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I’m concerned when I hear familiar drumbeats in Washington demanding we ‘show strength’, when we’re faced with what could be the worst European war in 75 years
That is why we must do everything possible to try and find a diplomatic solution to what could be an enormously destructive war in Ukraine.
No one knows exactly what the human costs of such a war would be. But there are estimates that there could be over 50,000 civilian casualties in Ukraine, and millions of refugees flooding neighboring countries as they flee what could be the worst European conflict since the second world war. In addition, of course, there would be many thousands of deaths within the Ukrainian and Russian militaries. There is also the possibility that this “regional” war could escalate to other parts of Europe. What might happen then is even more horrifying.
But that’s not all. The sanctions against Russia and Russia’s threatened response to those sanctions, could result in massive economic upheaval – with impacts on energy, banking, food and the day-to-day needs of ordinary people throughout the entire world. It is likely that Russians will not be the only people suffering from sanctions. And, by the way, any hope of international cooperation to address the existential threat of global climate crisis and future pandemics would suffer a major setback.
We should be clear about who is most responsible for this looming crisis: Vladimir Putin. Having already seized parts of Ukraine in 2014, the Russian president now threatens to take over the entire country and destroy Ukrainian democracy. In my view, we must unequivocally support the sovereignty of Ukraine and make clear that the international community will impose severe consequences on Putin and his associates if he does not change course.
With that said, I am extremely concerned when I hear the familiar drumbeats in Washington, the bellicose rhetoric that gets amplified before every war, demanding that we must “show strength”, “get tough” and not engage in “appeasement”. A simplistic refusal to recognize the complex roots of the tensions in the region undermines the ability of negotiators to reach a peaceful resolution.
One of the precipitating factors of this crisis, at least from Russia’s perspective, is the prospect of an enhanced security relationship between Ukraine and the United States and western Europe, including what Russia sees as the threat of Ukraine joining the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (Nato), a military alliance originally created in 1949 to confront the Soviet Union.
It is good to know some history. When Ukraine became independent after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russian leaders made clear their concerns about the prospect of former Soviet states becoming part of Nato and positioning hostile military forces along Russia’s border. US leaders recognized these concerns as legitimate at the time. They are still legitimate concerns. Invasion by Russia is not an answer; neither is intransigence by Nato. It is also important to recognize that Finland, one of the most developed and democratic countries in the world, borders Russia and has chosen not to be a member of Nato.
Putin may be a liar and a demagogue, but it is hypocritical for the United States to insist that we do not accept the principle of “spheres of influence”. For the last 200 years our country has operated under the Monroe Doctrine, embracing the premise that as the dominant power in the western hemisphere, the United States has the right to intervene against any country that might threaten our alleged interests. Under this doctrine we have undermined and overthrown at least a dozen governments. In 1962 we came to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union in response to the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba, 90 miles from our shore, which the Kennedy administration saw as an unacceptable threat to our national security.
And the Monroe Doctrine is not ancient history. As recently as 2018, Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, called the Monroe Doctrine “as relevant today as it was the day it was written”. In 2019, Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, declared “the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well”.
To put it simply, even if Russia was not ruled by a corrupt authoritarian leader like Vladimir Putin, Russia, like the United States, would still have an interest in the security policies of its neighbors. Does anyone really believe that the United States would not have something to say if, for example, Mexico was to form a military alliance with a US adversary?
Countries should be free to make their own foreign policy choices, but making those choices wisely requires a serious consideration of the costs and benefits. The fact is that the US and Ukraine entering into a deeper security relationship is likely to have some very serious costs – for both countries.
We must vigorously support diplomatic efforts to deescalate this crisis and reaffirm Ukrainian independence and sovereignty. And we must make clear that Putin and his gang of oligarchs will face major consequences should he continue down the current path. At the same time, we must never forget the horrors that a war in the region would cause and must work hard to achieve a realistic and mutually agreeable resolution – one that is acceptable to Ukraine, Russia, the United States and our European allies – and that prevents what could be the worst European war in over 75 years.
Ginni and Clarence Thomas. (image: Daily Beast)
Independent ethics watchdogs have raised new questions about the activism of Clarence Thomas' wife of 34 years, Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, a longtime political consultant who lobbies for some of the same conservative causes -- around abortion, gun rights and religious freedom -- that are before the high court.
A New Yorker magazine report last month documented a web of associations between Ginni Thomas and "conservative pressure groups that have either been involved in cases before the Court or have had members engaged in such cases."
Thomas sits on the advisory board of a group opposing affirmative action that filed a Supreme Court amicus brief in cases the justices recently agreed to take up. She has also been highly critical in public of the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, whose business has also come before the court.
Recently released emails obtained by the nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight, first reported by Politico, also suggest close ties between the Thomases and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has challenged federal COVID mandates before the high court. In a June 2021 message, not independently verified by ABC News, Ginni Thomas seeks the governor's participation in a private gathering of activists, noting that Clarence Thomas had been in contact with DeSantis "on various things of late."
Neither Clarence nor Ginni Thomas responded to ABC News' request for comment about the reports or claims of potential conflicts.
"Ginni Thomas' activities are different from any other spouse in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court," said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix The Court, a nonpartisan ethics group. "She is more activist in political causes than any other spouse. She has more relationships with organizations that have cases that come before the justices than any spouse before."
Ginni Thomas' personal website says she's "battled for conservative principles" for more than three decades, regularly advising fellow activists through her private firm, Liberty Consulting, and at conservative conferences.
"America is in a vicious battle for its founding principles," Ginni Thomas told a gathering of the Council for National Policy, a conservative advocacy group, in 2018, according to video obtained by the investigative site Documented. "May we all have guns and concealed carry to handle what's coming."
In a 2010 interview with ABC's "Good Morning America," Ginni Thomas spoke about her work to oppose the Affordable Care Act. "I think the clear focus is to stop the Obama agenda," she said at the time. (The ACA would later face three existential challenges at the Supreme Court. It survived each.)
On Jan. 6, 2021, before violence broke out at the Capitol, Ginni Thomas -- who had a direct access to the Trump White House -- was cheering the president's supporters challenging the electoral vote count, writing on Facebook that morning "GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING."
While 733 Americans now face federal charges for their alleged conduct later that day, Ginni Thomas joined an open letter in December calling congressional investigation of the attack by a Democrat-led committee a "political persecution."
Eight days after publication of the letter, former President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to block the committee's request for his records. Last month, the court declined over the objection of only one justice: Clarence Thomas.
"There were some eyebrows raised when Justice Thomas was that lone vote," said Kate Shaw, ABC News Supreme Court analyst and Cardozo Law professor. "But he did not explain himself, so we don't actually know why he wished to take up the case."
There are no explicit ethics guidelines that govern the activities of a justice's spouse, experts say, but there are rules about justices avoiding conflicts of interest. Federal law requires federal judges to recuse from cases whenever their "impartiality might reasonably be questioned."
Roth notes, however, that there is no independent enforcement mechanism in place; it's entirely up to the individual justice.
"There's this, you know, the court of public opinion," he said. "But the only way to punish a Supreme Court justice is through impeachment and removal, and no justice has ever been impeached and removed."
While there is precedent of justices recusing due to family members' involvement or association with a given case, Clarence Thomas has never recused over his wife's political activities.
With public approval of the Supreme Court sliding to a historic low, scrutiny of the justices' potential financial or political conflicts in cases has been growing.
Ginni Thomas is not named in any case on the court's docket, nor is any group of which she's known to be part. The Thomas' supporters see a double standard in the scrutiny of their relationship.
"There's always attempts on the left to manufacture grounds to recuse conservative justices from cases. This strikes me as just another round of those attempts," said Carrie Severino, a former Clarence Thomas clerk and president of the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative legal advocacy group.
In 2011, Federal Appeals Court Judge Stephen Reinhardt, a top liberal jurist, declined to recuse himself from a case involving California's ban on same-sex marriage despite the fact that his wife was a leader at the ACLU, which had filed an amicus brief challenging the ban.
Reinhardt defended his decision at the time, writing, "her views regarding issues of public significance are her own."
"I think we live in a world where women are [and] should be able to be strong, be active and be participants in public discourse," said Severino. "And that shouldn't be viewed as something that necessarily reflects on exactly what their husband thinks or how he's going to behave as well."
