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17 January 21
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Ronan Farrow | A Former Marine Stormed the Capitol as Part of a Far-Right Militia
Ronan Farrow, The New Yorker
Farrow writes: "Last week's storming of the Capitol attracted a wide range of people, but at least some of the individuals who made it into the building's inner chambers appear to be members of militia groups, acting with a degree of coördination."
Wearing tactical gear, they moved in an organized fashion, using handheld radios and headsets to communicate. Far-right groups at the Capitol included the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys, and the Boogaloo Bois, as well as smaller local organizations.
Donovan Crowl, a fifty-year-old former marine, who had served as a helicopter mechanic on an amphibious assault ship in the Persian Gulf, in 1990, was among the uniformed men. At the Capitol, Crowl wore a combat helmet, ballistic goggles, and a tactical vest with a handheld radio. In a video, he can be seen in a line of people making their way through the crowd up the Capitol steps, each with a hand on the shoulder of the one in front. In another video, he is standing alongside a group breaching the doors of the Capitol. The crowd responds to the question “Who’s our President?” with the shout “Trump!,” and, as people start to enter the building, a man can be heard saying, in astonishment, “We’re the first wave!” Crowl was later photographed in the Capitol Rotunda, and additional videos and photographs show him appearing to stand guard at the doors and on the steps of the Capitol. Crowl’s sister and mother, who identified Crowl, said that he had become increasingly radical in recent years, both in his support of Trump and in his expression of racist views. A friend of Crowl’s said that he had discussed plans to travel from his home, in Ohio, to Washington, D.C., to protest the certification of Joe Biden’s election.
In addition to his military attire, a patch on Crowl’s sleeve identified him as a member of the Oath Keepers. Founded in 2009, by Elmer Stewart Rhodes, a graduate of Yale Law School and a former Army paratrooper, the Oath Keepers is a loosely organized anti-government group with chapters around the country. It claims to have recruited tens of thousands of former law-enforcement and military officials into its ranks. While the organization says that its mandate is defending the Constitution, several human-rights groups have identified it as one of the largest and most dangerous extremist groups in the country. Oath Keepers has been involved in several armed standoffs with law enforcement in recent years, and a number of its members have faced criminal charges for threatening violence or other criminal activity. The group has in recent years embraced Trump, and, earlier this year, Twitter accused its founder of inciting violence and banned him.
In an eighty-minute interview, during which Crowl acknowledged that he was drinking, he confirmed to me that he had entered the Capitol, saying that he had gone to Washington to “do security” for “V.I.P.s” whom he declined to name. He said that his intentions had been peaceful and that he had never been violent, claiming “we protected the fucking Capitol Hill police.” He declined to substantiate the claim.
Along with the Oath Keepers, Crowl has participated in events organized by the Ohio State Regular Militia. Last November, he appeared with the group, whose members wore military fatigues and were armed with pistols and paintball guns, at an event at the Ohio Statehouse, where Biden supporters were celebrating his election. At the time, members of the militia declined to identify themselves to reporters, but said that they had voted for Trump and were attending to “protect people.” Mary McCord, a former acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security in the Justice Department, said that while “these types of modern unlawful militias have been around for decades, ever since Ruby Ridge and Waco,” Trump’s incitement had encouraged them. “All his false statements about the election being stolen, that he won in a landslide, that ballot boxes were being stuffed and dead people were voting en masse—those were all predicates to setting the stage for asking these groups to ‘fight like hell,’ as he said that morning.”
During the assault on the Capitol, a thirty-eight-year-old Ohio-based bar owner named Jessica Watkins, who described herself as the commanding officer of the Ohio State Regular Militia, posted live updates on Parler, the recently defunct Twitter alternative embraced by some right-wing extremists. She made reference to “forcing entry into the Capitol Building,” and later posted a video from inside the Rotunda, writing, “made it into the Senate.” In the posts, Watkins called Capitol police, one of whom died after attempting to repel the insurrectionists, “fuckweed cops.” She captioned one photo, showing Crowl in his tactical gear, “One of my guys at the Stop the Steal Rally today.”
