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Investigators believe her father may have been the target.
Images of the blast were widely circulated on Telegram by the news outlets Baza and 112, which reported that Darya Dugina, the daughter of Alexander Dugin, was killed instantly in the explosion. Russia’s TASS news agency cited law enforcement sources who confirmed that a Toyota Land Cruiser Prado had blown up, but they did not confirm the identity of the driver, only describing the victim as female. A man identified by TASS as an acquaintance of Dugina, however, confirmed that she was killed.
The Russian news outlet Baza reported that Dugina, 30, had been returning home from a literature and music festival called “Tradition” when the blast occurred. She was reportedly behind the wheel for only 10 minutes before the explosion.
Alexander Dugin was meant to be in the vehicle his daughter was driving but had gotten in a different one at the last second, according to Pyotr Lundstrem, a Russian violinist quoted by the outlet.
Dugin had reportedly been following right behind his daughter and had watched as her car exploded. Photos shared by Baza appeared to show Dugin distraught at the scene, holding his head in both hands as he stood in front of the fiery wreckage.
Denis Pushilin, the Russian proxy leader of Ukraine's occupied Donetsk, angrily blamed “terrorists of the Ukrainian regime” for the blast, writing on Telegram that they had been “trying to liquidate Alexander Dugin” but “blew up his daughter.”
“In loving memory of Darya, she is a true Russian girl,” Pushilin wrote.
Pro-Kremlin Telegram channels and social media pages similarly blamed Ukraine for the explosion and called on Russians to “avenge” Dugina’s death.
Investigators are reported to be viewing the explosion as a targeted hit that may have been meant for Alexander Dugin, a philosopher widely believed to be the chief architect of Vladimir Putin’s ideology of a “Russian World” and the driving force behind his aggression against Ukraine.
Darya Dugina had been outspoken in her support of Russia’s war against Ukraine. As evidence began to pile up in April of Russian war crimes in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Dugina argued in an interview that the slaughter of civilians had been staged, bizarrely claiming that the U.S. had chosen the city because in English the name sounds like “butcher.” She was also sanctioned by the U.S. government in March in connection with her role in a Kremlin-run influence operation known as Project Lakhta.
Donald Trump. (photo: James Devaney/GC Images/Getty Images/The Atlantic)
And that’s exactly why it’s so dangerous.
Now Trump’s apparent squirreling away of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and his outrage over the Justice Department’s investigation of that conduct, speaks once more to his vision of his own absolute authority—even after he has departed the presidency. It’s a vision that places Trump himself, rather than the Constitution and the rule of law, as the one true source of legitimate political power.
A great deal remains unclear about the documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago—among other things, why and how the material arrived at the estate in the first place instead of remaining in the custody of the National Archives, where it belonged. Reporting, though, suggests that Trump may have understood those documents—material that, under the Presidential Records Act, belongs to the American people—to be his own, to do whatever he liked with. “It’s not theirs; it’s mine,” Trump reportedly told several advisers about the misplaced documents. One “Trump adviser” told The Washington Post that “the former president’s reluctance to relinquish the records stems from his belief that many items created during his term … are now his personal property.” Another adviser to the former president said to the Post, “He didn’t give them the documents because he didn’t want to.”
Graeme Wood: Not even the president can declassify nuclear secrets
This childlike logic reflects Trump’s long-running inability to distinguish between the individual president and the institutional presidency, a structure that existed before him and that persists even after he unwillingly departed the White House. In his view, he is the presidency (which … is not what legal scholars typically mean when they talk about the “unitary executive.”) The same logic surfaces in the bizarre arguments made by Trump’s defenders that Trump somehow declassified all the sensitive documents held at Mar-a-Lago before he left office. Under the Constitution, the president does have broad authority over the classification system. But as experts have noted, it makes little sense to imagine a president declassifying information without communicating that decision across the executive branch so that everyone else would know to treat the material in question as no longer classified—unless, that is, you understand presidential power not as an institution of government, but as the projection of a single person’s all-powerful consciousness onto the world.
The approach of separating the presidency from the individual president evolved for a good reason: The vision of the man inextricable from the office he holds tips quickly into monarchy. Again and again during his presidency, Trump did his best to transform executive power into a resource from which to extract personal benefit. He likewise sought to use that power to extend his own time in office—either by seeking damaging information to harm the political chances of an opponent, as in the Ukraine scandal that led to his first impeachment, or by attempting to overturn an election outright on January 6. That tendency to collapse the institutional presidency into a reflection of his own desires often took the form of clashes between Trump and federal law enforcement, as officials tried with varying success to resist Trump’s efforts to turn the Justice Department and the FBI into a Praetorian Guard tasked with going after the president’s political enemies and protecting his friends.
The idea that law enforcement cannot and should not be the tool of the leader’s individual whims is central to the divide between the president and the institutional presidency, and therefore to the idea of “rule of law.” The concept’s roots trace back to the origins of liberal political theory: As John Locke wrote, governmental power “ought to be exercised by established and promulgated laws, that both the people may know their duty, and be safe and secure within the limits of the law, and the rulers, too, kept within their due bounds.” Authority, in this view, stems not from the person of the ruler but from the broader structure of law and the consent of the people.
In his terse public comments about the Mar-a-Lago search, Attorney General Merrick Garland has emphasized this understanding of law and power, which runs so counter to Trump’s. “Faithful adherence to the rule of law is the bedrock principle of the Justice Department and of our democracy,” Garland said in his August 11 press conference announcing that the department would move to unseal the warrant for Trump’s estate. “Upholding the rule of law means applying the law evenly, without fear or favor.”
Trump, obviously, disagrees with this characterization. In posts on his social-media platform, Truth Social, he has returned to familiar tropes, calling the search warrant and related investigation a “hoax,” a “scam,” and a “witch hunt.” During his presidency, attacks such as these on the Russia investigation followed naturally from his own understanding of absolute presidential power. After all, if the president’s authority is total and unbound by law, then how can the DOJ investigate him? As Trump liked to say during his time in office, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
The additional twist of the Mar-a-Lago scandal, though, is that Trump is now implicitly claiming that total authority even out of office. If, before, Trump was furious that Special Counsel Robert Mueller could investigate him even when he was the president, now he is outraged that the DOJ would investigate him even though he is Trump. Supporters of Trump incensed by the search of Mar-a-Lago, Adam Serwer writes, “simply believe that Trump should not be subject to the law at all.”
Following the Mar-a-Lago search, Trump’s Republican supporters in Congress have called to “defund the FBI.” Meanwhile, the former president’s aggressive denunciation of the agency and the Justice Department has coincided with a flood of threats against law enforcement, including the magistrate judge who approved the Mar-a-Lago warrant. A bulletin from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security announced that, following the Mar-a-Lago search, the agencies “have observed an increase in violent threats posted on social media against federal officials and facilities.” Last week, a man attacked the FBI field office in Cincinnati; recent posts on Truth Social under the name of the attacker, Ricky Shiffer, had called for people to “get whatever you need to be ready for combat” following the FBI’s arrival at Mar-a-Lago. On Monday, prosecutors brought a case against another man, Adam Bies, who had posted threats against federal agents days after the search of Trump’s estate.
