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But Hutchinson’s testimony carries other importance as well, both for prosecutors and institutionally for Congress—particularly for the Senate. Specifically, the light that the Jan. 6 hearings, and Hutchinson’s testimony in particular, have shed on Donald Trump’s response to the 2021 impeachment process warrants attention.
These hearings show that Trump, through his lawyers, lied to Congress about the events of Jan. 6 in his second impeachment trial in denying that the then-president had meant to spark violence. In so doing, he undermined the constitutional process of impeachment—as well as the peaceful transition of power.
In determining whether to bring charges, prosecutors have to assess not merely the quality of the evidence against Trump but also the national interest in a prosecution of the former president. Trump’s lies in the impeachment process should properly figure into prosecutors’ deliberations on this point. After all, this was the constitutional proceeding by which he was supposed to be held accountable, and a conviction would have included a Senate judgment of his ineligibility to ever again seek office. Corrupting the trial compounded the underlying conduct that prompted the impeachment by helping to sap the adjudication of its value—thus making prosecution arguably a more important mechanism for holding the president accountable.
What’s more, the hearings should prompt long overdue consideration of the processes by which Congress exercises its power to impeach and try presidents. Since 1974, it has been reluctant to conduct independent fact-finding. In the process affecting Bill Clinton, the House conducted virtually no independent factual inquiry, relying fatally on the independent counsel record compiled by Kenneth Starr. The Senate then did the minimum in the trial, conducting only three depositions. While the House conducted a substantial investigation in the first Trump impeachment trial, the Senate relied solely on House evidence and, though significant questions remained unanswered, passed on conducting any factual inquiry of its own.
In the second impeachment, concerning the events of Jan. 6, neither house did much investigation. The House faced time pressures in acting on a schedule that would allow for the Senate to vote on removal from office, but once Trump’s tenure ended on the constitutionally prescribed day and time, the Senate had more time in which to call witnesses. Yet it nonetheless declined to do so.
In this last case, the result was that people like Hutchinson were never called to testify, putting an enormous amount of weight on the select committee’s investigation more than a year later. A significant percentage of the revelations that have emerged through the committee’s investigation would have surfaced in a reasonable trial. In other words, that Trump’s lies to the Senate were not exposed in real time is largely a function of the Senate having chosen not to develop any independent factual record.
Trump’s defense in the second impeachment trial was not purely legal. Yes, a number of senators opposed to his conviction gave as their reason that this constitutional remedy is not available against a private citizen: the former president who has left office. They also expressed unease that the process would only serve as the vehicle for barring Trump, upon impeachment, from running for the presidency in the future. At least from the perspective of the president’s supporters, Congress would then be involved in a political power play without precedent in constitutional history. They also contended that Trump’s Jan. 6 rally speech did not constitute incitement as a matter of law.
But the president’s lawyers did not defend Trump only on these constitutional grounds. They argued his innocence in more sweeping, factual terms, and this choice requires some examination of these claims in retrospect.
Trump’s lawyers asserted, for example, that the former president had no intention of inciting a riot or unleashing an angry mob on the Capitol to intimidate in its conduct of these duties.
Consider the closing argument delivered by his counsel, Michael van der Veen:
- “[Trump’s] entire premise was that the proceedings of the Congress should continue.”
- “Mr. Trump did not spend the weeks prior to January 6 inciting violence, he spent those weeks pursuing his election challenge to the court system and other legal proceedings exactly as the Constitution and the Congress prescribe” (emphasis added).
- “[T]he gathering of January 6 was supposed to be an entirely peaceful event.”
- “All of us, starting with my client, are deeply disturbed by the graphic videos of the Capitol attack that have been shown in recent days. The entire team condemned and have repeatedly condemned the violence and law breaking that occurred on January 6 in the strongest possible terms. We have advocated that everybody be found and punished to the maximum extent of the law.”
At one point, on Feb. 12, van der Veen was asked by Sens. Susan Collins and Mitt Romney: “When Trump sent the disparaging tweet at 2:24 p.m. regarding Pence, was he aware that the Secret Service had removed Pence from the Senate chamber for his safety?” He responded: “The answer is no. At no point was the president informed the vice president was in any danger.”
He later stated, “Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence have had a very good relationship for a long time, and I am sure Mr. Trump very much is concerned and was concerned for the safety and well-being of Mr. Pence and everybody else who was over here.”
Another one of Trump’s attorneys, Bruce Castor, declared, “The president did not cause the riots. He neither explicitly or implicitly encouraged the use of violence or lawless action[.]”
All this was false. And it was not, importantly, falsity of the kind often tolerated in lawyers who “spin” the facts well or crudely but within the conventions of the craft. It was flat-out false. The president’s entire premise was emphatically not that the proceedings of Congress should continue. He tried in innumerable ways to stop those proceedings, according to testimony from aides to Vice President Mike Pence, former senior Justice Department officials, and White House aides like Hutchinson.