In interviews, a friend of Crowl’s, and his mother and sister said that he had served in the Marines for six years, rising to the rank of corporal, and had at one point been stationed on the U.S.S. Iwo Jima. They said that, encountering health issues, Crowl left the Marines in 1993 and returned to civilian life. He struggled with addiction and held occasional jobs in construction. Legal records show that, last year, Crowl was arrested in Ohio for driving under the influence, and he has been charged with misdemeanors for violating probation and for domestic violence. During the Obama Administration, the family members and friend recalled, Crowl expressed fury at the President, along with wider animosity toward Black people. “The only good Black person is a dead Black person,” his mother, Teresa Joann Rowe, a retired nurse, recalled Crowl saying—though she stipulated that Crowl used a racial epithet. She said that she had become estranged from her son owing to his views and had not been aware of his involvement in the attack on the Capitol until she saw photos. “I would have called the Ohio state police if I had known he was going to that place,” Rowe told me. “I’m sitting here sick to my stomach.” During the Trump Administration, the people close to Crowl said, he began to express increasing ardor for Trump and to embrace conspiracy theories. “It’s stuff he heard from that psychopath Alex Jones and those echo chambers on the Internet,” his sister Denissa Crowl, who is also a nurse, told me. She said that such radicalization was a familiar phenomenon in Crowl’s rural Ohio community. “That’s like ground zero,” she told me. “I fear him,” she added. “He’s very skilled in firearms. He was an expert sharpshooter.”
Crowl identified himself to me as a member of both the Oath Keepers and the Ohio State Regular Militia, and said that he had attended events representing those groups. “I went to Columbus, Ohio,” he said. “I’ve been to Louisville, when the B.L.M., when they came.” He acknowledged his criminal charges, and said that he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder. He said that, at the Capitol, “I expelled three fucking people,” whom he refused to identify but said had been injured. He acknowledged that there had been violence, saying “patriots dragged this fucking maggot off the wall and started beating his ass.” Crowl made vague threats during the interview, telling me, “I already know where you live.” He repeatedly denied that he harbored racist views or had made racist comments, but he said that he believed in phrenology, the discredited pseudoscience that infers intellectual ability from skull shape, and told me that he had responded to The New Yorker’s request for comment after examining pictures of my head. As people involved in the riot began to be identified and arrested, Watkins, the self-described leader of Crowl’s local militia, posted on social media, insisting, as Crowl later did to me, that the group “never smashed anything, stole anything, burned anything.” In an interview this week with the Ohio Capital Journal, which first reported the Ohio State Regular Militia’s presence at the riot, Watkins said that she was also a member of the Oath Keepers. Watkins did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Spokespeople for the Marines, which falls under the administration of the Navy, confirmed that Crowl had served as a marine, but noted that he is no longer on active duty. One of the spokespeople added, “Naval Criminal Investigative Services is coordinating closely with our federal law enforcement partners to determine if any Department of Navy-affiliated personnel participated in criminal activity at the Capitol this week.”
Since the events at the Capitol, both experts and individuals without formal training have participated in a crowdsourced effort to identify individuals involved in the riot and refer them to law enforcement. A group of Twitter users, none of whom wished to be named publicly, used Watkins’s posts and other social-media evidence to establish Crowl’s identity. The group set up a chat on the messaging platform Discord, titled “Capitol Terrorists Exposers,” and examined images of Crowl and his associates. “I was a lifelong Republican until Trump descended that escalator,” one user said. “Now I’m fighting to make sure that my worst fears of him destroying our democracy do not come to fruition.” John Scott-Railton, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, also investigated Crowl, and later referred his name to the F.B.I. “When looking for men in military gear, I came across a lot of people who appeared to be playing dress-up,” Scott-Railton told me. “But, again and again, military veterans kept flagging this guy, saying he looks like the real deal.”
