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Conservatives used to be outraged over the DOJ cracking down on errant sensitive material. They've now changed their tune ... for some reason
The investigation into the hundreds of documents Trump hoarded at his Mar-a-Lago estate was characterized by the right as a political witch hunt aimed at preventing the former president from running for reelection. Now that Biden is involved, Republicans think the government should be cracking down with more vigor.
In August, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called the Mar-a-Lago raid a horrific abuse of power and a “fishing expedition,” accusing Attorney General Merrick Garland of damaging the credibility of the FBI. Following the revelation that documents had been discovered in Biden’s office, however, Cruz immediately called for the convening of a grand jury, and insinuated that the Penn Center’s”s Chinese donors were a risk to the security of the documents.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) called for the FBI to be defunded when details of the Mar-a-Lago raid emerged, but she’s been quick this week to accuse the Biden administration of concealing information, alleging the DOJ appointed a special counsel (something that was also done in the Trump investigation) in order to provide cover for Biden. Greene has also called for both Biden and Garland to be impeached over the documents.
Marge Greene says Merrick Garland should be impeached over the docs Biden turned in. pic.twitter.com/GYLrn2Hme8
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) January 11, 2023
House Republicans have already launched an investigation into the Justice Department as backlash for the Mar-a-Lago raid, ordering Garland and others to retain documents and communications pertaining to the investigation. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a leader in the charge to undermine the DOJ’s investigation of Trump, has now launched a congressional investigation to make sure the DOJ is cracking down on Biden to their satisfaction.
Fox News has been all over it, too, portraying Trump as a cooperative subject despite his and his team’s repeated attempts to stonewall and delay investigators progress. The network previously condemned rulings by a judge appointed to oversee the review of the recovered documents as “corrupt,” while entertaining Trump’s dubious claims that he had privately declassified the documents, calling the investigation an “election ploy” and a “shot between the eyes of the republic.”
Since the discovery of the documents in Biden’s office and home, the network’s approach toward investigations into sensitive material has conveniently flipped. Laura Ingraham, to much mockery from social media, claimed the DOJ was being too lenient on the Bidens, who she claimed were hiding the docs as part of a corruption cover up. Tucker Carlson, who called the Mar-a-Lago raid a “power grab,” invited former Bush Ethics Lawyer Richard Painter on to lambaste Biden for irresponsibly handling and retaining classified documents.
Tucker Carlson brought on Richard Painter, former White House Ethics lawyer under GW Bush. Painter lambasted Biden for his handling of classified documents. Everything he said could be the same for former President Donald J. Trump unless Mar-A-Lago is magical. pic.twitter.com/aZuT7XFrw8
— Decoding Fox News (@DecodingFoxNews) January 13, 2023
Friday morning on America’s Newsroom, radio host Clay Travis even claimed falsely that Trump was not given time to conduct his own search for documents, and that he gave investigators access to the Mar-a-Lago documents during their investigation — only to be gently corrected by host Dana Perino. “They did have a months-long back-and-forth,” Perino said.
Clay Travis claims Trump wasn't given time to conduct his own search for documents, and gave investigators access to the Mar-A-Lago documents during their investigation-- Trump literally went all the way to the supreme court to prevent the DOJ from reviewing them. pic.twitter.com/de9q5b4a3I
— nikki mccann ramÃrez (@NikkiMcR) January 13, 2023
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday appointed Robert Hur to serve as a special counsel overseeing the investigation into the Biden document debacle. Roughly a dozen classified documents (an exact number has yet to be released, but it wasn’t 300) were recovered from three locations at Biden’s office and home, and according to both the DOJ and the White House, the president’s lawyers were forthcoming about the discovery and quickly turned over the material to investigators.
Trump responded to the discovery of classified documents in Biden’s possession in typical fashion, writing on Truth Social that the DOJ should immediately end the special counsel investigation into Trump because he “did everything right,” while instructing the DOJ to go after the “Biden crime family” instead.
Speaking of crime families, the Trump Organization was slapped with a $1.6 million criminal penalty on Friday after being convicted of criminal tax fraud in December.
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Kevin McCarthy. (photo: ABC News)
The discharge petition, explained.
But Democrats and GOP moderates have one weird trick they could use to stop him: the discharge petition.
This procedure was crafted to allow a majority of the House to force action on a bill that the speaker or key committees aren’t holding a House floor vote on. For instance, if McCarthy won’t allow a vote on a “clean” debt ceiling increase bill, 218 members of the House can sign a discharge petition forcing such a vote — and, since that’s a majority, that bill would likely then pass. Once a vacant Democratic seat in blue territory is filled in a special election next month, only five Republicans would have to join 213 Democrats to make a discharge petition succeed.
There are various procedural and timing technicalities that could complicate this if it had to happen right before a debt ceiling or government shutdown deadline. But in theory, it could happen, if a mere handful of Republican members want it to.
The real problem, of course, is politics — because there are many political reasons that even moderate Republicans would be reluctant to take this step.
A discharge petition is a bold challenge to the speaker’s authority, effectively wrenching control of the chamber out of his hands. In this case, it would also undercut his negotiating strategy, since he is purportedly trying to win concessions Republicans want. Working with Democrats on a petition would also be a marker of partisan disloyalty. Anyone who does it would get a target on their backs in next year’s primary — and, if they survive it, Democrats would turn around and try to beat them in the general.
