08 January 21
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Trump Resisted Sending National Guard to Capitol
Kaitlan Collins, Zachary Cohen, Barbara Starr and Jennifer Hansler, CNN
Excerpt: "Vice President Mike Pence, not President Donald Trump, helped facilitate the decision to mobilize members of the DC National Guard Wednesday when violence at the US Capitol building started to escalate, according to a source familiar with the move and public comments from top officials."
Trump, who has proven over the past year to be eager to deploy the National Guard when violence breaks out, initially resisted doing so on Capitol Hill Wednesday as a mob of his supporters breached the building, per a source familiar. Pence played a key role in coordinating with the Pentagon about deploying them, and urged them to move faster than they were.
The news raises questions about who was acting as commander in chief on one of America's darkest days, which saw the country's legislature overrun for the first time since the British attacked and burned the building in August 1814.
The Trump administration, earlier this week, said that civilian law enforcement would be tasked with protection of federal facilities but the Department of Defense received requests for additional support from the National Guard Wednesday as the situation became increasingly dangerous, a senior defense official told CNN.
As the chaos unfolded, doubts were raised about whether Trump would order the DC National Guard to respond due to the slowness of the response. Public statements by acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and other top officials suggested it was Pence who ultimately approved the decision. Miller's statement Wednesday seems to indicate he did not even speak with Trump, discussing the matter with his deputy instead as sources told CNN the President was reluctant to even denounce the violence being carried out in his name.
Kash Patel, Miller's chief of staff, said in a statement Thursday that Trump and the acting secretary of defense spoke "multiple times this week about the request for National Guard personnel in DC," but did not specify if they were in contact on Wednesday as the situation at the Capitol spiraled out of control.
"During these conversations the President conveyed to the Acting Secretary that he should take any necessary steps to support civilian law enforcement requests in securing the Capitol and federal buildings," Patel added.
Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy sidestepped questions Wednesday night about whether Pence, not Trump, directed the DC National Guard to be activated but suggested the vice president ultimately approved the decision.
Asked by Fox News about reporting that Pence, not the President, approved the activation, McCarthy demurred, but ultimately said: "I know the vice president has been in constant contact with us and also along with security inside the Capitol, I communicated with the vice president early on. It was in regards to getting the National Guard there. He said he will call right now."
The comments appeared to conflict with what White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a tweet hours earlier, when she asserted that Trump "directed" the National Guard to respond to the situation.
Pence spoke with defense secretary and top general
Miller also confirmed that he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, spoke with Pence, not Trump, on Wednesday afternoon. He also said he was in contact with top congressional lawmakers.
"Chairman Milley and I just spoke separately with the Vice President and with Speaker Pelosi, Leader McConnell, Senator Schumer and Representative Hoyer about the situation at the U.S. Capitol. We have fully activated the D.C. National Guard to assist federal and local law enforcement as they work to peacefully address the situation," he said in a statement.
"We are prepared to provide additional support as necessary and appropriate as requested by local authorities. Our people are sworn to defend the constitution and our democratic form of government and they will act accordingly," he said.
The National guard was not fully activated until hours after the violent mob descended on the capitol.
As CNN reported previously, the initial agreement for the deployment agreed on Monday -- which was under Pentagon control for this mission -- to support local law enforcement limited their involvement to helping local law enforcement at traffic control points and in the subway.
Under that agreement, National Guard forces did not have orders to provide protection to federal facilities. Top military commanders, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were determined to keep active duty military out of that effort and limit the role of the national guard, several defense officials say.
The Pentagon's long-standing focus has been to show that civil law enforcement and state activated national guard are sufficient to control civil unrest.
'A little bit of confusion'
In a statement Wednesday evening, chief Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman said that earlier in the week, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser "requested approximately 340 D.C. National Guardsmen to assist D.C. police in preparation for possible protests today."
"That request was approved. Today, the mayor requested the full activation of the D.C. Guard to support local and federal law enforcement as they respond to the situation at the Capitol. That request was approved. There have been no other requests from the D.C. government," he said.
Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy acknowledged there was a "little bit of confusion" with regard to the additional request.
"But as we worked through it, we ultimately made the determination about a half hour later to mobilize the entire DC National Guard. So, this has been incredibly fluid. But I have to go through the Secretary of Defense ultimately to get the final approval to mobilize personnel as well as to conduct operations in cooperation, in coordination with local authorities," he said.
A source familiar with the situation said White House staffers are "horrified" by the violence at the Capitol and are worried there will be more trouble on the streets Wednesday evening.
"He doesn't want to" do more than what he is doing right now, the adviser said.
"If we could throw him to the angry mob, we'd throw him to the angry mob now," the adviser said.
Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Getty)
Bernie Sanders: 'The Man Directly Responsible for the Chaos of Today Is Donald Trump'
John Haltiwanger, Business Insider
Haltiwanger writes: "Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont did not mince words in terms of who he blames for the violence at the US Capitol on Wednesday, explicitly blaming President Donald Trump for the pandemonium."
