02 February 21
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Ken Klippenstein | Inside the Brutal Power Struggle at Homeland Security
Ken Klippenstein, The Intercept
Klippenstein writes: "Tensions ran so high at the Department of Homeland Security's oversight wing that one senior official fantasized about Arya Stark, the fictional assassin in 'Game of Thrones,' 'taking care of' the agency chief, according to an investigation obtained by The Intercept under the Freedom of Information Act."
An investigation, conducted in 2020 by an outside firm and obtained via FOIA, paints a picture of DHS’s Office of Inspector General in chaos.
The investigation, conducted in 2020 by an outside law firm, reveals bureaucratic infighting so bitter that it drove out an agency head and led to an array of startling allegations, including that a high-level official made threatening comments about a concealed weapon during a meeting.
The investigation paints a picture of DHS’s Office of Inspector General in chaos. The OIG performs an important function: probing misconduct within the sprawling DHS, the largest law enforcement agency in the country. Policing DHS and its bevy of law enforcement agencies — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and the Secret Service, to name just a few — is a responsibility that falls upon the OIG. The dysfunction couldn’t have come at a worse time, as many of these same law enforcement agencies have been implicated in some of the Trump administration’s most controversial policies, like family separation at the border, the conditions of migrant detention facilities, and the crackdown on protesters in Portland, all of which DHS OIG has investigated in recent months. One of DHS OIG’s most important responsibilities is investigating DHS employees’ whistleblower disclosures, which appear to have been weaponized by employees who used them to go after one another.
The investigation, launched in May 2020, focuses on a senior official who brought down the agency’s leader — and its morale along with it. In one striking illustration of the civil war within the agency, the investigation describes a senior official saying of the agency’s top official, then acting Inspector General John V. Kelly, in an email: “Perhaps Arya would consider taking care of some business here? The DHS OIG throne isn’t as glam but we do have a night king that just. won’t. die.” (The “Night King” is one of the “Game of Thrones” series’ antagonists; he leads an army of undead bent on conquering the planet.)
While the document does not name names (most are redacted), three sources familiar with the underlying events and the investigation told The Intercept that the senior official, former Deputy Inspector General and second-in-command Jennifer Costello, coordinated the bureaucratic putsch with high-ranking colleagues Karen Ouzts, deputy counsel to the inspector general, and Diana Shaw, assistant inspector general. The sources requested anonymity to avoid professional reprisal. It was Costello who sent the “Night King” email to Ouzts, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
While the report does not find any violation of law, it concludes that the “trio” of Costello, Shaw, and Ouzts hampered the agency’s ability to function, consuming it with complaints and sniping. The report concludes, “In sum, our investigation revealed that [Costello], with the assistance of [Ouzts and Shaw] … elevated her own interests above those of the public.” An attorney for Costello disputed the findings of the report but did not respond to any specific allegations, citing privacy concerns. Shaw and Ouzts did not respond to a request for comment.
The “Night King” email was sent on April 29, 2019, three days after Kelly informed Costello that he was delaying his retirement. Despite initially getting along with Kelly until around the end of 2018, Costello soured on him when he postponed his retirement. Then began a pressure campaign of ethics complaints, leaks, and outright hostility, culminating in Kelly’s resignation. Costello launched the crusade in hopes of becoming inspector general, the report says, rewarding co-workers who helped and punishing those who did not.
“[Redacted] motive for her actions appears to have been a desire to further her own professional ambitions and those of her allies … while diminishing the professional opportunities of those whom she disliked and/or viewed as disloyal,” the report says. That redacted name is Costello’s, according to two sources familiar with the events, who also confirmed that Costello declined to provide interviews to investigators — unlike Shaw and Ouzts, who did.
But the infighting did not disappear with Kelly, who would soon be replaced by Joseph V. Cuffari, a longtime investigator who spent over 20 years at the Department of Justice. Though Cuffari was appointed by former President Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate in July 2019, Cuffari has conducted investigations into controversial Trump policies like family separation and sending DHS personnel to respond to protests in Portland. Nonetheless, Costello turned her attention to Cuffari after his nomination, filing multiple misconduct allegations against him within the first few months of his appointment.
By February 2020, Costello herself was put on administrative leave for alleged ethical misconduct; on June 11, DHS OIG notified Congress that she was no longer employed at the agency. But the bureaucratic war leading up to that point would bring the agency to its knees, with OIG employees telling investigators that it was “difficult for them to work together, much less collaborate on key functions of the office.”
The report has renewed significance in light of the incoming Biden administration, which will have to make staffing decisions in the coming weeks, including whether to keep Cuffari on as inspector general. Biden will also have to decide how to rein in DHS, which broadly suffers from the chaos depicted in the report, owing to its sprawling size and poorly defined mission — problems that prompted House Democrats to introduce legislation last year aimed at reforming the department. And though Costello, Ouzts, and Shaw are not currently at DHS OIG, high-level officials like them frequently pass through different agencies. Shaw, for example, is now deputy inspector general at the State Department.
