30 November 21
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A previously unreported FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone reveals that “private” messaging apps WhatsApp and iMessage are deeply vulnerable to law-enforcement searches
But in a previously unreported FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone, the bureau claims that it’s particularly easy to harvest data from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services, as long as the FBI has a warrant or subpoena. Judging by this document, “the most popular encrypted messaging apps iMessage and WhatsApp are also the most permissive,” according to Mallory Knodel, the chief technology officer at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has articulated a “ privacy-focused vision” built around WhatsApp, the most popular messaging service in the world. Apple CEO Tim Cook says privacy is a “basic human right” and that Apple believes in “giving the user transparency and control,” a philosophy that extends to the company’s wildly popular iMessage app. For journalists, activists, and government critics who worry about government mass surveillance and political retribution, secure messaging tools can mean the difference between doing their work safely or facing imminent danger.
While the FBI document raises no questions about the apps’ abilities to keep out hackers and snoops-for-hire, the paper does describe how law-enforcement agencies have multiple legal pathways to extract sensitive user data from the most popular secure messaging tools. The document — titled “Lawful Access” and prepared jointly by the bureau’s Science and Technology Branch and Operational Technology Division — offers a window into the FBI’s ability to legally obtain vast amounts of data from the world’s most popular messaging apps, many of which hype the security and encryption of their services.
The document, dated Jan. 7, 2021, is an internal FBI guide to what kinds of data state and federal law-enforcement agencies can request from nine of the largest messaging apps. Legal experts and technologists who reviewed the FBI document say that it’s rare to get such detailed information from the government’s point-of-view about law enforcement’s access to messaging services. “I follow this stuff fairly closely and work on these issues,” says Andrew Crocker, a senior staff attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s civil-liberties team. “I don’t think I’ve seen this information laid out quite this way, certainly not from the law-enforcement perspective.”
After the Cambridge Analytica controversy, when news outlets revealed that personal data from more than 50 million Facebook users was harvested without their permission to create psychological profiles of American voters, Zuckerberg sought to rebrand the social media giant as a tech company built around privacy. Facebook intended to make that vision a reality largely through the design choices it made with WhatsApp, which it had acquired in 2014 for $19 billion. Today, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world with more than 2 billion users. “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever,” he wrote at the time. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about.”
In the view of the FBI, however, WhatsApp is a wellspring of private user data. According to the FBI’s “Lawful Access” document, WhatsApp will provide more practically real-time information about a user and their activities than nearly every other major secure messaging tool. A subpoena will yield only basic subscriber information, the FBI document says. Presented with a search warrant, WhatsApp will turn over address-book contacts for a targeted user as well as other WhatsApp users who have the targeted individual in their contacts, according to the FBI.
But WhatsApp is unique in how quickly it can produce data to law-enforcement agencies in response to a so-called pen register — a surveillance request that captures the source and destination of each message for a targeted individual. WhatsApp will produce certain user metadata, though not actual message content, every 15 minutes in response to a pen register, the FBI says. The FBI guide explains that most messaging services do not or cannot do this and instead provide data with a lag and not in anything close to real time: “Return data provided by the companies listed below, with the exception of WhatsApp, are actually logs of latent data that are provided to law enforcement in a non-real-time manner and may impact investigations due to delivery delays.”
A WhatsApp spokeswoman confirmed the company’s near-real-time responses to a pen register. But the spokeswoman added that the FBI document omits important context, such as that pen registers for WhatsApp do not yield actual message content and only apply in a forward-looking, not retroactive, manner. The spokeswoman said the company uses end-to-end encryption for the content of users’ messages, which means law enforcement can’t directly access that content, and has defended that message encryption in courts around the world. “We carefully review, validate, and respond to law-enforcement requests based on applicable law, and are clear about this on our website and in regular transparency reports,” the spokeswoman said. The FBI document, she added, “illustrates what we’ve been saying — that law enforcement doesn’t need to break end-to-end encryption to successfully investigate crimes.”
Even without the ability to legally request message content from WhatsApp, however, the metadata provided by WhatsApp to law enforcement captures which users talk to one another, when they do it, and which other users they have in their address book. The handing over of that data can have serious consequences for people who seek truly secure and anonymous messaging, such as journalists working with a confidential source or activists who face government threats and punishment.
In 2017 and 2018, Buzzfeed News published a series of explosive stories about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, the Russian embassy in the U.S., and other high-profile figures that drew on a trove of confidential documents from the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN. In early 2020, a former senior FinCEN adviser named Natalie Edwards pled guilty to leaking so-called Suspicious Activity Reports to an unnamed reporter, and Edwards later said she was a source for Buzzfeed’s reporting. A judge later sentenced Edwards to six months in prison. According to the FBI’s criminal complaint in the case and subsequent reporting, Edwards and a Buzzfeed reporter exchanged hundreds of messages on WhatsApp, which they believed to be a safe place to communicate. Instead, authorities would later use those WhatsApp messages to make their case against Edwards.
“WhatsApp offering all of this information is devastating to a reporter communicating with a confidential source,” says Daniel Kahn Gillmor, a senior staff technologist at the ACLU.
Experts stressed that the FBI guide isn’t the full scope of law enforcement’s snooping powers. The document, for instance, doesn’t touch on what happens when police or federal agents gain access to a person’s physical device. “For probably all of these platforms, if law enforcement gets its hands on somebody’s device, no amount of end-to-end encryption is going to protect the information on the device,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, says.
The other tech giant that can be compelled by law enforcement to hand over potentially large amounts of sensitive messaging data is Apple. iMessage, Apple’s text-message service, comes loaded on the iPhone and is used by 1.3 billion people worldwide. According to the FBI’s “Lawful Access” guide, if served with a court order or a search warrant, Apple must hand over basic subscriber information as well as 25 days’ worth of data about queries made in iMessage, such as what a targeted user looked up in iMessage and also which other people searched for that targeted user in the app. That doesn’t include actual message content or whether messages were exchanged between different users.
But the amount of data available to law enforcement is potentially far greater — greater even than the user data provided by WhatsApp — if a targeted user backs up their iMessage activity to iCloud, Apple’s online storage platform. If that’s the case, the FBI document says, then law enforcement can request back-ups of the target’s device, including actual messages sent and received in iMessage if they’re backed up in the cloud.
While Apple describes iCloud as an encrypted service, it comes with a giant loophole. Apple holds an encryption key that can unlock user data in iCloud, and so police departments or federal agencies can request that key with a search warrant or a customer’s consent to access certain user data. “You’re handing someone else the key to hold onto on your behalf,” says Mallory Knodel of the Center for Democracy and Technology. “Apple has encrypted iCloud but they still have the keys, and as long as they have the key, the FBI can ask for it.”
An Apple spokesman declined to comment on the record and referred Rolling Stone to Apple’s legal-process guidelines, which describe the kinds of data the company hands over to law enforcement under certain circumstances.
Daniel Kahn Gillmor, the ACLU senior staff technologist, says Apple has the ability to implement end-to-end encryption for iCloud. But the company reportedly abandoned plans to do so after federal law-enforcement agencies put pressure on Apple, saying fully encrypting iCloud backups would interfere with the government’s investigative abilities. “For cloud-based backup providers, they could if they want to lock themselves out of their users’ data,” Gillmor says. “iCloud has not made that choice for iMessage backups.”
There are several messaging apps listed in the FBI document for which minimal data is available to law enforcement without the actual device in hand. Signal will provide only the date and time someone signed up for the app and when the user last logged into the app. Wickr will give law enforcement data about the device using the app, when someone created their account, and basic subscriber info, but not detailed metadata, the FBI document says.
But the number of users on Signal and Wickr, while growing, pales in comparison to WhatsApp and iMessage, which the FBI’s own guide describes as two of the most permissible secure-messaging apps in existence.
And that imbalance raises questions about the complaints from law-enforcement agencies about secure and encrypted messaging apps interfering with their ability to investigate crimes. Wessler of the ACLU says the FBI’s “Lawful Access” should act as a reality check the next time police officers or FBI officials insist that encrypted messaging hampers their work. “As we can see, [those complaints are] completely overblown and not representative of how much information they continue to have access to even from these encrypted communication platforms,” he says.
Property of the People, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit transparency group, received the document via a Freedom of Information Act request and shared it with Rolling Stone. “Privacy is essential to democracy,” says Ryan Shapiro, Property of the People’s executive director. “The ease with which the FBI surveils our online data, mining the intimate details of our daily lives, threatens us all and paves the way for authoritarian rule.”
Refugees and migrants at a detention center in Zawiyah, west of Tripoli. (photo: Taha Jawashi/AFP/Getty Images)
Tired of migrants arriving from Africa, the E.U. has created a shadow immigration system that captures them before they reach its shores, and sends them to brutal Libyan detention centers run by militias.
At 3 a.m. on February 5, 2021, Aliou Candé, a sturdy, shy twenty-eight-year-old migrant from Guinea-Bissau, arrived at the prison. He had left home a year and a half earlier, because his family’s farm was failing, and had set out to join two brothers in Europe. But, as he attempted to cross the Mediterranean Sea on a rubber dinghy, with more than a hundred other migrants, the Libyan Coast Guard intercepted them and took them to Al Mabani. They were pushed inside Cell No. 4, where some two hundred others were being held. There was hardly anywhere to sit in the crush of bodies, and those on the floor slid over to avoid being trampled. Overhead were fluorescent lights that stayed on all night. A small grille in the door, about a foot wide, was the only source of natural light. Birds nested in the rafters, their feathers and droppings falling from above. On the walls, migrants had scrawled notes of determination: “A soldier never retreats,” and “With our eyes closed, we advance.” Candé crowded into a far corner and began to panic. “What should we do?” he asked a cellmate.
No one in the world beyond Al Mabani’s walls knew that Candé had been captured. He hadn’t been charged with a crime or allowed to speak to a lawyer, and he was given no indication of how long he’d be detained. In his first days there, he kept mostly to himself, submitting to the grim routines of the place. The prison is controlled by a militia that euphemistically calls itself the Public Security Agency, and its gunmen patrolled the hallways. About fifteen hundred migrants were held there, in eight cells, segregated by gender. There was only one toilet for every hundred people, and Candé often had to urinate in a water bottle or defecate in the shower. Migrants slept on thin floor pads; there weren’t enough to go around, so people took turns—one lay down during the day, the other at night. Detainees fought over who got to sleep in the shower, which had better ventilation. Twice a day, they were marched, single file, into the courtyard, where they were forbidden to look up at the sky or talk. Guards, like zookeepers, put communal bowls of food on the ground, and migrants gathered in circles to eat.
The guards struck prisoners who disobeyed orders with whatever was handy: a shovel, a hose, a cable, a tree branch. “They would beat anyone for no reason at all,” Tokam Martin Luther, an older Cameroonian man who slept on a mat next to Candé’s, told me. Detainees speculated that, when someone died, the body was dumped behind one of the compound’s outer walls, near a pile of brick and plaster rubble. The guards offered migrants their freedom for a fee of twenty-five hundred Libyan dinars—about five hundred dollars. During meals, the guards walked around with cell phones, allowing detainees to call relatives who could pay. But Candé’s family couldn’t afford such a ransom. Luther told me, “If you don’t have anybody to call, you just sit down.”
