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The Scorched-Earth Legal Strategy Corporations Are Using to Silence Their Critics
Orcasita, a union leader, had been pushing for better conditions at his workplace, a mine in northern Colombia owned by a subsidiary of the Alabama-based coal company Drummond. Then the death threats started coming in. He believed that the armed strangers who had started appearing around the mine’s cafeteria would soon make those threats a reality.
“He foresaw his death,” said his widow, Elisa Almarales Viloria.
On March 12, 2001, paramilitary gunmen dragged Orcasita and another union leader, Valmore Locarno, from a company bus as the men returned home from work. The gunmen shot Locarno on the spot and carried Orcasita off in the bed of their pickup truck. His body was found the next day. He’d been shot in the head, his teeth knocked out.
The miners’ union was convinced that Drummond was involved in the murders. They suspected that the company was secretly paying the paramilitary group that executed their leaders. Ultimately, a Drummond food service contractor who ran the mine’s cafeteria was convicted of plotting the murders and sentenced to 38 years in prison.
To make the case that the company was complicit in the killings, the union turned to Terry Collingsworth, a lifelong human rights attorney based in Washington, D.C.
Victims suing multinational corporations for alleged crimes committed abroad face steep odds. Collingsworth has made a specialty of these uphill battles, devoting his career to holding companies accountable in American courts for human rights abuses overseas. In his struggle with Drummond, he collaborated with activist groups, spoke out in the media, and wrote letters to Drummond’s business partners accusing the company of “hiring, contracting with, and directing” the paramilitaries who committed the murders.
Collingsworth’s decision to file suit in the United States made Orcasita’s widow hopeful that justice would prevail. For years, she had felt that justice would be impossible in Colombia due to Drummond’s political clout.
“What we were most excited about was bringing the lawsuit in Alabama,” she said. “There it would not be so easy for them to traffic their influence.”
Collingsworth lost an initial trial in 2007, when a jury found there wasn’t clear evidence tying the company to the crimes. Another of his lawsuits was dismissed for being too similar to the first. But Collingsworth continued to press his case, offering new witnesses with firsthand testimony implicating Drummond.
Then, in March 2015, the case took a surprising turn.
Drummond had returned fire in the legal fight with an unusual accusation. The company charged that Collingsworth — an advocate who recently brought a case before the U.S. Supreme Court — had led a “multifaceted criminal campaign” to extort Drummond into paying a costly settlement. This campaign, Drummond alleged, was in fact a racketeering conspiracy as defined by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO.
Drummond’s charges represent a scorched-earth legal strategy in which corporations are turning the tables on attorneys and advocates who accuse them of wrongdoing. The technique was popularized by the elite corporate law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, whose clients include a who’s who of America’s most powerful companies. Representing the oil giant Chevron, Gibson Dunn convinced a judge to block one of the largest environmental verdicts ever reached by deploying a novel formula: using the civil provisions of RICO to charge opposing attorneys with racketeering.
Companies that have used RICO against their accusers say they brought the charges on themselves by committing fraud, bribery, and extortion. In Chevron’s case against environmental attorney Steven Donziger, a federal judge agreed; in the case against Collingsworth, a judge ruled that there was enough evidence of malfeasance to allow discovery. Human rights and environmental advocates contend that the true purpose of the cases is to send attorneys and activists a message: Going toe-to-toe with heavyweight corporations can lead to personal ruin.
Legal experts say some plaintiff’s attorneys made themselves vulnerable to RICO claims because they operated at the most aggressive edge of their field, overstepped ethical lines, and by their own admission made mistakes. By shifting the spotlight to these attorneys’ conduct, corporations effectively sidestepped the original allegations against them. Following these victories, other companies adopted similar theories to target advocacy groups directly.
If the goal is to hold attorneys accountable for unethical behavior, RICO is an odd choice. George Washington University law professor and international human rights attorney Ralph Steinhardt noted that RICO is a “very heavy club to swing” when there are more direct penalties, like sanctions, which punish the advocate without invalidating the entire case.
“One wonders why you would bring out the big guns of racketeering to send a message,” he said. “It’s a take-no-prisoners approach that’s intended to distract from whatever good faith allegations there may be.”
Ken White, a former federal prosecutor who specializes in First Amendment law, said responding to alleged misconduct by opposing attorneys with RICO charges is “like going after raccoons knocking over your trash cans with a tactical nuke.”
What’s missing, White says, is a universal mechanism to secure quick dismissals of baseless RICO claims. “Companies with functionally limitless resources can come in and bigfoot like this, and no one can withstand it,” White said.
The RICO Playbook
As scientists issue dire warnings about climate change, advocates have turned to the courts and public campaigning to try to impose consequences on companies they accuse of serious attacks on the environment. Energy and extractive industry giants targeted by these efforts have been particularly eager to turn the tables by deploying this no-holds-barred strategy.
One of the world’s biggest oil companies, accused of dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste in the Amazon rainforest, won the first high-profile victory that relied on this approach. Drummond filed RICO charges in response to allegations that it financed the murder of union leaders who threatened the productivity of its coal mines. A pulp and paper company accused of destroying forests and the energy company behind the Dakota Access pipeline followed soon after, bringing RICO claims against environmental campaigners and anti-pipeline protesters.
In each of these cases, the accused racketeers were environmental and human rights attorneys, Greenpeace and other environmental groups, or Indigenous land and water rights activists.
The RICO Act, originally passed in 1970 to help prosecutors go after the mafia, includes civil provisions that allow private parties to allege a racketeering conspiracy. Most civil RICO claims are filed in business disputes, while others have been brought against political groups from anti-abortion protesters to animal rights activists. These suits require a high bar of evidence: They must prove a pattern of at least two “predicate” crimes such as bribery, fraud, or money laundering; that the perpetrators worked together in a criminal “enterprise”; and that the perpetrators acted with criminal intent.
Nonetheless, RICO claims offer powerful incentives to plaintiffs. If a judge allows the case to go forward, the defendants are subject to extensive discovery in which a well-funded corporate law firm can bury them in paperwork. If the company wins and can establish damages, those damages are automatically tripled.
The success of early cases has helped build a body of law that opens the door for even more aggressive uses of the statute. The most recent corporate RICO cases have sought to define common public advocacy techniques such as negative media campaigns that allegedly contained false claims as predicate offenses for racketeering. The financial and reputational costs of defending these claims can make them devastating to their targets even if they ultimately fail.
“These RICO cases are easier to file than they are to win,” Steinhardt said. “Their intimidating purpose is served by their filing or their pendency.”
Deepa Padmanabha, deputy general counsel for Greenpeace USA, said that even though her team was awarded more than $800,000 in legal fees after successfully defeating RICO claims, the cost of defending the case was even higher.
Padmanabha said that two RICO suits would have cost the organization a total of more than a billion dollars if it had lost. The goal of the charges, she believes, was to caution the environmental movement that even the largest organizations were not safe from ruin.
“When we really think about what these suits are about, it’s fear,” Padmanabha said.
Corporate lawyers seem to be betting that the strategy will have staying power. In October 2020, Gibson Dunn announced a new practice in Judgment and Arbitral Award Enforcement, offering its services to creditors or debtors seeking to litigate existing judgments. The practice’s website highlights “its representation of Chevron Corporation in its successful RICO suit” and boasts that the firm “excels at defending companies and individuals against fraudulent arbitration awards and foreign judgments.”
Evan Mascagni, policy director for the Public Participation Project, an organization that fights against abusive lawsuits, said the RICO strategy threatens to overwhelm the legal system by allowing deep-pocketed companies to deploy endless resources to silence critics and defy judgments against them.
“I think if we accept this as a society, as a country, we’re saying we’re going to give incredibly powerful multinational corporations the ability to hijack our legal system,” Mascagni said.
A Victory for Chevron
The RICO strategy was most famously deployed in 2011 by Chevron in its bitter legal conflict with attorney Steven Donziger.
At the time, Donziger was the lead lawyer pursuing massive damages against the oil company for toxic pollution in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Chevron inherited the lawsuit when it acquired Texaco, which had allegedly left hundreds of open pits of sludge in the rainforests where it operated, causing cancer deaths, miscarriages, and birth defects among the area’s mostly Indigenous residents. As the prospects of a multibillion-dollar judgment grew higher, Chevron enlisted the help of Gibson Dunn.