The investigation that led to the report, dated December 14, 2020, was launched by the law firm WilmerHale on May 4, 2020. The inquiry was prompted by DHS OIG after the independent agency that normally handles these cases, the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, failed to produce an investigation despite multiple requests, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Though Cuffari’s office prompted the investigation, Cuffari told The Intercept that WilmerHale was selected under the formal federal contracting process and handled by a career contracting official to ensure independence. “I delegated this contract and awarding of the contract to our contract officer who has a warrant to do federal contracts,” he said.
In May 2019, an unidentified senior official — Costello, per accounts from two sources — “used an internal inquiry to put public and political pressure on [Kelly] to retire.” The inquiry involved publicly disclosing evidence that the agency had retracted 13 oversight reports regarding the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to disasters over concerns that they were too positive. While there’s nothing wrong with disclosing evidence of poor oversight, Costello’s motive was to prompt Congress to take action against Kelly, according to the report. (One employee is described as asking why they were issuing the FEMA report months after its completion in October.) Costello pitched the plan to Shaw, who replied that this was the “nuclear option,” according to emails reviewed by investigators and sources identifying the players.
After the disclosure to Congress, Kelly, the agency chief who had served at DHS OIG for over a decade, resigned on June 10, 2019. Following Kelly’s retirement, the report said, an official approved a retroactive change to a personnel file “which purportedly justified her” — Costello, per accounts from two sources — “to serve” in Kelly’s place. When Cuffari arrived in July 2019, Costello trained her sights on him.
Perhaps most concerning among all the investigation’s findings is the weaponization of the whistleblowing process, DHS OIG’s most important function, within the watchdog agency itself. If a DHS employee believes that they have witnessed misconduct, one of the only ways that they can file a whistleblower complaint and enjoy legal protections against reprisal is via DHS OIG, though the agency has a spotty record of investigating such complaints. But the investigation found multiple cases in which frivolous complaints were filed by employees of DHS OIG in order to pressure officials to resign. “The agency was beset by employees’ accusations of misconduct and retaliation, frequent internal investigations of OIG personnel, and complaints and counter-complaints,” the report found.
Within the first four months of Cuffari’s appointment as inspector general, both he and Costello had already filed multiple allegations of misconduct against each other. In one instance described by the report, an official — Costello, per accounts from two sources — allegedly sought to trigger an investigation into Cuffari for a work trip to the Southwest border, which she claimed was illegitimate and being undertaken for personal reasons since he had family there. An unnamed DHS official is described as having refused to investigate the matter, concluding it “inappropriate.”
Then during an “icebreaker” portion of one meeting involving DHS OIG leadership, one senior official — Ouzts, according to two sources’ accounts — allegedly made “threatening” comments toward an unnamed official about a concealed weapon, according to a misconduct report filed in September 2019 and referenced by the investigation. (While the investigation corroborated the remarks, which it said evinced “poor judgment,” it found no evidence that they were intended to be threatening.)
The meeting was one of many instances of what the report broadly describes as “unprofessional behavior” so prevalent that it hampered not just the agency’s mission but even its ability to retain employees. “The work environment became so bitterly hostile that employees who left the agency during this period [after July 2019] cited dissension and tension as contributing factors for their departures,” the investigation found.
Costello was placed on administrative leave for alleged ethical violations, including holding herself out as the acting inspector general without proper authority, in February 2020; in June, the agency announced that she was no longer there. (Costello maintains that she was retaliated against for speaking out against Cuffari.) Ouzts resigned earlier this month, and Shaw resigned in May before joining the State Department, according to their LinkedIn profiles as well as two sources familiar with the matter.
“I am deeply concerned about IG Cuffari’s disclosure of sensitive personnel information,” an attorney for Costello, Eden Brown Gaines, said. (Cuffari did not disclose any personnel information to me.) “I believe IG Cuffari’s actions and the report from the ostensible investigation by a private firm will have a chilling effect on staff at DHS and other agencies who might be contemplating coming forward to expose wrongdoing,” Costello’s attorney said, adding that the report did not find any illegal conduct or policy violations. (The report does note that among the misconduct it substantiates, none of it violated the law.)
“The report speaks for itself,” Cuffari said in a phone interview, declining to address specifics but adding that the team conducting the inquiry “had free rein to determine how best to pursue the allegations we gave them.”
While Cuffari was appointed by Trump, DHS OIG officials with whom I spoke said that Cuffari was not a partisan. Cuffari is well-liked among OIG employees, who expressed appreciation for his willingness to investigate politically fraught issues like the use of solitary confinement in ICE facilities and DHS’s involvement in the administration’s crackdown on protests in Portland, which “never would have happened” under earlier leadership, as one employee told me.
“He has done some very good work since I left,” Kelly, the former acting inspector general, said of Cuffari. “I think he’s doing an excellent job.”
Another OIG official pointed to the increase in the number of audits, inspections, and evaluations completed by the agency despite the telework environment and other complications of the pandemic as evidence of Cuffari’s effectiveness. (DHS OIG completed 80 in the year 2020 versus 67 the previous year, according to the agency’s website.) Rep. Raúl Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat who works extensively on immigration issues (his district borders Mexico), told The Intercept that he thought the agency had become “much more professional.”