In the past six years, the European Union, weary of the financial and political costs of receiving migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, has created a shadow immigration system that stops them before they reach Europe. It has equipped and trained the Libyan Coast Guard, a quasi-military organization linked to militias in the country, to patrol the Mediterranean, sabotaging humanitarian rescue operations and capturing migrants. The migrants are then detained indefinitely in a network of profit-making prisons run by the militias. In September of this year, around six thousand migrants were being held, many of them in Al Mabani. International aid agencies have documented an array of abuses: detainees tortured with electric shocks, children raped by guards, families extorted for ransom, men and women sold into forced labor. “The E.U. did something they carefully considered and planned for many years,” Salah Marghani, Libya’s Minister of Justice from 2012 to 2014, told me. “Create a hellhole in Libya, with the idea of deterring people from heading to Europe.”
Three weeks after Candé arrived at Al Mabani, a group of detainees devised an escape plan. Moussa Karouma, a migrant from Ivory Coast, and several others defecated into a waste bin and left it in their cell for two days, until the stench became overpowering. “It was my first time in prison,” Karouma told me. “I was terrified.” When guards opened the cell door, nineteen migrants burst past them. They climbed on top of a bathroom roof, dropped fifteen feet over an outer wall, and disappeared into a warren of alleys near the prison. For those who remained, the consequences were bloody. The guards called in reinforcements, who sprayed bullets into the cells, then beat the inmates. “There was one guy in my ward that they beat with a gun on his head, until he fainted and started shaking,” a migrant later told Amnesty International. “They didn’t call an ambulance to come get him that night. . . . He was still breathing but he was not able to talk. . . . I don’t know what happened to him. . . . I don’t know what he had done.”
In the weeks that followed, Candé tried to stay out of trouble and clung to a hopeful rumor: the guards planned to release the migrants in his cell in honor of Ramadan, two months away. “The lord is miraculous,” Luther wrote in a journal he kept. “May his grace continue to protect all migrants around the world and especially those in Libya.”
What came to be called the migrant crisis began around 2010, when people fleeing violence, poverty, and the effects of climate change in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa started flooding into Europe. The World Bank predicts that, in the next fifty years, droughts, crop failures, rising seas, and desertification will displace a hundred and fifty million more people, mostly from the Global South, accelerating migration to Europe and elsewhere. In 2015 alone, a million people came to Europe from the Middle East and Africa. A popular route went through Libya, then across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy—a distance of less than two hundred miles.
Europe had long pressed Libya to help curb such migration. Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s leader, had once embraced Pan-Africanism and encouraged sub-Saharan Africans to serve in the country’s oil fields. But in 2008 he signed a “friendship treaty” with Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, that committed him to implementing strict controls. Qaddafi sometimes used this as a bargaining chip: he threatened, in 2010, that if the E.U. did not send him more than six billion dollars a year in aid money he would “turn Europe Black.” In 2011, Qaddafi was toppled and killed in an insurrection sparked by the Arab Spring and supported by a U.S.-led invasion. Afterward, Libya descended into chaos. Today, two governments compete for legitimacy: the U.N.-recognized Government of National Unity, and an administration based in Tobruk and backed by Russia and the self-proclaimed Libyan National Army. Both rely on shifting, cynical alliances with armed militias that have tribal allegiances and control large portions of the country. Libya’s remote beaches, increasingly unpoliced, have been swamped with migrants headed for Europe.
One of the first major tragedies of the migrant crisis occurred in 2013, when a dinghy carrying more than five hundred migrants, most of them Eritrean, caught fire and sank in the Mediterranean, killing three hundred and sixty people. They were less than half a mile from Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost island. At first, European leaders responded with compassion. “We can do this!” Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor, said, promising a permissive approach to immigration. In early 2014, Matteo Renzi, at thirty-nine, was elected Prime Minister of Italy, the youngest in its history. A telegenic centrist liberal in the model of Bill Clinton, Renzi was predicted to dominate the country’s politics for the next decade. Like Merkel, he welcomed migrants, saying that, if Europe was willing to turn its back on “dead bodies in the sea,” it could not call itself “civilized.” He supported an ambitious search-and-rescue program called Operation Mare Nostrum, or Our Sea, which insured the safe passage of some hundred and fifty thousand migrants, and Italy provided legal assistance for asylum claims.
As the number of migrants rose, European ambivalence turned to recalcitrance. Migrants needed medical care, jobs, and schooling, which strained resources. James F. Hollifield, a migration expert at the French Institutes for Advanced Studies, told me, “We in the liberal West are in a conundrum. We have to find a way to secure borders and manage migration without undermining the social contract and the liberal state itself.” Nationalist parties such as the Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally exploited the situation, fostering xenophobia. In 2015, men from North Africa sexually assaulted women in Cologne, Germany, fuelling alarm; the next year, an asylum seeker from Tunisia drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing twelve. Merkel, under pressure, eventually insisted that migrants assimilate and supported a ban on burqas.
Renzi’s Mare Nostrum program had cost a hundred and fifteen million euros, and Italy, which was struggling to stave off its third recession in six years, could not sustain the undertaking. Efforts in Italy and Greece to relocate migrants floundered. Poland and Hungary, both run by far-right leaders, accepted no migrants at all. Officials in Austria talked of building a wall on its Italian border. Italy’s hard-right politicians mocked and denounced Renzi, and their poll numbers skyrocketed. In December, 2016, Renzi resigned, and his party eventually rolled back his policies. He, too, retreated from his initial generosity. “We need to free ourselves from a sense of guilt,” he said. “We do not have the moral duty to welcome to Italy people who are worse off than ourselves.”
During the next several years, Europe embarked on a different approach, led by Marco Minniti, who became Italy’s Minister of the Interior in 2016. Minniti, a onetime ally of Renzi’s, was frank about his colleague’s miscalculation. “We did not respond to two feelings that were very strong,” he said. “Anger and fear.” Italy stopped conducting search-and-rescue operations beyond thirty miles from its shores. Italy, Greece, Spain, and Malta began turning away humanitarian boats carrying rescued migrants, and Italy even charged the captains of such boats with aiding human trafficking. Minniti soon became known as the “Minister of Fear.”
In 2015, the E.U. created the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, which has since spent nearly six billion dollars. Proponents argue that the program offers aid money to developing countries, paying for COVID-19 relief in Sudan and green-energy job training in Ghana. But much of its work involves pressuring African nations to adopt tougher immigration restrictions and funding the agencies that enforce them. In 2018, officials in Niger allegedly sent “shopping lists” requesting gifts of cars, planes, and helicopters in exchange for their help in pushing anti-immigrant policies. The program has also supported repressive state agencies, by financing the creation of an intelligence center for Sudan’s secret police, and by allowing the E.U. to give the personal data of Ethiopian nationals to their country’s intelligence service. The money is doled out at the discretion of the E.U.’s executive branch, the European Commission, and not subject to scrutiny by its Parliament. (A spokesperson for the Trust Fund told me, “Our programs are intended to save lives, protect those in need, and fight trafficking in human beings and migrant smuggling.”)
Minniti looked to Libya—by then a failed state—to become Europe’s primary partner in stopping the flow of migrants. In 2017, he travelled to Tripoli and struck deals with the government recognized in the country at the time and with the most powerful militias. Italy, backed by E.U. funds, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Libya, affirming “the resolute determination to coöperate in identifying urgent solutions to the issue of clandestine migrants crossing Libya to reach Europe by sea.” The Trust Fund has directed half a billion dollars to Libya’s assault on migration. Marghani, the former justice minister, told me that the goal of the program is clear: “Make Libya the bad guy. Make Libya the disguise for their policies while the good humans of Europe say they are offering money to help make this hellish system safer.”
Minniti has said that the European fear of unchecked migration is a “legitimate feeling—one democracy needs to listen to.” His policies have resulted in a stark drop in migrants. In the first half of this year, fewer than twenty-one thousand people made it to Europe by crossing the Mediterranean. Minniti told the press in 2017, “What Italy did in Libya is a model to deal with migrant flows without erecting borders or barbed wire barriers.” (Minniti has since left government and now heads the Med-Or Foundation, an organization founded by an Italian defense contractor; he did not respond to requests for comment for this piece.) Italy’s right wing, which helped unseat Renzi, applauded Minniti’s work. “When we proposed such measures, we were labelled as racist,” Matteo Salvini, then the leader of Italy’s Northern League, a nationalist party, said. “Now, finally, everyone seems to understand we were right.”
Aliou Candé grew up on a farm near the village of Sintchan Demba Gaira. It has no cell reception, paved roads, plumbing, or electricity. As an adult, he worked the farm with his family, and lived in a clay house, painted yellow and blue, with his wife, Hava, and their two young sons. He listened to foreign musicians and followed European soccer clubs; he spoke English and French, and was teaching himself Portuguese, hoping one day to live in Portugal. Jacaria, one of Candé’s three brothers, told me, “Aliou was a very lovely boy—never in any trouble. He was a hard worker. People respected him.”
Candé’s farm produced cassava, mangoes, and cashews—a crop that accounts for around ninety per cent of Guinea-Bissau’s exports. But local weather patterns had begun to shift, likely as a result of climate change. “We don’t feel the cold during the cold season anymore, and the heat comes earlier than it should,” Jacaria said. Heavy rains left the farm accessible only by canoe for much of the year; dry spells seemed to last longer than they had a generation earlier. Candé had four skinny cows that produced little milk. There were more mosquitoes, which spread disease. When one of Candé’s sons came down with malaria, the journey to the hospital took a day, and he almost died.
Candé, a pious Muslim, worried that he was failing before God to provide for his family. “He felt guilty and envious,” Bobo, another of Candé’s brothers, told me. Jacaria had immigrated to Spain, and Denbas, the third brother, to Italy. Both sent money and photographs of fancy restaurants. Candé’s father, Samba, told me, “Whoever goes abroad brings fortune at home.” Hava was eight months pregnant, but Candé’s family encouraged him to go to Europe, too, promising that they would look after his children. “All the people of his generation went abroad and succeeded,” his mother, Aminatta, said. “So why not him?” On the morning of September 13, 2019, Candé set out for Europe carrying a Quran, a leather diary, two pairs of pants, two T-shirts, and six hundred euros. “I don’t know how long this will take,” he told his wife that morning. “But I love you, and I’ll be back.”
Candé worked his way across Central Africa, hitching rides in cars or stowing away on buses until he reached Agadez, Niger, once called the Gateway to the Sahara. Historically, the borders of many Central African countries have been open, as in the E.U., though the arrangement was less formalized. In 2015, however, E.U. officials pressured Niger to adopt a statute called Law 36: overnight, bus drivers and guides, who for many years had carried migrants north, were declared human traffickers and subject to thirty-year prison sentences. Migrants were forced to consider more perilous routes. Candé, along with a half-dozen others, struck out through the Sahara, sometimes sleeping in the sand on the side of the road. “Heat and dust, it’s terrible here,” Candé told Jacaria, by phone. He sneaked through a portion of Algeria controlled by bandits. “They will capture you and beat you until you’re released,” he told his family. “That’s all that’s there.”
In January, 2020, he arrived in Morocco, and learned that passage to Spain cost three thousand euros. Jacaria urged him to turn back, but Candé said, “You have worked hard in Europe. You sent money to the family. Now it’s my turn.” He heard that, in Libya, he could book a cheaper boat to Italy. He arrived in Tripoli last December, and stayed in a migrant slum called Gargaresh. His great-uncle Demba Balde, a forty-year-old former tailor, had lived undocumented in Libya for years, doing various jobs. Balde found Candé work painting houses and pressed him to abandon his plan to cross the Mediterranean. “That’s the route of death,” Balde told him.
