Thursday, January 30, 2020

FOCUS | Alan Dershowitz for the Defense: L'Etat, C'est Trump






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FOCUS | Alan Dershowitz for the Defense: L'Etat, C'est Trump
So long as Trump believes himself to be acting in the national interest, the President's counsel Alan Dershowitz argued, he can do whatever he wants. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker
Glasser writes: "Dershowitz had something larger and more profound to say: Donald Trump has the power to do just about anything he wants to do, and there's nothing that the U.S. Senate can or should do about it."
n hour into the Senate trial of Donald John Trump on Wednesday, the emeritus Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz came to the floor to answer a question from a former Harvard law student, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas. In theory, it was a question that went to the heart of the impeachment case against Trump, about the President’s imposition of a quid pro quo on military aid to Ukraine and whether his motivations mattered. Dershowitz had something larger and more profound to say, however: Donald Trump has the power to do just about anything he wants to do, and there’s nothing that the U.S. Senate can or should do about it.
For more than a week, House managers prosecuting the impeachment case against Trump have argued that the Senate’s failure to convict him would make Trump an unaccountable leader; in effect, a dictator or a king. When Dershowitz spoke, it was if he completely agreed with them. Two days earlier, Dershowitz had told senators that Presidential “abuse of power” should not be considered an impeachable offense under the Constitution. On Wednesday, he took that further—much further. “If a President does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” he argued. Dershowitz was offering Trump—and all future Presidents—a free pass. His argument seemed unbelievable: as long as the President thinks his reëlection will benefit the country, he can do anything in pursuit of it without fear of impeachment. Really?
Trump has already said that he considers himself empowered by Article II of the Constitution “to do whatever I want.” Video of this extraordinary moment has been played, repeatedly, by House managers in the trial. They clearly saw it as a damning statement made by a power-grabbing President—and then the President’s counsel, in effect, endorsed Trump’s power grab on the floor of the Senate. So long as Trump believes himself to be acting in the national interest, Dershowitz said, he can do whatever he wants. If the past three years have taught us anything, it is that Trump is a President who is comfortable conflating his own interest with the national interest. L’état, c’est Trump.
Were the senators supposed to take this seriously? Was it all just a show for the loyal Trump viewers on Fox? (That, after all, is how Dershowitz landed his Trump gig in the first place—going on the President’s favorite programs night after night to defend him.) After Dershowitz’s rant, his co-counsel Jay Sekulow launched into a long answer that was largely unrelated to the impeachment case surrounding Trump’s Ukraine scheme. He mentioned the 2016 Steele dossier, about Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, and Fusion GPS, the opposition-research firm that funded it. He talked about the F.B.I. and surveillance of the Trump campaign. The conspiracy theories Sekulow offered, though, didn’t really matter any more than Dershowitz’s outlandish constitutional theories did. The Senate math is the Senate math: Trump’s side has the votes to acquit him, and the Senate is running out the clock on the impeachment trial before the President’s inevitable acquittal by a Republican majority. Sekulow and Dershowitz might as well have been reading the phone book.
