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“The big joke that’s out there now is that ‘MAGA’ really stands for ‘make attorneys get attorneys,’” Cohen said as reports indicate that Trump may soon become a defendant.
During an interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes and Cohen, the names of several of Trump’s lawyers were mentioned, including Joe Tacopina, Alina Habba and Evan Corcoran. Tacopina has been speaking to the press about a potential indictment, which reportedly could come next week, while Habba and Corcoran are involved in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents investigation. (A federal judge on Friday ordered Corcoran to provide more testimony in the Justice Department’s probe.)
“There are so many more people that are around [Trump] in terms of lawyers, that the big joke that’s out there now is that ‘MAGA’ really stands for ‘make attorneys get attorneys,’ and sadly that’s really the truth,” Cohen said.
Habba and Trump himself, Cohen pointed out, were fined nearly $1 million for a frivolous lawsuit targeting Hillary Clinton.
Hayes, after mentioning Cohen’s time in prison, asked if he had anything pertinent to say to Corcoran, Habba, or anyone “who is considering signing up for this assignment”—referring to an indictment if it should come.
Cohen first said they should recall his testimony before the House Oversight Committee in Feb. 2019.
“I turned around and I had said to both Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), ‘I know what you are doing, and I know the place that you are trying to run, because I wrote the playbook, and it didn’t work out well for me, and it’s not going to work out well for you,’” Cohen said.
“The smartest thing that a lawyer can do, if Donald Trump asks to represent him in this nightmare that he is going to be living: run!” Cohen urged. “Run as fast as you can—and don’t run to Florida, and especially not Palm Beach. Run someplace east or west, but definitely don’t get involved with Donald. That’s what I would say.”
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Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, center. (photo: Kristin Callahan/REX/Shutterstock)
Alvin Bragg is expected to bring an indictment against Trump this week over hush payments to adult actor Stormy Daniels in 2016
Trump triggered a flurry of frantic headlines and statements from his political allies on Saturday when he posted a message on social media claiming he was set to be arrested this Tuesday on charges of hush payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels.
An indictment from the office of Alvin Bragg is widely expected this week but officials, and Trump’s lawyers, have clarified they have no certainty as to timing or what actually will happen in court.
But Bragg sent an email to his office, obtained by Politico, that did not mention Trump by name but that did appear to address the case, including widespread security fears around lower Manhattan courts in the wake of any indictment.
“As with all of our investigations, we will continue to apply the law evenly and fairly, and speak publicly only when appropriate,” Bragg wrote.
He added: “We do not tolerate attempts to intimidate our office or threaten the rule of law in New York … Our law enforcement partners will ensure that any specific or credible threats against the office will be fully investigated and that the proper safeguards are in place so all 1,600 of us have a secure work environment.”
On Saturday afternoon, Trump supporters gathered at his Mar-a-Lago home and country club in Florida to show their support. Trump later boarded a private jet to fly from Palm Beach to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to attend a college wrestling tournament.
Trump made no mention of a criminal indictment and arrest at the Tulsa event. He appeared alongside Senator Markwayne Mullin, congratulated the wrestlers and posed for pictures with supporters, according to pictures published by Tulsa World.
Trump and Mullin sat in a boxed-off area and stayed for all 10 matches, while Mullin, a former wrestler, explained the finer points of the sport. Trump talked with fans between matches, but reporters were kept away.
Speaking before Trump’s arrival, Mullin appeared to compare the likely charges against Trump with unproven and largely discredited claims that former secretary of state Hilary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 opponent, committed criminal security breaches while she served in the Obama administration.
“They’ve been after the president [Trump] since day 1,” Mullin was reported to have remarked. “Everybody sees this for what it is. It’s not what this country is about. We had an opportunity to get after Hilary … and we didn’t.
“The [Manhattan] district attorney needs to concentrate on putting bad guys in jail,” he added.
It was Trump’s first public appearance since he said in a social media post that he would be arrested over the payments made to Daniels, a month before the 2016 presidential election. If any indictment is handed down, it is likely to claim the payments were an illegal use of campaign finances.