Few moderates feel as empowered to defy their party on key issues as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), and recent history has shown that House Republican moderates are particularly unlikely to do such a thing. But this partisan loyalty and reluctance to take a bold stance could well lead the country into crisis. So while there may be a trick that could save us from the brink, its success will still depend on navigating the political polarization that has brought us to the brink in the first place.
One weird trick to circumvent House leaders
Through much of the House’s history, the chamber’s members have battled over who should have control over the chamber’s agenda — what gets brought up for a vote and when. Should it be the speaker? Should it be key committee chairs? Or should a disparate group of rank-and-file members be able to have a voice?
By 1910, old-guard Republican Speaker Joseph Cannon had centralized power in his hands to an unprecedented degree. But eventually enough Progressive Republicans joined with Democrats and revolted, forcing Cannon to make concessions limiting his authority. One of those changes to House rules established the discharge petition, though the details of how it works changed in subsequent decades.
Frequently threatened and attempted, successful discharge petitions have been rare — but some have been extremely consequential.
In 1938, Rep. Mary Norton (D-NJ) used it to get the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set a federal minimum wage, overtime pay, and a ban on “oppressive child labor,” out of the Rules Committee. (Democrats had an enormous House majority, but several Southern Democrats had opposed the bill and held key seats on the Rules Committee.)
In 1963, Democrats forced conservative Rules Committee chair Howard Smith to hold hearings on civil rights legislation with a discharge petition — Smith caved before they got 218 signatures, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the following year.
Democrats repeated that play in 1965 to advance their bill to let the District of Columbia govern itself past another conservative Democrat committee chair, though the bill did not become law that session. (Notably, in all three of these cases, a Democratic president had endorsed the discharge effort to bypass conservative Southern Democrats holding key committee seats.)
But it hasn’t only been used for bold liberal wins — interest groups also discovered the discharge petition could help them circumvent committee chairs they disliked.
Soft drink distributors sought and won an antitrust exemption in 1980, the banking industry rolled back a new tax withholding law in 1983, and the National Rifle Association got a gun rights bill through in 1986 — and all used the motion to discharge to get around Democratic committee chairs who opposed those measures. Similarly, the last discharge petition to win 218 votes got the Export-Import Bank’s reauthorization past a conservative GOP committee chair in 2015.
The discharge petition has also been employed to force party leaders to hold votes they’d prefer to avoid.
While Democrats controlled Congress in the 1980s and early 1990s, Republicans and conservative Democrats repeatedly used the discharge petition to force votes on a constitutional amendment to balance the budget (though, since a constitutional amendment requires two-thirds of the chamber for approval, it didn’t pass).
In the Republican-controlled House of 2002, Democrats and moderate Republicans used it to get campaign finance reform to the floor of the House, despite Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert’s reluctance. They succeeded, passing the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, otherwise known as McCain-Feingold.
Lessons from the last big discharge petition fight
But to understand why Republicans might be gun-shy about using it this year, it’s worth revisiting the last discharge petition that came close to succeeding, in 2018.
The battle then was over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provided temporary deportation protections for some unauthorized immigrants who came to the US as children. President Obama had established the program through executive authority, but now Trump was trying to phase it out. Many believed that if a legislative fix for DACA was presented to the House, it would pass (with the support of Democrats and some moderate Republicans). But Republicans controlled the chamber and, deferring to conservatives, they hadn’t acted.
So eventually, Reps. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) and Jeff Denham (R-CA) put together a discharge petition to try to force the House to vote on four different DACA bills, including a bipartisan compromise bill. Eighteen Republicans signed first, and then over the next month, every Democrat, as well as a few more Republicans, added their names, raising the number of signatures to 216 — two short of what was needed.
Then Republican Speaker Paul Ryan acted to prevent anyone else from going wobbly. He cut a deal in which he’d agree to hold votes on certain DACA measures — but not the bipartisan bill. Instead, Ryan wanted Republicans to make a deal among themselves that would include border security measures sought by conservatives. Ryan argued that only that process could advance a bill that President Trump would sign into law (though Politico suggested Ryan feared the potential “huge embarrassment” of the bipartisan bill passing and infuriating conservatives). The eventual deal failed overwhelmingly on the House floor that June, with opposition from most Republicans and all Democrats.
Did GOP moderates just so happen to fall two votes short of what they needed — meaning, if only two more sympathetic members happened to be in Congress, they could have succeeded? If so, that might bode well for a discharge petition in this Congress, since just five moderates rather than 25 would be necessary this time.
A cynic might suspect, though, that the key moderates were always likely to cave if they were close to success — making the whole effort look more like image-burnishing for reelection purposes than a genuine revolt. Alternatively, perhaps they were just trying to force some action but felt more comfortable if that was Republican action rather than banding with Democrats to enrage their own party.
The prospects this year
So what are the chances the discharge petition will be deployed this year, to seize control from McCarthy and the right on certain issues?
One complication is that there are certain procedural and timing restrictions with how it can be used. The process would likely take significantly more than a month from start to finish, as Josh Huder outlined on Twitter. It’s not an accident the process is cumbersome — it’s meant as a last resort rather than a first resort. As Semafor’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig points out, these complications could pose a problem when there’s a hard deadline in play, like for raising the debt ceiling or funding the government.
But there’s another, more political difference from past cases in which discharge petitions were successfully used. Typically, frustrated members of the majority party turn to them when their own party leaders or members are seeking to avoid an issue, taking no action on it at all.