In February 2011, Gibson Dunn attorneys filed a civil RICO suit in New York accusing Donziger and his colleagues of running a racketeering conspiracy. They charged that Donziger and his team secretly controlled a key independent expert appointed by the Ecuadorian court to assess pollution damages. By the time of Donziger’s trial, they added the accusation that Donziger had bribed an Ecuadorian judge to allow his team to ghostwrite the judgment against Chevron.
Chevron provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in benefits to Alberto Guerra, the witness who claimed he’d facilitated the bribery and served as a liaison between Donziger’s team and the Ecuadorian judge. The benefits included relocating Guerra and his family from Ecuador to the United States, where the company supplied him with a $12,000 monthly salary. Chevron has said that it relocated Guerra to ensure his safety and that the payments were to compensate him for the cost of providing his evidence.
The company’s case was bolstered by Donziger’s own words, obtained through discovery of materials that included outtakes from a documentary film. In one clip, Donziger discussed the size of a possible judgment against Chevron and speculated that his team could “jack this thing up to $30 billion.” In draft testimony in 2013, Donziger conceded that he “did make errors along the way” but challenged the legitimacy of the proceedings against him.
As the RICO case headed for trial, Chevron made a strategic move. Roughly two weeks before the trial date, it dropped its request for damages and sought only to block enforcement of Ecuador’s $9.5 billion judgment. That meant the case would no longer be heard by a jury but decided solely by Judge Lewis Kaplan, a federal district judge in Manhattan who had ruled in the company’s favor in earlier motions.
In March 2014, Kaplan ruled in favor of Chevron, barring U.S. enforcement of the Ecuadorian judgment and holding that private parties are entitled to seek relief from foreign courts’ decisions under civil RICO — a crucial green light for the strategy that Gibson Dunn had developed.
Kaplan concluded that Donziger’s team had not only secretly written the Ecuadorian court’s ruling, but also submitted false evidence and made hidden payments to the court-appointed expert. “The wrongful actions of Donziger and his Ecuadorian legal team would be offensive to the laws of any nation that aspires to the rule of law,” Kaplan wrote in his opinion.
Critics have raised questions about irregularities in the case against Donziger. Guerra later changed key details in his testimony, including the nature of the alleged bribe agreement and the dates of trips in which he claimed to have worked on the case. Computer analysis also showed the judge in question had a running draft of the judgment saved on his hard drive for months, undermining the ghostwriting claim. Still, the case set in motion a stunning downfall for Donziger. The one-time star of the environmental bar ended up serving time in federal prison on contempt charges stemming from his refusal to comply with orders from Kaplan after the RICO decision. Meanwhile, Chevron avoided paying the multibillion-dollar judgment for the toxic sludge that remains in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
In an emailed statement, Gibson Dunn noted that an arbitration panel established through a trade agreement between the United States and Ecuador found that Texaco, Chevron’s predecessor, had complied with a pollution remediation plan approved by the Ecuadorian government, releasing the company from liability. Critics contend that the remediation plan failed to clean up the damage and did not cover claims by private plaintiffs.
In response to questions about Guerra, the firm said Donziger exaggerated the importance of his testimony and pointed to Kaplan’s statement that he would have “reached precisely the same result in this case even without the testimony of Alberto Guerra.” Gibson Dunn added that Kaplan’s RICO ruling, which was unanimously affirmed by a panel of judges on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, showed that the firm’s advocacy had uncovered serious wrongdoing.
“As for Gibson Dunn’s work successfully exposing fraud by unscrupulous lawyers like Mr. Donziger who seek to rip off vulnerable people in weak legal systems overseas based on lies, this is laudable work vindicating the rule of law,” William Thomson, a partner at Gibson Dunn who was part of its Chevron team, wrote in the statement.
Donziger maintained that his contacts with the Ecuadorian expert were legal and appropriate under Ecuadorian law, and that the ghostwriting charges were fabricated.
“Chevron used a civil racketeering case and false witness testimony from a person who is an admitted liar to try to criminalize me,” Donziger told The Intercept and Type in a written statement. “They wanted to use this bogus RICO case to try to get people to forget about the human devastation Chevron caused in Ecuador.”
Witnesses in Dispute
About a year after Kaplan blocked the Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron, Drummond filed RICO charges against Collingsworth.
Although the company had already prevailed against several of his lawsuits, Collingsworth forged ahead with new legal actions, adding witnesses who offered firsthand testimony alleging that the coal company was complicit in the union leaders’ murders.
One of these witnesses was an imprisoned former paramilitary commander called El Tigre, or the Tiger, who testified that Drummond provided regular payments to his unit. Another key witness was Jaime Blanco, the food contractor who was ultimately convicted of the murders, who said Drummond used his company as a conduit to funnel money to the paramilitaries and directed them to commit the murders.
Collingsworth made payments to El Tigre’s family members and helped arrange financing for Blanco’s legal defense when he agreed to testify. He said the funds he provided to El Tigre’s family were security payments to help the family relocate in order to avoid violent retaliation by the paramilitaries, Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, which the U.S. State Department designated as a terrorist group in 2001. In response to a court order, Collingsworth disclosed similar payments to relatives of three ex-paramilitary witnesses, but he failed to include the payments to El Tigre and two other ex-paramilitaries, as well as his arrangement with Blanco.
Drummond’s media office did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails requesting comment for this story, and attorneys for Drummond declined to comment.
Colombian authorities have backed up key elements of Collingsworth and El Tigre’s account. In December 2020, the Colombian Attorney General’s Office charged the current and former presidents of Drummond’s Colombian subsidiary with conspiracy in the union leaders’ murders. The 149-page charging document included a summary of a forensic analysis that found evidence of more than $3.7 million in overpayments from the subsidiary to Blanco’s company, bolstering allegations that Drummond had financed the paramilitaries.
Prosecutors also noted that numerous witnesses who did not receive security payments had testified to the same facts. The accounts of El Tigre and other disputed witnesses, they wrote, were “in harmony with and verified by other forms of proof.”
This fall, prosecutors named Drummond’s Colombian subsidiary as a “civilly responsible third party” in the case of the union leaders’ murders.
Though its Colombian subsidiary is now in the crosshairs of prosecutors, Drummond has had more success against Collingsworth in the United States.
In 2015, Drummond filed a civil RICO suit charging that Collingsworth had bribed El Tigre, Blanco, and other witnesses to falsely testify that Drummond was involved in the murders, as part of a racketeering conspiracy to strong-arm the coal producer into paying a hefty settlement. The company pointed to inconsistencies in their testimonies, noting previous statements in which they denied that Drummond had worked with the paramilitaries before they became witnesses for Collingsworth.
The case, which focused on the undisclosed payments to witnesses, was heard by a federal judge who had ruled in Drummond’s favor in earlier litigation with Collingsworth, Judge R. David Proctor of the Northern District of Alabama.
Collingsworth said in court filings that the omissions were an “inadvertent disclosure error” resulting from miscommunication with his co-counsel in Colombia. He said he had failed to include the payments in an initial disclosure and then recycled his answer repeatedly before realizing his error. He also apologized to the judge for making a “terrible mistake” in not revealing his arrangement with Blanco, which he had previously deemed to be outside the scope of required disclosures.
“Sitting here now, boy, I wish I had just disclosed it,” Collingsworth said in a phone interview. “Because it wasn’t hiding the truth or changing the testimony.”
The real question, Collingsworth said, is whether the payments to the witnesses in Colombia were ethical and necessary for their safety. The security arrangements were needed for them to testify truthfully without endangering their families, he said, noting that he reviewed all arrangements in advance with ethics lawyers and turned down witnesses who sought to exchange testimony for cash. He fiercely defends his decision to help relocate the families of former paramilitaries and submitted testimony supporting the need for security payments by expert witnesses including Javier Peña, the former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who led the mission that killed cartel leader Pablo Escobar and inspired the Netflix series “Narcos.”
“It was morally necessary to protect these families from one of the most brutal groups that roamed the earth,” Collingsworth said.
In December 2015, Proctor ruled that Drummond’s RICO case could go forward, finding that Collingsworth’s explanation for the undisclosed payments was “as weak as it is incredible.” He held that there was probable cause to believe that Collingsworth had bribed witnesses and suborned perjury, opening the door to the extensive discovery process that Chevron had effectively used against Donziger.
