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While the Supreme Court temporarily preserved access to the abortion pill, these constant switches make it harder for those seeking abortion, as well as their providers.
In reality, it was just a procedural ruling: By reversing two lower court decisions that would have restricted access to mifepristone before an outcome in the case, the justices merely said that mail-order mifepristone cannot be prohibited while the court case is still being fought out. It could be months, years, before we get an indication of where the justices really stand on this case, which is likely to land in the Supreme Court’s lap as the appeals process plays out. Meanwhile, abortion services are getting harder and harder to access, as thousands of people seeking an abortion and those helping them—often with only a small or even an all-volunteer staff—try to make sense of these legal shifts.
Most abortion access groups aren’t the large nonprofits whose lobbying arms make them visible in mainstream media. There are the many abortion funds, generally operating state by state to help people pay for their abortion and associated costs. There are also groups like the Online Abortion Resource Squad, who meet people seeking abortion information but who may never have heard of an abortion fund, in the online spaces that they’re already in. And there are the relatively new abortion providers, like Just the Pill, who work in mobile clinics providing services in legal states. Their vision, one medical director told me, “is to expand access, regardless of what’s going on in the country with the laws.”
The Online Abortion Resource Squad was founded in 2019, when Ariella Messing, an abortion fund volunteer and then Ph.D. candidate in bioethics and health policy at Johns Hopkins University, saw that the r/abortion subreddit was an important resource for people seeking abortion information. For some, this subreddit might be the first place they went looking for resources or support, but their experience was dependent on who could answer their queries. So OARS is there, Messing recently told Garnet Henderson at Rewire News, to make sure that “every post had a good answer.”
To date, everyone at OARS is unpaid, with its volunteers working in shifts on the board 24/7. Behind the scenes, its volunteers share information among themselves to try to keep up with the legal challenges. Whenever there’s a big abortion case in the news, OARS volunteer Erin Johnson told me by phone this week, there’s an influx of people coming to the subreddit asking what it means. “This last series of rulings with the [mifepristone] case was particularly challenging,” said Johnson, who also works in reproductive health research, looking at how abortion funds are responding to the Dobbs decision. “We don’t really have anything that we can tell people about long-term access issues. We can tell people what is happening right now—if you need care today, here’s where you can go.” But given the confusion of the case and how long it may go on for, she said, “we can’t help people with the anxiety of two weeks from now, three months from now, six months from now—are they still going to be able to get abortion care?”
Part of the problem is that people may not think about the practical issues of accessing abortion until they need one. Another is that the news that reaches them may not be current, Johnson observed. “People often hear about the ban, but they don’t hear about the stays.” One recent poster was anxious that the mifepristone they had ordered online through an organization would not arrive in time to safely use, Johnson said. The mifepristone and misoprostol pills she ordered were hung up in customs, and the longer they didn’t have them, the more weeks their pregnancy advanced, along with the chance that the misoprostol could degrade before it arrived.* They thought abortion wasn’t legal in their state, Johnson said, but Johnson was able to tell them that the ban had been stayed; that the poster had the option to get mifepristone at a clinic. But by that point, “this person has spent three or four weeks being anxious” and had already spent part of the money that they might otherwise have used getting care in person. These possible bans and the uncertainty they cause, Johnson said, force a person to spend “all this time, money, emotional energy.” So the ongoing legal confusion depletes limited resources, even when bans end up being stayed or reversed.
Clinic staff too are racing to keep up with the court battles while just doing their jobs. Another poster on the subreddit lived in a state where two appointments 24 hours apart are required for a medication abortion. The poster, Johnson recalled, was told on her first appointment that it was the last day the clinic would be offering mifepristone, because the clinic was preparing for the possibility that the Supreme Court might not stay the lower court ruling. The poster, now presuming she wouldn’t have the option of mifepristone, Johnson said, “was concerned about how she would handle a procedural abortion.” She told the subreddit that she just didn’t know what to do. If she could afford it, she might have the option of traveling further away to a clinic still offering mifepristone—and meanwhile, the clinic was in the position of having to cancel appointments last-minute. “Different procedures take different amounts of time, different staffing, different resources,” said Johnson. “And of course, you know, that evening the stay was put in place.”
These kinds of resources—fundamentally about information and social support, rather than the actual performance of procedures or dispensing of medication—have been a crucial part of the abortion access landscape since before the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Even in states where abortion was legal, actually having access to abortion depended on where you lived. There was no clinic offering abortion in 89 percent of U.S. counties as of 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute. For many people, this has long meant that medication abortion was the best option. That may account for the increase in medication abortion—in the same year, 53 percent of all abortions were performed that way, up from 39 percent in 2017. The vast majority of those medication abortions—98 percent—involved taking both mifepristone and misoprostol.
That people lack information about their options, or where to receive abortions, is by design. This needless, intentional access gap in the United States is a direct result of decades of criminalization and overregulation, fueling and fueled by threats to abortion providers and seekers. This was true even before Dobbs. So some groups were already prepared last year for what recriminalizing abortion would mean.
Just a few days after this latest ruling in the mifepristone case, I spoke to Dr. Julie Amaon, medical director of Just the Pill, formed three years ago to expand abortion access. “The idea was originally to have mobile clinics to deliver pills,” she said, but then changes in FDA regulations during Covid-19 made mifepristone more accessible by mail, and they adapted too. “We try to work with patients and see how we can reduce as many barriers as possible,” said Dr. Amaon, “travel, childcare, lodging, all of that.”
Right now, Dr. Amaon said, “our team is very tired.” It’s been difficult for patients and the public in general to figure out what’s going on, she said, “so it’s been a struggle to make sure that patients know we’re still here and we’re offering services.” They noticed a drop in patient requests over the last week. “Obviously we don’t know exactly why. But it seems like people are just kind of confused about what’s going on, where they can access care.”
Currently, Just the Pill offers services in Minnesota, Montana, and Wyoming, as well as Colorado, the one state where they can legally operate mobile clinics. People all over the U.S. travel to them, she said, meeting them in a state where their mobile clinics are legal. “If Minnesota is a close drive for them,” for example, “we have them come over to the Minnesota border for their consultation.” In other cases, for “people who don’t have a mailing address in a state we are providing in,” she added, “we have been using general delivery at the post office,” where they can mail medication.
Whatever happens in the Texas mifepristone case, Dr. Amaon said, their clinical staff are ready to switch to a misoprostol-only option. “We’re not kind of set in a, this is how abortion care should be delivered, period [mindset].” That flexibility, finding new ways to provide abortion care, includes their work to reduce legal issues as much as possible, she said: “The hoops that people have to jump through are pretty ridiculous.”
The Supreme Court hasn’t removed mifepristone as a mailing option yet. And by staying the lower courts’ orders, they’ve offered countless people a sort of reprieve. But that shouldn’t lull people into a false sense of victory: The net result of these rulings is that the groups who want to ban abortion have succeeded in piling on more questions, more chaos, more barriers. The anti-abortion forces, in short, are gaining ground, not ceding it. While the case works its way through the courts, they still get to ratchet up fear and confusion about access—exactly what they want, should the court someday find in their favor.
