10 June 21
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Bess Levin | Donald Trump's Chances of Staying Out of Prison Are Not Improving
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "Most recently, the no good, very bad news for Agent Orange has involved the impaneling of a grand jury by the Manhattan district attorney as part of Cyrus Vance Jr.'s criminal probe."
A major Trump Organization executive has testified before a grand jury.
f you asked Donald Trump what he thinks the next several months will hold for him, he’d likely tell you that he’ll be holding some rallies, playing some golf, and getting ready to head back to the White House. He’d tell you that because he’s a disturbed man who apparently thinks that a president who loses an election can simply be “reinstated” to the presidency, like one can have their cable reinstated after canceling it and then panicking about how they’re going to be able to watch Vanderpump Rules. In reality, what the next several months, and potentially years, hold for the ex-president are a lot of meetings with attorneys about how he’s legally in the bad place—that is, assuming they’re still keeping him apprised of the situation and aren’t yet at a point where they just park him in front of the TV “while the grown-ups talk.”
Most recently, the no good, very bad news for Agent Orange has involved the impaneling of a grand jury by the Manhattan district attorney as part of Cyrus Vance Jr.’s criminal probe. Last month, The Washington Post reported that such a group will be hearing evidence concerning the ex-president, his business, and its executives, and on Friday, it emerged that one of the most senior officials at the Trump Organization has reportedly already testified. Which seems less than ideal for the owner of said Trump Organization.
Per ABC News:
Jeff McConney is among a number of witnesses that have already appeared before the special grand jury that will decide whether criminal charges are warranted against the former president, his company, or any of its employees, [sources with direct knowledge of the matter] said. McConney, who serves as a senior vice president and controller for the Trump Organization, is the first employee of the former president’s company called to testify, the sources said, and his testimony is a sign that prosecutors have burrowed deep into the company’s finances. “Complex accounting issues are crucial to this investigation, as is the knowledge and intent of the people at the Trump Organization involved in these transactions,” said Daniel R. Alonso, the former chief assistant district attorney in Manhattan and now a partner in private practice at Buckley LLP. “In any case like that, the two most important people—whether as targets or witnesses—are the company’s CFO and the company's controller,” Alonso told ABC News.
McConney was mentioned by Trump in his 2004 book, Trump: Think Like a Billionaire: Everything You Need to Know About Success, Real Estate, and Life. In a chapter titled “How to Stay on Top of Your Finances,” Trump describes an interaction he says he had with McConney in the late 1980s in which Trump implored McConney to always question invoices and never accept a contractor’s first bid. “Jeff got the message,” Trump wrote, “and is doing a terrific job. He looks out for my bottom line as if the money were his own.”
In other words, McConney likely knows a whole lot of information about the Trump Organization, including the kind that might be of interest to prosecutors. And maybe even some about another figure at the firm:
As part of his probe, Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance has also been investigating the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg’s financial dealings—specifically, what fringe benefits he received from the Trumps in addition to his salary, and whether taxes were appropriately paid for any such compensation, sources have previously told ABC News. “If, as has been reported, the D.A. is targeting Allen Weisselberg, it’s a logical step to seek testimony from the controller, who presumably reports to him and works with him every day,” Alonso said. A spokesman for Vance declined to comment on the development, but ABC News has previously reported that Vance has sought to flip Weisselberg into a cooperating witness against Trump and the company.
Weisselberg’s former daughter-in-law, Jennifer Weisselberg, has been interviewed by the district attorney’s office, she told ABC News, and was asked about topics ranging from school tuition and cars to the family apartment she lived in that the Trump Organization allegedly paid for. “Some of the questions that they were asking were regarding Allen’s compensation at the apartment at Trump Place on Riverside Boulevard,” Jennifer Weisselberg told ABC News in an interview last month. A spokesperson for the Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
Last month, after news of the convening of the grand jury broke, a source from Trumpworld told Politico that there was “definitely a cloud of nerves in the air,” with the adviser saying that while Trump is no stranger to legal issues, this situation feels different, in part because prosecutors are trying to gain the cooperation of Weisselberg, who’s described himself as Trump’s “eyes and ears” at the company. “I think the Weisselberg involvement and the wild card of that makes the particular situation more real, because there’s no sort of fluff and made-up fictional circumstances around the guy,” this person told Politico. “The fact that they’re dealing with a numbers guy who just has plain details makes people more nervous. This is not a Michael Cohen situation.” In related Trump legal news, Politico also reported last month that former prosecutors and defense attorneys believe Vance could be exploring the possibility of arguing that Trump‘s entire business empire is a corrupt enterprise, under a New York law known as “little RICO,” which was modeled after the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, originally used to crack down on the mafia. The state law can be used with proof of as few as three crimes involving a business or other enterprise and carries a minimum mandatory sentence of one to three years—and a maximum term of up to 25. “It’s a very serious crime,” said Michael Shapiro, a defense attorney who used to prosecute corruption cases in New York. “Certainly, there are plenty of things an organization or business could do to run afoul of enterprise corruption, if they’re all done with the purpose of enhancing the revenue of the enterprise illegally…it’s an umbrella everything else fits under.”
