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Demonstrators livestream a protest via smartphones in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago on June 1, 2020. (photo: Javage Logan/Getty)
Internal documents also reveal that police can take over informants’ social media accounts and pose as them online.
What he did next would become important for a little-known CPD task force overseen by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Called the Social Media Exploitation, or SOMEX, team, the task force had been set up to help the FBI find informants and intelligence using information gleaned from social sites. The Intercept and Chicago-based transparency groups obtained more than 800 pages of emails and other documents about the team through public records requests. These show that the team’s officers were given broad leeway to investigate people across platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, using fake social media accounts furnished by the FBI, in violation of some platforms’ policies. Campbell’s work would be held up as a model for the team.
“Found This POS”
Across the United States, federal and local authorities were combing social sites for scraps of information, disseminating alarmist notices about “revolutionary anti-capitalist” gatherings, suburban candlelight vigils, and children’s peace marches. Campbell thought maybe he could identify the man in the Joker mask. In the comments beneath the tweet, people had noted the man’s unusual tattoos: scrawled across his neck was the word “PRETTY.” At 5:09 a.m., the police officer believed he had found a match. Campbell emailed the Crime Prevention and Information Center, or CPIC, a Chicago-area fusion center set up for sharing intelligence among police and federal agencies. “Did a little digging and found this POS,” he wrote, using an abbreviation for “piece of shit.” He did not say how.
Campbell determined that the man in the tweet was Chicago resident Timothy O’Donnell. A few hours later, his tip was turned into a Suspicious Activity Report, or SAR, and entered into the FBI’s eGuardian system, through which law enforcement agencies share threats. Soon after, officers searched O’Donnell’s apartment. In a bedroom they found a Joker mask.
O’Donnell was charged with arson. In February, following nearly two years in custody, he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of civil disorder. A 2021 report by Chicago’s Office of Inspector General found that the night of the fire, police had kettled protesters in an area with many department vehicles, potentially contributing to the damage. “He was a target, really simply, because he had a mask on his face,” said O’Donnell’s attorney, Michael Leonard, who said that surveillance camera footage shows dozens of other people trying to damage the police car. “This was about the guy in the Joker mask because he was seen in photos, and that’s sexy from a police standpoint.”
Documents back up the claim that Chicago police were keen to work with sensational social media imagery. In the hours after Campbell sent in his tip, congratulatory emails pinged through the department. The context surrounding his email to CPIC suggests that Campbell had done his research while off-duty, which would have been a violation of department policy. But supervisors focused on his success. “Nice use of social media,” wrote a lieutenant. Although Campbell belonged to another part of the department, his sleuth work was celebrated by the SOMEX task force supervisors.
“This is a great job! Awesome work,” emailed a sergeant, later adding, “This is what I was talking about using our SOMEX teams for.”
By any measure, the week that followed George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer was an intense moment in Chicago’s — and U.S. — history. Thousands of people took to the city’s streets to peacefully demonstrate against police violence, marching along Lake Shore Drive and gathering outside the Trump Hotel. Despite ample warning, the Office of Inspector General report found, Chicago’s police were unprepared. When they did react, their response was chaotic and excessively violent, with officers variously hiding their badge numbers, turning off their body cameras, blasting people with pepper spray at close range, bantering about shooting people who were fleeing police in the head, and telling an arrestee that they would be raped in jail.
The SOMEX team’s reaction was also troubling. Ostensibly, the team’s mission was to provide both the FBI and the CPD with useful intelligence. But the documents show what the SOMEX officers did instead: flag potential damage of police cars, investigate the social media connections of people who had made threats online, and cull videos for the department’s YouTube channel. In a few instances, they also circulated posts about upcoming demonstrations, including an event called Northside Protest for Black Lives.
SOMEX team supervisors did not apparently see this as a failure, though. Documents show that in the protests and their aftermath, commanding officers spotted an opportunity to prove the recently established task force’s worth. They had officers trawl social media for posts that appeared to show arson or destruction of police property, with an eye toward finding footage for so-called seeking to identify videos – basically, “Wanted” videos — to be disseminated on the YouTube channel. They also deepened partnerships with surveillance tech outfits, including Amazon Ring.
Taken together, the documents are a rare window into the daily work of secretive social media investigators, whose ranks have grown within both local police departments and the FBI. They show Chicago police merging open-source intelligence, or information available to the public, with invasive online undercover work and granular data procured using surveillance tech. They also raise troubling questions at a moment when courts and civil liberties advocates are challenging the reach of powerful new policing tools.
“This is surveillance in the digital age,” said Matthew Guariglia, an historian and policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which for years has tracked the use of fake social media accounts by police and federal agencies. The pressure to identify threats and preserve “Wanted” videos raises the specter of police assuming guilt by association, he noted. “The real fear is that people who have done nothing wrong are going to be punished and face reprisals for just being in proximity.”
Freddy Martinez, a founder and organizer with the police accountability nonprofit Lucy Parsons Lab, noted that CPD has a poor track record of interpreting the meaning of online posts. Lucy Parsons Lab found that the department has surveilled residents who were simply grieving for loved ones who had died due to violence in the city. “There’s a lot of context that is lost online, and it makes it challenging to discern motive,” he said. “Is this a meme, is this a reference to something online? Social media monitoring is a tool that lends itself to potential abuse because it flattens that context into a thin window.”
The documents show that SOMEX officers have broad leeway to investigate people using online aliases. According to the special order that established the task force in 2019, the FBI can provide officers with fake accounts or “alias identities.” Elsewhere, the document says that fake profiles must use “uniquely created” photos — presumably images generated by AI. Officers are even allowed to take full control of informants’ online identities and, with permission, pose as them in their social media investigations.
A 2019 CPD special order, obtained by Transparency Chicago, establishing the SOMEX Team.
The order defines social media broadly to include dating sites, delivery apps, online shopping, and “any and all online communication sites known and unknown which collect user data.” It says that the FBI helps oversee the team’s day-to-day work, noting, “The FBI will detail personnel to assist in the implementation of the SOMEX Team.” The emails obtained by The Intercept suggest that during the George Floyd protests, some of the task force’s plans were in fact relayed to the FBI.
“I’ve never seen an internal police department policy that seems to abdicate authority to the FBI like this,” said Michael German, a former undercover FBI agent and a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice. “These types of policies rarely come into public view this way.” But in general, he noted, the FBI has a long-standing interest in monitoring social media. “We know that they’re collecting massive amounts of information about people based on no suspicion of wrongdoing.”
The FBI also uses the term “SOMEX” at the national level. It recently inked a $27.6 million contract for software for social media surveillance, the Washington Post reported in April. The contract covers 5,000 licenses to use Babel X, a software made by surveillance tech company Babel Street that allows users to search social media within bounded geographic areas. The call for bids that preceded the contract says it is “intended to satisfy the gaps in the FBI’s SOMEX capabilities.”
The FBI had sought software that could retrieve data within eight minutes of it being posted “from as many websites as possible, in a low-footprint and/or anonymous manner” and retain it for at least a year, according to the tender document. The bureau outlined plans for the software to be used by employees logging in with “generic accounts which do not indicate name or affiliation of the users.”
The FBI also has a Social Media Exploitation Team within the National Threat Operations Center in Clarksburg, West Virginia, that “addresses online threats to life from social media associated with unknown subjects, victims, and locations,” according to the 2020 annual report of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division.