Trump received a standing ovation in Tulsa and held up a defiant fist as he arrived at the wrestling event while fans cheered. Earlier on Saturday, Trump had urged his supporters to “protest, protest, protest” in comments made on his Truth Social platform.
Insider has reported that the grand jury looking at the case may still listen to one further witness on Monday, raising the prospect of any indictment coming later in the week.
Michael Cohen, the former Trump attorney and “fixer” who was sentenced to three years in federal prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion and campaign-finance violations, said that Trump’s comments signaled a desire for “another violent clash”.
“It’s eerily similar to the battle cry that he put out just prior to the Jan 6 insurrection, you know, especially including the call, you know, for protest,” Cohen told MSNBC. Cohen added that “it would have been smart for Donald to write ‘peaceful protest’, but he doesn’t want a peaceful protest”.
Cohen also theorized that Trump would see his arrest as a potential boost to his 2024 presidential campaign as he frequently has sought to portray himself as at the center of a political “witch-hunt”.
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Trump speaking. (photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)
An indictment of former President Donald Trump would offer the agency a chance to restore its tarnished reputation.
After years in which some agents acted as Trump’s loyal servants, the Secret Service must get back to basics. Although the agency faced considerable challenges before Trump became president, by the end of his presidency, its critics charged that its loyalty to the United States had been subsumed by its loyalty to a man. Trump regularly grifted off the service, charging it exorbitant hotel fees for his own protection on his properties. Trump broke the tradition of separating politics from protection when he appointed the deputy assistant director of the Secret Service, Anthony Ornato, to be his own deputy chief of staff; the service seemed a willing accomplice to Trump’s agenda. The roles played by both Ornato and the service in the January 6 insurrection were, at best, an embarrassing mess and, at worst, a sign that the service was not salvageable.
We were all talking about the Secret Service too much; it had become the subject and was not, as intended, in the background. Whether President Joe Biden has the capacity or inclination to take on an agency that is simultaneously protecting him and his family remains unclear; Biden has appointed a new director, but there haven’t been massive firings or reviews.
Now one of the most unusual moments the agency will ever have encountered presents the Secret Service with the chance to restore its tarnished reputation and return to normal. As a former president, Trump is still a protectee. As a former president, though, he is also no longer in charge. He does not control the environment; he can make noise, but he cannot dictate the terms of his arrest. He may want a perp walk for fundraising purposes, but nobody has to promise him one.
By all accounts of the preparation for a potential arrest, the Secret Service seems to have remembered that its role is to avoid the limelight. Tellingly, the Secret Service is not, in the terminology of site protection, “the coordinating entity.” The agents on Trump’s detail are not taking charge of site protection or securing the courthouse, and not performing advance work for a public appearance. They are leaving that all to local police. If Trump wants to incite a crowd or call for protests, as he has, so be it. That isn’t the service’s problem.
The service just needs to show up with the suspect and let the court conduct its typical process, recording the necessary information. In New York, that involves taking the name, address, Social Security number, and date of birth of the defendant. That the man who entered politics by questioning the birth certificate of Barack Obama will now be reduced to verifying his own identity in court is a delicious bit of irony.
If all goes as it should, Trump’s arrest should be no different from what the service calls an “off the record” event, as if Trump were invited to a wedding and the agents were checking where he was seated. The service seems to know this. Jonathan Wackrow, a former agent in the Presidential Protection Division, believes that it will be very hard for the service to recover if it is perceived as allowing the protectee to dictate the terms of the arrest. “For the Secret Service,” he told me, “they want this to just be another day in the life of the protectee. It is just an administrative movement. That is all. Get him from Point A to Point B and back to Point A.”
When a court demands that a person who is being detained be brought forward so that it can assess the legality of the detention, it issues a writ of habeas corpus—loosely, “produce the body.” That is a clarifying way to think of the service’s role in the days ahead.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting at the prime minister's office in Jerusalem Sunday, March 19, 2023. (photo: Abir Sultan/AP)
Netanyahu's remarks come as Israel is embroiled in a major crisis that has sent tens of thousands of people into the streets protesting every week for the last two months. The divide over Netanyahu's plans to change the legal system has not spared the country's military, its most trusted institution, where many reservists have pledged not to show up for duty under what they see as impending regime change.
