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A call to the Obama White House that some legal experts say is impeachable fits a pattern of the Governor smearing those who scrutinize him.
n April, 2014, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo placed a call to the White House and reached Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama. Cuomo was, as one official put it, “ranting and raving.” He had announced that he was shuttering the Moreland Commission, a group that he had convened less than a year earlier to root out corruption in New York politics. After Cuomo ended the group’s inquiries, Preet Bharara, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, issued letters instructing commissioners to preserve documents and had investigators from his office interview key witnesses. On the phone with Jarrett, Cuomo railed against Bharara. “This guy’s out of control,” a member of the White House legal team briefed on the call that day recalled Cuomo telling Jarrett. “He’s your guy.”
Jarrett ended the conversation after only a few minutes. Any effort by the White House to influence investigations by a federal prosecutor could constitute criminal obstruction of justice. “He did, in fact, call me and raise concerns about the commission,” Jarrett told me. “As soon as he started talking, and I figured out what he was talking about, I shut down the conversation.” Although Cuomo fumed about Bharara’s efforts, he did not make any specific request before Jarrett ended the call. Nevertheless, Jarrett was alarmed and immediately walked to the office of the White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, to report the conversation. Ruemmler agreed that the call was improper, and told Jarrett that she had acted correctly in ending the conversation without responding to Cuomo’s complaints. “I thought it was highly inappropriate,” the member of the White House’s legal team told me. “It was a stupid call for him to make.” Ruemmler reported the incident to the Deputy Attorney General, James M. Cole, who also criticized the call. “He shouldn’t have been doing that. He’s trying to exert political pressure on basically a prosecution or an investigation,” Cole told me. “So Cuomo trying to use whatever muscle he had with the White House to do it was a nonstarter and probably improper.”
Cuomo’s outreach to the White House may have opened him up to sanction for violating state ethics rules and could be relevant in an ongoing impeachment inquiry by the New York State Assembly. “It’s highly inappropriate and potentially illegal,” Jennifer Rodgers, a former prosecutor in Bharara’s office and an adjunct clinical professor at N.Y.U. Law School, told me. Jessica Levinson, the director of Loyola Law School’s Public Service Institute, added, “If he, in fact, called a U.S. Attorney’s bosses and implied, ‘Stop this guy from looking into me,’ that could easily amount to an impeachable offense.”
White House officials at the time believed that prosecutors might want to interview Jarrett and assess whether the call had risen to the level of illegality. Instead, the Department of Justice notified Bharara. “Everybody basically just said we’re not going to do anything—we’re not going to stop Preet,” Cole said. “The investigation is the investigation, and I don’t care if Andrew Cuomo calls us or not.” Bharara’s office chose not to pursue charges, but he recalled being alarmed. “Andrew Cuomo has no qualms, while he’s under investigation by the sitting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, trying to call the White House to call me off,” Bharara told me. “Trump did that. That’s an extraordinary thing, from my perspective.”
Elkan Abramowitz, an attorney for Cuomo, said that Bharara’s office had asked Cuomo whether he’d had contact with the White House about Bharara and that Cuomo acknowledged that he had, without providing specifics. Abramowitz added, “If Bharara thought this was obstruction of justice, he would have said so at the time.” A spokesperson for Cuomo declined to answer follow-up questions, saying only, of the allegations that Cuomo interfered with the Moreland Commission, “This threadbare narrative has been litigated and re-litigated to death and no wrongdoing was found.”
Cuomo’s vindictiveness, his attacks on officials who defy him, and his attempts to undermine inquiries about him are recurring themes in a report released last week by the New York attorney general, Letitia James. The report documents both allegations from women who say that Cuomo harassed them and claims that Cuomo and his inner circle threatened and smeared employees and political enemies. It is replete with accounts of state employees who say that they feared they would lose their jobs if they attempted to report misconduct by the Governor or his allies. It concludes that Cuomo and his team’s disclosure of confidential files related to one of his accusers, Lindsey Boylan, constituted illegal retaliation. It notes that Cuomo’s staff pressed former employees to call and secretly record women who had made allegations, apparently to collect information to use against them. When the recordings did not serve that end, Cuomo’s staff destroyed them—an act that legal experts said could also figure in ongoing inquiries. As the attorney general’s investigators worked on the report, Cuomo and his allies worked to discredit its authors; his aide Rich Azzopardi, who was instrumental in the disclosure of Boylan’s files, publicly suggested that James, the attorney general, had designs on Cuomo’s job. “There were attempts to undermine and to politicize this investigation, and there were attacks on me as well as members of the team, which I find offensive,” James said last week, as she announced the results of the probe.
Long before Cuomo’s efforts to discredit reports that he had sexually harassed women, he repeatedly interfered in another state probe that threatened him, the Moreland Commission. “Every single thing I’ve seen in the past couple of months was foreshadowed,” Danya Perry, a former federal prosecutor who served as the Moreland Commission’s chief of investigations, told me, in her first on-the-record comments about her work on the panel. The commission began with a sweeping mandate from Cuomo to probe systemic corruption in political campaigns and state government. However, interviews with a dozen former officials with ties to the commission, along with hundreds of pages of internal documents, text messages, and personal notes obtained by The New Yorker, reveal that Cuomo and his team used increasingly heavy-handed tactics to limit inquiries that might implicate him or his allies. “He did not want an investigation into his own dark-money contributions,” Perry recalled. “He was pulling back subpoenas that were gonna go to friends and supporters of his—it was just really unbelievable,” Kathleen Rice, a U.S. representative from Long Island who served as one of the commission’s co-chairs, added.
Both Perry and Rice said that they had not spoken out until now because Cuomo or members of his inner circle had threatened their careers, and because they had seen his team successfully retaliate against others. “I saw them destroy people,” Perry said. “And I did really fear that it could be me.” Claims that Cuomo was interfering with Moreland first surfaced in the press before the commission was shuttered, in early 2014; the Times powerfully documented examples of such interference later that year. The panel did not uncover evidence implicating Cuomo in personal graft, but several of the people involved said that their work was beginning to unravel a web of campaign donations around Cuomo, and could have ensnared his allies and laid bare his loyalties to special interests. “As we began to peel away the layers of the onion, he was behind everything,” Rice said. “I mean, the corruption began and ended at his doorstep.” Rice, Perry, and others also said they believed that Cuomo’s thwarting of the commission’s work, using a playbook that he subsequently employed for years, might constitute a form of corruption. “He obstructed, he lied, he bullied, he threatened,” Perry told me. “It’s an M.O., and all of the different components of it—he tried them on for size with Moreland.”
In early 2013, before Perry joined the Moreland Commission, she met with Cuomo at least twice to discuss leadership roles in the state government, including that of inspector general. She had worked for years as a federal prosecutor in Bharara’s office, serving as the deputy chief of its criminal division and successfully prosecuting a billion-dollar disability-fraud case. In interviews conducted over the past several months, Perry said that Cuomo unleashed a “full-on charm offensive” during their meetings, marked by the same disregard for boundaries later chronicled in the attorney general’s report. In one meeting, he told her about his flagging sex life with his long-term girlfriend, which prompted Perry to change the subject. In another, he gave her a private tour of the capitol building and invited her to the Executive Mansion. “He was definitely very, very personal and fairly intrusive,” she said. She ultimately declined to pursue the inspector-general job, in part because she believed that she was being asked to hold herself out as an independent actor while quietly remaining loyal to the Governor. “I had the sense that the Governor would want me under his thumb,” she said.