Such threats reveal the disturbing logic behind the GOP calls to defund the agency. The goal is not to critique law-enforcement overreach, but rather, as Zeeshan Aleem argues in MSNBC, to make the bureau “completely subordinate to the authoritarian political project.” And this project is authoritarian, because it locates total power in one person—even, it seems, when he has been voted out of office. This vision of Trump’s authority sets up a parallel structure of political legitimacy that competes with the Constitution.
This is the logic of insurrection. “HEY FEDS,” Bies apparently wrote on the social-media platform Gab two days after the Mar-a-Lago search. “We the people cannot WAIT to water the trees of liberty with your blood.” Meanwhile, Representative Bennie Thompson—the chair of the House committee investigating the insurrection—warned that such apocalyptic comments “are frighteningly similar to those we saw in the run-up to the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.”
After all, if power flows not from structures of law and consent but from the will of a single person, then the measure of whether violence is justified and legitimate no longer turns on whether force is channeled through the proper processes of state authority. Rather, it boils down to a single question: Is that violence wielded on behalf of Trump? Or against him?
The FBI SEARCH and retrieval of documents from Mar-A-Lago should cause pause for any reasonable person.
Reacting to Daffy Don's KNEE JERK HYSTERIA should give pause.
This has been a delayed process in which attempts were made to retrieve the documents and the sole question that should remain is included in the last paragraph.
These are not my words and I encourage everyone to subscribe to WALL STREET ON PARADE for facts.
There are numerous other sites you should review: HEATHER COX RICHARDSON, ROBERT REICH, REAL JUSTICE, OUR REVOLUTION, COMMON DREAMS, POGO (Project on Government Oversight), PEW, NRDC and others.
Mar-a-Lago: Thousands of People of Questionable Character Have Visited this Resort/Hotel in the 18 Months That Trump Stashed Top Secret Documents There
Mar-a-Lago Club, Palm Beach, FL (Official Photo)
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 18, 2022 ~
Trump Hosts a Packed Political Fundraising Event at Mar-a-Lago on April 17, 2021. (Twitter Photo.)
The narrative that the FBI took the unprecedented step of raiding former President Donald Trump’s “home” on August 8 has misdirected the media debate that should be happening right now. The majority of Americans hear the word “home” and think of a private residence where one family resides. But the property raided on August 8 by the FBI was Mar-a-Lago – which has as much resemblance to a private residence as Palm Beach International Airport has to a private airplane hangar.
Yes, it’s true that there are private quarters located at Mar-a-Lago for Trump and his family. But it’s also true that this is a 114-room oceanfront resort and hotel that sells memberships, rents hotel rooms and suites, and holds a multitude of events. The official website for Mar-a-Lago explains its event offerings as follows:
“Important occasions call for settings that inspire, enchant and exceed every expectation. Whether you are planning a gala for your favorite charity, the perfect Palm Beach wedding or an intimate party for close friends, the Mar-a-Lago Club has the most extraordinary setting that will suit your every need. Our Donald J. Trump Grand Ballroom is perfect for large galas, weddings, or bar/bat mitzvahs. For smaller soirées, we can offer the elegant White & Gold Ballroom or an incredible cocktail party under the stars poolside. Whatever the occasion, our Catering Director will be happy to assist you and make your event singularly exquisite and forever memorable.”
March 21, 2021 Motorsports Charity Event on Grounds of Mar-a-Lago (Instagram Photo)
March 21, 2021 Motorsports Event on Grounds of Mar-a-Lago (Instagram Photo)
Two large events at Mar-a-Lago that attracted thousands of people during the 18-months that the national security of the United States was put at risk by the housing of Top Secret government documents there were the annual “Palm Event: Celebrating Motorsports.” This is an event to show off expensive sports cars. Attendees include ticket holders as well as vendors, sponsors, Mar-a-Lago members and their guests, catering staff and resort staff. In other words, thousands of people roaming around a facility that holds Top Secret documents that might endanger the national security of all Americans. The events occurred on March 21, 2021 and again on March 18-20, 2022 at Mar-a-Lago. You can watch a video clip of the dense crowds on the grounds at Mar-a-Lago at the 2022 Palm Event here. (Be sure to turn on the video sound to catch the gleeful exclamation that there is a woman decked out as a mermaid in the Mar-a-Lago pool.)
Another event which should raise security alarm bells was the May 4, 2022 screening at Mar-a-Lago of the Dinesh D’Souza documentary “2,000 Mules” – the latest in a steady stream of conspiracy films attempting to gin up Trump’s base with the assertion that the presidential election was stolen from him. This event seems to have gone out of its way to include Trump supporters with past brushes with the law – just the sort of folks you want hanging around improperly stored Top Secret government documents.
Michael Flynn attended the screening. Flynn was Trump’s first National Security Advisor who ended up pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about communications with the Ambassador to Russia. Flynn received a pardon from Trump.
Also present at the screening was Kyle Rittenhouse, the teen acquitted for killing two men during the 2020 protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The protests arose from the police shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake. Rittenhouse became the darling of the right-wing crowd for heading into the protests with an AR-15 style rifle and joining up with other armed white men in Kenosha who said they were there to protect local businesses.
Another person at the screening was Bernie Kerik, the former New York City Police Commissioner who served under former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Kerik pleaded guilty in 2009 to eight felony tax and false statement charges, including two counts of tax fraud. He was sentenced to 48 months in federal prison and three years of supervised release.
Tina Peters also attended the screening. Peters is the embattled Mesa County, Colorado Clerk and Recorder who was indicted in March of this year on 10 counts related to an investigation into election equipment tampering.
We could go on but you get the picture.
In addition to the above events, Trump has held an endless series of political fundraising galas at Mar-a-Lago since he left office on January 20, 2021 – 14 days after he staged the worst insurrection at the U.S. Capitol since the British invaded it in 1814.
A small sampling of the political fundraisers includes the following:
April 17, 2021: There was a packed house at Mar-a-Lago with keynote speaker Mike Pompeo, Trump’s former Secretary of State. Other attendees included Florida Governor Ron DeSantis; Senator Rick Scott of Florida; and Trump’s former Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross. The event was closed to the press.
February 23, 2022: An event at Mar-a-Lago dubbed “Take Back Congress Candidate Forum.” It highlighted GOP candidates that Trump had endorsed in the midterms and came with hefty entrance fees. The cheapest ticket for a couple was a reported $5,000 while a package with a photo op with Trump cost $100,000. If you were among the first 10 to pay for the top $250,000 package, you got a photo with Trump, a private dinner, and an option to enjoy a two-night stay at the Mar-a-Lago resort.
March 10, 2022: According to the Missouri Times, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt held a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago and raised $1.6 million. Schmitt won the Republican primary in the U.S. Senate race in the state.
March 16, 2022: Trump hosted a fundraiser for Georgia gubernatorial candidate, David Perdue, who was challenging incumbent Governor Brian Kemp in the primary. For $24,200 in donations, you could get a photo of yourself with the two of them according to an ad on Twitter. The entrance fee was $3,000 per person. Despite Trump’s endorsement, Perdue was trounced by more than 50 points in the primary, with Kemp gaining 74 percent of the vote to Perdue’s 22 percent.
~~~~~
Mar-a-Lago was raided on August 8 because Trump, and potentially others, are under federal investigation for potential violations of the Espionage Act, which makes it unlawful to spy for a foreign country or mishandle defense information.
