP candidate jokes about kidnapping plot against Michigan governor
New York Times, Representative Kevin McCarthy is pitching an agenda with broad appeal that he says can unite Republicans
New York Times, G.O.P. Senate Hopefuls Leave Campaign Trail for Beltway Money Circuit
New York Times, Editorial: This Threat to Democracy Is Hiding in Plain Sight
New York Times, Kushner’s Company Reaches $3.25 Million Settlement in Maryland Lawsuit
New York Times, Project Veritas broke wiretapping laws and fraudulently misrepresented itself to a Democratic group, a jury found
Washington Post, A crowd response at a Trump rally created a quandary: What to do about the QAnon song

U.S. Courts, Crime, Shootings, Gun Laws

Washington Post, Pentagon launches effort to assess crypto’s threat to national security
Washington Post, Oath Keepers sedition trial could reveal new info about Jan. 6 plotting
Washington Post, Career prosecutors recommend no charges for Gaetz in sex-trafficking probe
Palmer Report, Analysis: Serious questions emerge about WaPo claim that Matt Gaetz is supposedly off the hook, Bill Palmer
Washington Post, U.S. watchdog estimates $45.6 billion in pandemic unemployment fraud

Abortion, Forced Birth Laws, Privacy Rights

Washington Post, Arizona judge reinstates near-total abortion ban from 19th century
Washington Post, Opinion: To say U.S. abortion rollbacks are in line with Europe is simply wrong
Associated Press via Politico, Indiana abortion clinics reopening after judge blocks ban
Washington Post, Judge orders accused Planned Parenthood shooter to be forcibly medicated

Food, Water, Energy, Climate, Disasters

Washington Post, Billions were allocated to prevent disaster in Puerto Rico. Fiona, a Category 1 storm, still caused havoc
Washington Post, Fiona makes landfall in Canada, leaving hundreds of thousands without power
Washington Post, Biden has a big climate win at home. Global success still depends on China
New York Times, World Bank Leader, Accused of Climate Denial, Offers a New Response
New York Times, On a Grim Anniversary, 230 Pilot Whales Are Stranded in Tasmania
New York Times, Fiona Leaves Puerto Rico in the Dark on the Anniversary of Hurricane Maria
Washington Post, Hurricane Fiona’s destruction of Puerto Rico, in maps and photos, Marisa Iati and Daniel Wolfe

U.S. Media, Culture, Sports, Education

Mediaite, Chris Wallace Asks Breyer About SCOTUS ‘Undoing’ Abortion Rights: ‘Doesn’t That Very Much Shake The Authority Of The Court?’
Mediaite, Media Matters Chief ‘Terrified’ New CNN Strategy Will Lead to Takeover – By Fox News Mogul Rupert Murdoch
New York Times, ‘I’m Done Saying I’m Sorry,’ Alex Jones Tells Sandy Hook Families, Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post, Opinion: Verdict upends Project Veritas’s journalism defense in infiltration case, Erik Wemple
ENews! Nia Long Comments After Fiancé Ime Udoka Is Suspended From Celtics
Washington Post, NPR’s news chief announces unexpected departure after four years, Paul Farhi
Washington Post Magazine, A new anti-communism museum in D.C. tallies 100 million victims of Marx’s ideology, Justin Wm. Moyer
Washington Post, Is the print newspaper comics page in trouble?

Pandemic, Public Health

New York Times, Major Covid Holdouts in Asia Drop Border Restrictions
New York Times, ‘We’re on That Bus, Too’: In China, a Deadly Crash Highlights Covid Trauma, Li Yuan

Top Stories

New York Times, War Crimes Were Committed in Ukraine, U.N. Panel Says in Graphic Statement, Nick Cumming-Bruce, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). In an unusually hard-hitting statement, the experts laid out allegations against Russian troops that included rape and torture.

Russian soldiers have raped and tortured children in Ukraine, a United Nations-appointed panel of independent legal experts said in a damning statement on Friday that concluded war crimes had been committed in the conflict.

A three-person Commission of Inquiry set up in April to investigate the conduct of hostilities in four areas of Ukraine laid out the graphic allegations in an unusually hard-hitting, 11-minute statement to the U.N Human Rights Council in Geneva.

“The commission has documented cases in which children have been raped, tortured, and unlawfully confined,” the panel’s chairman, Erik Mose, told the council.

He added: “Children have also been killed and injured in indiscriminate attacks with explosive weapons. The exposure to repeated explosions, crimes, forced displacement and separation from family members deeply affected their well-being and mental health.”

The report added more chilling allegations to the list of crimes widely reported by Ukrainian and international investigators probing the executions of civilians in Bucha and the mass burial site found near the town of Izium after it was recaptured by Ukrainian troops this month.

“Based on the evidence gathered by the Commission, it has concluded that war crimes have been committed in Ukraine,” Mr. Mose said in his statement. He later told reporters that the commission had not yet concluded that violations amounted to crimes against humanity.

The commission found that some Russian troops had committed sexual and gender-based violence, with the victims ranging in age from four years old to 82.

“There are examples of cases where relatives were forced to witness the crimes,” Mr. Mose told the council, noting that the commission was documenting the actions of individual soldiers and had not found any general pattern of sexual violence as a war strategy.

The commission’s findings were based on visits to 27 towns and settlements in the regions of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Sumy, and interviews with more than 150 victims and witnesses. Mr. Mose said the experts inspected sites of destruction, graves and places of detention and torture.

By calling up roughly 300,000 reservists to fight, and abandoning the objective of demilitarizing and “de-Nazifying” Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin of Russia acknowledged the reality and growing resistance of a unified Ukraine in a televised address on Sept. 21, 2022 (Pool photo by Gavriil Grigorov via New York Times).

New York Times, President Vladimir Putin rejected requests that troops be allowed to retreat from the southern city of Kherson, Julian E. Barnes, Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwirtz, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). The Russian president has rejected requests from commanders in the field that they be allowed to retreat from Kherson, a vital city in Ukraine’s south.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has thrust himself more directly into strategic planning for the war in Ukraine in recent weeks, American officials said, including rejecting requests from his commanders on the ground that they be allowed to retreat from the vital southern city of Kherson.

A withdrawal from Kherson would allow the Russian military to pull back across the Dnipro River in an orderly way, preserving its equipment and saving the lives of soldiers.

But such a retreat would be another humiliating public acknowledgment of Mr. Putin’s failure in the war, and would hand a second major victory to Ukraine in one month. Kherson was the first major city to fall to the Russians in the initial invasion, and remains the only regional capital under Moscow’s control. Retaking it would be a major accomplishment for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

Focused on victory at all costs, Mr. Putin has become a more public face of the war as the Russian military appears increasingly in turmoil, forcing him to announce a call-up this week that could sweep 300,000 Russian civilians into military service. This month, Moscow has demonstrated it has too few troops to continue its offensive, suffers from shortages of high-tech precision weaponry and has been unable to gain dominance of Ukraine’s skies.

New York Times, The line at Georgia’s border with Russia is 2,000 cars long, as some Russian men flee to avoid a call-up of troops, Ivan Nechepurenko, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). Hundreds of vehicles are clogging highways to border crossings between Russia and neighboring countries after President Vladimir V. Putin’s announcement of a call-up of troops, with the line into Georgia growing to over eight miles long in the past several days.

Since Mr. Putin’s announcement on Wednesday, some Russian men who had once thought they were safe from the front lines in Ukraine have fled the country. And they have done so in a rush, lining up at the borders and paying rising prices to catch flights to countries that allow them to enter without visas.

On Saturday afternoon, the line at the Russian border with Georgia was 2,000 cars — up from 50 before Mr. Putin announced the call-up — according to Russian data. The crossing point usually processes up to 2,000 cars a day, meaning that people may have to wait for at least 24 hours to cross the border.

The queue was more than eight miles long, according to Yandex, a Russian internet company that runs a popular map and traffic service. Smaller lines were also recorded by the Russian Federal Customs Agency at other crossing points, including with Latvia and Mongolia.

Many European countries have tightened entry restrictions for Russians. Georgia, which does not require Russians to have a visa to enter the country, appeared to be one of the few remaining destinations for those fleeing possible conscription.

In some Russian regions, military authorities banned reservists from leaving their districts and towns, but it was not clear how those bans would be enforced. No ban on travel has been imposed in Moscow and some other urbanized regions.

Russian media described anxious scenes as people in line at the border with Georgia worried about whether they would be let out of the country, though there were few reports of people being turned away.

This month, the three Baltic States agreed to ban Russians from crossing into their countries by land, sealing a popular route out of the country. Finland, where the number of people crossing the border on Friday doubled from a week earlier to nearly 8,000, said it would deny entry to Russian tourists some time in the coming week.

Russians can stay in Georgia — which fought its own five-day war with Russia in 2008 and considers 20 percent of its territory occupied by the northern neighbor — for up to one year without a visa.

In the months since President Vladimir V. Putin invaded Ukraine, thousands of Russians have settled in Georgia. In August, Transparency International Georgia said that Russians ran 13,500 companies in the country, half of them opened since the invasion, and had transferred more than $650 million into Georgia from April to June.

Georgian opposition parties have called on the government to restrict the number of Russians entering the country, citing security concerns. The ruling party has responded that the opposition is proposing “xenophobic policies” to pursue their political goals.

Euroweekly News, Putin changes law to make it simpler for foreigners to gain citizenship if they fight for Russia, Matthew Roscoe, Sept. 24, 2022. A new federal law has been signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin which will grant foreigners, who have signed a contract for service in the Russian army for not less than a year, a simplified scheme to get citizenship in Russia.

As part of the new law signed by President Putin, foreigners serving in the Russian army will be able to apply for Russian citizenship without a residence permit and without residence uninterruptedly for five years in Russia, which was required by the ‘old’ legislation.

The amendments also reduce the minimum period for which foreigners can be contracted from five years to one year, as reported by Russian media outlet RBC.

The draft law on simplification of the citizenship for foreign contractors was approved by the State Duma on September 20 in the second and third readings.

On the same day, the Mayor of Moscow Sergei Sobyanin announced that a military registration and enlistment office would be opened in the migration centre “Sakharovo”.

The Russian Federation Council approved the initiative the day after Russia announced a partial mobilisation in connection with the military operation in Ukraine.

As part of it, 300,000 reservists will be called up for service and undergo additional training, according to Sergei Shoigu, head of the Ministry of Defence.

However, there were claims that one million people could be called up following an alleged leak in Russia’s presidential administration that exposed the seventh point of the “partial mobilisation” decree, which was marked “for official use”.

According to a source for news outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe on Thursday, September 22, “The figure was corrected several times, and in the end, it was stopped at one million.”

This was later called a lie.

World Crisis Radio, Historical commentary: To neutralize Putin’s thermonuclear threats to NATO, US must launch crash program for strategic anti-missile defense using lasers & particle beams, Webster G. Tarpley, right, author, historian, commentator, Sept. 24, 2022 (93:10 mins.). US Patriots and Israeli ABM systems could help shield Ukraine in short term.

Desperate dictator runs press gangs to kidnap 300,000 recruits for cannon fodder on Ukraine front; 1,300 protesters arrested, indicating growing crisis for Kremlin; Iranian opposition mounts biggest anti-government actions since 2009;

Mar a Lago state secrets case turning against Trump with rational rulings from Brooklyn and Eleventh Circuit judges; New York AG lawsuit could prove fatal for family rackets; Fed boss Jerome Powell in monetarist frenzy, following catastrophic policy of Paul Adolf Volcker, who helped wreck Carter Administration with 22% prime rate;

MAGAt McQarthy presents GOP’s Commitment to America, a tissue of deception concocted with infamous demagogue Newt Gingrich; Platform is all lies and empty slogans, ducking questions on abortion, 2020 election, insurrection, democracy, and defunding FBI; GOP still at war with New Deal and Great Society reforms; Urging Italians to vote against neofascism this Sunday;

DeSantis’ cynical exploitation of asylum seekers for political provocations reveals the vile cruelty of Republicans; Trump sinking further into QAnon fascist mysticism; Next January 6 hearings September 28; Breaking: Benedict Donald’s lawyers struggling to prevent grand jury testimony on coup plot by subpoenaed White House aides

Associated Press, Puerto Ricans seething over lack of power days after Fiona, Danica Coto, Sept. 24, 2022. Half of Puerto Rico is without power more than five days after Hurricane Fiona struck — including an entire town where not a single work crew has arrived.

Many on the U.S. territory are angry and incredulous, and calls are growing for the ouster of the island’s private electricity transmission and distribution company.

Fuel disruptions are worsening the situation, forcing grocery stores, gas stations and other businesses to close and leaving apartment buildings in the dark because there is no diesel for generators.

Many are questioning why it is taking so long to restore power since Fiona was a Category 1 storm that did not affect the entire island, and whose rain — not wind — inflicted the greatest damage.

“It’s not normal,” said Marcel Castro-Sitiriche, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez. “They have not given a convincing explanation of what the problem is.”

He noted that Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority and Luma, a private company that took over the island’s power transmission and distribution last year, also have not released basic information such as details of the damage to the electricity grid.

“We don’t know the extent of the damage yet,” Castro said, adding that he was concerned and surprised that Luma had not brought in additional crews to boost extra manpower already on the island.

The late Mahsa Amini in a photo provided to Iran Wire by her family. The authorities have said she died of heart failure; her family say she had been in good health.

The late Mahsa Amini in a photo provided to Iran Wire by her family. The authorities have said she died of heart failure; her family say she had been in good health.

New York Times, Protests Surge in Iran as Crackdown Escalates, Vivian Yee and Farnaz Fassihi, Sept. 24, 2022. Dozens have reportedly been killed by security forces as demonstrations continue to spread across Iran. Protests began after Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the morality police

The 22-year-old woman emerged from the Tehran subway, her dark hair covered with a black head scarf and the lines of her body obscured by loose clothing, when the capital city’s Guidance Patrol spotted her. They were members of Iran’s notorious morality police, enforcers of the conservative Islamic dress and behavior rules that have governed daily life for Iranians since the 1979 revolution, and newly energized under a hard-line president who took office last year.

By their standards, Mahsa Amini was improperly dressed, which could mean something as simple as a wisp of hair protruding from her head scarf. They put her in a van and drove her away to a detention center, where she was to undergo re-education. Three days later, on Sept. 16, she was dead.

Now, over eight days of rage, exhilaration and street battles, the most significant outpouring of anger with the ruling system in more than a decade, her name is everywhere. Iranian protesters in dozens of cities have chanted “women, life and freedom” and “death to the dictator,” rejecting the Iranian Republic’s theocratic rule by targeting one of its most fundamental and divisive symbols — the ailing supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In several of the videos of the uprising that have torn across social media, women rip off their head scarves and burn them in street bonfires, including in deeply religious cities such as Qum and Mashhad. In one, a young woman atop a utility cabinet cuts off her hair in front of a crowd of roaring demonstrators. In another, young women dare to dance bareheaded in front of the riot police.

“Death to the dictator,” protesters at Tehran University chanted on Saturday. “Death to the head scarf! Until when must we tolerate such humiliation?”
I
Previous protests — over fraudulent elections in 2009, economic mismanagement in 2017 and fuel price hikes in 2019 — have been ruthlessly suppressed by Iran’s security forces, and this time may be no different. Yet, for the first time since the founding of the Iranian Republic, the current uprising has united rich Iranians descending from high-rise apartments in northern Tehran with struggling bazaar vendors in its working-class south, and Kurds, Turks and other ethnic minorities with members of the Fars majority.

The sheer diversity of the protesters reflects the breadth of Iranians’ grievances, analysts say, from a sickly economy and in-your-face corruption, to political repression and social restrictions — frustrations Iran’s government has repeatedly tried, and failed, to quash.

“The anger isn’t over just Mahsa’s death, but that she should have never been arrested in the first place,” said Shadi Sadr, a prominent human rights lawyer who has campaigned for Iranian women’s rights for two decades.

Trump Documents Scandal

mar a lago aerial Custom

New York Times, Former President Trump claimed he declassified the Mar-a-Lago documents. Why don’t his lawyers say so in court? Glenn Thrush, Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). Judges this week highlighted the gap between Mr. Trump’s public claims that he declassified everything and his lawyers’ reluctance to repeat that claim in a courtroom.

Former President Donald J. Trump claimed on Wednesday that when he was in the White House, his powers were so broad he could declassify virtually any document by simply “thinking about it.”

That argument — which came as he defended his decision to retain government documents in his Florida home in an interview with the Fox host Sean Hannity — underscored a widening gap between the former president and his lawyers. By contrast, they have so far been unwilling to repeat Mr. Trump’s declassification claim in court, as they counter a federal investigation into his handling of government documents.

Over the past week, a federal appeals court in Atlanta — along with Mr. Trump’s choice for a special master to review the documents seized last month — undermined a bulwark of his effort to justify his actions: Both suggested that there was no evidence to support the assertion that Mr. Trump had declassified everything — in writing, verbally or wordlessly — despite what the former president may have said on TV.

Trump documents federal Special Master Raymond Dearie, senior U.S. district court judge for the Eastern District of New York (File photo by Gregory Mango). On Thursday, the special master, Judge Raymond J. Dearie, right, also appeared to take aim at another one of Mr. Trump’s excuses — that federal agents had planted some of the records when they searched his Mar-a-Lago estate. In an order issued after the appellate court had ruled, Judge Dearie instructed Mr. Trump’s lawyers to let him know if there were any discrepancies between the documents that were kept at Mar-a-Lago and those that the F.B.I. said it had hauled away.

Recent Headlines

djt confidential markings

Washington Post, Opinion: New York’s lawsuit against Trump is yet further proof that he’s a loser, Jennifer Rubin
New York Times, Former President Trump claimed he declassified the Mar-a-Lago documents. Why don’t his lawyers say so in court?
Politico, Special master calls for help in Trump Mar-a-Lago documents fight
Washington Post, Appeals court: Justice Dept. can use Mar-a-Lago documents in criminal probe
Palmer Report, Analysis: Special Master hits Donald Trump again, Bill Palmer
New York Times, Trump Was Warned Late Last Year of Potential Legal Peril Over Documents
Politico, Special master expresses skepticism with Trump team’s assertions
Law&Crime, Who Is Senior U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie, the New Special Master in the DOJ's Mar-a-Lago Search?
Proof, Investigative Commentary: DOJ Investigating Ties Between the FBI and the Kremlin Agent Behind 2016 Trump-Russia Collusion; Jared Kushner May Also Be Implicated, Seth Abramson

Investigations

New York Times, Investigation: They Were Entitled to Free Care. Hospitals Hounded Them to Pay, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie Thomas, Sept. 24, 2022. One of the largest nonprofit hospital chains in the U.S. trained staff to wring money out of patients, even those eligible for free care. Many nonprofit hospitals have strayed from their charitable missions. A Times investigation found that the consequences have been stark.

In 2018, senior executives at one of the country’s largest nonprofit hospital chains, Providence, were frustrated. They were spending hundreds of millions of dollars providing free health care to patients. It was eating into their bottom line.

The executives, led by Providence’s chief financial officer at the time, devised a solution: a program called Rev-Up.

Rev-Up provided Providence’s employees with a detailed playbook for wringing money out of patients — even those who were supposed to receive free care because of their low incomes, a New York Times investigation found.

In training materials obtained by The Times, members of the hospital staff were instructed how to approach patients and pressure them to pay.

“Ask every patient, every time,” the materials said. Instead of using “weak” phrases — like “Would you mind paying?” — employees were told to ask how patients wanted to pay. Soliciting money “is part of your role. It’s not an option.”

If patients did not pay, Providence sent debt collectors to pursue them.

More than half the nation’s roughly 5,000 hospitals are nonprofits like Providence. They enjoy lucrative tax exemptions; Providence avoids more than $1 billion a year in taxes. In exchange, the Internal Revenue Service requires them to provide services, such as free care for the poor, that benefit the communities in which they operate.

But in recent decades, many of the hospitals have become virtually indistinguishable from for-profit companies, adopting an unrelenting focus on the bottom line and straying from their traditional charitable missions.

To understand the shift, The Times reviewed thousands of pages of court records, internal hospital financial records and memos, tax filings, and complaints filed with regulators, and interviewed dozens of patients, lawyers, current and former hospital executives, doctors, nurses and consultants.

New York Times, Investigation: How a Hospital Chain Used a Poor Neighborhood to Turn Huge Profits, Katie Thomas and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Sept. 24, 2022. Bon Secours Mercy Health, a major nonprofit health system, used the poverty of Richmond Community Hospital’s patients to tap into a lucrative federal drug program.

paul lepage maine governor

New York Times, Investigation: Paul LePage, running for Maine governor, benefited from tax breaks reserved for permanent Florida residents, records show, Alyce McFadden and Michael C. Bender, Sept. 24, 2022. Mr. LePage, a former governor who is seeking to reclaim the office, has along with his wife benefited from property tax breaks reserved for permanent Florida residents, public records show.

As governor of Maine for two terms until 2019, Paul LePage, a Republican, gained a reputation as one of the pre-Trump era’s most unfiltered politicians.

He said he wanted to tell President Barack Obama to “go to hell,” and told the N.A.A.C.P. to “kiss my butt.” He made racist comments about drug dealers who supposedly travel to Maine and “impregnate a young white girl before they leave.”

Making a comeback attempt now against his successor, Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, Mr. LePage is focusing heavily in his campaign on a push to phase out Maine’s income tax. He argues that the change is needed to keep wealthy residents from moving to Florida for just long enough each year to take advantage of the Sunshine State’s tax breaks.

But Mr. LePage and his wife, Ann LePage, who have owned property in Florida for over a decade, have themselves benefited from that state’s tax laws while living in the Maine governor’s mansion, and again as he campaigns to return to the job. From 2009 to 2015, and also from 2018 through the end of this year, the couple received property tax breaks reserved for permanent Florida residents, public records show.

The properties in question, both in Ormond Beach, Fla., are a home that the LePages bought in 2008 and sold in 2017, and another that they purchased in 2018 and still own. For both homes, the couple have sought and received what is called a homestead exemption, which is meant to apply only to primary residences in Florida.

The sum the couple saved over the years is relatively small: A little over $8,500, according to a New York Times analysis of public records.

But this is not the first time the LePages have faced scrutiny over such a tax matter — in 2010, Florida officials fined Mrs. LePage $1,400 before rescinding the penalty — and Mr. LePage’s focus on taxes in the current campaign for governor could open him up to attacks from Democrats.

Mr. LePage’s campaign defended the tax moves, saying that Mrs. LePage’s mother had used the Florida home as her primary residence from 2009 until her death in 2015, when the couple removed the first homestead exemption. Mrs. LePage’s mother had scleroderma, a chronic disease that causes hardening of the skin.

“Mrs. LePage’s mother would visit Augusta, but due to her condition, she spent a large amount of time, especially in cooler fall, winter and spring periods, at that permanent residence” in Florida, said Brent Littlefield, a spokesman for Mr. LePage’s campaign. “Mrs. LePage also traveled there in winter months to care for her. Her mother kept that as her primary residence while she was alive.”

But while Mr. LePage said that he and his wife were in Florida for only a couple of months a year, they have painted a different picture for Florida’s tax collectors over the years.

In his final months as governor, Mr. LePage told reporters in November 2018 that he had a home in Florida and planned to move there because the state had no income tax. But by that time, records show, he and his wife had already claimed a homestead exemption on their Ormond Beach property — indicating that Florida had been the primary residence of Maine’s governor and first lady since March 2018, when they bought the home.

That assertion meant that the four-bedroom home, about 15 minutes from the Atlantic Ocean, was eligible for a Florida homestead exemption, which shaves $50,000 from the taxable value of qualified primary residences in the state.

After leaving office in 2019 because of Maine’s prohibition on serving a third consecutive term, Mr. LePage obtained a Florida driver’s license and registered to vote in the state. Then, in February 2020, he said he was considering a bid for a third term, and when he announced his run last year he cited criticisms of Ms. Mills’s response to the pandemic. He switched his voter registration back to Maine in 2020 and publicized pictures of himself putting Maine license plates back on his car.

anika collier navaroli marlena sloss washington post

Whistleblower Anika Collier Navaroli, a policy official on the team designing Twitter's content moderation rules who spoke exclusively with the Washington Post, said Twitter's complacency toward then-President Donald Trump led to disastrous consequences (Photo by Marlena Sloss for The Washington Post).