Katherine Hawkins, a legal analyst with the Project on Government Oversight, expressed similar praise for the increase in on-site visits to monitor ICE detention facility conditions, calling it “genuinely valuable.” But she was also critical of the the agency’s failure to protect undocumented witnesses who reported misconduct in ICE facilities and were subsequently deported, apparently in retaliation. Hawkins also criticized Cuffari’s decision to oppose the Government Accountability Office’s finding that top DHS officials Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli had not been lawfully appointed; neither official received Senate confirmation. (Ironically, Cuffari is one of relatively few DHS leadership officials under the Trump administration to have been confirmed by the Senate.)
“As we try to uncover what DHS was up to over the last four years, you really want the strongest inspector general possible,” Hawkins said.
Shaw Drake, staff attorney and policy counsel on the border and immigrants’ rights for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, was broadly critical not just of Cuffari but the agency generally, which he said had “historically failed” to hold DHS accountable.
“Since 2019, the ACLU of Texas has filed 12 robust complaints with the DHS OIG, documenting numerous cases of abuse, from the ill-treatment of pregnant women in CBP custody, to persistent verbal abuse, to the unlawful rejection of those seeking protection at ports of entry,” Drake said. “While the inspector general has issued several reports documenting similar abuses, the agency has failed to hold agents accountable, make needed policy changes, or adequately address a persistent culture of cruelty.”
Irvin McCullough, a national security analyst at the Government Accountability Project, called the misconduct described by the report “troubling,” explaining that “wrongdoing in watchdog offices affects each and every whistleblower their offices are entrusted to protect.” Indeed, the investigation found that the conduct of senior agency members “exacerbated an atmosphere of mistrust and unprofessionalism to the detriment of the agency and its mission.”
Ken Cuccinelli during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Sept. 24, 2020. (photo: Tom Williams/AP)
A Whistleblower Alleges a Top Trump Official Signed a Last-Minute Agreement With ICE's Union That Could Hamstring Biden's Immigration Policies
Hamed Aleaziz, BuzzFeed
Aleaziz writes: "A whistleblower alleged Monday that a top Trump administration official abused his authority by entering into a series of last-minute agreements with the union for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers that could hamstring President Joe Biden's sweeping policy changes."
The agreement could give the union “unprecedented veto authority in many areas," the group representing the whistleblower wrote in a letter to Congress.
The letter released by the Government Accountability Project, which was sent to congressional committees and the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, alleges that Ken Cuccinelli, the department's former acting second-in-command, signed a set of agreements with the ICE union, which endorsed former president Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.
“The agreements grant [the union] extraordinary power and benefits — far more than what DHS agreed upon with its other employee unions which did not endorse President Trump. The agreements confer on the union the ability to indefinitely delay changes to immigration enforcement policies and practices as well,” the letter, written by David Seide, an attorney with the Government Accountability Project, states. “Moreover, under the agreements, ICE expressly waives statutory management rights which negotiating parties know better than to waive. Even more shockingly, the agreements attempt to prohibit any challenge to their validity for eight years.”
According to the Government Accountability Project, the agreement could give the ICE union “unprecedented veto authority in many areas” and increase the use of agency resources. The letter was first reported by the New York Times.
The group says it is representing the whistleblower, who is a current government official and “possesses information concerning significant acts of misconduct committed” by Cuccinelli.
The controversial former acting deputy secretary also signed a series of agreements that required DHS to provide notice of immigration policy changes to local jurisdictions to give them six months to review and submit comments. The state of Texas, which signed one of the agreements, eventually sued DHS over its implementation of a deportation moratorium, claiming it violated the contract.
The letter states that the government has 30 days to officially disapprove of the union agreement.
A representative for the union did not immediately return a request for comment.
Cuccinelli told the New York Times that the agreement "is entirely legal and appropriate, or we wouldn’t have executed it.”
“I absolutely deny any mismanagement, waste of government funds and any misuse of authority,” he said.
In its first week, the Biden administration issued new priorities for ICE officers as of Feb. 1, including that they should focus on immigrants who have been deemed a national security threat, were arrested at the border after Nov. 1, 2020, or have been convicted of an aggravated felony.
“This abuse of authority is shocking,” the whistleblower letter concludes. “When the evidence is collected — the agreements’ last second timing, their out-sized conveyance of power and benefits, their purported invulnerability and Mr. Cuccinelli’s extraordinary involvement — it is clear that they are another example of the prior administration’s effort in its waning hours to cement a legacy at taxpayer expense. We urge you to investigate immediately and promptly act as you deem warranted.”
Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. (photo: Marco Verch/Flickr)
COVID-19 Vaccine Developers Want to Keep Getting Billions in Public Money With No Strings Attached
Julia Rock, Jacobin
Rock writes: "Drug companies have received over $10 billion from the US government for COVID-19 vaccine production."