Their arguments on Wednesday came during the first day of Question Time, a unique aspect of the Presidential impeachment proceeding in which the Senate has up to sixteen hours, divided equally among the parties, over two days, to send written questions to the duelling legal teams, to be read aloud by Chief Justice John Roberts. Like everything else about the Senate trial, Question Time turned out to be a largely partisan box-checking exercise, with Democrats asking questions of the Democratic House managers and Republicans asking questions of the President’s legal team. There was no dialogue or debate between the two sides, or even a genuine effort to poke holes in each other’s arguments; these were, for the most part, parallel conversations. In the first two hours, there were only two questions that broke from the pattern of each party talking to itself. Later in the day, Cruz and several other senators crossed the partisan divide, but only to ask House managers to confirm identifying details about the intelligence-community whistle-blower whose complaint triggered the impeachment inquiry last fall. The House managers refused.
The arguments on the floor, to the extent that there was a running theme, revolved around the one remaining unsettled question: Will Senators hear testimony and evidence that Trump has blocked from Congress, most notably from John Bolton, the former Trump national-security adviser who has, according to the Times, written a devastating account of the President admitting that he was withholding millions in security aid to Ukraine on the condition of politically beneficial investigations? Bolton says that he is prepared to testify to the Senate about it, and there would seem to be no more relevant witness, considering that is precisely the allegation in the first article of impeachment. But Trump and his allies in the Senate G.O.P. are pushing ahead to vote for Trump’s acquittal as soon as Friday, without Bolton’s testimony—or anyone else’s not already in the House record. The managers, not surprisingly, made this the focus of many of their answers. “Don’t wait for the book,” Adam Schiff, the lead House manager, said. Have Bolton testify, he begged the senators. “You can erase all doubt.”
Before the senators’ questions began on Wednesday, I sat down with Zoe Lofgren, one of the House managers prosecuting the case against Trump. The California Democrat has the distinction of having participated in all three impeachment proceedings of our lifetime—as a House Judiciary Committee staffer during Richard Nixon’s impeachment process; as a House Judiciary member during Bill Clinton’s impeachment; and now as a House manager during Trump’s. She told me that the House managers had been working in the Capitol on Sunday when the Times story about Bolton’s forthcoming book was published. “The first words out of my mouth were ‘yikes,’ ” she recalled. “I just thought, Wow, that is a game-changer. That’s like when Nixon admitted everything,” she added, “and he had to announce his resignation.”
Of course, that’s not what happened this time. Not only is Trump not resigning but, in the three days since the Bolton revelations were published, the momentum appears to have shifted in the Senate Republican Conference—against hearing Bolton or any other witnesses. In the corridors off the Senate floor, Cory Gardner, of Colorado—a Republican facing a tough race this fall, who was previously seen as a possible swing vote on the issue—said that he was against witnesses. Republican leaders told reporters that they were prepared to move quickly after a vote against witnesses on Friday to a final vote on acquittal. “The momentum is clearly in the direction of moving to final judgment on Friday,” John Barrasso, of Wyoming, told reporters.
It turns out, once again, that Republican senators are more afraid of Donald Trump than of voters, who continue to strongly favor witness testimony, according to every public poll. Just in case the vote counts weren’t as solid as they seemed to be, the arguments on the floor seemed aimed at scaring any wavering Republicans back into line. Calling Bolton, Trump’s lawyers warned, would not be the end of it. They might call the former Vice-President Joe Biden, or Schiff himself, or the whistle-blower. The Senate “will be effectively paralyzed for months on end,” a Trump White House lawyer, Patrick Philbin, told the senators. “This would drag on for months.”
But will it? On Thursday, the senators’ questions will continue. On Friday, the senators will finally have to do what they have so far avoided, which is vote. Until then, it’s all just talking.












