02 December 21
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ALSO SEE: Roe v. Wade's Future Is in Doubt After Historic
Arguments at Supreme Court
ALSO SEE: Poll: As Supreme Court Hears Mississippi Case, Just 24% of Americans
Want Roe v. Wade Overturned
Oral arguments today made clear that this court will overturn Roe—and that they’ll insist on their own reasonableness the whole time.
But somehow, even still, only some of the six conservatives seem brave enough to admit to the real project. That became clear as oral arguments progressed this morning in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. Evaluating the constitutionality of a Mississippi law that prohibits virtually all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a pre-viability ban on its own terms that quite deliberately violates Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, some of the justices continued to pretend that what was being proposed—the overturning or hollowing out of a precedent on which generations of pregnant people had relied—was a teensy little tweak, a long-overdue tug of the constitutional sheets in the right direction.
Chief Justice John Roberts, sounding eminently Newsmax-y, referenced the private papers of Justice Harry Blackmun several times to argue that the author of Roe secretly believed the viability line established in that case is arbitrary. He then compared America’s abortion permissiveness to that of China and North Korea. (Reminder that the court’s conservatives do not like it when you compare U.S. capital punishment with foreign countries.) Justice Brett Kavanaugh, trying desperately to justify overturning Roe and Casey while sounding like the reasonable centrist he wants to be in the world, fatuously suggested, several times, that if only there were some way to balance a woman’s rights and interests against that of a fetus. The problem with Kavanaugh’s rhetorical question is that there is: It’s called Roe v. Wade, and if that wasn’t enough for him, he’d love to hear about Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which preserved the right to choose even while narrowing it. Indeed, the text of these opinions have struck that balance for 50 years. But rather than look to actual precedent, Kavanaugh instead posited that the middle place between a Constitution that outlaws all abortion and one that permits it is surely a Constitution that “leaves it to the states.” No matter that the outlawing of all abortion isn’t even on the table in this case. Say it enough times and it becomes a goalpost.
Meanwhile, Justice Samuel Alito, insisting that religion has no role in the personhood fetish of his colleagues, pretended that the question of when life begins is purely secular, because some secular philosophers have weighed in on it. Roberts batted away all of the statistics about how unwanted pregnancies harm women economically with a simple “putting that data aside,” before he asked why 15 weeks isn’t enough time (the existing standard is 24 weeks) to terminate a pregnancy. Similarly, the court was happy to put aside the data around the health risks of forced pregnancy (it’s 75 times more dangerous to give birth in Mississippi than it is to have a pre-viability abortion, and this falls hardest on poor women of color) or the legitimate reasons some women can’t access an abortion before 15 weeks of pregnancy. Justice Clarence Thomas really seemed to want to know whether we could punish more women for fetal endangerment.
Amy Coney Barrett—the only person on the current court who has actually carried a baby—spent most of her time explaining that since the time of Roe, state “safe haven” laws have expanded to make it slightly easier to give up an unwanted baby for adoption. This, according to Barrett, somehow means it’s now fine to make women carry fetuses to term against their will. If the problem is unwanted parenting, she asked, “why don’t the safe haven laws take care of that problem?” This is an extraordinarily wrongheaded argument that evinces no understanding of what both carrying your rapist’s baby to term, and indeed carrying any unwanted pregnancy to term, actually means. The old “drop that 12-year-old’s baby at the fire station” era of callousness is what Roe and Casey were designed to protect against.
If you want to pretend the Constitution has nothing to say about bodily autonomy even when it does, by all means. If you want to insist that equal protection is irrelevant to a discussion of forced maternity, do it. But if you really want to regulate women’s bodies, while claiming this is a teensy little issue, do, please, respect us all enough to call it what it is.
They won’t. Instead, they will fashion themselves heroes and champions as they make this decision—and the way they will do this was made apparent when both Kavanaugh and Alito decided to compare Roe v. Wade to Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy is the case that mandated separate but equal and was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education—to be clear, in this analogy, Roe is Plessy and Dobbs is Brown. Overturning Plessy was justified because it was wrong, Kavanaugh argued, a sentiment that is surprising from him and others because given the opportunity to compare Roe to Plessy at their confirmation hearings, none of these justices obliged. At their hearings, Roe was settled law, the precedent of the court. But now Roe is Plessy, which is why when the justices whisper softly that Lawrence v. Texas, Obergefell, and Griswold are not under threat today, you might wonder why you should trust them. They are all settled law—until they are not. They told us as much at their confirmation hearings and assured us today they were lying then, but aren’t lying now.
The real victim in all of this, for Kavanaugh at least, is the court. The poor Supreme Court, which has been obligated “to pick sides on the most contentious social debate in American life.” Why can’t everyone leave the court out of messy constitutional things? The only way to be “scrupulously neutral” would be to leave the question of abortion bans to the people. Of course, Kavanaugh has no real interest in leaving anything to “the people”—polling is quite clear on what the “people” would prefer. When Kavanaugh talks about getting out of this whole thorny personal autonomy and equality game, he means leave it to gerrymandered red-state legislatures, who are better positioned than pregnant people to know that they really just want to be forced to carry to term.
Despite all of the precious actions of Roberts and Barrett and, yes, Kavanaugh, this was never a 3–3–3 court. It was a 6–3 court of which half of that six are sometimes slightly cautious about the rates at which they are willing to push their own ideological agendas under the threat of public illegitimacy. It seems that the issue on which they are prepared to do so is, as it has always been, women’s health and safety and equality and dignity.
