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Kathleen Rice, at the time a House member from New York, sent a criminal referral to the FBI in 2021.
Joe Tacopina, the lead defense attorney in the latest case against the former president, has not been a prolific donor to political campaigns, but those he has made have been bipartisan.
In 2010, Tacopina gave to then-Rep. Kathleen Rice, D-N.Y., a former prosecutor who later sent a criminal referral to the FBI requesting they investigate Trump’s phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
The phone call, in which Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” him enough votes to overturn the presidential election, is now being investigated by the Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith.
While it’s not clear in this case, such criminal referrals are considered to carry significant weight with the FBI and often trigger investigations.
The $1,500 campaign donation to Rice is Tacopina’s second largest, behind a contribution of $1,721 to Jeanine Piro, the conservative host of Fox News’ “Judge Jeanine.”
Rice, who retired from Congress last year, has not publicly commented on Trump’s indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Neither Rice nor Tacopina immediately responded to requests for comment.
Tacopina’s often colorful defense of the former president enjoys Trump’s enthusiastic support but has drawn criticism from other sources, including Trump’s own legal team. Last month, Tacopina got in a heated altercation with MSNBC host Ari Melber over Trump’s hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, culminating in an attempt by Tacopina to grab Melber’s papers during an interview.
Trump’s other attorneys have expressed frustration with Tacopina’s “antics,” Rolling Stone reported this weekend.
“Tacopina is to the defense bar what Donald Trump is to real estate … clever but focused on his image,” the New York Times reported in 2005, long before Tacopina began representing Trump.
Tacopina’s penchant for flashy suits once prompted the foreman in a trial in which he was defending a mob-linked bookkeeper to remark, “The lawyer’s wearing $2,000 suits and I wouldn’t be surprised if the mob is paying for the defense.”
Tacopina, who began his career working on mob boss John Gotti’s case when he was in law school, has said that today he refuses to take mob money. “I probably gave up a couple million in fees just last year, turning this stuff down,” Tacopina lamented to GQ in a 2007 interview. “But I just won’t do it anymore.”
Reactions to Tacopina are not all negative. In 2018, the New York state Senate issued a commendation for Tacopina’s recognition by the Italian-American Organizations of Brooklyn.
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Israeli policemen detain a Palestinian man at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound following an attack on worshippers during the Islamic holy fasting month of Ramadan in Jerusalem on 5 April 2023. (photo: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP)
Al-Aqsa is one of the holiest sites in Islam and shares a hilltop with the Temple Mount, the holiest site for Jews. Palestinians consider the site a national symbol, and the storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque by Israeli security forces was a major catalyst for 11 days of violent clashes in 2021.
In response to the raid, a series of rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip, which is run by the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Israel then said it had conducted airstrikes targeting Hamas weapons storage and manufacturing sites.
Since the holy Muslim month of Ramadan began on March 22, some Palestinian worshippers have been trying to stay overnight inside Al-Aqsa, which is typically permitted only during the final 10 days of the festive period, The Associated Press reported. Israeli police have entered the site daily to evict the worshippers, the AP said.
After tens of thousands of people attended prayers at Al-Aqsa Tuesday evening, Israeli officials said they were forced to enter the compound when hundreds of Palestinian "agitators" barricaded themselves inside the mosque armed with fireworks and stones.
Videos posted online appeared to show police storming the compound, beating Palestinians with batons and rifle butts and restraining dozens of worshipers, and Palestinians taking aim at police with fireworks. Police said rocks had also been thrown at the officers.
"The youths were afraid and started closing the doors," Talab Abu Eisha, who was there at the time of the raid, told the AP. "It was an unprecedented scene of violence in terms of police brutality."
"After many and prolonged attempts to get them out by talking to no avail, police forces were forced to enter the compound in order to get them out," the Israeli police said.
Police dispersed Palestinians outside the mosque with rubber bullets and stun grenades.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said at least 50 Palestinians were injured in the raid. The police said 350 people were arrested, and one officer was injured in the leg.
The violence at the mosque triggered calls for mass protests by Hamas militants in Gaza. Palestinian civil affairs minister Hussein al-Sheikh said the "the level of brutality requires urgent Palestinian, Arab and international action," according to the AFP news agency.
Muslim-majority states quickly issued statements condemning the raid, including Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Arab League called an emergency meeting later on Wednesday.
Tensions have soared in the region since Israel's new far-right, ultra-nationalist government coalition took power late last year under returning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel's police are now overseen by one of the most radical members of Netanyahu's cabinet, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was previously convicted of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization.
Al-Aqsa is managed by an Islamic endowment called the Waqf as part of a long-standing agreement under which Muslims are allowed to pray at the site but Jews and Christians are not. The Waqf called the raid a "flagrant violation of the identity and function of the mosque as a place of worship for Muslims."
Netanyahu has said he is committed to maintaining the status quo at the sensitive site.
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Voters wait in line to deposit their ballots at the Loudoun County Office of Elections in Leesburg, Va., on Sept. 18, 2020. (photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
A resounding victory by a liberal judge who ran on abortion rights showed that a largely unified political left is keeping up its momentum, and served as a new warning sign to Republicans.
