05 January 21
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05 January 21
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Zak Cheney-Rice | The Never-Ending Coup Against Black America
Zak Cheney-Rice, New York Magazine
Cheney-Rice writes: "The last time I visited my grandparents' hometown, I was researching an article about lynching. In 1918, a white mob tore through Valdosta, Georgia, and the neighboring county and murdered at least 11 Black people, including Mary Turner, who was eight months pregnant and found suspended by her ankles and disemboweled."
My cousin is a history buff and offered to show me around. Crossing town in his pickup truck, we drove down a leafy street where, according to local lore, the mob went door-to-door looking for a Black man accused of killing his white employer and allegedly shot residents who failed to disclose his whereabouts. The goal of my story was to investigate a personal connection. One of the lynch mob’s victims, Eugene Rice, shared my family’s name and was hanged less than 20 minutes from where my maternal grandmother grew up. “You see that house over there?” my cousin asked, pointing next door. “The lady who lives there, they say her great-uncle was in on it.”
There’s a lot that feels unprecedented about today’s electoral crisis in Georgia, and there’s earnest concern that we may never recover from Donald Trump’s damage to democracy. On December 5, the president went to Valdosta to engorge his ego, prattling on for close to two hours before a crowd of roughly 10,000 fans about imaginary voter fraud. The outcome of the purported “fraud” was his loss in the November election — the first time a Republican presidential candidate had surrendered Georgia since 1992. Its mechanism, according to Trump, included criminality and corruption innate to Atlanta, a Black city of reliably blue votes whose suburbs he had tried to entice by vowing to preserve their segregation. Days earlier, death threats were made — likely by Trump voters — against Georgia’s election administrators, who are overseen by a secretary of state from the president’s own party. “This has to stop,” Gabriel Sterling, the voting-system-implementation manager with Secretary Brad Raffensperger’s office, said during a press conference, nearly breaking down in tears. “It’s un-American.”
Sterling detailed the intimidation he had witnessed — calls for a 20-year-old contractor to be hanged, the suggestion that a cybersecurity official be “drawn and quartered” and then shot. The stakes of the president’s lies are manifold. Beyond what he has tacitly encouraged his supporters to do, he drafted several of his party compatriots — among them Georgia senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. Both, of course, face runoff elections on January 5 that will determine the partisan makeup of the U.S. Senate, and they have concluded that their fate hinges on Trump getting his base to turn out for them.
Their chorus of national surrogates has grown louder by the day. On December 15, North Carolina representative-elect Madison Cawthorn went on Fox News and accused the Reverend Raphael Warnock, Loeffler’s Black opponent, of “disguising himself as some moderate pastor from the South.” The shades of birtherism were unmistakable; Warnock was born and raised in Savannah and has been a pastor for decades, most recently at Martin Luther King Jr.’s old church in Atlanta. Two days later, on December 17, ex–Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn appeared on Newsmax and suggested the president order “military capabilities” to swing states like Georgia and “rerun” the election. Georgians are flooding precincts during the early-voting period in record numbers, no doubt sensing the danger behind these attacks.
The cumulative effect of these events is an underlying recognition that the will of voters may be only as legitimate as the powerful choose to recognize. For Black Georgians, the conditional recognition of one’s citizenship rights, policed through terror, is the historical default. It is neither unprecedented nor, per Sterling’s lamentations, un-American.
It’s significant that Trump’s campaign to subvert democracy, by invalidating so basic a precept as a citizen’s right to have their vote counted, is unfolding in a place where basic rights for Black people are already invalidated as a matter of routine. What is the history of Black Georgia but a testament to the precariousness of Black people’s ability to participate in public life? What are the ways they have been selectively punished in their efforts to secure those rights but a brand of racial fascism, a slow-burn coup unfolding across centuries?
The lynchings of 1918 in Valdosta were emblematic of a national campaign of terror against America’s Black citizens and should have been understood as a rending of the social contract so profound, a betrayal so deep, that it would be thought to be unrecoverable. Instead, it was mostly forgotten. The reason for that lack of historical memory is simple. When such a betrayal is experienced by Black people, a restoration of normalcy tends to still look a lot like betrayal.
