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21 July 21
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s a special congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection prepares to hold its first hearings later this month, we speak with author Michael Wolff, whose new book, “Landslide,” provides fresh details about former President Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election, how he spurred his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol and why he still holds the reins in the party. “There’s no question Donald Trump runs the Republican Party,” Wolff says. “We have two realities here: the reality of Donald Trump in charge, and the other reality which is that everybody knows that there’s something wrong with Donald Trump.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Former President Donald Trump met with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy Thursday as McCarthy has yet to appoint Republicans to the congressional committee investigating the deadly January 6th riot by Trump supporters. For months Republicans have downplayed the insurrection, which was timed to disrupt the counting of electoral votes. McCarthy’s meeting with Trump came after the select committee investigating the Capitol riot said it would hold its first hearing about the attack on July 27th. After the meeting, McCarthy returned to Washington, D.C., from the Bedminster Trump hotel to attend a dinner at the White House with President Biden and visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
CNN reports McCarthy will likely appoint supporters and defenders of Trump to the January 6 committee. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can veto any of his picks.
This comes as a series of new books offering new details about what happened January 6th, when then-President Trump spoke to thousands of his supporters at a so-called Save America rally outside the White House and urged them to march on the Capitol building.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We’re going to walk down to the Capitol! And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.
AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about what happened January 6th, what led up to it, and particularly those last weeks of the Trump administration, we’re joined by Michael Wolff, author of the new book Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump White House, which completes his best-selling trilogy on the presidency of Donald Trump, following Fire and Fury and Siege.
Michael, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t we start off right there, when President Trump — I don’t know how many — tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands — of lies this was — but said that he will join the others in walking to the Capitol? Did he ever have a plan to do that?
MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, you know, it was at that moment — to just set the background here, this was a speech that he was largely reading off the teleprompter, which is unusual for Trump. Certainly, when he’s in the moment, enthusiastic, he’s departing from his speech. So he wasn’t really thinking about this. His mind was wholly on Mike Pence and what — and he believed that Mike Pence had the power and the willingness to throw out the electoral votes and install him as the president. That was on his mind. So he was sort of reading through this speech.
But at one point he did depart from the speech and said, “We will walk to the Capitol.” And that was the moment at which all of his aides kind of looked up and said, “What did he say? We’re going to walk to the Capitol?” And all of them had the same response: “What is he talking about? Donald Trump doesn’t walk anywhere.” So, that’s what they all thought at that point.
And then, when he came down after the speech, they said, “You know we can’t do that. You know, there’s no security for that.” And Trump responded, “What are you talking about?” And they said, “You said you’re going to walk.” And he said, “Oh, oh, I didn’t mean that literally.” So, again, we’re in the world of Donald Trump, which is mostly a world of what’s coming out of his mouth and of — and I would say that for a good part of the time, he’s not even aware of what’s coming out of his mouth.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I mean, this is particularly significant right now for some who are thinking, “Why do we have to talk about Donald Trump? He’s not the president anymore, even if he thinks he is.” But the fact is, he, by far, is the leading contender, if he chooses to run for president again. By far. And, of course, just yesterday, the House minority leader went to the Bedminster golf course to meet with President Trump. And he, Kevin McCarthy, has yet to choose the five Republican members of the committee — they quashed the commission that would investigate the insurrection. Also, just interesting to note that you have the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Beatty, being arrested yesterday with nine others. They were arrested in less time than it took Capitol Police, who were, to say the least, taken off guard, to arrest that number that day in the time of extremely violent riot, insurrection.
MICHAEL WOLFF: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that there’s no question Donald Trump runs the Republican Party. He is — it’s entirely top down. Nearly everybody, or at least certainly everybody who is contemplating a future in the Republican Party, has to pay — has to constantly kiss the Trump ring, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, the significance of this right now with him being in Mar-a-Lago, where you did a last interview with him — in Bedminster, running the show from behind the scenes? The significance of what that means for politics in this country? For example, even this investigation. And when you spoke to him in Mar-a-Lago, what did he say about the insurrection? What did he say about the number of the police, that he supposedly so reveres, being devastated, traumatized, beaten? One died.
MICHAEL WOLFF: Yeah, he didn’t say anything about the January 6. That’s clearly a subject that he is steering clear of.
But, you know, I want to make another point, and I think it’s an interesting point, that even though Donald Trump has a kind of lockstep control over the Republican Party, one of the things that’s also always going on is every — while every Republican acknowledges that, every Republican is also trying to walk that back or mitigate that or slow walk whatever the president wants. So we have two realities here: the reality of Donald Trump in charge, and the other reality which is that everybody knows that there’s something wrong with Donald Trump. Donald Trump is crazy. Donald Trump, you know, I mean, essentially, can’t put two sequential thoughts together.
You know, so Kevin McCarthy is going down there, and he’s perfectly well aware this is an aberrant situation. And, in fact, Trump himself is always kind of saying bad things about McCarthy out of the side of his mouth. So, you know, it’s this incredibly unusual situation, of which — I mean, it’s essentially an emperor’s new clothes situation. Everybody recognizes the completely unusual nature of what’s going on here, but nobody can do anything about it.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Wolff, you detail election night and the significance of the relationship between Fox and President Trump. Can you talk about what happened that night when Fox, before the other networks, called Arizona for Biden?
MICHAEL WOLFF: Sure. And that’s another example of this. I mean, OK, so we have Fox, the Fox News network, in abject fealty to Donald Trump. You know, I mean, that’s their entire business and programming strategy: bow down to Donald Trump. At the same time, the Murdoch family, who owns Fox — could change Fox at a second’s notice if they wanted to — detests Rupert Murdoch, cannot stand him. And that night, in their own sort of guerrilla action against Murdoch, when the call — when the call came from the election desk, which was that, you know, “We can call Arizona now. We’re confident about that. However, you know, we can also wait on this” — so, this decision went to Rupert Murdoch. And Rupert Murdoch said — I noticed on your instructions that you advise against using obscenities here, so I’ll let you phrase this if you want to. But anyway, Murdoch delivered an obscenity directed at Donald Trump and said, “Yes, make the call now.” And it was a devastating call for Trump at that moment on election night.
AMY GOODMAN: He said, “Make the F—ing call.”
MICHAEL WOLFF: That’s what he said. No, no, he didn’t say that. He said, “F— him.” In other words, directed to Trump himself.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about Fox letting the White House know that they’re going to make this call?
MICHAEL WOLFF: Yeah, and, I mean, that got some attention. And so, minutes before they made the call, Bill Hemmer, one of the Fox on-air people, called Jason Miller, who was one of the key campaign aides, and said, “Hey, this is what’s going down. We’re going to make this call. We can’t do anything about it.” And so, when this came out that I had reported this, then Fox immediately said, “That’s totally untrue, completely untrue.” You know, a lot of other publications immediately went to say, “OK, Michael Wolff is wrong.” And then Jason Miller said, “Oh, yeah, that was true. Everybody, many people around, many people heard that.”
AMY GOODMAN: Jason Miller, a surrogate for Donald Trump, who also —
MICHAEL WOLFF: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: — who appeared on Fox.
MICHAEL WOLFF: Yes, and who got the call. I mean, so the call went from Bill Hemmer to Jason Miller, who said then, “Yes, I got the call.”
AMY GOODMAN: And so, you’re a close observer of the right networks, of the right-wing networks, like Fox, OANN, Newsmax, maybe not as close as Trump himself, who you say spent hours every day — I mean, just hours — watching these networks.
MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, I am — just, I am pretty close. In addition to writing books about Trump, I’m Rupert Murdoch’s biographer. So, yes, I’m pretty familiar.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, what about the role of Fox now, and particularly the role of Sean Hannity?
MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, you know, Hannity is in — you know, let’s — I’m trying to find the word. What would be the word? Cahoots, I suppose, with Donald Trump. As a matter of fact, there’s one point in Landslide where I — during the campaign, and which I outline, in which Sean Hannity calls the president and says, “You know, your campaign is terrible. You know, you really need some help here.” And he says, “And I’ve written an ad for you.” And then the president calls up the campaign and says, “Sean says the campaign is terrible.” You know, this goes on. And then the campaign, in trying to keep Hannity from calling the president and then having the president call the campaign, the campaign then produces the ad. They literally make Hannity’s ad. And then they only run the ad on Hannity’s show. So, in some weird thing going on on here, Hannity gets the campaign to essentially give the Fox network a couple of million dollars to run this ad, only on his show.
AMY GOODMAN: Which, of course, is always helpful, because there are all these boycotts against advertisers on his show.
