03 February 22
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David Sirota | Biden Reversal Gives Wall Street a Big Win
David Sirota, The Daily Poster
Sirota writes: "The Democratic president slammed but now backs a Trump ruling that could help private equity kingpins loot retirees' savings."
The Democratic president slammed but now backs a Trump ruling that could help private equity kingpins loot retirees’ savings.
When former President Donald Trump paved the way for his private equity donors to skim fees from Americans’ 401(k) retirement accounts, Joe Biden’s campaign denounced the stealth executive action and promised to oppose such changes if he won the presidency. But less than two years later, Biden’s administration just quietly cemented that same policy, delivering a gift to the Democrat’s own finance industry sponsors, even as federal law enforcement officials are warning of rampant malfeasance in the private equity industry.
At issue is a Trump Labor Department ruling in 2020 that authorized retirement plan administrators to shift workers’ savings into high-risk, high-fee private equity investments, despite regulators’ long-standing interpretation that federal laws prohibited such moves.
Trump Labor Department officials touted the reinterpretation as a way to “help Americans saving for retirement gain access to alternative investments that often provide strong returns.” The letter followed Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman, a Trump adviser and major donor to his super PAC, saying that accessing the $7 trillion in Americans’ 401(k) was one of his company’s top goals.
At the time, Biden’s campaign criticized the Trump move, telling the American Prospect that the Democratic nominee “staunchly opposes regulatory changes that will lead to skyrocketing fees and diminished retirement security for savers. This regulatory action is another example of President Trump putting the interests of Wall Street ahead of American workers and families.”
But rather than rescinding Trump’s ruling, Biden’s own Labor Department appears to have cemented the Trump directive in a new supplemental letter being hailed by finance industry lawyers.
Though the new letter does include warnings about the risks of private equity, it avoids rescinding the Trump initiative. On the contrary, it explicitly affirms that retirement administrators with “experience evaluating private equity investments… may be suited to analyze these investments for a (401k) plan, particularly with the assistance of a qualified fiduciary investment adviser.”
“Biden's Department of Labor could have and should have made a stronger statement about the unsuitability of private equity products for workers' defined contribution retirement savings and the inability of nearly all brokers to evaluate private equity products,” said the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Eileen Appelbaum, who co-authored the book Private Equity At Work.
Last week, the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling empowering 401(k) holders to sue finance executives that invest their savings in inappropriately risky or predatory private equity investments.
However, Biden’s Labor Department has effectively blessed such investment strategies. Indeed, industry lawyers and investment executives are already celebrating the letter as a precedent setting ruling potentially opening trillions of dollars of Americans’ retirement savings up to higher-fee investments.
“We believe this is a settled matter now,” said a finance executive at Partners Group, the Switzerland-based investment firm that spearheaded the lobbying push for the letter, according to Bloomberg Law.
Appelbaum, however, said that especially with the recent court ruling, the threat of retiree lawsuits could still deter retirement plan administrators from moving quickly into higher risk, higher fee investments.
“Much as private equity firms may wish it were different, they have been mostly unable to worm their way into workers' 401(k)s and abscond with their retirement savings,” she told The Daily Poster.
A Gift To The Donor Class
Whatever happens next, the Labor Department precedent is a win for the private equity industry, which has made billions in fees off traditional public pensions and is eager to tap the even bigger pool of worker savings in 401(k) accounts and other so-called defined contribution retirement plans.
Trump’s original letter was a particularly sweet victory for Schwarzman, whose company Blackstone is the largest private equity firm in the world.
“In life you have to have a dream,” Schwarzman said in 2017. “And one of our dreams is our desire and the market’s need to have more access at retail to alternative asset products.”
Blackstone also has its tentacles in the Biden administration.
Biden’s election bid was boosted by $350,000 worth of donations from top Blackstone executives to a super PAC backing his campaign. One of his top 2020 fundraisers was Jon Gray, the heir apparent to Schwarzman.
In all, Biden’s campaign raked in more than $3.8 million from donors at private equity and investment firms, according to OpenSecrets.
A Blackstone executive recently chaired and serves on the board of directors of the Institute for Portfolio Alternatives, which has been lobbying the Biden Labor Department on “issues relating to 401(k) defined contributions,” according to federal records.
Law Enforcement Alarm
The Biden administration’s ruling to help private equity titans access retirees 401(k) accounts coincides with his own law enforcement agency sounding a loud alarm about the industry’s practices.
Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a risk alert saying that the agency’s examiners are finding pervasive malfeasance and fraud throughout the private equity industry.
The report found some firms haven’t been calculating management fees according to the terms in their fund disclosures, which “resulted in investors paying more in management fees than they were required to pay.”