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The discovery of the texts added pressure on the Fox leadership as it sought to find a way to avoid a trial in the Dominion defamation lawsuit. (photo: Rebecca Noble/The New York Times)
Private messages sent by Tucker Carlson that had been redacted in legal filings showed him making highly offensive remarks that went beyond the comments of his prime-time show.
Private messages sent by Mr. Carlson that had been redacted in legal filings showed him making highly offensive and crude remarks that went beyond the inflammatory, often racist comments of his prime-time show and anything disclosed in the lead-up to the trial.
Despite the fact that Fox’s trial lawyers had these messages for months, the board and some senior executives were now learning about their details for the first time, setting off a crisis at the highest level of the company, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.
Justice Clarence Thomas during Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s swearing-in ceremony at the Trump White House. (photo: Jonathan Newton/Washington Post)
The justices unintentionally make the case for more ethics rules that bind the Supreme Court.
It’s the Court’s most robust public statement on its ethical responsibilities in over a decade. But it hardly seems to respond to the Thomas revelations that prompted it.
The document spends far more time discussing other ethical issues, such as the rules governing when a justice can be paid to teach at a university, than it does discussing the more salient question of whether a sitting justice should be accepting expensive gifts from a wealthy political activist. And the Court’s brief discussion of such gifts suggests that its approach needs to be tightened down considerably.
The document is part of Chief Justice John Roberts’s reply to a letter Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D) sent to Roberts, inviting him or another justice to testify “regarding the ethical rules that govern the Justices of the Supreme Court and potential reforms to those rules.”
On Tuesday evening, Roberts responded with three documents, including a brief letter declining to testify on the grounds that “testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by the Chief Justice of the United States is exceedingly rare” and has historically involved noncontroversial matters.
The most significant document included in Roberts’s response is a three-page “Statement of Ethics Principles and Practices,” which lays out how the justices, who are not bound by the same code of conduct that applies to all other federal judges, approach ethical questions. This document is signed by all nine of the justices, both Democratic and Republican appointees.
The justices’ statement devotes an entire paragraph to paid teaching at universities, and another to unpaid speeches to “an educational institution, a bar group, or a nonprofit group.” It spends two entire paragraphs defending the Court’s approach to calls for a justice to recuse, arguing that “Justices have a duty to sit” in cases where a lower court judge might recuse because another judge cannot substitute for a justice who removes themselves from a case.
By contrast, the statement devotes only a few stray words to the problem at the heart of the Clarence Thomas corruption scandal: justices accepting gifts from individuals who may wish to influence how the Court decides cases. The statement claims that “Justices have followed the financial disclosure requirements and limitations on gifts” established by regulations that apply to other federal judges.
An appendix attached to the statement (this appendix is the third document Roberts provided to Durbin) also quotes a federal law that states that no federal judge may “accept anything of value from a person” who either has business before their court or “whose interests may be substantially affected by the performance or nonperformance” of a judge’s duties.
Beyond these brief mentions of gifts, however, the Court is largely silent on how it approaches lavish gifts from billionaire political donors. And it offers no explanation of how Thomas’s practice of accepting such gifts from Crow can possibly be squared with the law restricting gifts to federal judges.
Thomas drew an arbitrary line to justify his gifts from Harlan Crow; the Court’s response to Durbin provides some insight into why he drew it there
Thomas has accepted expensive gifts from his billionaire friend for a very long time — and this fact has also been known for a very long time. As far back as 2001, for example, Thomas accepted a $19,000 Bible that once belonged to Frederick Douglass from Harlan Crow and his wife Kathy. This and other such gifts from Crow to Thomas were revealed nearly two decades ago, in a 2004 report by the Los Angeles Times.
The justice, for his part, has attempted to defend himself by claiming that this kind of “personal hospitality from close personal friends” is not a problem because Crow “did not have business before the court” — though it turns out that’s not entirely true. According to Bloomberg, Thomas did briefly consider a $25 million copyright dispute involving a company that Crow was a partial owner of in 2005.
Thomas has also accepted gifts from organizations that file amicus briefs in cases where they are not parties. In 2001, for example, he accepted a $15,000 bust of Abraham Lincoln from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank with close ties to Harlan Crow — Crow currently sits on AEI’s board. Since then, AEI filed briefs in several cases before the Supreme Court, and Thomas did not recuse from those cases.
But, setting aside the question of whether Thomas should have recused from these few cases in which his benefactors filed a brief or had a direct financial interest in the outcome of a case, Thomas’s suggestion that he is untainted so long as he only accepts gifts from groups or individuals who do not “have business before the court” is ridiculous because every single American has a stake in the Supreme Court’s decisions.
The Supreme Court is the most powerful policymaking body in the United States, effectively capable of repealing or rewriting any law. In NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), for example, the Court allowed GOP-controlled states to opt out of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, denying health coverage to millions of Americans who’ve never filed a brief in the Supreme Court. The Court’s decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022) arguably impacts everyone on the planet because it drastically curtailed the EPA’s ability to fight climate change. And the Court’s campaign finance decisions, which have largely stripped away barriers to wealthy donors who seek to influence politics, have obvious implications for a billionaire political donor like Crow.
So the idea that it is somehow innocent for a sitting Supreme Court justice to accept expensive gifts from a billionaire with a long history of using his wealth to influence US politics and policy, so long as that billionaire doesn’t actually appear in the Court and isn’t a party to any lawsuit before the Court, is laughable and arbitrary. If the law permitted Crow to lavish similar gifts on the president, or on a member of Congress, it would be obvious that federal law is too lax, because Congress and the president exercise general authority over all matters of US policy. So too does the Supreme Court.
Other policymaking officials generally are bound by much more restrictive rules than the justices apply to themselves. Members of the US House and their staff, for example, must seek formal House Ethics Committee approval before they can accept a gift worth more than $250 from a personal friend. The federal anti-gifting statute imposes special obligations on executive branch officials, who typically may not accept a gift from anyone “conducting activities regulated by” the agency where they are employed.
The Court’s response to Durbin does offer a little bit of insight into how Justice Thomas could possibly think that the arbitrary line he drew to determine when he could accept Crow’s gifts was correct.
As mentioned above, the appendix to the nine justices’ statement on ethics quotes from a federal statute that prohibits federal officers and employees from accepting gifts from anyone “seeking official action from” or “doing business with” that federal employee’s “employing entity.” Read in isolation, this provision could be interpreted to only forbid federal judges from accepting gifts from lawyers or parties with direct business before their court.
But the very next line of the same anti-gifting statute provides that federal officials also may not accept gifts from anyone “whose interests may be substantially affected by the performance or nonperformance of the individual’s official duties.” The justices’ response to Durbin makes no attempt to square this language, which seems to forbid a justice from accepting a gift from anyone at all, with Thomas’s behavior.