Just over 20 years after the Valdosta affair ended with its target pumped full of bullets, genitals severed, dragged through the streets by a rope tied to the back of a truck, the U.S. government sent Black Georgians just like him to Europe to defend its putative democracy. American forces helped to defeat the Nazis, but in 1946, the year after the war ended, a Black GI named Maceo Snipes came home to Taylor County, Georgia, and was shot to death by a group of white men because he voted. During the 1948 election, a Black farmer named Isaiah Nixon was killed in Montgomery County under similar circumstances. By that point, Black votes in Georgia had been nullified with regularity starting soon after Emancipation. In W.E.B. Du Bois’s landmark study Black Reconstruction, he recounts how white legislators in Georgia turned against their recently elected Black colleagues once federal authorities withdrew from the state. “In September, 1868, the legislature declared all colored members ineligible,” he wrote, “and it then proceeded to put in their seats the persons who had received the next largest number of votes.” This overturned the will of nearly half of the state’s electors.
The same repressive spirit informs more recent actions. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results seem premised on the invalidation of votes in a handful of heavily Black cities. But for years before Trump even took office, Georgia governor Brian Kemp, then the secretary of state, used a monstrous variety of suppression measures to diminish Black electoral power on the local level. His regime, too, was enforced by the threat of violence. False and racialized claims of fraud effectively deputized Georgia’s citizenry to punish voting crimes where they did not exist. A Black city commissioner named Olivia Pearson was charged with fraud (though eventually acquitted) for showing a first-time voter how to use a ballot machine in Coffee County in 2012. And in 2018, a Black man named Royce Reeves Sr. was surrounded by seven police cars in Cordele and detained after transporting poor locals to their polling places. Massive voter-roll purges and sweeping precinct closures became routine. Kemp rode this suppression to the governor’s mansion with Trump’s endorsement. In an ironic twist, he proved insufficiently loyal to afford the president the same result.
But Kemp’s stand against Trump is not a rejection of these violent methods. Trump’s ultranationalist authoritarianism is not only compatible with Kemp’s ill-gotten power; it is the manifestation of a de facto coup at the expense of Black Georgians and made possible by decades of thwarted votes. The president may very well have lumbered back up the steps of Air Force One after his Valdosta rally knowing that he was defeated. Our national recovery following his departure, however, will be colored by the fact that the democracy we’re used to — that is, America’s political system in its “recovered” state — is routinely and often brutally shut off to Black people. What lingered from my trip to my grandparents’ hometown, where Black people were hunted for sport, was the feeling that history is rarely as far off as it appears. The U.S. can move forward from a lethal hobbling of its democracy. But for Black Americans, the next betrayal is usually lurking in the house next door. We recover at our peril.
U.S. Attorney Byung J. 'BJay' Pak's resignation comes just days after a phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was made public. (photo: Ron Harris/AP)
Trump Replaces US Attorney in Atlanta
Josh Gerstein, POLITICO
Gerstein writes: "President Donald Trump has replaced the top federal prosecutor in Atlanta with another Trump-appointed prosecutor from southern Georgia, bypassing a top career prosecutor."
Trump’s move came after the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung “BJ” Pak, abruptly resigned Monday.
Trump’s move came after the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung “BJay” Pak, abruptly resigned Monday. Justice Department officials have declined to say whether Pak resigned voluntarily or was asked to do so.
U.S. Attorney for Southern District of Georgia Bobby Christine said on his office’s website that he was named as the acting U.S. attorney in Atlanta on Monday “by written order of the President.” Christine, a former state prosecutor and magistrate, has served as the senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Georgia, which includes the cities of Savannah and Augusta.
In tapping Christine, Trump bypassed the prosecutor who would normally take over on an acting basis in the event of an emergency or sudden vacancy, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Kurt Erskine.
A White House spokesperson referred questions about the shuffle back to the Department of Justice.
