01 June 22
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
Never mind that the verdict was "not guilty," and the special counsel appointed by Trump's attorney general was routed.
Out on the fringes of believability, where the wild vines of imagination entwine with each other to strangle common sense, the trial of one Michael Sussman has ended. He was acquitted Tuesday by a jury whose brains must hurt. From the Washington Post:
Tuesday’s verdict was a major setback for Special Counsel John Durham, who was appointed during the Trump administration and has spent three years probing whether the federal agents who investigated the 2016 Trump campaign committed wrongdoing. Sussmann was the first person charged by Durham to go to trial. Another person charged in the investigation is due to face a jury later this year.
Lord, I wish every taxpayer had a line-item veto for situations like this.
Prosecutors showed the jury emails, law-firm billing records and even a Staples receipt for thumb drives to tie Sussmann to the Clinton campaign. But Berkowitz said much of the witness testimony showed that the Clinton campaign did not want the Alfa Bank allegations taken to the FBI, because they preferred to see a news story about the issue and feared an investigation might complicate or delay such stories.
“Law-firm billing records”! Holy flashback! Anything about cattle futures or the White House travel office?
Sussman is a cybersecurity expert who was loosely connected with the HRC campaign. It is the contention of special counsel John Durham and his merry band that Sussman lied to the FBI back in 2016 in a meeting with the Bureau regarding suspicious contact between the Trump campaign and the Russian ratfcking community. Durham was appointed three years ago to conduct an investigation that was in the end guaranteed to raise money and give the Trump-enabling conservative movement some crapola to throw against the wall and see what sticks. From the New York Times:
Two prosecutors told a jury that there was no doubt that Mr. Sussmann had lied to the F.B.I. to conceal his clients — including the Clinton campaign — at the September 2016 meeting, which focused on suspicious data that cybersecurity experts said suggested the possibility of a covert communications channel between Russia and someone close to Donald J. Trump. “It wasn’t about national security,” said one of the prosecutors, Jonathan Algor. “It was about promoting opposition research against the opposition candidate — Donald Trump.”
Yes, dear friends, we’re back on this snipe hunt again. My trusty guides through this legal thicket have been Charlie Savage of the NYT and, especially, the redoubtable Marcy Wheeler, who has been poring over the court transcripts to give us all a good look at what a three-act clown show this really is. Apparently, the prosecution’s approach to the judge’s orders with which they disagree was to simply ignore them and do whatever they wanted anyway. Later on, it seemed that the judge had gotten fed up with being treated as though he were largely decorative in his own courtroom.
THE COURT: You know, I know that questions get asked rhetorically or argumentatively that are likely to draw an objection, and I will give lawyers some slack on that, but I expect both sides to comply with my evidentiary rulings. There’s a lot of evidence in this case. There’s a lot for the jury to digest. They will have plenty of validly admitted evidence to pore over, and from here on out, including in arguments, I expect both sides to comply with both the letter and the spirit of the Court’s evidentiary rulings. So let’s keep it clean from here, okay?
The whole prosecution is being played by the ol’ Clinton Rules, first established in the Whitewater kabuki of the early 1990s. Wheeler obtained a copy of what the prosecutor told the jury, and this is what Durham and his crew sought to prove.
So what will the evidence show? The evidence will show that defendant’s lie was all part of a bigger plan, a plan that the defendant carried out in concert with two clients, the Hillary Clinton Campaign and Internet executive Rodney Joffe. It was a plan to create an October surprise on the eve of the presidential election, a plan that used and manipulated the FBI, a plan that the defendant hoped would trigger negative news stories and cause an FBI investigation, a plan that largely succeeded.
The rest of the prosecution case proceeded from this talk-show rant disguised as a legal argument. However, while Dickens warned us the law may be an ass, it’s not stupid enough to fall for such an obvious bunco scheme as this. Originally, I thought they’d be raising money misleading the rubes off this verdict by EOB Wednesday. It took less than 20 minutes after the verdict before an email landed from Mar-a-Lago. The former president* wants help in suing the Pulitzer board unless it rescinds its 2018 award to the NYT and the Washington Post for their coverage of the Russian ratfcking. He was vindicated in court, he says. The grift goes on, and it is undying.
Collage of Survivors of School Shootings. (photo: Courtesy of Sources)
ALSO SEE: Prankster Crashes NRA Meeting,
Mocks Group’s ‘Thoughts and Prayers'
VICE News asked school shooting survivors and parents of victims what they wanted to say directly to the NRA.
That’s what Jamiee Roeschke, who survived a shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, wants to ask the National Rifle Association. In 2019, two of her fellow students died after a gunman opened fire on the school’s quad. She and her sister survived.
“Almost 2,000 kids die a year from gun violence. Is that not enough for you? Do you have no sympathy, no empathy, no care for others?” Madison Roeschke said, also speaking directly to the NRA.
The deep-pocketed gun lobby held its annual conference last weekend in Houston, less than 300 miles from the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where an 18-year-old with an assault-style rifle and a handgun killed 19 students and two adults just days before.
Rather than cover the NRA’s continued attempts to thwart gun control, VICE News asked school shooting survivors and parents of victims what they wanted to say to the organization. Their pain—and their rage—took over our social feeds last weekend.
Although some politicians pulled out of speaking at the NRA conference—or at least didn’t appear in person, like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott—the event went on as planned, and members used the platform to skirt blame for the shooting.
“People who want to point at the NRA and gun owners and the, quote-unquote "gun lobby" for atrocities like this—we know we didn't do this. We didn't cause this. We have no culpability in it,” Jeff Knox, the director of the Firearms Coalition, said this weekend.
Like many other survivors, Colin Goddard, who was shot four times in his French class during the shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007, didn’t buy the deflection.
“I have bullets all around my body, slowly leaching lead into my blood,” Goddard said. “The NRA exists today to sell guns, fear, and this fantasy that we’re going to shoot our way out of problems.”
The rhetoric at the conference matched predictable responses from politicians opposed to gun control, much of which trickled out just hours after the shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott blamed a lack of mental health services and called the shooter “pure evil.” Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz prayed for the families, then straight up walked away when asked about gun control. Others in the state called for even more guns to solve mass shootings, even though heavily-armed police stood by and did nothing for almost an hour in Uvalde.
“To anyone that supports the NRA, you are responsible for the loss of innocence and the childhood of thousands of kids who have to go through school shootings,” said Alex Wind, who survived the 2019 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. “And the blood of those shootings are on your hands.”
Although the NRA’s membership and finances have recently taken some hits, the lobbying group remains as embroiled in politics as ever. Just a few months after filing for bankruptcy in January 2021, the NRA dropped the most money it ever had in a single quarter, according to CNBC. And 14 current U.S. senators—all Republicans—have taken more than one million in campaign donations over their careers, according to the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence.
