28 February 20
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27 February 20
Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith | How to Reform the Pardon Power
Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, Lawfare
Excerpt: "President Trump is reportedly 'obsessed' with the pardon power, which he apparently understands to be the unbounded constitutional authority to dispense forgiveness as he pleases."
Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, Lawfare
Excerpt: "President Trump is reportedly 'obsessed' with the pardon power, which he apparently understands to be the unbounded constitutional authority to dispense forgiveness as he pleases."
EXCERPT:
These proposed reforms are not ruled out by the strong formulations of the pardon power found in some old Supreme Court cases. Key cases often cited for the proposition that the pardon power is absolute were resolved on other grounds and are thus technically not binding precedent. Other decisions contained sweeping statements of presidential power that went beyond what was required to decide the particular matter before the Supreme Court. Congress has much more room to regulate abuses of the pardon power than is commonly assumed.
The proposed reform legislation will not solve every form of pardon abuse. It cannot stop a president from pardoning family members, friends or allies—a practice that did not start with Trump. But it can lay down a marker that the pardon power is not “absolute.” And it could be a tonic for crumbling norms of restraint. It is not healthy for a president, especially the current one, to think of any power as absolute except for possible political penalties. A president who understands that certain pardons or commutations implicate criminal liability may be more inclined to turn to legal advisers in cases that present the reality or appearance of self-dealing. And perhaps more importantly, the legal advisers the president turns to might be more constrained themselves, and constraining of the president, since they will worry more about aiding and abetting presidential crimes.
U.S. Army personnel. (photo: U.S. Army)
Trump Endorsed a Risky Antidepressant for Veterans. Lawmakers Want to Know if His Mar-a-Lago Pals Had a Stake in the Drugmaker.
Isaac Arnsdorf, ProPublica
Arnsdorf writes: "House Democrats are expanding their investigation of outside influence at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, examining whether a push to use a new antidepressant from Johnson & Johnson was advanced by a group of unofficial advisers who convened at Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump's private club."
Isaac Arnsdorf, ProPublica
Arnsdorf writes: "House Democrats are expanding their investigation of outside influence at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, examining whether a push to use a new antidepressant from Johnson & Johnson was advanced by a group of unofficial advisers who convened at Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump's private club."
The chairmen of the House veterans affairs and oversight committees sent letters last week asking for emails and financial records from the three advisers, Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter, physician Bruce Moskowitz and lawyer Marc Sherman. The Democrats are seeking, among other documents, any communications the men had with Johnson & Johnson and financial records showing whether they had any stake in the company.
As revealed by ProPublica in 2018, Trump gave the three men sweeping influence over the VA despite their lack of any relevant experience, such as having served in the U.S. military or government. VA officials called the trio the “Mar-a-Lago Crowd” because they met at the president’s getaway in Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump has enthusiastically endorsed a drug called Spravato, made by Johnson & Johnson, as a treatment to help prevent veterans from committing suicide. The federal government has faced criticism for not doing enough to curb suicides by veterans, which the VA says occur at a rate of 20 a day. While the problem has persisted for years, it gained more attention after a series of deaths in VA parking lots.
Through a spokesman representing all three men, Perlmutter, Moskowitz and Sherman said they had no role in the VA’s consideration of the Johnson & Johnson drug. They said they’re reviewing the committees’ request for documents. (The congressional committees have the power to issue subpoenas but usually start by asking for voluntary cooperation.)
“Our volunteer activity was motivated solely by a desire to see America’s veterans get the best possible care from the VA,” the men said in a statement. “We had no authority over decision making, rather we offered advice for VA leadership to accept or reject as they saw fit. We did not seek or receive any personal or financial gain.”
In 2017, the Mar-a-Lago advisers worked with the VA and Johnson & Johnson on a suicide-prevention awareness campaign that culminated in an appearance at the New York Stock Exchange. The event put the VA secretary alongside Johnson & Johnson representatives and superhero characters from Perlmutter’s company, Marvel, and its parent, Disney.
Johnson & Johnson is a pharmaceutical giant with annual revenue above $80 billion, 130,000 employees and federal contracts worth more than $100 million a year. It’s one of the largest U.S. companies by market capitalization and spends more than $5 million a year on federal lobbying. “Our interactions with the VA and other payers regarding coverage of Spravato has followed all laws, procedures and ethical standards,” company spokesman Ernie Knewitz said in a statement.