To what degree that national SOMEX team works with the Chicago task force is unclear. The Intercept also could not determine whether the FBI has similar task forces with other police departments, as is the case with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces. A bureau spokesperson did not respond to a list of detailed questions about the Chicago SOMEX task force and the national SOMEX team, instead sending a statement: “The FBI works with its federal, state, local, tribal and territorial law enforcement partners in task forces across the country in order to detect, investigate, and disrupt federal crimes and threats to national security and to protect the American people. In every instance, the FBI’s investigative activity complies with Department of Justice guidelines, applicable laws and the United States Constitution. The FBI does not investigate or collect information on solely First Amendment protected activity.”
From the Chicago Police Department, The Intercept obtained SOMEX emails from May-June 2020 and November 2021. The SOMEX team order was obtained by Transparency Chicago, and the SAR that Campbell sent to the fusion center was obtained by the Policing in Chicago Research Group at University of Illinois at Chicago. All of the documents were released following public records requests.
According to the order, Chicago’s SOMEX officers can interact with people online using fake profiles or assumed identities only after submitting a written request. But police are permitted to use fake profiles to “friend” targets and like posts under a broader range of conditions.
CPD declined to comment. Campbell did not respond to requests for comment sent to his department email.
Conventional undercover work is also prone to abuse. But when police go undercover in real life, says Rachel Levinson-Waldman, deputy director with the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program, “They have one persona. That persona has to be fairly well developed. It has to be really consistent. They can’t show up at a meeting on one side of town as one person and then go to a meeting on the other side of town as another person.” Fake online profiles are “a force multiplier,” she said. “You can sit at your desk and gin up a lot of covert identities.”
And in some circumstances, officers on the SOMEX team are allowed to take their fake online personae into the real world, to interact with targets in person.
Guariglia, of Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the SOMEX documents reminded him of the 1908 G.K. Chesterton novel ‘‘The Man Who Was Thursday,” about an anarchist council that turns out to be primarily comprised of undercover cops. “I can imagine one Chicago activist whose twelve Facebook friends are all different agencies’ undercover identities,” he said.
“A Great Mission”
As protests against police violence grew, CPD’s response remained scattered. Officers would later it describe it as “whack-a-mole.” But on May 30, the day that O’Donnell was photographed wearing a Joker mask, CPD leaders hatched a half-hearted plan. They told officers across the department to ready their riot gear. “All RDOs are canceled,” read an email from a lieutenant, referring to regular days off. Going forward, shifts would stretch to 12 hours. Even the SOMEX team’s digital investigators had to prepare. “In uniform,” wrote Sgt. Patrick Kinney, a former homicide detective who serves as one of the team’s supervisors, to his officers. “Make sure you have your helmets and batons.”
Kinney saw a bright side to the demonstrations: They were an opportunity to show the value of his team’s digital investigations. The task force officers had begun archiving social media footage showing potential destruction of property. “I think this will be a great mission for the SOMEX and help to highlight their need,” Kinney wrote to other commanding officers about the effort.
A SOMEX team sergeant discusses archiving social media footage during the George Floyd protests.
CPD Bureau of Detectives Chief Brendan Deenihan had meanwhile given Kinney and other supervisors an additional goal. He wanted their teams to each cull two “Wanted” videos per week from social media. Even as Kinney privately worried about pushback from overworked officers, he tried to convince his team that the quota would be easy to meet. “This only works and becomes less cumbersome if everyone does their due diligence and enters possible videos into the list,” he wrote. “For example, if you pull video for and [sic] shooting and the video captures the suspect or a vehicle used enter it onto the list. … This is not a heavy lift.”
Kinney did not respond to requests for comment sent to his department email.
The SOMEX team is housed within CPD’s Bureau of Detectives. As of May 2021, according to a roster obtained by Transparency Chicago, the SOMEX task force had 15 officers, in addition to the commanding officers. But its work overlaps with that of the department’s two Area Technology Centers, data-driven policing centers that local news outlets report were set up with funding from hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin.
CPD has been surveilling social media for over a decade, as The Intercept previously reported. It has even monitored social media use in public schools, an investigation by ProPublica and WBEZ Chicago found. The department has had a procedure for approving covert accounts since at least 2014, according to a document obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois in a public records lawsuit. “Young Black and brown people who are heavily policed are aware that cops use fake accounts,” said Maira Khwaja, who directs public impact strategy and outreach for Chicago’s Invisible Institute, a nonprofit investigative group. “There are always jokes on how to detect that someone’s a cop online — like someone asking obviously about drugs.” In Memphis, police have been accused of snooping on Black Lives Matter activists and their friends using a fake persona improbably named Bob Smith.
Fake profiles violate Facebook’s authenticity policy, and on occasion police departments have gotten into trouble for using them. Following attention from the press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Facebook changed its law enforcement guidelines and asked two police departments to stop using fake profiles. But abuses remain, on Facebook and on other platforms. In April, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights released a report criticizing the Minneapolis Police Department for not having a policy “to ensure that covert accounts are being used for legitimate investigative purposes, and not, for instance, to send messages to City Council Members criticizing them.”
The SOMEX task force appears to be an attempt to formalize CPD online undercover work. Documents show that the FBI keeps records of the fake identities it assigns to officers, giving them tracking numbers called Confidential Alias Numbers.
Roy L. Austin Jr., vice president and deputy general counsel for civil rights at Facebook’s parent company Meta, said there are no exceptions to Facebook’s authenticity policy, even for the FBI. “It is absolutely a violation of our policies to create a fake account, for any reason, no matter who you are,” he said. “ We require everyone, including law enforcement authorities, to use their authentic names on Facebook and we make this policy clear in our Community Standards. It is our intention to make sure that people can continue using our platforms free from unlawful surveillance by the government or agents acting in inauthentic ways.”
But documents make clear that CPD’s SOMEX officers routinely use fake Facebook profiles.
In March 2019, SOMEX officers repeatedly used Facebook aliases in the investigation of actor Jussie Smollett, who was accused of fabricating his own assault. Files from Smollett’s case that were unsealed by the Circuit Court of Cook County show that SOMEX officers assumed fake identities even for routine searches. An intelligence report from the case describing research on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, for example, says that a detective “logged on to the Internet through a non-attributable computer, utilizing departmental approved covert account AC08, with the Internet Protocol (IP) address of [REDACTED] which resolved to Chicago, IL.”
The documents show that SOMEX officers can also take over the accounts of informants, or what the department euphemistically calls “social media assets.” The department has a form that informants fill out to grant police use of their online identity. The form gives police full account access, even allowing CPD to change an informant’s password so that they cannot log into their account. “I find that totally astonishing,” said Levinson-Waldman, of the Brennan Center.
Following the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, FBI Director Christopher Wray claimed that the bureau had failed to act swiftly because it lacked the ability to fully monitor social media. “What we can’t do on social media is, without proper predication and an authorized purpose, just monitor ‘just in case’ on social media,” he told Congress last summer, in response to a question from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. He added, “Now, if the policies should be changed to reflect that — that might be one of the important lessons learned coming out of this whole experience. But that’s not something that currently the FBI has either the authority or certainly the resources frankly to do.”
“That is false,” said German, the former FBI agent, who noted that FBI agents have been able to do online research without any criminal predicate since 2002. (According to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office report, social media companies also tipped off the FBI to potential violence at the Capitol.) “Whenever they are criticized for failing to protect Americans, rather than allow an investigation of how they’re using or misusing the authorities they have, FBI blames it on a lack of authority, because that makes it easier for a policymaker to say, ‘OK, we’ll give them new authority,’” he said. Following Wray’s pitch, the bureau released the call for bids for SOMEX software, though the contract followed on FBI use of other social media surveillance software.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, too, has claimed that police need more resources for social media surveillance. In August 2020, she announced the creation of a second social media team: a 20-person unit within CPIC, the fusion center, tasked with keeping round-the-clock tabs on social sites to identify potential property damage. “As we’ve seen over these past few months, social media platforms have repeatedly been used to organize large groups of people to engage in illegal activity,” she said.
