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23 June 21
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Bess Levin | Trump's Legal Outlook Continues to Look Grim. The Matthew Calamari Edition
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "The ex-president's bodyguard turned COO is reportedly being investigated by the Manhattan District Attorney, too."
s part of its criminal investigation into Donald Trump, the Manhattan district attorney’s office has, for many months now, been trying to get Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, who knows where all the bodies are buried and could likely put the dots together for a jury, to flip. Thus far, it doesn‘t appear as if he’s done so, but the fact that Weisselberg could reportedly face charges this summer presumably ups the chances he’ll cooperate to save himself. In the meantime, though, Cyrus Vance Jr.’s office is apparently looking into another figure who may have some extremely helpful information to share.
The Wall Street Journal reports that New York prosecutors are investigating Matthew Calamari, Trump’s bodyguard turned chief operating officer, and the question of whether or not he was the recipient of “tax-free fringe benefits,” as part of their probe into the company possibly giving out such perks to employees as a way to avoid paying taxes. Calamari has reportedly lived for years in an apartment at the Trump Park Avenue building on the East Side and driven a Mercedes leased through the Trump Organization. His son, Matthew Calamari Jr., also lives in a company-owned building (Junior joined the family business in 2011 right after graduating high school and was named corporate director of security in 2017, according to a LinkedIn profile.) While neither Calamari has been accused of wrongdoing, prosecutors recently advised both men to hire lawyers, sources told the Journal, which is generally not a great sign.
Receiving benefits—such as free apartments, subsidized rent or car leases—from an employer, and not paying taxes on such benefits, can be a crime, although experts said prosecutors rarely bring cases on such perks alone…. Such a recommendation is often a sign that prosecutors’ interest in a subject is intensifying, but doesn’t mean the Calamaris will be charged with wrongdoing.
In 2019 testimony before the House Oversight Committee, former longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen mentioned the elder Mr. Calamari as among employees who could attest to what Mr. Cohen described as Mr. Trump’s practice of inflating his assets to insurance companies. The elder Mr. Calamari has worked at the Trump Organization for nearly four decades. He began working for Mr. Trump as his bodyguard after he tackled hecklers at a 1981 U.S. Open women’s semifinal, Mr. Calamari told Bloomberg in 2015. He said Ivana Trump, Mr. Trump’s wife at the time, asked for his name on her husband’s behalf. Mr. Calamari was ultimately promoted to chief operating officer.
In his 2004 book, Trump: How to Get Rich, Mr. Trump wrote, “After getting to know Matthew, I realized he had a lot more to offer than his job title warranted.” He described both Mr. Calamari and Mr. Weisselberg, among others, as “home-run, grand-slam people” in the acknowledgments section.
Weisselberg has not been accused of wrongdoing. Last month, The Washington Post reported that Vance’s office had assembled a grand jury that had already begun hearing evidence, a development that suggests the probe had “reached an advanced stage” after more than two years, and that charges against the ex-president could be coming.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of N.Y. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
ALSO SEE: House Progressives Demand Action After Voting Rights Bill Fails
Voting Rights Bill Blocked in Senate Despite United Democrats
David Smith, Guardian UK
Smith writes: "Joe Biden suffered a significant setback on Tuesday as one of his top priorities, a set of reforms to protect voting rights and shore up American democracy, was defeated in Congress."
READ MORE
Community activist India Walton in Buffalo, N.Y., on Dec. 15, 2020. (photo: Lindsay DeDario/Reuters)
Buffalo Appears to Have Elected a Socialist Mayor in Big Upset Over 4-Term Incumbent
Peter Weber, The Week
Weber writes: "Assuming India Walton keeps her lead, she is the presumptive mayor-elect."
emocratic primary voters in Buffalo, New York, appear to have selected nurse and political newcomer India Walton over four-term incumbent Mayor Byron Brown on Tuesday, in what Politico calls "a stunning loss for one of the most prominent figures in New York's Democratic establishment." Walton, a socialist, leads Brown by 1,507 votes with all in-person votes tallied, a number about equal to the absentee ballots remaining to be counted. Brown has not conceded the race.