Washington Post, Investigation: Jan. 6 Twitter witness: Failure to curb Trump spurred ‘terrifying’ choice, Drew Harwell, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). In an explosive hearing in July, an unidentified former Twitter employee testified to the House Jan. 6 committee that the company had tolerated false and rule-breaking tweets from Donald Trump for years because executives knew their service was his “favorite and most-used … and enjoyed having that sort of power.”

Now, in an exclusive interview with The Washington Post, the whistleblower, Anika Collier Navaroli, reveals the terror she felt about coming forward and how eventually that fear was overcome by her worry that extremism and political disinformation on social media pose an “imminent threat not just to American democracy, but to the societal fabric of our planet.”

“I realize that by being who I am and doing what I’m doing, I’m opening myself and my family to extreme risk,” Navaroli said. “It’s terrifying. This has been one of the most isolating times of my life.”

“I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe the truth matters,” she said of her testimony to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.

Twitter banned Trump two days after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, citing fears he could incite further violence. By that time, he had sent more than 56,000 tweets over 12 years, many of which included lies and baseless accusations about election fraud. One month earlier, he had tweeted, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Other Trump Probes, Disputes, Rallies, Supporters

News conference by New York Attorney General Letita James, center. Although the lawsuit against Donald J. Trump cannot include criminal charges, the former president could face substantial financial penalties (Photo by Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times).

Washington Post, Trump lawyers argue to limit White House aides’ testimony to Jan. 6 grand jury, Jacqueline Alemany, Spencer S. Hsu, Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey, Sept. 24, 2022. The legal dispute could impact the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation.

Lawyers for former president Donald Trump have entered a high-stakes legal battle seeking to limit the scope of former top White House aides’ testimony to a federal grand jury that is investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 elections, according to people familiar with the matter.

The action sets up a potentially precedent-setting struggle that could affect the Justice Department’s investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, and address the scope of a former president’s assertion of executive or attorney-client privilege to preserve the confidentiality of advisers’ communications.

The specific contours of the fight, reported first by CNN, are unclear. One person familiar with the matter said that the dispute concerned the testimony of two top aides to former vice president Mike Pence — his former chief of staff, Marc Short, and former counsel, Greg Jacob. The men appeared before the grand jury in July and answered some, but not all, questions, based on Trump’s assertion of privilege, people familiar with the matter said.

Grand jury matters are typically secret. However, the case spilled into light after Trump attorneys M. Evan Corcoran, John P. Rowley III and Timothy C. Parlatore were seen at federal court in Washington on Thursday with no publicly scheduled matters, along with a lead Jan. 6 federal prosecutor, Thomas Windom. A person with knowledge of the matter said Trump’s representatives were present for a Jan. 6-related proceeding.

A dispute over executive privilege and compelling a witness’s testimony before a grand jury would typically be heard by Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell in Washington. While Howell has in the past moved quickly, any appeal to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia would probably extend through the end of the year, and the arguments would be unlikely to be made public before then. A spokeswoman for Howell did not respond to a request for comment.

In most fights over executive privilege — which are often between Congress and the executive branch — both sides usually compromise and settle their differences rather than risk a precedent-setting defeat for either branch of government.

But the stakes of the criminal investigation into Trump’s actions during the presidential transition after he lost reelection in November 2020 may make negotiation more difficult.

The Justice Department is questioning witnesses about conversations with Trump, his lawyers and others in his inner circle who sought to substitute Trump allies for certified electors from some states Joe Biden won, people familiar with the matter have said. Prosecutors have asked hours of detailed questions about meetings Trump led in December 2020 and January 2021 and his pressure on Pence to overturn the election. Those lines of inquiry are separate from the investigation into classified documents recovered from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home — though that case, too, has produced legal fighting over issues of executive and attorney client privilege.

Both Short and Jacob have unique windows into those events. Both were with Pence on Jan. 6 at the Capitol. They testified with Pence’s approval before a House select committee conducting a parallel investigation, although the former vice president declined to do so himself. Jacob also told the committee that two days before the riot, private Trump attorney John Eastman conceded that the plot to have Pence help overturn the election was illegal.

Washington Post, Opinion: The two Howard University women on Trump’s trail, Colbert I. King, right, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). New York Attorney General Letitia James, who has filed a civil suit alleging fraudulent financial practices against former president Donald Trump, three of his children and the Trump Organization, is a Howard University Law School alumna.

Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis, who is conducting a state criminal investigation into possible interference with the 2020 election by Trump and his confederates, is a Howard University graduate.

That academic coincidence has no direct bearing on the two probes staring Trump in the face. He earned a front-and-center spot all by himself.

James’s suit was built on a 3½-year investigation that started when Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, told Congress about alleged shady and possibly unlawful dealings by Trump.

James charged that Trump engaged in more than a decade of deception. She said he “falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself and to cheat the system, thereby cheating all of us.” Her suit seeks about $250 million in allegedly illegal profits gained from the scheme. And she wants Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump banned for five years from participating in any real estate transactions.

If that weren’t enough, James said her investigation came across sufficient evidence of law violations to file a criminal referral to federal prosecutors in Manhattan and a separate tax-fraud referral to the IRS covering the same evidence. Now it’s up to the feds.

Trump’s response is the same as he’s said repeatedly: It’s all politics and a Democratic Party vendetta to scare him out of running for office. His lawyer said James’s filing “is solely focused on advancing the Attorney General’s political agenda.” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted that “the bulls--- Dem witch-hunt continues.”

The New York attorney general has heard it all before. Along with Trump’s rants, she has had large brickbats thrown her way by New York’s former Democratic governor, Andrew M. Cuomo.

To recall: James investigated and found that Cuomo had sexually harassed multiple former and current government employees. Shortly after James reported the investigation’s findings, Cuomo resigned.

Now, to rescue his shipwrecked reputation, Cuomo has filed a state ethics complaint against James, charging her with deliberately bungling the probe. And he echoed an attack heard in Trump’s quarters: “James cynically manipulated a legal process for personal, political gain.”

Cuomo’s complaint and James’s charges against Trump et al. have yet to be heard. But she may have disclosed what drives her work in the Trump and Cuomo cases in what she said during a keynote address to the Howard University Law School class of 2021. “My time as a [Howard] Bison laid the foundation for the work I am doing today because I learned,” she said, “to stand up, fight back and always speak truth to power.”

Trump and Cuomo are getting a taste of that.

Trump is also getting a bad taste down South. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has warned that at least 17 people are being investigated as part of her 2020 election probe. She said her team has collected evidence suggesting serious crimes were committed in attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, and “if indicted and convicted, people are facing prison sentences.” Those targeted include Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others who allegedly were part of a plot to create false documents declaring that Trump beat Joe Biden in Georgia in 2020. Subpoenas have been flying like confetti. While Willis won’t say whether she intends to charge Trump in connection with the probe, she said he could be forced to testify in front of a special grand jury. She won’t decide, she said, until possibly “late this fall.”

Politico, Judge dismisses Arizona GOP chair lawsuit to block Jan. 6 select committee subpoena, Kyle Cheney, Sept. 23, 2022. A federal judge has cleared the way for the Jan. 6 select committee to access the phone records of Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward, dismissing Ward’s lawsuit to block a subpoena issued by the panel in January.

In an 18-page ruling issued late Thursday, Arizona-based U.S.District Court Judge Diane Humetewa said the committee has a legitimate reason to obtain Ward’s call logs during the weeks between Election Day 2020 and the end of Donald Trump’s term in office, a period in which Ward help organize a set of pro-Trump electors who claimed to be Arizona’s legitimate slate, even though Biden had won the state.

“That three-month period is plainly relevant to its investigation into the causes of the January 6th attack,” Humetewa ruled. “The Court therefore has little doubt concluding these records may aid the Select Committee’s valid legislative purpose.”

In addition to her work on the slate of false electors — which included both Ward and her husband, Michael — Ward used her perch atop the Arizona GOP to stoke false claims of election fraud in the weeks following the conclusion of voting. Both Wards also joined a lawsuit against then-Vice President Mike Pence in late December 2020, amid a campaign by Trump to pressure Pence to help subvert the election.

Ward indicated her intent to appeal the ruling in a notice filed with the district court Friday morning. An attorney for her did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Can we explain all of Trump’s legal woes in 2 minutes? A POLITICO reporter tries (and fails).

The select committee is approaching the end of its yearlong investigation and intends to produce a final report by December. More than two dozen witnesses have sued to block the panel’s efforts to subpoena them for testimony and records or to obtain phone records from providers like T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T.

The committee has fought some of the subpoenas and won a string of rulings bolstering its probe, but it has also opted against mounting aggressive efforts in a large number of lawsuits, instead targeting those likely to have the greatest impact on its efforts. Those include lawsuits to obtain testimony and records from former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, attorney John Eastman and Trump himself, who unsuccessfully sued to block the National Archives from releasing his White House’s records to the panel.

In her lawsuit, Ward had argued that the select committee’s subpoena was improperly issued because the panel lacked a valid legislative purpose — rather that it was a law enforcement investigation in disguise — and that the panel lacked the required 13 members that it was supposed to include. Ward argued that the committee’s subpoena was really an effort to harass Trump supporters for exercising their First Amendment rights to petition the government and raise doubts about the election results.

But Humetewa, an appointee of President Barack Obama, said Ward’s evidence on both claims fell short.

The panel, she said, had repeatedly had its work ratified by votes of the full House, which notably approved the committee’s efforts to hold several defiant witnesses in contempt of Congress. Humetewa said she would not second-guess the House’s decision to permit the committee to function despite a smaller complement of members.

In addition, Humetewa cited the Washington, D.C.-based federal appeals court ruling that found the committee to serve a plainly valid legislative purpose.

Recent Headlines

Politico, Opinion: Trump Made N.Y. Attorney General’s Fraud Case Virtually Unbeatable, Renato Mariotti
Washington Post, Jan. 6 committee reaches deal with Ginni Thomas for an interview
New York Times, As Trump’s Legal Woes Mount, So Do Financial Pressures on Him
NBC News, Jury convicts QAnon believer who thought he was storming the White House during the Capitol riot
Palmer Report, Analysis: Michael Cohen just delivered even more bad news for Donald Trump, Bill Palmer
New York Times, Updates: New York Attorney General Unveils Lawsuit Against Trump
Politico, Trump attorney: 'We look forward' to defending against New York fraud claims
New York Times, The Story So Far: Where 6 Investigations Into Donald Trump Stand

More On Ukraine War

Washington Post, Ukraine live briefing: Zelensky tells Ukrainians in occupied regions to ‘sabotage’ Russian forces, Nick Parker, Katerina Ang, Ellen Francis and Robyn Dixon, Sept. 24, 2022. The referendums staged in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhizhia continued on Saturday. With the Kremlin’s referendums in Ukraine underway for a second day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on citizens in occupied territories to help resist Russian operations.

The process is unfolding in regions of Ukraine under the control of Russian forces, and Western leaders condemned it as a pretext to annex swaths of the country. President Biden said the United States would “never recognize Ukrainian territory as anything other than part of Ukraine.”

Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.

Key developments

Ukrainians should report those who “help conduct this farce,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address. He also claimed Russian forces sought to mobilize Ukrainians to fight their countrymen. “Sabotage any activity of the enemy,” he told residents in Russian-held territories, appealing to them provide information about “bases, headquarters, warehouses with ammunition” if they are forced into Russian military service.
The referendums, illegal under international law, will run until Sept. 27 in the separatist Luhansk and Donetsk territories in the east, Kherson in the south and parts of nearby Zaporizhzhia. There is little doubt that the announced result will overwhelmingly favor becoming part of Russia. When the Kremlin annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 after a disputed vote, it claimed that nearly 97 percent supported joining Russia.
The Kremlin has pledged to swiftly accept the regions into Russia after the vote. Moscow will consider Ukrainian attempts to retake the territory “as an attack on its lands in case of a positive decision in the referendums,” according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Anger is flaring as Russia’s mobilization affects minority regions and protesters. Despite official assurances that it is just a partial mobilization to help the war in Ukraine, the initial process has sparked fears that far more soldiers could be sent to fight than the 300,000 first announced, The Washington Post reports. Rights groups and activists expressed concern that the call-up was disproportionately targeting ethnic minorities in remote or impoverished parts of Russia, far from Moscow.

Battlefield updates

Moscow said it would exclude some employees in sectors such as information technology and finance from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s partial mobilization of reservists, which has prompted protests and traffic jams along some of Russia’s borders.
Russia replaced its Deputy Defense Minister for Logistics of the armed forces with Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, Russian news agencies said Saturday, citing the Defense Ministry. Mizintsev gained the moniker “butcher of Mariupol” and faced Western sanctions for his role in the brutal battle for the Ukrainian port city.
Two Americans freed from months of Russian captivity in Ukraine arrived in New York on Friday. Alexander J. Drueke and Andy Tai Huynh were met by a State Department representative at the airport, according to Drueke’s aunt.

Global impact

Tehran said Saturday it regretted Kyiv’s plan to revoke the accreditation of Iran’s ambassador and reduce diplomatic staff over alleged weapons supplies to Moscow. Iran’s Foreign Ministry said the move was based on “unconfirmed reports” and “media manipulation” after U.S. officials said Iran sent combat drones to Russia.
Riot police arrested demonstrators in Russian cities, with more protests against the mobilization order planned in Moscow and St Petersburg on Saturday evening. At least 69 people were arrested in the Siberian cities of Novosibirsk and Tomsk, according to rights monitor OVD-Info.
Finland will soon cut off entry for many Russians after a rise in border crossings attributed to Russia’s mobilization order, according to public broadcaster Yle. It is one of the last European Union member states with a land border open to Russians. Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania closed their borders to most Russian citizens.
The Group of Seven industrialized nations said Russia was trying to use “sham referendums … to create a phony pretext for changing the status of Ukrainian sovereign territory,” according to a White House release. The G-7 includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Washington Post, Anger flares as Russia mobilization hits minority regions and protesters, Mary Ilyushina, Sept. 24, 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted only reservists would be called to duty, but critics say military summonses are being issued to punish antiwar activists and persecute minorities.

New York Times, Ukraine Updates: Russia Begins Orchestrating Staged Voting in Occupied Ukraine Territories, Marc Santora, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). The process, condemned internationally as a sham, is expected to culminate with the annexation of an area larger than Portugal. While the Kremlin has used referendums in the past, the audacity of President Vladimir Putin’s gambit exceeds anything tried before.

Moscow began orchestrating votes Friday in territories it occupies in Ukraine asking residents to join Russia, an effort widely seen in the West as a sham that is expected to culminate in the annexation of an area larger than Portugal.

While the Kremlin has used referendums and annexation in the past to exert its will, the boldness of President Vladimir V. Putin’s gambit in Ukraine far exceeds anything it has tried before. Huge numbers of people have fled the areas that Russia controls, the process has been rushed and referendums are taking place against a backdrop of oppression — with U.N. experts citing evidence of war crimes in a forceful new statement.

The ballots being distributed had one question: Do you wish to secede from Ukraine and create an independent state that will enter the Russian Federation?

“We will be able to make our historic choice,” Kirill Stremousov, a leader of the Russian occupation administration in the southern region of Kherson, said in a statement.

He said the wording on the ballots — in both Ukrainian and Russian — was “in accordance with international law,” but even before the first vote, the referendum plans were met with international condemnation.

President Biden, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly this week, said that “if nations can pursue their imperial ambitions without consequences,” then the global security order established to prevent the horrors of World War II from repeating will be imperiled.

Russian proxy officials in four regions — Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, and Kherson and Zaporizka in the south — earlier this week announced plans to hold referendums over four days beginning on Friday. Russia controls nearly all of two of the four regions, Luhansk and Kherson, but only a fraction of the other two, Zaporizka and Donetsk.

Ukrainian officials have dismissed the voting as grotesque theater — staging polls in cities laid to waste by Russian forces and abandoned by most residents. President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked Ukraine’s allies for their steadfast support and said “the farce” of “sham referenda” would do nothing to change his nation’s fight to drive Russia from Ukraine.

Ukrainian partisans, sometimes working with special operations forces, have blown up warehouses holding ballots and buildings where Russian proxy officials preparing for the vote held meetings..

An explosion rocked the Russian-controlled southern city of Melitopol on Friday morning before the vote got underway. Ivan Fedorov, the exiled mayor, warned residents to stay away from Russian military personnel and equipment.

To give the appearance of widespread participation, minors ages 13 to 17 have been encouraged to vote, the Security Services of Ukraine warned on Thursday.

And Ukrainian officials said that workers were being forced to vote under threat of losing their jobs.

The exiled mayor of the occupied city of Enerhodar, the satellite town of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the south, told residents to stay away from polling stations.

“Stay at home if possible and do not open the door to strangers,” he said in a message posted on Telegram.

Olha, who communicated with friends in Enerhodar on Thursday night and who, like others, did not want to use her full name out of concern for her safety, said preparations had been going on for weeks and that security had been tightened.

“Since yesterday, they do not allow men aged 18 to 35 to leave the city,” she said. “They want to conscript them to the Russian armed forces. And Ukrainians will have to fight against Ukrainians,” she said, stopping short as she broke into tears.

Recent Headlines

New York Times, Ukraine War Comes Home to Russians as Putin Imposes Draft
BBC News, Ukraine 'referendums': Soldiers go door-to-door for votes in polls
New York Times, Ukraine Updates: Russia Calls Up Civilians for Service; Some Men Flee the Country
New York Times,‘They Are Watching’: Inside Russia’s Vast Surveillance State
New York Times, Updates: Over 1,000 Russian Protesters Arrested After Putin Mobilizes More Troops
Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: The Shanghai Collapsing Organization, Wayne Madsen
Washington Post, Americans in Russia-Ukraine prisoner swap wondered if death was near
Washington Post, Prisoner swap freed Putin’s friend, Azov commanders and U.K. fighters

U.S. Politics, Economy, Governance

As governor of Maine for two terms until 2019, Paul LePage, a Republican, gained a reputation as one of the pre-Trump era’s most unfiltered politicians.

The sum the couple saved over the years is relatively small: A little over $8,500, according to a New York Times analysis of public records.

But while Mr. LePage said that he and his wife were in Florida for only a couple of months a year, they have painted a different picture for Florida’s tax collectors over the years.

New York Times, Representative Kevin McCarthy is pitching an agenda with broad appeal that he says can unite Republicans, Luke Broadwater, Sept. 24, 2022. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the hard-right Georgia Republican who has sympathized with the rioters jailed for their roles in the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, smiled widely from her seat at center stage on Friday as her party laid out what its agenda would be if it succeeded in winning control of the House in November.

Just a few seats down sat Representative John Katko, the centrist from central New York, who voted to impeach former President Donald J. Trump over the Jan. 6 attack and is retiring from Congress.

In front was Representative Kevin McCarthy, right, the California Republican and minority leader who aspires to be speaker and has labored to manage the factions of his party. At a manufacturing plant here, he introduced the “Commitment to America,” an innocuous-sounding set of principles he said would guide a G.O.P. majority, and which appeared aimed at uniting members as disparate as Ms. Greene and Mr. Katko: fighting inflation, securing the border and hiring more police.

“They have no plan to fix all the problems they created,” Mr. McCarthy said of Democrats. “So you know what? We’ve created a ‘Commitment to America.’”

He was speaking to an audience that included 30 of his House Republican colleagues as well as factory workers and local residents in a politically pivotal state that is home to a competitive race for governor as well as critical House and Senate contests.

The agenda was light on details and avoided certain topics that polls show are not favorable to Republicans’ chances of electoral success: the abortion bans that most in the party have embraced, defunding the F.B.I., the Jan. 6 attack or Mr. Trump and his ongoing legal troubles.

Instead, Mr. McCarthy focused on proposals that most in the party proudly support, and that are unlikely to alienate the suburban and independent voters they need to win a majority.

He drew cheers from the crowd when he said the first order of business in a new Republican Congress would be a bill to eliminate the jobs of 87,000 I.R.S. agents. That is the number of employees the Treasury Department has estimated the agency could hire with an infusion of money Congress recently provided to crack down on tax cheats.

But if the agenda soft-pedaled Republicans’ less-popular proposals, it did not omit them entirely. It contained a reference to the party’s commitment to enacting strict abortion restrictions, pledging to “protect the lives of unborn children and their mothers.” It alluded to the G.O.P.’s continuing embrace of Mr. Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, promising that a Republican majority would “increase accountability in the election process through voter ID.” And it hinted that Republicans would look to change the Affordable Care Act and roll back legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs, saying that the party wanted to “personalize care” and “lower prices through transparency, choice, and competition.”

New York Times, G.O.P. Senate Hopefuls Leave Campaign Trail for Beltway Money Circuit, Jonathan Martin, Sept. 24, 2022. Their fund-raising dwarfed by their Democratic rivals, Republicans like Blake Masters and Mehmet Oz have been in Washington gathering cash from lobbyists.

Rushing to raise money and close yawning gaps with their Democratic rivals, every Senate Republican nominee in a competitive race is taking precious time from the campaign trail to come to Washington this week and next to gather money before Congress leaves for the fall.

Fund-raising invitations obtained by The New York Times reveal days full of dinners, receptions and even some free meet-and-greets — schedule-fillers the candidates hope they can use to make a good impression and pick up a check on the spot.

Two thousand miles from Phoenix, Blake Masters, the Republican challenging Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, made a campaign pitch on Wednesday evening alongside Senator Mitch McConnell in a conference room near the Capitol. Mr. Masters accused his Democratic rival of portraying himself as a moderate while voting like a liberal.

“We don’t need as much money as Kelly, just enough to get the truth out,” Mr. Masters said, according to notes from a person who was in the room, which was filled with lobbyists who had paid $1,000 per political action committee to attend.

New York Times, Editorial: This Threat to Democracy Is Hiding in Plain Sight, Editorial Board, Sept. 23, 2022 (Sept. 25 print ed.). In the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies were unable to get far in their attempts to prove widespread voter fraud. There were two reasons for that.

First, there wasn’t any, as numerous investigations by journalists, expert reports and court rulings showed. But second, Republican election officials in multiple states repeatedly said that their counts and recounts were accurate, and they defended the integrity of the election. For all the pressure that the Trump camp brought to bear, well-trained, civic-minded election workers carried out their duty to maintain the machinery of American voting.

Many top Republican Party officials and lawmakers have spent the last two years striking back, and drawn the most attention for their efforts to pass “voter integrity” laws that aim to make voting more onerous under the guise of preventing fraud. From January 2021 to May of this year, just under three dozen restrictive laws had been passed in nearly 20 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

These are pernicious laws, and they undermine Americans’ hard-won rights to vote. But just as important is the matter of who counts the votes, and who decides which votes count and which do not.

This is where Mr. Trump’s allies have focused much of their scheming since his re-election defeat. Their mission is to take over America’s election infrastructure, or at least key parts of it, from the ground up by filling key positions of influence with Trump sympathizers. Rather than threatening election officials, they will be the election officials — the poll workers and county commissioners and secretaries of state responsible for overseeing the casting, counting and certifying of votes.

These efforts require attention and mobilization from Americans across the political spectrum. America’s system of voting is complex and decentralized, with most of the oversight done at the state and local level by thousands of elected and appointed officials, along with poll workers. While it is outdated and inconvenient in many places, this system has worked relatively well for roughly 200 years.

But Mr. Trump’s attempts to subvert the election also revealed the system’s vulnerabilities, and his allies are now intently focused on exploiting those pressure points to bend the infrastructure of voting to their advantage. Their drive to take over election machinery county by county, state by state, is a reminder that democracy is fragile. The threats to it are not only violent ruptures like the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol but also quieter efforts to corrupt it.

A key element of this strategy is dismantling the bulwarks that stopped the assault on democracy in 2020. In Georgia, the top state election official, Brad Raffensperger, its secretary of state, refused Mr. Trump’s request to help steal the election by agreeing to “find” 11,780 additional votes. In Michigan, the Board of State Canvassers certified Joe Biden’s victory despite Mr. Trump’s aggressive meddling. A host of other state and local officials, many of them Republicans, pushed back on similarly antidemocratic machinations.

Mr. Trump and his allies have set about removing and replacing these public servants, through elections and appointments, with more like-minded officials. In some cases, the effort has failed. (In Georgia’s Republican primary this year, Mr. Trump backed a losing candidate in a vendetta against Mr. Raffensperger.) But in other states, Republicans have embraced election deniers as candidates, including for secretary of state.

In Nevada, the Republican secretary of state nominee, Jim Marchant, maintains that the 2020 presidential race was rigged and that he would not have certified Mr. Biden’s win in Nevada. He blames voting fraud for his own failed House run that year and has said that Nevada voters haven’t truly elected their leaders in years because the system is so rigged.