The liberal candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, swept onto the bench by 11 percentage points, a staggering margin in an evenly divided battleground state that signaled just how much last summer’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade has transformed American politics.
The Wisconsin race centered squarely on abortion rights and political representation: Judge Protasiewicz all but promised voters that if they elected her, the court’s new 4-to-3 liberal majority would reverse Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban and overturn the state’s famously gerrymandered, Republican-friendly legislative maps.
Wisconsinites responded to that pitch, rejecting a conservative candidate backed by anti-abortion groups who took 2020 election deniers as a client and struggled to rally Republican donors behind him.
The outcome, combined with a surprise victory in Chicago’s mayoral race by Brandon Johnson, an outspoken progressive, demonstrated that the country’s largely unified political left is sustaining momentum since its unexpectedly strong showing in the midterm elections, even as conservatives fight among themselves and struggle to counter Democratic messaging on abortion rights.
Republicans are now heading into a series of coming races — for Kentucky governor this year and for president and an array of Senate seats in 2024 — with ample warning signs about the pitfalls of nominating candidates who hold positions on issues like abortion and elections that are unpopular with voters in the nation’s most competitive states.
The triumph by Judge Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge, will also allow Wisconsin Democrats to pursue their own agenda through the courts after spending a dozen years ducking and running at most levels of state politics, worrying about what the dominant Republicans would lob at them next.
“For a long time, Democrats in the Assembly have understood that our role is primarily being on defense,” Greta Neubauer, who leads the chamber’s Democratic minority, said at Judge Protasiewicz’s victory party in Milwaukee. Now, Ms. Neubauer said, “we have an opportunity to go on offense.”
Judge Protasiewicz will be seated on the court on Aug. 1. A legal challenge to the state’s abortion ban is scheduled to begin in circuit court in Dane County next month, and while it is unclear when the ban could come before the State Supreme Court, the justices are widely expected to hear the case within a year or two and strike down the ban. Liberal lawyers are also eyeing the best way to frame a lawsuit that could prompt the court to throw out the Republican-drawn maps.
It will be many months, at least, before there is a final State Supreme Court resolution on those and other hot-button issues likely to come before the court’s new liberal majority, which will consist of four women for the first time in the state’s history.
To emphasize that point, when Judge Protasiewicz arrived to deliver her victory remarks on Tuesday night, she was trailed by the three sitting liberal justices as the sound system played Lizzo’s “About Damn Time.”
“Today’s results mean two very important and special things,” Judge Protasiewicz told supporters. “First, it means that Wisconsin voters have made their voices heard. They have chosen to reject partisan extremism in this state. And second, it means our democracy will always prevail.”
Judge Protasiewicz defeated Daniel Kelly, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice who also lost an April 2020 election by 11 points and went on to represent the Republican National Committee in its efforts to overturn President Donald J. Trump’s defeat that year.
Justice Kelly, who has long been an opponent of abortion rights, did little to parry Judge Protasiewicz on the issue. He never mentioned abortion in his television advertising and, during his final rally on Monday night in Waukesha, a parade of Republican officials spoke for more than an hour without mentioning abortion.
Instead, Justice Kelly and his allies focused almost entirely on crime, an issue that also fell flat in Chicago, where Mr. Johnson, a liberal candidate, defeated Paul Vallas, who had tethered his campaign to a tough-on-crime message.
Asked about his relative silence on abortion, Justice Kelly said that “the court does not do political decisions,” adding, “The question of abortion, that belongs in the Legislature to decide.”
That approach turned Justice Kelly into a denier of the current political reality.
Supportive right-wing radio hosts complained that he had not defended the state’s abortion ban, and conservative donors, whom Justice Kelly was reluctant to call to ask for money, steered clear of his campaign. And not enough of Wisconsin’s legions of conservative grass-roots voters were energized by his campaign speeches, which delved into legal theory and lamented his severe financial disadvantage.
“Doing a statewide campaign, as it turns out, is kind of hard,” Justice Kelly said at the Waukesha rally.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump blamed Justice Kelly, whom he endorsed in 2020, for neglecting to seek his endorsement this year, arguing on his social media site that this “guaranteed his loss.”
Democrats in Wisconsin and beyond gave the Protasiewicz campaign a decided financial edge. Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois organized a March 6 videoconference that raised $5 million for the Protasiewicz campaign, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and allied groups. The party transferred $8.3 million to the Protasiewicz campaign.
The Republican Party of Wisconsin gave no money directly to Justice Kelly. Instead, Republican donors poured $12 million into third-party groups, whose rates for television advertising are three times what candidates pay.
Brian Schimming, the Wisconsin G.O.P. chairman, lamented the disparity and donors’ decision to keep an arm’s-length distance from Justice Kelly’s campaign.
“There’s a fair bit of chatter about that right now,” he said. “We could have done a more efficient job of spending it.”
After abortion, the biggest issue facing the new liberal court will be the state’s legislative maps.