The Supreme Court is famously clueless about how corruption works
The Supreme Court’s devil-may-care response to Thomas’s actions, and to Crow’s apparent influence-buying, is not especially surprising given how the Court has spoken about corruption in its own decisions. Indeed, many of those decisions speak of such influence-buying as if it is both a positive good and an essential aspect of democracy.
Consider, for example, the Court’s anti-canonical decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which permitted corporations and unions to spend unlimited sums to influence elections. In reaching that conclusion, the Court spoke of elected officials who are unusually responsive to their donors as pillars of democracy:
Favoritism and influence are not . . . avoidable in representative politics. It is in the nature of an elected representative to favor certain policies, and, by necessary corollary, to favor the voters and contributors who support those policies. It is well understood that a substantial and legitimate reason, if not the only reason, to cast a vote for, or to make a contribution to, one candidate over another is that the candidate will respond by producing those political outcomes the supporter favors. Democracy is premised on responsiveness.
Supreme Court justices are obviously different from members of Congress in that they are not elected. But that suggests that justices should be held to a higher standard than elected officials: A corrupt member of Congress can potentially be cast out of office by their voters, while a justice serves for life unless they are successfully impeached.
The justices, however, appear to view influence-buying that targets justices in much the same way they view influence-buying that targets members of Congress. And so the Court’s first response to the recent reporting on Harlan Crow does little to allay concerns that Justice Thomas should not be taking expensive gifts from a politically connected billionaire.
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State Rep. Zooey Zephyr, D-Missoula, speaks on a motion to ban her from the Montana House of Representatives, Wednesday, April 26, 2023, at the Montana State Capitol in Helena, Mont. (photo: Thom Bridge/AP)
Zephyr had been prevented by Republicans from debating a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors after telling her colleagues that they would have blood on their hands if it passed. Her silencing led to protests from her constituents, seven of whom were arrested Monday while protesting in the House chamber.
"When I rose up and said 'there is blood on your hands,' I was not being hyperbolic," Zephyr said while addressing the House before the disciplinary vote. "I was speaking to the real consequences of the votes that we, as legislators, take in this body. And when the speaker asks me to apologize on behalf of decorum, what he is really asking me to do is be silent when my community is facing bills that get us killed."
House Speaker Matt Regier did not make a speech Wednesday, but he had previously said that the protests were a "dark day" and that "the only person silencing Rep. Zephyr is Rep. Zephyr. The Montana House will not be bullied. All 100 representatives will continue to be treated the same."
Following the Monday protests, the House did not meet Tuesday after Regier abruptly canceled the scheduled session.
Since her initial remarks, several Republican lawmakers have repeatedly misgendered Zephyr, including in a letter from the Montana Freedom Caucus sent last week demanding her censure. The letter, signed by 21 members of the House, said she should be punished "for trying to shame the Montana legislative body and by using inappropriate and uncalled-for language during a floor debate."
"When the speaker disallowed me to speak, what he was doing is taking away the voices of the 11,000 Montanans who elected me to speak on their behalf," Zephyr said Wednesday, saying that the protest was a response to having their voices silenced.
Zephyr said in a statement following the censure vote, "Though the Republican supermajority has voted to strip me of my ability to partake in debate, I remain steadfast in my commitment to my community."
Speaking in support of barring Zephyr from the floor for the remainder of the 90-day legislative session, House Majority Leader Sue Vinton accused her of placing lawmakers and staff at risk of harm for her actions during protests in the chamber on Monday.
"Freedom in this body involves obedience to all the rules of this body, including the rules of decorum," Vinton said.
Vinton and other House Republicans cited the Monday protest and accused Zephyr of inciting it.
"This is an assault on our representative democracy, spirited debate, and the free expression of ideas cannot flourish in an atmosphere of turmoil and incivility," Republican David Bedey said on the House floor.
"What is at stake is the expectation that any member of this body, whoever that might be, has a duty to strive to maintain decorum, so that the people's work, that work of all Montanans, can be accomplished."
Zephyr in her remarks pushed back on the idea that the protest threatened anybody's safety, saying that it was "peaceful."
"When the speaker gaveled down the people demanding that democracy work, demanding that their representative be heard, when he gaveled down, what he was doing was driving a nail in the coffin of democracy," she said.
The events have showcased the growing power of the Montana Freedom Caucus, a group of at least 21 right-wing lawmakers that has spearheaded the charge to discipline Zephyr. The caucus re-upped its demands and rhetoric Monday, saying in a statement that Zephyr's decision to hoist a microphone toward the gallery's protesters amounted to "encouraging an insurrection."
There were no reports of damage to the building and lawmakers were not threatened.
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Kiora Hansen and Della Currie protest against racism by Antioch police officers at a rally in front of the police department on Tuesday. (photo: Sandhya Dirks/NPR)
Now, on this early Tuesday evening in April, she was far from alone.
"Shut it all down," Wade screamed across the packed room.
She was talking about the police department of this suburban Northern California town, about 45 minutes northeast of Oakland.
Antioch sits in the middle of a storm of scandal after the release of violent, racist, homophobic and sexist text messages by the city's police officers.
The disturbing texts came to light during an investigation by the FBI and the local District Attorney's office into alleged misconduct by police in Antioch and the neighboring city of Pittsburg, Calif. Some of the issues being investigated include violent and excessive use of police dogs and eliciting false confessions.
Earlier this month, the District Attorney's office released two reports detailing the contents of multiple text message exchanges written by 17 officers from various time periods between 2019 and 2022. They include two texts from Rick Hoffman, the president of Antioch's police union.
But far more officers were included on the text chains, according to a letter sent by the Chief Public Defender of Contra Costa County, Ellen McDonnell to the county's District Attorney, Diana Becton. According to McDonnell, so far 45 officers — almost half of the entire department — received the texts and did nothing. At least 16 of those "are in leadership roles at APD as detectives, sergeants, and lieutenants," McDonnell wrote.
"You're going to have to listen," Wade cried out in the council chambers. Her words were directed at the councilmembers, Mayor Lamar Thorpe, and police chief Steven Ford, who joined the department last year, after most of the text messages were sent.
"You're going to have to absorb a lot of people's pain," Wade told them.
Including her pain.
Wade's son, Malad Baldwin, was 22-years-old when he was a victim of police violence, she claims. In 2014, he was asleep in Wade's car parked outside their house, when police dragged him from the vehicle and beat him, according to a lawsuit filed against the city and the officers. In the complaint, Wade said she came out of the house to see them striking her son, and that they beat him until he lost consciousness. The suit claims that police slammed Baldwin into the sidewalk, spread his legs and repeatedly struck him there. "They hit him right in between his butt cheeks," Wade said.
Antioch police claim Baldwin was drunk and combative. He was charged with resisting arrest, but those charges were dropped. The lawsuit was settled out of court, with officers admitting no wrongdoing.