On both the debt ceiling and government funding, though, the House GOP will likely be actively trying to make something happen in negotiations with Democrats — spending cuts that the vast majority of Republicans want in exchange for a debt ceiling increase.
McCarthy’s strategy there is to drive a hard bargain, holding tough to force the Senate and President Biden to make concessions to the GOP. That means, for Republicans, joining a discharge petition would mean undercutting their party leaders’ negotiating strategy and reducing the GOP’s leverage — a betrayal. (One could, of course, argue that it’s unethical to hold the nation’s credit rating hostage at all, but good luck convincing Republicans of that.)
Take Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, one of the most moderate Republicans in the House. Fitzpatrick told Semafor that a discharge petition was “one of many options” to avoid default, but also told Politico that he’d need moderate Democrats to “get on board” with spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. That is: He wants a deal where Democrats make concessions.
Indeed, the more a discharge petition effort is seen as defying McCarthy, rather than defying an extreme group of hardline House Republicans, the less likely House moderates will do it. The pressures to be a good partisan soldier are quite strong. Swing-district Republicans will face tough reelections and may think they need the money McCarthy and his allies can steer their way.
They also have to get through the primary before even making it to the general, which makes many reluctant to anger the right. Only some members have the appetite to truly be mavericks — for most, the path of least resistance is to stick with the team (though there could theoretically be a scenario where McCarthy tacitly approves of a discharge petition, so he could argue to the right that his hand was forced).
Again, these members of Congress do have agency, and it’s important to keep in mind that five Republicans really could act boldly, embracing the discharge the petition to save the nation from a dangerous crisis, if they wanted to. They just probably won’t want to, because they won’t see it as in their political self-interest.
More broadly, there’s a long-running centrist fantasy of the coalition of commonsensical moderates coming together, dramatically seizing power from the extremes, and doing reasonable things — funding the government, preventing a debt ceiling breach, and maybe passing other good policies, too.
In one sense, this never happens, because partisanship is too strong.
But in another sense, it happens all the time — just less dramatically. The appropriations process regularly proceeds with bipartisan support in the Senate. Even during the last eight-year stint of Republican House control, there was only one really big fight on the debt ceiling and one on government funding. For the rest of that span, GOP leaders regularly allowed bipartisan deals with Democrats on those matters to come to the floor and pass over conservative opposition.
No discharge petition was necessary for all that. The question is whether McCarthy is so beholden to the right that one will be necessary now.
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Ukrainian female soldiers are seen before heading to the frontline as Ukrainian displaced civilians continue to swarm around the train station to flee due to ongoing Russian attacks, in Lviv, Ukraine, March 24, 2022. (photo: Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
More than 50,000 women are now enlisted in the Ukrainian army.
Eugenia Emerald has become somewhat of an icon in Ukraine, fighting on the front lines as a sniper -- the only woman in her unit.
She's one of more than 50,000 women now enlisted in the Ukrainian army.
"All Russians are scared of us," said Emerald. "Afraid of me, afraid of us. Ukrainian women."
Women on the front is still a relatively recent phenomenon in Ukraine. As of 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea, women were still barred from combat roles. It wasn't until 2018 that female soldiers were finally given the same status as men -- and, according to Ukraine's Defense Ministry, women now account for close to a one-fifth of Ukraine's armed forces.
Emerald's said her father taught her how to use a weapon. She later enrolled in a military program in college, and when war broke out in February, the army called her up to see if she'd be willing to fight. As a single mom, Emerald said she made the difficult decision to leave her 11-year-old daughter behind. She's been everywhere now -- from Kharkiv and Zhytomyr, to Bucha and the battle for Kyiv.
But she says being a woman on the front has its fair share of challenges: battling both the common enemy and internal discrimination. Emerald recounted how one man she came into contact with told her a woman's place was not on the battlefield, but in the kitchen.
"I was angry, really angry," she said, adding she had to work twice as hard to be taken seriously. "But they respect me later."
It's something Anastasia Kolesnyk, who enlisted on the first day of the war, said she has also had to deal with.
"You always have to prove yourself," she said. "When you meet the new division, they need a couple days to get used to you, and the fact that you are the same as them."
Anastasia says she's not surprised so many Ukrainian women have enlisted.
"The only option I had was to enlist," said Anastasia. Because when a murderer and a thief come to your house, you don't just run away-- you try to protect it. And everything was at stake."
The surge of female soldiers is so new that Ukraine's military still doesn't have standard uniforms for women -- meaning they're often handed ill-fitting men's clothes.
"In the beginning, it was very cold -- I had to wear my sneakers, because there were no military boots available in my size," Kolesnyk said. "And the uniforms were two sizes too big," she added.
So she asked her brother Andrii and his girlfriend Kseniia Drahanyuk to send her the items she needed -- and after the two realized just how much gear Kolesnyk was lacking, they created the Zemlyachki nonprofit to help other female soldiers. They've now helped over 3,000 women, sending them over $1 million worth of care packages that include things like lighter body armor, tampons, smaller shoes, and fitted uniforms, Kolesnyk said.
As Emerald showed us her gear -- and the uniform that was in fact once too big for her -- she also stumbled upon her wedding dress.
Because in the middle of the fighting, Emerald also found love -- another soldier, in another unit, who read an article about her and reached out on Instagram. The two married on the battlefield, near Kharkiv.