But the emails show just how many fancy tools police in Chicago already had at their disposal. During the George Floyd protests, an Amazon Ring account representative gave Kinney’s officers a virtual presentation on how to use a police interface in Ring’s Neighbors, an app that combines the neighborhood vigilantism of Nextdoor with linked surveillance devices. Afterward, Kinney emailed the representative, asking that he add one officer to the service. “Thanks for going over the platform today,” he wrote. “My team expressed how excited they are to use it.” (Ring has come under fire elsewhere for aiding police during the protests; in Los Angeles, for example, the company helped police seek Ring footage of the demonstrations from customers of the home camera system.) A Ring spokesperson said that CPD was “activated” on the Neighbors police interface in September 2020 and that the emails obtained by The Intercept “are part of the standard onboarding process.”
Emails from November 2021, meanwhile, show that Area Technology Centers officers, including some on the SOMEX team, used GeoTime, a geolocation tool made by Uncharted Software, and that they were exploring joining Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader and camera network after the company offered them free accounts.
One incident from the George Floyd protests shows how SOMEX investigations could easily ensnare the innocent. On May 28, 2020, CPD learned of a man who had threatened to kill police and burn down a precinct. According to the Office of the Inspector General report, the threat had been identified by the fusion center, CPIC, on “open source social media” and had caught the attention of Lightfoot, who asked what was being done. A SOMEX officer checked the man’s Facebook accounts. One account was private, and a second account had last been updated in 2017. Other social sites turned up little. “There is nothing on his Instagram page either,” wrote the investigator. “Only five posts and nothing related to the police department.” The officer, who is unnamed in the emails obtained by The Intercept, went on to dig into the man’s social media contacts: “I took the liberty in observing public posts made by his friends.”
That sort of logic is troubling, said Guariglia. “Your tweets could end up under police scrutiny — which obviously opens you up for potential reprisals or retribution for your political opinions — just because a friend of yours attended a protest.”
Emails from the first week of the George Floyd protests show that officers amassed a large volume of content. They captured so much social media footage, in fact, that Kinney complained that they were running out of storage.
Of the SOMEX team work described in available documents from that week, the unmasking of the Joker appears to be the only research that resulted in criminal charges. But officers did achieve one goal: The Chicago Police Department published over a dozen “Wanted” videos on its YouTube channel. The videos zoom in on people’s faces. Overlaid, in red, is text that reads, “If you see these individuals do not approach. Call 911.”
Documents published with this article:
Chicago Police Department SOMEX George Floyd protests emails — a great mission
Chicago Police Department SOMEX team ATC emails — Ring
Chicago Police Department SOMEX team George Floyd protests emails — worries about pushback
Chicago Police Department SOMEX team George Floyd protests emails — capturing videos for YouTube
Chicago Police Department SOMEX team emails — RDOs are canceled
Chicago Police Department SOMEX team ATC 11-2021 emails
Jussie Smollett Chicago Police Department SOMEX report
Chicago Police Department SOMEX George Floyd Protests — Examining Social Networks
Chicago Police Department Social Media Policies 2014-2015
CPIC fusion center – Suspicious Activity Report 2020-00044 – George Floyd protests
Lynda DePiero is on the hook for nearly $435,000 after she accepted about $47,000 in benefits to which the government said she was not entitled. (photo: Mark Makela/The Washington Post)
The remarkable penalties led to tumult inside the office of Inspector General Gail Ennis, where a whistleblower was targeted for retaliation, an administrative judge found
Deckman told the agents she thought the $1,400 check deposited each month into an account to which she had access was a payment for land her partner had sold in Michigan. She spent the money on rent and clothes and gifts for her grandchildren, she said.
The inspector general’s office, which investigates disability fraud and tries to recoup money for the government, ultimately charged her $119,392 — nearly three times what she received in error.
Deckman didn’t have the money. So the Social Security Administration garnished the entire $704 check she was going to receive every month when she retired from her minimum-wage job flipping burgers at the convenience store in her local Rebel gas station. She can apply for retirement in 2032 — when she’s 83.
“I’m going to be dead by then,” Deckman said. “They’re taking away my Social Security. They’re charging me so much. Do they think I can afford a lawyer to fight this?” At 73, she continues to work, because she says she has to.
The inflated fees were set in motion during the Trump administration, when attorneys in charge of a little-known anti-fraud program run by the inspector general’s office levied unprecedented fines against Deckman and more than 100 other beneficiaries without due process, according to interviews, documents and sworn testimony before an administrative law judge. In doing so, they disregarded regulations and deviated from how the program had recovered money since its inception in 1995, failing to take into account someone’s financial state, their age, their intentions and level of remorse, among other factors.
The sums demanded by the government stunned those accused of fraud. The unusual penalties were not the only break with how the Civil Monetary Penalty program had previously been conducted: Unlike in the past, the chief counsel also directed staff attorneys to charge those affected as much as twice the money they had received in error, on top of the fines, interviews and court testimony show.
The escalating penalties created a giant jump — at least on paper — in the amount of money the inspector general could show lawmakers it was bringing in, according to interviews and sworn testimony obtained by The Washington Post. Fines as high as hundreds of thousands of dollars were imposed on poor, disabled and elderly people, many of whom had no hope of ever being able to pay.
A Chicago woman was fined $132,000 after wrongly receiving as much as $10,618 in benefits, according to internal data of penalties and assessments obtained by The Post. A Denver woman was sanctioned $168,000 after cashing as much as $14,960 in wrongly received checks. A New Jersey woman is on the hook for nearly $435,000 after she accepted about $47,000 in benefits but failed to report a $120,000 house she inherited from her father and car loans she co-signed for her children, on what she said was a lawyer’s advice.
Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), who leads the government operations panel on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, called the penalties “a cheap, easy way of getting enforcement up.”
“These cases are not willful crimes,” he said. “Shouldn’t the punishment fit the crime?”
Over a seven-month period ending in mid-2019, 83 people were charged a total of $11.5 million, the documents obtained by The Post show — a jump from less than $700,000 for all of 2017. It is not clear whether that is a full accounting of those affected by the practice of imposing stepped-up fines, which was halted by the inspector general’s office last year amid ongoing whistleblower complaints.
This account is based on interviews with 18 current and former Social Security employees, congressional officials, advocates for the disabled and beneficiaries, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The remarkable penalties led to tumult inside the Office of Inspector General Gail Ennis, where a whistleblower was targeted for retaliation, according to a ruling this month by the administrative judge at the Merit Systems Protection Board.
Ennis, who was sworn in as a Trump appointee in January 2019, declined an interview request but said in a written statement that her office is “unaware of any basis that supports the statement that unprecedented fines have been imposed.”
Ennis wrote that the civil monetary program is administered by “the Counsel to the Inspector General, not the Inspector General.” She said no penalty in recent years has been reduced or overturned by an internal appeals board for being excessive. However, cases rarely make it to the board, the last resort when an appeal to an administrative law judge fails.
