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An open question and subject of endless debate over the past year has been, what does Joe Manchin want? The Washington Post appears to have answered that question. Earlier this week the Post reported:
Democratic plans to restrict new oil and gas development off both coasts and in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have emerged as a new flash point in the Build Back Better bill, highlighting the party’s political schism as it tries to advance the massive spending legislation.
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), a critical swing vote, has rejected a provision that would prohibit all future drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, as well as the eastern Gulf of Mexico, according to three people familiar with the matter, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. He also expressed surprise at top Democrats’ decision to include language ending an oil and gas leasing program in the pristine refuge, a longtime priority for party leaders and their environmentalist allies, but he has not indicated whether he will oppose it.
Stick a pin that it will matter as we move on.
Joe Manchin although he stands in theatrical and material opposition to his entire party is, by virtue of the sheer amount of press coverage he and his antics are receiving is rapidly becoming the face of the Democratic party. As he bullies his way towards authorship of every key piece of democratic legislation in the early stages of Joe Biden’s presidency his views and initiatives by default or design supplant the agenda of every Democrat in Congress.
Conversely and more importantly under those circumstances his baggage becomes the baggage of every Democrat, the baggage of the party. And Maserati Joe indeed has a good deal of baggage in need of carrying.
Joe Manchin has been described as a “coal Barron.” That’s inordinately lofty. His coal byproducts company Enersystems Inc. is more bit player in the industry. While he seems to realize a few million dollars in net worth enhancement from his stake in the company it doesn’t make him a significant player in the energy sector.
Should Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Congressional contingent tire of carrying Joe Manchin and his baggage on their backs there are some opportunities his freewheeling style affords them.
The Chairmanship of The Senate Energy Committee
Mitch McConnell opined this week that he was open to allowing Manchin to retain his Chairmanship if he were to switch parties. But that doesn’t solve Manchin’s reelection problems in Republican dominated West Virginia where he wouldn’t be the favorite to win the Republican Senate primary. Switching parties would be an effective short term fix for Manchin’s problems with the Democrats, but in totality it doesn’t give him much longterm leverage. In totality Schumer can and should put the Chairmanship in play.
If Manchin does defect it would create short term problems for Biden’s agenda but it also provides a powerful campaign issue opportunity for the Democrats in 2022. They would have a corrupt bad guy to run against and a clear-cut legislative objective to campaign on.
Manchin and Sinema’s Industry Benefactors
While Joe Manchin may not himself be much of an energy baron he routinely does the bidding of a number of them. Joe Manchin loves to say that he is representing the people of West Virginia, the facts tell a different story. In reality his record is far more responsive to the needs of his deep pocketed donors in the energy sector. The same could be said of Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema and her ties to big Pharma.
Joe Biden working as the head of executive branch can do a lot of things to help the energy and Pharma sectors (carrot) and a lot of things to impact the financial interests of those industries, big-time, (stick). Regardless of which party Manchin choses to align himself with. That is the power of the President. The most effective way for Biden to further his agenda might well be to negotiate directly with the real decision makers standing behind Senators Manchin and Sinema. A tactic FDR, Truman and LBJ all used to great effect. That would take primary control of the entire equation and all of its sub plots.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Officers detain a demonstrator in Portland, July 29, 2020. (photo: Brandon Bell/The New York Times)
“No cops, no prisons, total abolition,” they chanted. Some of the activists, dressed in the trademark uniform of solid black clothing and masks that often signals a readiness to make trouble without being readily identifiable, smashed windows at the local Democratic Party headquarters.
The event — like others that had consumed the city since the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020 — included a variety of anarchists, anti-fascists, communists and racial justice activists. But there were others mingling in the crowd that day: plainclothes agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The FBI set up extensive surveillance operations inside Portland’s protest movement, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and current and former federal officials, with agents standing shoulder to shoulder with activists, tailing vandalism suspects to guide the local police toward arrests and furtively videotaping inside one of the country’s most active domestic protest movements.
The breadth of FBI involvement in Portland and other cities where federal teams were deployed at street protests became a point of concern for some within the bureau and the Justice Department who worried that it could undermine the First Amendment right to wage protest against the government, according to two officials familiar with the discussions.
Some within the agencies worried that the teams could be compared to FBI surveillance transgressions of decades past, such as the COINTELPRO projects that sought to spy on and disrupt various activist groups in the 1950s and 1960s, according to the officials, one current and one former, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the debate.
There has been no evidence that the bureau used similar surveillance teams on right-wing demonstrators during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, despite potential threats of violence against the heart of federal government — though the FBI did have an informant in the crowd that day. The bureau has at times used secretive tactics to disrupt right-wing violence, such as efforts that led to charges against men accused of conspiring to kidnap Michigan’s governor.
The FBI has broad latitude to conduct surveillance when agents suspect threats to national security or that federal crimes may be committed. But bureau guidelines warn that agents should not cross into actions that could have a chilling effect on legitimate protest, and should instead prioritize less-intrusive techniques.
In Portland, federal teams were initially dispatched in July 2020 to protect the city’s federal courthouse after protesters lit fires, smashed windows and lobbed fireworks at law enforcement personnel in the area. One demonstrator had attacked a federal officer with a hammer. But the FBI role quickly widened, persisting months after activists turned their attention away from the courthouse, with some targeting storefronts or local institutions whose protection would normally be up to the local police.
Both local and federal law enforcement officials have complained that lawful peaceful protests were hijacked in many cases by criminals.
