07 April 23
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The Manhattan district attorney’s charges underscore how profoundly unsuited Trump is for the office he is now again seeking.
The case isn’t immediately connected to the survival of American democracy as is the federal investigation into Trump’s responsibility for the January 6 insurrection or the Georgia probe into his efforts to meddle in the state’s counting of the 2020 vote. It lacks the urgent national-security concerns posed by Trump’s ferreting away of classified documents at his Florida estate. And yet it would be a mistake to brush it off as unserious. The Manhattan case, in its own quirky way, underscores how profoundly unsuited Trump is for the office he once held and that he is now again seeking.
For much of yesterday, the day of Trump’s arraignment, the mood around the Manhattan courthouse and on cable news was that of a circus. A group of protesters, counterprotesters, and journalists waited outside. Someone was handing out whistles. Television cameras tracked the former president’s journey by motorcade from Trump Tower to the courthouse, producing footage uncomfortably reminiscent of O. J. Simpson’s 1994 flight from police. Inside the courtroom, though, Judge Juan Merchan had banned cameras and other electronics. One of the few photographs permitted by the judge shows Trump seated at a dark wooden table with his lawyers, chin thrust forward, expression blank. He pleaded not guilty.
At a press conference following the arraignment, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg argued that the case was fundamentally about lies—“like so many of our white-collar prosecutions.” Trump, he alleged, had “lied again and again to protect his interests, and to evade the laws to which we are all held accountable.”
Bragg was, to some extent, on the defensive. For weeks, his office had faced scrutiny from pundits and journalists questioning his decision to resuscitate a case that had once seemed dead. In 2018, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York charged Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen for his role in shepherding the payments to Daniels and McDougal, arguing that the payments constituted an unreported in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign and thus violated federal election law. Yet Trump himself was never charged. When the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office picked up the case under Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance, it filed fraud charges against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer—but, again, the man for whom the organization was named went unscathed.
After Bragg took over the office, he reportedly clashed with the prosecutors leading the Trump investigation. Two quit in protest over what they perceived as Bragg’s unwillingness to press charges—an ugly dispute that became unusually public when one prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz, published a book early this year complaining that Bragg had decided to let Trump off the hook. And yet, by that point, Bragg had seemingly changed his mind and began pursuing the case with renewed vigor. This somewhat puzzling soap opera culminated in Trump’s arraignment, finally, yesterday.
Before the grand jury even handed up the indictment, the apparent quarrel between Bragg and Pomerantz had already highlighted potential weaknesses in the case against Trump. The days and weeks preceding news of the indictment last Thursday, and the arraignment four days later, were stuffed full of speculation from pundits wondering about what charges Bragg might pursue and what legal theories might support them.
In the end, the indictment and the accompanying “statement of facts” released by Bragg’s office provided surprisingly little new information. Trump has been charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records under New York law. The charges hinge on how the Trump Organization recorded a series of checks made out to Cohen as fees for his legal services; in fact, they were reimbursements for Cohen’s payment of $130,000 to Daniels, which he made out of pocket in the fall of 2016. But in New York, falsification of business records is a misdemeanor. The charges against Trump are felonies—“bumped up” to more serious charges under New York law because of their link to the commission of another crime. So which crime? The indictment does not say. In his press conference, Bragg indicated that this was a strategic choice by his office and pointed to a range of possibilities, including New York state-tax fraud and violations of both New York State and federal election law.
Each of those possibilities, though, offers potential pitfalls into which prosecutors might tumble. Following the arraignment and press conference, some commentators, including former prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, seemed confident about Bragg’s decision to pursue the case. Others, though, continued to worry that the charges’ legal foundations remained wobbly, and that Bragg’s U-turn on pursuing the case opens the district attorney up to accusations of politicized prosecution. “This kind of case can give credence to Trump claims of a witch hunt,” Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at UCLA Law School, warned in Slate. He would prefer, he wrote, to “see the fire aimed where it belongs: at Trump’s attempts to undermine American democracy and interfere with the peaceful transition of power during the 2020 election.”