Inside Ennis’s office, two officials raised concerns about the fees to her and her top staff, according to interviews and court testimony: Deborah Shaw, considered the program’s most knowledgeable, experienced attorney, who testified in September that she was directed by her bosses to issue penalties she found unconscionable; and veteran senior executive Joscelyn Funnié.
Ennis told them that she would not renegotiate any cases because she did not want to draw attention to the program and worried that Social Security would take it away from her office, according to testimony and four people familiar with her comments during a staff meeting.
After they repeatedly pressed to have cases reexamined and the penalties lowered, Shaw and Funnié were escorted out of the agency’s headquarters in Woodlawn, Md., in September 2019 and placed on paid leave. Ennis then fired Funnié, who had also raised separate concerns to her about what she believed were improper hiring actions she took and directed that Shaw, who was also threatened with suspension, be demoted, according to hearing transcripts and people familiar with their cases.
In a May 6 ruling, Judge Craig A. Berg found that Shaw was the victim of a “prima facie case of whistleblower reprisal” by Ennis’s office and ordered the agency to restore back pay and benefits and reinstate her as a supervisor.
Shaw “has shown that she had a reasonable belief she was disclosing an abuse of authority when she raised issues with the drastic increase in penalties the [Civil Monetary Penalty] program was assessing ...” Berg wrote in a 68-page decision. He found “significant evidence” that Ennis and her top staff “had motive to retaliate” against Shaw as she became a “vocal advocate” to reopen 83 cases whose penalties she believed were excessive.
In a statement before the ruling, Ennis said she had never retaliated “against any employee.” After the judge’s decision, her spokeswoman, Rebecca Rose, said in an email, “We disagree with the decision and we are evaluating options for next steps in this case.”
In a email to The Post, Shaw said, “As a 27-year public servant who cares deeply about the Inspector General’s oversight mission, I had no choice but to speak up when I witnessed the corruption of an anti-fraud program I helped build.”
“While I strongly believe that those who commit fraud against public entitlement programs deserve to be held accountable, I also believe that each person accused of misconduct deserves due process,” she added.
Shaw testified that she was shocked when she was directed in early 2019 to issue a penalty of $176,000 to a woman who had already written a check for $26,000 to repay the government the entire amount she had wrongly received in disability benefits. Before she was placed on leave, Shaw was able to dismiss or settle about 23 cases with high proposed fines that were already in the appeals process. But that left at least 83 cases that she thought merited review, interviews and testimony show.
The week after her hearing before the merit board, Shaw learned that a file she was ostensibly put on leave for losing was never misplaced at all, but had reappeared in the mailbox of the inspector general’s Office of Investigations, according to two people familiar with the incident.
Funnié was out of work for almost two years before she settled a similar claim of retaliation late last year with Ennis’s office, which had originally told her she was being fired for asking for a postponement in a court case. She is now back as a special adviser, but her duties have been restricted to tasks below her experience level, according to two people familiar with her situation. Funnié declined to comment.
Ennis’s staff issued new guidelines for the fraud program beginning late last year after the whistleblowers lodged their concerns, recommending a single fine of $2,300 to $7,000 in cases where the accused settle. But scores of those who came under scrutiny in 2018 continue to owe disproportionately high fines.
Advocates for those fined said they could not fathom how the government expected to recoup such large sums of money from people who generally live below the poverty line.
“Any penalties that impact poor people that don’t take into account their circumstances are unfair, particularly when there are policies in place that require this,” said Jonathan Stein, a longtime disability advocate who is of counsel to Philadelphia-based Community Legal Services.
The troubled anti-fraud program is one in a multitude of controversies roiling Social Security’s 500-person internal watchdog division, charged with oversight of the agency that distributes retirement benefits to 69 million Americans and monthly disability checks to about 15 million others.
Ennis’s office, with a $112 million budget, published 46 staff audits and reports of Social Security operations and performance in 2021, interviews and records show — less than two-thirds of its output in 2017 and 2018. Some early pandemic oversight work took a year to get underway.
Dozens of senior auditors, investigators and other staff have quit or retired, many in frustration with what they describe as Ennis’s mercurial leadership and lack of focus on the office’s mission, according to current and former staff members. The Office of Audit has lost 35 auditors since March 2019, almost double the number who resigned in the prior three years. In recent months, multiple supervisory law enforcement agents and the heads of investigations and digital evidence units quit, following an exodus in which some took demotions to accelerate their departures.
Ennis, in her statement, said she is committed to addressing issues affecting employee morale, which dipped to its lowest point since 2014 in a new survey of the federal workforce. She cited expanded recruitment efforts, particularly to find diverse job candidates, regular meetings to foster informal engagement and other efforts. Her spokeswoman, in an email, blamed the departures on a “normal and expected increase in attrition” as a result of leadership changes and the shift to remote work during the pandemic.
Ennis, a former WilmerHale attorney, also wrote that the number of audits “does not sufficiently capture the value the OIG provides to taxpayers” and said her office’s productivity has remained consistently above the average for the federal watchdog community.
Congress created the civil penalty program with bipartisan support to help Social Security recover benefits paid in error in its two antipoverty programs for low-income elderly Americans and those with disabilities. These have long been considered vulnerable to fraud since they rely on beneficiaries to report any changes that would disqualify them.
Civil fines provide an alternative when fraud is considered too insignificant to warrant criminal prosecution by the Justice Department. The fines act, in theory, as a deterrent to misconduct. Starting in 2015, Congress allowed the office to update the maximum penalties by a small amount each year in line with inflation. By 2018, the cap was $8,250, meaning that someone could be charged that amount for each wrongly received benefit check. But until the Trump administration, the full amount was rarely — if ever — imposed, according to people familiar with the program. Doing so was viewed as excessive punishment for a low-income and disabled population, according to current and former employees.
Twice a year, the inspector general reports to Congress how much money it has assessed to those it has accused of wrongdoing. By 2017, the amount had plummeted to less than $1 million from a peak of $20 million years earlier, according to the reports.
At the time, the program was run by Ennis’s predecessor, acting Inspector General Gale Stone, a career auditor. Stone asked her chief counsel, Joseph Gangloff, how he planned to reinvigorate the program, according to Gangloff and another person familiar with the conversation.
Gangloff directed his staff to increase penalties, attributing the demand to pressure from Stone and from lawmakers on Capitol Hill, according to current and former employees, who said they did not have any indications that lawmakers were concerned about how much the program was recovering. Stone declined to comment.
The counsel also did away with the financial disclosure forms the office had sent for two decades to those it accused of fraud in order to determine how much they would be charged. Deckman, for example, said she did not receive a form asking her to list the details of her finances, even though the final letter she received in July 2018 laying out what she owed said it was taken into account.
Gangloff also stopped issuing notices of any payments due by certified mail, a practice designed to ensure that people were properly notified of what the government claimed they owed and could appeal, according to interviews and testimony.
In an interview, Gangloff said the program suffered from a “lack of consistency” when he arrived as chief counsel in 2015 and that by raising penalties, “we tried to create a very transparent, consistent process.”
“I think there was a significant pressure both from Congress and the inspector general to increase the fines. … I thought congressional oversight would focus on this issues,” he said.
The higher fines were still “well below” the maximum set by Congress, Gangloff said. He did not think that notifying beneficiaries by certified mail was mandated by regulation, he said. In fact, the regulation does call for such notification. Gangloff said he stopped sending financial disclosure forms because someone filling them out could easily omit something and “be criminally liable.” He retired at the end of 2019.
Those accused of fraud have 60 days to file an appeal. Most of the 83 did not or contacted the office past the deadline, records show. Six people reached by The Post had missed the deadline and said they didn’t know they could appeal or were told they had forfeited that right.
