03 July 21
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People need to explain to themselves their immiseration, their disenfranchisement, their lack of power. Conspiracies do that
he greatest conspiracies are open and notorious – not theories, but practices expressed through law and policy, technology and finance. Counterintuitively, these conspiracies are more often than not announced in public and with a modicum of pride. They’re dutifully reported in our newspapers; they’re bannered on to the covers of our magazines; updates on their progress are scrolled across our screens – all with such regularity as to render us unable to relate the banality of their methods to the rapacity of their ambitions.
The party in power wants to redraw district lines. The prime interest rate has changed. A free service has been created to host our personal files. These conspiracies order, and disorder, our lives; and yet they can’t compete for attention with digital graffiti about pedophile satanists in the basement of a DC pizzeria.
This, in sum, is our problem: the truest conspiracies meet with the least opposition.
Or to put it another way, conspiracy practices – the methods by which true conspiracies such as gerrymandering, or the debt industry, or mass surveillance are realized – are almost always overshadowed by conspiracy theories: those malevolent falsehoods that in aggregate can erode civic confidence in the existence of anything certain or verifiable.
In my life, I’ve had enough of both the practice and the theory. In my work for the United States National Security Agency, I was involved with establishing a top secret system intended to access and track the communications of every human being on the planet. And yet after I grew aware of the damage this system was causing – and after I helped to expose that true conspiracy to the press – I couldn’t help but notice that the conspiracies that garnered almost as much attention were those that were demonstrably false: I was, it was claimed, a hand-picked CIA operative sent to infiltrate and embarrass the NSA; my actions were part of an elaborate inter-agency feud. No, said others: my true masters were the Russians, the Chinese, or worse – Facebook.
As I found myself made vulnerable to all manner of internet fantasy, and interrogated by journalists about my past, about my family background and about an array of other issues both entirely personal and entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand, there were moments when I wanted to scream: “What is wrong with you people? All you want is intrigue, but an honest-to-God, globe-spanning apparatus of omnipresent surveillance riding in your pocket is not enough? You have to sauce that up?”
It took years – eight years and counting in exile – for me to realize that I was missing the point: we talk about conspiracy theories in order to avoid talking about conspiracy practices, which are often too daunting, too threatening, too total.
It’s my hope in this post and in posts to come to engage a broader scope of conspiracy-thinking, by examining the relationship between true and false conspiracies, and by asking difficult questions about the relationships between truth and falsehood in our public and private lives.
I’ll begin by offering a fundamental proposition: namely, that to believe in any conspiracy, whether true or false, is to believe in a system or sector run not by popular consent but by an elite, acting in its own self-interest. Call this elite the Deep State, or the Swamp; call it the Illuminati, or Opus Dei, or the Jews, or merely call it the major banking institutions and the Federal Reserve – the point is, a conspiracy is an inherently antidemocratic force.
The recognition of a conspiracy – again, whether true or false – entails accepting that not only are things other than what they seem, but they are systematized, regulated, intentional and even logical. It’s only by treating conspiracies not as “plans” or “schemes” but as mechanisms for ordering the disordered that we can hope to understand how they have so radically displaced the concepts of “rights” and “freedoms” as the fundamental signifiers of democratic citizenship.
In democracies today, what is important to an increasing many is not what rights and freedoms are recognized, but what beliefs are respected: what history, or story, undergirds their identities as citizens, and as members of religious, racial and ethnic communities. It’s this replacement-function of false conspiracies — the way they replace unified or majoritarian histories with parochial and partisan stories — that prepares the stage for political upheaval.
Especially pernicious is the way that false conspiracies absolve their followers of engaging with the truth. Citizenship in a conspiracy-society doesn’t require evaluating a statement of proposed fact for its truth-value, and then accepting it or rejecting it accordingly, so much as it requires the complete and total rejection of all truth-value that comes from an enemy source, and the substitution of an alternative plot, narrated from elsewhere.
The concept of the enemy is fundamental to conspiracy thinking – and to the various taxonomies of conspiracy itself. Jesse Walker, an editor at Reason and author of The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory (2013), offers the following categories of enemy-based conspiracy thinking:
- “Enemy Outside”, which pertains to conspiracy theories perpetrated by or based on actors scheming against a given identity-community from outside of it.
- “Enemy Within”, which pertains to conspiracy theories perpetrated by or based on actors scheming against a given identity-community from inside of it.
- “Enemy Above”, which pertains to conspiracy theories perpetrated by or based on actors manipulating events from within the circles of power (government, military, the intelligence community, etc.).
- “Enemy Below”, which pertains to conspiracy theories perpetrated by or based on actors from historically disenfranchised communities seeking to overturn the social order.
- “Benevolent Conspiracies”, which pertains to extraterrestrial, supernatural or religious forces dedicated to controlling the world for humanity’s benefit (similar forces from Beyond who work to the detriment of humanity Walker might categorize under “Enemy Above”).
Other forms of conspiracy-taxonomy are just a Wikipedia link away: Michael Barkun’s trinary categorization of Event conspiracies (eg false-flags), Systemic conspiracies (eg Freemasons), and Superconspiracy theories (eg New World Order), as well as his distinction between the secret acts of secret groups and the secret acts of known groups; or Murray Rothbard’s binary of “shallow” and “deep” conspiracies (“shallow” conspiracies begin by identifying evidence of wrongdoing and end by blaming the party that benefits; “deep” conspiracies begin by suspecting a party of wrongdoing and continue by seeking out documentary proof – or at least “documentary proof”).
I find things to admire in all of these taxonomies, but it strikes me as notable that none makes provision for truth-value. Further, I’m not sure that these or any mode of classification can adequately address the often-alternating, dependent nature of conspiracies, whereby a true conspiracy (eg the 9/11 hijackers) triggers a false conspiracy (eg 9/11 was an inside job), and a false conspiracy (eg Iraq has weapons of mass destruction) triggers a true conspiracy (eg the invasion of Iraq).
Another critique I would offer of the extant taxonomies involves a reassessment of causality, which is more properly the province of psychology and philosophy. Most of the taxonomies of conspiracy-thinking are based on the logic that most intelligence agencies use when they spread disinformation, treating falsity and fiction as levers of influence and confusion that can plunge a populace into powerlessness, making them vulnerable to new beliefs – and even new governments.
But this top-down approach fails to take into account that the predominant conspiracy theories in America today are developed from the bottom-up, plots concocted not behind the closed doors of intelligence agencies but on the open internet by private citizens, by people.
