05 August 22
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If Trump or any of the likely Republican nominees win in 2024, they will immediately move to protect those who attempted to overturn the 2020 election
With the growing list of deletions, there is a whole new criminal conspiracy to investigate: one to destroy evidence of the grave federal crimes already under investigation. Nothing so focuses the prosecutorial mind or underscores the need to accelerate a criminal investigation as evidence that the investigation’s target may have plotted to erase the proof of his wrongdoing that is needed to hold him accountable.
The attorney general, Merrick Garland, knows that the fish always rots from the head. On 26 July, the Washington Post broke news that the justice department’s investigation is focused on Donald Trump himself. Time is of the essence in bringing his case to indictment.
Indeed, a moving target who gives every indication that he plans to strike again must trigger a different cost-benefit calculus in the inevitable debates both within and outside the justice department about when enough proof has been gathered to indict responsibly – and when it would be a dereliction of duty to delay further.
The former president’s insistence that he has nothing to be remorseful about (other than not marching to the Capitol) makes that debate seem academic. And the steps being taken at his behest even now in battleground states to replace 2020’s failure with 2024’s success redouble the urgency. Shakespeare’s Brutus had it right when he said, in Julius Caesar: “We must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”
In these circumstances, prudence counsels running the clock backwards to set clear benchmarks for moving forward. Any calculation of how to proceed must start with two pessimistic premises. First, that Trump will run in 2024 and could win. Second, that if any of the likely Republican nominees wins, the next administration will be one that is eager to scrap any prosecution of the last.
Hence, the goal must be to secure a conviction before November 2024, and in any event, no later than 20 January 2025, when the next presidential term begins. It is already too late for all appeals from any such conviction to be exhausted by that date, but the key to holding the chief conspirator accountable is a jury verdict of guilt.
Consider this: the trial of insurrectionist Guy Reffitt occurred 13 months after his original indictment. That trial, and its delaying pre-trial motions, were incalculably less complex than Trump’s would be. One can easily anticipate motions that, if denied, might go far up the appellate chain.
It is not hard to imagine a majority of supreme court justices in no great hurry to resolve motions upon which the start of trial could depend. One can easily conceive a 20-month or longer period with the former president indicted but not yet tried. If Trump is not formally charged until January 2023, that would imply a multi-month trial starting in September or October. Should he run for president and win in November, we would have a president-elect in the middle of a criminal trial.
Part of why a lengthy post-indictment/pre-verdict period is foreseeable is that federal district courts are bound to protect an accused’s rights to full airing of pre-trial claims and the time needed to file and argue them. Trump will have many pre-trial claims, setting out his serial and inexhaustible list of grievances, the imagined violation of his rights, his purported immunity from prosecution as a former president and the overriding unfairness of it all.
Some district court judges more than others will balance protections for the accused with accountability’s pragmatic need for speed. Importantly, even the four Trump-appointed district court judges in DC have often shown little sympathy for those charged with perpetrating the events of January 6 or resisting their investigation. On 1 August, Judge Dabney Friedrich sentenced Reffitt to more than seven years in prison, the longest sentence to date.
Judge Tim Kelly refused to dismiss indictments against Proud Boy leaders who were part of the January 6 siege. Judge Carl Nichols brooked no nonsense in Steve Bannon’s July trial, deliberately preventing it from becoming the “political circus” Bannon sought to make it.
On the other hand, among eight judges who have considered defendants’ motions to dismiss federal charges of obstructing an official government proceeding – Congress’s January 6 election certification session – Nichols was the lone outlier who dismissed the count. That is one of the main charges that observers believe federal prosecutors could bring against Trump.
The point is that if Trump were to be indicted, the Department of Justice cannot count on a favorable judge putting it on a jet stream to an actual trial. So what does that mean for precisely when Trump must be formally indicted?
Thankfully, it doesn’t imply the impossible. The Department of Justice could pull an experienced prosecutor or two from every US attorney’s office and put them together on the case.
With all stops pulled, prosecutors still have time to do what is needed before year end. The tasks include talking to witnesses that the January 6 House committee interviewed and deposed, which is well under way. Cassidy Hutchinson, principal aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Vice-President Mike Pence’s top aides, Marc Short and Greg Jacobs, are now working with the Department of Justice or appearing before its grand jury.