“I would say to the NRA: We see you, we understand your game, and we’re coming after you,” said Robert Schentrup, the brother of Carmen Schentrup, who was shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Watch the rest of the responses below:
Three people vote inside the Troy Community Center on Nov. 3, 2020, in Troy, Mich. (photo: Elaine Cromie/Getty Images)
Placing operatives as poll workers and building a "hotline" to friendly attorneys are among the strategies to be deployed in Michigan and other swing states.
The plan, as outlined by a Republican National Committee staffer in Michigan, includes utilizing rules designed to provide political balance among poll workers to install party-trained volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places, developing a website to connect those workers to local lawyers and establishing a network of party-friendly district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts at certain precincts.
“Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger,” said Matthew Seifried, the RNC’s election integrity director for Michigan, stressing the importance of obtaining official designations as poll workers in a meeting with GOP activists in Wayne County last Nov. 6. It is one of a series of recordings of GOP meetings between summer of 2021 and May of this year obtained by POLITICO.
Backing up those front-line workers, “it’s going to be an army,” Seifried promised at an Oct. 5 training session. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”
Seifried also said the RNC will hold “workshops” and equip poll workers with a hotline and website developed by Zendesk, a software support company used by online retailers, which will allow them to live-chat with party attorneys on Election Day. In a May 2022 training session, he said he’d achieved a goal set last winter: More than 5,600 individuals had signed up to be poll workers and, several days ago, he submitted an initial list of more than 850 names to the Detroit clerk.
Democrat Janice Winfrey, who serves as the clerk, would be bound to pick names from the list submitted by the party under a local law intended to ensure bipartisan representation and an unbiased team of precinct workers.
Separately, POLITICO obtained Zoom tapings of Tim Griffin, legal counsel to The Amistad Project, a self-described election-integrity group that Donald Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani once portrayed as a “partner” in the Trump campaign’s legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election, meeting with activists from multiple states and discussing plans for identifying friendly district attorneys who could stage real-time interventions in local election disputes.
On the recording, Griffin speaks of building a nationwide network of district attorney allies and how to create a legal “trap” for Winfrey.
“Remember, guys, we’re trying to build out a nationwide district attorney network. Your local district attorney, as we always say, is more powerful than your congressman,” Griffin said during a Sept. 21 meeting. “They’re the ones that can seat a grand jury. They’re the ones that can start an investigation, issue subpoenas, make sure that records are retained, etc.,” he said.
POLITICO obtained about a dozen recordings from people who were invited to listen to the meetings. Seifried referred POLITICO’s requests for comment to the RNC. Griffin, through the Thomas More Society, which runs Amistad, did not return repeated calls and texts to spokesperson Tom Ciesielka.
A spokesperson for the RNC said the party is attempting to rectify an imbalance in favor of Democratic election workers in large urban areas, particularly Detroit, a city that votes reliably Democratic by more than 90 percent. Just 170 of more than 5,400 Detroit election officials were Republicans in 2020, according to the RNC.
“Democrats have had a monopoly on poll watching for 40 years, and it speaks volumes that they’re terrified of an even playing field,” said RNC spokesperson Gates McGavick. “The RNC is focused on training volunteers to take part in the election process because polling shows that American voters want bipartisan poll-watching to ensure transparency and security at the ballot box.”
In the introduction graphic on his training presentation, Seifried says the RNC’s goal is to “make it easy to vote and HARD TO CHEAT.”
But election watchdog groups and legal experts say many of these recruits are answering the RNC’s call because they falsely believe fraud was committed in the 2020 election, so installing them as the supposedly unbiased officials who oversee voting at the precinct level could create chaos in such heavily Democratic precincts.
“This is completely unprecedented in the history of American elections that a political party would be working at this granular level to put a network together,” said Nick Penniman, founder and CEO of Issue One, an election watchdog group. “It looks like now the Trump forces are going directly after the legal system itself and that should concern everyone.”
Penniman also expressed concern about the quick-strike networks of lawyers and DAs being created, suggesting that politically motivated poll workers could simply initiate a legal conflict at the polling place that disrupts voting and then use it as a vehicle for rejecting vote counts from that precinct.
Democratic National Committee spokesperson Ammar Moussa said the DNC “trains poll watchers to help every eligible voter cast a ballot,” but neither the DNC nor the state party trains poll workers. The DNC did help recruit poll workers in 2020 due to a drop-off in older workers amid the pandemic; but he says it is not currently doing so and has never trained poll workers to contest votes.
On the tapes, some of the would-be poll workers lamented that fraud was committed in 2020 and that the election was “corrupt.” Installing party loyalists on the Board of Canvassers, which is responsible for certifying the election, also appears to be part of the GOP strategy. In Wayne County, which includes Detroit, Republicans nominated to their board a man who said he would not have certified the 2020 election.
Both Penniman and Rick Hasen, a law and political science professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, said they see a domino effect that could sow doubts about the election even when there was no original infraction: A politically motivated poll worker connecting with a zealous local lawyer to disrupt voting, followed by a challenge to the Board of Canvassers that may have nothing to do with the underlying dispute but merely the level of disruption at the polling place.
“You shouldn’t have poll workers who are reporting to political organizations what they see,” Hasen said. “It creates the potential for mucking things up at polling places and potentially leading to delays or disenfranchisement of voters,” especially “if [the poll workers] come in with the attitude that something is crooked with how elections are run.”
‘The precinct strategy’
The recordings are among the first windows into what former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon, who’s been urging listeners to his podcast to take on election leadership positions, calls “the precinct strategy.”
But Penniman, the election watchdog, believes the strategy is designed to create enough disputes to justify intervention by GOP-controlled state legislatures, who declined to take such steps in 2020.
“Come election day you create massive failure of certification” in Democratic precincts, Penniman said. “The real hope is that you can throw the choosing of electors to state legislatures.”
Participants in the recorded training sessions said their goal is to root out fraud, not just achieve more Republican poll workers in majority Democratic precincts.
Among panelists at a May 14 “Election Integrity” summit in Detroit was Jacky Eubanks, a Trump-endorsed state house candidate who warned “kids my age who are communists do and will staff our elections” in urging Republicans to become “paid, full-time elections workers” to police absentee ballot signatures, according to a recording of the summit.
Speaking separately to Macomb County Republicans, Eubanks also recently said, “The election system is rigged, and who best to steal it but our clerks.”
During the May 14 election-integrity summit, Seifried said the party is now actively recruiting lawyers and that he wanted to “start reaching out to law enforcement.”
Patrick Colbeck, a former member of the Michigan state Senate and former gubernatorial candidate, said at the same summit that he is “working with another organization right now” on “developing a kit for law enforcement” because many don’t understand election law and it will give them “tools that identify and enforce election fraud more effectively.”
Eubanks did not respond to requests for comment. In an email to POLITICO, Colbeck said there should be “regular training” for law enforcement on election laws.
A focus on Michigan
A central theater for the party’s “election integrity” organizing, Michigan is among a number of battleground states where party loyalists are being groomed to serve as inspectors in the next presidential election. Seifried estimated the RNC is committing $35 million to election integrity efforts nationwide, similar to what it spent in the last cycle in battleground state efforts. He is one of 16 state directors.
