18 August 22
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Some recent polling suggests voters, and particularly women, are ready to do something about it.
The poll comes one day after a surprise University of North Florida poll showing Democratic Rep. Val Demings leading sitting Republican Sen. Marco Rubio 48-44 in a Senate race many have assumed will go to the incumbent. Another poll released on Tuesday had Lt. Gov. John Fetterman leading Mehmet Oz by 16 points in yet another Senate race for a seat currently controlled by Republicans. All this polling comes on the heels of a broader trend in favor of Democrats: They’ve recently gone from looking like underdogs in the race to retain control of the Senate to being the 63 percent favorites in FiveThirtyEight’s Senate model.
While there are reasons to be skeptical of such favorable polling—especially given the failures of polls that overestimated Democratic chances in 2016 and 2020—it is in line with other recent trends showing Democrats moving even with—or even slightly ahead of—Republicans in the generic ballot for who the public favors to control Congress. It is also in line with a pair of recent House special elections where Democrats lost but vastly outperformed expected outcomes based on the 2020 presidential result.
Plus, this has all happened despite President Joe Biden’s abysmal approval ratings, which have, ticked up just a few points to about 40 percent approval. So, what explains the apparent shift? One highly plausible explanation for Democrats’ polling improvement can be found in the responses to additional questions included in a number of these latest polls: Democratic and Independent voters appear steamed over the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade and end constitutional protections for reproductive health care.
In the Wisconsin poll from Marquette Law School, for instance, 55 percent of voters said they were “very concerned” about abortion and 25 percent said they were “somewhat concerned.” In that same poll, 60 percent of voters opposed the Supreme Court’s decision to end the constitutional right and overturn Roe, with a full 62 percent of Independents opposing it. The poll also showed that 65 percent of Wisconsin voters thought abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared to just 58 percent in the same survey in June before Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was decided.
These trends are in line with other recent polls. In Tuesday’s favorable University of North Florida poll result for Demings, a full 51 percent of respondents said that Dobbs made them more likely to vote in November. This phenomenon was especially pronounced among Democrats, with 78 percent saying the decision made them more likely to vote in November. Further, 71 percent of Florida voters say they oppose a total abortion ban. “Without the protections of Roe, the likelihood of a strict or outright ban on abortion being introduced in Florida increases dramatically, and this looks to be mobilizing Democrats to the polls,” said Michael Binder, the faculty director of the research lab that conducted the poll.
This matches the nationwide trends. In a recent Fox News poll that had Democrats and Republicans tied 41-41 in the generic ballot, 55 percent disapproved of the Supreme Court’s job performance and 60 percent disapproved of the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. In that same poll, there has also been a significant shift among women towards Democrats since May.
Finally, another poll released this week showed that Latino voters in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, and Pennsylvania considered abortion to be a top-5 issue for the first time ever. In that poll, conducted by two Latino civil rights organizations, 70 percent of respondents said abortion should be legal and Democrats held a 2-to-1 advantage over Republicans in the generic ballot.
Will any of this polling actually matter when voters go to the polls in November, with inflation still topping polls as their number one concern and with Biden’s numbers seemingly remaining in the toilet? There’s one more reason for Democrats to be hopeful, connected to Kansas’ overwhelming vote to keep abortion legal in the state earlier this month. According to CEO of data firm TargetSmart, Tom Bonier, new women registering to vote outnumbered new men registering from the day the court released the decision in Dobbs up to the special election by a whopping 40 percent. According to Bonier, a similar though slightly less pronounced “registration gap” is being seen in critical swing states, such as Wisconsin (17 percent more women than men newly registered), Pennsylvania (12 percent gap), Ohio (11 percent gap), North Carolina (7 percent gap), Georgia (6 percent gap), and Florida (5 percent gap).
It seems that if Democrats have a stronger than expected result in November, they will have women voters angry at the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs to thank.
Mark Finchem waves to the crowd as he arrives to speak at a rally put on by former President Donald Trump in Arizona on July 22. (photo: Ross D. Franklin/AP)
Mainstream Republicans once laughed at Mark Finchem. Now the 2020 election denier and his Trumpist allies are close to taking power.
To be clear, they knew he would win — he had Donald Trump’s endorsement — but they were still stunned. Mark Finchem. Him.