But, several months later, when Cuomo’s team approached her about taking on a leading role on the Moreland Commission, she was persuaded by the urgency of its mission. A report issued by the commission described an “epidemic” of graft in Albany, noting that one in every eleven state legislators in recent years had left office under accusations of unethical or criminal conduct. By some measures, New York continues to rank among the most corrupt states in the country. “It really did seem like we had this opportunity to do some real good,” Perry recalled. She took the job after being assured of the commission’s power to issue subpoenas and refer matters for criminal investigation. A former member of the commission’s staff told me that Cuomo had underestimated Perry’s independence. “Otherwise, I don’t think she would have been so favored to take on the Moreland Commission position,” the former staffer said. “It’s just been sort of his way, to try and put in people who he thinks he can control. And, when that backfires, the way he responds is very ugly.”
Rice, who was then the district attorney for Nassau County, recalled that she, too, was initially hesitant to join the commission. Cuomo had a history of establishing oversight panels that were largely ineffectual and tightly controlled by him. Rice had previously served on a commission that Cuomo created in 2012 to investigate failures of planning and infrastructure after Hurricane Sandy. Rice said that her recommendations had been removed from that commission’s final report by Cuomo’s team without her consent. In the summer of 2013, Steve Cohen, a longtime Cuomo adviser, called to enlist her on the new panel. “No, thanks,” she recalled telling him, adding that the Sandy probe was “a terrible, terrible experience.” But Rice, who had used her position as Nassau County district attorney to prosecute a number of political-corruption cases, was ultimately convinced, like Perry, that the work of the new commission could be made independent through its power to issue subpoenas. She agreed to serve as one of the co-chairs, overseeing twenty-two prosecutors, academics, and lawyers who would contribute to its findings.
However, when the commission began pursuing specific targets, the Governor’s office pushed back almost immediately. The commission wanted to look at the New York Joint Commission on Public Ethics, an agency created by Cuomo, in 2011, that had been accused of being both ineffective and under the influence of the Governor. (The body would have been responsible for determining any sanctions related to Cuomo’s White House call.) Late that July, Perry told me, Cohen called her and said that Cuomo’s team did not want the commission to issue subpoenas related to the ethics group or to “suggest it is not doing what it is supposed to be doing.”
When Perry’s investigators continued to pursue the matter, she recalled, “there was a huge fight over it” with Regina Calcaterra, a Cuomo loyalist and former securities lawyer who served as the commission’s executive director. Several staffers said they believed that Calcaterra was monitoring their activities and reporting on them to Cuomo’s team. One lawyer working for the commission recalled seeing Calcaterra inspecting the team’s trash cans and desks after business hours. In response to the inquiries about the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, Calcaterra called Perry and shouted at her, saying that they would anger Cuomo’s team. According to the notes that Perry took during her time on the commission, Calcaterra demanded that Perry “tell her every single thing that happens so that she can tell the second floor,” a reference to the location of the Governor’s office in the state capitol. (Calcaterra said, in a statement, that she was in “full support” of issuing a subpoena to the ethics group, “regardless of the Governor’s Office’s views.” She also said that she had “suffered significant trauma” owing to negative portrayals of her by commission colleagues in the press.)
Soon after, Calcaterra summoned Perry to her office, where Larry Schwartz, another Cuomo loyalist, called and “flipped the fuck out” over speakerphone, Perry said. “Larry screamed at me for not understanding political sensitivities,” she said, addressing her “like a child” and repeatedly asking whether she understood him. (In a statement, Schwartz said, of Perry, “I had many conversations with her. One of the challenges of her hiring was her lack of experience or knowledge about how State Government worked. As a result, I had numerous conversations with Danya and others on her staff to download as much as I could. My aim was to avoid wasted or fruitless efforts. I was not always successful.”) In her notes, Perry wrote, of the episode, “2d floor went bananas.” The Joint Commission on Public Ethics, she added, “was the Gov’s creature and his people were on it.”
The following month, Perry was in a conference room conducting interviews when she started getting texts from a commission staffer informing her that Calcaterra was frantically attempting to recall process servers who were delivering subpoenas. “Regina is running up and down the hall saying we have to pull back the subpoenas,” the staffer wrote in an e-mail, which was first disclosed by New York. “Walmart, FedEx, and respective lobbyists.” Walmart and FedEx had both lobbied for favorable provisions in state legislation, and the commission had been investigating whether the companies’ contributions in Albany breached ethical or legal guidelines. Both companies also have connections to Cuomo: members of the Walton family have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to his campaigns in recent years. FedEx, too, had donated to Cuomo, before he decided whether to support legislation that could have significantly threatened the company’s bottom line. (Spokespeople for Walmart and FedEx both denied any improper lobbying.) The Times later reported that Schwartz was also involved in attempts to get the commission to withdraw subpoenas, including ones directed at Buying Time, an advertising firm that had worked on Cuomo’s campaign, and the Real Estate Board of New York, a lobbying outfit whose members included significant donors to the Governor. (Schwartz said he believed that “the focus of the Commission was on the State Legislature, not the Executive Branch,” and that he considered subpoenas to entities associated with the state executive branch to be inappropriate. He said that a committee official he had reached had agreed with his judgment and, with the staff, “made the decision to pull back on those subpoenas.”) Perry refused to back down, and all of the subpoenas were ultimately issued, but Cuomo allies warned her that the Governor’s office was displeased. “This is not the U.S. Attorney’s office,” she recalled Cohen telling her. She was being “too independent and aggressive,” another executive staffer said.
Rice said that, after she backed Perry, she also faced swift blowback, some of it delivered in calls from Cuomo, who argued that Rice had a conflict of interest, because the commission would be scrutinizing her donors. “The threats were almost from the very beginning, and I’ll never forget the call. He said, ‘I want you to step down,’ ” she told me. “Because I always sided with Danya. And I said no.”
The Governor’s allies also created obstacles after the commission retained K2 Intelligence, a private investigation firm, to analyze databases of political contributions and identify improper special-interest donations. The firm agreed to do the work at a discounted price, according to Perry, but the contract was terminated after a few months. Calcaterra said that there were concerns about the company’s performance and a desire to create a fairer competitive-bidding process. No company was subsequently hired. Perry, Rice, and several other people involved said that they believed K2’s work was halted because it was beginning to yield results that were uncomfortable for the Cuomo Administration. “They started spitting out some great avenues for investigation,” Perry said. “And that’s when Regina just cut their contract.” Rice added, “The second floor didn’t like what K2 was able to do, just looking at incontrovertible data.” A former K2 employee told me, “The short version is that Cuomo kind of shut it down when the investigation was kind of pointing toward a lot of his cronies in the real-estate world—getting a little too close to home.”
