17 February 22
Lacking for February: Larger Donors
So far for February larger donations, even those of one hundred dollars or more have been precious but scarce. The pace of donations is actually up, but the dollar figures are down.
Not everyone can make a larger donation. But it would really help.
For your consideration, respectfully.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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16 February 22
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Some of those legal battles have prompted public outrage, like the Justice Department’s continuing defense of Trump’s right to defame E. Jean Carroll, as well as its ongoing effort to maintain the secrecy of an internal memo about the Mueller investigation even after a judge accused department lawyers last year of intentionally misleading her. The list grew a little longer a week ago. Last Tuesday, the Justice Department opposed a legal effort by some of the families of the 346 people who died in the Boeing 737 Max crashes to revisit the department’s infamous settlement with Boeing in the final weeks of the Trump administration.
The Boeing deal, which ended a criminal investigation resulting from the crashes, was one of the most ill-conceived and widely criticized corporate criminal settlements in modern history — an extraordinary feat of corporate deal-making by Boeing in which the company effectively purchased an official government exoneration of the company’s executives in exchange for allowing the government to take credit for a bunch of money that the company was already going to pay anyway. (As I have noted previously, I worked in the Justice Department office that conducted the Boeing investigation and completed the settlement and also know several people on the team, but I was not involved in the investigation.)
The Justice Department’s settlement with Boeing took the form of a “deferred prosecution agreement,” in which the department filed a criminal charge against the company in federal court that it is holding in abeyance pending the three-year term of the deal. The underlying criminal conduct concerns a relatively low-level Boeing employee named Mark Forkner who allegedly provided “incomplete and inaccurate” information about the 737 Max’s flight-control system to the Federal Aviation Administration. But if the company abides by the provisions of the agreement — most importantly, paying a monetary penalty and not committing another crime — the government will dismiss the charge and Boeing will avoid the most serious “collateral consequences” of a criminal conviction, which can, among other things, affect a company’s ability to do business with the federal government, a vital source of Boeing’s business.
The Boeing settlement had a top-line figure of $2.5 billion, but about two-thirds of that was money that went to airlines — money that Boeing had, in fact, already set aside to pay them. Less than one-tenth of the total payment ($243.6 million) was an actual fine, which appears to have been generated by using one of the most charitable interpretations possible of the relevant guidelines, while another $500 million was set aside as a victim-compensation fund. Structurally, at least, perhaps the strangest part of the deal was a provision in which the government stated that “the misconduct” at issue “was neither pervasive across the organization, nor undertaken by a large number of employees, nor facilitated by senior mismanagement” — an unprecedented affirmative exculpation, according to experts.
The deal was heavily criticized, but it did not attract the widespread public attention it deserved since, in a perverse accident of timing, the settlement was announced the day after the siege of the U.S. Capitol on January 6. The meaning of the news, however, was not lost on the outraged families of the victims of the 737 Max crashes. Michael Stumo — whose daughter died in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 — said that the families “erupted in anger, shock, and renewed grief” when they heard about the settlement, while Chris Moore, another father who lost his daughter in the crash, described it as “a slap in the face.” Others decried the outcome as well. Peter DeFazio, the Democratic chair of the House Transportation Committee who led an investigation following the crashes, called the deal “pathetic” and a “slap on the wrist” that was “an insult to the 346 victims who died as a result of corporate greed.” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal called the settlement a “disgrace.” And a well-regarded expert on corporate crime at Columbia Law School said the deal was “an egregious case and one of the worst deferred prosecution agreements I have seen,” and accused the government of “serving its own interest by inflating the size of the settlement” through the payments to airlines, which were going to happen regardless of any settlement with the DOJ.
Ordinarily, that would be the end of it — even bad government settlements are pretty much irreversible — but in December, 15 families filed an unusual objection to the settlement in court on the theory that the government had failed to comply with a statute that requires it to confer with crime victims before completing a formal resolution, such as a plea agreement, with the offender. As Stumo wrote in an op-ed last month, the families claim that the department opted to “deliberately conceal its investigation and covertly negotiate with Boeing toward a favorable, deferred prosecution agreement” — citing, in particular, an episode in early 2020 in which someone in the department’s Victims’ Rights Ombudsman office incorrectly told a representative of the families that there wasn’t even an active criminal investigation. The families’ concerns, however, are more than procedural. They have taken issue with the fact that, under the deal, Boeing was able to avoid a criminal conviction or a trial that may have highlighted a broader array of questionable conduct within the company, particularly among Boeing executives.
