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Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg and Judge Juan Merchan have both reportedly received threats following Trump’s attacks, as has Merchan’s family.
Speaking at Mar-a-Lago hours after he was charged with 34 class E felonies, the former president and current presidential candidate continued his verbal assault on the district attorney and took aim at Merchan as well. In the case of the former, Trump claimed that Bragg was a “criminal” who “illegally leaked massive amounts of grand jury information, for which he should be prosecuted.” (He also took a shot at Bragg’s wife.) As for Merchan, Trump called him a “Trump-hating judge, with a Trump-hating wife and family, whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris and now receives money from the Biden-Harris campaign—and a lot of it.” The former leader of the free world also took the opportunity to take shots at Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis, whom he described as a “local racist Democrat district attorney in Atlanta who is doing everything in her power to indict me over an absolutely perfect phone call,” and DOJ-appointed special counsel Jack Smith, whom Trump dubbed a “lunatic.” The former commander in chief also bizarrely suggested Smith had changed his name, musing, “I wonder what it was prior to a change.”
The result? More death threats.
Per NBC News:
The judge overseeing the Trump hush money case, Juan Merchan, and his family and court in Manhattan have received unsubstantiated threats since Trump’s hearing yesterday, two sources familiar with the matter said. There have been “dozens” of such threats to the judge and his chambers recently, one official said.
Bragg and other top officials in his office also continue to receive threats, one source said. The unsubstantiated threats have been in the form of phone calls, emails, and letters.
As Axios noted on Thursday, all of this—Trump’s dangerous rhetoric and the threats it has seemingly inspired—raises a “crucial question”: What’s it going to take for Merchan to issue a gag order against Trump?
“There is no court that would want to impose a gag order on a president of the United States,” J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge, told the outlet. He added, however, that “if the former president forces the Manhattan criminal court, the court will have no choice.” After Merchan warned on Tuesday that both prosecutors and Trump’s team should “refrain from making statements that are likely to incite violence and civil unrest,” the ex-president’s attorney insisted his client’s previous rants on Truth Social were simply a result of his being “upset” and “frustrated” with the case and not meant to cause harm. “I don't share your view that certain language is justified by frustration,” Merchan responded.
Incidentally, Trump’s subsequent attacks on Merchan and various prosecutors came after the ex-president’s eldest son tweeted a story with a photo of Merchan’s daughter.
Not surprisingly, congressional Republicans are already insisting that any gag order on Trump would be “unconstitutional” and “further demonstrate the weaponization of the New York justice system.”
Area man appears to be unfamiliar with both Logan Roy and Donald Trump
To be fair, he only worked for Trump for 11 days.
Conservative-controlled Supreme Court does something right for a change
It appears the feeling is mutual, lady
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U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley hold a news conference following a virtual Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting at the Pentagon on March 15, 2023. (photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
ALSO SEE: New Batch of Classified Documents Appears on Social Media Sites
U.S. and European officials scrambled to understand how dozens of classified documents covering all manner of intelligence gathering had made their way online with little notice
The documents, which appear to have come at least in part from the Pentagon and are marked as highly classified, offer tactical information about the war in Ukraine, including the country’s combat capabilities. According to one defense official, many of the documents seem to have been prepared over the winter for Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior military officials, but they were available to other U.S. personnel and contract employees with the requisite security clearances.
Other documents include analysis from U.S. intelligence agencies about Russia and several other countries, all based on information gleaned from classified sources.
The series of detailed briefings and summaries open a rare window on the inner workings of American espionage. Among other secrets, they appear to reveal where the CIA has recruited human agents privy to the closed-door conversations of world leaders; eavesdropping that shows a Russian mercenary outfit tried to acquire weapons from a NATO ally to use against Ukraine; and what kinds of satellite imagery the United States uses to track Russian forces, including an advanced technology that appears barely, if ever, to have been publicly identified.