As Perry’s frustration mounted, she complained to Cohen in an August 28, 2013, text message: “it is v clear to everyone that the 2d flr is directing every thing we do. We have moved forward on exactly nothing as a result.” She made similar complaints to the wider group of commissioners at a regular briefing the following day. Cuomo allies in Perry’s orbit began to warn her of the potential consequences to her career. Cohen told her that Calcaterra was “torching” Perry when reporting back to Cuomo, according to her notes from the time. (Calcaterra told me, “It is true that Ms. Perry and I often disagreed professionally on various aspects of the Commission’s efforts as colleagues will certainly do from time to time.”) In a text, Cohen wrote, “Get out of the line of fire on this. Trust trust trust me.” Cohen also warned in a call that Cuomo could use the press and the legal community to “make my life very difficult,” Perry recalled. (Perry said that she believed Cohen was advising her as a friend. “He was conveying what would happen, and that he didn’t want to see it happen,” she said.) An attorney for Cuomo told her that she had to “get in line” or Cuomo would “scorch the ends of the earth to destroy me,” Perry recalled. “Don’t fight this,” the attorney said, according to Perry’s notes. “This will all be easier once your spirit is broken.” (The attorney said that he could not recall the exchanges and that Cuomo had been supportive of the commission.) In a text in September, Perry wrote to Cohen, “I feel like I am in a snake pit, and don’t know which way to turn . . . this is honestly one of the hardest things I have been through.”
That month, Perry was summoned to a meeting with Cuomo, in his office in Manhattan. With Calcaterra and Schwartz present, Cuomo told Perry that “no criminal cases” should come from the commission’s investigations. “He said it was not our purpose, as there were already ‘nine thousand prosecutors’ looking at corruption,” Perry recalled. “It was shocking to me,” she added. “I had always been told and believed that, if we found criminal conduct, we would be referring it and not sweeping it under the rug.” Cuomo complained that the commission’s subpoenas had been “distracting,” Perry recalled, and that she should stop issuing them. As she remembers the exchange, he told her that the commission should file a report based on its work to date, and support his efforts to enact a law that would include modest reforms. “He was sort of prescribing what he wanted the report to look like, and that this was all about getting the media to like it,” Perry said. “He was basically saying, ‘We’ll get this law, and then we’re done. We’re shutting down.’ ”
Cuomo mocked the commission’s co-chairs, Perry recalled, calling Rice an “angry” Irishwoman with an “axe to grind.” Rice and Perry, he said, were “a problem.” At the end of the meeting, Cuomo pulled Perry aside, showed her a picture of himself on a motorcycle, and told her about a road trip he planned to make upstate. Perry found Cuomo’s sudden shift to a friendly tone hollow; she said that the Governor had made it “very clear how mad he was at how I had turned out, how disappointing I was.” Perry considered resigning but was warned against it by Cuomo intermediaries, including the attorney, who told her that it would “look terrible” for Cuomo and further damage her standing with him, according to Perry’s notes. “It was, honestly, one of the lowest periods of my life,’’ Perry told me. (Schwartz said that he could not recall the meeting. Calcaterra said, “I recall a meeting did occur with named parties, but I do not recall the specific dialogue that took place.”)
That fall, the Moreland Commission prepared a preliminary report that included calls for more public funding for elections, lower limits on political contributions, and more transparency regarding legislators’ finances. Perry and others said that, as a consequence of Cuomo’s interference, the report included less scrutiny of individuals and entities, and of the Governor’s own reliance on dark money. Perry told me, “No one benefitted from that more than he did. We weren’t allowed to look at that.” Rice added, “The ultimate irony is that he was trying to root out political corruption—just that which doesn’t involve him.”
Rice and the commission’s co-chairs selected two successive independent ethics attorneys to help write the preliminary report, only to be overruled by Calcaterra both times. Instead, a junior staffer on the Governor’s team was selected. Perry recalled that staffer acknowledging his conflicted feelings about the assignment, becoming emotional as he told her that “everything had to be seen through the lens of what was good for the Governor and what was bad for the Governor.” ( Calcaterra told me, “I encouraged the use of an independent report writer early on. . . . However, the Governor’s office wanted to have a role in the selection of the person.”) A draft with more emphasis on the provisions that Cuomo had fought for was leaked to reporters first, a move that Perry and others involved believed to be deliberate. “Our feeling at the time was that it was not an error that that report went out first,” a lawyer who worked with Rice on the commission said. “That was different from that carefully litigated report the commissioners authorized.”
Rice said that Cuomo continued to pressure her during the preparation of the preliminary report and afterward. She likened the heated arguments she had with Cuomo to “physical assaults, even though they were verbal.” The lawyer who worked with Rice remembered “seeing her after she’d talked to the Governor, and you could just feel the stress following that conversation.” When Rice began to consider running for Congress, Cuomo’s attacks escalated. In January, 2014, as Cuomo’s team sought to dismantle the commission, the Governor told Rice that, if she resigned, he would support her candidacy. If she did not, he threatened to remove her and to oppose her future political ambitions. The lawyer said that the Governor’s office had prepared opposition research on Rice, who told Perry that the Governor’s team would “plant bad stories” about her if she defied him.
In early 2014, as their fears that Cuomo would disband the commission grew, Perry, Rice, and the co-chairs discussed how best to salvage their investigative materials. Responses to their subpoenas were still coming in. Calcaterra, several commission staffers said, was monitoring the movements of Perry and other officials and reporting back to Cuomo. “ We were forced to communicate only in person or by encrypted message,” Perry told me. “We took home hard copies of sensitive documents.”
In late January, Rice resigned. A month later, Perry followed. Her final act before departing was to send her cases to various prosecutors. “The only way I knew to preserve our work and to make sure that the criminal cases were actually investigated was to refer them to different prosecutors’ offices on my way out the door,” she told me. “That was the only way I knew to accomplish the mission I thought we had set out to do.” In early April, Cuomo announced a budget deal with legislators that included modest improvements to bribery and corruption statutes—the perceived victory that he had told Perry he sought. On a conference call with reporters, he announced that the commission, having served its goal, would be shuttered.
Bharara told me that the commission’s work aided his case against the Democratic State Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver, one of two Cuomo allies who were later convicted on federal corruption charges. But Perry’s hopes for more extensive criminal repercussions and legislative reforms had been dashed. “A lot of time and money and good intentions all went down the drain,” she said. “A couple of people were brought to justice, but obviously the system hasn’t changed at all.”
Perry, who now works in private practice, said that she spent years piecing her life back together. “I walked out of there at a real low in every possible way,” she said. “I had no job. I was going through a divorce. Three young kids. Like, I was terrified. . . . If I had stayed in favor, the Governor could have appointed me to something big, and, you know, I think I could have definitely had a completely different trajectory.” In December, 2015, Perry encountered Cuomo at one of his fund-raisers, hosted by a wealthy donor. She recalled Cuomo gesturing at her while turning to her companion and saying, “This one’s a little troublemaker, isn’t she?”
Rice successfully ran for Congress and remains an outspoken Cuomo critic. She told me that she continues to experience fallout. A significant campaign donor, she added, recently told her that Cuomo allies had urged him to stop supporting her. “This is the way he’s kind of taking it out on me,” she said.
After his initial call to the White House about Bharara, Cuomo continued to attack him. In a memorandum issued by his attorneys last week, Cuomo disclosed only one, less legally perilous, call with the White House, in the fall of 2014. He claimed that he called the Administration to lobby against Bharara becoming Attorney General, which had been rumored in the press. One longtime Cuomo aide said that the Governor also called the Donald Trump White House to complain about Bharara. (Cuomo’s office did not answer questions about that call.) In 2017, after Trump fired Bharara while he was continuing to build cases against Cuomo allies, articles assailing Bharara appeared in the New York Daily News. Cuomo advisers said that they believed those stories had likely been planted on the Governor’s behalf.