The F.B.I. has opened at least a hundred and seventy cases in relation to the events, leading to criminal charges against at least seventy people. Experts have expressed concern about the looming threat of further coördinated violence during next week’s Inauguration, with Pentagon officials telling the Times that some sixteen groups, including armed pro-Trump organizations, have registered to stage protests. McCord, the former acting Assistant Attorney General, said that she anticipated more activity from militia groups like Crowl’s after Biden takes office. “A Democrat Administration coming in typically means a resurgence,” she told me. “These groups are going to be figuring out their next play.” Crowl said that his group had no plans for the Inauguration, because he was told, by leadership he declined to identify, that it was “a fucking trap.” However, his sister and mother said that they were helping to identify him because they nevertheless worried about the threat posed by armed militias like his around the country. “I don’t want him to come after me,” Denissa Crowl told me. “But I’d rather he come after me than a bunch of people at the Inauguration.”
Ellis previously was chief counsel to Rep. Devin Nunes. (photo: CNN)
Acting Defense Secretary Orders NSA Director to Immediately Install Former GOP Operative as the Agency's Top Lawyer
Ellen Nakashima, The Washington Post
Nakashima writes: "Acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller ordered the director of the National Security Agency to install on Saturday a former GOP political operative as the NSA's top lawyer, according to four individuals familiar with the matter."
It is unclear what the NSA will do. The agency and the Pentagon declined to comment.
In November, Pentagon General Counsel Paul C. Ney Jr. named Michael Ellis, then a White House official, to the position of general counsel at the NSA, a career civilian post at the government’s largest and most technologically advanced spy agency, The Post reported. He was selected after a competitive civil service competition. He has not taken up the job, however, as he needed to complete administrative procedures, including taking a polygraph test.
Reached by phone Saturday, Ellis said, “I don’t talk to the press, thank you,” and hung up.
Miller gave NSA Director Paul Nakasone until 6 p.m. Saturday to install Ellis in the job, according to several people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. The 6 p.m. deadline passed without Nakasone taking action. It was unclear Saturday evening what the Pentagon’s next move would be.
Nakasone was not in favor of Ellis’s selection and has sought to delay his installation, according to several people.
Ellis’s naming, made under pressure from the White House, drew criticism from national security legal experts. It “appears to be an attempt to improperly politicize an important career position,” wrote Susan Hennessey, a former lawyer in the NSA Office of General Counsel, on Lawfare, where she is the executive editor.
The move is troubling, coming as it does four days before President Trump leaves office and the Biden administration takes over, former U.S. officials said. The move makes it more difficult for the Biden administration to immediately replace him, the former officials said.
“An 11th-hour move like this and a directive from the acting secretary of defense is overwhelmingly strong evidence of irregularity,” Hennessey said on Saturday. “Unless the acting secretary of defense can produce a compelling rationale for why this individual needed to be installed now, there should be a presumption that this is improper and the Biden team should remove this individual on Day 1.”
There also were concerns about Ellis’s qualifications for the job, according to several people. One individual said that those issues included the possibility that he was picked over candidates who scored higher during the interview process.
Pushing back against critics, one U.S. official said that the two prior NSA general counsels had ties to the Obama administration. Glenn Gerstell, who retired a year ago, raised $50,000 for the Obama campaign in 2012, he said. And Gerstell’s predecessor, Raj De, was White House staff secretary in the Obama administration prior to arriving at the NSA.
The concern of Nakasone and others, current and former officials said, is that the White House is seeking to “burrow” Ellis into the job in violation of a long-standing policy that prevents embedding political personnel into career civilian positions prior to a change in administration.
Nakasone recently got a verbal indication from the Office of Personnel Management that the policy did not apply to intelligence community employees, according to one U.S. official. On Thursday, he requested a written legal opinion on that point, according to two officials. He has not yet received that written opinion, the officials said.
Ellis previously was chief counsel to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), a staunch Trump supporter and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Ellis joined the White House in 2017, when he became a lawyer on the National Security Council and in 2019 he was elevated to senior director for intelligence.
Census worker. (photo: AP)
Trump's Final Attempt to Sabotage the Census Has Officially Failed
Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
Stern writes: "The Trump administration's final attempt to sabotage the census is dead."
