Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
But we also should remember that this is a time when many are struggling and the joy of the season feels very distant. We live in a world where much of our news is concentrated on our divisions; it is too easy to lose track of our common humanity. We forget to think of the sick, the lonely, the destitute, the homeless, and the scared.
So today, we wanted to share a favorite song from the late, great Merle Haggard that epitomizes the combination of pain and yearning of this time of year. Too many are just barely holding on, hoping to make it to the year ahead. “If We Make It Through December” captures this anxiety. It is a poignant reminder to those of us who know we can make it through to lend a helping hand to those who worry about what the end of the year holds in store.
We are calling today’s post “A Reason To Give.” And remember that giving is not only about money. It can be a phone call to check in on someone who is alone. It can be a knock on the door of a neighbor. It can be volunteering. It can be recognizing that we all are stronger when we support each other.
It brings a sense of steadiness to others, and to ourselves.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, scholar of fascism and authoritarianism, and Robert Weissman, president of the advocacy group Public Citizen. (photo: Democracy Now!)
With the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol recommending criminal charges against former President Donald Trump, we speak with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of fascism and authoritarianism, and Robert Weissman, president of the advocacy group Public Citizen. They say the committee has left no doubt that the insurrection was part of a larger plot to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election and that the Department of Justice must act soon if it intends to follow through on the referral. “The most important thing to prevent this kind of coup from ever taking place again is accountability for the people at the top,” says Weissman.
During its final hearing Monday, the committee aired what could be called an insurrection mixtape of excerpts from previous hearings, that includes footage of the attack on the Capitol, depositions, mainly Republican voices, Trump lawyers, assistants and family members. This excerpt begins with U.S. Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards.
CAROLINE EDWARDS: There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up. I mean, I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood.
MICHAEL FANONE: As I was swarmed by a violent mob, they ripped off my badge. They grabbed and stripped me of my radio. They seized ammunition that was secure to my body. They began to beat me with their fists and with what felt like hard metal objects.
ROGER STONE: The key thing to do is to claim victory. “No, we won. [Bleep] you. Sorry. Over. We won. You’re wrong. [Bleep] you.”
WILLIAM BARR: Right out of the box, on election night, the president claimed that there was major fraud underway. I mean, this happened, as far as I could tell, before there was actually any potential of looking at evidence.
BILL STEPIEN: I didn’t think what was happening was necessarily honest or professional at that point in time. So, yeah, that led to me stepping away.
MATT MORGAN: Generally discussed on that topic was whether the fraud, maladministration, abuse or irregularities, if aggregated and read most favorably to the campaign, would that be outcome determinative. And I think everyone’s assessment in the room, at least amongst the staff — Marc Short, myself and Greg Jacob — was that it was not sufficient to be outcome determinative.
EUGENE SCALIA: I told him that I did believe, yes, that once those legal processes were run, if fraud had not been established that had affected the outcome of the election, then, unfortunately, I believed that what had to be done was concede the outcome.
REP. ZOE LOFGREN: What were the chances of President Trump winning the election?
CHRIS STIREWALT: After that point?
REP. ZOE LOFGREN: Yes.
CHRIS STIREWALT: None.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You know, what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.
SECRETARY OF STATE BRAD RAFFENSPERGER: The numbers are the numbers, and the numbers don’t lie. We had many allegations, and we investigated every single one of them.
REP. ADAM SCHIFF: Did one of them make a comment that they didn’t have evidence but they had a lot of theories?
REP. RUSTY BOWERS: That was Mr. Giuliani.
REP. ADAM SCHIFF: And what exactly did he say? And how did that come up?
REP. RUSTY BOWERS: My recollection, he said, “We’ve got lots of theories. We just don’t have the evidence.” … “You’re asking me to do something that’s never been done in history, the history of the United States, and I’m going to put my state through that without sufficient proof?”
AMY GOODMAN: Part of a 10-minute insurrection mixtape that the House select committee on the attack on the Capitol played at the beginning of their final hearing on Monday.
We’re are joined now by two guests. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history at New York University, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, also publishes Lucid, a newsletter on threats to democracy. And joining us from Washington, D.C., Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.
Before we go to the technical aspects of what this means for a House select committee to refer criminal charges, first time ever, against a former president, Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, I want to talk about the significance of that moment and what this means for today, what you took from what happened yesterday — before Wednesday, they’ll release their report — but yesterday, the referral of criminal charges against a president.
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Well, first of all, I felt profoundly grateful that we still live in a democracy, where this investigation and this committee could even exist, and that, the second, that I felt how important it is to assert accountability, to assert the rule of law, and to say that no one is above the law, because, you know, Trump, like other authoritarians, spent a lot of effort creating a personality cult and a devoted mass of followers who think he is untouchable and also admire him because he transgresses. The essence of authoritarianism is getting away with it. And this is the glamor of the strongman. So, this criminal referral says, “No, you are a mortal like everyone else, and you can be held accountable.”
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Weissman, head of Public Citizen, if you can talk about these four criminal charges: obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, false statements to the federal government, and inciting or assisting an insurrection? These are the criminal charges that the House select committee is referring to the Justice Department.
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Yeah, I think what’s important about them is maybe two things. One, you know, for those who of us who were watching January 6 unfold in real time, it sort of seemed as a rally that sort of spun out of control. And what the January 6 committee has shown beyond any doubt, and has now referenced in their referral to the Justice Department, is that the insurrection was planned and intentional. In fact, we have reason to believe that Trump actually hoped to be at the Capitol leading the physical insurrection. So it wasn’t something that was an accident or a spur-of-the-moment thing; it was part of an overall scheme. That’s, I think, the first point.