This year, as the state attorney general’s office scrutinized the harassment allegations against Cuomo, allies of the Governor attacked Joon Kim, Bharara’s former deputy, who was one of the independent counsels retained to author the attorney general’s report. On March 16th, Josh Vlasto, a longtime adviser to Cuomo, wrote in a group text that Cohen had approached him about the effort to sully Kim. “Steve told me this morning they are asking him to spread oppo on Joon Kim. Don’t think we want to be getting down with that crowd,” he wrote. Ken Sunshine, a longtime public-relations executive and Cuomo confidant, later spoke with an editor at the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column, conveying rumors in political circles that Kim was trying to unseat Cuomo so that Bharara could run for governor. Sunshine, who was not employed by Cuomo, learned of the Governor’s desire to spread the rumor from a member of the Governor’s team. Bharara said that he has no plans to run for office. “ He was deliberately planting lies about me and lies about other people,” Bharara said.
The attempt to plant the rumor backfired: Page Six ran an item last month accusing Cuomo’s team of fabricating a “fishy story” about Bharara as a “smokescreen.” Those tactics could lead to more lasting consequences. State legislators considering impeachment proceedings may use the episodes to help establish patterns of retaliatory behavior. “He’s always figuring out ways to discredit the investigation, to discredit the accusers,” Bharara told me. “The real story is Andrew Cuomo cannot tolerate being investigated, by anyone.”
President Joe Biden with bipartisan group of Senators. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty)
Democrats along with 19 Republicans approved the public-works package in a Tuesday morning vote, teeing it up soon for the House
he Senate on Tuesday approved a roughly $1 trillion proposal to improve the nation’s roads, bridges, pipes, ports and Internet connections, advancing a historic burst in federal spending after years of failed attempts on Capitol Hill to invest anew in the country’s aging infrastructure.
The 69-to-30 vote follows weeks of turbulent private talks and fierce public debates that sometimes teetered on collapse, as the White House labored alongside Democrats and Republicans to achieve the sort of deal that had eluded them for years. Even though the proposal must still clear the House, where some Democrats recently have raised concerns the measure falls short of what they seek, the Senate outcome moves the bill one step closer to delivering President Biden his first major bipartisan win.
The package, nearly half of which constitutes new spending, would mark the most significant investment in the country’s inner workings since Congress marshaled a massive yet smaller rescue bill in the shadow of the Great Recession. It would combine lawmakers’ desire for immediate, urgently needed fixes to the country’s crumbling infrastructure with longer-term goals to combat challenges including climate change.
The bill proposes more than $110 billion to replace and repair roads, bridges and highways, and $66 billion to boost passenger and freight rail. That transit investment marks the most significant infusion of cash in the country’s railways since the creation of Amtrak about half a century ago, the White House said.
The infrastructure plan includes an additional $55 billion to address lingering issues in the U.S. water supply, such as an effort to replace every lead pipe in the nation. It allocates $65 billion to modernize the country’s power grid. And it devotes billions in additional sums to rehabilitating waterways, improving airports and expanding broadband Internet service, particularly after a pandemic that forced Americans to conduct much of their lives online.
Lawmakers also agreed to authorize a significant tranche of funding to improve the environment and respond to the oft-deadly consequences of a fast-warming planet. The aid includes $7.5 billion to build out a national network of electric-vehicle charging stations, a major priority for Biden, who has worked to advance the next generation of emissions-friendly vehicles. And it apportions $47 billion to respond to wildfires, droughts, coastal erosion, heat waves and other climate crises that previously have wrought significant economic havoc nationwide.
In recent weeks, Biden has hailed the proposal, which the White House helped craft alongside its chief congressional sponsors, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio). The two for weeks shepherded a group of 10 lawmakers from both parties toward a compromise that could thread a needle — proffering the massive investments Biden initially sought without raising alarm among spending-wary Republicans.
The result is a bill that is less than the roughly $2.2 trillion American Jobs Plan that Biden put forward this spring, but one that every chamber Democrat along with 19 Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) could still support. Democratic leaders have pledged to pursue the rest of their spending priorities as part of a second $3.5 trillion measure they are set to start debating later Tuesday.
“It will improve the lives of all Americans,” Portman said in a floor speech over the weekend as lawmakers prepared to vote. “People do expect here in America, [with] this great economy we have, we should also be able to lead the world in infrastructure. But we don’t.”
Lawmakers jettisoned Biden’s plan to raise taxes on corporations to finance the new infrastructure investments, a nonstarter for Republicans, who strained to protect the tax cuts they instituted under President Donald Trump four years ago. Instead, their new legislative effort relies on a mix of odd measures — and potential budgetary gimmicks — to try to offset its cost. An official analysis of the bill by the Congressional Budget Office on Thursday found that lawmakers fell short, threatening to add more than $250 billion to the deficit over the next decade.
The sour score set the stage for one of the only significant fights over the bill. The spending concerns prompted Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) to block the chamber from adopting the infrastructure measure swiftly over the weekend, arguing that Democrats should not be able to expedite passage of a work product that he said had not been paid for in full.
“We must fight to preserve our American system and the American Dream, not — in a tornado of hurried legislative activity — seal its decline,” Hagerty said in a floor speech Saturday.
In doing so, Hagerty’s opposition opened a rift between Democrats and Republicans over potential amendments, because changes to the bill’s timeline as well as its text required some measure of unanimous consent. The standoff ultimately prevented senators from making at least one key change to the bill, targeting highly disputed rules that require cryptocurrency investors and brokers to report more information to the Internal Revenue Service for tax purposes.
Broadly, though, lawmakers managed to avoid the same intractable fights that have scuttled other legislative efforts this year to regulate guns, change voting laws and investigate the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6. An earlier effort between the White House and top GOP senators to work out a compromise on infrastructure similarly fell short, illustrating the fragile victory that the Senate achieved in advancing a bill with Biden’s backing.
At the same time, the moment of political accord threatened to be short lived. Immediately, Senate Democrats pivoted to debate on their roughly $3.5 trillion budget measure that seeks to advance all of the spending that infrastructure negotiators omitted from their bill. Democrats unveiled the blueprint Monday, and intend to pass it this week, under a fast-track timeline that Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) set out in the weeks leading up to the Senate’s summer recess.
“Other parts of our infrastructure, not addressed by this bipartisan bill, still need focused attention and help,” Schumer said before the vote, citing areas including climate change. He added the Senate intends to adopt a budget that makes "generational transformation in these areas.”
Republicans are expected to unanimously oppose that $3.5 trillion outline, which Democrats say will expand Medicare, invest new sums to combat global warming and boost federal programs that aid parents and children. Unlike infrastructure reform, Democrats intend to bypass the GOP and advance it through a process known as reconciliation, which requires them to attain a majority to proceed rather than the usual 60 votes.
Motivating some of the party’s lawmakers is a belief that the Senate’s bipartisan plan on its own is inadequate to tackle the country’s economic challenges. Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), who oversees the top infrastructure committee in the chamber, as recently as last week said the process is “not a done deal.”
“As the Senate wraps up its work on a bipartisan infrastructure bill and sends it over to the House, I will continue to push for the inclusion of transformational policies that support American workers, tackle the climate crisis, and catapult our infrastructure into the 21st century and beyond wherever they can be included,” he said in a statement ahead of its adoption.