Cooperation is already reported to have begun among the lawyer-enablers of Trump’s coup plotting. With the investigation’s accelerating aim at Trump, every potential target’s defense counsel has surely discussed with the target the advantages of an early offer to plead guilty and cooperate. Early birds get better worms.
On 2 August, the federal grand jury investigating the lead-up to the January 6 insurrection subpoenaed the former White House counsel Pat Cipollone. Department of Justice prosecutors are reported to be preparing to go to court to secure his testimony about his conversations with Trump if Cipollone again declines to disclose them on grounds of executive privilege.
The task ahead is massive, but if attacked with supreme urgency, it can get done. The building blocks for a trial of Donald Trump must be put into place with alacrity. In no case more than this one, the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. The clock is ticking.
Russian soldiers in Ukraine. (photo: Shutterstock)
Ukraine started its counteroffensive in Kherson province by cutting off Russian supply lines to its forward positions.
Ukraine also scored a diplomatic victory: Russia has agreed to lift its blockade of Black Sea ports to allow Ukrainian grain exports, which Ukraine estimates will bring in $10bn in much-needed revenue.
Ukraine likely lost territory on its eastern front, including a key defensive position near Donetsk city; while an explosion in a Russian prisoner of war camp in occupied Donetsk killed an estimated 50 Ukrainian soldiers, in what Ukraine describes as a war crime.
The southern counteroffensive
Even before August 2, Ukraine claimed to have liberated 46 settlements in southern Kherson province and it says the number now liberated has risen again over the past week.
Britain’s defence ministry said the Kherson counteroffensive was “gathering momentum” after Ukrainian-operated HIMARS rocket artillery systems struck three Russian-controlled resupply bridges on the Dnieper river between July 20 and 27.
On July 30, Ukraine struck again. Its southern command said it had damaged a railway bridge over the Dnieper, rendering the movement of freight impossible. These strikes have jeopardised Russia’s ability to resupply forward positions in the south, and Ukraine’s general staff have reported that Russian forces are trying to repair the damaged bridges.
Ukraine is also attacking the warehouses from which Russian resupplies are sourced.
Ukraine’s southern command said that precision strikes had destroyed Russian stockpiles of fuel, lubricant and ammunition in Berislav district northeast of Kherson city, and “critically reduced” supplies in Nova Kakhovka, where Russian forces keep large stockpiles.
Further east along the Dnieper river on the same day, Nikopol district administrator Yevhen Yevtushenko said a Ukrainian strike destroyed a Russian ammunition warehouse across the river from Nikopol.
Sergey Khlan, a Kherson administrative adviser, also confirmed that Ukrainian HIMARS rockets destroyed a 40-car train with equipment in Brylivka, about 50km (around 31 miles) southeast of Kherson city. Some 80 Russian servicemen were estimated killed and 200 wounded in the attack.
Military experts say such tactics – decapitating the Russian army, thinning its resources and destroying logistics routes – are consistent with preparations for a counteroffensive.
Retired Australian Major-General Mick Ryan has called this a “strategy of corrosion”.
“In the Battles for Kyiv and Kharkiv, the Ukrainians were able to fight the Russians to a standstill because they were able to penetrate Russian rear areas and destroy parts of their logistic support,” Ryan wrote.
“In doing so, they had a significant impact on Russian morale. The Ukrainians, therefore, corroded the northern Russian expedition physically and morally from within, and forced its ejection from Ukraine.”
The Russians temporarily overpowered the Ukrainian strategy on the eastern front through a hail of missile and artillery fire, but the introduction of US-made HIMARS rocket artillery systems in late June has changed that, Ryan says.
“Ukrainians are re-adopting the asymmetric conventional tactics they used so successfully early in the war… an integral part of their strategy of corrosion,” he says.
“The ability to rapidly target [command posts] and use HIMARS to inflict maximum destruction is vital,” he added.
Ukrainian forces have excelled at doing just that.
On August 2, Ukraine’s southern command said it had destroyed a Russian ammunition depot in Skadovsk, on the southern shore of the Kherson region, well inside the Russian rear.
On the same day, geolocated footage showed Russian ammunition depots being destroyed in Starosillya and Arkhanhelske north of Kherson city, both on a highway that serves as a ground line of communication. Geolocated footage also showed Ukrainian forces striking Russian artillery positions in Soldatske in Russian-held Crimea, likely with a Phoenix Ghost kamikaze drone.