On Friday, the Justice Department told a federal judge that the Census Bureau would not release data on the number of undocumented immigrants living in each state before Jan. 20. NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang first reported the DOJ’s filing. Donald Trump intended to use this data for the apportionment of congressional seats among states; his plan, if successful, would have stripped seats in the House of Representatives from states with large undocumented communities. Trump’s political appointees tried to rush out this data before the president’s term ends, but the task proved impossible. Joe Biden is certain to undo the directive, ensuring that congressional seats will be apportioned based on the entire population of each state—as required by the Constitution.
Trump spent much of his term rigging the census to maximize the political power of white rural voters at the expense of immigrants, racial minorities, and city dwellers. He first sought to add a citizenship question, which would have produced a severe undercount of immigrants and Latinos. The Supreme Court blocked that question in 2018, finding that the administration illegally lied about its purpose when it claimed, absurdly, that gathering citizenship information was necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act. Trump then asked his administration to compile data on undocumented immigrants using existing administrative records. In July 2020, he directed the Census Bureau to exclude these immigrants from the population count used to distribute congressional seats among states. If successful, this plan would strip seats, as well as votes in the Electoral College, from more diverse states like California.
Civil rights groups sued to block Trump’s directive, but the Supreme Court’s conservative majority dismissed their challenge as premature in December. Over the next month, the entire scheme collapsed. The Census Bureau blew past the Dec. 31 deadline for the apportionment data. Its director—Steven Dillingham, a Trump appointee—then tried to rush out the information before Jan. 20. Dillingham reportedly called this report the bureau’s “number one priority,” and deputy directors Nathaniel Cogley and Benjamin Overholt—both Trump appointees—pushed career employees to produce Trump’s report before the inauguration.
Whistleblowers at the Census Bureau revealed this last-minute scramble to Peggy E. Gustafson, the inspector general of the Commerce Department (which houses the bureau). In a scathing letter, Gustafson wrote that career employees have been given incomplete and faulty data on undocumented residents. Due to the compressed timeline, these employees were forced to forgo standard data quality checks. They were not given precise guidelines to determine who, precisely, counts as an undocumented immigrant. And they were obligated to use datasets from outside the bureau whose accuracy they could not verify. One whistleblower called the work “statistically indefensible.” (Congressional Democrats reacted to the letter by calling for Dillingham’s resignation or termination.)
On Wednesday, in response to Gustafson’s letter, Dillingham told the Census Bureau to halt work on the tabulation of undocumented immigrants. And on Friday, the Justice Department bowed to the inevitable, telling a federal judge that the bureau “will not be in position to finalize or provide apportionment data until many weeks after January 20, 2021.” (In other filings, the DOJ suggested that it could finalize the information by March 6 at the earliest.) Justice Department lawyers asked the judge to stay ongoing census litigation for 21 days. The move is effectively an admission that Trump’s project is doomed, and an acknowledgment that Biden is poised to formally kill it within weeks.
Trump’s inability to manipulate the census is one of his most remarkable failures. His attempt to add a citizenship question was foiled by lies, stupidity, and bad luck. While the case was pending at SCOTUS, documents emerged that proved the real purpose of the question was to create an advantage for “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.” This revelation may have persuaded Chief Justice John Roberts to cast the fifth vote blocking the addition. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform later obtained more documents demonstrating that Trump’s operatives at the Justice Department lied under oath to conceal this racist goal. Federal courts also thwarted the administration’s plan to halt the census early in light of ample evidence that the count was incomplete. These rulings were eventually put on hold by the Supreme Court, but they added two final, crucial weeks to the census count. Now Trump’s ploy to strip House seats from diverse states—on the basis of inaccurate data—has collapsed in the twilight of his term.