Trump had removed at least 36 boxes of government documents when he departed the White House, moving them by truck to Mar-a-Lago. The National Archives recovered 15 of those boxes in January. (The Presidential Records Act requires that all Presidential records must be properly preserved by each Administration so that a complete set of Presidential records is transferred to the National Archives at the end of each Administration.) When the National Archives went through the recovered material and found highly classified material, it turned the matter over to the Justice Department.
Why it took the Justice Department until August 8 to get its act together and retrieve another 21 boxes of documents under a search warrant, deserves its own independent investigation. According to court material released thus far, included in those 21 boxes was Top Secret information as well as documents marked Top Secret/SCI – Sensitive Compartmented Information, meaning that the documents were only allowed to be viewed in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). That’s a far cry from storing these documents at a beach resort trafficked by former felons and indicted individuals.
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/08/mar-a-lago-thousands-of-people-of-questionable-character-have-visited-this-resort-hotel-in-the-18-months-that-trump-stashed-top-secret-documents-there/
People march during a protest demanding justice in the case of the students of Ayotzinapa, in Mexico City on November 26, 2015. (photo: CNN)
A court in Mexico on Friday ordered the arrest warrants of 83 people allegedly involved in the 2014 disappearance of 43 students, the prosecutor's office said in a statement.
The group is accused of "organized crime, forced disappearance, torture, homicide and crimes against the administration of justice," the prosecutor's office said.
The prosecutor's office did not identify those allegedly involved and only added that both the arrests and the accusations in each case "will be disclosed in the corresponding criminal process."
As of Saturday afternoon, the institutions had not made a public statement on the arrest warrants. CNN asked them for comments, and they have not responded.
The students had been visiting the southwestern city of Iguala from a teacher's college in Ayotzinapa when their buses were intercepted by local police and the federal military forces in September 2014. Exactly what happened after remains unknown, since most of the missing students were never found. But bullet-riddled buses were later seen in the city's streets with shattered windows and blood.
Survivors from the original group of 100 said their buses had been stopped by armed police officers and soldiers who suddenly opened fire. The case ignited international outrage.
The judge's decision Friday was released hours after the former attorney general of Mexico, Jesús Murillo Karam, was also arrested in relation to the disappearances. Murillo Karam led the state's investigation into the disappearance.
The prosecutor's office said it considers him a suspect of "the crimes of forced disappearance, torture and against the administration of justice, in the 'Ayotzinapa' case."
CNN does not know if Murillo Karam has legal representation or how he declares himself before the accusations.
The former attorney general's arrest and the issuance of the arrest warrants took place a day after a government truth commission presented a report concluding the disappearance of the students was a "crime of the state," in which members of "the Guerreros Unidos criminal group and agents from various institutions of the Mexican state" participated, Mexico's Undersecretary for Human Rights, Population and Migration Alejandro Encinas said.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Friday that the government will continue to work to capture those involved in the crime and find out what exactly happened to the missing students.
Brittney Griner. (photo: AFP/Getty Images/AP)
Brittney Griner will do her nine-and-a-half-year sentence in what's been called a Russian “concentration camp” notorious for abuses.
Much like American prisons in the Western Hemisphere, Russian penal colonies have a reputation for being some of the worst prison systems on their side of the globe. These remote facilities are notorious for their poor treatment of prisoners, partly due to brutal firsthand accounts from high-profile anti-government activists such as attorney Alexei Navalny and Pussy Riot frontwoman Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.
Toloknnikova, convicted in 2012 of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” for performing one of their songs at a cathedral in Moscow, recalled 16-hour days working in sewing shops on broken machines for pennies a month, grossly underequipped “hygiene rooms” often rendered useless by faulty plumbing, and hundreds of prisoners queuing up to use the handful of showers available.
Last year, Navalny, who was sentenced to two and a half years in prison on embezzlement charges, told his attorney that his facility was a “friendly concentration camp,” where prisoners like himself are constantly monitored, with guards even barging into his cell to film him sleeping. Navalny has since been sentenced to nine years in prison on contempt and fraud charges.
Both Toloknnikova and Navalny also spoke of rampant corruption, violence from guards and prisoners, and a general sense of fear among inmates.
“There are multiple human rights abuses and very bad conditions for prisoners,” Dr. Monika Kareniauskaite, a research fellow teaching post-Soviet history, law, gender, and criminality at Yale University, told VICE News.
What exactly is a penal colony?
Almost all of the 650 penal institutions in Russia are traditional penal colonies: barrack and dorm-style detention complexes where inhabitants carry out hard labor. It’s typical for people convicted on drug charges like Griner’s to be sent to a penal colony. Though inmates who stay at these facilities are classified as less dangerous than prisoners who spend a majority of their incarceration in cells, the colony conditions aren’t typically better.
According to a nearly 100-page human rights report conducted by the U.S. Department of State last year, overcrowding, poor sanitation and heating, and food shortages count among the system’s biggest problems. The report also found that systemic abuses, including torture and sexual violence flagged by local human rights groups, particularly against political prisoners, continue to be ignored.
Prisoners suspected of being anything other than heterosexual are also likely to face abuse as well. In 2020, a Chechen prisoner was reportedly suffocated and subjected to electrical shock for hours after security guards suspected him of being gay.
The poor conditions are a hangover from the gulags, or criminal detention camps that existed in the days of the Soviet Union, according to Kareniauskaite.
“There were a lot of attempts in the 1990s to introduce Russian lawyers, criminal justice system workers, and police with Western legal concepts and traditions,” she said. “But as the nongovernmental organizations report[ed] later, most of the reforms actually failed and didn't make a significant change.”
Penal colonies are typically located hundreds of kilometers from the nearest city, an infrastructural holdover of imperial Russia, when exile was synonymous with serious punishment from the government. As a result, many of these abuses are difficult for local activists to monitor, according to Russian prison sociologist Olga Zeveleva.
“There were not enough human rights defenders to go around before already,” Zeveleva told VICE News. “But if we look at the situation today, with a completely destroyed civil society and activist space in Russia against the backdrop of [President Vladimir] Putin's repression, there's not a lot of hope that human rights activists will come and help someone.”
How will Griner be treated?
On Monday, Griner’s attorneys filed an appeal for her prison sentence, according to Russian news agency Tass. The appeals process is expected to take months, according to her attorney Alexander Boykov.
Negotiations between the U.S. and Russia about potentially swapping Griner and ex-U.S. Marine Paul Whelan for a Russian in U.S. custody are ongoing. The leading candidate seems to be Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who’s currently serving 25 years in prison for conspiring to sell weapons to people who planned to kill Americans.
If a trade doesn’t happen before the Olympian goes to a penal colony, her identity as an openly gay, six-foot-nine Black woman in a country known to mistreat both people of color and the LGBTQ community will affect her treatment. But not in a way that many Americans would expect, Zeveleva said.
“There are other identities that I expect to be more acutely perceived in Russian prisons than her racial identity,” Zeveleva said. “First and foremost, she will be perceived as an American. Second, she'll be perceived as a high-profile prisoner.”
Zeveleva said that by the nature of her status, it’s unlikely people will target her. But there will be a sense of fascination among other prisoners, and the facility’s administration will likely keep close watch over her through informants among her dormmates in the colony.