Wade says the beating changed her son. He was depressed, riddled with anxiety, unable to hold down a job. That was the first of several incidents between Baldwin and Antioch police. Wade says it was as if they were stalking him, harassing him every where he went.
In 2020, Baldwin died by suicide. Wade faults Antioch police for her son's mental trauma, and ultimately for his death.
Antioch police have not yet responded to requests for comment regarding subsequent interactions with Baldwin.
Now, Wade says, "It feels like my baby died all over again."
That's because Baldwin was mentioned in the text messages.
"I knew from the beginning that it was a racist city"
Officers joked about Baldwin's claims that they beat him on his backside, and about the department using deadly force. "But we kill more Mexicans than anything else. So Blacks can feel safe," one officer texted. "Sorry. Reverse that," he followed up a minute later.
Those are some of the tamer texts released.
You'll hear people talk about "old Antioch" — which refers to the place it used to be: White, working class, a sundown town, where people of color knew not to be after dark.
But all that has changed. Antioch is now 36% white, 35% Latino, and 20% Black, according to the 2020 census. The shift happened both gradually and quickly. At first, Black people and other people of color moved here for the reasons everyone else did: bigger houses, better schools, a shot at the suburban American dream.
In the past decade or so, gentrification and exploding housing costs in cities such as San Francisco and Oakland drove displaced poor people here — especially people of color. As Oakland's Black population shrank, Antioch's grew.
This new great migration is happening across America, changing the suburbs that have long been thought of as white space into the most diverse places in the nation.
On this Tuesday night, the special council city meeting business was narrowly focused on addressing the ballooning scandal resulting from the racist texts, with the council voting to audit the department's internal affairs division, its hiring and promotional practices, and an equity audit.
Those all passed easily, but the meeting, like the one the week before, was about more than just policy. People needed to speak.
Almost 100 people protested in front of the police station ahead of the council meeting, walking a stone's throw away to city hall.
"Antioch didn't look like this, but it does now," said Timothy Manly. "When everybody was fixing their issues in the '6os, Antioch didn't think that they'd have to." In the '60s, Antioch was almost entirely white. "You're just reaping what you sowed."
Some people told stories of their own encounters with Antioch police, others spoke of the experiences of children and loved ones.
"These individuals that have spoken tonight are victims of police brutality, they are victims of crimes," public defender Ellen McDonnell said when it was her turn at the dais. "The community and our clients have been sounding the alarm about your police department for years and years and years."
Shayla Bowers talked about how important it was to name the officers. "Our Black and brown people, as you see in this room, we got names, we got banners, we are public about our deaths in our community," she said. "We need to be public about these police officers that are doing harm in our community."
"I knew from the beginning that it was a racist city," said Gigi Crowder, the executive director of the NAMI Contra Costa, an affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and an Antioch resident. "But then I believed that there was a possibility for change."
She believed that, she told the council, because it wasn't just demographics that were shifting, the balance of power was too.
"I'll bury that N*…*er in my fields"
For a long time the city's leadership did not reflect its diversifying population. That changed in 2020, with a Black majority emerging on the five-person city council, including Mayor Thorpe.
"In 2020, when all I asked for was a community to look at policies to do police reform," Thorpe reminded the council chambers, "people lost their collective minds."
"If they could've hung me from the highest tree in Antioch they would have," he said.
A group of pro-police, almost entirely white residents, many affiliated with a private Facebook group called "Back the Blue," flooded the then-online-only council meetings, pushing back against the new majority, and any suggestions of police reform. They mounted a recall campaign against Thorpe, which failed to gather enough signatures.
After the December 2020 death of Angelo Quinto in the custody of Antioch police, the council voted for police to wear body cameras, a reform many police departments passed over a decade ago, but Antioch had long resisted.
In one of the released texts body cameras are mentioned. Discussing an arrest made with the neighboring police department of Pittsburg, Calif., whose officers did have cameras, an officer wrote: "If Pitt didn't have all those body cams and that was us ... we would have f…*ked him up more."
Another police officer, Devon Wenger, responded, "I agree. That's why I don't like body cameras."
In a statement to ABC News Wenger denied accusations of racism, pointing out that he only sent that one text. "Out of both released reports, the initial 21-page-report and the secondary 14-page report, I just simply said I do not like body cams," he told them.
"To put it bluntly, that's not racist."
Wenger also suggested that the investigation into Antioch police may have been "corrupted."
NPR's attempts to speak to the officers named in the DA's report were either unsuccessful or declined.
Mayor Thorpe shows up in the police text messages too.
"I'll buy someone a prime rib dinner at House of prime rib to 40 that mfr during the protest today," one officer texted, referring to "the potential use of a .40mm less lethal launcher being utilized" on the mayor, the District Attorney's report explains. A .40mm weapon is a kind of gun that fires hard foam projectiles. Their use against protesters and for crowd control, as well as their designation as somehow less lethal, has been criticized.
That text was sent in June 2020, during the heart of the national uprising over the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Another text referred to Floyd as "the gorilla who died."
The text messages continuously refer to Black people as "gorillas" and "monkeys," and officers repeatedly texted photos of gorillas to each other.
A young activist, Shagoofa Khan, prominent in organizing protests in Antioch, including a hunger strike in front of the police station, was also mentioned in the texts. She "looks like an Arabian nights cum dumpster," a sergeant wrote.
The same sergeant, Josh Evans, texted in reference to the arrest of a Black suspect, "I'll bury that N*…*er in my fields."
Four minutes later he texted again. "And yes... it was a hard R on purpose."
"I'm only stopping them cuz they black"
The texts aren't just filled with racist and sexist vitriol, they also seem to suggest possible civil rights violations.
On a group chat, one officer asks the others what they are doing. The response from another, "violating civil rights."
Racial profiling was a "modus operandi with respect to these officers," civil rights lawyer John Burris claimed at a news conference on April 20 announcing a federal lawsuit against the city, the police department, and individual officers on behalf of a growing list of victims.
"They would stop people just because they were Black, they would harass them, they would search them, and ultimately arrest them if they thought they could get away with it," he alleged.
"They didn't want any kind of oral, written, videotape of the confession," he went on. "They wanted the confession to be such that they could make up the confession and convince their superiors that the person has confessed."
Burris said he was also disturbed by text messages that suggested officers took pleasure in using violent force, especially on Black people.
Burris' clients include those who say they were repeatedly targeted and falsely accused by Antioch police officers.
Adam Carpenter, one of the plaintiffs, was arrested for possession of a firearm by four of the officers named in the scandal.
"I have been harassed and targeted and railroaded by the Antioch police department for the last 10 years," Carpenter told a gathered scrum of reporters.
According to the lawsuit, in the year before his arrest he was stopped by the same officers almost 10 times.
Carpenter spent 11 months in jail, before all charges against him were dropped. The complaint alleges that one of the officers involved in Carpenter's arrest texted, "I'm only stopping them cuz they black." It alleges another wrote, "I sometimes just say people gave me a full confession when they didn't. gets filed easier."