Officials in several countries said that they were trying to assess the damage from the disclosures, and many were left wondering how they had gone unnoticed for so long. Photographs of at least several dozen pages of highly classified documents, which looked to have been printed and then folded together into a packet, were shared on Feb. 28 and March 2 on Discord, a chat platform popular with gamers. The documents were shared by a user to a server called “Wow Mao.”
Some of the documents appear to be detailed Ukraine battlefield assessments prepared over the winter for senior Pentagon leaders. But officials only became aware that the documents were sitting on a public server around the time that the New York Times first reported the leak, on Thursday, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an unfolding investigation.
Senior Pentagon leadership restricted the flow of intelligence Friday in response to the revelations, two U.S. officials said. One described the clampdown as unusually strict and said it revealed a high level of panic among Pentagon leadership.
A European intelligence official worried that if Washington restricts allies’ access to future intelligence reports, it could leave them in the dark. Many of the leaked documents are labeled “NOFORN,” meaning they cannot be released to foreign nationals. But others were cleared to be shared with close U.S. allies, including the Five Eyes alliance of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. U.S. intelligence about British and Canadian activities is contained in some of the documents, suggesting that the fallout from the leaks will not be limited to the United States.
“We need to manage this well both internally and externally,” a second defense official said. “There are lot of institutions and agencies involved.”
The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the leak. A spokeswoman for Discord, where the earliest known copies of the images were posted, declined to comment.
The full extent of the leak was unclear. The second defense official said that what had appeared online was likely the result of a single disclosure from one tranche of documents, but officials were not yet certain of that.
The 5o pages reviewed by The Washington Post involved nearly every corner of the U.S. intelligence apparatus. The documents describe intelligence activities at the National Security Agency, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, law enforcement agencies and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) — arguably the most secretive intelligence agency in the government, responsible for a multibillion dollar constellation of spy satellites.
The documents primarily concern the war in Ukraine and demonstrate how the United States is making assessments about the state of the conflict and where it’s headed. That analysis informs major policy decisions by the Biden administration, including what weapons to provide Ukraine and how to respond to Russia’s battlefield strategy.
For instance, a Feb. 23 overview of fighting in Ukraine’s Donbas region forecasts a “grinding campaign of attrition” by Russia that “is likely heading toward a stalemate, thwarting Moscow’s goal to capture the entire region in 2023.”
That confident statement, which is printed in boldface type, is supported by information obtained from “NRO-collected and commercial imagery,” a new generation of infrared satellites, signals intelligence and “liaison reporting,” a reference to intelligence from a friendly government, about the high rate of Russian artillery fire, mounting troop losses and the military’s inability to make significant territorial gains over the past seven months.
The fact that the United States bases its assessments on many sources is no secret. But U.S. officials said these more detailed disclosures could help Moscow thwart some avenues for collecting information. For example, the Feb. 23 battlefield document names one of its sources as “LAPIS time-series video.” Officials familiar with the technology described it as an advanced satellite system that allows for better imaging of objects on the ground and that could now be more susceptible to Russian jamming or interference. They indicated that LAPIS was among the more closely guarded capabilities in the U.S. intelligence arsenal.
The documents also demonstrate what has long been understood but never publicly spelled out this precisely: The U.S. intelligence community has penetrated the Russian military and its commanders so deeply that it can warn Ukraine in advance of attacks and reliably assess the strengths and weaknesses of Russian forces.
A single page in the leaked trove reveals that the U.S. intelligence community knew the Russian Ministry of Defense had transmitted plans to strike Ukrainian troop positions in two locations on a certain date in February and that Russian military planners were preparing strikes on a dozen energy facilities and an equal number of bridges in Ukraine.
The documents reveal that U.S. intelligence agencies are also aware of internal planning by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. One document describes the GRU planning a propaganda campaign in African countries with the goal of turning public support against leaders who support assistance to Ukraine and discrediting the United States and France, in particular. The Russian campaign, the report states, would try to plant stories in African media, including ones that tried to discredit Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
The documents point to numerous intelligence successes by the United States. But they also show how depleted Ukrainian forces have become after more than a year at war.