Indeed, the testimony before the Jan. 6 committee reflects the president’s active encouragement of the attack on the Capitol, including waiving any requirement that his supporters be screened for weapons at the rally site and before they headed to the Capitol. According to the Hutchinson testimony, Trump’s chief of staff expected that things would “get real, real bad,” and the president’s refusal to intervene and call off the mob when apprised of the threats against the vice president in particular, and more generally, the spreading violence, are all of a piece.
The event was not “supposed to be entirely peaceful,” and it is not true that Trump “[spent the] weeks [prior to January 6] pursuing his election challenge to the court system and the other legal proceedings exactly as the Constitution and the Congress prescribe.” He spent those weeks leaning on state legislators to overturn their own results and state officials to lie about the vote counts in their states. It is also not true that he was concerned for Pence’s well-being or that he was disturbed by the attacks, according to Hutchinson.
A skeptic might argue Trump had no obligation to refrain from falsehoods in his impeachment defense. And Congress, such a skeptic might suggest, took the willing risk of getting lied to when it initiated an impeachment process without taking the time to develop a factual record. It was, then, on Congress to make its case and to catch the president at his lies.
There is an important element of truth to this claim—one we shall address momentarily. That said, the public is entitled to expect that in mounting a defense in the constitutional process of impeachment, presidents—even former presidents—have a higher obligation than assumed by other types of “defendants.” The president swore an oath faithfully to execute the office and to preserve and protect the Constitution, including the constitutional process of impeachment. To the extent Trump wants to contend that he had no obligation to honor this oath, because he was no longer in office or because #lolnothingmatters, surely that is a legitimate prudential factor for criminal prosecutors to take into account when they consider prosecution for the crimes the impeachment was intended to adjudicate.
It is also a reasonable ground on which prosecutors might reject any defense that the criminal process is somehow inappropriate because Trump was already “tried” for Jan. 6-related charges in the impeachment process and acquitted. It cannot be the case that a president can induce an acquittal (or improve its likelihood) through systematic misrepresentations to the Senate and then rest a process-based defense against criminal prosecution on this ill-gotten outcome.
To be sure, the president did not, of course, directly lie to Congress; he did not appear before the Congress. And these are not the kind of lies in any event that prosecutors would charge. Rather, he authorized or led his lawyers to lie, which they then did, either wittingly or unwittingly on his behalf.
But there can be no question that Trump undermined this congressional proceeding, just as he sought to disrupt the Jan. 6 final vote count for the presidency. He could have rested his defense on constitutional grounds alone; he might have stood his ground on a purely legal defense against incitement involved in the Jan. 6 rally speech. Nothing required him to falsely proclaim his innocence of any attempt to use violent or other means to disrupt the congressional proceedings.
Our hypothetical skeptic would be correct on one key point: Congress did make the choice not to use the impeachment as a venue to conduct a wider-ranging probe of Trump’s conduct during the postelection period and it is accountable for that decision. The House’s decision to pass an article of impeachment without investigating first may have been defensible on grounds that the record, though incomplete, was perfectly adequate to issue charges. The Senate, however, elected not to examine the evidence behind the charge the House sent its way.
The Constitution requires that when sitting as a court of impeachment, senators “shall be on Oath or Affirmation.” The text of that specialized oath, spelled out in the Senate’s impeachment rules, required that each senator affirm the following: “I solemnly swear ... that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws: so help me God.”
Having thus sworn, the members of the Senate could reasonably be understood to have had some obligation to look into the kind of facts that the Jan. 6 committee has since unearthed. Even if we assume that House impeachment managers wouldn’t have known to call Hutchinson, who wasn’t on anyone’s radar screen at the time, the story of the attempted palace coup at the Justice Department had already broken. So had the story of Trump’s call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and the harassment of state legislators.
It is true that at the time, public attention was focused on the Jan. 6 rally speech and whether the words Trump spoke then constituted incitement. But the article of impeachment the Senate considered read more broadly. It referred to conduct other than the speech on Jan. 6—both the lies about the stolen election and specific steps taken to reverse results, as in Georgia where Trump sought to pressure the secretary of state in a famously taped conversation into finding the 11,000 votes that he needed. While the speech on Jan. 6 was the centerpiece of the article, the impeachable offense was the attack on the electoral process, culminating in the events of Jan. 6—which also explains why Trump’s counsel went to some length not only to dissect the words of Trump’s rally speech but also to disclaim any intention to upend the process beyond “what the Constitution and the Congress prescribe.” This was more than sufficient to justify Senate inquiry into other events of which the Jan. 6 speech was a part, not the whole.