"They have basically ruined my life," Carpenter said. "I've not been able to get a job, and I'm a journeyman by trade, a painter."
"It's been devastating, like living in hell."
Others shared similar stories, claiming patterns of harassment, planted evidence, and manufactured confessions.
The Antioch city attorney as well as current and former police chiefs have not yet responded to requests for comment on the litigation.
Michael Rains, a former police officer and lawyer who represents some, but not all, of the officers, responded with a brief statement. "I understand this story is newsworthy on a number of fronts," he wrote, "including, from my perspective, whether the due process and privacy rights of officers were abandoned by the Court and District Attorney." But he added that he has advised his clients not to speak publicly, and is himself not granting interviews "at the present time."
Current Antioch Police Chief Steven Ford, who is Black, came from San Francisco police to lead the department a year ago. At the first council meeting after the scandal broke, he said that he is trying not to reform, but to reframe policing there. "We're going to shift how things are done structurally, how they are done politically, how they are done administratively," he said.
No one can tell yet just how many criminal cases might hang in the balance, after these revelations. Burris, alongside others including two U.S. Congressmen, are calling for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the Antioch Police Department.
Carpenter said in a strange way, he was grateful to read all the texts. At least they confirmed for everyone else what he'd been experiencing for so long.
It has been the same for Kathryn Wade. Reading the texts may have reopened the wound of her son's death, but at least, she says, "Everything is out in the open, now."
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Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro arrives to attend the annual military exercises by the Navy, Army and Air Force, in Formosa, Brazil, Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. (photo: Eraldo Peres/AP)
Former president of Brazil says he shared video ‘by mistake’ while on morphine in US hospital
Bolsonaro spent more than two hours in the company of police investigators on Wednesday morning, nearly four months after thousands of hardcore supporters ran riot in the capital, Brasília, in what the new administration called a botched coup intended to reinstall the far-right former army captain as president.
The pro-Bolsonaro riot failed and the winner of last year’s election, his leftist rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, remains in power.
But federal investigators are now working to identify and punish the perpetrators of January’s violence as well as the financial backers and organizers of the turmoil.
Speaking earlier this week, Lula’s justice minister, Flávio Dino, said he believed “traitorous” army generals were involved in the conspiracy. “They go around calling themselves patriots but they are traitors,” Dino said.
Bolsonaro was forced to appear before police officials on Wednesday morning over a video he shared on Facebook two days after the 8 January uprising that claimed – without proof – that the election he lost had been rigged by electoral authorities.
Brazilian media reports claimed Bolsonaro told investigators he had republished the video by mistake and while under the effect of morphine he had received after being taken to hospital in the US.
Bolsonaro’s lawyer, Daniel Tesser, told reporters the former president “rejected any kind of anti-democratic deed” or behaviour which sought to destabilize the democratic order.
Opponents of the former president – who has a long and well-documented history of undermining Brazil’s democratic institutions and electronic voting system – scoffed at those claims.
“He has the ears, the snout and the tail of a coup-monger and he’s going to tell the federal police he’s not a coup-monger?!” tweeted the president of Lula’s Worker’s party (PT), Gleisi Hoffmann.
The federal police investigation is far from the only legal difficulty facing Bolsonaro, who is widely expected to be stripped of his political rights in the coming months by Brazil’s electoral court as a result of an investigation into online disinformation.
The former president, who no longer enjoys political immunity from prosecution, faces at least 16 separate investigations as well as a growing scandal over suspicions he tried to illegally take possession of millions of dollars worth of jewelry given to him by the government of Saudi Arabia.
Bolsonaro’s political backers are reportedly considering who might replace their leader if his legal woes mean he is unable to challenge Lula in the 2026 presidential election. One option is said to be his wife, the former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro.
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Runoff from Blackjewel’s Foresters No. 25 mine damaged a road in Wallins Creek, Kentucky, in 2020. (photo: Silas Walker/Lexington Herald-Leader)
Jeff Hoops built Blackjewel into the nation’s sixth largest coal company by acquiring bankrupt mines. When it declared bankruptcy, he pivoted to other ventures, leaving polluted streams and mud-shrouded roads in his wake.
Local residents repeatedly complained about washed-out culverts and mud in their yards. Time after time, county work crews came out after a heavy rain to repair Camp Creek Road, a water line that runs alongside it and a local bridge. The strip mine’s owner, Blackjewel, fixed some problems, but when the rains came again, so did the muddy flooding.
Amber Combs, who lived down the hill from Foresters, recalled a day in August 2017 when "the water was rushing down and the yard was a muddy slush pond. It was literally like a river around my house." Combs complained to Kentucky regulators, who fined Blackjewel $1,300, which it never paid. Overall, under Blackjewel’s ownership, Foresters would run up 17 violations and more than $600,000 in unpaid fines.
Founded in 2008 by West Virginia native Jeff Hoops, Blackjewel grew in just a decade to become the sixth-largest coal producer in the U.S., partly by accumulating mines like Foresters that had gone bankrupt. By 2018, it boasted more than 500 mining permits in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming. Then, in July 2019, Blackjewel stunned the industry by declaring bankruptcy, with claims against it later estimated at $7.5 billion.
That December, environmental groups where Blackjewel operated warned the bankruptcy judge that, while he was focusing on what they called the company’s “significant financial mismanagement,” he should also be aware of “severe environmental mismanagement problems.”
“Reclamation work, water treatment, and other expenses related to environmental compliance should be approved and prioritized” in the bankruptcy case, the environmental advocates wrote.
Kentucky regulators agreed. But, citing longstanding case law, the judge rejected their request. Instead, bankruptcy trustees began divvying up the company’s assets among preferred creditors such as banks and hedge funds. Problems at Foresters and other Blackjewel sites persisted. By mid-2020, there were more than 600 outstanding violations of state mining and reclamation standards at the company’s mines in Kentucky, including 450 since the bankruptcy filing. On top of that, regulators had cited Blackjewel mines for more than 13,000 violations of Kentucky water quality rules, mostly for failing to monitor pollution discharges.
The Blackjewel case, still unresolved and nearing its fourth anniversary this July, highlights the environmental toll of what has become a central feature of the coal industry’s business strategy: bankruptcy. Over the past decade, Blackjewel and other coal companies have found two ways to use bankruptcy to their advantage. First, they expanded their holdings by acquiring other companies’ bankrupt mines, which they hoped would turn a temporary profit during upticks in coal prices and production within the industry’s long-term decline.
Then they declared bankruptcy themselves, entering an arena where they didn’t have to pay all of their debts, and where environmental liabilities took a back seat to banks and other financial creditors. As more coal companies busted, hundreds of mines cycled through repeated bankruptcies. Some, like Foresters, are no longer producing coal, yet they continue to pollute their communities.
A first-of-its-kind analysis by ProPublica and Mountain State Spotlight has documented that mines that have gone through multiple bankruptcies also tend to create more environmental damage. By combining data from federal bankruptcy court filings and state regulatory records, we identified mining permits that have been through more than one bankruptcy and compared the number of environmental violations they’d accrued to violations for mines that had not been through bankruptcy.
