22 July 22
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“The mob was accomplishing President Trump’s purpose, so of course he didn’t intervene,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said. “President Trump did not fail to act... He chose not to act.”
Kinzinger and Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) — two military veterans — led the hearing and the questioning of two in-person witnesses: Sarah Matthews, Trump’s deputy White House press secretary, and Matthew Pottinger, a former National Security Council official. Both gave an inside look at Trump’s refusals to call off the mob, despite reported pleas to do so from numerous advisers, including his own daughter.
Trump “did not want to include any sort of mention of peace” in a tweet aides urged him to send to quell the violence, Matthews testified. The former president also hesitated to vilify the rioters and refused to say “the election’s over” while taping remarks the day after the attack, newly released video showed.
Promising additional hearings in September, committee members warned that a failure to hold Trump accountable would critically damage American democracy.
“There was no ambiguity, no nuance: Donald Trump made a purposeful choice to violate his oath of office, to ignore the ongoing violence against law enforcement, to threaten our constitutional order,” committee vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said. “There is no way to excuse that behavior. It was indefensible.”
Here’s what to know
- Several witnesses told the committee over its investigation that Trump did not call the Defense, Justice or Homeland Security departments — or any other agency — to coordinate a response as the attack unfolded. Instead, Trump was calling GOP senators to urge them to object to the electoral vote count, Luria said.
- The hearing also featured taped testimony from the committee’s interviews with other witnesses, including an unnamed White House security official who said members of Pence’s security detail started to fear for their own lives during the attack. “There were calls to say goodbye to family members and so forth,” said the official, whose voice was disguised.
- Pence was giving orders to the military to clear the Capitol and stop the violence, according to taped testimony from Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Get the military down here. Get the guard down here. Put down this situation!” Pence said, Milley told the committee. Other legislative leaders also were begging Christopher Miller, the acting secretary of defense, to help. Milley said Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, called him to say they needed the “narrative” that Trump was still in charge and making decisions. But Trump wasn’t giving any orders. Pence was.
National Guard troops at the Capitol after it was overtaken by a violent mob of Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. (photo: Kenny Holston/The New York Times)
The hearing did not fully answer the question, but it shed light on Mr. Trump’s refusal to push for troops to assist police officers who were overrun by an angry mob determined to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
The mobilization and deployment of National Guard troops from an armory just two miles away from the Capitol was hung up by confusion, communications breakdowns and concern over the wisdom of dispatching armed soldiers to quell the riot.
Ukrainian grain: The country is traditionally known as Europe's "bread basket." (photo: EPA)
ALSO SEE: Turkey Says Ukraine Grain Export Deal
to Be Signed in Istanbul
Turkey says a deal has been reached with Russia to allow Ukraine to resume exports of grain through the Black Sea.
The world shortage of Ukrainian grain since Russia's 24 February invasion has left millions at risk of hunger.
The invasion sent food prices soaring, so the deal to unblock Ukraine's ports is crucial. Some 20 million tonnes of grain is stuck in the country.
Ukraine's foreign ministry confirmed that another UN-led round of talks to unblock grain exports would take place in Turkey on Friday - and a document "may be signed". President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his late-night address that Kyiv awaited news "regarding the unblocking of our ports".
But one Ukrainian MP close to the talks voiced caution over the deal.
"We don't have [an] agreement yet," Odesa MP Oleksiy Honcharenko told BBC Radio 4's World Tonight programme. "We don't trust Russians at all. So let us wait till tomorrow for a final decision and that there will not be some pushbacks from Russians and last-minute changes."
"I keep fingers crossed tomorrow we'll have a deal and Russia will really respect it."
The US State Department welcomed the UN-brokered deal, but said it was focusing on holding Russia accountable for implementing it.
"We should never have been in this position in the first place. This was a deliberate decision on the part of the Russian Federation to weaponise food," said the department's spokesman Ned Price.
Diplomats say the plan includes:
- Ukrainian vessels guiding grain ships in and out through mined port waters
- Russia agreeing to a truce while shipments move
- Turkey - supported by the United Nations - inspecting ships, to allay Russian fears of weapons smuggling.
The deal is also meant to facilitate Russian exports of grain and fertiliser via the Black Sea.
The UN and Turkey have been working for two months to broker a grain deal amid global anxiety about the food crisis.