It was the beginning of years of legal wrangling that Collingsworth said drained the resources of his small human rights firm.
Collingsworth said he has spent some 2,000 hours — what a lawyer usually bills in a year — defending against Drummond’s charges. Even more damaging, he said, has been the impact on his professional reputation, which he says has deprived him of business opportunities and revenue.
“I have had colleagues who are in law firms tell me that they can’t collaborate with me until these charges are completely resolved in my favor, because they don’t want to be accused of associating with someone who bribes witnesses,” Collingsworth said.
Steinhardt, the human rights law professor, said the facts of the case aren’t black and white, but the charges against Collingsworth are disproportionate. “He isn’t a racketeer,” Steinhardt said.
A Chilling Effect
The success of these cases paved the way for increasingly aggressive uses of civil RICO.
Around 2012, Greenpeace and other environmental groups launched a protest campaign against Resolute Forest Products, accusing the forestry company of destroying boreal forests in Canada. Several years later, Greenpeace and others began another campaign targeting Energy Transfer Partners (now part of Energy Transfer LP), the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline. This campaign charged, among other things, that the company was threatening Indigenous communities’ water supply and sacred sites. Greenpeace and its allies rallied their members, drove media coverage, and urged the companies’ business partners to sever ties unless the companies changed course.
The two companies filed RICO charges against Greenpeace and the other groups in 2016 and 2017. Both were represented by the firm Kasowitz Benson Torres, whose founding partner Marc Kasowitz was a longtime personal attorney for Donald Trump and filed a defamation case against one of Trump’s critics. (First Look Institute, the nonprofit that publishes The Intercept, is involved in litigation with Energy Transfer, represented by the Kasowitz firm, over records related to the Dakota Access pipeline.)
Michael Bowe, the former Kasowitz partner who brought the RICO cases, told Bloomberg in August 2017 that he was in contact with other companies considering similar actions and “would be shocked if there are not many more.” He anticipates an increase in these actions, he wrote in response to questions from Type and The Intercept, because “the online nature of activism and speech generally makes it easier and more common to widely disseminate false claims and inflict great harm.”
The cases against Greenpeace took the RICO strategy well beyond the arguments made by Chevron and Drummond. They argued that common advocacy techniques such as naming-and-shaming campaigns and fundraising amounted to RICO offenses if the campaigns included false allegations. Greenpeace’s campaign against Resolute included an inaccurate claim that Resolute had logged in protected forests, which Greenpeace later retracted, saying it had made a mistake. Resolute accused Greenpeace of intentionally fabricating the claim in order to extort the company, calling the organization a “global fraud” that existed to maximize donations rather than protect the environment.
“The claims against Donziger aren’t claims against environmentalism as it operates,” said Joshua Galperin, an environmental law professor at Pace Law School. “But the claims against Greenpeace and others are much more broad, essentially saying, ‘Your activism is racketeering.’”
Bowe disputed this characterization. “The case is not about activism, it is about lies,” he wrote. “Legitimate activism is truthful.”
Krystal Two Bulls, an organizer who participated in the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, was added as a defendant in the racketeering suit brought by Energy Transfer in 2018, after a judge found that the initial complaint was too vague to support RICO claims. The company charged that Two Bulls, a media liaison for a group of protesters called Red Warrior Camp, had sought to “provide cover for their illegal activities” by issuing public calls to action on the group’s behalf. They accused Red Warrior Camp of being a “front for eco-terrorists” who engaged in violent attacks on construction sites. News reports state that while members of the camp occupied private land to block pipeline construction, police and security guards carried out much of the violence — using water hoses, rubber bullets, and tear gas against protesters.
Two Bulls, a U.S. Army veteran and a member of the Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne, was shocked when she learned she had been charged with racketeering.
“I remember thinking, what am I supposed to do with this?” she said. “I have no lawyer. I have no money for a lawyer.”
Two Bulls was represented pro bono by the nonprofit law firms Center for Constitutional Rights and EarthRights International. She considers herself lucky that colleagues in the environmental movement connected her with these lawyers but recalls a heavy weight on her shoulders while the charges were pending. She felt like her presence was a liability to her fellow activists.
“It made me second guess myself and the spaces I entered,” Two Bulls said. “I started to censor myself in the things I was saying.”
Laura Lee Prather, a partner at Haynes Boone who specializes in First Amendment law, said civil RICO claims often lead to extended litigation because they depend heavily on the facts of the case. Defamation charges can be thrown out if the defendant can affirmatively show their statements were true. By contrast, a civil RICO claim usually requires a more complex defense.
“Civil RICO is much more difficult to have a court feel comfortable dismissing at any early stage,” Prather said.
Federal judges in California and North Dakota dismissed the RICO claims in both cases almost a year and a half after they were filed. In the Resolute case, the judge ruled that the company failed to prove that Greenpeace’s fundraising claims had directly caused the alleged harm it suffered. He later ordered the company to pay more than $800,000 of Greenpeace’s legal costs.
Resolute noted that other charges it has brought against Greenpeace, alleging defamation and unfair competition, were allowed to proceed and are still before the courts. “The long-running dispute with activists has been about standing up for our communities to defend our sustainable practices against misrepresentation,” Resolute spokesperson Seth Kursman said in a statement.
In the case of Energy Transfer, the judge ruled that the company failed to prove that the various actors involved in the Standing Rock protests were a coordinated “RICO enterprise.”
“While there is a common purpose among defendants — they all oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline — there is no ongoing organization, no continuing unit, and no ascertainable structure apart from the alleged RICO violations,” U.S. District Judge Billy Roy Wilson wrote in February 2019. “That is far short of what is needed to establish a RICO enterprise.”
Energy Transfer did not respond to email or telephone inquiries. A week after its RICO charges were dismissed, the company filed charges in North Dakota state court, accusing Greenpeace, Two Bulls, and others of trespass, defamation, and civil conspiracy for their role in the Standing Rock protests. The litigation is ongoing.
Protecting the Protest
The RICO attacks on Greenpeace and its allies alarmed civil society organizations, which feared that the cases would deter advocacy groups from speaking out against big corporations. In 2018, a coalition of organizations founded Protect the Protest to combat lawsuits meant to silence free speech, which are known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs. These lawsuits can include RICO claims but have also proliferated in other ways. Telltale signs of a SLAPP, according to the coalition, are claims that target activities protected by the First Amendment, seek to exploit a power imbalance, and threaten to bankrupt defendants.
“Civil society is not just going to lay down and take this,” said Marco Simons, the general counsel for EarthRights International and a member of the coalition.
Simons believes the coalition’s recent work calling attention to the Greenpeace lawsuits has, for the time being, discouraged companies from attempting more RICO suits that broadly target activism. But Protect the Protest is still seeking more permanent solutions.
The coalition aims to crack down on these suits by promoting anti-SLAPP laws, which provide fast-track procedures for dismissing SLAPPs and shifting their legal costs to the party that filed them. More than half of U.S. states have some version of an anti-SLAPP law.
Ken White, the former prosecutor, said that state anti-SLAPP laws have been highly effective, both in deterring abusive lawsuits and providing a defense mechanism for their targets. But RICO is a federal law.
In September, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., introduced the SLAPP Protection Act of 2022, a federal bill that, like the state laws, would provide an expedited process for getting SLAPPs thrown out. Raskin singled out the fossil fuel industry for abusing the “legal system by deploying costly, protracted, and meritless lawsuits to target activists.”
A law providing a uniform standard for dismissing such lawsuits across federal courts would make it “much harder to abuse the system,” White said.
As advocates search for solutions, Drummond is pressing ahead with its RICO case against Collingsworth. The company subpoenaed VICE Media last year for raw audio recordings from a podcast about the union leaders’ murders. On March 7, Proctor, the judge, ruled in Drummond’s favor, ordering VICE to turn over recordings of its interviews with Collingsworth, Blanco, and another witness.
Collingsworth said that he doesn’t fear losing in court, but the looming racketeering charges have taken a toll psychologically.
“It has caused me emotional turmoil because some people view me differently,” he said. “There is a question mark over my name.”