It also found money managers employing schemes that “diverged materially from fund disclosures,” giving investors “inaccurate or misleading disclosures about their track record,” and presenting “inaccurate performance calculations to investors.”
Meanwhile, federal law enforcement officials are reportedly investigating allegations of predatory fees, misreported performance, and corruption at the Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania pension funds.
Those investigations followed a leaked FBI report warning that private equity and hedge fund investments were being used in “support of fraud, transnational organized crime, and sanctions evasion.”
“In my nearly 40 years experience conducting forensic investigations of over $1 trillion in defined contribution and defined benefit plans, I have never met a plan fiduciary capable of digging deeply into private equity offerings or a private equity firm willing to be fully transparent,” said Ted Siedle, a former SEC attorney who represents whistleblowers in the financial industry.”
“Any 401(k) fiduciary who believes he is capable of evaluating these high risk high cost investments is naive,” he said. “It is incumbent upon the Biden administration to set the record straight: private equity investments are inherently inappropriate for 401(k)s as it is impossible for plan fiduciaries to monitor them.”
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Officials from the Allegheny County Elections Division look for a specific ballot bin at its Pittsburgh warehouse on Nov. 4. It was thought to have been left at a polling place but was later located there. (photo: Michael Williamson/The Washington Post)
Memo Circulated Among Trump Allies Advocated Using NSA Data in Attempt to Prove Stolen Election
Josh Dawsey, Rosalind S. Helderman, Emma Brown, Jon Swaine and Jacqueline Alemany, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The memo used the banal language of government bureaucracy, but the proposal it advocated was extreme: President Donald Trump should invoke the extraordinary powers of the National Security Agency and Defense Department to sift through raw electronic communications in an attempt to show that foreign powers had intervened in the 2020 election to help Joe Biden win."
The proposal to seize and analyze ‘NSA unprocessed raw signals data’ raises legal and ethical concerns that set it apart from other attempts that have come to light
The memo used the banal language of government bureaucracy, but the proposal it advocated was extreme: President Donald Trump should invoke the extraordinary powers of the National Security Agency and Defense Department to sift through raw electronic communications in an attempt to show that foreign powers had intervened in the 2020 election to help Joe Biden win.
Proof of foreign interference would “support next steps to defend the Constitution in a manner superior to current civilian-only judicial remedies,” argued the Dec. 18, 2020, memo, which was circulated among Trump allies.
The document, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, laid out a plan for the president to appoint three men to lead this effort. One was a lawyer attached to a military intelligence unit; another was a veteran of the military who had been let go from his National Security Council job after claiming that Trump was under attack by deep-state forces including “globalists” and “Islamists.”
The third was a failed Republican congressional candidate, Michael Del Rosso, who sent a copy of the memo to Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who confirmed to The Post he received the document from Del Rosso. An aide to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) also said his office received the document but declined to say who sent it. Del Rosso did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The previously unreported proposal, whose provenance remains murky, in some ways mirrors other radical ideas that extremists who denied Biden’s victory were working to sell to Trump in the weeks between the November 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol. Many of those proposals centered on using government powers to seize voting machines.
But the proposal to seize and analyze “NSA unprocessed raw signals data” on behalf of Trump’s electoral ambitions raises particular legal and ethical concerns and distinguishes the new memo from other attempts that have come to light. The NSA collects a broad range of electronic data, including text messages, phone calls, emails, social media posts and satellite communications. By law, the NSA cannot target a U.S. person’s communications without a court order.
The effort also involved players whose names have not yet publicly surfaced in connection to efforts to overturn the election.
The memo outlined a plan in which Trump would ask Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller to tap Del Rosso, former NSC member Richard Higgins and an Army lawyer named Frank Colon to carry out the effort.
Miller told The Post he was not aware of the proposal and was not asked to enact it. Colon disavowed any knowledge of the memo, while Higgins did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The Dec. 18 memo was just one in a swirl of last-ditch efforts to prevent Biden’s legitimate victory from being recognized as Trump and his backers grew more desperate after the courts rejected their claims of fraud. Some of his allies mounted a series of efforts to get the memo into Trump’s hands in his final days in office, according to people familiar with the attempts, although no evidence has emerged to suggest they succeeded.
“That period in time was amateur hour with people who did not know Trump or had never met with Trump before in their lives attempting to get into the Oval Office to get authorized to do investigations that the rest of the government had examined and had said there was no evidence for,” said Michael Pillsbury, an informal adviser to Trump at the time.