Amid all the death and destruction, Emerald is now carrying new life -- she is pregnant with a baby girl.
"You know, my first daughter -- she is like a princess," she said. "But I think my second daughter, yes, she will be like me. And if she wants, I will teach her [how to] shoot."
She says as hard as it would be to leave her two daughters now, she would eventually like to head back to the front.
"Ukrainian women are very strong, and all of us love our land," she said, adding it's precisely because of her daughters -- and their future-- that she risks it all.
"It's the reason I go to war," she said.
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Trump supporters stand on a Capitol Police armored vehicle as others take over the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
The House committee investigating the riot avoided detailed discussion in its report for fear of offending Republicans and tech companies, sources say
The evidence they collected was written up in a 122-page memo that was circulated among the committee, according to a draft viewed by The Washington Post. But in the end, committee leaders declined to delve into those topics in detail in their final report, reluctant to dig into the roots of domestic extremism taking hold in the Republican Party beyond former president Donald Trump and concerned about the risks of a public battle with powerful tech companies, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the panel’s sensitive deliberations.
Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms — especially Twitter — failed to heed their own employees’ warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals. The draft report details how most platforms did not take “dramatic” steps to rein in extremist content until after the attack on the Capitol, despite clear red flags across the internet.
“The sum of this is that alt-tech, fringe, and mainstream platforms were exploited in tandem by right-wing activists to bring American democracy to the brink of ruin,” the staffers wrote in their memo. “These platforms enabled the mobilization of extremists on smaller sites and whipped up conservative grievance on larger, more mainstream ones.”
But little of the evidence supporting those findings surfaced during the public phase of the committee’s probe, including its 845-page report that focused almost exclusively on Trump’s actions that day and in the weeks just before.
That focus on Trump meant the report missed an opportunity to hold social media companies accountable for their actions, or lack thereof, even though the platforms had been the subject of intense scrutiny since Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016, the people familiar with the matter said.
Confronting that evidence would have forced the committee to examine how conservative commentators helped amplify the Trump messaging that ultimately contributed to the Capitol attack, the people said — a course that some committee members considered both politically risky and inviting opposition from some of the world’s most powerful tech companies, two of the people said.
“Given the amount of material they actually ultimately got from the big social media companies, I think it is unfortunate that we didn’t get a better picture of how ‘Stop the Steal’ was organized online, how the materials spread,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism nonprofit. “They could have done that for us.”
The Washington Post has previously reported that Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee’s co-chair, drove efforts to keep the report focused on Trump. But interviews since the report’s release indicate that Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat whose Northern California district includes Silicon Valley, also resisted efforts to bring more focus in the report onto social media companies.
Lofgren denied that she opposed including a social media appendix in the report or more detail about what investigators learned in interviews with tech company employees.
“I spent substantial time editing the proposed report so it was directly cited to our evidence, instead of news articles and opinion pieces,” Lofgren said. “In the end, the social media findings were included into other parts of the report and appendixes, a decision made by the Chairman in consultation with the Committee.”
Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), did not respond to a request for comment. Thompson previously had said that the committee would examine what steps tech companies took to prevent their platforms from “being breeding grounds to radicalizing people to violence.” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who sat in on some of the depositions of tech employees, did not comment.
Understanding the role social media played in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol takes on greater significance as tech platforms undo some of the measures they adopted to prevent political misinformation on their platforms. Under new owner Elon Musk, Twitter has laid off most of the team that reviewed tweets for abusive and inaccurate content and restored several prominent accounts that the company banned in the fallout from the Capitol attack, including Trump’s and that of his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Facebook, too, is considering allowing Trump back on its platform, a decision expected as early as next week.
“Recent events demonstrate that nothing about America’s stormy political climate or the role of social media within it has fundamentally changed since January 6th,” the staffers’ draft memo warned.
Social media moderation also has become a flash point in the states. Both Texas and Florida passed laws in the wake of Trump’s suspension to restrict what content social media platforms can remove from their sites, while California has imposed legislation requiring companies to disclose their content moderation policies.
But the Jan. 6 committee report offered only a vague recommendation about social media regulation, writing that congressional committees “should continue to evaluate policies of media companies that have had the effect of radicalizing their consumers.”
Did Twitter give Trump a pass?
Some of what investigators uncovered in their interviews with employees of the platforms contradicts Republican claims that tech companies displayed a liberal bias in their moderation decisions — an allegation that has gained new attention recently as Musk has promoted a series of leaked internal communications known as the “Twitter Files.” The transcripts indicate the reverse, with former Twitter employees describing how the company gave Trump special treatment.
Twitter employees, they testified, could not even view the former president’s tweets in one of their key content moderation tools, and they ultimately had to create a Google document to keep track of his tweets as calls grew to suspend his account.
“ … Twitter was terrified of the backlash they would get if they followed their own rules and applied them to Donald Trump,” said one former employee, who testified to the committee under the pseudonym J. Johnson.
The committee staffers who focused on social media and extremism — known within the committee as “Team Purple” — spent more than a year sifting through tens of thousands of documents from multiple companies, interviewing social media company executives and former staffers, and analyzing thousands of posts. They sent a flurry of subpoenas and requests for information to social media companies ranging from Facebook to fringe social networks including Gab and the chat platform Discord.