"The man directly responsible for the chaos of today is Donald Trump, who has made it clear that he will do anything to remain in power – including insurrection and inciting violence," Sanders said in a tweet. "Trump will go down in history as the worst and most dangerous president in history."
Sanders has been an unabashed critic of Trump, often excoriating the president over his authoritarian tendencies. He came relatively close to being Trump's opponent in the 2020 presidential race, but was ultimately defeated by President-elect Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination.
Trump incited a riot that amounted to an attempted coup at the US Capitol on Wednesday as he continued to push for the result of the 2020 election to be overturned.
A pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol building, and a woman was shot and killed in the process. Property was damaged as the violent crowd pushed into the building, with some entering the House and Senate chambers.
The riot was preceded by a Trump speech near the White House, in which Trump reiterated his baseless claims that he lost the election due to mass voter fraud. He urged his supporters to march on the Capitol building as lawmakers gathered in a joint session to certify the Electoral College vote, which would've finalized Biden's win.
The process got delayed by the violence, and Congress was evacuated. Meanwhile, Trump attacked Vice President Mike Pence, who presides over the certification, for refusing to overturn the election result. Pence does not have authority to unilaterally reject the result, despite Trump's claims.
Trump has issued lukewarm calls for his supporters in Washington, DC, to cease any violent activities and "go home in peace," while continuing to fan the flames of insurrection with ongoing, false assertions that the election was stolen from him.
Rep. Ilhan Omar, seen here in 2019, said Wednesday that she is drafting articles of impeachment against President Trump, as pro-Trump extremists stormed the U.S. Capitol. (photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
Rep. Omar Says She Is Drafting New Articles of Impeachment Against Trump
Laurel Wamsley, NPR
Wamsley writes: "Rep. Ilhan Omar said she is drafting articles of impeachment against President Trump. She blamed him for his supporters' attempt at an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday."
"Donald J. Trump should be impeached by the House of Representatives & removed from office by the United States Senate," wrote Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota. "We can't allow him to remain in office, it's a matter of preserving our Republic and we need to fulfill our oath."
In remarks to his gathered supporters on Wednesday at the Ellipse behind the White House, Trump falsely claimed that "this election was stolen from you, from me, from the country" and also incorrectly declared that he won "in a landslide."
Trump's supporters had gathered in Washington, D.C., to protest Congress' certification of the Electoral College vote, which was won by former Vice President Joe Biden by a large margin.
Even as his supporters occupied the U.S. Capitol building, Trump released a video message on Wednesday afternoon in which he told them to "go home now," while continuing to falsely claim the election had been "stolen."
The House of Representatives, where Democrats hold a majority, already voted to impeach Trump in December 2019. The articles of impeachment then included abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, related to Trump's push for Ukraine to conduct investigations that could help him in the 2020 election. Less than two months later, the Republican-controlled Senate voted to acquit him.
There were already calls from some, including Omar, to impeach Trump over his Saturday phone call to Georgia's secretary of state, a call in which the president urged state officials to "find" votes that could overturn his loss there during November's presidential election.
Without the support of the House leadership, Omar's efforts are likely to go nowhere, and Trump has just two weeks left in office before his term ends and Biden is inaugurated as president.
DHS police accompanying Amalija Knavs, the mother of first lady Melania Trump, as she arrived at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services building in New York in May 2018. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty)
FBI, Homeland Security, White House Advisers Foresaw Possible Riots, Looked the Other Way
William M. Arkin, Newsweek
Arkin writes: "They knew it could happen. They feared that Donald Trump would pull a 'Samson,' bringing down the whole house on top of him in the two weeks before he left the White House."
Officials from the FBI, the Secret Service, Homeland Security, the District of Columbia government, the Pentagon, the National Guard, and the Joint Task Force–National Capital Region who spoke to Newsweek last weekend on condition of anonymity, all talked about the potential for protesters and militias and paramilitary goons—egged on by the president—to storm Capitol Hill and even the Capitol building itself.
A half-dozen sources spoke openly about this very scenario: that the mob would take over the "People's House" and that somehow the system would break down. They speculated that this could occur because of the president's treasonous behavior, because of leadership deficiencies in the federal government and Congress, because of the extreme partisanship of the moment, and because everyone was looking the wrong way.
The blame was spread around, with the FBI dismissing the Department of Homeland Security as a bunch of amateurs and thugs; the military shaking their heads about President Trump and an absent White House leadership; Homeland Security department members mocking the District of Columbia's mayor, Attorney General, and police; and everyone making clear that "the problem" was someone else's.
It was clear that the very law enforcement and security people who in theory were responsible for maintaining order in our capital city weren't ready, weren't well led, weren't organized properly, and weren't impartial.
How did we get here? There are multiple causes for this historic failure.
