09 August 22
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In a lengthy statement Monday night, Trump said, “They even broke into my safe!”
Trump also claimed in a written statement that the search — unprecedented in American history — was politically motivated, although he did not provide specifics.
“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said in a lengthy email statement issued by his Save America political committee.
“After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate,” Trump said before bemoaning: “They even broke into my safe!”
Trump lawyer Christina Bobb, who said she was present for Monday’s search, told NBC News that Trump and his team have been “cooperative with FBI and DOJ officials every step of the way,” while adding that the bureau “did conduct an unannounced raid and seized paper.”
A senior government official told NBC News that the FBI was at Mar-a-Largo “for the majority of the day” and confirmed that the search warrant was connected to the National Archives.
Trump this year had to return 15 boxes of documents that were improperly taken from the White House, the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, said in February.
“In mid-January 2022, NARA arranged for the transport from the Trump Mar-a-Lago property in Florida to the National Archives of 15 boxes that contained Presidential records, following discussions with President Trump’s representatives in 2021,” the National Archives said in a statement Feb. 7.
The same month, the National Archives and Records Administration asked the Justice Department to examine whether Trump’s handling of White House records violated federal law, a story first reported by The Washington Post and subsequently confirmed by NBC News sources.
The New York Times on Monday first reported the FBI focus on the National Archives materials.
Just hours before agents searched Trump's residence, the FBI notified the Secret Service about the bureau’s plans to execute the warrant, according to a Secret Service official. The Secret Service facilitated access to the property, the official said, but did not participate in any aspect of the search.
At Justice Department headquarters, a spokesperson declined to comment. Officials at FBI field offices in Washington and Miami also declined to comment.
A senior law enforcement official in Florida confirmed that there was "law enforcement activity" at Mar-a-Largo on Monday.
The White House said it was not given a heads-up.
“We did not have notice of the reported action and would refer you to the Justice Department for any additional information,” a White House official said.
Trump is not at Mar-a-Lago, his winter residence. He often spends his summers at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey.
The FBI search came days after Attorney General Merrick Garland told NBC News that the “most wide-ranging investigation” in Justice Department history was examining not only the rioters who invaded the Capitol and physically attacked officers, but also whether anyone was “criminally responsible for interfering with the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another.”
The search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate came just over six years after another FBI action surrounding classified material that set the stage for Trump’s 2016 Electoral College victory: former FBI Director James Comey’s July 5, 2016, news conference about Trump's Democratic rival, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Comey, who broke with Justice Department protocol, declared at the time that Clinton and her colleagues were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” even though he said the facts did not support bringing criminal charges.
Trump was a persistent critic of Clinton's handling of classified material, claiming in 2016 that it was “the biggest political scandal since Watergate.” It was Comey's handling of the Clinton matter that was used as justification for Trump's decision to fire Comey. Trump eventually replaced Comey with Christopher Wray. He remains in the position.
Dozens of vehicles, many adorned with "Trump 2020" and U.S. flags, were parked outside Mar-a-Lago on Monday night in an apparent show of support for the former president.
Meanwhile, Republicans rallied around their party's de facto leader, who is weighing another run for president.
“The @FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago is incredibly concerning, especially given the Biden admin’s history of going after parents … other political opponents. This is 3rd World country stuff,” Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who leads the Senate GOP's campaign arm, said on Twitter.
“We need answers NOW,” Scott added, summing up the mood of many Republicans. “The FBI must explain what they were doing today … why.”
Scott’s reaction is an early sign of the fierce political blowback the Justice Department is likely to face for investigating Trump, underscoring the numerous challenges that would come with potentially prosecuting a former president who is both a likely White House candidate and the most influential figure in the GOP.
Trump is the focus of multiple investigations, including a criminal inquiry in Georgia concerning allegations of election interference and a New York civil probe into whether he fraudulently represented his finances to the state. Trump was in the New York area Monday as he prepared to give a deposition in that case.