The second thing that the committee has shown, and is, again, reflected in the referral, is that the insurrection itself was part of a broader scheme to overthrow the election. Again, in real time, I think a lot of us seeing what happened after the election in November of 2020 thought this stuff was just sort of child’s play and kind of Trump sort of working out his own psychodrama, claiming there was a fraud and a lie when — a fraud with the election when there never had been. But what we now know is that there was an actual, orchestrated, significant scheme that could have succeeded to overthrow the election.
And so, the four charges together reflect both those things: the intentionality behind the insurrection and the multifaceted overall scheme that Trump led, masterminded, orchestrated and nearly succeeded in carrying out.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about technically what this means, that this House select committee is referring criminal charges to the Justice Department. The Justice Department is investigating separately. They don’t need this to indict the president. But so, what does it mean?
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Well, that’s right. The Justice Department is going to make its own determination. They’re free to ignore, if they choose, what the House committee has now referred to them. But I think they’re not going to ignore it. For one thing, the committee has generated a lot of evidence, that’s now going to be made available to the Justice Department, and that should inform the decision that the Justice Department takes.
I think what’s going to be really important, for the reasons that Chairman Thompson laid out at the beginning, and as Ruth just said, that the Justice Department proceed with a prosecution. There are going to be a lot of reforms proposed. The House Republicans are not likely to move forward with them. One significant reform is going to probably be achieved in legislation in the next couple days to deal with the mechanism of counting electoral votes. But at the end of the day, the most important thing to prevent this kind of coup from ever taking place again is accountability for the people at the top, and most importantly for the single person who masterminded it, Donald Trump.
Now, whether the Justice Department proceeds with this, that decision has now been kicked over, at least in the first instance, away from the actual leadership of the Justice Department to a special prosecutor, Jack Smith. Hopefully, he’s going to make the decision soon to proceed with an investigation and have the Attorney General Merrick Garland agree that that should take place. The longer they wait, the harder it’s going to be politically to proceed with a prosecution.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, Jack Smith, Professor Ben-Ghiat, is an interesting guy. He served as head of the Justice Department Public Integrity Unit in 2010. He served in The Hague prosecuting war crimes. He was also involved in New York City in the prosecution of a group of New York City police officers involved in the 1997 attack on Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant who was raped, sodomized and attacked by New York City police. Can you talk about Jack Smith and, more significantly, also what that history means, from police corruption and violence to The Hague?
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: [inaudible] set to assess the activities of — just keeping to Trump for the moment — of somebody like Trump, who has such a broad range of criminality. You know, there is no one else in America — I can think of Berlusconi in Italy as a partial equivalent — who is criminal in so many ways as Trump. So, the fact that Jack Smith has prosecuted a sitting politician, he’s done corruption cases — because, of course, we heard, you know, that one of the charges is that Trump was trying to defraud the U.S. government, and fraud is what he does, right? Let’s remember that when Trump ran for office in 2016, he was under investigation for fraud for Trump University.
And then, of course, the prosecuting in The Hague is extremely important, because, you know, this has never happened before, but Donald Trump is somebody who’s different than any president we’ve ever had, Republican or Democrat, because he is an autocratic individual. The people he admires, the leaders he admires are autocrats. And he has no regard for human life whatsoever. And so, he would commit war crimes if he could. Indeed, we heard from John Kelly, in Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s book, hat he wanted — he was disappointed that his generals were not acting like Hitler’s generals. So, Jack Smith, with his range of experience, seems to be the perfect person that we have been sent at this moment in time.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, Professor Ben-Ghiat, it’s not only President Trump who’s got these criminal charges referred against him, also his lawyer, John Eastman. Can you talk about the significance of this?
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Yeah. There’s a little subtheme in authoritarian history of the lawyers of authoritarians, and many of them go to jail. Berlusconi’s lawyer is only one of many who went to jail. We have also Michael Cohen. But it’s very important, you know, this — they chose not to investigate the role of institutions, the FBI, the Secret Service, derelictions of duty. But it’s very important to have broadened the scope, because this was, again, not just a violent insurrection, but an elite — elites are very important to pulling off coups. And Eastman was kind of one of the minds of the coup and connected to the Claremont Institute. And when you look back in history, you need this kind of buy-in from elites who have these theories and come up with plans that then get implemented by the chief instigator. And so I was very pleased to see the name of Eastman there.
AMY GOODMAN: Rob Weissman, also referring to the Ethics Committee those congressmembers, this bipartisan committee’s colleagues, who refuse to participate in what so many others — Republican advisers, lawyers, even family members — did in terms of cooperating with the committee, and this includes the man who’s running to be House speaker, Kevin McCarthy.
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Yeah, Kevin McCarthy is fascinating. I think that, you know, the information that McCarthy didn’t want to share is that he actually was very upset, felt personally physically threatened the day of the January 6th coup attempt, insurrection, and called the president, called the chief of staff and made that clear. He didn’t want to be on the record about that, because he knew what that might mean for his efforts now to become speaker of the House.
The other three, and especially two of them, seem to be pretty actively involved in carrying out the conspiracy. That’s information we don’t quite know, exactly what their individual roles were. We may learn quite a bit more about that in the final report coming out from the committee tomorrow.
AMY GOODMAN: And we’ll talk more about that in the coming days on Democracy Now! Finally, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, again, President Trump has not been charged. The House will now switch to be Republican-led, but the Justice Department doesn’t change. Can you explain what happens next?
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: I’m not a legal expert, but, you know, one thing that came out yesterday, which is so important for democracy prevention, is that the only reason that Jeffrey Clark was not appointed — and this is what autocrats do, they politicize justice, they put loyalists in there — was that there was mass resignations threatened by DOJ employees. And this assertion of professional ethics is itself a form of democracy prevention. And so, civil service — some people think, “Oh, it’s boring,” the civil service. But it’s absolutely essential, because these are the people whose individual actions add up to — in this case, added up to — a block on an autocratic move. So, the culture of the DOJ is very important, and so we’ll see what they choose to do.