The patchwork quilt of roles and responsibilities created post-9/11, and the immense public illiteracy regarding all things national security, have weakened America.
Many people in official Washington had tolerated and even humored President Trump's sedition and incitement to riot. FBI sources said the White House wasn't ordering any new security measures, wasn't ordering any additional resources, and wasn't coordinating any extension of the so-called inaugural "National Security Special Event" timeline to include this week (it officially covers January 15-21). It wasn't doing those things, the sources said, because presidential aides were afraid that any movement might provoke Donald Trump to do something even worse than whatever he was already planning.
Several of the sources said the U.S. Capitol Police—with a strength of more than 2,000 law enforcement officers—might not act, or might be intentionally stood down, because many Congressional Republican leaders wanted the mob to amplify their shrinking voices that the election was illegitimate. There has been no confirmation of this claim. But it's notable that it took less than 15 minutes for the mob to gain entrance to the Capitol Building--and then virtually nothing was done to eject them.
Sources from other departments said the Department of Homeland Security—which had declined to use its mammoth army of law enforcement officers to suppress protests in Portland and other cities, ostensibly because they were needed in DC to protect government buildings—was making itself virtually absent from the scene for the transition. The Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf is actually in the Middle East, evidently not thinking that the threat was severe enough for him to be in Washington.
The DHS has been indiscriminate in using its law enforcement arms, now the largest in the federal government—Secret Service agents, ICE, Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations, Federal Air Marshals and even the Federal Protective Service—to intervene over the past year when protests didn't involve pro-Trump, right wing mobs. The Capitol Police did come out in force when Black Lives Matter and Antifa approached Capitol Hill last summer.
FBI sources told Newsweek that the Bureau was closely watching the various protestors converging on the city, that the Department of Justice was taking the law enforcement lead no matter what other agencies of the government were doing, and that the Bureau had a good sense of the protestors, the size of the crowd, the leaders, and the dangers. The intelligence apparently did not anticipate what the news media was openly speculating about and what the president and his supporters were publicly tweeting.
The District of Columbia government was the only prepared and ready force on Wednesday. Mayor Muriel Bowser activated 340 District National Guardsmen and women before Wednesday. In keeping with a desire not to use soldiers to enforce the law, she kept them unarmed and assigned them to traffic control and other duties to relieve more police officers of the Metropolitan Police Department—3,800 strong, the sixth largest municipal police department in the nation—to enforce the laws.
The riots—and the District's response—underscored the argument for making D.C. a state, so that the mayor wouldn't have to ask permission of the Secretary of the Army to activate the DC Guard.
And finally there's the Pentagon. Donald Trump's walk into Lafayette Park last June, accompanied by a gaggle of federal, National Guard and local police forces, jolted the U.S. military. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, in uniform, joined the president's entourage, giving the impression that the uniformed military supported Trump and the forces surrounding him. Gen. Milley was pummeled for his "loss of situational awareness," for being there. He publicly apologized.
The Lafayette Park incident and Milley's apology shifted Pentagon culture; ranking officers firmly rejected talk of martial law and openly declared that the U.S. armed forces had no role to play in the election or the transition. Now the Pentagon is being dragged in anyhow, in the form of the National Guard: the last non-partisan, honorable and duty-bound institution in Washington.
But the political structure has failed spectacularly, creating and living with a federal government so faulty that it gives the impression "the military" is the only institution that can be trusted, that it is the only one that can and will always save the day. The Congressional leadership cheered when they heard that the National Guard was on the way to the Capitol today.
To restore the rule of law and ensure accountability for protecting America's democracy, the post-Trump reforms must be as dramatic as the ones that followed 9/11. "The military is the only answer" is not just a false belief: it also weakens the civil institutions on which our nation depends.
A U.S. Capitol building police officer poses for a selfie with one of the insurrectionists who helped storm the U.S. Capitol building. (photo: TikTok)
Storm the Capitol as a White Man and You'll Get It (a Selfie With a Cop)
Katie Way, VICE
Way writes: "As insurrectionists breached the U.S. Capitol en masse Wednesday afternoon, footage posted on social media shows them doing a lot of different things inside the Capitol."
They’re banging on doors, yelling, waving Confederate and MAGA flags, brandishing guns, and posing for pictures in the Big Chair on the Senate floor. Another thing a few of them appear to be doing? Hanging out with the cops who are ostensibly deployed there to keep protesters from doing any of the stuff we just mentioned.
One clip, initially posted to TikTok, seems to show police simply stepping aside to passively allow a swarm of people to breach a barrier erected to prevent them from reaching the Capitol.
That’s pretty weird because, as Business Insider journalist Manny Fidel noted on Twitter, law enforcement in D.C. appears capable of keeping people from going places when they feel like it, exemplified by a show of force from this past June. I wonder: What was different then?