Cramer said Del Rosso sent the memo to his office after a Jan. 4 meeting that both men attended at the Trump International Hotel, which was organized by MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, a prominent backer of Trump’s bogus election fraud claims.
Cramer and Sen. Cynthia M. Lummis (R-Wyo.) joined some two dozen others crammed into a ground-floor hotel conference room to discuss election fraud allegations, according to Cramer and an aide to Lummis. Participants recalled that Johnson also attended, via videoconference. The details of the meeting, which took place two days before the attack on the U.S. Capitol, have not been previously reported. The meeting was similar to a briefing held in a congressional office building the next day for members of the House.
Michael Flynn, who resigned in 2017 as Trump’s national security adviser and had advocated using the military to “rerun” the election in battleground states, also extended an invitation to at least one senator and his staff, according to a person familiar with the meeting. Flynn did not respond to requests for comment.
That person and others interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations and sensitive documents.
What the senators heard from a handful of presenters were some of the most fantastical claims among those alleging that the election had been stolen — including, according to Cramer, that the 2020 vote had been influenced by foreign powers and that proper investigation required gaining access to voting machines around the country.
“They wanted to get the machines,” Cramer, who later voted to confirm Biden’s victory, told The Post in an interview. He said the presenters accused various countries meddling including China and Venezuela, and a “lot of theories but not a lot of evidence.”
Lindell said he didn’t recall discussion of getting access to machines. He said the goal of the Trump hotel meeting with senators was to line up congressional allies to delay the Jan. 6 certification of Biden’s election victory, making time to examine votes in key states.
“We were hoping that the senators would give it 10 more days to give it back to the states,” Lindell said in an interview. “We were in an anomaly in history. We still are.”
‘I was not impressed by these people’
The Jan. 4 meeting was part of a sustained, weeks-long effort by Trump allies to persuade the president and other high-level U.S. officials to take extraordinary actions, including employing the government’s military and intelligence powers, because they claimed the Nov. 3 election had been manipulated by foreign actors. There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the election or any indication that foreign interference helped Biden win.
While Trump did not ultimately order the national security establishment to intervene on his behalf, such proposals have become a particular focus of attention for the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks because of the extreme danger they would have posed to core tenets of American democracy.
As Jan. 6 approached, a loose network of self-styled technical consultants and intelligence experts redoubled their efforts to press for extreme measures. Some of the figures involved are only now coming into public view.
They conducted phone calls and meetings to coordinate their efforts, many of which were focused on the House, where Trump had numerous close allies. But the Electoral Count Act required that at least one senator join a member of the House in formally contesting the electoral votes of a state to prompt further debate.
Trump’s supporters faced a more challenging task persuading members of the Senate, where then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Republicans should not challenge Biden’s victory. Trump’s allies were hunting for others to join Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in saying they would defy McConnell.
Lindell said he was surprised at the size of the crowd at the Trump hotel meeting. He had simply wanted to make sure that his friend, Cramer, knew about the purported election fraud. Many people had reached out with what they said was evidence, Lindell said, and he had told some of them to come to the hotel that morning.
“I didn’t know any of them,” he said. “I had never met them before in my life.”
Cramer said in an interview that those in attendance — who included not only high-profile personalities but also less-well-known “people from the intelligence arena” — made clear that they wanted access to voting machines to conduct their own investigations. They laid out a variety of baseless conspiracy theories that included foreign powers such as China and Venezuela hacking voting machines, according to people in attendance.
“The whole point was getting a message to the president and the vice president on what they should be doing to stop the certification,” Cramer said.
Cramer said that he did not find the presentation compelling.
“Honestly, I was not impressed by these people,” said Cramer, who said that he attended as a favor to his friend Lindell and that he brought along his wife.
Through a spokesperson, Johnson acknowledged he attended the meeting remotely. Earlier in December, as chairman of the Senate’s Homeland Security committee, Johnson hosted a hearing on alleged election irregularities. “Following the hearing, myself and my staff continued to gather information and consider allegations, that is why I joined the meeting,” he said in a statement to The Post.
Cramer and Johnson both ultimately voted to certify Biden’s victory Jan. 6, when Congress formally counted the electoral college votes.
An aide to Lummis confirmed her attendance at the Trump hotel meeting and said she was unconvinced that there was widespread voter fraud or that the election was stolen. She voted to object to the certification of Biden’s win in Pennsylvania because of unrelated concerns about that state’s vote-by-mail law, the aide said.
It is unclear whether Trump was aware of the Jan. 4 meeting with senators. A spokesman for Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
‘A crazy tangle of things’
Attendees of the Trump hotel meeting included figures who have been known to be central to the effort to overturn Biden’s win, such as Lindell, lawyer Sidney Powell and former Overstock chief executive Patrick Byrne, who confirmed his attendance. Powell did not respond to requests for comment.