Mr. Marchant is a part of the America First Secretary of State Coalition, whose candidates are campaigning for measures that would make it more difficult for Americans to vote, such as by limiting voting to a single day and aggressively purging voter rolls. They have the financial backing of pro-Trump election deniers including Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow, and Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com.

The Republicans’ pick in Michigan, Kristina Karamo, is also an America First candidate. She gained political notice with her unsubstantiated claims to have witnessed election fraud as a poll watcher in Detroit in 2020. She has also promoted the baseless conspiracy theories that Dominion voting machines flipped votes in Mr. Biden’s favor and that Jan. 6 was a false flag operation conducted by “antifa posing as Trump supporters.”

The most outrageous G.O.P. choice may be Arizona’s Mark Finchem. Mr. Finchem has in the past identified as a member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group, and he spoke at a QAnon convention last year. He was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, although he denies being within about 500 yards of the building. As a member of the Arizona House of Representatives, he introduced a resolution this year to decertify the 2020 election in multiple counties, and was a sponsor of a bill to empower the Republican-led Legislature to overturn election results.

Mr. Finchem wants to ban early voting and put limits on mail-in voting. In April, he filed a federal lawsuit, backed by Mr. Lindell, to block the use of electronic vote-counting machines in Arizona in the midterms. (It was dismissed.)

Installing election deniers as top election officials is just one element of this plan. Much less visible, but just as important, is the so-called precinct strategy, in which Trump allies are recruiting supporters to flood the system by signing up to work in low-level election positions such as poll workers. A prominent promoter of the precinct strategy was Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser. Last year, Mr. Bannon rallied the listeners of his “War Room” podcast to sign up as precinct committee members. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct,” he proclaimed in May 2021.

The call was answered. An investigation by ProPublica in the summer of 2021 found a surge in Republicans signing up to be precinct officers or equivalent lowest-level officials in key counties. Of the 65 counties contacted, 41 reported a collective increase of at least 8,500 new sign-ups following Mr. Bannon’s call to arms. (ProPublica found no such spike on the Democratic side.)

The precinct strategy has been endorsed by Mr. Trump — who declared it a way to “take back our great country from the ground up” — and adopted by segments of the Republican Party.

“There’s a stirring of Democratic hearts, a blooming of Democratic hopes, a belief that falling gas prices, key legislative accomplishments and concern about abortion rights equal a reprieve from the kind of midterm debacle that Democrats feared just a month or two ago.”

Frank Bruni, in a roundtable discussion with Molly Jong-Fast and Doug Sosnik, on Democrats’ chances in the coming midterms. Read the discussion.

“So this constant distilling into the ‘Big Lie’ overlooks something key: A sea change is slowly happening on the right as it relates to policy expectations.”

Rachel Bovard, in a roundtable discussion with Ross Douthat and Tim Miller on the future of the Republican Party. Read the discussion.

“The reproductive rights side has long had the numbers, just not the intensity. If Democrats can keep the pressure on, abortion politics could prove increasingly painful and destructive for Republicans.”

“In my 28 years analyzing elections, I’ve never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in American politics: Women are registering to vote in numbers I’ve never witnessed.”
Tom Bonier, a Democratic political strategist, in “Women Are So Fired Up to Vote, I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It.” Read the guest essay.

“It is the direction of the line that is most important in politics. And I believe that Biden’s reversal will bode well for other Democrats.”

“While periods of divided government can yield gridlock, they also offer opportunities for progress.”
Oren Cass and Chris Griswold of American Compass, a think tank for conservative economics, in “What Republicans Should Do if They Win Big This Fall.” Read the guest essay.

Mr. Bannon is appealing to his supporters’ sense of civic duty by asking them to be more involved in their local election process. But unsettling details of what this effort entails emerged this summer after Politico acquired videos of Republican operatives discussing strategy with activists.

New election recruits would attend training workshops on how to challenge voters at polling places, explained Matthew Seifried, the Republican National Committee’s election integrity director for Michigan, in one of the recordings. These poll workers would have access to a hotline and a website staffed by “an army” of Republican-friendly lawyers prepared to help with challenges. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?” Mr. Seifried said at a meeting last October.

As testimony during the Jan. 6 committee hearings revealed, the legal challenges presented by Trump allies to the 2020 election quickly collapsed in part because they lacked even the most basic documentation. But carried out as designed, the precinct strategy means that even if, ultimately, there are no instances of fraud and most of the challenges to individual voters fall apart, they could still bog down the voting by causing delays and introducing unnecessary friction and confusion, giving cover to a state election official or state legislature to say that an election is tainted and therefore invalid.

In some parts of the country, this is already happening. This summer, an all-Republican county commission in rural New Mexico refused to certify the primary election results because of unsubstantiated suspicions of fraud. New Mexico’s secretary of state, a Democrat, intervened and asked the state Supreme Court to order the commission to certify the results. Two commissioners relented, but the third, Couy Griffin, refused. He admitted that his suspicion of fraud was not founded on any evidence: “It’s only based on my gut feeling and my own intuition, and that’s all I need.”

(Mr. Griffin, who attended the Jan. 6 melee at the Capitol, was later ruled to be ineligible to hold office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars from public office anyone who has sworn an oath to the Constitution and later engages in insurrection.)

After the May primary election in Pennsylvania, three Republican-controlled counties refused to count several hundred mail-in ballots on which voters had failed to write a date on the envelope. The administration of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, filed suit, and last month, a judge ruled that the ballots had to be included in the results, finally clearing the way for the primaries to be certified. (State officials learned of a fourth county that had done something similar.)

Litigation is an important tool in tackling this threat. But it will not save the day. The problem is too big, says Marc Elias, a Democratic voting rights lawyer. “For every one place you try to solve this in court, there are five additional places where it is happening,” he said.

The real threat to America’s electoral system is not posed by ineligible voters trying to cast ballots. It is coming from inside the system.

All those who value democracy have a role to play in strengthening and supporting the electoral system that powers it, whatever their party. This involves, first, taking the threat posed by election deniers seriously and talking to friends and neighbors about it. It means paying attention to local elections — not just national ones — and supporting candidates who reject conspiracy theories and unfounded claims of fraud. It means getting involved in elections as canvassers or poll watchers or precinct officers. (Mr. Bannon has the right idea about civic participation; he just employs toxic lies as motivation.)

And it means voting, in every race on the ballot and in every election. To this end, employers have a role to play as well, by giving workers time off to vote and encouraging them to do so.

The task of safeguarding democracy does not end with one election. Mr. Trump and others looking to pervert the electoral process are full of intensity and are playing a long game. Only an equally strong and committed countervailing force will meet that challenge.

Washington Post, A crowd response at a Trump rally created a quandary: What to do about the QAnon song, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Michael Scherer, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). A song’s journey from a Trump video to online forums and back to Trump rallies shows the melding of the MAGA and QAnon movements.

Washington Post, GOP candidate jokes about kidnapping plot against Michigan governor, Azi Paybarah, Sept. 24, 2022. One of the highest-profile domestic terrorism cases in recent memory is now, according to a Trump-backed Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan, a punchline.

michigan map In 2020, federal officials interrupted a kidnapping plot that targeted Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), leading to criminal charges against six people and convictions for two of them last month. Whitmer’s rival in the November general election referenced the plot Friday, drawing laughter from supporters. Twice.

At one event, the Republican challenger, Tudor Dixon, said, “The sad thing is Gretchen will tie your hands, put a gun to your head and ask if you’re ready to talk. For someone so worried about being kidnapped, Gretchen Whitmer sure is good at taking business hostage and holding it for ransom.”

A crowd response at a Trump rally created a quandary: What to do about the QAnon song

Dixon drew applause and laughter with the line, according to video posted online by a reporter in attendance. She spoke while standing in front of a backdrop that read “Michigan Families United,” an organization that says it advocates for “a family-friendly agenda” for the state.

At another event on Friday, Dixon said that when Whitmer appeared with President Biden at an auto show in Detroit recently, her facial expression appeared to say, “I’d rather be kidnapped by the FBI,” CNN reported.

Later, she added: “I think when you’re being attacked every day, you have to have a little levity in things — we can still have fun.”

Dixon made the remarks as she was joined on the campaign trail by former president Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and top adviser Kellyanne Conway. The former president, who endorsed Dixon right before her August primary, will hold a rally with Dixon and other candidates in the state Oct. 1.

Maeve Coyle, a spokeswoman for Whitmer’s campaign, said in a statement, “Threats of violence ... are no laughing matter,” adding that “the fact that Tudor Dixon thinks it’s a joke shows that she is absolutely unfit to serve in public office.”

Washington Post, Pentagon launches effort to assess crypto’s threat to national security, Tory Newmyer, Sept. 24, 2022. New project is part of the U.S. government’s wider crackdown on illicit uses of digital assets.

The military’s innovation office is launching a sweeping review of cryptocurrencies to assess threats to national security and law enforcement posed by the rise of digital assets.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — better known as DARPA, the office that developed the earliest technology undergirding the internet — has hired crypto intelligence firm Inca Digital to conduct the year-long project. The company will develop tools that give the Pentagon a granular view of crypto markets’ inner workings, in part to help authorities crack down on illicit uses of digital assets.

“The program underway here involves mapping out the cryptocurrency universe in some detail,” Mark Flood, a program manager with the agency, said in an interview with The Washington Post. Beyond fighting illicit finance, the office aims to use the data for insights into dynamics shaping traditional financial markets, where detailed information is harder to gather.

The deal is the latest evidence that federal agencies are ramping up efforts to thwart rogue regimes, terrorists and other criminal actors using crypto to fund their operations.

The Treasury Department last month issued its first-ever sanctions against software code to target Tornado Cash, a service that helped North Korean hackers and others launder stolen crypto. This week, the department issued a request for public input on crypto’s national security and illicit finance risks. Separately, the Justice Department this month announced that it’s launching a national network of 150 prosecutors to coordinate crypto-related investigations and prosecutions.

Washington Post, Oath Keepers sedition trial could reveal new info about Jan. 6 plotting, Spencer S. Hsu, Rachel Weiner and Tom Jackman, Sept. 24, 2022. Investigators continue to ask cooperating members of the Oath Keepers who have pleaded guilty about their knowledge of any coordination with others.

Five members of the extremist group Oath Keepers, including leader Stewart Rhodes, face trial for seditious conspiracy next week, in which U.S. prosecutors will try to convince jurors that Rhodes’s call for an armed “civil war” to keep Donald Trump in power on Jan. 6, 2021, was literal — and criminal.

Starting with jury selection Tuesday and opening statements as early as Thursday, Rhodes’s trial could reveal new information about the quest to subvert the 2020 presidential election results, as prosecutors continue to probe Trump’s conduct and that of his inner circle.

Prosecutors’ challenge will be to prove that Rhodes, one of the most visible figures of the far-right anti-government movement, and his group intentionally conspired to use force to prevent President Biden’s swearing-in. Whether the government tips its hand in court about the Oath Keepers’ ties to other political figures, the trial is an important step in the wider probe, analysts said.

Investigators continue to ask cooperating members of the Oath Keepers who have pleaded guilty about their knowledge of any coordination with others, according to defense attorneys. And they would welcome cooperation from those on trial, even if it came after convictions and the prospect of prison, former prosecutors said.

“I don’t think that the investigation is by any means over,” said Barbara L. McQuade, a former federal prosecutor who teaches law at the University of Michigan. “I think they may have important lines of investigation, and we just don’t know it yet. … and it will take many more months before they feel they have tapped all those veins of information.”

Prosecutors plan to call as many as 40 witnesses over a projected five-week trial, draw from 800 statements by those charged and summarize tens of thousands of messages, hundreds of hours of video footage and hundreds of phone call, location and financial records, according to pretrial proceedings. Three Oath Keepers members have pleaded guilty to the seditious conspiracy charge and are among more than a dozen potential informants in the case, according to government filings.

Washington Post, Opinion: Verdict upends Project Veritas’s journalism defense in infiltration case, Erik Wemple, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). On Thursday evening, a jury in D.C.'s federal courthouse returned a verdict against Project Veritas in a case stemming from its 2016 efforts to infiltrate Democracy Partners, a progressive political consulting firm that assisted Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The verdict, which included a damages award of $120,000, followed roughly a week of testimony in the case and one day of jury deliberations.
Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates

The verdict upends claims by attorneys for Project Veritas, the video-sting operation founded by James O’Keefe, that its four-part video series on Democracy Partners amounted to old-fashioned journalism.

“We thank the Jury for its decision and are deeply appreciative of the time and effort the members of the Jury devoted to consider our case," Democracy Partners said in a statement. "Hopefully, the decision today will help to discourage Mr. O’Keefe and others from conducting these kind of political spy operations.”

In a statement Thursday night, O’Keefe announced that Project Veritas will appeal the verdict. “The jury effectively ruled investigative journalists owe a fiduciary duty to the subjects they are investigating,” O’Keefe said in a statement, noting also that “investigative journalists may not deceive the subjects they are investigating.” O’Keefe was a constant presence at the trial, as were several other Project Veritas staffers.

At issue in the proceedings were two civil charges leveled by Democracy Partners in its 2017 suit — that Project Veritas engaged in unlawful wiretapping and fraudulent misrepresentation when it used false identities, bios and pretenses to earn the trust of Democracy Partners co-founder Robert Creamer and others. Project Veritas planted an intern — Allison Maass, who presented herself under the pseudonym “Angela Brandt” — in the firm’s offices, where she taped the goings-on from a camera attached to a button on her shirt.

“Fake, fake, fake,” said Joseph Sandler, attorney for Democracy Partners, in his closing statement on Wednesday.

Arguments in the case involved dueling descriptors: Democracy Partners claimed that Project Veritas, under O’Keefe, was orchestrating a “political spying operation” to assist candidate Donald Trump; Project Veritas said it was following in the grand tradition of American journalists who gather their news by going undercover. In his closing statement, Paul Calli, an attorney for Project Veritas, referenced the glory days of late “60 Minutes” correspondent Mike Wallace, once a virtuoso of undercover journalism and ambush interviews.

“Mike Wallace with his hidden camera,” said Calli, who said he could still hear the “tick-tick-tick” of the iconic “60 Minutes” clock. He didn’t mention that Wallace moved away from undercover tactics as his career matured. “I have no doubt that what we started has become a plague ... we got caught up in the drama more than we caught up in going after the facts,” said Wallace in a 2006 CNN interview.

The reference to Wallace drives at the larger dynamic looming over Democracy Partners v. Project Veritas. If nothing else, the litigation exposed the unethical lengths to which O’Keefe’s organization will go to secure footage that explodes on the internet, as well as the growing gap between Project Veritas and traditional news organizations when it comes to clandestine reporting methods. Long before O’Keefe established Project Veritas in 2011, American journalists were falling out of love with undercover tactics — a breakup aided by Food Lion’s 1995 suit against ABC News for its clandestine exposé on the grocery behemoth’s unsavory meat-handling practices.

Mainstream outlets, accordingly, have spent the past couple of decades either swearing off undercover work or narrowing the circumstances when it’s warranted. “Undercover reporting can be a powerful tool,” wrote Greg Marx in CJR in 2010, “but it’s one to be used cautiously: against only the most important targets, and even then only when accompanied by solid traditional reporting.”

Meanwhile: Court documents and testimony show that Project Veritas, in putting together its four-part “Rigging the Election” video series on Democracy Partners, did the following:

· Concocted fake identities and narratives to deceive Democratic operatives;

· Offered cash bonuses to staffers to get certain content from the targets of the investigation;

· Gave a $20,000 donation to a progressive organization in order to “keep mouths watering” at Democracy Partners, in the testimony of a Project Veritas staffer;

· Crafted a voter-fraud scheme and proposed it to Creamer, co-founder of Democracy Partners.

That last one is a doozy. A Project Veritas representative — Daniel Sandini, doing business as “Charles Roth” — hatched an initiative in which operatives would register out-of-state residents and even undocumented immigrants by using employer IDs and addresses of foreclosed properties, according to court records and testimony. These folks would be “surrogate voters” who would make up for the multitudes who had been disenfranchised by voter ID laws.

Of course, it screamed voter fraud. Creamer never bit on the scheme and testified that he considered “Roth” “well-intentioned” but ignorant of voting laws. And here’s the kicker: Even though it was Project Veritas that advanced the idea, its lawyer hammered Democracy Partners at trial for not doing enough to distance themselves from “Roth” after fielding the “surrogate voter” idea.

Got that?

Project Veritas must not have been spending enough time reading Poynter.org for ethics guidance. “Especially since the Food Lion misrepresentation and hidden-camera stuff, news organizations don’t do the ‘full Ginsburg’ ” of clandestine tactics, “where they put them all together at the same time,” says Lee Levine, a longtime First Amendment attorney. Contemporary examples of undercover stories are harder and harder to come by these days, says Levine — and even in the years when the practice was tapering off, he continues, news organizations that did embrace it were "very careful not to lie.”

Correct. Several years ago, Mother Jones decided that the best way to expose conditions in private prisons was to send in a writer to work as a guard. “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard,” by Shane Bauer, highlighted the scandalous crevices of the industry and hauled in all kinds of awards. Just how did Mother Jones get Bauer into the Corrections Corporation of America facility? Here’s how: “Shane Bauer applied for a job with the Corrections Corporation of America. He used his own name and Social Security number, and he noted his employment with the Foundation for National Progress, the publisher of Mother Jones. He did not lie.” (Disclosure: The Erik Wemple Blog’s wife is a staff writer at Mother Jones.)

Maass, the Project Veritas plant in the Democracy Partners infiltration, presented a résumé for her assignment. Asked at trial whether it contained anything that was true, Maass responded, “No.” Like other Project Veritas staffers on the stand, Maass didn’t shrink from confirming the deceptive measures that fueled the infiltration — what Sandler termed a “web of lies conjured by Project Veritas.” In his closing statement, Calli embraced the ethos of undercover reporting, asserting that Project Veritas propagates “deceit, deception and dishonesty” so that the organization can “speak truth to power.”

The trial, however, wasn’t simply a week-long seminar on journalism ethics. It turned, in large part, on prosaic legal technicalities and the tense testimony of a former union official. Following the publication of the Project Veritas videos, AFSCME withdrew from financial arrangements with Creamer and associated organizations.

Since Democracy Partners sued for fraudulent misrepresentation and unlawful wiretapping — and not defamation resulting from the content of the videos themselves — it had to prove that the damages stemmed from Project Veritas’s pre-publication actions: the operations and tactics themselves, that is. Former AFSCME executive Scott Frey testified that the infiltration was indeed a factor in the decision to cut ties, though he also said, in questioning from Calli, that the video itself was a “major factor."

That left an important judgment call in the hands of the jurors. Judging from the verdict, they viewed the infiltration as an actionable transgression itself. Too much fake-fake-fake.

New York Times, Project Veritas broke wiretapping laws and fraudulently misrepresented itself to a Democratic group, a jury found, Adam Goldman, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). The conservative group was found to have violated wiretapping laws and fraudulently misrepresented itself to a Democratic consulting firm, to which it was ordered to pay $120,000.

A jury in a federal civil case on Thursday found that Project Veritas, a conservative group known for its deceptive tactics, had violated wiretapping laws and fraudulently misrepresented itself as part of a lengthy sting operation against Democratic political consultants.

The jury awarded the consulting firm, Democracy Partners, $120,000. The decision amounted to a sharp rebuke of the practices that Project Veritas and its founder, James O’Keefe, have relied on. During the trial, lawyers for Project Veritas portrayed the operation as news gathering and its employees as journalists following the facts.

“Hopefully, the decision today will help to discourage Mr. O’Keefe and others from conducting these kind of political spy operations and publishing selectively edited, misleading videos in the future,” Robert Creamer, a co-founder of Democracy Partners, said in a statement after the jury had reached a verdict.

Project Veritas said it would appeal the decision.

In 2016, according to testimony and documents introduced at the trial, Project Veritas carried out a plan to infiltrate Democracy Partners, which worked for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign through the Democratic National Committee.

As part of the ruse, a Project Veritas operative posing as a wealthy donor named Charles Roth mentioned to Mr. Creamer that he wanted to make a $20,000 donation to a progressive group that was also a client of Mr. Creamer.

Later, the man posing as Mr. Roth told Mr. Creamer that his niece was interested in continuing her work in Democratic circles. After the money was wired from an offshore account in Belize to the group, Mr. Creamer spoke with the woman playing the role of Mr. Roth’s niece and offered her an unpaid internship at Democracy Partners.

The niece used a fake name and email account along with a bogus résumé. In his book, “American Pravda,” Mr. O’Keefe wrote that the “donation certainly greased the wheels.”

The operative, whose real name is Allison Maass, secretly taped conversations and took documents while working at Democracy Partners. She then supplied the information to her superiors at Project Veritas, which edited the videos and made them public.

The videos suggested that Mr. Creamer and another man, Scott Foval, were developing a plan to provoke violence by supporters of Donald J. Trump at his rallies. Mr. Creamer’s lawsuit said the “video was heavily edited and contained commentary by O’Keefe that drew false conclusions.” According to documents filed with the court in the case, the man playing Mr. Roth had proposed an “illegal voter registration scheme, and Creamer rejected it outright as illegal.”

The lawsuit contended that Mr. Creamer had lost more than $500,000 worth of contracts because of the deceptions behind the Project Veritas operation.

How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.
Learn more about our process.

Joseph E. Sandler, a lawyer for Democracy Partners, said during opening arguments last week that Mr. O’Keefe was a “strong supporter” of Mr. Trump and had tried to tip the scales in favor of him during the 2016 election. The operation, Mr. Sandler said, was “all carried out for the principal purpose of embarrassing Hillary Clinton and electing Donald Trump.”

He described the elaborate operation as a “painstaking web of lies conjured up by Project Veritas.”

According to a Project Veritas email and trial exhibit, Mr. O’Keefe offered cash bonuses to his employees to obtain incriminating statements, and $2,500 bonuses if Mr. Trump mentioned their videos in the presidential debates later that October. The email is marked “highly confidential.”

At the trial, Mr. Sandler said Project Veritas was trying to “uncover what they themselves concocted.”

Paul A. Calli, a lawyer for Project Veritas, argued that the videos were newsworthy and pointed out that media outlets had published stories about the undercover operation. He said the lawsuit was just “sour grapes.”

In his closing statement, Mr. Calli said Project Veritas had engaged in “deceit, deception and dishonesty.” The group used those tactics, he said, so Project Veritas “can speak truth to power.”

He said there was no evidence this was a political spying operation and that the lawsuit was an attack on journalism.

“The sole purpose of the operation was journalism,” Mr. Calli said.

Before the trial, a federal judge ruled that Democracy Partners could refer to Project Veritas’s conduct as a “political spying operation.”

Project Veritas is facing legal fights on several fronts. In August, some of its former employees sued the group, depicting a “highly sexualized” work culture in which daytime drinking and drug use were common and employees worked additional hours without pay.

That same month, two Florida residents pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to stealing a diary belonging to the president’s daughter, Ashley Biden, and selling it to Project Veritas. According to court documents, prosecutors asserted that an employee of Project Veritas had directed the defendants to steal additional items to authenticate the diary and paid them additional money after receiving them.

No charges have been filed against Project Veritas or any of its operatives in the Ashley Biden case, and the group never published the diary. But in a sign that the investigation into the group will continue, the authorities said one of the Florida residents had agreed to cooperate. As part of that investigation, F.B.I. agents conducted court-authorized searches last year at three homes of Project Veritas employees, including Mr. O’Keefe.

Project Veritas was also ordered in August to pay Stanford University about $150,000 in legal fees after a federal judge tossed the defamation lawsuit the group filed in 2021.

Project Veritas also has an ongoing defamation suit against The New York Times.

Recent Headlines

New York Times, Misleading and toxic posts about the Nov. 8 midterm vote have flooded social media. Here are three prevalent themes
New York Times, Secretary of State Races Turn Rowdy During the Homestretch
New York Times, A Democratic-aligned group is investing almost $60 million in state legislative races, an often overlooked arena
New York Times, Opinion: War, Inflation and Squandered Credibility, Paul Krugman
Politico, The Fed is declaring war on inflation. It could lead straight to recession
Washington Post, After months of debate, House Democrats strike deal to fund police

World News, Human Rights, Disasters

New York Times, British Government Goes Full Tilt on Tax Cuts and Free-Market Economics, Stephen Castle and Eshe Nelson, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). The new administration’s proposals are a sharp break from the era of Boris Johnson, and they represent a turn toward Thatcherism.

Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain on Friday gambled that a hefty dose of tax cuts, deregulation and free-market economics could reignite growth before the next general election as her government unveiled a package of measures that is likely to determine its electoral success or failure.

Breaking sharply with the era of the previous prime minister, Boris Johnson, the new chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, promised the dawn of a new age of lower taxation, with the scrapping of one planned tax rise and the reduction of levies on home purchases to try to fire up the real estate market.

But the negative reaction from financial markets — the value of British stocks, bonds and the pound dropped — underscored the risk the government is taking. Mr. Kwarteng abandoned a proposed rise in corporate taxation and, in a surprise move, also abolished the top rate of 45 percent of income tax applied to those earning more than 150,000 pounds, or about $169,000, a year. He also cut the basic rate for lower earners.

Washington Post, Italy’s election will likely bring the far right to power. Here’s why, Chico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). Two-thirds of Italians say they’re optimistic about the future of the European Union, whose stimulus helped buoy the country — and boost the image of the bloc — after the pandemic’s economic shock.

What’s more, the country has been led for the last year and a half by economist Mario Draghi, a paragon of centrist stability who continues to earn high approval ratings.

But if the national elections on Sunday go as expected, Draghi’s successor as prime minister will be Giorgia Meloni, a firebrand from the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party who wants her country to push for more autonomy in Europe, blockade the Mediterranean against undocumented immigrants and defend a traditional family identity she says is under attack.

A far-right politician is poised to become Italy’s first female leader

Crucially, in a country rebuilt after the ruins of war and fascism, Meloni would be the first Italian leader from a party with a post-fascist lineage — as well as a tricolor flame logo that hearkens to an earlier, more extreme political movement formed shortly after Mussolini’s death. She would take power 100 years after the March on Rome, the death knell for Italian democracy before World War II.

Associated Press, As Ukraine worries UN, some leaders rue what’s pushed aside, Jennifer Peltz, Sept. 24, 2022. In speech after speech, world leaders dwelled on the topic consuming this year’s U.N. General Assembly meeting: Russia’s war in Ukraine.

A few, like Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, prodded the world not to forget everything else.

He, too, was quick to bring up the biggest military confrontation in Europe since World War II. But he wasn’t there to discuss the conflict itself, nor its disruption of food, fuel and fertilizer markets.

“The ongoing war in Ukraine is making it more difficult,” Buhari lamented, “to tackle the perennial issues that feature each year in the deliberations of this assembly.”

He went on to name a few: inequality, nuclear disarmament, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the more than 1 million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar who have been living in limbo for years in Bangladesh.

In an environment where words are parsed, confrontations are calibrated and worry is acute that the war and its wider effects could worsen, no one dismissed the importance of the conflict. But comments such as Buhari’s quietly spoke to a certain unease, sometimes bordering on frustration, about the international community’s absorption in Ukraine.

Associated Press, China dials down Taiwan rhetoric; US, Canada transit strait, Ken Moritsugu, Sept. 21, 2022. China toned down its rhetoric on Taiwan on Wednesday, saying it is inevitable that the self-governing island will come under its control but that it would promote efforts to achieve that peacefully.

The comments followed recent remarks by President Joe Biden that the U.S. would defend Taiwan if China were to invade and came a day after U.S. and Canadian warships sailed through the Taiwan Strait.

They don’t appear to signal a change in policy as much as a broader attempt to calm the waters on multiple fronts in the runup to a major meeting of the ruling Communist Party next month.

“I would like to reiterate that … we are willing to strive for the prospect of peaceful reunification with the greatest sincerity and utmost efforts,” Ma Xiaoguang, the government spokesperson on Taiwan, said when asked about growing concern that China might resort to force.

China and Taiwan split in 1949 during a civil war that brought the Communist Party to power on the mainland. The rival Nationalists retreated to Taiwan and established their own government on the island off China’s east coast.
ADVERTISEMENT

China launched missiles into the waters around Taiwan during major military exercises held last month in response to a visit by senior U.S. lawmaker Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives.

Washington Post, Videos show Iran security forces opening fire on protesters, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Stefanie Le, Imogen Piper, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Atthar Mirza, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). Unrest continues one week after a 22-year-old woman died in the custody of Iran’s “morality police.”

It has been a week since the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who fell into a coma after being detained by Iran’s “morality police.” But the anti-government protests she inspired are still raging across Iran. Demonstrators, many of them women, are burning hijabs and fighting back against police; they are tearing down posters and setting fire to billboards of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader.

Why women are burning hijabs in Iran
Video posted on Sept. 22 shows a billboard depicting Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei set on fire in the Iranian city of Babol. (Video: Twitter)

Increasingly, protesters are paying with their lives. At least 30 people have been killed, according to rights groups and news reports. Hundreds have been injured. The government has disrupted cellular service across the country, and has imposed significant internet outages in some regions, including the Kurdish west, where the protests began and where rights groups say the crackdown has been most brutal.

What’s behind the protests in Iran?

Videos verified by The Washington Post show security forces opening fire on protesters. And a further escalation could be coming — Iran’s military warned Friday it would intervene if the demonstrations continued.

Washington Post, It is the deadliest accident to date as thousands flee Lebanon's escalating economic meltdown, Kareem Fahim and Sarah Dadouch, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). Syrian authorities have recovered the bodies of at least 77 migrants who were aboard a boat sailing from Lebanon that capsized off the port city of Tartus, Syria’s state news agency said Friday, in an accident that laid bare the alarming toll of an economic crisis in Lebanon that has caused tens of thousands to flee.

The boat is believed to have left from the coastal Lebanese city of Minyeh on Tuesday, carrying migrants of varying nationalities and bound for Italy, said Brig. Gen. Samer Kubrusli, Syria’s director general of ports, according to the news agency. Twenty survivors were being treated at a hospital, the agency said.

Thursday’s accident appeared to be the deadliest to date in the ongoing wave of sea migration from Lebanon that has accelerated over the last few years as the country suffers from a catastrophic financial collapse. The value of the local currency has been decimated, leaving three-quarters of the population living in poverty, according to the United Nations.

New York Times, Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door, Adam Satariano and Christopher F. Schuetze, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). Battling far-right extremism, Germany goes further than other Western democracies in policing online behavior, testing the limits of free speech on the internet.

When the police pounded the door before dawn at a home in northwest Germany, a bleary-eyed young man in his boxer shorts answered. The officers asked for his father, who was at work.

They told him that his 51-year-old father was accused of violating laws against online hate speech, insults and misinformation. He had shared an image on Facebook with an inflammatory statement about immigration falsely attributed to a German politician. “Just because someone rapes, robs or is a serious criminal is not a reason for deportation,” the fake remark said.

The police then scoured the home for about 30 minutes, seizing a laptop and tablet as evidence, prosecutors said.

At that exact moment in March, a similar scene was playing out at about 100 other homes across Germany, part of a coordinated nationwide crackdown that continues to this day. After sharing images circulating on Facebook that carried a fake statement, the perpetrators had devices confiscated and some were fined.

“We are making it clear that anyone who posts hate messages must expect the police to be at the front door afterward,” Holger Münch, the head of the Federal Criminal Police Office, said after the March raids.

Hate speech, extremism, misogyny and misinformation are well-known byproducts of the internet. But the people behind the most toxic online behavior typically avoid any personal major real-world consequences. Most Western democracies like the United States have avoided policing the internet because of free speech rights, leaving a sea of slurs, targeted harassment and tweets telling public figures they’d be better off dead. At most, Facebook, YouTube or Twitter remove a post or suspend their account.

But over the past several years, Germany has forged another path, criminally prosecuting people for online hate speech.

Recent Headlines

Politico, Treasury Department helps expand internet access to Iranian people amid violent government crackdown
Washington Post, South Korean president overheard insulting U.S. Congress as ‘idiots’
Washington Post, ‘Death to the dictator’: Videos show growing protests in Iran
New York Times, Protests Intensify in Iran Over Woman Who Died in Custody
New York Times, Thousands Pay Tribute as Britain Says Final Farewell to Its Queen
Washington Post, Queen Elizabeth II buried after historic state funeral

U.S. Courts, Crime, Mass Shootings, Law

New York Times, Kushner’s Company Reaches $3.25 Million Settlement in Maryland Lawsuit, Linda Qiu, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). The apartment company charged illegal fees and failed to adequately address leaks, mold and rodent infestations in its properties, the Maryland attorney general said.

An apartment management company partly owned by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former President Donald J. Trump, has agreed to pay a $3.25 million penalty and make restitution to thousands of tenants who were overcharged fees and subject to leaks, rodents and mold infestations, the Maryland attorney general said on Friday.

Westminster Management, the property management arm of Kushner Companies, and 25 affiliated businesses that owned nearly 9,000 units across the Baltimore area have agreed to settle a 2019 lawsuit over their rental practices. The companies violated consumer protection laws by charging tenants illegal fees and failed to adequately maintain the properties, the lawsuit said.

“This is a case in which landlords deceived and cheated their tenants, and then subjected them to miserable living conditions,” the Maryland attorney general, Brian Frosh, a Democrat, said in a news conference announcing the settlement. “The tenants were not wealthy people. Many struggled to pay the rent, keep food on the table, take care of their kids, keep everybody healthy. And Westminster used its vastly superior economic power to take advantage of them.”

Under the settlement, former and current tenants at 17 properties can file claims to recover a host of fees that Mr. Frosh said the company had improperly charged them. They could also file claims with an outside arbiter, known as a special master, who can return rental payments to tenants if they faced serious maintenance issues.

matt gaetz djt resized amazon public images rally

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Republican representing the Panhandle region of Florida, has been a fervant supporter of Donald Trump, who reportedly refused Gaetz's request for an open-ended pardon to cover unspecified matters and other associates, according to news reports.

Washington Post, Career prosecutors recommend no charges for Gaetz in sex-trafficking probe, Devlin Barrett, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). Investigators see credibility challenges for two of the main witnesses in the probe of the congressman’s past dealings with a 17-year-old.

Career prosecutors have recommended against charging Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) in a long-running sex-trafficking investigation — telling Justice Department superiors that a conviction is unlikely in part because of credibility questions with the two central witnesses, according to people familiar with the matter.

Senior department officials have not made a final decision on whether to charge Gaetz, but it is rare for such advice to be rejected, these people told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the deliberations. They added that it is always possible additional evidence emerges that could alter prosecutors’ understanding of the case.

Nevertheless, it is unlikely that federal authorities will charge Gaetz with a crime in an investigation that started in late 2020 and focused on his alleged involvement with a 17-year-old girl several years earlier. Gaetz, 40, has repeatedly denied wrongdoing, saying he has never paid for sex. He has also said the only time he had sex with a 17-year-old was when he was also 17.

Gaetz’s lawyer, Isabelle Kirshner, declined to comment. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

Gaetz sought pardon related to Justice Dept. sex-trafficking probe, people familiar say

Investigators set out to determine if the congressman paid for sex in violation of federal sex-trafficking laws and have examined his dealings with the then-17-year-old, people familiar with the matter have said. Earlier this year, a federal grand jury in Orlando heard testimony from associates of Gaetz, including an ex-girlfriend.

The ex-girlfriend was among several women on a trip Gaetz allegedly took to the Bahamas in 2018 that has been of particular interest to investigators. The 17-year-old at issue in the investigation was also on that trip, though by that time she was already 18 or older, people familiar with the matter have said. She has been a central witness in the investigation, but people familiar with the case said she is one of two people whose testimony has issues that veteran prosecutors feel would not pass muster with a jury.

The other is a former friend of Gaetz’s, Joel Greenberg, a former tax collector for Seminole County, Fla. He pleaded guilty last year to sex trafficking of a minor and a host of other crimes as part of a cooperation deal with authorities.

Greenberg was first charged in 2020 with fabricating allegations and evidence to smear a political opponent, but prosecutors continued to investigate and added additional charges to his case. He ultimately agreed to plead guilty to six criminal charges, including sex trafficking of a child, aggravated identity theft and wire fraud.

The sex-trafficking investigation involving Matt Gaetz, explained

In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors agreed to dismiss the other 27 counts Greenberg faced and recommend a term within federal sentencing guidelines, which are often far less than the statutory maximum penalties. They also agreed to recommend other possible sentencing breaks.

If Greenberg provided “substantial assistance” in building other cases, prosecutors might ask a judge to deviate below the minimum required penalty, according to Greenberg’s plea agreement. His sentencing is scheduled for later this year.

It was in exploring Greenberg’s conduct that investigators came upon evidence potentially implicating Gaetz in sex trafficking, people familiar with the matter have said. Prosecutors had been exploring whether Greenberg paid women to have sex with Gaetz and whether the two shared sexual partners, including the 17-year-old girl at issue in Greenberg’s case, these people said.

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL, at center, former Florida State Rep. Chris Dorworth, left, then of the Ballard Partners lobbying firm, and former Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg, at right, posed for the photograph above outside the White House in June of 2019.

Palmer Report, Analysis: Serious questions emerge about WaPo claim that Matt Gaetz is supposedly off the hook, Bill Palmer, Sept. 23, 2022. This morning the Washington Post published an article titled “Career prosecutors recommend no charges for Gaetz in sex-trafficking probe.” This promptly set off a wave of doomsday hysteria about how the DOJ was supposedly allowing Gaetz to get away with it all.

But you didn’t have to get very far into the WaPo article for the whole thing to starting sound rather…strange. The sourcing seemed to have been characterized using tricky wording. Nothing in the article seemed to be in line with how the DOJ actually does things. And other previously reported aspects of the Gaetz case, which are incompatible with today’s new reporting, were simply ignored by the WaPo article. Now even the article’s author appears to be casting doubt on his own sourcing.

The first red flag in the WaPo article is that it claims “career prosecutors” have advised their DOJ superiors against indicting Gaetz. When a major news outlet runs with an unnamed inside source, it always describes the source in the most important-sounding and relevant-sounding manner possible. If the source were a DOJ official, the article would refer to its source as a “DOJ official.” If the source were a prosecutor actually handling the Gaetz case, the article would specify as much, in order to underscore the legitimacy of the sourcing. In contrast, “career prosecutors” is a generic phrase that could refer to anyone in the DOJ who has spent their career working as a prosecutors. It could be the lowest-level prosecutors in the building, who have no connection to the Gaetz case.

The second red flag in this article is that the source goes on to question the viability of a key witness, Joel Greenberg, due to his status as a confessed underage sex trafficker. This makes no sense. Greenberg cut a cooperation deal last year, and the DOJ keeps signing off on delaying his sentencing so he can get full credit for his cooperation. If the DOJ prosecutors in this case thought Greenberg’s status as a sex offender made him non-viable as a witness, they wouldn’t have been using him as a witness all this time.

In fact the DOJ indicted a Florida Republican political operative just a couple days ago as part of the Greenberg probe. It’s difficult to imagine any DOJ prosecutor involved with the Greenberg case telling the media that Greenberg is a non-viable witness while using Greenberg as a witness in various ongoing investigations and prosecutions.

The WaPo article also claims that Matt Gaetz’s “ex-girlfriend” has turned out to be a non-viable witness. But the article then refers to her as having been underage at the time she was with Gaetz. This suggests that that article may be confusing two different people in this scandal: the then-underage girl that Gaetz allegedly had sex with, and the Gaetz ex-girlfriend who was given immunity several months ago after having allegedly conspired with Gaetz to obstruct the probe. These two women are not the same person, yet the WaPo article seems to present them as if they are the same person. It’s also beyond bizarre to think that any DOJ prosecutor working on the Gaetz case would publicly cast doubt on the legitimacy of an alleged victim who was underage at the time of the alleged crime.

Additionally, various major news outlets have previously reported that Gaetz is also under criminal investigation on alleged charges ranging from misuse of campaign funds, to fake IDs, to the aforementioned obstruction of justice. These kinds of charges wouldn’t go away simply because the underlying sex crime charge fell through. Campaign finance violations, for instance, would be proven with documentation and wouldn’t require someone like Greenberg to be considered a viable witness. Yet the WaPo article simply ignores the existence of the broader alleged Gaetz crimes being investigated, as if they never existed.

On top of all this, the DOJ has a policy of not making prosecutorial moves or announcements, within sixty days of an election, about candidates who are on the ballot. In fact Merrick Garland recently issued a memo reminding the DOJ of this policy. But this WaPo leak would also seemingly be a violation of that sixty day policy, because it’s not even a charging decision, it’s merely a leak about “career prosecutors” telling their bosses that they don’t think Gaetz should be charged. It’s precisely the kind of thing that Garland just told the DOJ not to do – so it further raises questions as to whether the sources for this WaPo article are serious people.

If the WaPo article didn’t fall apart enough in its own right, Joel Greenberg’s attorney then piled on by saying that this is not in line with anything he’s heard from the DOJ, and that he “would be surprised by such a decision.” We can’t simply take Greenberg at his word. But given all the red flags the WaPo article raises in its own right, Greenberg’s attorney’s statement does cast further doubt on the legitimacy of what’s being reported here.

Then things got even stranger, when the author of the WaPo article himself seemed to cast doubt on his own sourcing. Allison Gill of the Mueller She Wrote podcast tweeted a link to the WaPo article and added that she had “serious skepticism about the sources in this reporting.” The author of the WaPo article then retweeted Gill, appearing to acknowledge that his own sourcing could be off. Retweets famously aren’t endorsements. But why else would the author of the article retweet something like this?

It’s becoming more difficult by the hour to believe that that this WaPo article is accurate, and that the DOJ prosectors handling the Matt Gaetz case have indeed concluded that he shouldn’t be indicted. At this point the bigger story is how this severely flawed, questionably sourced, and seemingly clueless WaPo article came into existence – and why its own author is now retweeting people who are questioning his sourcing.

It’ll be worth watching to see what happens next. If this reporting is false or misleading, the DOJ will want to push back against it, but will also have to try to do so within the bounds of the sixty day rule. For that reason we might be stuck with this flawed WaPo article until after the November elections, at which point we might get the real story. But what we just read in the WaPo doesn’t seem to have much correlation with whatever might really be going on. Stay tuned.

Recent Headlines

Washington Post, ‘Fat Leonard’ caught in Venezuela after fleeing Navy bribery sentencing
Washington Post, The online incel movement is getting more violent and extreme, report says
Washington Post, How vigilante ‘predator catchers’ are infiltrating the criminal justice system
New York Times, Supreme Court Says Alabama Can Kill Prisoner With Method He Fears
Washington Post, U.S. can’t ban gun sales to people indicted on felony charges, judge says
Washington Post, U.S. charges 47 with ‘brazen’ theft of $250 million of pandemic food aid meant for kids
Washington Post, Opinion: DeSantis’s cruel stunt highlights the GOP’s hunger to change the subject, E.J. Dionne Jr.
New York Times, For the first time, arrests of undocumented immigrants on the southwestern U.S. border exceeded 2 million in a year
New York Times, Criminal Investigation Is Opened After Migrant Flights to Martha’s Vineyard
New York Times, Gov. Ron Desantis’s move prompted liberals’ condemnation, and more such flights may follow
New York Times, The Story So Far: Where 6 Investigations Into Donald Trump Stand, Peter Baker
Washington Post, Book Review: Former U.S. attorney dishes on how he held line against Trump White House, Barbara McQuade
New York Times, Speaking at Ellis Island, Attorney General Merrick Garland warned that political divisions had imperiled the rule of law
Washington Post, Opinion: A new and improved version of Electoral Count Act reform, Jennifer Rubin
Washington Post, Republicans in key battleground races refuse to say they will accept results, Amy Gardner, Hannah Knowles, Colby Itkowitz and Annie Linskey

Public Health, Pandemic, Responses

New York Times, Major Covid Holdouts in Asia Drop Border Restrictions, Alexandra Stevenson and Ben Dooley, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan have relaxed their pandemic rules, as they look to bolster their economies and play catch-up with much of the world.

After two and a half years of tight pandemic controls, some of Asia’s last holdouts are opening their borders, as they move to bolster their economies and play catch-up with a world that has largely learned to live with Covid.

Hong Kong said on Friday that it would abandon mandatory hotel quarantine for people coming to the city starting next week, following a similar move by Taiwan. Japan said it would drop its daily limit on arrivals and fully open its doors to tourists on Oct. 11.

The flurry of moves this week have left just one major country with strict border controls: China, where the ruling Communist Party still clings to its “zero Covid” policy. Those who travel to China, mainly residents, still face 10 days of hotel quarantine at their own expense.

Recent Headlines

New York Times, Investigation: ‘Very Harmful’ Lack of Health Data Blunts U.S. Response to Outbreaks, Sharon LaFraniere
Washington Post, Opinion: Biden is right. The pandemic is over, Leana S. Wen
Washington Post, Biden declares that ‘the pandemic is over’ in the U.S., surprising some officials
New York Times, Biden Says the Pandemic Is Over. But at Least 400 People Are Dying Daily
Washington Post, Editorial: After ‘a massive global failure’ on covid, what happens the next time?
New York Times, Investigation: How Russian Trolls Helped Keep the Women’s March Out of Lock Step
Washington Post, Investigation: Pentagon opens sweeping review of clandestine psychological operations, Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post, Can the Sunday morning talk show be saved? Paul Farhi
Washington Post, Oakland is closing public schools, raising tough questions in the proud city

Abortion, Forced Birth Laws, Privacy Rights

Washington Post, Arizona judge reinstates near-total abortion ban from 19th century, Andrew Jeong, Sept. 24, 2022. An Arizona judge revived a ban on abortion that dates back to the mid-19th century, lifting a decades-old injunction that means the procedure is effectively illegal in the state at all times except when a pregnant person’s life is at risk.

arizona map Pima County Superior Court Judge Kellie Johnson’s ruling was released Friday, a day before a law that restricts abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy was due to take effect. The conflicting restrictions on abortion had created confusion, with Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) pushing to enforce the tougher prohibitions and Gov. Doug Ducey (R) previously insisting that the 15-week ban was the law of the land.

Johnson cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade, which established a fundamental right to abortion, as rationale for lifting the injunction. Roe had been the basis of the 1973 injunction that prevented bans on abortion from being enforced, Johnson ruled. And because the nation’s highest court had returned decisions on the procedure to Congress and the states, that injunction can also be annulled, she wrote.
Judge Kellie Johnson lifted an injunction on most abortions in the state. (Mamta Popat/Associated Press)

The Arizona law threatens abortion providers with between two and five years in prison. It originated from a 1864 law and has no exception for victims of rape or incest. Some states did not update the laws on their books after Roe was decided in 1973, and the overturning of that decision has caused confusion from Michigan to West Virginia as to whether those laws still apply.

Johnson indicated that the older law, which was updated and codified in 1901, supersedes the recently passed law that was to take effect Saturday. “Most recently in 2022, the legislature enacted a 15-week gestational age limitation on abortion. The legislature expressly included in the session law that the 15-week gestational age limitation” does not “repeal” the older ban, she wrote.

Ducey’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Friday. Brnovich thanked Johnson on Twitter, saying that the county court had provided “clarity and uniformity on this important issue. I have and will continue to protect the most vulnerable Arizonans.”

Abortion is banned in these states. See where the laws have changed.

Planned Parenthood Arizona, which was a plaintiff in the case, criticized the court for reviving an “archaic” law that it said would send “Arizonans back nearly 150 years.” The reproductive health organization, which can appeal the ruling, also said it “will never back down.” Democratic gubernatorial nominee Katie Hobbs said in a statement that she was “mourning” the decision and pledged to veto antiabortion legislation if elected.

Washington Post, Opinion: To say U.S. abortion rollbacks are in line with Europe is simply wrong, Leah Hoctor, Sept. 24, 2022. Three months after the Supreme Court’s decision to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion in the United States shocked people across Europe, Republican lawmakers have astonished Europeans again with claims that 47 of 50 European countries ban abortion after 15 weeks.

This is simply untrue — as is the claim, made by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and other lawmakers, that by introducing a 15-week federal ban on most abortions, the United States would move into line with Europe.

Ruth Marcus: Graham’s 15-week abortion ban gives the endgame away

Apart from the very few European nations that retain highly restrictive laws on abortion — Andorra, Lichtenstein, Malta, Monaco and Poland — no other European country “bans” abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Instead, almost all European countries allow abortion throughout pregnancy on a range of grounds, including where there are risks to a patient’s physical or mental health, and in situations involving severe or fatal fetal impairment.