Another clip, cut from a livestream, shows a masked man pausing to snag a selfie with a United States Capitol police officer, whose badge number might be visible if you pause the video at the correct time. The cop, lest mine eyes deceive me, actually strikes a little pose when he sees that he’s on camera. Per the New York Times, one police officer told a crowd asking why protesters weren’t being dispersed: “We’ve just got to let them do their thing now.”
In another clip, a cop dressed in riot gear appears to be helping an insurrectionist walk down the stairs of the Capitol—a move that contrasts starkly with the Capitol police officers’ treatment of disabled activists from ADAPT protesting healthcare cuts in 2017.
Huh. Go figure, right? I guess, given the context that law enforcement unions around the country endorsed Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, it makes a little more sense. Further considering the reporting that’s been done on the deep-seated connections between American law enforcement agencies and the kind of white supremacist and extremist hate groups who could, I don’t know, break into the U.S. Capitol, a picture emerges of who the cops consider dangerous, and who they consider friendly enough to pose with. It’s not the first time police officers in the U.S. have been caught lending a helping hand to Trump supporters wreaking havoc—footage of officers tossing water bottles out to white militia members in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the night Kyle Rittenhouse shot multiple people, springs to mind.
For now, it’s searingly obvious that the people who stormed the Capitol building did not experience the brutality cops spent all summer enacting on the protesters who took to the streets to fight back against police violence. This is no accident: Statistically speaking, studies have shown cops are more likely to respond with aggression when police brutality is the thing being protested. One study, spanning from 1960 to 1990, showed that police were also more likely to deploy violence at protests led by Black Americans.
That’s not to say there should have been more tear gas or rubber bullets from the U.S. Capitol police force today; that was never going to happen as long as the police themselves have the power to decide who they react to and how, who threatens law and order, and who just needs to blow off a little steam.
It remains to be seen what kind of consequences the people who breached the Capitol building (and interrupted that vaunted Democratic process we all hear so much about) will face. But we already saw what they get when the police are allowed to react organically: a major symbolic gesture challenging the U.S. government, and a picture that says a thousand words about who the police really work for.
Cuban migrants, in Ciudad Juárez under the 'Remain in Mexico' program, react after the media announced that Joe Biden won the U.S. presidential elections on 7 November. (photo: José Luis González/Reuters)
Remain in Mexico Policy Needlessly Exposed Migrants to Harm, Report Says
Tom Phillips, Guardian UK
Phillips writes: "The incoming US president, Joe Biden, has been urged to scrap a 'devastating' migration program that activists say has exposed tens of thousands of asylum seekers - many of them children - to violence, abduction and rape in some of the world's most dangerous cities."
Human Rights Watch describes crimes including rape, kidnapping, extortion but Biden team warns change may not be immediate
The Trump administration created the “Remain in Mexico” program in January 2019 in an effort to deter asylum seekers trying to enter the US through is southern border.
The initiative – which is officially called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) - stipulated that asylum seekers would have to await their court hearings in Mexican border towns such as Ciudad Juárez, Mexicali and Matamoros, and not in the US as before.
But activists claimed that exposed highly vulnerable migrants, mostly from Central and South America, to physical harm and illness in unfamiliar and dangerous surroundings with some of the highest murder rates on Earth.
In a report published on Wednesday, Human Rights Watch described how Trump’s policy “needlessly and foreseeably exposed [asylum seekers] to considerable risk of serious harm”.
The group said those interviewed for its report, including children, “described rape or attempted rape and other sexual assault, abduction for ransom, extortion, armed robbery, and other crimes committed against them”.
“In some cases, Mexican immigration officers or police committed these crimes,” the group added.
Michael Garcia Bochenek, Human Right Watch’s senior children’s rights counsel, said its researchers had heard “really devastating” testimony from asylum seekers about their plight back in Mexico. He said the interviews had left him impressed with the resilience of those affected but “completely devastated about what the US government was doing to people”.
“The really shocking thing given the consistent reports of really, really serious risk to people who are placed in the MPP – or returned to Mexico after attending hearings in the US – is that US authorities have continued to place people in the MPP, including through the pandemic, and have consistently refused to pull people out of the [program] when they present proof of these harms,” Bochenek said.
“I can’t help drawing parallels to other contexts that I’ve seen,” he added, citing Australia’s longer-lasting offshore detention scheme.
“There’s a similarity there. The offloading of people who are only traveling to a country to seek safety – and not only offloading them but deliberately, or at least knowingly subjecting them to harm.”
Donald Trump defended policies such as Remain in Mexico – which has sent more than 69,000 people back over the border, sometimes into ramshackle refugee camps – as a way to protect US citizens from “thugs” and “bad hombres”.
Biden has pledged to scrap the program but, apparently wary of triggering a sudden surge of border arrivals, members of his transition team have sought to lower expectations they will do so immediately.
