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25 March 20
James Risen | After 9/11, Richard Burr Selfishly Ignored a Tip About Domestic Spying. Now He's Betrayed Americans Again.
James Risen, The Intercept
Risen writes: "Instead of protecting the constituents he served, Burr chose to protect his political career."
James Risen, The Intercept
Risen writes: "Instead of protecting the constituents he served, Burr chose to protect his political career."
In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, a House Intelligence Committee staffer named Diane Roark was assigned to handle the committee’s oversight of the National Security Agency. Roark developed excellent contacts inside the NSA and soon discovered that in the weeks after 9/11, the agency had launched a secret, illegal program to spy on Americans.
Roark wrote a memo warning the committee’s leadership about the new domestic spying program. She was certain that the chair and ranking member would order an investigation as soon as she told them about it.
But Roark was stunned when the committee’s staff director told her to drop the matter. She was ordered not to talk to anyone, even other committee members, about what she had uncovered. What Roark didn’t know until later was that the George W. Bush White House had only briefed the “Gang of Eight” – the top House and Senate leaders, including the chair and ranking member of the House intelligence committee — about the NSA program, and those leaders were now complicit in a silent coverup of the illegal operation.
Frustrated, Roark turned in early 2002 to Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican representative at the time and a backbench member of the Intelligence Committee who had not been briefed on the program. She quietly arranged a private meeting with Burr to tell him about it, and she brought along her NSA contacts to back her up. She was risking her job by ignoring orders to keep silent, but she hoped that Burr would be just as outraged as she was about the NSA program and help her fight back and shut it down.
Sitting in Burr’s congressional office, Roark and the others told Burr in detail what they knew about the NSA program. Burr said almost nothing in response, Roark recalled in an interview for my 2014 book, “Pay Any Price.”
He never talked to Roark about the matter again, she said, and apparently never took any other action to stop the illegal surveillance of American citizens.
Instead of protecting the constituents he served, Burr chose to protect his political career. He displayed cowardice when a courageous whistleblower sought his help. He was rewarded when he was elected to the Senate in 2004 with the full backing of the Republican Party.
Now, 18 years later, Burr has responded to another great national crisis by once again looking out for his own self-interest while ignoring the interests of the American people.
On February 4, Burr, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, received a briefing about how other countries were dealing with the threat posed by the new coronavirus. As a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, he received another briefing on February 12 from government health experts about the potential impact of an epidemic and whether the U.S. was prepared.
One day later, on February 13, Burr sold 33 stock holdings worth between $628,000 to $1.7 million, according to financial disclosure reports. ProPublica first reported on his stock sales last week. The timing of Burr’s sales allowed him to avoid financial losses when the market later declined in response to the growing Covid-19 threat.
Burr’s stock sales came as President Donald Trump was claiming that the threat of the virus was being hyped by the media and his political opponents.
Publicly, Burr joined Trump and other Republicans in downplaying the threat. But not in private. Last week, NPR obtained a recording of a February 27 talk Burr gave to an exclusive group called the Tar Heel Club, which includes North Carolina political insiders, warning of the potential impact of the virus.
Before the Trump era of blatant corruption, Burr’s actions would most likely have been career-ending and could have led to criminal prosecution. While lawmakers are allowed to trade in stocks and securities, the STOCK Act, passed in 2012, bans them from exploiting nonpublic information for financial gain.
Burr has claimed that he did nothing wrong and has sought to tamp down public outrage over his actions by asking for theSenate Ethics Committee to investigate. But he shows no sign of being willing to resign from the Senate, and given the highly politicized nature of the Justice Department under Trump and Attorney General William Barr, it seems highly unlikely that he will face criminal prosecution.
In fact, the Washington that existed before Trump — the Washington that would have expressed outrage at Burr’s actions — is gone. In 2016, the Republican Party sold its soul and backed Trump. Once he won the presidency, Republican congressional leaders defended his racism, misogyny, lies, and corruption. Republicans have used their control of the Senate to protect him time and again. As a result, Trump has become convinced that he can do whatever he wants with no real consequences.
It was inevitable that the rest of Washington would eventually follow. Now, three and a half years into his presidency, Trump has created a poisonous new climate in which financial corruption is out in the open and only suckers follow the rules.
In fact, Burr was not the only lawmaker who sought to get out of the market early after receiving privileged government information. Transactions by four other senators — Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California; Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe; and Georgia Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler — have also come under scrutiny. Loeffler is married to the chair of the New York Stock Exchange, and they jointly sold stock beginning January 24, the day she attended a Senate briefing on Covid-19.
Between January 24 and February 14, Loeffler and her husband sold 27 stocks worth from $1.28 million to $3.1 million, according to her financial disclosure reports. They also bought stock in a company that provides software for teleconferencing, which has done well since so many Americans are now working remotely.
But Burr’s actions seem worse than any of the others’ because of the special position of trust he holds. As chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he is the custodian of many of the government’s most sensitive secrets. This episode inevitably raises questions about whether he may have secretly exploited his post for financial gain in the past as well.
Sen. Chuck Schumer. (photo: Getty Images)
White House, Senate Reach Deal on Trillion Stimulus Package
Alexander Bolton and Jordain Carney, The Hill
Excerpt: "The White House and Senate leaders reached a deal early Wednesday morning on a massive stimulus package they hope will keep the nation from falling into a deep recession because of the coronavirus crisis."
Alexander Bolton and Jordain Carney, The Hill
Excerpt: "The White House and Senate leaders reached a deal early Wednesday morning on a massive stimulus package they hope will keep the nation from falling into a deep recession because of the coronavirus crisis."
The revamped Senate proposal will inject approximately $2 trillion into the economy, providing tax rebates, four months expanded unemployment benefits and a slew of business tax-relief provisions aimed at shoring up individual, family and business finances.
The deal includes $500 billion for a major corporate liquidity program through the Federal Reserve, $367 billion for a small business loan program, $100 billion for hospitals and $150 billion for state and local governments.
It will also give a one-time check of $1,200 to Americans who make up to $75,000. Individuals with no or little tax liability would receive the same amount, unlike the initial GOP proposal that would have given them a minimum of $600.
The agreement caps five days of intense negotiations that started Friday morning when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) convened Republican and Democratic colleagues, with talks stretching late into the evening each of the following four days.
“At last we have a deal. ... The Senate has reached a bipartisan agreement," McConnell said during a speech on the Senate floor after 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday, pledging that the Senate would pass the package later in the day.
Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) hailed the legislation as "the largest rescue package in American history."
“This bill is far from perfect, but we believe the legislation has been improved significantly to warrant its quick consideration and passage,” he said.
The final talks were conducted among McConnell, Schumer, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, White House legislative affairs director Eric Ueland and incoming White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
Schumer kept in close touch throughout the process with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who introduced her own $2.5 trillion bill Monday.