After the filing, the families requested a personal meeting with Garland to press their case — asking him, as Stumo put it, to “fully investigate the sweetheart deal that allowed Boeing to skate through with little punishment” — in an apparent effort to resolve the situation without the need for a potentially long and messy court battle. The families got that meeting in late January, and the presiding court, evidently hoping that the government might work out some sort of agreement with 15 families who have already suffered unfathomable losses, stayed the proceedings. At the meeting, according to what participants told the Associated Press, Garland “expressed sympathy to relatives who spoke” but “made no promises or substantive comments on the case.” That is presumably because, however gracious it may have been for Garland to grant the audience, the DOJ had already decided to oppose their efforts in court, which is what it proceeded to do less than two weeks later.
Standing alone, all of that would have been merely somewhat distasteful, but the Justice Department’s court filing is a remarkable specimen of legal writing — indelicate at best, at times bordering on offensive — that is so at odds with the somber and earnest tone Garland strives to maintain in public that it is difficult to believe that he saw it. The department’s principal contention is that the families are not actually victims of a crime since prosecutors have never specifically claimed that the alleged misconduct of the Boeing employee, Mark Forkner, actually caused the crashes. The department proceeds to apologize in the filing “for not meeting and conferring with” the families before the deal, “even though it had no legal obligation to do so,” and claims that even though “such consultations would not have changed” the outcome, “there is a chance that earlier consultation may have been able to provide these individuals with insight into the Government’s approach toward corporate criminal prosecution and this case.” This was a classic “I’m sorry, but …” non-apology coupled with a bit of condescension that is all the more striking because the families thus far seem to have a perfectly fine grasp of how corporate criminal investigations work.
Elsewhere, the filing suggests that the families have failed to fully appreciate the benefits that the government obtained for them in the form of the $500 million compensation fund — as if better than nothing was tantamount to as good as it should have been — while wholly ignoring the government’s exculpation of Boeing’s senior management. The DOJ filing also seems to accuse the families of strategically waiting to object until “after virtually all of the crash victims’ beneficiaries fund payments had been made” — a particularly gross implication considering that one victim’s widow has explicitly said that she refuses to accept any “blood money” from the settlement.
The implication that the families misunderstood the government’s position on the relationship between Forkner’s alleged misconduct and the crashes is extremely disingenuous. While it’s true the government has never specifically alleged that Forkner caused the crashes, the government has also gone out of its way to strongly imply as much. The agreement with Boeing packaged the allegations regarding Forkner into a global resolution of the investigation into the crashes. The press release announcing the deal talked at length about the crashes and the passengers who died while also claiming that Forkner had “impeded the government’s ability to ensure the safety of the flying public.” And the indictment against Forkner contains a section on the crashes even though the government does not need to establish anything about them in order to prevail on the charges that it brought against him, which turn on whether he intentionally misled regulators.
As it happens, the government’s effort to have it both ways last year — to charge relatively low-level and possibly inconsequential misconduct by Forkner while also suggesting that it had successfully completed a major criminal investigation into the crashes — has now also imperiled the case against Forkner, which is being overseen by the same judge who is presiding over the corporate settlement. That is thanks to an entirely different but similarly unprecedented development that unfolded in parallel in December, when it came to light that that three FAA officials had privately accused prosecutors on the case of making Forkner a “scapegoat” and of bringing an “incorrect and misguided” case that was premised on “many errors in fact.”
The FAA officials sent the Justice Department a lengthy PowerPoint presentation within weeks of the Forkner indictment late last year to object to the case against him. According to excerpts of the presentation provided in court papers by the defense, the FAA officials said that the crashes were caused by “an ENGINEERING issue that Mr. Forkner was neither qualified, expected, nor responsible for,” argued that a conviction of Forkner would result in a “miscarriage of justice,” and accused the government of misrepresenting the purported evidence against him.
The Justice Department appears to have been deeply concerned about the potential impact of the officials’ presentation on the case, because instead of immediately disclosing it to the defense, which is what should have happened, the government sat on it for a couple of weeks until after they could interview one of the authors. In that interview, according to a government court filing, prosecutors “corrected” the witness’s “misimpression” that they had alleged that Forkner’s conduct had actually caused the crashes, and the witness “conceded that he had no contemporaneous knowledge” of Forkner’s conduct.