A senior Ukrainian official on Saturday said the leaks had angered Kyiv’s military and political leaders, who have sought to conceal from the Kremlin vulnerabilities related to ammunition shortages and other battlefield data. The official said he was also concerned that more revelations of classified military intelligence were forthcoming.
In the meantime, some of the now public intelligence could ignite diplomatic controversies.
The documents show that the United States has gained access to the internal plans of Russia’s notorious Wagner Group, a private military contractor that has supplied forces to Russia’s war effort, and that Wagner has sought to purchase arms from Turkey, a NATO ally.
In early February, Wagner personnel “met with Turkish contacts to purchase weapons and equipment from Turkey for Vagner’s efforts in Mali and Ukraine,” one report states, using a variation on the spelling of the group’s name. The report further states that Mali’s interim president, Assimi Goïta, “had confirmed that Mali could acquire weapons from Turkey on Vagner’s behalf.”
It’s unclear from the report what the Turkish government may have known about the efforts by Wagner or if they proved fruitful. But the revelation that a NATO ally may have been assisting Russia in its war on Ukraine could prove explosive, particularly as Turkey has sought to block the addition of Sweden into the ranks of the trans-Atlantic military alliance.
A spokesperson for the Turkish government declined to comment. Mali’s Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Two other pages from the leaked intelligence file speak to Wagner’s plans for hiring Russian prisoners to fight in Ukraine and note that the Russian military has become dependent on the private soldiers. Like the report on meetings involving Turkey, these cite their sources as coming from “signals intelligence,” a reference to electronic eavesdropping and communications intercepts. Officials generally view those as among the most productive forms of intelligence-gathering, but they are potentially perishable if they are exposed.
Other intelligence reports among the leaked trove reflect on the geopolitical ramifications of the war in Ukraine. A summary of analysis from the CIA’s World Intelligence Review, a daily publication for senior policymakers, says that Beijing is likely to view attacks by Ukraine deep inside Russian territory as “an opportunity to cast NATO as the aggressor,” and that China could increase its support to Russia if it felt the attacks were “significant.”
U.S. and European officials have eyed warily the alliance between Moscow and Beijing. So far, officials have said there is no indication that China has granted Russia’s request for lethal military aid. However, a Ukrainian attack on Moscow using weapons provided by the United States or NATO would probably indicate to Beijing that “Washington was directly responsible for escalating the conflict” and provide possible justification for China to arm Russia, the analysis concludes.
The documents also show that Washington is keeping a close eye on Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon. One briefing from February succinctly notes that in recent days Iran had conducted tests of short-range ballistic missiles. Another takes stock of a newly published report by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s efforts to expand its facilities for enriching uranium.
Those reports appear offered as routine updates to policymakers. But another, which purports to derive from signals intelligence and “diplomatic reporting,” offers a dim assessment on behalf of the U.S. intelligence community of the IAEA’s ability to carry out its nuclear security mission.
Other reports provide updates on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, including missile tests. And in a reminder that the United States also spies on its allies, another document reports that South Korea’s National Security Council in early March “grappled” with a U.S. request that the country provide artillery ammunition to Ukraine, without unduly provoking Moscow. South Korea’s national security adviser suggested possibly selling the munitions to Poland, which controls the main weapons supply routes, since it was the U.S. goal to get the material to Ukraine quickly, the report said, citing signals intelligence.
The original source of the leak remains unclear. The Post identified the user that shared the images in February and March who, according to a review of previous social media posts, is based in southern California. A Twitter account using the same handle and avatar image as the Discord account wrote on Friday they had “found some info from a now banned server and passed it on.”
A man who answered the door at a house registered to the Discord user’s father on Friday evening declined to comment. “I’m not talking to anyone,” he said, closing the door of the family’s home at the edge of a cul-de-sac.
About three miles away, at a townhouse registered to the user’s mother, a knock at the door went unanswered. The parents did not respond to calls or messages.