But even as they do it, they will hold on to this idea that they have been moderate until the end. After all, pro-choice senators confirmed them. Academics at Ivy League law schools promised they believed in precedent. And when they rule for Mississippi’s 15-week ban and overturn (or hollow out) Roe, they’ll have cover to justify it. They’ll probably point to Texas’ S.B. 8, a six-week ban that has already been in effect for three months, which these same justices allowed to take effect when they didn’t have to sign their names to an order. But they’ll strike down that one, declaring that Texas cannot undermine judicial supremacy, and a six-week ban tied to vigilante justice is too, too much. And when they do, it will be yet another way for them to pretend to be scrupulously neutral on abortion and deeply worried about workable tests while they are really sailing through their own personal 24-hour drive-thru Overton window.
When that happens, you will hear more about the much-vaunted 3–3–3 court and its incremental moderates. That too will be gaslighting. Your call whether you want to fall for it.
Republican president Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden at the first presidential debate Tuesday in Cleveland. (photo: Morry Gash/AP)
Mark Meadows makes stunning admission in new memoir obtained by Guardian, saying a second test returned negative
Mark Meadows also writes that though he knew each candidate was required “to test negative for the virus within seventy two hours of the start time … Nothing was going to stop [Trump] from going out there.”
Trump, Meadows says in the book, returned a negative result from a different test shortly after the positive.
Nonetheless, the stunning revelation of an unreported positive test follows a year of speculation about whether Trump, then 74 years old, had the potentially deadly virus when he faced Biden, 77, in Cleveland on 29 September – and what danger that might have presented.
Trump announced he had Covid on 2 October. The White House said he announced that result within an hour of receiving it. He went to hospital later that day.
Meadows’ memoir, The Chief’s Chief, will be published next week by All Seasons Press, a conservative outlet. The Guardian obtained a copy on Tuesday – the day Meadows reversed course and said he would cooperate with the House committee investigating the deadly Capitol attack of 6 January.
In a statement on Wednesday, Trump called Meadows’ claims “Fake News”.
Meadows says Trump’s positive result on 26 September was a shock to a White House which had just staged a triumphant Rose Garden ceremony for the supreme court nominee Amy Coney Barrett – an occasion now widely considered to have been a Covid super-spreader event.
Despite the president looking “a little tired” and suspecting a “slight cold”, Meadows says he was “content” that Trump travelled that evening to a rally in Middletown, Pennsylvania.
But as Marine One lifted off, Meadows writes, the White House doctor called.
“Stop the president from leaving,” Meadows says Sean Conley told him. “He just tested positive for Covid.”
It wasn’t possible to stop Trump but when he called from Air Force One, his chief of staff gave him the news.
“Mr President,” Meadows said, “I’ve got some bad news. You’ve tested positive for Covid-19.”
Trump’s reply, the devout Christian writes, “rhyme[d] with ‘Oh spit, you’ve gotta be trucking lidding me’”.
Meadows writes of his surprise that such a “massive germaphobe” could have contracted Covid, given precautions including “buckets of hand sanitiser” and “hardly [seeing] anyone who ha[d]n’t been rigorously tested”.
Meadows says the positive test had been done with an old model kit. He told Trump the test would be repeated with “the Binax system, and that we were hoping the first test was a false positive”.
After “a brief but tense wait”, Meadows called back with news of the negative test. He could “almost hear the collective ‘Thank God’ that echoed through the cabin”, he writes.
Meadows says Trump took that call as “full permission to press on as if nothing had happened”. His chief of staff, however, “instructed everyone in his immediate circle to treat him as if he was positive” throughout the Pennsylvania trip.
“I didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks,” Meadows writes, “but I also didn’t want to alarm the public if there was nothing to worry about – which according to the new, much more accurate test, there was not.”
Meadows writes that audience members at the rally “would never have known that anything was amiss”.
The public, however, was not told of the president’s tests.
On Sunday 27 September, the first day between the tests and the debate, Meadows says Trump did little – except playing golf in Virginia and staging an event for military families at which he “spoke about the value of sacrifice”.
Trump later said he might have been infected at that event, thanks to people “within an inch of my face sometimes, they want to hug me and they want to kiss me. And they do. And frankly, I’m not telling them to back up.”
In his book, Meadows does not mention that Trump also held a press conference indoors, in the White House briefing room, the same day.
On Monday 28 September, Trump staged an event at which he talked with business leaders and looked inside “the cab of a new truck”. He also held a Rose Garden press conference “on the work we had all been doing to combat Covid-19”.
“Somewhat ironically, considering his circumstances”, Meadows writes, Trump spoke about a new testing strategy “supposed to give quicker, more accurate readings about whether someone was positive or not.”
The White House had still not told the public Trump tested positive and then negative two days before.
On debate day, 29 September, Meadows says, Trump looked slightly better – “emphasis on the word slightly”.
“His face, for the most part at least, had regained its usual light bronze hue, and the gravel in his voice was gone. But the dark circles under his eyes had deepened. As we walked into the venue around five o’clock in the evening, I could tell that he was moving more slowly than usual. He walked like he was carrying a little extra weight on his back.”
Trump gave a furious and controversial performance, continually hectoring Biden to the point the Democrat pleaded: “Will you shut up, man? This is so unpresidential.”
The host, Chris Wallace of Fox News, later said Trump was not tested before the debate because he arrived late. Organisers, Wallace said, relied on the honor system.
The White House had not said Trump had tested positive and negative three days before.
Three days later, on 2 October, Trump announced by tweet that he and his wife, Melania Trump, were positive.