Yet those companies weren’t required to offer their vaccines at fair prices or share intellectual property rights — and they want to keep it that way.
hen the US government awarded over $10 billion in contracts and advance purchase commitments to drug companies working on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, it did not require the recipients of government money to agree to offer their products at fair prices or share intellectual property rights to enable faster production.
Now, two of the companies awarded those contracts — Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson — are trying to prevent shareholders from voting on resolutions to require the companies to disclose information about the impact of government funding on vaccine access.
The US government has purchased two hundred million doses of the Pfizer vaccine and one hundred million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccines, for about $20 and $10 per dose, respectively.
The shareholder resolutions, filed by members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), a shareholder activism organization, ask those two companies to inform their shareholders how “receipt of public financial support for development and manufacture of products for COVID-19 is being, or will be, taken into account when making decisions that affect access to such products, such as setting prices.”
Similar resolutions were also filed at Eli Lilly, Gilead, Merck, and Regeneron.
Both Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson filed “no action requests” with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in December, asking the agency to rule that the companies can withhold the proposals from shareholders. Neither company responded to the Daily Poster requests for comment.
“Did You Take Government Funding Into Account?”
In nearly identical filings prepared by the same lawyer, both Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson argued that the proposals attempt to “micromanage” the companies “by requesting an intricately detailed report.”
Meg Jones-Monteiro, ICCR’s health equity director, called the micromanaging claim “ludicrous.”
The claim that investors are trying to “micromanage” the companies comes from an SEC precedent finding that certain “ordinary business operations” should not be subject to shareholder oversight. But Jones-Monteiro argues that the issue of vaccine pricing during pandemics doesn’t fall into this category.
“Anything related to drug pricing has been established as a social policy issue,” Jones-Monteiro told the Daily Poster, meaning it isn’t just ordinary business that doesn’t need any shareholder oversight.
She noted that the proposals don’t ask about ordinary pricing decisions or ask for intricate details about pricing algorithms. “We are asking very generally: Did you take government funding into account? And how did you take it into account?”
Oxfam, an ICCR member who filed the proposed resolution with Johnson & Johnson, wrote in a supporting statement that “JNJ stated publicly that it will distribute a COVID-19 vaccine on a ‘nonprofit’ basis,” adding: “JNJ has not clarified what ‘nonprofit’ means when the government funds a significant portion of the research and development cost.”
“We’re suspecting the vaccine’s price is higher than the cost of production,” Nicholas Lusiani, a senior advisor at Oxfam who works with the pharmaceutical industry in the United States, told the Daily Poster. “We would like to see a drop-down to the actual cost of production.”
Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen received $456 million for vaccine development last March, and then an additional $1 billion in August in exchange for providing one hundred million doses to the federal government. The company expects to have the US doses ready by April.
Pfizer received an advance purchase commitment from the federal government in July of about $2 billion for one hundred million doses, and signed an agreement to provide an additional one hundred million doses for the same amount in December.
Trinity Health, which filed the Pfizer resolution on behalf of the ICCR, wrote in an accompanying letter: “Although advance purchase commitments do not directly fund vaccine development, they reduce the risk associated with it.”
BioNTech, the company Pfizer worked with to develop its COVID-19 vaccine, also received funding from the German government.
Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer additionally argued in their no-action request that they have already “substantially implemented” the shareholder proposals by posting information on their websites about vaccine pricing.
That information isn’t sufficient, says Jones-Monteiro. “What they’re missing is the answer to the question we’ve asked, which is, how do you take government funding into account?” she said.
Intellectual Property Rights
While the government funded research and development of COVID-19 vaccines and minimized risks with advance purchase commitments, the vaccines also contain wholly publicly developed technologies, raising questions about intellectual property rights.
In November, Public Citizen issued a report finding that the Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson vaccines were developed using a spike protein technology that had been discovered by scientists at the National Institutes of Health. “Years of public investment have fueled the rapid advancement of COVID-19 vaccine candidates,” the watchdog group wrote.
“Already, Janssen’s agreements with [US health officials] have been criticized for limiting the government’s intellectual property rights,” Oxfam wrote in its Johnson & Johnson letter, which it said “could place a chokehold on mass production commensurate with global need — increasing price, decreasing overall supply and preventing universal access.”
Wealthy countries comprising 16 percent of the global population currently have over 60 percent of the world’s vaccine doses. Sharing or suspending intellectual property rights would allow increased production of the vaccine and make it easier for poorer countries to vaccinate their populations.
Under the current arrangement, countries whose populations participated in vaccine trials are facing vastly inadequate vaccine supplies. And the world’s richest countries have been blocking a proposal at the World Trade Organization by India and South Africa to waive vaccine patents in order to allow more widespread production of the vaccine.
“You need enough doses to create global herd immunity, and right now, we don’t have enough doses, and they are controlled by rich countries, which creates this situation of vaccine imperialism,” Lusiani, the Oxfam adviser, said.