Russia denies blockading Ukraine's ports - it blames Ukraine for laying mines at sea and Western sanctions for slowing Russia's own exports.
In a piece aimed at newspapers in Africa, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov blamed the West and Ukraine for "absolutely groundless" allegations that Russia was exporting hunger. He praised the "balanced position of the Africans regarding what is happening in Ukraine and around it".
Ukraine, however, says the Russian navy prevents it shipping grain and other exports and accuses Russian occupation forces of stealing grain from Ukrainian farms.
If the signing goes ahead as planned, it will be the first significant deal between Russia and Ukraine since the invasion began. There have been some prisoner exchanges, but a ceasefire still appears a long way off.
"The grain export agreement, critically important for global food security, will be signed in Istanbul under the auspices of President [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan and UN Secretary General Mr Guterres, together with Ukrainian and Russian delegations," said Mr Erdogan's spokesman Ibrahim Kalin.
Sergiy Kyslytsya, the Ukrainian ambassador to the UN, said the devil would be in the detail of the deal, which was still being worked on by all parties.
If the deal was signed and implemented, it would "ensure a significant number of ships can approach or leave the Ukrainian ports and we can export about 20 million tonnes of grain, which is ready to be exported," he told BBC World News.
Mr Kyslytsya added that Turkey would play a "very important part ensuring the security" and monitoring the process.
Sam Dobbins, the police chief in Lexington, Mississippi, was fired Wednesday, after the disclosure of a recording of him bragging about killing people in the line of duty and using the n-word repeatedly. (photo: AP)
The racist, homophobic and expletive-laden remarks that Sam Dobbins, the chief in the small town of Lexington, made during an April conversation with an officer caused an uproar this week in the Mississippi Delta community.
The roughly 16-minute conversation, which was first reported by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, was recorded by Robert Lee Hooker, a Black man who resigned as an officer from the Lexington Police Department last week due to what he described as a toxic work environment.
In the recording, later obtained by The Washington Post, Dobbins can be heard boasting to Hooker about all of the men he killed when he was an officer.
“I’ve killed 13 men in my career, justified,” he said, according to the recording. “In my line of duty, I have shot and killed 13 different people.”
While describing an alleged shootout in a cornfield, Dobbins claimed to Hooker that he “saved 67 kids in a school” by shooting a Black man more than 100 times.
“I shot that n----- 119 times, okay?” Dobbins said to Hooker, adding that the man he shot was “DRT,” or “dead right there.” It’s unclear what case he’s referencing, but Dobbins reiterated, “The vehicle was shot 319 times, but he was hit 119 times by me.”
As backlash mounted in Lexington — a town of 1,600 people, 80 percent of whom are Black — the board of aldermen voted 3-2 Wednesday to oust Dobbins, effective immediately.
“Once we heard it, I was just appalled and angry,” Cardell Wright, the paralegal for JULIAN, the civil rights and international human rights organization that obtained the audio from Hooker, told The Post. Wright, the president of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, added: “Just to see the hatred in your own backyard was disturbing. We knew we had to do something immediately.”
Neither Dobbins nor Hooker immediately responded to requests for comment early Thursday. Messages left for the mayor’s office were also not immediately returned.
Dobbins told the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting that he was unaware of the recording and that the topic of killing people in the line of duty was “something we don’t discuss, period.” He also denied using the slurs: “I don’t talk like that,” Dobbins said.
Mississippi is a one-party consent state when it comes to recording conversations, meaning not all parties in a conversation have to be made aware they are being recorded.
Jill Collen Jefferson, the founder and president of JULIAN, told The Post in a statement that “the corruption we’re seeing here is on a scale I haven’t seen since the civil rights movement.”
“This audio is damning,” Jefferson said. “It’s not just a reflection of one officer. It’s a reflection of an entire culture of policing, and it should spur Congress to finally rein in this modern-day slave patrol. A culture like this does not deserve immunity.”
Dobbins’s firing comes at a time when policing and the culture of small police departments is under scrutiny, nationwide. After the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., in May in which 19 children and two adult teachers were killed, critics and policing experts said the handling of the tragedy raised more concerns as to whether tiny police agencies still made sense. Agencies with fewer than 10 officers make up nearly half the nation’s more than 12,200 local departments, a 2016 federal survey found.