For the most part, spouses of the justices have tended to steer clear from the work of the court. "My wife does not give me any advice about cooking, and I do not give her any advice about the law," Martin Ginsburg, the late husband of former Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a longtime tax lawyer, joked in a joint appearance at Wheaton College in 1997.
But when the justices take up a major case on affirmative action later this year, they'll consider the views of the National Association of Scholars, a conservative nonprofit that opposes the use of race in college admissions. Ginni Thomas sits on its advisory board.
"It's absolutely OK that Justice Breyer's wife worked at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. It's absolutely OK that Jane Roberts is a legal recruiter during Chief Justice Roberts' tenure. And it's totally fine, too, that Ginni Thomas has a political consulting firm," said Roth. "But we need to look again at those closest to the justices."
"If you appear to be against someone or something, then you shouldn't be judging that someone or something," he said.
ABC News has learned Roth's group, Fix the Court, has asked the Supreme Court clerk to strike the National Association of Scholars brief from the record because of the apparent conflict with Ginni Thomas.
The clerk has not yet acted on that request.
A new ABC/Ipsos poll finds more Americans, 43%, believe partisan political views rather than the basis of law (38%) are driving the justices' decisions.
Members of Congress and outside experts say new enforceable ethics rules for the court are needed now more than ever. Even Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged in his 2021 year-end report that "public trust is essential, not incidental" to the court's function.
But Roberts opposes outside efforts to impose a new ethics code.
"I do think it could help the justices regain a little bit of the lost public trust and credibility just to say, look, you know, we ourselves are bound by some ethical guidelines that another body has imposed on us," said Shaw. "So far, the court as an institution has been unwilling to sign on to that."
Trump supporters in Wisconsin. (photo: Joel Lerner/Xinhua/Getty Images)
Ramthun wasn’t surprised by Donald Trump’s call. A few weeks earlier, Trump had left a message on his work phone at the state Capitol at 6:30 in the morning. Trump had wanted to thank Ramthun for his continued efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, something Trump proceeded to do later that day in a written statement praising Ramthun for “putting forward a very powerful and very popular, because it’s true, resolution to decertify the 2020 Presidential Election in Wisconsin based on the recently found absolute proof of large scale voter fraud that took place.”
Now, with his wife recording the conversation, Ramthun listened as Trump asked what he could do to be helpful. He offered to endorse Ramthun, and Ramthun knew how powerful that endorsement could be running for reelection to the Assembly or seeking a higher office. Trump wasn’t the only conservative luminary to dangle an endorsement: Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and a leader of the growing election-fraud movement in America, had twice said he’d back Ramthun. Ramthun told Trump he appreciated the pledge of support, but he wanted the former president to know that the fraud he believed he’d uncovered, and the conspiracy that tied it together, required all of his attention at the moment. First, he would pass his resolution to decertify the last presidential election, and then he would help other states follow his lead.
“If one state does this, I think others will follow,” he remembers telling Trump.
“You’re my kind of guy,” Trump replied.
More than a year later, the Republican Party remains obsessed with Trump’s defeat in 2020 and finding ways to sow doubt on that result, if not reverse it. In Arizona, conservative lawmakers and activists spent millions of dollars on a discredited “forensic audit” of every ballot cast in the state’s largest county. In Pennsylvania and Georgia, GOP legislators and candidates for office have called for their own Arizona-style reviews. There are at least 21 candidates for secretary of state across the nation who have challenged the 2020 election result. Trump leads this movement to mainstream the so-called Big Lie, calling the election “rigged” and arguing that Vice President Mike Pence had “the right to change the outcome,” and the GOP has, with few exceptions, marched in lockstep with him.
Nowhere is this crusade to subvert the 2020 election result more on display than in Wisconsin. Even though Republicans there do not control all the levers of power — the governor, Tony Evers, is a Democrat — they have launched a multifront effort to cast doubt on the 2020 election, intimidate local officials, and, in Ramthun’s case, throw out the state’s presidential-election result.
Lawyers aligned with the Republican Party have filed suit after suit seeking to roll back reforms that made it easier to vote in the pandemic. A secretive investigation run by a conservative former judge with a controversial past has issued dozens of expansive subpoenas, demanded closed-door testimony of mayors and clerks, and sought jail time for those who didn’t cooperate. GOP candidates and elected officials have gone so far as to demand the elimination of the state’s bipartisan election commission — a body that Republicans created seven years ago — and potentially give the GOP-led Legislature the power to control elections. “Wisconsin is the ground zero for the fights over elections right now,” says Paul Nolette, a political-science professor at Marquette University.
This effort did not start in earnest until after the 2020 election, when Trump’s defeat became official, and it has yet to turn up any evidence of widespread fraud or a conspiracy to rig the outcome. For the most part, Republicans waited until months after the vote to challenge the decisions made by election officials, mayors, and local clerks to ensure access to the ballot box in 2020, such as the use of drop boxes, accepting private grant money to safely and effectively administer the election, and mailing absentee ballots directly to voters living in nursing homes. “One of the weapons in the election-subversion arsenal is having post-hoc arguments about what the rules should’ve been, when in fact, election contests have to be built around the rules as they existed at the time,” says Bob Bauer, an election-law expert and co-chair of the Center for Election Innovation and Research’s Election Official Legal Defense Network. “The attempt to change the rules after the fact is the election-subversion campaign.”
With an eye toward the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election, Wisconsin Republicans now want to overhaul their democracy for the supposed sins of 2020. But the debate over how to do that has pitted Republicans against one another, with party leaders navigating an irate party base and MAGA-style lawmakers who believe the state can’t focus on the next election until it has “fixed” the last one. This winter, I spent a week in the state and spoke with dozens of people about the challenges to the 2020 election and the attacks on election workers, voting policies, and more.
In Wisconsin, as in other states, the energy in the conservative movement burns hottest among those voters who believe the Republican-controlled Legislature should empower people like Ramthun and throw out Biden’s 2020 victory. Moderate Republicans have responded by ostracizing Ramthun or blasting their party’s descent into a post-fact cult of conspiracy theorists. “A lot of them are stuck between having to follow what is now the party line in Trump’s party and trying to tamp down the most extreme calls for overturning a democratic result,” professor Nolette says.
It’s also created a bizarre, up-is-down environment in which a fringe lawmaker like Ramthun finds himself lauded by Trump, the party’s leader, and at the same time shunned by fellow Republicans in Wisconsin for his crusade to throw out the last presidential vote.
For the first 150 years or so of its existence, Wisconsin earned a reputation as a laboratory of sorts, a testing ground for policies cooked up by liberals and conservatives. Think unemployment insurance and Social Security, school choice and voter-ID laws. Love them, hate them: Thank (or blame) Wisconsin. Deep political divides have always cleaved the state’s politics — this was, after all, the home of progressive icon Fighting Bob La Follette and notorious red-baiter Joe McCarthy, the land of Republican hero Tommy Thompson and LGBTQ pioneer Tammy Baldwin. And for the past two decades, Wisconsinites have grown used to statewide elections decided by razor-thin margins and a perennial battleground-state status. But if not for Florida’s hanging chads in 2000, the entire world might have converged on Wisconsin instead, where Al Gore won by 5,700 votes. Through it all, Wisconsinites saw themselves as a model for clean, open government, a kinder counterpoint to the brutal machine politics of Richard Daley’s Chicago, 90 miles to the south.
For the past decade, however, Wisconsin politics have polarized in much the same way the nation has. Scott Walker’s gubernatorial election in 2010 and his subsequent “divide-and-conquer” assault on labor unions, a surgical gerrymander that has locked in GOP majorities with no end in sight, Wisconsin Republicans, including former Speaker Paul Ryan and former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, steering the party through the Trump presidency — all of it has cemented Wisconsin’s place as a bastion for the Republican Party. If you want to understand where the GOP might be headed, watch Wisconsin.
“Just as conservatives used the state of Kansas a decade ago as the testing ground for the most reactionary fiscal policies they could come up with, Wisconsin is the place that conservatives have chosen to be their testing ground for the most reactionary policies related to democracy and government,” says Jeff Mandell, a progressive lawyer who works on election litigation and who founded Law Forward, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting democracy in Wisconsin. “And it is not an accident.”