But organizers of the protests and civil rights groups, after being told of The Times’ findings, said that surveillance agents recording and following protesters in the midst of a demonstration was a form of domestic spying.
“These are all insidious tactics that chill First Amendment expression and erode trust with local officials,” said Bobbin Singh, executive director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center, one of several civil rights organizations that objected to the mass arrests and violent crackdowns that followed the protests. He called the government’s operations an “alarming” misuse of resources.
Kieran L. Ramsey, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the Portland field office, said the office was committed to pursuing “violent instigators who exploit legitimate, peaceful protests and engage in violations of federal law.”
“At all times, our focus was on those planning or committing significant criminal activity or acts of violence,” Ramsey said in a statement.
Police officers made more than 1,000 arrests during the course of the protests, and more than 200 people ultimately faced criminal prosecution. More than 100 cases had to be dropped because there was not sufficient evidence.
In fast-moving street gatherings where people concealed their identities and demanded that cameras not be present, working invisibly inside the crowd may have given the authorities more opportunity to identify and apprehend those engaging in the most serious mayhem.
In one case, FBI agents in plain clothing were credited in court records with helping catch a man accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at law enforcement officers. He faced federal explosives charges in addition to state charges that included attempted murder.
The FBI teams continued their operations among Portland’s far-left activists for months at the end of 2020 and the start of 2021. While the FBI has also been investigating far-right groups, some lawmakers have blasted the bureau for failing to detect and blunt the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Renn Cannon, who was the Portland office’s special agent in charge during the demonstrations until he departed early this year, said that there were persistent protest-related crimes and tense political dynamics, leaving the bureau to try to address the crimes while also upholding First Amendment rights.
“I thought a lot about what is allowed under the Constitution,” Cannon said. “How do you do surveillance effectively, safely and legally? That was something we spent a lot of time on.”
Cannon declined to discuss specific operations or tactics but said he believed that his agents had crossed no lines while trying to make sure that laws were enforced.
In the middle of his reelection campaign, President Donald Trump vowed to “dominate” protesters who had taken to the streets in the wake of Floyd’s death, and he directed federal agencies to deploy personnel to protect federal property around the country. Outrage and even larger mass protests ensued in Portland after videos showed federal agents in tactical gear seizing people off the streets into unmarked vehicles and one agent beating a Navy veteran with a baton.
FBI officials heeded the call for action. David L. Bowdich, who was then the FBI’s second-in-command, had called the protests after Floyd’s murder “a national crisis” in a memo. He likened the situation to Sept. 11 and suggested that the bureau could make federal criminal cases against protesters by using the Hobbs Act — a law from the 1940s that was designed to crack down on racketeering in labor groups.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers in September 2020 that the bureau was pursuing “quite a number of properly predicated domestic terrorism investigations into violent anarchist extremists, any number of whom self-identify with the antifa movement.”
The FBI is aggressively investigating people associated with violent far-right groups such as Atomwaffen and the Base, and prosecutors have already brought charges against dozens of members of the far-right Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia in connection with the attack on the Capitol. Federal agents are actively pursuing additional cases against those groups and further charges are likely to be filed.
Those investigations have sometimes involved confidential informants and surveillance. But no other evidence has emerged that FBI agents in recent years had blended into crowds engaged in political protests in the streets.
Later, after the overt federal crackdown in Portland ebbed and protest crowds waned, smaller groups of activists continued demonstrations that frequently included smashed windows and fires at buildings such as the headquarters of the Portland Police Association.
Agents from the FBI were still on the ground. In early November 2020, according to records reviewed by The Times, federal agents at one demonstration were “conducting surveillance in the crowd.” As a group marched near the Portland State University campus, some in the crowd shattered windows at a Starbucks.
An FBI special agent who reported being “in a plainclothes surveillance capacity” described witnessing one of the demonstrators break out a Starbucks window with a tire iron before placing the tire iron back inside his backpack, according to a written Portland Police Bureau summary of the federal agent’s account. In the report, the police officer wrote that he had been asked not to identify the federal agent’s name in documents.
The following week, according to an email between an FBI agent and a Portland police officer, FBI agents were again in the crowd conducting surveillance. One of the FBI agents captured a 30-minute video of the scene as he appeared to stand next to a crowd of demonstrators while others smashed windows at a Democratic Party building. The video shows the agent then joining the crowd as it marched down the street.
One of the agents later reported in records seeing an agent from the Department of Homeland Security also on the scene.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who has been scrutinizing the federal response to Portland, said that while federal officers have a right and a responsibility to protect federal property, there should be a high bar when it comes to agencies surveilling political gatherings.
“The Department of Justice needs to explain to me why it deployed those teams and provide a real record of their activities,” Wyden said. “What were they there for? Were they there primarily to chill peaceful protesters, or were they there to protect federal property?”
At the Inauguration Day demonstration in January, about 200 people gathered. “We are ungovernable,” one of their signs said.
Local and federal law enforcement records show that about half a dozen federal agents were there that day, with at least some of them doing what was described as surveillance in which they planned to follow protesters who engaged in property crimes or violence — even though the protest that day was starting on the east side of the city, far from the federal properties downtown. Agents singled out and tracked several people who had broken windows, trailing the individuals for several blocks until local law enforcement agents detained them.
Four agents testified before a local grand jury that was considering indictments against protesters who had been arrested. A person familiar with the proceedings said one of the agents testified that the federal officers had been wearing black apparel, a fact that suggests the agents were attempting to disguise themselves as protesters. FBI officials declined to discuss specific tactics or clothing used during their operations.