The coming months are expected to bring new developments in his legal battle with the coal company. Attorneys will take depositions from witnesses in Colombia for Drummond’s RICO suit and a more recent suit brought by Collingsworth. Meanwhile, Colombian prosecutors have resumed work in their case against the current and former presidents of Drummond’s Colombian subsidiary, seeking testimony from a former paramilitary leader in October. The defendants have appealed the decision to charge them with conspiring in Orcasita’s and Locarno’s murders, and the appeal must be decided before the case can go to trial, according to Ivan Otero, Collingsworth’s co-counsel in Colombia.
More than 21 years after her husband’s murder, Elisa Orcasita is still skeptical of Colombian justice but is hoping for a clean trial.
“We pray to God that there’s no more buying of anything, no more influence of anything,” she said. “That’s what we hope for as victims.”
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Former president Donald Trump speaks at a political rally in Warren, Mich., on Oct. 1. (photo: Sarah Rice/WP)
The inside story of how Trump transplanted the chaos and norm flouting of his White House into his post-presidential life, leading to a criminal investigation into his handling of classified documents that presents potential legal peril
There was no scheduler, either, nor a press aide. Only one person staffed Trump at the gathering with antisemites that drew days of denunciations: Walt Nauta, a cook and military valet in the Trump White House who is now employed as an all-purpose gofer for the former president and who ushered the group to the table before leaving them alone to talk. Nauta has continued to serve Trump loyally at Mar-a-Lago, even as he has emerged as a key witness in the Justice Department’s investigation of whether Trump purposely hid classified documents stored at the club from authorities.
The Nov. 22 dinner, described by three people familiar with the event, neatly encapsulates Trump’s post-presidential life — a reminder of how a former president who worked steadily to dismantle the government guardrails imposed by his elected office is now almost entirely without restraint.
From almost the instant it became clear he had lost the 2020 election, Trump refused to accept the results, creating a disorganized transition process during which he rebuffed efforts to prepare for his post-presidency.
In the two years since he left office, Trump has re-created the conditions of his own freewheeling White House — with all of its chaos, norm flouting and catering to his ego — with little regard for the law. With this behavior, Trump prompted a criminal investigation into his post-presidential handling of classified documents to compound the ongoing one into his and his allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election results — which presents potential legal peril and risks hobbling his nascent bid to be elected president again in 2024.
Even as he works to convince supporters that the documents probe is the result of an overblown paperwork dispute, and that the FBI’s Aug. 8 search of his Mar-a-Lago Club was an abuse of power, the investigation is in fact a product of how Trump has approached post-presidential life.
Though few rules guide the life of a former president, Trump has exhibited a characteristic disinterest in following any of them. These days, he is served almost exclusively by sycophants, having replaced successive rounds of loyal yet inexperienced aides with staffers even more beholden and novice.
Natalie Harp, one of Trump’s employees and a former host on the pro-Trump cable network One America News, often accompanies Trump on his daily golf outings, riding the course in a golf cart equipped with a laptop and sometimes a printer to show him uplifting news articles, online posts or other materials.
On some quiet days, another aide, Molly Michael, who served as Trump’s assistant in the White House, has called around to Trump’s network of allies across the country requesting that they dial the former president to boost his spirits with positive affirmations. There’s nothing going on, she has told them, adding that his friends know how restless he gets when nothing is going on, according to people who have heard her appeal.
Multiple Trump advisers said there is no senior aide living in Florida full time, with advisers flying in and out as needed. “He needs someone there to say, ‘Here’s a really bad idea, and this is why.’ I don’t think he has that kind of crowd around him right now. Nor does the president want anybody like that,” said David Urban, a longtime Trump adviser turned critic.
Like he did as president, Trump has looked for ways to turn a profit with his new arrangement: Trump’s staff tried, unsuccessfully, to get the General Services Administration to pay rent at Mar-a-Lago — potentially for his lifetime — for the office space he has created for himself above the club’s ballroom.
A longtime Trump confidant termed his Mar-a-Lago existence, where he has tried to re-create the trappings of the presidency, as “sad.” Comparing it to life at the White House, this person added, “It’s like a Barbie Dream House miniature.”
This behind-the-scenes account of Trump’s post-presidential life is based on interviews with 23 people, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private details about Trump and his orbit, many of which have not been previously reported.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung responded to questions about this reporting with a statement that said Trump “spent the last two years continuing to build up the MAGA movement and helping elect America First candidates across the country, to the tune of a 98.6% endorsement record in primary elections.”
“There is nobody who has worked harder to advance the conservative movement. After years of biased media coverage and Big Tech meddling in an election to help Joe Biden and the Democrats, President Trump continues to be the single, most dominant force in politics and people— especially unnamed sources who purport to be close to him— should never doubt his ability to win in a decisive and commanding fashion,” he added.
Observers and some Trump allies alike believe that after years of investigations into Trump’s conduct, it is his behavior since leaving office that may be most likely to lead to his criminal indictment — for mishandling classified documents and obstructing the work of federal investigators hunting for those records.
“I think it’s pretty obvious, when there was no around to tell you that, ‘No, Mr. President, you cannot do that,’ it just leads inevitably to this kind of problem,” said Chris Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers,” a history of White House chiefs of staff.
“In a way it looks almost like the Trump Presidency 2.0,” he said. “Just no guard rails, on steroids.”
‘Opportunities for messing up’
Trump is hardly the first ex-president to struggle with life as a private citizen after the heady experience of holding the world’s most powerful job. Bill Clinton, for instance, filled hours in his first months after leaving office holed up at home in Chappaqua, N.Y., bingeing TV shows and movies he had missed as president on a TiVo gifted to him by the Hollywood director Steven Spielberg.
Most former presidents have compensated for the boredom by throwing themselves into the task of crafting a new kind of public life, pursuing charitable goals and managing their legacies through books and the building of a presidential library.
But not Trump. Unwilling to accept the reality of his November 2020 election loss to President Biden, Trump resisted efforts to plan for his post-presidential life, according to people close to him. The result was a delayed, chaotic and little-thought-out process that many around Trump believe set the stage for troubles to come.
In his final weeks in office, White House staffers interested in working for Trump after he stepped down were required to engage in a strange dance in which they competed for post-presidential jobs without admitting there would be no second Trump term — a concession that risked angering the outgoing president and thereby eliminating them from consideration. It was all “cloak and daggers,” said one person familiar with the dynamic.
By law, presidents and vice presidents leaving office are together provided up to $2.6 million in public funds to “wind down” their offices, pay staff salaries, rent office space and buy supplies like copy paper and pens. Once requested, the money can be accessed for 30 days prior to leaving office and up to six months after.
Documents released by the GSA show that Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows did not sign a formal agreement requesting the money until Jan. 11, five days after the attack on the U.S. Capitol and several weeks after funding would have otherwise been available by law.
The delay impacted aides to Vice President Mike Pence, too, who could only then begin to tap the funds and start looking for office space to locate transition offices. Over the frantic days that followed, they selected the 12th floor of a generic-looking office tower managed by the GSA in Crystal City, near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Northern Virginia. Not long after, Trump aides contacted Pence’s team, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Though many around Pence believed Trump had endangered the life of his vice president during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, now Trump’s team asked: Could they use the Crystal City space for transition offices as well?
While Meadows signed the GSA document, the work of transitioning Trump to life in Florida actually fell to lower level staffers — including operations aide William “Beau” Harrison, body man Nick Luna and his personal assistant Michael — who held less sway with the outgoing president and knew less about government functions, people familiar with the transition said. Harrison, Luna and Michael declined to comment about their roles in the transition.
All administration documents, which represent the public historical record of a president’s time in office, are required by law to be sent to the National Archives and Records Administration at the end of the term for safekeeping. Gifts given to the president are also supposed to go to the Archives no later than Inauguration Day, unless the president pays the government an amount equivalent to the item’s appraised value.
Archives officials had been working with a military team since December 2020 to pack up and ship documents and gifts from the White House offices to storage in Maryland, with trucks going back and forth on a nearly daily basis until Trump left office on Jan. 20, 2021. But as his remaining days ticked down, they became concerned about boxes of documents that Trump had taken back to the White House residence. Meanwhile, a Jan. 11 email from Harrison to GSA officials shows he anticipated as many as 100 boxes of presidential gifts would be stored at the Crystal City office after Trump left the White House.
People around Trump said they believe the chaotic transition played a key role in Trump’s ability to carry off thousands of government documents to his Florida club. It also meant that the Crystal City office was crammed with leftover stuff from the Trump White House with no apparent organization and little knowledge of what was even there.