This past May, I travelled to Tripoli to investigate the system of migrant detention. I had recently started a nonprofit called the Outlaw Ocean Project, which reports on human-rights and environmental issues at sea, and I brought along a three-person research team. In Tripoli, the coastline was dotted with half-built offices, hotels, apartment buildings, and schools. Armed men in fatigues stood at every intersection. Almost no Western journalists are permitted to enter Libya, but, with the help of an international aid group, we were granted visas. Shortly after we arrived, I gave my team tracking devices and encouraged them to put photocopies of their passports inside their shoes. We were placed in a hotel near the city center and assigned a small security detail.
The Libyan Coast Guard’s name makes it sound like an official military organization, but it has no unified command; it is made up of local patrols that the U.N. has accused of having links to militias. (Humanitarian workers call it the “so-called Libyan Coast Guard.”) Minniti told the press, in 2017, that building up the patrols would be a difficult undertaking: “When we said we had to relaunch the Libyan Coast Guard, it seemed like a daydream.” The E.U.’s Trust Fund has since spent tens of millions of dollars to turn the Coast Guard into a formidable proxy force.
In 2018, the Italian government, with the E.U.’s blessing, helped the Coast Guard get approval from the U.N. to extend its jurisdiction nearly a hundred miles off Libya’s coast—far into international waters, and more than halfway to Italian shores. The E.U. supplied six speedboats, thirty Toyota Land Cruisers, radios, satellite phones, inflatable dinghies, and five hundred uniforms. It spent close to a million dollars last year to build command centers for the Coast Guard, and provides training to officers. In a ceremony in October, 2020, E.U. officials and Libyan commanders unveiled two state-of-the-art cutters that had been built in Italy and upgraded with Trust Fund money. “The refitting of these two vessels has been a prime example of the constructive coöperation between the European Union; an E.U. member state, Italy; and Libya,” Jose Sabadell, the E.U.’s Ambassador to Libya, said in a press release.
Perhaps the most valuable help comes from the E.U.’s border agency, Frontex, founded in 2004, partly to guard Europe’s border with Russia. In 2015, Frontex began spearheading what it called a “systematic effort to capture” migrants crossing the sea. Today, it has a budget of more than half a billion euros and its own uniformed service, which it can deploy in operations beyond the E.U.’s borders. The agency maintains a near-constant surveillance of the Mediterranean through drones and privately chartered aircraft. When it detects a migrant boat, it sends photographs and location information to local government agencies and other partners in the region—ostensibly to assist with rescues—but does not typically inform humanitarian vessels.
A spokesperson for Frontex told me that the agency “has never engaged in any direct cooperation with Libyan authorities.” But an investigation by a coalition of European news organizations, including Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, Libération, and A.R.D., documented twenty instances in which, after Frontex surveilled migrants, their boats were intercepted by the Coast Guard. The investigation also found evidence that Frontex sometimes sends the locations of the migrant boats directly to the Coast Guard. In a WhatsApp exchange earlier this year, for example, a Frontex official wrote to someone identifying himself as a “captain” in the Libyan Coast Guard, saying, “Good morning sir. We have a boat adrift [coördinates]. People poring water. Please acknowledge this message.” Legal experts argue that these actions violate international laws against refoulement, or the return of migrants to unsafe places. Frontex officials recently sent me the results of an open-records request I made, which indicate that from February 1st to February 5th, around the time that Candé was at sea, the agency exchanged thirty-seven e-mails with the Coast Guard. (Frontex refused to release the content of the e-mails, saying that it would “put the lives of migrants in danger.”)
A senior official at Frontex, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation, told me that the agency also streams its surveillance footage to the Italian Coast Guard and Italy’s Maritime Rescue Coördination Center, which, the official believes, notify the Libyan Coast Guard. (The Italian agencies did not respond to requests for comment.) The official argued that this indirect method didn’t insulate the agency from responsibility: “You provide that information. You don’t implement the action, but it is the information that provokes the refoulement.” The official had repeatedly urged superiors to stop any activity that could result in migrants being returned to Libya. “It didn’t matter what you told them,” the official said. “They were not willing to understand.” (A Frontex spokesperson told me, “In any potential search and rescue, the priority for Frontex is to save lives.”)
Once the Coast Guard has the coördinates, it races to the boats, trying to capture the migrants before rescue vessels arrive. Sometimes it fires on the migrant boats or directs warning shots at humanitarian ships. In the past four years, according to the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (I.O.M.), the Coast Guard and other Libyan authorities have intercepted more than eighty thousand migrants. In 2017, a ship from the aid group Sea-Watch responded to distress calls from a sinking migrant boat. As Sea-Watch deployed two rescue rafts, a Libyan Coast Guard cutter, called the Ras Jadir, arrived at high speed, its swells causing some of the migrants to fall overboard. Coast Guard officers then pulled the migrants out of the water, beating them as they climbed aboard. Johannes Bayer, the head of the Sea-Watch mission, later said, “We had a feeling the Coast Guard were only interested in pulling back as many people to Libya as possible, without caring that people were drowning.” One migrant jumped overboard and clung to the Ras Jadir as it accelerated away, dragging him through the water. According to Sea-Watch, at least twenty people died, including a two-year-old boy. A migrant told Amnesty International that this past February a Coast Guard ship damaged a migrant boat while officers filmed with their cell phones; five people drowned.
The Coast Guard appears to operate with impunity. In October, 2020, Abdel-Rahman al-Milad, the commander of a Coast Guard unit based in Zawiya, who had been added to the U.N. Security Council’s sanctions list for being “directly involved in the sinking of migrant boats using firearms,” was arrested by Libyan authorities. Milad had attended meetings with Italian officials in Rome and Sicily in 2017, to request more money. This past April, authorities released him, citing a lack of evidence. The Coast Guard, which did not respond to requests for comment for this piece, has often pointed to its success in limiting migration to Europe, and argued that humanitarian groups hinder its efforts to combat human trafficking. “Why do they declare war on us?” a spokesman told the Italian media. “They should instead coöperate with us if they actually want to work in the interest of the migrants.” The spokesperson for the Trust Fund said that the E.U.’s work with the Coast Guard is intended “to save the lives of those making dangerous journeys by sea or land.”
This past May, a documentarian from my team, Ed Ou, spent several weeks aboard a Doctors Without Borders vessel, filming its attempts to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean. The organization located migrant boats with the help of radar and volunteer planes, but in many cases the Coast Guard beat them there and captured the migrants. Occasionally, aid workers saw a Frontex drone—an I.A.I. Heron, capable of operating continuously for up to forty-five hours—circling overhead. Their ship was careful to conduct rescues only in international waters, but threats from the Coast Guard crackled over the radio. “Get away from the target,” an officer said. “Don’t enter Libyan waters. Otherwise, I’ll deal with you, and we resort to other measures.” After one successful rescue, several Sudanese migrants spoke about what they had seen in Libya. One said that he had been beaten and tortured by the Coast Guard when he was captured on an earlier voyage. Another had watched detainees shot to death in a Libyan detention center. A third migrant wore a homemade T-shirt that read “Fuck to Libya.”
When I got to Libya, government officials told me that I would be allowed to tour Al Mabani. But after several days it became clear that this would not happen. Late one afternoon, my team and I went to an alley and launched a small video drone, flying it high enough over the prison so that it would not be noticed by the guards. On the monitor, I saw them preparing to march the migrants from the courtyard back into their cells. Roughly sixty-five detainees sat in a corner, unmoving, heads down, legs folded, each man’s hands touching the back of the man in front of him. When one man glanced to the side, a guard struck him on the head.
Under Libyan law, unauthorized foreigners—including economic migrants, asylum seekers, and the victims of illegal trafficking—can be detained indefinitely, with no access to a lawyer. There are currently some fifteen recognized detention centers in the country, of which Al Mabani is the largest. An I.O.M. official told me that tens of thousands of migrants have been held in the detention centers since 2017. Earlier this year, six women who had been held at a center called Shara’ al-Zawiya told investigators from Amnesty International that women there had been raped or subjected to other forms of sexual violence. At Abu Salim, at least two migrants were killed during an escape attempt this past February. “Death in Libya, it’s normal: no one will look for you, and no one will find you,” a migrant there told Amnesty investigators. Diana Eltahawy, who works on North African issues at Amnesty International, declared in July, “The entire network of Libyan migration detention centres is rotten to its core.”
Migrants captured by the Coast Guard are loaded onto buses, many supplied by the E.U., and brought to the detention centers; sometimes Coast Guard units sell them to the centers. But some migrants never make it there. In the first seven months of 2021, according to the I.O.M., more than fifteen thousand migrants were captured by the Libyan Coast Guard and other authorities, but by the end of that period only about six thousand were being held in designated facilities. Federico Soda, the I.O.M.’s chief of mission in Libya, believes that migrants are disappearing into “unofficial” facilities run by traffickers and militias, where aid groups have no access. “The numbers simply don’t add up,” he said.
Al Mabani was created early this year under the supervision of Emad al-Tarabulsi, a senior leader in the Public Security Agency militia. The group has links to the Zintan tribe, which helped overthrow Qaddafi and held his son Seif prisoner for years. Today, the militia is aligned with the National Unity government, and Tarabulsi briefly served as its deputy head of intelligence. He built the prison in a corner of the city controlled by the militia and selected Noureddine al-Ghreetly, a soft-spoken commander, to run it. (Tarabulsi could not be reached for comment.)
Previously, Ghreetly oversaw a migrant prison called Tajoura, near a military base on the eastern outskirts of Tripoli. In a 2019 Human Rights Watch report, six detainees there, including two sixteen-year-old boys, described being severely beaten, and one woman said that she’d been repeatedly sexually assaulted. The report’s authors recounted seeing a female detainee attempting to hang herself. Prisoners were forced to do labor at the facility, including cleaning weapons, storing ammunition, and offloading military shipments, according to U.N. investigators. In July, 2019, during the latest outbreak of civil war, a bomb struck the detention center, levelling a hangar where the migrants were held. More than fifty were killed, including six children. Most of the survivors wound up at Al Mabani.
The E.U. concedes that the migrant prisons are brutal. The Trust Fund spokesperson told me, by e-mail, “The situation in these centres is unacceptable. The current arbitrary detention system must end.” Last year, Josep Borrell, a vice-president of the European Commission, said, “The decision to arbitrarily detain migrants rests under the sole responsibility” of the Libyan government. In its initial agreement with Libya, Italy promised to help finance and make safe the operation of migrant detention. Today, European officials insist that they do not directly fund the sites. The Trust Fund’s spending is opaque, but its spokesperson told me that it sends money only to provide “lifesaving support to migrants and refugees in detention,” including through U.N. agencies and international N.G.O.s that offer “health care, psycho-social support, cash assistance and non-food items.” Tineke Strik, a member of the European Parliament, told me that this doesn’t relieve Europe of responsibility: “If the E.U. did not finance the Libyan Coast Guard and its assets, there would be no interception, and there would be no referral to these horrific detention centers.”
She also pointed out that the E.U. sends funds to the National Unity government, whose Directorate for Combatting Illegal Migration oversees the sites. She argued that, even if the E.U. doesn’t pay for the construction of facilities or the salaries of their gunmen, its money indirectly supports much of their operation. The Trust Fund pays for the boats that capture migrants, the buses that bring them to prisons, and the S.U.V.s that hunt them down on land. E.U.-funded U.N. agencies built the showers and bathrooms at several facilities, and pay for the blankets, clothes, and toiletries migrants receive when they arrive. The Trust Fund has committed to buying ambulances that will take detainees to the hospital when they are sick. And E.U. money pays for the body bags they’re put in when they die, and for the training of Libyan authorities in how to handle corpses in a religiously respectful manner. Some of these efforts make the prisons more humane, but, taken together, they also help sustain a brutal system, which exists largely because of E.U. policies that send migrants back to Libya.