In sum, conspiracy theories do not inculcate powerlessness, so much as they are the signs and symptoms of powerlessness itself.
This leads us to those other taxonomies, which classify conspiracies not by their content, or intent, but by the desires that cause one to subscribe to them. Note, in particular, the epistemic/existential/social triad of system-justification: belief in a conspiracy is considered “epistemic” if the desire underlying the belief is to get at “the truth”, for its own sake; belief in a conspiracy is considered “existential” if the desire underlying the belief is to feel safe and secure, under another’s control; while belief in a conspiracy is considered “social” if the desire underlying the belief is to develop a positive self-image, or a sense of belonging to a community.
From Outside, from Within, from Above, from Below, from Beyond … events, systems, superconspiracies … shallow and deep heuristics … these are all attempts to chart a new type of politics that is also a new type of identity, a confluence of politics and identity that imbues all aspects of contemporary life. Ultimately, the only truly honest taxonomical approach to conspiracy-thinking that I can come up with is something of an inversion: the idea that conspiracies themselves are a taxonomy, a method by which democracies especially sort themselves into parties and tribes, a typology through which people who lack definite or satisfactory narratives as citizens explain to themselves their immiseration, their disfranchisement, their lack of power, and even their lack of will.
- Edward Snowden is the whistleblower who revealed the NSA’s mass surveillance program. He is also the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation
Donald Trump. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
The company has been charged with criminal tax fraud, falsifying business records and committing a scheme to defraud.
The chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, was also charged with grand larceny for avoiding taxes on $1.7 million in perks that he did not report as income. Weisselberg surrendered Thursday and pled not guilty. He could face up to a decade in prison if convicted. Many legal experts are speculating prosecutors targeted Weisselberg with the hope he’ll flip and help investigators in other ongoing probes into the former president’s company.
During arraignment Thursday, prosecutor Carey Dunne said, quote, “To put it bluntly, this was a sweeping and audacious illegal payments scheme,” he said. Prosecutors accused the Trump Organization of helping executives avoid paying taxes on fringe benefits, including cars, apartments and private school tuition.
We’re joined now by David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who’s followed Donald Trump and his taxes for more than 30 years, previously at The New York Times, now co-founder and editor of DCReport.org. His most recent book, It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.
So, David, can you explain what these charges are about, against both Weisselberg, the CFO, and the Trump Organization, which is the Trump family business?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: This indictment lays out a calculated scheme, over 15 years, to pay large sums of money, $1.7 million, to Allen Weisselberg that was not included in the compensation he reported for tax purposes, also for him to claim that he did not live in New York City, when he did, which helped him evade $220,000 of New York City taxes over the period in question.
And it shows that Donald Trump, while not named in the indictment, is all over the document in terms of actions he had to take, including, in the very last count, the alteration of records just before the 2016 election to remove an indication of an illegal act.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, criticizing the prosecutor’s case.
ALAN FUTERFAS: People across the country, we believe, have heard of corporate apartments, have heard of corporate cars. All of this is on the books and records of the company. That’s how they know about it. And so, it’s — in my view, my personal view, it’s not appropriate. And, quite frankly, it sets a precedent. I think, in 244 years, we have not had a local prosecutor go after a former president of the United States or his employees or his company. And that is a — that is a significant line to cross.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about that line to cross. And also, he said the reason the government knows about all of this is we kept the books. But, in fact, they kept two sets of books, is that right, David?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: They kept two sets of books, which is, of course, a classic sign of tax fraud. The prosecutors had to go to the U.S. Supreme Court twice to get access to these records.
And fundamentally here, neither Donald Trump, in the statement he issued through the Trump Organization, or his lawyers are saying, “We didn’t do it. It’s not true.” What they’re saying is, “We’re special, and we’re privileged.”
There’s a man in Alabama serving a life sentence for stealing $9. There was a man in California sentenced to consecutive 25-year terms because he was broke and hungry and he stole a slice of pizza from some children — 55 years. And the U.S. Supreme Court said, “That’s OK. That’s a reasonable sentence.”
But Donald Trump and the people around him believe that they shouldn’t be subject to the law. “It’s OK. Everybody does this.” Everybody doesn’t do this. But what an awful position for someone who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and faithfully execute the law.
AMY GOODMAN: So, the indictment alleges that Weisselberg evaded, oh, more than $1.7 million in taxes over a period beginning in 2005. So, instead of getting, you know, direct payment that he pays taxes on, he’s getting his grandchildren’s private school paid for, he’s getting an apartment and other things. Can you talk about why this investigation took so long? And is this just a way to flip him to get to Donald Trump? And what do we know, since you’ve been investigating Trump for 30 years, about Donald Trump and his children?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, first of all, let me just correct something: The taxes actually come to $880,211. The $1.7 million is the income. And a big portion of it is city taxes in New York, because Weisselberg claimed not to live in the city of New York when he did.
The investigation took so long for a very simple reason: Donald Trump fought the release and examination of his records from before he was president. In fact, his lawyer, George Consovoy, told a federal judge that if Donald Trump actually shot someone on Fifth Avenue — you’ll recall he said he could do that and not lose a vote — if he actually shot someone on Fifth Avenue, the New York City police would be prohibited from investigating that murder. His position here is entirely, “I am above the law. I am special.”
Now, the Trump children are not named in the indictment, but the older three are all executives of the Trump Organization, and there’s every reason to believe that the future indictments — this is only the first indictment, not the case — will involve at some point the Trump children, and perhaps Allen Weisselberg’s son Barry, for similar crimes. And there are hints of that in this indictment.
Now, the effort by prosecutors is fundamentally to get Allen Weisselberg to break with Donald Trump after 48 years of working for Donald and his father. At this point, Allen Weisselberg, who’s about to turn 74, is a wholly owned psychological subsidiary of Donald Trump’s criminal mind. It will be very difficult for him to break with Trump. And the case currently pending, while he could get, theoretically, 15 years, there is no requirement of any sentence higher than probation. So I think it’s reasonable to expect that Allen Weisselberg and his lawyers at the moment are pondering running the risk of a trial and a conviction and then a judge simply saying, “Well, go home, sir, and report to the probation department once a month.”