Starting Sunday, more than 700 elite officers from the Air Force, special forces, and Mossad said they would stop volunteering for duty. The typically taboo talk of refusal to serve in a military that is compulsory for most Jews and is highly respected by the Jewish majority underlines how deeply the overhaul plan has divided Israel.
Netanyahu has rejected a compromise plan proposed by the country's ceremonial president meant to defuse the crisis. He made no mention of reaching an agreement with opponents during the remarks to his Cabinet, instead saying he would not accept “anarchy,” listing off demands that his security chiefs rein in road blockages by protesters, incitement against him and his ministers and the refusal to serve by a growing number of reservists.
“I expect from the military chief of staff and the heads of the branches of the security services to aggressively combat the refusal to serve. There’s no place for refusal to serve in the public discourse,” he said. “A state that wishes to exist can’t tolerate such phenomena and we will not tolerate it as well.”
The military had no immediate comment about Netanyahu’s remarks. The military’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzl Halevi, has reportedly warned Netanyahu that the reservists’ protest risks harming the military’s capabilities. He has pledged to make sure it doesn’t and keep the military outside of the public debate on the overhaul.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid tweeted in response that if Netanyahu suspended the overhaul, reservists would stop refusing to serve.
The protest from within the military comes as Israel is mired in a year-long round of fighting with the Palestinians, and as Israel's archenemy Iran races ahead with its nuclear program. Israel says Iran is developing a nuclear bomb — a charge that Tehran denies.
Netanyahu said Sunday the legal changes would be carried out responsibly while protecting the basic rights of all Israelis. His government — the country's most right-wing ever — says the overhaul is meant to correct an imbalance that has given the courts too much power and prevented lawmakers from carrying out the voting public's will.
Critics say it will upend Israel's delicate system of checks and balances and slide the country toward authoritarianism. They also say it could give Netanyahu a chance to evade conviction in his corruption trial.
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The scene from Silicon Valley Bank headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. (photo: Ian C. Bates/NYT)
The bank was using an incorrect model as it assessed its own risks amid rising interest rates, and spent much of 2022 under a supervisory review.
The Fed repeatedly warned the bank that it had problems, according to a person familiar with the matter.
In 2021, a Fed review of the growing bank found serious weaknesses in how it was handling key risks. Supervisors at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which oversaw Silicon Valley Bank, issued six citations. Those warnings, known as “matters requiring attention” and “matters requiring immediate attention,” flagged that the firm was doing a bad job of ensuring that it would have enough easy-to-tap cash on hand in the event of trouble.
But the bank did not fix its vulnerabilities. By July 2022, Silicon Valley Bank was in a full supervisory review — getting a more careful look — and was ultimately rated deficient for governance and controls. It was placed under a set of restrictions that prevented it from growing through acquisitions. Last autumn, staff members from the San Francisco Fed met with senior leaders at the firm to talk about their ability to gain access to enough cash in a crisis and possible exposure to losses as interest rates rose.
It became clear to the Fed that the firm was using bad models to determine how its business would fare as the central bank raised rates: Its leaders were assuming that higher interest revenue would substantially help their financial situation as rates went up, but that was out of step with reality.
By early 2023, Silicon Valley Bank was in what the Fed calls a “horizontal review,” an assessment meant to gauge the strength of risk management. That checkup identified additional deficiencies — but at that point, the bank’s days were numbered. In early March, it faced a run and failed, sending shock-waves across the broader American banking system that ultimately led to a sweeping government intervention meant to prevent panic from spreading. On Sunday, Credit Suisse, which was caught up in the panic that followed Silicon Valley Bank’s demise, was taken over by UBS in a hastily arranged deal put together by the Swiss government.