But the biggest federal investigation swirling around Trump concerns his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, which resulted in his second impeachment and is the subject of a House committee examining the uprising.
Trump has not been charged in any of those investigations.
Of how Monday's law enforcement action might affect Trump’s political aspirations, a person close to Trump said: “If he wasn’t running before, he is now.”
The source, who was not authorized to speak publicly, appeared to be suggesting that Trump might benefit from being an active candidate for the presidency if he faces legal jeopardy.
Friends of Hamed Najim sit near his grave and those of his cousins in the same cemetery where they were killed. (photo: Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera)
Many Palestinians were killed just hours before a truce was agreed on between Israel and Islamic Jihad.
Israel and the Palestinian armed group Islamic Jihad declared a truce late on Sunday after three days of heavy Israeli bombardment on the besieged Gaza Strip.
Despite a flurry of Israeli air raids and Palestinian rocket launches until the last minute, the truce began at 11:30pm local time on Sunday (20:30 GMT) and has so far held.
According to the Palestinian health ministry, 44 Palestinians, including 15 children, were killed and at least 350 civilians wounded during Israel’s three-day “pre-emptive strike”.
Hamed and his cousins - Jamil Najm al-Deen Naijm, 4, Jamil Ihab Najim, 13, and Mohammad, 17 – were killed by a missile that hit them while they were in the Falluja cemetery across the street from their home.
Hamed’s mother, Diana, was visibly shaken. She told Al Jazeera her son was very careful not to leave the house, fearing Israeli attacks.
“Just two hours before the truce was announced, he told me he would go out for five minutes with his cousins,” she said. “Moments went by and then we heard a bombing. We ran out to find my son and his three cousins. They were all cut up into pieces.”
‘Our lives are worthless’
Diana’s story is similar to many others in the besieged Gaza Strip, after Israel launched repeated air attacks in a three-day operation involving “surgical strikes” against the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, according to Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan.
“I was a mother of four children. Today my children have become three in the blink of an eye. My son was very obedient, kind-hearted and excelled in his studies despite our difficult circumstances,” she said.
“Why are we in Gaza exposed to all this? We can lose our children at any moment and at any minute as if our lives are worthless.”
Despite losing her son, Diana expressed her satisfaction with the ceasefire. “Enough is enough. We can’t take it anymore and I don’t want other mothers in Gaza to see the bitterness of what I’m going through now,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks.
‘Bombing until last moment’
On Monday, at the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, large crowds gathered to mourn Yasser al-Nabaheen, 40, and his three children, who were killed the evening prior in an Israeli bombing of their family home.
The attack resulted in the death of the father and his two sons, Ahmed, 13, Mohamed, 9, and his daughter Dalia, 13. His oldest son was wounded and is recovering in hospital.
“I was sitting with my Uncle Yasser in the small plot of land across our house,” Ahmad, a family member, told Al Jazeera. “He moved a little forward when a missile fell in the space between us and directly above him and his children. They all turned to pieces in a moment.”
Ahmad said he could not believe what happened right before his eyes.
“I was screaming and calling for help and calling an ambulance. My uncle was a good person and loved by everyone. He had no political affiliations. We were sitting and his children were playing in front of him. Within minutes a massacre happened,” he said.
The father and his children died half an hour before the truce was agreed upon.
“It is overwhelming and very difficult to comprehend. Israel kept bombing and killing people and civilians until the last moment,” said Ahmad.
Photos showing torn pieces of paper at the bottom of toilets. (photo: Maggie Haberman)
Why it matters: Destroying records that should be preserved is potentially illegal.
Trump denied it and called Haberman, whose New York Times coverage he follows compulsively, a "maggot."
- Well, it turns out there are photos. And here they are, published for the first time.
Haberman — who obtained the photos recently — shared them with us ahead of the Oct. 4 publication of her book, "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America."
- A Trump White House source tells her the photo on the left shows a commode in the White House.
- The photo on the right is from an overseas trip, according to the source.
Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich told Axios: "You have to be pretty desperate to sell books if pictures of paper in a toilet bowl is part of your promotional plan."
- "We know ... there's enough people willing to fabricate stories like this in order to impress the media class — a media class who is willing to run with anything, as long as it anti-Trump."
Between the lines: The new evidence is a reminder that despite the flood of Trump books, Haberman's is hotly anticipated in Trumpworld.
Haberman's sources report the document dumps happened multiple times at the White House, and on at least two foreign trips.
- "That Mr. Trump was discarding documents this way was not widely known within the West Wing, but some aides were aware of the habit, which he engaged in repeatedly," Haberman tells us.
- "It was an extension of Trump's term-long habit of ripping up documents that were supposed to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act."
The handwriting is visibly Trump's, written in the Sharpie ink he favored.
- Most of the words are illegible.
- But the scrawls include the name of Rep. Elise Stefanik of upstate New York, a Trump defender who's a member of House Republican leadership.
Go deeper: A radical plan for Trump's second term
Wanda Cooper-Jones and Marcus Arbery, left, the parents of Ahmaud Arbery, are flanked by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, center, and attorney Lee Merritt, right, as they address the media after the sentencing of Travis McMichael in federal court in Brunswick, Georgia, on Aug. 8. (photo: Lewis M. Levine/AP)
Travis and Gregory McMichael and William Bryan sought to serve their time in federal prison, which they said would be safer
Travis McMichael; his father, Gregory McMichael; and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan appeared in back-to-back hearings in U.S. District Court in Brunswick, Ga., asking a judge to send them to a federal penitentiary.
Amy Lee Copeland, the attorney for Travis McMichael, 36, said he has received hundreds of threats and faced “an effective backdoor death penalty” if sent to Georgia state prison — a system that Copeland noted is under federal investigation for alleged violent and deplorable conditions.
But Arbery’s family vehemently opposed allowing his killers to choose where they would be incarcerated, noting that the young Black man who was gunned down while jogging in February 2020 will never be able to make choices about his life again.
“How can you ask for mercy? You didn’t give my boy no mercy,” Marcus Arbery said as he asked U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood to hand down the “stiffest penalty that the court allows.”
The pursuit and killing of Ahmaud Arbery, 25, became part of the impassioned debate over racial injustice spurred by the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville that same year. President Biden’s Justice Department has pursued federal civil rights charges in all three cases, convicting the officers involved in Floyd’s killing in December and February, and charging officers involved in the raid that led to Taylor’s death last week.
“Hate crimes have no place in our country,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement after Monday’s sentencings. “Protecting civil rights and combatting white supremacist violence was a founding purpose of the Justice Department, and one that we will continue to pursue with the urgency it demands.”
The McMichaels and Bryan, all of whom are White, received life sentences on state murder charges following their November 2021 convictions, with no possibility of parole for the McMichaels. Their federal trial, earlier this year, presented evidence about past racist and offensive statements by each of the defendants.
They were convicted of attempted kidnapping and violently interfering with Arbery’s right to use a public street because he was Black. The McMichaels were also convicted of a federal weapons violation.
On Monday, Godbey Wood sentenced Travis McMichael to an additional life sentence, plus 10 years for the weapons charge, and Gregory McMichael, 66, to an additional life sentence, plus seven years for the weapons charge; both men were also sentenced to 20 years for attempted kidnapping, to be served concurrent to the life sentence.
Bryan, 52, who was convicted of all but the weapons violation, was handed a 35-year federal sentence.
Godbey Wood said the state sentence takes precedence since it was imposed first. That means the McMichaels will probably spend the rest of their lives in state prison, and Bryan — who was given the possibility of parole with his state-level life sentence — will probably be incarcerated for decades. All three men have two weeks to appeal.
Bryan’s attorney urged the judge to give him a lesser sentence, noting that while Gregory McMichael told his son to pursue Arbery, and Travis McMichael did so and pulled the trigger, Bryan joined but did not initiate the chase and was not armed.