A back-bench lawmaker best known locally for his over-the-top drugstore cowboy get-ups and extreme ideas, Finchem would be in charge of the state’s elections should he win in November. That would also put him first in the line of succession for the governorship since Arizona doesn’t have a lieutenant governor.
“It’s basically from political gadfly within the Republican caucus to potentially the number two person in the state of Arizona,” says Arizona Republican Sen. T.J. Shope. “It’s a meteoric rise.”
“Never in a million years” would Paul Boyer, a fellow GOP state legislator, have imagined that Finchem would crush a field of qualified candidates and win a nomination to statewide office.
“Mark is known as the guy that’s probably the dumbest — well, there’s a long list, but one of the dumbest — legislators in the state House,” he says. (Finchem’s retort: Boyer is an “utter disgrace.”)
But Finchem’s rise makes sense in light of the broader shift within the Arizona Republican Party. Trump’s slate of political insurgents swept the GOP nomination for every state office in which he offered his blessing, from the U.S. Senate down to state Senate races.
After decades of civil war, the Arizona primaries mark a decisive swing in the state GOP’s balance of power. The center-right, pro-business wing of the party led by the late Sen. John McCain and Gov. Doug Ducey has been defeated, at least for now. Finchem and other far-right outsiders — the original tea party activists and the new Trumpist hard-liners — have taken over.
“We drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine,” Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake bragged, while making a stabbing motion, at a CPAC event following the primary. “We threw together a rag-tag team of nonpolitical people to run the most exciting campaign in the country. And we won.”
Lake, a former TV news anchor, fended off more than $20 million in spending against her to narrowly capture the nomination, despite her opponent’s backing from Ducey, former GOP Gov. Jan Brewer and former Vice President Mike Pence.
Blake Masters, a 36-year-old acolyte of billionaire tech entrepreneur and Trump donor Peter Thiel, surged from behind in the U.S. Senate primary after earning Trump’s nod. Abraham Hamadeh, a 31-year-old lawyer who has spent fewer days in a courtroom than many petty criminals, was rocketed out of obscurity to win the primary for state attorney general after snagging Trump’s endorsement.
None have any political experience. But they have the main qualification that matters to the former president: They repeat the lie that the Arizona election was rigged against him. Every winning Republican candidate said they wouldn’t have certified the 2020 election. That means that as Trump gears up for a possible third run for the presidency, Arizona is facing the prospect of a slate of statewide officials who could steal the election for him. (Indeed, another victim of a Trump-backed primary was Rusty Bowers, the soft-spoken leader of the Arizona House who rebuffed Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the state’s 2020 election results and testified to the January 6 committee.)
For his part, Finchem defeated three other candidates for the secretary of state nomination: Beau Lane, an advertising executive who had backing from the business community and Ducey’s full-throated endorsement; state Rep. Shawnna Bolick who had sponsored legislation to let lawmakers toss out the results of presidential elections they don’t like and had tried to capture the Trump vote; and state Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, who has been the architect of every major “election integrity” bill that has been signed into law for the past decade, but who refused to regurgitate the lie that Arizona’s election was stolen from Trump. Finchem beat them all by wide margins.
It’s not an overstatement to say Finchem remains a bit of a joke to his soon-to-be old colleagues.
Boyer, who served eight years in the Arizona Legislature alongside Finchem, cackled while recalling Finchem’s doomed 2020 run for speaker against Bowers. Finchem wrote a seven-page memo outlining his vision for the job, including his top priority: using viral content to take the messaging power back from the media. And he did prove that he knew how to go viral.
“The use of mime’s [SIC] is an emerging means of harnessing rhetoric and sarcasm with a purpose,” Finchem declared with a repeated typo of the word “meme,” which became a local meme itself. “The regular use of mime’s to build brand identity and establish solid differentiation will serve us well.”
Less than a third of the Republican caucus ultimately backed Finchem to become the speaker, but it cemented his status as the leader of the far right at the state Capitol.
Finchem has always been something of an underdog and outcast at the state Capitol. In his eight years as a lawmaker, he has only once been granted a committee chairmanship; typically, even junior Republican lawmakers get prime posts. He had just one bill signed into law this year — fewer than many Democrats who sit in the minority — and he hasn’t fared much better in past years.
