27 May 21
Need a Few Heroes this Morning
It’s the final day of the shortest month of the year. Our chances for covering our expenses for May are slim. At this stage we’re just trying to keep it close.
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27 May 21
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Bess Levin | Report: Prosecutors Are Getting Closer to Charging Donald Trump
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "Americans have trouble agreeing on most things, but one matter that's brought millions of people together of late is the shared fantasy of seeing Donald Trump actually suffer consequences for the first time in his life and live out his twilight years in prison, deprived of creature comforts like Diet Coke, bronzer, and a cell phone on which to call into Fox News - contraband Eric or Don Jr. would have to smuggle in on visiting day hidden in their ass cheeks."
A grand jury has been convened to hear evidence against the ex-president.
mericans have trouble agreeing on most things, but one matter that’s brought millions of people together of late is the shared fantasy of seeing Donald Trump actually suffer consequences for the first time in his life and live out his twilight years in prison, deprived of creature comforts like Diet Coke, bronzer, and a cell phone on which to call into Fox News—contraband Eric or Don Jr. would have to smuggle in on visiting day hidden in their ass cheeks. (And let’s be honest, they’d shove that flip phone up their orifices in a heartbeat, probably fighting over which one of them got to do with honors.) At this point, though, despite four (4!) separate criminal investigations into Trump senior, we don’t actually know if he will go to prison—but it‘s a prospect that just got more likely.
The Washington Post reports that the Manhattan district attorney’s office has assembled a grand jury that is expected to decide whether to indict Donald Trump, his company, or Trump Organization executives, a move experts say indicates that prosecutors believe they have evidence of a crime. The panel was recently convened and will hear evidence three days a week for six months. The development suggests District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.’s probe has “reached an advance stage” after more than two years. Per the Post:
Vance’s investigation is expansive, according to people familiar with the probe and public disclosures made during related litigation. His investigators are scrutinizing Trump’s business practices before he was president, including whether the value of specific properties in the Trump Organization’s real estate portfolio were manipulated in a way that defrauded banks and insurance companies, and if any tax benefits were obtained illegally through unscrupulous asset valuation. The district attorney also is examining the compensation provided to top Trump Organization executives, people familiar with the matter have said.... Vance’s criminal investigation began in 2018, after [former Trump attorney Michael] Cohen pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the hush-money payoffs, made in the last days of the 2016 campaign to women who said they had affairs with Trump years earlier—claims the former president denies. Vance’s investigation soon expanded, as the district attorney sought to examine millions of pages of Trump’s tax records.
Separately, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) began a civil investigation of the Trump Organization in 2019 prompted by Cohen’s testimony to Congress, where he said Trump had misled lenders and taxing authorities with manipulated valuations of his assets. Asset values were inflated at times when the company was seeking favorable loan interest rates and were deflated to reduce tax liability, Cohen has alleged. He has been interviewed extensively by Vance’s team, which has added a decorated former federal prosecutor, Mark F. Pomerantz, to help with the Trump case.
Rebecca Roiphe, a former assistant district attorney, told the Post that the recent step by Vance‘s office to convene a long-term grand jury shows the investigation has gotten to the point where prosecutors will show the jury evidence and witnesses and potentially ask them to consider charges. According to Roiphe, it is unlikely that the district attorney would have taken that step without believing they have evidence to show someone committed a crime. “The prosecutors are convinced they have a case. That’s at least how I read it,” Roiphe said.
A spokesman for Trump and an attorney for the Trump Organization did not respond to the Post’s requests for comment. Earlier this month, James’s office said its investigation into Trump was now criminal in nature, and that they are also criminally investigating longtime Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, upping the chances he may flip and testify against the ex-president.
Marjorie Taylor Greene thanks Twitter user for calling Kevin McCarthy a “moron” and a “feckless c**t”
On Tuesday, multiple days after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene insisted—and then doubled down on the claim—that mask mandates are equivalent to the treatment of Jewish people during the Holocaust, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy put out a statement saying, “Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling.” Was the Georgia congresswoman chastened by the reprimand? Not exactly!