Yet as the investigation continued, the role of social media took a back seat, despite Chairman Thompson’s earlier assertion that how misinformation spread and what steps social media companies took to prevent it were “two key questions for the Select Committee.”
Committee staffers drafted more subpoenas for social media executives, including former Twitter executive Del Harvey, who was described in testimony as key to Twitter’s decisions regarding Trump and violent rhetoric. But Cheney never signed the subpoenas, two of the people said, and they were never sent. Harvey did not testify. At one point, committee staffers discussed having a public hearing focused on the role of social media during the election, but none was scheduled, the people said.
The long debate about social media
The role of social media has been a central topic of American politics since the 2016 presidential campaign, when hackers accessed emails from Democratic Party servers and leaked the contents onto the internet, and Russian trolls posing as Americans posted misinformation on both Twitter and Facebook, without detection. Concern about the impact of social media grew in the aftermath of the 2020 election, with Facebook and Twitter suspending hundreds of accounts for spreading false information about the result as well as baseless conspiracy theories about balloting irregularities.
In the days before Jan. 6, 2021, media reports documented Trump’s call on Twitter for people to rally in Washington — it’ll be wild, he tweeted — and there was growing talk of guns and potential violence on sites such as Telegram, Parler and TheDonald.win.
The Purple Team’s memo detailed how the actions of roughly 15 social networks played a significant role in the attack. It described how major platforms like Facebook and Twitter, prominent video streaming sites like YouTube and Twitch and smaller fringe networks like Parler, Gab and 4chan served as megaphones for those seeking to stoke division or organize the insurrection. It detailed how some platforms bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives out of fear of reprisals, while others were reluctant to curb the “Stop the Steal” movement after the attack.
But as the committee’s probe kicked its public phase into high gear, the social media report was repeatedly pared down, eventually to just a handful of pages. While the memo and the evidence it cited informed other parts of the committee’s work, including its public hearings and depositions, it ultimately was not included as a stand-alone chapter or as one of the four appendixes.
In the weeks since the report was released, however, some of that evidence has trickled out as the committee released hundreds of pages of transcripts of interviews with former tech employees and dozens of documents. The transcripts show the companies used relatively primitive technologies and amateurish techniques to watch for dangers and enforce their platforms’ rules. They also show company officials quibbling among themselves over how to apply the rules to possible incitements to violence, even as the riot turned violent.
The transcript of Anika Collier Navaroli, one of the longest-tenured members of Twitter’s safety policy team, describes in detail how the company’s systems were outmatched as the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.
When the #ExecuteMikePence hashtag started trending on Twitter on Jan. 6, 2021, Collier Navaroli was sitting in her New York apartment, scrolling through thousands of death threats and other hateful messages and trying to remove them one by one.
Her main way of finding tweets calling for Vice President Mike Pence’s execution was by pasting the hashtag into the Twitter website's search box, manually copying each tweet's details into an internal flagging tool, and then returning to the timeline as more tweets poured in.
“I was doing that for … hours,” she testified, saying only a few other people that day were doing the same work. “We didn’t stand a chance.”
Collier Navaroli also faulted top executives, including Twitter’s Harvey, for blocking potential rule changes that would have allowed company moderators to take a more proactive stance to reduce calls for violence. At one point, Collier Navaroli said she pushed the company to enact a policy that would have restricted tweets using hashtags like #LockedandLoaded, which moderators had seen being used by people boasting they were armed and ready to march on the Capitol. Harvey, Collier Navaroli said, had pushed back, arguing that the phrase could be used by people tweeting about self-defense and should be allowed.
Harvey, who is no longer with Twitter and advertises herself as a public speaker, did not respond to requests for comment sent to her email or LinkedIn.
The Purple Team’s draft outlines how extremism and violent rhetoric jumped from platform to platform in the lead-up to Jan 6. In the hours after Trump’s tweet about how Jan. 6 would be wild, the chat service Discord had to shut down a server because Trump’s supporters were using it to plan how they could bring firearms into Washington, according to the memo.
The investigators also wrote that much of the content that was shared on Twitter, Facebook and other sites came from Google-owned YouTube, which did not ban election fraud claims until Dec. 9 and did not apply its policy retroactively. The investigators found that its lax policies and enforcement made it “a repository for false claims of election fraud.” Even when these videos weren’t recommended by YouTube’s own algorithms, they were shared across other parts of the internet.
“YouTube’s policies relevant to election integrity were inadequate to the moment,” the staffers wrote.
The draft report also says that smaller platforms were not reactive enough to the threat posed by Trump. The report singled out Reddit for being slow to take down a pro-Trump forum called “r/The-Donald.” The moderators of that forum used it to “freely advertise” TheDonald.win, which hosted violent content in the lead-up to Jan. 6.
Facebook parent company Meta declined to comment. Twitter, which has laid off the majority of its communications staff, did not respond to a request for comment. Discord did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
YouTube spokeswoman Ivy Choi said the company has long-established policies against incitement, and that the company began enforcing its election integrity rules once “enough states certified election results.”
“As a direct result of these policies, even before January 6 we terminated thousands of channels, several of which were associated with figures related to the attack, and removed thousands of violative videos, the majority before 100 views,” she said in a statement.
Reddit spokeswoman Cameron Njaa said the company’s policies prohibit content that “glorifies, incites or calls for violence against groups of people or individuals.” She said that the company “found no evidence of coordinated calls for violence” related to Jan. 6 on its platform.