“How can he go from that, to the Republican nominee for secretary of state? I mean, it’s simple. He won the ‘Arizona Apprentice’ for secretary of state,” Boyer says. “Abe Hamadeh for AG? Kari Lake for governor? It’s very simple. If you can fog up a mirror and win the ‘Arizona Apprentice,’ you’re good.”
Boyer, meanwhile, chose not to run for reelection after receiving death threats for refusing to go along with his party’s election lies. So just two years after his failed run for leadership, Finchem is on top. And those who laughed at his vision have been purged from Arizona’s political landscape.
In many ways, Finchem is a man made for the times. He’s a longtime leader of the legislature’s far-right “Liberty Caucus,” and is revered in conservative grassroots circles as one of the few “good lawmakers.”
He refused to do a phone interview for this article, but he did send a few text messages, saying if he’s having a moment in the sun, it’s because like him, the people are no longer afraid to be bullied by the establishment.
“I am but a humble servant who took the time to listen to his constituents and has been vilified for it,” he wrote. “Perhaps that’s why they view me as their champion.”
Originally from the Detroit area, Finchem moved to Arizona in 1999 and began a career as a realtor. (He had previously been a cop in Kalamazoo, Mich., where his final evaluation reads “poor rating, would not rehire.”) He later became vice president of business development for Clean Power Technologies LLC, an Idaho-based company that claimed on its now-defunct website that it can generate and deliver clean energy “without wires, anywhere around the world.”
Finchem was an early adopter of fringe politics in Arizona. He was touting state sovereignty issues long before phrases like “plenary powers” and the “independent state legislature doctrine” entered the mainstream political lexicon. Armed not with a law degree, but a masters in legal studies from the University of Arizona’s “freedom school,” Finchem became the thought leader of the movement to decertify the 2020 election in Arizona.
After losing his head-to-head contest with Bowers for the speakership in late 2020, Finchem held an unauthorized, unofficial “hearing” with Rudy Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team to air falsehoods about how the election was rigged. That hearing cemented his status as one of the key ringleaders of Arizona’s “Stop the Steal” movement and helped earn him the Trump endorsement that rocketed him to national stardom on the right.
Just a few weeks later, Finchem was outside the U.S. Capitol at the Jan. 6 riot. Though he maintains he never entered the building, video footage shows he was much closer than he originally claimed. Ali Alexander, the organizer of the rally that helped fuel the deadly mayhem, declared there wouldn’t have been a Stop the Steal movement in Arizona without Finchem.
CNN reported this week that Finchem previously shared posts on social media about stockpiling ammunition and touted his membership in the Oath Keepers anti-government extremist group, which is under scrutiny for its role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Finchem is still pushing baseless theories about how the election was rigged, texting a link to a conservative activist project that he claims shows the “Chinese Communist Party now has operational control over many elections across the United States because they control the servers where all of the electronic data sits.”
“What boggles my mind is reporters and journalists are sitting on the story of the century but nobody has the balls to write about it,” he wrote in a text.
The 2022 primaries underscored just how tight Trump’s grip is over Arizona Republicans, and that his 2020 loss is still fresh on these voters’ minds as he considers another run for the presidency.
How could it not be? In Arizona, it feels like the 2020 election is still ongoing.
Republicans in this state, perhaps more than any other, have followed Trump’s election conspiracies down the rabbit hole.
First there was the Cyber Ninjas’ audit authorized by the state Senate, which ultimately confirmed through a hand count of ballots that President Joe Biden won, but which offered up a host of other debunkable conspiracies about how maybe he didn’t win. Then there’s the still-ongoing investigation by the Arizona attorney general about alleged improprieties in the election, which uncovered a handful of record-keeping issues, but no proof of any widespread fraud, including from dead people voting.
Meanwhile, Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward not only continues to spout Trump’s fantasies about the election; she broke with the chair’s long-standing tradition of neutrality to throw her full weight behind the MAGA candidates in the primary, calling the Trump-opposed candidates RINOs and worse. The sycophantic pro-Trump student group Turning Point USA also is based in Arizona and deeply intertwined with the party infrastructure.