AMY GOODMAN: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, we want to thank you for being with us, historian, professor of history at New York University, author of the book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, and Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.
READ MORE 
Elon Musk in Germany in March. (photo: Christian Marquardt/Getty)
Twitter owner Elon Musk threatened legal action, changed the platform’s rules and suspended journalists’ accounts after a confrontation involving his security team at a gas station. But the incident’s timing and location cast doubt on a link to the @ElonJet account.
The timing and location of the confrontation cast doubt on Musk’s assertion that the account had posted real-time “assassination coordinates” that threatened his family and led to the confrontation. Police have said little about the incident but say they’ve yet to find a link between the confrontation and the jet-tracking account.
The incident last week triggered a major rewrite of Twitter’s rules and the suspensions of a half dozen journalists’ accounts, which were condemned by free-speech advocates. It also underscored how Musk’s personal concerns can influence his governance of a social media platform used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.
As the sole owner of Twitter, Musk can dictate policies as he chooses. Musk disbanded Twitter’s board of directors, which at other companies might have influenced the company’s reaction to the incident, as well as its long-standing “trust and safety” committee that had advised the social media platform on its policies. No executive at Twitter has the stature to balance Musk’s directives.
The incident occurred in South Pasadena, a Los Angeles suburb, on Tuesday at about 9:45 p.m. South Pasadena police were called to the gas station, according to the business’s manager, but made no arrests. South Pasadena police have not responded to requests for comment.
The Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement Thursday that its Threat Management Unit was in contact with Musk’s representatives and security team but that no crime reports had been filed. Police did not respond to requests for updates on Sunday.
Using a video of the incident that Musk posted to Twitter, The Washington Post identified the owner of the car involved and then the driver shown in the video who had rented it through the car-sharing service Turo.
The car’s renter, Brandon Collado, confirmed in interviews with The Post that he was the person shown in the video. He also provided The Post with videos he shot of Musk’s security guard that matched the one Musk had posted to Twitter.
In his conversations with The Post, Collado acknowledged he has an interest in Musk and the mother of two of Musk’s children, the musician known as Grimes, whose real name is Claire Elise Boucher. Boucher lives in a house near the gas station.
In his communications with The Post, Collado, who said he was a driver for Uber Eats, also made several bizarre and unsupported claims, including that he believed Boucher was sending him coded messages through her Instagram posts; that Musk was monitoring his real-time location; and that Musk could control Uber Eats to block him from receiving delivery orders. He said he was in Boucher’s neighborhood to work for Uber Eats.
Musk did not respond to emailed and tweeted requests from The Post to discuss the incident. Boucher did not respond to requests for comment.
Due to its concentration of high-profile figures, stalking is a pervasive problem in Los Angeles. After 21-year-old actress Rebecca Schaeffer was shot to death at the entrance to her Los Angeles home in 1989 by an obsessive fan, the city adopted several measures meant to protect targets of stalking, such as restrictions on public access to address information from California driving records and a specialized police unit focused on the problem.
However, in 2015, actress and singer Selena Gomez was forced to move out of her $4.5 million home due to a relentless stalker. Actress Sandra Bullock recently opened up about the trauma and PTSD she experienced after a stalker broke into her home in 2014. In 2012, a man accused of stalking actress Halle Berry was sentenced to over a year in jail.
Boucher, too, has been the target of stalking. In 2018, she was granted a restraining order against a man named Raymond Barrajas after he showed up at her home and said he believed she was secretly communicating with him through her music.
Marc Madero, a Los Angeles police detective with the unit that investigates high-profile stalking cases, told The Post the unit has investigated a man who was accused of stalking Boucher. After the confrontation in the gas station, Musk’s security team alerted the police, who began investigating whether the man in the video was the same alleged stalker, Madero said. He said the unit had yet to make a determination and continues to investigate.
Madero said the video of the man suggested he had taken efforts to hide his identity, including wearing gloves and partially covering his face. But he said his unit had no evidence to suggest the man police were investigating had used the jet-tracking account. He noted that stalkers commonly use “open-source searches of a targeted individual,” adding, “Nothing would surprise me.”
Musk tweeted Thursday that journalists had been “aware of the violent stalker and yet still doxed the real-time location of my family.” He did not say which journalists he was referring to or provide evidence. The Post was unaware of the incident until Musk tweeted about it. A review of the internet found no news accounts about a stalker. A volunteer with the investigative journalism group Bellingcat used the video Musk posted to locate the incident to the gas station.
Musk’s jet landed in Los Angeles last Monday, Dec. 12, following a flight from Oakland, the @ElonJet account said, citing flight information, known as ADS-B data, that is legally and routinely gathered by aviation hobbyists and posted to public websites such as ADS-B Exchange.
Musk had been in San Francisco the previous night, getting booed onstage at Dave Chappelle’s comedy show. Three days earlier, he had posted another photo from San Francisco of his 2-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii, whom Musk refers to as “X.”
The incident took place at the gas station on Tuesday, Dec. 13, approximately 15 minutes before the station closed, according to its manager, Daniel Santiago, who was working that night. Santiago said he was surprised when the car Collado was driving pulled into the Arco station and into the space next to Santiago’s car, which is not a normal location for a customer to park.
He said the incident was caught on the gas station’s security camera and that footage had been turned over to the South Pasadena police on Thursday.
According to the video of the incident that Musk posted, the member of Musk’s security team confronted Collado sitting in the car wearing gloves and a hood. “Yeah, pretty sure. Got you,” the Musk security team member can be heard saying on the video.
What took place between the two men before they arrived at the gas station is unknown. There’s no indication in videos shared with The Post that Musk’s children were present.
Collado claimed he was making Uber Eats deliveries and visiting a friend when he pulled into the gas station and said Musk’s security worker then confronted him without reason. Collado said he believed that Musk was monitoring his real-time location.
Two videos of the altercation Collado shared with The Post show him exiting his rental car and standing in front of a Toyota driven by Musk’s security worker.