That evening, Meadows helped Trump make his way to hospital. During his stay, Meadows helped orchestrate stunts meant to show the president was in good health. Trump recovered, but it has been reported that his case of Covid was much more serious than the White House ever let on.
Former Georgia gubernatorial Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams makes remarks during a Georgia Democrat U.S. Senate campaign rally. (photo: Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
The voting rights activist will likely face off against the current Republican governor, Brian Kemp.
Abrams announced the news with a two-and-a-half minute campaign video titled “One Georgia,” in which she touts her history as an activist in the state.
“Opportunity and success in Georgia shouldn’t be determined by your zip code, background or access to power,” Abrams said in a tweet. “For the past four years, when the hardest times hit us all, I’ve worked to do my part to help families make it through. My job has been to just put my head down and keep working — toward One Georgia.”
If Abrams wins, she’d be Georgia’s first Black governor and the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted.
Abrams previously ran for governor in 2018, narrowly losing to Kemp by less than 1.4 percentage points in an election that was plagued with voting difficulties that especially impacted people of color.
After the loss, Abrams responded by spearheading an ambitious voter registration effort. The organizing paid dividends in 2020 as the state flipped blue, sending Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the Senate and contributing to Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
Georgia Republicans, led by Kemp, reacted by passing a sweeping bill in 2021 making it much harder to vote in the state. In a statement at the time, Rep. Nikema Williams (D), chair of the Georgia Democratic Party, called the measure the “most flagrantly racist, partisan power grab of elections in modern Georgia history.”
Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, leaves the federal courthouse in Washington after appearing to face charges of snubbing a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot. (photo: Tom Williams/Getty)
Google kicked Bannon off YouTube because of his violent rhetoric but still sent ad dollars to his website that promotes misinformation about the election and the pandemic.
Google also confirmed to ProPublica that it has at times blocked ads from appearing on Bannon’s War Room website alongside individual articles that violate Google’s rules.
But Bannon found a loophole in Google’s policies that let him keep earning ad money on his site’s homepage.
Until Monday, the home page automatically played innocuous stock content, such as tips on how to protect your phone in winter weather or how to improve the effectiveness of your LinkedIn profile.
The content likely had no interest for War Room visitors, especially since it was interrupted every few seconds by ads. But the ads, supplied through Google’s network, came from such prominent brands as Land Rover, Volvo, DoorDash, Staples and even Harvard University.
Right below that video player was another that featured clips from Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, which routinely portrays participants in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as patriots and airs false claims about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The video player running Google ads amid innocuous clips disappeared from Bannon’s website on Monday, after ProPublica inquired with Google, Bannon and advertisers. The change was not Google’s doing: Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said the player did not break the company’s rules. He said Google’s policies were effective in preventing ads from ending up on sites with “harmful content.”
“We have strict policies that explicitly prohibit publishers from both promoting harmful content and providing inaccurate information about their properties, misrepresenting their identity, or sending unauthorized ad requests,” Aciman said. “These policies exist to protect both users and advertisers from abuse, fraud or disruptive ad experiences, and we enforce them through a mix of automated tools and human review. When we find publishers that violate these policies we stop ads from serving on their site.”
A spokesperson for Bannon, who was indicted this month for stonewalling Congress’ bipartisan investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection, declined to answer questions for this article.
Zach Edwards, the founder of Victory Medium, a consulting firm that advises companies on online advertising, said the digital ad industry, including Google, is rife with loopholes and bad behavior, and its complexity prevents advertisers from understanding what they’re funding. “A lot of times ad buyers just shrug their shoulders and are like, ‘It’s video ads, what can you do?’” he said.
Of Bannon’s dodge and Google’s acquiescence to it, Edwards added, “Nothing about this is aboveboard.”
The vast majority of online ads aren’t purchased through direct relationships with the sites on which they appear. Instead, brands use automated ad exchanges like Google’s that rely on real-time auctions to automatically place ads in front of people who fit a brand’s target audience. As long as Google keeps the War Room website in its network, and as long as brands don’t specifically block it from their ad buys, Bannon’s site can keep collecting money. Warroom.org draws between 450,000 and 1 million visits a month, according to traffic tracker SimilarWeb.
And Google takes a cut of each dollar from ads it places on the War Room site.
“For most advertisers, having an ad placed on a Steve Bannon-affiliated outlet is the stuff of nightmares,” said Nandini Jammi, the co-founder of Check My Ads, an ad industry watchdog. “The fact that ad exchanges are still serving ads should tell brands that their vendors are not vetting their inventory, and I wouldn’t be surprised if advertisers who have found themselves on War Room request refunds.”
Companies contacted by ProPublica said they didn’t intend to advertise on War Room’s site and would take steps to stop their ads from appearing there. Land Rover called the ad “an error.” Harry Pierre, a spokesperson for Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, said the school is working with its ad buyer to update its list of unwanted websites. Adobe said its ad was a violation of its brand safety guidelines. “We worked with the ad partner to remove the ads from the site,” a spokesperson said.
DoorDash also blamed a third-party vendor. “DoorDash’s mission is to empower local communities and provide access to opportunity for all, and we stand against the spread of disinformation that undermines those principles,” the company said in a statement.
Spokespeople for Volvo did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Google may have banned a different site affiliated with Bannon. Until recently, the site Populist Press earned money via Google’s ad network. The site, styled to imitate the Drudge Report, was prominently linked on the War Room homepage and draws roughly 5 million visits a month, according to SimilarWeb.