On March 5, 2019, the FDA approved Spravato to treat depression. It is a nasal spray form of esketamine, a variant of the anesthetic ketamine. The FDA imposed restrictions on Spravato’s use because of “the risk of serious adverse outcomes” and “the potential for abuse and misuse.” The regulator took the unusual measure of requiring a health professional to monitor a patient for two hours after taking Spravato.
Several segments discussing the drug aired on Fox News and other news channels on March 6. On Fox News, Marc Siegel, a regular contributor to the channel and a primary care physician at NYU Langone Health, said, “I’m a huge believer in this drug, especially for psychiatrists to have it for a suicidal patient.”
Some experts have been more cautious about the evidence supporting the drug, pointing to weak results from clinical trials and shortcomings in the trials’ methodologies. In an Oct. 31 article in the medical journal the Lancet, Erick Turner, a psychiatrist at Oregon Health and Science University and the Portland VA, noted that the FDA’s approval relied on fewer trials than usual. In one of the trials, the finding of the drug’s effectiveness was driven by one study site where the drug performed especially well. In response, Johnson & Johnson said it reanalyzed its patient data to exclude the outlier site. The new result barely met the threshold for being statistically significant, Turner said.
“For any other drug they would have said, ‘Oh, this doesn’t meet our criteria and we’re not going to approve it,’ but they bent over backwards for this one,” Turner, who served on the FDA panel that reviewed Spravato but missed the session where the drug was discussed, said in an interview. “There’s risk that clinicians might say, ‘The FDA approved it, it must work’ and leave it at that. It’s not that simple.”
In one of the trials, six people taking the drug died, including three by suicide. One of them, a 41-year-old man, drove his motorcycle into a tree 26 hours after taking the drug, according to the transcript of the FDA’s hearing on the drug. There were no deaths among the patients taking a placebo.
“I’m concerned that it may be presented to some desperate patients as some sort of panacea. It is not,” Jess Fiedorowicz, a professor of psychiatry, epidemiology and internal medicine at the University of Iowa who served on the advisory panel that reviewed Spravato, said in an emailed response to questions. “The effect sizes are small at best and may even be exaggerated.”
J. Wesley Boyd, a psychiatry professor specializing in bioethics at Harvard Medical School, objected to the cost of Spravato given its similarity to ketamine, which is available much more cheaply. “It was derived from a very inexpensive drug with a minor chemical tweak and then marketed at an outrageously high price,” he said in an interview. “To see it become the next big drug according to the hype is beyond ridiculous.”
An FDA spokesman, Jeremy Kahn, said the agency “works diligently to ensure that all products are evaluated equally and fairly, no matter the company, product or necessity.”
After the FDA approval, Johnson & Johnson immediately set its sights on the VA, according to emails obtained by ProPublica through the Freedom of Information Act. On March 6, the day after the FDA acted, a company official emailed Deborah Scher, an adviser to VA Secretary Robert Wilkie, from a Spravato launch event, saying, “We have been talking about you and the VA throughout the day.”
A day later, on March 7, Wilkie talked with Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky, according to an email between Scher and a company liaison. Scher replied that the VA’s top health official, Richard Stone, was taking charge of getting Spravato into the VA system. “He says this project is well underway,” Scher told the Johnson & Johnson contact. “He has coordinated all of the appropriate leaders from pharmacy, mental health, etc.”
Wilkie had the conversation with Gorsky at the urging of Trump, according to the president’s own account. “I had seen it somewhere, and I’ve read it, regularly, quite a bit about it,” Trump said of Spravato at a White House event on opioids on June 12. “I said, ‘Order — corner the market on it and give it to anybody that has the problem.’”
The White House declined to comment on where Trump saw or read about Spravato. Knewitz, the Johnson & Johnson spokesman, said the company hasn’t discussed the drug with the president.
Johnson & Johnson’s sales team did reach out to VA staff, according to an agency email obtained by ProPublica. In June 2019, a VA pharmacy leader told the company such contacts should cease until the agency had finalized its policies for the drug. Later that month, the agency decided to approve the drug for use in its pharmacies but stopped short of requiring them to carry it.
“While we are pleased to see that the VA is supportive of treating appropriate veterans with Spravato, we are disappointed in this decision as it will make access more difficult for U.S. veterans who need new options,” Knewitz said.
VA press secretary Christina Mandreucci said the agency will prioritize the medication for patients who have not responded to other treatments and will follow special procedures in line with the FDA’s requirement. “VA will closely monitor the use of esketamine in veterans to more fully understand its relative safety and effectiveness as compared to other available treatments,” she said in a statement. “Based on this information, VA may revise its clinical guidance and formulary status if warranted.”