A final question to be addressed about the Senate’s choice is the inevitably political judgment it faced: how long to expend on proceedings on Trump’s misconduct as a new administration took control and began to grapple with the major issues on its agenda, including the ongoing public health issues facing the country. This no doubt weighed heavily in how Democrats viewed the trade-offs, and Republicans would have additional reasons for moving the national conversation away from Trump’s presidency. A more full-blown factual inquiry might have tried public patience and impeded the achievement of other legitimate policy goals.
There was, however, a middle ground on the extent of fact-finding, something between “none” and “all possible.” We now know that there were former Trump administration officials open to offering valuable information about the events leading up to Jan. 6. At least a few of the known key witnesses, such as senior staff to the vice president, could have been deposed, and their testimony would have helped identify others. The Justice Department officials were also all available. It may have been politically unwise and institutionally difficult for the Senate to launch a trial on the order of the Watergate investigation. Some testimony now known to have been available, however, would have been accessible and could not have failed to have a major impact, even if it might not have changed the outcome.
In judging what the national interest demands, prosecutors will consider a wide range of factors. One is certainly the larger constitutional question of presidential accountability. Presidents enjoy legal immunity while in office, and then after they leave, many commentators express prudential reservations about the risks of one president’s administration proceeding criminally against its predecessor. It’s a kind of constitutional Catch-22. In office, the president is protected by the law; out of office, the president gets at least the benefit of the doubt, by the operation of what might be deemed a “norm” protecting the nation from rounds of politically inspired legal retribution.
Whatever one thinks of the norm in general terms, in this case, we should evaluate its power with all circumstances taken into account. In particular, the conduct reflected in the Jan. 6 testimony is egregious, far worse than most people supposed and very different from what supporters have offered in Trump’s defense. The evidence for what happened on Jan. 6 surfaced only gradually in part because Trump misled Congress and in part because it chose not to look beyond the Jan. 6 rally during the impeachment process.
Trump further compounded the problem of the constitutional Catch-22 involved in a president’s legal immunity while in office and the appeal to “norms” against prosecution when their term ends. In the 2021 impeachment, as in the first one, Trump argued that impeachment was improper in the absence of evidence that he violated the law. But he then lied to Congress about these Jan. 6-related actions and corrupted a trial record that was left without the evidence of potentially illegal conduct.
Whether the availability of this evidence in a Senate trial would have changed votes is unknowable. What we do know is that on this occasion, as in the planning for Jan. 6 itself, the president exhibited a contempt for Congress and its constitutional role that ought to inflect prosecutorial thinking about the prudential aspects of the decision before them. By lying to Congress, he undermined the ability of the tribunal to proceed on the basis of the truth. In weighing the national interest factors at issue in this complex prosecutorial decision, prosecutors cannot fail to take this conduct into account and certainly disregard any attempt to offer the defense of a prior “acquittal.”
Dead bodies are put into a mass grave on the outskirts of Mariupol. (photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP)
No fighting in Ukrainian city since Russian capture in late May, but dead people may be being found under buildings, say researchers
Investigators at CIR used satellite images to determine that approximately 1,400 new graves were added at the Mariupol Starokrymske cemetery between 12 May and 29 June.
CIR researchers estimate that five times more new graves are being dug each month than before the Russian invasion.
“Our report illustrates the continuing, extreme pressure on civilian life in Ukraine, especially in occupied areas. Makeshift burials and the growing number of graves around Ukraine, particularly in and around occupied areas, is a stark illustration of the civilian death toll following the Russian invasion,” said Benjamin Strick, the director of investigations at CIR.
Russia announced in late May that it had taken control of Mariupol, after a nearly three-month siege that reduced much of the port city to smoking ruin.
Using images captured by Planet Labs PBC, a private satellite operator, CIR estimated that by 12 May the number of graves at the Mariupol Starokrymske cemetery had increased by 1,700 since the start of the war, and by 29 June another 1,400 graves had been added, bringing the total number dug since the invasion to 3,100.
Images show that during the prewar period between 21 October and 28 March, approximately 1,000 graves were added.
Since Russia captured Mariupol, the city has seen no further fighting, and the roughly 90,000 Ukrainians who remain have been left with little access to electricity, phone, internet, water or healthcare.
CIR said the increase in graves during peacetime could be explained by hundreds of bodies being uncovered under destroyed buildings in the city.
At the end of May, Petro Andryushchenko, a senior aide to Mariupol’s Ukrainian mayor now operating outside the Russian-held city, said about 200 decomposing bodies had been found buried in the basement of a Mariupol high-rise.
In total, Andryushchenko estimated that 22,000 people died in the city in the two months of fighting. One person among several coordinating burials in the city previously told the Guardian that the total could be closer to 50,000.
The UN human rights office says that more than 5,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion on 24 February. Kyiv says the true number is many times higher.
Little information is known about the situation in Mariupol, which has largely been cut off from the outside world with the limited mobile phone and internet connections. Images occasionally posted on the Telegram сhannel “Mariupol Now”, which was set up by a Ukrainian volunteer to get information out of the city, show bodies being moved for burial. In one particularly gruesome picture, which the channel said was taken in June, dozens of bodies are seen lying in a car park.