Jeffrey A. Mandell, the board president and founder of Law Forward, a progressive law firm in Madison, said he aimed to have new maps in place in time for the 2024 election, which would most likely require the case to be decided and new maps to be drawn by next April, when candidates begin circulating petitions to qualify for the primary ballot.
“There’s no time to waste,” Mr. Mandell said.
The three sitting liberal justices declined to say whether they believed it was possible to have new maps ready for 2024, but Judge Protasiewicz said it was “unlikely” the court could decide a case and put new maps into effect by next year’s elections.
Liberals will hold a 4-to-3 majority on the court through at least 2025, when Ann Walsh Bradley, a 72-year-old liberal justice poised to become the new chief justice under the new majority, faces re-election. Justice Bradley said Tuesday night that she would run for a fourth 10-year term.
Democrats are hopeful about her chances: Since the Wisconsin Supreme Court began electing justices statewide in 1853, no justice who has won a competitive election, as Justice Bradley has done twice, subsequently lost one.
Beyond abortion and redistricting, the new liberal majority will decide a host of other issues, including labor rights that were diminished by Republicans.
Stephanie Bloomingdale, the president of the Wisconsin A.F.L.-C.I.O., said she had watched with jealousy this year as Michigan Democrats enacted a wide range of liberal policies after redistricting helped them take full control of their state government for the first time in 40 years.
“We see them, we’re very proud of them, but we’re wishing it could be us,” Ms. Bloomingdale said. “You know, in Wisconsin, we can have nice things, too.”
Even before Election Day, Wisconsin Republicans who saw that a liberal victory was likely began to disparage their State Supreme Court as an illegitimate body.
“I don’t think people have any idea of what’s coming,” said Rebecca Bradley, a conservative Supreme Court justice who in a decision banning drop boxes last year compared the state’s 2020 presidential contest to elections in Syria, North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. “We will have four people in Wisconsin robbing the people of the right to govern themselves.”
But the scale of Judge Protasiewicz’s victory suggests that Wisconsin voters are inclined to dismiss the Republican arguments. She carried 27 of the state’s 72 counties — 11 more than Mr. Evers did when he was re-elected in November by three points — and nearly equaled the margin by which Jill Karofsky, a fellow liberal, defeated Justice Kelly in the 2020 election, when Democrats held their presidential primary on the same ballot.
“I’m not concerned about the legitimacy of the court, because so many people voted for this court,” Justice Karofsky said as she nursed a Miller Lite at the Protasiewicz victory party. “So many people wanted this majority.”
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A bison herd within the Montana side of Yellowstone National Park. This year, the bison population had grown to a record-breaking estimate around 6,000. (photo: Michael Hanson/ The New York Times)
A months-long event, just outside the park, was intended to keep the animals from spreading a disease to livestock. But its scope and other removal measures affecting hundreds more have generated opposition.
Many were stopped from migrating even farther.
For four months, state and federal officials have sanctioned a hunt of the shaggy, humped animals that delight millions of tourists and are a centerpiece of Native American culture and history.
Officials said they had no choice but to approve the lengthy culling of the roughly 6,000-member herd as the animals instinctually cross the park boundary onto other public land primarily to the north in Montana’s Paradise Valley, but also west of the park. It is part of a strategy to prevent them from getting near livestock, because some 60 percent of the bison herd carries a disease, brucellosis, that could infect cattle and cause cows to abort their calves.
But in the last several weeks, the scope of the hunt, conducted mainly by members of eight Indigenous tribes, along with other park control measures, has generated more criticism than previous hunts. As the culling winds down, the record-breaking number of bison removed from Yellowstone’s herd has climbed to more than 1,530 — including hundreds of pregnant females that would have soon been giving birth. Hundreds more were sent out of the park — some to slaughterhouses and about 285 to a quarantine site where they will be held to determine if they are disease-free. The healthy ones will be sent to homes on Native American lands elsewhere.
Yet another estimated 800 have been captured and held to protect them from the hunt.
Government officials and conservation groups have wrestled with ways to manage the annual migration for decades.
“It’s probably the single-most challenging wildlife issue in Yellowstone,” Cam Sholly, the park superintendent, said in an interview. “The bison is the only species we constrain to a boundary.”
It’s a complex management scenario. Once the bison cross an invisible national park boundary and wander into Montana to the north and west on national forest land, they become the responsibility of the state.
Under historic treaties bestowing the rights to take buffalo, members of the Nez Perce, Blackfeet, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation, Northern Arapaho, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, the Crow and Shoshone-Bannock Tribes traveled to the region and harvested nearly 1,100 bison.
“It’s a very cultural and spiritual endeavor and brings our families together,” said Jeremy Red Star Wolf, of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. “And it gives us an opportunity to talk about who we are and where we come from.”
About 90 were shipped to slaughter facilities, and 75 were killed by other hunters.
“We don’t want to see this many bison taken out of the population in normal years,” Mr. Sholly said. “But we have had three years of very light migration out of the park. This is one of the first major migrations out of the park for a considerable amount of time.”