One was Lydia DePiero, the New Jersey woman who was told in December 2018 she owed $434,935 — nearly 80 percent of it in fines to compensate the government for several years of benefits to which the agency said she was not entitled.
“I feel like I got thrown in a pot of boiling water,” DePiero said of her reaction to the demand she received, signed by Gangloff. “I’m twisted in something I can’t get out of.”
DePiero, 55, said she has learning disabilities and back pain stemming from a leg damaged from birth. A single mother of five children, she had fought through eight years of appeals to win a $1,600 monthly benefit. Soon before her final appeal was heard, her parents died, DePiero said, and she asked the lawyer she had hired on contingency if inheriting their homes would put her benefits in jeopardy. He told her not to worry about it, she said. But while inheriting one house did not count against her benefits, the second did, along with several vehicles for which DePiero said she was signatory for car loans for her children.
“I know it all falls on me, even though he told me not to worry about it,” she said.
DePiero made several calls to the inspector general’s office before her appeal window closed, phone records show. But by the time she connected with an attorney there, it was two days after the deadline. She said she was told it was not possible to appeal the charges.
Her disability checks were diverted to pay her debt. DePiero found work during the pandemic in warehouses loading boxes, but back pain caused her to quit. She now lives on a monthly $1,502.70 disability check from UPS, she said. It will take her more than 22 years to pay back what the inspector general’s office told her she owes the government.
India Walton, the former socialist challenger to Buffalo's four-term incumbent mayor Byron Brown. (photo: India Walton)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
We turn now to Buffalo, where the first funeral is being held today for the victims of Saturday’s massacre, when an 18-year-old white supremacist opened fire on a grocery store in the heart of Buffalo’s Black community. The gunman shot dead 10 people, all African American. Today’s funeral is for 68-year-old Heyward Patterson. He was a deacon at the Tabernacle Church of God, known for giving rides to people who needed to shop at Tops, where Saturday’s attack took place.
We’re going back now to India Walton, longtime Buffalo community activist. She ran for mayor of Buffalo last year, works for the Working Families Party and RootsAction.
India, we talked to you on Monday, right after the massacre. And at the end of this week, we wanted to go back to you. It was horrifying as I laid out the names of the victims as we knew them at that point on Monday. In that list was Kat Massey, and you were hearing that for the first time at that moment. Again, our condolences. Can you talk about, at this point, a week later, six days later, how the community is dealing and who the people are who have died and what you think needs to be done?
INDIA WALTON: Thanks, Amy.
The community has come together. Buffalo really is a place of resilience, of deep community, of mutual aid. We’ve seen, time and time again, when tragedies happen, and even on a day-to-day, we take care of each other. So, the outpouring of support from agencies and individuals, from all over other municipalities, localities and all over the country and world, has really been overwhelming.
My question is: What happens when the cameras leave? How do we continue to support people who have been negatively impacted? I walked around the neighborhood yesterday and talked to folks who were just out sitting on their porches and walking through the streets, who were saying that, you know, they didn’t want to go back into that store. I talked to a young man whose mother shopped in that Tops, who hasn’t left the house since the incident happened. So we really have to make sure that the support is long-lasting and that we have our eye toward the systemic change that has to occur in east Buffalo and for Black people in this community.
AMY GOODMAN: So, the suspect appeared in court yesterday. Some of those who lost loved ones were in the courtroom. Can you talk about that scene?
INDIA WALTON: I didn’t go. I’ve been making myself scarce from a lot of situations, because I have a difficult time dealing with this emotionally. I’m still very, very angry. And I know that the families are feeling a lot of anger. But to know that he is being brought to court with a bulletproof vest on, it just — I’m curious as to who is being most protected in this situation and, you know, why it seems like the accused is being protected more than these families.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to President Biden, who visited your city of Buffalo on Tuesday, three days after the massacre. This is what Biden said. He denounced the attack as an act of domestic terrorism, describing white supremacy as a “poison.”
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Look, we’ve seen the mass shootings in Charleston, South Carolina; El Paso, Texas; in Pittsburgh; last year in Atlanta; this week in Dallas, Texas; and now in Buffalo — in Buffalo, New York. White supremacy is a poison. It’s a poison running through — it really is.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response, India, what you heard, what you want to hear, and also the response to the House of Representatives approving a bill aimed at combating domestic terrorism, passed by a vote of 222 to 203? Only one Republican congressmember supported the bill, joining the Democrats.
INDIA WALTON: Yeah, our Republican congressmember did not, by the way. And white supremacy is a poison. It is also in the foundation and DNA of this country. You know, the lone wolf narrative is untrue. This type of behavior is being bred. It’s being encouraged. And the stories of the people who are most impacted are being overshadowed by people who are using this as a moment of political — for political gain for themselves. And it’s disheartening. I’m trying to be very careful with the words that I use this morning.
I don’t want to hear anything. I want to see action. I want to see legislation. I want to see investments made in communities, so that every person is allowed to be self-determined. I want to see employers like Tops pay their employees a living wage, so people are not in disparate poverty. I want to see Black communities actually protected and valued. I want to see banks lend mortgages to families of color and give business financing so that we don’t have to depend on a single corporation for all of our needs in our community. I want to see solutions. I want to see something change, right?
At the press conference yesterday, the CEO of Tops said that there are no plans to put more stores on the East Side of Buffalo. The mayor said that his solution in his budget was more money for police and this failed ShotSpotter technology, where we’re seeing that in the moment people are saying white supremacy is a poison, but then they go back and they do the same things that uphold this white supremacist system.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to take each of what you just said. You tweeted this week about what you’re just talking about. You went to a hearing on the Buffalo budget that was focused on adding $900,000 to the police budget for the purchase of ShotSpotter, an artificial intelligence tool that finds sounds that resemble gunshots and alerts police officers. You wrote your biggest concern is that it doesn’t work. Explain.
INDIA WALTON: Multiple studies show that it doesn’t work. It picks up sounds like helicopters, hammers, backfires from cars, fireworks, and identifies it as gunshots. The most effective way to identify when a shooting happens is a person calling 911 dispatch. ShotSpotter has been proven time and time again to be not only the impetus of unnecessary police presence in certain neighborhoods, but in Rochester, the Rochester Police Department was able to get ShotSpotter to change the classification of a sound that it heard in an attempt to frame a Black man that they shot down for attempted murder on a police officer. It was proven. He was exonerated. But incidents like this is what we should be paying attention to when we make these types of decisions. And these technologies are not what decreases gun violence in communities. What decreases gun violence, particularly in places like east Buffalo, is going to be good living-wage jobs, affordable housing, a quality education and access to the basic needs that this community has lacked for so long.
AMY GOODMAN: India, can you talk about this 911 call that has become famous now? You have a Tops worker who’s whispering into the phone, trying to describe what’s happening, and the dispatcher yells at the worker because they’re whispering and hangs up on them? This is in the midst of the massacre.
INDIA WALTON: This, again, is just a symptom of a disease that we have, especially in western New York, about the way our public servants treat people who are asking for help and assistance.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me go to the clip. This was played on Buffalo TV station WGRZ. The worker, Latisha Rogers, an assistant office manager at Tops supermarket, describes what happened.