This sequence of events suggests the unseemly possibility that the government sat on the presentation until they could meet with the witness, before the defense could, in order to extract concessions from him that they could then use to cross-examine him at trial if he testifies. This is not improper as an ethical matter, but it is also not the level of scrupulousness you hope to see when the government is actively trying to send someone to prison. All of this has set off a major — and potentially decisive — pretrial fight between the government and Forkner that may turn on the same question at issue in the families’ dispute over the settlement with Boeing: Did the government cross a line by suggesting that Forkner himself caused the crashes?
In the wake of the revelations about the FAA officials’ PowerPoint, the government told the court that it will not “argue or even suggest” that Forkner caused the crashes, and has asked the court to preclude Forkner from defending himself at trial by claiming that he has been improperly scapegoated by the government. It remains to be seen how the court will rule, but it is not often that representatives of a victim of alleged criminal misconduct — in this case the FAA — accuse prosecutors of having charged the wrong person.
Indeed in the past, when it appears that the government may have charged someone to shoulder the blame for a much larger episode of corporate malfeasance, juries have refused to convict — which is what happened in the wake of the 2010 BP oil spill. (In fact, one of Forkner’s lawyers represented a BP employee who was eventually acquitted at trial.) The judge recently dismissed two of the charges against Forkner — yet another significant setback — but even if he sides with the government on this separate evidentiary question, the defense will surely appeal the ruling if Forkner is convicted.
All of this seems to be trending toward more unpleasantness and frustration with the Justice Department’s handling of the Boeing investigation — now under the leadership of Garland. Even if the families were to prevail in their fight against the settlement and somehow invalidate key portions of the agreement — which very much remains to be seen — there does not appear to be anything that would prevent the government from executing the exact same deal with Boeing after “conferring” with the families. Furthermore, a moderate attorney general who is overly concerned with a narrow conception of “institutionalism” and continuity is probably the last person to do anything truly radical like try to scrap the whole thing, even if the court made that possible for him. Meanwhile, Justice Department prosecutors have done nearly a complete 180 on Forkner, and are now going out of their way to minimize his conduct in order to prevent their case from being tanked as a result of the department’s own self-promotional and misleading rhetoric in the final weeks of the Trump administration.
The whole mess is another in a long line of unpleasant inheritances for Garland, but it became his to manage when he took office last year. So far, it is not going well.
National Archives workers loading boxes outside the White House five days before President Donald J. Trump left office last year (photo: Stefani Reynolds/The New York Times)
The House committee investigating the January 6 riot at the US Capitol is seeking records of visitors to Trump White House.
The committee has sought a trove of data from the National Archives, including presidential records that Trump had fought to keep private. The records being released to Congress are visitor logs showing appointment information for individuals who entered the White House on the day of the insurrection.
In a letter sent on Monday to the National Archives, White House counsel Dana Remus said Biden had considered Trump’s claim that because he was president at the time of the attack on the Capitol, the records should remain private, but decided against it.
“The President has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States, and therefore is not justified, as to these records and portions of records,” Remus wrote.
Remus noted that as a matter of policy, the Biden administration “voluntarily discloses such visitor logs on a monthly basis”, as did the Obama administration, and that the majority of the entries over which Trump asserted the claim would be publicly released under the present policy.
Remus, in the letter, said the logs of those who visited the White House before Trump left on January 20, 2021, should be handed over quickly “in light of the urgency” of the committee’s work and Congress’s “compelling need”.
A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the decision.
The Presidential Records Act mandates that records made by a sitting president and his staff be preserved in the National Archives, and an outgoing president is responsible for turning over documents to the agency when leaving office. Trump earlier tried, but failed to withhold White House documents from the House committee in a dispute that was decided by the Supreme Court.
Biden, a Democrat, has already made clear that he is not invoking executive privilege concerning the congressional investigation unless he absolutely must.
Last year, Biden rejected a Trump bid to block the US House of Representatives January 6 committee from accessing batches of documents from the former president’s time at the White House.
The committee is focused on Trump’s actions from January 6, when he waited hours to tell his supporters to stop the violence and leave the Capitol. Investigators are interested in the organisation and financing of a Washington rally the morning of the riot, when Trump told supporters to “fight like hell”. Among the lines of inquiry is how closely the organisers of the rally coordinated with the White House officials.
House investigators are seeking communications between the National Archives and Trump’s aides about 15 boxes of records that the agency recovered from Trump at his Florida resort and are trying to learn what they contained.