We found that the median number of environmental violations for surface and underground mines that had been through multiple bankruptcies between 2012 and 2022 in Kentucky was almost twice the median number for mines that had not, and 40% higher in West Virginia. Blackjewel mines in Kentucky that have gone through multiple bankruptcies had more than twice as many violations as the state median for nonbankrupt mines. Our analysis could not determine if bankruptcy caused the environmental violations or was simply associated with them. Read about our methodology here.
The analysis suggests that the bankruptcy system is “keeping mines alive that are not viable and that are struggling to remain in compliance with environmental laws,” said University of Chicago law professor Josh Macey, co-author of a 2019 study on coal bankruptcies.
Blackjewel’s founder, Hoops, epitomizes how the story of the coal industry and its barons has become inseparable from bankruptcy. He built his empire on bankrupt mines. Then, as Blackjewel’s liabilities mounted, he began seeking new vistas. In the months before Blackjewel’s bankruptcy, according to court records, he transferred tens of millions of dollars into another company that is building a resort in his native West Virginia, part of a broader effort he has described as a noncoal empire he can leave to his children.
Hoops, who declined requests for an in-person or phone interview, said in emailed answers to questions that he didn’t intend for Blackjewel to go bankrupt and that creditors forced him into it. “The model was never to bankrupt the company,” he wrote. “In no way have I benefited from the system.” He added, “I will not recover a cent of my valid claims.” Hoops said that Blackjewel complied with environmental laws and that when violations were issued, it took steps to address them.
Before his bankrupt company left a legacy of mud-shrouded roads and polluted streams, Jeff Hoops was a local hero. He rose from a dysfunctional family and a menial job in the West Virginia coalfields to create a regional economic engine and become a philanthropic pillar of his community.
He and his wife, Patricia Hoops, were all smiles on the front page of the Herald-Dispatch of Huntington, West Virginia, in April 2014 when the newspaper named him its “Citizen of the Year.” The article recounted Hoops’ charity work close to home — a residence hall at Appalachian Bible College in Mount Hope, an indoor football practice facility at the University of Pikeville in Kentucky — and halfway around the world: distributing Bibles in Russia, financing construction of an orphanage in India, running a hotel for missionaries in the Dominican Republic. The children’s hospital in Huntington was named for him, thanks to a $3 million gift. So was a local soccer facility, after what the paper called a “generous donation.”
Despite his wealth and success, Hoops remained the modest and deeply religious man that his friends and neighbors had always known. As a major donor to Marshall University’s Thundering Herd athletic program, he would rate a perch in a luxury box at the stadium. But he said he prefers to sit in the stands, where he can feel the crowd’s energy and be closer to the action.
“I’ve invited him into the box but he says, ‘No, I’m okay,'” said John Sutherland, executive director of Marshall's Big Green Scholarship Foundation.
When Sutherland wants to talk Marshall sports with Hoops, they meet at Shonet’s Country Cafe, a family diner in Milton, West Virginia, for scrambled eggs and sausage, and sometimes a slice of pie.
Born in 1956, Hoops grew up in Bluefield, deep in southern West Virginia along the Virginia border. Bluefield then had 20,000 residents; it counts less than half that many today. Historically, it was a financial hub and railroad center for the coal industry. Now, it promotes itself as “Nature's Air-Conditioned City” (elevation 2,611), and the local chamber of commerce gives away cold lemonade whenever a summer day hits 90 degrees.
Hoops was the second oldest of five children of Roy Hoops, who worked as a clerk for the Norfolk … Southern Railroad, and Lucy Walker. Roy’s drinking, infidelity and physical abuse of Lucy strained the family, according to court records. Lucy filed for protective orders and divorce several times. When Roy promised to change his behavior, they reconciled.
“Certainly my childhood had its challenges, as my father’s life was controlled by alcohol,” Hoops said.
Hoops was a striver. He sang in the youth chorus at church and made the Bluefield High basketball team as a sophomore despite standing 5-feet-1-inch tall. He sprouted to what he called “a towering 5-8” by 1974, when he graduated from Bluefield and married his high school sweetheart, Patricia Johnson, a week later. He wanted to work right away, but he was only 17, and the minimum age in the coal industry was 18. So he altered his birth certificate and found a job running parts in an underground mine, he said.
In 1975, Hoops joined the engineering department of a mining company, doing surveying and designing ventilation plans. He began going to college at night, eventually earning associate’s and master’s degrees and an executive MBA. Within a decade of high school, he became a top corporate engineer and then vice president of operations for United Coal, which became part of Arch Coal. After leaving Arch in the late 1990s, Hoops established and sold a series of coal companies. A former associate described Hoops as a workaholic driven by a competitive streak. “The joy of his life is coming out on top of a business deal,” the former associate said.
Hoops’ parents divorced in 1985, remarried in 1986 and divorced again in 1991. Roy retired from the railroad and owned an Exxon gas station from 1983 to 2002. On his deathbed in 2014, he called his son to apologize. “I forgave him, told him I loved him, and told him the most important thing was for him to make peace with God,” Jeff Hoops recalled.
When Hoops was growing up, coal was the most powerful business and political player in places like southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. But then, buffeted by skyrocketing natural gas production, cheaper renewable energy prices and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the industry began to founder.
Makers of everything from asbestos to opioids have used bankruptcy to avoid paying for damage they caused, but the sheer volume of coal bankruptcies outpaced any other sector. At least 60 coal companies went bankrupt between 2012 and 2022, including some of the biggest in the country. The environmental group Appalachian Voices warned in July 2021 that a wave of bankruptcies could leave 633,000 acres of coal mines in the eastern U.S. in need of cleanup, eroding the ability of communities to rebuild economically.
In theory, bankruptcy doesn’t exempt a company from its responsibility to preserve the environment. The 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act requires coal companies to clean up damage as they mine. When mining is over, the land must be put back to “a condition capable of supporting the uses which it was capable of supporting prior to any mining.”
That’s not how it generally works in practice. Coal companies often fall behind on so-called mine reclamation and, with obligations also mounting for worker pensions and health benefits, file for bankruptcy protection. They lay off employees at mines that are no longer productive or profitable, ditch pension and health care liabilities and avoid paying for environmental damages.
For example, coal giants Peabody Energy and Arch Coal created a third company, Patriot Coal, and spun off their mines with environmental problems and pension obligations into it. All three companies eventually went bankrupt, ducking a combined $2.6 billion in liabilities, according to Macey, the University of Chicago law professor. Many of these mines have changed hands since then but still have not been reclaimed.
“Bankrupt coal companies dump their mine cleanup obligations onto communities and taxpayers who simply don’t have the money to pick up the tab,” said Peter Morgan, a Sierra Club lawyer who has tracked coal bankruptcies around the country.