MICHAEL WOLFF: So, again, you know, yes. I mean, this is a consuming relationship. You know, Hannity works for Donald Trump, or Donald Trump works for Sean Hannity. You can barely separate this. But I would say that Hannity is certainly, and has been for four years, one of Trump’s closest outside advisers.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, I want to ask you about the man who did not desert President Trump, and he is Rudy Giuliani. He now has had his law license suspended by the state of New York, by Washington, D.C. Talk about his pivotal role as you talk —
MICHAEL WOLFF: And also, for his trouble, Trump no longer speaks to him. As a matter of fact, Rudy Giuliani cannot get a call through to the former president at this point. So, you know, it’s one of the — you know, a constant Trump theme. You know, whoever — the closer you get to Donald Trump, the more you’ll get burned by Donald Trump. But — which is not at all to excuse Rudy Giuliani, who has been a persistent part of the Trump toxicity and the Trump insanity, really. And, I mean, one of the things which I constantly point out in the book, because it certainly is — could not be more germane, is that Rudy is drunk all the time.
So, you know, stepping back from this, we see the Trump administration as, in part, terrifying and as, in part, engaged in all of this destructive behavior, but on another level, it’s also absurd. It’s the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. I mean, none of these people can do anything. I mean, they’re either drunk or they’re incompetent. And as we told the story, as this story unfolded about Donald Trump’s effort to undermine the election, what was seldom said, certainly by the established media, is that he had no ability to do this. He had no — he couldn’t work the levers of government. Everybody had deserted him. This was just weeks and weeks and weeks of utter ridiculousness. It was — as I said a couple of times, it isn’t really the big lie; it’s the big lunacy. And Donald Trump is the lunatic-in-chief.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us, Michael Wolff, author of the new book, Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump White House, which completes his best-selling trilogy on the Trump presidency.
Next up, we look at the catastrophic impact of the climate crisis around the world with leading climate scientist Michael Mann. Stay with us.
Prosecutors say Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a friend of former President Donald J. Trump's, used his position to promote the United Arab Emirates' agenda while soliciting direction from Emirati officials. (photo: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg)
Barrack, 74, was arrested by federal agents on Tuesday morning in Los Angeles. Two other men were also charged in the alleged scheme, in an indictment unsealed in federal court in Brooklyn, New York.
The three engaged in unlawful efforts to advance the interests of the United Arab Emirates in the U.S. at the direction of senior UAE officials, seeking to influence the foreign policy positions of the 2016 Trump campaign and then those of the new administration, according to prosecutors. Barrack was also charged with obstruction of justice and making multiple false statements in a 2019 interview with U.S. law enforcement agents.
Matthew Herrington, Barrack’s lawyer, said his client is innocent.
“Tom Barrack made himself voluntarily available to investigators from the outset,” Herrington said in a statement. “He is not guilty and will be pleading not guilty today.”
Prosecutors asked a U.S. magistrate judge in Los Angeles to keep Barrack, who is of Lebanese descent, in federal custody until he can be transported to Brooklyn to face the charges. They called him “an extremely wealthy and powerful individual with substantial ties to Lebanon, the UAE, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” who poses a risk of fleeing based on the seriousness of the charges and what they called “the overwhelming evidence of his guilt.” They said he has access to a private aircraft and “deep and longstanding ties to countries that do not have extradition treaties with the United States.”
At an initial court appearance in Los Angeles, Barrack appeared on a fuzzy video link in a blue suit jacket, slightly slumped over and not looking into the camera for much of the session. The judge ordered him detained locally until a bail hearing on Monday.
There was no immediate reply to a request for comment on the indictment from the UAE Embassy in Washington on Tuesday, an Emirati holiday. A representative of DigitalBridge Group Inc., formerly Colony Capital, declined to comment.
A ‘Betrayal’ of Trump
Prosecutors said Barrack’s alleged crimes constituted a betrayal of Trump.
“The defendants repeatedly capitalized on Barrack’s friendships and access” to Trump and senior campaign and government officials and news media “to advance the policy goals of a foreign government without disclosing their true allegiances,” according to a Justice Department statement. “The conduct alleged in the indictment is nothing short of a betrayal of those officials in the United States, including the former President.”
The U.S. said it is “putting everyone -- regardless of their wealth or perceived political power -- on notice that the Department of Justice will enforce the prohibition of this sort of undisclosed foreign influence.”
Barrack, who served as chairman of Trump’s presidential inauguration committee, and the other defendants took numerous steps to help the UAE during the transition to the incoming administration, including providing insights on potential appointments for secretary of state, secretary of defense and director of the Central Intelligence Agency, according to the indictment. Barrack got language praising the United Arab Emirates into an energy speech Trump gave as a candidate in May 2016, made numerous media appearances promoting the Emirates and solicited input from UAE officials for an op-ed about U.S.-Middle East foreign policy, prosecutors said.
Among the government’s specific allegations of influence was help that prosecutors say the UAE sought from the defendants to get the Muslim Brotherhood listed as a foreign terrorist organization. In addition, Barrack and the other defendants “agreed to advocate for the appointment of individuals favored by the United Arab Emirates in the new U.S. government administration,” including a member of Congress the Emirates wanted as ambassador, according to the indictment.
Barrack is hardly the first of Trump’s allies to be charged with violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires people in the U.S. who are acting on behalf of a foreign principal to register as such, with penalties ranging from a $5,000 fine to as many as 5 years in prison, according to the Justice Department. Among those associates are former top fundraiser Elliott Broidy, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn, all pardoned by Trump as president. Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani is being investigated for breaches of FARA and has denied wrongdoing.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed the seven-count indictment against Barrack, Matthew Grimes, 27, and Rashid Sultan Rashid Al Malik Alshahhi, also known as Rashid Al Malik, 43. The government described Grimes as a resident of California who worked for Barrack at the time of the alleged crimes and Al Malik as a citizen of the UAE who was also a California resident. All three were charged with acting and conspiring to act as unregistered agents of the UAE between April 2016 and April 2018.
Michael Freedman, a lawyer for Grimes, didn’t immediately return an email seeking comment on the charges. At the court appearance Tuesday, Freedman asked the judge to release his client on a $2 million bond secured by property. Like Barrack, Grimes will appear Monday for a bail hearing.
A lawyer for Al Malik couldn’t be identified right away.
Barrack and Trump
Barrack met Trump in the 1980s while working for the billionaire Bass family and famously sold him New York’s Plaza Hotel. At the outset of the campaign, he thought Trump, a gifted showman, was simply trying to conjure up publicity while renegotiating his contract as the reality show host of NBC’s “The Apprentice.” Within months Barrack was in deep, advising his friend on everything from foreign policy to cabinet appointments.
With the Trump era behind him, Barrack was going back to his roots. He stepped down as chairman of Colony Capital in March, formed a new venture, Falcon Peak Partners, and had just inked the first in a series of deals he’s pursuing in the hospitality, leisure and entertainment industries. He planned to bring in sovereign wealth funds and family offices in the Middle East as co-investors.
In an interview taped last week with Bloomberg TV, Barrack gave no indication that he was aware of impending charges. On the contrary, he talked confidently about the strength of his relationships in the UAE and how he expected the Emiratis to back deals he was pursuing.
“I’ve found that that’s a very fruitful place to invest in as they’re recycling, as they’re going from fossil fuels,” he said in the interview. “You look at places like Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Saudi Arabia. We have all the contention of things that go on that we don’t understand, but they’re all recycling as fast as they can to get to 2030, 2040.”
Five years earlier, in a May 2016 interview with Bloomberg TV, Barrack looked into the region’s future.
“The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and Israel, in my opinion, will align as allies very quickly here, and the world could change for the better,” he said, presaging the alliance that Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner would orchestrate between the countries last year.
A woman uses her iPhone outside the offices of NSO Group outside Tel Aviv. (photo: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images)
Officials and analysts say the Israeli surveillance tech firm makes a world-class product, but some suspect a relationship with Israel’s government
he Israeli company NSO Group has earned a reputation among national security experts around the world as a best-in-class manufacturer of surveillance technology capable of secretly gathering information from a target’s phone.
But U.S. and European security officials regard the company with a degree of suspicion despite the ability of its technology to help combat terrorists and violent criminals. In interviews, several current and former officials said they presumed that the company, which was founded by former Israeli intelligence officers, provides at least some information to the government in Jerusalem about who is using its spying products and what information they’re collecting.
“It’s crazy to think that NSO wouldn’t share sensitive national security information with the government of Israel,” said one former senior U.S. national security official who has worked closely with the Israeli security services and, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe intelligence operations. “That doesn’t mean they’re a front for the Israeli security agencies, but governments around the world assume that NSO is working with Israel.”
Though NSO is a private company, U.S. officials have long suspected that some information it collects is also viewed by the Israeli government, said a current U.S. official familiar with the matter.
U.S. intelligence agencies don’t use NSO’s products, current and former U.S. officials said.