Of course, it’s difficult to feel sympathy for McCarthy, who seemingly decided some time ago that the future of the Republican Party lies with unhinged carnival barkers like Greene and Donald Trump, the former of whom he refused to strip of her committee assignments despite her promotion of QAnon, harassment of a school-shooting survivor, promotion of 9/11 conspiracy theories, and indicating support for leading Democrats to be executed, among other things. (Democrats did end up voting to boot Greene from her assignments, leaving her with plenty of time on her hands to equate mask mandates with gassing Jews and harass fellow lawmakers).
And speaking of the GOP mascot
She…seems to believe there are lot of statues of satan out there? Or something? Per the Hill:
Marjorie Taylor Greene said in a 2020 video that she would not take down a statue of Adolf Hitler or “Satan himself” because of their historical significance. The comment comes amid a flurry of backlash after Greene has repeatedly compared mask policies to the Holocaust. In a newly discovered video of the then candidate in 2020, Greene argues that she would disagree with removing a statue of Hitler, despite the Nazi leader and others representing “something I would fully disagree with.”
“We’re seeing situations where Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, all kinds of statues are being attacked, and it seems to be just an effort to take down history. And whether I see a statue that may be something that I would fully disagree with like Adolf Hitler, maybe a statue of Satan himself, I would not want to say take it down,” Greene said in the video first reported by Punchbowl News. She said she would want the statues to remain intact “so that I could tell my children and teach others about who these people are, what they did and what they may be about.”
Aside from everything else, let us please just take a moment to appreciate the idea of someone describing Hitler’s genocide against the Jews as something they “fully disagree with,” like they’re debating with their book club whether or not Carrie should’ve taken Big back at the end of the first Sex and the City movie.
Ted Cruz loves himself some Russian propaganda
That’s something he and his ex-president pal have in common. Per Insider:
A video shared by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz last week to attack the U.S. military for being “woke” and “emasculated” originated from pro-Russian, anti-American far-right social media networks, experts on extremist propaganda have told Insider. The video, which had been initially uploaded to TikTok, sought to unfavorably compare a U.S. military recruitment ad to a Russian army one. The U.S. Army clip featured an animation telling of a female corporal’s life, while the Russian ad used masculine tropes, featuring fighter jets and shirtless men doing pushups. “Holy crap,” Cruz wrote in his retweet of the video. “Perhaps a woke, emasculated army is not the best idea…”
Alexander Reid Ross, a fellow at the U.K.’s Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right who specializes in mapping the spread far-right propaganda, told Insider that he had monitored the meme as it spread from pro-Russian and far-right networks to Cruz’s Twitter feed over the course of a week.
Asked about Cruz’s sharing of a piece of Russian propaganda, a spokesman for Cruz said the controversy over a U.S. senator being duped by an adversarial foreign power was distracting from the supposedly more important issue of “wokeness” threatening the military. “Sen. Cruz shared a widely-circulated video that shows wokeness is undermining the seriousness and purpose of our military. But instead of discussing this very real problem, journalists are dusting off absurd Democrat talking points and claiming the real issue here is racism, Russian propaganda, or both. They’re so invested in this liberal narrative they will destroy innocent people’s lives to advance it,” said the spokesman.
Three researchers from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care. (photo: Hector Retamal/Getty)
Biden Calls for US Report on Whether Coronavirus Emerged From a Lab
Michael D. Shear, Julian E. Barnes, Carl Zimmer and Benjamin Mueller, The New York Times
Excerpt: "President Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies on Wednesday to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, indicating that his administration takes seriously the possibility that the deadly virus was accidentally leaked from a lab, in addition to the prevailing theory that it was transmitted by an animal to humans outside a lab."