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Corporate Media Are the Real 'Sanders Attack Machine'






FAIR
 

Corporate Media Are the Real 'Sanders Attack Machine'

by Julie Hollar
Election Focus 2020As the Iowa caucuses approach, corporate media are beginning to panic.
"Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity," insisted  Jonathan Chait in New York magazine (1/28/20). The New York Times' Paul Krugman (1/20/20)—among many others (FAIR.org, 1/24/20)—revived the 2016 media trend of tarring Sanders as “Trumpian.”
New York: Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity
Electability advice from the pundit who wrote "Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination" (New York, 2/5/16).
The Never Trumper holdouts—an increasingly endangered species—are as scared as the establishment Democrats. "Bernie Can't Win," David "Axis of Evil" Frum wrote pleadingly in the Atlantic (1/27/20). "Bernie Sanders’s Trump-Like Campaign Is a Disaster for Democrats," cried the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin (1/27/20). "Anyone But Trump? Not So Fast," counseled the New York Times' Bret Stephens (1/24/20).
The Wall Street–funded Democratic think tank Third Way has also pulled out all the stops against Sanders' rise—with media's help. The group put out "A Warning" to Iowa Democrats (1/28/20), advising them that,
because of media negligence and the strategic calculation of his rivals, you have not seen much real exploration of the politically toxic background and ideas of the current polling leader in Iowa and a national co-frontrunner.
The memo proceeded to offer a lengthy list of ways Trump would attack Sanders—an easy list for them to compose, since some of them, such as that he'll be called a socialist and that Medicare for All is unpopular, are ones the Third Way itself has used to attack Sanders.
The media have been happy to offer a platform for this message. The Washington Post recently gave Third Way an op-ed column (1/15/20) to make its case that "Bernie Sanders’s agenda makes him the definition of unelectable." USA Today (1/29/20) likewise gave Third Way leaders space to charge, “Democrats Court Doom by Backing Bernie Sanders. His Ideas Are Toxic Outside Blue America.” And the group has been popping up in the latest round of centrist-source articles (among other usual suspects, like Rahm Emanuel and James Carville), in which establishment sources make unsubstantiated claims that reporters pass on without comment.
One of these ideas is that Sanders has flown under the radar, evading attacks or scrutiny from both his opponents and the media. "It's past time for other Democrats to come off the sidelines and for the media to start doing its job to vet a serious contender for the nomination," Third Way's Matt Bennett told NBCNews.com (1/25/20) in an article headlined, "'Oh My God, Sanders Can Win': Democrats Grapple With Bernie Surge in Iowa." In Politico (1/27/20), he ratcheted up the rhetoric: "[The media] let him get away with murder. They let him bluster past hard questions."
NBC: 'Oh my God, Sanders can win': Democrats grapple with Bernie surge in Iowa
Democrats are alarmed that too many Democrats want Bernie Sanders to be the nominee, NBC (1/25/20) reported.
Not all media observers agreed. In a bizarre "do they have an editor" moment, the Washington Post (1/26/20) published two news articles making opposite observations: "Bernie Sanders Faces Barrage of Attacks From Rivals as Polls Point to Surge in Early-Voting States" and "Rivals Aren't Throwing a Lot of Roadblocks in Front of Sanders." The former, by Chelsea Janes and Sean Sullivan, pointed to recent interviews and campaign messaging coming from Sanders' opponents that target him. The latter, by David Weigel, reported on some of the same evidence, but came to the opposite conclusion, because some of the attacks were made in venues without a broad reach (a South Carolina newspaper, a campaign email) and some were ineffective. (Many "voters were unmoved" by Biden and Klobuchar's attacks on Sanders as "upending the Obama legacy.")
The Weigel piece argued that
All of Sanders’s rivals spend time, sometimes after a worried voter asks for it, explaining how they will pay for their plans without busting the budget. Sanders does not get these questions and spent months at town halls where he asked voters to describe their crises — health-care bills, student debt — so he could explain why only an unfair economy would even allow the problems to exist.
To set the record straight: Sanders has gotten a great deal of media scrutiny and pushback, as FAIR noted back in 2016 (5/25/16) and David Sessions (New Republic, 1/28/20) has usefully updated. Sessions wrote:
The notion that Sanders is sailing toward primary victories with nary a soul bothering to pose a question about his record or electability is a relic of the 2016 Democratic primary, when Hillary Clinton and her supporters grew frustrated with his durable presence in the race and pundits puzzled over the fact that Sanders polled better against Donald Trump. The common explanation settled on was that Sanders’s popularity was a mirage resting on his lack of scrutiny. But it’s hard to square that conventional wisdom with the written record—a compendium of “vetting” so varied and substantial that it raises the question as to whether the people who need vetting the most are those who continue to call for it long after their needs have been met.