Recent studies indicate that the population should not be reduced to fewer than 3,500, Mr. Sholly said, to ensure genetic diversity. With a new calf crop this spring, the population should be about 5,000, he estimated.
Some have questioned whether killing so many animals disrupts the herds’ social structure. Mr. Sholly conceded the point, but said hunting was less invasive. “When shipping to slaughter occurred in the past, a lot of times you are taking an entire family,” he said. “The hunting is more sporadic and takes out individuals, not necessarily a whole family unit.”
The park is home to the wildest bison population in the contiguous United States, where there are virtually no fences, and where it is subject to myriad forces of nature, from weather to grizzlies and wolves. An adult bull bison can weigh up to 2,000 pounds, and cows weigh up to 1,000 pounds. Females and calves gather in herds, while bulls are usually solitary.
Yellowstone officials have also been able to diminish the practice of sending bison to slaughterhouses by expanding the hunting and increasing the numbers now given to tribes to enlarge their herds or create new ones.
Still, some critics of the hunt note that there has never been an outbreak of brucellosis infection among Montana’s roughly two million cattle that could be traced to Yellowstone bison. Bradley De Groot, the brucellosis program veterinarian for the state’s livestock department, credited constant monitoring and interventions.
The wildlife in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem are the only known U.S. reservoir of the disease, according to the federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
If cattle were to become infected with the highly contagious Brucella abortus bacterium, it would result in a lockdown of the animals. (The disease localizes in reproductive organs and is passed primarily through fetal tissue after birth.) “For livestock operations that are quarantined, the only place they can sell sexually intact animals is straight to slaughter,” Mr. De Groot said. “That puts a dramatic impact on their ability to continue to generate revenue.”
Brucellosis bacteria can spread from animals to people, primarily through raw dairy products, but transmission can also be airborne. In humans, a brucellosis infection can cause undulant fever and fatigue. It can be treated with antibiotics, but may recur or become a chronic illness.
U.S. officials have rejected inoculations against brucellosis for park bison because they say existing vaccines lack efficacy and are hard to distribute. Elk in the region also are infected, and could reinfect any immunized bison. Cattle are immunized against brucellosis.
In the future, Mr. Sholly said, any preventive measures against brucellosis should also take elk into account.
“It’s hard to claim bison are presenting an imminent threat to livestock while thousands of brucellosis-infected elk are literally side-by-side with livestock in the Paradise Valley and there is no strategy to manage that interface,” Mr. Sholly said.
The disparity is partly because bison have a much higher rate of infection, Mr. De Groot said. Bison and cattle also graze in similar places, he said, “and the potential for interaction sufficient to transmit brucellosis from bison to cattle is much higher.”
Deer, moose and other species can also harbor brucellosis, but are less of a primary source of contagion.
The hunt by Indigenous tribes is, in part, an effort to restore their ruptured relationship with the bison. At least 30 million once grazed across the West, and for thousands of years they were a vital source of food; their hides were used for shelter and clothing; and their vast roaming was a symbol of freedom. They were slaughtered in massive numbers in the late 19th century to force tribes onto reservations and for profit. Some experts say climate changes and disease brought by cattle contributed to the bison’s decline.
The forced extinction reduced the once seemingly limitless herds to a handful, including some two dozen here at Yellowstone. Today’s herds are descended from the remnant population.
Beginning late last year, hundreds of Indigenous hunters from the Northwest United States have flocked to the boundaries of Yellowstone, especially to a small area called Beattie Gulch, adjacent to the park’s northern border.
Some hunters have traveled with their families to harvest buffalo. Kola Shippentower-Thompson, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in eastern Oregon, hunted with her husband, Tommy Thompson, who is the Umatilla tribal game warden, and her cousin, Dion Denny.
Ms. Shippentower-Thompson said she had shot 13 bison since December, including a big bull last month, her first. After it fell to the snow, she and her husband gutted it, and she took a ceremonial bite of the old bull’s heart.
“That is a sign of respect,” she explained. “Everything we carry is within our heart. A big bull like that has made it through all the different seasons and territorial fights with other bulls, and you are taking on its spirit and the different teachings it has within it.”
But while these last few months have allowed hunters to connect to their heritage, the enormity of the culling is creating more controversy than in previous years. Critics, including some Native Americans, decried the park bison’s limited area of migration, saying they became trapped in a very small area, had little fear of people and were not given a fair chase afforded other hunted animals.
“The killing field is across the street from my driveway entrance,” said Bonnie Lynn, the founder of Yellowstone Voices, which campaigns against the hunt. The area is crowded with hunters, who have taken the bison meat and left the waste behind, with internal organs and hundreds of skeletons scattered about, she said.
“We have wolves coming to the gut piles, coyotes coming to the gut piles, mountain lions in the area, and we have bears coming out of hibernation to the gut piles,” she said. “It’s crazyville.”
Others pointed to the dangers posed by the limited area of the hunt, citing the wounding of Jackson Wak Wak, a member of the Nez Perce tribe, who was shot in the back by a ricocheting bullet.