Jeff Bezos is leaving planet Earth
Just for a little while, though:
Jeff Bezos will be flying to space on the first crewed flight of the New Shepard, the rocket ship made by his space company, Blue Origin. The flight is scheduled for July 20, just 15 days after he is set to resign as CEO of Amazon. Blue Origin said Bezos’s younger brother, Mark Bezos, will also join the flight. “Ever since I was five years old, I’ve dreamed of traveling to space,” Bezos, 57, said in a Monday morning Instagram post. “On July 20th, I will take that journey with my brother. The greatest adventure, with my best friend.”
For people who don’t own the company, Blue Origin has not said how much regular tickets will cost, though one can snag a seat through a monthlong auction that’s currently underway, the bidding for which hit $3.2 million Monday afternoon.
Democrats are pretty pissed at Joe Manchin
That tends to happen when one single-handedly f--ks over the voting rights of millions of people. Per Politico:
The party’s “For the People Act,” a sprawling bill that would rewrite the rules governing federal elections, has been stalled in the Senate since narrowly passing the House on a near-party-line vote earlier this year. But Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) came out against the bill in his home-state Charleston Gazette-Mail over the weekend, dooming this version of the legislation in the 50-50 chamber.
The fierce backlash to Manchin’s announcement reflects how important the bill was to many Democrats, even more than its label in the House and the Senate: H.R.1 and S.1, the monikers traditionally given to the majority’s top priority. Activists and lawmakers on Capitol Hill cast the legislation as a bulwark against restrictive new Republican proposals on voting in states across the country. But the bill also became a vehicle for all types of government reform—including proposals that have been bogged down in filibusters, partisan opposition, and even internal resistance among some Democrats over the last decade, like sweeping rules about “dark money” disclosure and how campaigns can raise their money.
In his weekend op-ed, Manchin said he wouldn’t back the bill because of a lack of Republican support, writing that “partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy,” which is a strange argument for voting against a piece of legislation attempting to save democracy.
Want to travel to the depths of hell?
Today’s your lucky day! Per The Hill:
Former president Trump is launching a speaking tour with former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly that will aim to “provide a never-before-heard inside view of his administration.” The series, dubbed “the History Tour,” will feature four live conversations across the country between Trump and O’Reilly in December. The tour “will discuss exactly how things were accomplished, as well as challenges, both good and bad,” according to a press release announcing the series.
Trump in a statement said the conversations will be “wonderful but hard-hitting sessions” that will discuss the “real problems” occurring in the U.S. “I will be focusing on greatness for our Country, something seldom discussed in political dialogue. If we don’t make our Country great again, we will soon no longer have a Country! I look forward to working with Bill, who right now has the #1 best-selling book, to openly discuss the real problems of our Country, and how to solve them,” Trump said.
O’Reilly and Trump, of course, have much in common, namely that they’re both blowhards who’ve been accused of sexual harassment by scores of women, which both of them have denied. In 2017, after it was revealed that O’Reilly and Fox News’s parent company had paid a whopping $13 million in settlements to five women who accused O’Reilly of sexual harassment or verbal abuse, Trump told The New York Times, “He’s a person I know well—he is a good person. I think he shouldn’t have settled; personally I think he shouldn’t have settled. Because you should have taken it all the way. I don’t think Bill did anything wrong.”
Former Attorney General William Barr. (photo: Joel Lerner/Alamy)
Eric Lichtblau | Trump's DOJ Was Wrong to Seize My Phone Records
Eric Lichtblau, The Intercept
Lichtblau writes: "I was sitting at an awards ceremony at my son's high school last week when I saw an email pop up on my cellphone with an ominous subject line: 'The Government Obtained Your Phone Records.'"
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Crews work on a right of way for the Keystone XL pipeline near Oyen, Alberta, Canada, on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021. (photo: Jason Franson/Getty)
Say Goodbye to the Keystone XL Pipeline, for Real This Time
Justine Calma, The Verge
Excerpt: "TC Energy terminated the project."
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U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland at a Senate hearing on June 9, 2021. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/Getty)
DOJ Vows to Hunt Down Whoever Let the Public Know How Little Billionaires Pay in Taxes
Tom McKay, Gizmodo
McKay writes: "This week, ProPublica released a massive scoop-a treasure trove of financial records showing how some of the U.S.'s wealthiest billionaires scamper off with virtually no tax burden."
After ProPublica published IRS records of the ultra-wealthy, Attorney General Merrick Garland says finding the leaker is "at the top of my list."
his week, ProPublica released a massive scoop—a treasure trove of financial records showing how some of the U.S.’s wealthiest billionaires scamper off with virtually no tax burden. And the U.S. government knows exactly what to do in response: find whoever released those embarrassing records and incarcerate the shit out of them.
Priorities, people!