Meanwhile, White House call logs obtained so far by the House committee do not list calls made by Trump as he watched the violence unfold on television on January 6, nor do they list calls made directly to the president.
That lack of clarity about Trump’s personal calls is a particular challenge as the investigators work to discern what happened, what the then-president was doing in the White House as supporters violently beat police, broke into the Capitol and interrupted the congressional certification of Biden’s election victory.
There are several possible explanations for omissions in the records, which do not reflect conversations that Trump had on January 6 with multiple Republican lawmakers, for example. Trump was known to use a personal mobile phone, or he could have had a phone passed to him by an aide. The committee is continuing to receive records from the National Archives and other sources, which could produce additional information.
The White House planned to inform Trump’s lawyers about the decision on Wednesday, according to The New York Times, which first reported the letter.
Separately on Wednesday, the founder of a right-wing militia group charged with seditious conspiracy over his alleged role in organising the January 6 attack was to appear in court seeking to be released from jail while he awaits trial.
So far, more than 725 people have been charged with playing a role in the attack that killed five people and injured more than 100 police officers. Four police officers involved in defending the Capitol later committed suicide.
The January 6 committee has made 81 subpoenas public, including those issued to top Trump aides and allies, and interviewed more than 560 witnesses. It has also sought records from social media and other telecommunication firms.
On Tuesday, it subpoenaed six people who had knowledge of or participated in unsuccessful efforts to send false “alternate electors” to Washington, DC, as part of Trump’s scheme to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
The Interior Department's inspector general found Zinke had repeated contact with developers about a real estate deal and lied about it to an ethics official. (photo: unknown)
The Interior Department’s inspector general found Zinke had repeated contact with developers about a real estate deal and lied about it to an ethics official. The Justice Department declined to bring charges.
Interior Department Inspector General Mark Greenblatt found that while Zinke was in office, he sent dozens of emails and text messages, held phone calls and met in his office with developers to discuss the design of a large commercial and residential development in his hometown of Whitefish, Mont.
Zinke continued to represent his family’s foundation in the negotiations for nearly a year, investigators found, even after committing to federal officials that he would resign from the foundation and would not do any work on its behalf after he joined the Trump administration.
Zinke could not be immediately reached for comment Wednesday.
Now a leading Republican candidate to win a newly drawn congressional seat in Montana this fall, Zinke also lied to an agency ethics official who questioned him about his involvement in the negotiations, according to the report. Zinke told the staffer that his participation in the project was minimal and limited to tax preparation, saying he no longer represented the foundation.
But after investigators issued subpoenas for the developers’ emails and text messages, they found that Zinke had communicated with the developers 64 times between August 2017 and July 2018 to discuss the project’s design and plans for a brewery. He met with the developers in his office at Interior Department headquarters in the summer of 2017 and, afterward, gave them a personal tour of the Lincoln Memorial and had dinner with them.
Investigators also concluded in the 32-page report that Zinke misused his official position by directing some of his staff to set up a meeting with the developers and print out documents related to the project. Federal officials are generally prohibited from assigning their employees tasks related to their private business.
The inspector general did not find that Zinke violated federal conflict-of-interest laws because his communication with the developers centered on a private business deal, rather than official Interior Department matters. The investigation also did not find evidence that Zinke had used his position to benefit Halliburton or for his own financial gain, or that his staff tried to conceal his continuing involvement with the development team.
The Washington Post first reported that the inspector general had referred the matter to the Justice Department in 2018. But the case remained open until last summer, when prosecutors declined to press criminal charges.
Zinke, 60, a former Navy SEAL who rode to work on horseback on his first day at Interior, served one term in the House of Representatives before he joined Trump’s Cabinet. A major proponent of oil and gas drilling, as well as coal mining, Zinke resigned under pressure less than two years later under an avalanche of investigations into his conduct.
With Trump’s endorsement and strong name recognition in a swath of western Montana that Trump carried by seven points in 2020, Zinke is widely favored to win his home state’s new House seat.
The investigation into his real estate dealing began in the summer of 2018, after Politico reported that Zinke had remained involved in the project while in office. This raised conflict-of-interest concerns, because the project involved a development group funded by David J. Lesar, then the chairman of Halliburton, which stood to benefit from policies Zinke oversaw encouraging oil and gas drilling on public lands.
Lesar’s company planned to build a large development along the Whitefish River, with shops, a hotel and a brewery. Zinke’s family foundation, run by his wife, Lola, had agreed to donate land for a parking lot. Known as 95 Karrow, the project had the potential to increase the value of multiple parcels of land the Zinkes owned nearby.