Leah Hoctor is senior regional director for Europe at the Center for Reproductive Rights and an expert on international and comparative European law on abortion.

Recent Headlines

Associated Press via Politico, Indiana abortion clinics reopening after judge blocks ban
Washington Post, Judge orders accused Planned Parenthood shooter to be forcibly medicatedWashington Post, Opinion: Chrissy Teigen has shown what abortion is. Some refuse to accept it, Kate Cohen
Washington Post, GOP senator says he won’t back Graham’s proposed national abortion ban
New York Times, Opinion: Lindsey Graham’s Unbelievably Cruel Abortion Ban, Michelle Goldberg
Washington Post, Opinion: Graham’s 15-week abortion ban gives the endgame away, Ruth Marcus
Washington Post, Most abortions stop in West Virginia after lawmakers pass near-total ban

Water, Space, Energy, Climate, Disasters

climate change photo

New York Times, World Bank Leader, Accused of Climate Denial, Offers a New Response, David Gelles and Alan Rappeport, Sept. 22, 2022, David Malpass touched off a furor, including calls for his removal, when he refused to acknowledge that fossil fuels are warming the planet.

The president of the World Bank, David Malpass, on Thursday tried to restate his views on climate change amid widespread calls for his dismissal after he refused to acknowledge that the burning of fossil fuels is rapidly warming the planet.

In an interview on CNN International on Thursday morning, Mr. Malpass said he accepted the overwhelming scientific conclusion that human activity is warming the planet.

“It’s clear that greenhouse gas emissions are coming from man-made sources, including fossil fuels,” he said. “I’m not a denier.”

He also sent a memo to World Bank staff, which was obtained by The New York Times, in which he wrote “it’s clear that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are causing climate change, and that the sharp increase in the use of coal, diesel, and heavy fuel oil in both advanced economies and developing countries is creating another wave of the climate crisis.”

That was much different from Tuesday, when he refused to acknowledge during a public event at The New York Times whether the burning of oil, gas and coal was dangerously heating the Earth .

Speaking onstage during a discussion about climate finance, Mr. Malpass was asked to respond to a remark made earlier in the day by former Vice President Al Gore, who called the World Bank president a “climate denier.” Pressed three times, Mr. Malpass would not say whether he accepted that man-made greenhouse gas emissions had created a worsening crisis that is already leading to more extreme weather.

“I’m not a scientist,” he said.

Washington Post, Billions were allocated to prevent disaster in Puerto Rico. Fiona, a Category 1 storm, still caused havoc, Arelis R. Hernández, Sept. 24, 2022. Hurricane Fiona triggered floods in Puerto Rico that destroyed homes, roads and bridges. The U.S. government allocated more than $3 billion for hazard mitigation after Hurricane Maria. But few projects have gotten underway.

The U.S. government made historic allocations, including more than $3 billion for hazard mitigation, to Puerto Rico after Maria — some of which was slated to go toward preventing severe flooding during storms. A separate pot of federal public assistance money is designated for rebuilding public infrastructure. In Salinas, which was walloped by Maria and battered again by Fiona, officials have submitted 74 projects to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for funding. To date, just seven — including road repairs and a basketball court — have been completed, data from Puerto Rico’s Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency, shows. About two dozen more entered the construction phase in the last six months.

Washington Post, Fiona makes landfall in Canada, leaving hundreds of thousands without power, Selena Ross, Scott Dance and Helier Cheung, Sept. 24, 2022. One of the strongest storms ever to hit Canada slammed into Nova Scotia’s coastline early Saturday, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power.

Former Hurricane Fiona made landfall early on Saturday morning over Guysborough county on the northeast corner of mainland Nova Scotia, Canada’s weather service said. There were maximum sustained winds of almost 81 mph, while peak gusts of over 100 mph were detected, it added.

It is the lowest pressured land falling storm on record in Canada, according to the Canadian Hurricane Center, which also described hurricane-force gusts battering the area. More than 40% of the population in Nova Scotia is affected by power outages, according to Nova Scotia power. “We are seeing significant impacts from the storm including uprooted trees, broken poles and downed power lines across the province,” the utility company added.

Washington Post, Biden has a big climate win at home. Global success still depends on China, Michael Birnbaum, Steven Mufson and Tyler Pager, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). President Biden is entering a crucial season of global climate talks boosted by the legislative victory of the Inflation Reduction Act, betting he can undercut China’s arguments that the United States is a less reliable negotiating partner because its policies depend on who is in power in Washington.

The new push comes as a freeze in climate talks between China and the United States, tensions over who should pay for the damage caused by global warming and an energy crisis and war in Europe have weighed on the prospects for the gathering in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh. On Friday, Europe’s top climate negotiator said that his fears were diminishing that a United Nations climate conference in Egypt in November would be a “train crash,” given passage of the new climate law and recent moves by other global negotiators.

The plan for talks between the United States and China, unveiled with fanfare during the Glasgow climate summit last year, aimed to tackle a broad range of planet-warming emissions. But the negotiations between Washington and Beijing — the world’s most important climate dialogue — have been frozen since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) infuriated Chinese officials by visiting Taiwan last month.

Recent Headlines

New York Times, The devastation partly reflects factors that preceded the storm. Here are three reasons for Puerto Rico’s power outage
Washington Post, All of Puerto Rico without power as Hurricane Fiona slams island
New York Times, Hurricane Fiona Knocks Out Power to All of Puerto Rico, Governor Says
White House, President Biden Approves Puerto Rico Emergency Declaration
New York Times, Billions in Climate Deal Funding Could Help Protect U.S. Coastal Cities
Washington Post, North America’s largest birds return to Northern California after a 130-year absence
New York Times, How a Quebec Lithium Mine May Help Make Electric Cars Affordable
Washington Post, Patagonia founder gives away $3 billion company: ‘Earth is now our only shareholder’
Washington Post, Strongest storm in decades battering Alaska

U.S. Media, Free Expression, Culture, Education, Sports News

Mediaite, Chris Wallace Asks Breyer About SCOTUS ‘Undoing’ Abortion Rights: ‘Doesn’t That Very Much Shake The Authority Of The Court?’
Tommy Christopher, Sept. 24, 2022. CNN anchor Chris Wallace challenged retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer about the effect of “undoing” 50 years of abortion rights, asking “doesn’t that very much shake the authority of the court?”

Wallace’s series Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace debuted on HBO Max this week, and the first episode features an in-depth interview with Justice Breyer. Wallace spoke about the erosion in public support for the Supreme Court that has coincided with the Court’s effective overturning Roe v. Wade with a 5-4 decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization:

WALLACE: I want to talk to you about public opinion. You like to quote Alexander Hamilton, who said that the court does not have purse like Congress, does not have the sword like the executive. That it depends on public acceptance for its authority. You talked earlier about public opinion. Look at the Gallup poll, which has measured approval of the courts since the year 2000. In July, the month after Dobbs, 43% approved of the way the Supreme Court does its job while 55% disapprove. That’s the most negative margin in the history of the court, worse than right after Bush v. Gore. You talk about social harmony, but when the court undoes a right that people have lived with for half a century, doesn’t that very much shake the authority of the court?

BREYER: If you’re going to be a judge, you do not worry about popularity. You do not worry about what the general public will say by way of public opinion. And if you do that going over a very small edge here, people won’t accept your opinion. They’ll think you’re a group of politicians and there have been some bad days in the history of the court. And I start complaining about the ones that I didn’t like, I think you know what Abraham Lincoln said, when he read Dred Scott. He said, That’s a shocker. And you say did I like this Dobbs decision? Of course I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. Was I happy about it? Not for an instant. Did I do everything I could to persuade people? Of course, of course. But there we are and now we go on. We try to work together. I mean, it’s a little corny, but I think, but I do think it.

Mediaite, Media Matters Chief ‘Terrified’ New CNN Strategy Will Lead to Takeover – By Fox News Mogul Rupert Murdoch, Tommy Christopher, rupert murdoch 2011 shankbone Sept. 24, 2022. President and CEO of Media Matters Angelo Carusone told SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah he’s “terrified” the influence of new CNN chief Chris Licht will leave the network vulnerable to a takeover by Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, right.

On Friday’s edition of The Dean Obeidallah Show, Carusone told the host that he’s rooting for CNN to succeed, but he feels the new direction will fail, and Murdoch will swoop in:

ANGELO CARUSONE: Thing I really am afraid of is that it is honesty that they sell to Rupert Murdoch. I’m terrified of this. It is super, it is his white whale and I think that it doesn’t fit into Discovery’s portfolio in a meaningful way. I’ve always been afraid of this, and the posture of making the platform more appealing, more attractive, more neutral, I think weakens it enough that they say, “Look, it’s just not worth it. We didn’t get the returns on investment. It hasn’t turned the corner yet.” You know, I don’t think they’re going to get the audience gains that they think they’re going to get, which is part of the strategy. And that’s a real problem, too. So at its core, I’m afraid that in the short term, we see some bad coverage out of them, some spots of bad coverage which actually have bigger harms when it comes from CNN. And then bigger… But longer term, I think that it actually weakens the business model of CNN enough that it makes them more susceptible to just being spun off. And that’s not great either.

DEAN OBEIDALLAH: That’s interesting, I never thought about that last one…

ANGELO CARUSONE: So I don’t think people realize how often Rupert Murdoch tries to buy CNN. It happens all the time. He did it and he made a really aggressive, year-long plus play in 2017 and a run at it in 2014. He’s made runs I did during the early 2000, and that matters because that’s how we got the Wall Street Journal. He tried to buy it half a dozen times before it, before he eventually convinced the Bancrofts, which were the owners of the Wall Street Journal, to sell it."

Infowars host Alex Jones is being sued by multiple parents of murdered Sandy Hook children for his lies about their deaths (Pool photo by Briana Sanchez from a trial in Austin, Texas).pool

Disgraced Infowars host Alex Jones is being sued by multiple parents of murdered Sandy Hook children for his lies about their deaths (Pool photo by Briana Sanchez from a trial in Austin, Texas).

New York Times, ‘I’m Done Saying I’m Sorry,’ Alex Jones Tells Sandy Hook Families, Elizabeth Williamson, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). In testimony in a Connecticut trial to assess the damages done by his Sandy Hook lies, the Infowars fabulist lashed out, ending the day in chaos.

Confronted on Thursday with the harm he had done by repeatedly lying on his Infowars radio and online show that Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie died in the massacre, was an actor, Mr. Jones erupted in a rant that drew a contempt threat by Judge Barbara Bellis of State Superior Court.

“Is this a struggle session? Are we in China? I’ve already said I’m sorry, and I’m done saying I’m sorry,” Mr. Jones responded, as his lawyer shouted objections.

Mr. Jones was set off by Chris Mattei, a lawyer for the families of the Sandy Hook victims, who pointed to Mr. Parker in the courtroom as he questioned Mr. Jones on the stand. “Robbie Parker’s sitting right here,” Mr. Mattei said. “He’s real, isn’t he? And for years you put a target on his back, didn’t you? Just like you did every single parent and loved one sitting here.”

“No, I didn’t,” Mr. Jones said.

“Why don’t you show a little respect, Mr. Jones?” Mr. Mattei said. “You have families in this courtroom here that lost children, sisters, wives, moms.”

Alex Jones, a far-right conspiracy theorist, is the focus of a long-running legal battle waged by families of victims of a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.

Here is what to know:

Pushing misinformation. Mr. Jones used his Infowars media company to spread lies about Sandy Hook, claiming that the attack in 2012, in which 20 first graders and six educators were killed, was a hoax. The families of the victims say Mr. Jones’s lies have added to their devastation and his followers have harassed them, threatening their safety.
Defamation lawsuits. The families of 10 Sandy Hook victims sued Mr. Jones in four separate lawsuits. The cases never made it to a jury; Mr. Jones was found liable by default in all of them because he refused to turn over documents, including financial records, ordered by the courts over four years of litigation.
Mr. Jones’s line of defense. The Infowars host has claimed that his right to free speech protected him, even though the outcome of the cases was due to the fact that he failed to provide the necessary documents and testify.
Three new trials. A trial in Austin, Texas this July was the first of three that will determine how much Mr. Jones must pay the families of the Sandy Hook victims. The other two are scheduled for September, but are on hold after Mr. Jones put the Infowars parent company, Free Speech Systems, into Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week, halting all pending litigation.
Compensatory and punitive damages. On Aug. 4, a jury in the Texas trial awarded the parents of one of the children killed in the mass shooting more than $4 million in compensatory damages, which are based on proven harm, loss or injury. A day later, jurors decided Mr. Jones must pay the parents $45.2 million in punitive damages, which aim to punish especially harmful behavior and tend to be granted at the court’s discretion.

Judge Bellis rebuked Mr. Jones. “This is not a press conference, this is clearly not your show,” she said. “You have to respect the process.”

At the end of the day, after the jury had gone, she warned Mr. Jones as well as his lawyer, Norm Pattis, that she would enforce a zero-tolerance policy on Friday for ignoring her orders about decorum in the courtroom. Mr. Pattis had repeatedly objected as his client shouted.

“You can expect a contempt hearing if anybody steps out of line,” Judge Bellis said. “And Mr. Jones, same thing.”

Mr. Jones for years spread lies on Infowars that the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting that killed 20 first graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was a government pretext for gun control. Late last year, Mr. Jones lost four separate defamation lawsuits filed by the families of 10 Sandy Hook victims, who had endured years of online torment and threats from conspiracy theorists who believed Mr. Jones’s bogus claims.

ENews! Nia Long Comments After Fiancé Ime Udoka Is Suspended From Celtics, Tamantha Gunn, Sept. 23, 2022. Nia Long broke her silence after her fiancé, Ime Udoka, was suspended for the 2022-2023 season as head coach of the Boston Celtics for violating team policies. See what the actress had to say below.

Nia Long is ready to speak out about the drama surrounding her fiancé, Ime Udoka.

Following Ime's suspension as head coach of the Boston Celtics for violating team rules, the Best Man actress shared a statement, via her rep Shannon Barr, thanking everyone for their love during this time.

"The outpouring of love and support from family, friends and the community during this difficult time means so much to me," she said in a statement to E! News Sept. 23. "I ask that my privacy be respected as I process the recent events. Above all, I am a mother and will continue to focus on my children."

Nia's statement comes one day after the Celtics announced Ime would be suspended for the upcoming 2022-2023 basketball season for "violations of team policies" in a Sept. 22 statement.

"A decision about his future with the Celtics beyond this season will be made at a later date," the organization added. "The suspension takes effect immediately."

Hours before the team's statement, ESPN, citing multiple sources, reported that Ime was facing disciplinary action for allegedly having "an intimate relationship with a female member of the franchise's staff."

Following the Celtics' announcement, Ime issued an apology and took accountability for his actions. "I want to apologize to our players, fans, the entire Celtics organization, and my family for letting them down," he said in a statement to ESPN reporter Malika Andrews Sept. 22. "I am sorry for putting the team in this difficult situation, and I accept the team's decision."

The coach added, "Out of respect for everyone involved, I will have no further comment."

Nia and Ime met in 2010 and got engaged five years later. The couple shares 10-year-old son, Kez Sunday Udoka, and the Fatal Affair actress is also mom to son Massai Dorsey II from a previous relationship.

Washington Post, Videos show Iran security forces opening fire on protesters, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Stefanie Le, Imogen Piper, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Atthar Mirza, Sept. 24, 2022. Unrest continues one week after a 22-year-old woman died in the custody of Iran’s “morality police.”

Washington Post, NPR’s news chief announces unexpected departure after four years, Paul Farhi, Sept. 23, 2022. The top news executive at NPR announced Friday that she is leaving the organization, an unexpected departure that coincides with a shake-up in the nonprofit media giant’s management structure.

Nancy Barnes, who took over NPR’s newsroom in 2018 as senior vice president and editorial director of the broadcasting and digital news operation, said she will leave the organization later this fall. She did not announce new plans, but said in a note to staff on Friday that she will “pursue other journalistic endeavors.”

Her decision came hours after NPR’s chief executive, John Lansing, announced the creation of a new position that will oversee all of NPR’s programming — trademark news programs such as “All Things Considered” as well as podcasts and non-news programming such as “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me.” The new chief content officer position would have effectively created another tier of management over Barnes, who previously reported directly to Lansing.

Barnes and Lansing did not respond to requests for comment.

A highly regarded newspaper editor at the Houston Chronicle and Minneapolis Star Tribune, Barnes took over NPR’s newsgathering operations from an interim manager following the resignation of Michael Oreskes in 2017 amid multiple allegations of sexual harassment.

NPR said it would conduct a search for Barnes’s successor, who will become the fourth person to run NPR’s news operations in the past five years.

She leaves at a time of growing financial pressure on NPR, a nonprofit organization that is funded by primarily by fees from noncommercial radio stations and corporate sponsorships.

For fiscal year 2021, NPR had revenue-after-expenses of $16.9 million — a swing from a deficit of $14.1 million the year before. Officials have indicated that the organization was hit hard by the pandemic, with daily listening and corporate support falling as fewer people listened to news reports while working from home. At one point in mid-2020, NPR imposed unpaid, week-long furloughs on most of its newsroom employees.

Lansing announced the new chief content officer position in a staff memo Friday morning. Barnes announced her resignation that afternoon.

She wrote in an internal memo that there is “increasingly overlap between the news and [non-news] programming divisions” and that she supported Lansing’s decision to add a new chief content officer. She called her departure “bittersweet.”

NPR’s news division currently employs 481 people. The programming division employs an additional 183.

Washington Post Magazine, A new anti-communism museum in D.C. tallies 100 million victims of Marx’s ideology, Justin Wm. Moyer, Sept. 20, 2022. Channy Laux, 60, is the granddaughter of a refugee from communist China who fled to Cambodia. She was 13 when the communist Khmer Rouge, which would eventually kill almost 2 million people, took over Cambodia in 1975. Her father and brother were shot trying to escape to Thailand through the jungle. Laux was sent to a reeducation camp and was tortured, raped and starved. She eventually reached the United States as a refugee with no English skills, studied to be an engineer, wrote a memoir, and now runs a Cambodian restaurant and food business in San Jose. “If you think that capitalism is bad,” she says, “wait until you live under communism.”

Today, Laux is a volunteer speaker affiliated with the Victims of Communism Museum, which opened in June in downtown D.C. The modest-size museum is housed in an office building once owned by the anti-communist United Mine Workers of America. It is run by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation — established by bipartisan legislation signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993 — and relies on donations, not tax dollars. Focused mostly on 20th-century atrocities, the museum details the evolution of communism from Marx to Soviet Russia to other governments around the world, estimating that communist regimes inflicted 100 million deaths worldwide, including lives claimed by executions and famine.

Bleak canvases by Ukrainian painter Nikolai Getman — who turned his Siberian gulag years into art — adorn the walls. An interactive display allows visitors to choose what they would do if facing persecution by Fidel Castro and other dictators. A photo gallery of those who survived communism includes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Pope John Paul II and the Dalai Lama. A merchandise table near the front door sells anti-Che Guevara shirts; the face of Cuba’s revolutionary hero, often found on dorm room walls, is encircled in red with a line through it.

On the second floor, a temporary collection focuses on the Tiananmen Square protest in China in 1989, which ended with the murder of hundreds if not thousands of pro-democracy dissidents. One of the protesters’ iconic blue tents is on display, as are the bloody shirt of a journalist beaten by soldiers and a flag flown at the protest bearing more than 90 inscriptions.

The museum aspires to be more than a catalogue of horrors. Andrew Bremberg, president of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, sees the museum becoming a center of scholarship like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It has published leaked documents detailing repressive tactics of Chinese police, and in July hosted Olena Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine.

Bremberg, 43, says young people are not fully aware of the dangers of communism because of misguided predictions that the ideology had no future after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The exit doors at the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington,. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/For The Washington Post)

Now, especially given the rise of left-wing regimes in Latin America, he argues that the threat is returning. “This is a huge challenge that has come back,” Bremberg told me. “The entire country needs to be more aware of the danger and evils of communism.”

From 2015: Yes, there are socialists in D.C. You just haven’t looked hard enough.

In the United States, however, unpacking the history of communism — an ideology associated with John Reed, Woody Guthrie, Isadora Duncan, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Paul Robeson, Lucille Ball, the Hollywood 10 and Rage Against the Machine — gets complicated quickly. This philosophy that killed tens of millions also inspired generations of activists. Roberta Wood, 73, joined the U.S. Communist Party in 1969. At the time, the nation was in the throes of the Vietnam War, mired in persistent segregation, and awash in revolutionary rhetoric among youth. The daughter of a steelworker, Wood was no hippie; she just wanted to join the labor movement. She moved to Chicago to work for U.S. Steel and later became a mechanic in Chicago’s sewage treatment plants. In retirement, she became the labor editor at a Communist Party-affiliated newspaper. Now the grandmother of eight children, she’s a party spokesperson. It has been, she told me recently, “a really wonderful life.”

Wood says communists are “against the victimization of anyone under any system.” “I can’t defend everything that’s been done in the past century-and-a-half in the name of communism. ... Humans are always going to make mistakes,” she argues. Wood has never been to the museum, but, “judging from its website,” she says, “this museum could be the basis of a whole other museum called ‘Lies About Communism.’ ”

Debra Friedmann looks at a display at the Victims of Communism Museum. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/For The Washington Post)

It’s easy to see a rightward tilt in the museum’s leadership. The foundation’s chairman, Edwin J. Feulner, is the founder of the Heritage Foundation; Bremberg is a former domestic adviser to President Donald Trump, who also appointed him U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva.

Still, opposition to human rights abuses by communist regimes has historically crossed party lines. The Victims of Communism congressional caucus — which supports the general cause of the museum — was founded by two Democrats and two Republicans. And politicians from both parties can be found on the same side of many contemporary issues connected to the museum — for instance, the ongoing treatment by the Chinese government of the country’s Muslim Uyghur minority.

One of the volunteer speakers associated with the museum is Rushan Abbas, who is Uyghur and was born in East Turkestan — otherwise known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China — in 1967. Among her earliest memories is her mother being taken away by Red Guards; both her mother and father were forced into reeducation during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The family was eventually reunited, but Abbas’s father worried enough about Rushan’s participation in anti-communist protests in the 1980s ahead of the Tiananmen massacre to arrange for her to study in the United States.

Opinion: China seized my sister. Biden must fight for her and all enslaved Uyghurs.

Now the executive director of an organization fighting to end China’s genocide against Uyghurs, Abbas, who told me her sister is currently imprisoned by Chinese authorities on false charges, works to bring international attention to Chinese human rights abuses. “I am very much a critic of all communism,” she says. “A hopeful idea failed.”

Washington Post, Is the print newspaper comics page in trouble? Michael Cavna, Sept. 24, 2022. Is this the beginning of the end for the daily printed comics page in many American towns and cities?

Some cartoonists and readers fear such a trend as Lee Enterprises, an Iowa-based media company that owns nearly 80 daily newspapers, is transitioning to a “uniform set of offerings” with its comics, puzzles and advice columns, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a Lee paper. The newspaper reported Sept. 11 that as a result, its print section would cut back to “a half-page of comics” Mondays through Saturdays.

And the Omaha World-Herald reported Sept. 13 that “to operate more efficiently, we’re streamlining the comics, puzzles and features that we and other Lee Enterprises newspapers have been providing.”

The shift made headlines when cartoonists such as “Bizarro” creator Dan Piraro and “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams said that they had lost Lee client newspapers. Adams said he had lost 77 papers. Creators are still working to determine the full impact of these changes, including how their strips’ online presence is affected.

The Lee announcement comes shortly after News Corp Australia said its scores of newspapers will drop their comic strips.

Comics sections in many papers have been shrinking for years, but Piraro says the across-the-chain changes by Lee Enterprises feel less gradual. “Seeing the dominoes begin to fall at such an accelerated pace is scary,” says Piraro, noting that he still depends on the income he receives from print newspapers. “I’ll now need to put more energy into generating income elsewhere.”

Adds Piraro: “I’m seeing this as the inevitable result of people choosing to get their news online.”

In their explanations for their comics-section changes, Lee papers such as the World Herald, the Waco Tribune and the Richmond Times-Dispatch cited the industry’s larger ongoing move to digital readership — as some outlets offer access to hundreds of strips online. “It is both exciting, and somewhat nerve-wracking, to migrate from the traditional print to the somewhat uncharted digital world,” the Tribune wrote, “but that is exactly what we are doing, one step at a time.” (Disclosure: This author’s comic strip appears on the online GoComics platform.)