“That’s not to paint this pretty picture of an accepting Russian prison where everybody is fine with everything and there’s a flourishing gay community there,” Zeveleva added. “If a prison officer or a prisoner [with] a lot of power in prison society chooses to target a person, they can choose any aspect of their identity.”
The continued activism around Griner’s arrest and imprisonment provides some hope. Combined with the nasty reputation of Russian penal colonies, U.S.negotiations efforts will likely become even more urgent—which is good news for Griner.
“Russia has one of the most abhorrent prison systems in the world, [which] definitely affects the negotiation process,” Zeveleva said.
For now, Griner will remain in one of Russia’s remand facilities until her appeals process is complete. Though her overseas incarceration has been criticized by athletes and politicians like President Joe Biden, her punishment is not far removed from the experiences of thousands of Black Americans convicted of drug offenses here.
Doug Mastriano, speaks at an event on July 1, 2022, at the state Capitol in Harrisburg, Pa. Pennsylvania's Republican governor nominee, Mastriano is appearing Tuesday before the Jan. 6 committee investigating the U.S. Capitol insurrection as the panel probes Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. (photo: Marc Levy/AP)
But the Republican nominee’s campaign is also notable for another reason: Mastriano has surrounded himself with a non-professional, armed security team whose members include at least one person with direct ties to a militia group.
Mastriano’s detail includes several members of a relatively new evangelical church near Elizabethtown, LifeGate, whose leaders have spoken openly about electing Christians to office to advance biblical principles in government.
Perhaps the most visible member of the security team is James Emery, an Elizabethtown Area School Board member who has been photographed providing security to Mastriano at numerous events over the past year, sometimes armed. Earlier this month, Emery blocked members of the news media from entering a room in Erie where Mastriano was scheduled to speak to local business leaders.
Emery is an active and visible member of the congregation at LifeGate Church. A November 2021 post to the church’s Facebook page refers to him as a licensed minister and congratulates him for completing the LifeGate Leadership Development School.
At a LifeGate meeting in May, Emery described himself as one of Mastraino’s “lead” security members. During an Easter Sunday testimonial, he revealed the names of four other congregants who work on Mastriano’s security team.
“I just want to ask for prayers while there’s a few in this congregation that have joined the (Mastriano) team: Scott and Skip and Dan, myself, and Carl,” Emery said. “We’re doing security for Mastriano and it comes with a lot of weight these days.”
The “Scott” mentioned by Emery is fellow LifeGate member Scott Nagle, who until recently was listed as a regional leader for the Oath Keepers, a militia group founded in 2009.
A photo from an early April event in Mercer County, which was reviewed by LNP|LancasterOnline, showed Nagle posing shoulder-to-shoulder with Mastriano. Also in the photo were Dan Slade and Carl Runkle, two other LifeGate members, along with Emery, Franklin County Constable Dom Brown and three other unidentified members of the security detail.
Emery said his security work for Mastriano is done as a private citizen expressing his First and Second Amendment rights. Nagle did not respond.
Private security
Photos and video from the Mercer County rally and other events show security team members wearing blazers and mismatched earpieces. Some appear to carry concealed firearms under their jackets.
Historically, candidates in Pennsylvania have not traveled with large security teams, the exception being incumbent governors who are provided Pennsylvania State Police protection as part of their office.
Josh Shapiro, Mastriano’s opponent, is accompanied by agents from the Attorney General’s Office as part of his position, campaign spokesperson Will Simmons said, though he declined to comment further on security details. Campaign finance reports showed he paid $3,125 for a police department for security in March.
It is unclear if the members of Mastriano’s security team have formal training, other than Nagle, who works as a firearms instructor for the United States Concealed Carry Association.
Pennsylvania does not require licensing for security guards, as it does for many other professions.
But the state’s Lethal Weapons Training Act requires privately employed security agents to receive training if they are required to carry lethal weapons as part of their duty, said Berks County attorney Joshua Prince, an expert on firearms law. A guard who is not required to carry a gun could still theoretically carry one for their own protection, he said.
The Pennsylvania State Police, which provides certification under the act, could not immediately confirm if the men identified from the April event are certified. The newspaper has submitted a records request for the information.
Brown was elected constable in November, and is scheduled to receive training from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency in October. Constables are exempt from concealed carry permitting requirements in Pennsylvania.
It is also unclear how, if at all, the team is being paid. No payments to security firms or individuals described as security professionals are listed on Mastriano’s campaign finance reports for 2021 and 2022. The filings also do not show in-kind donations from a security firm .
One expense from May lists a payment of $266.09 for “travel” to a “James Emory,” a copy of the receipt shows it was mileage reimbursement for an event Emery attended. Emery said he is a volunteer.
Brown also received roughly $1,000 in travel reimbursements and consulting fees from March to May.
The Mastriano campaign did not respond to inquiries about his security team. Political analysts suggest Mastriano, considered one of the most extreme candidates on the fall ballot, may believe he needs to protect himself on the campaign trail given the country’s political division.
“I’ve not known state senators and house members to have security, per se. They might have aides following them,” said G. Terry Madonna, Senior Fellow in Residence for Political Affairs at Millersville University, though he added he has assumed in the past some of those aides were at events for security.
“But this doesn't strike me as unusual given where we are as a country. (Six or seven security guards) would seem to me to be unusually large, but again, given the environment we’re in.”
Militia connections
In 2020, Emery’s son, Jay, helped lead a group whose members attended a Black Lives Matter protest in Elizabethtown. At least one member was armed, and they stood alongside members of another militia group, the Carlisle Light Infantry.
The two groups have at least one overlapping member and appeared to be coordinating their actions at the protest.
At the time, a man who identified himself to an LNP reporter only as Jay, a 30-year-old Elizabethtown resident, said he was with the “Domestic Terrorism Response Organization,” which he said was “dedicated to protecting businesses, citizens and homes.”
An archived version of the now deleted Facebook page for the group, provided to LNP|LancasterOnline, shows Jay Emery as an administrator. The LNP reporter who covered the 2020 Elizabethtown protest, shown a photo of James Emery-Shea, confirmed he is the same “Jay” the reporter spoke with.
James Emery-Shea, in an interview this week, denied the group was a militia and said “the whole premise (of coming to the Elizabethtown event) was if there are more numbers there no one will try anything stupid.”
His father, James Emery, was also a member of the Facebook group, the archived records show. Photos and video show him attending the Elizabethtown protest and speaking with members of the militia group.
James Emery said he was there to pray with the Black Lives Matter leaders for everyone's safety, and has “never had any affiliation with any kind of militia.”
Nagle, meanwhile, was the Lancaster County chapter leader for the Pennsylvania Oath Keepers as recently as January of this year, but his name was removed from the group’s website after LNP | LancasterOnline contacted him at the time for a story on a pre-Jan. 6, 2021, meeting of militia groups in Quarryville.
The Oath Keepers are a right-wing militia founded in 2009 by Stewart Rhodes, a U.S. Army veteran from Montana. The Pennsylvania Oath Keepers split from the national group in 2015, but a social media post three days before January 6 alluded to armed veterans violently resisting election results.
The April event was not the first at which Nagle and Mastriano were seen together.
At a June 2021 event for U.S. Senate candidate Kathy Barnette at the Star Barn in East Donegal Township, Nagle and his wife Leah posed for a photo with Mastriano, Emery, Ret. Gen. Mike Flynn, FreePA leader Tabitha Valleau, and Sharon Ogilvie, another LifeGate member.