Trump himself has seen Arizona as key to keeping his political future alive. He’s traveled to the state twice since losing the 2020 election. In January of this year, he came to promote his candidates and spin election yarns. And during the first weeks of early voting, he returned with pillow salesman and conspiracy-slinger Mike Lindell, who warmed up the crowd by claiming, once again, that the election was rigged and that the state is poised to do away with “defective” vote tabulating machines.
But just as important, Arizona’s mainstream conservatives have cowered to the lie that the election was stolen from Trump. While some, including Ducey, have attempted to tamp down on the rhetoric, none have forcefully confronted Trump’s disinformation.
On the same day as Trump’s latest rally for his candidates, Pence and Ducey stumped for their pick in the gubernatorial primary: Karrin Taylor Robson. Robson criticized Lake for saying the primary election was rigged against her before votes had even been cast, but Robson refused to say that the 2020 election was free and fair, saying she wasn’t sure if she would have certified Arizona’s 2020 election if she were governor.
“We have the wrong guy in the White House,” she said, while repeatedly refusing to clarify whether Biden was wrongfully elected or simply the wrong guy for the job.
Lane, Finchem’s business-backed opponent, would say the election wasn’t stolen when asked. But he never made it a central point of his campaign in an overt way. Instead, he took to the airwaves with criticism of Finchem for having supported a National Popular Vote bill, saying if Finchem had his way, Hillary Clinton would have been president.
In a state where even the mainstream conservative candidate for the top election official doesn’t forcefully articulate a message that the 2020 election was safe, secure and legitimate, it shouldn’t be a shock that Republican voters backed a slate of candidates that’s likely to be willing to throw out the results of the 2024 election.
Whether Finchem and his fellow Trumpists will find success in November is less clear.
In Arizona’s purple political landscape, Democrats and even many Republicans here say GOP primary voters went too far — that they’ve undermined the party’s chances of holding the state’s top offices in an otherwise great year for Republicans. Perhaps that could break the fever, as Barack Obama once predicted, before the party went even further to the right under Trump.
“It may take a drubbing at the polls this year to get Republican voters off the Trump train,” says Arizona Republican consultant Barrett Marson. “Or maybe they’ll just double down.”
Concern has grown at the Islamic Center of New Mexico since the killings started. (photo: Adria Malcolm/The New York Times)
The murders were merciless. According to the account of a victim’s brother, his plan to return the body to Pakistan was abandoned because his brother had been shot so many times with an AR-15-style rifle that he was “unrecognizable.” At least one of the victims was killed just hours after attending the funeral for two of the other victims. For a community this small—numbering only around 1,500—one murder was tragic. Four was unthinkable.
Major outlets picked up the story. They interviewed the families of the victims, and their Muslim neighbors who were afraid to go outside. One told a reporter they didn’t want to become “bait.” Ahmad Assed, president of the Islamic Center of New Mexico, told CNN he too had become paranoid. “When I get in the car, I’m watching every which way possible. I’m watching my side mirror. I’m looking in the back. I’m looking for any sign out of the ordinary,” he said. Leaders in the community asked Muslims to use a buddy system to stay safe.
There wasn’t much information about the murders at first. The killer was still at large. With no indication of a motive, police refrained from labeling the deaths as hate crimes. Instead, they told the press they believed the four murders were linked, and that the victims could have been targeted for their faith. But many did make assumptions. An ABC affiliate in Texas ran the headline, “Islamophobic Killer Targets 4 Men Killed in Albuquerque.” Reporters interviewed Muslim leaders across the country; one blamed “radicals with hatred.” A number of pundits with large followings also pinned the deaths on Islamophobia. One said the killer was “most likely a white supremacist.” A widely shared New York Times report noted that authorities were reluctant to label the crimes prematurely but raised the specter of recent hate crimes against Muslims.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a Muslim civil rights group, issued a press release condemning the killings, and offered a $10,000 cash reward for any information that may lead to an arrest and conviction. But Edward Ahmed Mitchell, a deputy director at CAIR, was careful when a CNN reporter asked him if he believed the attacks were motivated by Islamophobia. “We could be surprised by what is going on here,” he said. “When we catch this person, we can find out why they did it.”