It is inarguably true that the 2016 hush-money payments do not cut to the heart of the crises facing American democracy in the same way that the several other ongoing investigations into Trump do. A special grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, reportedly recommended multiple indictments over the Trump-led effort to interfere in the 2020 election, when Trump and his allies pressured and threatened Georgia election officials to throw the state’s electoral vote to Trump even though a majority of Georgia voters had cast their ballots for Joe Biden. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has said that her decision on whether to bring charges in that case is “imminent.”
At the Justice Department, meanwhile, Special Counsel Jack Smith is investigating both Trump’s responsibility for the January 6 riot and the ex-president’s improper storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. The Washington Post recently reported that federal investigators have amassed a wealth of evidence that Trump intentionally blocked government officials from recovering sensitive material, simply on the grounds that he didn’t want to give it to them. The Mar-a-Lago investigation, the January 6 probe, and the Fulton County special grand jury all speak to Trump’s insistence that he alone is the ultimate source of power and authority: His word ought to be law, regardless of legal structures or even the will of voters. Prosecutions of his conduct in such cases could signify a powerful reassertion of the rule of law over individual will, in a way the Manhattan hush-money prosecution, in all its grimy absurdity, can’t.
Or can it? Bragg consistently framed the charges in his press conference as efforts to hold Trump accountable for lies to the public. The statement of facts alleges that Trump and his team set the hush-money payments in motion to better his chances in the 2016 election: “The Defendant did not want this information to become public because he was concerned about the effect it could have on his candidacy,” the district attorney writes of McDougal’s account of an affair. Trump schemed with Cohen to pay off Daniels after news broke in early October 2016 of the Access Hollywood tape, further endangering his campaign. As sketched by Bragg, this was a coordinated effort to deny American voters relevant information in advance of the election. According to the statement of facts, Trump initially suggested to Cohen “that if they could delay the payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public.”
Trump did not just purchase silence ahead of the 2016 vote. He worked while he was in office to complete the cover-up. When The Wall Street Journal first began reporting about the payments to Daniels and McDougal in 2018, Trump lied repeatedly to the American public and claimed that he had no knowledge of the matter. Before that, as Bragg sets out and as Cohen admitted in his plea deal with the Southern District of New York, Trump repaid Cohen with a series of checks in 2017, after Trump had sworn the oath of office. According to Bragg, the two finalized the arrangements for repayment in a February 2017 meeting held in the Oval Office itself.
This is, by now, a familiar portrait: a candidate, and then a president, obsessed with gaining and holding on to power at all costs, without any care for or comprehension of his obligations to the public, nor any commitment to play by the rules that bind everyone else. Such conduct speaks directly to Trump’s unfitness for office and inability to conceptualize anything outside of himself. I would not, personally, rank it as worse than seeking to overturn the results of a lawful election or attempting a coup. But it is disturbing all the same.
The moral egregiousness of Trump’s behavior concerning the hush-money payments is, however, a separate question from the strength of the case that Bragg plans to bring against him. This latter point is difficult to evaluate without seeing more of what the district attorney’s office has planned. Over the past few days, the phrase “No one is above the law” has become a mantra of sorts among supporters of the Manhattan indictment. But given how the American system depends on the good judgment of prosecutors, just what “the law” is—and what it means to be above it—can be a slippery thing.
Trump, of course, isn’t waiting to pass judgment. Despite Judge Merchan’s request at the arraignment that he refrain from “statements that are likely to incite violence or civil unrest,” the former president complained bitterly at a Mar-a-Lago rally that evening about the forces arrayed against him: Bragg, he said, is a “criminal”; Merchan is “Trump-hating”; Fani Willis is “racist” and Jack Smith is a “lunatic.” All the investigations, all the many scandals, combine into a fractal of self-centered grievance.
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Sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations weren't enough to expel Tennessee House members in the past. But on Thursday, a protest against gun violence was. (photo: Kevin Wurm/Reuters)
Sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations weren’t enough to expel Tennessee House members in the past. But on Thursday, a protest against gun violence was.