The emails were released by the GSA on the agency’s website in response to a public records request from Bloomberg News. They track a chaotic effort to move the leftovers of Trump’s concluded term to Florida and frequent confusion over what was owned by the American people and what was owned by Trump.
In April 2021, a Trump aide emailed a GSA official to ask if the agency’s transition funds could be used to ship an enormous portrait of Trump to Florida. The painting, she explained, weighed 300 pounds and measured 6 by 8 feet in its crate.
“I am so sorry to ask — this is a weird one!” wrote Trump aide Desiree Thompson Sayle. After several days, the GSA official responded that the agency’s lawyers had nixed the request. “Since this is personal property, GSA Transition funds cannot be used for this shipping,” GSA official Kathy Geisler responded. In July, Sayle followed up to explain the team’s resolution for the painting, which was apparently given to Trump after the presidency ended: “We are loading the large portrait received after the 21st on a Penske truck to transport to my house so I can put it on my moving van.” Neither Sayle nor Geisler responded to requests for comment.
Max Stier, the president of the Partnership for Public Service, which assists with transitions, said the process for winding down a presidency can be challenging. But, he added, “it’s a lot harder if you start from the proposition that [the trappings of office] belong to you, than if you start with the proposition that it belongs to the office and to the country.”
“In a complicated process, if you don’t have the right underlying ethos, the opportunities for messing up are much larger,” he said.
As July 2021 drew to a close and Trump staff were losing access to transition funds, the emails show they raced to close down the Crystal City office and ship the remaining items to Florida, where Trump had now established his primary base of operations at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. He was now a Floridian, having changed his voter registration from New York to Florida. Emails show GSA officials rented an 8-by-10-foot storage unit in July 2021 for the former president at a private facility in nearby West Palm Beach and then arranged to ship more than 3,000 pounds of boxes from Virginia to the unit, as well as another nearly 1,500 pounds of boxes to Mar-a-Lago in September.
The documents show one employee who was listed as a contact for the shipment to the storage unit was Kitty Gubello, a longtime employee of Mar-a-Lago — an example of how thoroughly Trump intermingled his public and private lives. (Asked for comment, Gubello wrote in a text message: “My allegiance is to the club and the family. You will get nothing out of me.”)
Lawyers for Trump found two items with classification markings during a recent search of the storage unit, The Washington Post has reported. The discovery meant the items had likely followed a circuitous path since Trump left office, moving from the White House to Crystal City to the West Palm Beach unit, spending nearly two years in facilities that lacked security features required for the storage of classified materials.
One person familiar with the Virginia office called it “not especially secure” — the 12th floor of a high rise, where people came and went. Meanwhile, the storage facility, located off a busy interstate in West Palm Beach, lacks visible security guards near the rear entrance. People come and go there as well. Inside are hundreds of numbered storage units with locked metal garage doors. Representatives of the facility did not respond to a request to comment about security measures.
Trump advisers who helped oversee moving the boxes to Mar-a-Lago and the storage facility said there was no cataloguing system or organizational structure to track what ended up where — and the storage room was initially packed.
After transition funding lapses, former presidents are still by law afforded some financial support for the remainder of their lives, including funding for “suitable office space,” as determined by the GSA.
For Trump’s personal use, his young aides spent months redecorating office space located above the 20,000-square-foot ballroom at his Florida club. The former president personally directed the process, choosing the furniture, rugs and paintings, and designating which mementos of his time in office would be displayed. Even so, people familiar with the process said aides fretted he would deem the redesigned space insufficient after four years in the Oval Office.
At some point, his aides requested that the GSA formally lease the space from Mar-a-Lago for his use as a post-presidential office — an arrangement that would have directed a stream of taxpayer money back to Trump, potentially for the remainder of his life — a person familiar with the request said. The GSA declined, instead leasing office space in West Palm Beach.
A GSA spokesperson said the agency discussed “a variety of lease options” for Trump’s permanent use, “including the possibility of a lease at Mar-a-Lago.” The spokesperson said the conversations were “preliminary,” did not result in a deal and the agency currently pays no money to Trump-owned properties.
‘There are no protocols’
Trump took time to readjust to his post-presidential life. He was surprised by how much his Secret Service detail and motorcade had shrunk. He no longer had use of a major aircraft; Air Force One was unavailable to him, and his company’s TRUMP-emblazoned Boeing 757 was in the shop — repairs that took years, with delays that infuriated him. His living spaces were far smaller than the White House. And he was annoyed that his statements to the press were not getting much attention, four advisers said.
At one point in early 2021, Trump asked a team of advisers if he could summon a press pool — like the contingent of reporters, photographers and videographers who travel with the president — for an event at his Florida club. But there was no pool on call because he was no longer president.
“We had to explain to him that he didn’t have a group standing around waiting for him anymore,” one former aide said.
Instead, they gathered the few reporters who happened to be reporting in Palm Beach, two people familiar with the matter said.
He was routinely angry, advisers said, about being removed from social media, particularly his beloved Twitter, where his account was suspended two days after Jan. 6, 2021, for risking further violence with his false tweets. His mood was foul for months, as he paid attention to little else than the lost election, conspiracy theories to explain away the Jan. 6 attack and mounting legal bills from a rotating cast of attorneys he spoke to daily.
“It was a really dark, dark time,” the aide said, recalling that staff would ask “are you going to set up a library? What’s your post-presidential foundation?”
“He wasn’t interested in any of that at all,” the aide added.
People who know Trump said the need for attention that has been a driving force throughout his life has not dwindled since he left the office that shone on him the world’s brightest spotlight. That has pushed him to seek adulation from a court of supplicants who pay for access to Trump at his Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster, N.J., clubs, where he has spent most of his time.
“The appetite for attention hasn’t waned, but that’s where he gets it now,” a Trump confidant said. “The networks don’t carry his rallies. He doesn’t get interviews anymore. He can’t stand under the wing of Air Force One and gaggle [with reporters] for an hour.”
Trump rarely agrees to interviews these days with independent journalists that could become confrontational; several advisers noted he recently granted an interview with NewsNation’s Markie Martin, the sister of his longtime press aide, Margo Martin.
On a typical day since leaving office, advisers said, Trump gets up early, makes phone calls, watches television and reads some newspapers. Then, six days a week, he plays 18 or sometimes 27 holes of golf at one of his courses. After lunch, he changes into a suit from his golf shirt and slacks and shows up in the office above the Mar-a-Lago ballroom or, when he is in New Jersey, a similar office in a cottage near the Bedminster club’s pool.
By evening, Trump emerges for dinner, surrounded most nights by adoring club members who stand and applaud at his appearance; they stand and applaud again after he finishes his meal and retires for the night. He often orders special meals from the kitchen and spends time curating the music wafting over the crowd, frequently pushing for the volume to be raised or lowered based on his mood. In the Oval Office, Trump had a button he could push to summon an aide to bring him a Diet Coke or snacks. Now, he just yells out commands to whichever employee is in earshot.
At times, Trump makes unannounced visits at weddings, gala benefits and other events being hosted by paying customers in Mar-a-Lago’s ballroom, basking as attendees mob him for selfies. He has also attended fundraisers there; many Republican candidates have paid Trump to use his club as a venue at which to raise campaign funds.
“There are no protocols. He plays golf. He meets with people in the afternoon. He really doesn’t do a lot of consequence most days,” one person in his orbit said.
At times, advisers said, he becomes absorbed in his role as the de facto leader of the Republican Party, bringing about $150 million into his main fundraising vehicle and doling out endorsements to reward supporters and punish critics. At others, he appears aimless and rooted in the past, obsessing about an election two years ago and petty slights.
Harp, who has worked for Trump since the spring, offered a different view, writing in an email that the former president is “constantly busy and working.”
“In fact, I can’t believe how much work he is able to get done,” she wrote.
As a private citizen, Trump is far more isolated than he was as president. He makes virtually no public appearances outside of political rallies where he is surrounded by even larger crowds of screaming fans. (Despite declaring his reelection campaign in the Mar-a-Lago ballroom on Nov. 15, he has not emerged from his cocoon for a rally out in the country since then.) He takes no vacations to properties he does not own. He almost never encounters people willing to challenge his behavior — much less true political opponents.