Billboards sponsored by two environmental groups, Roam Free Nation and Alliance for the Wild Rockies, showcase concerns, with one featuring a photo of a herd of bison and a hunter, and the headline: “There is no hunt. It’s a slaughter.”
Another organization, the Buffalo Field Campaign, turned out this year to protest the ban on bison migration out of the park onto federal land in Montana. “They are killing one-quarter of the herd,” said Mike Mease, a founder of the organization. “That is insanity.”
Mr. Mease acknowledged the importance of the tribal hunt, but he criticized what he said was a powerful commercial influence driving the extent of the hunt.
“They wipe out way too many buffalo,” he said. “No other wildlife is treated this way. This is all directed by the Montana livestock industry.”
To Jeremy Red Star Wolf, of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the hunt is not only culturally meaningful but also a reliable food source. His family killed five bison, providing meat for other families.
“We would certainly love to hunt them out on the natural landscape that once existed, but that natural landscape doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. “Instead of being trapped and sent to slaughter, let us practice our treaty rights and provide bison, which has a very storied history within our tribe.”
Yellowstone’s bison face other dangers as they roam outside the park. In late December, 13 were killed near West Yellowstone, Mont., when they were hit on U.S. Route 191 by a semi-truck after dark. Collisions are not uncommon: The animals’ dark brown color and the fact their eyes don’t reflect headlights the way that the eyes of a deer do make them very difficult to see at night.
So far this year, 22 have been hit by vehicles; the Buffalo Field Campaign has organized volunteers to dig paths through the snow to allow the bison to migrate safely and stay off the highway.
In recent times, Native Americans have actively recruited and encouraged the growth of bison herds on reservations. About 82 tribes now have more than 20,000 bison in 65 herds, in an effort to reconnect to their history. And Yellowstone park officials, Mr. Sholly said, are helping to move bison to tribal lands.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve in a presidential cabinet, recently announced an outlay of $25 million to help conserve and restore the herds across the West.
Bison “are inextricably intertwined with Indigenous culture, grassland ecology and American history,” she said.
READ MOREVoters wait in line to deposit their ballots at the Loudoun County Office of Elections in Leesburg, Va., on Sept. 18, 2020. (photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
Groups have created incubator of policies that would restrict ballot access and amplify election fraud claims
Led by the Washington-based conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation, the groups have created an incubator of policies that would restrict access to the ballot box and amplify false claims that fraud is rampant in American elections. The unstated yet implicit goal is to dampen Democratic turnout and help Republican candidates to victory.
Details of the two-day “secretaries of state conference” held in Washington in February were obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with the Guardian.
Officials from 13 Republican-controlled states, including 10 top election administrators, participated in the event. Attendees discussed controversial “election integrity” ideas of the sort weaponized by Donald Trump.
Among the participants were nine secretaries of state and Virginia’s election commissioner, all of whom preside over both statewide and federal elections in their states including next year’s presidential contest. A list of attendees namechecks the chief election officials of Indiana, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.
Documented also obtained the conference agenda which lists a number of Trump associates among the speakers. They include Ken Cuccinelli who, as acting deputy secretary for homeland security, played a key role in setting elections policy for the Trump administration.
Cuccinelli now runs the Election Transparency Initiative which is fighting Democratic efforts in Congress to shore up voting rights, and has been active in pushing state-level vote restriction measures.
The keynote speech was given by Ken Blackwell, former secretary of state in Ohio. He was an early adopter of Trump’s lie about rigged elections, championing the idea in the 2016 presidential race which Trump won.
Blackwell now chairs the Center for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute, a rightwing thinktank led by former Trump officials. The center has been touting election-related model legislation.
Heritage was careful to organize the conference amid tight secrecy. Among the records obtained by Documented is an email from Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer at the foundation who leads their election work.
Responding to a query about the event from a Texas official, Von Spakovsky said: “There is no livestream. This is not a public event. It is a private, confidential meeting of the secretaries. I would rather you not send out a press release about it.”
Von Spakovsky has long been at the forefront of efforts to undermine US elections by claiming falsely that fraud is endemic. He helped spearhead the attack on voting by mail during the pandemic, holding private briefings with Republican state election officials – a drive that became a core part of Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
Heritage and its political arm, Heritage Action for America, have spent tens of millions of dollars promoting their own model bills that impose strict restrictions on voting. They have targeted the investment on key battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan that could hold the balance of power in the 2024 presidential race.
Heritage began hosting annual gatherings of Republican secretaries of state at the start of the Trump presidency in 2017. February’s in-person conference was the first to be sponsored by three rightwing powerhouses of election denial and voter suppression – Heritage, together with the Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf), and the Honest Elections Project (HEP).
Pilf is a conservative legal group that sues election officials to force them to purge voter rolls, a process that has affected eligible US voters. The group is led by J Christian Adams, a former justice department lawyer who tried to use the Voting Rights Act to claim voting discrimination against white people.
Trump’s former lawyer Cleta Mitchell also sits on the Pilf board.