Shortly after the incident, officers with the South Pasadena police arrived at the gas station, questioned Collado and told him they’d file a report, Collado said.
On Saturday, Collado tweeted at Musk, “I am the guy in this video … You have connections to me and have stalked me and my family for over a year.” Collado said he had not been contacted by the police since Tuesday night.
After the gas-station incident, Twitter changed its rules to ban the sharing of all “live location information,” including links to other websites that noted “travel routes, actual physical location or other identifying information that would reveal a person’s location, regardless if this information is publicly available.”
It also suspended @ElonJet, its operator, Jack Sweeney, and dozens of his other jet-tracking accounts, which monitored the public movements of sports teams, political figures and Russian oligarchs.
Twitter also suspended journalists from The Post, the New York Times, CNN and other news organizations who were covering the @ElonJet suspensions. Two former employees in contact with Twitter staff told The Post that the suspensions were at one time marked “direction of Elon.”
Musk representatives have previously asked the Federal Aviation Administration to limit the sharing of certain flight records, using a program known as Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed. But such requests do not prevent the transmission of ADS-B data, which come from unencrypted signals that are broadcast from the planes, and which anyone with the proper equipment can receive from the ground.
On Sunday, Musk posted videos showing he was attending the World Cup championship game in Qatar. When some in the stands shared photos showing Musk in attendance, Twitter users noted that the details could be classified as real-time location information, like the kind Musk had labeled “assassination coordinates,” and were no longer allowed.
READ MORE 
Donald Trump on stage at the Save America rally in Youngstown, Ohio, September 17, 2022. (photo: Jeff Swensen/AFP)
Republicans didn’t get their predicted “red wave” in the November midterms, but the results were hardly a repudiation of the Right: most of Donald Trump’s endorsed candidates won their races, and the GOP continues to make inroads with voters of color.
But in-depth analysis of the exit polls for the midterms tells a more worrying story. Youth and black turnouts were both far lower than hoped. The GOP successfully diversified its representation in Congress, revealing its ability to adapt to demographic changes in the US as well as Democrats can. And the narrative that Trump “lost” the election for the GOP is simply not true: most of the candidates that Trump endorsed won their races, and the GOP was able to take control of the House of Representatives from the Democrats.
Youth turnout during the midterms was low. This is in keeping with the general trend that sees lower turnout for midterms than presidential elections, but youth turnout in the most recent election was especially low. This was particularly true for the Democrats, who carried the under-thirty vote by only 53 percent, 8 points less than in 2020. This suggests either that there was relatively low activation of youth voters even as the Democrats presented this election as a titanic struggle between themselves and the end of democracy or that the GOP has successfully convinced a segment of young people who voted Democrat in 2020 to switch their votes.
Even worse for the Democrats, black turnout was also historically low this midterm election. Current information suggests that black voters were a smaller part of the electorate than they’ve been for almost twenty years, a worrying indicator for Democrats who rely on high black turnout to win races in urban areas. This is just one of a series of indicators that the Democrats can’t rely on the “demographic wave” of a majority-minority United States to win elections — not only are young white voters not behaving as predicted but voters of color aren’t the monolith that Democratic strategists and commentators sometimes assume them to be.
One important piece missing from the dominant narrative is that the GOP was able to diversify its caucus significantly with many wins from candidates of color. In such a close race, these candidates’ victories were crucial to securing the House for the GOP. In the long term, they also signal a transition in the racial makeup of the GOP and its voters. As the country becomes more diverse, the GOP is doing the same. This is a clear lesson that Democrats and the Left can’t sit back and watch as the country changes in their favor, automatically producing an electorate that will naturally vote for the center or the Left. Plenty of voters of color are motivated by right-wing views, and increasing numbers of right-wing candidates of color are winning seats. These candidates present themselves as newcomers to Washington interested in shaking things up and as pro-family patriots whose ideology fits with the GOP mainstream. This position is popular, and it won seats — including in districts that had been held by Democrats in the 2020–22 Congress.
The most damning evidence of the problem with the mainstream narrative that the “red wave” was prevented by Democratic campaigning is that the GOP did, in fact, take the House of Representatives. Suffering the “least bad defeat” for an incumbent president since 2002 is certainly better than suffering a worse one, but it’s hardly a success either. The results of the 2022 primary mean that the Democrats can no longer operate the January 6 special investigations committee. It means that progressive legislative items championed by some Democrats are even further from reality than they were before. And it means that the GOP has the power to disrupt any effort that Biden might make to influence the country’s economy.
Though Trump himself is falling in GOP primary polls, the politics he introduced to the party continues to gain ground. Far-right candidates won a large majority of the races they ran in. Even the losers in these races did well, with people like Ammon Bundy — who led an armed, insurgent, anti–federal government land occupation in Idaho in 2014 — getting 17 percent of the Idaho vote for governor, just 3 percentage points behind the Democratic candidate. These results show sustained growth in support for far-right politics. While the lack of a GOP landslide is welcome, now is not the time to celebrate: there’s plenty of evidence that the Right is continuing to expand its appeal.
READ MORE
A section of the Trans-Siberian Pipeline - Russia's main natural gas export pipeline, Thursday, Feb. 6, 2014. (photo: Vincent Mundy/Bloomberg)
"Transportation of gas is provided to consumers in full through parallel gas pipelines," the local unit of Russian gas producer Gazprom PJSC said in a statement.
The explosion happened at a section of the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod link in Russia's region of Chuvashia. A fire was extinguished after the incident, which reportedly happened during scheduled maintenance, according to local emergency services.
The Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod is one of the oldest gas conduits linking Russia and Europe through Ukraine. Gas flows via Ukraine are closely watched by the market as it remains the last route delivering Russian fuel to Western Europe amid deteriorated relations over the Kremlin's war in Ukraine.