Prosecutors obtained indictments for six people on riot and criminal mischief charges.
Mike German, a former FBI special agent who specialized in domestic terrorism and covert operations and is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that such surveillance operations inherently run the risk of violating First Amendment rights. They should be used only when there is evidence that a serious crime may occur, he said, and they should be tailored to focus on obtaining the evidence needed to prosecute that crime.
“The FBI should focus its resources on groups engaged in deadly violence, not vandals,” he said.
Cannon, the former FBI supervisor in Portland, said the bureau was indeed worried about acts of violence directed at the police, the potential that the protests could escalate and the toll the demonstrations were taking on the Portland Police Bureau, whose officers were fatigued after months of near-nightly confrontations on the streets.
“This was a wave of protest-related crimes that had a severe impact on the community,” Cannon said. “There was a lot of pressure. It was a fraught situation.”
Wayne LaPierre, CEO and executive vice president of the NRA, at the group's annual meeting in Dallas in May 2018. (photo:Daniel Acker/Getty)
Documents and accounts of former staffers, which raise questions about LaPierre’s statements, could strengthen the New York attorney general’s lawsuit to dissolve the gun-rights group.
On the day of the wedding, July 16th, there was rain and lightning, and the wedding took place indoors, at Atlantis. Sterner wore a white, jewel-collared cocktail dress at a ceremony that she described in a statement as “small,” and “private.” LaPierre and his wife, Susan, were among the guests. The event was part of a trip during which the LaPierres and the Sterners cruised around the Caribbean on a luxury yacht provided by an N.R.A. contractor for free.
In 2020, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, sued to dissolve the N.R.A. for a pattern of self-dealing that included LaPierre’s alleged acceptance of lavish gifts from contractors. Under questioning about the yacht trip, LaPierre did not disclose the wedding. Instead, he testified under oath that he used the boat that summer because his life was in imminent danger. He said that trip—the first of six annual summer voyages on the yacht in the Bahamas, from 2013 to 2018—was a “security retreat” and the only way he could be safe after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. LaPierre explained that he was under “Presidential threat without Presidential security” and that the boat “was offered” as a refuge. When he finally got to the yacht, he recalled thinking, “Thank God I’m safe, nobody can get me here.”
Internal N.R.A. documents, other records, and interviews with former staffers suggest that LaPierre repeatedly made misleading and possibly false statements under oath about the yacht and his niece. LaPierre testified that Sterner, whom he hired at the N.R.A., was an integral employee in the organization, but former colleagues, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, say she did little work.
Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University School of Law, said that LaPierre’s testimony could strengthen the attorney general’s legal case against the N.R.A. “The real risk with lies under oath, if they can be shown, is that a jury or judge will conclude that the person who lied had something additional to hide and knew it. What they said will then become evidence against them,” Gillers explained. “If LaPierre knowingly gave false testimony, it would be added ammunition for the A.G.’s effort to dissolve the N.R.A.”
The organization has disputed many of the attorney general’s allegations, and asserted counterclaims against James for allegedly breaching its constitutional rights. The nonprofit maintains that it is committed to “good governance,” and in recent tax filings revealed that LaPierre has repaid most of the travel expenses that the N.R.A. has so far deemed improper and intends to reimburse the rest. In October, its board elected LaPierre to his thirty-first one-year term as C.E.O. “The N.R.A. understands that Mr. LaPierre answered truthfully about his travel to and use of the yacht,” William A. Brewer III, the lawyer who represents the organization in its legal fight with James, said. “Any suggestion to the contrary is reckless and misleading.” He added that, “in the N.R.A.’s view,” LaPierre “is honoring all of his professional obligations to the association—operating with transparency and a commitment to good governance.” In a statement provided by the N.R.A., Sterner said “I have no idea why there is a fixation on my wedding, but it feels personally harassing.”
For nearly a decade, LaPierre failed to list the free yacht trips on N.R.A. internal disclosure forms, as required by the organization’s rules and New York State law. Instead, he only did so this spring, on the same day he was scheduled to testify before a judge for the first time. According to a charity-auction brochure, a four-night cruise on the hundred-and-eight-foot yacht—which has four staterooms, a waterslide, and a hydraulic swim platform—is worth more than seventy-five thousand dollars. In a deposition, LaPierre explained that, because he viewed the yacht as a “security issue with my family, with myself,” he had not considered it “a conflict back then.”
The owner of the yacht, David McKenzie, was a close confidant of LaPierre’s and a longtime N.R.A. contractor. For twenty years, the pro-gun group paid millions of dollars to McKenzie’s production company, Associated Television International, for “Crime Strike,” a reĆ«nactment show on cable TV that featured LaPierre as the host. Between 2011 and 2020, tax filings show, the N.R.A. also paid some seventy million dollars to two fund-raising companies that are at least partly owned by McKenzie’s wife, according to corporate records that she signed. McKenzie told me that he has nothing to do with the two firms and his wife played no role in their operation. “It’s a long backstory as to how that all happened,” he said. “It was basically a passive investment, and she doesn’t have anything to do with it, either.”
Contracts obtained by The Trace and The New Yorker for one of the firms, Allegiance Creative Group, were signed by LaPierre. The first extension was signed in November, 2013, four months after Sterner’s wedding. In his testimony, LaPierre asserted that he was not involved in contract negotiations with the companies tied to McKenzie’s wife. The N.R.A. told me LaPierre never reviewed the entities’ registration documents.