Several people close to Trump said there are only a few people who are willing to deliver bad news left in his orbit, political adviser Susan Wiles chief among them. His circle has shrunken considerably, with many of his longtime allies attempting to avoid dinner invites — and some even weighing roles with other 2024 candidates.
“No one wants to confront him because he can be a beast,” one adviser said. After the dinner with Fuentes and West, who now goes by the name Ye, advisers to Trump were flooded with calls from allies, lawmakers and others questioning the decision and urging him to apologize. Trump received few of them himself, however, people familiar with the matter said.
Some longtime aides are particularly distressed by the influence of Harp, 31, who is rarely absent from his side. She is said to cater attentively to his need for constant praise. While other advisers have urged Trump to vet his statements to the social media platform Truth Social, Harp has been willing to post whatever Trump wants without review. She often perches herself right outside his office, two advisers said, and follows Trump around all day, including on the golf course.
“She is indicative of the people around him who just love him,” the adviser said. “Love him too much.”
“Like other staffers, I do spend time with him,” Harp wrote, adding that she has “a great respect” for Trump.
“He is extremely popular with the people,” she wrote. “I see that by being with him.”
Cheung, the Trump spokesman, defended Harp: “Among many other talented members of the team, Natalie is dedicated and loyal and has been invaluable.”
Michael, 30, was also known for her loyalty — both in the White House, where she served as an assistant posted immediately outside the Oval Office, and at Mar-a-Lago in the post-presidency. She had a reputation in the White House for always being ready with the answer Trump wanted or the piece of paper he needed. “She just understands how Trump wanted things,” said one former colleague.
Michael left Trump’s employ late this summer, after being questioned by investigators about how Trump handled documents.
One of the only aides who worked for Trump in the White House and still spends significant time in his presence is Nauta, people close to Trump said. A native of Guam, Nauta enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 2001 and was promoted from the White House mess to serve as the president’s valet not long after Trump took office. In that role, he spent all day in and out of the Oval Office, bringing the president glasses of Diet Coke, fetching his coat and moving documents from room to room — duties not unlike those he performs for Trump now that he is out of office. In Trump’s world, where rivalries are common, Nauta is widely liked and perceived as a genuinely nice guy.
Prosecutors have been seeking to secure cooperation from Nauta in the investigation of classified documents stored at Mar-a-Lago, people familiar with the case have said. When first questioned by the FBI, they said he denied any knowledge or awareness of sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago. When questioned a second time, however, he told investigators he moved boxes at Trump’s direction after a grand jury subpoena in May was delivered demanding the return of any documents with classified markings. Nauta is one of several potentially key witnesses whose lawyers’ fees are being paid through Trump’s political action committee, Save America. Some experts have said the arrangement could influence Nauta’s testimony.
Even when Trump was president, former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly said senior staff dreaded the time the president spent at the 17-acre club in Palm Beach because he would often return to Washington brimming with off-the-wall ideas planted by Mar-a-Lago members.
“So many of the members knew exactly how to get what they wanted from him. It was all about his vanity,” Kelly said. “It was never good when he was there for long periods of time.”
Now that he is away from the security of the White House, people close to Trump say more random figures around the country have his personal cellphone number and can easily get access to him, particularly if they play to his obsession with false theories that the 2020 election was stolen. As a confidant put it, “Some guy from Arizona is calling and saying, ‘You won’t believe the fraud we saw.’”
Since the November dinner with Ye and Fuentes, advisers have attempted to install a bit more structure, trying to keep a top aide with him at all times and saying they plan to hire more Florida-based staff next year for the campaign. But one former aide said recent events show how security and political protocols have fallen away from Trump, starting in the White House and accelerating in the two years since.
“At first it was: how did Omarosa get in here?” the former aide said, referring to the former reality show star who caused a stir when she briefly was able to secure a White House job early in Trump’s tenure.
“Then it was: What is Sidney Powell doing here?” the former aide said, describing the moment in December 2020 when a group including the lawyer was able to talk their way into an Oval Office meeting with Trump to discuss overturning the election.
“Now it is: What was Nick Fuentes doing having dinner with Trump?” the former aide concluded.
‘What happened to the rest of the boxes?’
The May 2021 email from a top official at the National Archives did not initially set off alarm bells for Trump’s team. In the email, the official flagged that some high-profile documents from Trump’s time in office appeared to be missing from the records his team had turned over as he was leaving the White House. “It is absolutely necessary that we obtain and account for all presidential records,” the Archives official wrote.
But for months, Trump resisted the Archives’ request that he return the documents, informing staffers that boxes at Mar-a-Lago contained only news clippings, golf clothes, gifts and nonsensitive documents. What’s more, he argued that anything from his time as president was his to keep. Told by one aide in October 2021 that Archives officials had made a determination that missing records belonged to the American people and needed to be returned to the government, Trump responded, “It’s a bunch of crap,” according to one of his advisers.
Trump agreed to return some of the boxes only after the Archives threatened to notify Congress or the Justice Department. Trump packed the boxes himself, Michael told others. Those offering to help were warned by one of Trump’s lawyers, Alex Cannon, that doing so could put them in jeopardy, the adviser said.
Finally in December 2021, Trump aides informed the Archives that some notable documents had been located, including correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that Trump had once touted as “love letters.”
The following month, Trump returned 15 boxes to the National Archives. Some of his aides were immediately worried. They knew there had been more than 15 boxes stashed in a storage room in a basement area beneath the public areas of Mar-a-Lago. “What happened to the rest of the boxes?” one lawyer asked others, according to the Trump adviser.
In February, Trump told his team to release a public statement that all materials had been returned, and inform the Archives of the same. His spokesman and lawyer declined, people familiar with the matter said.
The lawyers working on the case — Cannon, former deputy White House counsel Pat Philbin and others — were soon replaced by a coterie of lawyers who told Trump what he wanted to hear. That group formally included Boris Epshteyn and Evan Corcoran, as well as Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, who played an informal role. Fitton argued that presidents are allowed to deem their records personal, a claim Trump echoed to his lawyers. Fitton declined to comment on his role.
When Archives officials opened the boxes they received from Florida, they soon discovered that some documents inside had markings indicating they were classified at the highest levels. They contacted the FBI. By May, after interviewing Trump aides, authorities were convinced that additional classified records might still be held at Mar-a-Lago and sent a grand jury subpoena seeking their return.
In June, two Trump lawyers met with Justice Department officials and turned over a taped up folder containing 38 documents with classification markings. One of the lawyers, Christina Bobb, also provided a signed statement saying she had been told boxes sent to Florida from the White House had been diligently searched and no other documents with markings were in Trump’s possession.
But when the FBI returned in August, this time with a court authorized search warrant, they gathered 103 classified documents, and took an additional 13,000 documents after examining a storage area in the byzantine lower levels of the club and Trump’s office and residence at the club.
The Ye dinner just before Thanksgiving reinforced questions that had already been raised about storing highly sensitive material at the club, which hosts regular public events and where some guests and employees are foreign nationals. National security experts and even some former Trump staff have called the club a counterintelligence headache.
In 2019, for instance, a Chinese national was arrested carrying phones and other electronic devices after getting past a reception area by saying she was headed to the pool. People who have visited the club since Trump left office have said security is even more lax now, with guests often able to access the property without even showing an identification.
Karen Giorno, the former Trump adviser who brought Ye and Fuentes to the club, has told others that she had forgotten her driver’s license when she arrived for dinner and was able to access the property by showing a security guard a bank card with her name on it.
While Trump continues to receive Secret Service protection as a former president, the detail is there to guard him, not provide broader security to the club. When one aide recommended the club subject visitors to more thorough vetting, Trump replied, “The members need to be able to come and go,” according to someone familiar with the exchange. He has told advisers that security is not a problem since everyone visiting the club loves him.
The club, meanwhile, is bordered by residential streets, including one to the north which ends at a gate with only a small sign to warn away trespassers.
Visited on a day late last month — four months after the club was searched by the FBI, and just as scandal was breaking over how easily Ye’s entourage was able to access the facility — there were no security guards at the entry point to the former president’s home.
The gate stood open.