On Wednesday, images showing some of the documents were also circulating on the anonymous online message board 4chan and made their way to at least two mainstream social media platforms, Telegram and Twitter. In at least one case, it appears a slide which initially circulated on Discord was doctored to make it look like fewer Russian soldiers have been killed in the war than the Pentagon assesses.
There was no indication that other documents, including those that dealt with countries besides Ukraine, had been altered.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has asked for NATO to fast-track his country's application for membership. (photo: Omar Marques/Insider)
On Tuesday, NATO formally welcomed its newest member, Finland. Speaking at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels, Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine's foreign minister, said his country was "aiming at reaching the same goal, becoming a full member of NATO."
Leaders from Poland and Estonia are among those who would like Ukraine to join the alliance sooner rather than later, according to officials who spoke with the Financial Times.
In 2008, NATO "welcomed" Ukraine's "aspirations for membership" but has not made progress on the issue since, in large part due to the active military conflict in the country since 2014.
Ultimately allowing Ukraine to join NATO remains US policy. But the Biden administration's stance is that now is not the time.
"In order for us to get to the question of when and how to get Ukraine into the alliance, we must, as the secretary-general has noted, 'ensure that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent nation,'" a US official told the Financial Times.
The US is also concerned that raising the prospect of NATO membership, now, would aid the Kremlin narrative that it is engaged in a war against the alliance and potentially escalate the conflict, the outlet reported.
A spokesperson for the State Department told Insider that the US is focused right now "on doing what needs to be done to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression." It also remains committed, the spokesperson said, to allowing Ukraine to someday join NATO.
"There's no change in that, but we have to be in this moment focused intensely on the weeks and months ahead, particularly as Ukraine prepares for a counteroffensive, again, to try to retake more of its territory, as well as work that needs to be done to continue to bring Ukraine up to NATO standards and NATO interoperability," the spokesperson said.
A White House spokesperson, speaking to Insider, declined to confirm the Financial Times report. But at a press briefing Thursday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre — asked about the US position on Ukraine joining NATO — affirmed that, while the Biden administration supports making membership available to any country that wishes to join, for now "we're focusing on making sure that the Ukrainian people have what they need to fight for their freedom."
NATO members are set to gather July 11 and 12 in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.
Gabrielius Landsbergis, the foreign minister of Lithuania, told Politico earlier this week that he believes it's important to show Ukraine that the alliance is taking concrete steps to address the country's aspirations.
"We need to show to Ukraine that their application is being taken seriously and they are making steps towards NATO, which at the end will end up with their full membership," he said.
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Senators, representatives, state officials and advocacy groups are calling on President Joe Biden to defy the U.S. District Court judge and use his executive powers to protect the drugs’ availability even before the case is heard by the conservative-leaning 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. (photo: Drew Angerer/Politico)
The Biden administration swiftly appeals abortion pill ruling as Dems split on going further.
Some Democrats say that’s not enough.
The judge appointed by former President Donald Trump sided with anti-abortion groups who said the FDA’s two-decade old approval of the drug mifepristone is unlawful and should be tossed, but the ruling won’t go into effect for a week to give the administration time to seek an emergency stay from higher courts.
Now, senators, representatives, state officials and advocacy groups are calling on President Joe Biden to defy the U.S. District Court judge and use his executive powers to protect the drugs’ availability even before the case is heard by the conservative-leaning 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“I believe the Food and Drug Administration has the authority to ignore this ruling, which is why I’m again calling on President Biden and the FDA to do just that,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said Friday. “The FDA, doctors, and pharmacies can and must go about their jobs like nothing has changed and keep mifepristone accessible to women across America. If they don’t, the consequences of banning the most common method of abortion in every single state will be devastating.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) backed Wyden’s call in a CNN interview Friday, arguing that the “deeply partisan and unfounded nature” of the court’s decision undermines its own legitimacy and the White House should “ignore” it.
But the Biden administration is afraid any public defiance of the Friday-night ruling could hurt its position while the case moves through the appeals process.