The information NSO products can mine is the same, though, that the world’s intelligence agencies gather from their targets.
The company’s Pegasus surveillance tool can penetrate cellphones and steal emails, call records, social media posts, user passwords, contact information, pictures, videos, sound recordings and browsing histories. All of this can happen without a user even touching her phone or knowing that she has received a mysterious message from an unfamiliar person.
The Israeli Defense Ministry reviews and must approve the license of NSO’s products to foreign governments. The founders of NSO are former members of Israel’s elite Unit 8200, which conducts electronic surveillance and is analogous to the U.S. National Security Agency.
A spokesperson for Israel’s Ministry of Defense said that “Israel does not have access to the information gathered by NSO’s clients.” The company also denies that there is any Israeli government access.
The laws governing surveillance of journalists and civil rights activists are far stricter in the United States and many European countries than in the Middle Eastern nations where NSO has licensed its products and generated considerable controversy. The company has publicly acknowledged that in some instances, its clients have used NSO tools to monitor individuals who fall outside the scope of what the company has deemed appropriate use — legal surveillance of criminals, including terrorists.
Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based journalism nonprofit, and Amnesty International, a human rights group, had access to a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers concentrated in countries known to surveil their citizens and also known to have been clients of NSO Group. The list does not identify who put the numbers on it, or why, and it is unknown how many of the phones were targeted or surveilled.
The two nonprofits shared the information with The Washington Post and 15 other news organizations worldwide that have worked collaboratively to conduct further analysis and reporting over several months. Forbidden Stories oversaw the investigation, called the Pegasus Project, and Amnesty International provided forensic analysis but had no editorial input. Amnesty has openly criticized NSO’s spyware business and supported an unsuccessful lawsuit against the company in an Israeli court seeking to have its export license revoked.
The numbers on the list are unattributed, but reporters were able to identify more than 1,000 people spanning more than 50 countries through research and interviews on four continents: several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials — including cabinet ministers, diplomats, and military and security officers, as well as several heads of state and prime ministers. The purpose of the list could not be conclusively determined. An attorney representing NSO told The Post in a letter that NSO had “good reason” to believe the list consisted of publicly accessible “look-up” services unrelated to NSO clients.
A senior European intelligence official said that since 2019, his country had confirmed that about 1,400 people in 20 countries had been spied on using NSO software.
“In some countries it was also used to target journalists, human rights activists, politicians and businesspeople,” the official said.
The official acknowledged that NSO tools can “be crucial in the fight against organized crime and terrorism,” but he said that incidents of foreign governments using the software, particularly NSO’s Pegasus tool, to monitor journalists and human rights activists had sullied the company’s reputation in his country.
“It is difficult for us to justify the need for such tools if the news about the abuse of using software like Pegasus, for targeting civil society and journalists, is increasing,” the official said. “Israelis also know it’s not the best [public relations] for their own democracy when such a software is used by repressive circles in some countries.”
The license of NSO’s products is regulated by government authorities in three countries from which it exports: Bulgaria, Cyprus and Israel, where NSO has its headquarters. In Israel, the Defense Ministry, which runs the Defense Export Controls Agency, can restrict the licensing of the company’s surveillance tools and conducts its own review of the human rights records of countries that NSO wants to turn into customers, according to Israeli government records as well as interviews with people knowledgeable of the process. In that respect, NSO’s surveillance technology is regulated like a weapon under Israeli law.
NSO executives have said they only license their products to countries that use them for lawful surveillance purposes, such as monitoring suspected terrorists, drug dealers and other criminals.
The company says it reviews potential customers according to its human rights policy, which it wrote to align with United Nations guidance to businesses on how to protect human rights.
“We license our product only to vetted and legitimate government agencies for the sole and exclusive use in preventing and investigating serious crime, including terrorism,” the company’s policy states.
In response to questions from The Post about officials’ belief that NSO shares information with Israel, the company said in a written statement: “We vehemently deny the suggestions that the Israeli Government monitors the use of our customers’ systems, which is the type of conspiracy theory that our critics peddle. Such claims are part of the salacious narrative about NSO Group that has been strategically concocted by several closely aligned special interest groups, among them your ‘anonymous officials’ who say they ‘assume’ something is taking place.”
In an interview following publication of some of the Pegasus Project’s findings, NSO’s co-founder and CEO, Shalev Hulio, disputed that the more than 50,000 phone records were connected to the company or its products.
Hulio said he was “very concerned” about what he read in the news articles produced by the Pegasus Project. “Every allegation about misuse of the system is concerning me. It violates the trust that we’re giving the customer. … We are investigating everything.” Hulio added that NSO has terminated contracts with two of its customers in the last 12 months because of concerns about human rights abuses.
The spokesperson for Israel’s Ministry of Defense said the country regulates the exports of products like NSO’s in accordance with Israeli law. “Policy decisions take into account national security and strategic considerations, which include adherence to international arrangements. As a matter of policy, the State of Israel approves the export of cyber products exclusively to governmental entities, for lawful use, and only for the purpose of preventing and investigating crime and counter terrorism.”
The spokesperson added, “In cases where exported items are used in violation of export licenses or end use certificates, appropriate measures are taken. Israel does not have access to the information gathered by NSO’s clients."
In NSO’s first-ever Transparency and Responsibility Report, published in late June, the company said it had refused to do business with certain countries that “have inadequate country-level protections in place to confidently prevent product misuse, or where the rule of law creates an unduly high risk of misuse.”
Without identifying the countries it has turned down, NSO said that from May 2020 through April 2021, it rejected about 15 percent of potential new opportunities to license its Pegasus surveillance tool over “human rights concerns that could not be resolved.” To date, NSO has turned down more than $300 million in sales opportunities as a result of its internal review processes, the company said, which are separate from the Israeli government’s review.
But once a country has gotten a license for or obtained NSO’s products, the onus is largely on that government to ensure the software is used in accordance with the country’s own laws governing surveillance, which vary widely.
“The issue is there’s always this fine line between what are responsible uses of the tools they produce and who are responsible users of those tools,” said Michael Daniel, who served as President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity coordinator on the National Security Council and is now the president and CEO of Cyber Threat Alliance, a nonprofit group founded by security companies to improve information-sharing about threats to computer networks.
Current and former U.S. officials said that since Israel reviews and grants export permission for NSO’s products, the Israeli government knows who NSO’s clients are. The relationship between NSO, as well as other Israeli technology firms, and the country’s military and security services is much tighter and arguably more symbiotic than parallel private sector-government connections in the United States, current and former officials said.
A former member of Israel’s security services said young Israelis who perform their compulsory military service in the intelligence branches see their training the way Americans view college. The government is developing their technological skills with the expectation that they will go to work in the private sector or start companies — but there is also an understanding they will maintain close relationships with the military and the security services, the former official said.
NSO’s relationship to the government of Israel doesn’t make it inherently less trustworthy, analysts said.
“I think it really depends on the person’s perspective,” said Daniel. “I think some do view that relationship with suspicion. Others see it as a mark of competence and that they know what they’re talking about.”
Daniel noted that Israeli technology companies are widely regarded among experts as making some of the best computer security products in the world.
Ultimately, he said, it’s up to governments to decide whether companies should provide the kinds of tools historically available only to countries’ spies.
“There needs to be further international work on what we consider legitimate business models in this area. Where do we want to put the line?”
Visitors walk past the US Supreme Court on June 26, 2021. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg/Getty
The Supreme Court isn’t even pretending that it’s bound by legal texts in its voting rights cases.
he Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan lamented in a dissenting opinion earlier this month, “has treated no statute worse” than the Voting Rights Act.
She’s right.
The Voting Rights Act is arguably the most successful civil rights law in American history. Originally signed in 1965, it was the United States’ first serious attempt since Reconstruction to build a multi-racial democracy — and it worked. Just two years after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, Black voter registration rates in the Jim Crow stronghold of Mississippi skyrocketed from 6.7 percent to nearly 60 percent.
And yet, in a trio of cases — Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Abbott v. Perez (2018), and Brnovich v. DNC (2021) — the Court drained nearly all of the life out of this landmark statute. After Brnovich, the decision that inspired Kagan’s statement that the Court has treated the Voting Rights Act worse than any other federal law, it’s unclear whether the Supreme Court would rule in favor of voting rights plaintiffs even if a state legislature tried to outright rig an election.
These cases are the culmination of more than half a century of efforts by conservatives who, after failing to convince elected lawmakers to weaken voting rights, turned to an unelected judiciary to enact a policy that would never have made it through Congress. All of this is bad news for minority voters in America, who are most likely to be disadvantaged by many of the new restrictions currently being pushed in statehouses across America, and for the country’s relatively young commitment to multi-racial democracy. And there are at least three reasons to fear that decisions like Shelby County and Brnovich foreshadow even more aggressive attacks on the right to vote.