Other House Democrats, meanwhile, have emphasized in recent days they aren’t even willing to begin debating infrastructure until the Senate completes its work on a reconciliation package. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, reiterated that pledge this week on behalf of her powerful bloc of lawmakers, without whom House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) cannot proceed. In a recent interview, Jayapal stressed there are “not going to be votes for the bipartisan bill without votes for the reconciliation bill.”
The successful vote Tuesday comes after months of bickering between lawmakers and the White House over Biden’s broader agenda, which he termed “Build Back Better," dating back to the 2020 presidential campaign. Biden sought to deliver Washington its long-sought infrastructure ambitions after years of false starts under Trump, who could never coalesce Congress around a deal.
The legislative saga began in the spring, after Biden released his jobs plan and invited GOP lawmakers led by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) to the White House for a series of ill-fated talks. The two sides after weeks of discussions could not agree on a total amount for infrastructure spending, much less how to pay for it, leading Biden in June to end negotiations amid public sniping between the two parties.
As that endeavor collapsed, a second group of 10 Democratic and Republican senators began to huddle on their own in pursuit of a deal. Lawmakers including Democratic Sens. Jon Tester (Mont.) and Mark R. Warner (Va.) and Republican Sens. Mitt Romney (Utah) and Susan Collins (Maine) met alongside Biden’s top aides in a series of late-night sessions at the Capitol — often over bottles of wine — as they hammered out what became a blueprint for a $1.2 trillion outline released in late June.
The fraught process nearly fell apart only days after they announced their agreement. Biden had threatened at a public event that he could veto a bipartisan public-works deal unless Congress also adopted a larger budget that included his other spending priorities, including his roughly $1.9 trillion families plan. Republicans saw the comment as evidence the White House might not be negotiating in good faith, prompting the president to issue a corrective statement that eventually got the two sides back on track.
It still took weeks of haggling — and pressure applied from Schumer as well as the looming summer recess — before Democrats and Republicans could produce the 2,702-page bill they adopted Tuesday. They had warred in private over differences about how to spend the money in areas like transit and broadband, and how to pay for the spending. Republicans at one point even upended the talks over their concerns about a plan to raise funding for infrastructure through enhanced enforcement of federal tax laws, resulting in the proposal’s removal from the deal.
But when lawmakers gathered on the Senate floor to reveal their final product — delivering several speeches in early August touting the wide-ranging benefits of their proposed investments — they hailed their long-sought accomplishment as a sign the Senate is still a functional body.
“I know it has been difficult, and I know it has been long, and what I am proud to say is that is what our forefathers intended,” Sinema said.
If Kathy Hochul, 62, replaces Gov. Andrew Cuomo, she will become the first woman to lead New York State. (photo: Seth Wenig/AP)
New York will its first female governor in Hochul, a centrist Democrat, following Andrew Cuomo’s resignation over sexual harassment allegations
hen the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, leaves office in 14 days time after resigning over allegations that he sexually harassed at least 11 women, the state will finally get its first female governor.
Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul, 62, has served in her post since 2015. Now, she will take over as New York’s top politician in just two weeks time, Cuomo announced suddenly on Tuesday.
Hochul, considered a centrist Democrat, got her start in politics working in local government, serving in offices like Eerie county clerk before winning a special election for state congress in her hometown district. However, her time as a congresswoman was short-lived, and she lost to Republican Chris Collins the following year.
As lieutenant governor, the Buffalo-raised politician has rarely sought the spotlight and maintained a characteristic distance from her boss. In recent months, as scrutiny around Cuomo intensified over his treatment of women and accusations that his administration intentionally downplayed the true number of New York nursing home deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic, Hochul further separated herself from him.
She called his behavior toward women “repulsive” in the wake of a report from the state attorney general released last week, which detailed allegations that he had sexually harassed 11 women.
“Sexual harassment is unacceptable in any workplace, and certainly not in public service,” Hochul said in an early August statement, according to the New York Times. “The attorney general’s investigation has documented repulsive and unlawful behavior by the governor towards multiple women … No one is above the law.”
Since then, Hochul has reportedly been seeking advice about how to handle filling Cuomo’s shoes. She has been considering how she would approach the office, which employees she might keep and whom she might hire, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Hochul is known for traveling to all of the state’s 62 counties every year and touts her pro-women bonafides on her website. She previously helped lead Cuomo’s “Enough is Enough” campaign against sexual violence on college campuses.
“Kathy has consistently placed issues that are important to women on the top of her agenda. Traveling the state, she has leveraged her position as the highest ranking female official in state government to encourage women to be an active voice for change,” says Hochul’s website.
Some influential labor groups have already started expressing their support for a Hochul administration.
“We are fortunate to have a lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, who is ready to lead with integrity and continue building on the advancements that New York has made towards greater economic, racial and social justice,” said a recent statement from the New York State Nurses Association.
Hochul came up in a predominantly Republican district, and in 2007, when serving as the Eerie county clerk, took a firm stand against then governor Eliot Spitzer’s proposal to issue drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants. At the time, Hochul said she would arrest undocumented people who applied for licenses. In 2018, Hochul walked back those statements, noting that “it is a whole different era out there”.
“I was an elected official in Erie county, and I represented the people of that district,” Hochul told reporters in 2018, according to Politico. “That was 11 years ago, and there were very few people saying that was the right policy at the time.”
Supporters of Hochul say she is known for her incorrigible work ethic and ability to charm leaders and voters alike.
“She visited not only every county in New York State, but every town and village and every borough in New York City,” said former representative John J LaFalce in an interview with the Buffalo News. “And in every single instance, when she left, people liked her.”
A man looks at The Tribute in Light installation from Liberty State Park, marking the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in New York City, as seen from Jersey City, N.J., Sept.11, 2020. (photo: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)
Family members of Sept. 11 victims say the information could shed light on whether any Saudi Arabian officials were involved in the attacks.
he Justice Department signaled Monday that it could release some classified information from its investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks, which families of the victims say could show connections between the Saudi government and the terrorist attackers.
In a letter in federal court, the Biden administration said the FBI recently closed part of the investigation and is now reviewing classified documents and evidence to determine whether more of them can be disclosed.
“The FBI has decided to review its prior privilege assertions to identify additional information appropriate for disclosure,” the letter said. “The FBI will disclose such information on a rolling basis as expeditiously as possible.”
The move comes after victims' family members, first responders and survivors called on President Joe Biden to skip Sept. 11 memorial events this year unless he releases the documents, which they believe implicate Saudi officials in supporting the acts of terrorism. They said that Biden pledged as a candidate to release as much information as possible, but that his administration has since then ignored their letters and requests.
Biden expressed support for the Justice Department’s move, saying in a statement Monday that he promised during his campaign that his administration would be committed to maximum transparency under the law. The department has previously cited state secrets privilege in refusing to declassify the documents.
“In this vein, I welcome the Department of Justice’s filing today, which commits to conducting a fresh review of documents where the government has previously asserted privileges, and to doing so as quickly as possible,” he said.
The Justice Department’s letter was filed in federal court in Manhattan as part of a long-running lawsuit brought by those victims’ families against the Saudi Arabia. The administration did not provide any information about the findings from the probe.