Assuming Walton keeps her lead, she is the presumptive mayor-elect. Buffalo hasn't picked a Republican mayor since the Kennedy administration, and Republicans didn't even field a candidate this year. Walton would be the first woman ever elected mayor in Buffalo as well as the first socialist, and Buffalo, with 260,000 people, is on track to be the largest city led by a socialist since Milwaukee's Frank Zeidler left office in 1960. Walton was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America and also the Working Families Party, an influential progressive third party in New York.
Brown, a former state senator and recent chairman of the state Democratic Party, was first elected mayor in 2005. He is a close ally of embattled Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), appearing with him at four press briefings in the past few months, Politico notes, which is "twice as many as any other elected official in the state."
A police officer stands near the scene of a fatal afternoon shooting in the Brooklyn borough of New York City in 2020. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The White House Announces New Steps to Try to Curb Surging Gun Violence
Alana Wise, NPR
Wise writes: "With cities across the country witnessing spikes in violent crime, the White House on Wednesday announced a new plan to tackle gun violence, building on President Biden's vow to make it his priority to curb America's gun violence epidemic."
ith cities across the country witnessing spikes in violent crime, the White House on Wednesday announced a new plan to tackle gun violence, building on President Biden's vow to make it his priority to curb America's gun violence epidemic.
Citing the uptick in violence since the coronavirus pandemic forced millions of Americans out of work and into their homes for extended periods, administration officials said Biden on Wednesday will announce a five-point proposal that includes:
- Cracking down on gun sellers who violate federal laws, with a new zero-tolerance policy.
- Giving additional support to local law enforcement to help with summer crime increases.
- Investing in community violence intervention programs.
- Expanding summer employment and services, particularly for teens and young adults.
- Helping formerly incarcerated individuals successfully reenter their communities.
A senior administration official told reporters Tuesday night that the Treasury Department will also inform states that they can use funds allotted by the American Rescue Plan to aid in reducing gun violence. Monies awarded via the COVID-19 relief law can be used to hire additional police officers and pay out overtime, as well as to assist in funding employment opportunities for youths and at-risk adults.
"President Biden believes that the surge in gun violence that has affected communities across the country over the last year and a half is unacceptable," the White House said in a fact sheet outlining the plan, "and his Administration is moving decisively to act with a whole-of-government approach as we enter the summer months when cities typically experience a spike in violence."
Biden has faced criticisms from gun safety advocates who say that the White House has not made gun reform enough of a priority, despite Biden's promises to work to curb violent crime.
In the early months of Biden's presidency, the nation saw a number of mass shootings that prompted new calls for gun reform, including the March 16 Atlanta spa shootings and the March 22 grocery store shooting in Boulder, Colo.
Since then, Biden has signed a series of executive actions on gun laws, calling America's gun violence an "international embarrassment."
The Department of Justice has also issued model legislation from which states can craft their own so-called red-flag laws to temporarily remove guns from certain people.
A voter arrives at a polling station set up at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on New York's primary election day, in New York, NY, June 22, 2021. (photo: Anthony Behar/CNN)
NYC Democratic Mayoral Primary to Proceed to Ranked-Choice Counting After No Candidate Wins Majority Outright
Gregory Krieg and Ethan Cohen, CNN
Excerpt: "The New York City Democratic mayoral primary winner will be determined using ranked-choice voting tabulation, CNN projected on Tuesday night."
he New York City Democratic mayoral primary winner will be determined using ranked-choice voting tabulation, CNN projected on Tuesday night.
But the question that will dominate the coming process is much simpler: Can Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, who raced out to a lead after an initial count of early and primary day in-person voting, hold on to his advantage?
Adams, a retired captain in the New York Police Department, came out to chants of "the champ is here" -- Muhammad Ali's famous boast, sampled in a Jadakiss song -- at his headquarters in Brooklyn late Tuesday and, after acknowledging the ranked-choice process to come, spoke as if the race was over.