The first is that Republican partisans can use race as a proxy to identify communities with large numbers of Democratic voters. In 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, 92 percent of non-Hispanic Black voters supported Democrat Joe Biden over Republican Donald Trump — and that’s after Trump slightly improved his performance among African Americans compared to 2016.
That means that state lawmakers who wish to prevent Democrats from voting can do so through policies that make it harder for Black voters (and, to a lesser extent, most other nonwhite voters) to cast a ballot. And Republican lawmakers haven’t been shy about doing so. As a federal appeals court wrote in 2016 about a North Carolina law that included many provisions making it harder to vote, “the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
An even more stark example: Georgia recently enacted a law that effectively enables the state Republican Party to disqualify voters and shut down polling precincts. If the state GOP wields this law to close down most of the polling places in the highly Democratic, majority-Black city of Atlanta, it’s unclear that a Voting Rights Act that’s been gravely wounded by three Supreme Court decisions remains vibrant enough to block them.
The second reason to be concerned about decisions like Brnovich is that the Supreme Court’s attacks on the Voting Rights Act are not isolated; they are part of a greater web of decisions making it much harder for voting rights plaintiffs to prevail in court.
These cases include decisions like Purcell v. Gonzales (2006), which announced that judges should be very reluctant to block unlawful state voting rules close to an election, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (2008), which permitted states to enact voting restrictions that target largely imaginary problems, and Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), which forbade federal courts from hearing partisan gerrymandering lawsuits because the Court’s GOP-appointed majority deemed such cases too “difficult to adjudicate.”
Finally, decisions like Shelby County and Brnovich are troubling because the Court’s reasoning in those opinions appears completely divorced from the actual text of the Constitution and from the text of federal laws such as the Voting Rights Act.
Shelby County eliminated the Voting Rights Act’s requirement that states with a history of racist election practices “preclear” any new voting rules with officials in Washington, DC. It was rooted in what Chief Justice John Roberts described as “the principle that all States enjoy equal sovereignty,” a principle that is never mentioned once in the text of the Constitution.
In Brnovich, the Court upheld two Arizona laws that disenfranchise voters who vote in the wrong precinct and limit who can deliver an absentee ballot to a polling place. Alito purports to take “a fresh look at the statutory text” in this case. But he imposes new limits on the Voting Rights Act — such as a strong presumption that voting restrictions which were in place in 1982 are lawful, or a similar presumption favoring state laws purporting to prevent voter fraud — which have no basis whatsoever in the law’s text.
As Kagan writes in dissent, Brnovich “mostly inhabits a law-free zone.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean that this Supreme Court will allow any restriction on voting to stand — under the most optimistic reading of cases like Brnovich, the Court might still intervene if Georgia tries to close down most of the polling places in Atlanta — but it does mean that voting rights lawyers and their clients can no longer expect to win their cases simply because Congress passed a law protecting their right to vote.
The rules in American elections are now what Chief Justice John Roberts and his five even more conservative colleagues say they are — not what the Constitution or any act of Congress has to say about voting rights.
How Republicans learned to stop worrying and oppose the Voting Rights Act
In retrospect, it was probably inevitable that the conservative backlash against voting rights would flourish in the one unelected branch of the federal government.
When Congress first enacted the Voting Rights Act in 1965, its “preclearance” provision — the provision that was deactivated in Shelby County — was set to expire in five years. Congress extended preclearance four times, in 1970, in 1975, in 1982, and in 2006, and each time the bill reauthorizing the fully operational Voting Rights Act was signed by a Republican president.
At least some of these GOP presidents made aborted efforts to weaken the law — President Richard Nixon, for example, proposed allowing preclearance to expire in 1970, but he backed down in the face of intense opposition from civil rights organizations.
Similarly, a significant faction within the Reagan administration — a faction that included future Chief Justice Roberts — pressed President Ronald Reagan to veto a 1982 bill expanding the Voting Rights Act. In 1980, Reagan had denounced the Voting Rights Act as “humiliating to the South,” so this conservative faction appeared to have a sympathizer in the Oval Office.
But Republicans in Congress and in the White House ultimately concluded that standing athwart the Voting Rights Act was too politically toxic. As then-Rep. Trent Lott (R-MS) warned Reagan in 1981, after an expansive voting rights renewal had already passed the House, “anyone who seeks to change” that bill “will risk being branded as racist.”
By the time the Voting Rights Act was up for reauthorization again in 2006, its conservative opponents had largely given up on convincing elected officials to let much of the law die. The bill passed both houses by overwhelming margins and was signed by President George W. Bush.
“Republicans don’t want to be branded as hostile to minorities, especially just months from an election,” anti-civil rights activist Edward Blum complained in a bitter 2006 article published by the National Review. Blum would go on to be the driving force behind Shelby County and several other lawsuits seeking to diminish the rights of people of color.
Yet, as it turned out, Blum understood something that the conservative opponents of voting rights who lobbied elected officials in vain did not.
The premise of an independent judiciary is that judges must be insulated from political pressure so that they will apply the law without favor. This is why federal judges serve for life, and why they are guaranteed to keep their salary so long as they remain in office. But these very same protections also allow judges who support an unpopular policy agenda to implement it without fear of losing their job.
By the time Shelby County reached the Supreme Court, the Court was dominated by conservatives who, in Justice Antonin Scalia’s words, saw the Voting Rights Act as a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”
“Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements,” Scalia complained during the Shelby County oral arguments, “it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.” He then channeled the resentments of men like Blum.
“I don’t think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act,” Scalia continued. “And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless — unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution.”
And so the Court said just that.
The Supreme Court’s treatment of the Voting Rights Act has no apparent basis in the Constitution, or the act itself
One of the many frustrating things about the Shelby County opinion is that it doesn’t even attempt to root its holding in the text of the Constitution.
The question of what constraints the Constitution’s text places on judges, especially when that text is ambiguous, is one of the most hotly contested questions in American law. But even when the Court hands down constitutional decisions that are broadly criticized, it typically makes at least some effort to ground its holding in a specific provision of the Constitution.
The Court’s anti-worker decision in Lochner v. New York (1905) and its pro-abortion decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), for example, were both rooted in the 14th Amendment’s promise that no one shall be denied “liberty” without “due process of law.”
Indeed, even the Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), one of the most widely mocked majority opinions of the last century, at least tried to ground its holding in specific constitutional provisions. Griswold established married couples’ right to use contraceptives, and announced a “right to privacy” that formed the basis for subsequent liberal victories on abortion and sexuality. But the Court swiftly abandoned Griswold’s legal reasoning, which was rooted in the idea that the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments “have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.”
And yet, compared to Roberts’s majority opinion in Shelby County, Griswold seems like a paean to textualism and judicial restraint. Shelby County never identifies which provision of the Constitution embodies the “‘fundamental principle of equal sovereignty’ among the States” that the Court’s decision rests upon.
Although Shelby County does make a vague statement that the 15th Amendment “is not designed to punish for the past; its purpose is to ensure a better future,” this principle appears nowhere in the text of that amendment. And, in any event, the concept of “equal sovereignty” does not flow from Roberts’s future-driven interpretation of that amendment. It can’t even be found in the 15th Amendment’s penumbras and emanations.
We don’t have to imagine what Shelby County might have said if the Court had attempted to ground its decision in constitutional text — and in nearly 200 years of precedent governing how courts should read that text. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that opinion for the Court in South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966), the Court’s original decision upholding the Voting Rights Act, which relies heavily on both the text of the 15th Amendment and a centuries-old line of cases holding that Congress’s power to legislate should be construed broadly.
The 15th Amendment has two provisions. The first prohibits the government from denying or abridging the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” while the second clause declares that “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Thus, as Warren explained, Congress has broad authority to enact laws preventing race discrimination in voting.
Warren quoted a line of cases, stretching back to the early days of the republic, which established that Congress’s power to regulate is quite broad indeed. When the Constitution gives Congress the power to legislate on a particular subject matter, the Court established in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), it may use “all means which are appropriate” and that are “plainly adapted” to a legitimate end, so long as Congress does not violate some other provision of the Constitution in the process.
Taken together, decisions like McCulloch and the 15th Amendment’s text yield a clear result: Congress, not the Court, gets to decide how it wants to fight race discrimination in voting. Congress, not a handful of Republican-appointed judges, gets to decide whether preclearance should exist, and which states should be subject to it.
Indeed, Congress would have the power to impose a preclearance regime on most state election rules even if the 15th Amendment didn’t exist. Although the Constitution’s “Elections Clause” permits states to determine the “times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives,” it also permits Congress to “make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators.” Thus, the federal government doesn’t just have nearly complete authority to regulate congressional elections, it explicitly has the power to displace state laws.