‘Flow from the pulpit’
LifeGate’s congregation has become increasingly active in politics in recent years.
“If you put Christian politicians in office, Christian attorneys in office, Christian district judges in office, Christian businessmen, people truly loving by biblical principles you will bless your communities and your society,” Doug Lamb, a co-pastor at LifeGate, said in a November 2021 sermon.
Don Lamb, another pastor at LifeGate, said in a statement the church has not directed parishioners to engage in specific political activity, but that the church's members believe “the primary reason America is in a crisis spiritually and culturally is because Christians were duped into stepping away from the public square of culture and engaging in their civic responsibility.”
Emery, along with fellow LifeGate members Stephen and Danielle Lindemuth, won seats on the Elizabethtown Area School Board just a few days before Lamb’s sermon. A political yard sign for the three was placed on LifeGate property.
This year, LifeGate members campaigned to win seats to the local Republican committee. In a break between sermons in March, LifeGate member Sharon Ogilvie encouraged members to get active by signing petitions for local candidates.
“God has put the mantle of government on their shoulders,” she said.
Ogilvie is not just a LifeGate member. Along with Danielle Lindemuth, she is the head of the Elizabethtown chapter of FreePA, a group of grassroots activists who formed in opposition to coronavirus lockdowns and whose members were among Mastriano’s earliest and most vocal supporters.
In the county at large, FreePA was largely unsuccessful in challenging incumbent Republicans in the May 2022 primary. But in Elizabethtown, where FreePA membership crosses over with that of LifeGate, the group was much more successful.
Seven LifeGate members — Nanette and Seth Lamb, Theia and David Hofstetter, Dan and Stephanie Slade, and Ogilvie — won seats to the Elizabethtown Area Republican Committee in May. Ogilvie, Nanette Lamb, Emery, and the Lindemuths are also members of FreePA.
Five other FreePA members who do not appear to be members of LifeGate — Melissa Carmen, Wendy Ober, Nicole Woods, Robert Ulmer and Dale Aungst — also won committee seats.
Together, the LifeGate and FreePA members circulated a mock ballot which told voters to select them over some of the committee’s incumbents.
Former members of the Elizabethtown area GOP described the contest as “a hostile takeover.”
Logan Hoover, a West Donegal Township resident who lost a race for committeeman, said he thinks many of the incumbents who chose not to run did so because they saw this change coming.
“I guess it is my way or the highway, or it just seems like it is from an outside perspective,” said Logan, a former staffer for U.S. Rep. Lloyd Smucker, of FreePA’s approach to outside views.
Hoover said he thinks people will see this play out in different people being endorsed for positions in the area.
“It’s a little scary. As a Republican I hope Republicans do well, I don’t wish them ill will, but I hope we are true to who we are as a community and not just this one single group.”
Many LifeGate members are now turning their attention toward Mastriano’s campaign. At least five members have provided security, and Doug Lamb, the congregation’s pastor, made a $1,000 donation in May.
“We need to get real (and) we need to start living our Christianity out loud,” Emery said during an Oct. 2020 sermon exploring government shutdowns, racial division and removal of God from education.
"We allowed humbleness to turn into illegitimate passivity,” Emery continued. “(God's will) will flow from the pulpit, down to the pews, out through the parking lot, out into the communities, into our White House, into our Capitol building. And he wants to do this so that the law, so that the government, which we all know he created, can begin to serve him again."
Our Founding Fathers protected us from THEOCRACY & MONARCHY.
When Ben Franklin replied: A REPUBLIC, IF YOU CAN KEEP IT
Republicans, Christian Extremists seemed to have determined its end.
Maybe some should review the founding of PENNSYLVANIA.
It is becoming home of ARMED WHITE DOMESTIC TERRORISTS.
excerpt:
William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania and advocate of religious freedom, was born October 14, 1644*, 375 years ago. It was his influence that set the framework for not only Pennsylvania's Constitution, but also the U.S. Constitution. For researchers interested in exploring this connection, many of Pennsylvania's founding documents are reprinted in the Appendices to the Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania, which is available for free online from the Pennsylvania Legislative Reference Bureau. Let's take a look at some of these documents.
https://www.jenkinslaw.org/blog/2019/10/15/william-penn-and-pennsylvanias%C2%A0founding-documents
excerpt:
One of the original 13 colonies, Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn as a haven for his fellow Quakers. Pennsylvania’s capital, Philadelphia, was the site of the first and second Continental Congresses in 1774 and 1775, the latter of which produced the Declaration of Independence, sparking the American Revolution.
After the war, Pennsylvania became the second state, after Delaware, to ratify the U.S. Constitution. In the American Civil War (1861-1865), Pennsylvania was the site of the Battle of Gettysburg in which Union General George Meade defeated Confederate General Robert E. Lee, bringing an end to the Confederacy’s Northern invasion, as well as Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address.
https://www.history.com/topics/us-states/pennsylvania
People wearing masks depicting Colombia's president Gustavo Petro and vice president Francia Marquez at her symbolic inauguration ceremony in Suarez, Colombia, on 13 August, 2022. (photo: Mariana Greif/Reuters)
With our new progressive president and coalition government, we now have a chance at peace and unity – let’s not waste it
Now at last, we may be nearing the end of our national nightmare. On 7 August, Gustavo Petro was sworn in as president of Colombia, joining Afro-Colombian land defender Francia Márquez at the helm of the country’s first progressive government. In his inaugural speech, Petro promised his incoming government will bring “true and definitive peace” to Colombia. To do this, he has invited historic political opponents to the table to reach a common agreement through which both guerrilla and paramilitary forces will lay down their arms.
The call for peace has been building across the country. Following Petro’s election victory, the final active guerrilla force in the country, the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional), requested fresh negotiations with the government to lay down their arms. Soon after, a joint letter by dozens of rightwing paramilitary forces, drug cartels, and criminal gangs called for a ceasefire to negotiate terms for peace. At Petro’s inauguration ceremony on 7 August, the cries of the chanting crowd could be heard from hundreds of metres away: ¡No más guerra! No more war.
The pursuit of unity has been central to Petro’s presidential programme. It is also the reason that so many progressive candidates like myself are now in Congress. Over the course of many months of deliberation, we brought together a broad coalition that embraced workers, urban professionals, farmers, Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples. This alliance, known in Colombia as the Historic Pact, won a landmark victory in the legislative elections in March and became the single largest force in Congress.
What would it take to win this lasting peace? First, it would means fulfilling the peace agreements signed in 2016. Back then, the Colombian government and the guerilla forces of the Farc (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) undertook extensive, internationally coordinated negotiations to cease violent conflict. But Colombia’s former president Iván Duque abandoned this agreement as soon as he took office. The consequences have been devastating. Since 2016, more than 1,300 social leaders and signatories of the peace accords have been assassinated.
We want to redeem the promise of the 2016 accords. This includes making provisions for the full reintegration of former guerrilla fighters into society, providing economic support to help them find jobs in their communities. It also means pursuing land reforms to address Colombia’s extremely concentrated land ownership, which ranks among the most unequal in the world. Finally, it means ending the “war on drugs”, which has seen the influx of arms to paramilitary organisations that commit crimes against our people in the name of “drug control”.