"We know that this is going to be layers, this is the first early voting count -- we know that. We know there's going to be twos and threes and fours -- we know that," Adams said. "But there's something else we know. That New York City said, 'Our first choice is Eric Adams.' "
The claim, though likely to be true, was premature. The city has yet to count absentee ballots, a process that is scheduled to begin on June 28.
The Democratic mayoral nominee is expected to be determined by mid-July and, with Republicans barely putting up a fight, is heavily favored to win the general election in November. The winner will be charged with guiding the city into a new era, up and out from the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic. But that rebuilding job will be complicated by a spike in crime intertwined with the trauma and lost opportunities of Covid-19. The demands for an equitable economic recovery, along with public safety free from police abuse will present the new mayor with a series of challenges unlike any in a generation.
Before the general election can begin, Adams will hope -- and he clearly expects -- to maintain his early lead over former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia and civil rights attorney Maya Wiley, his two closest competitors in the initial vote preferences.
Those results could change once absentee ballots are included and the ranked-choice tabulation is run, a point Garcia stressed in her own election night remarks.
"This is going to be a ranked choice election," Garcia said. "This is not just about the ones. It's going to be about the twos and threes."
Wiley sounded a similar note -- a mix of caution and hope.
"It is simply fact that 50% of the votes are about to be recalculated," she said
While Garcia and Wiley hope that they can add enough to their tallies as the ranked-choice process thins the field and reallocates support from the lowest vote-getters, former 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang said on Tuesday that he is ready to move on.
"I am not going to be the mayor of New York City based on the numbers coming in tonight," Yang told supporters, conceding the race and ending a campaign that, for a brief period in its early stages, dominated a race that had not yet been overtaken by voters' anxieties over a rise in violent crime.
It was that pivot, as the city's vaccination rates went up and its pandemic anxieties began to diminish, that cleared the way for Adams to surge. In his speech in Brooklyn, Adams -- who criticized Yang in increasingly personal terms as the race drew on -- offered a lecture to the media wrapped in one last jab at his rival.
"My advice to the younger reporters is that Twitter is not academic research," Adams said. "What some candidates misunderstood is that social media does not pick a candidate. People on social security pick a candidate."
The people have indeed spoken, but what exactly they have said remains to be seen. And it's going to take a while to find out.
Since no candidate will win a majority of the first-choice votes, tabulation will continue in rounds. The candidate with the fewest votes after the initial count will be eliminated and all ballots for that candidate will be reallocated to the next highest-ranked candidate selected. That process will continue with the remaining candidates until two are left with the winner determined by who has the most votes in that final round.
New York City's Board of Elections plans to release the first set of results from this ranked-choice voting process on June 29, but those results will only include votes from early in-person and election day voters, not absentee ballots.
The board will release the results of the ranked-choice voting process again on July 6, this time including as many absentee ballots as they've been able to process. They'll report results again every Tuesday until all the ballots have been counted.
Also on Tuesday, CNN projected that Curtis Sliwa would win the Republican mayoral nomination in his party's primary, beating Fernando Mateo. The activist and founder of Guardian Angels will take on the winner of the Democratic primary in November's general election for mayor.
Letters on a main street in Bogota, Colombia, last month read 'disappeared.' (photo: Daniel Munoz/AFP/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Police Brutality in Bogota Columbia
Leaves 1 Dead, 40 Injured
Colombians Have Thronged to Anti-Government Protests. Hundreds Have Gone Missing.
Ana Vanessa Herrero, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Protesters and human rights advocates say they're seeing the revival of a familiar tactic from Colombia's long civil conflict: disappearances."
uan Esteban Torres left his home on the afternoon of May 18 to join an anti-government protest in Caldas, Colombia. Millions across the country had taken to the streets in daily demonstrations against rising poverty, inequality and police brutality. Torres, his brother says, believed they deserved support.
Security camera footage gathered by his family shows the 27-year-old walking between the protest and his home. No one has seen him since.
“We said goodbye,” Daniel Torres said, “and we never saw him again.”