Trump’s installation of a new leader in the U.S. attorney’s office in Georgia’s largest city comes as he continues to rail against the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for failing to move aggressively against what he has baselessly alleged was rampant fraud in the November election in Georgia and in other swing states.
Georgia election officials have rebutted Trump’s claims in detail. In addition, former Attorney General Bill Barr said late last year that he saw no evidence of widespread fraud that could have affected the outcome of the election. Barr declined to appoint a special counsel to investigate such claims before he resigned last month.
U.S. attorneys are typically replaced following a change in presidential administrations and some do leave in advance of the formal transfer of power. Pak had been expected to stay on through Inauguration Day.
Pak’s resignation and Christine’s assignment were first reported by Talking Points Memo, which quoted an internal memo from Pak attributing his hasty departure to “unforeseen circumstances.” As of mid-morning Tuesday, the “Meet the U.S. Attorney” web page that used to contain Pak’s biography simply said “will be added shortly.”
Pak’s resignation came a day after the release of an explosive audio recording of a telephone call in which Trump berated Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, repeatedly raising specious claims of election fraud and insisting that the Republican official change the vote counts to show that Trump won.
At one point in the call, Trump seemed to denigrate a federal prosecutor in Georgia, saying, “You have your never-Trumper U.S. attorney there.” Trump did not appear to name anyone, but some associates of Pak believe the president may have been referring to him.
Last June, Barr made an awkward attempt to oust the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey Berman, and replace him on an acting basis with the U.S. attorney in New Jersey, Craig Carpenito, who was viewed as more of a Trump loyalist. While Berman was tapped by the administration to take the job on an acting basis, he was never formally nominated to the post.
The attempted reshuffle prompted outrage from prosecutors in Berman’s office, some of whom had investigated Trump, his companies and his allies over campaign finance allegations and other issues. Barr ultimately backed away from the plan to install Carpenito and allowed the career first assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Audrey Strauss, to take the post on an acting basis.
President Trump. (photo: Justin Merriman/Getty)
Tom Engelhardt | Saying Goodbye to the Conman-in-Chief: Demining America After The Donald
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Engelhardt writes: "2021 has indeed begun and god knows what it has in store for us. But unless, somehow, we're surprised beyond imagining, The Donald is indeed going to leave the White House soon and, much as I hate to admit it, in some strange fashion we're going to miss him."
As you can see, after 17 years in action, the ancient TomDispatch website has been elegantly and simply redesigned and updated. The main advantage: those of you who aren’t 76 years old like me (or are that age but not as technologically backward as I am) can now read TD comfortably on whatever new gadgets you’re using. I hope this redesign, which brings the site into the modern age in more than its analysis, also helps spread its articles ever more widely. There’s only one part of the site that hasn’t been updated and that, of course, is me. You’ll still get me — today for example — just as I always was. Now, onwards into this new year! Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Saying Goodbye to the Con-Man-in-Chief
Demining America After The Donald
Of course, it will be beyond a great relief to see his… well, let’s just say him in the rearview mirror. While occupying the White House, he was, in a rather literal sense, hell on earth. Nonetheless, he was also a figure of remarkable fascination for anyone thinking about this country or that strangest of all species, humanity, and what we’re capable of doing to ourselves.
So, here’s my look back at our final Trumpian months (at least for a while). As I review the weeks just past, however, you may be surprised to learn that I’m not planning to start with the president’s former national security adviser (of 23 days — “you’re fired!”) cum-convictee-cum-pardonee urging The Donald to declare martial law; nor will I review the president’s endless tweets and fulminations about the “fraudulent” 2020 election or his increasing lame (duck!) assaults on all those he saw as deserting his visibly sinking Titanic, including Mitch McConnell (“the first one off the ship”); nor do I have the urge to focus on the conspiracy-mongress who captured the president’s heart (or whatever’s in that chest of his) with her claims about how “Venezuelan” votes did him in; nor even his doom-and-gloom “holiday” trip to Mar-a-Lago, including on Christmas Day his 309th presidential visit to a golf course; nor will I waste time on how the still-president of these increasingly dis-United States, while pardoning war criminals and pals (as well as random well-connected criminals), managed to ignore the rest of a country slipping into pandemic hell — cases rising, deaths spiraling, hospitals filling to the brim in a fashion unequaled on the planet — about which he visibly couldn’t have cared less; nor will I focus on how, as Christmas arrived, he landed squarely on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s position of giving $2,000 checks to the American people and so for a few days became an honorary “socialist”; nor will I even spend time on his unique phone call for 11,780 votes in Georgia.