In a recent interview with the Spanish language news agency Efe, Biden’s domestic policy adviser, Susan Rice, said: “Migrants and asylum seekers absolutely should not believe those in the region peddling the idea that the border will suddenly be fully open to process everyone on Day 1. It will not.”
Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told Efe that Remain in Mexico had “been a disaster from the start and has led to a humanitarian crisis in northern Mexico”. “But putting the new policy into practice will take time,” he added.
Bochenek said campaigners did not want to see “a rush to the border” after Biden took office. “But it is reasonable to expect a managed and orderly wind-down of the [MPP] system.
“It doesn’t need to take months. That can be done in relatively short order with the proper planning,” he said. “I’m hopeful that we can take the [Biden] campaign promises at face value and see the kind of orderly yet expeditious end to the program that we are hoping for.”
Clear-cut forests in western Oregon. (photo: Brooke Herbert/The Oregonian)
Timber Tax Cuts Cost Oregon Towns Billions to Treat Dwindling Water Supplies
Tony Schick, Oregon Public Broadcasting and Rob Davis, The Oregonian
Excerpt: "In rainy Oregon, communities tap a network of streams and creeks to supply millions of residents with cold, clean water."
Rural communities in Oregon paid millions of dollars for clean, safe drinking water because the state didn’t protect their watersheds from logging-related contamination.
n a damp night in November 2019, dozens of residents packed into the local firehouse in Corbett, Oregon, a town about 30 miles outside of Portland. Water manager Jeff Busto told the crowd that logging had devastated a creek that provided part of the town’s drinking water supply.
A timber company had clear-cut thousands of trees along the creek, leaving only a thin strip standing between the town’s drinking water and recently flattened land strewed with debris. A single row of trees was left on either side to protect it from mud, herbicides and summer sun. After many of those trees were bowled over by wind, the creek flow dropped so low that the town could no longer get water.
As a result, Corbett now had only one creek supplying drinking water for more than 3,000 residents. If a wildfire or more logging compromised the remaining creek, the town’s taps could run dry in as little as three days, Busto said.
“I’m really seriously concerned about the future of this community,” Busto told the crowd. “There are places all over the world that lose their water source and they lose their town. If you guys don’t have water coming out of your tap, you’re not going to be able to live here.”
In rainy Oregon, communities tap a network of streams and creeks to supply millions of residents with cold, clean water. The problem is that the land surrounding drinking water streams is, in many cases, owned not by the towns or the residents who drink the water, but by private timber companies that are now logging more intensively than ever, cutting trees on a more rapid cycle and spraying herbicides to kill other plants that compete with replanted seedlings for sunlight.
In the past two decades, Oregon environmental regulators identified industrial logging as a risk to more than 170 public water systems, listing clear-cutting, road building and pesticide spraying as potential sources of contamination.
Timber companies have successfully fought to keep Oregon’s laws more lenient than neighboring states, lobbying lawmakers and the public through opinion campaigns to burnish the industry’s reputation. Oregon legislators have failed to change logging laws that state regulators, scientists and the federal government say are insufficient to protect clean water, leaving small towns with millions of dollars in additional costs, an investigation by Oregon Public Broadcasting, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica found.
Many of those communities are in Oregon counties already bearing the brunt of timber tax cuts, which cost the state nearly $3 billion in revenue that would have been largely used to fund schools and local governments.
Lawmakers and forestry officials have joined timber executives in defending current environmental laws, saying they protect communities without unnecessarily burdening one of Oregon’s most important industries. But they have ignored the costs to communities that say they are powerless to protect their most critical resource: water.
More than two dozen communities have had at least 40% of the forests around drinking water sources cut down in the past 20 years, according to an analysis by the news organizations.
In Corbett, the town has started excavation work to find a new water supply. Residents will have to help pay the $2.2 million cost. In Wheeler, the investment in a new water system happened 16 years ago, but residents of the former mill town on the coast are still paying off the $1.1 million debt.
“It is absolutely ridiculous that we have to fight for our right to clear water in the face of giant corporations coming in and basically having no accountability,” said Stevie Burden, former mayor of Wheeler. “And the responsibility for it ends up in these really tiny little municipalities and water districts that can’t afford to shoulder the cost.”
A spokeswoman for the Oregon Forest & Industries Council, a lobbying organization, said the state has robust and effective rules.
“Oregonians should feel confident forest practices strongly protect their drinking water,” Sara Duncan, the spokeswoman, said in an email.
Duncan pointed to pollution monitoring data from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality that found public and private forests provide the cleanest water in the state. The government agency says the data is not an appropriate metric because it is too imprecise to measure the effectiveness of Oregon’s logging rules.
Recent research funded by the industry also challenges the council’s claim. This year, Oregon State University released two studies which found logging can cause long-lasting water shortages and pollute drinking water with herbicides and dirt. A March study examining timber practices over a 60-year period found that water levels in streams surrounded by industrial timber plantations dropped by more than 50% compared with older forests.