In late January, I meet with Tim Ramthun in his office in Madison, and we talk for nearly two hours about his push to overthrow the 2020 presidential vote in Wisconsin. Ramthun, a father of two and a grandfather of four, turns 65 in March. Bearded and intense, with an eye for pastel-colored blazers, he works out of a cramped office that feels more like an attic in the state Capitol in Madison. A small Christmas tree stands sentry on an old radiator. Above the tree hang three artifacts matted in red, white, and blue, and framed in Trumpian gold: The press release announcing his resolution to decertify Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election, the resolution itself, and Trump’s statement praising Ramthun. Below the documents is a gold plaque that reads: “Ramthun Office/Saving America.”
He speaks in a mix of technical jargon and religious fervor as the words tumble out of him: “full forensic physical cyber audit” and “privileged resolution,” Dominion and Lindell and someone named Dr. Frank, the Book of Genesis and state statutes 6.84 and 6.875 and 12.13. Ramthun expects you to keep up because the time to act is running out, and when he wants to emphasize a point, he flips an imaginary coin in the air and catches it on the back of his hand like a referee. Forget Democrats and Republicans, he says. Forget Trump and Biden. This isn’t about personalities, he says. It’s about process, it’s about data, it’s about facts. He speaks with such conviction that, if you didn’t know any better, it almost starts to feel real. He tells me, “I have to do everything to get them to” — he flips his imaginary coin — “see the light.”
Ramthun came late to the cause. He traces his journey toward the truth to a March 10, 2021, hearing of the state Assembly’s campaigns and elections committee. He listened as the witnesses, all of them selected by the Republicans who ran the committee, made accusations of illegality and fraud about the way the city of Green Bay ran its 2020 election. His mind reeled as a lawyer named Erick Kaardal, who had previously represented Kanye West’s campaign in the state, told the committee that “a private corporation” funded by Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg had funneled millions of dollars into the state’s five biggest cities, which Kaardal referred to as the “Wisconsin Five.” The money had acted as bribes to those cities to get out the vote for Joe Biden, and no one had noticed it at the time.
A few months later, Ramthun attended a gathering in Sioux City, Iowa, of all the major election-fraud activists, hosted by MyPillow’s Mike Lindell, and returned full of conviction that his state needed to do more to ensure integrity in the 2020 election.
Ramthun tells me he texted the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, Robin Vos, and urged Vos to do more to root out fraud. Vos brushed him off. So he sent out a series of press releases titled “Let There Be Light”; he talked about fraud in the “Ramthun Report,” the periodic videos he made for his constituents and posted on Facebook. He asked the state Legislature’s in-house lawyers what options he had as an elected official to formally claw back Wisconsin’s 10 Electoral College votes; none, came the response. He sent the opinion to former President Trump’s legal team, and three days later, Boris Epshteyn, a former White House aide to Trump, sent back a five-point memo saying that the nation was in “unchartered territory” and that “decertifying votes that were illegally certified would be valid.”
Ramthun also received an eight-page analysis from John Eastman, the same lawyer who wrote the infamous memos arguing for how Pence could overturn the election result on Jan. 6, 2021. Eastman’s memo for Ramthun, dated Dec. 30, 2021, argues that if there was “acknowledged illegality” in an election, then the result of that election was rendered null and the state Legislature had the power to pick the electors “as it sees fit.” A third memo, dated Jan. 8, 2022, from a group called the Amos Center for Justice and Liberty, also supported Ramthun’s position, citing the “wide-spread election fraud … that occurred in the largest cities of the state and throughout Wisconsin.”
Epshteyn tells Rolling Stone that Ramthun “is undoubtedly correct in his undertaking: the 2020 election in Wisconsin should absolutely be decertified, just as it should be in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan.” (A Trump spokeswoman, John Eastman, and the Amos Center for Justice and Liberty didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
Ramthun felt that he had the legal justification he needed, and still his colleagues wouldn’t act. The Republican leadership, he says, treated him like a pariah: “I had indifference and I had obstruction, and it was pretty much everywhere.” When he traveled the state, he urged the citizens he met to ask their representatives to join his cause; if they refused, then the voters should replace them. Soon afterward, Vos stripped him of his lone full-time staffer. Then, on the evening of Jan. 25, he stood up on the Assembly floor and introduced a resolution to decertify Biden’s victory. His measure had no co-sponsors, and the Republican majority leader, Jim Steineke, vowed to kill the measure, but Ramthun had managed to persuade the Republican leadership to treat it as legitimate.
Outside the state, he was quickly becoming a conservative hero. Kari Lake, a Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, praised his resolution. The Gateway Pundit, a conspiratorial website, published the video of Ramthun’s floor remarks and erroneously said that Wisconsin had in fact “voted to withdraw” its 10 electors for Biden. Sitting across from him in his office, I ask Ramthun if he felt alone in his fight. Quite the opposite, he says. He was never alone. “I’ve got the Lord with me. I’m surrounded by friends. And I’ll tell you,” he adds, “I’ve got the entire state behind me.”
At one point in the conversation, he grabs a binder off a bookcase and drops it on the table in front of me with a thud. Six paper inches of email after email from people in Wisconsin and from outside the state thanking him for his “testicular fortitude” and “tireless dedication” to overturning the election. “For some reason we have Republicans in our state and local governments who are turning a blind eye to the fraud that is, and has happened,” a couple from St. Cloud wrote.
Ramthun knew he had Trump’s support. And now he had developed a following across the state. “They want me to run for governor,” he says, and when I ask if he’s considering it, he responds immediately: “Yes.”
Wisconsin has the most decentralized election system of any state in the union. Nearly 1,900 clerks at the municipal level, most of them part-time, register voters, program voting machines, run polling places, hire poll workers, mail out absentee ballots, count the votes, recount them (sometimes), and report the results to the state’s election commission. From one vantage point, the decentralized nature of Wisconsin’s system is seen as a strength: It would require a conspiracy of Nixonian proportions to hack or tamper with the overall vote when the voting and counting is so dispersed. But it also means that turnover is a constant headache. A survey by the University of Wisconsin–Madison a few years ago reported a nine to 12 percent turnover among clerks each year. Meagan Wolfe, the nonpartisan administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, told me that the rate of churn averages out to 12 new clerks a week who need training on how to run a safe and secure election.
No amount of training could have prepared election officials for the cataclysm that arrived in early 2020. As scattered news stories about a flu-like virus sweeping through China grew into a full-blown pandemic in the U.S., Wisconsin’s election workers found themselves in a uniquely precarious spot. Three weeks after the Trump administration declared a national health emergency in response to the spread of the coronavirus, Wisconsin was scheduled to hold its presidential primary on the first Tuesday in April. It would be the first major election in any state since the pandemic officially began. Gov. Evers tried to postpone the election, but the Republican-controlled Legislature challenged his plan, and the state’s conservative-leaning Supreme Court sided with the Legislature, ruling the night before election day that the election would proceed after all. With a massive shortage of poll workers and a reduction in the number of polling places in Milwaukee, voters stood in line for hours. “I quickly recognized the amount of trust from the public that we were going to have to build back after the election in April,” says Claire Woodall-Vogg, executive director of Milwaukee’s election commission.
Election officials decided on the fly how best to adapt in time for the next set of elections, in August, and the November general. At the center of these debates was the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which oversees all elections in the state. By law, the WEC has six commissioners, three Democratic and three Republican appointees. Created in 2016, it replaced a previous body, the Government Accountability Board, which had been run by retired judges and touted as a model for nonpartisan oversight. But after the GAB opened two secret investigations related to then-Gov. Scott Walker, one of which led to a Walker donor paying the largest civil forfeiture to the state’s election regulator in history, Republicans in the Legislature replaced the agency with a more partisan model. “The GAB actually did its job, and so the Legislature said, ‘Let’s get rid of it,’ ” says Ann Jacobs, a Democratic appointee and chairwoman of the WEC.
Early in the pandemic, the WEC’s six commissioners agreed they needed to adapt certain voting rules. One was a requirement that so-called special voting deputies make two visits to nursing homes before an election to assist elderly residents in filling out and submitting their ballots. Only after those two visits took place could clerks mail absentee ballots to nursing-home residents. In normal times, poll watchers from the two political parties would accompany the voting deputies to ensure equal treatment. But deputies weren’t deemed essential workers by the state or federal government, and nursing homes feared endangering residents by letting the deputies and poll watchers come and go. “A lot of the nursing homes or senior living facilities didn’t want people to come in,” says Sara Bruckman, deputy clerk-treasurer for the town of Fox Point and president of the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association.