Bryan’s decision to pursue Arbery after seeing the chase underway was a “snap judgment” decision rather than one motivated by racism against a Black man, said the attorney, J. Pete Theodocion.
Godbey Wood said that while she didn’t hand Bryan the maximum possible sentence, 35 years was no slap on the wrist.
“By the time you serve your federal sentence, you will be close to 90 years old,” she told Bryan. “But again, Mr. Arbery never got a chance to be 26.”
Arbery, an avid jogger, was out for a run when the McMichaels and Bryan chased him in pickup trucks and then killed him in Satilla Shores, a neighborhood just outside of Brunswick, Ga., on Feb. 23, 2020.
The case drew little national attention until video of the shooting was released that May. Arbery’s family expressed fears early on that the case was being covered up and would be forgotten; 74 days passed before anyone was criminally charged.
The delay was partly because the case wound its way through four different state prosecutors. Two recused themselves because they had previously worked with Gregory McMichael, a former Glynn County police officer.
The first of those two, former Glynn County district attorney Jackie Johnson, was eventually charged with using her position to delay the arrests of Arbery’s killers. The second, Waycross District Attorney George E. Barnhill, declined to bring charges in Arbery’s death before his recusal.
After the trio were convicted and sentenced in state court, federal prosecutors offered a plea deal to the McMichaels in hopes of avoiding the expense and uncertainty of a federal civil rights trial.
Under the terms of the deal, the father and son, who had both denied in their state murder trial that race was a factor in their actions, would have to admit under oath that they killed Arbery because he was Black. In exchange, they would serve 30 years in federal — not state — prison.
But the deal fell apart at the last minute, after Arbery’s family strongly rejected the idea of letting the young man’s killers choose where they would do their time.
“Granting these men their preferred conditions of confinement will defeat me,” Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said in court in January. “It gives them one last chance to spit in my face after murdering my son.”
In court filings before Monday’s sentencing, Gregory McMichael raised safety concerns similar to his son’s in seeking to serve his time in a federal facility; such facilities also tend to have better amenities, including health care.
Speaking to Arbery’s family Monday, he said: “I’m sure that my words mean very little to you, but I want to assure you I never wanted any of this to happen. There was no malice in my heart and my son’s heart that day.”
Gregory McMichael apologized in court to his son, saying he should have “never put him in that situation” of shooting Arbery, and to his wife, thanking her for standing by him. “You are a better wife than I deserve,” he said.
Travis McMichael declined to speak during his sentencing hearing. In seeking an order that he serve his sentence in federal prison, Copeland, his lawyer, said she understood “the rich irony … of expressing that my client will face vigilante justice himself.”
When it was his turn to speak, Bryan apologized to the Arbery family.
“I’m glad to finally have the chance to say to Mr. Arbery’s family and friends how sorry I am for what happened to him on that day. I never intended any harm to him, and I never would have played any role if I knew then what I know now,” Bryan said.
Arbery’s family also addressed the court, tearfully recalling their tremendous loss and pleading with the judge to show the defendants no mercy.
“If they had left him alone that day, they would have been fine. But they tortured him,” Kimberly Arbery, Ahmaud’s aunt, said of her slain nephew. “Give these people what they deserve.”
Another aunt, Ruby Arbery, said Gregory McMichael failed his son by participating in the chasing and killing of Arbery.
“Seems like a generational curse: like father, like son,” she said. “I don’t want them to have an easy life, because we will never have an easy life again. If they could bring Ahmaud back, they could have an easy life. But they chose to take a life, so they don’t deserve an easy life.”