But they also included less familiar characters who claimed ties to the intelligence community.
One presenter was Don Berlin, according to documents reviewed by The Post and people in attendance at the meeting. Berlin is a private intelligence operative who has held a high-level security clearance, worked for a time as an expert at the Defense Department and has performed classified work for the U.S. government on behalf of defense contractors, his lawyer has said in court filings in two civil matters since 2018.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Berlin was involved in a GOP effort to hunt for emails from Hillary Clinton’s personal server, according to a 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report.
Hours after the Jan. 4 meeting at the Trump hotel, Berlin sent an email to Republican Senate staffers, according to a copy of the message obtained by The Post. He wrote that he understood that Cramer and Johnson had been skeptical of the presentation and had asked to see “actual evidence.”
“In essence,” Berlin wrote, senators had said “show us the beef — not the bun.” He sent them a link to two documents. Because the link is no longer working, The Post was unable to examine the documents.
Berlin did not respond to phone messages, emails or a note left at his home.
Another attendee of the Jan. 4 meeting, Del Rosso, sent to Cramer the memo calling for Trump to use the NSA and DOD. Del Rosso, a former technology executive whose role in efforts to overturn the election has not been previously reported, ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House in 2016 from Virginia and has had ties to the right-wing Claremont Institute. He was also a Trump campaign surrogate, according to his resume obtained by The Post.
Staff for Johnson received a copy of the memo on Jan. 13, a spokeswoman for the senator said. She said the staff took no further action and that Johnson did not become aware of the memo until The Post’s recent inquiry.
The memo advocated that Trump use supposed authority under a document known as NSPM-13 — a classified presidential directive for offensive cyber operations adopted in 2018 — to examine electronic intelligence collected by the NSA for signs of foreign election interference.
“This inquiry would be done confidentially and could be completed in several days,” the memo read, warning that civilian court remedies were not enough. “To treat this solely as a legal issue is to ensure that the USG’s response is under-scoped and inadequate.”
The plan, according to the memo, was to then declassify the purported evidence to help Trump win.
The bottom of the memo included a notation suggesting a desire to keep its contents from becoming public: “Proprietary and privileged — dispose via shreding,” it read, misspelling the last word.
The memo listed Colon, the Army lawyer, as a “point of contact for legal and execution logistics,” including an email and phone number. Attached to the memo were detailed page-long resumes for both Del Rosso and Colon.
Michael Daniel, the chief executive of the Cyber Threat Alliance and the cybersecurity coordinator under President Barack Obama, called the strategy outlined in the memo “a crazy tangle of things” that appeared to involve a misunderstanding of the White House policy memo’s powers and a proposal that would have significant legal and privacy implications.
“To use an overused term, all of this would have been completely unprecedented. I can’t imagine anything like that ever having happened before,” he said. “It would have been a radical departure from normal procedure.”
‘Everybody was bringing me stuff’
At the time, Colon was serving as a senior legal counsel to the Army, according to the copy of his résumé attached to the election memo, which said he specialized in cyber operations and intelligence. Colon described himself as a “legal adviser to the nation’s top military leaders” on a LinkedIn page that has since been removed.
In a brief telephone interview with The Post, Colon denied having any involvement in the election memo or having attended the meeting. He claimed he did not know Del Rosso, Berlin or Higgins, never communicated with them about the election and did not know how his name and résumé — which included his home address, personal email address and cellphone number — came to be included in the plan.
“I have no idea what you’re referring to,” Colon said.
Colon claimed he may have been selected because he had written an article recently on cybersecurity. “I can’t help it if somebody writes my name on a bathroom wall, either,” he said.
Colon’s name first surfaced publicly on Jan. 15, 2021, while the country was still reeling from the violence of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
On that day, Post photographer Jabin Botsford took a picture of Lindell, the MyPillow executive, exiting the White House with a coffee cup and a document that mentioned “martial law” and the “insurrection act.” The portions of the document visible in Botsford’s photograph called for Trump loyalist Kash Patel to be installed as acting CIA director and for Colon to be named “Acting National Security” adviser.
At the time, Colon disavowed any knowledge of Lindell’s proposal, and White House aides said Lindell met only briefly with Trump, who declined to act on Lindell’s proposals as he prepared to decamp from the White House.
An Army spokesman confirmed Colon currently serves as a civilian legal adviser assigned to a military intelligence brigade headquartered at Fort Meade in Maryland. The spokesman said the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command launched an investigation in January 2021, following the media reports about the Lindell documents.