Had Trump succeeded, he would have handed Republicans an unearned electoral advantage for the next 10 years. The citizenship question would have shifted representation from immigrant-rich communities, especially urban areas, toward white, rural regions by producing an undercount of Latinos, both documented and undocumented. Moreover, it may have provided states with the information necessary to exclude immigrants from the population when redrawing legislative and congressional districts. This method of redistricting would undermine the bedrock democratic principle of one person, one vote, and entrench the electoral power of Republicans until at least 2030. A competent administration probably could have achieved many of Trump’s census goals. The Supreme Court’s conservative justices seem favorable to a nativist overhaul of the process that diminishes representation for noncitizens. Trump’s appointees, however, got too tangled up in their own mendacity and ineptitude to get the job done. When the chief justice rejected the citizenship question, he sent administration officials a message: lie better next time. But these officials never figured out how to lie better, and they have now run out of time to learn.
Cy Vance. (photo: Shutterstock)
Manhattan DA Expands Probe Into Trump Company to Include Family Estate: Report
Celine Castronuovo, The Hill
Castronuovo writes: "A probe into the Trump Organization's business dealings led by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance has reportedly expanded to include the Trump family's Westchester County estate."
CNN reported Friday that court documents it had obtained revealed President Trump’s son Eric Trump, who serves as the executive vice president of the Trump Organization, was directly involved in discussions on the 212-acre property, called Seven Springs.
Town officials have reportedly been sent grand jury subpoenas seeking information surrounding any conversations or correspondence they have had with the Trump Organization on its development plans.
Roland Baroni, a lawyer for the town of North Castle, N.Y., told CNN that the town had received and complied with a subpoena "asking for the planning board files, any correspondence, any email" exchanged between the town and the Trump Organization.
North Castle is one of three municipalities the large family compound covers.
CNBC reported Friday that a lawyer for the town of Bedford, N.Y., said they had also received a subpoena from Vance's office sometime “before Christmas” for information and records relating to the estate.
The town supervisor for the third town, New Castle, N.Y., declined CNBC's request for comment.
People familiar with the investigation told CNN that the Trump Organization had also been subpoenaed for information on the property, including tax deductions the company took after donating a portion of the land to a public trust for conservation.
The Hill has reached out to the Trump Organization for comment.
According to CNN, Trump’s business sought to develop the property multiple times, including putting together plans to potentially build a golf course or a community of residential homes.
By making a land donation for conservation, a property is able to take a tax deduction based on the value of the property. Vance’s investigation is looking into whether the value was inflated on the property to get a more beneficial tax deduction.
Court filings indicated that 158 acres of the Westchester County property were given to the North American Land Trust with an appraised value of $21.1 million.
The property, which the Trump Organization purchased in 1995 for $7.5 million, is also part of a civil investigation being conducted by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) into whether the company lied about the value of certain assets to receive more beneficial loans and tax benefits.
This comes as The Associated Press reported Friday that Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen had been interviewed for hours this week by Vance’s office, at least partially on Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that the investigations by Vance and James, both Democrats, are part of a “witch hunt” with political motivations.
Protesters in Oak Flat in June 2015. Oak Flat is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its spiritual and cultural significance. (photo: Ross D Franklin/AP
Outcry as Trump Officials to Transfer Sacred Native American Land to Miners
Annette McGivney, Guardian UK
McGivney writes: "As one of its last acts, the Trump administration has set in motion the transfer of sacred Native American lands to a pair of Anglo-Australian mining conglomerates."
Critics condemn ‘callous betrayal’ after Trump officials set in motion transfer of Oak Flat to Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton
The 2,422-acre Arizona parcel called Oak Flat is of enormous significance to the Western Apache and is now on track for destruction by what is slated to be one of the largest copper mining operations in the United States.
Steps for the controversial land transfer from the US government, which owns the land, to the miners were completed on Friday morning, when a final environmental assessment was published. The government must soon transfer title to the land.
Native Americans in the area have compared it to historical attacks on their tribes. “What was once gunpowder and disease is now replaced with bureaucratic negligence,” said Wendsler Nosie, founder of activist organization Apache Stronghold and a member of the Apache band descended from Geronimo. “Native people are treated as something invisible or gone. We are not. We don’t want to be pushed around any more.”