READ MORE
Don McGahn, White House counsel under former President Donald Trump. (photo: NBC)
Trump White House Counsel McGahn Set to Testify Next Week
Phil Helsel, MSN
Helsel writes: "Earlier this month, the House Judiciary Committee said that it expected McGahn to respond to questions about the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller and allegations of obstruction of justice."
on McGahn, White House counsel under former President Donald Trump, is expected to testify before a House committee next week, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to NBC News. The interview will be transcribed.
Earlier this month, the House Judiciary Committee said that it expected McGahn to respond to questions about the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller and allegations of obstruction of justice.
The New York Times first reported Monday that McGahn was expected to appear for the closed-door session next week.
The House committee, headed by Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., announced on May 12 that an agreement for McGahn's testimony had been reached.
There was a delay after an attorney for Trump conveyed that the former president intended to intervene before saying last week that he would not intervene, The Times reported.
Nadler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, issued a subpoena to McGahn in April 2019 as part of its investigation into possible obstruction of justice and other issues.
It's been the subject of a legal battle. The committee and Justice Department asked to postpone oral arguments in that suit after an agreement of a settlement was reached.
According to court documents filed earlier this month when the committee announced an agreement had been reached, the interview's scope appeared limited to information attributed to McGahn in publicly available parts of the Mueller report, and in events that involved him.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (photo:Alex Wong/Getty)
Democrats Consider the Possibility of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Seeking a Restraining Order Against Marjorie Taylor Greene
Eliza Relman, Business Insider
Relman writes:
op Democrats in Congress have discussed whether Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could seek a restraining order against GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene after the Republican shouted at her colleague in the Capitol earlier this month, Politico reported on Tuesday.
Democratic sources told Politico that Ocasio-Cortez would likely need to seek the restraining order herself.
A spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment on Tuesday.
Greene has repeatedly targeted Ocasio-Cortez over the past few years. In 2019, Greene and several of her associates taunted Ocasio-Cortez's staffers and vandalized the congresswoman's guest book outside her Capitol office.
On May 12, the conservative Georgia lawmaker chased Ocasio-Cortez down a hallway as the two left the House chamber and accused her of supporting terrorists and "radical socialism," according to two Washington Post reporters who witnessed the incident.
"You don't care about the American people," Greene shouted at Ocasio-Cortez, according to The Post. "Why do you support terrorists and antifa?"
A spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez urged congressional leaders to "take real steps to make Congress a safe, civil place" after the May incident.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats have called for a House Ethics Committee investigation into Greene over her treatment of Ocasio-Cortez, behavior Pelosi characterized as "verbal assault" and "abuse." Ocasio-Cortez called Greene "deeply unwell" and said her "fixation" on progressive lawmakers worried her and other members.
"I think that this is an assessment that needs to be made by the proper professional," she told reporters.
Greene mocked Ocasio-Cortez's safety concerns.
"@AOC 'Ms. Defund The Police' wants to call the police for security bc she's afraid of debating with me about her socialist GND," she tweeted. "AOC is a fraud & a hypocrite. That's fine Sandy. Since you lack the courage & intelligence to debate me, I'll debate the person who really wrote it."
Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA). (photo: Saul Loeb/Getty)
Top Democrats Jump-Start Push to Offer a Health Care 'Public Option,' a Biden Promise
Julie Tsirkin and Sahil Kapur, NBC News
Excerpt: "Two Democratic committee chairs overseeing health care policy are seeking to jump-start a legislative push to craft a 'public option' to compete with private insurers."
Rep. Frank Pallone and Sen. Patty Murray are trying to craft a government-provided insurance option to compete with private plans and extend coverage.
House Energy and Commerce Chair Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., wrote a letter to interested parties Wednesday seeking their input by July 31 on how to structure a government-provided plan.
"We believe bold steps are necessary in order to achieve universal coverage and lower health care costs," they wrote. "Health care affordability remains a challenge for many American families despite the fact that the United States spends more on health care than any other country."