Last week, law enforcement announced they had arrested a suspect, 51-year-old Muhammad Syed, who is Muslim. Syed was pulled over in a traffic stop 100 miles away from his home. He told investigators he was fleeing to Texas, citing fears of himself becoming the next victim in New Mexico. They found a gun, along with bullet casings that appeared to match the weapon used in the murders. He’s suspected in two of the four killings but may be connected to all four. His son was also held on gun charges. (Syed denies all of the allegations.)
Authorities believe Syed, a Sunni Muslim, may have been motivated by sectarian hate after his daughter agreed to marry a Shia man. Others pushed back on that characterization this week, pointing to personal feuds between Syed and the victims. Whatever the motive, a community that had girded itself with the possibility an outsider was killing them now has to confront an even harder-to-contemplate outcome. So do national leaders who watched speculation get ahead of the investigation.
I asked Mitchell, of CAIR, if many had been too quick to blame the attacks on Islamophobia. “We always said that we don’t know who’s doing it or why they’re doing it,” he told me, explaining his group’s caution. “Looking back in hindsight, I really wouldn’t change anything about what anyone did. I think everyone reacted appropriately based on what we knew.”
He said while some may have made assumptions, the coverage of these events was indicative of a culture shift in how Muslims are reported on and how they’re policed. “There was a time when Muslims victims of crime were completely ignored, and Muslim perpetrators of crime were the top of the evening news. Now we’re moving to a situation where there’s a little more balance. Muslim victims of crimes get the attention they deserve, and when there are Muslim perpetrators of crime, their behavior is not imputed to the entire community. And it’s not some automatic assumption that Islam must to be to blame for the behavior of one unhinged individual,” he said.
Mitchell doesn’t blame Muslims around the country who instinctually felt these were Islamophobic attacks. “I think it made sense for everyone to recognize there’s a pattern here,” he said. CAIR tracks complaints to its office, and its latest report found more than 6,500 between 2019 and 2020, the highest it’s ever seen. “Of course everyone had to take this very seriously. And regardless of the suspect’s identity, it was right to take this very seriously.”
The uneasiness around the apparent outcome in the case also stems from some American Muslims’ fears of looking inside their own communities. Zainab Chaudry, a spokesperson for CAIR and director of its Maryland office, said that though CAIR’s mission is largely to combat Islamophobia, combatting internal Muslim hate is a priority as well. “Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry is a very real issue. But it’s not just interfaith. It’s intrafaith, too,” she said. “Anti-Shia hate is also a form of hatred and bigotry. It’s something that deserves to be condemned. It doesn’t overshadow our struggle with Islamophobia,” she said.
She says CAIR’s position in this case was informed by past experiences where it might have assumed too much. “We’ve had cases happen in the past, where you think it’s one thing and it turns out to be something completely different and then it backfires and then the issue loses credibility and then people feel like, ‘You’re exaggerating the problem of Islamophobia in our country,’ ” she said. (Even so, that response proliferated online in response to news of the Albuquerque suspect.)
Chaudry added that the case was far from over: “From CAIR’s standpoint, we wouldn’t have done anything different had it been a white supremacist versus a Muslim, but we do want to caution that it’s still very early in the investigation. There is a suspect in custody. There’s still two other murders that haven’t been accounted for. And we just don’t have all the details,” she told me. “There’s still a lot of questions, but we hope that at least this arrest brings some peace of mind to the community.”
Mitchell noted that CAIR tracked the anti-Muslim chatter online relating to the murders, and found that some celebrated that Muslims were being murdered—then celebrated that the perp might be Muslim too. “It’s predictable that there are people who are gonna jump on this and say, ‘Well, what about Muslim-on-Muslim hate? Or Muslim-on-Muslim violence?’ ” he said. “Our priorities are making sure the victims get justice, the families and the community is protected and safe, and they have the resources and support that they need to navigate that. And whoever’s behind this, they’re brought to justice.”
Christopher Shaw was arrested in June 2021 and severely injured while in police custody, his lawyers claim. (photo: Shutterstock)
Civil rights activists and Christopher Shaw’s lawyers are demanding justice after he was severely injured while in police custody in 2021
On Wednesday, lawyers of 41-year-old Christopher Shaw hosted a press conference that called for justice for Shaw, who was severely injured while in custody in June 2021.