ProPublica obtained official Internal Revenue Service documents that were, admittedly, not supposed to be public knowledge and released key details about just how well various tax tricks used by the ultra-wealthy are working out for them. For example, compared to Forbes estimates, the country’s 25 richest people saw a net growth of $401 billion in wealth from 2014 to 2018 but paid just $13.6 billion in federal income tax—an effective rate of 3.4%. Berkshire Hathaway investment titan Warren Buffet saw his net worth rise by $24.3 billion over that period, paying just $23.7 million in tax. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos saw his net worth rise by $99 billion, paying just $973 million in tax. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ratio was $22.5 billion in net worth gains to $292 million in tax, while Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was $13.9 billion to $455 million.
Morally obscene display of inequality and impunity as this is, the U.S. government has far more pressing concerns, such as punishing whoever squealed. Attorney General Merrick Garland assured lawmakers on Wednesday that one of his most immediate focuses will be plugging the leak, wherever or whoever it might be.
“I promise you, it will be at the top of my list,” Garland told GOP Sen. Susan Collins during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, according to CNBC.
“Senator, I take this as seriously as you do. I very well remember what President Nixon did in the Watergate period—the creation of enemies lists and the punishment of people through reviewing their tax returns,” Garland added. “This is an extremely serious matter, people are entitled, obviously, to great privacy with respect to their tax returns.”
Garland added that IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig had told him “inspectors were working on it, and I’m sure that that means it will be referred to the Justice Department.”
“The unauthorized disclosure of confidential government information is illegal,” Treasury spokeswoman Lily Adams told CNN. “The matter is being referred to the Office of the Inspector General, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, all of whom have independent authority to investigate.”
Of course, the tax records likely were obtained in some illegal manner before they were released to ProPublica. And even if the IRS sympathized with those on the shitty end of the billionaires’ inequality stick—not that they do—looking the other way is not an option in any way, especially as the feds must determine if any IRS officials were involved in the leak or IRS systems were compromised by hackers. (According to the Financial Times, 30-year IRS small business division veteran Eric Hylton said he had “not seen a leak such as this in my entire career” and found the idea it originated with IRS personnel hard to believe.)
Finding the source is not mutually exclusive with President Joe Biden’s proposals to raise an additional $3.5 trillion in taxes from the extremely wealthy over the next decade. But punishing someone won’t change that ProPublica’s scoop was undeniably in the public interest, detailing just how and why the system is wired to enrich the wealthy at the expense of pretty much everyone else.
The Biden administration has said it will not go to the same extremes as Donald Trump’s administration in hunting down leakers, taking off the table some methods that threatened the First Amendment right of journalists to publish leaked government documents. But previous administrations, such as Barack Obama’s, have similarly paid lip service to a free press while simultaneously targeting whistleblowers, leakers, and journalists for crackdowns, and Biden has yet to demonstrate he won’t do the same. CNBC noted that Garland’s comments come as the Justice Department is backpedaling Trump-era tactics at the DOJ such as obtaining phone records of New York Times reporters, but hasn’t officially ruled them off-limits yet:
Garland’s comments came as the Justice Department, at the direction of President Joe Biden, has sought to move away from the aggressive tactics employed against journalists and media organizations under former President Donald Trump and previous administrations.
;On Saturday, the department said that, “in a change to its longstanding practice,” it will refrain from seizing records from reporters in leak investigations. Last month, Biden called that practice “simply wrong,” though his position hadn’t been formalized yet as policy.
The Financial Times wrote that at least one of the billionaires shaken by the ProPublica report is planning to launch their own investigation. Bloomberg told the paper in a statement he would use “all legal means” to find the source of the leak, that he “scrupulously obeys the letter and spirit of the law,” and that three-quarters of his annual income goes to taxes or charities.
“The release of a private citizen’s tax returns should raise real privacy concerns regardless of political affiliation or views on tax policy,” Bloomberg told the Times. “We intend to use all legal means at our disposal to determine which individual or government entity leaked these and ensure that they are held responsible.”
In this Saturday, May 23, 2020 image from Franklin Parish Sheriff's Office body camera video, law enforcement officers restrain motorist Antonio Harris, bottom center, on the side of a road after a high speed chase in Franklin Parish, Louisiana. (photo: Aaron Touchet/AP)
Louisiana Police Unit Under Investigation for Systematic Targeting of Black Drivers
Jim Mustian, Associated Press
Mustian writes: "The same Louisiana State Police unit whose troopers stunned, punched and dragged Ronald Greene on video during a deadly 2019 arrest is now under internal investigation by a secret panel over whether its officers are systematically targeting Black motorists for abuse."
The panel, whose existence was confirmed to The Associated Press by four people familiar with it, was set up in response to Greene’s death as well as three other violent stops of Black men: one who was punched, stunned and hoisted to his feet by his hair braids in a body-camera video obtained by the AP, another who was beaten after he was handcuffed, and yet another who was slammed 18 times with a flashlight.
“Every time I told him to stop he’d hit me again,” said Aaron Bowman, whose flashlight pummeling left him with three broken ribs, a broken jaw, a broken wrist and a gash to his head that required six staples to close. “I don’t want to see this happen to nobody — not to my worst enemy.”
The panel began working a few weeks ago to review thousands of body-camera videos over the past two years involving as many as a dozen white troopers, at least four of whom were involved in Greene’s arrest.