For decades, the RNC was barred from so-called “ballot security” measures after it settled an early 1980s case in which it was accused of voter suppression in violation of the Voting Rights Act, including sending armed police officers off duty to polling places in minority areas. In 2018, a federal judge allowed that consent decree to expire.
“The 2020 election would have been the first year that the RNC could have done anything with election integrity,” said Seifried in the tapes.
Of all former President Donald Trump’s battleground-state allies, Republican operatives in the state of Michigan came the closest to throwing the 2020 election — and the nation — into a constitutional crisis. So many volunteer challengers overwhelmed Detroit’s TCF Center, where votes were being counted, that police intervened because Covid safety protocols had been breached.
The poll watchers accused poll workers of “bullying” them and blocking them from voting tables due to pandemic social distancing requirements. They also falsely alleged “phony ballots” were smuggled into the center, helping lay the predicate for a weeks-long delay in certifying the state’s electoral votes. That’s despite the fact that then-Democratic candidate Joe Biden had won the state by more than 154,000 votes.
In the recorded meeting with activists in March, Seifried said there “was a lot of disorganization, a lot of lack of preparedness and I’ve heard horror story after horror story,” referring to the GOP watchers barred by police due to Covid restrictions.
“We’re going to have lawyers that work to build relationships with different judges so that when that happens, we’re going to have lawyers that have relationships with the police chiefs in the different areas, with the police officers in the different areas so that when that happens with preexisting relationships already established so that they can’t lie,” Seifried said during an October 2021 training session in Oakland County.
A GOP-led committee found no evidence of widespread fraud in Michigan’s 2020 election and recommended the state’s attorney general investigate those who made false claims “to raise money or publicity for their own ends.” Numerous lawsuits were dismissed in court.
In the tapes, Seifried cites specific grievances from 2020: that “unsolicited” absentee ballots were mailed by the Secretary of State, that not all clerks were required to match signatures on absentee ballot applications, that the number of ballot drop-off locations were dramatically increased and that Democratic areas received more outside funding to increase voting access than Republican areas.
‘How to Challenge a Voter’
In 2022 and 2024, instead of untrained volunteers, the goal is for GOP recruits to have undergone training and be equipped with new tools, according to Seifried.
Before sharing a slide on “How to Challenge a Voter,” Seifried outlined a series of scenarios under which recruits could contest voters or voting processes, though he cautioned it is illegal to challenge every vote.
“You have to have good reason to believe that an individual is not a citizen, that an individual is not of legal voting age. If an individual does not live at the location that they’re registered at, or if the person is not registered at all,” he said during a March 2022 meeting.
This also includes if a voter received an absentee ballot but is voting in person. He also urged recruits to approach clerks, including attending “public accuracy” meetings to question them about how voting machines work, recording machine numbers, requesting copies of tabulator results before and after voting begins and challenging clerks to prove their machines are not connected to the internet.
When asked about the strategy, an RNC spokesperson initially said recruits are not being trained to challenge voters. The RNC later responded by citing a Michigan election law excerpt that election workers “shall” challenge a voter if the inspector “knows or has good reason to suspect” the voter is ineligible and noted that a judge would ultimately review the case.
In an October meeting, Seifried said priority targets are Detroit, Pontiac and Southfield, which are heavily Democratic and minority areas. “Those are the ones that we need to focus all our efforts on,” he said.
Grassroots groups aligned with Trump are helping with recruitment. They include “Stand Up Michigan,” whose members adapted the Village People’s hit “YMCA” to “MAGA,” Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. While the law stipulates election inspectors must be trained by local clerks, candidates are also being coached on things to look out for by operatives in RNC-sponsored workshops.
Chris Thomas, who served for 36 years as elections director under one Democratic and three Republican secretaries of state, said he’s spent time with Seifried, who seems to be trying to be “above board” about his plans to create more equal representation among poll workers.
“He claims not to be a ‘Stop the Steal’ type but obviously all of the people he’s talking to are,” said Thomas. ”They’re going to be all ginned up thinking they’re going to see all kinds of stuff.”
“If Seifried is honest with them,” he will tell them they won’t see much, added Thomas. “There’s little to no history of election inspectors challenging people” based on qualifications to vote, and if they create chaos, “that’s just going to get them [the poll workers] thrown out.”
The potential for conflict is clear. In a training in March, Seifried told recruits to stand behind voter registration tables to “oversee the electronic poll book to make sure the person that is coming in to vote is who they say they are.” Voters should be challenged by alerting precinct chairs and then recruits should call the RNC legal hotline or log the complaint in a website with a live chat so “we can communicate with you real time.”
“Ideally, you guys will all be the election inspector,” said Seifried. “You have so much more authority because you’re the one that’s actually administering the election.”
While Seifried stressed challengers “cannot obstruct voting in any way” and not to be “adversarial,” Thomas said it is wrong to suggest a first-time worker would be in charge of a poll book and such workers have “no right to require inspectors to toggle through” poll books.
The first question in the Zoom chat: “How do we stop the counts if the person of authority doesn’t respect the challenges made like at TCF in Detroit?” Another asked what to do if someone is “clearly” using a fake I.D. to vote. Seifried said to “try challenging it.”
The effort has been underway for months, and GOP officials are planning to use Aug. 2 primary elections in Detroit as a dry run, according to Seifried.
“The early hours on election day Aug. 2 will tell the story about whether this is a legitimate operation or an attempt to slow the process to discourage voting,” said Thomas.
Pressuring the Detroit clerk
The approach is proceeding as planned.
In an interview, Winfrey, the Detroit elections clerk, confirmed that the RNC delivered a list of more than 800 names in early May and that she is likely to give “a good number” of the individuals roles as long as they attend training sessions and are confirmed registered voters.
“Before every election we always reach out to both the Democratic and Republican parties to let them know we are recruiting poll workers” and “we get what we get,” or mostly Democrats in a majority Democratic-voting city.
The list comes nearly a year after Griffin, during a June, 2021 meeting, outlined how GOP lawyers could corner Winfrey into either hiring their recruits or establishing the basis for a lawsuit. “How do we build the proper evidence and how do we build a trap for Janice Winfrey?” said Griffin.
Submitting a list of people “whom she’s not going to hire” would open “up the door for a mandamus lawsuit for them to start following the law,” or seating more Republicans. Two months later, in a separate meeting, Griffin reiterated the strategy is building lists of Republican poll workers who might be rejected and hence “creating the evidence for future cases.”
When informed of the tapes, Winfrey said she is “not shocked” and “not in any way intimidated.”
“Apparently they think I’m stupid,” she said. “Apparently they think I don’t follow the law. I’m not surprised by their ignorance.”
In Massachusetts, Republican thugs attempted their disruptive intimidation in several minority communities, except it's against state election regulations.
These Republicans won't stop with their delusions and attempts to rig elections and disenfranchise voters.
They ignore that the VOTER FRAUD and dead people voting has been committed by WHITE REPUBLICANS who don't even get jail time.