Militias also employ a variety of methods to make a profit from the facilities, such as siphoning off money and goods sent for migrants by humanitarian groups and government agencies—a scheme known as “aid diversion.” The director of a detention center in Misrata told Human Rights Watch that militia-linked catering companies that serviced the facility pocketed some eighty-five per cent of the money sent to supply meals. A study financed by the Trust Fund in April, 2019, found that much of the money that it sent through humanitarian groups ended up going to militias. “Most of the time, it is a profit-making exercise,” the study reads.
Qaddafi-era laws allow unauthorized foreigners, regardless of age, to be forced to work in the country without pay. A Libyan national can pick up migrants from a prison for a fee, become their “guardian,” and oversee private work for a fixed amount of time. In 2017, CNN broadcast footage of a slave market in Libya, at which migrants were sold for agricultural labor; bidding started at four hundred dinars, or about eighty-eight dollars, per person. This year, more than a dozen migrants from detention centers, some as young as fourteen, told Amnesty International that they had been forced to work on farms and in private homes, and to clean and load weaponry at military encampments during active hostilities. Perhaps the most common money-making scheme is extortion. At the detention facilities, everything has a price: protection, food, medicine, and, the most expensive, freedom. But paying a ransom doesn’t guarantee release; some migrants are simply resold to another detention center. “Unfortunately, as a result of the high number of centres and the commodification of migrants, many are detained by another group after their release, leading to them having to make multiple ransom payments,” the Trust Fund-financed study reads.
In a meeting with the German Ambassador to Libya, earlier this year, General Al-Mabrouk Abdel-Hafiz, who runs the Directorate for Combatting Illegal Migration, portrayed himself, and his country, as being tasked with an impossible job. “Libya is no longer a transit country, but rather a victim left alone to face a crisis that the countries of the world failed,” he said. (Abdel-Hafiz declined to comment for this piece.) When I called Ghreetly, the director of Al Mabani, and asked about allegations of mistreatment there, he replied, “Abuse does not happen,” and quickly ended the call.
Several days after I arrived in Libya, I travelled to Gargaresh, the migrant slum where Candé briefly stayed, to speak to former detainees. During the Second World War, the Italian and German militaries used the area, then called Campo 59 or Feldpost 12545, as a prisoner-of-war camp. Today, it is a honeycomb of alleys and narrow streets, surrounded by fast-food restaurants and cell-phone stores. Raids carried out by militiamen are part of daily life. Candé’s friend Soumahoro, who was taken to Al Mabani with him when their dinghy was intercepted, met me on the main road and whisked me into a windowless room occupied by two other migrants. Over a meal of chana masala, he told me of his time in prison. “Talking about this is really hard for me,” he said.
Migrants in Al Mabani were beaten for whispering to one another, speaking in their native tongues, or laughing. Troublemakers were held for days in the “isolation room,” an abandoned gas station behind the women’s cell with a Shell Fuel sign hanging out front. The isolation room had no bathroom, so prisoners had to defecate in a corner; the smell was so bad that guards wore masks when they visited. Guards tied the hands of detainees to a rope suspended from a steel ceiling beam and beat them. “It’s not so bad seeing a friend or a man yelling as he’s being tortured,” Soumahoro said. “But seeing a six-foot-tall man beating a woman with a whip . . .” In March, Soumahoro organized a hunger strike to protest violence by the guards, and was taken to the isolation room, where he was strung upside down and repeatedly beaten. “They hang you like a piece of clothing,” he said.
Several former detainees I spoke with in Tripoli said that they had witnessed sexual abuse. Adjara Keita, a thirty-six-year-old migrant from Ivory Coast, who was held at Al Mabani for two months, told me that women were frequently taken from their cells to be raped by the guards. “The women would come back in tears,” she said. After two women escaped from Al Mabani, guards took Keita to a nearby office and beat her, in an apparently random act of retribution.
The guards also engaged migrants as collaborators, a tactic that kept them divided. Mohamed Soumah, a twenty-three-year-old from the Republic of Guinea, sometimes called Guinea Conakry, volunteered to help with daily tasks and was soon pumped for information: Which migrants hated each other? Who were the agitators? The arrangement became more formal, and Soumah began handling ransom negotiations. As a reward, he was allowed to sleep across the street from the prison in the cooks’ quarters. At one point, as a gift for his loyalty, the guards let him pick several migrants to be freed. He could even leave the compound, though he never went far. “I knew they’d find me and beat me if I tried to go away,” he told me.
One international aid organization visited the prison twice a week and found that detainees were covered in bruises and cuts, avoided eye contact, and recoiled at loud noises. Sometimes migrants slipped the aid workers notes of desperation written on the backs of torn COVID-safety pamphlets. Many told the workers that they felt “disappeared” and asked that someone inform their families that they were alive. During one visit, the workers couldn’t enter Candé’s cell because it was so packed, and estimated that there were three detainees per square metre. They met with migrants in the courtyard. The overcrowding was intense, and tuberculosis and COVID-19 have since been detected. During another visit, the workers were told of beatings from the night before, and they catalogued fractures, cuts, abrasions, and blunt traumas; one child was so badly injured that he couldn’t walk.
In the weeks after Candé’s arrival, members of another aid group brought water and blankets that the facility had requested. But, after discovering that guards had kept some of the supplies for themselves, they decided that they would no longer assist Al Mabani. Near the end of March, Cherif Khalil, a consular officer from the Embassy of Guinea Conakry, visited the prison. Candé, pretending to be from Guinea Conakry, asked if the Embassy could help him, but Khalil was powerless. “He was desperate,” Khalil told me.
Halfway through my meal with Soumahoro, my phone rang. It was a police officer. “You are not allowed to be talking to migrants,” he screamed at me. “You cannot be in Gargaresh.” He told me that if I didn’t leave immediately I would be arrested. When I returned to my car, the police officer was standing there. He said that if I spoke to any more migrants I would be thrown out of the country. After that, my team and I weren’t allowed to venture far from our hotel.
As Candé sat in his cell, waiting for Ramadan, he and Luther passed the time by playing dominoes. Luther wrote in his journal of a protest by female inmates: “They are in underwear and sitting on the floor because they also demand to be released.” He and Candé called the guards nicknames based on the orders they barked. One was known as Khamsa Khamsa, Arabic for “five, five,” which he yelled during meals to remind migrants that five people had to share each bowl. Another guard, called Gamis, or “sit down,” insured that no one stood. Keep Quiet policed the chatter. At one point, Candé and Luther cared for a migrant who had sustained a blow to the head during a beating and seemed to be suffering a mental break, thrashing and screaming. “He was so mad,” Luther wrote, that they had to restrain him “so that we could sleep in peace.” Eventually, the guards took the detainee to a hospital, but a few weeks later he returned, as disturbed as ever. “Unbelievable situation,” Luther wrote.
Near the end of March, the migrants learned that they would not be freed during Ramadan. Luther wrote, “This is how life is in Libya. We will still have to be patient to enjoy our freedom.” But Candé seemed increasingly desperate. When he was first taken into custody, the Coast Guard had somehow failed to confiscate his cell phone. He had kept it hidden, fearing that he would be severely punished if caught with it. After the Ramadan rumor was dispelled, however, he sent a voice message to his brothers over WhatsApp, attempting to explain the situation: “We were trying to get to Italy by water. They caught us and brought us back. Now we are locked in prison. . . . You can’t keep the phone on too long here.” He begged them, “Find a way to call our father.” Then he waited, hoping that they would scrape together the ransom.
At 2 a.m. on April 8th, Candé awoke to a noise: several Sudanese detainees were trying to pry open the door of Cell No. 4 and escape. Candé, worried that all the inmates would be punished, asked Soumahoro what to do. Soumahoro went with a dozen others to confront the Sudanese. “We’ve tried to break out several times before,” Soumahoro told them. “It never worked. We were just beaten.” The Sudanese wouldn’t listen, and Soumahoro told another detainee to alert the guards, who backed a sand truck up against the cell door.
The Sudanese yanked iron pipes from the bathroom wall and began swinging them at those who had intervened. One migrant was hit in the eye; another fell to the ground, blood gushing from his head. The groups began pelting each other with shoes, buckets, shampoo bottles, and pieces of plasterboard. Candé told Soumahoro, “I’m not going to fight. I’m the hope of my entire family.” The brawling lasted for three and a half hours. Some migrants shouted for assistance, yelling, “Open the door!” Instead, the guards laughed and cheered, filming the fight with their phones through the grille. “Keep fighting,” one said, passing in water bottles to keep the brawlers hydrated. “If you can kill them, do it.”
But at 5:30 A.M. the guards left and came back with semi-automatic rifles. Without warning, they fired into the cell through the bathroom window for ten minutes. “It sounded like a battlefield,” Soumahoro told me. Two teen-agers from Guinea Conakry, Ismail Doumbouya and Ayouba Fofana, were hit in the leg. Candé, who had been hiding in the shower during the fight, was struck in the neck. He staggered along the wall, streaking blood, then fell to the ground. Soumahoro tried to slow the bleeding with a piece of cloth. Candé died within minutes.
Ghreetly arrived several hours later and shouted at the guards, “What have you done? You can do anything to them, you just can’t kill them!” The migrants refused to hand over Candé’s body, and the panicked guards summoned Soumah, the collaborator, to negotiate. Eventually, the militia agreed to free the migrants in exchange for the body. Soumah told them, “I, Soumah, will open this door and you guys will get out. I will be in front of you, running with you until the exit.” Just before 9 a.m., guards took up positions near the gate, guns raised. Soumah opened the cell door and told the three hundred migrants to follow him out of the prison, single file, without talking. Morning commuters slowed to gawk at the migrants as they left the compound and dispersed through the streets of Tripoli.
By my eighth day in Tripoli, my team and I were piecing together the details of Candé’s death. We had interviewed dozens of migrants, officials, and aid workers. I had the distinct impression that the hotel staff and our private security guards were reporting our movements to the authorities.
On Sunday, May 23rd, shortly before 8 p.m., I was sitting in my hotel room, on the phone with my wife, when there was a knock on the door. As I opened it, a dozen armed men burst in. One held a gun to my forehead and yelled, “Get on the floor!” They placed a hood over my head, kicked and punched me, and stepped on my face, leaving me with two broken ribs, blood in my urine, and damage to my kidneys. Then they dragged me from the room.
My research team was on their way to dinner near the hotel; their driver spotted cars following them and turned back. Several cars blocked the road, and armed men in masks leaped out. They took my team’s driver from the van and pistol-whipped him, then blindfolded my colleagues and drove them away. We were all taken to an interrogation room at a black site, where I was punched again in the head and ribs. Still hooded, I could hear the men menacing the others. “You are a dog!” one yelled at our photographer, Pierre Kattar, striking him across the face. They whispered sexual threats to the female member of our team, Mea Dols de Jong, a Dutch filmmaker, saying, “Do you want a Libyan boyfriend?” After a few hours, they removed our belts and jewelry and placed us in cells.
I’ve since discovered—by comparing satellite imagery with the little we glimpsed of the surrounding area—that we were held at a secret jail several hundred yards from the Italian Embassy. Our captors told us that they were part of the Libyan Intelligence Service, nominally an agency of the National Unity government, which also oversees Al Mabani, though it has ties to a militia called the Al-Nawasi Brigade. Our interrogators bragged that they had worked together under Qaddafi. One, who spoke conversational English, claimed that he had spent time in Colorado at a U.S.-government-run training program for prison administration.