Last week, Democratic Reps. Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and Justin Pearson were accused of violating decorum rules for their use of a bullhorn and signs to call for gun control in the wake of the mass killing of children and staff at Nashville’s Covenant School by an assailant toting two AR-15s. The three Democrats only led the protest when they hadn’t been recognized to speak under House rules.
Republicans, in turn, vowed to override the three members’ election by holding a vote to expel them. The move has shocked many Americans, who questioned a legislature that had, until Thursday, expelled just two members since the Civil War, and had failed to take action against other members accused of sexual harassment or violating campaign finance laws.
President Joe Biden even spoke up to condemn Republican lawmakers’ actions Thursday evening.
“Three kids and three officials gunned down in yet another mass shooting,” Biden wrote on Twitter. “And what are GOP officials focused on? Punishing lawmakers who joined thousands of peaceful protesters calling for action. It's shocking, undemocratic, and without precedent.”
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Flames can be seen during Israeli air attacks in Gaza on April 6, 2023. (photo: Bashar Talib/Reuters)
Later Friday, there were signs that both sides were trying to keep the hostilities in check. Fighting on Israel’s northern and southern borders subsided after dawn, and midday prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem passed peacefully. But a Palestinian shooting attack in the Israeli-occupied West Bank killed two women near an Israeli settlement just hours later — a grim reminder of the combustible situation.
The early morning Israeli strikes followed an unusually large rocket barrage fired at Israel from southern Lebanon — what analysts described as the most serious cross-border violence since Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon’s Hezbollah militants. The violence erupted after Israeli police raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem earlier this week, sparking unrest in the contested capital and outrage across the Arab world.
The Israeli strikes seemed designed to avoid drawing in the Iran-backed Shiite group, which Israel considers its most immediate threat. The Israeli military said its warplanes struck infrastructure belonging to Palestinian militants that it accused of firing the nearly three dozen rockets that slammed into open areas and northern Israeli towns on Thursday. Nonetheless, the Israeli military said it believed the Palestinian militants acted with the knowledge of Hezbollah, which holds sway over much of southern Lebanon.
There were no reports of serious casualties, but several residents of the southern Lebanese town of Qalili, including Syrian refugees, said they were lightly wounded.
“I immediately gathered my wife and children and got them out of the house,” said Qalili resident Bilal Suleiman, who was jolted awake by the bombing.
A flock of sheep was also killed when the Israeli missiles struck an open field near the Palestinian refugee camp of Rashidiyeh, according to an Associated Press photographer. Other airstrikes hit a bridge and power transformer in the nearby town of Maaliya and damaged an irrigation system providing water to orchards in the area.
In the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military pounded what it said were weapons production sites and underground tunnels belonging to Hamas, the militant group ruling the Palestinian enclave. Residents inspected the damage left after Israeli strikes — including to a children’s hospital in Gaza City, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
After the retaliatory strikes, Israelis living along the southern border returned home from bomb shelters. Most missiles that managed to cross into Israeli territory hit open areas, but one landed in the nearby town of Sderot, sending shrapnel slicing into a house.
There were no reports of casualties on either side of the southern border.
The Israeli military said everyone wanted avoid a full-blown conflict. “Quiet will be answered with quiet,” said Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, a spokesman for the Israeli military.
Tensions remained high in the region. In the West Bank, a Palestinian shooting attack near an Israeli settlement in the Jordan Valley killed two sisters in their 20s and seriously wounded their 45-year-old mother, Israeli medics and officials said. The three victims were residents of the Israeli settlement of Efrat, near the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, said Oded Revivi, the mayor of the settlement. The girls’ father was driving in another car behind his wife and daughters and witnessed the attack, Revivi added. Medics said they dragged the unconscious women from the smashed car that appeared to have been pushed off the road.
The Israeli military said it was searching for those behind the attack, setting up roadblocks in the area. No militant group immediately claimed responsibility. But Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem hailed the attack “in retaliation for the crimes committed by Israel in the West Bank and the Al-Aqsa mosque.”
Jerusalem’s holy site of Al-Aqsa, a tinderbox for Israeli-Palestinian conflict, sits on a hilltop sacred to both Muslims and Jews. In 2021, an escalation also triggered by clashes at the scared compound spilled over into an 11-day war between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers.