HEP is a conservative dark-money group closely tied to the Republican operative Leonard Leo who was instrumental in engineering the current conservative supermajority on the US supreme court. Reporting by ProPublica and the New York Times last year revealed that Leo has received control of a staggering $1.6bn to advance rightwing causes.
Concern about the potential of top election officials to subvert democracy intensified during the 2022 midterm elections when a number of individuals committed to Trump’s stolen election lie also ran for office. They formed the “America First Secretary of State Coalition” which became a conduit of far-right conspiracy theories linked to QAnon.
Most of those candidates failed in their bid to take over the reins of election administration in their states. But the Heritage conference suggests that the desire to deploy Republican secretaries of state as channels of voter suppression and election misinformation remains very much alive.
Though chief election officials are tasked with ensuring that ballots are fair and impartial, the Heritage conference was attended only by Republican secretaries of state.
The Guardian asked Heritage to explain why its conference was held in secret and with only Republican attendees. The group did not answer those questions.
Von Spakovsky said that the event was an “educational summit intended to provide information on current issues in elections and ensure that our election process protects the right to vote for American citizens by making it easy to vote and hard to cheat”.
He disputed the argument that security measures at the ballot box such as voter ID suppressed turnout. “The claim that secure elections somehow promote greater restrictions is outrageous and has been clearly disproven,” he said.
Von Spakovsky also pointed to Heritage’s election fraud database, which he said sampled “proven instances of election fraud from across the country”. The database records 1,422 “proven instances of voter fraud” stretching back to 1982 – a 41-year period during which billions of votes have been cast in the US.
Several of the participants at the conference have election denial and voter suppression track records. They include Florida’s secretary of state, Cord Byrd, who, soon after being appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis last spring, refused to say whether Joe Biden had won the 2020 presidential election.
Byrd runs Florida’s “election integrity unit” that was set up by DeSantis last year to investigate election crimes, even though there is scant evidence of substantial voter fraud. More than a dozen citizens accused of illegally voting have been arrested at gunpoint under DeSantis’s crackdown on supposed voter fraud.
Another attendee – Jay Ashcroft, secretary of state of Missouri – has been a leading proponent of that state’s new restrictive voting law. His office has been named in numerous lawsuits in the last year for imposing extreme constraints on voter registration, including a recent lawsuit accusing Ashcroft of illegally blocking a ballot measure.
Tennessee’s secretary of state, Tre Hargett, another listed participant, has been accused by Democratic leaders in Tennessee of purging thousands of voters from the official rolls.
Panel discussions laid out in the agenda were held on several of the core talking points of the current Republican party. The opening discussion, moderated by Von Spakovsky, was on “Auditing Expertise”.
The main speaker was Paul Bettencourt, a state senator in Texas who has sponsored several bills making it harder to vote including a measure that would deploy armed “election marshals” to oversee polling stations.
Before the conference-goers attended a cocktail reception and dinner held at an upscale restaurant in downtown Washington, day one ended with a session entitled: “Realistic Eric Fixes and Reforms”. Eric – the Electronic Registration Information Center – is a non-profit group run collectively by 28 states which is used to finesse the accuracy of state voter rolls.
In recent months it has become the target of rightwing conspiracy theories fueled by Trump who claimed falsely that it was rigged to benefit Democrats.
Ashcroft, the Missouri secretary of state, was one of the speakers in that session. Earlier this month he announced that he was pulling Missouri out of Eric, making it one of the first Republican-controlled states to quit the organization along with Alabama, Florida and West Virginia.
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Brandon Johnson, the mayor-elect of Chicago, appeared with Senator Bernie Sanders in the days before Chicago’s election. (photo: Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times)
Mr. Johnson, a progressive county commissioner, won over liberal voters across the city after finishing second in a first round of balloting.
The coalition that Mr. Johnson needed — young people, Black voters on the South and West Sides, a sizable number of Latino voters, white progressives on the North Side and along the lakefront — was coming together.
On Tuesday, Mr. Johnson, a Democratic county commissioner who was unknown to many Chicagoans a few months ago, came from behind to defeat Paul Vallas, a more conservative Democrat and a former school executive who entered the runoff campaign with a significantly larger base of support. Mr. Vallas, 69, was the favorite of many moderate and conservative voters, running on a law-and-order platform in which he promised to expand the police force and crack down on crime.
But even though large numbers of Chicagoans had said in polls that they considered public safety to be the most important issue in the election, it was Mr. Johnson, 47, who captured the slim majority of votes in Tuesday’s election. He tapped into the vast network of progressive groups in liberal Chicago — from the powerful teachers’ union to smaller, ward-based political organizations — who focused on field work to rally voters. Mr. Johnson pitched voters on a public safety plan that went beyond policing but distanced himself from past support for defunding of law enforcement.
Mr. Johnson took advantage of widespread doubts among Democratic voters over Mr. Vallas’s party identification, ever since the emergence of a television interview from 2009 in which Mr. Vallas called himself “more of a Republican than a Democrat.”
And Mr. Johnson capitalized on key endorsements to bolster his credibility among voters who did not know him well, especially those from Senator Sanders and Representative Jesús G. García, a progressive congressman with a base of support in mostly Hispanic neighborhoods on the West Side.