Pallone and Murray touted the Affordable Care Act's successes at extending coverage but noted that "tens of millions of Americans still remain uninsured or underinsured."
A "public option" was one of President Joe Biden's campaign promises, billed as a moderate alternative to rival Bernie Sanders' plan to scrap private coverage and put all Americans in Medicare. But Biden has not included the policy in his economic rescue and stimulus proposals so far, instead seeking to infuse cash in the ACA exchanges and invest in Covid-19 vaccines.
But the Democrats are signaling it is still a priority, and aim to introduce a bill by the end of this year, a Murray aide said.
It will be a daunting task for Democrats, who have paper-thin margins in Congress and not much hope of winning Republican support. They are likely to face an assault from health industry groups, including insurers who won't want to compete with the government, as well as doctors and hospitals who would complain about likely reductions in reimbursement rates.
A Palestinian boy in front of the ruins of his house in Gaza City on Friday after it was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike. (photo: Samar Abu Elf/The New York Times)
Do Not Mistake an Impasse in Gaza With Stability
Steve Coll, The New Yorker
Coll writes:
n early May, Palestinians protesting the pending eviction of six families from their homes in East Jerusalem clashed with Israeli police. For many Palestinians, the eviction cases evoked a long history of dispossession while presenting evidence of continued efforts to remove them from the city. These protests and others regarding Palestinian rights in Jerusalem devolved into street fights, and Hamas, from its redoubt in the Gaza Strip, warned that it might “not stand idly by.” On May 10th, its forces fired a fusillade of rockets and missiles at Israeli villages and cities, and the Israel Defense Forces responded with air strikes on Gaza, inaugurating a mini-war of depressingly familiar dimensions—the fourth in a dozen years between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.Last Thursday, after eleven days of destruction and loss of life, and behind-the-scenes mediation by the Biden Administration and Egypt, the combatants declared a ceasefire. The conflict and its announced termination had a ritualized aspect: Israel and Hamas both knew from the start that international diplomacy would offer an exit ramp whenever both were ready, and although past ceasefires have not always held initially, neither side seemed to want a prolonged war. For the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu—who is facing corruption charges and has struggled to hold on to power after several indecisive elections—thumping Hamas, even briefly, offered a reprise of his self-mythologizing role as the unbowed protector of Israel. For Hamas, a limited battle in the name of Jerusalem allowed it to advance claims to Palestinian leadership at a time when the group’s main rival, the Fatah Party, appeared weak, after its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority President, recently postponed long-awaited elections.
It was, as usual, always clear who the losers would be: Gaza’s two million people, who were trapped in a humanitarian crisis even before the bombs fell. Israel and Egypt maintain a blockade on the enclave, where high rates of poverty have been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. In more than a thousand air and missile strikes, Israel said it targeted Hamas commanders and military “infrastructure,” but although Israeli forces adopted rules of attack designed to protect noncombatants, Palestinian civilian casualties mounted. Even the use of relatively precise aerial firepower against a region as densely populated as Gaza is all but guaranteed to kill innocents. Israeli attacks claimed more than two hundred and thirty fatalities, including more than sixty children, and destroyed or damaged hospitals, residences, sewer systems, and the electric grid.
Suhaila Tarazi, who has run Gaza City’s Ahli Arab Hospital for about twenty-five years, found herself once again admitting scores of patients, this time with “broken limbs—lots of them,” she said on Wednesday. Diesel supplies for generators, her facility’s only reliable source of electricity, were running low; Tarazi had to ration power to keep operating theatres and X-ray machines functioning. Her medical director couldn’t come in that day, because an Israeli attack had struck his neighborhood, and he needed to take care of his elderly sisters, who had evacuated their home. Not far from the hospital, a section of the busy thoroughfare Wahda Street lay in ruins, after an Israeli strike on May 16th brought down buildings and killed forty-two people, including sixteen women and ten children. Israel acknowledged these civilian casualties; a military spokesperson said that a strike had crumpled a tunnel used by Hamas, unintentionally causing the collapse of nearby houses. For its part, Hamas fired more than four thousand rockets and missiles in indiscriminate attacks, killing at least twelve people in Israel.