Ukraine’s southern command said its forces killed 32 Russian soldiers on that day.
These surgical strikes are wrong-footing the Russians. On August 1, Russian forces had to stop unloading an ammunition train in Kalanchak station, Kherson, after a smoke screen they had created to disguise their activities from air attack apparently ignited the cargo.
The train retreated to Crimea, Ukraine’s military intelligence said.
“In corroding the Russian military physically, morally, and intellectually, the Ukrainians have evolved the military art. This is what 21st-century war looks like,” Ryan says.
Hard choices
Russia now has to make hard choices.
On July 31, Ukraine’s general staff reported “individual units” of Russian forces were redeploying from the Sloviansk front in Donetsk province to Zaporizhia in the south. This shift, says Ukraine’s military intelligence, came after a successful Ukrainian counterattack decimated the garrisons of Verkhniy Tokmak and Chernihivka, two settlements northeast of the occupied city of Melitopol in Zaporizhia well behind the Russian front line.
Military intelligence believes Russian forces plan to abandon Chernihivka, which was left with 100 defending soldiers.
On August 1, Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, said Russia has been moving large numbers of troops to Crimea from Donetsk and Luhansk, fearing it may have to fight for the territory it annexed in 2014.
“The threat of the transfer of the war to the territory of Crimea is already becoming a reality for them,” Skibitsky said.
Ukraine’s counteroffensive is partly to pre-empt a Russian annexation of Kherson.
According to intercepted Russian documents, Russia plans to hold a referendum in the south soon. Its preparations include organising 140 pro-Russia demonstrations, creating Russia-supportive media stories to be covered by pro-Russian media, and distributing food and other resources to collaborators.
Skibitsky also said Russian forces in Kherson were setting up polling stations and preparing voter lists.
The eastern front
Ukrainian defenders have so far pushed back daily Russian assaults on Donetsk province, and while Luhansk province is nominally under Russian control, acts of resistance are frequently reported there.
On August 2, however, Russian forces are believed to have captured a key Ukrainian defensive position near Avdiivka in Donetsk.
Ukrainian troops had held the Butivka coal mine ventilation shaft since 2015, and it was their closest position to Russian-occupied Donetsk city. Ukrainian forces managed to repel an advance on Avdiivka itself, but Russian forces made incremental advances on Bakhmut.
What began as a war for territory now seems to be turning into a scramble for populations.
Ukraine’s Ministry for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories, a newly formed body, set up a coordination headquarters to evacuate Donetsk on June 29 and told residents that evacuation is now mandatory.
“Donetsk is now on the verge of a humanitarian disaster: active fighting is ongoing, infrastructure destroyed. People are not only at risk of being shelled – in the absence of heat, medicine and food, it will be difficult to survive in winter. The way out is to evacuate,” the ministry said.
“There are hundreds of thousands of people, tens of thousands of children … Many refuse to leave … But it really needs to be done. This decision will still have to be made,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address.
Russia says it is also in the process of evacuating civilians from the Donbas region for humanitarian reasons at a rate of 25,000 a day, and claims to have already moved almost three million residents to Russia since the war started, including nearly half a million children.
War crime in Olenivka
Russia says Ukraine killed 50 of its own men when it targeted a detention facility in the Russian-controlled settlement of Olenivka in Donetsk using HIMARS rocket artillery.
The deputy head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic militia, Eduard Basurin, told Rossiya-1 TV channel: “The Ukrainian authorities killed their own people. All the prisoners of war are Ukrainian nationals.”
The ambassador of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic to Moscow, Rodion Miroshnik, claimed that Ukraine had carried out the attack to silence disgruntled soldiers.
“In Kyiv, they decided that the surrendered “heroic Azovs” were a disgrace and had a bad effect on the moral climate of both Ukrainians and sponsors of the war. They gave an order to liquidate,” Miroshnik wrote.
Blast analysis indicating that the explosion in the prison came from within the building suggests the attack was a Russian false flag operation, Ukraine said.
Ukraine’s general staff said Russia blew up its own penal colony in order “to cover up war crimes, discredit the Armed Forces of Ukraine, disrupt the supply of Western weapons and increase social tension in Ukrainian society”.