The review is focused on Louisiana State Police Troop F, a 66-officer unit that patrols a sprawling territory in the northeastern part of the state and has become notorious in recent years for alleged acts of brutality that have resulted in felony charges against some of its troopers.
“You’d be naïve to think it’s limited to two or three instances. That’s why you’re seeing this audit, which is a substantial undertaking by any agency,” said Rafael Goyeneche, a former prosecutor who is president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a New Orleans-based watchdog group. “They’ve got to identify these people and remove them from the organization.”
Other than the federal civil rights investigation into Greene’s death, the state police panel is the only known inquiry into possible systemic abuse and racism by its troopers.
Its seven members, drawn from officials from across the State Police, are not only scouring the videos for signs of excessive force, the people told the AP, but also examining whether troopers showed racist tendencies in their traffic stops and pursuits, and whether they mislabeled body-camera videos, turned off their cameras or used other means to hide evidence from internal investigators.
It’s not clear if the panel has a deadline or if it plans to expand the inquiry to the eight other troops in the 1,200-officer state police.
The State Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Secrecy has permeated the Greene case from the beginning.
Soon after Greene’s May 10, 2019, death, troopers told his relatives he died in a crash following a chase on a rural road near Monroe. Later, State Police issued a one-page statement saying that troopers struggled with Greene during his arrest and that he died on the way to the hospital.
For more than two years, Louisiana officials from Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards down rebuffed repeated requests to release the body-camera video of Greene’s arrest.
But that changed last month after the AP released footage it obtained showing troopers converging on Greene’s car, repeatedly jolting the 49-year-old unarmed man with stun guns, putting him in a chokehold, striking him in the head and dragging him by his ankle shackles. Greene can be heard apologizing to the officers, telling them he is scared and moaning and gasping for air.
One 30-minute clip, which a supervisor denied having for two years, shows troopers ordering the heavyset Greene to remain facedown with his hands and feet restrained for more than nine minutes — a tactic use-of-force experts criticized as dangerous and likely to have restricted his breathing.
An autopsy report obtained by AP lists Greene’s cause of death as “cocaine induced agitated delirium complicated by motor vehicle collision, physical struggle, inflicted head injury and restraint.”
No troopers have been charged in Greene’s arrest. Trooper Kory York, who was seen dragging Greene, was suspended without pay for 50 hours. Master Trooper Chris Hollingsworth, who was recorded on his body camera bragging that he “beat the ever-living f---” out of Greene, was told he would be fired last year just hours before he died in single-vehicle car crash.
While none of the other beatings that prompted the broader review of Troop F resulted in deaths, all led to felony charges against some of the troopers involved. And like Greene, all the suspects were driving alone, were unarmed and didn’t appear to resist after troopers closed in.
State police have not released body-camera video of any those cases, but AP obtained footage from the May 2020 arrest of Antonio Harris, who sped away from a traffic stop and led troopers through rural Richland Parish at speeds topping 150 mph before his car was finally stopped with a spike strip.
He can clearly be seen on the video surrendering next to a cornfield by lying on the ground with his arms and legs outstretched before at least seven officers converged.
Dakota DeMoss, a trooper involved in the Greene arrest, can be seen striking Harris in the face and later, after he was handcuffed, yanking him onto his feet by his dreadlocks. Another trooper, George Harper, uses a fist reinforced by his flashlight to punch Harris in the head and threatens to “punish” him while Trooper Jacob Brown pulls the man’s hair.
An unidentified officer also can be seen in the footage shocking Harris with a stun gun.
“I hope you act up when we get to the f——— jail,” Harper can be heard saying. “What the f—— is wrong with you, stupid motherf——-.”
Internal investigators found that troopers produced “wholly untrue” reports saying Harris resisted and that they sought to conceal the existence of body-camera video. Troopers also exchanged 14 text messages peppered with “lol” and “haha” in which they boasted about the beating.
“He gonna be sore tomorrow for sure,” Brown texted. “Warms my heart knowing we could educate that young man.”
State police arrested Brown, Harper and DeMoss on charges of simple battery and malfeasance in Harris’ case.
Another beating happened in late May 2019 — 20 days after Greene’s death — when a Ouachita Parish deputy sheriff tried to pull over Bowman for a traffic violation a block from his Monroe home. The deputy reported that Bowman failed to pull over and continued into his driveway, where he was ordered out of his vehicle.
Brown, the trooper charged in the Harris incident, quickly responded to the arrest and, according to court documents, can be seen on his own body-camera video pummeling Bowman with a flashlight designed for shattering car glass, striking him 18 times as he was being handcuffed and not resisting.
“I thought I was going to die that night — I bled so much,” Bowman told the AP. “It’s hard to deal with. I can’t function half of the time. It’s just hard for me to think now.”
For months, state police were not aware footage of Bowman’s arrest existed because Brown misclassified it and failed to document any use of force, according to court records. Brown was charged with aggravated battery and malfeasance.
Brown also faces charges in yet another beating of a Black motorist — the July 2019 arrest of Morgan Blake, who was pulled over for a traffic violation on Interstate 20 in Ouachita Parish.