“The results of the investigation found no evidence any individual assigned to INSCOM acted inappropriately in their capacity as a Department of the Army Civilian employee with respect to the election,” the spokesman said.
In an interview with The Post, Lindell — who has spent millions of dollars over the past year promoting bogus claims that the 2020 election was stolen — said that he had indeed been asked to deliver an envelope to Trump if he was able to secure a meeting with him. Lindell couldn’t recall who asked him except that it was a group of lawyers.
He said he didn’t know who Colon was or what was in the envelope that he ultimately gave to aides at the White House. He hadn’t read what was inside, he said.
“Everybody was bringing me stuff in January and December,” Lindell said. “I became a hub of a wheel of information.”
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A 'State of Jefferson' sign hangs on a structure along Interstate 5 in California. (photo: Tracy Barbutes/Guardian UK)
California County on Track to Be Run by Militia-Aligned Secessionist Group
Dani Anguiano, Guardian UK
Anguiano writes: "A retired police chief and self-described Reagan Republican with decades of public service, Leonard Moty checked all the boxes to represent his community in one of California's most conservative counties."
ALSO SEE: He's Head of a Georgia Election Board - and Fixated on QAnon
Shasta county’s recall efforts highlight how distrust in the government has led to increasing extremism in local politics
A retired police chief and self-described Reagan Republican with decades of public service, Leonard Moty checked all the boxes to represent his community in one of California’s most conservative counties.
But on Tuesday, voters ousted Moty, handing control of the Shasta county board of supervisors to a group aligned with local militia members. The election followed nearly two years of threats and increasing hostility toward the longtime supervisor and his moderate colleagues in response to pandemic health restrictions.
While it’s not yet clear who will replace Moty, the two candidates in the lead attended a celebration on Tuesday with members of an area militia group, the Sacramento Bee reported.
The recall is a win for the ultra-conservative movement in Shasta county, which has fought against moderate Republican officials and sought to gain a foothold in local government in this rural part of northern California.
It also highlights a phenomenon that extends far beyond the region, as experts warn the pandemic and eroding trust in US institutions has fueled extremism in local politics and hostility against officials that could reshape governments from school boards to county supervisors to Congress.
“I think it’s going to be a change in our politics. I think we’re going to shift more to the alt-right side of things,” Moty said on Wednesday. “I really thought my community would step up to the plate and they didn’t and that’s very discouraging.”
Located more than two hours from California’s more densely populated state capital, Sacramento, Shasta county has long been a conservative bastion and home to a thriving State of Jefferson movement, which advocates for secession from California and the formation of a new state. But it was also the sort of place where people could work through their differences to achieve common goals, said Moty, who had served as a supervisor since 2009.
After the pandemic took hold in 2020 and the governor instituted lockdown measures, however, many residents were outraged by the restrictions and what they viewed as the failure of county officials to stand up to the state government. Shasta county was among the least restrictive in California, Moty said, but residents unhappy about state rules and mask requirements began showing up in meetings in large numbers.
Moty and other supervisors were soon subjected to levels of anger and hostility once reserved for state officials, in what Lisa Pruitt, a rural law expert at the University of California, Davis, describes as a trickling down effect.
“There’s a lot of pent-up anger by a lot of people in rural and quasi-rural places that they’re not getting a fair shake from the government,” she said. “Most of that has been directed at state government. The anger at state officials is now trickling down at local officials because people think ‘my local officials aren’t doing enough’.”
Carlos Zapata, a local militia member who helped organize the recall efforts, in 2020 told the board there could be blood in the streets if the supervisors didn’t reject state health rules such as mask requirements.
“This is a warning for what’s coming. It’s not going to be peaceful much longer. It’s going to be real … I’ve been in combat and I never wanted to go back again, but I’m telling you what – I will to stay in this country. If it has to be against our own citizens, it will happen. And there’s a million people like me, and you won’t stop us,” he said.
The rhetoric was a marked change from anything Moty had seen while in office. “This is not the community I grew up in, I was surprised people would make sort of veiled threats toward public officials and push the envelope,” he said.
Disruptions and threatening rhetoric have been seen in public meetings across the country in what experts view as an alarming development. In Oregon, a county commission moved to virtual meetings last month due to anti-mask protesters. A parent in Virginia was arrested after threatening to bring guns if officials didn’t make masks optional.
“Distrust in government has permeated the most local levels,” said Colin Clarke, a terrorism expert. “I’m familiar with the indicators of extremism and radicalization. I see them in places I never expected to see them. If you had told me as terrorism expert I’d be talking about school boards, I’d have said you’re crazy.”