LaPierre also testified that, starting about ten or twelve years ago, the N.R.A. decided that he needed to always “travel private, whether it was business or personal.” The organization’s security director, LaPierre added, “was adamant about it, based on what he was seeing in terms of the harassment and the threats.” But the N.R.A. told me that the LaPierres and the Sterners flew commercial to the Bahamas in July, 2013, and then boarded the yacht. Former N.R.A. staffers said that Sterner initially posted photographs of her wedding on Facebook and removed them within the past few years. Several months ago, the “check-ins” portion of Sterner’s Facebook page, as well as her husband’s, contained July, 2013, references to Atlantis. Those references are now gone, too. When asked why, the N.R.A. said that it “does not comment on the social-media practices of its employees.”
Sterner is like a daughter to the LaPierres, according to former N.R.A. staffers. The couple married in 1998 but never had a child of their own. Sterner comes from Susan’s side of the family. When she and her husband had a daughter, in 2014, they gave her the middle name Susan. A year later, according to the attorney general’s complaint, at Susan’s behest LaPierre hired Sterner, then in her mid-thirties, to work for the N.R.A.’s Women’s Leadership Forum. Susan was technically a volunteer, with the title of “co-chair,” but she ran the endeavor, which cultivates wealthy female donors. Every year, the W.L.F. holds expensive luncheons and retreats at some of America’s grand hotels and resorts.
Sterner received costly perks, including private jet flights, that were not available to her colleagues. In testimony, LaPierre asserted that his niece was an essential employee and that the expenses carried a legitimate business purpose. But former staffers who worked on W.L.F. events found Sterner’s role confounding. They recall that she would occasionally perform menial tasks assigned to her, such as ordering flowers, but most of the time she was simply not around.
Tyler Schropp, who oversees the N.R.A.’s fund-raising efforts involving wealthy donors, defended LaPierre’s employment of his niece. He said that Sterner is an “extraordinary and valuable employee” who manages “national events that make a positive impact on the N.R.A., its members, and its mission.” In 2015, the year Sterner was hired, she attended a W.L.F. summit at the Broadmoor, an elegant five-star resort in Colorado Springs. Sterner brought her daughter, who was then an infant, to the event as well. According to Andrew Arulanandam, an N.R.A. spokesperson, Sterner “played a leading role in producing” the affair. Yet one of the summit’s organizers told me, “I’d never met Colleen before the event started, but Susan had mentioned she’d be part of the staff. She didn’t work at headquarters, and she wasn’t on the regular planning calls or meetings that we had. Her status was never clear to me.”
Internal N.R.A. records show that Sterner was assigned a half dozen basic responsibilities, such as providing “registration support as needed” and serving as a point of contact for a trap and skeet shooting activity. Multiple people who worked the summit said that it was often difficult to locate Sterner. At one point, they said, she was unavailable because of a private photo shoot with her daughter and two photographers from Ackerman McQueen, the N.R.A.’s then public-relations firm. Arulanandam, the N.R.A. spokesperson, defended the photo shoot. “If a few personal photos were taken, that is neither improper or extravagant,” he said.
Since she was hired by the N.R.A., Sterner has lived in Nebraska, far from the nonprofit's headquarters near Washington. Schropp, the N.R.A. fund-raising executive, said that Sterner assisted with a number of tasks such as “event planning, administrative issues, and other projects that helped facilitate the success of the W.L.F.” In August, 2016, the attorney general’s complaint says, LaPierre authorized the N.R.A. to pay for a private flight, from Dallas to Nebraska, for Sterner and her husband. The airfare cost the organization more than eleven thousand dollars. When LaPierre was questioned about it during a court hearing, he said that there were a limited number of commercial flights headed to the family’s remote corner of the state. “Our annual meeting was coming up down there. She was working on the Women’s Leadership Forum with people in Dallas and . . . it’s the advantage of the NRA to have her . . . do that work.”
At the time of the flight, Sterner was also working a second job, selling cars at Gateway Motors, a Chevrolet dealership in Broken Bow, Nebraska. On Facebook that month, she posted an ad for a black Jeep Grand Cherokee with four-wheel drive. Former W.L.F. staffers told me that, for the other full-time employees, holding down a second job would have been logistically impossible. Arulanandam defended Sterner and said that she “has always been in full compliance with our HR policies” and that there is “no policy that prevents NRA employees at Ms. Sterner’s level from pursuing vocational interests outside of the Association with approval.”
In January, 2017, a small W.L.F. contingent, including Susan, attended the annual convention of Safari Club International, a hunting-advocacy group, in Las Vegas. Susan and her colleagues socialized with donors and solicited items for forthcoming auctions. Wayne LaPierre, the complaint says, “authorized a private jet to pick up” Sterner’s husband, in Nebraska, and fly him to Vegas. When asked about the travel arrangement, LaPierre testified that his niece was busy “working the entire time,” dealing with donors, and that someone was needed to “help babysit” their daughter “because there was nobody else to do it.”
The former staffers expressed astonishment to me at LaPierre’s claims under oath. “Colleen was not involved in the planning of, or participation in, any event or donor visits,” one said. “If she and her husband were there, neither of them had a hand in helping coƶrdinate donor activities, events, or soliciting items for the annual auction.” The person added, “There were corporate-relations individuals who needed to be at events during show season and had children at home. They were never offered any enhanced accommodation, let alone travelling by private jet with their spouse and child.” A second person said that “there was absolutely no indication” Sterner worked at the Las Vegas gathering. She could not be found on the convention floor or at parties, dinners, receptions, or strategy breakfasts hosted by Susan. At one point, the W.L.F. sponsored a private luncheon for about a dozen wealthy female hunters who, based on their accomplishments, were called the Dianas, after the Roman goddess of hunting. The event, in the penthouse of the Four Seasons, was hosted by Susan. Sterner was not there, either, people with knowledge of the gathering told me.