By a 6-0 vote, the state election commission voted to waive the in-person-visit requirement for the voting deputies; instead, clerks could mail absentee ballots to nursing homes right away. As Mark Thomsen, a Democratic appointee on the commission, saw it, the WEC had to help clerks find a way to keep voting accessible to those seniors even in the midst of a pandemic. “If we wouldn’t have acted, we would’ve disenfranchised thousands of senior citizens,” Thomsen says. Twice more in 2020, by 5-to-1 votes, the WEC voted to continue its guidance that the voting deputies didn’t have to visit nursing homes, given the potential public-health risk to residents. The WEC solicited public comments before its first vote about the deputies, and for all three votes the WEC deliberated in public, livestreamed meetings before voting. Thomsen, the WEC commissioner, says there was no opposition or backlash in the moment to the commission’s decision.
At the local level, clerks scrambled to respond to surging demand for absentee voting and find the resources to adapt to a pandemic-year election, while grappling with chronic delays created by the U.S. Postal Service. Woodall-Vogg says her office blew through most of its budget for 2020 in April alone, creating a possible crisis for the rest of the year. Federal grant money was available, but it came with restrictions, Woodall-Vogg says. The state Legislature offered no help, ending its 2020 session without appropriating any additional money for elections. “We just didn’t have resources,” says Bruckman.
Around that time, someone in the Milwaukee mayor’s office approached Woodall-Vogg and asked her if she would apply for grant money from a nonpartisan nonprofit out of Chicago, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), that funded election administration work in dozens of states. Funded in large part by Facebook CEO Zuckerberg’s charity, CTCL offered grants to municipalities that needed it. “The mayor’s office said, ‘Put together your wish list of absolutely everything you’d need to make voting safe and accessible for the fall, and we will submit for this grant,’ ” Woodall-Vogg recalls.
In the summer of 2020, Wisconsin’s five biggest cities — Milwaukee, Kenosha, Madison, Green Bay, and Racine — combined their requests for money into a single, 21-page document. The cities asked for a total of $6.3 million. They intended to use this money, they wrote, to run safe elections during the pandemic and educate voters on how to vote in a challenging moment, which included encouraging people to vote absentee. The document also stressed that the cities would use the money to “be intentional and strategic in reaching our historically disenfranchised residents and communities.” The document makes no mention of partisan affiliation or party loyalty; it does state a desire to increase absentee voting.
To Woodall-Vogg’s surprise, she got everything she asked for. When she later realized she needed additional funds, she asked for more from CTCL and received that, too. She used the money to purchase twice as many high-speed vote tabulators for counting absentee ballots; increase the wages for election workers to $15 an hour; pay higher postage costs; upgrade the security systems for the city’s ballot drop boxes; send out mailers about how to vote absentee; and rent additional vehicles for election workers to use. “The way we spend our money is entirely transparent,” she says. “We can account for every dollar.”
In the moment, the steps taken by election clerks and officials to adapt to the pandemic went unchallenged or caused little controversy. The Wisconsin Elections Commission continued to issue guidance. CTCL gave more than $10 million in grants to 217 recipients in Wisconsin. The bulk of the money went to the five most-populous cities, which are heavily Democratic and home to most of the state’s Black and Hispanic citizens, but smaller counties received funding as well. Marathon County, which had the highest number of localities awarded a CTCL grant, supported Trump in 2020, as did the county of Marinette, with the second-highest number of grants, according to a review by the Wisconsin State Journal.
It wasn’t until September 2020, six weeks before the general election, that the first sign of what was coming appeared. A small, newly created nonprofit called the Wisconsin Voter Alliance filed a lawsuit in federal court for an injunction that would block the state’s five largest and most diverse cities — but none of the other municipalities — from accepting CTCL’s money. Citing an obscure part of state law, the suit alleged that the cities had violated the law by committing the crime of election bribery.
A judge swiftly dismissed it, writing that the complaint had no basis in law. The election took place soon afterward, and Biden carried Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes. Under state law, the Trump campaign had the opportunity to request a full, statewide recount of every paper ballot. “There is no greater forensic audit than a statewide paper-ballot recount,” says David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
Trump’s campaign chose not to do so. Instead it asked for a post-election recount of just the two largest counties by population, Milwaukee and Dane, which were Democratic bastions and home to the vast majority of the state’s minority voters. Those recounts confirmed Biden’s victory. A post-election audit of the state’s voting machines also found no evidence of wrongdoing. It was only then that a campaign of a different nature began.
Ron Heuer is the president of Wisconsin Voter Alliance. A short, wiry man in his seventies, he looks like Dr. Anthony Fauci’s better-looking brother, a comparison Heuer would resent given his dislike of Fauci. When I meet him for dinner in Green Bay on a frigid evening in January, he tells me to take my mask off, even as the omicron variant rips through the state. (In fairness, not another soul in the restaurant is wearing a mask, either.) Heuer worked as an executive in the tour wholesale business for decades, traveling the world and making a “great living.” When he retired, he moved to Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, located on shores of Lake Michigan, and got involved in local Republican politics, taking over as the local GOP chairman.
In the fall of 2020, Heuer was contacted by a lawyer named Tim Griffin, who worked for a conservative law group in Chicago, the Thomas More Society, that defended pro-life activists and challenged orders that shut down churches during the pandemic. Griffin asked Heuer if he wanted to launch a new group focused on elections in Wisconsin. Heuer tells me he was no expert on the subject, so he started to read. “I’m one of those people who will drill down and do my research,” he says. He also talked to the lawyer Erick Kaardal about the CTCL grants. (Kaardal did not respond to requests for comment.)
The more Heuer learned, he says, the more outraged he became. He read the June 2020 grant proposal by the five cities to CTCL asking for $6.3 million, highlighting the passages he found most troubling: “our strategies and plans to encourage and increase absentee voting”; “communities of color, senior voters, low-income voters”; and “Our five cities share the desire to assist as many residents as possible with casting ballots before Election Day.” To Heuer, the document was a smoking gun, evidence that “Democrat cities” were using CTCL’s money — “Zuckerbucks,” he called it — to turn out Democratic voters and swing the election. When I tell him that a plain reading of the document gave me the impression that the cities wanted the money to help as many people vote as possible, he scoffs. “Don’t be naive,” he says. “They’re using that money to accentuate the Black and Latino vote. When you’re saying you’re going to get the people of color out to vote, isn’t that biased?” Heuer would later tell me that this scheme to rig the vote in big cities was a conspiracy planned several years before the 2020 election. He says, “This was in the place a long time ago.”
Heuer and Kaardal filed their election-bribery lawsuit in September 2020; the case was dismissed. Undeterred, Heuer and Kaardal filed another suit in D.C. federal court seeking to block the election results in Wisconsin and four other states — a claim that a judge dismissed in a stinging opinion. Heuer’s group also took aim at another target, the Wisconsin Elections Commission, arguing that the organization’s guidance on voting in nursing homes broke the law. “They have no idea what they’re doing,” Heuer says of the commission, and he called its nonpartisan administrator, Meagan Wolfe, a “very dangerous person.”
Tiana Epps-Johnson, the founder and executive director of CTCL, tells Rolling Stone that her organization is nonpartisan and “backed by Republicans, Democrats, and nonpartisan officials.” Every “legitimate applicant” that asked for money received it, and more than half of the group’s election-administration grants nationwide went to election offices that serve fewer than 25,000 registered voters, she says. As for claims of election bribery or improper influence, she adds: “Every judge — conservative, liberal, and two Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices — rejected these kind of arguments, with one judge issuing a strongly-worded opinion that labeled these challenges a ‘conspiracy theory.””
These allegations of fraud and wrongdoing started on the fringes in late 2020, stoked by activists like Heuer and lawyers like Kaardal. But in the chaotic aftermath of the election, as Trump and his lawyers searched for any legal argument or shred of evidence to keep him in office, Wisconsin Republicans seized on Heuer and Kaardal’s arguments. Party leaders such as U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, who had initially said the election was fair, now backed away from those proclamations. Janel Brandtjen, the new chairwoman of the state Assembly’s campaigns and elections committee, invited Kaardal to testify at a March 2021 hearing and gave him a microphone to spread his baseless theories without the committee even hearing from the subjects of Kaardal’s allegations. Brandtjen praised the witnesses for bringing to light potential wrongdoing in the election and called for further investigation by the Legislature.