A research report released in June concluded that logging increases sediment runoff into streams, which can lead to higher costs for water treatment plants and create cancer-causing byproducts when towns use chemicals to disinfect dirtier water. A survey included in the research showed logging was the top concern for water managers.
“The community gets strapped with a very large debt when they have to build these treatment plants,” said Sheree Stewart, who retired in 2019 after 28 years in drinking water protection with the state agency.
More than 30 communities have contacted the Department of Environmental Quality with concerns about logging near their drinking water sources in the past 20 years. Emails obtained by the news organizations show that in 2002 Stewart flagged to her agency’s leadership a pattern of logging practices that were damaging water supplies.
She said little has changed.
“If we could have done a better job of protecting some of these smaller watersheds, perhaps we could have saved these communities a lot of money,” Stewart said. “I’d like to think that we could have saved some money for future generations.”
“Boils Down to Influence”
Oregon, the nation’s biggest lumber producer, has for decades allowed timber companies to leave fewer trees than neighboring states to protect streams and rivers from pollution.
Every tree left behind is lost money.
Each West Coast state varies stream protection rules based on the size of the stream, its geography and whether it provides drinking water or a habitat for fish.
In Washington, the smallest buffer allowed on a stream that provides drinking water is 50 feet from either bank, and the state requires that additional trees be left behind up to 200 feet from the water. California forbids cutting within 30 feet. The state also requires at least half the tree canopy to remain after logging within 100 feet of stream banks.
In Oregon, the minimum no-cut buffer is 20 feet. The state’s stream buffers for drinking water are smaller than for fish.
After Corbett was clear-cut in 2017, Busto raised concerns with the Department of Environmental Quality about the thin layer of trees required by the state, saying the 20 feet that was left along portions of the creek simply was not enough to protect his town’s water supply.
Regulators there said he had no recourse. Since the companies were following state law, the town had only two choices: seek voluntary concessions from timber companies the next time or get the law changed.
Jim Frank, owner of Frank Lumber, which logged the area, said his company has a good relationship with the Corbett Water District and would take its concerns into consideration when planning future cuts along its water source.
“Do we go beyond what the rules are? Probably not,” he said. “I guess if the watershed wanted us to put bigger buffers in they could pay us the value for that stuff, and we could let it sit there.”
Frank said his company, which employs 150 people in rural Lyons, couldn’t afford to leave additional trees behind, especially now after losing millions of dollars worth of timber in Oregon’s Labor Day wildfires.
“We try to be good neighbors. Sometimes it works,” Frank said. “We do put our faith in what the regulations are. We didn’t write them. We just follow them.”
In 1991, the year Oregon lawmakers began cutting taxes for the timber industry and created a public agency that has lobbied for industrial logging, the Legislature also passed laws shielding timber owners from being found in violation of regulations that govern water quality, so long as logging is done in “good faith” according to the state’s best practices.
Current and former regulators say rather than acting to prevent problems, the Legislature has set an unreasonably high scientific threshold that first requires proof a hazard exists.
“In environmental protection, we often approach things with a precautionary principle, acting in a way that protects public health, that protects the environment,” said Richard Whitman, head of the Department of Environmental Quality. “We’ve lost that.”
Unlike Washington’s Department of Ecology, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality does not have the statutory authority to set rules to limit pollution caused by logging.
The Oregon Legislature reserved that power for state forestry officials, who are also charged with promoting the industry. The state forester, Peter Daugherty, has denied any direct connection exists between clear-cutting and polluted drinking water.
Daugherty said while recent research from Oregon State University found a connection between logging and increases in muddy water, it did not provide direct evidence that logging causes problems for drinking water.
Water managers around the state say they’ve seen striking increases in muddy water, after logging operations. In Yachats, on Oregon’s central coast, water treatment plant operator Rick McClung said so much mud washed downhill after logging there that he had to stop using one of his two water sources for two years. He said the problem wasn’t helped when the landowner didn’t replant, which is required by state law. “He just logged and left,” McClung said.
The state Forestry Department found the company in violation of Oregon’s replanting requirement in 2015. Five years later, the state still hasn’t collected a $14,000 fine, less than it would’ve cost to replant. The agency said it had been slowed down by staff turnover and busy wildfire seasons. The company could not be reached for comment.
Scientists and regulators have long faulted Oregon’s failure to protect water quality from the effects of logging.
During 20 years with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, leading a team overseeing forestry pollution in Oregon, Teresa Kubo noticed a familiar pattern: Scientists would determine Oregon’s rules weren’t protecting water quality. Recommendations would be made, then watered down to the most incremental of changes by the time the state adopted them.
Since 2016, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the EPA have denied Oregon $1.2 million in annual funding after determining that state logging rules don’t do enough to control pollution from logging roads and high-risk landslides or protect small streams with fish.
But after becoming the only state to lose out on nearly $5 million in funding, lawmakers and forestry officials have not addressed the shortcomings federal regulators identified in Oregon law.