Lusiani said the vaccine pricing issues pose potential risks to investors. “You can imagine the reputational risk of Johnson & Johnson receiving over a billion dollars in public money, and then raising the price once the pandemic is over to astronomical levels,” he said, arguing it could lead investors to pull out of the company.
Then, there are larger risks to the economy created by limited vaccine access. “Investors want everybody to get the vaccine so that the economy can rebound as people go back to work,” he said. The White House Council of Economic Advisers estimates that accelerating vaccination is worth $10 billion to the economy every day.
Jones-Monteiro expects the SEC to make a decision on the no-action requests this month.
Jay Ashcroft. (photo: News-Press Now)
'About Power.' Lawmakers in Kansas, Missouri Race to Change Voting Laws After Election
Jonathan Sharman, Bryan Lowry and Sydney Hoover, McClatchy DC
Excerpt: "In Jefferson City last week, Missouri's Republican secretary of state, Jay Ashcroft, urged passage of a bill restoring much of the state's voter photo ID law, gutted as unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court."
n Jefferson City last week, Missouri’s Republican secretary of state, Jay Ashcroft, urged passage of a bill restoring much of the state’s voter photo ID law, gutted as unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court.
The next day, Kansas lawmakers in Topeka weighed eliminating the secretary of state’s power to extend deadlines for the delivery of mail ballots — a tool that ensures votes still count even in an emergency that disrupts an election.
But in Washington, Democrats are aiming to expand voting rights after taking narrow control of the U.S. Senate. They say the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — a brutal attempt to overturn the will of Black voters — should serve as a rallying point to pass legislation that has stagnated for the last two years.
The aftermath of the extraordinary 2020 election, conducted in a pandemic and then challenged by former President Donald Trump’s baseless allegations of fraud, has produced immediate, but sharply divergent, responses in statehouses and in the U.S. Capitol.
Kansas, Missouri and other Republican-controlled states are advancing measures to make it more difficult to cast a ballot. Temporary expansions of mail-in voting, implemented because of COVID-19, may not be renewed. Congressional Democrats and voting rights advocates want to pass measures to limit the effects of the more extreme state-level proposals.
“What we saw in D.C. was about power, who has the power to decide the leadership of this country,” said Kayla Reed, co-founder and executive director of Action St. Louis. “And while there are no longer white supremacists scaling the buildings of Congress and attempting to kick down the doors of the halls of Congress, there are many who will use the power of their office in the coming years to suppress the Black vote.”
Reed, in a voting rights panel discussion two weeks after the riot with Missouri Democratic Reps. Emanuel Cleaver and Cori Bush, said the “backlash will be aggressive and it will be swift and we must be ready.”
More than 100 restrictive voting bills have already been filed in 28 states, according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. That is far more than early February 2020, when just 35 bills had been filed in 15 states.
Most seek to roll back 2020’s explosive increase in mail voting, impose stricter voter ID rules or limit more expansive registration policies. Others would make it easier to purge the rolls of registered voters, according to the Brennan Center.
In swing states that decided the election, GOP lawmakers are proposing measures that would have helped Trump allies scuttle the 2020 results. In Arizona, for example, a Republican has offered a bill that would enable the legislature to overturn the secretary of state’s certification of an election.
Pennsylvania Republicans are moving to repeal the state law that Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley made the focus of his attempt to cancel the state’s electoral votes. The measure, which expanded mail voting, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support just 18 months ago.
At the same time, at least 406 bills to expand voting access have been filed across 35 states. But in those controlled by Republican supermajorities, like Kansas and Missouri, these measures are unlikely to advance far.
“I think people have sort of put the pieces together over the past several months that these voter suppressive policies are trying to keep Black and brown voters from the ballot box,” said Eliza Sweren-Becker, counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice and lead author of its report. “Those implications cannot be denied anymore. That connection has been made very plain.”
Republicans in Kansas, Missouri and Congress are adamant that strengthened election security and protections against fraud are their motivations — not disenfranchisement of voters. Confirmed cases of fraud are extremely rare, however, and courts have overturned some of the strictest GOP voting laws, including a Kansas law that required voters to provide proof of citizenship.
Republicans have accused Congressional Democrats of trying to expand their own power through voting and election access legislation.
“Speaker Pelosi and her colleagues are advertising it as a package of urgent measures to save American democracy,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said last year. “What it really seems to be is a package of urgent measures to rewrite the rules of American politics for the exclusive benefit of the Democratic Party.”
Missouri, Kansas proposals disputed
In Missouri, Republicans are trying to wind back the clock to Jan. 13, 2020. That is the day before the state Supreme Court struck down most of the state’s photo voter ID law.
The 2016 statute established three-options: vote with an approved photo ID like a state-issued driver’s license; cast a provisional ballot, or present a non-photo ID and sign an affidavit stating under penalty of perjury that you have no form of personal identification approved for voting,
The high court found the affidavit’s wording confusing unconstitutional. Legislators have now filed several bills in an attempt to restore the voter photo ID requirement.
Ashcroft, who testified in favor of one measure on Wednesday, warned against equating a lack of prosecutions with a lack of fraud.