“You walk into a runoff with a certain base, but then you’ve got to expand your base beyond that,” Andre Vasquez, a City Council member who organized for Mr. Johnson, said on Wednesday. “The Latino community did better for Brandon than expected. The North Side performed well. It feels like a coalition of everything.”
Still, Mr. Johnson will take charge of a deeply divided Chicago. Mr. Vallas, who was once in charge of the city’s public school system, won nearly 49 percent of the vote to Mr. Johnson’s 51 percent, with thousands of mail-in ballots yet to be counted. In the first round of voting in February, Mr. Vallas received the most votes.
Ahead of the runoff, Mr. Johnson worked to increase turnout among young voters and broaden his support among Hispanic residents.
“That’s one thing that really caught my attention about Brandon: He’s out here with my people, my Hispanic community, advocating for himself,” said Lily Cruz, 22, a college student from the Southwest Side who voted for Mr. Johnson. “I feel like he has put more effort than I’ve seen any other politician that wants to run for office,” she added.
Mr. Johnson performed well in some largely white neighborhoods near Lake Michigan and in predominantly Hispanic areas northwest of downtown, just as he had in a first round of voting in February. But unlike then, Mr. Johnson, who is Black, dominated on Tuesday in wards with Black majorities, winning 80 percent of the vote in some of those areas on the South and West Sides.
In both rounds of the election, Mr. Vallas, who is white, ran up huge margins around downtown and on the Northwest and Southwest Sides in largely white neighborhoods that are home to many city workers. In the runoff, Mr. Vallas made notable inroads with Hispanic voters southwest of downtown, but he failed to win over many Black voters after having emphasized endorsements from well-known Black politicians, including Jesse White, who was Illinois’s longest-serving secretary of state.
Chicago has roughly equal numbers of Black, white and Hispanic residents, and race has long played a role in the city’s politics. Mr. Johnson will take over next month from Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who failed to qualify for the runoff after serving one term. Ms. Lightfoot, the first Black woman and the first openly gay person to lead Chicago, carried all 50 wards in the 2019 runoff, but her support eroded amid labor battles, rising crime and the pandemic.
Anthony Quezada, a Cook County commissioner from the Northwest Side, credited a blitz of support from neighborhood progressive groups for spreading the word about Mr. Johnson and persuading undecided voters to embrace his public safety plan over Mr. Vallas’s.
“We just spent, as organizers, a lot of dedicated time talking to people, listening to people’s real concerns and meeting them where they’re at and really saying, ‘Look, let’s give this a chance,’” Mr. Quezada said.
Mr. Quezada said that when he had knocked on doors to collect petition signatures for Mr. Johnson last fall, at a time when the fledgling campaign was just starting to print literature, many voters had never heard of Mr. Johnson. When Mr. Quezada canvassed again last Saturday, he said, after a rally with two members of Congress, every voter he met knew about Mr. Johnson.
The result on Tuesday, Mr. Quezada said, was a “huge, huge rebuke” of the sort of tough-on-crime policies pitched by Mr. Vallas.
“What the people of Chicago just said is, ‘We want to be invested in,’” Mr. Quezada said. “‘We don’t want to just be punished.’”
In one Far South Side ward that Ms. Lightfoot had carried by a large margin in February, Mr. Johnson was leading this time with more than 80 percent of the vote. Ronnie Mosley, a progressive Democrat who was ahead in that ward’s City Council race, said that Mr. Johnson had been able to win over voters through church visits, union endorsements and the support of neighborhood groups.
“The excitement about what’s possible under this administration, I think, really drove it home,” said Mr. Mosley, who added that he saw parallels between the multicultural coalition that elected Mr. Johnson and the one that propelled Chicago’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington, to office 40 years ago. “Folks were able to again feel that they could be heard, seen, felt, and action would actually come about on the issues that were important to them.”
Before the first round of voting, Paul Rosenfeld said, progressives in his North Side ward split their votes between Mr. Johnson and Mr. García, who finished fourth citywide. But ahead of the runoff, Mr. Rosenfeld, the Democratic Party committee person in his ward, said that liberal voters had coalesced behind Mr. Johnson, with canvassers from United Working Families and labor groups going on a door-knocking blitz.
“Progressive Democratic voters were able to really focus on just two candidates and see the stark difference between the two,” he said. “That made all the difference.”
Tom Bowen, a Democratic strategist who worked for Rahm Emanuel and for Ms. Lightfoot, said that Mr. Johnson had prevailed, in large part, by appealing to liberals with the closest identification to the Democratic Party.
“He ran a great race, but it is also true that this is an 80 percent Democratic town,” he said. “He had a low bar to clear by being the Democrat with most ties to Democratic voters.”
Now, Mr. Bowen said, the mayor-elect is about to meet the reality of governing, but with a sizable coalition of Chicago voters.
“He has the support of the progressive North Siders and the Black wards on the South Side,” he said, “which is the most enduring coalition in Chicago politics.”