“The timber industry is extremely influential in Oregon,” Kubo said. “It just boils down to influence, the politics and economics.”
In June, the Oregon Legislature passed a law that imposed restrictions on timber companies spraying pesticides from helicopters within 300 feet of homes, schools and drinking water. The measure, which had the blessing of the timber industry, came after timber companies and environmental groups agreed to negotiate in 2021 what could be the biggest changes to Oregon’s logging laws in decades.
The effort focuses not on drinking water but habitat conservation for salmon and other protected species. The two sides have pledged to have an agreement in place by the end of 2021. It remains unclear whether they will find common ground.
Even if those rules are strengthened, risks will continue for towns trying to protect their drinking water unless they are able to purchase the watershed or find some other way to slow the rate of logging, said Whitman, the state’s top environmental regulator.
If timber companies log entire watersheds as they have on the Oregon Coast, simply leaving a few more trees along creeksides won’t be enough, he said.
“It’s not going to avoid some of the effects that these drinking water providers are seeing,” he said. “You’re going to see some landslides. You’re going to see more sedimentation. And most importantly, you’re going to see streams dry up in the late summer and early fall because you don’t have that tree cover.”
In Debt for Clean Water
The tap water in Arch Cape, on Oregon’s rocky north coast, violated federal drinking water standards again and again while the forests around its supply were logged, forcing the town to spend $1 million in 2010 on a new treatment plant.
The town sits in Clatsop County, which has lost an estimated $170 million in revenue to timber tax cuts since 1991. Phil Chick, the district water manager, said the treatment plant upgrade raised annual bills by $40. But it was merely a reaction to the problem, he said, not a long-term solution.
The water district plans a 2021 tax levy that will cost roughly $2,300 per home for its 300 customers, part of a $5.5 million effort to buy the forests around its drinking water source.
Arch Cape still plans to log the forest, Chick said, but under far more rigorous standards than Oregon requires, with no use of herbicides.
If the effort to purchase the land fails, Chick said he worries about the future of the forest, “because we’re not sure who could come in and buy it. We don’t know who our neighbor is going to be.”
Other towns haven’t been able to afford what Arch Cape is attempting. In Corbett, Busto said purchasing private timberlands was far too expensive.
In Wheeler, where private timber companies owned 98% of the land around the water supply, Burden said she would’ve loved to have bought and protected part of the forest. But the town of 428 residents struggles just to keep a handful of city staff members employed.
“You looked at the budget; there’s so little in it that we barely get by,” said Burden, who served five terms as mayor of Wheeler before retiring this year.
When federal rules required Wheeler to filter its drinking water, the city decided it would be cheaper and more reliable to drill wells than to treat the creek water off industrial timberlands. Then in 2001, debris from logging on a nearby ridge rapidly filled the town’s reservoirs with silt and gravel, sending the town scrambling to get a new water system.
Wheeler has been paying off a $1.1 million debt from its water project for nearly 20 years.
Burden said the debt handcuffed the town budget. Wheeler has no money to replace its aging stormwater pipes and drainages to handle wind and rain storms on the Oregon Coast, which scientists predict will become more frequent and severe because of climate change.
In 2015, the city flooded so badly the post office closed for seven months. City officials said the flooding was exacerbated not just by their aging stormwater system, but by runoff from logging above the town.
Since Burden’s first stint as mayor in the 1990s, nearly 90% of the forests surrounding Wheeler have been logged.
Residents continue to complain of drift from aerial spraying and heavy sediment pollution into Nehalem Bay, home to clams, Dungeness crab and runs of chinook and coho salmon.
Burden said she used to attend Oregon Board of Forestry meetings to advocate for issues that included conserving forestland to help Wheeler’s tourism and recreation economy. She eventually gave up, tired of the little progress she’d made with the seven-member panel.
“I knew there was just nothing to be gained for a little town like mine,” she said.
For One Company, a Small Town Caused a Big Stir
In Rockaway Beach, one of three towns in Oregon where industrial timber companies own all the land around its water supply, almost every tree has been cut in the last 20 years, except for a few dozen acres.
In December, Portland-based Stimson Lumber sent loggers for many of the remaining trees, despite protests from residents who have fought to protect their drinking water from industrial logging.
“I am dismayed that they intend to take another 55 acres, even after all the public attention,” said Nancy Webster, a retired social worker who lives in the area.
Few Oregon communities have drawn statewide attention to logging like Rockaway Beach, a town of about 1,300 on the North Coast.
In 2010, Webster and other residents there began receiving warnings about carcinogenic byproducts in their tap water, created when the city used chlorine to disinfect muddy water. They pointed to the barren hillsides above town, saying runoff from clear-cuts had polluted the creek where they get their water. Stimson, one of two companies that owns the majority of the watershed, has said the town’s water issues were unrelated to logging.