Arulanandam, the N.R.A. spokesperson, said that there was a simple explanation. “It is common practice at the NRA—and, indeed, other organizations—that not every employee attends events and social functions as registrants or special guests,” he stated. “Some employees work behind the scenes while others work the show floor. It is clear that whoever is pushing this narrative doesn’t appreciate the ‘invisible hands’ that often make these events successful.”
After the convention, LaPierre had the N.R.A. pay fifteen thousand dollars for the husband’s return flight to Nebraska. Two days later, the complaint says, the executive approved a separate private jet trip to Nebraska, to fly his niece home.
LaPierre testified that the trips with his wife and niece aided the organization. “Any time I get the two of them together anywhere, there is a benefit for the NRA,” LaPierre said. “I mean, did they enjoy being there, yeah. I mean, on the other hand, did [the] NRA get a benefit out of them being together, yes, absolutely.” People who worked on W.L.F. events questioned the veracity of LaPierre’s claim. One said, “No staffers knew there was any W.L.F. planning in the Bahamas.” Another added that, if anything had been planned in the Bahamas, “it was not shared” with the W.L.F. team. According to the N.R.A., “Those whose functions required their involvement were fully aware.” Susan recently stepped down from her position as co-chair of the W.L.F. Sterner continues to work for the N.R.A.
Joseph Moore worked for nearly 10 years as an undercover informant for the FBI, infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan in Florida, foiling at least two murder plots. (photo: Robert Bumsted/AP)
At times the U.S. Army veteran donned a white robe and hood as a hit man for the Ku Klux Klan in North Florida. He attended clandestine meetings and participated in cross burnings. He even helped plan the murder of a Black man.
However, Moore wore something else during his years in the klan – a wire for the FBI. He recorded his conversations with his fellow klansmen, sometimes even captured video, and shared what he learned with federal agents trying to crack down on white supremacists in Florida law enforcement.
One minor mistake, one tell, he believed, meant a certain, violent death.
“I had to realize that this man would shoot me in the face in a heartbeat,” Moore said in a deep, slow drawl. He sat in his living room recently amid twinkling lights on a Christmas tree, remembering a particularly scary meeting in 2015. But it was true of many of his days.
Before such meetings, he would sit alone in his truck, his diaphragm heaving with the deep breathing techniques he learned as an Army-trained sniper.
The married father of four would help the federal government foil at least two murder plots, according to court records from the criminal trial for two of the klansmen. He was also an active informant when the FBI exposed klan members working as law enforcement officers in Florida at the city, county and state levels.
Today, he and his family live under new names in a Florida subdivision of manicured lawns where his kids play in the street. Geese wander slowly between man-made lakes. Apart from testifying in court, the 50-year-old has never discussed his undercover work in the KKK publicly. But he reached out to a reporter after The Associated Press published a series of stories about white supremacists working in Florida’s prisons that were based, in part, on records and recordings detailing his work with the FBI.
“The FBI wanted me to gather as much information about these individuals and confirm their identities,” Moore said of law enforcement officers who were active members of or working with the klan.
“From where I sat, with the intelligence laid out, I can tell you that none of these agencies have any control over any of it. It is more prevalent and consequential than any of them are willing to admit.”
The FBI first asked Moore to infiltrate a klan group called the United Northern and Southern Knights of the KKK in rural north Florida in 2007. At klan gatherings, Moore noted license plate numbers and other identifying information of suspected law enforcement officers who were members.
Moore said he noted connections between the hate group and law enforcement in Florida and Georgia. He said he came across dozens of police officers, prison guards, sheriff deputies and other law enforcement officers who were involved with the klan and outlaw motorcycle clubs.
While operating inside this first klan group, Moore alerted the feds to a plot to murder a Hispanic truck driver. Then, he says, he pointed the FBI toward a deputy with the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office, Wayne Kerschner, who was a member of the same group.
During Moore’s years in the United Northern and Southern Knights, the FBI also identified a member of the klan cell working for the Fruitland Park, Florida, police department. Moore said he’d provided identifying information that was useful in that case.
His years as an informant occurred during a critical time for the nation’s domestic terrorism efforts. In 2006, the FBI had circulated an intelligence assessment about the klan and other groups trying to infiltrate law enforcement ranks.
“White supremacist groups have historically engaged in strategic efforts to infiltrate and recruit from law enforcement,” the FBI wrote. The assessment said some in law enforcement were volunteering “professional resources to white supremacist causes with which they sympathize.”
The FBI did not answer a series of questions sent by the AP about Moore’s work as a confidential informant.
CREATING A CHARACTER
Moore was not a klansman before working for the FBI, he said. He said he joined because the government approached him, and asked for his help. As a veteran and Army-trained sniper, he said he felt that if his country asked him to protect the public from domestic terrorists, he had a duty to do so. He saw himself, he said, as a safety net between the violent extremists and the public.
He said he never adopted their racist ideology. To keep a lifeline to his true character, Moore claims to have never used racial slurs while in character — even as his klan brethren tossed them around casually. On FBI recordings reviewed by the AP, he was never heard using racial slurs like his former klan brothers.
But he also acknowledges that successful undercover work required him to change into a wholly different person so that he could convince his klan brothers that he was one of them.