"Ladies and gentleman, we're done. We have a deal," Ueland told reporters, breaking the news after one of the final meetings in McConnell's office after midnight Tuesday night.
Ueland noted that staffers would work into Wednesday morning to finish the text of the bill, but that when it came to some of the negotiation's largest sticking points they already have language agreed to "or we know exactly where we're going to land."
Mnuchin said early Wednesday morning that President Trump was "pleased" with the deal and urged Pelosi to take up the Senate bill and pass it without changes.
"This is a very important bipartisan legislation that is going to be very important to help American workers, American business. ... We couldn't be more pleased. Spoken to the president many times today, he's very pleased with this legislation and the impact this is going to have," he told reporters.
Pressed if that meant Trump would sign it if it reaches his desk in its current form, he added: "Absolutely."
Congress is under intense pressure to quickly pass the deal and reassure both the markets and an American public rattled by the spread of the coronavirus, with the United States having more than 55,000 confirmed cases as of Tuesday night, according to John Hopkins University.
The deal hammered out by negotiators provides $30 billion in emergency education funding, $25 billion in emergency transit funding and creates an employee retention tax credit to incentivize businesses to keep workers on payroll during the crisis.
It will also provide $25 billion in direct financial aid to struggling airlines and $4 billion for air cargo carriers, two industries that have taken a big hit in the economic downturn.
Senate Republicans on Tuesday were characterizing the direct assistance as “snap loans” instead of grants, to avoid the stigma of the proposal being called a bailout, but it has yet to be determined how the government would be compensated.
The bill bans stock buybacks for any corporation that accepts government loans during the term of their assistance plus one year.
Schumer added a provision to ban businesses owned by the president, vice president, members of Congress and the heads of federal executive departments from receiving loans or investments through the corporate liquidity program. The prohibition also applies to their children, spouses and in-laws.
The legislation creates an inspector general and oversight committee for the corporate assistance program, similar to what was done for the Troubled Asset Relief Program of a decade ago, according to the senior administration official.
The deal comes two days after talks appeared to unravel when Democrats accused Republicans of walking away from negotiations and drafting the bill on their own. Schumer and Pelosi announced early Sunday afternoon that there was no agreement after they met with Mnuchin, McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in the Capitol.
But Schumer and Mnuchin met at least five times Monday as they worked until midnight. Mnuchin was back in the Capitol at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, when he and Meadows met with McConnell before restarting his shuttle diplomacy with Schumer.
And Pelosi appeared cautiously optimistic on Tuesday that the Senate would reach a deal that could also get support in the House.
"I'm optimistic that we can get something done. I've praised Chuck and Senate Democrats for staying strong," Pelosi told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. "We've been working together in terms of the policy issues there, great progress has been made."
But the days-long talks weren’t without plenty of drama. Tempers flared when the discussions hung up on disagreements over the length of unemployment assistance, restrictions on executive pay and stock buybacks and a Democratic push to require distressed corporations that accept taxpayer assistance to keep workers on payroll.
Republicans were furious when the negotiations dragged beyond McConnell’s stated goal of passing a bill on Monday and Democrats twice blocked procedural motions to move on to a largely GOP-drafted stimulus plan. Democrats temporarily blocked Republicans from speaking on the Senate floor, a tactic Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) could be overheard calling “bullshit.”
“Are you kidding me?” a visibly enraged McConnell asked from the Senate floor.
Still, as Monday wore on, Schumer kept hopes of a deal alive. The Democratic leader told members during a conference call that he expected to reach a deal with Mnuchin. They both stressed as they left the Capitol around midnight, and hours later when they returned, that they expected a deal on Tuesday.
“We’re looking forward to closing a bipartisan deal today. The president wants us to get this done today,” Mnuchin said.
As negotiations stretched late into the night Tuesday, McConnell called a group of GOP negotiators — Sens. Mike Crapo (Idaho), Pat Toomey (Pa.) and Roger Wicker (Miss.) — back to the Capitol.
The final stages of the negotiations focused on putting conditions on corporate loans backstopped by the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve, such as restricting executive compensation and stock buybacks for companies that take taxpayer-funded assistance, according to an aide familiar with the talks.
A last-minute fight over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cropped up as an eleventh-hour issue on Tuesday after Pelosi said that a deal for a 15 percent increase in funding was taken out of the bill. A boost in food assistance money is a top priority for progressives in her caucus and members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
And both sides accused the other of trying to get unrelated provisions in the bill, which could be the final major piece of legislation Congress passes for months.
Republicans accused Democrats of trying to include increased fuel emissions standards for airlines and expansion of wind and solar tax credits, while Democrats homed in on a provision in a draft circulated Sunday that would have blocked nonprofits who receive Medicaid, like Planned Parenthood, from the previous coronavirus package from receiving Small Business Administration assistance under the stimulus package.
One of the thorniest questions of the talks was how to deliver relief to the battered airline industry, whose representatives burned up the phone lines over the weekend and Monday calling senators.
“They’re calling everybody,” one Democratic senator said of the airlines’ intense lobbying push for direct grants in addition to loans.
Hundreds of billions of dollars in buffer capital for the Treasury Department will allow the Fed to hand out an additional $4 trillion in loans to distressed companies such as U.S. airlines and Boeing, the nation’s leading airplane manufacturer. Their stocks have been hit the hardest in the recent stock market selloff that had erased the gains made since Trump took office.
The Fed loan program, which Democrats bashed as a corporate bailout program and Mnuchin’s “slush fund,” was one of the biggest sticking points during the late rounds of the negotiations.
Republicans argued the Treasury Department needed $500 billion to help the Fed inject enough liquidity into the economy, while Democrats were enraged over a provision they said would let Mnuchin provide loans and guarantees and then wait six months before disclosing who got the assistance. Schumer noted in a letter to his caucus on Wednesday morning that they were able to get that provision removed.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) touted that Democrats were able to get “better oversight,” saying “you can’t just ... go ahead and give all your corporate executives, based on the back of the taxpayers, free carte blanche.”
Some of the nation’s biggest companies could face bankruptcy without federal intervention.
Fitch Ratings downgraded its outlook for United Airlines to negative on Thursday amid fears about its ability to pay back loans. S&P Ratings downgraded Boeing’s credit rating to just two notches above junk on Monday.
Other major areas of disagreement were over how long to provide beefed-up unemployment benefits, how much to spend on hospitals and health care providers and how much to provide to cash-strapped state governments through stabilization funding.
The negotiations seesawed for days over unemployment benefits. In a concession to Democrats, the bill will include four months of boosted unemployment benefits, according to two sources briefed on the deal. Republicans initially proposed three months.