According to a lawsuit filed last month, Shaw was arrested on 12 June 2021 over misdemeanor public intoxication charges after Beaumont police officer James Gillen found him standing in the middle of a roadway, “in need of medical assistance”. Shaw was then taken to a hospital to be evaluated before being transported to Jefferson county correctional facility in Beaumont where he was restrained for “noncompliance”.
“Before entering the facility, Mr Shaw slightly turned his body. Defendant Gillen responded by attempting to slam Mr Shaw to the concrete platform at the rear entrance of the facility,” the lawsuit said.
He landed on his head and fractured his spine in multiple places, the lawsuit alleges. Shaw asked for help from jail staff and employees of the jail’s medical contractor CorrHealth but they refused to help him, according to the lawsuit. When Shaw asked one nurse for assistance, she allegedly told him, “I won’t help you until you help yourself.”
The lawsuit added that Shaw was left alone in his jail cell for approximately 20 hours before someone attended to him medically. While he was left alone in his cell, he “defecated and urinated on himself multiple times due to his inability to control his bowels and kidney function”, the lawsuit said. Only later was an ambulance called for him and he was taken to the hospital again where he underwent various emergency surgeries.
Upon coming back to jail from the hospital, “Mr Shaw clearly showed signs of paralysis. Specifically, Mr Shaw was not ambulant. Mr Shaw was placed in a wheelchair and, with the assistance of another officer, Mr Shaw was wheeled back into JCCF. Mr Shaw was unable to control his lower extremities,” the lawsuit said.
Shaw has since filed the lawsuit against police officer James Gillen, the city of Beaumont and CorrHealth.
During Wednesday’s press conference, Candice Matthews, the statewide steering committee chair for the Rev Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition, said, “We’re dealing with America’s chaos. And from police brutality, that is exactly what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with road cops that operate on ignorance and authority. And that is a dangerous combination because the end result is what has happened to dear brother Christopher Shaw.
“We’re dealing with lack of accountability because accountability breeds responsibility. And therefore we need our law enforcement to be responsible enough to hold their officers accountable when wrongdoing has been done,” she added.
Speaking to KBMT last September, the Beaumont police chief, James Singletary, said that although he felt “very badly about the gentleman that got injured”, Gillen was “just doing his job”.
The incident was captured on video which Shaw’s attorneys have seen, but according to Beaumont officials, public release of the video is currently prohibited as it may jeopardize jail security. Shaw’s attorney and civil rights advocate said they are working to release the video.
An aerial view of Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, March 1, 2021. (photo: AP)
The lengthy review period underscores the large volume of seized documents and efforts to return files that are covered by attorney-client privilege or not relevant to the probe.
The FBI's filter team — a group of agents independent of the overall investigation — is tasked with separating out documents that are covered by attorney-client privilege and material deemed not relevant to the probe.
Records deemed relevant are turned over to the investigating agents, while those that are not relevant are returned to Trump. The officials who spoke to NBC News said it was the filter team that determined that Trump’s passports, which he claimed agents “stole” during the search, were considered not relevant and returned to him, as previously reported by NBC News.
The officials also said the filter team is checking to see whether any of the documents or other materials not marked classified include classified information.
The lengthy period of review underscores the large volume of documents that were seized from Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, when FBI agents removed 11 sets of classified documents, some of which were labeled secret and top secret.
The case is being run out of the FBI’s Washington field office, and former agency officials say counterintelligence agents are likely to be involved.
In a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump said Sunday that the FBI last week “took boxes of privileged ‘attorney-client’ material, and also ‘executive’ privileged material, which they knowingly should not have taken.”
Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart in Florida has scheduled a hearing Thursday on whether to unseal the affidavit federal investigators used to justify their search warrant after a group of news organizations, including NBC News, filed court papers asking him to publicly release the document. The Justice Department has filed a motion against unsealing the affidavit, arguing it would compromise an ongoing investigation, while Trump's attorneys have yet to file a motion taking a position.
A Russian serviceman stands guard near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant outside the Russian-controlled city of Enerhodar, Ukraine, August 4, 2022. (photo: Alexander Ermochenko)
On Thursday, Russia threatened to shut down the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. warning that there was a risk of a human-made disaster due to alleged continued shelling by Ukraine.
This comes amid allegations and speculation from both Russia and Ukraine that an incident is being planned Friday at the plant.