More than 1,050 people have been shot and killed by police in the past year, according to data tracked by The Post. Although half of those people were White, Black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate: They account for less than 13 percent of the U.S. population but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of Whites. Hispanics are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.
In Lexington, about 64 miles north of the capital, Jackson, Dobbins was promoted to police chief last year, Wright said.
In recent months, more than a dozen Lexington residents have accused law enforcement of harassment — with one person calling the culture of policing in the town as “the Wild, Wild West.”
Shirley Gibson, a lifelong resident, accused Lexington police of breaking into her home in December and using force against her and her son, even though she says the officers did not have a search warrant. “I’m very terrified because this isn’t the first time they did this,” she told WLBT at the time.
Hooker had resigned as an officer with the force only days after he joined the department earlier this year, Wright said. But the officer, who was allegedly frustrated with how Dobbins was speaking to him and others, decided to rejoin the force to help bring some accountability if needed.
“He was waiting to see if the chief slipped up any more and showed his true colors,” Wright said.
On April 11, Hooker and Dobbins were talking to each other following a couple of arrests in town. Dobbins is heard in the recording using multiple racial slurs to Hooker while arguing that he would defend the officer.
“There’s only going to be one man fighting for you, and it’s going to be me, okay?” Dobbins said, according to the recording.
Then, Dobbins talked about the 13 people he’s killed in the line of duty. When Hooker asked if he really did fatally shoot that many people while on duty, Dobbins responded, “Yes, sir, justified, bro. Ask around.”
At that point, he again used the n-word and claimed to have shot a Black suspect 119 times. While he does not specify the case, Wright told The Post that JULIAN has received calls indicating that it was an incident in Montgomery County, Miss., involving an unarmed man. Dobbins said in the recording that the man was armed. Dobbins told Hooker in April that the Humphreys County Sheriff’s Office, where he worked at the time, cleared him of all wrongdoing.
A spokesperson with the sheriff’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Dobbins is also heard uttering homophobic slurs and claiming that he would smash suspects “through the window” to get their respect.
“It would get your attention real quick,” he said, according to the recording.
Wright said he was unaware such a recording existed until Hooker resigned from the force and handed over the tape last Friday. Hooker told reporters on Wednesday that he came forward because he could no longer sit back and let Dobbins’s alleged behavior continue.
“I just got to the point where you’re not doing the people right, you’re not doing right, so therefore let me expose you for what you are, who you are,” Hooker said, according to WLBT. “And that’s how it happened.”
Investigator Charles Henderson has been named interim chief in Lexington until a permanent replacement is found.
Hooker is thankful that Dobbins has been dismissed, but he is also cautious of any potential backlash that could come, Wright said.
“He’s being cautious because we don’t know who in the community is mad about the situation,” Wright said. “But he is relieved that he was able to do his part in standing up for the Black community in Lexington.”
ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations officers question a woman. (photo: Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)
Apparently President Biden isn’t in charge of the executive branch anymore.
The decision was largely along party lines, except that Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Court’s three Democratic appointees.
The decision in United States v. Texas is temporary, but the upshot of this decision is that Tipton will effectively wield much of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s authority over how ICE officers prioritize their time for as much as an entire year — and that’s assuming that the Biden administration ultimately prevails when the Court reconsiders this case next winter.
At issue in this case is a perfectly standard decision Mayorkas made last September. Federal law provides that the secretary of homeland security “shall be responsible” for “establishing national immigration enforcement policies and priorities.” Pursuant to this authority, Mayorkas issued a memo to ICE’s acting director, informing him that the agency should prioritize enforcement efforts against undocumented or otherwise removable immigrants who “pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security and thus threaten America’s well-being.”
Then-secretaries of homeland security issued similar memos setting enforcement priorities in 2000, 2005, 2010, 2011, 2014, and 2017.
Not long after Mayorkas handed down his memo, however, the Republican attorneys general of Texas and Louisiana went to Tipton, a Trump judge with a history of handing down legally dubious decisions halting Biden administration immigration policies, asking Tipton to invalidate Mayorkas’s memo. Tipton obliged, and an especially conservative panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit allowed Tipton’s order to remain in effect.