Major questions have been raised about why regulators failed to spot problems and take action early enough to prevent Silicon Valley Bank’s March 10 downfall. Many of the issues that contributed to its collapse seem obvious in hindsight: Measuring by value, about 97 percent of its deposits were uninsured by the federal government, which made customers more likely to run at the first sign of trouble. Many of the bank’s depositors were in the technology sector, which has recently hit tough times as higher interest rates have weighed on business.
And Silicon Valley Bank also held a lot of long-term debt that had declined in market value as the Fed raised interest rates to fight inflation. As a result, it faced huge losses when it had to sell those securities to raise cash to meet a wave of withdrawals from customers.
The Fed has initiated an investigation into what went wrong with the bank’s oversight, headed by Michael S. Barr, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision. The inquiry’s results are expected to be publicly released by May 1. Lawmakers are also digging into what went awry. The House Financial Services Committee has scheduled a hearing on recent bank collapses for March 29.
The picture that is emerging is one of a bank whose leaders failed to plan for a realistic future and neglected looming financial and operational problems, even as they were raised by Fed supervisors. For instance, according to a person familiar with the matter, executives at the firm were told of cybersecurity problems both by internal employees and by the Fed — but ignored the concerns.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which has taken control of the firm, did not comment on its behalf.
Still, the extent of known issues at the bank raises questions about whether Fed bank examiners or the Fed’s Board of Governors in Washington could have done more to force the institution to address weaknesses. Whatever intervention was staged was too little to save the bank, but why remains to be seen.
“It’s a failure of supervision,” said Peter Conti-Brown, an expert in financial regulation and a Fed historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “The thing we don’t know is if it was a failure of supervisors.”
Mr. Barr’s review of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse will focus on a few key questions, including why the problems identified by the Fed did not stop after the central bank issued its first set of matters requiring attention. The existence of those initial warnings was reported earlier by Bloomberg. It will also look at whether supervisors believed they had authority to escalate the issue, and if they raised the problems to the level of the Federal Reserve Board.
The Fed’s report is expected to disclose information about Silicon Valley Bank that is usually kept private as part of the confidential bank oversight process. It will also include any recommendations for regulatory and supervisory fixes.
The bank’s downfall and the chain reaction it set off is also likely to result in a broader push for stricter bank oversight. Mr. Barr was already performing a “holistic review” of Fed regulation, and the fact that a bank that was large but not enormous could create so many problems in the financial system is likely to inform the results.
Typically, banks with fewer than $250 billion in assets are excluded from the most onerous parts of bank oversight — and that has been even more true since a “tailoring” law that passed in 2018 during the Trump administration and was put in place by the Fed in 2019. Those changes left smaller banks with less stringent rules.
Silicon Valley Bank was still below that threshold, and its collapse underlined that even banks that are not large enough to be deemed globally systemic can cause sweeping problems in the American banking system.
As a result, Fed officials could consider tighter rules for those big, but not huge, banks. Among them: Officials could ask whether banks with $100 billion to $250 billion in assets should have to hold more capital when the market price of their bond holdings drops — an “unrealized loss.” Such a tweak would most likely require a phase-in period, since it would be a substantial change.
But as the Fed works to complete its review of what went wrong at Silicon Valley Bank and come up with next steps, it is facing intense political blowback for failing to arrest the problems.
Some of the concerns center on the fact that the bank’s chief executive, Greg Becker, sat on the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s board of directors until March 10. While board members do not play a role in bank supervision, the optics of the situation are bad.
“One of the most absurd aspects of the Silicon Valley bank failure is that its CEO was a director of the same body in charge of regulating it,” Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, wrote on Twitter on Saturday, announcing that he would be “introducing a bill to end this conflict of interest by banning big bank CEOs from serving on Fed boards.”
Other worries center on whether Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, allowed too much deregulation during the Trump administration. Randal K. Quarles, who was the Fed’s vice chair for supervision from 2017 to 2021, carried out a 2018 regulatory rollback law in an expansive way that some onlookers at the time warned would weaken the banking system.