I was placed in an isolation cell, which contained a toilet, a shower, a foam mattress, and a ceiling-mounted camera. Guards passed me yellow rice and bottles of water through a slot in the door. Every day, I was questioned in an interrogation room for hours at a time. “We know you work for the C.I.A.,” a man kept telling me. “Here in Libya, spying is punished by death.” Sometimes he put a gun on the table or pointed it at my head. To my captors, the steps I had taken to safeguard my team became proof of my guilt. Why would we wear tracking devices and carry copies of our passports in our shoes? Why did I have two “secret recording devices” in my backpack (an Apple Watch and a GoPro), along with a packet of papers titled “Secret Document” (a list of emergency contacts that was actually labelled “Security Document”)?
The fact that I was a journalist was less a defense than a secondary crime. My captors told me that it was illegal to interview migrants about abuses at Al Mabani. “Why are you trying to embarrass Libya?” they asked. They repeatedly told me, “You people killed George Floyd.” Hoping to break out, I took apart some of the toilet’s plumbing and searched for a piece of metal to unscrew the bars on the window. I tapped on the wall of my cell and heard Kattar, the photographer, tap back, which I somehow found reassuring.
My wife had overheard the beginning of my kidnapping and had alerted the State Department. Along with the Dutch foreign service, the agency began lobbying the National Unity government for our release. At one point, we were taken from our cells to record a “proof of life” video. Our jailers told me to wash the blood and dirt off my face, and we all sat around a table covered with sodas and pastries. “Smile,” they said, and instructed us to say to the camera that we were being treated humanely. “Talk. Look normal.” We were required to sign “confession” documents written in Arabic on letterhead of the “Department for Combatting Hostile Activity,” and bearing the name of Major General Hussein Muhammad al-A’ib. When I asked what the documents said, our captors laughed. They kept our computers, phones, and cash, plus thirty thousand dollars’ worth of filming equipment and my wedding ring.
The experience—deeply frightening but mercifully short—offered a glimpse into the world of indefinite detention in Libya. I often thought of Candé’s months-long incarceration, and its terrible outcome. Soon afterward, my team and I were released from our cells and escorted toward the door. As we approached, an interrogator put his hand on my chest. “Guys, you can go,” he told the others on my team. “Ian will be staying here.” Everyone stared. Then he burst out laughing, and said he was just kidding. After a total of six days in captivity, we were taken to a plane and flown to Tunisia—expelled from the country, we were told, for “reporting on migrants.”
After the detainees in Cell No. 4 were released, word of Candé’s death spread quickly through Tripoli, eventually reaching a community leader among migrants. The community leader (who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation in Libya) went with Balde, Candé’s great-uncle, to the police station, where they were given a copy of the autopsy report. It said that Candé’s name was unknown, and wrongly stated that he was from Guinea Conakry. The authorities suggested that he had died in a fight, which angered the community leader. “It wasn’t a fight,” he told me. “It was a bullet.” Later, the pair went to the local hospital to identify Candé’s body; he was wheeled out on a metal gurney, wrapped in a gauzy white cloth partially undone to reveal his face. In the next several days, they travelled around Tripoli paying off Candé’s debts, all incurred after his death: a hundred and eighty-nine dollars for the hospital stay, nineteen for the white shroud and burial clothes, two hundred and twenty-two for the coming burial.
Candé’s family learned of his death two days after it occurred. Samba, his father, told me that he could barely sleep or eat: “Sadness weighs heavily on me.” Hava had given birth to a daughter named Cadjato, who is now two, and told me that she would not remarry until she finished mourning. “My heart is broken,” she said. Jacaria had little hope that the police would arrest his brother’s killers. “So, he is gone,” he said. “Gone in every way.” Conditions on the farm have worsened, with heavy rainfall flooding the fields. Bobo, Candé’s youngest brother, will likely soon try to make the journey to Europe himself. “What else can I do?” he said.
Ghreetly was suspended from Al Mabani after Candé’s death, but was later reinstated. For almost three months, Doctors Without Borders, which assists migrants in detention centers, refused to enter the prison; Beatrice Lau, its head of mission in Libya at the time, said, “The persistent pattern of violent incidents and serious harm to refugees and migrants, as well as the risk to the safety of our staff, has reached a level that we are no longer able to accept.” It resumed its activities after receiving assurances that, among other things, officials would prevent further violence in the prison. But in October Libyan authorities, including members of the militia that controls Al Mabani, rounded up more than five thousand migrants in and around Gargaresh and sent many to the prison. Days later, guards opened fire on prisoners attempting to escape, killing at least six.
After Candé’s death, Sabadell, the E.U. Ambassador, called for a formal investigation, but it appears never to have taken place. (An E.U. spokesperson said, “The assurances from the Libyan authorities that these events will be investigated and that the appropriate judicial action will be carried out need to be translated into practice. Perpetrators must be held accountable. There can be no impunity for such crimes.”) Europe’s commitment to anti-migrant programs in Libya remains unshaken. Last year, Italy renewed its Memorandum of Understanding with Libya. Since this past May, with support from the E.U., it has spent at least $3.9 million on the Coast Guard. The European Commission recently committed to building the Coast Guard a new and improved “maritime rescue coördination center” and to buying it three more ships.
On April 30th, shortly after 5 p.m. prayers, Balde and some twenty other men gathered at the Bir al-Osta Milad cemetery for Candé’s funeral. The cemetery occupies an eight-acre plot between an electrical substation and two large warehouses. Many of Libya’s dead migrants are buried there, and it has an estimated ten thousand graves, many of them unmarked. The men prayed aloud as Candé’s body was lowered into a hole dug in sand, no more than a foot and a half deep. They topped it with rectangular stones and poured a layer of concrete. The men said, in unison, “God is great.” Then one of them, using a stick, scrawled Candé’s name into the wet concrete.
Donald Trump. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Sources tell Guardian Trump pressed lieutenants at Willard hotel in Washington about ways to delay certification of election result
The former president first told the lieutenants his vice-president, Mike Pence, was reluctant to go along with the plan to commandeer his largely ceremonial role at the joint session of Congress in a way that would allow Trump to retain the presidency for a second term.
But as Trump relayed to them the situation with Pence, he pressed his lieutenants about how to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January, and delay the certification process to get alternate slates of electors for Trump sent to Congress.
The former president’s remarks came as part of strategy discussions he had from the White House with the lieutenants at the Willard – a team led by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn and Trump strategist Steve Bannon – about delaying the certification.
Multiple sources, speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity, described Trump’s involvement in the effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election.
Trump’s remarks reveal a direct line from the White House and the command center at the Willard. The conversations also show Trump’s thoughts appear to be in line with the motivations of the pro-Trump mob that carried out the Capitol attack and halted Biden’s certification, until it was later ratified by Congress.
The former president’s call to the Willard hotel about stopping Biden’s certification is increasingly a central focus of the House select committee’s investigation into the Capitol attack, as it raises the specter of a possible connection between Trump and the insurrection.
Several Trump lawyers at the Willard that night deny Trump sought to stop the certification of Biden’s election win. They say they only considered delaying Biden’s certification at the request of state legislators because of voter fraud.
The former president made several calls to the lieutenants at the Willard the night before 6 January. He phoned the lawyers and the non-lawyers separately, as Giuliani did not want non-lawyers to participate on legal calls and jeopardise attorney-client privilege.
Trump’s call to the lieutenants came a day after Eastman, a late addition to the Trump legal team, outlined at a 4 January meeting at the White House how he thought Pence could usurp his role in order to stop Biden’s certification from happening at the joint session.
At the meeting, which was held in the Oval Office and attended by Trump, Pence, Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, and his legal counsel, Greg Jacob, Eastman presented a memo that detailed how Pence could insert himself into the certification and delay the process.
The memo outlined several ways for Pence to commandeer his role at the joint session, including throwing the election to the House, or adjourning the session to give states time to send slates of electors for Trump on the basis of election fraud – Eastman’s preference.
The then acting attorney general, Jeff Rosen, and his predecessor, Bill Barr, who had both been appointed by Trump, had already determined there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the 2020 election.
Eastman told the Guardian last month that the memo only presented scenarios and was not intended as advice. “The advice I gave the vice-president very explicitly was that I did not think he had the authority simply to declare which electors to count,” Eastman said.
Trump seized on the memo – first reported by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book Peril – and pushed Pence to adopt the schemes, which some of the other lieutenants at the Willard later told Trump were legitimate ways to flip the election.
But Pence resisted Trump’s entreaties, and told him in the Oval Office the next day that Trump should count him out of whatever plans he had to subvert the results of the 2020 election at the joint session, because he did not intend to take part.
Trump was furious at Pence for refusing to do him a final favor when, in the critical moment underpinning the effort to reinstall Trump as president, he phoned lieutenants at the Willard sometime between the late evening on 5 January and the early hours of 6 January.
From the White House, Trump made several calls to lieutenants, including Giuliani, Eastman, Epshteyn and Bannon, who were huddled in suites complete with espresso machines and Cokes in a mini-fridge in the north-west corner of the hotel.
On the calls, the former president first recounted what had transpired in the Oval Office meeting with Pence, informing Bannon and the lawyers at the Willard that his vice-president appeared ready to abandon him at the joint session in several hours’ time.
“He’s arrogant,” Trump, for instance, told Bannon of Pence – his own way of communicating that Pence was unlikely to play ball – in an exchange reported in Peril and confirmed by the Guardian.
But on at least one of those calls, Trump also sought from the lawyers at the Willard ways to stop the joint session to ensure Biden would not be certified as president on 6 January, as part of a wider discussion about buying time to get states to send Trump electors.
The fallback that Trump and his lieutenants appeared to settle on was to cajole Republican members of Congress to raise enough objections so that even without Pence adjourning the joint session, the certification process would be delayed for states to send Trump slates.
It was not clear whether Trump discussed on the call about the prospect of stopping Biden’s certification by any means if Pence refused to insert himself into the process, but the former president is said to have enjoyed watching the insurrection unfold from the dining room.
But the fact that Trump considered ways to stop the joint session may help to explain why he was so reluctant to call off the rioters and why the Republican senator Ben Sasse told the conservative talkshow host Hugh Hewitt that he heard Trump seemed “delighted” about the attack.
The lead Trump lawyer at the Willard, Giuliani, appearing to follow that fallback plan, called at least one Republican senator later that same evening, asking him to help keep Congress adjourned and stall the joint session beyond 6 January.
In a voicemail recorded at about 7pm on 6 January, and reported by the Dispatch, Giuliani implored the Republican senator Tommy Tuberville to object to 10 states Biden won once Congress reconvened at 8pm, a process that would have concluded 15 hours later, close to 7 January.
“The only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow – ideally until the end of tomorrow,” Giuliani said.
Liz Harrington, a spokesperson for Trump, disputed the account of Trump’s call after publication. “This is totally false,” Harrington said, without giving specifics. Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment. Eastman, Epshteyn and Bannon declined to comment.
Trump made several calls the day before the Capitol attack from both the White House residence, his preferred place to work, as well as the West Wing, but it was not certain from which location he phoned his top lieutenants at the Willard.
The White House residence and its Yellow Oval Room – a Trump favorite – is significant since communications there, including from a desk phone, are not automatically memorialized in records sent to the National Archives after the end of an administration.
But even if Trump called his lieutenants from the West Wing, the select committee may not be able to fully uncover the extent of his involvement in the events of 6 January, unless House investigators secure testimony from individuals with knowledge of the calls.
That difficulty arises since calls from the White House are not necessarily recorded, and call detail records that the select committee is suing to pry free from the National Archives over Trump’s objections about executive privilege, only show the destination of the calls.
House select committee investigators this month opened a new line of inquiry into activities at the Willard hotel, just across the street from the White House, issuing subpoenas to Eastman and the former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik, an assistant to Giuliani.