Instead, in this most downbeat of seasons, I’d like to begin with something more future-oriented, a little bit of December news you might have missed amid all the gloom and doom. So, just in case you didn’t notice as 2020 ended in chaos and cacophony, as the president who couldn’t take his eyes off a lost election sunk us ever deeper in his own version of the Washington swamp, there were two significantly more forward-looking figures in his circle. I’m thinking of his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner who plunked down $30 million on the most exclusive bit of real estate they could find in Florida, a small island with only 41 residences known among locals as the “billionaire’s bunker.”
They purchased a plot of land there on which they can assumedly build the most modest of multimillion-dollar mansions… but let the Hill describe it:
“The secluded spot sits on 1.8 acres and comes with 200 feet of waterfront and ‘breathtaking sunset views.’ A real estate listing dubs it an ‘amazing parcel of land,’ saying, ‘This sprawling lot provides a rare opportunity to build your waterfront dream estate.’ The listing boasts that the Miami island is ‘one of the most exclusive and private neighborhoods in the world with its private country club and golf course, police force, and 24/7 armed boat patrol.'”
And better yet, though just off the coast of Miami, it’s only 60 miles from what they may hope will be the alternate White House for the next four years, Mar-a-Lago.
The Future, Trump-Style
As far as I’m concerned, amid the year-ending chaos of the Trump presidency, nothing could have caught the essential spirit of the last four years better than that largely overlooked news story. Let’s start at its end, so to speak. Instead of brooding nonstop about a lost election like you-know-who, Ivanka and Jared, both key presidential advisers, are instead going to pour millions of dollars into what might be thought of as a personal investment in the future on that island off the southern coast of Florida.
When it comes to the planet, this catches in a nutshell the essence of what’s passed for long-term thinking in the Trump White House since January 2017. After all, the most notable thing about the southern coast of Florida, if you’re in an investing (and lifestyle) mood, is this: as the world’s sea levels rise (ever more precipitously, in fact) thanks to climate change, one of the most endangered places in the United States is that very coast. Flooding in the region has already been on the rise and significant parts of it could be underwater by 2050 with its inhabitants washed out of their homes well before that — and no personal police force or patrol boats will be able to protect Ivanka and Jared from that kind of global assault. Even Donald Trump, should he run and win again in 2024, won’t be able to pardon them for that decision.
Put another way, the future of those two key Trump family members is a living example of what, in this world of ours, is usually called climate denialism; the “children,” that is, have offered their own $30-million-plus encapsulation of the four-year environmental record of a 74-year-old president who couldn’t imagine anyone’s future except his own.
Though climate denialism is indeed the term normally used for this phenomenon, as a descriptor in the Trump years it fell desperately short of the mark. It’s a far too-limited way of describing what the U.S. government has actually been doing. Withdrawing from the Paris climate accords, promoting oil exploration and drilling galore, and deep-sixing energy-related environmental regulations, Trump and his crew have not just been denying the obvious reality of climate change (as the West Coast burned in a historic fashion and the hurricane season ramped up dramatically in 2020), but criminally aiding and abetting the phenomenon in every way imaginable. They have, in fact, done their best to torch humanity’s future. As I’ve written in these years, they rather literally transformed themselves into pyromaniacs even as they imagined unleashing, as the president proudly put it, “American energy dominance.” The promotional phrase they used for their fossil-fuelized policies was “the golden era of American energy is now underway” — that golden glow assumedly being the flames licking at this overheating planet of ours.