US flags, across New York Bay from the Statue of Liberty, fly at half-mast at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, New Jersey, on May 25, 2022, as a mark of respect for the victims of the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. (photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)
Politicians diverge from voters when it comes to preventing gun deaths.
To be clear: Americans’ views about guns are complicated, and vary significantly by political party and geography. Overall, the vast majority of Americans support the right for private citizens to own guns, and more than 40 percent of households own at least one firearm. That doesn’t mean they’re against tighter rules on their guns. Nearly three-quarters of Americans think that gun violence is a big or moderately big problem, according to a survey last year by Pew Research Center. And a majority of Americans think that the epidemic of school shootings could be stopped with drastic changes in legislation, according to a poll this week by YouGov.
Still, when Americans are asked broadly if they support stricter gun laws, their opinions volley back and forth, and it’s hard to see a consistent majority. Slightly more than half (52 percent) of Americans in a Gallup poll last year said laws regarding firearms sales should be stricter — a number that has actually gone down in recent years — and a Quinnipiac poll last year found that just under half (45 percent) support stricter gun laws. More recently, a Politico/Morning Consult poll last week found that 59 percent of registered voters think it’s very important (41 percent) or somewhat important (18 percent) for lawmakers to pass stricter gun laws.
But these might not be the right things for pollsters to be asking. That’s because of how drastically existing gun laws vary state by state.
“The thing about those sort of generic questions: Somebody in Vermont can say yes and someone in California can say no, and they favor the exact same thing,” Chris Poliquin, an assistant professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, who studies gun legislation after mass shootings, told Recode.
When asking Americans about their opinions on more specific gun policies, the results are clearer. A vast majority of Americans supports universal background checks, keeping people with serious mental health issues from buying guns, bans on assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, and so-called “red flag laws” that would allow police and family members to seek court orders to temporarily take guns away from those considered a risk to themselves and others. A majority of Americans, of both political parties, oppose carrying concealed weapons without a permit.
In the wake of tragedies like last week’s Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting, in which 19 children and two teachers were murdered at an elementary school, there have always been calls for stricter national gun legislation, but those measures rarely pass and are often very modest when they do pass. That said, federal gun laws — which are much more popular among Democrats than Republicans — remain a particularly high priority, since many of the guns used in crimes come from states with looser gun laws.
There’s much more action at the state level, but it doesn’t typically end with progress. Poliquin’s research found that state legislatures consider 15 percent more firearm bills in the year after a mass shooting, although the existence of more bills doesn’t typically lead to stricter gun laws. In fact, Republican legislatures pass more gun-related legislation in the wake of mass shootings — but they’re laws that make gun laws less strict.
America’s increased polarization makes things difficult.
“A lot of those [gun control measures] are actually supported in the abstract by gun owners, but often not in practice,” Matthew Lacombe, an assistant professor at Barnard and author of Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force, told Recode. “So people have a particular issue stance, but then that issue becomes salient and Democratic and Republican politicians start taking clear stances on it. And then people’s views tend to fall into line to match their partisan outlooks.”
Part of the issue is that Americans have somewhat conflicting stances on gun control. But what’s a bigger problem is that even when a majority of Americans agree, a simple majority of lawmakers agreeing on a bill is not enough to pass laws in our country. The Senate filibuster lets a minority of states — and Americans — veto national policy that the majority of Americans want. The result is a minority of people making the laws for the majority of Americans, regardless of what the population at large thinks.
Background checks
Background checks are by far the least controversial aspect of gun legislation, according to a whole lot of surveys. Roughly 80 to 90 percent of Americans support universal background checks, which would mean all sellers would have to verify that a person doesn’t have a history of violent crime or domestic abuse before they can buy a gun. As Robin Lloyd, managing director of the gun control advocacy group Giffords, put it, “Background checks on every gun sale polls higher than people who support ice cream.”
That overwhelmingly broad support, however, has not led to sweeping national requirements for background checks. There are currently laws requiring extended background checks for all people who buy guns in 21 states, but federal law only covers sales between federally licensed dealers. That means there’s a loophole in which about a fifth of gun sales — sold privately, online, and at gun shows — are done without that oversight. Even states that have expanded laws suffer from an influx of guns from those that don’t.
Of course, many mass shooters would have no trouble passing a background check. The 18-year-old Uvalde shooter, for instance, legally purchased his guns. The Buffalo shooter bought his guns legally. The Parkland shooter did. The list goes on. Still, according to a 2020 study, the odds of mass shootings are 60 percent lower in states with laws requiring permits for firearms — and, by extension, background checks.
Notably, many of these killers are young and don’t yet have a record. After the Parkland shooting in 2018, there was massive support for raising the legal age for buying a firearm from 18 to 21. Universal background checks are one of those rare issues that both Republicans (70 percent) and Democrats (92 percent) support, but partisanship in other areas keeps it from going anywhere. Republican senators would have to cross the aisle to vote for gun control laws — a move that would likely hurt them in their state primaries.
The Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2021, or HR 8, which would close the background check loophole, was sketched out in rough form after the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre a decade ago. Despite lawmakers from both sides of the aisle signaling support for such bills, these bills have repeatedly passed the House only to languish in the Senate.
Red flag laws
Americans overwhelmingly support red flag laws, otherwise known as extreme risk protection orders, which work similarly to restraining orders. Again, these laws allow police and family members to petition a court — which would determine whether there’s enough evidence to do so — to temporarily keep guns from people who might be a threat to themselves or others. Some 77 percent of Americans think that a family member should be able to petition a court to do this, while 70 percent think police should, according to a survey by APM Research Lab.
And this approach to gun control has been gaining traction in recent years. A number of states adopted such laws following the Parkland, Florida, shooting, in which the gunman, like many mass shooters, displayed obvious red flags. (An acquaintance said he’d introduce himself, “Hi, I’m Nick. I’m a school shooter.”) Some say the red flag approach might be less controversial with gun owners, specifically, because it seems like common sense.
“Red flag laws are promising because they’re specifically targeted at people or cases or instances in which there’s reason to believe that there might be a problem,” Lacombe said. “So it’s not like a blanket rule that treats gun owners like a particular class of citizen.”
Of course, for red flag laws to be useful, they have to be used. If police had decided to seek such an order against the shooter in the Buffalo supermarket earlier this month, who had been referred to police for threatening violence, 10 gun deaths could have been prevented. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has since announced an executive order that would compel police to do so.
Mental health restrictions
There’s also overwhelming support on both sides of the aisle (85 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of Democrats) for stopping those with mental illness from buying a gun. But in the case of gun sales that happen through a licensed dealer, that’s supposed to already be happening (though the same loopholes occur for online and private sellers). If a court has had someone involuntarily committed or otherwise determined that they are incapable of managing their life, that person is not supposed to be able to buy a gun, since they should be flagged by the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) database.
In practice, that has not always happened.
After a student with a documented history of court-ordered mental health treatment shot and killed 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech in 2007, there was a major push to make sure state-level records were entered into NICS. George W. Bush signed the NICS Improvement Act into law in 2008, but it still had huge holes where relevant state and federal records were not uploaded to the database. Some of those were remedied by the Fix NICS Act that was signed into law in 2018, but the system is far from perfect.