Troopers said Blake had 13 pounds of marijuana concealed in a locked compartment of the vehicle and was taken into custody. At some point, he complained that his handcuffs were too tight, and Brown took him to the ground.
Body-worn camera captured Trooper Randall Dickerson punching Blake five times and kneeing him. State Police determined that Blake “was not resisting, attempting to escape or being aggressive,” and that the troopers failed to document their use of force in any reports.
Dickerson and Brown were charged with simple battery and malfeasance.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana on Wednesday called for a “top-to-bottom federal investigation” of the State Police.
“This is not a matter of a few bad apples,” the group said, “this is a systemic issue that demands a systemic and transparent response.”
An emergent marsh reflects the sky at the Panther Island Mitigation Bank, near Naples, Florida. (photo: Brynn Anderson/AP)
Biden Administration Acts to Guard Wetlands, Undoing a Major Trump Move
Dino Grandoni, The Washington Post
Grandoni writes: "The Biden administration is set to toss out President Donald Trump's efforts to scale back the number of streams, marshes and other wetlands that fall under federal protection."
The change could have broad implications for farming, real estate development and other activities, the latest salvo in a decades-long battle
he Biden administration is set to toss out President Donald Trump’s efforts to scale back the number of streams, marshes and other wetlands that fall under federal protection, kicking off a legal and regulatory scuffle over the fate of wetlands and waterways around the country, from the arid West to the swampy South.
Michael Regan, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said his team determined that the Trump administration’s rollback is “leading to significant environmental degradation.” The EPA and Army Corps of Engineers will craft a new set of protections for waterways that provide habitats for wildlife and safe drinking water for millions of Americans, according to a joint statement.
With the announcement, the Biden administration is wading into a decades-long battle over how far federal officials can go to stop contaminants from entering small streams and other wetlands.
“Communities deserve to have our nation’s waters protected,” said Jaime A. Pinkham, acting assistant secretary of the Army for civil works.
Some Republican lawmakers accused the Biden administration of wanting to return to Obama-era clean-water rules and burden farmers, real estate developers and other businesses with new restrictions on how they can use their land.
“This is a gut punch to Iowans, and I will continue to stand up to onerous regulations the administration may seek to impose on our hard-working families,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa).
In 2015, the Obama administration expanded federal authority to stop or curtail development that could harm a variety of wetlands, streams and ditches that feed into larger bodies of water protected under the Clean Water Act.
Heeding the call of home developers, oil drillers and growers who saw the restrictions as detrimental to their livelihoods, the Trump administration rolled back those Obama-era pollution controls.
But critics, including a panel of independent scientists picked by the Trump administration itself, slammed the move for potentially hastening the destruction of waterways, including “ephemeral” streams that appear only after rainfall and help purify water on its way to larger lakes and rivers that serve as sources of drinking water for millions of Americans. The current lack of protections is particularly notable in desert states such as New Mexico and Arizona, the EPA said.
“The science says those streams and these wetlands are an important part of our clean-water system in the United States and should be protected,” said Tom Kiernan, head of American Rivers, a conservation group.
Now, Regan says he’s trying to strike the delicate balance between conservation and development that both the Trump and Obama administrations failed to reach.
“We’ve learned lessons from both, we’ve seen complexities in both, and we’ve determined both rules did not necessarily listen to the will of the people,” Regan told House lawmakers in April.
The Biden administration’s rulemaking could help stem the staggering loss of wetlands.
Since the end of the Revolutionary War, more than half of the 221 million acres of wetlands in what would become the contiguous United States have been drained, often for farming. The rate of destruction began to wane only in recent decades.
In northwest Ohio, for instance, corn and other crops are grown on a vast tract once known as the Great Black Swamp. Farmers began draining it during the 19th century, and now agricultural runoff flows into Lake Erie and feeds the growth of toxic algae that regularly closes beaches and once forced the city of Toledo to suspend tap water use for about two days.
Bill Stanley, state director of the Nature Conservancy in Ohio, said the Trump administration’s withdrawal of federal protections for what few streams remain to filter nutrient waste from fertilizers could make the lake susceptible to even bigger algae blooms.
“ ‘Nutrients’ doesn’t sound like a bad word,” he said, “but when you get too many of them, it causes major problems for our water quality in Ohio.”
But farmers such as Daryl Lies, who raises hogs and sheep and grows vegetables on 160 acres in central North Dakota, say the Obama-era restrictions on wetland development would have been “painstakingly costly for agriculture.” Those rules, he said, “would have made it a lot harder to have the livestock” near a creek that winds along his farm on its way to the Missouri River.
“Farmers and ranchers are the original environmentalists, I say,” said Lies, who heads the North Dakota Farm Bureau. “We’re not the activists, like we hear across the nation, but we are the real environmentalists. We care about taking care of our land and having it there for the next generation.”
The Trump-era rule eased the path for several construction projects, including a commercial, industrial and residential park along the Savannah River, which forms the border between South Carolina and Georgia.