Medical workers transporting a coronavirus patient into an isolation ward in Fuyang, China. (photo: Chinatopix/AP)
The Coronavirus Isn't Mutating Quickly, Suggesting a Vaccine Would Offer Lasting Protection
Joel Achenbach, The Washington Post
Achenbach writes: "The coronavirus is not mutating significantly as it circulates through the human population, according to scientists who are closely studying the novel pathogen's genetic code."
READ MORE
Joel Achenbach, The Washington Post
Achenbach writes: "The coronavirus is not mutating significantly as it circulates through the human population, according to scientists who are closely studying the novel pathogen's genetic code."
READ MORE
Attorney General Bill Barr, left, and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at the Department of Justice in April 2019. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
Walmart Was Almost Charged Criminally Over Opioids. Trump Appointees Killed the Indictment.
Jesse Eisinger and James Bandler, ProPublica
Excerpt: "For almost two years, federal prosecutors and agents from Texas had been investigating the opioid dispensing practices of Walmart, the largest company in the world. They had amassed what they viewed as highly damning evidence only to face a major obstacle: top Trump appointees at the Department of Justice."
Jesse Eisinger and James Bandler, ProPublica
Excerpt: "For almost two years, federal prosecutors and agents from Texas had been investigating the opioid dispensing practices of Walmart, the largest company in the world. They had amassed what they viewed as highly damning evidence only to face a major obstacle: top Trump appointees at the Department of Justice."
Even as company pharmacists protested, Walmart kept filling suspicious prescriptions, stoking the country’s opioid epidemic. A Republican U.S. Attorney in Texas thought the evidence was damning. Trump’s political appointees? Not so much.
n a Tuesday just before Halloween in 2018, a group of federal prosecutors and agents from Texas arrived in Washington. For almost two years, they’d been investigating the opioid dispensing practices of Walmart, the largest company in the world. They had amassed what they viewed as highly damning evidence only to face a major obstacle: top Trump appointees at the Department of Justice.
The prosecution team had come to Washington to try to save its case. Joe Brown, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, led the group, which included Heather Rattan, an over-20-year veteran of the office who had spent much of her career prosecuting members of drug cartels.
They first went to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s headquarters to meet the acting administrator, Uttam Dhillon. There Rattan laid out the evidence. Opioids dispensed by Walmart pharmacies in Texas had killed customers who had overdosed. The pharmacists who dispensed those opioids had told the company they didn’t want to fill the prescriptions because they were coming from doctors who were running pill mills. They pleaded for help and guidance from Walmart’s corporate office.
Investigators had obtained records of similar cries for help from Walmart pharmacists all over the country: from Maine, North Carolina, Kansas and Washington, and other states. They reported hundreds of thousands of suspicious or inappropriate opioid prescriptions. One Walmart employee warned about a Florida doctor who had a “list of patients from Kentucky that have been visiting pharmacies in all of central Wisconsin recently.” That doctor had sent patients to Walmarts in more than 30 other states.
In response to these alarms, Walmart compliance officials did not take corporate-wide action to halt the flow of opioids. Instead, they repeatedly admonished pharmacists that they could not cut off any doctor entirely. They could only evaluate each prescription on an individual basis. And they went further. An opioid compliance manager told an executive in an email, gathered during the inquiry and viewed by ProPublica, that Walmart’s focus should be on “driving sales.”
After they finished their presentation, Dhillon sat back in his chair and exclaimed, “Jesus Christ,” according to five people familiar with the investigation. “Why aren’t we talking about this as a criminal case?”
That’s precisely what had occurred seven months earlier: Rattan had informed Walmart that she was preparing to indict the corporation for violating the Controlled Substances Act. Indictments of Fortune 500 companies are unheard of, let alone of one with $500 billion in annual revenue and over 2 million employees. But Rattan, with support from her boss Brown, believed the evidence justified such an unprecedented step.
Before the Texas prosecutors could file their case, however, Walmart escalated concerns to high-ranking officials at the DOJ, who then intervened. Brown was ordered to stand down. On Aug. 31, 2018, Trump officials officially informed Walmart that the DOJ would decline to prosecute the company, according to a letter from Walmart’s lawyer that lays out the chronology of the case.
But the Texas prosecutors hadn’t given up. Now, two months later, they still thought they had a chance to bring the then-deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, and other top officials around. After the first presentation at the DEA offices that day, the Texas group — now accompanied by the DEA’s Dhillon — caravanned over to the DOJ.
They filed into a big, bright conference room, where they were received by Rosenstein and a collection of political appointees and career staff. Rattan and her team were given a half-hour to make their presentation. She explained that dispensing opioids without a legitimate medical purpose is legally akin to dealing heroin. Criminal law says if a person or entity is willfully blind or deliberately ignorant, they are as liable as if they had acted intentionally. Once Walmart’s headquarters knew its pharmacists were raising alarms about suspicious prescriptions, but the compliance department continued to allow — even push — them to fill them, well, that made the company guilty, the Texas prosecutors contended.
This was not a question of a few rogue employees, Rattan explained. Walmart had a national problem. Worse, the prosecutors contended, the company was a repeat offender. Walmart had agreed to a settlement with the DEA seven years earlier in which it had promised to improve its controls over the abuse of opioid prescriptions. Still the problems persisted. That’s why the prosecutors believed they needed to pursue the extraordinary path of a criminal prosecution. As they concluded, Brown was emphatic, telling Rosenstein: “We have to act.”
A fine would not be a sufficient deterrent, the DEA’s Dhillon added, since Walmart “has more money than it knows what to do with.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” Rosenstein responded, according to five people familiar with the investigation. “We are all capitalists here.”
Rosenstein’s quip brought the prosecutorial team up short. They weren’t pursuing Walmart because it was profitable but because, in their view, the company had put its customers at deadly risk.
Not long after, Rosenstein’s assistant entered the room to say he had a call. He left. The prosecutors’ push to persuade Rosenstein to revive the criminal case had failed.
Still, there were multiple avenues left to pursue: After the meeting, the Texas prosecutors focused on bringing criminal charges against individual employees, as Rosenstein and other Trump DOJ officials directed them to do. But later, when the prosecutors sought to indict a mid-level Walmart manager, the Trump officials blocked that, too.
That left potential civil claims. After the meeting with Rosenstein, Brian Benczkowski, the head of the criminal division, had told Brown, “You have a whopper of a civil case,” according to four people familiar with the investigation.
But the civil case, too, was stymied by Trump appointees in the DOJ who continued to side with Walmart.
In its dealings with the DOJ, Walmart pursued a classic strategy. It relied on Jones Day, an influential law firm that has salted officials throughout the Trump administration. Walmart conceded mistakes and opened the door for a civil settlement. But the company consistently denied that any of its employees committed crimes.
In the view of many prosecutors and agents, Walmart never fully cooperated. (From the beginning of the investigation, Walmart said it was cooperating and taking action to fix its opioid dispensing practices. Still, the company acknowledged that it halted its cooperation in mid-2018 after it became convinced prosecutors were not acting in good faith.)