So, a climate-change endangered island? Why even bother to imagine such a future? In fact, the president made this point all too vividly when it came to Tangier Island, a 1.3-square-mile dot in the middle of Chesapeake Bay that global warming and erosion are imperiling and that is, indeed, expected to be gone by 2050. In 2017, the president called the mayor of its town (after CNN put out a story about the increasing problems of that Trump-loving isle). He assured him, as the mayor reported, that “we shouldn’t worry about rising sea levels. He said that ‘your island has been there for hundreds of years, and I believe your island will be there for hundreds more.’”
IED-ing the American System
And of course, let’s not forget that, for the president’s daughter and son-in-law, dropping $30 million is just another day at the office. In that, they distinctly follow in the tradition of the bankruptee who has similarly dished out dough to his heart’s content, while repeatedly leaving others holding the bag for his multiple business failures. (Undoubtedly, this is something the American people will experience when he finally jumps ship on January 20th, undoubtedly leaving the rest of us holding that very same bag.) Pardon me, but that $30 million dollars being plunked down on a snazzy plot of land — someday to be water — should remind us that we’re talking about a crew who are already awash in both money (of every questionable sort) and, at least in the case of the president, staggering hundreds of millions of dollars in debts. It should remind us as well that we’re dealing with families evidently filled with grifters and a now-pardoned criminal, too.
Make no mistake, from the moment Donald Trump walked into the White House, he was already this country’s con-man-in-chief. Back when he was first running for president, this was no mystery to his ever-loyal “base,” those tens of millions of voters who opted for him then and continue to stick by him no matter what. As I wrote in that distant 2016 election season,
“Americans love a con man. Historically, we’ve often admired, if not identified with, someone intent on playing and successfully beating the system, whether at a confidence game or through criminal activity. [At] the first presidential debate… Trump essentially admitted that, in some years, he paid no taxes (‘that makes me smart’) and that he had played the tax system for everything it was worth… I guarantee you that Trump senses he’s deep in the Mississippi of American politics with such statements and that a surprising number of voters will admire him for it (whether they admit it or not). After all, he beat the system, even if they didn’t.”
And admire him they did and, as it happens, still do. He was elected on those very grounds and, despite his loss in 2020 (with a staggering 74 million voters still opting for him), a couple of weeks from now, he’ll walk away from the White House with a final con that will leave him floating in a sea of money for months (years?) to come. Here’s how New York Times reporters Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman describe the situation:
“Donald J. Trump will exit the White House as a private citizen next month perched atop a pile of campaign cash unheard-of for an outgoing president, and with few legal limits on how he can spend it… Mr. Trump has cushioned the blow by coaxing huge sums of money from his loyal supporters — often under dubious pretenses — raising roughly $250 million since Election Day along with the national party. More than $60 million of that sum has gone to a new political action committee, according to people familiar with the matter, which Mr. Trump will control after he leaves office.”
He was, in other words, in character from his first to last moment in office and, in his own way (just as his followers expected), he did beat the system, even if he faces years of potential prosecution to come.
Oh, and one more thing when it comes to The Donald. With a future Biden administration in mind, you might think of him not just as the con-man president but the Taliban president as well. After all, he’s not only torn up but land-mined, or in Taliban terms IED-ed, both the federal government, including that “deep state” he’s always denounced, and the American system of governing itself. (“This Fake Election can no longer stand…”) And those improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, he and his crew have buried in that system, whether in terms of health care, the environment, or you name it are likely to go off at unexpected moments for months, if not years, to come.
So, when you say so long, farewell, aufwiedersehn, adieu to you-know-who, his children, and his pals, the odds are you won’t ever be saying goodbye. Not really. Thanks to that $60 million-plus fund, that base of his, and all those landmines (many of which we don’t even know are there yet), he’ll be with us in one form (of disaster) or another for years to come — he, his children, and that island that, unfortunately, just won’t sink fast enough.
Like it or not, after these last four years, whatever the Biden era may hold for us, Donald Trump proved a media heaven and a living hell. It’s going to be quite a task in a world that needs so much else just to demine the American system after he leaves the White House (especially with Mitch McConnell and crew still in place). Count on one thing: we won’t forget The Donald any time soon. And give him credit where it’s due. There’s no denying that, in just four years, he’s helped usher us into a new American world that already couldn’t be more overheated or underwhelming.