A person who is advising the White House on legal strategy, granted anonymity to discuss the ongoing litigation, said administration officials think it would be “premature” and “pretty risky” to take the step Wyden is calling for, because it’s possible a higher court would reverse the decision by Texas U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmayrk.
“They’re able to present themselves right now as the adults in the room who care about the rule of law,” the person said. “But that posture would come under pressure if they jumped out of the gate and said they wouldn’t abide by the ruling.”
The person added that the White House sees limited benefit in publicly defying the court’s ruling at this juncture for three reasons:
First, ignoring a lower court ruling stripping FDA approval of the pills wouldn’t stop GOP-controlled states from imposing their own restrictions and prosecuting those who violate them. Second, a future Republican president could reverse any decision on enforcement discretion and choose to aggressively prosecute those who sell or prescribe the pills. And third, even in the short term, the president defying the court could leave doctors across the country afraid to dispense the pills.
“It’s a very, very loose Band Aid that wouldn’t actually ensure access to medication abortion,” the person said. “And when you have another option on the table like the appeals process, it’s a pretty risky strategy.”
Additionally, the person said, because the Texas judge put his ruling on hold for one week to give the Biden administration time to appeal, the pills can still be legally prescribed in much of the country, limiting the urgency to take such a drastic action.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) told reporters on a call Saturday that while she is sympathetic to Wyden’s position, she doesn’t endorse anything that could jeopardize the administration’s fight to overturn the district court ruling.
“I get the sentiment, because this is a truly infuriating situation,” she said. “This outrageous decision had nothing to do with the facts or science or the law. But the key thing that needs to happen right now is making sure this decision is quickly appealed and reversed in court.”
Murray and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Saturday signaled their intent to use the decision to mobilize their base in the 2024 elections — arguing that flipping the House and passing a law restoring Roe v. Wade is the best path to achieving more permanent protections for the pills than whatever temporary protections the Biden administration could offer through executive actions.
“This battle is going to be fought with public opinion and with our votes at the ballot box, from here until we move forward in 2024,” Murray said.
Schumer suggested Democrats will force votes in Senate in the coming months that “put Republicans on the record” on the issue.
“The American people will see for themselves the stark contrast between Democrats who are relentlessly fighting for women’s rights, to make decisions about their own bodies and MAGA Republicans who will stop at virtually nothing to enact a national abortion ban with no exceptions,” Schumer told reporters on Saturday.
Biden himself appeared to endorse this strategy in the hours after the ruling, saying in a statement that while the administration was appealing the case, “The only way to stop those who are committed to taking away women’s rights and freedoms in every state is to elect a Congress who will pass a law restoring Roe versus Wade.”
Even some abortion-rights leaders who have previously criticized the Biden administration for not doing enough to protect access say they support the wait-and-see strategy given the current judicial threats to the pills.
“They do tend to be cautious,” NARAL President Mini Timmaraju told POLITICO. “But with stakes like this, with these courts, they should be. They’re the defendant. We want them to be careful. Also, it has served them well in the past. So I feel confident the administration is doing what they need to do.”
Some legal experts are also warning the administration against defying the decision this early in the process, saying doing so could create a precedent that gives future presidents cover to ignore “future orders that would be more firmly rooted in the law.”
“It would not be advisable for the FDA to disregard a court order even if they believe it’s wrong,” said Joanne Rosen, an attorney and senior lecturer at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “They could appeal. They could re-initiate the approval process of mifepristone all over again to get it back on the market.”
Yet others in the legal community are urging the administration to play hardball, arguing that the FDA was given enforcement discretion by Congress and previous court rulings and the agency should use those to the fullest extent if it is ultimately ordered to rescind its approval of abortion pills.
Those in this camp are pointing to another court ruling Friday night out of Washington State ordering the FDA to maintain the status quo for abortion pills and forbidding the agency from rolling back access in the dozen blue states that brought the challenge. Those clashing decisions, they say, give the Biden administration cover to maintain access to the drugs in defiance of the Texas court if that ruling stands.