The chairman of the select committee, Bennie Thompson, said in a statement that the panel was pursuing the Trump officials at the Willard to uncover “every detail about their efforts to overturn the election, including who they were talking to in the White House and in Congress”.
Mark Harris, Republican candidate in North Carolina's 9th Congressional race, fights back tears at the conclusion of his son John Harris's testimony during the third day of a North Carolina State Board of Elections hearing on the 9th Congressional District voting irregularities. (photo: Travis Long/News and Observer)
In North Carolina, a few hundred fraudulent ballots changed the outcome of a race. It had nothing to do with Donald Trump.
A year earlier, Harris had lost the 2016 Republican primary for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District by a mere 134 votes. A handful of absentee votes in Bladen County had made all the difference.
Now a powerful judge had arranged the furniture store meeting with three local Republican power players — a Realtor whose family founded the famous hamburger joint in town, the county GOP chair and the county commissioner who owned the furniture store, Ray Britt. They wanted to introduce Harris to the person who steered those handful of absentee ballots, McCrae Dowless.
Harris and Dowless bonded quickly. Dowless couldn’t even wait until the next morning to call Harris to follow up on the meeting. That night he called Harris at 11:25 p.m. The two talked for seven minutes and 20 seconds. Over the next 18 months, they’d contact each other hundreds of times, according to phone records we obtained during the course of our reporting. And those conversations would result in a congressional election being overturned because of election fraud, the only time that’s happened in modern U.S. history, with Harris giving up a seat in Congress he believed he’d won on election night.
All of this happened long before this past tumultuous year, during which Donald Trump and his followers have alleged vast conspiracies of fraud to cast doubt on Joe Biden’s election as president. The consequences have been dire: from the riot of Jan. 6 that nearly stymied the certification of Biden’s victory to the widespread and wholly unsupported belief by large segments of the electorate that the election was stolen.
None of those allegations have been substantiated. Multiple court cases and recounts and audits have disproven the claims of absentee ballot manipulation in multiple states involving hundreds, even thousands of alleged conspirators.
But fraud involving absentee ballots is a real thing. It just looks nothing like the lurid tales spun by people like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. The story of what happened in the race for North Carolina’s 9th District shows just how rare and also how basic and local election fraud really is. What happened in Bladen County in 2018 wasn’t carried out by sophisticated computers from a foreign land, but by low-level operatives with handwritten lists and spreadsheets in a forgotten stretch of eastern North Carolina where the median household income is $36,000 a year, where the most prominent employer is a hog-slaughtering plant and where folks were desperate enough to knock on doors and ask for people’s votes for candidates they didn’t know.
From the beginning, Mark Harris couldn’t get enough of the relationship with Dowless.
Dowless, a man in his mid-60s who only recently quit a several-packs-of-Newports-a-day habit, is easy to like. He carries himself like a humble Bladen County tour guide. Understated, soft-spoken, aware of every turn in the road. If you didn’t know about his past — he was convicted of insurance fraud in the early 1990s, and had been the subject of a 2016 state board of elections investigation into election fraud — you might think his plan for boosting Republican votes was fool-proof. And lawful.
Harris woke up the next morning still turning their first date over in his head. The Baptist preacher had heard the speculation of foul play in eastern North Carolina elections, sure. To this day he swears that the last thing he’d want to do is sign on with someone who was breaking the law. The morning after the meeting, he called a trusted advisor, his son John, a lawyer who worked in the U.S. Attorney’s office, to talk about it. John was on his way to work in Raleigh.
An idealist with a straight jaw and classic haircut, John wouldn’t know how to get in trouble if he was dropped into a bucket of it. As a high schooler at the century-old McCallie School in Tennessee, he was president of the student senate, an honor council designed to regulate truth and fairness among students. He was also president of the Young Republicans. From there, he went to UNC and Duke as a Robertson Scholar.
It was John who first thought his father had a shot to win the 9th District. When the congressional maps were redrawn before the 2016 primary, John saw a district that was more rural and less affluent, and those were the kinds of folks his dad connected with. The new 9th was set up nicely for a pastor who in 2010 led a campaign to ban same-sex marriage that rural, conservative voters overwhelmingly favored. The incumbent, Robert Pittenger, had few friends in the rural reaches of the district. He lived in the district’s wealthier western end, in a 13,898-square-foot mansion valued at $7 million — not exactly a lifestyle familiar to the majority of voters in Bladen County.
John Harris had been a law clerk in Washington during that 2016 campaign. He wasn’t involved day to day in his father’s run but he supported from afar by analyzing data and giving his parents advice.
On the night of the June 2016 primary, as Mark Harris conceded victory to Pittenger, John clicked through the results: Out of 26,606 cast his dad had lost by a margin of one half of 1 percent. It was late, 11 p.m., when he shot both of his parents an email: “I mentioned by text that things looked strange coming out of Bladen County. I’ve taken another look, and can confirm that the absentee by mail votes look very strange.”
The results were close enough that Harris and his campaign team considered calling for a recount. Any wrongdoing they could find, they figured, would only bolster their argument. In his email, John Harris highlighted the wild mail-in ballot numbers in Bladen, which ran completely counter to the overall results:
• 221 votes for Todd Johnson, who finished third overall in the district
• 4 votes for Mark Harris, who nearly won the election
• 1 (one) vote for Robert Pittenger, the sitting congressman
“The irregularity suggests perhaps there is a more systemic error, and given that you outperformed Pittenger in both early voting and on Election Day in Bladen County, it may be worth investigating,” John went on in his email. “This smacks of something gone awry.”
John had a hunch that the man behind the margin, McCrae Dowless, had helped Johnson amass all those votes by collecting absentee ballots and bringing them to the board of elections. That would be a crime. Still, in a move that was either polite or weak or both, the Harris campaign didn’t mount a challenge and Pittenger won reelection easily in November.
Now in the spring of 2017, a more motivated Mark Harris considered a second challenge. And this time he meant to hire the same Bladen County operative who had appeared to be the secret weapon in his defeat.
That morning after the meeting at Ray Britt’s furniture store, Mark Harris walked John through what Dowless had told him about his two-step process. How Dowless sent workers to collect the absentee ballot request forms, which is legal, but not the absentee ballots themselves, which is illegal. How Dowless sent a team of two people to witness absentee ballots but not collect them, which is legal so long as both people who sign as witnesses actually watched the voter cast their ballot. How Dowless swore to him he wouldn’t take a 90-year-old woman’s ballot to the mailbox even if she asked. Based on Dowless’s presentation the day before, the elder Harris said, the operation seemed to be legal.
John didn’t believe it.
He tried to convince his father to stay away. Their conversation stretched on through John’s 20-minute drive into downtown Raleigh, as he sat in his car in the parking garage and as he walked across the street and sat on a bench outside of his office. John told his dad that Dowless was a convicted felon. The young man who was president of his high school honors council said he worried Dowless would do something illegal. And even if he didn’t, he still might do something that would stain the victory.
“You better believe that Robert Pittenger, if it’s a close race, he’s going to send everything after you to determine, you know, whether or not anything had gone on,” John told his dad.
John, by now pacing outside his office, said he had to go to work. But the conversation continued via email. The first note from John simply quoted the North Carolina statute that made it a felony to collect someone’s absentee ballot.
Mark responded a half hour later. “So you found no problem in handling ‘request forms?’ I am certain they have them mailed in then!”
John replied right away in an email that began with a cold admonition: “This is not legal advice.” It was as though he was talking to a would-be client whose case he knew was bad, a case he didn’t want to take. It was also as if he knew that one day his emails would be made public.
“The key thing that I am fairly certain they do that is illegal is that they collect the completed absentee ballots and mail them at once,” John wrote. “The way they pop up in batches at the board of elections makes me believe that. But if they simply leave the ballot with the voter and say be sure to mail this in, then that’s not illegal.”
Mark’s response to his scholar son’s well-reasoned, well-researched advice was hypothetical. “Mom brought up a good point,” Mark wrote, speaking of his wife, Beth. “Maybe they just go with the person to their personal mailbox and put it in, and raise the flag for the mailman to pick up. Since the ballot is already sealed and signed over the seal, they don’t pick them up, to my understanding, but rather encourage them to mail it that day by putting it in their mailbox and raising the flag.”
John, in disbelief, flung back one last reply. “Good test is if you’re comfortable with the full process he uses being broadcast on the news.”
Mark Harris didn’t respond. His answer came two weeks later when he started writing checks to Dowless to secure his services for the 2018 election.
On May 8, 2018, a year and change after the first meeting between Harris and Dowless, the primary election day broke sunny with temperatures in the upper 70s. A great day for people to show up to the polls. That is, if they hadn’t already voted.
By then, Dowless had introduced Harris to everyone he could find in Bladen County. He’d taken the candidate to the Beast Fest, Bladen’s fall festival named in honor of a mythical predator from the 1950s that supposedly was killing people’s pets, and to the peanut festival. Mark had eaten muscadine slushies and collard sandwiches, hyper-local delicacies, in his efforts to connect with the rural voters.
Harris and his campaign were on their way to paying Dowless about $130,000 to work three counties — Bladen, Robeson and Cumberland — over the course of the 2018 election. Dowless used the cash on various campaign expenses, including payments to workers on the ground. Dowless could have worked for Pittenger but he told us he liked Harris more, and he paid better. “I knew Pittenger wouldn’t have paid that much,” Dowless told us. “He’d have said $3,000 or $4,000. You can’t do three damn counties for $3,000 or $4,000. You can’t do it. And I said, ‘Hey, I’m not gonna do it.’”
His playbook was as it ever was. Dowless sent a small army of people to knock on doors, convince people to fill out an absentee ballot request form, and then follow up after the ballots arrived to make sure they actually voted. The workers drove down dirt roads and knocked on doors, not out of a love of politics or a sense of civic engagement. They did it for the cash. Dowless paid roughly $200 per stack of request forms.
By 2018, the opioid crisis was part of the fabric of Bladen County. The rate of unintentional deaths due to drugs was about 29 percent higher than anywhere else in North Carolina. Dowless and many of his non-user friends have a name for these addicts. Hearkening back to the days when people who worked in cotton mills were called “lintheads,” he calls them “pillheads.” People like that were looking for quick work for cash, and Dowless had stacks of it.
He was willing to hire them, but he gave them no leeway: payment upon receipt of the ballot request forms. No exceptions. “These people, if you don’t pay them to do something,” Dowless told us, “if you pay them an hourly rate, they’ll go sit under a tree.”
So these “pillheads,” as Dowless called them, collected the request forms and brought them back to him. They would either return them to his house, where he’d look them over sitting in his swivel chair at his kitchen table, or to his office a few miles away, where he’d hold court from a different swivel chair behind an old desk with a full ashtray.
He’d look over the forms, then put the initials of the person who collected it in the top right corner. That way, if the board of elections had any questions about the ballot request form, he knew which worker to call. He made a copy of each form before turning it in. This way, he’d have the voters’ information when the actual ballots went out, and he could send workers back to their houses to make sure they voted.
Bladen County saw 647 absentee ballots cast in the 2018 primary. Dowless couldn’t claim credit for all of them, but many came from people in and around Bladenboro, near his house. These were votes from people he knew, and people he was certain would bubble in the circle he wanted them to bubble. There wasn’t any single way folks knew who Dowless wanted them to vote for. It was a combination of techniques: who he talked about when he was hanging around the convenience store and the local barbecue restaurant; who he put campaign signs out for; whose sticker was on the back of his car.