Over 130,000 worshippers poured into the compound for midday prayers on Friday, which ended without incident. Before dawn prayers, chaos had erupted at one of the entrances to the esplanade as Israeli police wielding batons descended on crowds of Palestinian worshippers, who chanted slogans praising Hamas as they tried to squeeze into the site. An hour later, according to videos, people leaving the prayers staged a largescale protest on the limestone courtyard, with Palestinians raising their fists and shouting against Israel. Israeli police forced their way into the compound, inflaming tensions during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
Police did not comment on the earlier beatings, but said security forces entered the holy compound after prayers in response to “masked suspects” who threw rocks toward officers at one of the gates. Israeli authorities control access to the area but the compound is administered by Islamic and Jordanian officials.
The unrest comes at a delicate time for Jerusalem’s Old City, which on Friday was teeming with pilgrims from around the world. The Christian faithful retraced the route Jesus is said to have taken for Good Friday, Jews celebrated the weeklong Passover holiday and Muslims prayed and fasted for Ramadan.
The current round of violence began Wednesday after Israeli police twice raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque — in one case fiercely beating Palestinians, who responded by hurling rocks and firecrackers. That led Thursday to rocket fire from Gaza and, in a significant and unusual escalation, the barrage from southern Lebanon and the Israeli retaliation.
Lebanon’s Foreign Ministry said Friday it had instructed the country’s mission to the United Nations in New York to submit a complaint to the U.N. Security Council against the “deliberate Israeli bombing and aggression” in the south, which it condemned as “a flagrant violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty.”
Even as a tense calm took hold along the Lebanese and Gaza borders, the West Bank remained volatile. Violence has surged to new heights in the territory in recent months, with Palestinian health officials reporting the start of 2023 to be the most deadly for Palestinians in two decades.
Nearly 90 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank since the start of the year, according to an Associated Press tally. During that time, 16 people have been killed in Palestinian attacks on Israelis — all but one of them civilians. Israel says most of those Palestinians killed have been militants. But stone-throwing youths protesting police incursions and people not involved in the confrontations have also been killed.
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Voters cast ballots in Virginia on 3 November 2020. (photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP)
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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Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) signed the abortion law a day after approving a measure that bans gender-affirming care for transgender youths. (photo: Darin Oswald/AP)
The new law brands such involvement by adults as “abortion trafficking.” With a near-total abortion ban already in place in Idaho, the legislation, passed by Republican state legislators, makes Idaho the first state to make it illegal for minors to seek an out-of-state abortion when their parents aren’t involved.
Abortion rights advocates have vowed to fight the law, opening another front in the battle over abortion rights in one of the states that moved swiftly to enact bans after the June 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade. A court battle is also likely over whether Idaho medical providers are banned from giving a woman a referral for abortion in another state, something Planned Parenthood sued Idaho Attorney General Raúl R. Labrador over Wednesday.
Little signed the abortion law the day after approving legislation that bans gender-affirming care for transgender youths and makes it a felony for doctors to provide such care to minors. Together, the new laws criminalize help from adults for minors who seek gender- or abortion-related care. They come as Republican-led states across the nation tighten restrictions on abortion access and gender-affirming care.
The American Civil Liberties Union plans to sue to block the transgender-care law.
In both cases, Little has said the laws aim to protect children. The governor told lawmakers in a letter that the abortion bill “seeks only to prevent unemancipated minor girls from being taken across state lines for an abortion without the knowledge and consent of her parent or guardian,” not to block interstate travel or adult out-of-state abortions.
An adult convicted of breaking the law will face two to five years in prison, and the minor’s parents and siblings can sue, as can the person who impregnated the minor and children of the minor.
Even in cases of rape, someone who helps a minor obtain an abortion can be charged, the Associated Press reported, though the person who raped the minor can’t sue under the law.
According to Planned Parenthood, the majority of girls who become pregnant do consult their parents. By criminalizing assistance for those who want to conceal an abortion from their parents, advocates say, the law is targeting young adults who may be most vulnerable — seeking an abortion because they are “in dangerous, abusive situations,” Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates West said on Twitter.