Enrique Tarrio says his far-right group will turn out in numbers on Wednesday. (photo: Getty Images)
Proud Boys Leader Arrested in the Burning of Church's Black Lives Matter Banner, DC Police Say
BBC
Excerpt: "Enrique Tarrio faces misdemeanor destruction of property charges, police say."
The leader of the far-right Proud Boys group has been arrested in Washington DC on suspicion of burning a Black Lives Matter flag last month.
He has reportedly admitted torching a banner taken from a black church during a rally in December in the city.
President Donald Trump has been urging supporters to gather in the capital this week for another demonstration.
On Wednesday, members of Congress are due to certify Democratic President-elect Joe Biden's election victory before he takes office on 20 January.
Mr Tarrio has said on the social media app Parler that the Proud Boys will "turn out in record numbers on Jan 6th", referring to his members as "the most notorious group of extraordinary gentlemen".
The National Guard has been deployed by Washington DC's mayor to assist local authorities. Officials say the troops will not be armed and will be there to assist with crowd management and traffic control.
A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Department, Dustin Sternbeck, told the Washington Post on Monday that Mr Tarrio had been stopped in a vehicle shortly after it entered the district.
The 36-year-old was also found during his arrest to be in unlawful possession of two devices that allow guns to hold additional bullets, a source told CBS News.
The destruction of property charge relates to a protest in Washington DC on 12 December in support of the outgoing Republican president's unsubstantiated claims of systemic election fraud.
The mostly peaceful demonstration ended in isolated scuffles as confrontations with counter-protesters broke out. Police said more than three dozen people were arrested and four churches were vandalised.
Mr Tarrio - who lives in Miami, where he also reportedly runs a grassroots organisation called Latinos for Trump - told the Washington Post at the time that he had burned the Black Lives Matter flag.
"Let's make this simple," he said. "I did it."
But he maintained he did not know the Asbury United Methodist Church, where the flag had reportedly flown, was predominantly attended by African American worshippers.
Mr Tarrio also said Proud Boy members have had their flags and hats stolen in past demonstrations without anyone being arrested for those alleged incidents.
Earlier on Monday, another black church that was vandalised during December's protest sued Mr Tarrio and the Proud Boys.
The Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church accused the group of climbing over a fence and tearing down a Black Lives Matter sign.
Kristen Clarke, head of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in a statement: "Black churches and other religious institutions have a long and ugly history of being targeted by white supremacists in racist and violent attacks meant to intimidate and create fear.
"Our lawsuit aims to hold those who engage in such action accountable."
The city's police department said last month it had been considering a potential hate crime charge over the incident.
The vehicle that prompted a bomb scare in Queens on Monday. (photo: Gothamist)
Suspect in Queens Bomb Scare Is Pro-Trump Activist Connected to White Nationalist Group
Jake Offenhartz, Gothamist
Offenhartz writes: "The man who allegedly triggered an hours-long bomb scare outside a Queens mall on Monday is a far-right activist with a history of threatening Black Lives Matter protesters."
He turned himself in to police at around 3 a.m. on Tuesday morning, according to sources familiar with the investigation.
Louis Shenker, 22, is believed to have left a stolen Tesla, rigged with electrical wires and a fuel canister, on a ramp outside the Queens Place Mall in Elmhurst. The vehicle prompted an evacuation of the area on Monday morning. There were no explosives inside the car, and police eventually deemed it a "hoax device."
Photos shared with Gothamist show the vehicle was also affixed with a Black Lives Matter sign, raising suspicions that the stunt was meant to discredit the movement. Police also recovered a dog that they said was trapped inside the vehicle.
Shenker is known to NYPD officers and federal agents for past alleged attacks on local progressives. He was arrested last week for allegedly setting fire to part of a Black Lives Matter vigil at Carl Schurz Park on the Upper East Side, according to a complaint shared with Gothamist.