“These are not radical,” said David S. Cohen, a professor at the Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law. “These are real strategies within the law.”
Other Senate Democrats, anticipating this ruling, have called on the Biden administration to “use every legal and regulatory tool in its power” to keep abortion pills on the market. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) recently petitioned the White House to use “any existing authorities, such as enforcement discretion, to allow mifepristone to remain available.
“FDA has previously used its authority to protect patients’ access to treatment and could do so again,” they wrote.
Timmaraju sees the mounting pressure from Democratic officials to ignore the court ruling as meaningful — even if they don’t ultimately goad the Biden administration into sweeping action.
“The senators are doing their jobs — it’s their job to push the White House and agencies like the FDA,” she said. “We need lawmakers from blue states getting out there and calling public attention to this case and raising awareness. For us, the biggest point people need to understand is that there is no state that is safe from these tactics.”
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Daniel Perry, center, and his attorney Doug O'Connell, left, walk out of the courtroom during jury deliberations in his murder trial. (photo: Jay Janner/AP)
Texas governor moves to pardon Daniel Perry, who was convicted of shooting Garrett Foster during rally in 2020
After an eight-day trial and two days of verdict deliberations, a jury in Travis county, Texas, found 33-year-old Daniel Perry guilty of murdering air force veteran Garrett Foster, 28. Perry is white, as was Foster.
While the jury also found Perry not guilty of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, the murder conviction left him facing a maximum of life imprisonment. He could be sentenced as soon as next week, according to the local television news outlet KXAN.
However, Texas’s Republican extremist governor Greg Abbott said on Saturday on Twitter that he was already working on pardoning Perry from his conviction, which he called an attempted jury nullification of Texas’s self-defense law.
Perry was driving for Uber in downtown Austin where Foster was participating in a Black Lives Matter rally on the night of the shooting on 25 July 2020. According to police, Perry stopped and honked at the protesters as they walked through the streets before driving his car into the crowd, the Texas Tribune reported.
Perry’s attorneys argued their client was forced to shoot Foster five times in self-defense after Foster approached his car with an AK-47 rifle. Meanwhile, prosecutors contended Perry had other options to confront the situation, including driving away before he fired his own gun at Foster.
There were no passengers in Perry’s car at the time of the shooting, which unfolded during nationwide demonstrations prompted by the murder of George Floyd by an on-duty police officer in Minneapolis.
In court, prosecutors brought up Facebook messages that Perry sent prior to Foster’s killing.
In one message, Perry wrote: “No protesters go near me or my car” and “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters,” the Austin television news outlet KTBC reported.
Another message that Perry sent on 31 May 2020 said: “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex.” A few days later, Perry commented on a Facebook post of a video titled “Protesters Looters Get Shot San Antonio Texas”, writing, “glad someone finally did something”.
During the trial, Austin police detective William Bursley testified about evidence found on Perry’s cell phone. Part of the evidence included online searches for “protest tonight”, “protesters in Seattle gets shot”, “riot shootouts” and “protests in Dallas live”.
“This is an age-old story about a man who couldn’t keep his anger under control,” said prosecutor Guillermo Gonzalez, according to the Austin American-Statesman. “It’s not about police, and it’s not about protest marchers.
“Garrett Foster had every right to go up to him and see what the heck was going on and he had every right to do it with a deadly weapon.”
Meanwhile, Perry’s attorney, Doug O’Connell, argued that the protesters “didn’t know anything about Perry when they attacked the car and boxed it in”.
“Daniel had no choice, and that could have happened to anyone,” O’Connell said.
O’Connell’s argument has a key ally in Abbott, with the governor saying he would not allow jurors to nullify Texas’s self-defense law. Abbott said on Saturday that the self-defense law in Texas was one of the strongest in the US, and he said he would defend it by asking the state board which handles such matters to give a pardon to Perry and to expedite the process.
After the verdict, Foster’s father, Stephen Foster, said: “We are happy with the verdict and also very sorry for [Perry’s] family as well.”