Anti-government extremists have utilized fears around the pandemic as a recruiting tool, Clarke said. “The whole pandemic was really tailor made to far-right extremists and they’re getting a lot of mileage out of it.”
Politics in Shasta county has only become more hostile and contentious. In 2020, voters elected a new supervisor, Patrick Jones, who has been critical of Moty and other supervisors. In January 2020, Jones and supervisor Les Baugh opened the doors to the supervisors’ chambers and allowed members of the public into what was supposed to be a virtual meeting due to Covid cases. Moty has accused Jones, who has been a vocal supporter of the recall, of riling up the public.
Jones did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. He told KQED: “We’ve been demonized as radicals and various things like this. We are not. We are just simply business owners. We’re mothers, we’re fathers, we’re grandmothers, we’re grandfathers – and we want to return to a county where we grew up: a safe, prosperous county that we can be proud of.”
The board elected to hold a meeting last month virtually due to rising Covid cases and threats against Moty and other supervisors. The Shasta county sheriff’s office is investigating what it described as credible threats against Moty and two other board members. One person told Moty that bullets are expensive, but “ropes are reusable”.
The Redding Record Searchlight reported this week that an election official said they had been subjected to bullying in the lead-up to the election.
Meanwhile, money poured into the county in support of the recall from an outsider, a millionaire, Reverge Anselmo. His $400,000 donation to the gathering committee in the recall is believed to be one of the largest in the county.
Polling numbers on Wednesday showed 52% of voters opted to recall Moty. The success of the recall will likely set up more conflict between the local government and the state government, Pruitt said.
Moty is done with politics, he says. He plans to stay in Shasta county “for now”, but worries for the future of the area and that it could become a haven for those with extremist views. For many Shasta county citizens, he said,
“They’re gonna get a rude awakening.”
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Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery in the death of Laquan McDonald. (photo: Antonio Perez/Getty)
Officer Who Killed Laquan McDonald Leaves Prison After Barely Three Years
Guardian UK
Excerpt: "The white former Chicago police officer who killed the Black teenager Laquan McDonald has left prison after serving less than half his sentence."
Jason Van Dyke, a white police officer who murdered the Black teenager, was freed early for good behavior
The white former Chicago police officer who killed the Black teenager Laquan McDonald has left prison after serving less than half his sentence.
Jason Van Dyke was released from state prison on Thursday morning after serving a little more than three years behind bars for the 2014 murder of McDonald.
The Chicago Tribune reported that an undisclosed source had indicated that Van Dyke was “no longer in IDOC custody” by mid-morning on Thursday, referring to the Illinois department of corrections. Van Dyke will be on parole for a further three years.
The prospect of his early release, having originally been sentenced in 2018 to less than seven years, had already sparked anger among relatives, community organizers and politicians who questioned the decision to shave three years off his sentence for “good behavior”.
In a press conference last Thursday held by McDonald’s relatives at a local church, his grandmother Tracie Hunter called Van Dyke’s punishment a “slap on the wrist”, according to the Chicago Tribune.
“I just want justice, the right justice,” Hunter said. “I’m not going to rest or be satisfied until this man does his rightful time.”
Police dash-cam video taken at the time but which did not surface for more than a year, showed Van Dyke shooting McDonald 16 times as the teen was moving away from police, and Chicago’s mayor at the time, Rahm Emanuel, the former top aide to Barack Obama, was accused of cover-up.
Backlash against Van Dyke’s release has been magnified by Chicago’s shaky record on police reform after McDonald’s murder and more police-involved shootings since, despite a consent decree mandating reform. The decree was issued after a blistering justice department investigation into the Chicago police department found excessive, racist force and widespread corruption.
The current mayor, Lori Lightfoot, had said: “We are not where we want to be when it comes to police reform and accountability, but we are further along in two-plus years of doing this work than any other city that has been under consent decree.”
Ahead of Van Dyke’s imminent release, Lightfoot issued a statement.
“I know some Chicagoans remain disheartened and angry about Jason Van Dyke’s sentence for the murder of Laquan McDonald. As I said at the time, while the jury reached the correct guilty verdict, the judge’s decision to sentence Van Dyke to only 81 months was and remains a supreme disappointment,” the statement read.
It continued: “I understand why this continues to feel like a miscarriage of justice, especially when many Black and brown men get sentenced to so much more prison time for having committed far lesser crimes. It’s these distortions in the criminal justice system, historically, that have made it so hard to build trust.”