Recent Headlines

New York Times, Celtics Coach Ime Udoka Suspended for 2022-23 Season
CelticsBlog, Brad Stevens and Wyc Grousbeck address Ime Udoka’s suspension
New York Times, Opinion: The Inside Joke That Became Trump’s Big Lie, Carlos Lozada
Politico, Top Meta exec Clegg to decide whether to reinstate Trump on Facebook
Mediaite, Iranian President Bails on Interview With CNN’s Christiane Amanpour After She Refuses to Wear Headscarf

Sept. 23

Top Headlines

New York Times, Ukraine Live Updates: Russia Begins Orchestrating Staged Voting in Occupied Ukraine Territories
New York Times, War Crimes Were Committed in Ukraine, U.N. Panel Says in Graphic Statement
New York Times, Ukraine War Comes Home to Russians as Putin Imposes Draft
BBC News, Ukraine 'referendums': Soldiers go door-to-door for votes in polls
Washington Post, Appeals court: Justice Dept. can use Mar-a-Lago documents in criminal probe
Washington Post, U.S. watchdog estimates $45.6 billion in pandemic unemployment fraud
Palmer Report, Analysis: Special Master hits Donald Trump again, Bill Palmer
Washington Post, Career prosecutors recommend no charges for Gaetz in sex-trafficking probe
Palmer Report, Analysis: Serious questions emerge about WaPo claim that Matt Gaetz is supposedly off the hook, Bill Palmer

Trump Documents Scandal

New York Times, Former President Trump claimed he declassified the Mar-a-Lago documents. Why don’t his lawyers say so in court?
Politico, Special master calls for help in Trump Mar-a-Lago documents fight
New York Times, Trump Was Warned Late Last Year of Potential Legal Peril Over Documents
Politico, Special master expresses skepticism with Trump team’s assertions
Washington Post, Opinion: The Dearie hearing was worse than a trainwreck for Trump, Jennifer Rubin
Politico, Analysis: How Judge Cannon broke with conservatives in Trump documents case, Josh Gerstein

Other Trump Probes, Disputes, Rallies, Supporters

Politico, Opinion: Trump Made N.Y. Attorney General’s Fraud Case Virtually Unbeatable, Renato Mariott
Washington Post, Jan. 6 committee reaches deal with Ginni Thomas for an interview
New York Times, As Trump’s Legal Woes Mount, So Do Financial Pressures on Him
NBC News, Jury convicts QAnon believer who thought he was storming the White House during the Capitol rio
Palmer Report, Analysis: Michael Cohen just delivered even more bad news for Donald Trump, Bill Palmer
New York Times, Updates: New York Attorney General Unveils Lawsuit Against Trump
Politico, Trump attorney: 'We look forward' to defending against New York fraud claims
New York Times, The Story So Far: Where 6 Investigations Into Donald Trump Stand

More On Ukraine War

Washington Post, Ukraine Updates: Russians protest Putin’s mobilization order; Zelensky urges ‘just punishment’
New York Times, Ukraine Updates: Russia Calls Up Civilians for Service; Some Men Flee the Country
New York Times, Ukraine Updates: At U.N., Biden Says Nations Must Stand Against Russia’s Aggression
New York Times, Updates: Putin Calls Up More Troops as His War Effort Falters
Politico, Father's death forces Blinken's departure from U.N.

World News, Human Rights, Disasters

New York Times, Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door
Politico, Treasury Department helps expand internet access to Iranian people amid violent government crackdown
Washington Post, South Korean president overheard insulting U.S. Congress as ‘idiots’
Washington Post, ‘Death to the dictator’: Videos show growing protests in Iran
New York Times, Protests Intensify in Iran Over Woman Who Died in Custody
Washington Post, Iran says no nuclear deal without U.S. guarantees it won’t walk out again, Karen DeYoung

Puerto Rican Hurricane, Power Failure

New York Times, Fiona Leaves Puerto Rico in the Dark on the Anniversary of Hurricane Maria
Washington Post, Hurricane Fiona’s destruction of Puerto Rico, in maps and photos, Marisa Iati and Daniel Wolfe

U.S. Politics, Elections, Economy, Governance

New York Times, Project Veritas broke wiretapping laws and fraudulently misrepresented itself to a Democratic group, a jury found
New York Times, Zeldin Has a Path to Becoming New York Governor. It Runs Through Brooklyn
New York Times, Misleading and toxic posts about the Nov. 8 midterm vote have flooded social media. Here are three prevalent themes
New York Times, Secretary of State Races Turn Rowdy During the Homestretch
New York Times, A Democratic-aligned group is investing almost $60 million in state legislative races, an often overlooked arena
New York Times, Opinion: War, Inflation and Squandered Credibility, Paul Krugman
Politico, The Fed is declaring war on inflation. It could lead straight to recession
Washington Post, After months of debate, House Democrats strike deal to fund police
Washington Post, House passes bill to prevent efforts to subvert presidential election results
Washington Post, Government funding bill at risk as Manchin, GOP clash over energy projects

U.S. Courts, Crime, Shootings, Gun Laws

Washington Post, ‘Fat Leonard’ caught in Venezuela after fleeing Navy bribery sentencing
Washington Post, The online incel movement is getting more violent and extreme, report says
Washington Post, How vigilante ‘predator catchers’ are infiltrating the criminal justice system
New York Times, Supreme Court Says Alabama Can Kill Prisoner With Method He Fears
Washington Post, U.S. can’t ban gun sales to people indicted on felony charges, judge says
Washington Post, U.S. charges 47 with ‘brazen’ theft of $250 million of pandemic food aid meant for kids
Washington Post, Opinion: DeSantis’s cruel stunt highlights the GOP’s hunger to change the subject, E.J. Dionne Jr.
New York Times, For the first time, arrests of undocumented immigrants on the southwestern U.S. border exceeded 2 million in a year
New York Times, Criminal Investigation Is Opened After Migrant Flights to Martha’s Vineyard
New York Times, Gov. Ron Desantis’s move prompted liberals’ condemnation, and more such flights may follow

UK Post-Queen Elizabeth

New York Times, British Government Goes Full Tilt on Tax Cuts and Free-Market Economics
New York Times, From Mourning to Crises: U.K. Prime Minister Pivots to Mounting Woes
Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Trump would have disrupted the Queen's funeral and disgraced America again, Wayne Madsen

Abortion, Forced Birth Laws, Privacy Rights

Associated Press via Politico, Indiana abortion clinics reopening after judge blocks ban
Washington Post, Judge orders accused Planned Parenthood shooter to be forcibly medicated

Food, Water, Energy, Climate, Disasters

New York Times, World Bank Leader, Accused of Climate Denial, Offers a New Response
New York Times, On a Grim Anniversary, 230 Pilot Whales Are Stranded in Tasmania

U.S. Media, Culture, Sports, Education

New York Times, ‘I’m Done Saying I’m Sorry,’ Alex Jones Tells Sandy Hook Families, Elizabeth Williamson
New York Times, Celtics Coach Ime Udoka Suspended for 2022-23 Season
CelticsBlog, Brad Stevens and Wyc Grousbeck address Ime Udoka’s suspension
New York Times, Opinion: The Inside Joke That Became Trump’s Big Lie, Carlos Lozada
Politico, Top Meta exec Clegg to decide whether to reinstate Trump on Facebook
Mediaite, Iranian President Bails on Interview With CNN’s Christiane Amanpour After She Refuses to Wear Headscarf
Washington Post, Opinion: The story that even ‘the Donald Trump news network’ wouldn’t publish, Erik Wemple
The Athletic via New York Times, LIV Golf Wants Official World Ranking Status. Here’s Why It Matters
Politico, LIV Golf may need a mulligan on Capitol Hill, Andrew Desiderio

Pandemic, Public Health

New York Times, Major Covid Holdouts in Asia Drop Border Restrictions
New York Times, ‘We’re on That Bus, Too’: In China, a Deadly Crash Highlights Covid Trauma, Li Yuan

Top Stories

New York Times, Ukraine Live Updates: Russia Begins Orchestrating Staged Voting in Occupied Ukraine Territories, Marc Santora, Sept. 23, 2022. The process, condemned internationally as a sham, is expected to culminate with the annexation of an area larger than Portugal. While the Kremlin has used referendums in the past, the audacity of President Vladimir Putin’s gambit exceeds anything tried before.

The ballots being distributed had one question: Do you wish to secede from Ukraine and create an independent state that will enter the Russian Federation?

“We will be able to make our historic choice,” Kirill Stremousov, a leader of the Russian occupation administration in the southern region of Kherson, said in a statement.

Ukrainian partisans, sometimes working with special operations forces, have blown up warehouses holding ballots and buildings where Russian proxy officials preparing for the vote held meetings..

To give the appearance of widespread participation, minors ages 13 to 17 have been encouraged to vote, the Security Services of Ukraine warned on Thursday.

And Ukrainian officials said that workers were being forced to vote under threat of losing their jobs.

The exiled mayor of the occupied city of Enerhodar, the satellite town of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the south, told residents to stay away from polling stations.

“Stay at home if possible and do not open the door to strangers,” he said in a message posted on Telegram.

News summary:

Staged voting is happening amid international condemnation.
The referendums are taking place in areas from which large numbers of people have fled.
U.N. experts find that war crimes have been committed in Ukraine.
Crimea’s 2014 referendum was followed by swift annexation by Russia.
As freed Ukrainian soldiers return, joy and relief ripple across the country.
‘One man chose this war.’ Harsh words fly at a U.N. Security Council meeting.

New York Times, War Crimes Were Committed in Ukraine, U.N. Panel Says in Graphic Statement, Nick Cumming-Bruce, Sept. 23, 2022. In an unusually hard-hitting statement, the experts laid out allegations against Russian troops that included rape and torture.

“The commission has documented cases in which children have been raped, tortured, and unlawfully confined,” the panel’s chairman, Erik Mose, told the council.

The commission found that some Russian troops had committed sexual and gender-based violence, with the victims ranging in age from four years old to 82.

New York Times, Ukraine War Comes Home to Russians as Putin Imposes Draft, Anton Troianovski, Valerie Hopkins, Ivan Nechepurenko and Alina Lobzina, Updated Sept. 23, 2022. As Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” enters a new chapter, Russians are being plucked from villages around the country for training and military service.

A day after President Vladimir V. Putin announced a call-up that could sweep 300,000 civilians into military service, thousands of Russians across the country received draft papers on Thursday and some were being marched to buses and planes for training — and perhaps soon a trip to the front lines in Ukraine.

Mr. Putin’s escalation of the war effort was reverberating across the country, according to interviews, Russian news reports and social media posts. As the day wore on, it became increasingly clear that Mr. Putin’s decision had torn open the cocoon shielding much of Russian society from their leader’s invasion of a neighbor.

Mothers, wives and children were saying tearful goodbyes in remote regions as officials — in some cases, ordinary schoolteachers — delivered draft notices to houses and apartment blocks. In mountainous eastern Siberia, the Russian news media reported, school buses were being commandeered to move troops to training grounds.

BBC News, Ukraine 'referendums': Soldiers go door-to-door for votes in polls, James Waterhouse, Paul Adams and Merlyn Thomas, Sept. 23, 2022. Ukrainians have reported armed soldiers going door-to-door in occupied parts of the country to collect votes for self-styled "referendums" on joining Russia.

"You have to answer verbally and the soldier marks the answer on the sheet and keeps it," one woman in Enerhodar told the BBC.

In southern Kherson, Russian guardsmen stood with a ballot box in the middle of the city to collect people's votes.

The door-to-door voting is for "security", Russian state media says.

"In-person voting will take place exclusively on 27 September," Tass reported. "On the other days, voting will be organised in communities and in a door-to-door manner."

One woman in Melitopol told the BBC that two local "collaborators" arrived with two Russian soldiers at her parents' flat, to give them a ballot to sign.

"My dad put 'no' [to joining Russia]," the woman said. "My mum stood nearby, and asked what would happen for putting 'no'. They said, 'Nothing'.

"Mum is now worried that the Russians will persecute them."

The woman also said there was one ballot for the entire household, rather than per person.

Although the evidence is anecdotal, the presence of armed men conducting the vote contradicts Moscow's insistence that this is a free or fair process.

Experts say the self-styled referendums, taking place across five days, will allow Russia to claim - illegally - four occupied or partially-occupied regions of Ukraine as their own.

In other words, a false vote on annexation, seven months into Russia's invasion.

The "annexation" would not be recognised internationally, but could lead to Russia claiming that its territory is under attack from Western weapons supplied to Ukraine, which could escalate the war further.

US President Joe Biden described the referendums as "a sham", saying they were a "false pretext" to try to annex parts of Ukraine by force in violation of international law.

"The United States will never recognise Ukrainian territory as anything other than part of Ukraine," he said.

matt gaetz djt resized amazon public images rally

Washington Post, Career prosecutors recommend no charges for Gaetz in sex-trafficking probe, Devlin Barrett, Sept. 23, 2022. Investigators see credibility challenges for two of the main witnesses in the probe of the congressman’s past dealings with a 17-year-old.

Gaetz’s lawyer, Isabelle Kirshner, declined to comment. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

Gaetz sought pardon related to Justice Dept. sex-trafficking probe, people familiar say

The sex-trafficking investigation involving Matt Gaetz, explained

Palmer Report, Analysis: Serious questions emerge about WaPo claim that Matt Gaetz is supposedly off the hook, Bill Palmer | 7:16 pm EDT Sept. 23, 2022. This morning the Washington Post published an article titled “Career prosecutors recommend no charges for Gaetz in sex-trafficking probe.” This promptly set off a wave of doomsday hysteria about how the DOJ was supposedly allowing Gaetz to get away with it all.

Trump Documents Scandal

mar a lago aerial Custom

New York Times, Former President Trump claimed he declassified the Mar-a-Lago documents. Why don’t his lawyers say so in court? Glenn Thrush, Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage, Sept. 23, 2022. Judges this week highlighted the gap between Mr. Trump’s public claims that he declassified everything and his lawyers’ reluctance to repeat that claim in a courtroom.

Former President Donald J. Trump claimed on Wednesday that when he was in the White House, his powers were so broad he could declassify virtually any document by simply “thinking about it.”

On Thursday, the special master, Judge Raymond J. Dearie, also appeared to take aim at another one of Mr. Trump’s excuses — that federal agents had planted some of the records when they searched his Mar-a-Lago estate. In an order issued after the appellate court had ruled, Judge Dearie instructed Mr. Trump’s lawyers to let him know if there were any discrepancies between the documents that were kept at Mar-a-Lago and those that the F.B.I. said it had hauled away.

Washington Post, Appeals court: Justice Dept. can use Mar-a-Lago documents in criminal probe, Devlin Barrett, Sept. 23, 2022 (print ed.). Federal appeals panel says Judge Aileen Cannon ‘abused’ her discretion in requiring outside review of seized classified documents; Trump says presidents can declassify documents ‘even by thinking about it.’

An appeals court sided with the Justice Department in a legal fight over classified documents seized in a court-authorized search of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, ruling Wednesday that the FBI may use the documents in its ongoing criminal investigation.

The decision by a three-judge panel of the appeals court marks a victory, at least temporarily, for the Justice Department in its legal battle with Trump over access to the evidence in a high-stakes investigation to determine if the former president or his advisers mishandled national security secrets, or hid or destroyed government records.

It was the second legal setback of the day for Trump, who was sued Wednesday morning by New York Attorney General Letitia James. The lawsuit said Trump and his company flagrantly manipulated property and other asset valuations to deceive lenders, insurance brokers and tax authorities to get better rates and lower tax liability.

In Wednesday night’s ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta found fault with Trump’s rationale that the classified documents seized on Aug. 8 might be his property, rather than the government’s. The appeals court also disagreed with the rationale used by U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon in agreeing to have the classified documents reviewed by a special master to see if they should be shielded from investigators because of executive or attorney-client privilege.

“For our part, we cannot discern why [Trump] would have an individual interest in or need for any of the one-hundred documents with classification markings,” the court wrote, noting that the stay it issued is temporary and should not be considered a final decision on the merits of the case.

The status of key investigations involving Donald Trump

The lower court “abused its discretion in exercising jurisdiction ... as it concerns the classified documents,” the panel wrote in a 29-page opinion. Two judges on the panel were appointed by Trump; the third was appointed by President Barack Obama.

A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In an interview Wednesday with Fox News that was recorded before the appeals court issued its ruling, Trump claimed he had declassified the documents, and he suggested there would not have to be any written record of such an action.

Trump documents federal Special Master Raymond Dearie, senior U.S. district court judge for the Eastern District of New York (File photo by Gregory Mango). “I declassified the documents when they left the White House,” Trump said. “There doesn’t have to be a process as I understand it. You’re the president of the United States, you can declassify … even by thinking about it.”

Trump documents federal Special Master Raymond Dearie, senior U.S. district court judge for the Eastern District of New York (File photo by Gregory Mango).

The panel found particularly unpersuasive the repeated suggestions by Trump’s legal team that he may have declassified the documents — citing an appearance by Trump’s attorneys on Tuesday before special master Raymond Dearie, who pressed them to say whether the former president had acted to declassify the materials in question.

Law&Crime, 11th Circuit Allows DOJ to Review Mar-a-Lago Docs for Criminal Investigation, Partially Staying Judge Cannon's Order for Special Master

Palmer Report, Analysis: Special Master hits Donald Trump again, Bill Palmer, right, Sept. 22, 2022. On Tuesday, Special Master Dearie made clear that he intended to side with the DOJ over the classified documents that it seized from Donald Trump’s home, after Trump failed to offer any evidence to support his claim that he was entitled to the documents. The next day, the Court of Appeals took a hint and ruled that the classified documents were exempt from the Special Master process and that the DOJ could immediately resume working with them. But the Special Master is still in place to sort the other seized evidence – and by now Trump is surely wishing the Special Master didn’t exist.

Dearie ordered Trump’s legal team to tell him whether or not they’re asserting that the FBI planted evidence at Trump’s home. This puts Trump and his attorneys in a difficult situation. If they make this claim to Dearie, then they’re stuck with that as a defense, and may not be able to introduce other reasonable doubt defenses at trial that conflict with it. But if they tell Dearie that they’re not asserting evidence was planted, they may not be able to introduce that as a defense at trial. So either answer harms Trump’s prospects at trial.

At this point we wouldn’t be shocked if Trump asks his pet judge Cannon to pull the plug on the Special Master process entirely. But in such case the DOJ would then be left to make its own decisions about the rest of the seized evidence, which would also be bad for Trump.

Donald Trump has gone his entire criminal life without ever being the target of a federal criminal investigation, without ever being on the wrong end of a search and seizure warrant, and without having ever been on the verge of criminal indictment. He’s quickly learning the hard way that the parlor tricks he’s used to BS his way through life simply don’t work in the federal criminal court system.

Politico, Special master calls for help in Trump Mar-a-Lago documents fight, Josh Gerstein, Sept. 23, 2022. The former president also gets a deadline to produce any proof of tampering during the FBI search last month. The outside expert tapped to sort through former President Donald Trump’s legal claims over documents seized from his Florida home last month is calling for backup.

U.S. District Court Judge Raymond Dearie, a New York City-based jurist named by a federal judge in Florida to act as a so-called special master in the review of more than 11,000 documents the FBI confiscated, proposed on Thursday that former Magistrate Judge James Orenstein help with the process.

“The undersigned has determined that the efficient administration of the Special Master’s duties requires the assistance of the Honorable James Orenstein,” Dearie’s proposed plan for the document review said. The order said Orenstein “has experience with complex case management, privilege review, warrant procedures, and other matters that may arise in the course of the Special Master’s duties.”

Orenstein spent 16 years as a federal magistrate in the same Brooklyn courthouse where Dearie sits. Orenstein drew attention several years ago for his role in what was semi-sarcastically dubbed “the magistrates’ revolt” — rulings from a smattering of federal magistrate judges across the country questioning government tactics in warrant applications seeking electronic data.
Can we explain Trump’s reaction to the DOJ probe in 2 minutes? A POLITICO reporter tries (and fails, again)

In 2016, Orenstein issued a controversial ruling rejecting prosecutors’ arguments that a two-century-old federal law gave the government the right to command Apple to assist in unlocking an iPhone used by an alleged drug dealer. The judge’s pro-privacy stance in that matter may have led the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to appoint him to a list of approved friends of the court who provide their perspective on surveillance requests.

Dearie proposed that the former magistrate, who has a top secret clearance, be paid $500 an hour for work on the Trump documents case. The federal judge who named Dearie as special master, Florida-based Aileen Cannon, has previously ruled that Trump must assume all expenses related to the review.

Politico, Special master expresses skepticism with Trump team’s assertions, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Sept. 21, 2022 (print ed.). Judge Raymond Dearie pushed Trump’s lawyers repeatedly for refusing to back up the former president’s claim that he declassified the highly sensitive national security-related records discovered in his residence.

The senior federal judge tasked with reviewing the materials seized by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate sharply questioned the former president’s attorneys Tuesday during their first hearing before his courtroom.

Judge Raymond Dearie, right, pushed Trump’s lawyers repeatedly for refusing to back up the former president’s claim that he declassified the highly sensitive national security-related records discovered in his residence.

“You can’t have your cake and eat it too,” said Dearie, the “special master” picked by U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon to vet Trump’s effort to reclaim the materials taken by federal investigators.

Trump has argued that the 11,000 documents taken from Mar-a-Lago were rightfully in his possession, including about 100 bearing classification markings that suggest they contain some of the nation’s most closely guarded intelligence.

Palmer Report, Analysis: Special Master Dearie quickly holds Donald Trump’s feet to the fire, as Trump’s stunt backfires, Bill Palmer

Recent Headlines

djt confidential markings

Washington Post, Opinion: New York’s lawsuit against Trump is yet further proof that he’s a loser, Jennifer Rubin
Washington Post, Trump warns of ‘big problems’ if indicted, says he’d still run for office
Washington Post, Opinion: The Dearie hearing was worse than a trainwreck for Trump, Jennifer Rubin
Politico, Analysis: How Judge Cannon broke with conservatives in Trump documents case, Josh Gerstein
Palmer Report, Analysis: The odds of Donald Trump being criminally indicted just went through the roof, Bill Palmer
Politico, Trump scored some Mar-a-Lago probe wins. The venue’s now shifted
Washington Post, Investigation: Trump team misrepresented files at Mar-a-Lago, saying they were only news clippings, Jacqueline Alemany, Josh Dawsey and Rosalind S. Helderman
New York Times, Judge Keeps Block on Inquiry Into Mar-a-Lago Files and Names Special Master, Charlie Savage, Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush
Law&Crime, Who Is Senior U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie, the New Special Master in the DOJ's Mar-a-Lago Search?
Proof, Investigative Commentary: DOJ Investigating Ties Between the FBI and the Kremlin Agent Behind 2016 Trump-Russia Collusion; Jared Kushner May Also Be Implicated, Seth Abramson

Other Trump Probes, Disputes, Rallies, Supporters

Politico, Opinion: Trump Made N.Y. Attorney General’s Fraud Case Virtually Unbeatable, Renato Mariotti, Sept. 23, 2022. He should have settled early, but he got boxed into taking the Fifth — and that can be used against him now.

New York Attorney General Tish James raised eyebrows when she refused last-minute settlement overtures from former President Donald Trump. Her 222-page lawsuit filed Wednesday doubles down, asking for wide-ranging penalties against Trump, including $250 million and various bans that would bar Trump and his three oldest children from selling or acquiring real estate or applying for loans in New York for five years — potentially devastating measures for a company that depends on plastering the family name on properties for profit.

It’s not hard to see why James is taking such a hard line. She has a winning hand.

Renato Mariotti is the Legal Affairs Columnist for POLITICO Magazine. He is a former federal prosecutor and host of the “On Topic” podcast.

New York Times, As Trump’s Legal Woes Mount, So Do Financial Pressures on Him, Maggie Haberman, Ben Protess, Matthew Goldstein and Eric Lipton, Sept. 22, 2022 (print ed.). The lawsuit filed by New York’s attorney general is the latest indication of how investigations are affecting former President Trump’s business.

The New York attorney general’s fraud lawsuit that was filed on Wednesday against former President Donald J. Trump seeks to recover $250 million from his company and essentially run him out of business in the state.

Next month, Mr. Trump’s company will go on trial in Manhattan on criminal tax charges in a separate case that could cost millions of dollars in penalties and legal fees.