The move comes after the administration sped up the environmental approval process for the transfer by a full year. During a meeting with environmental groups, regional Forest Service officials attributed the accelerated timeline to “pressure from the highest levels” of the US Department of Agriculture, though the government says it is only because the work was finished more quickly than expected.
The recipient of the land is a firm called Resolution Copper, which was set up by the miners Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.
“The Forest Service is clearly jumping through flaming hoops to get this done for Rio Tinto before Trump leaves office,” said Randy Serraglio, conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity. He called it “a callous betrayal of Native people who value the land as sacred.”
Last May, Rio Tinto blasted a sacred Aboriginal site in western Australia’s Juukan Gorge. The widespread public outcry and investor revolt over the destruction led the Rio Tinto chairman, Simon Thompson, to promise that the company would “never again” destroy sites of “exceptional archaeological and cultural significance” during mining operations.
Called Chi’chil Bildagoteel in Apache, Oak Flat is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its spiritual and cultural significance to at least a dozen south-west Native American tribes. It contains hundreds of indigenous archaeological sites dating back 1,500 years and is a place where Apache tribes have performed ceremonies for centuries.
Yet thousands of feet beneath Oak Flat is a copper deposit estimated to be one of the largest in the world and worth more than $1bn. If the mine goes forward as planned, it will consume 11 square miles, including Apache burial grounds, sacred sites, petroglyphs and medicinal plants.
Unbeknown to tribes and environmental groups who had long opposed mining Oak Flat, the land transfer was passed by Congress and signed by Barack Obama in December 2014 as a last-minute rider to a Department of Defense spending bill.
The legislation calls for giving Oak Flat to Resolution Copper in exchange for 5,736 acres of its privately held land across Arizona that are desirable for recreation or conservation. While conducting its environmental review, the Forest Service acknowledged that the mine will destroy sites sacred to Native Americans but claimed the loss was an unavoidable consequence of the land exchange mandate.
The San Carlos Apache Tribe filed a lawsuit in US district court in Phoenix on Thursday alleging, among other things, that by moving forward with the land exchange the Forest Service is violating the National Historic Preservation Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and an 1852 treaty between the United States and Western Apache tribes.
On Friday, in a separate lawsuit, a judge denied Apache Stronghold’s request to delay publication of the environmental assessment. But as a result of litigation and public pressure the Forest Service agreed to delay the land transfer for 55 days.
Apache Stronghold also filed a lien on Oak Flat claiming that the land was owned by the Apache according to the 1852 treaty – under which Oak Flat was deemed a part of the Apache homeland – and the Forest Service did not have legal title to the property.
The Arizona representative Raúl Grijalva and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders also plan to introduce the Save Oak Flat Act in Congress to repeal the land exchange.
Tribes and environmental groups are hopeful Oak Flat can still be preserved. “There are plenty of things an incoming Biden administration can do to stop this,” said Serraglio of the Center for Biological Diversity.
Even if Oak Flat ends up in the hands of Resolution Copper through title transfer “there is no guarantee they will be able to get any of the other federal permits to actually do the mine”.
SUNDAY SONG: Leonard Cohen | There Is a War
Leonard Cohen, YouTube
Excerpt: "There is a war between the rich and poor, A war between the man and the woman. There is a war between the ones who say there is a war And the ones who say there isn't."
New York, around 1970. (photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
There is a war between the rich and poor,
A war between the man and the woman.
There is a war between the ones who say there is a war
And the ones who say there isn't.
Why don't you come on back to the war, that's right, get in it,
Why don't you come on back to the war, it's just beginning.
Well I live here with a woman and a child,
The situation makes me kind of nervous.
Yes, I rise up from her arms, she says "I guess you call this love"
I call it service.
Why don't you come on back to the war, don't be a tourist,
Why don't you come on back to the war, before it hurts us,
Why don't you come on back to the war, let's all get nervous.
You cannot stand what I've become,
You much prefer the gentleman I was before.
I was so easy to defeat, I was so easy to control,
I didn't even know there was a war.
Why don't you come on back to the war, don't be embarrassed,
Why don't you come on back to the war, you can still get married.