Ben Ginsberg, a veteran election lawyer who worked for the Republican National Committee and several GOP presidential campaigns, says the legislators and activists taking issue with rule changes and outside grant funding needed to have done so before the election for their complaints to have merit. “The criticism of the WEC’s decisions was something that could’ve been valid if they were raised at the time,” he says. As for the CTCL money, Ginsberg says a more functional government would fund its elections so that private nonprofits didn’t have to, but noted that no one has come forward with evidence that CTCL money made it possible for illegal voters to vote. “The allegation apparently is that you don’t want all legal voters to vote, which is not a good place for a party to be,” he says.
The evidence for a rigged election may have been nonexistent, but the budding election-fraud movement fomented the idea that the state needed to take action to stop voter fraud. While Republicans introduced legislation to crack down on drop boxes, Speaker Vos, who had urged his fellow Republicans to move on from the 2020 election, faced pressure from his base to launch an Arizona-style audit. Instead, he hired a former state Supreme Court justice, Michael Gableman, to run a special investigation into possible election crimes that would conclude by the end of October 2021. Gableman’s choice raised some alarms: At a Trump rally in November 2020, he claimed the election was stolen, and went on to hire staffers for the investigation who had also amplified election-fraud misinformation. Documents show that Gableman and his team’s investigation has ballooned into something far larger, sending expansive subpoenas to clerks and voting-machine companies, while threatening to jail mayors for refusing to sit for depositions about the 2020 election. Vos allocated $676,000 in taxpayer money to fund Gableman’s investigation, but the final cost will likely run higher.
Charlie Sykes, a never-Trump conservative writer and former talk-show host in Wisconsin, says the Gableman investigation shows how Vos’ attempts to appease his base have spiraled out of control. “He really thought he was going to be the guy who was going to grow the alligator in the bathtub and it wasn’t going to bite him,” Sykes says.
Last fall, the Republican campaign to challenge the integrity of the 2020 election turned to a new target: the Wisconsin Elections Commission. A review of the 2020 election by the state’s Legislative Audit Bureau released in October turned into the next flashpoint in the battle over voting. The nonpartisan bureau concluded that the election was safe and secure, but also made dozens of recommendations about improvements needed. Republicans treated those suggestions as proof of incompetence or malfeasance by the commission.
Soon afterward, the sheriff of Racine County announced he had referred five of the six commissioners to the local district attorney for criminal charges over their 2020 directives about nursing-home voting. GOP legislators now demanded the resignations of administrator Wolfe, her deputy, and five of the six commissioners. The only commissioner not under scrutiny was Bob Spindell, a Republican appointee and party loyalist. (Spindell was also one of the 10 fake electors for Trump sent to D.C. by state Republicans.)
I meet with Wolfe in her office and ask about the campaign to make her step down. She has worked her entire career in elections, starting at the Government Accountability Board; in 2019, the Republican-led state Senate voted unanimously to confirm her as WEC administrator. In person, she comes across as a pure elections nerd, her laptop festooned with voting-themed stickers, her expression brightening when she talks about voter databases or the auditing of voting machines. As the nonpartisan chief of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, Wolfe implements the guidance of six board members and ensures the agency runs smoothly. She is a public servant, not a partisan operative, and she says that makes her a convenient target. “A lot of the things that people are upset about weren’t my decision,” she says.
Still, she can’t help but feel frustrated by the ire directed at the commission by Republicans, considering that it was Republicans who created the commission. “Our commission is operating exactly as it’s designed under law. … These decisions had to be made in public meetings, by a bipartisan commission, with four votes,” she says. “That’s exactly what’s happening.” Now, the WEC has become a campaign bogeyman among Republicans, and two leading GOP candidates for governor have called for dissolving the WEC entirely.
Lawmakers and longtime political observers say they see the conservative push to change voting and punish election officials as part of a larger strategy to help win more seats in the 2022 midterms and create a more favorable environment in the next presidential race. If the GOP defeats Gov. Evers and holds onto its majorities in the Legislature, which it is expected to do thanks to heavy gerrymandering, then they can make all the changes they want to elections and voting. “This is an all-hands-on-deck moment here,” Evers tells me. “If I weren’t able to veto bills without the Republicans overriding my veto, we’d be Georgia right now. We’d be Texas. We’d be Arizona.”
Wisconsin Republicans say they’ve heard from voters who are disgusted by the 2020 election, and plan to hold Democrats accountable. “There will be retribution down the road,” state Rep. Brandtjen tells me in her office. There’s an icy certainty in the way she says this, and her use of the word “retribution” catches me off guard. What does she mean by that, I ask.
Brandtjen stares straight at me. “There’ll be retribution for people because they don’t think there’s fair elections.” She goes on, “You see what happens to countries when they don’t think they have fair elections. Look at Venezuela. It falters the republic.”
The threat to democracy in Wisconsin isn’t coming from a lawless election commission, hacked voting machines, or illegal ballots coming out of nursing homes. It comes from a political party that united around suspicions and lies, and sought to bend reality to its will. Wisconsin is more than a laboratory for new policies and bold ideas; it’s a trial for whether democracy can survive at all.
Cables for connecting between several mobile phones and Cellebrite UFED TOUCH, a device for the data extraction from mobile devices, are seen at Tokyo office of Sun Corp. on March 30, 2016. (photo: Issei Kato/Reuters/Alamy)
Cellebrite’s extensive federal sales come as another Israeli phone-spying firm, NSO Group, falls under federal sanctions.
Across the federal government, agencies that don’t use Cellebrite technology are increasingly the exception, not the rule. Federal purchasing records and Cellebrite securities documents reviewed by The Intercept show that all but one of the 15 U.S. Cabinet departments, along with several other federal agencies, have acquired Cellebrite products in recent years. The list includes many that would seem far removed from intelligence collection or law enforcement, like the departments of Agriculture, Education, Veterans Affairs, and Housing and Urban Development; the Social Security Administration; the U.S. Agency for International Development; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Cellebrite itself boasted about its penetration of the executive branch ahead of becoming a publicly traded company in August. In a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said that it had over 2,800 government customers in North America. To secure that reach, The Intercept has found, the company has partnered with U.S. law enforcement associations and hired police officers, prosecutors, and Secret Service agents to train people in its technology. Cellebrite has also marketed its technology to law firms and multinational corporations for investigating employees. In the SEC filing, it claimed that its clients included six out of the world’s 10 largest pharmaceutical companies and six of the 10 largest oil refiners.
Civil liberties advocates said the spread of Cellebrite’s technology represents a threat to privacy and due process and called for greater oversight. “There are few guidelines on how departments can use our data once they get it,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “We can’t allow every federal department to turn into its own spy agency.”
But Cellebrite’s extensive work with U.S. authorities may be providing it with something even more important to the company than money: political cover. Like NSO Group, whose formidable phone malware recently made headlines, Cellebrite is based in Israel. While NSO’s Pegasus malware is far more powerful than Cellebrite’s technology, providing near-effortless remote infection of devices, both companies have stirred controversy with their sales to authoritarian governments around the world. Cellebrite’s technology is cheaper and has been used in China to surveil people at the Tibetan border, in Bahrain to persecute a tortured political dissident, and in Myanmar to pry into the cellphones of two Reuters journalists. (Under pressure, the company has pledged to stop selling in China and Myanmar, though enforcement is spotty.)
But unlike NSO and the lesser-known Israeli spyware company Candiru, which were added to a Commerce Department trade blacklist in November, Cellebrite has yet to face calls for sanctions. There are signs that people at the company are worried: The day before the NSO listing, D.C. lobbying firm Alpine Group registered with the U.S. Senate to lobby on behalf of Cellebrite. The contract was Cellebrite’s first engagement with outside lobbyists since 2019.
Cellebrite and Alpine Group declined to comment on the lobbying contract. But according to Natalia Krapiva, tech-legal counsel for Access Now, “Cellebrite tries hard to distinguish themselves from NSO by claiming that they are not a spyware company that gets involved in foreign espionage.” While she did not know for certain the reason behind Cellebrite hiring Alpine Group, she said, “They are investing a lot of resources into aggressively defending their reputation, especially in the West.”