By 2018, Zinke’s wife had rescinded the letter of intent to donate land for the parking lot, investigators found.
Zinke declined investigators’ requests to meet with them. When they asked him for an interview, he refused.
The Whitefish land deal was one of at least 15 inquiries launched into alleged misconduct by Zinke. The investigations included one by the inspector general into Zinke’s decision to deny two Connecticut tribes a permit to operate a casino; multiple inquiries into his travel expenses and whether he violated agency policy by allowing his wife to ride in government vehicles; and questions about his management of the department, including an investigation into a National Park Service report that removed any reference to climate change.
The casino case, which was referred to the Justice Department for potential criminal charges, is still pending.
Government investigators ultimately closed most of the other inquiries without reaching a finding that Zinke had violated ethics rules. In other cases, Interior Department officials refused to cooperate.
But the slew of inquiries strained his relationship with White House officials, who pressured him to resign when the Whitefish investigation was referred to the Justice Department for a possible criminal investigation. Zinke blamed his departure in a private resignation letter on “vicious and politically motivated attacks” and said he could not “justify spending thousands of dollars defending myself and my family against false allegations.”
Zinke touted himself as a Republican in the model of Theodore Roosevelt. But he worked to weaken existing environmental protections and shrink national monuments established by previous presidents. Trump scaled back two national monuments in Utah — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — and Zinke called on him to curtail the boundaries of several others.
Zinke voiced suspicions that career staffers at the department were undermining his policies, telling a group of oil and gas executives that a third of Interior Department employees were disloyal. He abruptly reassigned dozens of senior executives.
Among the quirks of his tenure was his revival of an arcane military ritual that required a security staffer to hoist a special secretarial flag on the roof of the agency’s headquarters in downtown Washington whenever he entered the building. When the secretary went home for the day or traveled, the flag — a blue banner emblazoned with the agency’s bison seal flanked by seven white stars representing the Interior Department bureaus — came down.
Zinke’s official portrait, which hangs at headquarters, shows him riding a horse in front of a tree-covered butte, a scene inspired by a photograph taken of him at Bears Ears. President Biden restored full protections to it and Grand Staircase-Escalante in the fall, at the urging of tribal activists and conservationists.
Multnomah County, Ore. staffers sort ballots for the City of Portland's Special Runoff Election Aug. 11. Oregon is one of five states that conduct all-mail elections. (photo: Motoya Nakamura)
Ten state chief election officials say in interviews they have had to refocus their positions to battle a constant flow of disinformation. This year, they say, will be no different.
The officials are no longer just running elections. They’ve become full-time myth-busters, contending with information threats coming from the other side of the globe — and their own ranks.
In interviews with 10 state chief election officials — along with conversations with staffers, current and former local officials and other election experts — many described how they have had to refocus their positions to battle a constant rolling boil of mis- and disinformation about election processes.
They’re dealing with political candidates undermining the election systems that they still run for office in, and conspiracy theories that target even the most obscure parts of America’s election infrastructure. And they say the country will face the same issues this year as it elects a new Congress and decides control of three dozen statehouses.
“The biggest challenge that we face is disinformation, about the 2020 election in particular, and more generally about the election system itself,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said in an interview.
Their battle against mis- and disinformation comes at a tenuous time for American democracy, as an already diminished faith in the U.S. electoral system risks slipping further still in 2022. A recent NPR/Ipsos poll found that 64 percent of Americans believed democracy was “in crisis and at risk of failing.”
“Not to be hyperbolic, but our democracy is at stake,” New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, said. “This year, more than ever, trying to combat mis- and disinformation is crucial not just for trust in democracy … but for those of us that are on the ballot this year. It is very real.”
She is one of the roughly twenty secretaries of state up for reelection this year, many of whom have drawn challengers who have spread misinformation about election systems.
The struggles stemming from misinformation vary state-to-state, from dealing with threats of violence against election workers at all levels to contending with so-called insider threats — election workers who themselves pose a security challenge to the system.
And on top of that, many secretaries say local election officials in their states are facing pressures on other fronts, from physical and cybersecurity-related dangers to a potential retirement crisis looming in a field rife with burnout. “It’s a lively time in secretary of state offices,” said Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill, a Democrat. “And it seems like every day some new issue crops up.”