That suggests there will be other charges that will have much tougher penalties. And I think the record is increasingly showing that something I’ve been saying for about a year is going to happen, that eventually there will be an indictment for New York state racketeering enterprise. The state has a RICO law, like the federal government. It requires showing three felonies. This indictment shows numerous felonies. And it would allow prosecutors to have a judge appoint a receiver to take control of the Trump Organization as a criminal enterprise.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, before we end, can you, David, talk about one of your most recent articles, headlined “DCReport Uncovers a Huge Secret Tax Favor for Super Wealthy”? And in that, tell us just who Charles Rettig is.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Donald Trump appointed Charles Rettig to be the commissioner of the IRS. He is the first person to hold that job who made his name and spent decades helping rich people avoid and perhaps evade taxes, and, if they got caught, negotiating secret settlements that never hit the public record for the taxes they cheated the government out of. He has said that the actual tax cap in the U.S. is more than twice the official number. It’s probably over a trillion dollars. The government doesn’t collect $3 trillion in taxes, so that makes it a huge number. And most of this is among very wealthy people who own their own businesses.
What’s happened now is that in the Trump era, they got an approval to expand the number of auditors for gift and estate taxes. And there’s plenty of evidence of massive, massive cheating in gifts and estates, after people die. But the new hires will not be lawyers. They’ll get the same pay lawyers get. Effectively, the job is being downgraded from colonels to corporals, but at colonel pay. And these new hires will simply not have the legal knowledge to take apart the complex, multilayered structures that people like Charles Rettig have created so that billions of dollars appear to the IRS to be mere pennies.
The Biden administration could stop this with one phone call. This whole scheme is based on the Trump administration’s legal advice that you can’t hire any more lawyers to do this work. All they have to do is undo that decision. I’ve repeatedly emailed the White House. They told me they didn’t know anything about this, which isn’t surprising. This is a scheme we uncovered. But they haven’t gotten back to us about whether President Biden will, or his staff will, see to it that this is at least stopped until they understand what’s going on, and hopefully permanently stopped, because it’s just a big giveaway to the most aggressive efforts by people and their lawyers to avoid taxes, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, David Cay Johnston, we thank you for being with us. We’re going to link to that article at democracynow.org. David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, co-founder and editor of DCReport.org. The exposé, “DCReport Uncovers a Huge Secret Tax Favor for Super Wealthy.” His most recent book, It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.
Angela Davis. (photo: Duke Downey/The Chronicle)
t was 1971 and, being young, single, a political activist, and a New Yorker, I wasn’t home much at my third-floor walkup in Greenwich Village except to sleep. One night in March, my across-the-hall neighbor poked her head out of her apartment to nervously tell me that “federal marshals” had been trying all day to find me.
I couldn’t think why the feds wanted to talk to me but figured it couldn’t be anything good. So, the next morning, I packed a couple of things and moved into Susan Sontag’s vacant apartment on the Upper West Side for a few days.
Susan and I had become close friends after being invited guests in Havana for the Cuban Revolution’s tenth anniversary celebrations in 1969. I had nowhere near her intellectual firepower — not many did — but I held my own with her in political debates, and she was amused, amazed, and intrigued that I was a real, live, actual US communist. What’s more, I was one with a sense of humor — even about the party — and with an anti-authoritarian bent. She lived part of the year in Paris, and I sometimes stayed in her apartment.
I was working (in a manner of speaking) at American Documentary Films — distributor and producer of a handful of antiwar, anti-racist, and pro-environmental films to churches, schools, and universities — which was walking distance from her place.
A day or two after my neighbor’s warning, I was walking down West End Avenue to work from Susan’s apartment. At 88th Street, a car cut me off. Two men emerged to hand me a subpoena. Turns out I was to be a prosecution witness in the trial of United States v. David Poindexter. David was a friend, and the man who was arrested at the Times Square Howard Johnson Hotel with Angela Davis, whom he’d accompanied on her flight from the authorities in California.
Meeting Angela Davis
I first met Angela in 1962. She was eighteen years old and had come north from Birmingham (known, after the Ku Klux Klan’s 1963 murder of four black girls attending Sunday school at the 16th Street Baptist Church, as “Bombingham”) to study, first at Elizabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village and then Brandeis University. She and a childhood friend, Harriet Jackson, had applied and were accepted to be part of the 450-member US contingent at the World Youth Festival in Helsinki that year. I was the organizer of the US contingent, with an office on lower Park Avenue. Jim Jackson, Harriet’s father and a leader of the Communist Party, came by the office and encouraged me to look after his daughter and her friend Angela.
Seven years later, on that trip to Havana where Susan and I met, the Cubans asked me to organize a group of young Communists to visit Cuba, tour the island, and perhaps to work for a week or so in the sugarcane fields to understand the lives of ordinary Cubans under the revolution. The Cubans and I understood that this would be an “unofficial” delegation, not a Communist Party delegation, since I would be selecting the members, not the party. At the time, the Cuban and US parties were barely on speaking terms.
My selections for the group came mainly from two sources: members of the Che-Lumumba Club, a unit of the Southern California Communist Party, and my teammates from the Central Park softball games against the Cuban UN Mission team. The Che-Lumumba Club was comprised of young African American comrades who worked closely with the Black Panther Party, though not always in agreement.
Angela, an assistant professor of philosophy at UCLA, belonged to the club. She joined that unofficial young Communist contingent that travelled to Cuba and cut cane. It wasn’t until later that I understood our contingent was the prototype for the Venceremos Brigade, contingents of young people from the United States who travelled to Cuba to work in agriculture and construction alongside Cuban workers, challenging US policies toward Cuba, including the nearly sixty-year-long embargo against the nation. (The fiftieth brigade travelled to Cuba in 2019. Altogether, some ten thousand US citizens have participated in the brigades.)
I first met David Poindexter in New York around the same time. We met through Charlene Mitchell, a lifelong friend of David’s from their Chicago youth. Charlene moved to Los Angeles as a young woman and became a Communist Party leader there; and later came to New York to head up its Black Liberation Commission. Because of her Party work, Charlene helped direct the Che-Lumumba Club — which, fortuitously, was headed by Franklin Alexander, Charlene’s brother and a good friend of mine from my own California days.
These became the central actors in the drama that followed a few years later, when Angela became the FBI’s “most wanted woman” in 1970, following Jonathan Jackson’s shoot-out at the Marin County Civic Center. Jonathan’s older brother, George Jackson, was a Black Panther Party leader and acclaimed writer in San Quentin prison, and close to Angela. Several of the guns Jonathan used in the botched attempt to free his brother, which involved the killing of a judge at the civic center, were legally registered and licensed to Angela, for whom Jonathan sometimes acted as security (her life being under constant threat following then-governor Ronald Reagan’s attacks on her).