Additionally, mass shooters generally wouldn’t be considered to have mental illness severe enough to show up in the federal gun database in the first place.
“There’s sort of this perception about mass shooters that they are severely mentally ill people,” Poliquin said. “Although they might have mental health issues, the level of mental health issues doesn’t necessarily lead to institutionalization.”
Additionally, there’s a lot of debate over mental health and mass shooting coming from Republicans that might be in bad faith. It’s not as though Americans have a higher rate of mental health problems than other countries — what makes the US exceptional is the number of guns in the country and the corresponding number of gun deaths.
“I’m not aware of any instance in which a Republican saying that this is really a mental health issue has actually then come forward with a proposal to invest additional resources in our public health and mental health infrastructure, which I think sends a signal just how serious they are,” Lacombe said.
Assault rifles and high-capacity magazines
Bans on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines have an approval rating of over 60 percent in the US, according to Pew.
Assault weapons are a poorly defined class of firearms, but generally refer to military-style semi-automatic weapons. High-capacity magazines are generally ammunition clips that hold more than 10 rounds. AR-15s, the preferred style of weapon in recent mass shootings, are assault weapons, which can be modified to accept a number of after-market parts, including high-capacity magazines, that make it even deadlier.
While it has majority support, banning assault weapons is much more divided by political party. While 83 percent of Democrats approve of banning assault-style weapons, just 37 percent of Republicans do; 83 percent of Democrats would like a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines compared with 41 percent of Republicans.
Assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, both of which allow murderers to kill more people in a short span of time, used to be illegal in the US. A federal law passed in 1994 banned assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, but Congress let the legislation lapse in 2004. Even though the 1994 law had its issues — it didn’t make illegal or confiscate the 1.5 million assault weapons and 25 million large-capacity magazines that Americans already owned — the bans did significantly reduce death tolls while they were in effect.
“After that, we’ve just seen like an explosion of assault weapons all across the country,” Lloyd said, estimating the number to be in the tens of millions.
Cassandra Crifasi, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said gun laws should go beyond simply listing which specific guns are restricted or not by making it harder to get deadly gun accessories.
“In response to some of these bans, you can buy a rifle that falls into the approved list, and then you can find accessories online or at gun shows that allow you to customize it and then it may become in violation of the ban,” she said. “Once you have the rifle, if you can then buy those accessories after-market, you can skirt around the ban.”
The Buffalo shooter, for example, purchased his AR-15-style gun legally but modified it to accept a large-capacity magazine that is illegal in New York.
However it’s defined, Lloyd says, limiting guns, ammo, and accessories would limit the extent of gun violence in mass shootings.
“It is impossible to ignore the fact that assault weapons are extremely dangerous because of how many people they can kill in such a short amount of time,” she said, referring to the death tolls in Buffalo and Uvalde.
There is proposed legislation, including the Keep Americans Safe Act (HR 2510 / S 1108), that would ban high-capacity magazines, and the Assault Weapons Ban of 2021, which would ban military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. All of these bills have been introduced but not voted on, and thanks to the filibuster, would be unlikely to pass without a lot more Republican support.
Concealed carry
Though it varies by party, the vast majority (81 percent) of Americans oppose laws that would allow people to carry concealed handguns without a permit, according to a recent poll this month by Marquette Law School. And generally, support for the wider ability to carry guns — in schools, without permits — has been declining, according to Crifasi.
At the same time, laws allowing people to carry weapons in public have become much more commonplace in the last decade. The effort, however, began decades before in the 1980s as the NRA, beginning in Florida, sought to get states to slowly roll back their concealed carry laws from something that was a special dispensation to something that was expected as a way for gun owners to express their Second Amendment rights. Just last year, the Texas legislature passed a law making it so that people no longer need a license or training to carry a handgun.
“The NRA put forth a pretty strategic, organized, and concerted effort to change state laws, one state at a time,” Lacombe said. “As it became increasingly normalized to be in the law, voters also became more likely to see it as acceptable.”
The thinking behind these Republican and NRA talking points is that having a concealed weapon would allow the “good guys” to take down the bad guys. In practice, that doesn’t actually happen. Though there are a handful of anecdotes in which a person with a concealed weapon successfully stops a mass shooter, adding more guns to the mix is more dangerous. To wit: a man who stopped a mass shooter with his concealed weapon last year in Colorado, only to be mistakenly shot and killed by police.
As the conceal carry issue shows, gun policy reflects the influence of NRA lobbyists more than everyday Americans.
“We have an exceptionally powerful gun lobby that works on behalf of gun manufacturers to make it easy for gun dealers and gun manufacturers to sell a lot of guns really easily,” Crifasi said. “And many of our elected officials are more beholden to the gun lobby than they are to their own constituents.”
Many of the gun control ideas above are part of kitchen table discussions being had right now across the country, as Americans mourn yet another senseless tragedy at the hands of a mass shooter. Specific gun control measures have bipartisan support and could go a long way toward stopping the next mass shooting before it happens.
Unfortunately, what Americans want is not being reflected in America’s laws. The ability of the minority in small, mostly rural, and mostly white communities to outweigh the majority has vast repercussions for the way we live and the way we die. The Senate filibuster is undermining democracy, and in turn is undermining the American government’s legitimacy. It’s possible tragic events like the one last week in Texas could help turn the tide, but for now. tide-turning would require support from Republican lawmakers that actually matches the desires of their Republican constituents.
For that to change, Republicans in addition to Democrats will have to vote out politicians whose stances on guns don’t align with theirs. If not, these conversations begin and end at the kitchen table.
A demonstrator raises a fist during a 'Sit Out the Curfew' protest against the death of George Floyd along a street in Oakland, Calif., on June 3, 2020. (photo: Philip Pacheco/AFP/Getty Images)
In nearly 600 pages, the initial report recounts the “moral and legal wrongs the American and Californian governments have inflicted upon their own Black citizens."
The report, which will be released Wednesday, offers a comprehensive look at the impacts of enslavement and generations of discrimination on Black Californians and Black Americans more broadly. It finds that the damage to Black communities is extensive and that a variety of intentionally crafted policy, judicial decisions and racism by private actors has created a widespread exclusion of Black people that has not been sufficiently addressed at any level of government.
“Almost 150 years of active, conscious federal, state, and local government action and neglect of duty have resulted in compounded harms that are unique to Black Americans,” the authors wrote in a draft reviewed by NBC News prior to its release.
The report, the first to be released at the state level, comes amid an increased national discussion on reparations, as well as action at the local and municipal level. Last year, H.R. 40, congressional legislation that would create a national commission to study reparations and explain the U.S. government’s role in enslavement and systemic discrimination, passed out of the House Judiciary Committee, but it has languished since then.
The California report covers not just the immediate impact of enslavement but also the harms of decades of political neglect, finding that there has been sustained damage to generations of Black Americans. The damage has had a lasting effect on the political, economic, social, physical, mental and cultural well-being of Black people, particularly those descended from the formerly enslaved.