While many of the thousands of demonstrations that have roiled Colombia over the last two months have been peaceful, security forces have responded to some with force. The government ombudsman reported 548 human rights violations through June 7, and 20 deaths.
Now protesters and human rights advocates say they’re seeing the revival of another familiar tactic from Colombia’s long civil conflict: disappearances. Hundreds of people in the South American nation have gone missing since the protests erupted in late April. According to the attorney general’s office, 84 remain unaccounted for. Advocates say this is the first time they’ve seen so many disappearances associated with demonstrations.
José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director of Human Rights Watch, called that number “terrifying.”
“These cases have occurred in a context of brutal abuses by the police, including massive arbitrary detentions,” he said. “Prosecutors need to urgently redouble their efforts to look for these people in police stations, in hospitals, and in the streets, and investigate any police involvement.”
Luz Marina Monzón is director of the Unit for the Search of Disappeared Persons, established to account for the people who went missing during the half-century-long conflict.
“Patterns that happened during the conflict years ago seem to be reproducing,” she told The Washington Post. “In a democratic country, this should not be normal.”
The White House has taken notice. Spokeswoman Jen Psaki urged authorities last month to “continue to work to locate all missing persons as quickly as possible.” The government of President Iván Duque has said it’s doing all it can.
The Colombian attorney general’s office says it received 572 reports of people “not located” from April 28 to June 15. Of those, the office said, 335 people have been found and 153 reports were inadmissible.
In most cases, the office told The Post, the reports “correspond to the normal dynamics of people who voluntarily left their family circle, or who, due to circumstances different from those presented in the demonstrations, lost contact with close people.”
Human rights groups say they’ve recorded up to 700 cases, with some difficulty. Many families, they say, are not coming forward; most of the cases on their list have been gathered from social media.
“Some people, when they are arrested, shout out their name and ID and sometimes, we only have that information and photos or videos that protesters manage to get with their phones,” said Gloria Gómez, coordinator of the Association of Families of the Detained and Disappeared. “This makes locating them very difficult.”
The attorney general’s office is investigating 84 cases of missing persons, four of them as forced disappearances. The others lack the necessary elements to meet the legal definition, the office says.
Juan Esteban Torres is one of the four. He participated in protests near his house on May 18 — “a day filled with tension between protesters and authorities,” according to Liberty Legal Corp., a legal advocacy group that’s advising the family. After running from police, the group said, Torres and others sought refuge in a house nearby. He was last seen by a friend between 10 and 11 p.m.
Torres’ supporters say they have reviewed footage showing him near his home at 2 a.m. May 19.
Three weeks after Torres’s disappearance, his family still hopes to see him walk in. They were recovering from the death of his mother when he disappeared.
“It’s like a movie,” Daniel Torres said. “We have been everywhere — hospitals, police — and I still don’t know what happened to him.”
Members of Extinction Rebellion hold a banner reading 'Make Ecocide a Crime' in Parliament Square on August 28, 2020 in London, England. (photo: Peter Summers/Getty Images)
Ecocide: How a Fast-Growing Movement Plans to Put Environmental Destruction on a Par With War Crimes
Sam Meredith, CNBC
Meredith writes: "A campaign to criminalize acts of widespread environmental destruction is quickly gathering pace."
Ecocide, which literally translates from Greek and Latin as “killing our home,” is an umbrella term for all forms of the mass damage of ecosystems, from industrial pollution to the release of micro plastics into the oceans.
The term has been debated by academics, climate activists and legal professionals for more than half a century. However, it’s only in recent years that the idea has become increasingly widespread, with Pope Francis, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and French President Emmanuel Macron all endorsing the movement to recognize ecocide as an international crime.
Now, a team of top environmental lawyers is working to define it. A panel convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation will publish the legal definition of ecocide on Tuesday, seeking to pave the way for acts of environmental destruction to be incorporated into the International Criminal Court’s mandate. It could see ecocide established alongside war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity in the Hague.