Franklin and his wife, Kendra, were Angela’s closest confidants and comrades. Charlene was their leader. David was the knight in shining (though disguised) armor, and I was a good friend with a close-up view of their doings.
Angela’s tenure at UCLA had been cut short when Governor Reagan denounced her Communist Party membership and demanded the university regents fire her. She was all of twenty-five years old. Given the governor’s hatred of her and the all-out federal war against the Panthers and their supporters, Angela quite rationally fled California with David Poindexter accompanying her. David, who was not a Party member and was not really all that political, risked his own life to aid her.
Avoiding arrest for almost two months, Angela and David were finally apprehended at a hotel near Times Square in New York City. David was held pending trial in the Tombs, the Manhattan men’s house of detention. For a couple weeks, while fighting a not-unexpected losing battle against extradition to California, Angela was held in the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village, walking distance from my apartment. I regularly walked by the dreary twelve-story, red-bricked prison, which had housed Ethel Rosenberg, Billie Holiday, Dorothy Day, and tens of thousands of New York’s poor, tired, and hungry women.
Greenwich Village had long symbolized alienated American bohemia and traditionally served as a haven for refugees from stultifying middle-class life. But from the Women’s House of Detention, screams and shouts of the prisoners daily pierced the neighborhood’s complacency. Here and there, scattered on the sidewalk, were bits of paper — stuffed through prison bars and fallen below — bearing messages about prison conditions. Reports of lice, roaches, mice, and rats were common. With a diet lacking the barest nutritional essentials, an inmate would occasionally find a mouse tail mixed into her evening meal.
Angela would eventually pull together a brilliant team of criminal defense attorneys in California. In New York, ahead of her extradition, her lawyers were John Abt, chief counsel for the Communist Party, and Margaret Burnham, another of Angela’s childhood friends who would later become Massachusetts’ first African American female judge and a Northeastern University law professor.
Through John and Margaret, I was able to secure official visits with Angela in jail, both as a friend and to conduct interviews for Ramparts magazine. It was the custom for relatives and friends of inmates to begin lining up outside the prison a couple of hours before the gates opened. When those in line around me learned I was there to visit Angela, they asked that I convey their support for her. One middle-aged African American woman, a nurse, said, “We’ve got to get her out or, the way things are going, we’ll all be inside those bars.”
In the two months between her disappearance in California and arrest in New York, Angela’s whereabouts, thoughts, and plans were the subject of much speculation in the media and on the street. When she and David were finally seized, the speculation achieved galloping proportions. David, routinely described in the press as a “mystery man,” was indicted for harboring a criminal federal fugitive.
While Angela remained incarcerated, David was released on $100,000 bail posted by his mom in Florida. In an interview, he told me, “Why am I a mystery man all of a sudden? The FBI has visited me for years and the Chicago police knew me well enough to watch me when presidents came to Chicago. . . . I just don’t know what criminal they are talking about my harboring. I wasn’t seen with [segregationist] senator [James] Eastland of Mississippi or a Pentagon general. Certainly, Angela is no criminal.”
He then discussed the period leading up to the arrest:
J. Edgar Hoover obviously decided to make an example of Angela and unleashed all the forces at his command. To have been stationary would have paralyzed our ability to function. It is not so easy to avoid arrest as some people say, particularly when your picture is on the cover of every magazine in the country, on national television daily, and so on. It must be remembered that we had no preconceived apparatus. The charges against Angela came like a bolt from the blue, so the responsive reaction had to be planned day to day. . . . The point is that Angela Davis is innocent; there was no premeditation so there couldn’t be a prior apparatus set up.
David continued,
Angela had been subject to a year of harassment, and at times physical intimidation. This is important to remember. Then the death of Jonathan Jackson was a deep personal loss. The period of so-called flight was a time put aside to muster strength for the fight ahead. Angela was not about to place herself in the hands of those who vowed to “get” her. It’s amazing how many quarterbacks we have since the arrest; there must be thousands who have offered hindsight “advice” as if they had themselves built up years of experience. People want to know why we were found at Howard Johnson’s. Well, we weren’t in the ghetto because the search was concentrated in ghettos all across the country. We know that hundreds of black women resembling Angela were picked up. . . . When Angela asked me to help her, I was damned happy to comply. And it must be pointed out that in fact we did evade the dragnet for two months.
These excerpts from conversations with David, which were printed in Ramparts in the introduction to my interview with Angela at the Women’s House of Detention, were what led the federal marshals to subpoena me to appear as a prosecution witness against David in his upcoming trial.
The single charge against David was of knowingly harboring a federal fugitive. There was no suggestion that he participated in the shooting at the Marin County courthouse. As Judge John Cannella said in his instructions to the jury at the end of the trial, “the very crux of this case” was whether David was aware of the federal warrants for Angela. “If you find that the defendant had knowledge only of the state charges, you must acquit him.”
David had never said to anyone that he was so aware. Nobody had ever overheard him saying so. He obviously knew that she was wanted by the California authorities. But this was a federal case against him, and the prosecution had to prove he had knowledge of a federal warrant. The one piece of evidence against him was my interview with him.
I was a prosecution witness, but I was never going to testify against David — that was as likely as President Nixon appointing me to his cabinet. It wasn’t gonna happen, but I didn’t know how it wasn’t gonna happen. I’ve never been someone who accommodates hostile commands or demands. If I’m told by someone that it’s time for me to leave the premises, my initial impulse is to look for the nearest chair to make myself comfortable.
But now I was going to face a federal prosecutor in open court, having sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. This was cause for concern.
So I consulted individually with Charlene Mitchell of the Party’s Black Liberation Commission, who was now organizing the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis; John Abt, the Party’s chief counsel; and Mary Kaufman, another Party attorney who had served as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. I needed guidance: how do I avoid testifying against David?
Each of them said basically the same thing: I needed to take the stand and tell the truth. David knew what he was doing and what the consequences might be; no point in my also going to jail for contempt of court. I was disappointed to hear them say this. I wanted advice on how to defy the prosecution, not submit to it.
So I had to rely on my own lonesome middle finger to the government, and I had no idea how it would play out until I took the witness chair to be sworn in. I was to be the forty-fourth prosecution witness, the cherry on the frosted cake — or more aptly, the lock on David’s casket.