Another line of attack is the revival of the "Bernie Bro" as a means to discredit the Sanders campaign. A central trope of the 2016 campaign, based on anecdotal evidence and repeated endlessly by Clinton supporters and journalists, the idea that Sanders supporters are predominantly white, male, and viciously offensive on social media lingers on—despite its utter lack of basis in reality.
As all journalists and most of the rest of the world know, the internet is awash in vile rhetoric coming from all directions, not just from a small subset of Sanders supporters. As Glenn Greenwald put it (Intercept, 1/31/16):
There are literally no polarizing views one can advocate online — including criticizing Democratic Party leaders such as Clinton or Barack Obama — that will not subject one to a torrent of intense anger and vile abuse…. Pretending that abusive or misogynistic behavior is unique to Sanders supporters is a blatant, manipulative scam.
In fact, a March 2016 study found that, among voters, Sanders supporters were perceived as much less "aggressive and/or threatening online" (16%) than were Clinton supporters (30%), who in turn were perceived as much less so than Trump supporters (57%).
NBC: Bernie Sanders and His Internet Army
The New York Times ( 1/27/20) suggests that Sanders is responsible for his followers "venom" because he says things like, “I don’t go to the Hamptons to raise money from billionaires.” 
And yet the media persist with the trope. In the New York Times ( 1/27/20), this came as a lengthy front-page article headlined:
Bernie Sanders and His Internet Army: At the Start of His 2020 Bid, the Vermont Senator Told His Supporters That He Condemned Bullying. Is It His Problem if Many Don’t Seem to Listen? 
In the Daily Beast (1/22/20), the headline was "Bernie Bros Are Loud, Proud, and  Toxic to Sanders’ Campaign." And the headline of an NBCNews.com (1/19/20) column announced, "Trump's MAGA Supporters and Twitter Bernie Bros Have This Ugly Tactic in Common: Bernie Twitter Operates Under the Self-Righteous Guise of Being the True Progressives of the Internet. But Their Harassing Tactics Are Anything but Progressive.”
These pieces continue the trend of cherry-picking evidence and moving seamlessly between accusations of death threats and examples that hardly qualify as abuse (The closing piece of evidence in the New York Times: “Some of you millionaires need to realize that many of us actually *need* Bernie Sanders to win the presidency,” one account replied. “We can’t just ‘chill.’”).
In the Times piece, reporters Matt Flegenheimer, Rebecca R. Ruiz and Nellie Bowles regurgitated the completely unsubstantiated claim of chair-throwing at the 2016 Nevada convention (rated "false" by Snopes, but eagerly repeated across the media) and combined it with "a torrent of menacing messages" to the state party chair to justify associating Sanders' campaign with violence: "In person, serious violence has been avoided, it seems, though there have been occasional low-grade clashes."
Meanwhile, rivals are given the opportunity to cast blame on Sanders, again with no evidence. For instance, a strategist for both Obama and Clinton is quoted saying that Sanders "had empowered aides and surrogates who 'have a tendency to aggressively amplify things that a campaign would normally shut down amongst supporters.'”
No evidence is supplied, unless you count the example given later in the article in which prominent Sanders supporter Shaun King tweeted that the Warren campaign "leaked this attack against Bernie to the press for political gain," and that Warren staffers had told him that Warren "routinely embellishes stories." The outcome, according to the Times? The Sanders campaign manager told King to stop; "but by then, much of the Sanders-aligned internet was about to begin tweeting snakes at Ms. Warren and her supporters en masse."
In other words, the campaign did not empower King; they shut him down. But notice how King's tweets are nonetheless held responsible for "the Sanders-aligned internet" that was "about to begin" tweeting snakes—and then Sanders' campaign is apparently held responsible by association.
Hillary Clinton jumped into the fray with guns blazing in the Hollywood Reporter (1/21/20). When asked if she would endorse and campaign for Sanders if he got the nomination, her response was evasive but decidedly antagonistic:
I’m not going to go there yet. We’re still in a very vigorous primary season. I will say, however, that it’s not only him, it’s the culture around him. It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women.... I don’t think we want to go down that road again where you campaign by insult and attack and maybe you try to get some distance from it, but you either don’t know what your campaign and supporters are doing, or you’re just giving them a wink and you want them to go after Kamala [Harris] or after Elizabeth [Warren]. I think that that’s a pattern that people should take into account when they make their decisions.
The Post's Rubin (1/21/20) drew on this quote and other excerpts from Clinton's Hollywood Reporter interview to paint Sanders as having an "Attack Machine" centered on a "thinly veiled misogyny" that is now supposedly "com[ing] back to haunt him."
The real Sanders attack machine isn't the mythical machine run by Sanders to take down his opponents; it's run by the establishment Democrats and their media counterparts to take down Sanders.
SIDEBAR:

‘Menacing’ Sanders ‘Tightens Grip’ by ‘Threatening to Seize Control’


NYT: In Iowa, the ‘Not Sanders’ Democrats Find Voters Torn
New York Times (1/27/20)
The New York Times, in a piece headlined "In Iowa, the ‘Not Sanders’ Democrats Find Voters Torn” (1/27/20), described Sanders' rise in alarming terms:
Mr. Sanders is threatening to seize control in the early states, taking narrow but clear polling leads in Iowa and New Hampshire and increasingly menacing Mr. Biden’s advantage in national polls.
"The liberal Bernie Sanders tightens his grip in Iowa,” the piece’s subhead warned, using imagery more often used to convey the movement of hostile military forces than to report a politician’s favorable polling results.
—J.H.
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FOCUS: Trump's Legal Team Gave Thousands in Contributions to Republican Senators Ahead of Impeachment Trial


REPUBLICAN PROSTITUTION! 



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FOCUS: Trump's Legal Team Gave Thousands in Contributions to Republican Senators Ahead of Impeachment Trial
Attorney Kenneth Starr, who is part of Trump's impeachment defense team. (photo: AP)
Igor Derysh, Salon
Derysh writes: "Former independent counsels Ken Starr and Robert Ray, who both investigated former President Bill Clinton ahead of his impeachment, contributed thousands of dollars to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell last year before they joined the president's team."


Trump's lawyers also gave thousands to Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and Ted Cruz before the trial began



resident Trump's legal team made numerous campaign contributions to Republican senators overseeing the impeachment trial.
Former independent counsels Ken Starr and Robert Ray, who both investigated former President Bill Clinton ahead of his impeachment, contributed thousands of dollars to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell last year before they joined the president's team, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics (CFPR).
Starr, who lamented that "we are living in … the age of impeachment" during the trial on Monday and accused Democrats of waging a "domestic war," gave $2,800 to McConnell in July 2019, according to CFPR.
Ray, who wanted to indict Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair but now claims Trump has been vindicated by the transcript of his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, contributed the maximum $5,600 to McConnell in September 2019, according to the report.
The contributions came months before McConnell bragged to Fox News host Sean Hannity that he would be in "total coordination with the White House counsel's office and the people who are representing the president in the well of the Senate."
"Everything I do during this, I'm coordinating with the White House counsel," he said. "There will be no difference between the president's position and our position as to how to handle this."
Starr also contributed $2,700 to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., in 2017. Graham has been one of the most ardent Trump defenders in the Senate and previously pushed for Republicans to dismiss the impeachment charges against Trump without a trial.
Trump's personal attorney Jay Sekulow has contributed to multiple Republican senators over the last two decades, according to CFPR, including Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Sen. John Thune of South Dakota. The right-wing Washington Times noted that "no Republican has been more active in defense of President Trump during the impeachment trial than Sen. Ted Cruz." Thune has accused Democrats of presenting an "especially partisan" case and rejected calls for new witnesses, arguing the record is "pretty complete."
Sekulow, White House counsel Pat Cipollone and deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin all also gave thousands to Sen. Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign, according to CFPR. Ironically, Romney has been one of the most vocal Republicans pressing for former national security adviser John Bolton to testify after his leaked book manuscript blew up Trump's trial defense. Romney's comments drew criticism from fellow Republicans, like Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., who accused him of trying to "appease the left" by "calling witnesses who will slander" Trump.
Trump himself came under fire after he launched a fundraising committee effort to raise money for vulnerable Republican senators ahead of his impeachment trial. Trump raised money for several vulnerable Republicans who expressed support for him ahead of the trial but snubbed others, including Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who has said she may be open to witnesses.
Along with raising money for senators who will decide his fate, Trump has also been accused of threatening Republicans after a Trump confidant told CBS News that senators were warned: "vote against the president, and your head will be on a pike."
Senators like Collins vehemently denied that any Republican was threatened by Trump but Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., who is a member of Trump's defense team, confirmed to CBS News on Monday that any senator who votes against Trump may "face political repercussions."
"I mean listen, I don't want to speak for my Senate colleagues. But there are always political repercussions for every vote you take," Meadows said. "There is no vote that is higher profile than this."