And yet, as Franita Tolson, a law professor at the University of Southern California and a leading expert on the federal government’s power to regulate elections, explained in recent testimony before Congress, Shelby County “ignored that the Elections Clause stands as an additional source of authority” which “can justify federal anti-discrimination and voting rights legislation.”
The impact of Shelby County was fairly swift. In 2013, for example, Texas enacted racially gerrymandered legislative maps, even though a federal court had rejected many key elements of these maps under the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provisions. Yet, with preclearance dead, the Supreme Court upheld nearly all of Texas’s gerrymandered maps in Abbott v. Perez (2018).
Similarly, if preclearance were still in effect, it is unlikely that many of the controversial provisions of Georgia’s recently enacted voter suppression law would survive. And certainly no federal official acting in good faith would permit Georgia to simply start closing down polling places in Black neighborhoods.
Alito’s opinion in Brnovich pays no more heed to the text of the Voting Rights Act than Roberts’s opinion in Shelby County paid to the Constitution.
That case involved two interlocking provisions of the Voting Rights Act. One prohibits any law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” The other provides that the Voting Rights Act is violated if “based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by” voters of color, or if such voters “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”
That’s a lot of thick legal language, but one searches it in vain for anything suggesting, as Alito wrote in Brnovich, that election practices that were common in 1982 are presumptively legal. Or, as he also suggested in Brnovich, that state election rules are presumptively lawful so long as they supposedly combat voter fraud.
As Rick Hasen, a law professor and election law expert at the University of California Irvine, writes in Slate, Brnovich ignores “the text of the statute, its comparative focus on lessened opportunity for minority voters, and the history that showed Congress intended to alter the status quo and give new protections to minority voters.” Alito’s opinion in Brnovich bears the same resemblance to the text of the Voting Rights Act that Taco Bell does to Mexico.
Just as significantly, Brnovich raises serious doubts about whether this Supreme Court would strike down any state election law that discriminates on the basis of race.
The case for (very limited) optimism
One thing that surprised me after Brnovich was handed down is that my initial assessment of the opinion was slightly more optimistic than the view among many voting rights scholars, including Tolson and Hasen.
I wrote that the Supreme Court left the Voting Rights Act alive in Brnovich — if only “barely.” Hasen, by contrast, accused Alito of essentially offering “a new and impossible test for plaintiffs to meet” if they allege that they were denied the right to vote. Tolson told the legal podcast Strict Scrutiny that it’s “very difficult to determine what voting restrictions would violate” the standard laid out in Brnovich.
So let me lay out the case for why Brnovich — and the array of Roberts Court decisions limiting voting rights that proceed it — may not produce an apocalyptic crisis for American democracy. This argument has three prongs.
The first is that, while Alito’s opinion in Brnovich imposes a long list of extratextual limits on the Voting Rights Act, it doesn’t go quite as far as the Republican Party asked the Court to go. The Arizona Republican Party’s brief in Brnovich argued that “race-neutral regulations of the where, when, and how of voting do not” violate the Act — a proposal that, as Kagan pointed out at oral argument, would allow a state to require all voters to cast their ballot at a country club.
Meanwhile, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) suggested that voting restrictions that have a disproportionate impact on minority voters should be upheld, so long as the state didn’t cause voters of color to behave differently than white voters. Thus, under Brnovich’s standard, a state could potentially limit the franchise to country music fans — because the state didn’t cause white people to be more likely to listen to country music than voters of color.
Republicans, in other words, gave the Supreme Court two different legal standards that it could have applied in Brnovich if the Court wanted to effectively neutralize the Voting Rights Act altogether. The fact that the Court rejected these proposed standards — in an opinion that was otherwise completely shameless about its disregard for what the law actually says — suggests that some key members of the Court may have balked at the GOP’s request to shut down the Voting Rights Act altogether.
The second reason for optimism is that, while Republican state lawmakers have enacted a bevy of voting restrictions in the wake of decisions like Shelby County, most of those restrictions have not had as drastic of an impact on voting as many advocates feared.
Voter ID laws, for example, which require voters to show photo ID before they can cast a ballot, are a common voter restriction favored by many Republicans. Yet, while initial research on voter ID suggested that these laws may disproportionately prevent left-leaning demographics from casting a ballot, more recent research suggests that they have no impact whatsoever. They appear to neither diminish voter turnout (as Democrats feared), nor have any real impact on voter fraud (which Republicans often highlight to justify such laws, even though voter fraud is exceedingly rare).
Similarly, a recent paper by political scientists Mayya Komisarchik and Ariel White finds that Shelby County “did not reduce aggregate Black or Hispanic voter registration or turnout,” and that turnout among these voters may have even slightly increased since the Court’s decision in 2013 — an unexpected finding that the authors think may be attributable, at least in part, to voter turnout efforts “explicitly targeted to counter potential voter suppression in the wake of the decision.”
I want to be cautious about being too optimistic here. As the Court’s decision in Perez suggests, even if eliminating preclearance did not diminish “voter registration or turnout,” it has made it easier for states to enact racial gerrymanders. And even if Democrats and voting rights advocates have thus far succeeded in countering Shelby County through countermobilization efforts, it’s unclear if those efforts will remain successful forever.
Shelby County is also less than a decade old, so it remains to be seen what impact more innovative voter suppression laws — such as the one recently enacted in Georgia — will have on turnout. But that brings us to the third reason to be cautiously optimistic.
As Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard election law professor, wrote shortly after Brnovich came down, that decision does not preclude challenges to “novel or unusual voting restrictions” because such restrictions “weren’t prevalent in 1982.” The more creative Republican lawmakers get in their efforts to restrict the vote, the more likely it is that the courts will balk.
Two unanswered questions
The biggest threat facing American democracy is that state lawmakers may go beyond restrictions, such as voter ID, which make it harder for some voters to cast a ballot — and actually impose election rules that make it impossible for Democrats to win.
Think of former President Donald Trump’s failed attempts to pressure judges, state officials, and Congress into tossing out President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
Last year, the Supreme Court literally did the least that it could possibly do to preserve democracy in the United States, by turning aside frivolous lawsuits brought by Republicans seeking to overturn Biden’s victory. But future efforts to rig elections are likely to be more subtle — and the lawyers who defend those efforts are likely to be more competent than the band of misfits Trump assembled to challenge the 2020 election.
We don’t yet know how the Court will approach those efforts.
Consider, for example, Georgia’s new law. The most troubling provision of that law permits Republican officials to seize control of local election boards that have the power to close down polling locations and disqualify voters. This is a novel form of voter suppression — it’s unlikely that many states permitted partisan officials to simply toss out Democratic ballots in 1982 — so the Court’s decision in Brnovich should not prevent courts from intervening if Georgia Republicans go that far.
But here’s the rub: imagine that Georgia Republicans start shutting down polling precincts in the largely Democratic, majority-Black city of Atlanta shortly before the 2022 election — or imagine that, say, Arizona passes a new law one month before the election that shuts down half the precincts in Democratic neighborhoods.
The Court’s decision in Purcell held that judges should be reluctant to intervene in election-related disputes as Election Day draws close, because such decisions “can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls.” Yet, more recent decisions have treated Purcell less as a practical warning that judges should avoid decisions that might confuse voters, and more like an inexorable rule that late-breaking voting rights decisions are not allowed.
The danger, in other words, is that if a state imposes last-minute voting restrictions that seek to rig an election, the Supreme Court may forbid the federal judiciary from doing anything about it.
Another unanswered question is how far this Court is willing to go in giving Republicans an unfair advantage during the next legislative redistricting cycle, which is expected to begin this fall.
In a long line of cases stretching back more than a century, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected something known as the “independent state legislature doctrine,” which could potentially allow state legislatures to pass election laws that can neither be vetoed by a state governor nor reviewed by the state’s courts. But four members of the Court recently endorsed this doctrine, and newly confirmed Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s views on the doctrine are unknown.
As Justice Neil Gorsuch summarized this doctrine in a 2020 opinion, “the Constitution provides that state legislatures — not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials — bear primary responsibility for setting election rules,” at least for federal elections.
In its most extreme form, Gorsuch’s approach could forbid Democratic governors from vetoing congressional gerrymanders passed by Republican legislatures. It could forbid states from using nonpartisan commissions to draw congressional maps. And it could even prevent state supreme courts from enforcing state constitutional safeguards against gerrymandering.
The biggest uncertainty surrounding the Court’s voting rights decisions, in other words, is whether the Court will enable efforts to lock Republicans into power no matter what voters do to elect their candidates of choice, or whether the Court’s majority will, at some point, tell their fellow Republicans in state legislatures that they’ve gone too far.