Starbucks employees and supporters react as votes are read during a viewing of their union election on December. 9, 2021, in Buffalo, New York. (photo: Joshua Bessex/AP)
We supposedly have the most pro-union US president of our lifetimes. Let’s see him act like it
Plausible deniability aside, this is an extremely serious problem. Not just for the underpaid, overworked employees at all of these low-wage jobs, desperately hanging on to financial survival by their fingernails, but for all of us. America is mired in a half-century-long crisis of rising inequality that has been fueled, above all, by the combined erosion of labor power and the growth of the power of capital. The American dream enjoyed by the lucky baby-boom generation – buying a home and sending your kids to college on one income – is dead and gone, replaced by a thin crust of the rich sitting atop a huge swamp of once-middle-class jobs that no longer offer enough to sustain a middle-class lifestyle.
The power of workers relative to the power of the investment class must be rebalanced. Rebuilding the power of unions is the only way out of this trap, unless you are credulous enough to believe that we will all be rescued by the sudden radicalization of the tax policymakers on the House ways and means committee. If you ever want to live in a country where the American dream is more than a cruel, tantalizing joke, you have a stake in the revival of organized labor.
So when you see a big company closing down operations because workers there want to unionize, you should be pissed. Such coldhearted retaliation against people exercising a fundamental right on the job goes to the very heart of how we got all this inequality in the first place. It is meant not just to derail one union drive, but to strike fear in all the other workers who see it happen: if you ask for what you’re worth, this could happen to you. Shut up and eat your gruel, and be happy that the kindly billionaire CEO is allowing you to earn enough not to starve today. Even if you don’t work at a fast-food outlet or a factory, this should enrage you, as a human being. It is an assault on human dignity.
America’s convoluted and hostile labor laws actually do allow a business to shut down in response to unionization, unless (and this is important) the company is doing so in order to scare its remaining employees out of unionizing – in other words, exactly what big employers like Chipotle and Starbucks would be doing by closing stores where workers have organized, as workers at many other stores across the country looked on. (Government regulators have not yet ruled on the legality of the recent closures by those companies.) Unfortunately, the evil, high-priced union-busting attorneys these companies hire are well aware that the gears of justice in labor law grind so slowly that even on the off chance that they were found to have closed the stores illegally, it would be far too late for it to mean anything to the workers who were laid off and forced to go find other jobs. The scary, unsubtle message to the company’s workforce would have already been sent.
That’s why this stuff is not really a question of law, but of power. The working class, galvanized by the near-death experience of the pandemic, is busily organizing in new industries across the country; the labor movement today is as energized as it has been in two generations. Corporate America is determined to stop this. In the mid-1950s, one in three Americans was a union member; today, that figure is one in 10. Companies know that their ability to extract excess profits will go down as union density goes up. This is going to be a hard, nasty fight. As all of those recently laid-off Chipotle and Starbucks and Amy’s Kitchen workers know, it already is.
It is also a golden opportunity for a Democratic party that has spent the last six years wringing its hands about losing working-class voters to the pseudo-populist (and racist) appeal of Trumpism. Want to get working people enthusiastic about Democrats again? Then the Democrats should help working people. National Democratic politicians should be holding press conferences decrying the greedy chief executives closing these stores just because workers tried to stand up for themselves. Joe Biden should be screaming his head off about billionaire Starbucks chief Howard Schultz’s disgusting union-busting at the same volume that Ron DeSantis is blathering about “woke corporations”.
Republicans are insincere ghouls who want to harvest working-class votes while their policies stab working-class people in the back – but Democrats are ceding the terrain to these scumbags by failing to match their fervor. We don’t need our politicians making anodyne statements about how unions are nice. We need a rain of zeal and fury emanating from Washington, to terrify companies away from closing down their union stores with threats of merciless retributions from the state.
History shows that organized labor thrives when it has the government’s support, and suffers without it. We are supposedly living under the most pro-union president of our lifetimes. So? Let’s hear some damn fire, man. The only reason companies feel so free to abuse their workers is that they don’t believe anyone will make them pay for it.
People spread earth over Aftab Hussein's grave at Fairview Memorial Park in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Friday. (photo: Chancey Bush/AP)
Police in New Mexico have warned that deaths of local Muslim men, including one last year, may be linked
The killings also followed the November 2021 killing of Mohammad Ahmadi, another Muslim man, which local advocates and law enforcement officials believe could also be linked to the more recent attacks.