Social media posts affiliated with Shenker suggest he is a member of the "Groyper" movement, a loose network of white nationalists aiming to rebrand the Alt Right. He is an outspoken Trump supporter, who has threatened on his podcast to disrupt the run-off election in Georgia on Tuesday, and has spread conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic.
Shenker was also interviewed by the FBI last month after making threats against Mayor Bill de Blasio at an anti-lockdown protest on Staten Island.
Shenker was initially stopped by officers inside the parking lot at around 5 a.m. on Monday, but was not arrested, according to the source. Police are seeking a second person who they believe was involved in the Tesla scare.
John Miller, deputy commissioner of the NYPD's intelligence bureau, said at a briefing on Monday that the Tesla incident was likely a deliberate act intended to sow panic.
"A great deal of inconvenience was incurred by an act that seems deliberate to cause that inconvenience and expense," Miller said.
Shenker has not yet been charged in Monday's incident, police said. He is due in court in March for his most recent arrest.
An attorney representing Shenker did not respond to a request for comment.
Federal agents. (photo: Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/AP)
New Law Requires Federal Agents to Identify Themselves to Protesters
Kate Oh, ACLU
Oh writes: "When people took to the streets this year to protest racial injustice and police brutality against Black people, they faced a repressive, violent response from local police and federal agents."
Some of these agents arrived with militarized uniforms, riot gear, and weapons, but, notably, no visible name labels, badges, or even insignia marking their government agency. Congress just put a stop to this corrosive and undemocratic secrecy, requiring federal agents to identify themselves.
Tucked inside the National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 6395), which just became law, is a new requirement for federal military and civilian law enforcement personnel involved in the federal government's response to a "civil disturbance" to wear visible identification of themselves and the name of the government entity employing them. That's good news, because requiring such identification should be a no-brainer in a democracy. When government employees are interacting with members of the public and exercising government authority, such as the power to arrest people, the public should have the right to know who the employees are and which agency employs them.
Furthermore, when government personnel engage in wrongdoing, such as attacking protesters, one of the first steps in holding them accountable is knowing who they are. It's no surprise that rights-violating law enforcement would want to obscure their name plate and badge number before committing some unethical or even illegal act. Impeding transparency blocks oversight and accountability.
What the nation witnessed in Washington, D.C. and Portland, Oregon underscores the vital need for the legislation. In Portland, incognito federal officers who refused to identify themselves snatched civilians off the street and whisked them away in unmarked vehicles. Only later did U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Marshals Service reveal that they were involved. In our nation's capital, the Trump administration swarmed the city with heavily-armed, unidentified officers with unclear governmental affiliations. When asked by journalists to give their names or specific governmental affiliation, these federal officers refused.
The resulting images provoked outcries of our government resorting to the kinds of unaccountable "secret police" used by authoritarian regimes to silence dissidents and terrify ordinary citizens into submission. Protesters and security experts also flagged that the unidentified government forces' appearances can be practically indistinguishable from the kinds of right-wing armed extremists that have, among other things, shot racial justice protesters on the streets of Kenosha, plotted to kidnap Michigan’s governor, and engaged in violent clashes around the country. This creates the risk that members of the public will treat law enforcement agents as illegitimate armed vigilantes, or defer to vigilantes who are posing as law enforcement.
In an important step forward for government transparency and accountability, lawmakers like Rep. Houlahan and Sens. Murphy and Schumer heeded the calls for reform and sought to ensure that a new identification requirement would be part of the final defense bill. Thankfully, they were successful.
Even with this provision poised for enactment, additional reform is still urgently needed at all levels of government. For example, it is always better to have the officer's name displayed rather than allowing a non-name identifier, such as a badge number, to be used as a substitute. Names are usually easier to remember than numbers or letters, thus making it easier for people to later identify and report officers. The current exceptions to the new identification requirement should also be narrowed.
Still, the message that Congress is sending to the executive branch and enshrining into statute is unmistakable: Secret police forces patrolling our neighborhoods in response to protests and other mass gatherings, in anonymity and shielded from accountability, are unacceptable. They do not belong in a democracy such as the United States.