The answers to these questions, moreover, won’t be found anywhere in the Constitution, or in any law enacted by Congress. The Roberts Court’s voting rights cases bear far more resemblance to the old English common law, a web of entirely judge-created legal rules governing areas such as contracting and property rights, than they do to the modern, more democratic model where federal judges are supposed to root their decisions in legal texts. The future of democracy in the United States will be decided by six Republican-appointed justices’ arbitrary whims.
And, if a majority of the justices do support a wholesale attack on liberal democracy, their actions will hardly be unprecedented.
Nearly a century before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, Congress and state legislatures passed a different kind of legislation that was supposed to guarantee the franchise to people of color.
It’s called the 15th Amendment, with its command that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
The pre-Voting Rights Act United States did not deny voting rights to millions of African Americans because we lacked a legal guarantee protecting the right to vote. We did so because powerful public officials — including judges — decided that they did not care what the Constitution had to say about voting rights.
We’re about to find out whether the Supreme Court is going to repeat that history.
Merrick Garland. (photo: AP)
The new policy largely codifies the commitment Garland made in June, when he said the Justice Department would abandon the practice of seizing reporters’ records as part of efforts to uncover confidential sources. It aims to resolve a politically thorny issue that has long vexed Justice Department prosecutors trying to weigh the media’s First Amendment rights against the government’s desire to protect classified information.
“The United States has, of course, an important national interest in protecting national security information against unauthorized disclosure,” Garland wrote in his memo. “But a balancing test may fail to properly weight the important national interest in protecting journalists from compelled disclosure of information revealing their sources, sources they need to apprise the American people of the workings of their government.”
The memo makes clear that federal prosecutors can, in some cases, obtain journalists’ records. Those exceptions include if the reporters are suspected of working for agents of a foreign power or terrorist organizations, if they are under investigation for unrelated activities or if they obtained their information through criminal methods like breaking and entering. There are also exceptions for situations with imminent risks, like kidnappings or crimes against children.
Garland was moved to act following an outcry over revelations that the department during the Trump administration had obtained records belonging to journalists at The Washington Post, CNN and The New York Times as part of investigations into who had disclosed government secrets related to the Russia investigation and other national security matters.
Others whose records were obtained were Democratic members of Congress and aides and former White House counsel Don McGahn.
Garland’s announcement came after President Joe Biden said he would not allow the Justice Department to seize journalists’ phone records and emails, calling the practice “simply wrong.” After that, Garland and other senior Justice Department staffers held meetings with representatives of news media organizations.
In the memo, Garland also said he would support federal legislation to add protections for journalists.
Media advocates praised the policy shift.
“The attorney general has taken a necessary and momentous step to protect press freedom at a critical time,” said Bruce Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “This historic new policy will ensure that journalists can do their job of informing the public without fear of federal government intrusion into their relationships with confidential sources.”
Leak investigations have long challenged department officials, resulting in policy changes in the last decade as well as pushback from media groups against government encroachment into their work.
President Barack Obama’s first attorney general, Eric Holder, announced revised guidelines for leak investigations after an uproar over actions seen as aggressively intrusive into press freedom, including the secret seizure of phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors.
Jeff Sessions, President Donald Trump’s first attorney general, announced in 2017 a leak crackdown following a series of disclosures during the investigation into Russian election interference.
Richard Nixon, then Dwight D. Eisenhower's vice president, met with Cuba's Fidel Castro on April 19, 1959, in Washington, DC. (photo: unknown)
For sixty years, the United States has aimed to strangle Cuba’s economy and inflict misery on the Cuban people. Blockades are methods of war — and it’s time for the war on Cuba to end.
hey always blame the United States,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said on the Senate floor this week. “The embargo, the first thing they blame, it’s the embargo. ‘The embargo is causing all this.’”
Not long after the UN General Assembly voted for the twenty-ninth straight year to condemn the six-decade-long US embargo on Cuba — a 184-2 vote that pitted only the US and Israeli governments against the rest of the entire world — the country has erupted in massive protests over widespread food and medicine shortages. A chorus of voices, ranging from Bernie Sanders and other congressional progressives to former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, have blamed the conditions on the long-standing US policy, and called for it to be finally lifted.
Regime-change advocates like Rubio have pushed back against this. For them, the embargo is irrelevant to what’s now happening in the country, which they claim instead is a product of “six decades of suffering under totalitarian socialism and communism.” Predictably, their preferred response to the current protests doesn’t involve ending the policy.
But the reality is that the US “embargo” — or blockade, more accurately — was designed to exacerbate scarcity and encourage social unrest in Cuba. For decades, the blockade has strangled the country’s economy and deprived Cubans of access to essentials like medical supplies, its success at creating misery only intensifying with the fall of the Soviet Union, the coronavirus pandemic, and four years of “maximum pressure” under President Trump.
As eighty House Democrats told Joe Biden at the start of this year, “with the stroke of a pen,” he could undo Trump’s actions and “assist struggling Cuban families and promote a more constructive approach by promptly returning to the Obama-Biden administration policy of engagement and normalization of relations.” But this obvious course of action is the very least Washington should do. The US blockade has been a generations-long undeclared economic war on Cuba, one that has consistently failed even on its own terms while inflicting enormous pain on ordinary Cubans.
The Undeclared War
The US blockade on Cuba has been a key part of Washington’s long-standing war on the country, launched shortly after Fidel Castro led a revolution overthrowing the country’s US-backed military dictatorship in 1959.
Things didn’t start out entirely hostile. The Eisenhower administration publicly took a cagey wait-and-see attitude toward the new government. Meeting with Castro for three and a half hours, then–vice president Richard Nixon advised him, according to a post-meeting memo, “that it was the responsibility of a leader not always to follow public opinion but to help to direct it in proper channels, not to give the people what they think they want at a time of emotional stress but to make them want what they ought to have.” With a tinge of regret, Nixon recounted that Castro’s “primary concern was with developing programs for economic progress.”
By September that year, as Castro restricted private ownership of agricultural land and prepared to nationalize foreign-owned industry, the US ambassador to the country expressed “our serious concern at the treatment being given American private interests in Cuba.” The next month, president Dwight Eisenhower approved a program backing anti-Castro elements — including Cuban exiles launching raids on the country and, later, US-supplied sabotage and bombing campaigns — in the hopes that it would topple Castro and make him appear to have caused his own undoing.
By December, a CIA division head would advise that “thorough consideration be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro.”
The Cold War gave this US mission extra urgency. Eisenhower warned the Soviets in 1960 that his administration wouldn’t tolerate “the establishment of a regime dominated by international communism in the Western hemisphere,” in line with long-standing Washington doctrine that the US government would intervene in countries in the hemisphere if they ran counter to US interests.
Hoping to stop the spread of “Castroism” and end it in Cuba, Washington pressured other Latin American countries to cut off diplomatic ties, travel, and arms shipments to the country, threatening to suspend military aid and other penalties to those who didn’t comply, eventually twisting enough arms to expel Cuba from the Organization of American States. After successfully pressuring European and Canadian banks to cancel and refuse loans to the Cuban government, what was termed a US “quarantine” of the country began in October 1960, barring all exports to Cuba, aside from food and medical supplies, and over the next few years adding all trade, imports, and even goods from third-party countries containing Cuban materials. By 1963, under John F. Kennedy, the blockade as we know it today was fully in place.
This was no small thing. A blockade — distinct from an embargo, by including imports and trying to coerce third-party countries — is a method of war that, under international law, is meant to only take place during armed conflict. It’s not for nothing that legal scholars have argued that the blockade of Cuba is a serious violation of international law, not least for the fact that it’s aimed explicitly at forcing a change in government. Even the US government’s own legal advisors determined in 1962 that it “could be regarded by Cuba and other Soviet bloc nations as an act of war.”
Just as Nixon would respond to the 1973 election of a socialist government in Chile by ordering the CIA to “make the economy scream,” US policymakers openly hoped impoverishing and starving the Cuban people would lead them to overthrow Castro. “Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba,” one State Department official wrote in 1960, in order “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Eisenhower said it more plainly: “If they (the Cuban people) are hungry, they will throw Castro out.”
Tightening the Screws
As Cuba’s largest and closest trading partner, the United States produced an immediate impact on its economy when it ended trade. The share of Cuban exports going stateside plummeted from the more than 60 percent it stood at through the 1950s to less than 5 percent by 1961, while the roughly 70 percent of imports that entered the country from the United States by the end of the 1950s cratered at less than 4 percent. By 2018, a UN agency estimated the embargo had cost Cuba more than $130 billion over six decades, significant for a country whose average annual GDP is a mere fraction of that sum.
It was the Soviet bloc that kept Cuba’s economy afloat for decades, both through billions of annual subsidies and by filling the trade vacuum left by the United States, becoming responsible for 79 to 90 percent of Cuba’s overseas trade. From fuel, machinery, and parts, to fertilizers, pesticides, and even the fats used to make soaps, the resources that allowed life and the economy in Cuba to function normally flowed because of Cuba’s integration into a broader Communist camp.
The Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991 was the biggest of several shocks that hit the Cuban economy that decade, leaving it more vulnerable than ever to the US blockade. GDP nose-dived by 35 percent, while agricultural output and manufacturing capacity collapsed by 47 and 90 percent, respectively. Construction and passenger transportation plunged by more than 70 percent each, while food queues, hours of no running water, and blackouts became a regular part of life. With soap suddenly needing rationing, Cubans had to make do with four measly bars a year.
Smelling blood, US lawmakers moved in for the kill. When Cuban trade with US corporate subsidiaries sharply rose in the wake of the Soviet crack-up, US congress passed the Cuban Democracy Act the following year to bar the practice, over the objections of the European Community and other allies, leading to the cancellation of dozens of trade deals with the country. On top of this, the law banned the sale of food for the first time (later repealed, sort of) and created a licensing regime for medicine and medical equipment so onerous that it functionally served to end medical commerce with the country. US lawmakers, it seemed, had no problem with heavy-handed government interference in the private sector, so long as it was at the service of overthrowing a government they didn’t like.
The EU similarly objected to the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which took authority for the blockade away from the president and gave it to Congress, all but cementing it into place. Besides making revolution a prerequisite for lifting it, it further discouraged foreign investment into Cuba by, for instance, denying US visas to representatives of firms doing business with confiscated US property. This, even though a year later US military and intelligence agencies determined that “Cuba does not pose a significant security threat to the United States or other countries in the region,” and the Pentagon concluded the same thing a year after that.
The results, as you might imagine, were brutal. After a yearlong investigation, the American Association for World Health concluded in 1997 that the blockade had “dramatically harmed the health and nutrition of large numbers of ordinary Cuban citizens” and “caused a significant rise in suffering — and even deaths — in Cuba” through “critical shortages of even the most basic medicines and medical hardware.”
The report painted a chaotic picture: increased disease as a result of more untreated water and less soap; ambulances, other emergency services, and health care facilities unable to function properly thanks to power outages and a lack of resources like fuel; high rates of anemia, iron deficiency, and undernourishment, the latter of which affected 22 percent of the population at one point; and hundreds of medicines out of reach or only sometimes available, made all the worse by pharmaceutical megamergers. Little surprise that 1994 saw similar civil unrest in Cuba as we’re seeing now.
These conditions were celebrated by the right-wing Heritage Foundation that year. Describing with relish reports of mothers turning to sex work, families subsisting on one meal a day, and the return of diseases like malaria, it urged the US government to keep the blockade in place until Castro’s government collapsed and to deny him a “much-needed safety valve” by turning away Cuban refugees. It casually noted the policy would likely lead to more repression for the Cuban people and possibly end in “bloodshed, armed conflict, and chaos,” before concluding, with no trace of irony, that “the United States must not abandon the Cuban people by relaxing or lifting the trade embargo.”
So, when Marco Rubio says today that “food, medicine and gas shortages are sadly nothing new in Cuba,” he’s right: modern history’s longest blockade has ensured these problems have been going on for a long time.
Economic Sabotage
That Cuba weathered all this is a testament to the benefits of what’s possible with a government that takes an active role during crises and seeks to guarantee economic security. With belt-tightening inevitable, the government launched a program of “humanistic austerity,” with major cuts to the state sector but increased health care and social spending, and food, clothing, and other goods rationed to prioritize vulnerable groups like pregnant women and the elderly.
Yet such temporary measures have their limits, as we’re seeing now. While Cuba’s economy is certainly plagued by serious issues separate from US policy, the ills being felt most acutely are overwhelmingly driven by two factors: the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy and the pandemic.
Over his four years in office, Trump signed more than two hundred directives aimed at making Cuba’s economy scream. He sharply restricted remittances (to one family member at a maximum of $1,000 per quarter) before effectively banning them outright. He also barred US travelers from carrying out any transactions with entities tied to the military and intelligence and security services, in practice an attack on both Cuba’s ability to draw foreign investment and its crucial tourism industry, given the heavy involvement of the military’s business conglomerate in, by one estimate, 60 percent of the economy. And he put sanctions on shipping companies and vessels transporting oil to Cuba from Venezuela, on top of an existing embargo on the country, which subsidized and supplied a third of Cuba’s oil consumption in 2019.
The impact was swift and clear. The targeting of Venezuela’s oil exports has led to more rationing of energy, shortages of personal hygiene products the government can’t afford while it buys fuel on the open market, and oxen replacing tractors on farms. Trump’s attacks on remittances led to the eventual closure of Western Union on the island, imperiling hundreds of thousands of Cuban families. And after an Obama-era uptick in tourism, Trump’s various restrictions on travel, including a 2019 cruise ban, saw tourist numbers drop for the first time in a decade, by 9.3 percent over 2018 to 2019, and nearly 20 percent over the year after that, with US visitors declining close to 70 percent.
On top of all this, the decline in both remittances and tourism deprived the country of key sources of hard currency. That’s caused the government’s further struggle in paying overseas creditors, hobbled its ability to import the 60 to 70 percent of its food supply it gets from overseas, and motivated its creation of the high-priced dollar stores that have been a core source of anger driving the current protests.
While it may be true the US blockade technically no longer applies to food nor prevents trade with other countries, Washington’s overlapping web of sanctions — by doing everything from depriving Cuba of oil and foreign-exchange currency to crippling its economy more generally and forcing tough trade-offs in overseas purchases — has effectively closed the door on both.
All of this would’ve been hard enough to navigate at the best of times. But in 2020, Cuba, like the rest of the world, saw its economy further devastated by the coronavirus pandemic that exacerbated every one of these problems: it brought tourism to a standstill, further strangled the entry of hard currency, worsened food shortages, and caused job losses that made Cubans ever more dependent on the foreign remittances Washington was determined to choke out. Over the year, the country saw its economy shrink 11 percent.
As the pandemic magnifies the devastation of the US blockade, the blockade has in turn made it harder for Cuba to handle the pandemic. In July 2020, a UN special rapporteur concluded the blockade was “obstructing humanitarian responses to help the country’s health-care system fight the COVID-19 pandemic.” Among other things, the blockade stopped medical aid and money transfers from overseas companies and humanitarian organizations, denied Cubans the ability to use Zoom, precluded the country’s purchase of ventilators, and caused a shortage of these and personal protective equipment (PPE), while blocking a donation of pandemic aid from China’s richest man.
Oxfam reports the blockade has had a “drastic effect on Cuba’s vaccine industry,” making it difficult to obtain the necessary raw materials. Even so, the state’s generous and long-term investment in health care and education means it was able to develop its own COVID vaccine — only to then face a shortage of syringes, the blockade making it difficult to buy them from manufacturers.
It’s the blockade, too, that has driven the pandemic’s resurgence on the island, a big driver of the current protests. The economic squeeze pushed a desperate Cuba to reopen the country to tourism in November, which, combined with shortages of PPE and a shortfall of 20 million syringes, led to a jump in cases. Still, it’s rich for the Rubios of the world to charge that “the regime’s disastrous COVID response is the predictable result of a corrupt government” as they beat the drums of regime change, when, even with Washington’s determined effort to sabotage Cuba’s pandemic recovery, its response — with 1,608 deaths as of July 12 — doesn’t even come close to the mass death of US citizens engineered by Rubio and his ilk during the pandemic.
Of course, none of this matters to Washington politicians who don’t think twice about casually starving and killing foreign people, whether by bombs or economic sanctions. But the irony is that the blockade has had a devastating effect on Cuba’s private sector, which is heavily dependent on tourism and on traveling to the US to buy materials. Nor is it particularly good for American industry either, with the blockade estimated to cost US businesses and farmers nearly $6 billion a year in export revenue.
Nor is it popular. For years, polling has shown a majority of Americans, even a fluctuating majority of Cuban Americans in South Florida, support ending the blockade, likely realizing that it’s both inhumane and, after nearly sixty years, ineffective.
Unfortunately, true to his Trump-lite approach to foreign policy, Biden has broken his campaign promises and is steadfastly continuing Trump’s Cuba policy, departing from the successful approach of the very Democratic administration he served in. Even as he “calls on the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs,” Biden refuses to lift the Trump restrictions on remittances that more of those Cubans now depend on than ever.
Washington’s Handiwork
The unrest last week in Cuba cannot be fully understood outside the context of the blockade. None of this absolves the Cuban government over its repression of dissidents, or for the mistakes made in the course of the country’s economic management. But to put the stress on its “Soviet-style, centrally planned economy” and insufficient zeal in market reforms as the cause of the country’s woes, and not the more than half century of warfare waged by the world’s biggest power, is misleading to say the least.