The law criminalizes the part of the trip that happens within Idaho: Anyone who helps a minor obtain an abortion or abortion pill by “recruiting, harboring, or transporting the pregnant minor within this state commits the crime of abortion trafficking,” House Bill 242 reads.
Critics questioned the constitutionality of a state effectively punishing people for travel to another state.
“All Idahoans should be paying attention to this extreme attempt at government overreach to control our movements in and out of the state of Idaho,” Rebecca Gibron, CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai‘i, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky, said in a statement.
In his letter, Little said the law “does not criminalize, preclude, or otherwise impair interstate travel.”
State Rep. Barbara Ehardt (R), one of the measure’s sponsors, championed it as a “parental rights” bill.
“What we want to make sure of is that parents are the ones who are in charge of their children,” she told HuffPost.
Ehardt’s office did not immediately respond to a request from The Washington Post on Thursday morning.
A spokesperson for the governor did not answer questions from The Post about the new law, but emailed a statement that doesn’t mention the measure:
“Governor Little is busy wrapping up a successful legislative session marked by historic investments in teacher pay, workforce training, and critical infrastructure while delivering even more tax relief for hardworking Idaho families and businesses.”
Idaho Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow (D) has decried the measure, telling The Post last week that it “cheapens the term ‘human trafficking’ and that’s shameful.”
“Human trafficking is a terrible crime where one person takes another person against their will,” said Wintrow, who did not immediately respond to a Thursday request for comment.
Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates West said on Twitter that the organization would fight the law.
“This legislation is despicable, and we’re going to do everything in our power to stop it,” the organization tweeted. “Idaho lawmakers have slipped under the radar with some of the strictest antiabortion laws in the country. Now, they’re using an incredibly serious term like trafficking to talk about young people traveling with trusted adults to access a legal procedure in another state.”
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Canada's Scotiabank holds the largest foreign share of Elbit Systems, whose wares have been connected to rights abuses. (photo: AP)
Canada’s Scotiabank holds the largest foreign share of Elbit Systems, whose wares have been connected to rights abuses.
Last fall, Scotiabank, one of Canada’s largest banks, was reported by Bloomberg to have become a major shareholder in Elbit Systems, Israel’s premier defense contractor. On Tuesday, at a shareholder meeting, a representative of the ethical investing activist group Ek? delivered a petition on behalf of 12,000 signatories calling on Scotiabank to divest from the firm.
“Since the petition started in October, we have asked Scotiabank to divest from Elbit Systems. This is a company whose weapons have caused countless civilian deaths,” said Angus Wong, the senior campaign manager from Eko, the group formerly known as SumOfUs. “The question is not why they own shares — it is why they are the biggest foreign shareholder in Elbit. We demand to know why Scotiabank is investing hundreds of millions of dollars of funds from middle-class families in this company.”
A representative of Scotiabank at the meeting did not address questions about Elbit’s human rights record or the large scale of Scotiabank’s investment, Wong, who delivered the petition, told The Intercept. At the Scotiabank shareholder meeting, a representative of the bank characterized all fund decisions as being driven by “the interests of shareholders.”
Scotiabank’s gigantic stake in Elbit Systems, estimated to be about $500 million, dwarfs that of its two larger domestic competitors, TD Bank and Royal Bank of Canada. The two other banks hold around $3 million in shares, combined, in the company.
“1832’s investment in Elbit Systems is unusually large for a bank its size,” said Adriana DiSilvestro, a research consultant focused on corporate accountability. “It’s unusual that an asset manager of this size would own that percentage of outstanding shares of a company unless they have some sort of strategic interest.”
The investment in Elbit comes through Scotiabank’s asset management arm, 1832 Asset Management, and a particular subdivision known as Dynamic Funds, several of whose funds are run by a fund manager and executive named David Fingold. (Scotiabank declined to comment, and Fingold did not respond to a request for comment.)