The CIR report said the high fatality rate seen in Mariupol during the fighting for the city “correlates with Russian movements and incessant shelling within a reasonable proximity”.
In Manhush, a town near Mariupol, CIR analysed a grave site that was first reported by Ukrainian officials on 21 April, when the Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security in Ukraine announced that locals had found a new 30-metre mass grave.
According to CIR, Planet imagery showed an increase in activity at the grave site from 24 April to 8 May. The Ukrainian Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security alleged that 3,000 to 9,000 Mariupol residents were buried in the mass grave.
The report also analysed a graveyard in Pionerske, a settlement outside Mariupol, which the report said showed the emergence of trenches at grave sites that coincided with newly formed Russian military positions.
“In cases such as Mariupol, the emergence of multiple mass graves nearby such as Pionerske denotes the high fatality rate that correlates with Russian movements and incessant shelling within a reasonable proximity,” the report said, concluding that combined with other open-source evidence, “a clear picture emerges of the Kremlin conducting their campaign in breach of international human rights conventions”.
Russian soldiers. (photo: Creative Commons)
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a regional security organization, issued a report Thursday detailing "clear patterns of serious violations of international humanitarian law" committed mainly by the Russian army.
The report describes in vivid detail the torture of Ukrainian civilians by Russian troops.
In a summer camp in Bucha, just outside Ukraine's capital of Kyiv that was occupied for over two weeks by Russian forces, the investigators said they found a series of torture chambers.
"In Zabuchchya, a village in the Bucha district, 18 mutilated bodies of murdered men, women, and children were discovered in a basement: some had their ears cut off, while others had their teeth pulled out," according to the report.
Speaking Thursday in Vienna, U.S. Ambassador to the OSCE Michael Carpenter described a Russian missile attack on the central city of Vinnytsia that killed more than 20 people, including 3 children, as "disgusting," but "a reality that we contend with each and every day."
Ukrainian emergency services showed images of a child's dead body lying on the ground next to a play stroller she had been pushing down the road with her mother when the missiles struck.
In an interview with CBS News senior foreign correspondent Holly Williams, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov called the strike the latest proof that his country is at war with "a state of terrorists."
"They're using that weapon against civilian people, against the civilian facilities, against the hospitals… against the kindergartens," he said.
The OSCE report says that as Russia is increasingly unable to muster enough of its own forces, it has recently begun resorting to conscripting Ukrainian men between the ages 18-65 from territory it occupies and sending them straight to the front lines, with little to no training.
"The escalation, and rising casualty rates, have begun to spark anger even among pro-Russian communities. Several videos posted online purportedly show the wives of Donetsk and Luhansk conscripts demanding assistance for their husbands and asking why men with no military background are being sent to fight," according to the report.
Incidences of gender-based violence have remained prevalent throughout the war, the report states. Natalia Karbowska, co-founder and director of strategic development for the Ukrainian Women's Fund, suggested during a June U.N. Security Council briefing that "the Russian Federation is using sexual violence and rape as instruments of terror to control civilians."
In one instance, 25 girls aged 14 to 24 were allegedly kept in a basement in Bucha where they were gang-raped by Russian troops. Nine of the girls became pregnant, according to Ukraine's Commissioner for Human Rights.
Russian President Vladimir Putin bestowed the honorary title of "guard" on the military unit accused of war crimes in Bucha, according to a Russian presidential decree.
In a Facebook post, the Russian Embassy in the U.S. dismissed the report as an attempt by Washington "to vilify the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation," which it suggested was due to "dissatisfaction with the success of a special military operation." The Putin regime has consistently referred to the invasion of Ukraine as a "military operation." Referring to it as a war can land Russians in prison.
The OSCE report also discusses "filtration centers," set up by Russia's occupying forces, where Ukrainian civilians "are separated from others and often simply disappear."
The report says detained individuals are handed over to authorities in the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions, where some are sentenced to death.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for an immediate end to Russia's "filtration" operations and for the release of detained Ukrainian civilians. Russian authorities have deported between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, deliberately separating Ukrainian children from their parents, according to the Biden administration.
"The unlawful transfer and deportation of protected persons is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians and is a war crime," Blinken said in a statement Wednesday. "Russian authorities must release those detained and allow Ukrainian citizens forcibly removed or coerced into leaving their country the ability to promptly and safely return home."
Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Rising prices, party infighting and the aftershocks from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have undercut the president’s plans to speed an energy transition.
Ending more than a year of fruitless negotiations over a proposal to push the nation’s electricity and transportation sectors away from fossil fuels, Mr. Biden said Friday he was instead prepared to “take strong executive action to meet this moment.”
Even for a president who has prided himself on compromise and the art of the possible, it was a marked retreat, one driven by the economic and political challenges of rampant inflation.