Dutch front-month gas futures, Europe's benchmark, briefly surged as much as 6.6% on the explosion reports before erasing those gains. The contract traded 1.6% lower at €106.78 (RM502.23) a megawatt-hour by 3.25pm in Amsterdam, following the statement from Gazprom's unit.
Gas nominations for Wednesday transit via Ukraine so far remain unchanged, according to the nation's grid data.
READ MORE 
Crime scene tape surrounds Robb Elementary School after a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, May 25, 2022. (photo: Jae C. Hong/AP)
Previously unreleased video, audio and interviews for the first time show helicopter and ambulance delays after police finally confronted the Robb Elementary shooter
“You’re fine. You’re fine,” said her husband, Uvalde school district police officer Ruben Ruiz, who had been frantically trying to rescue her since the attack began. Mireles looked at him but could not speak. She’d been losing blood for more than an hour.
Officers placed Mireles on the sidewalk just beyond one of the school’s exits and started treating her wounds. A medic later told investigators he did not see any ambulances, though video footage showed two parked just past the corner of the building, about 100 feet away.
The chaotic scene exemplified the flawed medical response — captured in video footage, investigative documents, interviews and radio traffic — that experts said undermined the chances of survival for some victims of the May 24 massacre. Two teachers and 19 students died.
Law enforcement’s well-documented failure to confront the shooter who terrorized the school for 77 minutes was the most serious problem in getting victims timely care, experts said. But previously unreleased records, obtained by The Washington Post, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica, for the first time show that communication lapses and muddled lines of authority among medical responders further hampered treatment.
Three victims who emerged from the school with a pulse later died. In the case of two of those victims, critical resources were not available when medics expected they would be, delaying hospital treatment for Mireles, 44, and student Xavier Lopez, 10, records show.
Another student, Jacklyn “Jackie” Cazares, 9, likely survived for more than an hour after being shot and was promptly placed in an ambulance after medics finally gained access to her classroom. She died in transport.
The disjointed medical response frustrated medics while delaying efforts to get ambulances, air transport and other emergency services to victims. Medical helicopters with critical supplies of blood tried to land at the school, but an unidentified fire department official told them to wait at an airport three miles away. Dozens of parked police vehicles blocked the paths of ambulances trying to reach victims.
Multiple cameras worn by officers and one on the dashboard of a police car showed two ambulances positioned outside the school when the shooter was killed. That was not nearly enough for the 10 or more gunshot victims then still alive, though additional ambulances began arriving 10 minutes later. Six students, including one who was seriously wounded, were taken to a hospital in a school bus with no trained medics on board, according to Texas EMS records.
Although helicopters were available, none were used to carry victims directly from the school. At least four patients who survived were flown by helicopter to a more fully equipped trauma center in San Antonio after first being driven by ambulance to a nearby hospital or airport.
In public statements made since May, law enforcement officials have defended their officers’ actions as reasonable under difficult circumstances. Federal, state and local agencies that responded to the shooting have not directly addressed the medical response, nor did they answer detailed questions from the news organizations that worked jointly on this investigation.
Eric Epley, executive director of the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council, a nonprofit that helps coordinate trauma care in southwest Texas during mass-casualty events, said medics encountered challenges, including a faulty radio system.
“These scenes are inherently confusing, challenging, and chaotic,” Epley said in an email. He later added, “We remain steadfast that the decisions by the on-scene medical leadership were sound and appropriate.”
The Texas Rangers, an arm of the state Department of Public Safety, are investigating what went wrong in Uvalde, including whether any victims might have survived if they had received prompt medical care. The local district attorney has said she will use that investigation to determine whether to charge anyone with a crime, including law enforcement officers.
Mireles, an avid hiker and CrossFit enthusiast who was fiercely proud of her college-graduate daughter, was shot within the first minutes of the attack, according to interviews students gave to investigators and a DPS analysis of gunfire obtained by the news organizations.
It’s difficult to know whether Mireles or anyone else who died that day might have survived their wounds, in part because local officials have refused to release autopsy reports. But footage shows that Mireles was conscious and responsive when she was pulled from the classroom, an indicator that she probably had survivable wounds, according to medical experts.
“Had medics gotten to her quickly, there’s a good chance she would’ve survived,” said Babak Sarani, director of critical care at George Washington University Hospital.
The flawed coordination among police and medical crews echoes missteps during other mass shootings, despite the development of recommended practices after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. In several of those cases, the communication problems resulted in delays in getting medical care for victims.
Medics on helicopters and in ambulances who responded to the Uvalde shooting told investigators they were confused about who was in charge, where they should be stationed and how many victims to expect. Some of them pleaded to be allowed closer to the scene. In the absence of clear guidance, experts said, medics did the best they could while trying to save lives.
“They were told, essentially, to go to the airport and wait,” according to an interview the Texas Rangers conducted with Julie Lewis, the regional manager for AirLIFE, an air medical transport service that sent three helicopters from the greater San Antonio area. “They couldn’t figure out who was in command.”
Pleading for help
The morning of May 24 was warm and sunny in Uvalde, the seat of a rural county of about 25,000 residents near the Texas border with Mexico. It was one of the last days of class, and teachers had planned a festive, celebratory day.
Mireles left her home wearing a flowery blouse and pair of black pants, feeling happy, her daughter said.
“My dad had just told her how beautiful she looked,” Adalynn Ruiz, 23, recalled in a text message to a reporter.
About two dozen fourth-graders were in Rooms 111 and 112, adjoining classrooms, that day. They included Jackie, who relished cherry limeades with extra cherries, and Xavier, who loved art class and couldn’t wait to start middle school.
They’d just finished a student awards ceremony and settled into watching the Disney movie “Lilo & Stitch” when a teenage gunman dressed in black scaled the school’s fence and fired shots at 11:32 a.m.
Hearing the gunfire, Mireles quickly called her husband.