Travis county’s district attorney José Garza, for his part, said: “Our hearts continue to break for the Foster family. We hope this verdict brings closure and peace to the victim’s family.”
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Fox News. (photo: Twitter)
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El Paso. (photo: Justin Hamel/The Texas Tribune)
Climate activists have turned to local initiatives to rein in carbon emissions, including a May special election in El Paso.
El Pasoans will decide, in a special election this spring, the fate of an amendment to the city charter that would set aggressive renewable energy goals and overhaul city policy to make controlling carbon emissions a cornerstone of major city decisions.
Proposition K, known as the “climate charter,” has provoked fierce resistance and doomsday projections from business interests, spawning a bitter fight with local climate activists.
The fight has also become a testing ground for the national youth-led climate activist group Sunrise Movement, which has lent its support to the campaign and hopes that El Paso proves a model for enacting climate policies at the local level as global efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions have stalled.
The proposition is the second climate proposal brought to El Paso voters in less than a year. In November, voters approved a proposition to create a city climate action plan, which compels the city to create renewable energy goals for its operations. The ballot measure included $5.2 million in bonds to do it.
Proposition K would reach beyond the city’s own operations, attempting to set clean energy goals for the entire local economy. It was born after the Chaparral Community Coalition, a neighborhood advocacy group, settled a dispute over a gas plant expansion in 2021. The group donated more than $100,000 of its settlement money to jumpstart a campaign to rewrite the city’s charter in favor of policies shifting El Paso’s economy away from fossil fuels.
Sunrise El Paso, the local chapter of the Sunrise Movement, spearheaded the campaign and garnered almost 40,000 signatures to get Proposition K on the ballot. The city said it couldn’t verify the signatures in time for the November election, so voters will decide on May 6; early voting starts April 24.
The climate charter has been called “detrimental” and “irresponsible” by local business groups, which have claimed the policy is too vague and would open the door to banning everything from gas stoves to diesel trucks — although the proposal doesn’t address such consumer decisions at all, nor would it appear to create bans on the use of fossil fuels.
Instead, the proposition reads as a sort of climate manifesto, calling on the city of El Paso to reorganize its employees, create a new climate department and rethink local policy at all levels to cut greenhouse gas emissions and put the entire community on a path to an “environmentally sustainable future.”
“Fundamentally, this charter creates a process,” said Michael Siegel, political director and co-founder of Ground Game Texas, an Austin-based organization that backs progressive local campaigns and worked with Sunrise El Paso in writing the proposed climate charter. “It says that whenever there’s a major city decision, we’re going to consider the climate impact.”
The specific requirements: create climate impact statements for major city policies; study whether the city could take over its electric utility; stop selling water to fossil fuel companies outside of the city; and create renewable energy goals for electricity generation.
“The City of El Paso shall employ all available methods to require that energy used within the City is generated by clean renewable energy, with the goals of requiring 80 percent clean renewable energy by 2030 and 100 percent clean renewable energy by 2045,” the proposed charter states.
The renewable energy goals are among the more contentious parts of the proposal — generating alarm from business groups and Republican politicians. In a press conference hosted by the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales suggested the proposal would cause electricity bills to skyrocket and force widespread job losses. A video produced by the Hispanic chamber shows a woman attempting to turn the lights on only to realize that the electricity is out. She then attempts to pump gasoline but encounters an “OUT OF GAS” sign.
The dramatic characterizations rely on an economic analysis commissioned by the El Paso Chamber which made the striking claim that the climate charter, if implemented, would cut El Paso’s local economy by 41 percent and eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs. The prediction, though, assumes the policy would ban fossil fuels altogether, from electricity generation to stoves and furnaces.
Brian Points, president of Points Consulting in Idaho and author of the analysis, called the climate charter “dramatic and extreme” in an interview with the Tribune and said he interpreted the language to be a “prohibition” of using fossil fuels.
Points also assumed the city would not use fossil fuels even if green energy isn’t feasible, provoking widespread electricity disruptions, he said.