Short of sadism and imperial hubris, there’s no good reason for the blockade to continue against a country that poses no threat to the United States, and which creates overwhelming misery for the ordinary people figures like Donald Trump and Joe Biden claim to stand with. And while removing it in full will be a heavy lift, requiring getting Congress on board, the president on his own could at least roll back the Trump policies he himself once acknowledged were an abominable failure.
Not doing anything will only drive home how hollow establishment lip service to human rights is.
Demand for FEMA funds to help communities prepare for climate change has outpaced the available money. Advocates fear the consequences could leave poorer communities with weaker defenses against the intensifying crisis. (image: Elise Wrabetz/NBC News/Getty Images/AP/US Forest Service)
Three of the country's wealthiest states are on track to receive more than half of the money from a new program helping communities prepare for extreme weather.
Waves from Lake Michigan batter apartments along the coastline. Sinkholes from erosion pockmark the predominantly Black and working-class community’s streets. One crater, Louis recalled, opened up next to a streetlight.
While Louis and her neighbors press for solutions, one family whose windows were shattered by the waves last year has since built its own fortress of rocks, sand bags and concrete.
“If they didn’t do the work, they wouldn’t exist,” Louis, an activist with the advocacy group Black Chicago Water Council, said of her neighbors. “That’s how dire the situation is.”
To better protect the residents, Chicago applied to a new Federal Emergency Management Agency program designed to help communities prepare before natural disasters hit. The city hoped to receive $851,250 to build a stone barrier along South Shore Drive.
But residents and environmental advocates were disappointed to learn this month that FEMA had not chosen their project, leaving the construction of the barrier in limbo. (Chicago’s Department of Transportation will explore other options to protect the coast, a spokesman said, but the timing is unclear.)
“I don’t know how it could be a lot more dramatic than waves crashing into someone’s living room, or a high-rise on the brink,” said Naomi Davis, founder of Blacks in Green, a Chicago-based environmental advocacy group, who supported the grant. “I don’t know what could be more urgent than that.”
Nearly 1,000 local governments applied for FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which recently announced the 406 expected recipients of its first wave of $500 million in grant funding. (Final decisions on awards will be made in September.) Interest far outstripped the available money, and many communities are set to receive nothing.
Three of the wealthiest states — California, New Jersey and Washington — are on track to receive more than half of the money, for initiatives including flood mitigation, a tsunami shelter and the removal of dense undergrowth to prevent wildfires. Plenty of poorer communities will receive funding as well, but dozens will not, including Amazonia, Missouri, with a population of just over 300, which wanted to protect critical equipment for its sewer system from rising waters, and Wilson, North Carolina, which hoped to move public housing away from areas at risk of flooding.
The long list of more than 500 communities that received no funding — many without the resources to prepare for extreme weather on their own — has raised concerns among environmental justice and civil rights advocates that better resourced communities won big, while disadvantaged areas remain in need. In some cases, that’s because poorer communities don’t have the money for the matching part of the grant, or lack the resources to prepare a competitive grant application.
The consequences of climate change are particularly pernicious for the poor and communities of color. Black, Latino and low-income families are more likely to live in flood zones, researchers have found. The nation’s wealth gap means their neighborhoods are less likely to have money to harden infrastructure and homes in advance of natural disasters, and the recovery is unequal as well. An investigation of FEMA’s data by NPR shows that affluent survivors are more likely to receive help.
As disappointed officials learn why their projects were turned down, some advocates are questioning whether the agency ’s long-criticized disparities in disaster assistance are at risk of being repeated in a program meant to buttress communities before disasters happen.
Jacqueline Patterson, the recently retired director of the NAACP’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program, said FEMA needs to be aggressive about reaching towns and cities that are particularly vulnerable.
“Communities don’t have the luxury of time for trial and error when we’re talking about lives that are being lost as we speak,” she said.
David Maurstad, FEMA’s deputy associate administrator for federal insurance and mitigation, said in a statement that the agency “is committed to delivering our programs with equity.” FEMA “will be persistent in our efforts to refine and improve the program through the lessons we learn and the feedback we receive from our stakeholders.”
FEMA is planning a new round of $1 billion in funding for the nascent program, though the agency has not yet set a timeline for opening applications. In response to NBC News’ questions, FEMA said that it would work with up to 10 communities to help them prepare their applications for that funding.
One obstacle that poorer communities face is that the new grant program does not cover the full cost of projects, requiring state or local governments to provide a 25 percent match. For economically disadvantaged areas with a population of 3,000 or less, the state or local share can drop to 10 percent. But that 10 percent can still be too high for some communities, shutting them out from applying.
Malary White, a spokeswoman for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, said in a statement that some cities and counties in the nation’s poorest state “simply can’t afford that cost share, therefore mitigation dollars go unused.”
Amelia Muccio with Hagerty Consulting, an emergency management firm that advised California and other communities on FEMA’s grant requests, said smaller locales may also lack the resources to go through the cumbersome process of applying for the grant. Among many other requirements, communities had to show that the project ultimately cost less than the consequences of not taking action.
“That kind of becomes a barrier,” Muccio said of the complex application process. “I’d argue that a lot of these communities don’t have a seat at the table.”
Another setback for some communities was out-of-date construction and building codes. FEMA incentivizes state and local governments to adopt either the 2015 or 2018 versions of the International Building Code and International Residential Code, which set requirements for construction, such as requiring sprinkler systems in new homes, and are meant to provide a baseline of safety for buildings. In judging grant applications, FEMA awarded up to a fifth of the total available points to applicants in areas with the codes in place.
The result was that all of the funds that FEMA expects to allocate through the competition — about two-thirds of the $500 million — are expected to go to applicants in states requiring adherence to these codes. This left out states that have not adopted them or have not required local jurisdictions to adhere; those states will receive just the $600,000 baseline grant, plus in some cases grants dedicated to Native American tribes. (In some states, updating building codes can become a contentious process opposed by real estate industry lobbyists who worry about additional costs for builders.)
As hurricane and wildfire season sets in, many of the communities who lost out in FEMA’s initial round are regrouping and deciding whether to reapply in the future or seek another source of funds.
In Wilson, North Carolina, where 51 percent of residents are Black or Latino, and the poverty rate is almost double the nation’s average, officials recently learned that their project was not picked. The local housing authority had hoped for $8.8 million to rebuild public housing in the city farther away from a flood-prone creek. The vacated homes would be torn down, so that the once-residential area could serve as a green space to help soak up water and reduce risks.
Tim Rogers, a spokesman for the housing authority, said several tenants had already been forced to relocate after their apartments flooded during Hurricane Matthew in 2016.
“Floods are getting worse,” Rogers said. “That’s one of the things we’re trying to prepare for.”
In Coconino County, Arizona, which faces the combined threat of wildfires and flooding and where 16 percent of residents live in poverty, officials had asked for almost $188,000 for fire prevention efforts, including removing trees and brush.
Lucinda Andreani, the county’s deputy manager, said residents who want to protect their homes generally have to spend thousands of dollars hiring specialists to cut down trees vulnerable to embers. Income is often a deciding factor between residents who can afford the mitigation efforts and residents who cannot.
Andreani said the county is checking to see if Covid relief funds can be used for fire prevention, as the state’s congressional delegation continues to lobby for increased federal aid to fight wildfires.
In Amazonia, Missouri, Mayor Rick Russell learned that the small town’s request to FEMA to help address flood threats was denied just weeks after a deluge of rain on June 24 led to emergency boat evacuations.
“We were really hoping for this grant, especially after this flood,” he said.
Russell is waiting to see if his town will receive federal disaster assistance for damage to infrastructure, including roads. The area was one of at least 21 counties in Missouri hit hard by storms and flooding last month.
If the disaster funds come through, that could provide some relief — but Russell is still grappling with how to address the needs that led him to apply for FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program in the first place.
During last month’s flood, Amazonia received more than 12 inches of rain in a day, covering the town’s generator with almost 2 feet of water, making it inoperable.
When the power goes out, the generator works as the town’s backstop, allowing its sewer system to continue pumping out water. After the storm, those pumps were down for two days until electricity was restored.
Part of the funds Russell requested from FEMA would have been used to move the generator 4 feet higher, out of the likely path of floodwaters.
As a last resort, the town’s council has given permission to tap into its roughly $150,000 reserve funds to elevate the generator. But that would reduce the reserve account’s balance by $45,000, a prospect the mayor prefers to avoid. The local water tower could need repairs in the coming years, he said.
Many residents in the town are elderly and on a fixed income. Federal grants are critical to addressing the town’s infrastructure needs, as the mayor knows disasters can occur regardless of the town’s thin budget.
“We try to keep our nose above water,” Russell said. “We have a low tax base.”
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