“There’s somebody shooting at the school,” she said, Ruben Ruiz recalled in an interview with investigators.
“We’re coming up,” he told her as he drove to the school with a state police officer, who later described the comment to investigators. “We’ll be there.”
The gunman got there first, entering Mireles’s classroom and firing his AR-15-style rifle. Officers rushed into the school minutes later and approached her classroom, but they retreated after the gunman fired through the door, grazing two of them.
Ruiz, who declined to comment for this report but spoke with state investigators, ran into the hallway at 11:36 a.m., according to video footage. But none of the officers tried to enter the classrooms, where the gunman continued to fire sporadically.
Desperate to reach his wife, Ruiz told the other officers what he knew.
“He’s in my wife’s classroom,” he said, according to the footage. He later recalled to investigators that it felt “like my soul had left my body.”
About 20 minutes later, his wife called again.
At 11:56 a.m., he shouted, “She says she’s shot!”
That information was a key indication that officers were dealing with an active shooter, not a barricaded subject as school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo incorrectly assumed, according to a legislative report on the shooting. But Ruiz’s comment did not change how law enforcement officers, following Arredondo’s lead, responded to the attack.
The school district’s active-shooter protocol designated the chief as the incident commander. Arredondo has repeatedly defended his role in the delay, telling Texas lawmakers investigating the massacre that he did not consider himself to be in charge. The Uvalde school board fired Arredondo in August, amid sharp public criticism of the police response to the shooting.
Trapped inside her classroom, Mireles tied a plastic bag around her arm to help slow the blood loss, one of her students told investigators. Another child in Room 112 told investigators that Mireles tried to protect him. The boy was hit in the back of his shoulder but survived.
At least two students used Mireles’s phone to call 911, begging officers to send help.
Officers confiscated Ruiz’s gun and forced him to wait outside the school, where he told “anybody that would get next to me” that his wife was in danger, according to his law enforcement interview. He tried to get back in, but fellow officers stopped him. They later told investigators they had seized his gun for his own safety.
Inside Rooms 111 and 112, students anxiously tried to get officers’ attention. They knew that for Mireles, there was little time to spare.
One girl later recalled to investigators that Mireles “was telling us she was going to die.”
‘We as a nation are not ready’
More than two decades after the Columbine school shooting shocked the nation, key failures continue to repeat themselves.
After that shooting, officers across the country received training on what they should do first when a mass shooting is reported: Subdue the shooter and stop the killing. Next, trainers tell first responders, they must “stop the dying.”
Over time, that insistence on prompt, effective medical care became an established mantra, as did the idea that all first responders — police, fire and EMS — should work under a joint command overseeing and coordinating the response. An overall incident commander is supposed to coordinate with the head paramedic or lead fire department supervisor to organize the medical response, experts said.
“If you don’t have a system, the whole response goes awry,” said Bob Harrison, a former police chief and a homeland security researcher at the Rand Corp., a think tank based in California.
A Justice Department review of the response to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando that killed 49 people found that the police and fire departments’ decision to operate separate command posts for hours led to a lack of coordination.
A review by local authorities of the 2012 Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting that killed 12 people discovered that the delayed establishment of a unified command led to communication problems between police and fire responders, slowing medical care for victims.
“We as a nation are not ready,” said Sarani, the director of critical care at George Washington University Hospital. “The air assets and the ground assets do not talk to each other very well. The fire, the police do not talk to each other very well.”
Experts said that the Uvalde shooting response appeared to lack both an overall incident commander and someone clearly in charge of coordinating the emergency medical response.
The rural community’s emergency medical services are contracted out to private companies. On that day in May, Stephen Stephens, the director of Uvalde EMS, was in charge of organizing helicopters and ambulances responding to Robb Elementary, he later told investigators.
“My job was to manage assets,” he said, noting that Juan Martinez, his deputy, instructed medics arriving at the scene.
After police breached the classrooms where the shooter had been holed up, Stephens said, he handed command over to the fire chief of neighboring Medina County. The Medina fire chief declined to comment to the news organizations.
It’s unclear what information Stephens had about how many victims first responders should expect to find. Multiple medics expressed confusion over who was in charge of the medical response and where to go.
“There was no EMS command and control,” said Julio Perez, a medic for AirLIFE, who told investigators he was pleading to help. “Nobody could tell me anything.”
His account was backed up by Lewis, the manager for the air transport service, who said several of her medics were upset. “They feel like the resources weren’t used as they should have been.”
The school district declined to release its active-shooter response plans or protocols and did not answer questions posed by The Post, the Tribune and ProPublica. Separately, the state has fought the release of the active-shooter plans it requires school districts to submit, with the backing of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office determines whether government information is open to the public. The news organizations also have sued state and city officials for some records related to the shooting and its response.
The city of Uvalde did not respond to detailed questions about the communication between police and medics or about its training for mass shootings, citing ongoing litigation. But a spokesperson said in an email that the city’s police department has not conducted any formal training with Uvalde EMS, a nonprofit that provides emergency medical services for the city and county.
A document from a March active-shooter training conducted by the school district, later published by San Antonio television station KSAT, provides only general guidance on how police and EMS should work together.
The plan states that EMS, fire and law enforcement need to know “the exact location of the injured, as well as the number and types of injuries to expect upon their arrival.” It does not detail a process for communicating that information.
Stephens, Martinez and representatives for Uvalde EMS did not respond to requests for comment, including queries sent by certified letter. Five other private ambulance companies seen responding to the shooting also did not answer written questions or phone calls seeking comment.
Confusion and delays
Martinez told investigators that he directed other medics to park their ambulances nearby until they knew whether it was safe to move closer. Experts said it’s not unusual to keep ambulances at a short distance from crime scenes with active shooters.
He soon identified a pressing obstacle: As dozens of officers descended on the scene, they left their vehicles blocking the roads that ambulances needed to get to the school.