The purpose of bankruptcy is to give desperate people and companies time and relief from creditors so they can get back on their feet. But not all creditors are treated equally. Bankruptcy law gives secured creditors such as banks, law firms, the Internal Revenue Service and equipment suppliers — but not environmental costs or fines — priority for payment.
“Bankruptcy courts are not doing enough to stop conduct that allows coal companies to get out of their environmental responsibilities,” Macey said.
There’s a potential backstop to pay for environmental cleanup: reclamation bonds. Federal law requires coal companies to post these bonds to receive mining permits, as a sort of insurance. The amount that companies are required to put up varies from state to state; in West Virginia, it can be as much as $5,000 per acre of the permit. To secure the bonds, companies pay a surety firm a one-time fee — typically 20% to 50% of the face value, according to Hoops. If a mining company goes belly up, state regulators can revoke its permits and use the bond money to clean up whatever mess is left. Money from forfeited bonds, sometimes along with other revenue such as environmental penalties or coal production fees, goes into state reclamation funds to restore abandoned mine sites.
But the required bond amounts often aren’t enough to cover all potential costs. Cleanup costs have soared, partly due to larger surface mines that blew up or chopped off entire mountaintops, and partly because modern studies have increasingly identified water pollutants requiring lengthy and expensive treatment. According to a 2021 legislative audit, West Virginia’s reclamation bonds have covered only one-tenth of cleanup costs. Separately, the Appalachian Voices analysis projected cleanup costs in West Virginia alone as high as $3.5 billion.
As a result, state officials are reluctant to revoke permits and take on the financial responsibility for cleanup. What often ensues instead is a game of musical mines. Knowing that they won’t end up on the hook for reclamation, other coal companies buy mines out of bankruptcy — and then often go bankrupt themselves.
The ProPublica analysis identified 2,030 mines in Kentucky and West Virginia that have been through bankruptcy since 2012 — more than a third of all coal mines in those states. Of the bankrupt mines, 491, or 24%, have gone through more than one bankruptcy.
Of the 210 bankrupt Blackjewel mines in our database, including 197 in Kentucky and 13 in West Virginia, almost half have gone through at least one other bankruptcy. The vast majority of those — 101 of 103 — are in Kentucky and had a median of 16 environmental violations, more than twice the median for nonbankrupt mines in that state.
Since Blackjewel went bust in 2019, more than 100 of its Kentucky permits have been sold out of bankruptcy — many for the second time, according to court filings. Lawyers jokingly call the second round of bankruptcy “Chapter 22,” or Chapter 11 twice over.
In 1999, Hoops went out on his own with just one mine, the Hunts Branch Mine in Phelps, Kentucky. In 2008, he founded Revelation Energy. It grew, and Hoops changed the name to Blackjewel in 2017 as part of what he called “a strategic restructuring.” The plan was to shift away from providing steam coal for power plants and toward producing more metallurgical coal for steel mills, a market where prices were increasing.
Blackjewel assembled mines from the bankruptcies of James River Coal, Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal and others. Alpha paid Hoops $200 million in cash and more than $100 million in installments to take about 250 of its mining permits. Every acquisition “was based on a detailed economic model that demonstrated the mines could make money even in a down market,” Hoops said.
The strategy, Hoops said, was working. Blackjewel expanded from central Appalachia to Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. It employed 1,700 miners and boasted 1.2 billion tons of coal available for mining, enough to keep going for many decades.
But in April 2019, two bankruptcy experts questioned whether Hoops would be able to honor his companies’ environmental obligations.
“Rather, his businesses have begun to exhibit a pattern,” Macey and Jackson Salovaara wrote in “Bankruptcy as Bailout,” an article in the Stanford Law Review. “Hoops takes over abandoned mines, receives cash from the company that wants to get rid of them, and then fails to actually remediate the environmental problems.”
Three months later, Blackjewel declared bankruptcy. It cited a roof collapse at a Virginia mine, a spike in workers’ compensation costs and flooding that prevented railroads from moving coal out of Wyoming. It also blamed adverse market conditions, including the rise of cheap natural gas, greater use of renewable energy and increased regulatory pressures.
Energy industry researcher Clark Williams-Derry pointed instead to questionable business decisions, such as Blackjewel locking in prices for steel-making coal just before prices increased sharply. “The signs of financial distress have been evident to anyone who cared to look,” he wrote in a blog post titled, “Seven Bombshells in the Blackjewel Bankruptcy.” Hoops said that lenders forced the timing of the price locks on Blackjewel, costing the company millions of dollars.
Hoops said that key lenders — United Bank and the investment firm Riverstone Holdings — cut off credit for Blackjewel, forcing the firm into Chapter 11. “They had managed to get my funds put on hold before and during the bankruptcy, as I would have never allowed the company to file but for their actions,” Hoops said. United and Riverstone declined comment.
In a press release, Hoops portrayed the bankruptcy as part of an effort to “position the company for long-term success.” But it didn’t feel that way to many Blackjewel miners. Some mines closed, sending workers home without any notice, and without their most recent paychecks. A mine in Wyoming was on fire, and Blackjewel was scrambling to pay employees to put it out.
Joseph Fox, who worked at a Blackjewel coal preparation plant in Virginia, had just taken his family on vacation to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Then, his paycheck bounced. Fox, his wife and their son and two daughters cut their beach trip short.
“They’re kids. All they wanted was a vacation,” Fox recalled. “They didn’t understand, and you don’t want to be telling them your paycheck bounced.”
In Kentucky, a group of miners who missed paychecks blocked a Blackjewel coal train in Harlan County. Hoops said that all of the miners have been paid. Still, they filed claims and lawsuits alleging that they were laid off without due notice.
The bankruptcy trustee settled the lawsuits with a promise that miners would be bumped up in the ranking of creditors. But court documents suggest there will be little money to go around, maybe only enough to pay the lawyers, accountants and consultants managing the liquidation, lawyers monitoring the case said.
By the time of the bankruptcy, Hoops was already preparing for a future outside coal. He set up a family holding company, Clearwater Investments, with his three sons as trustees. Its purpose was to “leave a financial dynasty to Jeff and Patricia’s heirs by investing in several businesses as well as by collecting royalties on various investment properties,” said an internal “executive overview” filed in the bankruptcy case.
Some of the listed holdings retain a connection to coal, including a trucking firm and a mining equipment sales service. Others don’t, like a wheelchair and brace sales firm with sales in 2018 of $8.7 million.
In January 2019, Hoops sent the Clearwater overview to his sons, Jeffrey Jr., Jeremy and Joshua. “I hope by the end of this year to have a nice package together that shows everything we own as it is a vast company now,” he wrote. “Love you guys …. Dad.”
It didn’t take long for Clearwater to surface in the Blackjewel case.
Creditors discovered that in the six months prior to Blackjewel’s bankruptcy filing, as the company was becoming increasingly insolvent, Hoops had transferred at least $34 million from Blackjewel to Clearwater.