Mr. Powell typically defers to the Fed’s supervisory vice chair on regulatory matters, and he did not vote against those changes. Lael Brainard, then a Fed governor and now a top White House economic adviser, did vote against some of the tweaks — and flagged them as potentially dangerous in dissenting statements.
“The crisis demonstrated clearly that the distress of even noncomplex large banking organizations generally manifests first in liquidity stress and quickly transmits contagion through the financial system,” she warned.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, has asked for an independent review of what happened at Silicon Valley Bank and has urged that Mr. Powell not be involved in that effort. He “bears direct responsibility for — and has a long record of failure involving” bank regulation, she wrote in a letter on Sunday.
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Asian Americans gathered at Times Square to protest Asian hate in New York City on March 16, 2023. (photo: Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency)
The FBI’s supplemental hate crimes data for 2021 shows bias-motivated attacks rose to the highest level on record.
Tracking hate crimes is notoriously difficult, and the FBI’s data remains incomplete — a result of underreporting by local and state agencies. Criminologists disagree on whether the data is enough to draw conclusions about the prevalence of hate crimes in the US. But several said that the Bureau’s report, alongside other data sources, is sufficient to show that hate crimes overall have, in fact, been on the rise in recent years.
“Is the FBI catching the exact volume? Of course not,” Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino who tracks hate-crime data, told Vox. “But they’re getting information from more reliable high-reporting agencies and you can get a sense that the trends are alarming.”
The report comes as the Stop Asian Hate movement enters its third year, as reports show that trans people are more than four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime, as drag shows are reportedly being increasingly targeted with protest and violence, and after the US Department of Homeland Security identified white supremacists as the most persistent and lethal threat in America.
The new numbers released this week build on an incomplete annual hate crimes report that the FBI released in December. That initial data appeared to show a drop in hate crimes but was missing information from some of the country’s largest cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and data from most of Florida and California, after the FBI switched to a new reporting system. The supplemental report includes information from an additional 3,025 agencies, according to the FBI.
The 10,840 bias incidents reported in 2021 represent a 31 percent increase from 8,263 crimes in 2020 and a third consecutive annual increase. Nearly 65 percent of them were motivated by bias over race or ethnicity, nearly 16 percent were a result of sexual-orientation bias, and more than 14 percent of them resulted from religious bias. Intimidation and assault made up most of the offenses, while 19 rapes and 18 murders were reported as hate crimes. The remainder of the offenses were classified as destruction of property or vandalism.
Experts say the data has serious holes: “The FBI hate crime data is hugely flawed and is not an appropriate source for national hate crime statistics or to compare year-to-year numbers,” Jacob Kaplan, a researcher at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, told Vox.
The FBI’s data set is limited for a few reasons, he wrote in the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences’ January 2022 newsletter: for an offense to be deemed a hate crime there must be evidence that it was motivated by bias — which can be hard to prove. The crime also must be reported to the police in the first place, which studies show doesn’t happen enough. Victims may not even know they experienced a hate crime. For example, if a racist person punches the first Black person they see without using a racial epithet or wearing a racist symbol, how can investigators prove that the perpetrator was motivated by anti-Black hate? And when agencies do report data, their reports are inconsistent over time, or they might report unreliable data, according to Kaplan.
So the FBI report is one piece of an incomplete puzzle — one that could be clearer with more and better information. Experts are calling for Congress to make hate crime reporting mandatory.
“Data drives policy,” Steven M. Freeman, the Anti-Defamation League’s vice president of civil rights and director of legal affairs said. “And when the data is incomplete, it sends the wrong message to victims and perpetrators.”
Better data (and mandatory data that isn’t collected punitively) could send a message that hate crimes are taken seriously, and it could increase the likelihood that members of marginalized groups will come forward to report crimes committed against them.
Even in the face of incomplete data, the data is “horrifying”
The federal government’s hate crime law bans crimes that are motivated by race, color, national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability. The actions criminalized under the law are typically violent, like assault, which means that other hateful offenses, like using a racial slur, aren’t illegal. Most states have hate crimes laws, but those laws vary, leading to unequal protection from hate crimes in different jurisdictions. And most states with hate crimes on the books do not require data collection.