“Cellebrite is now trying to put the flashlight more on how much they are connected to the American government,” said Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack, who has repeatedly exposed abuses perpetrated with Cellebrite technology. “But I believe that they are very worried. They are working in many countries that the Americans have problems with. Because of the story of NSO Group, they are afraid that things could become difficult for them.”
So far, however, Cellebrite’s growth seems to be continuing unimpeded, pushing deeper and deeper into police, corporate, and bureaucratic surveillance.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, along with most of the U.S. departments and agencies contacted by The Intercept, did not comment for this article. A spokesperson with the strategic communications firm Reevemark, which represents Cellebrite, pointed The Intercept to the “Ethics and Integrity” page on Cellebrite’s website but otherwise declined to comment.
The Rise of Cellebrite
Cellebrite’s journey into the citadels of global power began in the 1990s, when it was started as a relatively benign consumer technology outfit. Its first product was a tool to migrate contacts from one cellphone to another. It eventually moved into coercive forms of data transfers, allowing customers to bypass phone passwords and vacuum data out of devices.
As smartphones came to contain more and more information about people’s daily lives, business boomed among police and militaries around the world. Cellebrite cashed out in 2007, selling to the Japanese conglomerate Sun Corp., although many of the researchers who collect cellphone vulnerabilities remain based at its campus in Petah Tikva, Israel.
In 2016, the company got a boost from speculation that the FBI had used a Cellebrite product to unlock the phone of one of the perpetrators of a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. The rumors turned out to be false, but Cellebrite’s government work in the United States continued to grow. It gained clients within the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Air Force, as well as among local police departments, which have used its technology on people accused of minor crimes like graffiti, shoplifting, and being drunk in public.
The company has a 4,000-square-foot showroom that it calls an “envisioning center” in Tysons Corner, Virginia, a stone’s throw from the nation’s capital. Today its chief marketing officer, Mark Gambill, is based in the area, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Cellebrite’s flagship offering is the Universal Forensic Extraction Device, or UFED, a phone-hacking kit, but it also offers software that can perform similar feats through a desktop computer as well as products to access data stored in the cloud.
This type of work has been lucrative. According to Cellebrite’s recent SEC filing, the company’s average government customer spends $415,000 on data collection devices and services, with additional millions if they add on analytics software.
The cost of that business, Cellebrite’s critics say, is borne by citizens, and not just in the form of tax dollars. “We talk about the sanctity of the home, but there’s so much more on your phone that gives a deeper and more intimate view than probably anything in your house,” said Jerome Greco, a public defender for the Legal Aid Society. Greco remembers police turning to a Cellebrite UFED-type device following a bar fight between strangers. “What could be on the person’s phone, when they didn’t know each other?” he said.
The proliferation of Cellebrite’s technology within the federal government is “deeply alarming,” said Cahn. While a 2014 Supreme Court ruling set new legal hurdles for searches of cellphones, citing the intimate information the devices now contain, this has “meant very little on the ground.”
“Not only is there no justification for agencies like U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to use this sort of invasive technology, it’s deeply alarming to see agencies use these devices in more and more low-level cases,” he added. Federal wildlife investigators aren’t the only ones using Cellebrite tools in the great outdoors: Wildlife officers in Missouri and Michigan, for example, use such devices, and Cellebrite has heavily marketed its hardware and software for combating animal trafficking. Upturn, a nonprofit focused on justice and equity, last year published a report documenting the purchase of mobile device forensic tools, including Cellebrite technology, by over 2,000 smaller agencies. “Very, very few people understand the power of the tools that Cellebrite offers,” said Upturn’s Logan Koepke.
“Cellebrite should only be used by competent law enforcement agencies with proper oversight and screening, and only for more serious crimes,” said Krapiva. “It should be up for public discussion as to whether we as a society accept that such invasive tools are being used by educational institutions, private firms, and government agencies.” Other experts interviewed by The Intercept said they believed that cellphone crackers should never be used, even when investigating serious crimes.
Cellebrite’s federal customers provide little transparency as to how they’re using the powerful technology. Of the agencies that did respond to The Intercept’s requests for comments, few offered any concrete information about their use of the tools or answered questions about the implications of that usage. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, would not comment on specific technologies, according to a spokesperson, who said only that the department uses a “wide variety of tools” to “leverage technology” to advance its mission.
The Department of Education at least allowed through a spokesperson that it uses Cellebrite tools for “investigative work” by its inspector general and “to determine if a government-issued iPhone has been compromised and to what extent.” The Department of Energy, whose responsibilities touch on nuclear weapons and federal research labs like Los Alamos, said that it uses Cellebrite products in investigations by its Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence and inspector general and to examine government-owned handsets “that have exhibited or been reported to exhibit strange or malicious behavior; or devices that were taken on foreign travel where there is an opportunity for compromise or tampering by a foreign adversary.”
A Social Security Administration spokesperson told The Intercept that Cellebrite tech is used in its office solely to investigate allegations of fraud, including stolen Social Security numbers, insurance fraud, and scams related to pandemic-related relief such as Paycheck Protection Program loans and unemployment benefits. The spokesperson declined to discuss specific instances.
After Hours, Lining the Pockets of Law Enforcement
Further complicating the ethics of government Cellebrite use is the fact that, according to LinkedIn, Cellebrite has employed more than two dozen U.S. government employees from across the country as contract instructors or forensic examiners. The contract employees have apparently included police detectives, a Secret Service officer, and people who claim to work for the Defense Department and defense contractor Lockheed Martin.
Other contractors say they work for the Florida attorney general’s office and the United States Postal Service Office of the Inspector General.
“Cops teaching cops is not anything new,” said Greco, the public defender. “But I would be concerned that there is a financial incentive to choose Cellebrite’s tools over others.”
“Even if it’s an appearance of impropriety, it’s concerning,” said Krapiva.
Cellebrite’s apparent payments to police officers and prosecutors may also violate some police departments’ policies on moonlighting. The Florida attorney general’s office did not respond to questions about its policy on taking on side work. A Postal Service spokesperson approached with the same questions said that The Intercept would need to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to the Office of the Inspector General. The policy, which was eventually provided following a request, requires agents with the office to seek formal approval of outside employment in writing so that the position can be reviewed for potential conflicts of interest. It is not clear whether that happened in this case.
In another instance of government collaboration, Cellebrite has also brokered a partnership with an influential attorneys general’s association, with the goal of “creating legal policy and procedures” that allow for the use of a Cellebrite cloud tool.
Cellebrite may need all the U.S. government work it can get. Its stock prices have taken a dip. Recent exits from authoritarian countries have made its U.S. contracts even more critical to staying afloat. In December, facing recruitment difficulties in Israel following negative press coverage, the company launched a public relations campaign comparing its employees to superheroes.
Mack, the human rights lawyer, said the campaign had an air of desperation to it. “They have already been marked because they are working in some very bad places,” he said. “And things are going to keep being exposed.”
In Memphis, Tennessee Starbucks has fired leaders of a union drive. (photo: Stanislav Kogiku/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images)
Workers at a Memphis Tennessee Starbucks say the company fired them for publicly speaking in support of a union drive. Retaliating against workers for organizing is illegal — but virtually routine.
A Starbucks spokesman told the New York Times that the workers were fired for violating company safety and security policies, citing a photograph of a journalist inside a store apparently after hours, which the spokesman described as a violation of company policy. But workers allege that the terminations were retaliatory.
“Being fired for ‘policies’ that I have never heard of. Never been talked to about before. Never had a write up about and all of a sudden it’s an offense to get fired over!” said one of the workers who was fired on Tuesday morning. “This is an outrage! They are firing the entire committee!”
The union says it will file an unfair labor practice (ULP) charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over the terminations. In a statement, the union alleges that “Starbucks is using policies that have never been enforced…to fire workers.” Should the Board find Starbucks’ stated reasons for the firings to be a pretext for retaliation against workers engaged in union activity, it can charge Starbucks with breaking the law. It recently charged the company with precisely such a violation at a Philadelphia store, a ruling Starbucks has appealed.