As Stimson began logging in another coastal watershed, which supplies drinking water to the nearby town of Oceanside, the company tried to mitigate the public relations damage from a citizen group that Webster formed. Several Oceanside residents joined Webster’s group. They questioned whether the cut there could be done safely.
Statewide environmental groups had seized on the Rockaway Beach complaints and were threatening to turn to the ballot to stop Stimson and other timber companies from using helicopters to spray herbicides statewide, which would remove a critical tool used to prime large stretches of clear-cut land for replanting.
One group, Oregon Wild, early in 2018 wrapped Portland buses and a MAX light-rail train in full-sized advertisements showing recently logged lands on the Oregon Coast, including one clear-cut near Arch Cape, where Stimson had logged. “Welcome to Oregon Home of the Clear-Cut,” the advertisements said.
The timber industry knew the idea of banning herbicides had traction. A year earlier, environmental advocates narrowly passed an initiative to ban aerial spraying in coastal Lincoln County. An internal 2018 poll, obtained by OPB, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica, found a majority of coastal voters supported a ban, including those with family members employed in the industry.
Stimson, which supplies two-by-fours to Home Depots across the country, in February 2018 hired a public relations company, Quinn Thomas. The firm had proposed a $12,000 monthly retainer to improve Stimson’s image and win back public trust in Tillamook County, where Stimson has one of its six mills and almost a fifth of its 600,000 acres of timberland. Documents obtained by the news organizations show the firm said the campaign would help counter activist narratives in Tillamook County, home to Rockaway Beach.
The public relations company’s strategic plan set a goal to build Stimson’s brand and “thwart negative claims against Stimson’s forestry practices, such as efforts to ban aerial spray and clear cutting,” the documents show. The public relations company did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Andrew Miller, Stimson’s CEO, said his company wanted to share details about its forestry and sawmill operations with the community.
“Our opponents communicate their views aggressively, usually based on presumptions with a transparent anti-forestry objective,” Miller said in an email.
In internal documents, Quinn Thomas urged Stimson to get noticed for doing good things to help repair the damage to its reputation that came after its cutting in Rockaway Beach.
“Unfortunately, the critical role of Stimson has been suppressed by activists and community groups scrutinizing minute phases of the 45‐year lifecycle of your forests,” the company’s communications plan said.
Quinn Thomas suggested that Stimson target coastal water managers with “influencer engagement” efforts after focus groups showed they were more trusted than timber companies.
The firm called for Stimson to increase awareness of its philanthropic giving to Habitat for Humanity, a Tillamook County domestic violence shelter and local sports teams, including a planned donation of wrestling mats. The consultant said the donations would help create trust with parents, women and new retirees and recommended targeting the community through Stimson’s Facebook page.
Three months later, Tillamook High School’s wrestling team, the Cheesemakers, opened its season with a win in a tournament sponsored by Stimson Lumber, wrestling on mats the company helped buy. Stimson shared photos from the event on its Facebook page, congratulating the team for winning.
Efforts to ban aerial spray and limit clear-cutting have not reached voters statewide. Environmental groups withdrew a set of ballot initiatives, including one that would have effectively banned aerial spraying, as part of a deal with timber companies to negotiate new logging rules.
Meanwhile, Stimson has continued logging and spraying around Oceanside and Rockaway Beach.
Residents of those highly scrutinized towns have secured some additional voluntary protections from Stimson, including bigger no-cut buffers around creeks and advanced notice of spraying so they can take samples and pull from stored water instead of the creeks.
A state water quality regulator who visited the Oceanside site praised the Stimson field work, according to a 2019 memo.
But, he said, even if the added protections helped reduce the impacts from a single clear-cut, more logging within a short time frame would probably damage the watershed.
“Corbett Got Forgotten”
In early December, two weeks into his job as Corbett’s new water manager, Tom Edwards drove to the creek that had been logged. He said he was so startled by what he saw that he realized Corbett would need more than its $2 million well project to be assured of its long-term drinking water security.
Edwards emailed the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. He wanted to know whether the state could help the town buy the land around Corbett’s water sources.
A few miles away, Portland’s Bull Run Watershed is surrounded by untouched forests, which are off-limits to the public to protect water quality. Edwards said he didn’t understand how Corbett’s water supply could be so unprotected.
“It’s like Corbett got forgotten,” Edwards said.
The department said the town could apply for two state grant programs that have distributed hundreds of millions in federal dollars. It gave no assurances.
One program doesn’t fund drinking water projects unless the community can prove it also reduces other pollution. The second program has funded just two land purchases, which have helped keep drinking water clean for a total of 120 people.
Edwards worries about the district’s lack of control over its watershed. Its well is two years away from being ready, if the town finds enough water underground. The tree-strewed creek still isn’t being used. In the meantime, Corbett is getting water off a single creek.
“It’s scary,” he said. “That’s the source of water for the whole town.”
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