The plaintiffs have said they believe that as many as 25,000 pages of documents have been withheld from discovery in their case.
Brett Eagleson, whose father, Bruce, died at the World Trade Center in 2001, said he and the others who urged Biden not to attend upcoming memorial events are “collectively are at our wits’ end with our own government.”
“We are frustrated, tired and saddened with the fact that the U.S. government for 20 years has chosen to keep information about the death of our loved ones behind lock and key,” he said.
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) heads to a vote on the Senate floor on June 8, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Samuel Corum/Getty)
Warnock’s political career — and democracy in Georgia — could hinge on the most dangerous provision of the state’s new voter suppression law.
ate last month, Georgia Republicans began a process that could end with them seizing control of election administration in Fulton County — a Democratic stronghold that encompasses most of Atlanta.
Under Georgia’s new election law, SB 202, the GOP-controlled state elections board may remove a county’s top election officials and replace them with a temporary superintendent (although this process will likely take months as the board has to jump through a few procedural hoops first). Once such a superintendent is in place, they can disqualify voters, move polling places, and even potentially refuse to certify election results.
Voter suppression laws are nothing new, even in the post-Jim Crow era. And Georgia’s SB 202 is hardly the first effort by Republican state lawmakers to skew elections by making it harder for Democratic constituencies to cast a ballot.
But prior efforts to restrict the franchise frequently placed unnecessary hurdles in the way of voters, such as by requiring them to show certain forms of ID or by limiting where and when voters can cast their ballot. These sorts of laws are troubling, but they can be overcome by determined voters.
SB 202, by contrast, is part of a new generation of election laws that target the nuts and bolts of election administration, potentially allowing voters to be disenfranchised even if they follow the rules.
Because state voter suppression laws targeting ballot counting and election certification are relatively new, Democrats did not come into 2021 with a legislative proposal to address these laws. Democratic leaders’ primary voting rights bill, the For the People Act, includes a grab bag of provisions intended to neutralize state laws making it harder to vote. But the For the People Act’s drafters did not anticipate something like SB 202’s provisions allowing the Republican Party to take control of election administration in Democratic counties.
Which brings us to the Preventing Election Subversion Act of 2021, a bill introduced by Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) that seeks to fill that gap.
It doesn’t prevent Georgia’s elections board from removing a local election official, but it does impose some procedural safeguards intended to prevent local officials from being removed for partisan reasons. Among other things, it allows such officials to sue for reinstatement in federal court.
Additionally, the bill would make it a felony to harass or intimidate election workers in order to interfere with their official duties. GOP lawmakers in some states, including Texas, are pushing legislation making it harder for election workers to remove partisan observers who disrupt an election. Warnock’s bill would subject the worst-behaved election observers to criminal charges.
Realistically, Warnock’s bill has a long way to go before it becomes law. Warnock is reportedly in negotiations with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) to include safeguards against “election subversion” in a package of voting rights reforms that enjoys Manchin’s blessing. As the most conservative Democratic senator in an evenly divided Senate, Manchin is key to advancing any meaningful voting rights legislation.
And, even if Manchin signs on to the Preventing Election Subversion Act, that support is unlikely to amount to much unless Democratic senators unanimously agree to eliminate the GOP’s power to filibuster voting rights bills. Plus, there’s always a risk that an increasingly conservative judiciary will refuse to enforce new voting rights legislation.
But, at the very least, this bill is a sign that Democrats understand that the GOP recently escalated its tactics in the voting rights war, and that Democrats — and democracy — need an adequate countermeasure.
What exactly could the Preventing Election Subversion Act do in Georgia?
SB 202 presents a devilish problem for federal policymakers.
On its face, SB 202 creates a process that can be used to remove local elections officials who violate the law, or who demonstrate “nonfeasance, malfeasance, or gross negligence in the administration of the elections.” Few people would argue that election officials who repeatedly break the law, or who prove incapable of doing their jobs well, should remain in office. It’s entirely reasonable for a state to create a nonpartisan process to remove officials who are bad at their jobs.
The problem with SB 202, however, is that, in effect, it creates a partisan process to remove local elections officials. The bill ensures that Republicans will control four of the five seats on the state elections board for as long as the GOP controls both chambers of the state legislature. (As they have since 2005.) And it removes Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who rebuffed former President Donald Trump’s attempts to toss out Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia’s 2020 election, as chair of the state board.
The Preventing Election Subversion Act includes several provisions that would diminish the GOP’s ability to take over local election administration in Georgia — and in other states that enact SB 202-style laws. One of its central provisions is that statewide officials may only remove a local elections official “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
Of course, SB 202, at least on its face, also gives similar protections to local elections officials. But SB 202 allows the GOP-controlled State Elections Board to determine if an official committed malfeasance. Warnock’s bill would allow a local elections official targeted by SB 202 to sue in federal court for reinstatement.
Thus, the ultimate determination of whether a local official performed their job so poorly that removal is warranted would be made by federal judges who, at least in theory, are less likely to be motivated by partisanship than a state board dominated by Republicans.
Warnock’s bill also includes provisions to ensure that such a federal lawsuit is vigorously litigated by a well-financed team of lawyers. Among other things, it provides that a local election administrator who is wrongfully relieved of duty may receive “reasonable attorney’s fees” if they file a successful lawsuit.
And under the bill, when a state begins proceedings to remove a local official, it must inform the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division that it has done so, and the Justice Department may also challenge the state’s effort to remove such an official in federal court.
The Preventing Election Subversion Act only works if federal judges are committed to the rule of law
The basic theory underlying the Preventing Election Subversion Act is that federal courts can be trusted to stop partisan efforts to seize control of local election administration. But it’s far from clear that this theory is correct.
The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, has generally been hostile toward voting rights statutes. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013) the Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act — the primary federal safeguard against racist voter suppression — based on an entirely novel reading of the Constitution that is at odds with the Constitution’s text. Similarly, in Brnovich v. DNC (2021), the Court imposed new limits on the Voting Rights Act that have no basis in that law’s text.
Congress, in other words, could pass a law that effectively neutralizes the most virulent provisions of SB 202, but there’s no guarantee that the Supreme Court will follow that law.
Another danger is that, should the Preventing Election Subversion Act become law, individual federal judges may apply that law in bad faith.
Imagine, for example, that Georgia Republicans uncover a few instances where Fulton County’s election board made suboptimal management calls — the sort of minor errors that are inevitable in any operation tasked with counting hundreds of thousands of ballots. Because Warnock’s bill allows local officials to be removed for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” a partisan federal judge might claim that these minor missteps justify removal.
And then there’s the risk that the Supreme Court — perhaps by engaging in the same sort of textually challenged legal interpretation that it performed in Shelby County and Brnovich — could strike down a federal law governing who may administer elections.
As a general rule, federal courts are reluctant to hear lawsuits challenging how a state allocates power among its “political subdivisions.” Though there are some exceptions to this general rule, typically, if Georgia decided to take over Atlanta’s police force, or its schools, or some other government agency that is typically led by local Atlanta officials, federal courts would not intervene.
The Supreme Court has also held that the federal government may not “commandeer” state officials and demand that they perform their jobs in certain ways. A conservative Supreme Court could potentially extend this doctrine to prevent the federal government from shaping who will administer elections in Fulton County.