According to an online disclosure from a former advertising partner, Populist Press is affiliated with August Partners, a Colorado company registered to Amanda Shea, whose husband, Tim Shea, was a partner of Bannon’s in We Build the Wall initiative. Bannon and allies used We Build the Wall to solicit money to fulfill Trump’s campaign promise of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Federal prosecutors accused Bannon, Tim Shea and other associates of misusing the money, and Trump pardoned Bannon before leaving office. An attorney for Tim Shea, who is awaiting trial, declined to comment, and Amanda Shea did not respond to a request for comment.
At some point during the week of Nov. 15, Populist Press stopped showing Google ads — and it stopped being promoted on the War Room homepage. Aciman, the Google spokesperson, declined to comment on whether Google had banned Populist Press, but said that the site “is not monetizing using our services.”
Bannon’s “War Room” podcast draws a massive audience, with more than 100 million total downloads across more than 1,000 episodes, available on platforms including Apple’s. A sort of far-right “Meet the Press,” it’s the go-to talk show for pro-Trump influencers and Republican hopefuls. Frequently using violent imagery, Bannon and his guests promote new ways of trying to overturn the election, such as demanding “audits” of the 2020 ballots. Since February, Bannon has inspired thousands to take over local-level Republican Party committees, unlocking influence over how elections are run from the ground up.
On his podcast in 2020, Bannon called for the beheading of Fauci and FBI director Chris Wray. On the eve of Jan. 6, Bannon said, “We’re on the point of attack” and “all hell will break loose tomorrow.” Bannon was also reportedly involved in the Trump team’s command center on the day of the riot, which is part of congressional investigators’ interest in his testimony and records. Since the insurrection, Bannon has taken up the cause of people held on charges related to the Capitol riot.
In addition to his podcast, Bannon has spun a complex web of political and business ventures. He co-founded a training academy for right-wing nationalists that got mired in a legal dispute with the Italian government over control of a medieval monastery near Rome. A media company he launched with Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese billionaire on whose yacht Bannon was arrested in 2020, was part of a $539 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in September for illegally marketing digital currency. Before advising Trump, Bannon had a wide-ranging career in finance and movies, and his pardon from Trump lifted a $1.75 million lien against his house in Laguna Beach, California.
Bannon’s megaphone is not just influential. It’s also lucrative. His show and website have promoted fellow election fraud evangelist Mike Lindell’s MyPillow business, as well as a cryptocurrency investing newsletter called TheCryptoCapitalist. (The marketers of an unproven COVID-19 treatment that Bannon promoted were sued by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission in April. The chiropractor behind the treatment denies the government's accusations.) The War Room site also contains ads from MGID, a network that places content ads that look like links to related articles and sometimes promote dubious health or financial products.
It’s not clear how much money Bannon makes from online ads. But industry data shows that the links placed by MGID are much less profitable than the video ads facilitated by Google. (MGID did not respond to a request for comment.)
The issue is that major brands likely have no idea that they’re advertising on the site of one of the biggest perpetrators of bogus election fraud claims. That disconnect between brands and where their ads and money end up is a failure of digital advertising and a concern for consumers, according to industry experts.
“Over the past few years, consumers have become really vocal about buying from brands that are aligned with their values,” said Jammi of Check My Ads. “When they find out a brand is funding toxic content, that matters to them.”
A similar scenario has played out with ads that aired during Bannon’s podcast airing on a right-wing website called Real America’s Voice. In March, for instance, an ad for prescription coupon company GoodRx appeared on Bannon’s show.
“We take the trust and reputation of our brand very seriously and have strict advertising standards in place, which include not participating in heavily editorialized news programming,” the company said in an emailed statement to ProPublica. “This placement was an error in the media buying policies.”
Bannon’s show also airs on Pluto TV, a streaming service owned by ViacomCBS that is available on Roku and other devices. This month, the show on Pluto featured ads for such major companies as Men’s Wearhouse, Lexus and Procter … Gamble, according to monitoring by the liberal watchdog Media Matters. As with the Google video ads on the War Room website, these ads are not placed directly, and companies were at a loss to explain why they had appeared on Bannon’s show. (Bannon’s podcast is available in the Google Podcasts app, but the company does not place ads in it.) A Lexus spokesperson said the company’s ad was briefly on Bannon’s site and taken down. A spokesperson for Procter … Gamble did not respond to a request for comment.
“Our marketing spend follows targeted customers, rather than choosing specific programs we want to appear alongside,” said Mike Stefanov, a spokesperson for Tailored Brands, which owns Men’s Wearhouse. “The team continually refines the criteria used, but the appearance of advertising on a specific program does not necessarily mean the company agrees with or endorses the views espoused.”
Many of former President Donald Trump's false claims of election fraud have focused on Fulton County, a heavily Democratic area that includes Atlanta. (photo: Brandon Bell/Reuters)
Desperate to overturn his election loss, Donald Trump and his team spun a sprawling voter-fraud fiction, casting two rank-and-file election workers, a mother and her daughter, as the main villains. The women endured months of death threats and racist taunts - and one went into hiding.
At its center were two masterminds: a clerical worker in a county election office, and her mom, who had taken a temporary job to help count ballots. The alleged plot: Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and mother Ruby Freeman cheated Trump by pulling fake ballots from suitcases hidden under tables at a ballot-counting center. In early December, the campaign began raining down allegations on the two Black women.
Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, falsely claimed that video footage showed the women engaging in “surreptitious illegal activity” and acting suspiciously, like drug dealers “passing out dope.” In early January, Trump himself singled out Freeman, by name, 18 times in a now-famous call in which he pressed Georgia officials to alter the state’s results. He called the 62-year-old temp worker a “professional vote scammer,” a “hustler” and a “known political operative” who “stuffed the ballot boxes.”