Law enforcement officials have said there is a “strong possibility” the victims were targeted because of their race and religion.
In the latest attack Nayeem Hossain was shot on Friday afternoon while returning from the burial of the other two victims, Aftab Hussein and Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, who were shot on 26 July and 1 August, respectively.
His fiance, who was on the phone with him, heard the shot while he was waiting in a parking lot. Hossain had become a US citizen just two weeks ago.
Since the latest killings, the local Muslim community has been on edge and is trying to stay in as much as possible, Dr Mahmoud Eldenawi, imam of the Islamic Center of New Mexico in Albuquerque, told the Guardian on Saturday.
“Especially when evening comes, nobody goes out, they’re rushing to finish everything during the daytime,” he said. “Unless it’s urgent they don’t leave home in the evenings. Everybody thinks they’re a target.
“We are faith leaders, we ask people to be strong, but we are human, we do feel concerned about our wife and children,” said Eldenawi.
Abbas Akhil, who founded the Islamic center, added that they had asked Muslim students, especially those from Pakistan living around campus, to be vigilant.
The killings happened within a mile of the area surrounding the campus of the University of New Mexico, Akhil said.
On Saturday, New Mexico’s governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, condemned the killings and said they were “deeply angering and wholly intolerable”.
“I am sending additional state police officers to Albuquerque to work in close coordination with APD and the FBI to bring the killer or killers to justice – and they will be found,” she said.
“Going by what law enforcement is saying – it’s disturbing,” Ibrahim Hooper, spokesperson for Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), told the Guardian, adding that the council was trying to coordinate the local Muslim community.
Hate crimes targeting race and religion have the highest number of victims among other kinds of hate crimes in the state.
Eldenawi of the Islamic center said they are satisfied with the response of local law enforcement, who have been checking in on them and, since Friday’s killing, had six to seven members at the mosque to monitor any potential threat.
They have also been patrolling the area, he said.
The mosque usually attracts between 300 and 400 people at Friday prayers, a holy day for Muslims.
He mentioned the community had also been receiving support and solidarity from the local Christian and Jewish communities.
Eldenawi, who has been in the community for 10 months, said the incidents came as a shock for him, as he had not faced any discrimination either in Albuquerque nor in Arkansas, where he lived for seven years before this.
Except for an attack where a woman tried to set the mosque on fire, he had not experienced any discrimination or hate crimes, he said.
Akhil, who has been living in the community for 50 years, echoed this.
“Never,” he said. “New Mexico is not the type of state where I’d expect something like this – it’s a very inclusive state. It brought people to tears to have two funerals at the same time.”
Despite the attacks, Eldenawi said he did not have any fear being in the public eye as a religious leader.
“I’m supposed to give people power – we should never let evil dictate our life,” he said.
A full-sized Woolly Mammoth restoration at UMN's Bell Museum. (photo: Bell Museum)
Americans have long understood the species’ extinction as a warning. But is trying to “de-extinct” it really a good idea?
Also in the parade: an eight-foot-tall woolly mammoth, on wheels, made out of plywood, chicken wire, PVC pipes, burlap, coconut husks, white birch bark, nails, box springs, buttons, rusty iron tools, and deer bones. For tusks, it had coiled metal tubing and, for a trunk, a chimney liner. “It’s a climate prophet,” Kevin O’Keefe, who built it, said. O’Keefe is a circus artist and a writer. From a gray plastic bucket, he handed out prophecies to paradegoers. One read “Humankind, animal kind, and earth are ALL one, all belong to the same home.” True, but one of us is a homewrecker.
Since 1970, wildlife populations have fallen by two-thirds, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The World Animal Foundation has predicted that a third to a half of all nonhuman animal species will have become extinct by 2050. A study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—citing the latest projections from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and evidence of the accelerating mass extinction of nonhuman species—reports that “previous mass extinction events occurred due to threshold effects in the carbon cycle that we could cross this century.” What does the woolly mammoth have to do with all this?