“Every state has some history of harm in the African American community,” said Kamilah Moore, a Los Angeles-based attorney and reparatory justice scholar who chairs California’s reparations task force. The nine-member task force, which a state law created in 2020, is charged with studying the impacts of enslavement on Black Californians and coming up with possible plans for restitution.
The interim report, produced by the civil rights arm of the California Department of Justice with input from the task force, includes testimony from experts and public meetings of the task force, as well as a comprehensive review of media articles, academic papers and historical documents. Members of the task force argue that the report is the most comprehensive look at the structural barriers Black Americans face since the 1968 Kerner Commission report.
A second report from the California task force, detailing specific reparations proposals and who should be eligible for them, is expected next year.
The California report highlights a history of ‘moral and legal wrongs’
Over 13 chapters and about 600 pages, the interim report’s authors recount the “moral and legal wrongs the American and Californian governments have inflicted upon their own Black citizens and residents,” noting how slavery and subsequent discrimination have exposed Black communities to racial terror and political disenfranchisement, left them with inferior outcomes in health and wealth building, and relegated them to segregated neighborhoods and schools.
The harms were largely intentional, crafted through local and national policies that reinforced one another, ensuring that the formerly enslaved and their descendants would be denied even basic protections under the law. The denial was acutely felt in California, which prohibited slavery when it joined the U.S. in 1850 but also supported the rights of pro-slavery white Southerners and looked the other way as enslaved people were trafficked into the state.
The stated ban on slavery was far from the only time California seemed to contradict itself on its stance toward Black Americans, according to the report. Two years after California entered the U.S. as a free state, legislators passed a fugitive slave law that allowed for the capture and deportation of men and women fleeing enslavement. The state also declined to immediately ratify the 14th Amendment, which established the equal rights of people born in the U.S., and the 15th Amendment, which said race could not be used to deny voting rights — it waited to approve the measures until 1959 and 1962, respectively.
As the state built a progressive reputation, drawing a growing Black population over decades, it continued to act against the best interests of Black people and other communities of color, according to the report. Black people were often denied voting rights and were subjected to literacy tests and poll taxes. Housing covenants were used to keep Black Californians from living in white communities, only for Black neighborhoods to later be demolished to create parks and freeways.
The report adds that in some metrics, California not only matched discrimination across the country; at times it was a national leader. The authors write that in the 1900s, the state led the country in forced sterilizations, which disproportionately affected Black, Latina and Indigenous women. Twenty-two years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson established that racial segregation did not violate the Constitution, California’s Supreme Court upheld racial segregation in schools. The state remains one of the most segregated in the country for Black and Latino students.
In a chapter dedicated to outlining how violence was used to terrorize Black Americans, the report focuses specifically on the expansion of the Ku Klux Klan in California, noting that in a 20-month period during the state’s “sizable and violent Klan resurgence” in the 1920s, California cities held more KKK meetings than Mississippi, Louisiana, North Carolina and Tennessee.
During the same period, Klan membership was widespread in some local governments, and it was also extensive in police departments in Los Angeles and Long Beach. As Klan activity receded nationwide during the Great Depression, it was sustained in California, and KKK activity increased in the 1940s in response to Black families’ trying to buy homes in better-resourced white communities.
The report offers some recommendations to improve the lives of Black Americans
The report also highlights that historical injustices have helped fuel modern-day disparities, noting that California’s stagnant rates of Black homeownership, racial disparities in police arrests and use of force, a large gap in the average wealth of Black and white families and unequal discipline of Black students compared to their white peers are least in part the results of decades of social engineering designed to exclude Black Californians from gaining access to the same political, financial, employment and educational opportunities as their white counterparts.
Such exclusion also had support at the federal level, which the report takes care to document, highlighting that in the years before enslavement and in the decades after its collapse, all levels of government worked with private actors to preserve and deeply entrench racial discrimination.
“Reparations is a federal responsibility first and foremost,” Moore said. “The report has nationwide breakdowns for each chapter to constantly remind people that even with the current California effort, this is primarily a federal responsibility.”
The report does recommend some actions the state could take to address the history outlined in the report, including establishing an office of Freedmen Affairs that could lead efforts to support Black Californians on a variety of issues. The report also suggests raising the minimum wage, increasing investments in Black neighborhoods’ environmental infrastructure and addressing health inequities as initial steps the state can take before it enacts a full reparations effort.
Now that it has released the report, California’s reparations task force will pivot to its next task, creating a detailed proposal for reparations for the Legislature to consider. The task force has already made some progress, deciding in a contentious 5-4 decision in March that eligibility for compensation would be based on lineage and limited to the descendants of enslaved and free Black people who lived in the country before the end of the 19th century.
Some task force members and advocates have criticized the decision, arguing that the eligible community should include all of the 2.6 million Black people in California, including recent Black immigrants who have faced race-based discrimination and prejudice in the state.
In the meantime, Moore said, she hopes the report will spark conversations about the need for reparations in other states and spur additional activity at the federal level. “I hope that the report is used not just for awareness but as an organizing tool, a sort of rallying call,” Moore said. “The harm against the African American community has been so extensive that reparations are pretty much overdue.”
Gustavo Petro and his running mate, Francia Marquez, celebrate after the first round of presidential elections in Bogota, Colombia. (photo: Guillermo Legaria/Getty Images)
On Sunday, Rodolfo Hernández, a right-wing populist, snuck into the second round of Colombia’s presidential elections. Leftist Gustavo Petro is still the front-runner, but the Right's unexpected success should be cause for alarm.
In recent weeks, construction magnate Hernández, often nicknamed “Colombia’s Trump,” has made a surprise surge in the polls indicating that he may be headed to second place, beating the more moderate right-winger Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez.
With most results in by late Sunday night, Hernández garnered an astonishing 28 percent of the vote. As predicted by the polls, leftist and former guerrilla Gustavo Petro won more than 40 percent of the vote. Given that most of Fico’s supporters, 24 percent of the voters, will back Hernández in the June 19 runoff, Petro who was anticipated to win the presidency comfortably, now faces a troublesome uphill struggle.
The former M-19 guerrilla and mayor of the capital Bogotá has been able to mobilize swathes of Colombians and maintain popularity after widespread anti-government protests erupted in May 2021 in response to the center-right government’s proposal to implement a regressive tax on public services.
Although he topped the polls for months, Petro has been unable to break through his ceiling of 40 percent — a number that may haunt him at the presidential runoff vote which requires a 50 percent majority.
Ruled for decades by the center-right elite, Colombia has never come closer to having a left-wing government. Discontent and frustration with the right-wing government have been growing since the onset of the pandemic.
In the country mired by a history of violence, income inequality is the highest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the second highest in Latin America, only behind Brazil. According to the World Bank, this inequality increased under outgoing president Iván Duque.