And on the horizon are civil suits from people seeking to hold the former president responsible for injuries and trauma inflicted during the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by his supporters, a possible wave of litigation that some of his advisers fear could prove extremely costly to him.

Together, the numerous investigations and lawsuits swirling around Mr. Trump are creating new and significant financial pressures on him.

eugene goodman igor bobic HuffPost via Storyful

NBC News, Jury convicts QAnon believer who thought he was storming the White House during the Capitol riot, Liz Brown-Kaiser, Ryan J. Reilly and Zoë Richards, Sept. 23, 2022. Doug Jensen, who chased down U.S. Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman (as shown in a photo above by Igor Bobic for Huffington Post via Storyful) on Jan. 6, 2021, "is a confused man,” his attorney told jurors. He was convicted on all seven counts.

A federal jury on Friday convicted a QAnon believer who chased down U.S. Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman on Jan. 6, 2021, finding the defendant guilty on all charges against him.

Doug Jensen, an Iowa man who was one of the first 10 rioters to enter the Capitol during the insurrection, went on trial this week and was found guilty on seven counts, including felony charges of civil disorder, and assaulting, resisting or impeding officers.

Sentencing is scheduled for Dec. 16. Jensen’s wife, April, cried as the verdicts were read.

douglas jensen mug Jensen, shown in a mug shot, has been in pretrial custody since last year. He had been released in a high-intensity pretrial program, but a judge ordered him detained again after he violated the conditions of his release by live-streaming an event hosted MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who has promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

On Jan. 6, Jensen filmed videos from the base of the Capitol building, where he proclaimed — inaccurately, but with tremendous confidence — that he was at the White House. “Storm the White House! That’s what we do!” he said in one video.

The government and Jensen’s defense team made their closing arguments Friday, before the jury of 10 men and two women began deliberating in the afternoon.

Prosecutors argued that Jensen "was the rioter who would not back down" in his determination to the prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

“Every barrier he encountered that day, he was ready to topple,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Hava Arin Levenson Mirell said. He scaled a 20-foot wall to reach the Capitol, inhaled clouds of pepper spray “like it was oxygen,” and passed through police lines.

Goodman, the USCP officer who testified at Jensen's trial, had “no back-up” when he faced off with rioters, Mirell said. And the mob, “led by the defendant," didn’t withdraw despite being asked to by authorities.

Palmer Report, Analysis: Michael Cohen just delivered even more bad news for Donald Trump, Bill Palmer, Sept. 23, 2022. When New York Attorney General Letitia James rolled out the sweeping punitive measures she’s attempting to bring against Donald Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization, some questioned why she was “only” seeking $250 million in penalties. After all, hasn’t Trump committed a lot more fraud than that over the years?

When James announced her penalties, she pointed out that her investigation was put in motion when Michael Cohen publicly testified to Congress about how Trump had alternately overvalued and undervalued his properties, in order to fool everyone from lenders to the government. Cohen had more to say about this when he appeared on the Ari Melber show on MSNBC on Thursday night.

Cohen stated his belief that Letitia James is merely using the $250 million number as a placeholder, and that the actual number could be revised upward as far as one billion dollars. This is notable because it seems highly unlikely that Donald Trump or the Trump Organization has anything close to a billion dollars cash on hand, meaning James could move to seize Trump’s assets to cover the penalties. This is just going to keep getting worse for Trump as it moves forward.

New York Times, Updates: New York Attorney General Unveils Lawsuit Against Trump, Jonah E. Bromwich, William K. Rashbaum and Ben Protess, Sept. 22, 2022 (print ed.). Accuses Him of ‘Staggering’ Fraud. Letitia James accused former President Trump and his family business of fraudulently overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars in a sprawling scheme.

Donald J. Trump, his family business and three of his adult children lied to lenders and insurers for more than a decade, fraudulently overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars in a sprawling scheme, according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who is seeking to bar the Trumps from ever running a business in the state again.

Ms. James concluded that Mr. Trump and his family business violated several state criminal laws and “plausibly” broke federal criminal laws as well. Her office, which in this case lacks authority to file criminal charges, referred the findings to federal prosecutors in Manhattan; it was not immediately clear whether the U.S. attorney would investigate.

The 220-page lawsuit, filed in New York State Supreme Court, lays out in new and startling detail how, according to Ms. James, Mr. Trump’s annual financial statements were a compendium of lies. The statements, yearly records that include the company’s estimated value of his holdings and debts, wildly inflated the worth of nearly every one of his marquee properties — from Mar-a-Lago in Florida to Trump Tower and 40 Wall Street in Manhattan, according to the lawsuit.

The company also routinely spurned the assessments of outside experts: After a bank ordered an appraisal that found 40 Wall Street was worth $200 million, the Trumps promptly valued it at well over twice that number. Overall, the lawsuit said that 11 of Mr. Trump’s annual financial statements included more than 200 false and misleading asset valuations.

“The number of grossly inflated asset values is staggering, affecting most if not all of the real estate holdings in any given year,” according to the lawsuit. Ms. James, a Democrat who is running for re-election, filed the lawsuit, which comes just weeks after the former president refused to answer hundreds of questions under oath in an interview with Ms. James’s office.

Mr. Trump has long used his net worth to construct a public persona as a self-made billionaire, an image that underpinned his initial run for the White House. But, according to Ms. James, he had a financial motivation for inflating his property values.

His company, the Trump Organization, provided the fraudulent financial statements to lenders and insurers, her suit said, “to obtain beneficial financial terms,” including lower interest rates and lower premiums. All told, Ms. James said, he was able to obtain a quarter of a billion dollars in ill-gotten gains, money that she now wants the company to forfeit.

Lawyers for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ms. James, who has become one of Mr. Trump’s primary antagonists, is looking to extract a steep price from the former president and his company. Her lawsuit asks a judge to appoint an independent monitor to oversee the company’s financial practices, while ousting the Trumps from the leadership of their own family business; Ms. James also wants to prevent the family from acquiring real estate in New York for five years in order to preclude the company from reinventing itself in Florida while expanding its New York operations.

If she is successful, Mr. Trump — as well as his children who are named as defendants, Eric, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. — will also be permanently barred from serving as officers or directors in any New York company, essentially chasing them out of the state. While Ms. James stopped short of trying to dissolve the Trump Organization altogether, she wants to shut down at least some of his New York operations.

Former President Trump, right, and his three oldest children (file photo).

Former President Trump, right, and his three oldest children (file photo).

Politico,Trump attorney: 'We look forward' to defending against New York fraud claims, Myah Ward, Sept. 22, 2022 (print ed.). An attorney for Donald Trump on Wednesday called the New York attorney general’s lawsuit against the former president and the Trump Organization a product of the office’s “political agenda” and said she looks “forward to defending our client” against the claims.

“Today’s filing is neither focused on the facts nor the law — rather, it is solely focused on advancing the Attorney General’s political agenda,” Alina Habba, a Trump attorney who has represented the former president in New York-based and Trump Organization litigation.

“It is abundantly clear that the Attorney General’s Office has exceeded its statutory authority by prying into transactions where absolutely no wrongdoing has taken place. We are confident that our judicial system will not stand for this unchecked abuse of authority, and we look forward to defending our client against each and every one of the Attorney General’s meritless claims.”

Recent Headlines

Washington Post, Why Trump may be at a tipping point, Jennifer Rubin
Washington Post, Opinion: Letitia James used Trump’s boasts against him. It was devastating, Eugene Robinson
Washington Post, Opinion: New York’s lawsuit against Trump is yet further proof that he’s a loser, Jennifer Rubin
New York Times, Videos Show Trump Allies Handling Georgia Voting Equipment
New York Times, Writer Who Says Trump Raped Her Plans to Use New Law to Prove It
Washington Post, Opinion: Letitia James used Trump’s boasts against him. It was devastating, Eugene Robinson
New York Times, Trump Adviser’s Trial May Shed Light on Foreign Influence Campaigns
Palmer Report, Analysis: Allen Weisselberg’s guilty plea suddenly looms large, Bill Palmer
New York Times, Writer Who Says Trump Raped Her Plans to Use New Law to Prove It
Palmer Report, Analysis: One of Donald Trump’s closest associates is going on federal criminal trial this week – look for him to flip if he’s convicted, Bill Palmer
New York Times, Durham Inquiry Appears to Wind Down as Grand Jury Expires, Katie Benner, Adam Goldman and Charlie Savage
New York Times, Trump’s Former Accounting Firm Begins Turning Over Documents to Congress
Washington Post, Editorial: One way to repair the Supreme Court
Washington Post, Judge subjected staff to insults, outbursts, court investigation finds
Palmer Report, Opinion: The real reason Matt Gaetz hasn’t been indicted (yet), Bill Palmer

More On Ukraine War

Washington Post, Ukraine Updates: Russians protest Putin’s mobilization order; Zelensky urges ‘just punishment,’ Annabelle Timsit and Kelly Kasulis Cho, Sept. 23, 2022 (print ed.). Two U.S. veterans and a British man fighting in Ukraine were among nearly 300 people released as part of a prisoner exchange between Moscow and Kyiv.

U.S. and European leaders on Wednesday swiftly condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to call up as many as 300,000 reservists in his war against Ukraine, a move that sparked protests across Russia and soaring demand for one-way flights out of the country.

Speaking to the U.N. General Assembly, President Biden accused Putin of attempting to extinguish Ukraine’s “right to exist,” and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his citizens “demand just punishment” for Russia’s actions during the war. Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.

Key developments

Two U.S. military veterans and five Britons were among the nearly 300 people released Wednesday as part of an elaborate prisoner exchange between Moscow and Kyiv. The deal, brokered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, also led to the release of 215 Ukrainians and 55 Russians. Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Kremlin opposition politician from Ukraine who is considered a close friend of Putin’s, was also released. Bridget A. Brink, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, thanked the Ukrainian government early Thursday for securing the Americans’ release. “My thoughts this morning are with the released POWs, and with their loved ones,” she said in a tweet.
Putin’s partial military mobilization represents a major escalation in the war after Moscow suffered embarrassing setbacks, including a retreat from the Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the mobilization “reflects the Kremlin’s struggles on the battlefield, the unpopularity of the war, and Russians’ unwillingness to fight in it.”
Thousands of Russians took to public spaces to protest after Putin’s announcement, with authorities making at least 1,300 arrests in a single day, according to the human rights group OVD-Info. Video footage from rallies across the country shows police officers pushing protesters to the ground, stuffing them into buses and, in at least one instance, attempting to punch an apparent protester in the head on a busy street.
Zelensky’s passionate appeal to the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday focused on his desire for peace and “just punishment” for Russia. He proposed a five-part “peace formula,” which included requests he has made publicly before, such as more sanctions against Russia, visa restrictions for Russian citizens and additional defense and financial support for Ukraine.

Battleground updates

Russia’s military and weapons, including “strategic nuclear weapons,” can be used to defend annexed territories including Crimea, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of the Russian Security Council, said in a Telegram post on Thursday. Moscow-backed officials in occupied parts of Ukraine announced plans this week to hold “referendums” from Friday to Tuesday on the prospect of joining Russia. The votes would be illegal under Ukrainian and international law.
Five people were injured and at least one person died in overnight strikes on the city of Zaporizhzhia, regional governor Oleksandr Starukh said Thursday on Telegram. Residential buildings were destroyed by rockets, he said, adding that the extent of the damage was still being clarified. Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the Ukrainian president’s office, said nine rockets hit a hotel, trapping people under the rubble. He said a power station was also struck, leaving people in the south of Zaporizhzhia without electricity.
Mykolaiv, in southern Ukraine, was “subjected to massive rocket fire” overnight into Thursday, Vitaliy Kim, the regional governor, said. While no one was injured or killed in the strikes, largely carried out with S-300 antiaircraft missiles, residential and government buildings were damaged, as well as gas and water pipes, a cinema and a theater, Kim said. Air raid sirens were reportedly still blaring around 10 a.m. local time.
“Russia is likely to struggle with the logistical and administrative challenges of even mustering the 300,000 personnel,” Britain’s Ministry of Defense said Thursday following Putin’s announcement of a partial military mobilization. The ministry assessed that those called up to serve “are unlikely to be combat effective for months.”

Global impact

The U.N. Security Council will meet to discuss the war in Ukraine on Thursday during the U.N. General Assembly. The session will involve a debate on the “maintenance of peace and security of Ukraine,” according to the council agenda. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres and International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan are set to address the 15-country body, according to Reuters.
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell denounced Russia’s plans for the next phase of the war, vowing at an emergency meeting of the bloc’s foreign ministers that member states would increase E.U. military support to Ukraine and study a new set of sanctions against Russia. Borrell condemned Russia’s plan to stage sham referendums, as well as Putin’s plan for partial military mobilization.
At the U.N. General Assembly, Biden accused Putin of “irresponsible nuclear threats” and “reckless disregard for the responsibilities of the nonproliferation regime,” hours after Putin hinted in his speech that Russia might use nuclear weapons if threatened. Biden also rebuked Russia’s invasion in general, saying: “This war is about extinguishing Ukraine’s right to exist as a state, plain and simple, and Ukraine’s right to exist as a people. Whoever you are, wherever you live, whatever you believe, that should make your blood run cold.”
North Korea has denied claims that it exported weapons or ammunition to Russia and said it has “no plans” to do so, according to a statement released Thursday by the government-run Korean Central News Agency. A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity about a newly declassified intelligence report, told The Washington Post this month that Moscow was suffering from severe supply shortages and was preparing to buy “millions of rockets and artillery shells” from Pyongyang.

U.S. President Biden respondss to Russian escalation against Ukraine in speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 21, 2022 (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

U.S. President Biden responds to Russian escalation against Ukraine in speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 21, 2022 (New York Times photo by Doug Mills). New York Times, At U.N., Biden Says Nations Must Stand Against Russia’s Aggression, Farnaz Fassihi, James Tankersley, Michael Crowley, Edward Wong, Sept. 22, 2022 (print ed.). President Biden addressed dozens of global leaders, saying the world’s “blood should run cold” over the invasion.

New York Times, Ukraine Updates: Russia Calls Up Civilians for Service; Some Men Flee the Country, Valerie Hopkins, Sept. 23, 2022 (print ed.). A day after President Vladimir V. Putin announced a call-up that could see 300,000 civilians swept into military service, thousands of Russians across the country had reportedly received draft papers and were being bundled into buses on Thursday for training — and soon, possibly, to the front lines in Ukraine.

In mountainous eastern Siberia, the Russian news media reported that school buses were being commandeered to move troops to training grounds, and teachers were writing “povestki,” or draft papers. Videos circulated on social media purporting to show new conscripts saying tearful goodbyes before boarding buses.

The call-ups reportedly began within hours of a recorded video announcement by Mr. Putin in which he raised the stakes in the war and escalated his confrontation with the West despite Russia’s humiliating setbacks on the battlefield. By declaring for the first time that Russian civilians could be pressed into service in Ukraine, Mr. Putin risked a public backlash but said the move was “necessary and urgent” because the West had “crossed all lines” by providing sophisticated weapons to Ukraine.

Despite the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent, protests erupted on Wednesday night across Russia in response to Mr. Putin’s move, with at least 1,312 people arrested, according to the human rights watchdog OVD-Info. Many Russians sought to travel to other countries to escape being called up to fight as men across the country reported to draft offices.

Russian officials said the call-up would be limited to people with combat experience. But Yanina Nimayeva, a journalist from the Buryatia region of Siberia, wrote on Thursday that her husband — a father of five and an employee in the emergency department in the regional capital — had been called up despite never having served in the military. She said he had received a summons to an urgent meeting at 4 a.m. in which it was announced that a train had been organized to bring reservists to the city of Chita.

“My husband is 38 years old, he is not in the reserve, he did not serve,” Ms. Nimayeva said in a video addressed to the regional leader, Aleksei S. Tsydenov of Mr. Putin’s United Russia party. In a sign of how the call-up is deepening discontent with Mr. Putin’s government, Ms. Nimayeva continued: “I understand that we have plans. Our republic needs to gather 4,000 soldiers. But some parameters and principles of this partial mobilization must be respected.”

Others also voiced anger at the government.

“Buryatia experienced today one of the most terrible nights in its history,” Alexander Garmazhapova, the head of the antiwar Free Buryatia Foundation, wrote on Facebook. He said he had received “hundreds of messages asking how to leave for Ulaanbaatar,” the Mongolian capital.

It is not known how many people have received summonses. A woman from Dagestan, one of Russia’s poorest regions, who had already lost one of her sons in the war with Ukraine, told a New York Times reporter that three buses carrying newly mobilized soldiers had left her town. She sent videos showing armored personnel carriers driving along the potholed roads, although their authenticity could not be immediately verified.

In Ulan-Ude, the regional capital of Buryatia, draft papers “were distributed to houses and apartments all night,” according to a report from Arig-Us, a local independent television station. The local news media reported that new recruits had gathered at a military facility a short walk from a sports complex where funerals are held for soldiers who die in Ukraine.

Farther northeast, in the city of Neryungri, one video showed four buses lined up at a stadium. Similar videos showing new recruits gathering appeared on social media from across the country — including Vladivostok in the far east, Pskov and Belgorod on the Ukrainian border, the working-class Moscow suburb of Lyubertsy, and Chechnya and Dagestan in the Caucasus.

New York Times,‘They Are Watching’: Inside Russia’s Vast Surveillance State, Paul Mozur, Adam Satariano, Aaron Krolik and Aliza Aufrichtig, Sept. 23, 2022 (print ed.). A cache of nearly 160,000 files from Russia’s powerful internet regulator provides a rare glimpse inside President Vladimir Putin’s digital crackdown.

Four days into the war in Ukraine, Russia’s expansive surveillance and censorship apparatus was already hard at work.

Roughly 800 miles east of Moscow, authorities in the Republic of Bashkortostan, one of Russia’s 85 regions, were busy tabulating the mood of comments in social media messages. They marked down YouTube posts that they said criticized the Russian government. They noted the reaction to a local protest.

Then they compiled their findings. One report about the “destabilization of Russian society” pointed to an editorial from a news site deemed “oppositional” to the government that said President Vladimir V. Putin was pursuing his own self-interest by invading Ukraine. A dossier elsewhere on file detailed who owned the site and where they lived.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: The Shanghai Collapsing Organization, Wayne Madsen, left, Sept. 22-23, 2022. Russia's authoritarian president Vladimir Putin recently got an earful from his supposed allies at a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Established in 2001 by Russia, China, and some, but not all, of the former central Asian Soviet "stans," SCO is intended to serve as a counter-force to NATO.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi criticized Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Putin was forced to acknowledge the criticism by his allies. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who hopes Turkey will soon become the first NATO member to join SCO -- it is currently a "dialogue partner" -- told Putin that Russia must withdraw from all of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.

So, instead of heeding the advice of his SCO partners, Putin announced a partial mobilization of 300,000 Russians to be sent into the Ukrainian meat grinder.

In this image provided by the United Nations, the U.N. Security Council meets for an emergency session on Ukraine, Monday, Feb. 21, 2022, at the U.N. headquarters. (Evan Schneider/United Nations via AP)

Politico, Blinken, Lavrov come face-to-face at U.N. Security Council showdown, Kelly Hooper, Sept. 23, 2022 (print ed.). Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov have only spoken one other time since the war began.

antony blinken o new Secretary of State Antony Blinken, right, face-to-face with Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov on Thursday at the United Nations, railed against Russia over its alleged war crimes and atrocities committed in Ukraine.

“That President [Vladimir] Putin picked this week as most of the world gathers at the United Nations to add fuel to the fire that he started shows his utter contempt for the U.N. charter, for the General Assembly and for this council,” Blinken said in remarks at a U.N. Security Council meeting. “The international order that we gathered here to uphold is being shredded before our eyes.”

The meeting comes just one day after Putin mobilized 300,000 reservists to aid in Russia’s war against Ukraine and threatened to use nuclear weapons. Biden blasted Putin for the escalation, saying in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday that Russia’s attempts to “erase” Ukraine from the map “should make your blood run cold.”

sergey lavrov The 15-member security council gathered on Thursday to discuss Russia’s war on Ukraine, alleged war crimes and “sham” referendums to be held in Ukrainian territories seized by Russia — marking one of the highest-profile confrontations between Russian officials and their critics since the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. Lavrov’s attendance came as a surprise to some officials, as he had in July walked out of a meeting of the Group of 20 foreign ministers in Indonesia following criticism over Russia’s war.

Blinken and Lavrov,left, have only spoken one other time since the war began — during a July phone call where they discussed a prisoner swap to bring two Americans home.

Blinken, the fourth of the 15 council members to speak on Thursday, blasted both Russia and Putin for the alleged war crimes committed in Ukraine, reiterating support for international and national efforts to investigate the atrocities. Russia has allegedly committed what Ukraine’s ambassador has called “war crimes of massive proportions,” echoing reporting out of Ukraine of another mass grave found in recent days, with some of the bodies showing signs of torture.

He also strongly condemned nuclear threats from Putin, urging every U.N. Security Council member to “send a clear message” to Russia that it must stop these types of threats. He also called on every member of the council to reject Russia’s “sham” referendums to annex parts of Ukraine.

“One man chose this war, one man can end it. Because if Russia stops fighting, the war ends. If Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends,” Blinken said.

Politico, Father's death forces Blinken's departure from U.N., Kelly Hooper, Sept. 23, 2022. “My family lost a parent and grandparent, a source of love and inspiration — my father Donald Blinken,” Blinken announced in a tweet late Thursday.

Washington Post, Prisoner swap freed Putin’s friend, Azov commanders and U.K. fighters, Annabelle Timsit, Natalia Abbakumova, Mary Ilyushina and Robyn Dixon, Sept. 23, 2022 (print ed.). The hundreds of prisoners of war released Wednesday in a surprise deal between Moscow and Kyiv included 10 foreign nationals captured in Ukraine, a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s, and commanders and fighters of the Azov Regiment, a Ukrainian far-right paramilitary group.

As part of the swap, Moscow agreed to release the foreigners as well as 215 Ukrainians, including more than 100 members of Azov. In return, Ukraine said it released Viktor Medvedchuk and 55 Russian and pro-Russian fighters. The imbalance in numbers, as well as the freeing of Azov members long portrayed as “Nazis” by the Kremlin, has already sparked criticism in Russia from pro-war nationalists.

However, the breadth and depth of the prisoner exchange — which was brokered with involvement from Saudi Arabia and Turkey — drew praise from the governments of the freed foreigners, several of whom had been sentenced to death in territory occupied by pro-Russian separatists.

Here’s a brief look at those who were released.

viktor medvedchuk captured Viktor Medvedchuk, left: In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, Viktor Medvedchuk sits handcuffed after being detained in a special operation carried out by Ukraine's secret service on April 12 in Ukraine. (AP)

Viktor Medvedchuk, 68, is a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian opposition politician and close friend of Putin’s. He was captured in April by Ukraine’s internal security service, which said Medvedchuk had been in hiding for weeks and claimed he was going to be smuggled out of Ukraine with the help of Russia. He was charged with treason last year and allegedly escaped house arrest in February, two days after the Russian invasion, according to Kyiv.

Who is Viktor Medvedchuk, the pro-Russia mogul arrested in Ukraine?

Medvedchuk, a longtime Machiavellian figure in Ukrainian politics, appears to be the highest-profile prisoner secured by the Russian side, though officials in Moscow have been surprisingly quiet about his role in the exchange, with both the Kremlin and the Defense Ministry shying away from confirming that he was involved.

Washington Post, Americans in Russia-Ukraine prisoner swap wondered if death was near, Dan Lamothe and Karoun Demirjian, Sept. 23, 2022 (print ed.). The Americans were released Wednesday as part of a prisoner exchange between the governments in Kyiv and Moscow, an agreement as stunning as it was sprawling.

Details of the sweeping deal, mediated with involvement from the governments of Saudi Arabia and Turkey, continued to trickle out Thursday. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters covering the U.N. General Assembly in New York that the prisoner exchange was the result of “diplomatic traffic I conducted” with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, calling it an “important step” toward ending the war that began seven months ago, according to a transcript of his comments carried by state-run media. Ankara also played a key role in brokering a breakthrough deal this summer that allowed for the resumption of grain exports after Russia’s n

Days after their capture in June, the Kremlin proclaimed that the men, both American military veterans, were suspected war criminals and refused to rule out that they could face the death penalty. In a phone call with his aunt Thursday, Drueke said that in that moment, it seemed things “could go either way.”