Merrill, who has been in office for over a decade, called misinformation “the issue of our lifetime,” and said that she anticipated combating misinformation to be a focus of her tenureship as co-chair of the National Association of Secretaries of State elections committee.
The threat from within
One of the most concerning things administrators have to prepare for is those insider threats spawned by misinformation, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, said.
Griswold said her office has investigated potential instances in three counties where there may have been unauthorized access to election equipment, aided by election officials in the counties, with two continuing and one being cleared.
“It’s incredibly concerning that the people elected to oversee elections are working from within to undermine them, and that phenomenon in itself is increasing,” she said. “States need to get ready for situations where folks in the secretary of state’s office or the county clerk’s office, or the county clerks themselves, are working to undermine the elections from within.”
Griswold and other election officials expressed concerns that proponents of former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election are running for election administration positions. Trump himself has endorsed three secretary of state candidates and his followers have trained their attention on secretary of state and other election-related positions up this year.
Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who Griswold is seeking to bar from overseeing elections this year after Peters allegedly allowed an unauthorized person to access county voting machines, announced on Monday that she would be running to challenge Griswold in November.
Election officials also expressed concern at the increase of election mis- and disinformation coming from state lawmakers. Secretaries said that they were concerned that legislators and other elected officials are using their platforms to give a veneer of legitimacy to untrue claims about election systems, while also looking to introduce legislation that looks to act upon those conspiracies.
“It’s one thing if it is just some Twitter profile with an egg icon and 60 followers,” said Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican.
He said he generally doesn’t think it is worth responding to pseudo-anonymous accounts spreading conspiracies, which would risk spreading and legitimizing it.
“The biggest problem I’ve got with regards to misinformation is we’ve got a sitting state senator who’s going around the state conducting a tour alleging that we’re having corrupt, hacked elections,” Adams said. “It’s not just fighting misinformation that she’s putting out to the public, it’s also finding out the misinformation that she’s putting within the legislature.”
‘Pre-bunking’ the conspiracy theories
Election workers are still facing some of the most personal, direct consequences of the election conspiracy theories: threats of violence.
While most secretaries say that threats to their offices — and the local officials in individual cities and counties — don’t carry the same fervor like the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, several pointed to a far right activist in Colorado seemingly calling for Griswold to be hung last week as a sign that that rhetoric is still dangerously common, and could flair up again at a moments’ notice.
Many secretaries said they expected to focus on a model that emphasized promoting local partners — like city and county election officials, civic groups and local media — as the most effective way of combating it.
Oregon’s Democratic Secretary of State Shemia Fagan said she wanted to refocus her office on the concept of “pre-bunking” misinformation instead of being reactive to it, by trying to put out information about election systems well ahead of the election.
She said her office was in the midst of planning for a series of PSAs about elections in Oregon. And she said that earned media — instead of paid advertisements — will be important, and that election officials need to build a stronger connection with local journalists to facilitate that.
“How do we build that trusted relation with our media to say, ‘if you hear something, reach out to us?’” Fagan said. “We’ll try and go find you that accurate information to make sure that we’re not just spreading mis- and dis-information that comes in that maybe looks credible initially, because it’s more sophisticated.”
Election officials also remain concerned about foreign disinformation efforts as well, which Fagan said federal officials have stressed is still active. “They expect Russia to be much more involved in spreading mis- and disinformation in 2022 and 2024,” she said.
Ohio Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose said he believed that local partnerships would be key to fighting off misinformation, foreign or domestic-based. He hoped to revive briefings with local media in his state to help explain the election processes and connect them with local election officials. He also said that he would continue to work with minority representation groups, like the NAACP and local Urban League chapters, because the communities they serve are “often the targets of disinformation campaigns.”
LaRose touted the benefits of outreach efforts, citing a robocall shortly before the 2020 election from Jacob Wohl, a far right conspiracy theorist. The call went out to Cleveland residents with false information about mail voting.
“The moment that [call] went out, my phone started ringing personally … from community leaders, ministers, local elected leaders reporting it to us,” he said. “And thankfully, one of them actually recorded it and passed it along to us.”
‘It has exploded out of control’
Misinformation is far from the only problem election officials are dealing with, with other longrunning challenges demanding their attention. Several said they have seen an uptick in retirements after the 2020 election — part of an already occurring brain drain that election officials fear could be exacerbated by threats and stress from running pandemic-era elections. And others expressed concerns about cybersecurity threats local offices were facing.
Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson, a Republican, said he has heard in the past couple weeks about phishing scams targeting local offices. He said his office has been trying to direct traffic on those scams and make sure local officials had the tools to recognize and report them. “I think they have always been lurking,” he said. “The incidents [have] probably increased.”
Election officials said they have increasingly been leaning on national partnerships — both with other secretaries and federal agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security — to help prepare local election workers.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, said that she will soon host a workshop with CISA and local clerks in her state.
“It has exploded out of control,” Bellows said. “Disinformation can lead to people threatening harm” to election workers. She also said her office would work on further training for local officials, including de-escalation training, to help protect them in volatile situations.
The latest target of conspiracy theorists
One of the most recent disinformation campaigns has taken aim at an obscure but important part of America’s election infrastructure, an interstate compact known as the Electronic Registration Information Center. Officials on both sides of the aisle say it is an important part of election security in the United States.
The Electronic Registration Information Center — often known as ERIC — was originally founded a decade ago by seven states to help maintain voter rolls. Membership has since swelled to 31 states and Washington, D.C.
The organization shares some data between member states to find voters who may have moved, died or are otherwise potentially registered in another state. The organization also develops lists of potentially eligible voters who aren’t registered, and requires the state to contact them.
But ERIC has increasingly become a focus of some of the latest conspiracy theories, especially after a far right website popular among election deniers published a three part “investigation” into the organization labeling it a “Soros funded” group that is “essentially a left wing voter registration drive.”
(ERIC is funded exclusively by dues from member states, and its board of directors includes an election official from each member state, with membership ranging from the deep blue Maryland to red states like Alabama.)
It is the rare piece of America’s election system where there is broad, bipartisan consensus — and has struck up an unusual bedfellows situation of secretaries willing to defend it. In interviews, all nine of the secretaries of state whose members belong to ERIC praised the effort. Secretary John Merrill of Alabama, a Republican, called it a “valuable tool,” while Merill of Connecticut called it an “extremely constructive” organization. (The two Merrills are unrelated.)
“If Alabama was not a member of ERIC, then we would not be able to gain access to that data, because our state does not have the resources, the personnel or the financial wherewithal to create the kind of check and balance environment that exists with ERIC,” John Merrill said. “We would just be left out in the cold.”
But one secretary has backed away from ERIC: Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, who is also the president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, or NASS.
In a late-January announcement, Ardoin office’s said that he would “suspend” the state’s participation in ERIC, saying in a statement that, “after reading about these allegations and speaking with election attorneys and experts, I have determined that it may no longer be in Louisiana’s best interests to participate in this organization.”
NASS does not have an institutional stance on ERIC, and Ardoin’s office declined an interview request. (An Ardoin staffer told NPR that his office has been in touch with ERIC.)
But his statement triggered grumbling from some other secretaries whose states are members.
“It was a little bit out of the blue, and it was unexpected,” Oregon’s Fagan said. “I personally was surprised by it.”
Meta, Facebook's parent company, agreed to pay $90 million to settle a 2012 lawsuit accusing the company of tracking users. (photo: Chris Ratcliff/Getty)
The case targets Facebook’s off-platform tracking
The settlement was submitted for approval Monday evening in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. It is still awaiting final approval from the court. Plaintiffs affected by Facebook’s improper data tracking will receive portions of the $90 million. Meta will also be required to delete all of the data it wrongfully collected from those users.
Reached for comment, Meta spokesperson Drew Pusateri told The Verge, “Reaching a settlement in this case, which is more than a decade old, is in the best interest of our community and our shareholders and we’re glad to move past this issue.”
The lawsuit was dismissed in June 2017 after a federal judge said that the plaintiffs failed to show that they had a reasonable expectation of privacy or suffered financial damages. But in a 2020 opinion, a federal appeals court revived the case, ruling that Facebook’s data collection did create “economic harm” and that this alleged data collection required explicit user consent specified under the Wiretap Act. Facebook appealed these decisions to the Supreme Court which declined to take up the case last year, leaving the Ninth Circuit ruling in place.
“Even before the Settlement was reached, this litigation had already profoundly improved privacy rights. The Ninth Circuit clarified that when personal data is unlawfully copied and monetized, the result is economic harm (not just privacy harm) even if the value of the data in plaintiffs’ hands does not diminish,” the settlement proposal said.
According to the settlement, users who visited websites that included a Facebook “like” button between April 2010 and September 2011 will be covered, assuming the settlement is approved by the court.