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A local brass band leads environmental protesters as they approach the EPA’s office on Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Emma Ricketts/Inside Climate News)
Policy experts express cautious optimism that new, lasting regulations are imminent.
Approximately 100 demonstrators marched to the agency’s headquarters on Tuesday afternoon to chants of “EPA, don’t delay!” and “Don’t wait, regulate!”
The group, a coalition of environmental and justice groups, demanded a faster rollout from the Biden administration of tightened climate and air quality regulations for fossil fuel power plants.
The protest came after the agency fell increasingly behind on eight key climate and clean air regulations including those governing the release of carbon dioxide, mercury and soot as well as the formation of ground-level ozone, or smog.
“It is the 21st century; we shouldn’t be living with 20th century pollution when we have the means to do otherwise,” Sharon Hawthorne, a demonstrator from Arlington, Virginia, said.
“We need stricter rules for our power plants.”
Two key climate rules—the carbon standards for new and existing power plants—are nearly a year behind schedule, according to a recent report by Evergreen Action, an advocacy group pushing for aggressive climate policy.
Other regulations, including a stronger national smog standard, which would address air pollution that contributes to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths worldwide each year, and a stronger coal ash rule regulating the storage of harmful waste from coal fired power plants, are a year or more behind prior schedules set by the agency.
“The agency needs to move forward full throttle,” Charles Harper, Evergreen Action’s power sector policy lead and a co-author of the report, said. “We’re really up against a tight deadline.”
Joe Goffman, EPA principal deputy assistant administrator for the office of Air and Radiation, told Inside Climate News in an email that the agency plans to release proposed carbon standards for new and existing power plants “in the coming weeks.”
The Biden administration promised in 2021 to cut carbon dioxide emissions across all sectors of the economy 50 percent by 2030. The Inflation Reduction Act passed by Congress in August provides $370 billion for clean energy development that should reduce emissions by 40 percent by the end of the decade, according to an analysis by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Further executive action is needed to meet the additional emissions reduction targets and to rein in pollution that disproportionately affects low income communities and communities of color, Harper said.
At the same time, the agency is still trying to recover from the departure of more than 1,200 employees during the Trump administration, a Supreme Court ruling on greenhouse gas emissions that constrained the path forward for potential rulemaking and ongoing efforts by Republican Senators to block key agency appointments.
Last month, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) slammed potential EPA assistant administrator for the office of air and radiation, Joe Goffman, for his “dangerous regulatory record” and “job-killing agenda” in what was his second unsuccessful nomination hearing in as many years.
To safeguard against the potential rollback of environmental regulations, any proposed rules from the agency must be introduced this spring, Harper said.
Proposed rules must allow time for public comment before they can be finalized, a period that takes approximately one year. Once a new rule is finalized, lawmakers then have 60 legislative days to review the rule and potentially repeal it under the Congressional Review Act. Any rules introduced by the Biden administration that are finalized after mid-2024 could conceivably be repealed by Republicans if they control both the House and Senate after the 2024 elections.
“EPA does need to act with urgency to make sure that it does get these rules out ASAP,” Harper said.
Harper expressed cautious optimism that the agency will soon release proposed rules for four of what he considers to be the most crucial regulations, including those governing carbon emissions from new and existing power plants, mercury emissions and coal ash storage.
Any publication of proposed rules would follow the recent release of the final version of the “Good Neighbor” rule, which addressed smog-forming pollution that travels beyond states’ boundaries and impacts air quality for millions of people living in downwind communities.
“We’re really encouraged to see that progress,” Harper said of the Good Neighbor rule and the anticipated release of additional proposed regulations. “It comes just in the nick of time.”
Carrie Jenks, the executive director of Harvard University’s environmental and energy law program, said the Biden administration set an ambitious agenda when it took office and has been working diligently to make sure that the rules they release withstand legal scrutiny.
“I think we learned from the Trump administration that it’s critical for rules to be done well,” Jenks said. “That’s essential, to make sure that the rules that they do finalize are upheld by the courts, and that in the end is really what matters.
“Some have criticized the administration for taking too long, but I think that the administration is taking a very methodical and diligent approach to these rulemakings,” Jenks added.
Bob Perciasepe, who served as EPA deputy administrator during the Obama administration and is an advisor for the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, said a June ruling by the Supreme Court on greenhouse gas emissions undoubtedly delayed EPA regulations on carbon dioxide emissions from new and existing power plants.
“The Supreme Court taking the case, and then having to wait until June to take care of the case, and then having to take a few months at least to analyze the case, is probably one of the primary reasons they didn’t put the rule out last year,” Perciasepe said.
In West Virginia v. EPA, the Supreme Court ruled in June that a cap-and-trade approach to greenhouse gas regulation across the power sector was outside the agency’s authority. Instead, the court ruled that the agency can only impose limitations on emissions within the fenceline of each individual power plant. Any new rules released by the agency will have to focus on these more facility-specific requirements.
While optimistic about pending regulations, Harper, of Evergreen Action, urged climate and environmental justice advocates to continue to call on the agency to take strong and immediate action.
“These rules aren’t out just quite yet,” he said.
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