“There have been working definitions in the past, but this is the first time that something has been convened globally and in response to political demand,” Jojo Mehta, co-founder of the Stop Ecocide campaign, told CNBC via telephone.
“What that shows is that the space is opening up in the political world to actually look at a solution like this. This conversation is no longer falling on deaf ears and, indeed, it is actually gathering momentum at quite a pace,” Mehta said.
How did we get here?
The term ecocide was first coined in 1970 to characterize the massive damage and destruction of ecosystems, although it would remain on the fringes of the environmental movement for decades thereafter.
It wasn’t until nearly 50 years later that a campaign to progress ecocide as an international crime would celebrate its biggest public step forward yet. That moment came as the tiny South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu addressed the ICC’s annual Assembly of States Parties on Dec. 2, 2019.
“We believe this radical idea merits serious discussion,” John Licht, Vanuatu’s ambassador to the European Union, said at the time. The call was soon echoed by the government of the Maldives.
The climate crisis poses an existential threat to the island states of Vanuatu and the Maldives, with both countries facing the imminent prospect of losing significant amounts of territory as a result of rising sea levels. The actions that have caused rising global temperatures have taken place almost entirely elsewhere, however.
Proponents of the Stop Ecocide campaign argue that a standalone law to punish decision-makers at the top level is required in order to create “a moral red line” to widespread environmental destruction.
“There are encouraging signs. You wouldn’t have believed how quickly ecocide erupted over the last couple of years,” Rachel Killean, senior lecturer in law at Queen’s University Belfast, told CNBC via telephone.
“I think there are still huge political barriers because ecocide impacts powerful states, but I wouldn’t have predicted we would be where we are today. So potentially there’s enough of a groundswell around environmental issues for us to see it come through.”
Why does it matter?
Advocates of the Stop Ecocide campaign say there are a number of benefits when it comes to recognizing the term in international criminal law. These include the expansion of international accountability and deterrence, opening the door to the enhanced rights of nature, access to reparations and improved public understanding of the scale and scope of the ecological crisis.
“If we had ecocide, what it might mean is that you could prosecute crimes against the environment potentially without there needing to be a connection to some widespread human atrocity. You could also prosecute environmental crime that is happening at a time of peace: It is a different way of looking at what atrocity looks like,” Killean said.
“It’s a declaration that we have got to a point where we need to stop destroying the planet. The people that are destroying the planet are actually fairly few in number and are causing massive harm to our home and communities all around the world through their actions. So, there needs to be something to say you can’t do that anymore. Ecocide is potentially one part of that,” she added.
What about the challenges facing ecocide law?
There are a number of potential stumbling blocks. The international criminal law would only apply to individuals, for instance, raising the question of whether the recognition of ecocide at the ICC can, in effect, have a meaningful impact on business practices.
It is also thought some states are likely to be unwilling to place themselves at a perceived economic disadvantage by enforcing criminal penalties domestically.
What’s more, should ecocide be criminalized, countries would not be obliged to ratify the ICC’s ruling and there are several states with heavy environmental footprints — such as the U.S., China, India and Russia, among others — that are not party to the ICC’s Rome Statute.
Stop Ecocide’s Mehta argued that a period of transition would help to alleviate some of these concerns and noted the ICC has broader applicability than one might think, with non-members able to be referred via the U.N. Security Council, for example.
When it was suggested ecocide should not be considered as a “silver bullet” to eradicate environmental destruction, Mehta replied: “I think that is absolutely correct … But the way we see it is, I suppose you could say, an acupuncture needle in the sense that there is a pressure point here.”
“At the moment, if you are campaigning for human rights and social justice, at least you know that mass murder and torture are beyond the pale. They are criminal and they are condemned. But, if you are in the environmental arena, you don’t have that. You’re standing on a void. There’s a missing foundational piece that says this much damage is simply not allowed.”
“It’s very difficult,” she said. “Ask any conservationist and we’ll tell you so.”
Mehta said that while ecocide law is not likely to be sufficient to deal with the crises incurred in many areas environmentally, “it is necessary.” She estimated it would take four to five years to put ecocide law into practice.
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