Freeman made a series of 911 emergency calls in the days after she was publicly identified in early December by the president’s camp. In a Dec. 4 call, she told the dispatcher she’d gotten a flood of “threats and phone calls and racial slurs,” adding: “It’s scary because they’re saying stuff like, ‘We’re coming to get you. We are coming to get you.’”
Two days later, a panicked Freeman called 911 again, after hearing loud banging on her door just before 10 p.m. Strangers had come the night before, too. She begged the dispatcher for assistance. “Lord Jesus, where’s the police?” she asked, according to the recording, obtained by Reuters in a records request. “I don’t know who keeps coming to my door.”
“Please help me.”
Freeman quit her temporary election gig. Moss took time off amid the tumult. The 37-year-old election worker, known for her distinctive blonde braids, changed her appearance. Moss often avoided going out in public after her phone number was widely circulated online. Trump supporters threatened Moss’s teenage son by phone in tirades laced with racial slurs, said her supervisor, Fulton County Elections Director Richard Barron.
Freeman and Moss did not grant interviews for this report. This account of the campaign against them – including previously unreported details of their ordeal – is based on interviews with Barron, another colleague and a person with direct knowledge of their ordeal, along with an examination of police reports, state records, 911 call records, internal county emails and social media posts. Reuters also reviewed the video footage that Trump and his allies used to attack Freeman and Moss and hours of testimony by the former president’s surrogates at state hearings.
The threats hurled at Freeman and Moss are part of a broader campaign of fear against election administrators that has been chronicled by Reuters this year. Previous reports detailed how Trump supporters, inspired by his false stolen-election claims, have terrorized election officials and workers in battleground states. In all, Reuters has documented more than 800 intimidating messages to election officials in 14 states, including about 100 that could warrant prosecution, according to legal experts.
The story of Moss and Freeman shows how some of the top members of the Trump camp – including the incumbent president himself – conducted an intensive effort to publicly demonize individual election workers in the pursuit of overturning the election.
Some of these targets – including the top election officials in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona – are notable political figures in their states. Others, like Moss and Freeman, have been rank-and-file workers. Moss’s full-time job pays about $36,000 a year. Freeman’s temp gig paid $16 an hour.
Their modest incomes left the two women with little power to defend themselves against the billionaire president and his legions of backers. After Freeman went into hiding, she initially stayed with friends. They soon asked her to leave, fearing for their own security, so she moved from one Airbnb to another, never staying in one place for too long, said a person with direct knowledge of her movements. Freeman went to great lengths to conceal her identity and location, the person said. She stopped using credit cards and started using a system for electronic money transfers that caters to people wanting to keep a low profile, the person said.
The constant threats so terrified the two women that they did not return calls from Fulton County District Attorney’s Office investigators who wanted to talk to them this summer as part of their probe into whether Trump illegally interfered with Georgia’s 2020 election, Barron said. “They wouldn’t even answer the phone,” he said.
No arrests have been made in connection with the threats against the women, and almost no one has been held accountable for threatening election workers nationwide, as Reuters reported on Sept. 8. After the news organization reported the continuing harassment of election officials and their families in June, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a task force to investigate threats to election workers. It has said it takes all threats of violence seriously.
The threats against the mother and daughter followed a hearing of Georgia lawmakers on Dec. 3, 2020, where the Trump campaign falsely claimed that a surveillance video from a ballot-processing room at State Farm Arena in Atlanta amounted to “shocking” evidence of “fraud.” A volunteer Trump campaign attorney, Jacki Pick, said two unnamed Fulton County election workers had engaged in maneuvers involving "suitcases" of ballots pulled out from under a table and illegally counted through the night. She identified them as the “lady with the blonde braids” – Moss – and an “older” woman with the “name of Ruby” on her shirt – Freeman.
In a statement, Pick defended her presentation. “There was nothing normal about what the video showed,” she said.
Giuliani, who spearheaded Trump’s effort to overturn the election results, appeared at another hearing with Georgia lawmakers the next week, on Dec. 10. He showed snippets of the video and repeatedly identified Moss and Freeman by name, calling them “crooks” who “obviously” stole votes.
But the full video revealed the women were legally counting ballots, a state investigation found.
“I will go to my grave knowing that Rudy Giuliani looked the state senators in the eye and just flat-out lied,” said Gabriel Sterling, a senior Georgia election official and a Republican, in an interview with Reuters.
Trump and Giuliani did not respond to comment requests.
Some conservative media outlets covered the false story as fact, giving it credibility among millions of Trump supporters. The Gateway Pundit, a far-right website known for promoting conspiracy theories, cast Freeman and Moss as “crooked” operatives who counted “illegal ballots from a suitcase stashed under a table!” Other Republican officials reinforced the Trump team’s message.
“Caught on candid camera,” tweeted Congressman Jody Hice, a Georgia Republican. “Say it with me... F R A U D.”
Hice did not respond to requests for comment. The Gateway Pundit declined to comment.
As the Trump camp spread falsehoods about the two women, Freeman told police her phone wouldn’t stop ringing with menacing messages. By Dec. 4, she had received about “300 emails, 75 text messages, a large amount of phone calls and multiple Facebook posts,” according to a police incident report.
And people kept coming to her house, she told a 911 dispatcher on Dec. 6.
“Somebody was banging on my door, and now somebody is banging on the door again,” she said.