A section of the Bohorodchany Iconostasis in the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Kyiv is moved to safety in March. (photo: Bernat Armangué/AP)
Experts monitoring the loss of Scythian artefacts have been shocked at scale of theft by Putin’s forces
The fabulous gold weapons and ornaments they left behind ended up in museums across the region, many of them in Ukraine. Since Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February, however, much Scythian gold – along with millions of other priceless artefacts – has been looted or “evacuated”.
Serhii Telizhenko, of the National Institute of Archaeology in Kyiv, who has been monitoring the wave of destruction, said he realised there would be losses after the invasion, “but I could not imagine the scale”.
Some museums managed to move their collections to safety in time. They include Odesa’s archaeological museum and one in Melitopol that holds Ukraine’s most important collection of Scythian gold. Meanwhile Irina Shramko, director of Kharkiv’s archaeological museum, and her colleagues have been spending their nights close to their Scythian and bronze age treasures.
“This is the case all over Ukraine,” said Regina Uhl of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, which has been providing money and materials for its Ukrainian colleagues. “They thought they could protect the objects better if they were closer.”
However the rapidity of the Russian occupation in the east of the country, especially, meant many museums had no time to implement their evacuation plans. Local history museums in Lyman, in the Donetsk region, and Rubizhne in Luhansk had been destroyed, Telizhenko said, and the fate of their collections was unknown.
The museum of local lore in Mariupol, which also had an important collection of Scythian gold, was badly shelled in the spring, and in April Russian media announced that about 2,000 objects had been removed from it to the occupied city of Donetsk. They include priceless paintings by Arkhip Kuindzhi and Ivan Aivazovsky.
Ukrainian intelligence claims that much of the material taken from its museums has found its way to Crimea. Telizhenko cited reports that in late October, employees of the Chersonese state museum in Sevastopol, Crimea, arrived at the Kherson regional museum of local lore to remove its collection.
While this report is hard to confirm, it is corroborated by sources in the country as well as exchanges in virtual forums being monitored from outside Ukraine. Much of the destruction and removal of objects has been documented photographically, and the photos published on a website set up by the Ukrainian government to record “culture crimes”.
The website includes images of damaged archaeological sites. Telizhenko said that some of the destruction predated the current conflict. Russian troops began building defensive structures on a cluster of bronze age burial mounds near the village in Dovhe in the Luhansk region in 2017, he said. “The integrity of this complex is lost forever,” he said of the 5,000-year-old site. “There are many such cases, because the warring parties use the features of the terrain for self-defence.”
Archaeologist Mykhailo Videiko of Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University confirmed this: “They dig in for defence, often in places where people did the same hundreds and thousands of years ago.” He noted that ramparts up to nine metres high, built by the princes of Kyiv in the 10th century to repel eastern marauders, successfully repelled Russian tanks more than 12 centuries later.
Sam Hardy, head of illicit trade research at international charity the Heritage Management Organisation, said the loss of ancient sites’ integrity was more serious than the loss of priceless artefacts. “The thing that we get the information from is the context, the relationship between everything, the site rather than the individual object,” he said.
Hardy said that there had been organised removal efforts by the Russians in territories they had occupied, and looting by Ukrainians and Russians – though mostly by Russians. “There’s a huge problem of legal nihilism in both societies,” he says. “People don’t really feel that the law exists or is implemented fairly.”
His monitoring of Russian media and internet channels indicates that some collections removed to Crimea have already been moved on, further into Russia. Meanwhile, Russian looters are targeting Crimean sites that they perceive to be of high value for antiquities, including Unesco world heritage sites.
It was similar to the aftermath of the second world war, said Friederike Fless, president of the German Archaeological Institute, when the Red Army’s so-called trophy brigades stripped eastern German, Ukrainian and other museums. Among the collections spirited out of Berlin were Priam’s treasure, the cache of priceless objects from Troy unearthed by German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s.
Although the overall picture looks bleak for Ukraine, Videiko said there was a silver lining. The disturbance of ancient sites had brought to light new finds, including a previously unknown site of the mysterious Trypillians – one of the last surviving cultures of Neolithic Europe. When the electricity supply permits, he and his colleagues hunker down to write up those finds. “This year has been very fruitful from a scientific point of view,” he said.
Teams and match officials line up prior to the December 18 final between Argentina and France. (photo: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
Teams and match officials line up prior to the December 18 final between Argentina and France. (photo: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
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Supporters of President Donald J. Trump swarming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (photo: Jason Andrew/NYT)
The charge of seditious conspiracy is the same as in a recent trial of members of the Oath Keepers militia, but the Proud Boys defendants are accused of a central role in the fighting at the Capitol.
“I want to see thousands of normies burn that city to ash today,” he wrote.
Almost two years later, the notion that the Proud Boys wanted to provoke violence among the “normies” — or the normal people — in the crowd that day rests at the heart of the government’s case against five members of the group who are facing trial on charges of seditious conspiracy in connection with the Capitol attack.
At the trial, which begins with jury selection on Monday, prosecutors intend to argue that the five defendants turned the mob into a weapon on Jan. 6 and pointed it at the Capitol, where lawmakers had gathered to certify the results of the 2020 election, according to court papers and pretrial hearings. It was all part of a plot, the government will say, to stop the lawful transfer of power and ensure that President Donald J. Trump remained in office.
The Proud Boys trial is opening in Federal District Court in Washington less than a month after Stewart Rhodes, the leader of another far-right group, the Oath Keepers militia, was convicted along with one of his lieutenants of seditious conspiracy at a separate trial in the same courthouse, which sits within sight of the domed Capitol building.
While prosecutors could have taken the five Proud Boys to trial on relatively simple charges like trespassing or interfering with law enforcement officers, they instead aimed higher and charged sedition, which carries a hefty 20-year maximum sentence and has much more serious political connotations. But by doing so, the government has assumed the burden of proving that the defendants plotted in advance of Jan. 6 to use force to oppose the authority of the U.S. government or to interfere with the execution of federal laws — in this case, those that govern the transfer of presidential power.
Much as in Mr. Rhodes’s trial, the government’s presentation in the Proud Boys trial will seek to bolster its sedition charges with thousands of internal text messages seized by the government and insider testimony from cooperating witnesses. But the differences between the two proceedings may be more instructive than their similarities.
For one thing, prosecutors never accused Mr. Rhodes and his four co-defendants of personally committing serious acts of violence at the Capitol. Instead, they proved that the Oath Keepers plotted to use force against the government by pointing out that the group persistently said a civil war might be needed to fight the administration of Joseph R. Biden Jr. and that on Jan. 6 it stashed an arsenal of high-powered weapons in hotel rooms in Virginia.
But in trying the Proud Boys, prosecutors plan to take a different tack: They will offer the jury a detailed account of how the five defendants — including Enrique Tarrio, the group’s former chairman — led their own troops and other “tools” in the mob into battle at the Capitol and played a central role in breaches of the building and in hand-to-hand fights with the police.
Founded in 2016 during Mr. Trump’s first run for office, the Proud Boys have long described themselves as “Western chauvinists” out to protect American politics from the supposedly corrosive effects of modern liberal culture.
But something else has always simmered beneath that public guise: a toxic stew of male grievance, misogyny, Islamophobia and anti-gay hatred, as well as a veneration of violence that has often boiled over into brawling in the streets.
The government plans to tell some of that history at the trial and to demonstrate how the Proud Boys, under Mr. Tarrio’s leadership, became involved in pro-Trump rallies in Washington after the election. At one of those events, on Dec. 12, 2020, Mr. Tarrio burned a Black Lives Matter banner that had been hanging at a local Black church; other members of the group clashed with leftist counterprotesters, resulting in a Proud Boys leader, Jeremy Bertino, getting stabbed.
A lingering effect of that incident, prosecutors plan to argue, is that it turned the Proud Boys against the police after years of having troublingly close relationships with officers across the country. The government wants to show the jury how the group became disillusioned with law enforcement to explain the events of Jan. 6, when members of the Proud Boys took the lead in assaulting the police.
One week after the December rally, Mr. Trump posted a message on Twitter that announced another protest — which he said would be “wild” — in Washington on Jan. 6. Prosecutors will try to show that the Proud Boys heard the message as a clarion call and sprang into action.
Working with a group of his top lieutenants, prosecutors say, Mr. Tarrio put together a handpicked crew of “rally boys” who would take the lead in the Proud Boys’ efforts on Jan. 6. The rank-and-file members of the group, Mr. Tarrio later said, would work in 10-man teams that day with medics and communications experts.