“I laid out a character that had been overseas. That had received medals in combat. That was proven. That had special operations experience — more experience than I had. But someone that they would feel confident would be a useful asset to the organization at a much higher level,” Moore said.
It worked, and Moore was given high-level access and trust.
“If you’re not credible, if you’re not engaged on all levels, you don’t get to go home to your family. So you have to jump all in in order to keep you and your family safe,” he said.
It also required Moore to lie — to his wife, to her parents, to everyone. Nobody could know what he was doing. But eventually, Moore’s wife became suspicious of his activities, and he cracked. He told her and her parents what he was doing.
“You can’t tell them. And they continue to probe because they want to know what’s going on in your life. So there’s this concern that you have to lie to your own family and I didn’t want to be lying to my family,” he said.
Moore was also being treated for bipolar disorder and severe anxiety, which he’d gotten under control with medications. But given his struggles with mental illness, his wife didn’t immediately believe him. He’d eventually take her with him to a few klan gatherings, a decision he regrets because it put her at risk.
When the FBI agents with whom he worked discovered that his wife knew, they ended the relationship with the agency, and Moore sought additional mental and physical health treatment through the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Still, after some time away, the FBI would come back to him and recruit him for his second mission.
THE GRAND KNIGHT HAWK
In 2013, an FBI agent who’d worked with Moore during his first stint as an informant recruited him again. This time he was asked to infiltrate the Florida chapter of a national group called the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Within a year of becoming “naturalized,” he’d become a Grand Knight Hawk of the “klavern” based in rural north central Florida. He was in charge of security and internal communications, and because of his military background, he was the go-to guy for violence.
It was at a cross-burning ceremony in December 2014 that Charles Newcomb, the “Exalted Cyclops” of the chapter, pulled him aside to discuss a scheme to kill a Black man. Warren Williams was a former inmate who’d gotten into a fight with one of their klan brothers, a correctional officer named Thomas Driver. Driver, corrections Sgt. David Moran and Newcomb wanted Williams dead.
Moore alerted the FBI and was approved to make secret recordings over the next few months. By this time, he’d become enmeshed in Newcomb’s life: They drank together, hung out at barbecues, and talked about life’s problems. This allowed Moore to get close enough to record the three current and former Florida correctional officers as they planned Williams’ murder. He captured discussions of the murder plot that would lead to criminal convictions for the three klansmen.
“And this wasn’t the only person that they wanted to target,” said Moore. “There were other people in the community that they wanted to target. But this was the one that we could build a case on.”
Over his decade inside, Moore said his list of other law enforcement officers tied to the klan grew. The links, he said, were commonplace in Florida and Georgia, and easier to identify once he was inside.
“I was on track to uncover more activity in law enforcement, but the immediate threat to the public with the murder plot was a priority,” Moore said. “And I was only one person. There was only so much I could do.”
Moore said the three current and former prison guards implicated in the murder plot case operated among a group of other officer-klan members at the Reception and Medical Center in Lake Butler, Florida, a prison where new inmates are processed and given health checks. He said the officers he knew were actively recruiting at the prison.
Florida’s Department of Corrections said that’s not true.
“Every day more than 18,000 correctional officers throughout the state work as public servants, committed to the safety of Florida’s communities. They should not be defamed by the isolated actions of three individuals who committed abhorrent and illegal acts several years prior,” the department said in an emailed statement.
Spokeswoman Michelle Glady has told the AP the agency found no evidence of a wider membership by extremist white supremacist groups, or a systemic problem. She said every allegation of wrongdoing is investigated by the department’s inspector general.
“That statement by the state is not accurate based on the facts,” said Moore, who asserts he saw evidence of a more pervasive problem than the state is publicly acknowledging. He said he gave the FBI information about other active white supremacists who were working as state prison guards and at other law enforcement agencies. He said he also provided information about klansmen applying to be state prison guards.
After testifying in the murder conspiracy case against the klansmen he’d spent years working with, Moore’s work with the FBI ended. He’d been publicly identified, and in 2018 he began life under a new name.
By then the work had taken an enormous toll on his mental and physical health. He says the character of Joe Moore, Grand Knight Hawk of the KKK, had to develop a kinship and almost familial relations with those he was investigating in order to make it out alive.
But he lost close friends, he said, who were angry that he had claimed fraudulent military honors as part of his alter ego.
Today Moore is worried that the men he helped put into prison know where he is and are looking for revenge. They’re all due out in a few years.
Moore has installed motion-detecting surveillance cameras outside the home that allow him to monitor any activity, and carries a gun everywhere he goes.
He said, at this point, he believes coming out of the shadows and publicly discussing his story is the best way to protect himself and his family.
“We have had to change our names. We have tried to move, we have had our address placed in confidentiality. However, there are people that have investigative capacities that have tracked us, they’ve uncovered our names,” Moore said. In recent months, people connected to the klan have appeared at his house, he said. Moore alerted the FBI and filed a report with the local sheriff’s office.
Moore also does not want his work, and those of other confidential informants who put their lives on the line to help expose domestic extremists, to have been in vain.
He said he wants Florida’s corrections and law enforcement leaders to conduct systemwide investigations to root out white supremacists and other violent extremists.
“If you want to know why people don’t trust the police, it’s because they have a relative or friend that they witness being targeted by an extremist who happens to have a badge and a gun. And I know as a fact that this has occurred. I stopped a murder plot of law enforcement officers,” said Moore.