The primary ended with Harris taking the Republican nomination that had eluded him two years earlier. In Bladen County, he won nearly 70 percent of the votes overall. And in absentees, the number was staggering: Harris received 437 absentee votes; Pittenger got 17. It’s a difference of 420. But if you take into account that had Dowless been working for Pittenger, nearly all of them would’ve gone to the incumbent, it was an 840-vote flip.
Harris’s overall margin, after all the votes in the 9th District were counted from Charlotte to Bladenboro, was 828 votes. Bladen County was the difference. And once again McCrae Dowless was the difference in Bladen County.
The general-election ballot harvest season runs along the same timeline as beans in eastern North Carolina. Planting starts in late July but mostly in August and early September, in order to have a crop by the first frost in early November.
In early August 2018, a woman working for the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC, a Democratic-leaning group that works to get out the vote for candidates most of whom are Black, dropped off 184 request forms at the county board of elections. This, perhaps more than any other event, marked the unofficial start of the 2018 general election between Mark Harris and Dan McCready, a Democrat and Marine Corps veteran who had the support of some of the wealthiest left-leaning donors in the district, as well as the national Democratic Party.
A few weeks later, on Aug. 22, another big batch of ballot request forms showed up, filled out and signed, more than 100 in all. Dowless’s signature is hard to miss: a big ‘M,’ then an underlined small ‘c,’ then the uppercase ‘C,’ followed by some squiggles. Then a big, loopy ‘D,’ followed by an ‘o,’ and one clear cursive ‘l’ that gives way to more squiggles. That signature was next to a line declaring those 128 ballot request forms had been dropped off. The first seeds of the 2018 general election harvest were planted, and the rains from Hurricane Florence were on their way.
In mid-October, weeks after Florence struck, eastern North Carolina was still in shambles, with people’s moldy belongings piled up on the country roads. But Dowless kept working. He prepared another list of folks who’d requested absentee ballots. It was time to make sure they voted. Now he needed the same workers to go out and nudge people. Or, if needed, maybe something a little more than a nudge.
As Election Day and that first frost grew near, farmers rushed to harvest the last of the bean crops, and the vote collectors did the same.
Meanwhile, investigators and attorneys with the state board of elections were watching closely. They’d grown increasingly impatient since they sent to the U.S. Attorney’s office a 300-page report about the 2016 shenanigans in the district. The report included details not only of Dowless’s operation, but also his rivals at the Bladen County Improvement Association. But the U.S. attorney, Robert Higdon, did nothing with the file, instead focusing his attention on a handful of immigrants he thought were voting illegally. Most of those immigrants wound up having the proper paperwork.
So in the fall of 2018, the state board’s investigators continued to do the work the Justice Department hadn’t done. On Oct. 3, they went to the Bladen elections board office to inquire about the high number of absentee ballots that were pouring in. There they met Valeria McKoy, a Black woman and the deputy director, and asked if she’d noticed anything strange.
Yes, McKoy told the investigators, she’d noticed that several of the containers were signed by the same name. Actually, a lot of the containers were signed by the same names. The investigators asked to see the ballot request forms in question, but McKoy hesitated. “You’re getting me in trouble,” she said quietly, then turned away to go get them, according to the investigators’ report.
Dowless was by now convinced his candidate would win. Never more so than the afternoon he saw a new mailer for McCready. Most people would see an image that couldn’t be more wholesome: a young man with his pregnant wife and three young kids — a girl and two boys — and two curly-haired labradoodles, one white and one black, all looking at the camera. The only thing you could fault them for was being perfect.
That was the problem. Dowless pulled his phone from his breast pocket and called Harris.
“Mark, we got that McCready mailer down here in Bladen today,” he said. “That dog’s been to a groomer. That ain’t gonna fly in Bladen County. You’re gonna win.”
Late on election night, Dowless was steadily on his phone, calling friends and other people interested in small-town politics, crunching the data, while Mark Harris and his campaign partied at a country club in Monroe, about 120 miles west.
The congressional contest wasn’t even close in Bladen, with Harris collecting 5,413 votes to McCready’s 3,856. Of those who voted for Harris, 420 were by absentee ballot. That was a pretty healthy return on the 572 request forms Dowless’s team planted and picked up earlier in the election season.
Just before midnight, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee sent a video message that was played on the big screen at the Harris rally. “I can’t wait for you to represent all of us,” Huckabee said, as it looked more and more like Harris would win.
The crowd started chanting, “MARK, MARK, MARK,” and soon Mark Harris walked out to greet his supporters wearing the uniform of a Republican member of Congress: dark navy suit, white shirt and red-and-blue striped tie. His white hair was, as always, neatly shaped, with a stark part on the left side. An American flag pin was on his right lapel.
Nearly 280,000 people cast votes throughout the district that year, and Harris was on his way to what would eventually be called a 905-vote edge. Less than half a percent — roughly the same margin by which he had lost to Pittenger some two years before. While Dowless sat at home with a satisfied smoke, and while Dan McCready stayed in a Charlotte Marriott room with his campaign team instead of talking to his supporters, Harris took the stage next to his wife, Beth, in front of a blue and white backdrop that read “MarkHarrisForCongress.com” to claim victory.
Harris looked back and forth across the room, his voice projecting excitement. He held a microphone in his left hand, and with his right, he waved and pointed his index finger to emphasize his points, as if he were giving a Sunday sermon.
As he looked into the crowd, the previous 19 months flashed before him. He knew which places had propelled him to victory. He believed that the meeting at the furniture store, the hundreds of calls and texts to McCrae Dowless, the Beast Fest and the peanut festival, the muscadine slushies and the collard sandwiches, they were all wrapped up in those 900 or so votes that separated him from McCready. They were the reason this room at the country club was full and McCready’s room at the Marriott was empty.
As he continued with his victory speech, the pastor with the good hair made sure to mention the places that made the difference and to praise the Lord for them.
“And I have to say, as I look at that map tonight,” Harris said, “thank God for Bladen and Union counties!”
Meanwhile, across the state, Dowless was sitting at his kitchen table chain-smoking and calling people to ask if they’d seen what he’d done. He’d not only licked a sitting congressman in the primary that spring, now he’d done it again to the rich Democrat and his longtime Bladen Improvement PAC rivals in the general. On top of that, he did it for someone he genuinely liked in Harris.
At 2:04 in the morning, Dowless sent Harris a text. They exchanged several messages over the next few minutes.
Dowless called Harris again at 3:49 a.m., and Harris answered. They talked for about two minutes. Dowless had a suggestion: Maybe Harris should come to Bladen County for a celebration? Dowless would organize something.
“I have to go to Washington,” Harris said, laughing. New-member orientation for the 116th Congress was the following week.
Maybe it was the feeling of not being in the room. Maybe it was his excitement. Maybe it was just his chatty nature. Whatever the case, Dowless called Harris four more times: 3:52 a.m., twice in a row at 4:33 a.m. and again at 5:51 a.m.
Each of those went unanswered. Then, with less than an hour before sunrise, he finally went to sleep.
A few weeks later, on Nov. 27, 2018, the state board of elections met to certify the results of all the contests in the state. It was a ho-hum meeting with little coverage. But then Vice Chair Josh Malcolm, a Democrat from Robeson County, Bladen’s neighbor, spoke up.
“So, um,” he cleared his throat, “It’s my request that the 9th Congressional District, to be clear, the 9th Congressional District, will not be part of this motion.”
“I’m very familiar with unfortunate activities that have been happening down in my part of the state,” Malcolm said. “And I am not going to turn a blind eye to what took place …”
Hours later, five Democrats and four Republicans returned from a closed session and voted unanimously to certify the election results throughout the state with a fairly big exception: the 9th District.
As national media rented cars to descend on Bladen County that December, McCrae Dowless and Mark Harris were painted as the faces of election fraud in America. They both still deny any wrongdoing. But eventually, the state board of elections set a February 2019 date for an evidentiary hearing into fraud in the 9th District.
Dowless declined to take the stand. Harris held firm in his denial that he knew anything improper was going on with Dowless’s operation. But the state board of elections had a star witness who was willing to say he had, in fact, been warned: Harris’s own son.
While his father wept in the audience, John Harris told the story of how he’d warned Mark about Dowless’s operation. Not only that, John produced the emails, which Mark’s own lawyers had kept from the board’s investigators.
The next day, Mark Harris said he believed there should be a new election. The crowd gasped. Harris quickly left the stand and avoided a reporters’ questions as he got in a vehicle to be carried away.
A few days later, Harris’s phone rang with a number he didn’t recognize. The caller left a voicemail. When Harris checked it, he heard the voice of his opponent, Dan McCready. The Democrat wanted to know if Harris was going to run again in the special election.
Harris did not run. McCready did.
In May 2019, Dan Bishop, a Republican who leans much farther right than Mark Harris and who who would later support the “big lie” in the 2020 election of Donald Trump, won the GOP nomination for the 9th Congressional District special election.
That summer, Bishop would stand on stage in eastern North Carolina with Trump. It was the same night supporters chanted “send her back,” referring to Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a U.S. citizen who was born in Somalia.
The election was set for September 2019, some 28 months after McCready first announced his candidacy. That night, McCready’s supporters again gathered in a Charlotte hotel, expecting victory. But the evening ended with Bishop standing on stage smiling, taking a call from Trump during his victory speech and putting the president on speakerphone for the room to hear. Bishop had won by nearly 4,000 votes out of 188,000 cast — a margin much larger than the number of absentee ballots from Bladen County.
Meanwhile, Dowless, who maintains his innocence as he awaits trial in August 2022 on election fraud charges, sat at home while Bishop celebrated, calling friends to see if they had any numbers or stats from the first election he hadn’t worked in decades.
Jessica Cisneros is a Mexican American immigration and human rights attorney running for Congress in Texas's 28th District. (photo: Veronica Cardenas/Reuters)
Cisneros, a 28-year-old immigration and human rights lawyer, is mounting a second primary challenge against Rep. Henry Cuellar, a 66-year-old former attorney who has represented south Texas in Congress for nearly two decades.
In the 2020 primary, Cuellar beat Cisneros by less than 3,000 votes. This time around, Cisneros is seeking to highlight Cuellar's donations from the oil and gas industry, which she says have driven his opposition to certain climate policies.
- Cuellar is the fourth-biggest recipient in the House of oil and gas campaign contributions in the 2022 cycle so far, receiving $100,200, according to OpenSecrets.
- He previously received $165,305 from the fossil fuel industry over the 2015-16 campaign cycle, leading McClatchy to speculate whether he was "Big Oil's favorite Democrat."
In the climate policy arena, Cuellar opposes the Green New Deal, the sweeping proposal to wean the nation off fossil fuels in a decade with a government-led jobs program.
- He has also expressed concern about including a fee on emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that can leak from oil and gas wells, in Democrats' climate and social spending bill.
- While Cuellar voted for the Build Back Better Act when it passed the House this month, he is continuing to lobby the Senate to drop the methane fee from the spending bill, the Associated Press reported last week.
"It's no surprise that as a result of his track record, he's known as Big Oil's favorite Democrat," Cisneros said of Cuellar in an interview with The Climate 202. "And it's no surprise that he's doing their bidding after all the support he's received from them."
As a candidate, Cisneros has supported a methane fee and signed the “No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge," which states: “I pledge not to take contributions over $200 from oil, gas, and coal industry executives, lobbyists, and PACs and instead prioritize the health of our families, climate, and democracy over fossil fuel industry profits.”
In comments emailed to The Climate 202 by his chief of staff, Cuellar strongly pushed back on Cisneros's allegations.