DOJ asked the Supreme Court to stay Tipton’s decision, temporarily restoring an elected administration’s control over federal law enforcement while this case proceeds. But the Court just refused. And it did so without explanation.
Additionally, the Court’s order announces that the justices will hear this case in December, after which it will decide whether Tipton’s decision should be permanently vacated.
This is not a close case, at least under existing law. Not only is there a federal statute that explicitly gives Mayorkas, and not Tipton, the power to establish “national immigration enforcement policies and priorities,” but Tipton’s order is also inconsistent with a legal doctrine known as “prosecutorial discretion.” That doctrine gives the executive branch discretionary authority to determine when to bring enforcement actions against individuals who allegedly violated the law.
The Supreme Court has instructed judges like Tipton to be very reluctant to second-guess these kinds of discretionary judgments by law enforcement agencies. As the Court held in Heckler v. Chaney (1985), “an agency’s decision not to take enforcement action should be presumed immune from judicial review.”
This presumption is especially strong in the immigration context. The Court has said that “a principal feature of the removal system is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials.” Even after an enforcement agency decides to bring a removal proceeding against a particular immigrant, the Court explained in Reno v. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (1999), it “has discretion to abandon the endeavor.” And it may do so for any number of reasons, including “humanitarian reasons or simply for its own convenience.”
It is still possible that, after the Court hears this case in December, a majority of the Court will vote to vacate Tipton’s order and restore Mayorkas’s lawful authority. But even if that happens, that still means that Tipton will be allowed to exercise unlawful control of a federal law enforcement agency for months.
It won’t be the first time this happened, either. Last year, a Trump judge named Matthew Kacsmaryk handed down a similar order requiring the Biden administration to reinstate a Trump-era immigration policy known as “Remain in Mexico.” Though the Court eventually ruled against Kacsmaryk, it allowed his order to remain in effect for 10 months, leaving Remain in Mexico in place for that entire time.
And even after the Court ruled against Kacsmaryk, it sent the case back down to him with several legal issues unresolved — permitting Kacsmaryk to seize control of much of the nation’s border policy again, if he chooses.
Now, the best-case scenario for Mayorkas — and for the rule of law in the United States — is that the Supreme Court will treat Tipton’s order much like it treated Kacsmaryk’s, permitting an unlawful seizure of the Biden administration’s authority to remain in effect for only months, instead of permanently.
Spyware from Candiru and NSO Group has been used to target activists and journalists across the Middle East, cybersecurity companies have revealed. (photo: iStock)
Avast Threat Labs says Tel Aviv-based spyware vendor commonly known as Candiru looked to exploit vulnerabilities in google chrome to target journalists
Avast Threat Labs, a global cybersecurity company, attributed the attacks to the Tel Aviv-based spyware vendor commonly known as Candiru.
Last year online security firm ESET revealed that Middle East Eye was targeted by the hacking for hire group in April 2020.
At the time, Middle East Eye editor-in-chief David Hearst said: “Middle East Eye is no stranger to such attempts to take our website down by state and non-state actors. Substantial sums of money have been spent trying to take us out. They have not stopped us reporting what is going on in all corners of the region and it will not stop us in future. They will not stop us reaching a global audience.”
Candiru was sanctioned in November 2021 by the US Commerce Department for engaging in activities contrary to US national security.
Avast detected the latest Candiru attack in March using an updated toolset that aimed to target individuals in Turkey, Yemen and Palestine - as well as journalists in Lebanon where Candiru compromised a website used by employees of an unnamed news agency.
“We can’t say for sure what the attackers might have been after, however often the reason why attackers go after journalists is to spy on them and the stories they’re working on directly, or to get to their sources and gather compromising information and sensitive data they shared with the press,” Avast said in a statement.
Candiru was first exposed by Microsoft and Citizen Lab in July 2021. The findings showed that the hacking company had targeted at least 100 activists, journalists and dissidents across 10 countries. According to Avast, Candiru likely scaled back its activities following last year’s release of the Citizen Lab’s report in order to update its malware and evade detection efforts.
The company is currently registered in Tel Aviv under the name, Saito Tech.
Middle East Eye reached out to a Candiru executive last year following the revelations by online security firm ESET and was told that the company and its products don’t hack websites.
“The product of the company [Candiru] is purposed to help law enforcement agencies to fight terror and crime, at a time all unlawful activities are encrypted, hiding from the law.”