And Walmart and Jones Day added a Trumpian tactic: At a moment when the president had established a habit of attacking the investigators in his own government, the company followed a similarly aggressive approach. Walmart lawyers complained to Washington about the Texas prosecutors, accusing them of seeking to “embarrass” the company while using the threat of criminal charges to extort a larger civil fine. Criminal and civil investigations can run in parallel, but it’s an ethical violation for prosecutors to use the threat of criminal penalties to generate a higher civil settlement.
In a statement to ProPublica, Walmart spokesman Randy Hargrove reiterated the company’s complaints: “The United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas (EDTX) engaged in misconduct multiple times as it investigated Walmart, including threatening to bring meritless criminal charges against Walmart in order to extort an unjustified civil settlement from the company. This behavior was clearly improper, violated the Department of Justice’s own internal policies and rules of legal ethics, and was entirely inconsistent with the Department’s long-standing policies.”
Hargove added that having failed to bring “baseless” criminal charges against the company, “It appears that one or more individuals familiar with EDTX’s investigation have violated Department of Justice rules in an attempt to achieve through leaks what they could not accomplish in a court of law.”
In response to the Walmart statement, the U.S. attorney, Brown, offered his own to ProPublica: “Drug Enforcement Agency investigations of multiple opioid overdose deaths in the Eastern District of Texas resulted in our office opening parallel civil and criminal investigations of Walmart’s pharmacy practices. These investigations have been handled appropriately, and according to Department of Justice policy. These investigations, which we would typically not confirm or deny, but do so now because of Walmart’s statement, continue. Accordingly, it would be inappropriate to comment further on the specific facts of the case.
“Walmart chooses now to attack the investigators, a tried and true method to avoid oversight. We are confident that once all of the facts in this matter are public the hollowness of this criticism will be apparent. It is not the goal of our office to embarrass Walmart. Walmart’s behavior in dispensing opioid medication in the middle of a public health crisis should embarrass Walmart.”
Walmart’s ability to go over the heads of the Texas office left the U.S. attorney’s team profoundly frustrated — so much so that the lead civil prosecutor on the case resigned in protest on Oct. 25, 2019. “I deeply regret that Department leadership prevented EDTX from filing its lawsuit in 2018,” Joshua Russ, then the head of the Eastern District’s civil division, wrote in his resignation letter, a copy of which (with Walmart’s name blacked out) ProPublica obtained. “Corporations cannot poison Americans with impunity. Good sense dictates stern and swift action when Americans die.”
The investigations of Walmart have not been previously reported. This account is based on hundreds of pages of Walmart internal emails and investigative documents, correspondence between the company’s attorneys and the Justice Department, and interviews with nine people familiar with the investigation. All of the conversations described in this article were recounted either in those documents or by multiple people with knowledge of the conversations. The DOJ declined to make anyone available for interviews and did not answer an extensive list of questions.
The news of the Walmart investigation comes at a time when the Trump administration is being assailed for legal favoritism and cronyism. Attorney General Bill Barr has inserted himself into multiple investigations of Trump friends and associates. In February, four prosecutors on the case of Roger Stone, a Trump friend and adviser, quit the case in protest after political appointees undercut their sentencing recommendation.
The Trump DOJ has also pulled back on white-collar and corporate investigations and prosecutions. White-collar prosecutions are at a record low. Walmart itself seems to have already benefited from the Trump administration’s approach to corporate misconduct. The company was the subject of a seven-year investigation into bribery allegations in Mexico and around the globe. The Obama administration sought $600 million in fines, according to The New York Times, which broke the story, but failed to reach a resolution with the company. The Trump DOJ settled the charges for $282 million in June 2019. (“Walmart took the investigation very seriously, cooperated with the DOJ and the SEC’s investigation, and took extensive steps that have established its comprehensive Global Anti-Corruption Program,” the company said.)
Even as Trump’s DOJ was preventing its own prosecutors from getting tough on Walmart, the Trump administration told the public it was confronting the nation’s opioid crisis. In March 2018, Trump said his administration would hold those responsible accountable, pledging that federal lawsuits against opioid drugmakers “will happen.” The same month that Rosenstein declined to revive the criminal case against Walmart, Trump signed legislation aimed at curbing the opioid crisis. A key element was a public-private partnership with several companies, including Walmart, to implement measures such as opioid addiction education initiatives. “Together we are going to end the scourge of drug addiction in America,” Trump said. (This month, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon appeared in the White House’s Rose Garden to pledge the company’s help in combating the coronavirus.)
For those who spent years investigating Walmart, the chasm between the public posturing and the behavior behind closed doors has been deeply discouraging. By the end of the experience, one said: “I wanted to ask for a Walmart greeter badge. It’s got much more stroke than a DEA badge.”
The case against Walmart originated in the summer of 2016, with an investigation of two Texas doctors, Howard Diamond and Randall Wade, who were prescribing opioids on a vast scale. Prosecutors would link each to multiple deaths. The lead prosecutor on the criminal case, Rattan, made it clear to the DEA agents on the case that this should be run like any drug investigation. They should focus on cutting off the dealers’ sources of drugs.
One of those was Walmart. In August, DEA agents, surveilling Wade’s clinic, followed three women to a Walmart in McKinney, Texas. Shortly afterward, all three walked out with large quantities of painkillers.
On Dec. 7, 2016, DEA agents raided that Walmart, seeking records about Diamond and Wade. The two doctors were eventually convicted of illegal distribution of opioids, with Wade sentenced to 10 years in prison and Diamond 20 years.
Walmart has the fifth-highest pharmacy revenue in the country and was the fifth-largest opioid distributor in Texas from 2006-14, according to the DEA. But Walmart pharmacies had not been raided before; raids of Fortune 500 companies are exceedingly rare. Alarmed, Walmart’s lawyers quickly asked the government to conduct no more raids and pledged full cooperation.
The Texas prosecutors broadened their investigation and began to amass evidence that extended far beyond Diamond and Wade. Between 2011 to 2017, they discovered, Walmart pharmacists repeatedly filled prescriptions that they worried were not for legitimate medical purposes, including large doses of opioids and mixtures of drugs the DEA considered red flags for abuse. Walmart pharmacists not just in Texas but in Maine, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Kansas and Washington state raised alarms to the company’s national compliance department about doctors.
Sometimes, these pharmacists requested permission to stop filling opioid prescriptions for certain doctors. In February 2015, a pharmacist wrote to the national compliance department about Diamond:
“We are all concerned about our jobs and about filling for a pill mill doctor. I’m in my 29th year with walmart and have never had a situation this bad with a doctor. Other chains are refusing to fill for him which makes our burden even greater. Please help us.”
Another wrote that same month:
“doctor Diamond is a problem and a liability on us...