Peace does not begin with a simple cessation of violence. We need to build the social conditions for a peaceful society. First and foremost, this means reorienting the Colombian state away from war against internal enemies, real and invented, and towards the development of our communities. It means investing in our people through public schools and hospitals, not riot police; deploying our planes and helicopters to build infrastructure, not to kill our fellow citizens; developing sustainable agriculture in the countryside, not raining down chemicals such as glyphosate to kill off coca production. And it means protecting and empowering women to overcome violence on a daily basis and help build peace in our society.
On the campaign trail, Gustavo Petro often framed the election as a simple choice: the old politics of death or a new politics of life. The people of Colombia have now made their choice. Our task is to convene them all — from marginalised communities in the countryside to political opponents in Congress — to initiate this new peace process.
Time and again, mining company Homestake and government agencies promised to clean up waste from decades of uranium processing. It didn’t happen.
Neighbors built the map a decade ago after watching relatives and friends fall ill and die. Dominating the top right corner of the map, less than half a mile from the cluster of colorful arrows, sits what residents believe is the cause of their sickness: 22.2 million tons of uranium waste left over from milling ore to supply power plants and nuclear bombs.
“We were sacrificed a long time ago,” said Candace Head-Dylla, who created the death map with her mother after Head-Dylla had her thyroid removed and her mother developed breast cancer. Research has linked both types of illnesses to uranium exposure.
Beginning in 1958, a uranium mill owned by Homestake Mining Company of California processed and refined ore mined nearby. The waste it left behind leaked uranium and selenium into groundwater and released the cancer-causing gas radon into the air. State and federal regulators knew the mill was polluting groundwater almost immediately after it started operating, but years passed before they informed residents and demanded fixes.
The contamination continued to spread even after the mill closed in 1990.
The failures at Homestake are emblematic of the toxic legacy of the American uranium industry, one that has been well-documented from its boom during the Cold War until falling uranium prices and concerns over the dangers of nuclear power decimated the industry in the 1980s. Uranium mining and milling left a trail of contamination and suffering, from miners who died of lung cancer while the federal government kept the risks secret to the largest radioactive spill in the country’s history.
But for four decades, the management of more than 250 million tons of radioactive uranium mill waste has been largely overlooked, continuing to pose a public health threat.
ProPublica found that regulators have failed to hold companies to account when they missed cleanup targets and accepted incorrect forecasts that pollution wouldn’t spread. The federal government will eventually assume responsibility for the more than 50 defunct mills that generated this waste.
At Homestake, which was among the largest mills, the company is bulldozing a community in order to walk away. Interviews with dozens of residents, along with radon testing and thousands of pages of company and government records, reveal a community sacrificed to build the nation’s nuclear arsenal and atomic energy industry.
Time and again, Homestake and government agencies promised to clean up the area. Time and again, they missed their deadlines while further spreading pollution in the communities. In the 1980s, Homestake promised residents groundwater would be cleaned within a decade, locals told the Environmental Protection Agency and ProPublica. After missing that target, the company told regulators it would complete the job around 2006, then by 2013.
In 2014, an EPA report confirmed the site posed an unacceptable cancer risk and identified radon as the greatest threat to residents’ health. Still, the cleanup target date continued shifting, to 2017, then 2022.
Rather than finish the cleanup, Homestake’s current owner, the Toronto-based mining giant Barrick Gold, is now preparing to ask the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the independent federal agency that oversees the cleanup of uranium mills, for permission to demolish its groundwater treatment systems and hand the site and remaining waste over to the U.S. Department of Energy to monitor and maintain forever.
Before it can transfer the site to the Department of Energy, Homestake must prove that the contamination, which exceeds federal safety levels, won’t pose a risk to nearby residents or taint the drinking water of communities downstream.
Part of Homestake’s strategy: buy out nearby residents and demolish their homes. Local real estate agents and residents say the company’s offers do not account for the region’s skyrocketing housing costs, pushing some who accept them back into debt in order to buy a new home. Those who do sell are required to sign agreements to refrain from disparaging Homestake and absolve the company of liability, even though illnesses caused by exposure to radioactive waste can take decades to manifest.
Property records reveal the company had, by the end of 2021, purchased 574 parcels covering 14,425 acres around the mill site. This April, Homestake staff indicated they had 123 properties left to buy. One resident said the area was quickly becoming a “ghost town.”
Even after the community is gone, more than 15,000 people who live nearby, many of them Indigenous, will continue to rely on water threatened by Homestake’s pollution.
The company said it has produced models showing that its waste won’t imperil the region’s water if it walks away. The NRC says it will only grant a groundwater cleanup exemption if that’s the case.
But while Homestake and other mining companies have polluted the region, it’s been the NRC and various other agencies that stood by as it happened. ProPublica found the NRC has issued exemptions from groundwater cleanup standards to uranium mills around the country, only to see pollution continue to spread. This has occurred as climate change hammers the West, making water ever scarcer.
“Groundwater moves. Groundwater doesn’t care about regulations,” said Earle Dixon, a hydrogeologist who reviewed the government’s oversight of uranium cleanup and pollution around Homestake for the New Mexico Environment Department and the EPA. Dixon and other researchers predict contamination at Homestake will likely spread if cleanup ends.
The company has denied that its waste caused residents’ illnesses, and judges ruled in Homestake’s favor in a case residents filed in 2004 alleging the site caused cancer. Doctors testified that the pollution was a substantial factor contributing to residents’ cancers, but tying particular cases to a single source requires communitywide blood, urine and other testing, which hadn’t been done.
“We are proud of our work done in remediating the Homestake Uranium Mill site,” Patrick Malone, Homestake’s president, said in a letter responding to questions from ProPublica. He said Homestake was entering the final stages of cleanup because “the site is at a point where it is not technically feasible to provide additional, sustainable improvements to water quality.”
David McIntyre, an NRC spokesperson, attributed cleanup delays to the area’s complex groundwater system. “We understand and share the concern that remediation is taking so long,” McIntyre said, adding that the agency’s priority is to protect public and environmental health rather than meet particular deadlines.
The EPA has oversight of the former mill’s cleanup under its Superfund program that aims to clean the country’s most toxic land. The EPA regional office did not respond to questions.
Larry Carver has implored an endless stream of regulators to take action since his family moved to Murray Acres in 1964, and neighbors defer to him to tell the community’s story. The 83-year-old leaned against his Chevrolet pickup on a blustery spring morning, peering from beneath a baseball cap at Homestake’s 10-story pile of waste. He lamented that the community would be sacrificed so uranium waste could remain.
For Carver, arrows on a map don’t tell the full story of uranium’s impact. His wife’s aunt and uncle owned the home closest to the waste piles. Her aunt died of liver cancer when she was 66 years old, and her son, who grew up playing in unfenced waste ponds, died of colon cancer when he was 55 years old. Now, Carver and his wife both have spots on their lungs, with hers recently requiring radiation treatment.
“All the houses are going to be gone. The wells are being plugged. The septic systems are being torn up,” Carver said. “There will be nothing.”
Saturday, April 26, 1958, was a momentous day in the towns of Grants and Milan, New Mexico.
Full-page newspaper ads announced the opening of Homestake’s new uranium mill. A military flyover kicked off the festivities, a high school band played, and the New Mexico secretary of state unveiled a plaque commemorating the occasion. An estimated 6,000 people, nearly three times Grants’ population at the beginning of that decade, toured the mill, the local newspaper, the Grants Beacon, reported. Grants would be the Carrot Capital of America no more. It was running headlong into the Atomic Age.