“Colombia has been going down a bad path for more than thirty years — we citizens have been completely abandoned by the government,” said Cesar Augusto Franco Salazar, a taxi driver. “The strikes last year have united Colombians whose working conditions have deteriorated, and we’ve now come together to seek a change by participating in the elections.”
Both Petro and Hernández’s campaigns have harnessed widespread discontent amongst Colombians. Some 75 percent of Latin American nations’ citizens feel that their country is heading down the wrong path.
Petro and his running mate, Francia Márquez, have promised to address these concerns with an ambitious agenda focused on education, reshuffling the economy, women’s rights, and environmental preservation.
Hernández, compared, campaigned on an anti-corruption ticket, becoming a popular figure on the social media platform TikTok, calling for an end to “the robbery in Colombia” in his videos.
Alleged of graft himself, as a former mayor of Bucaramanga, he will stand trial in July for improperly awarding a contract for the recycling of rubbish to one of his son’s companies. Hernández dismisses these charges as an attempt to smear his presidential campaign.
But despite little clarity on how Hernández would root out Colombia’s deep-seated corruption, his message and anti-elitist style resonates with angry voters.
Without a political party, the wealthy businessman leads the makeshift League of Anti-Corruption Governors movement and has financed his campaign using his own wealth. He pledges to radically slash the state budget, donate his presidential salary, and offer rewards to citizens reporting on corrupt officials.
Accepting defeat, Fico was quick to endorse Hernández and call on his supporters to vote for him and his running mate, Marelen Castillo, in the runoff.
Some Petro supporters now fear that they’ve run into a trap and see Hernández as a worse option than Fico. Others, motivated by fears stoked up by conservatives that their country might become “another Venezuela,” see Hernández as the only way to stop left-wing rule over the Andean country.
“Many Colombians are thinking about Venezuela these days. People want something different indeed largely because of the difficult global economic situation. Still, I cannot but feel concerned about the left in Colombia,” said Donelia Alvarez, a massage therapist from Colombia’s third largest city, Cali.
Opinion polls had suggested that Petro would have comfortably beaten Fico, widely seen as representing the deeply unpopular establishment, in the runoff.
But when it comes to beating Hernández in the second round, polls indicate a head-to-head vote, with both polling at 40.5 percent.
While Sunday’s elections raise many new questions, one thing that Colombians have ascertained is that they are hungry for change.
And change is now sure to come, but whether that will be in the way Petro envisages it is less clear today than before. Petro’s campaign team will now have to grapple with the new reality of beating someone who portrays themselves as more antiestablishment than Petro.
His team will require a radical shift in strategy if they are to emerge as the successful winners.
The significance of the 2022 elections has not been understated, and they are on course to become the most consequential in the country’s history. Satisfying Colombia’s hunger for meaningful change amid a global economic downturn and rising inflation will by no means be an easy task.
Nearly 40 acres of mangrove forest surrounding the village of Goi were destroyed in the fire. (photo: Jacob Silberberg/Getty Images)
The fossil fuel industry faces a reckoning in the Niger Delta after a disaster left families ‘eating, drinking, breathing the oil’
It wasn’t until the next day that officials climbed onboard a helicopter, ascended over Dooh’s village situated on the banks of the Oroberekiri Creek in Nigeria’s southern Niger Delta region, and confirmed what villagers already knew: oil was spreading and not letting up.
Later that day, the situation in Goi went from bad to worse. Oil spilled into a local farmer’s house and connected with a cooking fire. The village, its oil-seeped creek and the surrounding mangrove forests erupted into flames.
On 12 October a team of investigators – made up of locals, government officials, and employees for Shell’s Nigerian offshoot, Shell Petroleum Development Company – located the source of the leak: an 18-inch hole in an exposed portion of the pipeline. They temporarily plugged the split pipeline with wood chips and later sealed it with a clamp, but over the course of the three-day leak, the operators never shut off the flow of oil at its source. By then, more than 23,000 litres of oil had spilled and nearly 40 acres of mangrove forest had burned, poisoning the land and fishponds that were the lifeblood of the village.
Shell would later argue in court that locals brought the disaster upon themselves; the leak was the work of saboteurs, they claimed. Vandalism and theft are common in the region, but so too is old and abandoned pipeline infrastructure that’s prone to leaks. Dooh and his father, Barizaa, who was the chief of their village, attested the oil spill was the result of a poorly maintained pipeline.
Two years dragged by before government agencies began clean-up efforts around Goi. “We were eating, drinking, breathing the oil,” Dooh said. By 2010, six years after the initial leak, Goi was still too polluted to sustain its residents. The Nigerian government ordered them to abandon their homes and permanently evacuate Goi. By then, most of the villagers, including the Dooh family, had already moved away, scattered across nearby towns.
Today, the oil industry in Nigeria faces a reckoning with Shell at the helm. According to Amnesty International, the oil company has come under “unprecedented legal scrutiny” in recent years for its negligent and criminal practices in the Niger Delta. Several lawsuits are ongoing while others have culminated in courts ordering Shell to pay plaintiffs billions of dollars in damages. The mounting pressure has Shell considering a rapid departure from the region’s oil market. In early August 2021, the company announced it would sell off all remaining onshore oilfields in Nigeria, citing challenges with community unrest, sabotage and a company-wide refocus on promoting green energy. But locals and lawyers see the move as Shell ducking its responsibility to clean up after itself. A court in March barred Shell from selling any more assets in Nigeria while the company appeals against a ruling in which it was found liable for a 2019 oil spill and ordered to pay affected communities nearly $2bn in damages.
“It is incomprehensible to imagine that if these spills and this level of pollution occurred in North America or Europe that it would be allowed to happen,” said Mark Dummett, the director of Amnesty International’s global issues programme.
Dooh and his neighbors were among the hundreds of thousands of Niger Delta residents who had suffered from spills in the half century after Shell discovered oil in the region. Dooh and his father set out to put an end to the industry’s legacy of environmental pollution, corporate greed and human rights abuses. But seeking justice and compensation for their losses was not for the faint of heart. For one, they would be going up against a multibillion-dollar, multinational conglomerate with a team of experienced lawyers at their disposal. Then there was fear of arrest and reprisal. Government security forces provided security for oil companies and often responded violently to protests and uprisings against oil pollution. In 1995, the Nigerian government hanged nine environmental activists, who became known as the Ogoni Nine, named for the Indigenous Ogoni people, who spoke out against Shell’s pollution.
Accountability was hard to come by. But Dooh and his family had lost everything: their village, their thriving chicken farm and bakery, their fishponds and livelihoods. They wanted Shell to pay.
In June 2005, less than a year after the leak in Goi, residents of another village about 90 miles west called Oruma reported seeing oil “bubble out of the ground”. Over the course of 11 days, an estimated 63,600 litres of oil had spilled from a nearby Shell pipeline. Then in August 2007, in the village of Ikot Ada Udo, about 100,000 litres of oil leaked from an above-ground wellhead that was built by Shell in 1959 but never used for oil extraction, according to court records.