The general staff has called for an international investigation into the explosion.
Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) said that Russian forces laced the prisoner detention centre with explosives and fired Grad missile launchers next to it to provoke return fire.
If this account is true, this may have been aimed at discrediting Ukrainian use of the HIMARS system, which has proven so devastating to Russian forces.
Ukrainian forces did not return rocket fire that day, the SBU said.
Ukraine’s military intelligence believes the killing of the prisoners of war (POWs) was not ordered by Moscow but carried out by the Wagner Group, a military contractor mercenary unit, in order to cover up the fact that it had embezzled money the Kremlin had paid the group to build detention facilities.
“[The explosions were] carried out by mercenaries from the Wagner Group by the personal team of the nominal owner of the specified private military company – Eugene Prigozhin,” Ukraine’s general staff spokesman Alexander Štupun said.
“The organisation and execution of the terrorist attack were not agreed with the leadership of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation. The main purpose of the terrorist attack is to hide the facts of total embezzlement of funds allocated to hold Ukrainian prisoners of war. It is known that on August 1, a commission from Moscow had to arrive at the “object” to check the expenses of allocated funds and conditions of detention of prisoners,” he said.
“The shelling of the pre-trial detention centre in Olenivka is unacceptable, as are reports of barbaric treatment of prisoners of war by the Russian military,” US ambassador to Kyiv Bridget Brink said in a Twitter post.
Zelenskyy called the killing of the prisoners “a deliberate Russian war crime”.
A worker mixes pesticides, which will be sprayed on a field. (photo: David Bacon/Report Digital-REA/Redux)
The June 30 report by a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that out of 2,310 urine samples collected, 1,885 were laced with detectable traces of glyphosate, the active ingredient in herbicides sold around the world, including the widely used Roundup brand.
The new data was released as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which relies on a series of ongoing studies to evaluate the health and nutritional status of adults and children in the United States. NHANES research is typically highly valued by scientists because the sampling is designed to be representative of the US population.
NHANES says in order to produce reliable statistics, it “over-samples” African Americans, Hispanics and people 60 years old and older.
Also, a CDC spokesperson said the agency’s National Center for Environmental Health (NCEH) “is working on analyzing glyphosate” through additional data.
Academics and private researchers have been noting high levels of the herbicide glyphosate in analyses of human urine samples for years. But the CDC has only recently started examining the extent of human exposure to glyphosate in the United States, and its work comes at a time of mounting concerns and controversy over how pesticides in food and water impact human and environmental health.
“I expect that the realization that most of us have glyphosate in our urine will be disturbing to many people,” said Lianne Sheppard, professor at the University of Washington’s department of environmental and occupational health sciences. “Now from this NHANES analysis we know that a large fraction of the population has it in urine. Many people will be thinking about whether that includes them.”
Sheppard co-authored a 2019 analysis that found glyphosate exposure increases the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and also co-authored a 2019 scientific paper that reviewed 19 studies documenting glyphosate in human urine.
That latter paper concluded that more robust research was needed to “fully understand the extent of exposure overall and in vulnerable populations such as children.”
The CDC work now is a “huge step” toward addressing that need, Sheppard said.
Found in baby food
Both the amount and prevalence of glyphosate found in human urine has been rising steadily since the 1990s when Monsanto Co. introduced genetically engineered crops designed to be sprayed directly with Roundup, according to research published in 2017 by University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers.
Paul Mills, the lead researcher of that study, said at the time there was “an urgent need” for a thorough examination of the impact on human health from glyphosate in foods people commonly consume.
More than 200 million pounds of glyphosate are used annually by US farmers on their fields. The weedkiller is sprayed directly over genetically engineered crops such as corn and soybeans, and also over non-genetically engineered crops such as wheat and oats as a desiccant to dry crops out prior to harvest. Many farmers also use it on fields before the growing season, including spinach growers and almond producers. It is considered the most widely used herbicide in history.
Residues of glyphosate have been documented in an array of popular foods made with crops sprayed with glyphosate, including baby food. The primary route of exposure for children is through the diet.