“My job was to take the letter of this [policy] and play it out,” Points said. “It’s a bad idea to base policy on slogans and aspirations.”
Supporters of the climate charter say Points’ analysis mischaracterizes their proposal to reach its predictions of economic doom. The renewable energy goals included in the proposal appear limited to electricity generation, according to the language of the policy, and Sunrise organizers point out that those are goals, not bans.
“It’s a goal — that’s why we wrote ‘goals,’” said Miguel Escoto, a Sunrise El Paso organizer who helped author the climate charter. “This is not a rigid document.”
There’s another reason the charter uses the word “goals”: An outright ban on using fossil fuels could be illegal. State laws, including one passed in 2021, bar cities from banning gas as a fuel source in new subdivisions.
Escoto, who also works for Earthworks, an environmental group, called Points’ analysis a “hatchet job” and a gross misinterpretation of the proposal. Escoto views the attacks from business groups as a sign that fossil fuel interests feel threatened.
The El Paso Chamber said in a press release that the language of Proposition K is “rushed and unrealistic.”
“The passage of the Climate Charter … would bring our economy to a screeching halt,” the chamber wrote in a response to criticism of the economic analysis study.
Renewable energy currently makes up less than 5 percent of electricity generation in El Paso, according to El Paso Electric’s most recent corporate sustainability report.
The targets in the climate charter are based on El Paso Electric’s own stated goals to achieve 80 percent carbon-free energy by 2035, but the company’s goals substantially differ from the activists’ proposal.
El Paso Electric counts nuclear energy from its Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona, which provides 45 percent of the utility’s electricity generation, in its definition of clean energy. It’s unclear whether the proposed climate charter would agree with that.
And El Paso Electric’s goal for 2045 is the “pursuit” of 100 percent decarbonization. In an interview, Jessica Christianson, vice president of sustainability and energy solutions for El Paso Electric, said the utility does not have a clear plan “penciled out” for how to achieve 100 percent clean energy by that time.
“We have some strategies, but we need some technologies to evolve and price points to [fall] to achieve that final 20 percent,” Christianson said. Carbon capture — an emerging technology that sucks carbon dioxide from polluting plants — would be included in the utility’s 2045 goal, she added.
But climate activists said the company’s sustainability advertisements mislead the public into believing the utility will generate 100 percent clean and renewable electricity by 2045 without highlighting the caveats.
“The biggest lie that fossil fuel companies want us to believe is that they’ve got it covered,” Escoto said. “We’re basing [the climate charter] off of what El Paso Electric is promising, but we’re making it bigger, and we’re making it actually based on policy.”
The climate charter would also require the city to explore taking over El Paso Electric, an idea that the private utility company strongly opposes. Christianson, of El Paso Electric, also said the company is concerned about the charter’s ban on selling municipal water to fossil fuel companies that operate outside of the city; some of the company’s plants operate outside city limits and use city water in their operations.
Climate activists want the utility to be more accountable to the public, which they argue is difficult while it’s privately held. In 2020, an infrastructure fund advised by J.P. Morgan Investment Management Inc. closed on an acquisition of the company in a multibillion-dollar deal that Sunrise El Paso opposed.
“Community members should be participating in the decision-making, not just the utility company,” said Christian Marquardt, another Sunrise organizer in El Paso. “[The charter] is a way of restoring that democratic power.”
City officials declined to comment on the practical implications of the charter ahead of the election, but Nicole Alderete-Ferrini, the City of El Paso’s climate and sustainability officer, said that she views the special election as a signal of the community’s commitment to advancing the conversation on climate change goals.
“I’m proud that we’re having this conversation in our community, because it doesn’t come from nowhere,” Alderete-Ferrini said. “It comes from 20 years of a lot of people working really hard to do everything we can to advance a healthy environment in the city of El Paso.”
City officials want to “set the example” for the private sector’s energy transition, she said. She anticipates the climate action plan, which will set emission reduction targets for city operations, will be finalized in April 2025.
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