While the FBI is required to release an annual report on hate crimes, the bureau relies on voluntary reporting from local and state agencies. So, for example, the 2020 report did not include statistics from around 3,500 agencies that failed to submit data, including 10 cities with populations over 100,000, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. For that year’s report, another 59 police departments in cities with populations over 100,000 reported that there were no hate crimes, according to an analysis by the Anti-Defamation League.
“Only 20 percent of agencies reported one or more hate crimes, and it’s hard to credit agencies when they report that there weren’t many hate crimes in their districts,” said Freeman of the 2021 report. “While one hate crime is one too many, it’s difficult to address the surges if we don’t have a complete picture. Still, there are trends that give us a snapshot and tell us that the problem is growing.”
The FBI’s supplemental 2021 report showed that Black victims were targeted the most, with 3,277 incidents up from 2,871 in 2020. Crimes against white people followed, with 1,107 in 2021 up from 869 in 2020. Gay men were the victims in 948 incidents up from 673 in 2020 and Jewish people were targeted in 817 cases, up from 683 cases in 2020.
There were 746 attacks against Asian people, a record for the group for a single year, up from 249 the previous year, a sharp spike.
These numbers identify a few trends when held up against three decades of data — and new reports from groups including Stop AAPI Hate. For one, new records were set. It was the worst year for anti-Latino crimes and anti-Asian crimes and more than double that of the previous year for Asian victims. It was the second-worst year on record for Black victims and had the most offenses committed against transgender and Sikh victims since that data started being recorded in 2015.
Next, surges of violence are lasting longer. According to Levin, the data has historically shown that a cycle of violence occurs when a “bigoted spotlight” is focused on a certain group. But the cycles of violence, usually brought on by a catalytic event, are now remaining longer and, in some instances, pushing totals up as well.
For example, hate crimes against Muslims rose after 9/11 as a result of Islamophobic rhetoric, but the spike in crimes against Muslims decreased in the months after October 2001. June 2020, the height of Black Lives Matter protests, was the worst month recorded for Black Americans, but the hate crimes continue at a high rate through November 2020, Levin said, with similar trends in anti-Asian crimes in 2021.
One explanation for this trend is that politicians, social media influencers, and pundits are keeping stereotypes elevated longer, Levin said. “Hate crimes in this decade are acting differently because they’re being impacted by a very hostile social media, political, and cultural environment,” Levin said.
Ultimately, the FBI’s 2021 data is one part of the jigsaw puzzle that when combined with earlier data, social science data, and other data, shows the country had an inflection point in 2019 and 2020, with consecutive years of increases, said Levin.
Levin’s team has already collected data for 2022 from nearly three dozen big cities and found that hate crimes were up in 32 major cities, and crimes motivated against race and gender-nonconforming people saw the most increases. There were decreases in anti-Black and anti-Asian crimes in 2022, but because these crimes increased precipitously in previous years, the number of crimes is still significant.
In a bipartisan move and as a response to a surge in anti-Asian violence, the House passed the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act to bolster hate crime tracking by providing grants to regional law enforcement agencies to create reporting hotlines and train police officers on hate crime response, among other efforts.
Many celebrated the law but as Vox’s Li Zhou reported, it won’t prevent anti-Asian hate crimes since it mostly addresses what takes place after the crime has already occurred. Hence, others point to the need for education, mental health aid, and other social services to counter bias.
“Whichever way you slice the data, it’s horrifying,” Levin said. “People are behind these numbers, and we are in a perfect storm for directed, fragmented violence.”
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This July 24, 2008 photo shows the Monticello nuclear power plant in Monticello, MN. In November 2022, the plant confirmed a 400,000 gallon leak of water containing tritium and reported it to officials. The leak wasn't known to the public until Thursday. (photo: Karen Bleier/AFP)
The leak was detected nearly four months ago and reported to state and federal regulators. The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission posted a notice publicly at the time, but the company and state agencies did not notify the general public until last week.