Roughly 87% of children represented in the CDC study had the pesticide in their urine, according to a population-weighted analysis by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) research organization. In 2019, EWG and several food companies called for a ban on glyphosate as a desiccant, saying “Americans’ widespread exposure to glyphosate is of growing concern, particularly in the context of children’s health, because of the potential risk of cancer.”
Monsanto, and its owner Bayer AG, maintain that glyphosate and Roundup products are safe and that residues in food and in human urine are not a health risk.
But many researchers disagree and say there is a large body of evidence linking glyphosate exposure to disease. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a unit of the World Health Organization, classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen in 2015.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has taken the opposite stance, classifying glyphosate as not likely to be carcinogenic. But last month the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion vacating the agency’s safety determination and ordering the agency to give “further consideration” to evidence of glyphosate risks.
Research indicates the chemical is also tied to other health problems, including liver disease.
“People of all ages should be concerned, but I’m particularly concerned for children,” said Phil Landrigan, who worked for years at the CDC and the EPA and now directs the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good at Boston College.
“Children are more heavily exposed to pesticides than adults because pound-for-pound they drink more water, eat more food and breathe more air,” Landrigan said. “Also, children have many years of future life when they can develop diseases with long incubation periods such as cancer. This is particularly a concern with the herbicide, glyphosate.”
Cynthia Curl, Boise State University assistant professor of community and environmental health, said it was “obviously concerning” that a large percentage of the U.S. population is exposed to glyphosate, but said it is still unclear how that translates to human health.
“We have a critical need for more epidemiological research,” Curl said. “I will say that I am very glad to see NHANES including glyphosate measurements, and that in and of itself is an important step forward.”
Undocumented immigrants from El Salvador wait to be deported on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flight bound for San Salvador. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
While a memo from DHS Secretary Mayorkas is in legal limbo, the administration should still take action to protect immigrant communities.
The Mayorkas guidelines memo was intended to move Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) away from Trump’s indiscriminate enforcement approach of deporting as many people as possible, regardless of their family and community ties. Taking up the Obama administration’s approach, Mayorkas directed ICE agents to focus their time and resources on individuals who pose a threat to “national security, public safety, and border security.” He added that agents should exercise “discretionary authority in a way that protects civil rights and civil liberties” and be “guided by the fact that the majority of undocumented noncitizens who could be subject to removal have been contributing members of our communities for years.”
Advocates, including the ACLU, were highly critical of the guidelines because they left too much discretion with ICE agents, despite their documented xenophobia. But for all its serious flaws, the memo provided attorneys a powerful tool for advocating to protect their clients from deportation.
The Supreme Court, however, declined to restore the deportation guidelines while the case proceeds, and will instead hear the case on the merits in November. For now, Mayorkas’ memo is not in force, leaving ICE agents with what they had under Trump: nearly unfettered discretion to pursue deportations.
While this is a major setback for Mayorkas, he can still dismantle the infrastructure that makes indiscriminate deportations a threat to the millions of people he acknowledged “work on the frontlines in the battle against COVID-19, lead our congregations of faith, teach our children, [and] do back-breaking farm work to help deliver food to our table.”
Here are two actions the Biden Administration can take:
Dismantle ICE’s “Force Multiplier” by ending partnerships with local law enforcement
For years, ICE has tapped local law enforcement agencies to help identify immigrants for deportation, enabling ICE to stretch its tentacles into communities across the country and deport more people than it would be able to on its own, under a set of partnerships known as 287(g). These partnerships expanded five-fold under President Trump, and allow sheriffs notorious for racism, xenophobia, and civil rights violations to target and attack immigrants in their communities. ICE calls 287(g) its “force multiplier.”
Recently, the ACLU released a research report that found 59 percent of 287(g) sheriffs have documented records of anti-immigrant rhetoric, and over half have expressly advocated inhumane federal immigration policies, in some cases while vowing to disobey any federal directives they disagree with. Nearly two-thirds of 287(g) partners have records of racial profiling and other civil rights abuses, while more than three-quarters operate detention facilities with documented patterns of abuse and inhumane conditions.
As a candidate, President Biden pledged to eliminate 287(g) contracts initiated under Trump, but over 140 contracts with state and local law enforcement agencies are still in effect to this day.
Now that Secretary Mayorkas’ guidelines have been stalled, it is more important than ever for the Biden administration to end these partnerships, which directly threaten the millions of people Mayrokas has acknowledged as being integral members of our communities by subjecting them to racial profiling, abuse, and separation from their families and loved ones.