“That was one of those moments,” said the aunt, Dianna Shaw, “where it was a gut punch for me.”

The Americans were released Wednesday as part of a prisoner exchange between the governments in Kyiv and Moscow, an agreement as stunning as it was sprawling. In addition to Drueke, 40, and Huynh, 28, the Russian government agreed to release eight other foreign nationals who had joined the war on behalf of Ukraine, plus 215 Ukrainians. Fifty-five Russian fighters were freed in exchange, along with Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian opposition politician who has such warm relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin that Putin is believed to be the godfather to Medvedchuk’s daughter.

In addition to Drueke, 40, and Huynh, 28, the Russian government agreed to release eight other foreign nationals who had joined the war on behalf of Ukraine, plus 215 Ukrainians. Fifty-five Russian fighters were freed in exchange, along with Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian opposition politician who has such warm relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin that Putin is believed to be the godfather to Medvedchuk’s daughter.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, where Drueke and Huynh are convalescing, also was credited with facilitating the foreign nationals’ release. A senior member of the Saudi government on Thursday said Mohammed’s efforts illustrate his “proactive role in bolstering humanitarian initiatives.” The U.S. government has expressed gratitude to the crown prince for his efforts in securing the two Americans’ release, but relations between the two countries remain strained over Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights and, notably, over Mohammed’s suspected role orchestrating the plot to kill Saudi American journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In Russia, there was outrage among some nationalists who considered the deal a betrayal. Medvedchuk once was seen as a potential replacement for Zelensky, had Russian forces successfully managed to topple the government in Kyiv and install a puppet regime. Several of the Ukrainians released in exchange for Medvedchuk and other Russians were members of the far-right Azov Regiment, a military force Putin has branded Nazis.

In Ukraine — where Azov forces have been cheered for their courage during Russia’s bloody siege of Mariupol — the deal was celebrated.

A senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, said, “It is telling Putin elected to trade his crony and one of his long-term proxies in Ukraine, Medvedchuk, for the heroes of Mariupol,” calling the move further evidence of how the Russian leader prioritizes himself over the interests of the Russian people.

“Even as this [war] is awful for Ukraine … it’s awful for the Russian people,” the official said. “Putin has chosen his own vain imperial ambition over his people’s needs.”

Kyryl Budanov, who leads Ukraine’s chief military intelligence directorate, said some of the liberated Ukrainians had been “subjected to very cruel torture” while in captivity. It is unclear if Drueke and Huynh endured such treatment, although there are signs both went through stages of physical degradation that may take time to reverse.

Drueke’s aunt said her nephew has not yet shared many details with his family about how his captors treated him and Huynh. She said Drueke and Huynh have some “minor, minor, minor health considerations” and that both are “very dehydrated,” noting that the family is unsure precisely when Drueke and Huynh may be ready to make the 14-hour flight home to Alabama from Saudi Arabia.

Footage of the captives’ release that aired on German television network Deutsche Welle station showed a gaunt and thin Drueke being assisted by what appeared to be medical personnel as he walked. He was carrying his own bag, however.

Drueke, a former U.S. soldier, and Huynh, a Marine Corps veteran, disappeared near the city of Kharkiv on June 8 while fighting alongside Ukrainian forces. They were moved a few times during their captivity, and likely were held in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, Drueke’s family believes.

Recent Headlines

New York Times, Ukraine Updates: Russia Calls Up Civilians for Service; Some Men Flee the Country
New York Times,‘They Are Watching’: Inside Russia’s Vast Surveillance State
New York Times, Updates: Over 1,000 Russian Protesters Arrested After Putin Mobilizes More Troops
Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: The Shanghai Collapsing Organization, Wayne Madsen
Washington Post, Americans in Russia-Ukraine prisoner swap wondered if death was near
Washington Post, Prisoner swap freed Putin’s friend, Azov commanders and U.K. fighters
Washington Post, Editorial: Putin is getting desperate. Ukraine and the West must keep the pressure on
WNew York Times, Analysis: With his latest speech, President Vladimir Putin showed that he is at his most dangerous when he is cornered, Roger Cohen
New York Times, Analysis: U.S. Shores Up Ukraine Support as Energy Crisis in Europe Looms
Politico, OSCE Ukrainian staff members sentenced in Russian-separatist kangaroo court
Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Is the Russian visa ban list also a "kill list?" Wayne Madsen
Washington Post, Opinion: Chris Murphy’s warning: A GOP House would defund the Ukraine struggle, Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent
New York Times, World Leaders Convene at the U.N. for the First Time in 3 Years
New York Times, Separatists Speed Push to Join Russia, a Move Ukraine Sees as Desperation

U.S. Immigration Laws, Disputes

Washington Post, Opinion: DeSantis’s cruel stunt highlights the GOP’s hunger to change the subject, E.J. Dionne Jr., right, Sept. 22, 2022. Florida ej dionne w open neck Gov. Ron DeSantis’s cruel stunt of flying Venezuelan migrants to Martha’s Vineyard — now under investigation by a sheriff in Texas and the subject of a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in Boston — is widely seen as a play for Republican votes in a possible 2024 presidential run.

But it is also part of an unusually intricate battle over which party will set the agenda for the 2022 election, and which side will be forced to play defense.

The fact that this messaging struggle is happening at all is a strategic victory for Democrats, even if they still have a lot of defending left to do. Midterm elections are typically about the party that controls the White House. This gives the opposition a big offensive advantage.

But even with inflation as a cudgel, it hasn’t been that easy for the GOP. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion, Donald Trump’s high profile in the news and the right-wing radicalism of many of the party’s candidates, Republicans are having to scramble far more than they expected to. The anti-Biden, anti-inflation message of so much of the GOP’s advertising is no longer enough. Democrats have found ways to be aggressive, even when they’re on defense.

So DeSantis’s cynical move was, as much as anything, an effort to push aside abortion rights, an issue central to the underdog campaign Democrat Charlie Crist is waging against him.

This dynamic is playing out all over the country. Candidates who once spoke of their ardent opposition to abortion are now scrubbing their websites of references to the issue (“duck and cover” exercises, in the words of one Democratic strategist) and touting their own moderation on the issue.

Washington Post, South Korean president overheard insulting U.S. Congress as ‘idiots,’ Amy B Wang, Sept. 23, 2022 (print ed.). South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol was caught on a hot mic Wednesday insulting U.S. Congress members as “idiots” who could be a potential embarrassment for President Biden if they did not approve funding for global public health.

Yoon had just met with Biden at the Global Fund’s Seventh Replenishment Conference in New York City. There, Biden had pledged $6 billion from the United States to the public health campaign, which fights AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria worldwide. The funding would require congressional approval.

“It would be so humiliating for Biden if these idiots don’t pass it in Congress,” Yoon was overheard telling a group of aides as they left the event. Video of the exchange quickly went viral in South Korea, where Yoon took office in May.

Representatives for Yoon did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday. A spokesman for the National Security Counsel said in a statement Thursday it would “not comment on the hot mic comments.”

“Our relationship with the Republic of Korea is strong and growing,” the statement said. “President Biden counts President Yoon as a key ally. The two leaders had a good, productive meeting on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly yesterday.”

Park Hong-keun, the leader of the opposition Democratic Party in South Korea, criticized Yoon’s “foul language tarnishing the U.S. Congress” as “a major diplomatic mishap,” Agence France-Presse reported.

Yoon and Biden were both in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, where they held discussions on the sidelines Wednesday.

“The two leaders reaffirmed their commitment to strengthen the U.S.-ROK alliance and ensure close cooperation to address the threat posed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK),” the White House said in a readout of their meeting. “The Presidents also discussed our ongoing cooperation on a broad range of priority issues including supply chain resilience, critical technologies, economic and energy security, global health, and climate change.”

Washington Post, How vigilante ‘predator catchers’ are infiltrating the criminal justice system, Jessica Contrera, Sept. 23, 2022 (print ed.). It began with a live-streamed shaming in an Olive Garden parking lot. It ended with an Indiana cop on trial for child solicitation.

— The jury was waiting. They’d cringed when they learned what kind of case they’d hear in this Indiana courthouse. Child solicitation.

But don’t worry, the county prosecutors assured them. There would be no graphic pictures. There would be no testimony from an abused child.

Because in this case, there was no child.

The man charged with the crime — a 37-year-old veteran named Joshua Clark — didn’t know the 14-year-old girl he thought he was texting with was actually an adult, prosecutors said.

Law enforcement had been using this tactic for years, investing millions to train detectives on how to go online, pretend to be teenagers and wait for predators to emerge. Clark knew they conducted sting operations like these; after serving in the Army and working in a prison, he’d been hired as a police officer himself. That was, until he was arrested and fired.

Now on this July morning, the jury was going to meet the person responsible for catching this cop.

The prosecutor stood up. “The state calls Eric Schmutte,” she said.

The courtroom doors opened. But no detective walked in.

Now on this July morning, the jury was going to meet the person responsible for catching this cop.

The prosecutor stood up. “The state calls Eric Schmutte,” she said.

The courtroom doors opened. But no detective walked in.

Instead, there was a man in a polo shirt. His dreadlocks were tucked into a ponytail. After raising his right hand and swearing to tell the truth, Schmutte, a 35-year-old welder, began to explain why he was there.
Joshua Clark's child solicitation trial took place at the Hendricks County courthouse in Indiana in July. (Anna Powell Denton for The Washington Post)

He wasn’t just a welder. He was the founder of an organization called Predator Catchers Indianapolis.

“Our mission,” he said, “is to expose men and women that are online, preying on kids.”

“And when you say ‘expose,’ ” the prosecutor said, “what’s your plan to expose them?”

“Put their faces out online,” Schmutte explained. “Post videos so that community knows … these men and women are out here, and they’re okay with the idea of meeting up with your children for sexual activity.”

For two years, Schmutte had been taking it upon himself to do what the police do. Go on dating and social media apps. Pretend to be 14 or 12 or 8. Agree to meet up with an adult to do something sexual.

Recent Headlines:

New York Times, Criminal Investigation Is Opened After Migrant Flights to Martha’s Vineyard
New York Times, Gov. Ron Desantis’s move prompted liberals’ condemnation, and more such flights may follow
New York Times, For the first time, arrests of undocumented immigrants on the southwestern U.S. border exceeded 2 million in a year, Eileen Sullivan

Puerto Rican Hurricane, Power Failure

puerto rico fiona path 2022

New York Times, Fiona Leaves Puerto Rico in the Dark on the Anniversary of Hurricane Maria, Laura N. Pérez Sánchez and Patricia Mazzei, Photographs by Erika P. Rodriguez, Sept. 20, 2022 (print ed.). Puerto Rico will once again find itself mostly without power on Tuesday, the five year anniversary of when Hurricane Maria tore through the island. While Hurricane Fiona will be the direct culprit, Puerto Ricans also blame years of continued disruptions, the result of a slow effort to build a stable grid.

Hurricane Fiona deluged Puerto Rico with unrelenting rain and terrifying flash floods on Monday, forcing harrowing home rescues and making it difficult for power crews to reach many parts of the island.

Now the island is once again in darkness, five years after Hurricane Maria inflicted more damage on Puerto Rico than any other disaster in recent history.

While Fiona will be the direct culprit, Puerto Ricans will also blame years of power disruptions, the result of an agonizingly slow effort to finally give the island a stable grid. Hurricane Maria, a near-Category 5 storm, hit on Sept. 20, 2017, leaving about 3,000 dead and damaging 80 percent of the system. The last house was not reconnected to the system until nearly a year later. Hurricane Fiona, with far less ferocious winds, is the strongest storm to reach the island since.

New York Times, The devastation partly reflects factors that preceded the storm. Here are three reasons for Puerto Rico’s power outage.

Washington Post, Hurricane Fiona’s destruction of Puerto Rico, in maps and photos, Marisa Iati and Daniel Wolfe, Sept. 23, 2022 (print ed.). Days before the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria killing thousands in Puerto Rico, another storm clobbered the island archipelago this week and set back its halting progress toward modernizing its fragile infrastructure.

Hurricane Fiona battered parts of Puerto Rico’s south and central mountain regions with more than 20 inches of rain — causing flash flooding, triggering mudslides and leaving the entire U.S. territory without power. Much of the island remained inaccessible Tuesday, delaying a full assessment of the devastation.

At least four people were killed amid what Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi called the storm’s “catastrophic” destruction.

The southeast part of the large island was deluged by rain, with many areas getting more than 20 inches and some areas receiving over 25 inches. Fiona dumped more than 32 inches on the Ponce region, where the island’s second-largest city is located, and prompted emergency crews to rescue 400 people from flooding in Salinas, on the southern coast.

Recent Headlines

New York Times, The devastation partly reflects factors that preceded the storm. Here are three reasons for Puerto Rico’s power outage
Washington Post, All of Puerto Rico without power as Hurricane Fiona slams island
New York Times, Hurricane Fiona Knocks Out Power to All of Puerto Rico, Governor Says
White House, President Biden Approves Puerto Rico Emergency Declaration

Challenges To American Democracy

United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (l) with his wife of thirty-five years, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas (r). (Safe Image)

United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (l) with his wife of thirty-five years, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas (r).

Washington Post, Jan. 6 committee reaches deal with Ginni Thomas for an interview, Jacqueline Alemany and Azi Paybarah, Sept. 23, 2022 (print ed.). The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection has reached an agreement with Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to be interviewed by the panel in coming weeks, according to her attorney and another person familiar with the agreement.

Thomas’s attorney, Mark Paoletta, confirmed the agreement in a statement.

“I can confirm that Ginni Thomas has agreed to participate in a voluntary interview with the Committee,” Paoletta said. “As she has said from the outset, Mrs. Thomas is eager to answer the Committee’s questions to clear up any misconceptions about her work relating to the 2020 election. She looks forward to that opportunity.”

Trump campaign documents show advisers knew fake-elector plan was baseless

CNN was first to report on the agreement.

The committee had earlier announced a public hearing for next week.

The panel had contemplated issuing a subpoena to compel her testimony. Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, had pushed lawmakers and top Republican officials to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, citing baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.

Her efforts caught the attention of lawmakers and legal scholars who questioned whether it could prompt Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from any cases linked to causes on which his wife had worked.

Ginni Thomas repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to find ways to overturn the election, according to messages she sent to him weeks after the election. The messages represent an extraordinary pipeline between Thomas and one of Trump’s top aides as the president and his allies were vowing to take their efforts all the way to the Supreme Court.

Recent Headlines

New York Times, The Story So Far: Where 6 Investigations Into Donald Trump Stand, Peter Baker
Washington Post, Book Review: Former U.S. attorney dishes on how he held line against Trump White House, Barbara McQuade
New York Times, Speaking at Ellis Island, Attorney General Merrick Garland warned that political divisions had imperiled the rule of law
Washington Post, Opinion: A new and improved version of Electoral Count Act reform, Jennifer Rubin
Washington Post, Republicans in key battleground races refuse to say they will accept results, Amy Gardner, Hannah Knowles, Colby Itkowitz and Annie Linskey

UK Post-Queen Elizabeth

New York Times, British Government Goes Full Tilt on Tax Cuts and Free-Market Economics, Stephen Castle and Eshe Nelson, Sept. 23, 2022. The new administration’s proposals are a sharp break from the era of Boris Johnson, and they represent a turn toward Thatcherism.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Trump would have disrupted the Queen's funeral and disgraced America again, Wayne Madsen, Sept. 21-22, 2022. Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social on-line cesspool of nitwittery and racism that if he had been president he would have violated strictly-set royal and diplomatic protocol at Queen Elizabeth's state funeral in Westminster Abbey and created an embarrassing scene by insisting that he would have insisted on being seated in a front row along with Europe's senior ruling monarchs.

Trump wrote that the seating protocol showed “no respect” to the U.S. but that it did offer Biden the chance to network with “leaders of certain third world countries. Biden and the First Lady were seated with the presidents of Poland, South Korea, and Switzerland and the prime minister of Czechia, [left] hardly "certain third world countries" as labeled by the almost universally despised racist ex-president. Trump added, "If I were president, they wouldn’t have sat me back there . . . In Real Estate, like in Politics and in Life, LOCATION IS EVERYTHING!!!” And in diplomacy and matters of state, being a manky mingebag in the eyes of the world is also everything.

It is such bolshie behavior and lack of basic human decency that contributed to Trump's landslide loss for re-election in 2020. And it is to President Joe Biden's credit that he graciously took his seat, according to protocol ranking, with leaders who have been in office for roughly about the same length of time as Biden. That is how protocol seating works and was accomplished without a hitch for some 500 leaders invited to the Queen's funeral.

The seating arrangements at Westminster were based on historical precedent and traditional protocol and Trump would have never been permitted to violate them. The seats in the cavernous abbey were assigned by Edward William Fitzalan-Howard, the 18th Duke of Norfolk and the hereditary Earl Marshal, the Great Officer of State responsible for state occasions, such as state funerals and coronations.

America, Britain, the Commonwealth, and the rest of the nations represented at the Queen's funeral should be thankful that it was Biden and not Trump jetting into London. Trump would have turned the funeral of the longest-reigning British monarch into an disruptive event meant to shine all the spotlight on himself. Trump has a well-known reputation of being the "corpse at every funeral." Hopefully, he will soon actually assume that role and be planted at his tax scam "cemetery" on his golf course in New Jersey should the world be so fortunate.

Trump's condolence message stated, "Melania and I will always cherish our time together with the Queen, and never forget Her Majesty's generous friendship." Like everything from Trump, the Queen reportedly believed that Trump was, by far, the most boorish, unlikable, and ogreish president she had ever met and she had met twelve of them, starting with Harry Truman and ending with Joe Biden. According to biographies and memoirs, out of all the world leaders Queen Elizabeth had met, she truly despised three: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and Trump.

Of course, Trump had been steeped in hatred for the British royals by his Nazi-loving father, Fred Trump, Sr. The 1930s, when Fred was sieg heiling it with the German-American Bund, saw the abdication of Elizabeth's uncle, Edward VIII, over his plans to marry an Adolf Hitler-loving American divorcee from Baltimore, Wallis Simpson, who became the Duchess of Windsor after marrying Edward, who was demoted after abdication to Duke of Windsor and Governor of the Bahamas. Had Hitler carried out Operation Sea Lion and invaded and occupied the British Isles, Elizabeth's father, George VI, and her mother, Queen Consort Elizabeth, would have been lucky to have been consigned to imprisonment in a concentration camp. There is no telling what might have befallen Elizabeth and her sister, Princess Margaret. It is doubtful that a Nazi puppet King Edward and Queen Wallis would have had much empathy for George VI and his family. Wallis Simpson had been an integral part of the pro-Hitler America First Movement of leading fascists like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Father Charles Coughlin, and one notorious slum lord in New York, Fred Trump, Sr.

Recent Headlines

queen elizabeth funeral 9 19 022 david ramos getty

New York Times, Thousands Pay Tribute as Britain Says Final Farewell to Its Queen
Washington Post, Queen Elizabeth II buried after historic state funeral
New York Times, From Mourning to Crises: U.K. Prime Minister Pivots to Mounting Woes
Washington Post, Forget the private jet and limo. Most world leaders relegated to buses for queen’s funeral
New York Times, Line to View Queen Elizabeth’s Coffin Hits 5 Miles and Has to Be Closed Off
New York Times, Line to View Queen Elizabeth’s Coffin Hits 5 Miles and Has to Be Closed Off
Washington Post, Forget the private jet and limo. Most world leaders relegated to buses for queen’s funeralNew York Times, ‘We’re Part of History’: An Overnight Wait to Bid Farewell to the Queen
Washington Post, As Elizabeth gives way to Charles, realms consider severing tiesN

U.S. Politics, Economy, Governance

New York Times, Zeldin Has a Path to Becoming New York Governor. It Runs Through Brooklyn, Nicholas Fandos and Eliza Shapiro, Sept. 23, 2022. Representative Lee Zeldin, a Republican, is hoping for a realignment of political loyalties in parts of the borough, including those of Hasidic Jews. Representative Lee Zeldin’s campaign schedule has included frequent stops to Hasidic neighborhoods across Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley over the last few weeks.

New York Times, Misleading and toxic posts about the Nov. 8 midterm vote have flooded social media. Here are three prevalent themes, Cecilia Kang, Sept. 23, 2022. allot mules. Poll watch parties. Groomers.

These topics are now among the most dominant divisive and misleading narratives online about November’s midterm elections, according to researchers and data analytics companies. On Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Truth Social and other social media sites, some of these narratives have surged in recent months, often accompanied by angry and threatening rhetoric.

The effects of these inflammatory online discussions are being felt in the real world, election officials and voting rights groups said. Voters have flooded some local election offices with misinformed questions about supposedly rigged voting machines, while some people appear befuddled about what pens to use on ballots and whether mail-in ballots are still legal, they said.

“Our voters are angry and confused,” Lisa Marra, elections director in Cochise County, Ariz., told a House committee last month. “They simply don’t know what to believe.”

The most prevalent of these narratives fall into three main categories: continued falsehoods about rampant election fraud; threats of violence and citizen policing of elections; and divisive posts on health and social policies that have become central to political campaigns. Here’s what to know about them.

False claims of election fraud are commanding conversation online, with former President Donald J. Trump continuing to protest that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

Voter fraud is rare, but that falsehood about the 2020 election has become a central campaign issue for dozens of candidates around the country, causing misinformation and toxic content about the issue to spread widely online.

“Stolen election” was mentioned 325,589 times on Twitter from June 19 to July 19, a number that has been fairly steady throughout the year and that was up nearly 900 percent from the same period in 2020, according to Zignal Labs, a media research firm.

On the video-sharing site Rumble, videos with the term “stop the steal” or “stolen election” and other claims of election fraud have been among the most popular. In May, such posts attracted 2.5 million viewers, more than triple the total from a year earlier, according to Similarweb, a digital analytics firm.

New York Times, Secretary of State Races Turn Rowdy During the Homestretch, Blake Hounshell, Sept. 23, 2022 (print ed.). Democrats are outspending Republicans in Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada, where they see their opponents as threats to democracy.

In a normal election year, races for secretary of state are sleepy affairs, and their campaigns struggle for media coverage amid the hurly-burly of more prominent Senate, governor and House contests.

This year, however, is anything but normal.

Democrats are pouring millions of dollars into races for secretary of state, buoyed by the nature of their Republican opponents and the stakes for American democracy.

According to an analysis by my colleague Alyce McFadden, Democrats in Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada have outraised their Republican opponents as of the most recent campaign finance reports. And overall, Democratic-aligned groups working on secretary of state races in those four states have outspent Republicans by nearly $18 million in this election cycle, according to the ad analytics firm AdImpact, with more spending on the way.

The role of a secretary of state varies, but in those four states, as well as Arizona and Pennsylvania (where the governor appoints the secretary), they play a critical role in overseeing the mechanics of elections. During the height of the pandemic in 2020, for example, they often had to make judgment calls about how to ensure that voters had access to the polls when vaccines were not yet available, making elderly and immunocompromised Americans concerned about showing up in person.

New York Times, A Democratic-aligned group is investing almost $60 million in state legislative races, an often overlooked arena, Nick Corasaniti, Sept. 23, 2022. The group, the States Project, aims to help Democrats in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Maine and Nevada, as the left tries to make up lost ground in state legislatures.

A Democratic-aligned group is investing nearly $60 million in state legislative races in five states, a significant sum in an often overlooked political arena where Democrats have struggled for decades.

The group, the States Project, said it was focusing on flipping a single seat in the Arizona State Senate that could swing it to Democratic control and on winning back both chambers of the Michigan and Pennsylvania Legislatures. The group also aims to defend Democratic majorities in Maine and Nevada.

The large infusion of cash from the States Project amounts to a recognition of the critical role that state legislatures play in American politics, orchestrating policy on abortion access, what can be taught in schools and other issues that animate voters. In every state except Minnesota, Virginia and Alaska, a single party controls both chambers.

Next year, the Supreme Court could give the legislative bodies yet more power if it endorses a theory, often called independent state legislature doctrine, that would give state legislatures nearly unchecked authority over elections. Left-leaning groups like the States Project argue that state legislative contests this year in several key battlegrounds could have an outsize impact on future elections.

New York Times, Project Veritas broke wiretapping laws and fraudulently misrepresented itself to a Democratic group, a jury found, Adam Goldman, Sept. 23, 2022. The conservative group was found to have violated wiretapping laws and fraudulently misrepresented itself to a Democratic consulting firm, to which it was ordered to pay $120,000.