Mr. Biden called on Democratic senators to pass a narrow bill to expand health-insurance subsidies through the Affordable Care Act and reduce the cost of prescription drugs. The move effectively dooms his quest for a major climate change law, and his accompanying plans to raise taxes on businesses and high-earning individuals, unless Democrats hold the House and Senate in November’s midterm elections.
The president’s climate goals stalled amid shifting economic priorities driven by fast-rising consumer prices, including the gasoline price spike triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Underscoring that point, Mr. Biden made the announcement from Saudi Arabia, where he flew on Friday to press the region’s oil giants to pump even more crude onto global markets.
At the end of a news conference in Jeddah, Mr. Biden vowed that “I am not going away” on the climate fight. “I will use every power that I have as president to continue to fulfill my pledge toward dealing with global warming,” he said.
Mr. Biden came to office promising to wean the United States from fossil fuels like oil and coal in order to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are on pace to trigger catastrophic global warming.
He surrounded himself with experienced and aggressive advisers on international and domestic climate politics. He cast himself as a master negotiator who had spent nearly four decades in the Senate and could build coalitions on big legislation.
But the events of Thursday showed how thoroughly Mr. Biden has been frustrated in that effort.
Democratic leaders began the day thinking they were finally close to agreement with their party’s sole holdout, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia. But by nightfall, Mr. Manchin told them he could not support roughly $300 billion in tax incentives for clean energy like solar and wind power. He said he wanted to wait for more encouraging data on inflation, even though administration officials said the clean energy provisions would be part of a broader bill designed to reduce health and electricity costs, cut the deficit and strengthen the economy. It was the coda to more than a year of tortured negotiations.
Mr. Manchin had been in talks with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, on a scaled-back version of the climate initiatives Mr. Biden had unsuccessfully tried to sell to Mr. Manchin last fall. In a taste of the on-again, off-again nature of the discussions, on Friday, Mr. Manchin told the West Virginia radio host Hoppy Kercheval that he was still engaged in those negotiations and dangled the idea that he might support energy legislation in September.
But Mr. Manchin also said he was wary of raising taxes to offset the energy and climate credits, at a time when inflation is rising at its fastest pace in 40 years.
“Inflation is absolutely killing many, many people,” Mr. Manchin said on the radio program. “Can’t we wait to make sure that we do nothing to add to that?”
Mr. Biden’s statement effectively ruled out waiting any longer on Mr. Manchin, who has objected to various portions of the climate plan over the course of prolonged negotiations.
Mr. Manchin’s vote was key in an evenly divided Senate, where not a single Republican has been willing to vote for the Democrats’ climate legislation.
Auto industry analysts said that the death of the legislation would likely slow the nation’s transition to electric vehicles and cause some automakers to rethink their investments.
The bill had included $7,500 in tax credits for buyers of electric cars, intended to help reach Mr. Biden’s goal that half the new cars sold in the United States will be all-electric by 2030, up from just 6 percent today.
Without that incentive, electric vehicles, which climate experts say are essential to reducing emissions, could be out of reach for many consumers.
The collapse of the legislation will also kneecap the clean energy industry in the U.S. even as it takes off around the world, said Heather Zichal, chief executive of the American Clean Power Association, which represents wind and solar energy companies and battery manufacturers.
“After this, if you are looking around across the world to see where the opportunities are to invest, you are now going to overlook the U.S. Other countries have put policies in place,” she said. “They provide regulatory certainty. We don’t have that.”
For decades, the U.S. has provided short-term tax credits for wind and solar power, usually expiring after one to two years, subjecting the industry to a boom-bust cycle until the credits are renewed. The tax credits in the blocked legislation would have lasted 10 years, giving companies confidence to make long-term investment decisions.
The death of the legislation is just the latest, but arguably worst, blow to Mr. Biden’s climate agenda, as his tools to tackle global warming have been stripped, one by one.
“There has been a party leadership-wide failure to address this,” said Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, an environmental group that represents many young climate activists.
“I want to make sure Biden and his administration hear this loud and clear,” Ms. Prakash said. “They have to create a response across all agencies of the government at every level over the course of the two and a half years that they remain in office to do everything in their power to address the climate crisis, or risk being a huge failure and disappointment to the American people and young people in particular.”
Leaders of some of the country’s biggest environmental organizations delivered that message during a call Friday afternoon with two of Mr. Biden’s top aides, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed, as well as Ali Zaidi, the White House deputy climate adviser.
“We were very clear in our meeting at the White House that this was a moment that demands presidential leadership. President Biden has said the climate crisis is ‘code red’ and he’s right,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, an environmental group, who co-chaired the discussion.
They urged the White House to make maximum use of regulations to cut emissions from power plants and vehicles, including actions that had been delayed in an effort not to anger Mr. Manchin during negotiations. They also urged the administration to stop new drilling for oil and gas as well as coal mining on federal lands and waters. The Biden administration had allowed for the possibility of new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, also to appease Mr. Manchin, several administration officials have acknowledged.