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FOCUS: Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda | The Far-Right Bolsonaro Movement Wants Us Dead. But We Will Not Give Up




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FOCUS: Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda | The Far-Right Bolsonaro Movement Wants Us Dead. But We Will Not Give Up
David Miranda and Glenn Greenwald in 2013. (photo: Evaristo Sa/AFP/Getty Images)
Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Substantial media coverage over the last year, within Brazil and internationally, has been devoted to threats and attacks we each received, separately and together, due to our work - David's as a congressman and Glenn's as a journalist. 

Demagogues rely on fear to consolidate power. But courage is contagious – that’s why we must join hands and fight back

These incidents have been depicted, rightfully so, as reflective of the increasingly violent and anti-democratic climate prevailing in Brazil as a result of the far-right, authoritarian, dictatorship-supporting movement of President Jair Bolsonaro, which consolidated substantial power in the election held at the end of 2018.
There was much discussion when David entered congress in early 2019 after the only other openly LGBTQ+ congress member, Jean Wyllys, fled his seat and the country in fear of his life. As a longtime LGBTQ+ celebrity and sole LGBTQ+ member of congress, Wyllys had endured constant death threats and even bullying from fellow members of congress. His multiple fights with Bolsonaro and his sons made him a particular object of contempt by that movement. That they now occupied full-scale power made his remaining in Brazil untenable.
That Wyllys was replaced by another LGBTQ+ congress member provoked a contentious exchange between David and Bolsonaro that went viral on Twitter. David’s substantially increased visibility as the new LGBTQ+ member of congress provoked countless and highly detailed death threats from the Bolsonaro movement toward our family. That David, in 2016, had become the first-ever elected LGBTQ+ member of the Rio city council already had made him a target of much animus in a city dominated by paramilitary gangs and rightwing evangelical groups.
But his new status as the only openly LGBTQ+ member of the lower house of the federal congress made him a prime target of the vitriolic anti-LGBTQ+ Bolsonaro movement. That primal animus was enhanced by the fact that our public 15-year marriage and our two children serve as a living refutation of the false and toxic depiction of LGBTQ+ life as barren, unhappy, sickly and solitary, an anti-LGBTQ+ demonization campaign that is central to the Bolsonaro movement’s political identity.
A massive new wave of media coverage about our family was triggered when Glenn and the Intercept began their series of explosive exposés last June about rampant corruption at the highest levels of the Bolsonaro government, provoking a wave of violent threats, official acts of reprisal and a powerful fake news machine erected by the Bolsonaro movement against their enemies. All of those seemingly endless multipronged attacks culminated last week in criminal charges brought against Glenn by a far-right prosecutor that have been widely condemned domestically and internationally as legally frivolous and a blatant assault on a free press.
But the sense of danger and political violence in our lives, and for many others in Brazil, began almost two years ago. On 14 March 2018, Marielle Franco – the LGBTQ+, black, favela-raised city councilwoman from Rio de Janeiro – was gunned down while riding in her car on the streets of Rio at roughly 9pm in a brutal political assassination. Franco was one of our family’s best friends as well as a rising political star, a vessel of hope to so many people marginalized for decades and who had no voice. The loss was a major trauma, still unhealed, for both the country and for our lives.
Franco was a member of David’s party, the leftwing Socialism and Liberty party (PSOL). David – also black, LGBTQ+ and raised in a violent favela as an orphan – was as unlikely as Franco to occupy political power in a country long plagued by severe inequality, racial inequities and discrimination of all types. Because they shared the same causes of combating lethal police violence and inequality, they sat next to one another in the city council chamber. Her politically motivated murder at the age of 37 brought political violence into our lives as a lurking, terrorizing reality which has only intensified since then.