Martinez instructed the county’s two dispatchers to ask law enforcement to create a clear path.
“We were anticipating essentially just grabbing whatever patients we had and running out,” he later told investigators.
While outside, Martinez and a second medic treated a Uvalde police lieutenant who had been grazed in the head when the gunman shot through the classroom door. Then they waited, with no clear sense of the horror unfolding inside the school.
“We didn’t know the numbers of patients, number of injuries, number of fatalities,” Martinez recalled in interviews with investigators. “Nobody was relaying that.”
Other emergency crews were also struggling to get crucial information and figure out where to go.
The crew of an AirLIFE helicopter grounded in Uvalde for maintenance heard the unfolding chaos on the radio and offered to help. The crew later told investigators that the emergency responders they talked to had rejected their assistance repeatedly. They did not provide the names of those responders.
“Nobody knew what was really going on,” said Perez, one of the helicopter medics. He said the officials told his crew to “stand by, stay there — don’t come.”
With no one clearly in charge of the police or medical responses, an elite Border Patrol tactical team that began arriving at the school at 12:10 p.m. assumed both roles, according to a July report by a state House committee tasked with investigating the response.
The team, which typically handles dangerous situations involving migrants at the border, devised a plan to breach the adjoining classrooms while its medics set up a triage station.
At 12:50 p.m., a Border Patrol-led unit that included local police breached the classrooms. The gunman sprung from a closet and fired. They shot back, killing him.
The team gave the all-clear.
Officers who had packed the hallway now filled the classrooms. Ruiz ran back into the school, looking for his wife. Children lay on the floor, many near or on top of each other, most of them dead.
‘I can still feel the heart’
Officers quickly began taking victims to a triage area inside the school, carrying some by their limbs. With so many law enforcement officers and first responders at the scene, there was little space to move. Some children were placed in a line on each side of the hallway.
One local medic later complained to investigators that the response was so chaotic that emergency crews were stepping on victims.
Several medics expressed frustration to investigators that law enforcement officers brought them students who could not be saved.
“You’re doing this wrong,” Martinez, the Uvalde EMS deputy supervisor, recalled yelling to police after being handed a child with a significant head injury. “There’s nothing I can do for this patient.”
Within minutes, medics determined that several critically wounded patients with pulses needed to be urgently taken to a hospital where surgeons could provide advanced care.
A girl matching the description of Jackie — wearing the same red shirt and black shorts she’d had on earlier in the day — was placed in one of the two ambulances at the school. The 9-year-old, described by her family as a “firecracker” for being so full of life, died on the way to the hospital.
Andrew Aviles, a regional trainer for the Border Patrol’s medic team, began treating a young boy, doing everything he could to revive him.
“I can still feel the heart,” Aviles yelled, as he later recounted to investigators in an interview punctuated with sobs. “I need a f---ing plane. I need a helicopter down. I need to get a kid inside there!”
The boy needed to be taken to San Antonio’s University Hospital, the nearest Level 1 trauma center, which is equipped to handle the most serious cases. It was about 45 minutes away by helicopter, 90 minutes in an ambulance.
Uvalde is more than 80 miles from the nearest Level 1 trauma centers, which provide the most advanced care for seriously injured patients. (Satellite © 2022 Landsat / Copernicus via Google Earth)
The child seen in the police body-camera footage fits the description of Xavier. A law enforcement document listing what students were wearing indicates that Xavier had on a black shirt, blue jeans and black-and-white shoes. That is similar to the clothing worn by the boy Aviles was treating, the officer video shows.
Aviles had heard that the wounded were being airlifted from a field on the west side of the school, so he and other medics put the boy on a stretcher and began rushing him out to the dusty patch of grass at 12:56 p.m.
There was no helicopter.
Although at least five medical helicopters responded to the shooting, not one picked up anyone from Rooms 111 and 112 at the school, according to a review of flight data, satellite imagery and photographs, as well as interviews with air crew members by Texas Rangers.
Epley, the executive director of the regional coordinating agency for trauma care, said it was not safe to have medical helicopters at a scene with an active shooter. But Uvalde police could be heard on radio transmissions asking where medical helicopters were 10 minutes after the gunman was killed. It took 15 minutes more for the first to land near the school.
Spokespeople for the ambulance helicopter companies, Air Methods, which includes AirLIFE, and Air Evac Lifeteam, both of which responded to the shooting, said they rely on local medics to decide who should be airlifted. They declined to respond to detailed questions.
Each passing second dimmed the odds for the boy who appeared to be Xavier.
Dread set in when Aviles felt softness on the back of the child’s head, indicating a significant injury. The wounds were consistent with those detailed in the autopsy report shared with Xavier’s family, which revealed that the boy had been shot five times.
“I was like, ‘Guys, he’s …,’” Aviles said, pausing for a moment to take a breath as he spoke with investigators. “That took the wind out of my sails.”
First responders waited 11 minutes for a helicopter but decided to drive to San Antonio when it didn’t arrive. At that point, the boy had already gone into cardiac arrest. Overwhelmed medics enlisted State Trooper Matthew Neese to help with CPR in the ambulance.
Once a gunshot victim’s heart stops beating, the likelihood of survival diminishes sharply, experts said. A patient in that condition should immediately be brought to an operating room, where a surgeon can attempt to stop internal bleeding.
State records show that Neese did not have an EMT or paramedic license in Texas, but he performed CPR on Xavier for more than 30 minutes while a medic tried to treat the boy’s wounds. The ambulance diverted to Medina Regional Hospital in Hondo, about 40 miles from Uvalde, where doctors declared the child dead shortly after 2 p.m., according to his family.
A helicopter arrived near Robb Elementary at 1:15 p.m., eight minutes after the ambulance departed.
Hospital officials did not respond to a request for comment and neither did Neese. The trooper later attended Xavier’s funeral, according to the boy’s family.