“The people that elected Biden need to see much more action,” said Ramón Cruz, president of the Sierra Club.
Several people on the call, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss it, said White House officials acknowledged the need for action but did not offer specifics. One person described the response as “not inspiring.”
Economists generally agree there are two basic ways to reduce emissions and curb global temperature rise. One is to drive down the cost of low-carbon energy sources, like wind, solar or nuclear power, while improving energy efficiency. The other is making fossil fuels more expensive to use, either by putting a price on carbon emissions or raising the price of the fuels.
Mr. Biden appears to have lost his best chance to lower the costs of clean energy, at a time when he is working to bring down the price of fossil fuels.
He could pursue executive actions to regulate emissions in some sectors of the economy, though his options have been narrowed on that front by a recent Supreme Court ruling that restricted the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to limit emissions from power plants, the nation’s second-largest source of planet-warming pollution.
At the White House, Mr. Biden’s climate team is now assembling a suite of smaller and less muscular tools to fight global warming, which experts say could still reduce the nation’s carbon footprint, although not by enough to meet Mr. Biden’s pledge to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by about half by the end of this decade.
In the coming months, the E.P.A. still plans to issue tougher regulations to control methane, a potent greenhouse gas that leaks from oil and gas wells, along with a more modest rule to cut emissions from utilities.
And while many economists have long pushed for governments to tax fossil fuels to reduce emissions, Mr. Biden and his advisers have said repeatedly that they want to reduce, not raise, gasoline prices. The president is mindful of gasoline’s impact on household budgets and the political toll that high gas prices have exacted on his presidency.
Mr. Biden acknowledged the contradictions of that position last fall, when gasoline prices were rising but were still $1.50 a gallon cheaper on average in the United States than they are today.
“On the surface,” he told reporters at a news conference following a Group of 20 summit meeting in Rome, “it seems like an irony, but the truth of the matter is — you’ve all known, everyone knows — that the idea we’re going to be able to move to renewable energy overnight and not have — from this moment on, not use oil or not use gas or not use hydrogen is just not rational.”
The collapse of climate legislation comes as Mr. Biden’s top environmental advisers are said to be headed for the exits. Mr. Biden had assembled what many called a dream team of experts including Gina McCarthy, who had served as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama, to lead a White House office of climate policy.
Ms. McCarthy has indicated she intends to step down from her position this year, but had hoped to do so on a high note after the passage of climate legislation, aides have said.
Mr. Biden’s top international envoy, John Kerry, who served as secretary of state in the Obama administration, is expected to leave after the next round of United Nations climate negotiations, which will be in November in Egypt.
With little to show from the United States, however, Mr. Kerry will struggle to push other countries to cut their climate pollution, experts said. Doing so is critical to keeping the rise in average global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels. That is the threshold beyond which the likelihood of catastrophic droughts, floods, fires and heat waves increases significantly. The Earth has already warmed by an average of about 1.1 degrees Celsius, or about 2 degrees Fahrenheit.
As the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases historically, the United States occupies a singular role in the fight to mitigate global warming. President Donald J. Trump abdicated that role, but when Mr. Biden was elected he declared that America was “back” and would lead nations in tamping down the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.
Now, the United States “will find it very hard to lead the world if we can’t even take the first steps here at home,” said Nat Keohane, the president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, an environmental group. “The honeymoon is over.”
An immigrant detention center. (photo: ABC)A nurse at the privately run Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, according to the complaint, took advantage of his position to coerce the women "into giving him access to private parts of their body without medical justification or need."
The Southern Poverty Law Center and a coalition of advocacy organizations filed the administrative complaint Tuesday with the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. It accuses Immigration and Customs Enforcement and private prison company CoreCivic of enabling the nurse's alleged actions and failing to protect and care for people in their custody.
The complaint details the accusations of four women identified with pseudonyms and described as detainees held at Stewart in late 2021 and early 2022.
Two of the women notified Stewart officials of the nurse's alleged behavior while they were in detention, according to the complaint, which alleges the women were "brazenly retaliated against through aggressive and accusatory interrogations and threats of prolonged imprisonment."
The nurse's name is redacted in a copy of the complaint the organizations released to the media Wednesday. The complaint, first reported by The Intercept, says the nurse continues to work and see patients at Stewart.
CoreCivic has denied the allegations
A spokesman for CoreCivic, the private company that operates the detention facility, said in a statement released to CNN that an internal administrative investigation of two of the women's accusations found one woman's claim to be "unsubstantiated" and the other's to be "unfounded."
Those women were released from Stewart before the investigation concluded, CoreCivic spokesman Matthew Davio said.
"We have very little information regarding the claims made by the other two women, but will investigate them thoroughly if and when we receive that information," he said.