"The company is selling its products to government agencies only, after receiving all needed licences from the Israeli MOD [Ministry of Defence] export control.
Citizen Lab has previously reported that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are “likely Candiru customers”. The firm also “has become closer to Qatar” recently, according to an August 2020 report from Intelligence Online.
In July, Citizen Lab reported that Candiru spyware, along with Pegasus software produced by the Israeli NSO Group, has been used by governments, including Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to illegally access the phone data of activists and journalists worldwide.
The spyware was used to weaponise vulnerabilities in Google and Microsoft products which allowed government clients to hack more than 100 activists, journalists, politicians, dissidents, and embassy workers.
A mobile phone belonging to Ragip Soylu, MEE's Turkey bureau chief, was among those hacked using spyware produced by the NSO Group.
The body of a dead dolphin that washed up on shore lies on the coast of the Tuzly Estuaries National Nature Park in Odesa Oblast, July 16, 2022. (photo: Ivan Rusev/Facebook)
Marine biologists and ecologists from countries in the Black Sea region are sounding the alarm, as dolphins die en masse for the fourth month in a row.
Ivan Rusev, an environmental scientist at Ukraine's Tuzly Estuaries National Nature Park, estimates at least 5,000 dolphins have died in the Black Sea between March and July.
This number is three times higher compared to pre-war figures, according to Rusev.
Dolphins use echolocation, also known as sonar, to communicate, find food, and navigate. The constant underwater noise caused by submarines of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and their powerful hydrocollators, as well as explosions, is causing dolphins acoustic trauma, paralyzing this vital echolocation system.
As a result, dolphins are dying in higher numbers as they have trouble finding food and become susceptible to viruses and parasites due to weakened immune systems. As Russian warships use the Black Sea to fire missiles at Ukrainian territory, the decline is expected to continue, with devastating effects on the Black Sea ecosystem.
If before Russia's all-out invasion on Feb. 24, biologists recorded traces of nets on the bodies of dead dolphins with their fins cut off by fishermen and poachers, now they are found untouched.
“I have never seen this before. This is something absolutely new and terrifying for scientists,” Rusev told the Kyiv Independent.
Disaster for all
The dolphin population in the Black Sea has been rapidly declining over the last hundred years.
It has dropped more than 20 times, from 6 million last century to today’s 253,000, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources.
Ecologists from Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey have all reported an “extraordinary increase” in the number of dead dolphins washed ashore.
In the Bulgarian city of Burgas alone, about 60 dead dolphins have been found around since the beginning of the year, according to ecological inspection expert Maria Andreeva.
Rusev says that the number of dolphins that wash up on shore generally represents only 5% of the total that have died. Those that aren’t found on beaches are eaten by birds, crustaceans, and other sea predators.
The Turkish Marine Research Foundation Tudav reported that at least 80 dead dolphins have been found in the western part of the Black Sea as of May.
Although Turkish biologists agree that the Black Sea has never had “so many ships and so much noise,” they say they have no direct evidence that dolphins are dying because of the war in Ukraine, some 630 kilometers north of Turkey by sea.
However, Rusev believes that there is convincing evidence. He received laboratory tests that his colleagues conducted in Romania that showed that out of the 10 dolphins examined, half had died due to infection or parasites.
“A healthy dolphin is a very powerful creature and is rarely affected by such diseases. It’s definitely acoustic trauma,” he said.
What’s more, constant explosions in the Black Sea trigger dolphins to swim rapidly to the surface of the water causing air embolism — similar to “the bends,” or decompression sickness, that occurs when scuba divers surface too quickly and nitrogen bubbles form in the bloodstream.
“When it happens quickly, blood clots appear and dolphins die,” said Rusev.
Radioactive pollution and chemical pollution from missiles is also threatening wildlife in the Black Sea, but the effects will likely only be visible later.
Even before the war, one of the conditions for Ukraine to enter the European Union was to raise the percentage of protected natural areas from 6% to 15% by 2025.
But not much was done to reach that goal. If the dolphins, who also act as sanitarians of the sea by eating sick fish, continue to disappear, life in the sea will degrade, the expert fears.
“Many of the unique fish species we have today will disappear. We will lose a whole ecosystem,” said Rusev.
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