Mr. Tarrio was not at the Capitol on Jan. 6, having been kicked out of Washington by a local judge after he returned to the city two days earlier and was arrested over the banner-burning incident and for carrying two high-capacity firearm magazines.
But prosecutors plan to argue to the jury that three of his co-defendants — Joseph Biggs of Ormond Beach, Fla.; Ethan Nordean of Auburn, Wash.; and Zachary Rehl of Philadelphia — took the lead on the ground that day. A fourth co-defendant — Dominic Pezzola of Rochester, N.Y. — is best known for having broken one of the first windows at the Capitol with a stolen police riot shield.
As part of the government’s case, jurors are also likely to hear from several former Proud Boys who have since pleaded guilty, including two from North Carolina: Mr. Bertino and Charles Donohoe. The government may also seek to introduce evidence about a document called “1776 Returns” that was given to Mr. Tarrio by one of his girlfriends and detailed a plan to surveil and storm several government buildings around the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Recent court filings suggest that the lawyers for the Proud Boys intend to mount a robust defense. Echoing the lawyers in the Oath Keepers case, their central argument will be to claim that while the defendants breached the Capitol building, they did not plan the attack in any way that rose to the level of seditious conspiracy.
Indeed, the lawyers have claimed in court papers that many of the government’s own witnesses have provided statements to prosecutors contradicting the assertion that the Proud Boys had any sort of plan to assault the Capitol. The lawyers have also maintained that the F.B.I. had as many as eight informants in the group before Jan. 6 and that none of them reported back about an intent to storm the building, raising questions, as one lawyer wrote, about “whether a Proud Boy conspiracy plan” to commit sedition “ever existed or could have existed.”
In a more general sense, the defense will seek to persuade the jury that the Proud Boys are not racist brawlers, as they are often portrayed by the media, but more like what the founder of the group, Gavin McInnes, has long described them as: a patriotic men’s drinking club. At one point, the lawyers had thought they might call Mr. McInnes as a witness for the defense, but that remains unclear.
Still, the jury is likely to get a glimpse of Proud Boys culture as the lawyers relate how dozens of members of the group descended on Washington to support Mr. Trump on Jan. 6, with some of the leaders moving into an Airbnb rental apartment near Chinatown.
As evidence that the Proud Boys had no plan to attack the Capitol, the lawyers may tell the jurors how a musician friendly to the group — Michale Graves, the former lead singer for the punk band Misfits — was supposed to give a private concert at the rental apartment on the afternoon or evening of Jan. 6.
The lawyers have also accused the government of threatening to bring charges against several other people the defense wants to call as witnesses at the trial.
In court papers, the lawyers said they wanted to introduce testimony from Shannon Rusch, a former member of the Navy SEALs who marched with Mr. Biggs and Mr. Nordean toward the Capitol on Jan. 6, and Adrienna DiCioccio, a right-wing political organizer who was also at the building. But they claim the government is still investigating both Mr. Rusch’s family and Ms. DiCioccio, and has effectively scared them away from taking the stand.
The lawyers have raised similar claims about a veteran Washington police officer, Lt. Shane Lamond, who could tell the jury how Mr. Tarrio was in constant contact with him before and during Jan. 6. But prosecutors have been investigating Lieutenant Lamond’s relationship with Mr. Tarrio for several months, and his lawyer has said he will most likely invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if called as a witness.
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New Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass speaks during her inaugural address, Sunday, Dec. 11, 2022. (photo: Damian Dovarganes/AP)
The initiative, called Inside Safe, is expected to launch Tuesday, eight days after Bass was sworn in and declared homelessness a state of emergency.
"Well, you know, what we have found in the community organizations that we're bringing in to do this work is that you can get 95% of the people housed," she said on NBC's Meet the Press. "People will go. It takes a while. You have to do outreach."
Bass said the initiative would not involve clearing out encampments where unhoused people gather, and said that in four years, a metric of the city's success in tackling homelessness would be if there are little to no encampments left.
"And there should not be 40,000 people who are unhoused, that's for sure," she said.
Homelessness has risen in the Los Angeles area since the pandemic. The county released a 2022 report in September, after not doing so in 2021. The count reached 41,980 people in Los Angeles City, up 1.7% since 2020. The total population in Los Angeles is about 3.8 million.
Additionally, Bass announced an executive order Friday that mandates the city to review applications for affordable housing projects within 60 days. Once construction begins, the city has five days to grant a permit and a certificate of occupancy; the city has two days to complete the process for short-term housing projects.
Following the order, 31 affordable housing projects are expected to be "immediately expedited," according to a statement from Bass's office.
"This is a dramatic reduction in red tape and acceleration of the construction timeline that will move people inside faster and save precious dollars that can be invested in more housing and more solutions for L.A.'s homelessness crisis," she said.
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Oil spill. (photo: U.S. EPA)
It's all about the kind of oil that gets spilled.
In early December, nearly 14,000 barrels of oil known as diluted bitumen spilled in north-central Kansas, three hours outside of Kansas City, Kansas. The cleanup is still underway, with at least 4,000 barrels now cleared from a waterway known as Mill Creek. But as time goes on, environmentalists and infrastructure experts worry about the oil that will be more difficult to clean.
According to TC Energy ,the Canadian operator of the Keystone Pipeline responsible for the spill, other sections of the pipeline have been restarted at reduced pressure. At the time of the spill, the pipeline was operating at 80 percent of the maximum recommended rate, which is allowed under a 2007 permit granted to the pipeline company by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA. Normally, crude oil pipelines can’t operate above 72 percent of this rate. To be granted the exception, TC Energy had to “construct the pipeline using higher-grade steel,” according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.
Diluted bitumen, or dilbit, is a natural oil sand found in sand deposits. It’s composed of sand, water, and bitumen, a sticky, black petroleum. According to an Inside Climate News analysis, dilbit is the heaviest of the crude oils used today and 50 to 70 percent of its composition is likely to sink in water, compared to the less than 10 percent of most crude oils. The oil inside the Keystone Pipeline is transported from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada — the globe’s third largest petroleum reserve — to refineries in the Midwest and the Gulf Coast. The leak occurred on a section of the Keystone Pipeline completed in 2011.
“It is troubling to see so many failures and so much oil spilled from any pipeline, but it is especially troubling from such a relatively new pipeline,” Bill Caram, executive director of the nonprofit pipeline watchdog group Pipeline Safety Trust, said in a statement.
According to a report from the National Academy of Sciences, dilbit is harder to clean, coats and adheres to landscapes and animals more than other crude oils, and has a smaller window of opportunity for proper cleanup. This study was commissioned by Congress after the infamous 2010 Kalamazoo, Michigan oil spill, where nearly 42,000 barrels of dilbit spilled into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River from an Enbridge-operated pipeline. This oil spill, which took four years and billions of dollars to clean up while also prompting the evacuation of hundreds of homes, was the worst tar sands oil spill in the nation’s history.
So far, 71 fish and four mammals have been confirmed killed in the Kansas oil spill, with one beaver saved by rescue crews, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. After the initial spill, TC Energy created two dams to prevent any continued spread and has since been working to remove the tar sands oil from surface water. According to the EPA, no drinking water wells were affected by the spill, but the federal agency and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment have urged people and animals to avoid the contaminated creek.
“We continue to prioritize the safety of people and the environment,” TC Energy said in a statement. “We are working with wildlife assessment crews including state and federal wildlife trustees and have trained professional responders onsite to identify any impacts to wildlife.”
The company has previously paid over $300,000 in fines related to damage caused by the Keystone Pipeline.
The Keystone Pipeline, and its now-defunct offshoot Keystone XL, have sparked battles from local communities and Indigenous people in the nation’s prairie lands since its inception. In 2011, then-Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman urged the federal government to stop the expansion of the pipeline through his state to protect water. When the Keystone XL segment was announced, federal and local law enforcement began to strategize about how to stop Indigenous protests in Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska “by any means.”
The ruptured Kansas segment of the pipeline remains closed during the cleanup process. In a statement, TC Energy said it continues to work with the PHMSA to determine the cause of the ruptured line. President Joseph Biden recently released 2 million barrels of oil from the nation’s strategic reserve to various refineries in hopes of preventing “potential supply disruptions” caused by the spill.
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