Shutdown ICE detention sites
For decades, the U.S. government has overinvested in punishment and detention, and underinvested in community-based support services, even as ICE continues to amass a track record of egregious civil liberties violations. The result of this investment is an immigration detention machine that is fundamentally bloated, cruel, and inhumane.
At present, about 24,000 people are languishing in ICE detention, in sites often run by for-profit, private prison companies. They may be detained for the duration of their removal proceedings — which could last months or even years. Thousands of these people are trapped in inhumane, unsafe living conditions, where they are denied access to lawyers who could help them secure release. Many are separated from their families, including their U.S. citizen-children, even though they could be free — on bond, their own recognizance, or community-based alternatives to detention.
But there is another way. The government can shrink the infrastructure that has been used to arrest, incarcerate, abuse, and traumatize immigrants.
The Biden administration took an important step toward shrinking the infrastructure of civil immigration detention when it requested funding for 9,000 fewer detention beds in its proposed budget for next fiscal year. Secretary Mayorkas also announced plans to close or limit the use of six detention sites, five of which were on a list of 39 detention sites the ACLU asked Mayorkas to shutter in an April 2021 letter, and stopped detaining families at three family detention sites.
But ICE still maintains a sprawling detention network of about 200 detention sites around the country, and has made plans to expand privatized, for-profit immigration detention — despite outcry from dozens of congressional Democrats.
If the Biden administration stops over-investing in the infrastructure for detaining immigrants, then many of the people Secretary Mayorkas rightfully identified as providing important contributions to the country won’t have to live in daily fear of arrest or deportation. The administration should take action now.
Alex Jones. (photo: CNN)
The award from the jury was far less than what the plaintiffs, Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, had asked for. At the start of the trial, attorneys for Lewis and Heslin asked the jury to award their clients $150 million in compensatory damages.
A separate, shorter trial during which punitive damages will be discussed is now expected. Punitive damages are awarded when the court finds the defendant's behavior to be especially offensive.
Mark Bankston, an attorney for the parents, told CNN that the plaintiffs are happy with the jury's decision, noting that they had also received money prior to the trial due to sanctions the court had hit Jones with.
"Having already secured $1.5 million in fines from Mr Jones, the plaintiffs are now due $5.6 million that Alex Jones will have to pay them," Bankston said.
"Neil and Scarlett are thrilled with the result and look forward to putting Mr. Jones' money to good use," Bankston added. "Mr Jones on the other hand will not sleep easy tonight. With punitive damages still to be decided and multiple additional defamation lawsuits pending, it is clear that Mr Jones' time on the American stage is finally coming to an end."
An attorney for Jones could not immediately be reached for comment.
Jones himself celebrated the jury's decision, calling it a "major victory for truth," in a video posted online to his conspiratorial outlet Infowars.
"They thought they would shut us down," Jones said. "But that jury understood the truth and resisted the propaganda."
The decision from the jury is a partial ending to a years-long process that began in 2018 when Lewis and Heslin sued Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, which is Infowars' parent.
Jones baselessly said in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, in which 26 people were killed, that the incident was staged. Facing multiple lawsuits, Jones later acknowledged the shooting occurred. He testified in court this week that he now believed it to be "100% real."
But Jones failed to comply with court orders during the discovery process of the lawsuit. His failure to do so led to Heslin and Lewis winning default judgments judgements against Jones.
Judge Maya Guerra Gamble ruled in October that Jones was legally responsible for inflicting emotional distress on Heslin and Lewis. Gamble also ruled that Jones was liable for defaming Heslin.
Jones claimed in his testimony that a jury award of just $2 million would destroy him financially.
But the accountant who is now in charge of overseeing Jones' company Free Speech Systems, the parent of his conspiratorial media outlet Infowars, testified in bankruptcy court Wednesday that Jones withdrew about $62 million dollars from the company over 14 years, of which about $30 million was paid to the IRS.
And the accountant testified that Infowars had received about $9 million in cryptocurrency donations and that "they went directly to Mr. Jones."
The decision to punish Jones in such terms also comes at a seismic moment in American society, where the lies and conspiracy theories have flourished in recent years.