But while it is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act to fire, threaten, or discipline workers for engaging in protected concerted activity, such employer law-breaking happens all the time. A 2019 study found that employers are charged with violating federal law in 41.5 percent of union drives. Prior research showed that workers are fired in 34 percent of NLRB election campaigns.
The penalties for such violations are laughably miniscule. If a terminated worker’s ULP charge is sustained, the Board can only compel the employer to post signs on the worksite pledging not to violate the law, and demand reinstatement of a worker and compensation for her lost wages. However, those wages are calculated by subtracting any income she made in the interim if she found work elsewhere — which she likely will have, given that she must find a new job if she does not want to starve while awaiting the Board’s ruling. The result is that the employer will owe the worker little, if anything.
For a major corporation like Starbucks, those penalties are nothing compared to the immediately chilling effect of firing union leaders. Such a move can derail organizing, scaring workers away from support of the union. The Board’s slow pace means that even if a worker is reinstated, the damage will have long been done. This is why so many employers, from small businesses such as Coffee Tree Roasters to prestigious institutions like Columbia University, remain quick to threaten workers’ jobs. The long-stalled PRO Act, it should be mentioned, goes some way to rectify this problem by imposing a $50,000 fine on an employer for each labor law violation.
The speed of the Starbucks union drive has raised the stakes for the company, which is employing at least thirty lawyers from union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson to fight the union. Littler’s strategy has been to contest the store-by-store NLRB elections. The lawyers argue that an individual store is not an appropriate bargaining unit and instead, elections should include multiple stores within a region. Inflating the size of a bargaining unit is a familiar move in the employer playbook, with the boss betting on stacking the vote with workers who have not yet joined the union drive. Amazon used this method to great effect during last year’s union drive in Bessemer, adding thousands of workers to the proposed bargaining unit.
There is, of course, no reason an employer should have a say in who is and isn’t in a union, no matter how established the practice is in existing US labor law. This, too, is part of the PRO Act, which would remove employer standing from representation proceedings.
For now, Starbucks workers are fighting the terminations by speaking out about the company’s alleged retaliation. That Starbucks is union-busting at a Memphis location is particularly resonant: these workers launched their campaign on Martin Luther King Jr (MLK) Day, and Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in Memphis, where he had gone to march with sanitation workers who were on a strike for union recognition. As a GoFundme for the fired Starbucks workers states, “Workers should not be afraid to speak to the media, to organize our stores, or to fight for our right to have a union — the same right Dr. King was killed while fighting for in our city.”
On MLK Day this year, as Memphis Starbucks employees announced their union drive, Starbucks tweeted that the company is “inspired by Dr. MLK Jr.’s legacy.” You can still find an invitation to “volunteer with Starbucks in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day” on the company’s website. “At Starbucks,” the copy reads, “we believe that the positive actions we take together strengthen our communities and make us all better.” Taking action together? Well, now there’s an idea about which their workers in Memphis have a few thoughts.
Residents of Banyuwangi in East Java, Indonesia protest against the Tumpang Pitu gold mine in 2018. (photo: RZ Hakim/Mongabay Indonesia)
Human rights activists, including the national rights commission, Komnas HAM, have criticized the law, an amendment to an old mining law, for its provisions that are widely seen as undermining the rights of local communities for the benefit of mining companies.
“After the revision of the mining law [in May 2020], Article 162 has often been used to silence people’s fights against mining operations,” Melky Nahar, campaign head for watchdog group Mining Advocacy Network (Jatam), told Mongabay, referring to the most contentious provision in the new law.
Article 162 states that “anyone who hinders or disturbs mining activities by permit holders who have met the requirements … may be punished with a maximum prison term of one year and maximum fines of 100 million rupiah [$7,000].”
Of the 53 people subjected to criminal charges for opposing mining companies in 2021, at least 10 were charged with violating Article 162, according to Satrio Manggala, environmental policy manager at the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi).
“So these people protested [against mining activity], but in their protests, they’re perceived as hindering and disturbing mining activity,” he said at a recent online press conference.
Hairansyah, a commissioner with the government-funded Komnas HAM, called the article “a major setback” as it poses “a serious threat to human rights defenders.” He said the article goes against the 2009 law on environmental protection, which states that no criminal charges may be brought against anyone for campaigning for their right to a clean environment. Activists warn that Article 162 adds to a growing list of measures encouraging the prosecution of dissent against extractive and other environmentally harmful activities.
‘To cripple people’s fight’
Prosecutions under these measures are known as SLAPP, or strategic lawsuits against public participation, and in the case of the mining law’s Article 162, they have proliferated in the past two years.
In December 2020, state-owned tin miner PT Timah pressed charges against 12 residents of the fishing village of Matras, on the island of Bangka off Sumatra, after they boarded one of its vessels in a protest. The company said the villagers had disrupted its operations, in violation of Article 162.
The villagers justified their actions as an act of protest against the company’s mining activities that they said had disrupted their livelihoods, reducing their daily fish catches by nearly 90%.
In November 2021, residents of Tuntung village on the island of Sulawesi blocked the road leading to a nickel mine run by PT Koninis Fajar Mineral (KFM), also in protest against the environmental impact of the company’s activities. They said the water in their village had been polluted by KFM’s operations.
Following the protest, local police summoned and questioned at least 13 of the protesters under the pretext of Article 162 violations.
On Dec. 29, some of the villagers reported the police to the local office of Komnas HAM, saying they felt they were being criminalized under Article 162. On Jan. 4 this year, the rights commission sent a letter to the police asking them to stop any legal proceedings against the villagers.
In the letter, Komnas HAM called Article 162 a contentious tool for silencing the voices of people defending their rights against mining activities, and pointed out that the public’s rights to gather and express their opinions are guaranteed under the Constitution and the 1999 law on human rights.
Jatam’s Melky said there was no question that the use of Article 162 by the police was aimed at stifling grassroots opposition. “This increasing trend of criminalization is not an effort to uphold the law, but to cripple people’s fight [against mining],” he said.
‘A devious policy’
The most recent case involving the use of Article 162 was the arrest of 10 people, including villagers and activists, in Pasar Seluma village in southern Sumatra.
On Dec. 23, the protesters set up an encampment in the mining area of PT Faminglevto Bakti Abadi (FBA), an iron ore miner that they say never obtained their permission to operate in their area, and whose activities since 2010 have been mired in irregularities.
On Dec. 27, police bulldozed the protesters’ tents and arrested them, including Ayu Nevi Anggraeni, a villager who said they were dragged out of their tents like animals.
“We and our children were forcibly dragged. The police didn’t care for us,” she said at an online press conference. “We’re being treated like a thief or an animal even though we did nothing wrong. We didn’t provoke [anyone]. From deep within our heart, we want the mine to be closed.”
Another villager, who did not give her name, said she felt the same.
“We’re just asking for justice,” she said. “When we were being kicked out of the protest site, some police officers called us stupid. Why? We just want to defend our territory.”
The Pasar Seluma police chief, Darmawan Dwiharyanto, told local media that the forced eviction was a last resort after previous attempts to persuade the villagers to leave the site had failed.
Saman Lating, a lawyer representing the villagers, said police investigators had told him the villagers were arrested for disrupting FBA’s activities — that is, for violating Article 162.
“We know that this article is a powerful one in the mining law used by the powers that be,” he said at the online press conference. “This article is meant to perpetuate all mining activities in Indonesia.”
But Saman questioned the use of Article 162 in this case, given that it’s ostensibly meant to protect businesses that have the proper permits. This doesn’t appear to be the case for FBA, he said.
The company is allegedly operating without having conducted an environmental impact assessment, known locally as an Amdal, or obtaining an environmental permit. It has also allegedly failed to pay its post-mining reclamation deposit to the state as of 2018. The deposit, which is required of all miners, is meant to ensure that funds are available for rehabilitating the site once mining operations have ended.
FBA was also included on a list of companies whose mining permits were revoked by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources in 2016. Rere Christanto, manager of the mining division at Walhi, said FBA had also violated at least 15 regulations by operating in coastal and protected areas.
Usin Abdisyah Putra Sembiring, a provincial councilor in Bengkulu, where Pasar Seluma is located, said FBA isn’t fit to operate because it hasn’t fulfilled all of its obligations. In addition to allegedly not having an Amdal and an environmental permit, he said, the company has never reported its environmental monitoring and management plan to the local environmental agency.