There is a war between the rich and poor,
A war between the man and the woman.
There is a war between the left and right,
A war between the black and white,
A war between the odd and the even.
Why don't you come on back to the war, pick up your tiny burden,
Why don't you come on back to the war, let's all get even,
Why don't you come on back to the war, can't you hear me speaking?
An aerial view shows Marathon Petroleum Corp's Los Angeles Refinery, the state's largest producer of gasoline, in Carson, Calif., on April 22, 2020. (photo: David McNew/Getty Images)
Big Oil Is Backing Off Election Denial - but Has Deep Ties
Alleen Brown, The Intercept
Brown writes: "A parade of oil and gas companies nobly announced this week that they will review their political donations in the wake of last week's riot in Washington, D.C. - an attempt to distance themselves from the spectacle of election fraud conspiracists and white supremacists attacking the Capitol building and temporarily halting the election certification process."
The fossil fuel industry pioneered massive political disinformation with climate denial. It also fed the “Stop the Steal” movement.
Marathon Petroleum, Occidental Petroleum, and the employee political action committees for ConocoPhillips and BP temporarily froze their contributions. Exxon Mobil and Chevron are reviewing their donations. Even energy industry association spokespersons for the American Petroleum Institute, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, as well as a leader of the Koch network said the attack on the Capitol will factor into their future giving.
Those who have spent years confronting fossil fuel industry-funded disinformation campaigns, raising alarms about the climate crisis, are unimpressed with the moves. The origin of the storming of the Capitol was a series of lies, and there is no indication that the fossil fuel industry is taking a meaningful stance against high-risk deceit.
In many ways, fossil fuel companies laid the groundwork for the widespread acceptance of lies big enough to cause an existential threat to democracy’s survival — even humanity’s. “Lying has become a habit,” said science historian Naomi Oreskes, whose book with Eric Conway, “Merchants of Doubt,” documents how veterans of the tobacco industry’s misinformation efforts seeded climate denial among the media and lawmakers.
“They have been funding disinformation and anti-climate politicians for a very long time,” she said over email, of the fossil fuel industry. Oreskes said reconsidering political donations for election misinformation is a belated gesture: “A day late and a dollar short. Or, rather, three decades late and hundreds of millions of dollars short.”
Meanwhile, the industry still has not come close to fully divesting from nor making amends for their spread of lethal climate disinformation.
To climate scientist Michael Mann, the fossil fuel groups’ announcements that they will review political giving serves to evade attention from the fact that, during the Trump administration, the oil and gas agenda was supercharged by the racist rhetoric and lies that swayed elections in the direction of their favored candidates. Indeed, never has the fossil fuel industry’s agenda been carried to fruition so completely as it was over the past four years, achieved using what Mann described to The Intercept as “red meat” thrown out for the racist right, including election disinformation.
“It is the fossil fuel industry, the front groups that they fund along with plutocrats like the Koch brothers — these are the groups that have been pulling the strings, that have been throwing out the red meat, that have been instigating this racially motivated, treasonous rebellion by the disaffected base of the Republican Party,” said Mann. “They’re playing with fire, and it’s almost like they don’t really care about democracy.”
Links To Election Deniers
The fossil fuel companies will presumably be reexamining donations to politicians who supported the “Stop the Steal” movement to overturn election results. Some 139 U.S. representatives and eight senators voted against certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s win, including lawmakers like Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who has received extensive contributions from some of the oil and gas companies now denouncing the Capitol attack. Perhaps they will also reconsider future contributions to President Donald Trump himself, who incited the insurrection and received $14,696,347 from the oil and gas industry for the 2020 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Many more individuals and groups would have to be included in a comprehensive audit of the fossil fuel industry’s involvement in the events leading up to the storming of the Capitol. Among those listed as coalition partners on the March to Save America website, which called on Trump supporters to defend the president, was the Rule of Law Defense Fund, a dark-money group started by the Republican Attorneys General Association.