Up Against the Court
The forty-three witnesses who preceded me were FBI agents and federal marshals who searched for Angela and David, and the clerks at the motels they stayed in, car rental employees, and the like. Judge Canella, in his instructions to the jury at the end of my testimony, said that they could convict if they found there was sufficient circumstantial evidence of a “high probability” that David knew of a federal warrant for Angela. The prosecution’s extensive list of witnesses was to show this sufficient circumstantial evidence.
Prior to the judge’s instruction, Stanley Arkin, David’s attorney, in his final argument told the jury, “Not one witness said that David had knowledge of the warrant. They came up with zero, except for speculation.” Which was why the prosecution had been so intent on getting me onto the witness stand: mine was the one potential testimony that would not be speculation.
After being sworn in, I gave my profession as a journalist and, quite generously, “film executive.” (Of course, I was the furthest thing from, say, Louis B. Mayer. Like the rest of the American Documentary Films staff, I was being paid wages that would shame a monk.)
Then began a three-way minuet between the prosecutor, the judge, and me that seemed to stretch on forever. It went like this — direct from the court transcript — with myriad variations on essentially the same give-and-take:
MR DOYLE (THE PROSECUTOR): Now, do you recall at this time the statements that Mr Poindexter made to you in the course of [your] conversations?After some back-and-forth objections by David’s attorney, denied by the judge,
WITNESS: Not really.
MR DOYLE: I show you Government Exhibit 91 [the Ramparts interview] and ask you if it refreshes your recollection as to statements made to you by David Poindexter . . . ?
WITNESS: No, it doesn’t.
THE COURT: Read the question to the witness again. He apparently is still thinking or doing something. I don’t know what.
WITNESS: Thinking.
THE COURT: You are thinking. All right.
The question about my recollections is read to me.
WITNESS: It is really very difficult for me to answer that. I really don’t recall — I don’t have an independent recollection.
THE COURT: Listen, you are a man that deals with language, you write, you are a journalist. Now, when you are asked a question here, listen to the question and answer the question yes, it does, no, it doesn’t, or I don’t know.
WITNESS: I don’t know is the answer to that.
THE COURT: Just a minute, wait until you get the question and then you can answer it.
The question is read.
WITNESS: I don’t know.
At one point, the questions turned to whether and when I took notes in my conversations with David.
WITNESS: I am really embarrassed, but I really don’t know.
THE COURT: When you write something don’t you attempt to put down for the public’s edification what you yourself believe to be the facts as you know them?
WITNESS: I am very embarrassed.
THE COURT: You can be embarrassed as you want, but will you answer that question, or are you telling this jury that you write down something when you don’t know anything and you are not sure it is true or not?
WITNESS: I do that sometimes.
THE COURT: You do that sometimes?
WITNESS: Yes.
If I were a publisher sitting in the courtroom listening to my testimony, I’d have to be thinking, “What a schmuck. This guy thinks he’s a journalist? He’s a putz.” Of course, that was fine with me.
After more back-and-forth, then a sidebar conference of the prosecutor, defense counsel, and the judge, during which Mr Arkin said he was objecting “to continuing questioning this witness as to his recollection which has already been taxed.”
THE COURT: If that is a request and an objection, the objection is overruled and the request is denied.
MR DOYLE: When this story [was] on typewriter, Mr Myerson, at that very moment were you reducing to writing your best recollection of what the defendant Poindexter had told you when you had spoken to him?
WITNESS: [The] story was done in a great hurry partially by telephone with the San Francisco office and I don’t recall—
THE COURT: Just a minute. Strike it all out. I suggest to you that instead of you explaining why you can or can’t answer a question, either answer the question that it is so or it isn’t so or you don’t know. Read the question to him and we will get an answer to it.
The question is read.
WITNESS: I don’t know.
In the witness chair, I was essentially sitting right next to the judge. But sensing the frustration in his voice, I didn’t look at him. I focused my attention on the prosecutor. He had been given this slam-dunk assignment — after all, David had been arrested together with Angela, their photos were on front pages around the world — and he’s now questioning this fool who was essentially telling the world that he’s the most inept, if not unscrupulous, journalist in the country. He looked like he would rather throttle me than interrogate me.
Then came the following exchange.
MR DOYLE: Now, as a journalist, what is your normal practice with respect to writing articles? Do you normally endeavor to the best of your ability to reduce to writing or do you actually remember what you were told as a journalist?
WITNESS: It depends on the kind of story.
MR DOYLE: Do you normally write a truthful account of your best recollection of what you were told as a journalist; is that your normal practice?
WITNESS: That also depends on the story.
The prosecutor couldn’t have appeared more flummoxed had I peed on his foot. And the judge was becoming more agitated.
MR DOYLE: Were you attempting to put to writing an untruthful account of what you were told by Mr Poindexter? . . .
THE COURT: He has already answered that and I don’t think that is going to help us because I think his answer is going to be the same, so I see no reason in having him answer the same.
I am a little closer to him and I can hear him a little better than you. I don’t know essentially what I am hearing, but I am closer to him.
Would you step to the side bar a minute, both lawyers, because this waltzing could go on forever.
In the sidebar, Mr Arkin asks for a declaration of mistrial because of “Your Honor’s comments that you don’t know what you’re hearing.” To which the judge replied, “All right, that is good and the motion is denied.”
The judge then asked the prosecutor to show me the Ramparts article itself and essentially took over the questioning from the prosecutor.
MR DOYLE: Did you write the words that are indicated in brackets there, sir?
WITNESS: I really don’t recall. I can’t say for sure.
THE COURT: Is that your article?
WITNESS: Yes.
THE COURT: Is it over by your by-line?
WITNESS: Yes.
THE COURT: And you are telling us now that you don’t know whether that belongs to the article which you submitted, is that what you are saying?
WITNESS: It is in the article, but I don’t know if I wrote it.
THE COURT: Is it your by-line?
WITNESS: I tried to explain earlier, sir, that part of it was written in the San Francisco office by the editors.
THE COURT: And they use your by-line.
WITNESS: It is a very frequent practice, common practice.
THE COURT: But you stand behind your by-line, don’t you?
WITNESS: It is over my name.
THE COURT: What is the sense of putting your by-line on it if it doesn’t concern you and concerns somebody in the San Francisco office, can you tell me that?
WITNESS: That is a problem we writers have with editors all the time.