A woman and her children vote at a polling station during midterm elections. (photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Getty)
Program asks people on voter rolls to prove citizenship, sparking concern that eligible voters could be wrongfully targeted
The Texas secretary of state’s office has identified just under 12,000 people it suspects of being non-citizens since September, when the program restarted (there are more than 17 million registered voters in Texas). About 2,327 voter registrations have been cancelled so far. The vast majority of cancellations were because voters failed to respond to a notice giving them 30 days to prove their citizenship.
The secretary of state flags anyone as a suspected non-citizen if they register to vote and then subsequently visit the Texas department of public safety (DPS), the state’s driver’s license agency, and indicate they are not a citizen.
Local election officials in Texas’ 254 counties are then asked to review the names. If those officials cannot verify citizenship, they are required to send them a letter asking them to prove their citizenship within 30 days or else their voter registration gets cancelled.
But election officials in Harris county, the most populous in the state, are concerned about the accuracy of the data being used to challenge voters.
After the county mailed proof of citizenship requests to 2,796 people, 167 voters - nearly 6% of those contacted – responded with proof of citizenship. The state removed an additional 161 people from the list of people whose citizenship needed to be verified, according to a county official.
“We are not confident in the quality of the information we are being mandated to act upon,” Isabel Longoria, the county’s election administrator, said in an email.
In Fort Bend county, just outside of Houston, officials mailed notices to 515 people in October. About 20% responded with proof of citizenship and the rest were removed from the rolls, according to John Oldham, the county’s election administrator. Many of the people who responded said they had accidentally checked a box during their DPS transaction indicating they were not citizens, Oldham said.
In Cameron county, along the US-Mexico border, election officials have sent out 246 letter since September, almost all to people with Hispanic surnames, according to the Texas Monthly, which first reported the program restarted. About 60 people have been cancelled so far.
After the notices went out, a married couple who had heard about the notices came into the elections office to provide their naturalization papers, even though the couple’s citizenship wasn’t challenged, said Remi Garza, the county elections administrator.
“It saddened me too,” Garza said. “People who shouldn’t have to be concerned about this type of proving citizenship felt that they had to do that.”
Voting rights groups say they are trying to better understand the process the state is using, but are concerned eligible voters are getting targeted.
“ A US citizen voter who gets a challenge letter is understandably intimidated. And especially for naturalized US citizens, who went through an entire bureaucratic process to be able to vote, getting a letter that accuses them of being an ineligible voter is particularly intimidating,” said Nina Perales, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “People will naturally assume, based on this official correspondence, that they might have made some kind of mistake, or that they are not proper voters.”
The program had been on hold since 2019, when a federal judge ordered Texas to stop a similar, error-filled, effort that he described as “ham-handed”. As part of a settlement in that case, Texas agreed to only flag people if they registered to vote prior to the DPS visit in which they indicated they weren’t a citizen. It also agreed to reinstate and challenge voters who provided proof of citizenship, even if it was outside the 30-day window.
The citizenship check comes as Republicans have moved to blunt the rapidly growing political power of Texas’ non-white population. Texas prosecutors have sought criminal punishments for people, including non-citizens, who make voting mistakes and the attorney general, Ken Paxton, has zealously pursued claims of voter fraud, which is exceedingly rare in Texas and elsewhere.
Bruce Elfant, whose office oversees voter registration in Travis county, said his office so far has internally been able to confirm that less than 100 of the 300 to 400 people flagged by the secretary of state’s office were citizens. Most in the group had been flagged because of clerical errors, he said. His office has not yet sent out any challenge notices and is waiting for more information before it does so.
In El Paso county, state officials referred 4,000 suspected non-citizens for review, and around 300 had already offered proof of citizenship, said Lisa Wise, the county’s election administrator. The county isn’t currently cancelling the registration of any voter who doesn’t respond, she said.
Federal law prohibits officials from conducting mass voter cancellations within 90 days of a primary election. Texas’ primary is on 1 March, so the state can’t remove anyone who doesn’t respond to a proof of citizenship letter until later this spring.
Thomas Buser-Clancy, a senior staff attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said his organization was trying to understand why eligible voters were being flagged, but it was clear “something is not going right”.
“Even if your system flags one eligible voter and threatens to remove them, that’s a problem,” he said. “If you have hundreds, and if you add it up across counties, you’re probably getting to thousands of eligible voters, being threatened with removal.”
Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the Texas secretary of state’s office said he was confident in the data.
“We’re following the settlement agreement exactly as we’re supposed to. If the counties have additional information where they’re able to cross people off the list who have in fact become citizens and they’re lawfully registered to vote, that’s great. That’s how the process is supposed to work.”
But Buser-Clancy noted that those who were able to affirm their citizenship likely only represented a fraction of the eligible voters who were probably affected.
“Those people are the lucky ones that both received the notice, like actually went through their mail, looked it up, and had the documentation on hand to send in,” he added. “What that tells you is that there’s some other percentage of people who are going to be removed from the rolls even though they’re eligible voters.”
"No to war. We defend life." (photo: Colombia Informa)
The highest number of murders by department was registered in the Cauca Valley, which was the epicenter of massive protests against President Ivan Duque.
"The OHCHR analized 191 homicide complaints. Of these, it verified 73 cases, 35 cases are in the verification process, and 83 cases are inconclusive," the UN agency said.
The highest number of murders by department (31) was registered in the Cauca Valley, which was the epicenter of the massive protests against President Ivan Duque's economic policy.