Filling for him is a risk that keeps me up at night. This is a serious situation.”
But even after more than a decade of soaring addiction and deaths had transformed opioids into a national crisis, Walmart had a policy that pharmacists could conduct no “blanket refusals” that shut off prescriptions written by a particular doctor. Nor would Walmart put doctors on a prohibited list from headquarters, known as a “corporate block.”
Some of Walmart’s competitors had stopped filling Diamond’s and Wade’s prescriptions, company pharmacists told headquarters. Why wasn’t Walmart doing the same? In February 2014, for example, Kroger sent a letter to Diamond saying it would no longer fill his controlled substances prescriptions. Walmart pharmacists were telling headquarters that CVS, Walgreens and Target were doing the same. (A CVS spokesman said the company implemented a policy of corporate blocks several years ago but, citing privacy, declined to comment on whether the policy was applied to Diamond and Wade. Spokespeople for Kroger, Walgreens and Target did not respond to requests for comment. Walmart insists there is no evidence that competitors issued corporate blocks against Diamond and Wade.)
A Walmart pharmacist in September 2016 wrote an alarmed note about a Pennsylvania doctor who was “under investigation by the DEA for what we believe is a pill mill operation.” He added:
“Rite Aid has sent him a blanket denial letter. ...
And since then we have seen our almost solely narcotic and controlled prescriptions from him double....
We are putting pharmacists and Walmart in a bad situation legally....”
Instead of blanket refusals or a corporate block, Walmart’s compliance department said each prescription had to be evaluated separately. To block a prescription and report the refusal, a pharmacist had to fill out a form that could take 20 minutes, a bureaucratic hurdle that pharmacists sought to avoid because they were under pressure to fill prescriptions quickly.
From early 2014 to when Walmart finally blocked Diamond in March 2017 — after the federal investigation had started — the company’s pharmacists filled over 13,000 controlled substances prescriptions from Diamond, an average of 11 a day, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica. That amounted to over 1.3 million doses. Walmart only blocked Wade in November 2016, a month after he was indicted. Between the first Walmart employee’s alarm and then, Walmart pharmacies filled an average of nine controlled substance prescriptions a day written by Wade, amounting to 875,000 doses. Between 2011 and 2016, over 100 different Walmart pharmacies in 17 different states filled Wade’s opioid prescriptions.
More troubling to the federal investigators, for much of this period, Walmart was operating under a secret settlement, known as a Memorandum of Agreement, with the DEA, reached in 2011 and running four years. (The existence of the MOA has not been previously reported.) According to that agreement, a Walmart pharmacy in California had been filling prescriptions “for other than a legitimate medical purpose and/or outside the usual course of professional practice in violation of federal and state law” and had “dispensed controlled substances to individuals that [the pharmacy] knew or should have known were diverting the controlled substances.”
As part of the agreement, in which Walmart did not admit or deny wrongdoing, the company agreed to install national procedures to identify bad prescribers and prescriptions not written for legitimate medical purposes and report them quickly to the DEA.
In addition, Walmart had repeatedly run afoul of the Controlled Substances Act. The company had received more than 50 “Letters of Admonition” from the DEA for its prescribing practices from 2000 to 2018, according to records obtained by ProPublica. And it had paid two small Controlled Substances Act settlements in 2007 and 2008, one for filling unlawful prescriptions and the other for recordkeeping violations.
Prosecutors believed that Walmart was not fulfilling the terms of its agreement with the DEA. The company had an internal system for compiling pharmacists’ “refusals to fill” that it would send to the DEA. They found that Walmart didn’t always send the DEA its alerts. When the company did so, the notices were not complete. The form included a comments field, where pharmacists might write notes flagging concerns about doctors whom they believed were operating pill mills. Walmart sent the DEA the information that a prescription had been refused but excised the employee comments.
On Feb. 13, 2015, when a regional manager received a list of “Refusal to Fill” prescriptions from headquarters, he asked, “Does your team pull out any insights from these we need to highlight?” according to an email reviewed by ProPublica.
Brad Nelson, then a director of Health and Wellness Practice Compliance at Walmart, wrote back:
“The MOA that requires the reporting of the Refusal to fills expires in 30 days. We have not invested a great amount of effort in doing analysis on the data since the agreement is virtually over. Driving sales and patient awareness is a far better use of our Market Directors and Market manager’s time.”
Walmart maintains that Nelson was expressing relief that the onerous burden of alerting the DEA to its refusals to fill was coming to an end, and that in urging the manager to “drive sales,” he was referring to immunizations. Walmart depicted Nelson as a popular middle manager who was the first in the office every morning. He’d come in at 4:30 or 5 a.m. and spend the next three hours faxing refusals to fill to the DEA. Then he would make popcorn for his colleagues.
On Jan. 8, 2015, Nelson emailed colleagues that a pharmacist had contacted him with concerns, indicating “that he is feeling pressured” by his supervisor to fill prescriptions for controlled substances. If the pharmacist doesn’t fill the prescriptions, Nelson added, “then that would be a significant issue.”
Walmart says this email shows that Nelson was consistent: Pharmacists could not issue blanket refusals but could refuse prescriptions on a case-by-case basis. (Nelson referred questions to his lawyer, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
Walmart told the investigators that the evidence the Eastern District compiled was misleading. The company said the DEA never required “corporate blocks” or “blanket refusals-to-fill.” The DEA did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.
Meanwhile, some state boards of pharmacy and medical boards protected doctors from being cut off by pharmacies on the grounds that companies should not interfere with the doctor-patient relationship, Walmart says.
For its part, Texas has no rules that would prohibit a pharmacy chain like Walmart from instituting a corporate block or blanket refusal policy, said Allison Benz, executive director of the Texas State Board of Pharmacy.
In Texas, pharmacy chains may, indeed, impose corporate-wide blocks on doctors whom they suspect are running pill mills, according to Sherif Zaafran, president of the Texas Medical Board. Zaafran said the board has told Walmart and other pharmacies that if they have concerns about a doctor, they have a legal obligation to file a complaint with the board while providing information supporting their concerns. “We never weigh in on a corporate block,” he said. “The corporation can instruct a licensed pharmacist to do so. It is the licensed pharmacist who has the legal ability to not dispense something.”
For its part, Walmart says it was taking its responsibilities seriously. The company says it flagged over 60,000 concerning prescriptions its pharmacists refused to fill during the period the investigation covered. It maintains Nelson was vigilant in urging his pharmacists to refuse to fill if they saw prescriptions they did not like, and to fill out the forms so that the company could send the information to the DEA. In the case of Diamond, Walmart says one of its pharmacists alerted the Texas Medical Board of its concerns. The board allowed Diamond to continue practicing medicine, finding that his “prescribing was appropriate.” (It did place him on a “remedial plan” to fix his allegedly sloppy record-keeping.) The board did not revoke Diamond’s license until October 2017, after his arrest.