To barrister Chima Williams, an environmental and human rights lawyer in Benin City, the string of oil spills were not one-off accidents spread out over a few years, but the result of a larger pattern that he was intimately familiar with. As the executive director of the non-governmental organization Friends of the Earth Nigeria, Williams wanted to make a statement that would reverberate across the oil industry. He embarked on a search for the most polluted communities in the region, visiting more than 20 villages that had been devastated by recent oil spills.
Williams came across Eric and Barizaa Dooh, as well as three other farmers and fishermen from Oruma and Ikot Ada Udo. Their lives had been upended by a cycle of oil spills and inaction; Williams knew he had a strong legal argument to build four separate cases against the oil company. And so on 9 May 2008, lawyers hired by Friends of the Earth Nigeria and its Dutch sister company, Milieudefensie, sued Royal Dutch Shell and SPDC in the Netherlands.
It was a David versus Goliath battle: a group of Nigerian farmers and fishermen and a human rights NGO taking on one of the largest oil conglomerates in the world. The lawsuits were unprecedented; never before had a European court ruled over a corporate liability case in which the plaintiffs were foreigners and the incidents in question had happened overseas. But justice would not be swift; the court cases – fraught with complexity, appeals, obstruction and delaying tactics – would inch along for more than 13 years.
By 2009, Eric Dooh had taken over as lead plaintiff in their case after his father became ill. When he traveled to The Hague to testify in court, an event that drew global attention, Dooh said he felt like a celebrity. Before delivering his testimony, he became gripped with fear. “I have never experienced that before,” Dooh recalled. “I had not even traveled by air, let alone talk[ed] in the midst of white, white, white, people who will be questioning you.”
Shell, for its part, would not give in easily. The company employed well-honed stalling tactics. For the first few years of legal proceedings, Shell lawyers argued that a Dutch court had no legal standing to hear a case about incidents that happened in a foreign country. Then they said Shell was not responsible for the 2004 leak in Goi in the first place because they believed it was caused by local saboteurs. Investigators found soil had been dug up around the pipeline, possibly before the leak. The team of government officials and Shell representatives called to the scene noted in their initial report that oil leaked from a straight slice of the pipeline, indicating, they said, it had been sawed.
Shell’s legal team rejected allegations that the 40-year-old pipeline had not been properly maintained, but they refused to hand over evidence proving so, claiming it had been lost. Once they eventually did hand over the maintenance records, the documents were so heavily redacted they were illegible, according to Channa Samkalden, a lawyer representing Friends of the Earth and the plaintiffs. The delaying tactics continued. The courts ordered Shell to assemble a team of experts to travel to Goi and investigate the cause and impact of the oil spill. For two years, Shell delayed this process, citing security concerns in the Niger Delta, Williams said.
The strategy to draw out the court proceedings did far more than test the plaintiffs’ patience and resolve. By the time the group of fishermen and farmers heard the court’s verdict, three of the four original plaintiffs in the case, including Dooh’s father, Barizaa, had died of either sickness or old age.
On Friday 29 January 2021, Dooh, Williams and a handful of environmental activists and journalists gathered in the event hall at the Visa Karena hotel in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. They connected by videofeed to a courtroom 4,000 miles away in The Hague, Netherlands, where three judges in black robes and white jabots prepared to deliver their long-awaited decisions.
Just before the judges read the verdicts, the internet connection in Port Harcourt cut out and the videofeed went blank. Dooh waited in silence until Samkalden, sitting in the Netherlands, called them to share the news.
In the case of Dooh v Shell, the Dutch Court found the Nigerian subsidiary SPDC liable for damages caused by the October 2004 oil spill. Shell’s Dutch headquarters, however, were not held at fault. The court also ruled that SPDC acted unlawfully by not discontinuing the oil supply to the pipeline. The oil company was ordered to compensate Dooh for damages incurred from the spill and the fire, while also finding it liable in two other cases Williams and his team had brought.
Environmental and human rights activists hailed the verdicts as historic, landmark rulings that would help pave the way for victims of oil pollution around the world to seek justice and compensation from companies who have acted criminally for decades.
The dominos have since started falling against Shell. In February, the UK supreme court agreed to hear the cases of two other Niger Delta communities, Ogale and Bille, who are suing Royal Dutch Shell and SPDC for widespread environmental pollution. In August, more than 10 years after a Nigerian supreme court first ruled it must do so, Shell finally agreed to pay the Ejama-Ebubu people approximately $111m in compensation for oil spills that occurred in the 1970s.
“A global standard has been set that the oil companies will not only be held responsible for the destruction they cause to any of their host communities but will also be reprimanded and held to take steps not to further destroy the environment and source of livelihoods of citizens,” Williams said to the press immediately after the court judgment was announced.
Dooh, today in his 50s, still visits Goi, now only skeletal remains of the once bustling village where he grew up. He can point out where the mangrove forest stood before it burned down in the 2004 fires, where his father kept his chicken flock, where an old shrine to crocodile deities once stood. At his fishponds, oil sheens still fray from the water’s edge, dead fish float at the surface. In the village’s one-room school, hip-tall weeds have cracked through the concrete floor. Moss, mold and mildew spread up the walls. Small plots of farmland have succumbed to the encroaching bush. At the village entrance, a rusted signpost reads, “Public Notice, PROHIBITION! Contaminated Area, Please Keep Off.”
At the edge of the village, Dooh, wearing his signature green togokpéé, a chieftaincy dress, and his father’s red cap, recalls that his grandfather was a celebrated palm wine tapper but that because of the oil pollution, there are hardly any raffia palm trees left to tap. The crocodiles too are all gone.
“It is like a museum for now,” Dooh says of the village. Standing in a back room of his father’s now dilapidated bakery, he laughs at the determination of a tree that has grown through the ceiling. When he receives his compensation from Shell, he plans to rebuild the bakery, establish a vocational school and provide jobs to his community.
“I will reinvent this place,” he says. Dooh hopes to rebuild his father’s legacy and pass on his prosperity to his daughter, Queen, who is studying accounting in school.
While the string of successful lawsuits has ushered in a wave of hope among Niger Delta residents, it remains unclear if real justice and change will be delivered. Seventeen years after the Goi oil spill and more than a year after The Hague ruled in Dooh’s case, the legal teams continue to negotiate a compensation package for the plaintiffs. (Shell confirmed that negotiations are ongoing but declined to comment further on this case or their activities in Nigeria.)
“It feels very inappropriate to claim a victory like that, knowing that we left our clients without any relief until this very day,” said Samkalden, the attorney helping represent Dooh. “The real difference needs to be that relief for victims of environmental abuses, human rights abuses abroad, can be obtained within, if not weeks or months, at least within a couple of years, but not like here: 15 years or so. It is kind of ridiculous.”
Meanwhile, Dooh and other community leaders lament the passage of a new law that various experts say aims to attract domestic and foreign oil industry actors and make the Nigerian oil market less risky.
“That is another round of battle,” Dooh said. “It is the global community that is advocating for green energy. Now you are inviting the world to this environment again for bigger industry for oil production. Is this part of the world the dumping ground? Are we not human beings?” Dooh asked.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.