The jury's decision, while far lower than what the plaintiffs' attorneys had asked for, sends a message to those who propel lies into the public conversation, whether for political power or financial gain, that there can be consequences for such behavior.
"Speech is free, but lies you have to pay for," the Sandy Hook family attorneys argued to the jury during their opening statements and closing arguments.
During the trial, Heslin and Lewis offered emotional testimony, telling the jury that the lies pushed by Jones stained the legacy of their son Jesse and tormented them for years.
Fighting back tears at times, Heslin told the jury that Jones, through his conspiratorial media organization Infowars, "tarnished the honor and legacy" of his son. Heslin said that he couldn't "even begin to describe the last nine-and-a-half years of hell" he has endured because of Jones, and described in detail how he fears for the safety of himself and his family.
In a remarkable moment in court, Lewis spoke directly to Jones, saying she wanted to address him to his face.
"Jesse was real," Lewis told Jones. "I'm a real mom."
Lewis told the jury she feels monetary damages were appropriate in the case because she doesn't believe Jones would otherwise ever stop his behavior.
"There has not been a sincere apology," she said. "But if there was, ever, I liken it to being in a car accident and you run over someone and cause tremendous bodily damage and you look at that person lying on the ground and say, 'I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm not accountable for any of the damage I just caused. But I'm sorry.' That's how I see it."
Lewis also reflected on what it meant that the trial had to ever take place.
"It seems so incredible to me that we have to do this," Lewis told Jones. "That we have to implore you — not just implore you, punish you — to get you to stop lying...It is surreal what is going on in here."
The trial in Texas is one of three that is expected to play out over the next couple of months.
A different group of Sandy Hook families sued Jones in Connecticut. Those families also won a default judgment against Jones and a trial was scheduled to begin in September. But jury selection was suspended the same day it started earlier this week and the trial could be delayed because of a bankruptcy filing from Free Speech Systems.
Attorneys representing some Sandy Hook families have accused Jones of having drained Free Speech Systems of assets in recent years as part of an effort to protect himself from potential judgments he may be ordered to pay.
One of the attorneys, Avi Moshenberg, told CNN on Tuesday that the bankruptcy filing made by Free Speech Systems indicated that $62 million in assets had been withdrawn from the company in 2021 and 2022.
"If you look at the bankruptcy filing, leading up to the declaration of bankruptcy, Alex Jones, the sole owner [of Free Speech Systems], took $62 million in draws in 2021 and 2022," Moshenberg told CNN. "Just straight up draws. That's why the company has few assets."
A vigil for slain journalists in Mexico. (photo: Yuri Cortez/AFP/GettyImages)
As Mexico grapples with a wave of violence against members of the press, small local outlets are especially at risk.
Guanajuato Governor Diego Rodriguez Vallejo condemned the Tuesday night killing of Ernesto Mendez, the director of the local outlet Tu Voz, or Your Voice, after a group of gunmen stormed the bar, which Mendez also owned in the town of San Luis de la Paz.
Mendez had also worked at the news site Zona Franca several years ago, according to its director Carmen Martinez.
The journalist had previously received threats, according to human rights organisation Article 19.
“It wasn’t just the owner of the establishment who was killed but sadly others were as well,” Luis Gerardo Sanchez, the mayor of the town told a news conference on Wednesday.
The attack also left one person seriously wounded, he added. The other victims were not named.
It is not known whether Mendez was enrolled in the Mexican government’s protection programme for journalists and human rights defenders, the Associated Press news agency reported.
Journalists involved with small news organisations in Mexico’s interior have become easy targets, and small town officials and politicians are often suspects, along with organised crime.
The killing of Mendez took place about one month after 47-year-old Antonio de la Cruz, a reporter for the regional newspaper Expreso, was shot and killed outside his home in Ciudad Victoria in northeastern Mexico.
De la Cruz was the 12th Mexican journalist killed since the start of the year, making 2022 the deadliest year on record for Mexican reporters.
Two Mexican journalists, Yessenia Mollinedo and Sheila Johana Garcia, were murdered in the state of Veracruz in May, and more than 150 journalists have been killed since 2000.
Amid the spate of violent attacks, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has been criticised for not doing enough to protect journalists, and for his own combative relationship with the media.
The group Reporters Without Borders said that Obrador had not “undertaken the necessary reforms to stop the spiral of violence against the press”.