But the celebration was short-lived: Less than a year and a half after operations began, state and federal regulators, with the company’s help, began investigating whether contaminants were leaking from Homestake’s waste.
ProPublica found that, as with most uranium mills in the U.S., Homestake built no liner between the earth and the sandy waste left over from milling, known as tailings. This happened even though an engineer with the New Mexico Department of Health warned the company only weeks after the mill opened that it needed to at least compact the soil underneath its waste to prevent leaks. Without a liner, pollution seeped into aquifers that supplied drinking water. In 1961, the same engineer wrote that groundwater samples showed radium 226, a radioactive and cancer-causing element, at levels as much as 31 times higher than naturally occur in the area, indicating “definite pollution of the shallow ground water table by the uranium mill tailings’ ponds.”
A federal report a year later identified even higher levels of radium 226 in groundwater.
Residents drank that water, fed it to livestock and applied it to crops. They weren’t told of the issue or supplied with bottled water until the mid-1970s, neighbors said. “A long time to keep the secret,” Carver said.
The EPA in the 1970s found elevated levels of selenium, which can damage the nervous system at high doses. Homestake disputes what levels of contaminants are attributable to the mill versus other sources, a question regulators are currently studying. The company confirmed in 1976 that its waste had created a plume of contamination in the groundwater but waited another decade to connect residents to an uncontaminated water system, only doing so after pressure from the EPA.
Seventeen years after pollution was first detected, Homestake began a series of ultimately unsuccessful attempts to clean the groundwater. The company pumped contaminated water out of aquifers and evaporated it aboveground, treated it in filtration systems and dumped hundreds of millions of gallons of clean water on the waste to flush uranium out of the pile, collecting the newly contaminated water for disposal.
Homestake was still left with more polluted water than it could process, so the company irrigated crops, applying more than 3.1 billion gallons to farmland in the subdivisions. As a result, the topsoil contained elevated levels of uranium and selenium. The state and the NRC halted the practice, which the NRC said the company had done without its approval.
Much of the now-fallow farmland has turned to dust that’s an incessant headache for residents. Windstorms whip it up, piling it on roadways and pushing it through the slightest cracks in homes. Regulators have issued dozens of violation notices to the company, including for failing to fence off contaminated land and for exposing workers to high uranium levels without alerting them.
At the state level, New Mexico regulators waited until 2009, 49 years after first finding water pollution, to issue a formal warning that groundwater included substances that cause cancer and birth defects. They waited another nine years before barring people from drilling new or replacement wells in aquifers near the cleanup effort, but the order did not require existing wells to be plugged. A spokesperson for the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer said authorities had issued a “relatively small” number of domestic or livestock well permits in the contaminated area. That number, the spokesperson said, is 122.
Uranium exposure is pervasive in this part of the world.
Miners who worked before 1971, when the government was the sole purchaser of uranium, are eligible for compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. In June, President Joe Biden signed a bill postponing its expiration for two years. But miners who worked in the industry after other uranium buyers entered the market, as well as residents of communities that were impacted by uranium extraction and processing, like those next to Homestake, still receive no benefits. Spearheaded by the New Mexican delegation, bills pending before Congress would expand the legislation to include more miners and appropriate funds to study the health impacts of living near these sites.
Linda Evers is waiting on those reforms. She worked in the area’s mines and mills, including Homestake, after the 1971 cutoff. She stayed on the job through two pregnancies, removing trash from the ore until hours before she gave birth to her son. Both her children have birth defects, and she now lives with kidney failure, cysts on her organs and a degenerative bone disease.
“You worked in a never-ending dirt storm,” Evers remembered. “You were supplied a paper mask that was worthless in about 20 minutes.”
She also dealt with contamination at home. For more than 15 years, Evers lived across the street from Homestake. Her well water was so foul it stunted the plants in her garden, she said. Evers eventually accepted the company’s buyout offer and moved to a new home farther from the waste. A half-built greenhouse sits in her former backyard, her once-lively home stripped of its porch and part of the roof.
Down the road, John Boomer doesn’t know where he’ll go if he sells to Homestake. An artist who paints with a Southwestern palette of sand and soil, he lives in an art studio and home he shares with his partner, Maggie Billiman, a member of the Navajo Nation and fellow artist.
The consequences of uranium production are constantly on the couple’s minds. More than 500 abandoned uranium mines pockmark the Navajo Nation, and Billiman’s father, a Navajo Code Talker in World War II, died of stomach cancer, an illness associated with downwind exposure to nuclear tests. Boomer has written the story of uranium into lyrics, singing about the harm caused by the waste that was left behind.
Those corporate little creeps
Will cause many a widow to cry and weep
While I’m just left on the ground to seep
Homestake is working on requests to both the NRC and the EPA for groundwater cleanup waivers, arguing it’s done all it can to clean up the area.
The company excavated soil from more than 3,500 acres where wind had carried contaminants off-site. Homestake also collected about 1.3 million pounds of uranium and 75,000 pounds of selenium by treating or evaporating more than 10 billion gallons of groundwater, according to company data.
Other uranium mines and mills polluted the area’s main drinking water aquifer upstream of Homestake. Residents worry what will happen to contamination from those sites and from Homestake when the company halts its water treatment.
Homestake says it has built a hydrological model that shows the former mill’s contamination will stay close to the site. (The model won’t be released until the company files its formal application for cleanup exemptions, likely in August.)
But researchers who have studied the hydrology around Homestake said the contamination will head downstream. “Would it keep on moving? Yes, that’s nature,” said Dixon, the hydrogeologist. The real question, he said, one that modeling can’t answer, is how quickly the pollution will migrate.
ProPublica identified sites across the West where regulators approved waivers based on modeling, only to later discover the predictions were flawed.
At a site in Wyoming called Bear Creek, the NRC found concentrations of uranium in groundwater more than 10 times higher than a model had predicted. At a site along the banks of the Colorado River, in Rifle, Colorado, the NRC approved a cleanup plan based on groundwater modeling that predicted uranium would fall to safe levels within 10 years. Monitoring showed concentrations remained dangerously high about a decade later, and new modeling predicted uranium levels wouldn’t reach safe levels for more than a century.
There’s also the cleanup of another Wyoming mill named Split Rock, which Homestake has compared its site to as it seeks a cleanup exemption. Regulators granted a waiver in 2006 after the responsible company presented a model showing contamination wouldn’t reach downstream wells for 1,000 years. “The recent data, however, have shown results that are not consistent with the model predictions,” the NRC wrote seven years later. Nitrates, which are sometimes used in the uranium refining process, were measured in a downstream monitoring well at more than four times approved limits.
McIntyre, the NRC spokesperson, said that in those cases, “NRC staff reviewed groundwater monitoring results and verified that the levels were and remain protective of public health and safety,” adding that the agency requires models used in waiver requests be conservative in their predictions.
Leaders of communities downstream from Homestake, including the Pueblo of Acoma, fear that wishful thinking could allow pollution from the waste to taint their water. The Acoma reservation, about 20 miles from Homestake’s tailings, has been continuously inhabited since before 1200. Its residents use groundwater for drinking and surface water for irrigating alfalfa and corn, but Donna Martinez, program coordinator for the pueblo’s Environment Department, said the pueblo government can’t afford to do as much air and water monitoring as staff would like.