The company argues that, as the regulatory entity that licensed doctors to dispense opioids, the DEA, not Walmart, was responsible for the failure to shut down pill pushers like Diamond sooner. After the investigation started, Walmart reversed itself and began instituting corporate blocks, which suggested to prosecutors that the company could have been doing so all along. Since Walmart began the policy, multiple states have assailed and even investigated Walmart for improperly interfering with doctors’ decisions.
The prosecutors did not find Walmart’s many explanations convincing. The fact that the company had sent so many refusals to the DEA for a given doctor and yet would turn around and keep filling prescriptions for the very same sketchy physician suggested the problem was widespread. As far as federal prosecutors and the DEA were concerned, the MOA had placed Walmart on parole — and the company had violated its terms.
In the spring of 2018, the Eastern District of Texas informed Walmart that it was preparing criminal charges against the company. In traditional criminal investigations against individuals, indictments often come as a surprise. The government accumulates evidence and makes its arrest. The defense eventually sees the evidence and can respond then, sometimes only at trial.
Criminal investigations of big corporations don’t typically work that way in the United States. They have developed into a ritualized series of give-and-takes between prosecutors and the company. Prosecutors lay out their evidence and theories and the company gets the opportunity to respond in great detail — all out of public view. The Eastern District of Texas skipped this dance.
Stunned and worried, Walmart requested a meeting with the prosecutors. In April 2018, the two sides sat down.
Walmart had a powerful team. Karen Hewitt, the partner-in-charge of Jones Day’s California region, was the company’s lead outside lawyer. She had been the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of California, appointed by George W. Bush and then serving under President Barack Obama, accumulating a record for prosecuting corrupt politicians and drug and border crimes. Walmart’s inside lawyer was Bob Balfe. Walmart’s chief counsel for global investigations, Balfe also had been a U.S. attorney, serving as the head of the Western District of Arkansas, which includes Walmart’s hometown of Bentonville. In the biggest case of his career, he’d successfully prosecuted a Walmart legend, then-vice chairman Tom Coughlin, for a bizarre embezzlement scheme. Since he’d come to Walmart, Balfe had helped steer the company through the seven-year bribery investigation.
Most of the interactions between the government and the Jones Day lawyers were politely choreographed. Hewitt and Balfe were the picture of affability. “When you meet with them, it’s like those two chipmunks,” said one person familiar with the investigation, referring to the Looney Tunes characters Mac and Tosh, gophers that speak with posh British accents. “‘After you.’ ‘No, after you.’ They are so polite.”
The two sides largely agreed on the facts, but differed completely on whether they justified a criminal charge. And a dispute over the use of a single word would poison relations between the two sides, with Walmart using the word as a cudgel to attack the prosecutors.
The word in question was “embarrass.” According to two people familiar with the prosecution, Rattan told the Walmart side that the company should feel embarrassed by its conduct. Walmart would portray it differently, claiming that Rattan said her goal was “to embarrass Walmart” with a criminal indictment. (Walmart’s account is captured in a letter of complaint Hewitt sent the next month to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.)
For the moment, though, the two sides maintained decorum. Walmart asked for 30 days to respond. Prosecutors agreed. On May 3 and 4, the two sides met again, this time in Plano, Texas, where the U.S. attorney’s offices are located.
By this time, Josh Russ had ramped up his office’s civil investigation. He did not plan to attend the May meeting, because it was a meeting led by the criminal side.
Walmart’s lawyers said they hoped to resolve any criminal or civil investigations in one shot and insisted on Russ’ presence. The prosecutors, leery of being accused of improperly coordinating the criminal and civil cases, demanded that Walmart make the request in writing. Walmart did, and Russ agreed to attend. Soon, however, Walmart would accuse the prosecutors of precisely the behavior they were attempting to avoid.
During the first six hours of the meeting, Hewitt and the Walmart lawyers described the results of their own internal investigation, saying the company’s outside lawyers had found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the company or its employees. They’d found no evidence of collusion or any improper financial relationships between doctors or customers and Walmart pharmacists. They also admitted that “Walmart could have and should have done more to voluntarily combat the opioid crisis,” according to the letter Hewitt sent to Rosenstein.
The Walmart lawyers outlined the risks to shareholders, employees and the public that could result from a criminal prosecution. But the prosecutors were unmoved. Rattan said that Walmart was no different from an individual criminal defendant who pleaded with the government for leniency by stating that her children would be harmed by her incarceration. Civil Chief Randi Russell took her remarks a step further, saying that Walmart’s size didn’t make it above prosecution. Balfe, becoming animated, touted Walmart’s opioid reforms and the company’s extensive cooperation with law enforcement.
“All of our defendants find Jesus in jail,” one person present recalled thinking. “But that doesn’t mean they don’t go to prison.”
The country was in a crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people dead and major companies poisoning people like drug dealers, as the prosecution team saw it. To the prosecutors, Walmart’s attitude was not only that it hadn’t done anything wrong, but that Walmart didn’t even need to take the prosecutors seriously. That point was reinforced the next day when Walmart made its first settlement offer: $34 million. Calling the offer “insulting,” Russ said Walmart could do better. The parties, he said, were “in different solar systems.”
The discussions reached a crescendo after one of Walmart’s outside lawyers accused the prosecutors of unethically trying to use the threat of a criminal prosecution to leverage higher civil penalties. Russell, angry, demanded that the Walmart lawyer retract his statement. Russ left the room, saying he would not tolerate an attack on his ethics.
The Eastern District thought Walmart should pay an amount that was several times larger than the then-record $150 million civil penalty that McKesson, the giant pharmaceutical distribution company, had paid for its alleged violations of the Controlled Substances Act. Russell suggested a payment of $1.2 billion.
Later, Rattan pulled out her phone, announcing she’d received a “confidential text message” from her boss, U.S. Attorney Joe Brown, who was attending an NRA rally that day with President Donald Trump. According to Hewitt’s written account, Rattan read the text aloud to the slack-jawed Walmart lawyers: “Walk away, indict them, and then be willing to settle with them after the indictment.”
After another counteroffer, Rattan read Brown’s reply aloud: “That doesn’t hurt Walmart in the least.” Walmart, which had earlier boasted to the group of giving $1 billion a year away to charities, could do much better, the government prosecutors said. Civil Chief Russell quoted the New Testament: “To whom much is given, much is required.”
Some of the prosecutors were willing to trade off a large fine, however, if they could add greater detail to the statement of facts that would eventually go public. Russell said Walmart had to admit it had “killed people.” Jones Day appeared to be eager to avoid such an admission, which would have brought bad publicity and made the company vulnerable in private and state lawsuits. (Walmart is a defendant in the massive opioid lawsuit brought by the states.)