After several more minutes of this, the prosecutor tried to get a word in but the judge quieted him.
THE COURT: He has stated from the beginning that he can’t pinpoint this because he doesn’t know what was told to him and what was told to the San Francisco people. Is that a fair statement of your testimony?
WITNESS: The first part, not the second part.
THE COURT: What do you mean the “first part”?
WITNESS: That I can’t pinpoint it.
THE COURT: Can you pinpoint any of this material?
WITNESS: You were accurate about that.
THE COURT: What was inaccurate about what I said?
WITNESS: I don’t know — I don’t remember with any kind of independent recollection what is accurate in there and what [of it is not] accurate. I don’t have any notes from that time.
By now the prosecutor is a confused bystander, and the judge is pissed. After a few more minutes of dumb and dumber, the prosecutor tried to get in a question.
THE COURT: He already said “No” to that.
MR DOYLE: I thought you wanted me to ask that question, your Honor.
THE COURT: Let’s get this clear: I don’t care what you and Mr Arkin ask. I only rule on the question. I couldn’t care less what you ask, so don’t be putting any direction at me. I am not directing anything.
The prosecution got the drift and said he had no further questions. David’s attorney said he had no cross-examination, and I was dismissed from the stand.
I had no idea what I was going to do or say when I first took the witness chair. My older brother had a very successful career directing, producing, and teaching improvisational theater. That afternoon might have made him proud.
I left the courthouse and went home to cook dinner and relax. Later that night, the phone rang. It was David. “That was great, man. We did it. It’s over and I’m free. Let’s get some drinks.”
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. (photo: Jim Lo Scalzo/AP/Shutterstock)
The court upheld two Arizona laws — one of which banned the collection of absentee ballots by anyone other than a relative or caregiver, otherwise known as "ballot harvesting"; the other threw out any ballots cast in the wrong precinct.
"Obviously, the Supreme Court accepted our test and our reasoning and rejected the Democratic National Committee's attempt to micromanage state elections," Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich said on NPR's All Things Considered Thursday.
The decision, though, was a blow to those who believe voting access is more important than rooting out fraud — and that's most Americans, the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found. Fifty-six percent said making sure that everyone who wants to vote can do so is a bigger concern than making sure that no one who is ineligible votes.
"It very much narrows the path of challenging these many, many voter obstacles that states are instituting across the country," Debo Adegbile, an anti-discrimination attorney, told NPR's Nina Totenberg.
With a solidified 6-3 conservative court majority, the ideological lines upon which this decision was drawn, the direction of the court is clear. And the influence of former President Donald Trump's court appointees will likely last for a very long time.
A year before the potentially consequential midterm elections — and two years before the presidential primaries begin in earnest — here are four things to watch for what's next for voting rights:
1. Federal lawsuits against states
Many GOP-led states are enacting restrictive voting laws. The Biden Justice Department is already suing Georgia over the law there.
"Our complaint alleges that recent changes to Georgia's election laws were enacted with the purpose of denying or abridging the right of Black Georgians to vote on account of their race or color, in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act," Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a news conference last week.
But Section 2 is exactly what was at issue in this week's Supreme Court case, and the court's conservatives clearly signaled which side of voting rights they are on.
Reacting to the decision, Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley said, "The department remains strongly committed to challenging discriminatory election laws and will continue to use every legal tool available to protect all qualified Americans seeking to participate in the electoral process."
He hinted, however, that there is only so much DOJ can do. "The department urges Congress to enact additional legislation to provide more effective protection for every American's right to vote," Coley added.
2. (Lack of) congressional action
The Voting Rights Act had passed with broad bipartisan support in Congress for decades until the Supreme Court hollowed out a key section of it almost a decade ago.
The court's narrow 5-4 majority in that case also pointed to Congress to fix it.
But since that Supreme Court decision, there has been little movement toward a voting-rights bill that can pass both the House and Senate. Last month, Republicans filibustered a version that passed the Democratic-controlled House.
There are two voting-rights bills — the broad For the People Act and the more narrow John Lewis Voting Rights Act, named for the late congressman and civil rights icon. Both are stalled.
That has led to calls from many progressives and some civil rights groups to eliminate the procedure that requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.
"We know that without congressional action, there is not nearly the scope of enforcement initiatives available to the president that we think are necessary," Wade Henderson, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told NPR's Ayesha Rascoe. "For that reason, both bills must be passed in some form."
Key Democratic senators, however, like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, do not support eliminating the procedural step because they fear it will lead to even more partisanship. Eliminating it cannot pass without their support because of Democrats' narrow majority (with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Harris).
3. Lots of efforts in the states
Like so many other controversial issues that are deadlocked in polarized Washington, most of the action is taking place in the states.
Hundreds of bills have been introduced, and they overwhelmingly skew toward curtailing access. In fact, the country has already enacted more restrictive voting laws than in any other time in U.S. history.
Already, 17 states enacted 28 new laws that restrict access, the most ever, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks legislation and advocates for more expansive voting laws.
There was rare bipartisan agreement in Kentucky to expand voting access, but, largely, Republican-led states are looking to restrict voting access, while Democratic-led ones are trying to expand it.
4. Biden's bully pulpit
President Biden condemned the Supreme Court decision, saying it would cause "severe damage" to voting rights.
Cedric Richmond, a senior White House adviser, told NPR's Rascoe that the White House views this moment as the beginning of the fight.
"We're going to fight in the courts; we're going to fight in the streets," he said. "We're going to fight for fair voting. We're going to do that, but, at the same time, we want our groups and community leaders to also take the belt-and-suspenders approach of educating people on how to deal with these new laws. What do they mean? How do I still vote meaningfully?"
Richmond added that Biden is going to be using the bully pulpit and the power of the White House to try to bring civil rights groups, private companies and activists together to bring more attention to it.
Activists say Biden should push to keep in place the safety measures that were enacted during the last election to protect unvaccinated people against COVID-19.
Vice President Harris is the point person for the administration's efforts. The president himself will be taking the message on the road next week, hoping, in the words of another president, that change can come from outside Washington.
But even when former President Barack Obama tried that, on things like gun violence, it didn't work out so well.
And big, sweeping change — that can only come from Congress.