Former Facebook employees who testified to the committee reported their company also resisted imposing restrictions. Brian Fishman, the company’s former head of dangerous organizations, testified that the company had been slow to react to efforts to delegitimize the 2020 election results.
“I thought Facebook should be more aggressive in taking down ‘Stop the Steal’ stuff before January 6th,” Fishman said. He noted, however, that broader action would have resulted in taking down “much of the conservative movement on the platform, far beyond just groups that said ‘Stop the Steal,’ mainstream conservative commentators.”
He said he did not believe such action “would have prevented violence on January 6th.”
The committee also spoke to Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, whose leaked documents in 2021 showed that the country’s largest social media platform largely had disbanded its election integrity efforts ahead of the Jan. 6 riot. But little of her account made it into the final document.
“It’s sad that they didn’t include the intentional choices that Facebook made,” she said in an interview. “At the same time, you’re asking them to do a lot of different things in a single report.”
Deference to Trump
A large part of Twitter’s failure to act, multiple former Twitter employees, including Johnson and Collier Navaroli, told the committee was deference to Trump.
Trump’s account was the only one of Twitter’s hundreds of millions that rank-and-file officials could not review in one of their main internal tools, Profile Viewer, which allowed moderators to establish a history and share notes about an account’s past tweets and behaviors, the employees testified.
The block prevented moderators from reviewing how others had assessed Trump’s tweets, even as his following grew to 88 million and his tweets drove conversations around the world. Trump “was a unique user who sat above and beyond the rules of Twitter,” Collier Navaroli testified.
“There was this underlying understanding we’re not reaching out to the President,” she told the committee. “We’re not reaching out to Donald Trump. There is no point in doing education here because this is how this individual is. So the resolution was to do nothing.”
Collier Navaroli and a few others inside the company had worked to push executives to action long before Jan. 6, she said, citing internal memos and messages. In the week after the November 2020 election, she said, they began warning that tweets calling for civil unrest were multiplying. By Dec. 19, she said, Twitter staff had begun warning that discussions of civil unrest had centralized on Jan. 6 — the day that Trump had called his supporters to mass in Washington, saying it “will be wild!”
By Dec. 29, she and members of other Twitter teams had begun warning that Twitter lacked a coordinated response plan, and on Jan. 5, she said, she warned a supervisor directly that the company would need a much more robust response the following day.
When asked by a committee staffer whether Twitter had adopted a “war footing,” having seen the warnings, Collier Navaroli said her U.S. team had fewer than six people, and that “everybody was acting as if it was a regular day and nothing was going on.”
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Elon Musk. (image: CNN)
Back then, a series of tweets about a possible $72-billion Tesla buyout that never materialized got Musk, the electric vehicle maker's CEO, in trouble with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC said the billionaire knew a deal wasn't on the horizon.
Now, a civil trial stemming from those tweets is being watched as a window into Musk's behavior, past and present, which means the trial could produce new controversies of its own.
The trial starts Tuesday in San Francisco with jury selection. Here's what else you need to know.
First, a quick refresher on what happened with the buyout tweets
On August 7, 2018, Musk tweeted that he had secured the funding needed to pay for a potential buyout of Tesla at $420 per share. He tweeted again on the same day, implying that the move was imminent: The "only reason" why the move was not certain is because it's contingent upon a shareholder vote, he said.
But the buyout never happened.
After a week-long roller coaster in Tesla's stock price, the company said it didn't have the funding secured after all. Musk said it was feedback from shareholders that made him change his mind about the deal.
An investigation by the SEC commission led to a settlement with the company, which included a $40 million fine, split evenly between Tesla and Musk, and Musk's relinquishment of his chairman role for at least three years.
The SEC also said then that Musk wasn't even close to locking up the billions needed to pull off the buyout he teased on Twitter.
Musk has since said that he really believed he had the funding and that he entered into the SEC agreement under duress.
What's the deal with this trial?
The trial stems from a class-action lawsuit brought by investors who owned Tesla stock during a 10-day period (Aug. 7-17) that began the same day as Musk's tweets.
District Judge Edward Chen has already ruled that Musk's initial tweets were knowingly false and misleading. A jury will now decide whether Musk acted recklessly by posting them, as well as whether he caused financial harm to Tesla shareholders.
Tesla's stock prices swung by roughly $14 billion during the 10-day period covered in the lawsuit, the shareholders say.
What's happened to Tesla stock since the 2018 drama?
The August 2018 shareholder loss wasn't sustained for long: When adjusting for two stock splits, Tesla's shares are now worth roughly six times more than their 2018 values.
Still, recent investors have also lost a lot more than the $14 billion at the heart of the case. After a meteoric rise, Tesla shares started to plummet last year.
It lost 65% of its value in 2022 alone, a dip partly due to a tough year for the overall automobile industry and partly because of widespread disapproval of Musk's Twitter takeover.
Musk himself has broken the record for the most amount of money lost by one person in the shortest amount of time, according to Guinness World Records.
His fortune went from an estimated $320 billion in 2021 to its current level of roughly $147 billion, though he's still one of the richest people in the world.
What's at stake for Musk?
The CEO could lose another chunk of change after this trial, depending on its outcome. The shareholders say Musk should pay damages for the financial risk he put them in.
And while Tesla's stock price isn't directly on the line in this case, it could be swayed by another factor at stake: Musk's reputation.