“So what frequently happens when people ask whether or not fraud occurs, they say, ‘Well, how many people have been prosecuted for it?’ We can’t find that person, we don’t have a photo of them, no one remembers what they look like, we didn’t require them to do that. But we have had that happen,” he said of voter impersonation.
Still, Ashcroft also drew attention to high-profile instances of prosecuted voter fraud. He alluded to how two relatives of then-Rep. John Rizzo, a Kansas City Democrat, admitted to providing false addresses in order to vote in a highly-competitive 2010 primary. Rizzo ended up winning the race by a single vote, meaning fraudulent votes could have delivered his victory.
Rizzo, who has won multiple elections since then and is now the Missouri Senate minority leader, has said he was unaware of the illegal votes by his aunt and uncle.
“It happens and it shouldn’t happen,” Ashcroft said.
Critics of the measure question whether it would actually bring state law into compliance with the court. Sharon Jones, a lobbyist for the Missouri NAACP State Conference and the Missouri LGBT advocacy group PROMO, told legislators that under the bill, voter identification cards wouldn’t be sufficient ID.
“And that’s just one example of a way this bill makes it more difficult to vote than it is to exercise our other constitutional rights,” Jones said.
The Missouri General Assembly is also wrestling with whether to re-authorize the expanded mail voting it approved last year in response to the pandemic. The provisions expired at the end of 2020.
Under the temporary rules, mail balloting was available to all voters, but under different rules. Some ballots had to be notarized — a rare requirement nationally — and some didn’t.
Despite the multiple-tier system, the rules represented a significant, if uneven, expansion of mail-in voting. Previously, Missouri voters weren’t allowed to vote absentee without an excuse.
“We know the public appreciated the special provisions that applied during the pandemic,” said Evelyn Maddox, president of the League of Women Voters of Missouri.
But extending the law doesn’t appear to be a priority for Republicans. Gov. Mike Parson made no mention of it in his State of the State speech last week, even though some legislators had urged him to extend the rules through an executive order.
In Kansas, state senators held a Thursday hearing on legislation to strip the secretary of state’s power to extend deadlines for ballot delivery. Current law allows ballots to count if they are postmarked on or before Election Day and arrive up to three days after Election Day. But the secretary also has the discretion to extend the time frame.
The law hasn’t been used since it was implemented ahead of the 2016 election, but could be deployed in extreme circumstances.
“My reasoning for introducing this bill is I personally do not want to have one single person in the state of Kansas to have unilateral ability to change the due date on an election,” said Sen. Richard Hilderbrand, a Galena Republican.
If approved, the bill would require the secretary of state to only count ballots received by the third day — typically a Friday — after an election. The secretary of state’s office was neutral on the bill, but Deputy Secretary of State Clay Barker said there was no opposition to it.
Austin Spillar, policy associate for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued the bill would restrict voters’ rights in extreme events such as a pandemic, natural disaster or war, calling it an “overt act of voter suppression.”
“It is a punishment to hardworking, civically minded Kansans to do their part and mail their ballot on time, and who in turn expect every properly postmarked ballot to count,” Spillar said.
A ‘small change that has a big effect’
The push by state legislatures to restrict voting has increased the urgency to pass voting rights bills at the federal level, said Cleaver, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, who represents Kansas City.
“Almost 15 minutes after the Georgia elections, legislators in the state down there were talking about… ways they can make voting more difficult for minorities,” Cleaver said, referencing the victories in Georgia’s Senate runoff elections by Democrats Ralph Warnock and Jon Ossoff, respectively the first Black and Jewish senators to represent the southern state.
“I think there’s going to be a whole round of voting restrictions in predictable states and the only way to deal with that is for us to pass this Voting Rights Act quickly,” Cleaver said.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named for the Civil Rights icon and Georgia congressman who passed away last year, would restore voting rights protections that were ended under a 2013 Supreme Court decision.
In a 5-4 decision, the court struck down a portion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required state and local governments with histories of discrimination to obtain preclearance from the U.S. Department of Justice before enacting changes to their laws.
The court didn’t find the concept of preclearance unconstitutional, but rather it ruled the preclearance formula was impermissible because it was “based on decades-old data and eradicated practices,” from the Jim Crow era. Chief Justice Roberts said that there was no longer compelling evidence for its continued use.
The bill would set a new formula based on the last 25 years. If it passes and is signed into law by President Joe Biden, it could be used to strike down many of the state-level restrictions being floated in legislatures.
Another bill, H.R. 1, goes further and seeks to aggressively expand voting access throughout the nation.
The bill would expand mail voting nationwide and permit same-day registration for unregistered people who come to the polls but are otherwise eligible. It would restore to those who have completed prison sentences the right to vote in federal elections.
H.R. 1 would also create automatic registration for people who interact with state agencies, such as the DMV. These agencies already register people to vote, but the process would change from opt-in to automatic unless the person chooses not to register.
“It’s actually a very small change that has a big effect,” said Sweren-Becker.