Trump’s push for the VA to “corner the market” on Spravato despite doctors’ concerns about its safety and effectiveness was first reported in June by the Center for Public Integrity.
In addition to Perlmutter, Moskowitz and Sherman, the House Democrats also directed their letter to Perlmutter’s wife, Laura, who was involved in meetings and emails with VA officials. The couple was among Trump’s biggest donors in 2016, contributing almost $7.5 million to Republican causes, according to federal elections data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. The spokesman for Perlmutter, Moskowitz and Sherman declined to comment for Laura Perlmutter beyond the group’s statement.
The trio communicated with VA leaders daily, weighing in on all manner of policy and personnel matters. Laura Perlmutter was looped in on many of those emails, according to records obtained through FOIA by ProPublica and by the liberal activist group American Oversight. According to former VA Secretary David Shulkin’s book about his time in office, Laura Perlmutter participated in a meeting over the 2017 winter holidays at which the Mar-a-Lago Crowd scolded Shulkin for not visiting them enough and indicated they had lost trust in him. Shulkin was fired in 2018.
Laura Perlmutter was also present for a Mar-a-Lago meeting with Shulkin’s successor, Wilkie. “There is a template in place based on your efforts to move this institution out of the Industrial Age,” Wilkie said in an email to the group after the meeting.
In addition to the House Democrats’ probe, the Government Accountability Office is also investigating the Mar-a-Lago trio.
Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: AFP)
Sanders Slams Trump for Suing New York Times: 'Trying to Dismantle the Right to a Free Press'
Reuters
Excerpt: "U.S. President Donald Trump's re-election campaign said on Wednesday it was filing a libel suit accusing the New York Times of intentionally publishing a false opinion article that suggested Russia and the campaign had an overarching deal in the 2016 U.S. election."
READ MORE
Reuters
Excerpt: "U.S. President Donald Trump's re-election campaign said on Wednesday it was filing a libel suit accusing the New York Times of intentionally publishing a false opinion article that suggested Russia and the campaign had an overarching deal in the 2016 U.S. election."
READ MORE
Critics say the Trump administration's emphasis on denaturalizations underscores the idea that naturalized citizens have fewer rights than those born in the United States. (photo: Wilfredo Lee/AP)
Justice Dept. Establishes Office to Denaturalize Immigrants
Katie Benner, The New York Times
Benner writes: "The Justice Department said Wednesday that it had created an official section in its immigration office to strip citizenship rights from naturalized immigrants, a move that gives more heft to the Trump administration's broad efforts to remove from the country immigrants who have committed crimes."
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Katie Benner, The New York Times
Benner writes: "The Justice Department said Wednesday that it had created an official section in its immigration office to strip citizenship rights from naturalized immigrants, a move that gives more heft to the Trump administration's broad efforts to remove from the country immigrants who have committed crimes."
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Alfonzo Tucker photographed at his home in Tuscaloosa. (photo: Jonathon Kenos/Guardian UK)
How Alabama Blocked a Man From Voting Because He Owed $4
Sam Levine, Guardian UK
Levine writes: "Faced with the staggering amount, Tucker contacted Blair Bowie, an attorney at Campaign Legal Center, a Washington DC voting rights group. It took Bowie 15 minutes to realize Alabama officials made a huge mistake."
Sam Levine, Guardian UK
Levine writes: "Faced with the staggering amount, Tucker contacted Blair Bowie, an attorney at Campaign Legal Center, a Washington DC voting rights group. It took Bowie 15 minutes to realize Alabama officials made a huge mistake."
Alfonzo Tucker Jr is just one of millions of Americans who have been entangled in a racially biased system – and deprived of their democratic right
In 2018, with the midterm elections approaching, Alfonzo Tucker Jr was particularly eager to vote. The mayor of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Tucker’s hometown, was running for governor, and the year before he had canvassed for Doug Jones, a Democrat running in a closely watched US Senate race.
But Tucker wasn’t able to cast a ballot – state officials refused to even let him register. It wasn’t until weeks later that he learned why he had been deprived of the right to vote.
The US is founded on the promise of democracy and fair representation, but it is also the country where minorities are frequently disenfranchised for political gain. Among the most vulnerable are millions of Americans, disproportionately African Americans, like Tucker, who have been entangled in America’s racially biased criminal justice system, and losing civil liberties like voting as a result.
The barriers facing Americans like Tucker, advocates say, are modern adaptations of poll taxes and other devices which were designed to keep people from the voting booths during the Jim Crow era – when white politicians used the law to curb the civil rights of African Americans. Alabama is one of 30 states that requires people with felony convictions to pay back the financial obligations associated with their sentence before they can vote again.