Mexico is the most dangerous country for reporters outside of war zones.
While a government programme has been set up to protect journalists, press freedom groups say that it is insufficient.
Firefighters tackle a wildfire in Oroville, California. Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, research suggests. (photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)
Scientists say there are ample reasons to suspect global heating could lead to catastrophe
They call such a catastrophe the “climate endgame”. Though it had a small chance of occurring, given the uncertainties in future emissions and the climate system, cataclysmic scenarios could not be ruled out, they said.
“Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst,” the scientists said, adding that there were “ample reasons” to suspect global heating could result in an apocalyptic disaster.
The international team of experts argue the world needs to start preparing for the possibility of the climate endgame. “Analysing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanise action, improve resilience, and inform policy,” they said.
Explorations in the 1980s of the nuclear winter that would follow a nuclear war spurred public concern and disarmament efforts, the researchers said. The analysis proposes a research agenda, including what they call the “four horsemen” of the climate endgame: famine, extreme weather, war and disease.
They also called for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to produce a special report on the issue. The IPCC report on the impacts of just 1.5C of heating drove a “groundswell of public concern”, they said.
“There are plenty of reasons to believe climate change could become catastrophic, even at modest levels of warming,” said Dr Luke Kemp at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, who led the analysis. “Climate change has played a role in every mass extinction event. It has helped fell empires and shaped history.
“Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities.”
The analysis is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was reviewed by a dozen scientists. It argues that the consequences of global heating beyond 3C have been underexamined, with few quantitative estimates of the total impacts. “We know least about the scenarios that matter most,” Kemp said.
A thorough risk assessment would consider how risks spread, interacted and amplified, but had not been attempted, the scientists said. “Yet this is how risk unfolds in the real world,” they said. “For example, a cyclone destroys electrical infrastructure, leaving a population vulnerable to an ensuing deadly heatwave.” The Covid pandemic underlined the need to examine rare but high-impact global risks, they added.
Particularly concerning are tipping points, where a small rise in global temperature results in a big change in the climate, such as huge carbon emissions from an Amazon rainforest suffering major droughts and fires. Tipping points could trigger others in a cascade and some remained little studied, they said, such as the abrupt loss of stratocumulus cloud decks that could cause an additional 8C of global warming.
The researchers warn that climate breakdown could exacerbate or trigger other catastrophic risks, such as international wars or infectious disease pandemics, and worsen existing vulnerabilities such as poverty, crop failures and lack of water. The analysis suggests superpowers may one day fight over geoengineering plans to reflect sunlight or the right to emit carbon.
“There is a striking overlap between currently vulnerable states and future areas of extreme warming,” the scientists said. “If current political fragility does not improve significantly in the coming decades, then a belt of instability with potentially serious ramifications could occur.”
There were further good reasons to be concerned about the potential of a global climate catastrophe, the scientists said: “There are warnings from history. Climate change has played a role in the collapse or transformation of numerous previous societies and in each of the five mass extinction events in Earth’s history.”
New modelling in the analysis shows that extreme heat – defined as an annual average temperature of more than 29C – could affect 2 billion people by 2070 if carbon emissions continue.
“Such temperatures currently affect around 30 million people in the Sahara and Gulf Coast,” said Chi Xu, at Nanjing University in China, who was part of the team. “By 2070, these temperatures and the social and political consequences will directly affect two nuclear powers, and seven maximum containment laboratories housing the most dangerous pathogens. There is serious potential for disastrous knock-on effects.”
The current trend of greenhouse gas emissions would cause a rise of 2.1-3.9C by 2100. But if existing pledges of action are fully implemented, the range would be 1.9-3C. Achieving all long-term targets set to date would mean 1.7-2.6C of warming.
“Even these optimistic assumptions lead to dangerous Earth system trajectories,” the scientists said. Temperatures more than 2C above pre-industrial levels had not been sustained on Earth for more than 2.6m years, they said, far before the rise of human civilisation, which had risen in a “narrow climatic envelope” over the past 10,000 years.
“The more we learn about how our planet functions, the greater the reason for concern,” said Prof Johan Rockström, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “We increasingly understand that our planet is a more sophisticated and fragile organism. We must do the maths of disaster in order to avoid it.”
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