These bills face strong opposition from Republicans. McConnell has repeatedly blasted H.R. 1 as a Democratic “power grab.”
Both pieces of voting rights legislation passed the House in the previous congressional session, but went nowhere in the Senate as McConnell blocked any election-related legislation from moving forward for the last two years.
With Democrats in control of the Senate, election reforms are expected to get new life. Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar will take the Senate Rules Committee gavel from Missouri GOP Sen. Roy Blunt.
Blunt, a former Missouri secretary of state who began his political career as a county clerk, bristled at Democratic proposals that would expand the federal role in setting state-level election policies during his chairmanship of the Rules Committee, which oversees most election legislation.
“The wrong thing here would be to federalize these elections and take away the protections that people truly have by elections locally administered under state laws that meet the needs that you have in your state,” Blunt said on a radio show last year about proposals to expand mail voting.
Blunt has not weighed in on the John Lewis bill, which was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Both election bills are more likely to advance to the floor with Democrats setting the agenda, but it is uncertain they can achieve the 60 votes needed to break the Senate’s filibuster.
“The problem has been in the past McConnell wouldn’t put it on the floor,” Cleaver said. “I’m convinced if he puts it in on the floor a measurable number of Republican senators are going to vote for it.”
Blunt’s office did not respond to a question about Cleaver’s prediction.
'For too long the burden of our crumbling infrastructure has not been equally felt.' (photo: Rebecca Cook/Reuters)
I Represent Children in Flint, Michigan. Here's What I'm Asking Biden to Do
Corey Stern, Guardian UK
Stern writes: "In his first 100 days, President Biden is racing to secure comprehensive reforms that both address the immediate challenges of today's concurrent crises and make our economy and society more resilient for the future."
Every single American has a right to live and work in a safe environment. President Biden can help ensure we can
Next month, he’ll unveil the second part of his recovery plan which is expected to focus on infrastructure investment and job creation. It is crucial that this plan includes an emphasis on protecting the health and safety of communities that are consistently failed – and often seriously harmed – by ageing infrastructure. Biden has already put equity and justice at the center of his climate plans, but he’ll need to do the same for any infrastructure plan he puts forward.
For too long the burden of our crumbling infrastructure has not been equally felt. As of last January, lead in ageing pipes, contaminated soil and old, peeling paint was found in 3.6m homes nationwide – most of which are concentrated in low-income neighborhoods. I’ve ridden the unhurried roads to justice for communities that have been debilitated by public officials allowing infrastructure to fall into disrepair. I’ve represented thousands of children exposed to lead-based paint hazards in New York City public housing, and I currently represent 3,000 young victims of the Flint water crisis and their parents.
In fact, just last week a judge granted preliminary approval of the historic $641m settlement we reached with the state of Michigan and other defendants responsible for the lead poisoning of innocent families and children. But the proposed settlement represents a rare moment of justice in a country that has a history riddled with tragedies like the one that took place in Flint, Michigan.
The Biden administration now has the opportunity – and the obligation – to change that trajectory. He can ensure infrastructure gets modernized while achieving his goals of creating new jobs and holding polluters accountable. Here are three ideas for how he can do it.
First, Biden’s infrastructure plans should include investments to finally deliver clean water and shelter for every American. This is basic stuff, and he doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel to follow through: last year, Senator Cory Booker and the then representative Deb Haaland introduced a proposal to clean up dangerous Superfund sites, replace wastewater systems and lead pipes, and remove lead-based paint in low-income and tribal communities. And of course, Senator Elizabeth Warren has a plan for this too, which mandates that the federal government fully fund drinking water infrastructure and install filtering systems to clean up our drinking water – all while creating 190,000 new jobs. Both of these are good ideas, and they share a common component: putting people to work at a time when jobs are sorely needed, while delivering on a fundamental right for millions of Americans.
Second, Biden recently created a new division at the Department of Justice (DoJ) that will focus on environmental justice and support “ongoing plaintiff-driven climate litigation against polluters”. That’s important, but we also need to make sure those who are funding and profiting from pollution are held liable. I recently filed suit against the big banks – JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Stifel Nicolaus – that provided the loans to Flint so it could change its water source back in 2014, knowing full well it would lead to toxic lead exposure in the community. Over six years later, those banks still haven’t been held responsible for their role in creating one of the worst environmental justice disasters in our history. The Biden administration should change what has been a default position of denial and dismissal in dealing with environmental claims and implement a policy that presumes environmental harm if someone goes so far as to make a claim – which already requires claimants to meet a high threshold.
Lastly, President Biden must follow through on and provide more clarity to his commitment to provide disadvantaged communities with 40% of overall benefits from investments made in the remediation and reduction of legacy pollution and the development of clean water infrastructure. “Building back better” means being explicit about the people who have been left behind. The Biden administration must ensure that at-risk communities receive restitution, and then develop strategies to break the cycles of injustice that led to their being harmed in the first place. That means they should be prioritized in job creation and in creating solutions to these problems. For example, if water pipelines are going to be repaired, the jobs for doing so should be filled by diverse, local workers.