If approved, this settlement would be one of the largest data privacy settlements in US history. But Facebook has faced even larger penalties in the past over alleged data privacy violations. Last February, a federal judge approved a $650 million Facebook class action privacy settlement affecting over 1.6 million members. The lawsuit accused Facebook of violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act over the platform’s use of facial recognition in photo-tagging.
A fighter loyal to Yemen's Houthi rebels stands guard during a rally commemorating the death of Shia Imam Zaid bin Ali, in Sanaa on 14 September 2020. (photo: AFP)
Move follows string of unprecedented missile and drone attacks by the Yemeni group reaching deep into the Gulf Sheikdom
The Houthis are an Iran-aligned group fighting against the Yemeni government and a Saudi-led military coalition that includes the UAE.
In recent months, the Houthis launched unprecedented air assaults on the UAE after militias supported by the Gulf state successfully pushed the rebels back on several battlefronts in Yemen.
Last month the group claimed responsibility for a drone attack on a key oil facility in Abu Dhabi that killed three people.
The UAE and the United States have since intercepted several ballistic missiles and drones fired by the Houthis at the cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
The Houthis have taken aim at the UAE’s status as premier business and tourism hub for the region, taunting it with cryptic threats against the Dubai Expo and warning foreign companies to leave the country.
The Saudi-led coalition has responded to the Houthi attacks by launching massive air campaigns against areas under the control of the group.
The UAE has already asked the Biden administration to re-designate the Houthis as a terrorist organisation. Biden came into office promising to end the war in Yemen, and one of the signature moves of his early days in office was removing the Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) label slapped on the Houthis during the final days of the Trump administration.
Several members of the US Congress have also floated the idea of re-designation. Democratic Congressman Gregory Meeks, who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he was looking "very carefully" at the issue and was in conversation with other officials.
US President Joe Biden has said his administration was considering the move in light of the recent attacks.
Many rights groups have warned, however, that such a move could jeopardise humanitarian work in Yemen and endanger the population, in what the UN has deemed the one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Neuralink, co-founded by Elon Musk, aims to create a way for humans to control devices with their brains. (photo: Mateusz Slodowski/Shutterstock)
An animal welfare group alleges that monkey test subjects endured ‘crude surgeries’ and ‘extreme suffering’
Neuralink – which hopes to create a revolutionary interface that would allow humans to control devices with their brains – said in a statement on Monday that its research animals were “respected and honored by our team”. The company was responding to allegations that the animals were tortured and left to die in horrific experiments at its facilities.
In a lengthy complaint filed with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) said the research caused “extreme suffering” in its test subjects, who “had their brains mutilated in shoddy experiments and were left to suffer and die”. PCRM is a non-profit advocacy organization that promotes a plant-based diet and alternatives to animal testing.
The complaint targets a partnership between Neuralink and the University of California, Davis that was carried out between 2017 and 2020, in which researchers implanted a device “approximately the size of a quarter” into the skull of macaque monkey test subjects.
PCRM obtained hundreds of pages of health records, necropsy reports and other documents related to the $1.4m partnership through California’s open records laws. It said the documents reveal the monkeys suffered “extreme psychological distress” from the “crude surgeries”.
In the complaint, PCRM said Neuralink used a substance known as “BioGlue” that destroyed parts of the monkeys’ brains. It described animals exhibiting substantial psychological effects from the experiments, including anxiety, vomiting, poor appetite, hair loss and self-mutilating behavior including removing their own fingers.
Neuralink called the data cited in the complaint “misleading”, saying in a blogpost it “did and continues to meet federally mandated standards”. After the UC Davis partnership came to an end, Neuralink moved its work to an in-house facility.
It responded directly to allegations that more than a dozen monkeys died after Neuralink procedures, stating that some of these were “terminal procedures” – where live test subjects are euthanized “humanely” following surgery.
Musk has previously stated that Neuralink’s brain chip technology could have major implications for people with disabilities, tweeting it would “let a paralyzed person tweet faster than a person using their thumbs on a smartphone”, for example.
Neuralink in 2021 published a video of a monkey appearing to control a computer with its mind. The release sparked controversy, with many noting that typically such videos are published in scientific journals and subject to peer review, allowing for more oversight and accountability.
PCRM said in its complaint that Neuralink has violated Animal Welfare Act regulations and has requested both UC Davis and Neuralink be given the “maximum civil penalty available per violation”. The USDA did not immediately respond to request for comment.
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