At a time when shareholders are losing faith in Musk, we're likely to learn a thing or two about his management style from a witness lineup that includes top Tesla executives and Silicon Valley stars such as Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, according to The Associated Press.
The trial has already turned into a bit of a referendum on Musk's likeability.
Last week, Judge Chen rejected the billionaire's bid to transfer the trial to Texas, which has been the site of Tesla headquarters since 2021.
Musk's lawyers said that he wouldn't get a fair trial in San Francisco due to the jury pool's probable biases against Musk related to his Twitter takeover, which included laying off over 3,750 employees.
The judge sided with the shareholders' lawyers, who said Musk had only himself to blame for any negative perceptions.
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Indigenous women in Ecuador. (photo: Kimberley Brown/Mongabay)
A novel idea to leave the country’s vast oil reserves in the ground fizzled for lack of international support. Now, struggling under painful debt, the government wants to expand drilling in the rainforest.
Teams are drilling in one of the most environmentally important ecosystems on the planet, one that stores vast amounts of planet-warming carbon. They’re moving gradually closer to an off-limits zone meant to shield the Indigenous groups. It turns out that some of the country’s largest oil reserves are found here, too.
Ecuador is cash-strapped and struggling with debt. The government sees drilling as its best way out. The story of this place, Yasunà National Park, offers a case study on how global financial forces continue to trap developing countries into depleting some of the most biodiverse places on the planet.
Countries like Ecuador are “against the wall,” said MarÃa Fernanda Espinosa, an Ecuadorean diplomat and a former president of the United Nations General Assembly.
Drilling in this part of the rainforest wasn’t Ecuador’s first choice. In 2007, Rafael Correa, the president at the time, proposed a novel alternative that would have kept the oil reserves in a parcel here designated as Block 43, estimated then at around a billion barrels, in the ground.
Under that plan, countries would have created a fund of $3.6 billion, half of the oil’s estimated value, to compensate Ecuador for leaving its reserves untouched. Supporters of the idea said it would have been a win for the climate, for biodiversity and for Indigenous rights. And, they said, it would have been a precedent-setting moral victory: A small, developing nation would have been paid for giving up a resource that helped make places like the United States and Europe so wealthy.
But, after early fanfare, only a pittance in contributions trickled in. Ecuador turned to China for loans, around $8 billion over the course of the Correa administration, some to be repaid in oil.
“Now that the global trend is to abandon fossil fuels, the time has come to extract every last drop of benefit from our oil, so that it can serve the poorest while respecting the environment,” the current president, Guillermo Lasso, said last year.
Other nations are also looking to new oil development, even though the International Energy Agency has said countries must stop new projects to avoid catastrophic climate change. Developing nations say they should be allowed to keep using fossil fuels, since, historically, they’re least to blame for climate change. But these countries are often home to the very ecosystems that are most valuable in helping to stave off global warming and biodiversity collapse. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, has put up for auction oil blocks that include rainforest, peatlands and parts of a sanctuary for rare mountain gorillas.
In Ecuador, the oil industry insists that drilling can occur with little damage, but scientists say that even the best cases so far have led to deforestation and other pressures.
More oil extraction couldn’t come at a worse time for the world’s forests. With the Amazon weakened by deforestation and climate change, scientists warn that the forest is approaching a threshold beyond which it could degrade into grassland. Some areas are already emitting more carbon than they store, a ticking time bomb of greenhouse gases.
“Ecuador’s greatest wealth is its biodiversity,” said Carlos Larrea, a professor at Simón Bolivar Andean University in Quito, the capital, who helped to design the failed fund. The destruction of YasunÃ, he said, “is suicide.”
‘Nature Always Loses’
Yasunà brims with life. It trills, squawks and hoots. The world’s tiniest monkeys, called pygmy marmosets, scamper over branches, and the world’s largest rodents, capybaras, loll along riverbanks.
In one parcel of just 25 hectares, or about 60 acres, scientists have documented roughly 1,000 species of native trees, around the same number that exist in the entire United States.
No region of land on Earth is more rich in biodiversity than this one, where the Amazon climbs into the foothills of the Andes, according to scientists. The genetic diversity is a vast, untapped resource that could unlock cures for diseases and open doors to technological innovations. But the fragmentation here has already started.
“Nature always loses,” said Renato Valencia, a forest ecologist at Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador who has studied this area for decades. “When it comes to economic matters, that’s the rule.”
Even under the industry’s best practices, the ecosystem has suffered.
In the 1990s, as oil production began near those 25 hectares, executives went out of their way to protect nature, scientists said. They strove to keep deforestation to a minimum and hired scientists to study the local biodiversity.
“We kept hoping that this would be an example whereby oil development could coexist with a wild forest and its biota,” said Robert S. Ridgely, an ornithologist who led the study on birds. “But it just didn’t turn out that way.”
The worst environmental damage came not from oil contamination, the scientists said, but from the company’s road. Despite strict controls, it attracted new Indigenous Ecuadoreans to the area, who cut down trees to grow crops. Local hunters started killing more animals to sell, including threatened species. Illegal logging is a problem.
The New York Times reached out to authors of the company-funded studies. Six of seven responded, each expressing grave concern about the new drilling in Block 43.
“It is going to be another complete disaster,” said Morley Read, a zoologist who conducted the study on reptiles and amphibians.