LATISHA ROGERS: I didn’t really see much at all. I just heard the gunshots and just dropped down to the ground and just waited for him to stop. And he just wouldn’t stop. So, I tried to call 911, and I was whispering because I could hear him close by. And when I whispered on the phone to 911, the dispatcher started yelling at me, saying, “Why are you whispering? You don’t have to whisper.” And I’m trying to tell her, like, “Ma’am, he’s in the store. He’s shooting. It’s an active shooter. I’m scared for my life.” And she said something crazy to me, and then she hung up in my face, and I had to call my boyfriend to tell him to call 911.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Latisha Rogers. India?
INDIA WALTON: That 911 dispatcher is a civilian employee that is paid for with tax dollars. There’s no excuse for that type of treatment and that type of behavior. And I hope that a lot of these stories that are coming out about corrections officers, police officers, public servants making light of this situation — I hope that they’re all held fully accountable.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, India, can you end by talking a little more about one of the victims who you knew, the one we talked about, well, you were first stunned by on Monday, Katherine “Kat” Massey? Her funeral will be held Monday.
INDIA WALTON: Yeah, Miss Kat is going to be sorely missed, I know, by myself but also her family and this community. She was the co-founder of an organization called We Are Women Warriors. She was a mentor and supporter of me in the work that I did in the Fruit Belt, where she lived, where her family has been for many, many decades. She was always an advocate and a fighter for what is just and what is right. And I want to make sure that her legacy lives on, and I want to do all of the things I know I can do to continue to make her proud in me.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much. And again, our condolences to you, India, to the whole Buffalo community. India Walton, former Buffalo mayoral candidate, longtime community activist. Did you intimate, India, this week that you’re going to run again for office? I think she just froze, so we’ll have to get to that the next time we interview India, now a senior adviser for special projects for the Working Families Party and senior strategic organizer with RootsAction.
Next up, we look at the fight for reproductive rights as Oklahoma lawmakers approve the most sweeping abortion ban in the country. We’ll speak with The Nation’s abortion access reporter Amy Littlefield. Stay with us.
Elon Musk was accused of sexual misconduct by a SpaceX flight attendant. (photo: Andrew Kelly/Reuters)
The attendant worked as a member of the cabin crew on a contract basis for SpaceX's corporate jet fleet. She accused Musk of exposing his erect penis to her, rubbing her leg without consent, and offering to buy her a horse in exchange for an erotic massage, according to interviews and documents obtained by Insider.
The incident, which took place in 2016, is alleged in a declaration signed by a friend of the attendant and prepared in support of her claim. The details in this story are drawn from the declaration as well as other documents, including email correspondence and other records shared with Insider by the friend.
According to the declaration, the attendant confided to the friend that after taking the flight attendant job, she was encouraged to get licensed as a masseuse so that she could give Musk massages. It was during one such massage in a private cabin on Musk's Gulfstream G650ER, she told the friend, that Musk propositioned her.
After Insider contacted Musk for comment, he emailed to ask for more time to respond and said there is "a lot more to this story."
"If I were inclined to engage in sexual harassment, this is unlikely to be the first time in my entire 30-year career that it comes to light," he wrote, calling the story a "politically motivated hit piece."
Insider extended the deadline and reiterated the offer to Musk to comment on the claims. He did not respond.
Reached via cell phone, SpaceX vice president of legal Christopher Cardaci said, "I'm not going to comment on any settlement agreements." SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment to its general media contact email address.
An allegation that Musk offered a horse in exchange for an erotic massage
The flight attendant told her friend that the billionaire SpaceX and Tesla founder asked her to come to his room during a flight in late 2016 "for a full body massage," the declaration says. When she arrived, the attendant found that Musk "was completely naked except for a sheet covering the lower half of his body." During the massage, the declaration says, Musk "exposed his genitals" and then "touched her and offered to buy her a horse if she would 'do more,' referring to the performance of sex acts."
The attendant, who rides horses, declined and continued with the massage without engaging in any sexual conduct. The attendant "is not for sale," the friend's declaration said. "She is not going to perform sexual favors for money or gifts." The incident occurred during a flight to London.
In an interview with Insider, the friend described the attendant's allegations in more detail. She spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fears for her personal safety, but Insider is aware of her identity. Insider is also aware of the flight attendant's identity, but is not naming her because she has claimed to be a victim of sexual misconduct. She declined to comment for this story.
"He whipped out his penis, it was erect," the friend said, describing the allegations. "And he started propositioning her, like he touched her thigh and told her he would buy her a horse. And he basically tried to bribe her to perform some sort of sexual favor."
"Punished for refusing to prostitute herself"
The friend said that the attendant told her about the misconduct while they were on a hike together shortly after the London trip. The friend described the attendant as distraught and visibly shaken. "She was really upset," the friend said. "She didn't know what to do."
The flight attendant told her friend that work began to dry up after she refused Musk's advances. "Before the incident, she regarded Mr. Musk as a person to look up to," the declaration says. "But after he exposed himself, touched her without permission, and offered to pay her for sex, she was full of anxiety."
"She figured things could just go back to normal and she would pretend like nothing happened," the friend told Insider. "However, she started to feel as if she was receiving some sort of retaliation where her shifts were cut back, and she was starting to feel really stressed."
Eventually, the declaration says, the attendant felt "she was being pushed out and punished for refusing to prostitute herself."
Massages on demand
SpaceX places a special emphasis on massages, going so far as to employ in-house massage therapists as a perk for executives. According to the friend, the flight attendant was encouraged by her superiors to purchase her own professional massage training for her sessions with Musk.
"They encouraged her to get licensed as a masseuse, but on her own time, on her own dime," the friend said. "They implied that she would get to fly more often if she were to do this because she'd be able to give Elon proper massages. I thought that was kind of strange because — you weren't hired to be a masseuse. You were hired to be a flight attendant. And if Elon likes massages, then he should be paying for you to go to masseuse school. But she was just so happy and eager to have the job and be able to travel."
A $250,000 severance payment
In 2018, after becoming convinced that her refusal to accept Musk's proposal had diminished her opportunities at SpaceX, the attendant hired a California employment lawyer and sent a complaint to the company's human resources department detailing the episode. Around that time, the attorney's firm contacted the friend and asked her to prepare the declaration corroborating the claims.
The attendant's complaint was resolved quickly after a session with a mediator that Musk personally attended. The matter never reached a court of law or an arbitration proceeding. In November 2018, Musk, SpaceX and the flight attendant entered into a severance agreement granting the attendant a $250,000 payment in exchange for a promise not to sue over the claims.
The agreement also included restrictive non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses that bar the attendant from ever discussing the severance payment or disclosing any information of any kind about Musk and his businesses, including SpaceX and Tesla.
Musk is currently engaged in a bid to purchase Twitter driven by his professed belief that "free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy." Earlier this month, he wrote on Twitter that "sunlight is the best disinfectant."
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
"When you choose to remain silent, you become part of that system"
The friend told Insider that she decided to come forward without consulting the flight attendant because, as a survivor of sexual assault, she felt an obligation to share what she has been told about Musk. Unlike the flight attendant, her friend is not bound by any non-disclosure agreement.
"I absolutely felt a responsibility to come forward with it, especially now," she said. "He is the richest man in the world. Someone with that level of power causing that kind of harm and then throwing some money at the situation, that's not accountability. There are predators all over the world. But when someone is particularly wealthy and powerful, they literally have systems that are like a machine working for them, to set them up to be able to do whatever they want."
Remaining silent, the friend said, would make her complicit. "When you choose to remain silent, yeah, you do become a part of that system," she said. "You do become a part of that machine that allows someone like Elon Musk to continue to do the horrible things that he's done."