On Thursday, Russia threatened to shut down the plant, warning that there was a risk of a human-made disaster due to alleged continued shelling by Ukraine.
But Ukraine has a completely different story, according to Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate.
“There is new information, it arrived about half an hour ago, that for tomorrow, August 19, there is an order for the majority of the staff not to go to work,” Yusov told NBC News.
“This is what the Russians told their people, primarily the employees of Rosatom,” he said, referring to the Russian nuclear agency.
He said that this might be evidence that Russia is preparing “large-scale provocations” at the power plant Friday.
“We do not rule out the possibility of massive Russian provocations on the territory of the ZNPP tomorrow. This is confirmed by their propaganda, information from our sources, and the behavior of the Russians at the station,” he added, referring to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
NBC News has reached out to Russia for comment.
Earlier Thursday, the Russian Defense Ministry accused Ukraine and what it called its “U.S. handlers” of trying to stage a “minor accident” at the plant in southern Ukraine on Friday in order to blame Russia.
It said the “provocation” was timed to coincide with a visit to Ukraine by United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres and that it may involve a radiation leak.
Trading blame
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor complex, the largest in Europe, was captured by Russia soon after it invaded Ukraine almost six months ago and has come under repeated shelling, with both Moscow and Kyiv trading blame.
Russia has repeatedly accused Ukrainian forces of recklessly firing at the plant, while Ukraine says Russia is deliberately using the complex as a base to launch attacks against its population.
NBC News has not verified the claims of either side.
A senior Ukrainian official told Reuters that the simplest solution to the situation would be for Russian forces to withdraw from the plant, remove any munitions stored there and de-mine it.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov told reporters Thursday that Moscow was taking measures to ensure safety at the complex and denied it had deployed heavy weapons in and around the plant.
However the ministry said a shutdown of the plant may be attempted if Ukrainian forces continued shelling it.
In a briefing, Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s radioactive, chemical and biological defense forces, said the plant’s backup support systems had been damaged as a result of shelling.
Kirillov presented a slide, showing that in the event of an accident at the plant, radioactive material would cover Germany, Poland and Slovakia.
Yevgeny Balitsky, head of the Russian-installed administration in the Zaporizhzhia region, said earlier there was a risk that shelling could damage the cooling system of the reactor complex and was quoted as saying the plant was operating with only one unit.
It is not clear how the plant will be shut down, but the ministry said two of the plant’s six units may be put into “cold reserve.” The plant accounts for one-fifth of Ukraine’s annual electricity production.
Guterres, who is set to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy later Thursday, has called for a halt to all fighting near the plant.
“Russia is worried about the possibility of a disaster at the ZNPP. Russia’s Ministry of Defense laughs cynically,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, wrote on Twitter.
“There is a solution. You just need to take the [munitions] out of the halls, demine the buildings, release the plant’s personnel from cells, stop shelling [the southern city of] Nikopol from [the plant’s] territory and leave the station. It’s simple, isn’t it?”
Boston mayor Michelle Wu leads a City Hall press conference. (photo: Gary Higgins/Boston Business Journal)
The Democrat said the state’s largest city will take advantage of a key provision in the climate change bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Charlie Baker last week.
That legislation, which is meant to bring the state closer to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, calls for a pilot project allowing 10 Massachusetts cities and towns to require new building projects be all-electric, with the exception of life sciences labs and health care facilities.
Wu said the city will file a home rule petition with the state Legislature to join the pilot.
“Boston must lead by taking every possible step for climate action,” she said in a statement. “Boston’s participation will help deliver healthy, energy efficient spaces that save our residents and businesses on utilities costs and create local green jobs that will fuel our economy for decades.”
Wu's office said natural gas, oil and other fossil fuels used in buildings represent more than one-third of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Other major U.S. cities have already moved to ban fossil fuel hookups in new buildings, including New York City and Washington, D.C.
Opponents of the idea say it can make housing more expensive.
Rocky Mountain Institute has been a leader and offers solutions:
https://rmi.org/about/
Typical disappointing response that has stymied reasonable solutions from an industry focused on McMansions and luxury apartments:
"Opponents of the idea say it can make housing more expensive."
Mayor Wu is leading the way for Boston and continues to do so!
Boston was excluded from the initial list of 10 communities.
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