As images of the dead and the injured in Gaza coursed across the global media, President Joe Biden did not criticize Israel in public. Last week, a narrative emanating from Washington emphasized the contrast between the President’s back-channel diplomacy and the willingness of progressive Democrats in Congress, such as Representative Rashida Tlaib, to openly accuse Israel of committing war crimes. Biden was surely influenced by his experiences dealing with Israel as Vice-President during the Obama Administration, including during the last major conflict in Gaza, in 2014, when Israeli ministers directed scorn at then Secretary of State John Kerry for, in their view, pushing a ceasefire prematurely.
Netanyahu famously embarrassed and snubbed Barack Obama. Not incidentally, Obama and some of his advisers lost faith in the possibilities for peace in the Middle East. In his memoir, “A Promised Land,” he recounts how, in 2010, he hosted a dinner with Netanyahu, Abbas, then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and King Abdullah of Jordan, before reflecting, later that night, on “all the children, whether in Gaza or in Israeli settlements” who would know “mainly violence, coercion, fear, and the nursing of hatred because, deep down, none of the leaders I’d met with believed anything else was possible.” There is little reason to think that Biden’s view today is much sunnier, yet his traditional, art-of-the-possible diplomacy seems to have helped to halt devastating violence.
The latest crisis in Gaza cannot be set aside as just another passing episode in Hamas’s forever war against Israel’s existence. The fighting coincided with shocks inside Israel’s recognized borders, where mob violence and attempted lynchings sundered ties between Jewish and Arab citizens and neighbors. An Arab mob pulled a driver presumed to be Jewish from his car in Acre and severely beat him, while Jewish extremists organized vigilante squads in dozens of WhatsApp groups and attacked Arab citizens and businesses in Bat Yam and elsewhere. Israel imposed states of emergency in several towns and cities, quelling the violence, at least temporarily.
Israel is the longest-lived democracy in the Middle East, and by many measures the most successful nation in the region, yet its continued occupation of the West Bank and its harsh blockade of Gaza have undermined its constitutional ideals and worsened internal fault lines that threaten its future. Netanyahu has been in power continuously since 2009, but his accommodations of far-right political parties and millenarian settler movements, coupled with his rejection of reconciliation with Palestinians, have failed to deliver durable security. It is easy to mistake an impasse for stability. However long the announced ceasefire in Gaza holds, there will be even less reason than before to confuse that state of quiet with peace.
Exxon Mobil storage tanks in Rotterdam. Shareholders say the oil giant should invest more heavily in renewables like wind and solar energy. (photo: Peter Dejong/AP)
A Tiny Fund Has Scored a Historic Win Against ExxonMobil Over the Future of Oil
Camila Domonoske, NPR
Domonoske writes: "In a dramatic boardroom battle on Wednesday, a tiny hedge fund fought with the energy giant ExxonMobil over the future of the oil and gas industry - and won."
The brand-new activist hedge fund, Engine No. 1, successfully placed at least two new candidates on the company's board of directors in hopes that they can use that position to push Exxon to take climate change more seriously. For two more seats on the board, the vote was too close to call.
Winning a seat for any directors at all is an unprecedented achievement by activist shareholders, who have spent decades trying to persuade companies to cut their carbon emissions. To do it at ExxonMobil, once the world's most influential oil company, makes the feat all the more astonishing.
During Wednesday's shareholder meeting, Charlie Penner of Engine No. 1 described his fund's campaign as a "long shot." Seemingly braced for defeat, he lambasted the investment community for accepting "the idea that humanity will inevitably drive itself off the cliff" as "hard-headed realism or sound business practice."