The RiverPort project came with the promise of jobs in shipping and construction. But wildlife officials at the nearby Savannah National Wildlife Refuge warned in 2010 the proposal “represents a significant threat” to its bottomland hardwoods of gum and maple trees and freshwater marshes that attract migrating waterfowl.
Yet after the Trump administration rolled back the Obama-era rule, more than 200 acres of the wetlands in the project’s footprint fell out of federal oversight, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center, which is suing the EPA over the regulation.
“Every day the rule is in place, we are losing protections for 92 percent of wetlands, waters and streams,” said Kelly Moser, a senior attorney at the Charlottesville-based legal advocacy group, citing the organization’s analysis of the impact of the Trump rule.
In total, the EPA and Army Corps said they are aware of 333 projects that no longer require federal water permits under the Trump rule.
A former regulator from North Carolina, Regan arrived in Washington with a reputation as a consensus builder and has spent much of his first months in office listening to both sides of the debate over water protections. Regan met with Lies and other members of North Dakota’s agriculture and oil industries last week during a trip to Bismarck hosted by Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.).
“I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll be able to work with this EPA administrator and that he truly is sincere about getting out and getting input,” Lies said.
With the announcement Wednesday, the Biden administration is kicking off a lengthy rulemaking process. It must first strike down the Trump rule before establishing its own definition for which waterways get federal protection.
Some environmentalists are upset the EPA isn’t moving more quickly to revoke the more forgiving water regulations, which will remain in place until the part of the rulemaking process is complete. “Today’s action falls well short of the Biden administration’s commitments to protecting our environment and communities,” said Julian Gonzalez, a water policy lobbyist for Earthjustice.
The fate of the EPA’s effort could ultimately hang in the U.S. Supreme Court.
At the center of the decades-long legal storm over water protections is the Clean Water Act, which bans pollution in “waters of the United States” without a permit. The question of what constitutes such water has been up for debate since the law’s passage in 1972.
In a 2006 decision, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote federal officials could step in when there was a “significant nexus” between smaller and larger bodies of water. The Obama administration wrote its rule around that standard.
But after Kennedy’s retirement and with the Supreme Court taking an even more conservative turn with the appointments of three justices by Trump, it’s unclear what sort of rule could now pass muster.
“That is the $64 million question, isn’t it?” said Patrick Parenteau, a professor of natural resources law at Vermont Law School. “It’s got to be a rule that gets five votes on the Supreme Court, and that’s going to be … difficult.”
Mike Tuell dip net fishes with Nat-aani McCaskey, 12. (photo: Mason Trinca/Guardian UK)
Salmon Face Extinction Throughout the US West. Blame These Four Dams
Hallie Golden, Guardian UK
Golden writes: "Knee-deep in the rumbling waters of Rapid River in western Idaho, Mike Tuell guided his dip net between boulders and tree branches in search of the calm pockets where salmon rest."
It was a Tuesday evening in May, and his first time out fishing this season. The spring-summer Chinook were just beginning their treacherous journey back to their natal spawning areas.
His shoulders tensed as he pushed the net deeper. With each passing stroke, Tuell, 53, a member of the Nez Perce tribe, settled into a rhythm with his net, becoming less an intruder on the river and more a natural part of its ecosystem.
Crouched on the rocks behind him was his girlfriend’s 12-year-old son, Nat’aani McCaskey. Decades ago, Tuell had been taught to fish along this same waterway by his uncle, and he was now passing that knowledge on.
“If we want to have the way of life we have now, or the life we used to have, he’s got to learn to do it now and do it right so he’s not wasting fish or doing it for the wrong reasons,” explained Tuell, who also serves as production division deputy director for the tribe’s fisheries department.
Not quite big enough to manipulate the pole himself, Nat’aani held a knife and club, ready to take over once Tuell caught a salmon. He listed off the steps: “Hold it by its tail, club it, cut its gills out, and then put it in the ice.”
But the opportunity never came. After nearly two hours, with sweat glistening across Tuell’s forehead, the pair weren’t able to catch a single salmon.
It’s a scene that has increasingly played out in recent years across the 1,078-mile Snake River and some of its tributaries, due in large part to four towering and closely spaced dams in eastern Washington state. The dams act as massive hurdles to the salmon’s migration.
Today, experts have voiced concern that the salmon are headed toward a point of no return.
The loss of these anadromous fish along a waterway that twists through western Wyoming, Idaho, Washington and Oregon, would wreak havoc on over 130 species that depend on salmon – from salamanders to whales – and leave a gaping hole in a region that prides itself on hosting them. Thirteen populations of Columbia-Snake salmon and steelhead are protected under the Endangered Species Act.
But for the Nez Perce community and other Columbia River basin tribes, whose physical sustenance and cultural and spiritual practices have been tied with salmon for millennia, it would be pure devastation.
“It puts us in a situation where we start asking the question, who would we be if we didn’t have salmon? If they became extinct, then as salmon people, who would we become?” said Alyssa Macy, CEO of the Washington Environmental Council and a member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. “Obviously, that’s a question that none of us want to answer.”