The nurse was placed on administrative leave during the company's investigation, Davio said, adding that there have been no allegations against the nurse before or since.
"As he was cleared of all allegations, the nurse is still in our employ," Davio said. "We unequivocally deny any claims of threats or retaliation."
ICE also said its administrative investigation into the initial allegations determined they were unsubstantiated.
"Two allegations remain under investigation and ICE continues to follow all appropriate protocol" for reporting and investigations, an ICE spokesman said in a statement. "Any individual -- ICE employee or contractor -- suspected of sexual abuse or assault is immediately removed from contact with detained individuals until the completion of the investigation."
The agency has "a zero-tolerance policy for all forms of assault, including sexual abuse," the spokesman said, adding that facilities are required to notify ICE of all sexual abuse or assault allegations and notify local law enforcement of allegations involving potentially criminal behavior.
CNN has also reached out to the Department of Homeland Security and the Stewart County Sheriff's Office for a response to the allegations.
What the former detainees say happened
The complaint filed this week alleges that the two women who reported the nurse while detained were repeatedly accused of lying by officials at Stewart and warned that if they continued with their complaints their detention could be prolonged, they could be charged and they could face up to seven years in prison. The complaint also alleges that food was withheld from one of the accusers.
At a press conference in Atlanta Thursday, advocates accused authorities of dismissing the women's complaints and threatening them rather than protecting them.
"How many times have we seen this? How many times -- that survivors are disregarded, not believed and vilified," said Amilcar Valencia, executive director of El Refugio ministry, an organization whose volunteers are in regular contact with Stewart detainees and their families.
"To the survivors," he added, "we as a community are saying today that we hear you, that we believe you, that we stand by you, and we thank you for being brave."
The complaint outlines a series of allegations against the nurse.
In one instance, the nurse allegedly put his penis in a woman's hand during a medical exam, ordered her to lower her pants and tried to touch her below her waistline. When that woman, identified as "Maria Doe," attempted to report the alleged assault to officers at the facility, the complaint alleges that she was "subjected to repeated interrogations and accusations that she was lying."
In other instances, the complaint alleges the same nurse inappropriately touched women who'd come to him seeking medical help.
A woman identified as "Marta Doe" alleges that when she went to the medical unit for chest pain, the nurse had her remove her shirt and bra, then placed a stethoscope on her bare chest. On another occasion when she sought treatment for an injured wrist, the complaint says that the nurse "grabbed her hand and insisted that she remove her pants." In that instance, after she repeatedly refused, the complaint says, the nurse "gave up and told her to calm down."
"It has really affected me. I have become insecure and fearful, because the only person who could help me with my pain wanted to hurt me," she told CNN, adding that the experience has caused her to have nightmares. The woman, who is seeking asylum, asked to be identified by the pseudonym used in the complaint to protect her safety.
Marta told CNN she was detained from September to November 2021 and didn't report the incidents when they occurred because she was afraid she'd face retaliation and would be forced to spend more time detained. But she says she told her attorney what had happened as soon as she was released from custody, and felt it was important to join the complaint and share her story now, because she's afraid others could get hurt.
"There are a lot of us, the women who were abused mentally and physically. And he is still there," she said. "I'm afraid he's still causing harm."
Immigrant advocates are calling for a 'thorough investigation'
The SPLC's Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative led the complaint, joined by Project South, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, El Refugio, the Georgia Human Rights Clinic, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights and Owings MacNorlin LLC.
The organizations are requesting removal of the nurse from Stewart, an investigation into the facility and records related to the cases, among other things.
Erin Argueta, the initiative's lead attorney, said the complaint was filed with the DHS civil liberties office because that division is tasked with investigating allegations of abuse in ICE detention.
"We hope for a thorough investigation, with transparent results and follow-up," she said.
Lawsuits also could be possible in the future, she said.
The Stewart Detention Center is one of the largest ICE detention facilities in the country and was the subject of the 2018 CNN series, "Inside America's Hidden Border."
The facility had housed only male detainees for years, but ICE began holding women there in late 2020, several months after accusations of high rates of hysterectomies and medical neglect surfaced at another Georgia detention facility.
For years immigrant rights advocates have criticized medical care at Stewart -- and in the wider ICE detention system -- alleging inadequate staffing, delays in care and neglect.
CoreCivic's spokesman said Wednesday that the safety, health and well-being of detainees is a top priority.
"It is CoreCivic policy to aggressively investigate all allegations, regardless of the source, and support prosecution for those who are involved in incidents of sexual abuse," Davio said.
Armed forces secure an area of state offices in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, July 11, 2022. (photo: Odelyn Joseph/AP)
MSF says corpses line only road into isolated area of Cite-Soleil, Haiti, which rival gangs have turned into a ‘battlefield’.
In a statement, the humanitarian aid group said residents have been unable to leave an area in Cite-Soleil known as Brooklyn, while trucks that bring drinking water into the neighbourhood have been unable to enter.