Undocumented immigrants from El Salvador wait to be deported on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flight bound for San Salvador. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
A motorist watches from a pullout on the Trans-Canada Highway as a wildfire burns on the side of a mountain in Lytton, B.C., Thursday, July 1, 2021. (photo: Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press)
British Columbia reports jump in number of ‘sudden and unexpected deaths’ and links them to extreme weather
early 500 people may have been killed by record-breaking temperatures in Canada’s westernmost province, as officials warn the grim toll from “heat dome” could rise again as more deaths are reported.
On Friday, British Columbia’s chief coroner said that 719 “sudden and unexpected deaths” had been reported over the past week – triple the number during a similar period in a typical year.
“We are releasing this information as it is believed likely the extreme weather BC has experienced in the past week is a significant contributing factor to the increased number of deaths,” the chief coroner, Lisa Lapointe, said in a statement.
The coroner’s office said it would typically expect close to 230 deaths in a similar period.
The overall total will probably rise after more communities provide data, but Lapointe said the province has seen a promising downward trend in recent days as the heat ebbs and shifts eastward.
Officials have cautioned it will probably take months to determine the exact cause of death for hundreds of residents, but they say heat played a significant role in the surge in fatalities, especially among seniors in the province.
“Many of the deaths experienced over the past week were among older individuals living alone in private residences with minimal ventilation,” Lapointe said in her statement.
In a region of the country accustomed to mild summer temperatures, communities were forced to scramble to find ways to help vulnerable residents stay safe amid blistering temperatures.
But regional officials are facing growing questions over their response to the crisis.
On Thursday, the head of the province’s emergency health service apologized after residents were made to wait hours for ambulances during the worst of the heatwave.
Global News reported that British Columbia’s emergency services centre – which allows paramedics to be redeployed to high need areas – wasn’t activated until after the worst of the heatwave had passed.
The weather system that enveloped large swaths of the Pacific north-west broke 103 heat records across British Columbia, Alberta, Yukon and Northwest Territories earlier this week, according to Environment Canada.
The heat has done little to help a province already vulnerable to the devastating effects of wildfires.
At least two people are believed to have died in a wildfire that destroyed the village of Lytton on Wednesday. Police attempted to search for missing residents, but dangerous conditions have prevented them from entering the community.
Late on Friday, 136 active wildfires were reported in British Columbia, including nine which were “of concern”, according to officials. The dry, hot weather is expected to continue for the next week, hampering efforts to gain control over the fires.
A worker mixes pesticides which will be sprayed on a field. (photo: David Bacon/Report Digital-REA/Redux)
EPA managers removed information about the risks posed by dozens of chemicals, according to whistleblowers.
anagers and career staff in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention tampered with the assessments of dozens of chemicals to make them appear safer, according to four scientists who work at the agency. The whistleblowers, whose jobs involve identifying the potential harms posed by new chemicals, provided The Intercept with detailed evidence of pressure within the agency to minimize or remove evidence of potential adverse effects of the chemicals, including neurological effects, birth defects, and cancer.
On several occasions, information about hazards was deleted from agency assessments without informing or seeking the consent of the scientists who authored them. Some of these cases led the EPA to withhold critical information from the public about potentially dangerous chemical exposures. In other cases, the removal of the hazard information or the altering of the scientists’ conclusions in reports paved the way for the use of chemicals, which otherwise would not have been allowed on the market.
This is the first of a series of articles based on the four whistleblowers’ highly detailed allegations, which were supported by dozens of internal emails with supervisors, meeting summaries, and other documents. Together, the evidence they provided shows a pattern in which the EPA failed to follow the law that oversees chemical regulation, particularly the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, and depicts a workplace in which EPA staffers regularly faced retribution for following the science.
“The Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention is broken,” the scientists wrote in a statement they provided to The Intercept and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. “The entire New Chemicals program operates under an atmosphere of fear — scientists are afraid of retaliation for trying to implement TSCA the way Congress intended, and they fear that their actions (or inactions) at the direction of management are resulting in harm to human health and the environment.”
The four EPA staff members, who hold doctorates in toxicology, chemistry, biochemistry, and medicinal chemistry, said that they told colleagues and supervisors within the agency about the interference with their work. Each of the scientists also filed complaints with either the EPA’s inspector general or the Office of Science Integrity, which has pledged to investigate corruption within the agency. But because most of their concerns remained unaddressed months after they disclosed them — and because, in each case, the altering of the record presented a potential risk to human health — the scientists said they felt compelled to make their complaints public.
Maybe the Hazards Will Go Away
Elyse Osterweil, one of the four scientists, said she was at first reluctant to speak up about the intense pressure she faced from her supervisors to remove references to potential toxicity from the assessments of new chemicals. The assessments, which use animal studies to gauge a chemical’s potential risk to humans, can lead the agency to place limits on its use — or to ban it entirely. In the case of one substance that Osterweil was reviewing in February of this year, the animal studies suggested serious potential for harm. Rats exposed to a single dose of the chemical had become lethargic, lost weight, and had trouble moving. Some became comatose, and others died.
“Usually with this type of acute study, there are no effects,” said Osterweil. “So this was a red flag to me that we needed further information.” But when Osterweil said in a meeting that she needed more data to complete her hazard assessment report, one of her supervisors responded with a series of questions. “She kept asking me, ‘Look at the data, look at the data, look at it again, tell me what you see,’” Osterweil said of her supervisor. “I knew she wanted me to make the hazards go away, and she even said that: ‘Why don’t you take a look at the actual study data again, and maybe the hazards will go away?’”
Although she knew she didn’t have enough information to say that the chemical didn’t pose a risk, Osterweil seriously considered giving in to the pressure to deem it safe. “There was a time when I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should let this one go and just pick my battles,’” she said. “But I just couldn’t.”
A chemist named Martin Phillips faced similar pushback when he was assessing a mixture of compounds in January of 2020. One component of the product, which was to be used in cleaning solutions, is a chemical that caused birth defects and miscarriage in experiments on rats. Phillips and another risk assessor noted the developmental effects in the chemical’s hazard assessment, which must by law then be added to the chemical’s safety data sheet, a document the Occupational Safety and Health Administration uses to communicate risk to workers. But the company that had submitted the product for approval balked at the requirement. And the day after the assessment Phillips wrote was finalized, a representative of the company who had recently worked in the same division of the EPA met with several of Phillips’s colleagues and his supervisor, whom she had known from her time at the agency. Phillips wasn’t invited to attend the meeting. The following day, another assessment of the chemical was uploaded into the EPA’s computer system without Phillips’s consent or knowledge. The new version omitted the information about the birth defects and miscarriages.