Facts and falsehoods
Before the Trump team upended her life, Moss had loved her job, colleagues say. She began working at the Fulton County Elections Office as a temporary worker. After several years, she was offered a full-time job in 2017. She cried when she got the promotion, Barron recalled. Four years later, the official county letter offering her the position remains pinned to her cubicle wall.
As a registration officer, Moss handles voter applications, including those for absentee ballots, and helps process the actual votes on election day, in addition to other clerical duties such as working in the mail room. Her data-entry work, Barron said, may be “the fastest in Georgia.”
Her mother, Freeman, had also worked in local government, as a staff member at a center that coordinated 911 emergency calls for Fulton, a county of one million people that includes Atlanta. After retiring, she started a small boutique business selling fashion accessories.
Heading into the election, Fulton County had been hit hard by COVID-19. Many election staff were sick. One died. The first big test, a June primary election, went off poorly, marred by long lines and malfunctioning voting machines. Moss asked her mother if she could help with November’s election. Freeman signed up as a temp.
Election Day – Nov. 3, 2020 – got off to a difficult start. Moss arrived at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena before dawn. The floors were drenched from a ceiling leak in the space where mail-in ballots were processed. The leak was fixed by about 8:30 a.m., causing a brief delay in the count.
Though minor, the mishap made national headlines. Georgia’s biggest and most heavily Democratic county was a crucial battleground for Democrats hoping to flip the traditionally red state. Before the vote, Trump had been insisting that a winner be declared on Election Day. He aimed to cast doubt on the validity of absentee ballots, which are often tallied late and were widely expected to favor Democrat Joe Biden. News of the leak-related delay added tension to the closely watched Georgia race.
By about 10 p.m. that night, workers had been on the job for nearly 18 hours. Ralph Jones, the voter-registration chief, told some staff they could go home to get rest, he said, halting the scanning of uncounted ballots for the night. Most packed up and left. Some news reporters and election observers, who monitor vote-counting for both political parties, did the same.
Just a few workers remained, including Moss and Freeman. The arena’s surveillance footage showed them sealing and packing the remaining absentee ballots in black plastic boxes for storage overnight, a standard security measure against tampering.
The close election and national spotlight added urgency to the counting. Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, criticized Fulton County on TV for pausing the processing of ballots when many other counties had already finished. Chris Harvey, the state elections director at the time, called Barron, urging him to keep going, Sterling said.
At about 11 p.m., Barron phoned registration chief Jones and told him to resume counting, Barron said. Moss walked over to a table draped with black cloth, leaned down and pulled out the containers of mail-in ballots her team had sealed up about an hour earlier. Workers unpacked them and counted votes into the night under the watch of an independent monitor and a state investigator, according to state and county officials and a Reuters review of the surveillance video.
For the next month, Trump and his supporters attacked the legitimacy of the state’s election, which Biden won by 11,779 votes.
On Dec 3, Georgia’s Republican lawmakers held their first hearings on “election integrity.” That morning, Trump went on Twitter to tout a live broadcast of the hearings by far-right news channel One America News Network. “Georgia hearings now on @OANN. Amazing!” he told his 88 million followers in a tweet at 11:09 a.m.
At a little past 1 p.m., Pick, the volunteer Trump campaign attorney, told the lawmakers she had “evidence” of “fraud” – excerpts of footage from the arena’s surveillance video, which she showed at the hearing. Pick, a Republican donor, said a “lady with the blonde braids,” referring to Moss, had told the media and Republican observers to leave. Once those people were “cleared out,” Pick said, the same woman pulled out “suitcases” of ballots hidden under a black table.
“So what are these ballots doing there separate from all the other ballots?” Pick asked. “And why are they only counting them whenever the place is cleared out with no witnesses?” She said the site’s “multiple” scanning machines could have allowed workers to process enough ballots to account for Biden’s margin of victory.
As Pick spoke, a Trump legal adviser, Jenna Ellis, tweeted about the “SHOCKING...VIDEO EVIDENCE” being presented at the hearing, declaring a “FRAUD!!!” Minutes later, the Trump campaign tweeted a One America News clip of Pick’s presentation.
“Wow! Blockbuster testimony,” Trump tweeted. “This alone leads to an easy win of the State!”
By evening, Pick’s excerpts of the State Farm Arena video had gone viral. Sean Hannity, the highest-rated host on conservative cable-news giant Fox News, called it a “bombshell” with “what appears to be extensive law violations.”
Ellis, Fox News and One America News did not respond to comment requests.
The Gateway Pundit identified one of the workers as Ruby Freeman. Other far-right outlets followed suit.
“What’s Up, Ruby? Crooked Operative Filmed Pulling Out Suitcases of Ballots in Georgia IS IDENTIFIED,” read a Gateway Pundit headline. It posted six photos of her, including one captioned, “CROOK GETS CAUGHT.” The story, shared by 38,000 people on Facebook, also identified Freeman’s business, LaRuby’s Unique Treasures. A follow-up Pundit story identified the woman in the blonde braids as Shaye Moss.
At about 10 p.m. that night, the threats began. Strangers rang, emailed and texted her with threats and racist taunts. They tagged her friends on Facebook and said “horrible” things about her, she later told police.
She read the 911 dispatcher the “What’s Up, Ruby?” headline, saying she believed the Gateway Pundit story might have triggered the harassment.
Over the next three days, local and state officials dismantled the Trump campaign’s claims. The so-called suitcases were standard ballot containers and the votes were valid and counted properly, they said. A Georgia secretary of state’s investigator concluded that observers and media hadn’t been asked to leave the arena and that “there were no mystery ballots that were brought in from an unknown location and hidden under tables.”