When the next president takes office this month, his administration should affirm the principle as it implements the new law in the strongest possible manner — and keep its goal of a transparent and accountable government in mind as it works with Congress and civil society to respond to the inequities highlighted by the recent protests.
Andrew Wheeler, Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
A Final EPA Rollback Under Trump Curbs Use of Health Studies
Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press
Knickmeyer writes: "The Environmental Protection Agency released one of its last major rollbacks under the Trump administration on Tuesday, limiting what evidence it will consider about risks of pollutants in a way that opponents say could cripple future public health regulation."
EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the new rule, which restricts what findings from public health studies the agency can consider in crafting health protections, was made in the name of transparency about government decision-making. “We're going to take all this information and shine light on it,” Wheeler said Tuesday, in unveiling the terms of the new rule in a virtual appearance hosted by a conservative think tank.
“I don’t think we get enough credit as an administration about wanting to open up ... to sunlight and scrutiny,” Wheeler said of the Trump administration, which has already rolled back dozens of public health and environmental protections.
Opponents say the latest rule would threaten patient confidentiality and privacy of individuals in public health studies, and call the requirement an overall ruse to handicap future regulation.
The kind of research findings that appear targeted in the new rule “present the most direct and persuasive evidence of pollution's adverse health effects,” said Richard Revesz, an expert in pollution law at the New York University School of Law.
“Ignoring them will lead to uninformed and insufficiently stringent standards, causing avoidable deaths and illnesses,” Revesz said in a statement.
Wheeler said the rule will go into effect Wednesday, just one day after its final terms were made public, an unusually brief period. The change comes after hundreds of thousands of earlier objections from scientists, public-health experts, regulators, academics, environmental advocates and others in public hearings and written remarks, in some of the strongest protests of recent years to a proposed EPA rule change.
Wheeler signed the rule last Wednesday. EPA declined requests to release it until Tuesday.
The new regulation would restrict regulators' consideration of findings from public health studies unless the underlying data from them are made public. The rule deals with so-called dose response findings, which look at harm suffered at varying exposures to a pollutant or other toxic agent.
Some industry and conservative groups have pushed for the change for decades, calling public health studies that hold confidential potentially identifying data about the test subjects “secret science.”
The change could limit not only future public health protections, but “force the agency to revoke decades of clean air protections,” Chris Zarba, former head of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, said in a statement.
Wheeler said Wednesday that the increased requirement for public disclosure would only increase public acceptance of EPA regulation.
Public health studies — such as Harvard's 1990s Six Cities study, which drew on anonymized, confidential health data from thousands of people to better establish links between air pollution and higher mortality — have been instrumental in crafting health and environmental rules. The Six Cities study led to new limits on air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
Wheeler was equivocal Tuesday on tossing out that pivotal study in particular as a basis for health rules. “It can still be used and probably will be used,” he said. “It could still pass muster.”
The EPA's final rule also deleted a section from its original proposal that would have specifically required regulators to consider a questioned scientific model backed by proponents of a theory that radiation and similar threats are not harmful at low doses, and can be beneficial. The scientific community for decades has held that all exposure to the most damaging form of radiation has risks.
The Associated Press first reported on expert concerns about that part of the rule. The EPA at the time denied any link to the controversial theory. However, the Los Angeles Times, citing emails obtained under open records laws, later reported that the theory's most prominent backer, a toxicologist named Edward Calabrese, had worked with EPA officials in crafting that section of the rule.
The EPA final rule released Tuesday cited “significant comment” in opposition in saying it had removed those specific mentions.
The EPA has been one of the most active agencies in carrying out President Donald Trump’s mandate to roll back regulations that conservative groups have identified as being unnecessary and burdensome to industry.
Many of the changes face court challenges and can be reversed by executive action or by lengthier bureaucratic process. But undoing them would take time and effort by the incoming Biden administration, which also has ambitious goals to fight climate-damaging fossil fuel emissions and lessen the impact of pollutants on lower-income and minority communities.
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