“There are always going to be concerns with the plumes,” Martinez said.
Most days, Billiman contemplates this “poison” and whether she and Boomer might move away from it as she prays to Mother Earth and Father Sky toward Mount Taylor, one of the four sacred Diné peaks, which rises just east of the subdivisions.
“I tell her, gosh, we did this to you. I’m sorry,” Billiman said. “Then, we just say ‘hózho náhásdlii, hózho náhásdlii’ four times.”
“All will be beautiful again,” Boomer roughly translated.
As they prayed one recent morning, the dawn light tumbled over the mountain, illuminating the nearby Haystack Mountain, where a Diné man named Paddy Martinez discovered economically recoverable uranium in 1950 and ignited the region’s mining boom. The light cascaded over Homestake’s tailings piles, across the valley and onto the five subdivisions.
The smell of pizza wafted through a Village of Milan government building down the road from the mill site, as about 20 locals trickled in to meet with Homestake one April evening. They caught up while JoAnne Martinez, a community liaison for Homestake, beseeched them to tuck into the food she had set out. A map taped to the wall showed the location of groundwater contamination, and a stack of glossy booklets celebrated the company’s reclamation project with the slogan: “Doing it right… …Right to the end.”
Tensions rose when residents spoke about the company’s offers to buy their properties. Homestake, whose parent company Barrick had nearly $12 billion in revenue last year, pays market value based on past sales prices of comparable properties, rather than the cost to replace what residents have, which is ballooning rapidly amid the housing crunch. Over the past five years, prices for residential properties around New Mexico have increased about 59%, while they’ve spent about half as long on the market, according to data from real estate companies Zillow and Redfin, respectively.
In the meeting, residents explained what that trend, coupled with Homestake’s offers, has meant for their own housing searches. “It’s like you spit on me,” one resident said of the company’s proposal to buy the property where she has lived for 61 years. Another neighbor told ProPublica she had asked a builder to assess the cost of constructing a nearly identical home and got an estimate $60,000 higher than what Homestake offered. But Homestake didn’t budge.
Neighbors have worried about Homestake’s impact on their property value for decades. They filed a class-action lawsuit against the company in 1983 for alleged property damages, later settling the case for what they deemed to be small payouts. In exchange, those residents agreed to release the company from further liability.
More recently, the company has rejected residents’ requests to move the waste to a lined disposal cell, which could prevent additional groundwater contamination and radon exposure and possibly allow them to stay in their homes. So far, cleanup has cost more than $230 million, including about $103 million that came from taxpayers through the Department of Energy. Homestake estimates it could cost as much as $2 billion more to move the entire pile. Buying out five subdivisions is the cheaper option.
Homestake argues capping the site and walking away is safer, citing reports that conclude moving the pile would lead to at least one workplace traffic-related death and a high likelihood of workers and residents developing cancer. The reports used calculations from the Department of Energy, which is moving 16 million tons of uranium waste off of a site in Moab, Utah. The department’s report found it posed far less risk to workers than later estimates for Homestake. Department of Energy staff said they could not comment on why there are such different risks for the Homestake and Moab sites.
As more neighbors at the meeting demurred about the company’s offers, Orson Tingey, a land manager for Homestake and Barrick, explained that the company has continued to offer the same rates for properties as it did before the COVID-19 pandemic to remain consistent. “We know that doesn’t necessarily work for everybody,” he said.
Jackie Langford set a radon detector on her kitchen table and shooed away her inquisitive 12-year-old, who was more interested in talking uranium policy than finishing his homework. She recalled when her family moved in a decade ago for her husband’s job. No one mentioned the risks posed by Homestake’s tailings pile, which looms less than a mile away.
Now, as a registered nurse tending to former uranium miners, Langford knows too much about the dangers. When it’s inhaled, radon breaks down in the lungs, releasing bursts of radiation that can damage tissue and cause cancer. Her patients have respiratory issues as well as lung cancer. They lose their breath simply lifting themselves out of a chair.
Radon, the radioactive gas formed as uranium decays, poses Homestake’s main cancer threat to residents, according to the EPA’s 2014 study. It is more concentrated in outdoor air near Homestake than in a nearby community with a former uranium mill that has fully covered its waste.
It hasn’t helped that the company has struggled to control radon emanating from its larger waste pile, exceeding federal safety standards each of the last six years, according to company readings reported to the NRC. This year, Homestake requested permission to add a new cover to the pile to reduce radon emissions, which the NRC is now reviewing.
During the pandemic Langford and her family began thinking more about Homestake’s possible impact on their respiratory health, driving them to buy a radon detector. The gas can seep into buildings through cracks in foundations. Indoor radon exposure is the second-leading cause of lung cancer in the United States, behind smoking.
When Langford measured levels in her home, the radon detector registered 4 picocuries per liter and rose as high as 7 pCi/L, she said — levels high enough that the EPA recommends remediation.
She brought her concerns to Homestake, but “for the longest time, they wouldn’t talk to me,” she said. The company eventually connected her with one of their consultants, who told her not to worry because his own home tested above 4 pCi/L and the results did not concern him. He also told Langford, as well as ProPublica, that he is not a radon expert and suggested she complete a longer-term radon test and contact people better versed on the topic.
In 2010, before Langford moved in, EPA contractors placed radon detectors in homes near Homestake and found unsafe radon levels in a dozen homes.
While independent researchers suggested the uranium waste could be a source of indoor radon, the EPA has not determined that is the case, instead identifying naturally occurring gas seeping from the soil. The agency required Homestake to fund radon mitigation in homes but has not done any more radon testing or mitigation since.
“Best practice would be retesting at least every other year to assure things have not gotten worse,” said Michael Murphy, who is retired from the EPA’s indoor air quality team.
ProPublica spoke with eight households the EPA monitored, and all said they were never retested or advised to retest on their own. An EPA staffer told one resident the agency had no plans to conduct follow-up studies.
Because the EPA did not return to test, ProPublica did, placing certified indoor radon kits in nine area households. Three returned readings that exceeded the EPA’s threshold for mitigation, while a fourth registered above the World Health Organization’s lower suggested mitigation level. Langford’s tests averaged 6.95 pCi/L.
She immediately thought about her son. Children are more vulnerable to radon.
Early this spring, Homestake approached Langford and her husband with an offer to purchase their home. They wavered. The family loved the area and knew neighbors who had sold, only to find it impossible to buy a similar property elsewhere.
“I don’t think that’s fair,” Langford said, “but at this point I don’t even know how you fight it.”
With the results from their radon testing front of mind, Langford’s husband signed Homestake’s buyout deal. The family had made a decision. Their health was too important to remain in their home.
The unregulated NUCLEAR INDUSTRY has contaminated wide swaths of the nation both with mining waste and above ground testing.
It's invisible, but not benign.
Neither the EPA nor NRC have been particularly aggressive in clean up efforts costing LIVES.
Those who continue to support and promote NUCLEAR ENERGY need to address their failures first.
"Homestake, whose parent company Barrick had nearly $12 billion in revenue last year, pays market value based on past sales prices of comparable properties, rather than the cost to replace what residents have, which is ballooning rapidly amid the housing crunch...."
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