Just as the situation reaches a fever pitch, an unlikely pair of bipartisan US congressmen out of Idaho and Oregon have come on to the scene, championing a $33.5bn solution centered on breaching the four dams.
Mike Simpson, the Republican congressman from Idaho who first introduced the proposal, is resolute in his efforts to get ahead of what he described as an impending “train wreck”: the Bonneville Power Administration – the federal agency which markets electrical power from 31 hydroelectric dams – facing key financial problems due in part to salmon mitigation costs, or the dams being removed without any thought to the communities and industries that rely on them, or ultimately the salmon disappearing altogether.
While many different political choices can be made, “salmon don’t have a choice”, he said. “They need a river. And right now, they don’t have a river.”
The dams back up the water flow for miles, increase water temperature and create an overall much longer and thus more dangerous journey for them, explained Jay Hesse, director of biological services for the Nez Perce tribe.
Mitigation efforts involve a complex and costly system of fish ladders for adults, spillways for juveniles to get through, a barge transporting them down river, and even wires and loud noises to keep predators away.
The proposal to breach the dams is timely: the Biden administration has signaled an appetite for big spending on infrastructure; the flood of renewables have created uncertainty for hydropower; and leaders in a wide array of sectors have signaled interest in finding solutions, explained David Moryc, senior director of wild and scenic rivers and public lands policy at the non-profit conservation organization American Rivers.
In other words, he said, there’s a unique merging of both crisis and opportunity.
In north-east Oregon, the creation story for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation begins with a sacrifice by the salmon, explained Don Sampson, a member of the tribe and an advisory board member for the Northwest Tribal Salmon Alliance. Out of a crowd of animals, they were the first to respond to a call from the Creator warning that the humans were coming and would need nourishment.
The story goes that the salmon’s responsibility would be to travel through the waters, ingesting food in order to provide nourishment to humans. In exchange, the tribe was given the sacred duty of taking care of the salmon and honoring them through prayer and ceremony.
“This is part of our religious belief. We do it every Sunday at our church,” said Sampson. “We sing our ceremonial songs. We teach our kids about who they are by these religious beliefs and the relationship to the animals and the plants. And that is our identity.” Similar stories can be found across the Pacific north-west.
For thousands of years, both the salmon and humans remained largely in step. The Native communities would eat what they needed, while large portions of the population would be left to complete their lifecycle of hatching in fresh water, traveling downstream to the ocean and then returning to their birthplace to spawn and die.
But a little over a century ago, the situation started to shift. Initially, largely unregulated commercial fishing fueled by the expansion of salmon canneries resulted in the population declining. In the years that followed, the runs were further strained by habitat loss.
By 1975, the US army corps of engineers completed construction of a series of four dams across just 137 miles of the lower Snake River in Washington in an effort to produce renewable energy while facilitating barge transportation.
After construction of the dams was completed, wild salmon returns fell by more than 90%, according to American Rivers. The Idaho Conservation League reported that before the dams, about 1.5 million spring-summer chinook salmon returned each year to the Snake River. By 2017, only about 5,800 wild spring-summer chinook completed that journey.
The impact is especially evident when looking at the smolt-to-adult returns below the dams, compared with above. While 3.5% of salmon survive the ocean and make it through three dams to return to the John Day River to spawn, only 2.4% return to the Yakima River after passing through four dams (2% is considered the minimum needed for salmon persistence). By comparison, less than 1% of salmon return to the Snake River after crossing eight dams, according to Trout Unlimited, a conservation non-profit organization.
The dams are spaced so closely that they have created a type of “pressure point” for the salmon population, explained David Montgomery, author of King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon. Removing them wouldn’t get rid of all of the historical impacts that there have been, according to him, “but it’s an impact that can be undone in a single stroke that is acknowledged to be very likely to have a major effect”.
Last February, 68 of the country’s top salmon and fisheries experts sent a letter to north-west leaders stating that in order to avoid extinction and restore the once abundant salmon runs, these four dams would need to be removed. Two months later, the American Rivers listed the Snake as the country’s most endangered river, citing the dams, along with the climate crisis and poor water quality, as its biggest threats.
A Columbia River system impact statement last year reported that breaching these dams would have the greatest positive impact on Snake River salmon. But the report, which was authored by the US army corps of engineers, Bureau of Reclamation and Bonneville Power Administration, ultimately did not endorse such a plan due to the “adverse impacts to other resources such as transportation, power reliability and affordability, and greenhouse gas emissions”.
In 2016, it was reported that the four dams were producing on average over 1,000 megawatts of energy each year – or enough to power 800,000 American homes. But as the renewable energy sector continues to shift and hydropower competes against low-cost renewable energy, including solar and wind, there is some uncertainty when it comes to what the future will look like for the industry.
Against this backdrop, more than $17bn has been spent in recent decades as part of federal salmon recovery efforts.
The local tribes have contributed through habitat recovery efforts and extensive salmon hatchery work. The Nez Perce Tribal Hatchery has been working toward releasing 825,000 Spring Chinook this year – 200,000 more than last year.