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Louisiana State Police fired a trooper who exposed the death of an unarmed motorist in 2019. (photo: USA TODAY)
Louisiana State Police Trooper Fired for Speaking Out About a Black Man's Death in Custody and Cover-Up
Brett Murphy, USA TODAY
Murphy writes: "The Louisiana State Police on Monday fired a trooper who helped expose how the department allegedly covered up the death of an unarmed Black motorist, Ronald Greene, in 2019."
The Louisiana State Police on Monday fired a trooper who helped expose how the department allegedly covered up the death of an unarmed Black motorist, Ronald Greene, in 2019.
The department fired Trooper Carl Cavalier for disloyalty, seeking publicity and other infractions related to his “openly critical” public statements about the Greene case, according to the termination letter.
“They’re trying to make an example out of me to keep people from speaking up,” Cavalier said in an interview. “It’s a horrible feeling because I worked so hard to be a part of the department.”
Cavalier was one of several police officers featured in a recent USA TODAY series on law enforcement’s blue wall of silence. The newspaper’s investigation found that departments around the country – especially in Louisiana – frequently retaliate against whistleblowers in order to hide misconduct. Cavalier is the latest officer who has faced additional repercussions after speaking to reporters, including one in Illinois who was ousted from his union.
Last summer, Cavalier leaked emails and other documents showing that the State Police brass blocked internal investigators when they wanted to arrest one of the troopers involved in Greene’s death. Then he sat down for interviews with WBRZ and other local news outlets to explain the evidence.
Cavalier, who is Black, has also alleged widespread racism within the department and said its leaders need to be held accountable for not fixing the problems. The department is currently under a federal investigation into the Greene case and possible obstruction of justice, according to media reports.
No troopers have been charged with a crime in Greene’s death. The State Police suspended one officer involved and fired another. A third trooper died in a single-vehicle car crash hours after he learned he would also be terminated for his role.
Louisiana State Police Colonel Lamar Davis, who was appointed superintendent in October 2020, said Cavalier violated an array of policies by disseminating "confidential information" and making unauthorized public comments that Davis characterized as untruthful and unsubstantiated.
“Your conduct has brought discredit upon yourself,” Davis wrote in Cavalier’s termination letter, “and has destroyed public respect for State Police officers.” Davis, who is also Black, said Cavalier was warned to stop speaking out but ignored the order.
In an interview Wednesday, Cavalier, who first started working at the State Police in 2014, said he is appealing the termination. He also filed a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination and whistleblower retaliation last November.
“To be on the outside looking in, it’s just appalling,” Cavalier told USA TODAY. “I’m hoping I can get my job back.”
Louisiana State Police spokesperson Capt. Nick Manale said in an email that Cavalier, who was not personally involved in the Greene incident, leveled several complaints against individuals in the department that were investigated and determined to be unfounded.
Manale added that the department began investigating the Greene incident the day Greene died and that the district attorney gave federal officials case files in September 2019, before Cavalier went public.
In an interview late last year, Davis told USA TODAY that the Greene scandal prompted a raft of reforms, including bystander intervention training and quarterly reviews of bodycam footage. “I’m not one that believes in covering up and that blue wall of silence,” he said.
At the time, Davis would not discuss Cavalier’s situation specifically. But he said he values transparency and that officers would be within their rights to report misconduct to the FBI or attorney general if they felt the internal grievance procedure had fallen short.
When asked if troopers had the same right to talk to the media, or if that would be considered disloyal, Davis replied, “I can’t go there.”
Last year, the Associated Press published videos showing State Police troopers beating, stunning and dragging Greene after a car chase in 2019 outside Monroe. “I’m sorry,” he pleaded, blood splashed on his skin and clothes. “I beat the ever-living f--- out of him,” one officer said in an audio recording. Greene stopped breathing soon after.
For almost two years, troopers lied to Greene’s mother by saying her son had died in a car crash. They had refused to release the videos revealing the truth.
Since the federal investigation launched, pressure has mounted not only on the department but also in the state’s highest office. The AP reported last week that Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, was notified of the circumstances of Greene’s death within hours back in 2019 but did not publicly acknowledge those details.
At a press conference yesterday, Edwards denied taking part in a cover-up or stalling an investigation into the case during his reelection bid. "Nothing like that has ever happened because of me," he said. "That is not who I am as a person."
Edwards also added his strongest public condemnation of the case to date: “The manner in which Mr. Greene was treated that night was criminal.”
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Russian and Belarusian tanks take part in a joint military drill, in an image released Feb. 2, 2022. (photo: AP)
US to Allege Russian Plot to Stage Attack as Pretext for Ukraine Invasion
Ellen Nakashima, Shane Harris, Ashley Parker and John Hudson, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "U.S. officials say they have evidence that Russia has developed a plan, approved at high levels in Moscow, to create a pretext for invading Ukraine by falsely pinning an attack on Ukrainian forces that could involve alleged casualties not only in eastern Ukraine but also in Russia."