On the way home, Walmart’s lawyers processed what had just happened. Balfe told his colleagues it felt like a hostage situation. A week later, Hewitt wrote to Rosenstein, reiterating the complaint about the office’s purported ethical violations. In a subsequent letter to the DOJ, she appeared ready to make a civil deal: “Walmart is a responsible corporate citizen and stands ready to engage in a principled and reasoned dialogue concerning any potential conduct of its employees that merits a civil penalty under the CSA.”
Rattan and her fellow criminal prosecutors insisted they were sincere. “The threat of indictment is real,” she said, as she concluded the May meeting. “I am not bluffing.” Rattan had amassed a highly successful record in her dozens of trials. “I’m telling you right now,” she would say around the office of the case against Walmart. “Swear in 12 people and present the evidence and they are in trouble.”
Josh Russ began preparing to file the Eastern District’s civil complaint. He sent it to the DEA, which signed off on it. In August 2018, the U.S. attorney’s office commenced planning to bring its civil charges; it began preparations for a press conference to make the announcement.
Meanwhile, Walmart continued appealing up the chain to top officials in Washington. On Aug. 10, Jones Day’s Hewitt sent a letter to Benczkowski, assistant attorney general and head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, complaining about the investigation. The letter argued that a conviction could harm “millions of low-income and elderly citizens” who rely on federal programs for food and medicine. A convicted corporation might not be permitted to participate in those programs any longer. She outlined what she said were Walmart’s “remedial” measures to become “an industry leader in the Nation’s fight against the opioid crisis.”
Soon after, an official in the deputy attorney general’s office called Brown and told him to halt the Texas office’s criminal investigation, according to five people familiar with the investigation.
Officials at DOJ in Washington then turned their attention to the civil probe. In a video conference call in late August, Stephen Cox, the deputy associate attorney general and a top official in the civil division, and Mary Daly, a daughter of Bill Barr and then the director of opioid enforcement, asked Russ’ team about its tactics and evidence. Cox, who had never been a federal prosecutor and joined the agency from Texas energy company Apache, appeared upset that the Texas prosecutors had sought emails between compliance officials and their bosses, senior executives at Walmart. He seemed to view that tactic as overly aggressive, according to a person familiar with the investigation. The Texas prosecutors said they did so to find out what top Walmart executives knew.
Russ and others contended the civil suit was ready to be filed. Cox said it wasn’t. To spur Cox and his colleagues to action, Russ began to send daily examples of what the prosecutorial team viewed as particularly egregious prescriptions Walmart pharmacists had filled. His message: People had died because of opioids Walmart had dispensed, and every day that passed meant another lost opportunity because of the ticking clock on the statute of limitations.
Meanwhile, Walmart exercised its PR and political muscle. Just days after the contentious May meeting with Eastern District officials, Walmart launched what it billed as a sweeping effort “aimed at curbing opioid misuse and abuse.” The cornerstone was that it would restrict initial opioid prescriptions to no more than a seven-day supply. In September 2018, Ivanka Trump visited a Walmart in Mesquite, Texas, very close to the Eastern District’s offices. She was there, the White House said, to learn how Walmart trains and retains workers. The trip seemed to indicate just how close the company was to the White House.
Then came the meeting with Rosenstein in October 2018. Asked about his comments that day, Rosenstein responded by email that he did not recall his comment about everyone being “capitalists” but said: “If you lack the courage to decline a proposed criminal prosecution when you conclude that it is a mistake, you do not belong in a leadership job. We reached every decision after considering the non-partisan factors set forth in the Justice Department’s principles of federal prosecution.”
Trump officials ordered a six-month cooling off period, directing the U.S. attorney’s office to try to reach a settlement with Walmart.
Meanwhile the DOJ formed a national Walmart Working Group, with four other U.S. attorney’s offices in New York, North Carolina, Florida and Colorado. State attorneys general were brought in. On the one hand, the creation of the group underscored the national character of Walmart’s opioid problems. On the other, it dispersed responsibility among different offices and Russ, who was appointed co-head of the group, told colleagues he thought his investigation was being taken away from him.
In January 2019, the DEA presented Walmart with a new, broad subpoena. Walmart had been furnishing what it contended were huge volumes of materials. But it had not handed over everything the government requested. Walmart complained to the prosecutors that the requests were too onerous and overreaching, and that the company needed more time.
Prosecutors felt Walmart wasn’t sufficiently cooperative. Walmart never furnished a full list of doctors its pharmacists were concerned about. Walmart did not give the government full information on its internal databases to analyze prescribing information and patterns. Perhaps most crucially, Walmart had not turned over the emails the Eastern District had subpoenaed between compliance officials and their bosses (the ones Cox had been so shocked about).
Russ begged Washington officials to take it to a judge to enforce the government’s subpoena. The Trump appointees refused, telling the Working Group to keep negotiating.
The Texas prosecutors worried Walmart had an even better inside track than it had already displayed. In June 2019, they learned that Hewitt and Balfe had met with Barr.
The company says the three met as part of a national conference of U.S. attorneys and that it amounted to a grip-and-grin photo op in the presence of several other U.S. attorneys. No one raised the investigation, according to Walmart: “Bob Balfe and Karen Hewitt did not have any discussions with Attorney General Barr or his staff about Walmart.”
In response to an extensive list of questions for this story, DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec responded with a statement that read in whole: “While the Department does not generally confirm, deny, or acknowledge the existence of investigations, it is worth noting that Pro Publica’s reporting in this piece is misleading and contains numerous inaccuracies and erroneous conclusions. As just one example, the meeting with Attorney General Barr that is cited was with eight former US Attorneys from the National Association of Former US Attorneys (NAFUSA) all acting in their capacities as NAFUSA officers, where no particular matters were discussed.”
Still, the prosecutors felt like the Walmart side attempted multiple end runs. For example, Cox’s predecessor, Rachel Brand, had left the DOJ in February 2018 to take a top job in Walmart’s legal department. About a year later, Brand’s attorney inquired as to whether she could appear before the DOJ. The Eastern District team got wind of the request and raised concerns. Walmart says Brand had no interactions with top DOJ or White House officials about the investigation.
On the criminal side, now that the corporate indictment was dead, the Texas prosecutors pursued the directive to focus on individuals. Rattan prepared an indictment of Brad Nelson, the former compliance manager who had told an executive that the company should focus on “driving sales.”
Walmart lawyers objected. Nelson was no criminal, they contended. Jones Day kept up its pressure. In another letter to Trump officials on Sept. 27, 2019, this time addressed to Gus Eyler, who was now the co-head of the national Walmart Working Group with Russ, Hewitt objected to the threat of a Nelson indictment and once again accused the prosecutors of trying to embarrass the company. Hewitt wrote: “We are concerned that either of the following may be true: the threat of an indictment of Mr. Nelson is being made to pressure Walmart in a civil proceeding in violation of DOJ procedures and the rules of legal ethics, or, just as concerning, EDTX actually intends to prosecute an individual not because the facts support it but in an effort to embarrass Walmart in retaliation for the previous declination of a criminal case against the Company.”