Other departments where murders of human rights activists were verified were Antioquia (6), Cundinamarca (5), Norte de Santander (4), Choco (3), Santander (2), Arauca, Caldas, Caqueta, Cordoba, Huila, La Guajira , Meta, Putumayo, Risaralda, NariƱo, and Tolima.
While the #EU loves to shout about Human Rights in #China , it has no problem turning a blind eye to some of the worst Human Rights abuses in the world in #Colombia under the far right Wing Government of #Duque who carries out State Terrorism with the support of EU and #US .... pic.twitter.com/k4asq0sDlu
— Mick Wallace (@wallacemick) May 8, 2021
The figures on State terrorism and paramilitary violence, however, could be much higher. So far this year, the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (INDEPAZ) has registered 159 human rights defenders murdered and the Ombudsman's Office has counted 130 cases.
Previously, at the presentation of the report "Announced Deaths" on Dec. 7, the Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Organization (CAJAR) and the "We Are Defenders" program denounced that the Colombian State was timely warned about the risks that human rights defenders faced.
"Despite this, the Duque administration, which has the responsibility of deploying institutional responses to tackle these risks, did not act diligently," outlet Rural Press stressed, recalling that 572 social leaders have were killed since the far-righ politician came to power in 2018.
Thousands of Colombians say no more #Duque! ✊š¾#21NSomosTodos #ParoNacional pic.twitter.com/BM9IoHLVRQ
— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) November 21, 2019
"I am not hopeful of a positive outcome at Cop26, knowing who is participating. I was not invited to Glasgow, though that is hardly a surprise." (photo:Magdalena Bujak/Alamy)
Covid-19 may well have been one attempt by the Earth to protect itself. Gaia will try harder next time with something even nastier
That is the wrongheaded approach of the United Nations, which is about to stage one big global conference for the climate in Glasgow, having just finished a different big global conference for biodiversity in Kunming.
This division is as much of a mistake as the error made by universities when they teach chemistry in a different class from biology and physics. It is impossible to understand these subjects in isolation because they are interconnected. The same is true of living organisms that greatly influence the global environment. The composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and the temperature of the surface is actively maintained and regulated by the biosphere, by life, by what the ancient Greeks used to call Gaia.
Almost 60 years ago, I suggested our planet self-regulated like a living organism. I called this the Gaia theory, and was later joined by biologist Lynn Margulis, who also espoused this idea. Both of us were roundly criticised by scientists in academia. I was an outsider, an independent scientist, and the mainstream view then was the neo-Darwinist one that life adapts to the environment, not that the relationship also works in the other direction, as we argued. In the years since, we have seen just how much life – especially human life – can affect the environment. Two genocidal acts – suffocation by greenhouse gases and the clearance of the rainforests – have caused changes on a scale not seen in millions of years.
Because subjects like astronomy, geology, and meteorology are taught separately in schools and universities, few people are aware of the natural forces affecting the Earth’s surface temperature.
For billions of years the Earth’s surface temperature has been determined mainly by the radiant heat coming from the sun. This energy increased over time because it is the nature of stars like the sun to increase their heat output as they grow older. But temperatures on Earth remained relatively stable thanks to Gaia: forests, oceans and other elements in the the Earth’s regulating system, which kept the surface temperature fairly constant and near optimal for life.
The global warming that concerns all of us, and which will be discussed this week in Glasgow, includes a great deal of extra heating that comes as a consequence of extracting and burning fossil fuels since about the middle of the 19th century. That releases methane, carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere. They absorb radiant heat and stop it escaping from Earth. This is what causes global warming.
The amount of global warming depends hugely on the properties of water. When cold ice forms, much of it is white snow. This reflects the sunlight back to space and is cooling. But when it is warm, the water vapour in the air is a powerful greenhouse gas that makes it warmer still.
Much of the confusion over global heating comes about because of the huge quantities of heat needed to change the state of water. Few are aware that to melt a gram of ice takes 80 calories, enough heat to raise the temperature of 1ml of water to 80C. Try an ice cube in your boiling hot tea.
Then imagine how much heat was needed to melt large areas of the polar ice cap during the recent summer and how much hotter the world would have been if the ice had not been there. No wonder there is confusion about whether there is global heating or not.
Warnings that once seemed like the doom scenarios of science fiction are now coming to pass. We are entering into a heat age in which the temperature and sea levels will be rising decade by decade until the world becomes unrecognisable. We could also be in for more surprises. Nature is non-linear and unpredictable, never more than at a time of transition.
Lowering these risks and adapting to those we can no longer avoid will require a mobilisation of resources on the scale of a war economy. We have no choice but to reduce the burning of fossil fuels or face even worse consequences.
But we should also not become over-reliant on renewable power, which will leave us with an energy gap. We need to build more nuclear power stations to overcome that, though the greens will first have to get over their overblown fears of radiation.
The dangers are nowhere near as bad as they are often painted. I’ve travelled millions of miles by air, and all that time I have been exposed to levels of radiation that are ten times as great as at ground level. The dangers are exaggerated.
We also need to address the problem of overpopulation and to urgently halt the destruction of tropical forests. Most of all, we need to look at the world in a holistic way.
I am not hopeful of a positive outcome at Cop26, knowing who is participating. I was not invited to Glasgow, though that is hardly a surprise. As well as being 102 years old, I am an independent scientist, and the university academics have never been comfortable with that.
But my fellow humans must learn to live in partnership with the Earth, otherwise the rest of creation will, as part of Gaia, unconsciously move the Earth to a new state in which humans may no longer be welcome. The virus, Covid-19, may well have been one negative feedback. Gaia will try harder next time with something even nastier.
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