When he learned of the new assessment, Phillips asked that the original one be restored. The meeting that followed was hostile, with a senior science adviser in the office calling Phillips “passive aggressive” for being so concerned about the assessment. While some information about the chemical was restored in the assessment after Phillips complained about its removal, the warning about its potential to cause developmental toxicity, which would alert pregnant people to these harms, never made it into the safety data sheet.
Phillips had his work revised without his knowledge on other occasions too. In one case in 2019, he was asked to assess a chemical even though the manufacturer had not submitted studies. Phillips followed the EPA’s written guidance for such situations and used toxicity numbers for the class to which the chemical belongs. When he plugged in the proper values, Phillips calculated that the likely exposures to the chemical would exceed the agency’s safety limit by more than 15,000 times. Three months after he submitted the document with this conclusion, he noticed that a new assessment of the chemical had been uploaded to the EPA’s computer system. In this new assessment, which deviated from guidelines, the assessor found that the chemical posed only a slight risk and that workers who used the material could mitigate the danger by wearing protective gear.
The second assessment, which found the chemical not likely to pose harm, was finalized in August of 2020. “So it went from being over 15,000 times over the safe dose to you just need to wear a dust mask and you’ll be fine,” said Phillips.
Siding with the Company
All four scientists said the pressure to downplay the risk of chemicals increased during their time in the division. “We started getting increasing pressure to use the wrong exposure metrics,” said Sarah Gallagher, who joined the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, which is within Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, in May 2019. (The Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention is also home to the Office of Pesticide Programs.)
Gallagher protested changes in multiple risk assessments between March and June of 2020. Her supervisors asked her to represent the developmental effects of one chemical, which included the reduction of fetal weight in animal studies, as effects on the pregnant people. Such a mischaracterization would mean that the risk the chemical poses to a developing human fetus would not be reflected by its safety data sheet. Gallagher refused to make the change.
One month later, she was reassigned to another office.
Even after her transfer, documents she had written while in the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention continued to be altered, including an assessment of a PFAS compound. Because there was limited information available about the chemical, she had looked to studies of similarly structured compounds, as is EPA policy. In this case, one of the closest analogues was PFOA, an industrial chemical that poses both cancer and developmental risks, as Gallagher noted in her assessment. But one of her former supervisors had instructed another scientist to remove her reference to PFOA from the assessment and replace it with another, less toxic chemical to gauge its safety. The change resulted in a 33-fold underestimation of the compound’s risk, according to Gallagher.
William Irwin, another of the four whistleblowers, who has worked at the EPA for over 11 years as a toxicologist, was also moved out of the office after repeatedly resisting pressure to change his assessments to favor industry. Irwin said that while it had seemed obvious that the pressure stemmed from chemical companies, the science adviser in the office made the point irrefutably clear during an argument over one particular chemical assessment.
“At one point, he was shouting at me to change it,” Irwin said of the science adviser, who was urging him to eliminate hazards noted in the assessment. “He basically was siding with the company, shouting at me that ‘the company went apeshit when they saw this document.’” Irwin replied, “Well, that’s the assessment.”
Irwin didn’t make the changes. “I actually added extra hazards to it,” he said. “It was also a carcinogen.” Several months after that encounter, the antagonism stopped when Irwin was transferred out of the office. The scientist saw the move as a last resort for his managers. “I have three board certifications in toxicology, so it was hard for them to say, ‘William, you’re stupid,’ and so instead they just kicked me out of the program.”
Phillips was also transferred in September 2020. Meanwhile, Osterweil continues to work in the office, where she said disputes over chemical assessments and retaliation against her have continued unabated.
The ongoing issues are evidence that the pressures on chemical assessors within the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention have persisted even under the Biden administration, according to Kyla Bennett, director of science policy at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, an organization that provides support to whistleblowers and helped the scientists draft their disclosure document. “The problems in OCSPP are not due solely to the Trump administration and its appointees,” said Bennett. “The issues faced by our clients occurred before Trump took office, during the Trump years, and continue now.”
On Monday, PEER submitted its complaint to the EPA inspector general; Michal Freedhoff, assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention; and Khanna, asking that they conduct an audit to identify risk assessments that were altered without the knowledge or consent of the risk assessor; investigate apparent violations of the EPA’s records management policy, in which documents were altered; and evaluate the process that allowed these changes to be made and remain uncorrected.
Khanna provided a statement to The Intercept applauding the whistleblowers. “Clean, cancer-free air and water still isn’t a given in our country,” Khanna wrote. “I will continue to monitor this situation and ensure that these scientists’ concerns are addressed to ensure that toxic or harmful chemicals are not going out to the market without the appropriate health and safety warnings. I am so proud of the work of our Environmental Subcommittee is doing to create a healthier world.”
Asked about the complaint, the EPA wrote in an email that “This Administration is committed to investigating alleged violations of scientific integrity. It is critical that all EPA decisions are informed by rigorous scientific information and standards. As one of his first acts as Administrator, Administrator Regan issued a memorandum outlining concrete steps to reinforce the agency’s commitment to science.
“EPA takes seriously all allegations of violations of scientific integrity. EPA’s scientific integrity official and scientific integrity team members will thoroughly investigate any allegation of violation of EPA’s scientific integrity policy that they receive and work to safeguard EPA science. Additionally, EPA is currently reviewing agency policies, processes, and practices to ensure that the best available science and data inform Agency decisions. EPA is committed to fostering a culture of evaluation and continuous learning that promotes an open exchange of differing scientific and policy positions. Additionally, retaliation against EPA employees for reporting violations alleged to have occurred will not be tolerated in this administration. EPA leadership are reviewing these complaints, and any appropriate action will be taken.”
While such complaints are usually kept confidential, by Tuesday many mangers in the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention had somehow obtained a copy of the whistleblowers’ allegations. “The fact that EPA released our clients’ names is inappropriate and troubling,” said Bennett. “They’ve been put in an incredibly uncomfortable situation. This gives the managers the chance to circle the wagons trying to go after them.”
For the whistleblowers, the release of their names is just the latest battle in a war they’ve been waging for years. For Gallagher, a scientist with expertise in chemistry and toxicology, the combative turn of her career has been a surprise. “Like a lot of us who are in this, we came to work at the EPA because I wanted to preserve the environment for our children’s children,” said Gallagher. “It’s infuriating that I have to push back against managers to do that.”
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