But the Constitution also gives Congress an unusually broad power to regulate congressional elections. Although the Constitution permits states to determine “the times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives,” it also permits Congress to “at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators.”
So, as the Supreme Court held in Smiley v. Holm (1932), federal law may “provide a complete code for congressional elections,” regulating such granular matters as “notices, registration, supervision of voting, protection of voters, prevention of fraud and corrupt practices, counting of votes, duties of inspectors and canvassers, and making and publication of election returns.”
A Supreme Court that believes it is bound by the text of the Constitution, in other words, should uphold Congress’s ability to prevent Georgia Republicans from taking over the administration of congressional elections in Fulton County. But, of course, America is ruled by the same Supreme Court that gave us Shelby County and Brnovich, so there is no guarantee Warnock’s bill would be upheld, even if it becomes law.
Tank at the Esplanade of the Ministries avenue, Brasilia, Brazil, Aug. 10, 2021. (photo: Roberto Stuckert Filho)
The last South American president who rode in a tank "is in prison. It was Alberto Fujimori in Peru," recalled former Lower House president Maia.
oliticians from different idological stances called the military parade led by President Jair Bolsonaro an attempt to intimidate Congress on the day when lawmakers are scheduled to vote on his proposal to reintroduce paper voting.
On Tuesday, a convoy of armored military vehicles paraded through the Esplanade of the Ministries, an avenue in Brasilia where the main public buildings are located. Since 1988, this annual parade is part of Operation Formosa, which takes place about 300 kilometers from Brasilia. On this occasion, however, the vehicles left from Rio de Janeiro and crossed the streets of Brasilia for the first time.
Accompanied by the three commanders of the Armed Forces, Bolsonaro received the convoy at the gates of the Planalto presidential palace, where he received an invitation to attend the military training that will take place in Formosa on August 16.
To delegitimize the 2022 presidential elections, Bolsonaro maintains that the electronic ballot box encourages "fraud" but has presented no evidence. To facilitate his reelection, the far-right President has been pressuring Congress to pass a mixed voting system with machines and ballots.
The tweet reads, "Armored vehicles run through Brasilia. On the day of the discussion about paper voting, the armored parade lasts 10 minutes and keeps Bolsonaro at the top of the Planalto ramp. The act provoked a reaction as it occurred at a time of institutional tension between the branches of the State."
Reactions to this display of strength were immediate. Sao Paulo Governor Joao Doria affirmed that the “unprecedented and unnecessary parade of war tanks” is a "clear threat to democracy."
Former President Lula da Silva considered it "unacceptable" that the Armed Forces allow its institutional image to be used to support the political maneuver of Bolsonaro, who has threatened to break the democratic order frequently.
Even a conservative politician such as former Lower House president Rodrigo Maia harshly criticized Bolsonaro and compared him to Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori. "The last president who rode in a tank ended his administration badly and he is in prison. It was Alberto Fujimori in Peru," said Maia.
In response to the criticism, the Navy said the Operation Formosa parade was planned before the vote in the Lower House plenary and that there is no "link" between the two events.
The buffy-headed marmoset is down to no more than 2,500 individuals scattered across dwindling patches of Brazil's Atlantic Forest. (photo: Mongabay)
’ve been writing about wild things for more than 10 years, and while there are many animals I don’t know, I thought I’d at least heard of most of the world’s primates: monkeys, lemurs and apes. And then a conservationist sent me a photo of a buffy-headed marmoset (Callithrix flaviceps). My response: Holy bananas, what the hell is this?! How did I go 40-plus years of obsession with wild things and never hear of this kitten-sized, sad clown-faced monkey?It turns out I wasn’t the only one. The species is barely known to locals in its native Brazil, and until very recently had little direct attention from conservationists. That is until Rodrigo Salles de Carvalho and his group, Mountain Marmosets Conservation Program (MMCP), decided to focus on the species a few years ago. MMCP had long been working to conserve the buffy-tufted marmoset (Callithrix aurita), which inhabits similar regions, and the more they learned about the buffy-headed marmoset the more concerned they grew.
Over the last few years, Carvalho, his team at MMCP, and collaborators have come to realize that the buffy-headed marmoset is in dire trouble. The IUCN Red List recently changed its status to critically endangered, and scientists estimate its population is no bigger than 2,500 animals (and likely less than that). Ever heard of Glenrock, Wyoming? Me neither. But more people live in that small town than there are buffy-headed marmosets in the world. Not only is this sad clown-faced marmoset among the most endangered mammals in Brazil — it’s probably one of the most endangered primates in the entire world.
The buffy-headed marmoset looks a little like an aging clown: the black markings around its eyes a little smudged, perhaps, as though its hands trembled as it put on its makeup, its hair sticking out at the sides like an uncombed mop.
“They have a very charming mocha coffee outfit,” Carvalho says. “To exchange glances … with [their] quite vivid eyes is an outstanding experience.”
Still, when I first saw the photo, I couldn’t help but think the buffy-headed marmoset looked a little melancholic, like a diva whose best days are behind her. But it’s a melancholy I find appealing. This sad-clown version of a marmoset was enough for me to want to dig deeper — and find out what’s happening to these little relatives of ours.
It’s not good.
First off, these marmosets live in a small region of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil — one of the most imperiled ecosystems on the planet, with about 11-16% of the ecosystem surviving. Add on top of that: the species is being smacked by yellow fever, climate change and, worst of all, hybridization with invasive marmoset species, a recent issue that may turn out to be the buffy-headed marmoset’s doom.
The species needs swift and aggressive action to safeguard its survival, but that requires money and support. Given that few people have heard of this animal, Carvalho says his group struggles to get the required funding. Moreover, the Brazilian government of President Jair Bolsonaro has hardly proven itself conducive to conservation and environmental issues.
The sad-clown marmoset is walking a tightrope.
The sad-clown marmoset
Marmosets are a diverse group of 22 tiny monkey species found in South America, including the world’s smallest monkeys (the western and eastern pygmy marmosets, Cebuella pygmaea and Cebuella niveiventris). They are a part of the Callitrichidae family, which includes the other super tiny monkeys, the tamarins.
The buffy-headed marmoset is unique for a number of reasons. First, as noted, its milky coloring and markings are quite head-turning. It is also one of only two known marmosets that inhabit higher-altitude areas, somehow able to survive chilly heights. Finally, it has the smallest range of any marmoset, covering just 28,500 square kilometers (11,000 square miles) of the states of EspÃrito Santo and Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil.
Buffy-headed marmosets also have a wide palate, eating fruit and gum, but also lots of insects, small birds, frogs, and even eggs. Seasonally, research has shown that the buffy-headed marmoset even has a taste for fungi!
Seeing the little monkeys in the wild, however, is nearly impossible.
Carvalho describes them as shy compared to most other marmoset species. Indeed, he’s only seen them a few times in his work in the forest. The team usually employs prerecorded calls of other buffy-headed marmosets to see if they can lure them into view to assess the population.
“When finally, they respond to our playback calls and we get to see them, we get fascinated and joyous as children receiving Christmas gifts,” Carvalho says. One time, he was lucky enough to see a troupe of about 10 animals, a surprise since biologists didn’t expect buffy-head marmoset groups to contain that many individuals.
“They make this sound like a bird. They’re really fast-moving. I would say they’re really beautiful animals,” says Carla B. Possamai, the coordinator of the Primate Community of Caratinga project, where she has been tracking populations of buffy-headed marmosets.