From New York to Flint, I’ve seen that it’s always the same under-resourced, low-income communities that bear the brunt of our nation’s infrastructure failures. My job shouldn’t exist. People shouldn’t need advocates fighting for justice after they’ve been poisoned in their own homes, schools, and places of work. Every single American has a right to live and work in a safe environment, free from the fear that the infrastructure around them will threaten their health and safety. President Biden – and all of our nation’s leaders – must fight to see that right become a reality for everyone. At this point, there’s simply no excuse for failing to do so.
Alexei Navalny. (photo: Getty Images)
Alexei Navalny Sentenced to Two-and-a-Half Years in a Penal Colony
Matthew Champion, VICE
Champion writes: "Alexei Navalny, the main opposition figurehead in Russia and the most high-profile critic of President Vladimir Putin, has been jailed by a court in Moscow for three-and-a-half years."
READ MORE
Wetlands play a key role in regulating the planet's climate. (photo: sdbower/Getty Images)
How Protecting Wetlands Can Help the Climate
Tim Schauenberg, Deutsche Welle
Schauenberg writes: "Although wetlands cover less than 4% of the Earth's surface, 40% of all animal species live or reproduce in them. One-third of all organic matter on our planet is stored in places like the gigantic Pantanal wetland in western Brazil, the Sudd floodplain in southern Sudan or the Wasjugan Marsh in western Siberia."
lthough wetlands cover less than 4% of the Earth's surface, 40% of all animal species live or reproduce in them. One-third of all organic matter on our planet is stored in places like the gigantic Pantanal wetland in western Brazil, the Sudd floodplain in southern Sudan or the Wasjugan Marsh in western Siberia.
Wetlands filter, store and supply the planet with water and food — more than a billion people worldwide depend on them for sustenance.
They also play a key role in regulating the planet's climate, according to James Dalton of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), an umbrella organization of numerous international governmental and non-governmental organizations.
Globally, peatlands and peat soils store twice as much carbon as the total biomass of all the world's forests combined.
From Storing CO2 to Releasing It
Dams, groundwater usage, increasing water pollution, and industrial and agricultural production have reduced wetlands worldwide by 35% since 1970. Latin America tops the table with an estimated 60% of areas destroyed — not including losses in the Orinoco River region of Colombia and Venezuela and the Amazon. In Asian countries, about a third of all wetlands have been destroyed, and in Africa more than 40% have been lost.
The biggest contributor to rising water stress worldwide is agriculture. According to World Bank figures, 70% of the annual drinking water demand flows into agriculture. Much of the water is used to raise livestock and grow livestock feed, such as soybeans.
The draining of areas for peat extraction is doubly damaging to the climate. Not only is CO2 storage capacity destroyed, but "When you drain these lands, you also release the gases that are stored in these areas," Dalton warned. That includes methane, a gas that is particularly harmful to the climate.
As temperatures rise and wetlands dry out, they can go from vast greenhouse gas stores to greenhouse gas sources. When they are still wet, they store carbon. But if they dry, decomposition of the biological material begins. This process releases carbon. This is also true of permafrost soils in Antarctica and Canada. As temperatures rise, the melting accelerates. Their disappearance would release about as much CO2 as if the United States continued burning fossil fuel at the current annual rate until 2100. Record temperatures in Siberia last year also caused huge fires on peat soils. Burning peat releases 10 to 100 times more CO2 than burning trees.
Wetlands Can Help Combat Natural Disasters
Climate change is rendering environmental disasters such as storms and floods more severe. Wetlands such as mangrove forests and salt marshes and swamps near the coast can help counteract this.
Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz calculated that salt marshes and swamps reduced the damage to homes from Hurricane Sandy on the US East Coast in 2012 by a total of $625 million. In some places, damage was averted by as much as 70%. The reason: Wetlands reduce the force of the waves. Aside from the ecological contribution, "that's the value of our wetlands today — and that's why we need to invest in better protection and make sure they're protected," said Siddharth Narayan, one of the study's authors. "If they are lost, the damage we see will increase."
Can Lost Wetlands Be Restored?
The process of restoring destroyed wetlands is long and costly.
After almost 10 years, some 600 hectares (148 acres) of salt marshes and parts of a natural lagoon in the east of the UK were restored in 2018. More than 500 years ago, people drained the area for agriculture, largely destroying the natural wetland. Aside from providing a natural habitat for countless plants and animals, the wetland eases the pressure on the water conservation dams. The value to coastal protection alone is estimated at a billion pounds.
"Of course, restoration will be needed in many places. But if we can protect what we have for now, I think we should focus on that," Narayan said.
"We can't replicate these systems," added Dalton of the World Conservation Union (IUCN). The irony, he said, is that we are de facto destroying some of the most efficient systems for achieving climate and biodiversity goals. Peaty forests in the Congo, the Amazon, Indonesia and Siberia, and mangrove forests urgently require better protection, Dalton said. To date, less than one-fifth of the world's wetlands, covering an area the size of Mexico, are protected. The majority of this area is in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
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