Non-disclosure agreements are crucial components of that machine. The friend said that before she reached out to Insider, she called the attorney who represented the victim. The attorney told her that, although she was free to speak to the press, sharing any documents from the case — including her own declaration — could put the flight attendant at risk.
"Her primary concern was clearly her client," the friend said. She recalled the attorney saying that confidentiality provisions are "bullshit" and that if any other women have been victimized by Musk, they ought to come forward. But when it came to her client, the attorney urged the friend not to share the declaration. "That would be a massive problem," she told the friend.
California, where SpaceX is headquartered, no longer permits companies to require non-disclosure clauses in agreements like the one the attendant signed. Just months after her settlement in 2018, then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law the "Stand Against Non-Disclosure Act," which bars the use of NDAs going forward in settlements involving sexual harassment, discrimination, or assault unless they are requested by the plaintiff.
The attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
"If there were a way for [her] to come forward without putting herself at risk, without jeopardizing her life in any way, I believe she would," the friend of the attendant told Insider. "I hope she feels like I did the right thing. I hope she feels I said the things that she didn't feel safe enough to say."
"I would like for the truth to be revealed"
This is the only known allegation and settlement for sexual misconduct tied personally to Musk.
Two of his companies, however, have faced allegations of sexual harassment in the past. In December 2021, the same week he was named Time's Person of the Year, four women who worked at SpaceX spoke out about sexual harassment they said they faced at the company, where Musk is the CEO. One, Ashley Kosak, published an essay recounting being groped and touched inappropriately by male employees while she was an intern. Three others — one of whom said she was bound by a non-disclosure agreement — recounted similar treatment to the New York Times.
In response to the reports, SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell sent a company-wide email saying that "timely reporting of harassment is key to our maintaining SpaceX as a great place to work; we can't fix what we don't know," the Times reported. She added that SpaceX will "rigorously investigate all harassment or discrimination claims and take rapid and appropriate action when we find our policy is violated."
And at least six women have sued Tesla, where Musk is the CEO, alleging sexual harassment at a Tesla factory. Men at the factory ogled women and remarked on their clothes, the complaints said, leading some women to wear baggy outfits and use stacks of boxes to obstruct the views of leering co-workers. Some of the women claimed they were retaliated against when they came forward.
The friend told Insider that if anyone else was mistreated by Musk, she hopes they will publicly tell their story. If there are other victims, she said, "I would like for them to come forward. I would like for the truth to be revealed."
Adel Al Manthari, then a civil servant in the Yemeni government, is treated for severe burns, a fractured hip, and serious damage to the tendons, nerves, and blood vessels in his left hand following a drone strike in Yemen in 2018. (photo: Reprieve)
Because of a broken civilian casualty compensation system, the U.S. military never made a payment to Yemeni drone strike survivor Adel Al Manthari.
Al Manthari’s feet and legs have recently blackened due to restricted blood flow, and this week a doctor told him he’s at imminent risk of developing gangrene. Al Manthari needs emergency medical care that he can’t afford. His future now rests with a GoFundMe campaign.
That the limbs — and possibly life — of a civilian drone strike victim now depend on donations to a fundraising website is due to what experts said is an inadequate, arbitrary, and broken civilian casualty investigation and compensation system that has failed victims of U.S. wars for decades.
Despite a top Pentagon spokesperson’s recent claim that the military now embraces accountability regarding civilian casualty allegations, the Department of Defense failed to provide basic information about the 2018 attack and refuses to even acknowledge pleas for assistance or compensation made on Al Manthari’s behalf, much less dip into millions of dollars in funds allocated by Congress for compensation in such cases.
“Congress cut DoD a check for millions to pay for exactly this type of scenario,” said Jennifer Gibson, a human rights lawyer and project lead on extrajudicial killing at Reprieve, an international human rights organization representing Al Manthari. “DoD’s refusal to spend even a penny of it — on Adel or any of the thousands of civilians harmed by U.S. drones — sends the message that they simply don’t care about accountability.”
In cases like Al Manthari’s, experts said that compensation is hampered by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s resistance to reassessing past allegations of civilian harm.
“It was the U.S.’s Hellfire missile that cost Adel his family and his health,” Gibson said. “It should be the U.S. that pays for the treatment to save his legs. That’s what responsible governments do. They own up to their mistakes.”
The March 29, 2018, drone strike left Al Manthari, then a civil servant in the Yemeni government, with severe burns to the left side of his body, a fractured hip, and serious damage to the tendons, nerves, and blood vessels in his left hand. The injuries left him unable to walk or work, plunged him into debt for medical treatment, and caused his daughters — aged 8 and 14 at the time of the strike — to drop out of school to care for him.
A 2018 investigation by the Associated Press and a meticulously documented 2021 report by the Yemen-based group Mwatana for Human Rights determined that the victims of the 2018 strike were civilians not, as the Pentagon claimed, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula “terrorists.” In March, Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., asked the Pentagon to open a new investigation of the airstrike that disabled Al Manthari, as well as 11 other U.S. attacks in Yemen.
If Al Manthari’s story sounds familiar, there’s a good reason. From Libya to Somalia, Syria to Yemen, the U.S. military regularly undercounts civilian casualties, according to victims’ family members, investigative journalists, and humanitarian groups that independently investigate claims. For years, exposés by journalists and NGOs have been necessary to push the Department of Defense to reinvestigate attacks and, in limited instances, acknowledge killing civilians.
Last year, for example, a New York Times investigation forced the Pentagon to admit that a “righteous strike” against a terrorist target in Afghanistan actually killed 10 civilians, seven of them children. Times reporting also exposed a 2019 airstrike in Syria that killed up to 64 noncombatants and was obscured through a multilayered coverup. And a blockbuster investigation of U.S.-led airstrikes, combining shoe-leather journalism and U.S. military documents, revealed that the air war in Iraq and Syria was marked by flawed intelligence and inaccurate targeting, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocents.
After the Times reporting recently won a Pulitzer Prize, the Defense Department offered praise and a rare admission. “We know that we had more work to do to better prevent civilian harm. And we’re doing that work,” said Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby. “We knew that we had made mistakes, we’re trying to learn from those mistakes. And we knew that we weren’t always as transparent about those mistakes as we should be.”
While Kirby was touting a sea change at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin; Anna Williams, the senior adviser for civilian protection; and Cara Negrette, the director for international humanitarian policy, had for almost a month ignored a letter asking that department to reopen the civilian casualty assessment of the March 29, 2018, strike. The letter, sent on Al Manthari’s behalf by Reprieve, asked the Pentagon to provide Al Manthari with emergency medical evacuation and funds to obtain lifesaving treatment. To this day, no one has even acknowledged — much less responded to — the request.
“It’s hard to take Mr. Kirby’s words at face value when the DoD continues to systematically evade accountability for the lives ended and wrecked by U.S. drone strikes,” said Reprieve’s Gibson. “If the Pentagon is truly committed to changing the culture of secrecy and impunity that has surrounded the U.S. drone program for the last decade, then responding to Adel’s complaint would be a start. Letting it sit on someone’s desk gathering dust while a man loses his legs screams business as usual.”
The Pentagon did not respond to a request for an interview with Kirby. Williams and Negrette both referred The Intercept to Pentagon public affairs, which promptly declined a request to interview either of them. When asked about Al Manthari’s case, a U.S. military spokesperson replied: “We have no updates.” In response to requests for basic information about the 2018 strike, Lt. Col. Karen Roxberry recommended filing a Freedom of Information Act request — a process that can take months or years to yield documents, if they are ever made available at all.