She added, “We also intend to suspend further production of documents under the Omnibus Subpoena until these issues relating to the status of this investigation are resolved.”
The government had issued a lawful subpoena. Walmart was treating it as optional.
Under other circumstances, the DOJ might have raced into a court to force a defiant company to comply with the subpoena. Instead, soon after receiving Hewitt’s letter, Washington informed the Texas prosecutors that they could not indict Nelson.
The civil investigation was still muddling on, however. In midsummer, as the six-month deadline approached, Russ told DOJ officials that Walmart was still not cooperating fully. Trump officials decided to give Walmart three more months. When the next deadline came up on Oct. 25, Washington wanted to extend the negotiations again.
Russ resigned that day. Walmart, he said in his resignation letter, “abused the Department’s fairness, largely ignored our subpoena, and scoffed at our larger work on behalf of all Americans.”
He added, “When I took my oath of office, I invoked God’s judgment and swore that I would support and defend the Constitution.”
The news reverberated throughout the office. “Josh was Captain America, well-respected, well thought of. It came as a big blow,” said a person familiar with the investigation, adding, “It seemed that maybe the country’s best interests were not at heart.”
On Nov. 7, the new deputy attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, summoned the Texas prosecutorial team again to Washington for another meeting, gauging the progress of the Working Group’s negotiations with Walmart. The team reprised its presentation of the evidence that it had delivered to Rosenstein about a year earlier. Joe Brown, the U.S. attorney, asked Rosen: “Can you point out what’s wrong with our evidence?” Rosen did not respond.
In recent weeks, the DOJ’s inaction has begun to raise concerns on Capitol Hill. Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Dhillon and Barr expressing “concern regarding the Department’s inability to hold prescription opioid distributors and chain pharmacies accountable.” A hearing may follow.
Meanwhile, four years after the investigation first began, negotiations on a civil settlement between the government and Walmart continue.
A Honduran migrant wears a mask while waiting in line to plead for asylum in Tijuana, Mexico. (photo: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)
Rapes, Murders ... and Coronavirus: The Dangers US Asylum Seekers in Mexico Must Face
Alexandra Villarreal, Guardian UK
Villarreal writes: "Migrants in Mexico are staring down yet another existential threat to their health and safety in the shape of the coronavirus outbreak."
READ MORE
Alexandra Villarreal, Guardian UK
Villarreal writes: "Migrants in Mexico are staring down yet another existential threat to their health and safety in the shape of the coronavirus outbreak."
READ MORE
Worker cleans a mural portraying Saint Oscar Arnulfo Romero, El Salvador. (photo: Twitter/santegidionews)
El Salvador Remembers Oscar Romero, Saint of the Americas
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Latin America today remembers El Salvador's Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the 'Voice of the Voiceless,' who was assassinated on March 24, 1980, while holding a mass."
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Latin America today remembers El Salvador's Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the 'Voice of the Voiceless,' who was assassinated on March 24, 1980, while holding a mass."
EXCERPT:
Today, we pay tribute in memory of Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero, who was murdered on March 24, 1980. He was actively engaged in denouncing violations of the human rights of the most vulnerable individuals in El Salvador.
Bleached coral on Australia's Great Barrier Reef near Port Douglas on Feb. 20, 2017. (photo: Brett Monroe Garner/Greenpeace/Reuters)
Great Barrier Reef Hit by Third Major Bleaching Event in Five Years
Denise Chow, NBC News
Chow writes: "The Great Barrier Reef is experiencing its most widespread coral bleaching event, according to scientists who say record warm temperatures and warming oceans are threatening its fragile corals."
Denise Chow, NBC News
Chow writes: "The Great Barrier Reef is experiencing its most widespread coral bleaching event, according to scientists who say record warm temperatures and warming oceans are threatening its fragile corals."
The entire Great Barrier Reef and some of its surrounding areas are facing an unprecedented period of heat stress in what is the third major bleaching event in only the past five years. Heat-induced bleaching can occur periodically, but scientists say climate change is causing the destructive events to happen more frequently, which is particularly troubling because corals don't have enough time to recover and grow back.
The reef's last major bleaching event occurred in 2017, and scientists weren't expecting another one so soon, said Mark Eakin, coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch program in College Park, Maryland.
"This has never happened before," Eakin said. "We're in completely uncharted territory."
There have been only five recorded bleaching events at the Great Barrier Reef, said Terry Hughes, director of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in North Queensland. The first occurred in 1998, followed by another in 2002. There was then a 14-year gap before the next one, in 2016, but then the first instance of back-to-back bleaching events occurred the following year.
"The gap between one event and the next is shrinking, not just for the Great Barrier Reef, but reefs throughout the tropics," Hughes said. "That's important, because it takes a decade or so for a half-decent recovery of even the fastest-growing corals. The slowest ones take several decades."
Coral bleaching occurs as a response to abnormal conditions, such as when ocean temperatures are cooler or warmer than usual or when ocean water is more acidic than normal. These environmental stressors cause corals to expel tiny photosynthetic algae that live in their tissues, causing the colorful and vibrant marine invertebrates to turn ghostly white.
The bleaching process doesn't necessarily kill the corals, but the reefs are subsequently more susceptible to disease.
In the 2016 bleaching event, 27 percent of the Great Barrier Reef's corals died, and the following year, 22 percent were lost, meaning nearly half the famed reef's corals died in just two years.
Hughes said early satellite observations suggest that this year's bleaching is far more widespread across the reef compared to 2016 and 2017 but not as severe.
But the extent of the damage will also depend on how much ocean temperatures warm over the coming weeks and for how long. Past bleaching events, such as those in 2002 and 2016, have been driven by El Niño conditions, which are naturally occurring climate patterns that affect the equatorial Pacific and can trigger far-reaching climate anomalies.
The current bleaching event is happening even in the absence of El Niño conditions, according to Eakin.
"We no longer need an El Niño to trigger a bleaching event — we just need a hot summer," he said. "And the summers are getting hotter and hotter because of global warming. That is astounding in itself."
Maintaining the health of the Great Barrier Reef carries enormous economic implications — the area, a designated World Heritage Site, has been valued at more than $50 billion — but the sprawling reef is also an important part of the ocean ecosystem. The reef, which covers an area almost 1,500 miles long off the coast of Queensland, is home to a diverse array of marine life.
Hughes said scientists are already seeing impacts on the region's fish, turtles, mollusks and other sea critters as a result of past bleaching events.
"The mix of species on reefs is changing because of these very rapid disturbances," he said. "It's changing the biodiversity of the whole ecosystem."
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