- Cuellar noted that despite her scorn for fossil fuel industry donations, Cisneros accepted $1,000 from an offshore oil and gas consultant and $263 from two Chevron employees in 2020, according to Federal Election Commission records. (The consultant and employees were not covered by the “No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge,” which only mentions executives and lobbyists.)
- “My opponent supports the Green New Deal, which will cost nearly $100 million and is not paid for, but still took thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the Oil … Gas Industry … that is hypocritical,” Cuellar said.
- The incumbent congressman also defended his opposition to a methane fee, saying the policy would further raise energy prices for the middle class and would “impose punitive and additional burdens on U.S. production of oil and natural gas.”
- Despite his 47 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters, Cuellar said he has helped secure millions of dollars to address climate change as a member of the Appropriations Committee.
The AOC factor
Cisneros, who mounted her first primary challenge at age 26, is seeking to capitalize on a new political era where youth can be an asset on the campaign trail. She hopes to follow in the footsteps of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who rose to liberal stardom at 28 after her surprise primary win over incumbent congressman Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.).
The Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate group that backed Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, recently endorsed Cisneros for a second time. It was the group's first House endorsement of the 2022 campaign cycle.
"It means a lot to be able to count on their vote of confidence again," Cisneros said of Sunrise's support, adding that young people “understand the urgency” of addressing climate change because "we're all trying to fight for a livable planet for ourselves and obviously the generation that comes after us."
Joel Bravo, Sunrise's electoral politics director, told The Climate 202 that the group is supporting Cisneros again after a power crisis hit Texas last winter, leaving millions without electricity. While some Republicans blamed frozen wind turbines, the main problem was record low temperatures that hindered natural gas production.
"As we've seen with the Texas freeze, Henry Cuellar has not stopped taking a single dollar from Big Oil, even as his south Texas community continues to struggle and is being destroyed by the climate crisis," Bravo said.
The political action committee of the League of Conservation Voters backed Cisneros in the 2020 primary, but the organization has not yet released endorsements for the 2022 cycle, nor have several other leading environmental groups.
The primary is scheduled for March 1.
Honduran presidential candidate for the Libertad y Refundacion (LIBRE) party Xiomara Castro de Zelaya delivers a speech during a rally in Santa Barbara, Honduras. (photo: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images)
With more than half the votes counted, Xiomara Castro had lead of 20 percentage points over ruling party candidate Asfura.
With more than half the votes counted, Castro had at least 53 percent support and held a commanding lead of almost 20 percentage points over the ruling National Party’s Nasry Asfura, according to a live count from Honduras’s National Electoral Council (CNE) on Monday.
Castro, whose husband Manuel Zelaya was deposed from the presidency in a 2009 coup backed by business and military elites, claimed victory late on Sunday, even as the CNE said no result would be announced until the last vote is counted.
With more than 1.8 million votes counted, Castro held a margin of at least 350,000 votes. Despite warnings from the CNE to wait for official results, major Honduran news outlets have called the race as a victory for Castro, 62.
The council said voter turnout was at more than 68 percent.
Jubilant celebrations broke out at Castro’s campaign headquarters as the vote count progressed and her lead held, with supporters chanting “JOH out” in reference to two-term President Juan Orlando Hernandez of the National Party.
Hernandez is deeply unpopular and has been implicated in a drug trafficking case in a United States federal court. He denies wrongdoing, but could face an indictment when he leaves office.
“I believe firmly that the democratic socialism I propose is the solution to pull Honduras out of the abyss we have been buried in by neoliberalism, a narco-dictator and corruption,” Castro said in a campaign speech.
Castro, who would be the Central American nation’s first female president, has promised big changes, including a constitutional overhaul, United Nations support in the fight against corruption, and looser abortion restrictions.
She has also floated the idea of dropping diplomatic support for Taiwan in favour of China, a policy proposal keenly watched in Washington, Beijing and Taipei.
Business leaders quickly offered congratulations and Castro promised to work “hand in hand” with the private sector. “We’re going to form a government of reconciliation, a government of peace and justice,” Castro added.
However, critics have sought to paint her as a dangerous radical, recalling Zelaya’s closeness to late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
In her speech, Castro promised to strengthen direct democracy by holding referendums on key policies. Elsewhere in Latin America, that tool has sometimes in fact strengthened presidential power.
The election took place against a backdrop of deep socioeconomic problems and poverty exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, which helped push record numbers of Hondurans to leave for the US.
Al Jazeera’s Manuel Rapalo, reporting from the capital Tegucigalpa on Monday, said leftist leaders from across Latin America have been sending Castro messages of congratulations on social media, even though final results have yet to be announced.
“There a number of reasons why this has the potential to be an historic election for Honduras,” said Rapalo, pointing among other things to voter turnout, which was at its highest since the country returned to democratic rule in the 1980s.
“Many people feel hungry for change after 12 years of single-party rule,” Rapalo said. “Many people see the ruling National Party as being endemically corrupt, leading to worsening poverty in the country.”
Honduras has been hit hard by gang violence, drug trafficking and hurricanes, with 59 percent of the country’s 10 million people living in poverty.
“We’ve tried this government for 12 years and things have gone from bad to worse,” Luis Gomez, 26, told the AFP news agency in the gang-ridden Tegucigalpa neighbourhood of La Sosa. “We hope for something new.”
Castro, who sought the presidency twice before, seized on the unpopularity of outgoing Hernandez, while the National Party’s candidate Asfura was at pains to keep his distance from the president during the election campaign.
Asfura was accused in 2020 of embezzling $700,000 in public money, and the so-called Pandora Papers linked him to influence-peddling in Costa Rica.
The third major candidate in the presidential race, the Liberal Party’s Yani Rosenthal, spent three years in a US jail for money laundering. He scored just nine percent, according to early election results. He has reportedly conceded to Castro, Al Jazeera’s Rapalo said Monday.
Asfura urged voters to show patience in a social media post, but stopped short of conceding.
The fate of Honduras’s 128-member Congress also remained in the air with no results published on Monday. If the National Party keeps control, it could complicate things for a Castro administration.
Plastic pellets found on a beach. (photo: Getty Images)
Billions of these tiny plastic pellets are floating in the ocean, causing as much damage as oil spills, yet they are still not classified as hazardous
Classified by the UN as Sri Lanka’s “worst maritime disaster”, the biggest impact was not caused by the heavy fuel oil. Nor was it the hazardous chemicals on board, which included nitric acid, caustic soda and methanol. The most “significant” harm, according to the UN, came from the spillage of 87 containers full of lentil-sized plastic pellets: nurdles.
Since the disaster, nurdles have been washing up in their billions along hundreds of miles of the country’s coastline, and are expected to make landfall across Indian Ocean coastlines from Indonesia and Malaysia to Somalia. In some places they are up to 2 metres deep. They have been found in the bodies of dead dolphins and the mouths of fish. About 1,680 tonnes of nurdles were released into the ocean. It is the largest plastic spill in history, according to the UN report.
Nurdles, the colloquial term for “pre-production plastic pellets”, are the little-known building block for all our plastic products. The tiny beads can be made of polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride and other plastics. Released into the environment from plastic plants or when shipped around the world as raw material to factories, they will sink or float, depending on the density of the pellets and if they are in freshwater or saltwater.
They are often mistaken for food by seabirds, fish and other wildlife. In the environment, they fragment into nanoparticles whose hazards are more complex. They are the second-largest source of micropollutants in the ocean, by weight, after tyre dust. An astounding 230,000 tonnes of nurdles end up in oceans every year.
Like crude oil, nurdles are highly persistent pollutants, and will continue to circulate in ocean currents and wash ashore for decades. They are also “toxic sponges”, which attract chemical toxins and other pollutants on to their surfaces.
“The pellets themselves are a mixture of chemicals – they are fossil fuels,” says Tom Gammage, at the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an international campaign group. “But they act as toxic sponges. A lot of toxic chemicals – which in the case of Sri Lanka are already in the water – are hydrophobic [repel water], so they gather on the surface of microplastics.
“Pollutants can be a million times more concentrated on the surface of pellets than in the water,” he says. “And we know from lab studies that when a fish eats a pellet, some of those pollutants come loose.”
Nurdles also act as “rafts” for harmful bacteria such as E coli or even cholera, one study found, transporting them from sewage outfalls and agricultural runoff to bathing waters and shellfish beds. The phenomenon of “plastic rafting” is increasing.
Yet nurdles, unlike substances such as kerosene, diesel and petrol, are not deemed hazardous under the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO’s) dangerous goods code for safe handling and storage. This is despite the threat to the environment from plastic pellets being known about for three decades, as detailed in a 1993 report from the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency on how the plastics industry could reduce spillages.
Now environmentalists are joining forces with the Sri Lankan government in an attempt to turn the X-Press Pearl disaster into a catalyst for change.
When the IMO’s marine environment protection committee met in London this week, Sri Lanka’s call for nurdles to be classified as hazardous goods attracted public support, with more than 50,000 people signing a petition. “There is nothing to stop what happened in Sri Lanka happening again,” says Gammage.
Last year there were at least two nurdle spills. In the North Sea a broken container on the cargo ship MV Trans Carrier lost 10 tonnes of pellets, which washed up on the coasts of Denmark, Sweden and Norway. In South Africa, a spill in August 2020 came after an accident in 2018, which affected up to 1,250 miles (2,000km) of coastline. Only 23% of the 49 tonnes that were spilled were recovered. In 2019, 342 containers of plastic pellets spilled into the North Sea.
Awareness is growing about the huge threat posed by the tiny pellets. Last year two environmental protesters in the US were charged under a Louisiana state law with “terrorising” a plastics industry lobbyist when they left a box of nurdles outside his house as part of a campaign to stop the Taiwan-based Formosa Plastics opening a factory in Louisiana.
The nurdles came from another Formosa plant in Texas, which had spilled vast amounts of the pellets into Lavaca Bay on the Gulf of Mexico (Formosa agreed to pay $50m to settle a lawsuit for allegedly violating the Clean Water Act). The charges against the activists, which carried a 15-year prison term, were later dropped.
Such incidents are preventable, campaigners say. “The sinking of the X-Press Pearl – and spill of chemical products and plastic pellets into the seas of Sri Lanka – caused untold damage to marine life and destroyed local livelihoods,” says Hemantha Withanage, director of the Centre for Environmental Justice in Sri Lanka. Consumption of fish, the main protein source for 40% of Sri Lankans, has reduced drastically, he says. “It was a huge accident and unfortunately there’s no guidance from the IMO.”
Classifying nurdles as hazardous – as is the case for explosives, flammable liquids and other environmentally harmful substances – would make them subject to strict conditions for shipping. “They must be stored below deck, in more robust packaging with clear labelling,” says Tanya Cox, marine plastic specialist at the conservation charity Flora … Fauna International. “They would also be subject to disaster-response protocols that can, if implemented in the event of an emergency, prevent the worst environmental impacts.”
But the nurdle can has been kicked down the road, with the IMO secretariat referring the issue to its pollution, prevention and response committee, which meets next year. Campaigners said it was disappointing that the Sri Lankan proposal was not properly discussed. The EIA’s Christina Dixon said: “The attitude of the committee members was extraordinary and showed a callous disregard for plastic pollution from ships as a threat to coastal communities, ecosystems and food security. This is simply unacceptable.”
Meanwhile, the cleanup continues in Sri Lanka. Some of the 470 turtles, 46 dolphins and eight whales washing ashore have had nurdles in their bodies, says Withanage. While there is no proof the nurdles were responsible, he says: “I’ve seen some of the dolphins and they had plastic particles inside. There are 20,000 families who have had to stop fishing.
“The fishermen say when they dip [themselves] into the water, the pellets get into their ears. It’s affected tourism, everything.”
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