If “Save the Whales” was the motto of the environmental movement in the nineteen-seventies, “Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth” is something of a slogan for the twenty-twenties. Woolly mammoths, which were as big as the African elephant but closer, genetically, to the Asian elephant, lived across Asia, Europe, and North America until about ten thousand years ago—although in some places they survived until about four thousand years ago. They are the first species whose extinction humans came to understand, and could prove. The reason was harder to know. Humans were first believed to have played a role, by hunting them, but climate change more likely caused the decline, by ending the last Ice Age. The mammoths left behind bones and giant tusks, which Western naturalists began collecting in the seventeenth century, before the discovery of dinosaurs.
The mammoth, often confused at the time with the American mastodon, was “the dinosaur of the early American republic,” as the historian Paul Semonin wrote in “American Monster”—evidence of antiquity, of greatness, and, apocalyptically, of possible doom. Two centuries before Charles Darwin boarded the Beagle, analysis of mammoth remains proved that Earth is much older than the account given in Genesis and that, contrary to a Christian doctrine of divine design, not every species that God created lasts forever. The unearthing of the mammoth proved the existence of a time before time. Its disappearance was taken as a warning of the possibility of an end of time; a way to imagine, for the first time, the extinction of humankind.
Woolly mammoths keep being unearthed. In June, in the Yukon, in the territory of the First Nation people the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, a gold miner hacking into the permafrost came across a baby mammoth, about a month old, exquisitely preserved, her legs tucked under, as if she’d just fallen asleep. Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in elders decided to name her Nun cho ga, big baby animal. “She is beautiful, one of the most incredible mummified Ice Age animals ever discovered,” Grant Zazula, the Yukon’s government paleontologist, said. “She has a trunk. She has a tail. She has tiny little ears.” She died alone, very likely, having wandered off and got stuck in the mud.
Creating a baby woolly mammoth today is the objective of Colossal, a bioscience and genetic-engineering company founded last year by the Harvard geneticist George Church and the serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm, who had earlier launched the similarly named A.I. firm Hypergiant. “Extinction is a colossal problem facing the world,” the startup’s Web site announces. “And Colossal is the company that is going to solve it.” The plan is to reconstruct the DNA of the woolly mammoth, use CRISPR to combine it with the DNA of an (endangered) Asian elephant, make an embryo, implant it in an Asian elephant—or, perhaps, into a not yet invented artificial womb—and begin to “de-extinct” the species. Resurrected mammoths would populate the permafrost and avert its melting by turning wet tundra into dry grasslands, which better sequester carbon and reflect sunlight, keeping the permafrost cooler and helping, thereby, to save the planet.
After Colossal had raised its first fifteen million dollars from venture capitalists (among them the Winklevoss brothers), Lamm, who is the C.E.O., said that the company expects to have its first calves as soon as 2025. Last month, Colossal announced that, together with the Vertebrates Genomes Project, it had completed the reconstruction of the DNA of the Asian elephant. Aside from the countless ethical problems, technological hurdles, and scientific improbabilities of this venture, it makes almost no sense as climate-change mitigation; it’s too little, too late. And that’s not even considering the plight of the motherless baby mammoths, alone and wandering helplessly.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the dinosaur had dethroned the woolly mammoth as an American emblem—and become the favorite megafauna of Gilded Age oligarchs. Robber barons loved the idea of giant reptilian carnivores. In 1906, J. P. Morgan financed the installation of a T. rex in the American Museum of Natural History. Colossal is funded, in part, by Musky, tusky tech billionaires keen to “futureproof” the world. They’re hoping to build animals out of bitcoin and code. Meanwhile, back in Brattleboro, a homespun and better-beloved hope for humanity made out of chicken wire and birch bark and burlap rolls along, through pine-dark woods.
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