Earlier this week, after the Pulitzer announcement, Austin expressed a “commitment to transparency and accountability” in terms of civilian casualty incidents and declared that “efforts to mitigate and respond to civilian harm resulting from U.S. military operations are a direct reflection of U.S. values.” The memo followed a January memo directing subordinates to draw up a yet-to-be-released “Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan,” including a review of how the Pentagon “responds to civilian harm, including, but not limited to, condolence payments and the public acknowledgment of harm.”
For decades, the U.S. has relied upon an arbitrary and degrading system of solatia: condolence payments made ex gratia, meaning they are provided as an expression of sympathy rather than an admission of fault for civilians slain or injured during U.S. military operations.
During the Vietnam War, the going rate for an adult killed was $33. Children merited just half that. Payouts in Afghanistan ranged from as little as $124 to $15,000 for one civilian life. Despite a dedicated annual Department of Defense fund of $3 million for payments for deaths, injuries, or damages resulting from U.S. or allied military actions, payments are an increasing rarity. The Pentagon’s most recent report on civilian casualties, released last June, noted that the Defense Department “did not offer or make any such ex gratia payments during 2020.”
“The United States has repeatedly failed to acknowledge and make amends for civilian harm,” Annie Shiel, the senior adviser for U.S. policy and advocacy at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Intercept. “There are so many civilians like Adel Al Manthari and his family who are grieving the loss of loved ones, dealing with injuries and trauma, or struggling to survive after losing their homes and livelihoods — all while waiting for some kind of acknowledgement or response from the U.S. government that often never comes.”
Even if the United States had an effective system for providing reparations to victims of U.S. attacks, Austin has recently been vocal about not reevaluating past civilian casualty claims. Last month, when Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., asked whether the Pentagon was planning to revisit past civilian harm allegations, Austin replied, “At this point we don’t have an intent to re-litigate cases.” That may prove to be a death sentence for Adel Al Manthari.
At his May 10 press briefing, Kirby said that “at its very best,” the press “holds us to account.” At every turn, however, the Pentagon has concealed information and obstructed reporting efforts concerning Al Manthari’s case.
“The watchwords of the U.S. drone program,” said Gibson, “have consistently been ‘no accountability, no apology, no compensation,’ and a radical rethink is needed.”
Until then, victims like Al Manthari will need to rely on fundraising websites and the kindness of strangers to stay alive, as the Pentagon boasts about accountability while trafficking in secrecy and impunity.
The PolyMet Mining Corporation has been locked in a battle to open Minnesota's first copper-sulfide mine for over 17 years. (photo: Rob Levine)
The PolyMet Mining Corporation has been locked in a battle to open Minnesota’s first copper-sulfide mine for over 17 years.
Now, environmentalists and nearby tribal nations hope that recent court victories will shut it down for good. Earlier this month, the Army Corps of Engineers held a hearing to decide whether to reissue a permit for PolyMet to dump waste rock on more than 900 acres of wetlands, a possibility that the downstream Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa vehemently opposes. The Environmental Protection Agency came out in support of the tribe, telling the Corps that allowing the mine to go ahead with its plans would risk contaminating the already-polluted St. Louis River with dangerous levels of mercury.
As opponents highlight the mine’s environmental impact, PolyMet is touting its potential for producing valuable metals needed to build transmission lines and electric vehicle batteries — making it the latest dispute over how to responsibly mine the materials needed for the renewable energy transition. In Nevada, a lithium mine is facing stark opposition from tribes who say it would damage a culturally, historically, and spiritually significant area. Cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo have reportedly been subjected to exploitative working conditions, including by the company that owns PolyMet. At the same time, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing for an increase in domestic mining in response to supply chain issues and increased demand.
Activists say these conflicts are increasingly testing the idea of a “just transition” — one that doesn’t repeat the mistakes of the past, such as prioritizing extraction over the needs of Indigenous people and the environment, in shifting to new forms of energy.
“The Band is not opposed to mining,” Band Chairman Kevin Dupuis Sr. said in a press release on the first day of the Army Corps hearing. “But if mining is to occur, we must ensure that our waters are protected, not just for the Band, but for all Minnesotans.”
PolyMet, which is majority owned by the Swiss mining conglomerate Glencore, first unveiled plans for its Northern Minnesota mine, the NorthMet project, in 2005. Since then, it’s faced legal challenges to multiple other permits it needs to move forward, including water pollution, air pollution, and mining permits that are either tied up in litigation or have been sent back to state agencies for further study and adjustment. And it’s not the only disputed mine in Minnesota; in January, the Biden administration canceled two federal leases for the Twin Metals mine, which would have extracted copper, nickel, and precious metals near the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness.
In the last few years, PolyMet has leaned into its role as a supplier of elements needed to build electric car batteries and other renewable energy infrastructure. The company has said that the area of the NorthMet project contains significant reserves of copper, nickel, and palladium — “metals vital to global carbon reduction efforts” — and that it would become one of the country’s top suppliers once the mine becomes operational, although it can’t guarantee how much of its eventual output would go toward green energy.
“These metals that we’re producing are really crucial to not only modern society,” PolyMet spokesperson Bruce Richardson told MinnPost, but also “for clean energy and climate change and our own security.”
JT Haines, the northeastern Minnesota program director for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, called this view “problematic.” The industry is using the demand for new metals for green energy as a “safe harbor talking point,” he said, to justify destructive mining activities without addressing the core issue of consumption and extraction. Instead, Haines argued, the focus should be on how to recycle and reuse the metals that already exist while reducing consumption and energy use in the first place.
“It’s clear that we can’t mine or drive our way out of the climate crisis,” Haines said.
The contested permit at the center of the recent Army Corps hearing was issued in 2019 – despite years of opposition from the Fond du Lac Band, which as a sovereign nation has the right to set its own water quality standards and the legal status of a downstream state. Last year, following a lawsuit from the tribe, the EPA determined that the NorthMet project “may affect” water in the Fond du Lac Band’s territory as well as the state of Wisconsin, and asked the Army Corps to suspend the permit.
At the hearing on May 3, the EPA said PolyMet’s plan to dredge and fill the wetlands with mining waste could contaminate multiple waterways that drain into the St. Louis River, which flows through the tribe’s reservation near Duluth. The biggest concern is mercury, a potent neurotoxin that can be a byproduct of mining. The NorthMet project would also release sulfate, which helps convert mercury into methylmercury — the metal’s most toxic form, which accumulates in fish and other wildlife and can eventually be toxic to humans that consume it.
The St. Louis River is already one of Minnesota’s most mercury polluted waterways, and the Fond du Lac Band relies on both the river and its upstream tributaries for hunting, fishing, and gathering foods such as wild rice. While PolyMet said it would capture and treat the mine runoff to prevent mercury and sulfate pollution, the Fond du Lac Band’s scientists testified that the discharge would exceed the tribe’s water quality standards, which are more stringent than Minnesota’s.
The Army Corps is now accepting public comments through June 6, after which it will decide whether to reinstate, permanently revoke, or modify PolyMet’s permit. PolyMet did not respond to a request for comment from Grist.
Although this is the first time that a tribal nation has used its authority as a “downstream state” to challenge a federal permit that could impair its lands and water, a win in the PolyMet case could set a precedent for other tribes to do the same, said the Fond du Lac Band’s attorney, Vanessa Ray-Hodge.
“ It’s an important mechanism for tribes to be able to use and to have available to them to protect their reservation waters from development, just like other states can do all the time,” Ray-Hodge said.
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