‘She should be shot’
On Dec. 4, the day after Pick’s presentation, Freeman told police she had received hundreds of threats at her home in neighboring Cobb County, according to a county police report.
The Trump campaign continued to portray Moss and Freeman as criminals. At a Dec. 5 rally in Valdosta, Georgia, Trump played excerpts of the State Farm Arena video on a giant screen, narrated by a host for far-right news channel One America News. The footage revealed a “crime” committed by “Democrat workers,” Trump said.
The next day, Dec. 6, a Gateway Pundit story described Freeman and Moss as “infamous in the annals of voter corruption.” That evening, Freeman called the police again.
She was scared, she said. Strangers had started to show up at her home, ordering pizzas for delivery to her address in an attempt to lure her out, according to a Cobb County Police incident report. She showed the officer 428 emails and text messages on her cell phone, almost all of them threats, the report said.
Cobb County Police said no one was arrested in response to the reported threats and declined further comment.
Freeman’s home address had been posted on Twitter and Parler, a social media platform popular among conservatives. Some Trump supporters publicly called for her and her daughter’s execution or hurled racial and misogynistic slurs at them on Facebook and other online forums.
“The coon c---s should be locked up for voter fraud!!!” wrote a Parler user. “She should be shot,” said a Facebook commenter under a Dec. 7 Gateway Pundit story. “YOU SHOULD BE HUNG OR SHOT FOR YOUR CRIMES,” wrote another Facebook commenter.
As the threats continued, Giuliani told the Dec. 10 hearing of Georgia lawmakers that he would “like to focus on the two people that are involved in this” – Freeman and Moss. In addition to “stealing votes,” he accused them of hacking into Georgia’s voting machines while passing USB thumb drives between them, “as if they’re vials of heroin and cocaine. I mean it’s obvious to anyone who is a criminal investigator or prosecutor, they’re engaged in surreptitious illegal activity.”
The Nov. 3 ceiling leak at State Farm Arena was, according to Giuliani, a “phony excuse” to clear observers and media from the voting area so Freeman and Moss could go “about their dirty, crooked business.” The leak was real – a urinal had overflowed – but state investigators found there was nothing to his claims about the women.
On Jan. 2, Trump placed his call to Secretary of State Raffensperger and other Georgia election officials, urging them to find enough votes to swing the election his way. They refused. Trump later denounced Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, who along with his family was inundated with death threats from the president’s supporters.
A recording of that call was leaked to reporters and published the next day, drawing global attention. Trump is heard claiming Freeman pulled suitcases “stuffed with votes” from under a table and scanned each ballot “three times.” She was “a professional vote scammer and hustler,” he said.
Two days later, on Jan. 4, Freeman again called the police and reported that strangers had come to her home, threatening that it was “just a matter of time” before they come for her and her family, according to a recording of a 911 call obtained by Reuters.
Freeman was so frightened that she refused to give her number to the 911 operator. “I’m just afraid right now of giving my number to anybody, even the police,” she said.
‘Safe house’
Barron, the supervisor of the two women, had kept in close touch as tormentors hounded them through December. The harassment increased after Trump’s call with Georgia officials went public, he said, especially for Freeman.
“Once President Trump mentioned her in that call to Raffensperger, it got even worse,” Barron said. “And it just kept going.”
By the end of January, dozens of stories in far-right and conservative publications had repeated Trump’s allegations against Moss and Freeman. On Parler, Freeman’s name featured in 1,512 comments and 204 posts, according to a Reuters review of archived posts on the social media platform.
“Only a matter of time before some vengeful person slips in through an open window of Ruby Freeman’s home and bludgeons her to death” with a voting machine, read a Parler comment on Jan. 4.
On Jan. 25, Barron emailed Fulton County police chief Wade Yates and other officials. The family needed protection, he said. “Can we do anything to help her and her family with security?” he asked, referring to Moss, in the email, reviewed by Reuters. Yates suggested hiring an armed guard at a cost of $22.50 per hour, according to an email. “We can work out funding details next week,” he said.
The women, however, never received funding for security, Barron said. And the cost was too high to pay for themselves, he said, exceeding Freeman’s $16 hourly wage.
Asked why Freeman and Moss didn’t receive a security detail, Fulton County Police said in a statement that it can’t approve budgeting in such a case and referred questions to the county government. The county government said it did not provide security for the women because the messages they received did not rise to the level of criminal threats that could be prosecuted. The decision was not financial in nature, it added.
In February, Moss told NPR about some of the harassment aimed at her and her mother for a report about the Trump camp’s pressure on Fulton County. After that, she kept a low profile.
In the spring and summer, Moss worked remotely a few days at a time to avoid going out in public. She spoke of feeling like she was being followed, Barron said. Moss also took sick days when the stress became overwhelming. Threatening calls came to an old cell phone of hers, which her teenage son used for remote school learning during the pandemic, he added.
Freeman left her home and went into hiding in an undisclosed location after Trump’s Jan. 2 call triggered more threats, Barron said. Moss blamed herself for upending her mom’s life, Barron said, and expressed regret for asking her to help with the elections.
The threats continued through the summer. In a July 1 email, Moss told Fulton County’s senior election officials she was shaken. A few weeks earlier, someone had put photos of her car and license plate online, Barron said, and strangers were contacting her family and friends.
“They are impersonating people like reporters, journalists, etc. to get info on me from them saying they are attempting to make a citizen's arrest,” Moss wrote in the email. “My mom is currently in a safe house,” she added.