Mongabay has reached out to the environmental agency in Bengkulu to confirm the allegations but hasn’t received a response.
If all these allegations are true, said Saman the lawyer, then the police had no grounds for evicting and arresting the villagers protesting against FBA’s presence. By doing so, he said, “the law enforcers are working to justify the mistakes of the company.”
Walhi’s Rere said the case in Pasar Seluma is evidence of how the mining law has become a serious threat to people’s rights.
“What’s happening in Pasar Seluma further convinces us that the mining law is a devious policy used to eradicate people’s participation [in fighting for their rights],” he said.
Constitutional challenge
Activists from Walhi and from mining watchdog Jatam’s office in East Kalimantan province in June last year filed a constitutional challenge against the mining law. The challenge, known as a judicial review, seeks to strike down nine articles from the law on constitutional grounds, including Article 162.
In a hearing at the Constitutional Court on Jan. 5, Ridwan Jamaludin, the director-general of minerals and coal at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, said the article isn’t aimed at silencing protesters, but at providing legal certainty for investors.
It’s meant, he said, “to protect them from irresponsible people in a government effort to build a healthy climate for investment.”
Jatam’s Melky said this reasoning shows how the government is siding with companies instead of the people.
“His statement shows that the government is not working to guarantee people’s safety and [the rights to] their land, but just to make sure that the interests of companies are guaranteed without hurdles,” he said.
Melky added that during the legislative process to pass the mining bill into law, there was no public participation allowed. This, he said, explains the inclusion of provisions like Article 162.
“The problem is that nearly all mining policies in Indonesia [are issued] without involving the public as the rightful owners of land [in the country],” he said. “All [deliberation] is done behind closed doors.”
Walhi’s Satrio said this isn’t the first time Article 162 has been challenged in court.
The previous mining law also contained the same article, which critics challenged three times at the Constitutional Court. The court eventually ruled that the restrictions prescribed in the article could only be applied to people who have sold their lands to mining companies, and not to all individuals who oppose mining operations, Satrio said.
But when lawmakers passed the amended law in 2020, they reinstated the same old article that the court had ruled unconstitutional, and not the updated version from the court.
“We initially thought that when the mining law was amended in 2020, the article would disappear, or at least the version from the Constitutional Court will be used,” Satrio said. “However, the article reappeared in its complete form, which led to many victims [of criminalization] in 2021.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
Trees grown on forest land adjacent to Mount Rainier National Park near Ashford, Wash., is part of a project of 520 acres on private timberland that allows a private nonprofit to sell "carbon credits" to individuals and companies who are hoping to offset their carbon footprints. (photo: Ted S. Warren/AP)
That's the conclusion of a new report by the NewClimate Institute, an environmental organization that works to combat global warming. Its researchers, who examined the actions of 25 companies, concluded that many of them are misleading consumers by using accounting practices that make their environmental goals relatively meaningless or are excluding key parts of their businesses in their calculations.
The companies have pledged to make their emissions reductions or to offset their emissions through such techniques as planting carbon-capturing forests over self-imposed periods ranging from 2030 to 2050.
The authors chose to study corporate giants, including Amazon and Walmart, which made bold climate pledges and who, because of their size, are seen as especially influential. In recent years, large corporations have increasingly adopted pledges to significantly reduce their carbon footprints — a priority of growing importance to many of their customers, employees and investors.
NewClimate Institute concluded that even though many companies have pledged to reach net-zero emissions, the 25 companies they studied have collectively committed to reduce emissions by about 40% — not the 100% that people might be led to believe from the companies' net-zero or carbon-neutral pledges.
"We were frankly surprised and disappointed at the overall integrity of the companies' claims" said Thomas Day of NewClimate Institute, one of the study's lead authors. "Their ambitious-sounding headline claims all-too-often lack real substance, which can mislead both consumers and the regulators that are core to guiding their strategic direction. Even companies that are doing relatively well exaggerate their actions."
Among the 25 companies the researchers studied, 24 relied too heavily on carbon offsets, which are rife with problems, the report said. That's because carbon offsets often rely on carbon removal ventures such as reforestation projects. These projects suck up carbon but are not ideal solutions because forests can be razed or destroyed by wildfires, re-releasing carbon into the air.
Most of the companies, the report said, presented vague information on the scale and potential impact of their emissions-reduction measures or might have exaggerated their use of renewable energy.
The report called Amazon's goal of net-zero carbon by 2040 unsubstantiated. It said it was unclear whether Amazon's goal referred solely to carbon dioxide emissions or to all greenhouse gases. The report also said it was not clear to what degree Amazon planned to reduce its own emissions, as opposed to buying carbon offset credits which rely on nature-based solutions.
In response, Amazon said it has been transparent about its investments in nature-based solutions, and disputed that its net-zero goals are based on offsets. The company said it's on a path toward powering its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, five years ahead of its original target of 2030. It also highlighted other initiatives including deploying 100,000 electric delivery vehicles by 2030.
As an example of a misleading goal, the report said CVS Health could potentially achieve its 2030 emissions target with little effort because it compared that target with a base year that included extraordinarily high emissions.
A CVS spokeswoman responded that after the company's merger with Aetna in late 2018, 2019 was the first full year of data the company could use as a baseline for the new combined entity.
"By 2030, we plan to reduce our environmental impact by more than 50%, including a reduction in our energy consumption and use of paper and plastic," the company said.
The NewClimate report said that Nestle, among the companies with the lowest marks, had emissions-reduction plans that covered only portions of its business and that its net-zero targets relied upon carbon offsets. The company also provided little detail on the renewable electricity sources it was pursuing, it said.
Nestle responded that its emissions reduction targets do cover all its activities, that it's reducing greenhouse gas emissions 50% by 2030 and that its factories and offices are switching to renewable electricity.
Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the school for environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan, who had no role in the NewClimate report, said: "Far too many companies are coming up short when it comes to meaningful decarbonization. Corporate decarbonization goals and plans for meeting them are generally far less compelling than needed for success in halting climate change."
Some other outside experts suggested that the NewClimate report was too critical of carbon offsets.
"Forest-based offsets are challenging, but they can be real and important," said Christopher Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. "A too-strong emphasis on decarbonization paths that don't include offsets will slow overall progress and raise costs."
The report did note some things it said the companies are doing well. Shipping company Maersk received the best ratings despite the challenges its industry faces in reducing emissions. The authors noted that Maersk is pursuing alternative fuels and has partnered with a renewable energy company to establish a factory for e-methanol. Maersk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Most of the companies studied, 15 of them, have outlined plans to reduce their "Scope 1" and "Scope 2" emissions, which are emissions released directly by the company or by its using electricity, the report said. But those companies didn't address their "Scope 3" emissions; these include emissions released by suppliers or customers that use their products. Scope 3 emissions account for, on average, 87% of all emissions for the 25 companies studied, the group said.
The report commended Walmart, which pledged to be net-zero by 2040, for following good practice by committing to reduce its operational emissions to zero without the use of offsets and setting near-term goals for those reductions which include using 100% renewable energy by 2035. But Walmart was faulted for not including Scope 3 emissions. Walmart does have a voluntary program that guides its product suppliers to reduce emissions, and nearly a quarter of its suppliers have joined, the report said.
Walmart responded that it does have a goal to reduce or avoid one billion metric tons of Scope 3 emissions and that it reports its progress openly.
The report stressed that companies should take more responsibility to reduce Scope 3 emissions. Yet it can be challenging to track those emissions across supply chains, especially when working with smaller companies, said Maggie Peloso, a lawyer involved in climate change risk management and environmental litigation.
"It's not always as easy as calling someone up and saying, 'Hey, I want to know what your emissions were from the factory when you produced that 100 boxes of stuff that you sent to my stores and I sold them,' " Peloso said.
Among the suggestions for improvement that the NewClimate Institute offered were that companies focus on shorter-term emissions reduction targets for the next five to 10 years. It also suggested that companies set specific emissions-reduction targets with transparent accounting, instead of ambiguous net-zero goals.
If national governments created policies and regulations to meet the targets they have set, it would be far more effective, suggested John Reilly, who served as co-director of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT. "On the hopeful side, perhaps there is ongoing effort within companies to create rules, procedures, and strategies to achieve their ambitious targets," he said.
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