Fossil fuel companies like Koch Industries and Exxon have donated to the attorneys general association and groups backed by the industry — like the Koch brothers’ Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce and the Edison Electric Institute — have directly contributed to the Rule of Law Defense Fund. The Rule of Law Defense Fund even went so far as to put out robocalls promoting the march, as Documented reported.
Also listed on the march’s website was Turning Point USA, which recently entered into a partnership with the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC, as the group is known, brings together lobbyists and lawmakers to promote industry friendly legislation at the state level. Turning Point and ALEC are working together to place right-wing students on university boards of regents, according to reporting by the Center for Media and Democracy. Koch-linked groups also helped mobilize this summer’s reopen protests — a movement that significantly overlapped with Stop the Steal.
Meanwhile the Twitter account for the climate denial website Climate Depot tweeted on January 6: “Striking fear in politicians is not a bad thing.” A subsequent tweet said, “Thomas Jefferson: ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Climate Depot is run by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a think tank that the fossil fuel industry has funded in the past. Its Twitter was just one among several climate denier accounts that DeSmog documented supporting the Stop the Steal movement or spreading disinformation in the aftermath of the Capitol attack.
Big Lie of Climate Denial
Mann, the climate scientist, pointed to parallels between the industry’s attempt to distance itself from election misinformation and its recent move to steer away from all-out climate denial. “They’ve done the same thing with climate denialism as it has become untenable to deny that climate change is real and happening,” he said.
The story of the climate lie goes back to the 1980s. In the early part of the decade, a task force of fossil fuel industry representatives was meeting regularly to talk about the emerging climate science they were helping produce. Just as the science was becoming clear, the American Petroleum Institute and companies like Exxon Mobil began pouring money into disinformation. To cast doubt on climate science, the industry lobbied, funded new organizations, published ads, paid for studies, bought scientists who would act as media pundits, and of course lavished millions of dollars on politicians who would advance their cause.
As a young scientist and author of a key study showing that recent high temperatures were aberrations in the historical record, Mann became a target of the industry’s denial machine. Media pundits and politicians attempted to smear his credibility. He received death threats.
Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., who is among the politicians who have received the highest donations from the fossil fuel industry, went so far as to call for Mann to be investigated as a criminal.
By the mid-aughts, under pressure from scientists, environmentalists, civil society, and shareholders, the industry began to distance itself from denial. But the lies were well rooted by then, in part because of how well they fit into dreams of unfettered capitalism championed by the right. (Oreskes, the science historian, and her co-author Conway have a forthcoming book, “The Magic of the Marketplace: The True History of a False Idea,” which will focus on how ideas about free market fundamentalism helped normalize misinformation.)
Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry continued to donate money to politicians who purveyed climate lies. A 2019 analysis by the Center for American Progress Action Fund of the outgoing 116th Congress counted 150 Republican members who did not believe that human activity causes climate change. They’d collectively accepted $68 million in donations from the fossil fuel industry.
And Trump himself, perhaps fossil fuel firms’ all-time biggest champion, accepted more than $14 million from the oil and gas industry for his reelection campaign. Over the course of his administration, Trump dismantled much of the existing government infrastructure for confronting the climate crisis and promoted outright deniers to positions of power.
Mann’s book, “The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet,” published this week, argues that the industry never truly quit promoting climate disinformation. “They haven’t given up in their effort to block the clean energy transition and keep us addicted to fossil fuels,” he said. “They just changed their tactics to tactics they think they can get away with.” He pointed to fossil fuel industry efforts to derail state-level policies to incentivize renewable energy development, bolster false solutions like geoengineering, spread the idea that the climate problem is about individual lifestyle choices, and promote a sense of doom, that nothing can really be done about the climate crisis — which, Mann argues, is simply untrue.
What should the industry do if it truly wants to make amends for sowing chaos? “That’s easy,” said Oreskes. “Stop funding and fomenting disinformation, stop exploring for new oil, gas and coal reserves, and start working on a new business model that shifts to renewable energy, or something else entirely.”
“I think it is tragic that it took an insurrection for them to rethink their strategy,” she said. “I hope this will prompt a deeper self-examination. An awful lot is at stake here.”
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