On Aug. 14, a fresh Gateway Pundit article repeated Trump’s old allegations against them. “These two election workers took ballots out from under a table on Election night and jammed thousands of ballots into the tabulators numerous times,” it said.
New threats ensued. One reader, posting a comment under the story, evoked the history of lynching Black people in the American South: “Those two should be strung up from the nearest lamppost and set on fire.”
‘Target on our back’
Trump’s conspiracy claims turned Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold containing most of Atlanta, a majority black city, into a hotbed of threats against other election workers.
Nearly 100 messages to election officials documented by Reuters this year targeted officials and workers in the county, whose fast-growing population is making Georgia more competitive for Democrats.
Between 2004 and 2020, the share of white voters in Georgia dropped from 70% to 60%, and Democrats made significant gains, winning last year in the counties around Atlanta and turning the once-reliably Republican state into an electoral battleground, with Fulton on the front line.
“We know we have a target on our back,” said Robb Pitts, 79, chairman of Fulton County’s Board of Commissioners and a two-decade veteran of Atlanta’s city council. Pitts, who is Black, reported receiving threats himself, including a racist email in his inbox calling for his execution. “Who would have thought that this kind of thing would be happening in this country?”
The threats are happening elsewhere, too. In a Reuters survey of 30 county election offices in six hotly contested states in the 2020 presidential race, 13 said they were aware of threats or harassment directed at local election officials and staff.
Barron, Fulton County’s elections director for eight and a half years, said he was sickened by the racial slurs and threats against his Black staff members. “This is the best group of people I’ve ever worked with,” said Barron, who is white.
The son of a retired state judge, Barron began his career in elections in 1999 recruiting and training poll workers in Travis County, Texas. He served in other election roles before landing the top job in Fulton County’s elections office in 2013. After the intense scrutiny of the 2020 vote and the barrage of threats against him and his staff, Barron says he’s had enough.
He plans to leave his job at the end of the year. He said he’s disgusted by the vilification of election workers like those on his staff.
“It’s not worth it anymore,” he said.
But Moss is staying, Barron said. He says he understands why. As a single mom, she needs the paycheck and the health insurance.
Yemeni Red Crescent workers remove the body of a casualty following a Saudi-led airstrike in Dhamar. (photo: Yahya Arhab/EPA)
A humpback whale breaching off South Africa's Wild Coast. (photo: Reinhard Dirscherl/Getty)
The fossil-fuel giant had planned to search for oil and gas reserves by setting off underwater explosions along a stretch of South Africa known as the Wild Coast, according to MSN. The explorations were slated to begin December 1. However, four environmental and human rights organizations filed a legal challenge Monday night to stop the blasting, Greenpeace Africa said.
“Shell’s activities threaten to destroy the Wild Coast and the lives of the people living there,” Greenpeace Africa senior climate campaigner Happy Khambule said in a statement about the challenge. “We know that Shell is a climate criminal, destroying people’s lives and the planet for profit.”
The Wild Coast stretches along South Africa’s Eastern Cape from Morgan Bay in the south and Port St Johns, according to MSN. It is rich in biodiversity and an important habitat for marine life.
“To give you an idea about the Wild Coast, where my family come from, it is the most incredibly breathtaking place one could ever dream of,” concerned citizen Tracy Carter told MSN. “The ocean is lush and abundant with sea life in all shapes and sizes.”
The testing was also slated to begin when Southern right and humpback whales are migrating back from South Africa to Antarctica after the breeding period, and the testing could injure or kill the traveling families.
The exploratory plans were first approved in 2014, before the country passed its One Environmental System legislation to coordinate mining and environmental regulations, The Guardian reported.
The environmental groups behind the court case — Border Deep Sea Angling Association, Kei Mouth Ski Boat Club, Natural Justice and Greenpeace Africa — argue that the exploration is illegal because Shell has not applied for the necessary permit under the National Environmental Management Act (NEMA).
They say that the seismic testing would mean that a vessel would fire air guns every 10 seconds for five months. The shock waves would reverberate through three kilometers (approximately 1.9 miles) of water and 40 kilometers (approximately 25 miles) below the seabed into the earth’s crust. This would harm whales, dolphins, sharks, seals, penguins and smaller animals like crabs. It would also have a negative impact on the human communities of eXolobeni, Nqamakwe and Port Saint Johns, who consider the land sacred and rely on eco-tourism and fishing for their livelihoods.
“The needs and rights of these communities, the stewards of our seas, land and biodiversity, far outweigh the selfish interests of companies like Shell,” Cullinan … Associates, the law firm representing the four groups, said, according to The Guardian.
In response, Shell has argued that its actions won’t harm marine life.
“[T]he impacts are well understood and mitigated against when performing seismic surveys. This is supported by decades of scientific research and the establishment of international best practice guidelines,” the company said, as New Frame reported. “There is no indication that seismic surveys are linked to (whale and dolphin) strandings.”
However, more than 375,000 South Africans disagree. They have signed a petition started by the Oceans Not Oil Coalition to ask Minister of Environmental Affairs Barbara Creecy to withdraw approval for the testing. They argue that Shell’s actions don’t just have local impacts.
“At a time when world leaders are making promises and decisions to step away from fossil fuels because climate science has shown we cannot burn our existing reserves (let alone drill for more), offshore oil and gas Operation Phakisa is pushing ever harder to get its hands on a local supply of gas,” the petition reads. “Shell must answer for how the harms done during this survey and any exploration drilling done hereafter are part of its energy transition plan to control global warming.”
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