"Xcel Energy took swift action to contain the leak to the plant site, which poses no health and safety risk to the local community or the environment," the company announced in a statement on Thursday. Ongoing monitoring has confirmed that the leak "is fully contained on-site and has not been detected beyond the facility or in any local drinking water," the company said.
Xcel confirmed the leak of water containing tritium in November 2022 and notified officials the same day, according to the company's announcement. Officials attributed the leak to a water pipe running between two buildings at the plant site. The amount of contaminated water that leaked out is enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool about 60% full.
Xcel is based in Minneapolis, Minn., and operates in eight states around the U.S. Its two nuclear power plants are both based in Minnesota. Monticello is about 40 miles northwest of Minneapolis and has a population of about 15,000 people.
Because there was no immediate threat to the public's health and safety, "we focused on investigating the situation and containing the affected water in concert with our regulatory agencies," Xcel spokesperson Lacey Nygard said in an email to NPR when asked why there was a nearly four month delay in notifying the public. "We are now at a place where we can share with the public not only what has already been done, but what we're going to do next. This timing allows us to provide the most accurate and complete understanding of the situation."
In 2009, Xcel's same Monticello plant had a small tritium leak, which Nygard said was smaller in scale than the 2022 leak and came from a sump rather than a pipe.
"Many operating nuclear plants have had some level of tritium leakage at some point during their operations," Nygard said.
Michael Rafferty, a spokesperson for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, told NPR the agency waited to get more information before announcing it to the public.
"Minnesota state agencies are deeply committed to our role in protecting human health and the environment and take seriously our responsibility to promptly inform the public when a situation presents any sort of current or imminent risk," Rafferty said. "The situation at Xcel Energy's Monticello site did not — and still does not — present an imminent threat to residents' health."
Officials with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the NRC, Victoria Mitlyng, told a local news station that the public's concern was "very understandable," and emphasized that "the public in Minnesota, the people, the community near the plant, was not and is not in danger."
What is tritium?
Tritium is a naturally occurring form of hydrogen that emits a weak form of radiation, which can't travel far in air or penetrate skin, according to the NRC.
Tritium is also a byproduct of producing electricity in nuclear power plants, and the dose of tritium that comes from nuclear power plants is much lower than exposures from radiation present in the natural environment, according to the NRC. Xcel said the tritium levels in the leaked water were below NRC safety thresholds.
"Everyone is exposed to small amounts of tritium every day, because it occurs naturally in the environment and the foods we eat," according to an NRC fact sheet.
Any radiation exposure can pose some health risk, including increased occurrence of cancer. The risks of exposure are linear, meaning lower levels of radiation pose lower risk.
Eating or drinking food or water with tritium in it is the most common way it enters the body. It can also be absorbed through the skin. About half of it leaves the body within 10 days after exposure.
The cleanup will take months
Xcel says it has recovered about 25% of the tritium-contaminated water that leaked, and recovery efforts will continue over the course of the next year.
"While this leak does not pose a risk to the public or the environment, we take this very seriously and are working to safely address the situation," Chris Clark, president of Xcel Energy–Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, said in the company's statement. "We continue to gather and treat all potentially affected water while regularly monitoring nearby groundwater sources."
To contain the leak, the water is being diverted to a treatment system inside the plant, which prevents water from leaving the plant. Xcel said it also inspected all of its piping to ensure this wasn't also happening elsewhere in the facility.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency said Xcel is considering building above ground storage tanks or installing a retention pond to store the water containing tritium that has been recovered, as well as considering treatment, reuse and disposal options. Minnesota regulators will review any options the company selects, MPCA said.
"Our top priority is protecting residents and the environment, and the MPCA is working closely with other state agencies to oversee Xcel Energy's monitoring data and cleanup activities," said Kirk Koudelka, MPCA assistant commissioner for land and strategic initiatives. "We are working to ensure this cleanup is concluded as thoroughly as possible with minimal or no risk to drinking water supplies."
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