Yellow fever and other existential perils
Attempting to list the number of issues impacting the buffy-headed marmoset is daunting. But let’s start with the most obvious: the Atlantic Forest, or Mata Atlántica in Portuguese, is a fractured, shrunken and broken ecosystem. Once spreading across 1.2 million km2 (463,000 mi2), humans have whittled it down to just a fraction of its original area.
Since the arrival of the Portuguese in the early 1500s, the forest has succumbed to massive urbanization — the region is home to some of Brazil’s biggest cities, including São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro — intensive agriculture, monoculture plantations, cattle ranching, and mining. Nearly all of what remains is in patches, enclosed by cities, towns, and farmland. As deforestation continues, many species here are on the verge of vanishing.
So that’s where we start in the 21st century. But the marmosets might be able to hold on, at least for a while longer, if they didn’t face three other major threats: disease, climate change and, most pressing of all, hybridization.
The buffy-headed marmoset is one of only two marmoset species that inhabit mountains, making them more adapted to the cold. But like all higher-altitude species, climate change poses a threat. As mountains warm, cold-specialist species are pushed higher and higher until there is literally nowhere else to go. Researchers don’t know yet how much of an impact climate change is having on this species, but they remain alert and concerned.
Then there’s yellow fever. It hit the region in late 2016, absolutely decimating populations of primates in the Atlantic Forest patches. Farmers told conservationists that “the forest went silent.”
Possamai was monitoring a 1,000-hectare (2,500-acre) private reserve during the yellow fever outbreak, cataloging buffy-headed marmosets and northern muriqui or woolly spider monkey (Brachyteles hypoxanthus), the largest monkey in South America and also critically endangered. The site had once been home to around 200 marmosets, but after the yellow fever outbreak, Possamai didn’t see any. She searched for months, playing back the marmosets’ squeaking call over and over. Nothing.
Possamai was beginning to believe that the species had vanished altogether from this forest until one day in October 2017, when two buffy-headed marmosets appeared out of the canopy.
“Before [the yellow fever outbreak], there was this one specific place in the forest that tourists used to go and the [marmosets] would come. They were very easy to see,” Possamai says, noting that one group was particularly famous for hanging out and entertaining tourists. “Now, it takes sometimes a couple of months to find them,” she says.
Indeed, after that first sighting, Possamai didn’t see the marmosets again for another three months.
Currently, this particular patch houses just 17 animals, spread over three family groups. It’s not nothing, but hardly what it was pre-yellow fever outbreak. While the population here appears stable, it does not seem to be rebounding.
“I’m really worried about it,” Possamai says.
As if all this weren’t enough to deal with, the buffy-headed marmoset is in danger of completely disappearing due to hybridization.
The hybrid problem
For a while in Brazil, marmosets were all the rage as pets. The “pets” were primarily common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) and black-tufted-ear marmosets (Callithrix penicillata) taken from the wild and sold in markets.
The traders would ply the monkeys with alcohol so they appeared “very nice [and] very kind” to customers, says CecÃlia Kierulff with the National Institute of the Atlantic Forest, or INMA. She describes the process as “horrible.” Customers would take the drunk monkey home, and after a few hours, the marmoset would “freak out,” according Carvalho.
Not only was the monkey no longer sedated, but it was suffering from an awful hangover.
“After we started working with the marmosets, everybody said, ‘Oh, when I was a kid, my uncle gave me a marmoset.’ Thousands of stories like that,” Carvalho says. “Of course, 90% were released back into nature.”
Once people realized that what they’d bought wasn’t a cute, docile pet, but a feral, wild animal, they would dump the marmosets in the nearest forest. But these forests already had marmosets: buffy-headed marmosets.
The invasive former pets began breeding with the buffy-headed marmosets, producing hybrids. Very quickly, populations became entirely hybridized, genetic mix-ups of various marmoset species.
Kierulff says it’s easy to tell the difference between hybrids and unmixed buffy-headed marmosets once you’ve had some training.
“When you see a group where each one is different from the other, completely different, then something is wrong,” she says.
And the hybridization can happen fast, the conservationists say. Really fast. One year, researchers are concerned about disease and deforestation, and the next they suddenly notice that the marmoset juveniles no longer look right.
“If there’s one hybrid, just one hybrid entering in a protected area, it’s horrible,” Kierulff says.
The hybridization problem has become so bad that the researchers view it as the biggest threat to the species. And there isn’t an easy solution.
In the past, conservationists may have turned to culling to get rid of hybrids. However, the conservationists here don’t feel that’s the way to go for a number of reasons. Many are against it for ethical reasons, and even those that would consider it don’t feel the Brazilian public or policymakers would support outright killing of the hybrid marmosets. A more palatable idea that’s being discussed may be sterilizing hybrid animals.
Currently, though, Carvalho says he’s putting all his energy into identifying “safe havens” — forests that could be actively maintained to keep any invasive marmosets out. His group, MMCP, is mapping and analyzing different forests, both public and private, looking for potential sanctuaries. They’re seeking forests that lack connecting corridors and ones whose borders could be, at least somewhat, controlled. None of this will be easy or cheap.
Saving the sad-clown marmoset
If the group can identify “safe haven” sites they will need to make agreements with either the government, if it’s a public forest, or landowners, if private. They will then need to establish numerous controls to attempt to keep any invasive marmosets out.
“Every politician speaks about conservation [in Brazil] but real money [for] conservation … we don’t have it,” Carvalho says. “Park managers also know they will have a big fight to get the minimum money to make it happen.”
Kierulff adds that the Bolsonaro administration is cutting funds for “research, science, for everything.” Funding for student research and work is also vanishing, imperiling conservation work across the country.
Currently, most of MMCP’s money comes from foreign zoos, such as the Beauval zoo in France and the French Association of Zoological Parks, or AFdPZ.
“It was because of them, we survived,” Carvalho says, adding that his group is working on expanding its revenue stream. The fact that MMCP is funded largely by zoos is not surprising: Zoos are often some of the only institutions willing to fund the direct conservation of lesser-known species.
Another idea: captive breeding. Currently there are no buffy-headed marmosets in a captive-breeding program, meaning that if they vanish from the wild there are no captive populations to avoid total extinction and leave options open for rewilding.
“All the specialists agree that we need a captive population,” Kierulff says. But that, too, will require funding and time, both of which are running out for the sad-clown marmoset.
It’s not supposed to be this way. Primates are supposed to be easy to protect, right? They’re mammals, charismatic, and our closest relatives. The buffy-headed marmoset, in addition, is ridiculously cute — something that usually translates well into conservation attention and action. However, research in 2017 found that six in 10 primates are threatened with extinction, and 75% are seeing their populations decline. Many, like the buffy-headed marmoset, are receiving nowhere near the required conservation attention.
If we can’t save an animal as splendid as the buffy-headed marmoset, what does that mean for the millions of other less “charismatic” species on Earth? And what does that say about us?
“They need minimal money just to survive,” Kierulff says of the buffy-headed marmoset.
Like an increasing number of species today, the buffy-headed marmoset is at a stage where it requires human action in order to survive at all. It doesn’t need humans to just leave it alone — a conservation tactic that has worked for many species in the past. It needs humans to intervene. It needs us to act. Will we? Or has the sad clown begun its last act?
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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