Hoops said that these transfers were appropriate because they represented partial repayment of $51.5 million in loans that he and his family had made to Blackjewel since January 2019 via a revolving line of credit. But this explanation didn’t satisfy creditors, who accused him of violating bankruptcy rules by putting himself at the head of the line.
It was a “sweetheart deal,” then-bankruptcy trustee David Bissett told the judge during a July 2019 hearing. Hoops was “protecting his own self-interest” rather than Blackjewel’s employees or creditors, Bissett said.
Lenders were so outraged at Hoops’ money transfer that, as a condition for providing Blackjewel with emergency financing, they forced Hoops to step down as an officer of the company. They also blocked any Hoops family members from taking a management role.
In a farewell email to employees, Hoops defended himself. “No one is hurting more than me over what has occurred,” he wrote. “There has not been one cent taken out of the mining company, the exact opposite I have loaned more money to try to get this company through these difficult times.”
The email continued: “I accept responsibility for being unable to lead this company through these difficult times.” Hoops wrote, “I know in my heart how hard I fought for each of you and this company and to have people threaten me and say I took money out of this company for other projects hurts more than words can express.”
The liquidation trustee sued Hoops and seven family companies, including Clearwater, over the money he shifted from Blackjewel to them in the months before the bankruptcy.
Last August, the trustee settled these cases. Few details were made public, except that as part of the deal Hoops dropped a $2.6 million claim for money he argued Blackjewel owed him.
Hoops said only that the lawsuit was “resolved amicably.” The liquidation trustee declined comment.
Another bankruptcy court fight focused on the Foresters mine.
This wasn’t the mine’s first brush with bankruptcy. U.S. Coal, its original owner, went bankrupt in June 2014. By the time Hoops took over the permit in 2016, the mine was down to fewer than 20 workers, and production was a third of its 2013 peak of 550,000 tons. In 2018, it stopped producing coal altogether, and had only three employees, according to the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.
A year into Blackjewel’s bankruptcy, a flood from Foresters eroded part of a local road and damaged a drinking water line. The rest of Blackjewel’s now-idled operations across Kentucky were also polluting their surroundings. Alarmed by the worsening conditions, the state’s Energy and Environment Cabinet sought the court’s help. In June 2020, the environmental regulator asked the judge to order Blackjewel’strustee to bring all of the company’s permits into compliance with mining standards and pollution rules.
In a court filing, agency officials warned that Blackjewel sites not only weren’t being restored to pre-mining conditions but weren’t even being maintained to prevent contaminated water from pouring downstream into water supplies. The agency warned of flooded holding ponds being at high risk of “discharging metals and suspended solids into adjacent rivers and streams” and of landslides “that could endanger the lives and the property of residences below.”
In September 2020, a week after state inspectors again cited Foresters for erosion and drainage, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Benjamin A. Kahn held a hearing on the regulators’ complaints. But the concerns about environmental fallout ran smack into a wall of decades-old law. While noting that crews were already responding at Foresters and other sites, the bankruptcy trustee argued that legal precedent gave the judge little scope to intervene. The judge agreed. Citing U.S. Supreme Court and federal appeals court decisions, Kahn instructed the trustee to clean up only "imminent” threats to public safety, not “speculative” threats.
Some problems at Foresters met this standard, and Kahn ordered them fixed. Still, violations for muddy runoff and sediment from holding ponds have persisted there.
Kahn deferred action at dozens of other Blackjewel sites with hundreds of environmental violations that he deemed less severe. Kahn’s analysis didn’t address the risk that if bankrupt mining companies can avoid routine maintenance and reclamation, speculative threats can turn imminent in a hurry. Once the judge’s criteria are met, “it’s too late,” said Lena Seward, lawyer for the Kentucky state regulatory agency. “The road is washed out.”
Kentucky also tried to forfeit bonds for some Blackjewel mines so that the state could begin cleanup. But that’s tied up in a legal challenge by the surety company, which contends that it has the right to restore the sites itself instead of losing the bond money. For other mines, the state and the bond company are still working out terms for cleanup.
Meanwhile, the companies that bought most of the mines haven’t gotten very far with cleanup, sometimes because the state blocked final approval of the purchases due to unresolved violations at mines they already owned. Kentucky regulators acknowledged in an email that they “would like to have seen a faster transfer applications/reclamation process.”
As it acquired mines, Blackjewel posted a total of more than $500 million in reclamation bonds in four states. But that sum may not be enough. State regulators warned the bankruptcy judge in late 2020 that, for the 32 Blackjewel mines without buyers, conditions had deteriorated so much that cleanup costs were estimated at $20 million more than the bonds would cover.
Hoops disputed that the bond amounts were inadequate. The regulators were “wrong,” he said, but he did not elaborate.
In February 2021, the Kentucky cabinet went back to the judge. A Blackjewel mine was showing severe erosion, with sediment ponds so full that they posed what an inspector called “an immediate danger to the public and environment downstream.”
Kahn ruled against the regulator again.
“The violations just continue to mount,” said Kentucky attorney Mary Varson Cromer, who represents coalfield residents in the Blackjewel case. “The whole system is not functioning, and it ends up costing more to reclaim, and it’s the residents and the community that are at risk.”
The game of musical mines is slowing down. Across Appalachia, coal production is forecast to drop more than 20 percent over the next decade. In a market where coal production and prices continue to drop, there’s little demand for Blackjewel’s coal. Almost all its mines in Kentucky, including Foresters, have been sitting idle for four years.
Blackjewel’s case has also bogged down in paperwork, or the lack of it. “The books and records inherited by the trust were woefully incomplete (and largely nonexistent in some instances),” the trustee complained in March 2023, explaining yet another delay.
With Blackjewel behind him, Hoops is looking to the future. Clearwater is building a resort in Milton, where Hoops lives. The project is meant to invoke the splendor of ancient Rome. Hoops named it the Grand Patrician Resort. Patrician has a double meaning: It refers to the ruling class of ancient Rome and also honors Hoops’ wife, Patricia.
Hoops wept as he announced the resort project, which is located on the site of a former children’s hospital. His aunt and his brother-in-law had both been patients there, he told a local newspaper. “I get emotional,” he said. “To see God take something that was used to treat kids that were hurting, a lot of them crippled for life, he always takes something bad and turns it for good.”
The resort’s golf course had a soft opening last August. Construction of a luxury hotel continues. Local press accounts say the site will include a 400-seat steakhouse, a wedding chapel and ballroom and two indoor pools. A second phase is expected to feature another hotel, equestrian trails and a 3,500-seat outdoor arena modeled on the Roman Colosseum. This month, Hoops hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new hiking trail at the resort.
Even though Hoops left Blackjewel four years ago, one of his family-run businesses is still connected to its mines. The insurance company holding the reclamation bonds for the Blackjewel mines that weren’t bought out of bankruptcy has hired Lexington Coal to reclaim them. Its manager is one of Hoops’ sons. Lexington Coal “has not benefited in any way economically” from the reclamation contract, Hoops said.
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