Tucker’s case is particularly glaring. He lives less than a hundred miles north-west of Selma, the birthplace of the voting rights movement in America. This week, civil rights leaders are commemorating the 55th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches led by Martin Luther King Jr and civil rights activists as they protested against laws preventing African Americans from voting. Many were brutally beaten in Selma during the protests.
The specific policy that had ensnared Tucker dates back to the turn of the 20th century when Alabama leaders, openly seeking to preserve white supremacy, stripped anyone convicted of a crime of “moral turpitude”, among other offenses, of the right to vote.
“What is it that we want to do? Why, it is within the limits imposed by the federal constitution, to establish white supremacy in this state,” John Knox, the chair of the convention, said at the time. “If we would have white supremacy, we must establish it by law – not by force or fraud,” he added.
Tucker said the legacy of that discrimination affects the lives of people like him today.
“I read about the challenges during the 60s, 50s, that black people had to overcome just to vote,” Tucker said. “It’s the same thing going on in 2020.”
Tucker, who sometimes goes by Zo, speaks softly and deliberately. He has lived in Tuscaloosa his whole life, now in a modest house 10 minutes outside of downtown. He says he would have left the city where he grew up, but never had the money.
Sitting in his living room, surrounded by pictures of family, Tucker said things are much different now for him than they were in the early 1990s, when he was much more “aggressive”. In the late 1980s, he got into a fight at a club with a University of Alabama football player and wound up being convicted of third-degree assault, a misdemeanor. A few years later, he fought with a police officer and was convicted of second-degree assault, a felony. He wound up going to prison for two years and serving several more on probation.
After he got out of prison, Tucker rebuilt his life, working at steel factories and in maintenance, and chipping away at the approximately $1,600 that the court had ordered him to pay. He had two more children, which made him want to stay out of trouble. He joined the Nation of Islam.
Before his conviction, Tucker had never voted. But in prison, Tucker had read about Medgar Evers, who fought for equal citizenship and was assassinated in Mississippi in 1963. When he got out, he started regularly voting in elections. He and his wife Narkita would bring his young children into the voting booth with them, wanting to teach them about the importance of a single vote, and the long struggle African Americans had faced to gain access to the ballot.
But in 2013, Tucker got a letter from his state officials saying he could no longer vote.
He was angry and upset, but didn’t act immediately – the letter didn’t tell him anything about how to get his voting rights back. Then came another letter, a few years later, this time addressed to his son, Alfonzo Tucker III, who had just turned 18, and claiming that he too was ineligible to vote. The younger Tucker, however, didn’t have a criminal record. It was a mistake, possibly because he shared his father’s name.
Tucker got his son registered to vote, but the episode lit a fire in him. As the 2018 midterm elections approached, he went to an event where activists were helping people with felony convictions learn about their voting rights, and called up the Alabama board of pardons and paroles to talk about his case. Two weeks later, the board sent him a letter saying he still owed $135.10 in connection with his conviction.
Tucker, who relies in part on disability income, borrowed money from his sister to pay off the debt. But just when he thought it was settled, a courthouse clerk told him he owed money for another decades-old criminal offense – an additional $5,535.47 which she said he had to pay back to gain back his vote.
Faced with the staggering amount, Tucker contacted Blair Bowie, an attorney at Campaign Legal Center, a Washington DC voting rights group. It took Bowie 15 minutes to realize Alabama officials made a huge mistake.
Under Alabama law, people with felonies only have to pay off the money originally assessed as part of their criminal conviction to regain their voting rights. By 2018, Tucker had paid back most of what he owed. But, unbeknown to him, the state had added an additional debt of $131.10, a fee that was irrelevant to whether he could vote because it was not part of his original conviction. And the $5,535.47 debt was from a misdemeanor offense, Bowie saw, which does not cause someone to lose their voting rights in Alabama.
All that Tucker actually owed in order to vote was $4.
“What is voter suppression if not officials wrongly telling you that you can’t vote?” Bowie said. “That’s been a classic way of disenfranchising people, particularly in Alabama.”
After he paid the $135.10, Tucker drove two hours to Montgomery, the state capitol, with a friend to hand-deliver the receipt to a staffer at the board of pardons and paroles.
But weeks later he had not heard anything back. The elections came and went, and Tucker couldn’t vote. The parole board declined to comment on Tucker’s case.
Bowie eventually referred Tucker to John Paul Taylor, an organizer with the Southern Poverty Law Center, who followed up with the board and got Tucker registered to vote in 2019.