People are at risk, too. In YasunÃ, an unknown number of men, women and children live in what’s known as voluntary isolation, rejecting contact with the outside world. They are called the Tagaeri and the Taromenane.
Their reserve and a related buffer zone are off-limits to drilling, but government officials have discussed shrinking the protective zone to reach more oil.
“That’s where nature put it,” said Fernando Santos, the Ecuadorean energy minister, in an interview in November. “And that’s where we need to get it from, albeit very carefully.”
A Nation ‘Dependent on Oil’
Oil has been flowing out of Ecuador’s Amazon for half a century, ever since American companies discovered it there. In 1972, a symbolic first barrel was paraded through the streets of Quito by the military. “The people cannot contain their excitement,” said the narrator of a newsreel filmed that day.
Per capita gross domestic product almost doubled in the following fifty years, a slightly faster pace than Latin America as a whole. Many credit oil.
“There has been a change from a very backward Ecuador to an Ecuador that has progressed not to the first world but to the middle — a breakthrough,” Mr. Santos, the energy minister, said.
But as oil revenues grew, global markets allowed the government to borrow more heavily.
“The thing that you see in Ecuador is that whenever Ecuador has experienced the oil booms, that’s when the debt of Ecuador has skyrocketed,” said Julián P. DÃaz, a professor of economics at Loyola University Chicago.
Economists say poorer countries get easily caught in this kind of debt trap because they have less robust economies to begin with and typically borrow at elevated interest rates, since they’re considered riskier.
“Obviously we are in monstrous debt,” Mr. Santos said. But, while he recognizes that oil played a role in creating the problem, he also sees oil as the solution. With more drilling and mining development, he said, “the country will be able to get out of debt.”
However, economic gains have barely trickled down to communities that have lived close to oil development for decades. More than half the people who live in the Ecuadorean Amazon, where the vast majority of the country’s oil comes from, are poor.
Ramiro Páez Rivera, an executive who has worked for several oil companies in the area, said it was the government’s job to put oil taxes to good use.
“We pay millions of dollars,” he said. “People don’t even have potable water.”
Last year, thousands of Indigenous Ecuadoreans staged an 18-day strike that stopped much of the country’s oil production. “We don’t want oil,” said Leonidas Iza, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, which helped lead the protests.
But even as protesters demanded an end to the president’s plans to double oil production, they also insisted the government bring down fuel prices, something that typically creates more demand.
“There is a harsh reality that in these 50 years our economies have become dependent on oil,” Mr. Iza said.
‘The World Has Failed Us’
The proposal in 2007 to leave the oil in the ground was an effort to chart a different path. A surprising figure pushed the proposal: the minister of energy, Alberto Acosta.
It was “the minister of petroleum proposing not to extract the petroleum,” Mr. Acosta recalled. As a younger man, he’d accepted as gospel that oil was the key to lifting Ecuador out of poverty. But after decades of production, the biggest effects he saw were pollution and deforestation.
So Ecuador asked the world for $3.6 billion, half of what it predicted it would make by selling the fuel. At first, there were positive signs. The United Nations agreed to manage the fund. Germany and Italy pledged resources.
But some governments didn’t trust the president, Mr. Correa, a populist who had intentionally defaulted on foreign debt. Many seemed perplexed by the idea of paying a country not to do something. Mr. Correa was accused of blackmail because he planned to drill if the money didn’t materialize.
As the Yasunà proposal lost momentum, China took on a growing influence in Ecuador, stepping in with billions of dollars in loans, some to be repaid in oil.
In the end, the Yasuni proposal only raised about $13 million. “The world has failed us,” Mr. Correa told the nation in August 2013.
Mr. Correa now lives in Belgium and faces arrest in Ecuador because of a corruption conviction.
Seeking ‘Another Type of Economy’
After the failure of the Yasunà project, a state-owned oil company, now part of Petroecuador, started knocking on doors in Indigenous communities throughout Block 43, offering money, housing and sanitation projects.
Today, twelve platforms dot the forest, connected by a gravel road.
From each platform, workers are drilling dozens of wells, bent in different directions to avoid further deforestation. Hundreds of workers toil in shifts, 24 hours a day.
“We are making an aggressive push given the limits of what can be done there,” said Hugo Aguiar, Petroecuador’s general manager.
However, it’s unclear how long the oil in Block 43 will be worth the investment. The heavy oil is less valuable and emits more carbon than lighter types. Over 90 percent of what’s pumped is toxic water that needs to be removed and treated, making operations more expensive.
Many economic alternatives have been studied, such as carbon offset projects and developing markets for local products like nuts.
But oil is one of the most profitable industries in the world. To compete, government policy and global collaboration are needed, researchers say.
One idea gaining traction involves “debt for nature” deals. Ecuador is considering a big one in coming months, getting banks to renegotiate a sizable portion of its debt in exchange for investing in a new marine reserve off the Galápagos Islands.
Another country may try its own version of the Yasunà proposal. Seychelles, an Indian Ocean island nation under threat from rising sea levels, is sponsoring oil exploration that could be used as leverage when asking wealthy countries to help fund renewable energy projects.
Pressure against oil in Ecuador continues to build. After years of legal hurdles, a ballot measure asking if the government should keep Block 43 crude oil underground may finally go to a vote.
“We will run all the oil blocks down, run all the ecosystems down, but we won’t solve the problem of Ecuador’s economy,” Mr. Iza, the Indigenous leader, said. “We must think of another type of economy.”
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