The end of that year saw the election of Bolsonaro as president despite his decades-long advocacy of a return to the US/UK-supported military dictatorship. That regime brutally ruled the country with torture and murder until 1985, torturing and killing dissidents, journalists and anyone who opposed them. Along with his long-taboo praise for the dictatorship (except when he criticized it for being insufficiently violent and repressive), Bolsonaro, though relegated to the fringes of political life as a congressman for 30 years, gained media attention through a slew of shockingly bigoted comments against the nation’s racial minorities, its indigenous population in the Amazon and especially against LGBTQ+ people.
But in the 2018 election, it was not only Bolsonaro but also his far-right Social Liberal party (PSL), which barely existed the year before, that enjoyed a stunning rise to power. Virtually overnight, PSL, filled with previously obscure and fanatically anti-democratic figures, became the second most represented party in congress, just a few seats behind the center-left Workers’ party that had governed the country since 2002. Among its elected members were two police candidates who, days before the election, had destroyed a street sign erected in homage to Franco with their fists raised in the air.
Just weeks after Bolsonaro’s election, a terrifying scandal was revealed in which Bolsonaro’s eldest son, Flávio, who had been elected to the federal senate in the 2018 election, was found to have employed in his cabinet as a state representative for a full decade both the wife and mother of the chief of Rio’s most violent and feared paramilitary gang. Composed largely of police and military officers, the militia specialized in abusing their law enforcement expertise to carry out highly skilled pay-for-hire assassinations, including – police believed – the assassination of Franco.
A police operation carried out as part of the investigation into Franco’s murder succeeded in apprehending five of the top six militia leaders, but the sixth, who fled and is now a fugitive, was the top leader – the one whose wife and mother were disturbingly employed for 10 years by Bolsonaro’s son. This shocking link of the now all-powerful Bolsonaro family to the most terrifying paramilitary gang of Rio has since been strengthened by newly discovered connections, including photos of Bolsonaro with both of the killers, that one of the ex-police officers arrested for having pulled the trigger that killed Franco was a neighbor of Bolsonaro’s in his gated community, while the other police officer, who was the driver of the car, has a daughter who dated Bolsonaro’s youngest son.
In early 2019, David’s replacement of Wyllys in congress became a much-publicized and dramatic story in a country where anti-LGBTQ+ animus had become a major force in Brazil’s political life and where very few LGBTQ+ candidates ever occupy high office. The acrimonious Twitter exchange between Bolsonaro and David instantly converted David into a new prime enemy of that movement.
That Glenn had co-founded a growing and increasingly vocal Brazilian bureau of the Intercept in 2016 that was highly critical of the Bolsonaro campaign and then his presidency made us both visible adversaries of this newly empowered far-right movement. That we are a gay, interracial couple in a country governed by a virulently anti-LGBTQ+ movement made each of us separately, but especially together, a particularly reviled yet visible target of their wrath. In sum, the bulk of the hatred devoted to Wyllys quickly transferred to David, to our marriage and to our family. As a New York Times article in July put it: “The two men find themselves on the front lines of the country’s increasingly bitter political divide.”
Since entering congress a little more than a year ago, David has not left the house without armed security and an armored vehicle of the kind that would have stopped the 11 bullets pumped into Franco’s car. We significantly escalated security measures at our home, and our two newly adopted sons had to be driven back and forth to school by security agents.
All of that was the context for the reporting Glenn and his Intercept colleagues began on 9 June 2019, and which has continued through to this day. It is hard to overstate the political impact of this journalism. As the Guardian reported last July, the reports “have had an explosive impact on Brazilian politics and dominated headlines for weeks”.
The last nine months of our lives, since the beginning of those reports, have been filled with attacks of every kind. We have received detailed death threats containing personal, non-public data available only to the state. Many have been directed at our two sons, sometimes with gruesome detail. A month after our reporting began, a news site notorious for being a dumping ground for leaks by Sérgio Moro announced that an agency under his command had initiated an investigation into Glenn’s personal finances, one stopped by the supreme court on the ground that it was clearly retaliatory and thus a violation of the constitutional guarantee of a free press. We learned in September that the same federal agency had also initiated an investigation into David’s personal finances, one launched two days after the Intercept’s reporting began.