Jean Hislain Frederick, the deputy mayor of Cite Soleil, said earlier this week that the fighting erupted on Friday in a battle between members of two rival gangs and that at least 50 people had died and more than 50 were wounded.
“People have no access to water, no access to electricity, and there is a great need for healthcare and latrines. Because of the current fighting, the situation has worsened,” MSF’s head of mission in Haiti, Mumuza Muhindo, said in the statement.
Muhindo also said “corpses that are decomposing or being burned” line the only road into Brooklyn.
“They could be people killed during the clashes or people trying to leave who were shot – it is a real battlefield. It is not possible to estimate how many people have been killed,” he said.
The violence began just a day after the first anniversary of the assassination of President Jovenel Moise, which worsened an already fraught political situation in the Caribbean nation and sent gang violence soaring.
The clashes in Cite-Soleil also have forced the closure of the nearby Varreux fuel terminal, a source familiar with the matter told the Reuters news agency.
Two ships carrying imported fuel have been unable to unload their cargoes, and fuel trucks that distribute to filling stations are not approaching the terminal due to security concerns, said the source, who asked not to be identified.
During the past year, Haiti has suffered from fuel shortages, including some that were exacerbated by gang blockades on fuel terminals in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas.
Haitian protesters blocked roads in the downtown area of the capital on Wednesday morning in anger over the lack of supplies.
Groups of motorcycle drivers blocked intersections and some were setting tyres on fire, witnesses told Reuters.
“The violence appears to be the result of a confrontation between the G9 and the GPEP gangs,” said a spokesman for the office of Prime Minister Ariel Henry.
The United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) also warned this week that hunger was set to worsen in Haiti as a result of the continuing gang violence.
More than one million people in the capital are already food insecure and deliveries of homegrown supplies such as bananas, cannot get there by road because the trucks are at risk of getting shot at or held up along the way, Jean-Martin Bauer, WFP’s Haiti country director, told reporters.
“Large parts of the population have been cut off from the economic heart of the country,” Bauer said in a statement on Tuesday. “We are seeing hunger rise significantly in the capital and south of the country, with Port-au-Prince being the hardest hit.”
The Washburn Fire near Yosemite National Park's southern entrance in Wawona, California. (photo: Stephen Lam/SF Chronicle)
The Washburn Fire ignited July 7 in Yosemite National Park and promptly forced the evacuation of hundreds of people from the town of Wawona and the closure of the park’s southern entrance, as The Guardian reported. Since then, it has spread to 4,759 acres — according to the most recent figures from InciWeb — and entered the Sierra National Forest.
“As firefighters pursue the Washburn Fire using a coordinated full suppression strategy, the fire remains active on the Sierra National Forest during hot and dry conditions,” the forest wrote in a press release posted on Facebook Thursday.
The flames first breached the Sierra National Forest on Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times reported. At the time, the fire displayed “active to very active fire behavior” driven by hot, dry conditions, officials said. This led to the closure of Forest Routes 5S43, 5S06, 5S22 and 5S37, which will remain in effect until August 1. Five more routes were announced closed on Thursday, according to the press release: 6S10, 5S40Y, 5240, 5S04 and 5S70A.
“The fire is moving east along the South Fork of Merced River in a remote river canyon making access very challenging,” the press release explained. “The fire is impacting wilderness, main forest roads and recreation areas. This calls for significant firefighting and Forest Service resources to help fight the Washburn Fire. For these reasons, these forest lands and roads near the southern boundary of Yosemite National Park need to be closed for the safety of the public and firefighters.”
However, the release noted that the closures still only impacted less than three percent of the total forest area.
When the Washburn Fire forest ignited in Yosemite, it was near the park’s famed Mariposa Grove of redwoods, according to a press release from InciWeb and the park. There was concern that the flames could harm the more than 500 mature sequoias in the grove, including the park’s second tallest tree — the 209-foot tall Grizzly Giant — NPR reported.
However, the trees are safe for now, according to The Guardian. In previous years, the park had ordered prescribed burns to clear vegetation around the trees, and this paid off, stalling the flames so that firefighters could put in sprinklers to offer additional protection.
“We’ve been preparing for the Washburn fire for decades,” Yosemite forest ecologist Garrett Dickman said, as The Guardian reported. “It really just died as soon as it hit the grove.”
As of now, the fire is 31 percent contained, according to InciWeb. However, it could keep burning until January if the dry weather doesn’t let up, said Stanley Bercovitz, public information officer from the interagency team responding to the fire, as The Guardian reported.
California and the rest of the U.S. West is in the midst of its worst megadrought in 1,200 years, which has been made 42 percent more extreme due to the climate crisis. The drought is also fueling severe wildfires in the region. In general, climate change will make extreme fires 30 percent more common by 2050 and 50 percent more common by 2100, according to the UN.
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