Reached on his cellphone, Aviles declined to comment, referring questions to his supervisors at U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In a statement, a CBP spokesperson said the agency is investigating the role of its officers in the response and could not comment while that was ongoing.
Xavier’s mother, Felicha Martinez, said an awful premonition hit her as she stood outside the school waiting for news. Her body went limp and she collapsed. His father, Abel Lopez, searched for any sign of his son, peering between the buses blocking the view of the school.
They have since learned bits and pieces about what happened to their son but are left with questions, including why Xavier wasn’t taken to a hospital by helicopter.
“If the cops had done their job, the medics might’ve had a chance,” Lopez said.
Martinez added: “I’m so full of anger. I don’t know how to put into words how much I am hurting.”
‘Don’t give up’
On the day of the shooting, emergency responders frantically tried to keep Mireles alive on the sidewalk outside Robb Elementary. She was deteriorating quickly. Within minutes, her heart had stopped and first responders began to administer CPR.
More ambulances arrived at the school, but it wasn’t until 16 minutes after the breach that medics put her inside one.
“Come on, ma’am, don’t give up,” a voice can be heard saying in a state trooper’s body-camera footage.
By then, the teacher’s chances of survival had sunk.
In the ambulance, medics began a blood transfusion and used an automatic compression device to try to get the teacher’s heart pumping again. They gave her fluids and intubated her.
But they did not take her to a hospital, a decision some experts described as a mistake and others said could indicate that medics thought Mireles had no chance of survival.
First responders continued CPR in the ambulance for about 40 minutes before the chief medic for Uvalde EMS declared her dead.
The ambulance that Mireles was inside never left the school curb.
READ MORE 
Past maps of 'high-risk' neighborhoods shape present power plant emissions. (photo: Silvia Otte/Getty)
Past maps of "high-risk" neighborhoods shape present power plant emissions.
Since minorities and immigrants tend to live in lower-income neighborhoods, this also adds to the racial disparities present in the US. Now, a group of public health researchers has found another factor that contributed to this disparity. The historic practice of "redlining," or assigning high-risk scores to mortgages in minority neighborhoods, is also associated with higher power plant emissions, reinforcing the challenges minorities face in the US.
In the red
The term redlining is derived from a federal program, started in the New Deal, that was intended to expand access to mortgages and boost home ownership in the US. The organization that oversaw the program, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, set standards for loans that focused on four categories of risk scores, evaluated by neighborhood. The highest risk category was identified on maps with a red line, leading to its name. It was much harder to obtain mortgages in these neighborhoods, which depressed housing prices for their residents.
It has been widely documented that these ratings were influenced by racist attitudes toward the neighborhoods' occupants. Nearly all the top-rated neighborhoods were entirely white, and neighborhoods with high numbers of minorities and immigrants were frequently assigned the lowest rating. Redlining ended up reinforcing racial disparities in the US and has kept minorities from building wealth through home ownership, with effects that still persist.
The new work expands on that by associating redlining with higher pollution exposure due to power plants.
The work involved looking into everything from historic maps of redlined neighborhoods, the site of power plants (including those that have been closed for decades), and weather patterns to determine the prevalent direction of travel for pollutants from all these plants. Geographic information on exposure to pollution from power plant emissions was also included in the analysis.
The researchers also broke down the analysis into several distinct time periods. These include the post-war period (1940-1969), the post-Clean-Air-Act period (1970-1999), and recent years (2000-2020). Pollution data is only available for the last of these.
The basic measurement the researchers used was whether there were one or more power plants located upwind of the neighborhood and within 5 kilometers. These measurements were then broken down according to the neighborhood's rating, which was based on four categories (A to D, with A being the lowest risk category). Neighboring categories were then compared—meaning A with B, B with C, and C with D, to see how changes in risk ratings correlate with exposure to power plant emissions. Changes in these exposures over time were also tracked.
Steady exposure
The analysis found that things were worst in the post-war period when there was extensive growth in power plants and the redlining system was in full swing. Here, redlining was associated with a 72 percent higher risk of having a fossil fuel plant nearby. That declined after the passage of the Clean Air Act but hasn't changed much in more recent years. Associations were even stronger when the most polluting plants, used to provide peak power, were considered.
In general, this sort of effect was apparent across the different ratings. The top-rated neighborhoods had lower exposure than the next-highest rating, and so on to the C-D differences. And, while the magnitude of these differences varies in the different time periods, the trends are consistent throughout the entire period.
Not surprisingly, this was also associated with pollution exposure. Redlining was associated with an 80 percent increase in exposure to nitrogen oxides, a 40 percent boost in sulfur dioxide exposure, and a 60 percent increase in fine-particulate exposure compared to neighborhoods rated just one category higher.
It's also clear that this difference is persistent. While the magnitude shrank in the most recent period, the differences in neighborhoods display the same trends—even though the Home Owners' Loan Corporation shut down in the 1950s. The effect persisted even when controlling for socioeconomic factors.
While racism has clearly played a role in the redlined designations, that doesn't mean that direct racism played a role in power plant sites. A small difference existed in power plant exposure in the pre-war period that displays the exact same trend that was visible once power plant construction boomed. And there are some indications that the presence of industrial sites like power plants may have influenced the ratings. Finally, low-income communities tend to have less political power and so probably have less input into the placement of power plants.
Nevertheless, the redlining system contributed to keeping minorities in the redlined neighborhoods and thus exposed them to higher pollution levels. So, regardless of the source of the disparity, its persistence is likely to be an outcome of the redlining process. And the impact may be dramatic, as air pollution is estimated to cause up to 100,000 premature deaths in the US.
On the plus side, the US has experienced a dramatic energy transition, shifting its reliance to natural gas, which pollutes less than coal and oil, and clean renewable generation. But the researchers cite evidence that the coal power plants that have been shut down so far are predominantly located near neighborhoods with low minority populations.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.