With this reporting, the death threats intensified to an entirely new level. Now, in addition to David, Glenn also has not been able to leave home for any reason without a team of armed security and an armored vehicle since last June. The same is true of the Intercept’s Brazil editor, Leandro Demori, who has been the target of horrific threats aimed at his family. The exterior of our house now resembles a fortified prison, and its interior is filled with cameras and guards.
In November, Glenn appeared on a popular rightwing radio and YouTube program alongside a pro-Bolsonaro journalist who had, a month earlier, called on a children’s judge to investigate whether we are sufficiently taking care of our children – on the ground that David works as a congressman and Glenn works on these exposés. When Glenn confronted him on air about having used our children in this manner, the journalist physically assaulted him. The more significant part of the episode occurred afterwards: many of Bolsonaro’s closest allies, including his politician sons and the “guru” of his movement, not only cheered the assault but said their only regret was that the attack on Glenn was not more violent.
It is sometimes hard for citizens of centuries-old western democracies to appreciate how much easier it is for a young democracy like Brazil to easily slip back into full-scale tyranny, or to be violently brought back to it. That Brazil now has a president and is dominated by a political movement that openly seeks such a regression makes the threat all the more acute. In politics, they crave violence and civil conflict in lieu of dialogue and elections because they view those as the necessary conditions to justify a return of dictatorship-era repression. That is why they rely on threats, violence, attacks, intimidation and abuse of state power: they need civil upheaval and institutional conflict as a pretext for the repression they openly support.
When news broke last week that Glenn had been criminally charged, many wondered how that could have happened given that the federal police just weeks earlier had closed its comprehensive investigation into the hacking of Brazilian authorities and concluded that he was involved in no wrongdoing (to the contrary, the report emphasized that Glenn had exercised extreme caution in carrying out his work as a journalist). That the supreme court in July had barred any investigation into Glenn provoked the obvious question: if the high court had barred investigation of Glenn in connection with this journalism, how could they indict him for it?
The answer is that the Bolsonaro movement seeks to prove that they are not limited by law or anything else. To prove that, they will defy court orders, ignore police investigations, ride roughshod over all other institutions – just as the military dictatorship did by decree, using violence, torture and murder of dissidents, ignoring of supreme court orders and summary removal of congress members who even minimally opposed them. The playbook they are using is as dark and horrifying as it is familiar and obvious.
Because Glenn is a US citizen with a valid US passport, we could leave Brazil at any time. David and our sons would be entitled to automatic US citizenship. But we have not done that and we never will. Brazil is the country we love and we intend to fight this repression, not flee from it. Brazil is an extraordinary country, unique in so many ways, and is easily worth fighting for. We could never in good conscience exploit the privileges we have to leave behind a country we love and the millions of people who are not able to leave.
When you live in a country where roughly half the population endured life under a military tyranny, you end up meeting many who risked so much to fight against it and fight for democracy. Brazil re-democratized in 1985 only after two decades of profoundly difficult struggle, protest, organizing and resistance. We personally know many people who were imprisoned or exiled for years for their fight against the dictatorship. Many of their friends and comrades were murdered by the military regime while they fought for the cause of Brazilian democracy.
Courage is contagious. Those are the people who inspire us and so many like us in Bolsonaro’s Brazil who are confronting state repression to defend the democracy that so many people suffered so much to bring about. Demagogues and despots like Bolsonaro are a dime a dozen. They centrally rely on intimidation, fear and the use of state repression to consolidate power. A refusal to give into that fear, but instead to join hands with those who intend to fight against it, is always the antidote to this toxin.










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