But then the votes were tallied. The long shot, it turns out, was a success. And instead of accepting the inevitability of climate change, the mainstream investment community sent a signal that it was embracing the possibility that the world will shift away from using oil and gas.
Exxon CEO Darren Woods, who is also the chair of his own board, welcomed the new board members, saying "we look forward to working with them constructively and collectively on behalf of all shareholders."
Public companies have a board of directors that's responsible for oversight of the CEO and overall corporate strategy. The members of the board are technically elected by shareholders, but normally those elections are uncontested and voting is just a formality.
Sometimes, though, unhappy investors decide to make it a real race by putting forward rival candidates. That's exactly what happened at Exxon.
Engine No. 1 was formed just last year with the express purpose of challenging Exxon's corporate strategy. It nominated four new candidates to the board. The two elected, Kaisa Hietala and Gregory Goff, have backgrounds in oil and gas (Hietala focused on renewable products within a refining company.) Two other candidates had experience in wind energy and new clean technologies.
The company and the upstart fund have been vying for shareholders' votes through slideshows, letters and public statements.
The fund pointed to Exxon's poor performance, relative to its peers, during the years leading up to the pandemic. It also forcefully argued that the company has not laid out a viable plan to be profitable if the world makes a rapid transition away from oil and gas to ward off the worst effects of climate change.
Large European oil and gas companies are investing in renewable energy and pledging to slash their emissions to zero, but Exxon has consistently rejected that strategy. The company says its core strengths are in oil and gas, and it argues that the world simply will not pivot away from those energy sources very quickly.
Instead of branching into new industries where it doesn't have a competitive advantage, it argues that it can invest in carbon capture technology — capturing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — and continue to make money off oil and gas in a "lower-carbon" future.
This vision of the future is increasingly at odds with the goals espoused by world governments and the pathways laid out by organizations like the International Energy Agency.
Exxon regards those goals and pathways as unrealistic, skeptically noting that some plans for fighting climate change would require people to immediately adjust their home thermostats and take significantly fewer flights. Those are behavioral changes the company does not believe likely enough to factor in to its business planning.
The vote to defy management and add at least two dissident members to the board represents a repudiation of that philosophy.
"Investors are no longer standing on the sidelines," said Anne Simpson, the chair of the steering committee of climate investor group Climate Action 100+. "This is a day of reckoning."
Engine No. 1 holds a tiny fraction of Exxon shares — just 0.02%, according to the proxy advisory firm ISS. By itself, it had no chance to sway the company.
But it spent months building support for its case. CalSTRS, the California teachers pension, was an early backer, citing frustration with Exxon's lack of response to previous shareholder proposals and direct appeals from investors.
"When Engine No. 1 brought this idea to us around replacing some of the incumbent directors, we were very intrigued — because we had tried everything else," says Aeisha Mastagni, a portfolio manager with CalSTRS' sustainable investment and stewardship strategies unit.
The influential proxy advisory firms ISS and Glass Lewis, which issue recommendations on how investors should vote in shareholder meetings, also partially endorsed Engine No. 1's nominations.
Their reports provide a striking glimpse into how arguments that were initially made by climate activists are becoming increasingly mainstream in the investor community.
Both firms used the word "inevitable" to describe the energy transition, or the world's shift away from relying on fossil fuels, and agreed that Exxon has inadequately prepared for this future.
Heading into Wednesday's meeting, all eyes were on the three companies with the biggest sway in this vote: BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street Global Advisors.
Those companies manage huge funds — including many people's retirement accounts — and their votes are weighted accordingly, giving them tremendous power in these kinds of proxy votes.
All three have pledged support for investor initiatives focused on fighting climate change.
BlackRock voted in favor of three of Engine No. 1's candidates, explaining that it believes "Exxon's energy transition strategy falls short of what is necessary."
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