Erik Holt, a member of the Nez Perce tribe and its fish and wildlife commission chair, was seven the first time he caught a salmon. It was the summer of 1977, and he and his family had hiked the two miles up to the Blue Hole on the Imnaha River, a tributary of the Snake River, in Oregon.
Clutching an 18ft gaff and tied to his grandpa to make sure he didn’t fall in, Holt struggled against the strength of the creature.
“I could feel the power and the spirit of it all because it just absorbs you,” Holt said. “Even as a young boy, I could feel that.”
Since then, he’s worked to introduce the tribe’s younger generations to fishing, including his 10-year-old nephew. He’s taught him the basic mechanics of the practice, and also about how to treat such a sacred place:
“When you get to the river, you pray for your pole and then you put it in the water and you say another prayer … [Then] you got to get in the water yourself. And that’s what we call washing the bad medicine away. Before you even go fishing, you get in that water, you wash off and purify yourself.”
Holt’s nephew was excited to travel out to the Clearwater, a tributary of the Snake in Idaho, to carry on the tradition. He had his hook, line and mini dip net ready to go when Holt broke the news that the fishery had been closed because of the lack of salmon.
He said it was “devastating” to have to explain it to him and see the forlorn look on his face.
Already this season, the Nez Perce tribe has closed virtually all of the lower Snake River to fishing, along with most of the middle and upper parts of the Salmon River, in an effort to protect the salmon. The Clearwater has recently been opened, but with very limited harvest.
These closures can affect Native families’ ability to travel out together to fish and share songs and prayer, and also the tribe’s ability to feature the salmon in their first foods ceremonies and funeral services, explained Shannon Wheeler, the Nez Perce tribal vice-chairman.
The possibility of losing salmon altogether also gets in the way of treaties the federal government signed with Nez Perce and many other local tribes. About 150 years ago, they fought to secure rights to fish these waterways. Having to close down fisheries because there’s not enough salmon is a huge infringement on crucial contracts.
“In that treaty, we bargained for a way of life,” said Wheeler. “We ceded well over 13m acres of land to the United States government, to be held in trust for our way of life. That way of life included salmon.”
The fight to remove these dams is more than just about the survival of salmon. It’s also about the cultural impact these structures have had on the surrounding Native community.
Standing on a dock in the middle of a largely motionless section of the Snake River in Colton, Washington, Louis Reuben looked out on to what had once been his ancestors’ home. He pointed out the spot he believed had held a series of rock formations perfect for fishing, and the hills that may have housed graveyards.
But it’s difficult to be sure, he explained, as the winter home for the Wawawai Band of the Nez Perce is now underwater due to the dams.
“The dams displaced us, disconnected us from our place of origin for me,” said Reuben, a Nez Perce tribal member and descendant of the Wawawai Band of the Nez Perce. “It’s difficult to go back to a place that’s underwater. It really kind of put a huge dent in my identity as an Indigenous person.”
For Reuben, a free-flowing Snake River would finally give him the chance to return to the cave where his great-grandfather was born, and the place where his ancestors lived before being moved on to the reservation.
In April, representatives from 12 tribes located throughout the north-west devoted two days to discussions on breaching these dams and the overall proposal first presented by Mike Simpson and then supported by Congressman Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Oregon.
Simpson is resolute in his effort. “Everything we do on the Lower Columbia and Snake River can be done differently if we choose to do it,” he told the Guardian.
Kat Brigham, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation board of trustees chair, said that they support the proposal, applauding the lawmakers for thinking outside the box. She highlighted the fact that there have been periods where parts of the Columbia River basin had no salmon runs, but they were able to rebuild them.
“We know it’s possible,” she said. “But we have to do it together. No tribe, no state, no federal agency, or no individual organization can rebuild these runs. It has to be collaborative, partnership approach.”
In addition to breaching the dams, the proposal would include funds to replace the energy lost and help the agricultural community reconfigure transportation. But it would also involve waiting about 10 years before the dams are breached, offer a 35-year license extension for other dams in the Columbia River basin and provide a 35-year dam litigation moratorium.
Some stakeholders still have plenty of questions about its viability.
In May, Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, and Senator Patty Murray released a statement rejecting the proposal.
Kristin Meira, executive director for Pacific Northwest Waterways Association, made up of ports, barge companies, steamship operators and farmers, also spoke out against the proposal, citing the toll it would take on hydropower and barge transportation.
More than a dozen environmental organizations sent a letter in March to Democratic lawmakers in Washington and Oregon explaining that while they support removing the four dams, it should not be at the expense of environmental protections.
Simpson said that he put the proposal out there to continue the discussion and is open to hearing ideas and suggestions. But after about 500 meetings with tribes, environmental groups, state representatives and a variety of other stakeholders over the last three years, he said it was clear that salmon recovery will need to involve removing these dams.
Back at Rapid River, Tuell lifted up his dip net and began the short walk with Nat’aani through the high grass away from the river. The sound of water crashing against rocks and branches slowly began to dim.
Nat’aani turned to Tuell: “Next week might be better.”
The two continued on in silence. The uncertainty of the season ahead hung in the air.
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