U.S. officials say they have evidence that Russia has developed a plan, approved at high levels in Moscow, to create a pretext for invading Ukraine by falsely pinning an attack on Ukrainian forces that could involve alleged casualties not only in eastern Ukraine but also in Russia.
The details of the plan have been declassified by U.S. intelligence and are expected to be revealed Thursday by the Biden administration, said four people familiar with the matter. The administration last month warned that the Russian government had sent operatives into eastern Ukraine, possibly in preparation for sabotage operations.
The alleged operation the United States plans to expose would involve broadcasting images of civilian casualties in eastern Ukraine — and potentially over the border in Russia — to a wide audience to drum up outrage against the Ukrainian government and create a pretext for invasion, two of the people said. It was unclear if the casualties would be real or faked, one U.S. official said.
The people familiar with the plan said it was formulated by Russian security services and is in the advanced stages of preparation.
The plan is related to but separate from other plots that have been disclosed by Western intelligence, including Russia’s placement of saboteurs in eastern Ukraine and another alleged scheme, revealed last month by the British government, to destabilize the Ukrainian government and install a pro-Russian figure at its head, officials said.
“They’re all related, of course, but this is a specific operation designed to create a potential pretext,” said one U.S. official, who, like others, did not provide the underlying evidence for the alleged plot but had been briefed on the matter. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
The allegation of advanced plotting by Russia comes as Washington and its allies try to expose Moscow’s planning for a potential invasion in real time, in the hope of complicating the Kremlin’s designs on its neighbor.
Russia has massed more than 100,000 troops around the borders of Ukraine, prompting the Biden administration to warn that Russian President Vladimir Putin could send his forces into Ukrainian territory at any moment. The White House has said the United States does not have an indication that Putin has made a decision to invade but says it has evidence of advanced planning by the Russian government.
The Kremlin has denied that Russian forces are preparing to invade Ukraine, saying that Moscow has the right to move troops around Russia domestically as it wishes.
In recent weeks, Russian troops and materiel have been flowing into neighboring Belarus, which shares a 674-mile border with Ukraine, in preparation for the second stage of joint Russian-Belarusian exercises slated to begin Feb. 10. Military analysts worry that the exercises could be a ruse to position Russian forces along Ukraine’s northern border in advance of a new invasion.
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The entrance to the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, Jan. 15, 2019. (photo: Suzanne Cordeiro/Getty)
A Butterfly Conservatory Is Shutting Down Due to Right-Wing Harassment
Sharon Pruitt-Young, NPR
Pruitt-Young writes: "The butterflies will fly no more - or not in public view, anyway."
The butterflies will fly no more — or not in public view, anyway.
The National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, has announced that it's closing its doors "for the immediate future" after ongoing harassment directed at employees and the center itself.
The center, a nonprofit nature reserve nestled near the U.S.-Mexico border, unwittingly became the subject of conservative conspiracy theories and political conflict in recent years, having been locked in a years-long legal battle with the Trump administration and We Build the Wall regarding a planned border wall.
The harassment grew so great that it led the board of directors of the North American Butterfly Association, which owns and operates the butterfly center, to decide on Tuesday to close the center's doors, according to a statement released Wednesday.
"The safety of our staff and visitors is our primary concern," Jeffrey Glassberg, the NABA's president and founder, said in the news release. "We look forward to reopening, soon, when the authorities and professionals who are helping us navigate this situation give us the green light."
Though it is unclear when or if the center will reopen, employees will continue to be paid in the interim, according to Wednesday's release.
The National Butterfly Center filed a lawsuit in 2017 after the Trump administration allegedly began construction of a wall, using chainsaws to destroy trees and other plant life, on center-owned property without permission. The 100-acre property is home to lush gardens and endangered plant life, as well as numerous nature trails that are the natural habitats of the more than 200 species of butterflies that live there.
If efforts to build a border wall on the center's property were to continue, it would greatly damage the environment and potentially harm numerous endangered species, the center has said. It would also essentially leave the center's property divided, NPR previously reported.
The center's closure announcement comes on the heels of a previous three-day shutdown Jan. 28 to 30 due to safety concerns. In a public statement, the center cited "credible threats" it was made aware of in relation to We Stand America, a right-wing rally set to be happening that same weekend in McAllen, Texas.
"We still cannot believe we are at the center of this maelstrom of malevolence rising in the United States," the center said.
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