Bowie and Taylor said Tucker shouldn’t have had to rely on experts to get his voting rights back.
“Here’s a very clear example of a person who has jumped through every single hoop that you’ve given them and they’re still being denied because of something that they really don’t even know about,” Taylor said.
Meanwhile, Tucker and Bill Foster, the friend he went to Montgomery with, helped start a group in Tuscaloosa to assist people with felonies get their voting rights back. Tucker’s story helps people understand that they can in fact vote once they complete their sentence, said Larry Tucker, his cousin. And Alfonzo said he’s met other people who have wrongly been told they owe the state money.
So far, Tucker estimates that they’ve been able to help about 10 people – people like Terrance Gray, 49, who learned he was eligible to vote last year. Gray believed he had been ineligible to vote since he was released from prison in 1996.
“He told me that it will make a difference if more people go and vote,” Gray said of Tucker. “He’s always been on me about that.”
Tucker plans to cast his first ballot since the ordeal this year (he says he likes Bernie Sanders). He thinks the state should give him back the extra $131.10 that he paid.
Women walk past charred vehicles Thursday in a riot-affected area of New Delhi following clashes over a new Indian citizenship law. (photo: Adnan Abidi/Reuters)
Criticism of Police Grows After Mob Violence Kills Nearly 40 in India's Capital
Joanna Slater, The Washington Post
Slater writes: "Rahis Mohammed's voice shook as he described how a mob of 200 people arrived in his neighborhood intent on destruction while calls to police went unanswered."
Joanna Slater, The Washington Post
Slater writes: "Rahis Mohammed's voice shook as he described how a mob of 200 people arrived in his neighborhood intent on destruction while calls to police went unanswered."
EXCERPT:
“After 48 hours they have come,” Mohammed, 40, said bitterly. “They left us to die.”
As India’s capital reels from an outbreak of communal violence that has left nearly 40 people dead and 200 injured, criticism of the response by law enforcement authorities is growing.
Witnesses say police were unwilling or unable to control the mobs and, in some instances, may have participated in the worst riots in Delhi in decades.
At least one police officer is among those killed in the violence. The Delhi Police have rejected accusations that their response was slow or inadequate and denied allegations that officers encouraged rioters and beat residents. Others accused the police of shooting indiscriminately.
By Thursday, the violence in neighborhoods of northeastern Delhi had subsided. Television channels showed a senior police officer walking the streets of one riot-hit area wearing riot gear and a helmet, urging people to come out of their homes and return to daily life.
The violence came after months of protests over a controversial citizenship law enacted by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The law has intensified fears among India’s 200 million Muslims that Modi’s goal is to marginalize them and turn India into a Hindu nation.
Critics say the law, which excludes Muslim migrants from a fast-track to citizenship, runs counter to India’s secular ethos. Supporters of the law say it helps persecuted religious minorities from nearby countries. Members of Modi’s party have vilified the protesters, likening them to traitors and criminals.
This week, those tensions boiled over, triggered by a politician in Modi’s party who threatened to remove protesters holding a sit-in in northeastern Delhi. Clashes broke out late Sunday and devolved into deadly violence throughout Monday and Tuesday, including during President Trump’s visit to the city.
It is not clear whether Trump’s presence in Delhi and the attendant security demands impacted the police’s ability to respond to the riots. One news report suggested that the police had informed the government that they were short of personnel to control the violence. India’s Ministry of Home Affairs denied the report, saying that adequate forces were in place. The police force in India’s capital is controlled by the central government.
Vikram Singh, a former senior police official in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, said the fact that authorities had not arrested the politician who helped spur the violence spoke of interference by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The law should be “unsparing,” he said, not dictated by political whims.
Travelers wearing masks arrive on a direct flight from China. (photo: David Ryder/Reuters)
How the Climate Crisis Is Making the Spread of Infectious Diseases Like Coronavirus More Common
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "This novel coronavirus is just one of a whole spate of other pathogens we've seen - Ebola in West Africa, where it had never been seen before, Zika in the Americas, where it had never been seen before, new kinds of tick-borne diseases, new kinds of mosquito-borne diseases, new kinds of highly drug-resistant bacterial pathogens."
READ MORE
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "This novel coronavirus is just one of a whole spate of other pathogens we've seen - Ebola in West Africa, where it had never been seen before, Zika in the Americas, where it had never been seen before, new kinds of tick-borne diseases, new kinds of mosquito-borne diseases, new kinds of highly drug-resistant bacterial pathogens."
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