Fingold is a prolific investor in controversial Israeli firms: As of recent reporting funds under his management had also taken a roughly 2 percent stake in Mizrahi-Tefahot Bank, an Israeli company on a United Nations list of firms profiting from Israeli settlements, and 8 percent of Strauss Group, a conglomerate that co-owns Sabra and has been previously criticized for its vocal public support of the Israeli military. The funds that Fingold manages accounted for the entirety of 1832 Asset Management’s stake in these companies.
Fingold’s Israel Investments
While it’s not possible to attribute Fingold’s eyebrow-raising investments in companies like Elbit to a particular ideological stance, his social media postings consist heavily of links to pro-Israel influencers and websites. Many of his posts reshares content from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and pro-Israel figures like Hananya Naftali, including posts characterizing Palestinians as supporters of terrorism and Nazism.
In late 2021, Fingold also shared an article on Twitter referring to Ben and Jerry’s board of directors chief Anuradha Mittal as “antisemite of the year” — a reaction to the company’s announcement that it would not be selling its products in Israeli settlements. (Following The Intercept’s request for comment, Fingold made his Twitter account private.)
Ben and Jerry’s boycott announcement coincided with 1832 Asset Management’s divestment from large financial positions in the brand’s parent company, Unilever. The company became a target of widespread divestment efforts from state investment funds across the U.S. in 2021 over Ben and Jerry’s stance on the conflict.
Publicly available information shows that 1832 Asset Management held nearly 700,000 shares of Unilever on March 31, 2021, a large position that the firm sold off all the way down to zero by September of the following year. The most recent update to the firm’s position shows a smaller position of roughly 67,000 shares. The breakdown of positions does not indicate whether it was Dynamic Funds trading that accounted for the sell-off.
In a 2019 interview with an Israeli financial news outlet, Fingold explained that his investments in Israel were outsized compared to the MSCI World Index, which serves as a guideline for how mutual funds should distribute their investments across various global economies. Some funds hew to the index’s weighting, but Fingold said Dynamic did not.
“We came into Israel as early as 2002, and we have had holdings here for a long time,” Fingold said in the interview. “Most firms can’t invest beyond Israel’s weight in the [MSCI] indices, but we don’t care about Israel’s weight, and Israel accounts for a larger share of our investment portfolio than its proportion in the indices.”
Socially Irresponsible Investing
While socially responsible investing has become an attractive marketing tool for financial institutions, it has not translated into much in the way of altering the balance sheets of major firms.
Scotiabank prominently touts its “four pillars for responsible banking” and boasts of its listing on socially responsible investment indices. The company also touts its “allyship” to various marginalized communities in public-facing marketing materials and has identified “advancing human rights” as a core environmental, social, and governance objective in investment decisions.
This saccharine language has not impeded it from holding a major stake in a weapons manufacturer accused of facilitating terrible human rights abuses.
Elbit Systems has been under scrutiny from activists for years over its involvement in arming Israeli military units operating in the occupied Palestinian territories. The company is a major developer of drone technology for the Israeli military, as well as weapons systems, munitions, and surveillance tools.
Drones developed by Elbit have been involved in carrying out attacks that have killed civilians. A notorious 2014 strike in the Gaza Strip that killed four children playing on a beach was reported to have been carried out with the help of an Elbit-designed surveillance drone.
Activists have charged that surveillance technology developed by Elbit has also been sold to regimes like Ethiopia, which have deployed them to target dissidents and journalists both domestically and abroad.
Several major European banks and pension funds have divested from Elbit over the past decade due to the use of its technology in the occupied West Bank. The company has also come under fire for its alleged involvement in the production of cluster munitions blamed for causing indiscriminate harm to civilians in war zones.
Last spring, Australia’s sovereign wealth fund banned investment in Elbit due to a subsidiary’s alleged manufacturing of cluster bombs. The move followed similar steps taken by Norwegian and Swedish government-run funds, as well as the London-based bank HSBC, to divest from Elbit over broader human rights concerns.
As the security situation in the occupied Palestinian territories continues to deteriorate, Elbit has remained a subject of ethical investment concerns.
The petition submitted by activists at this week’s shareholder meeting for Scotiabank is only the latest salvo in a growing campaign against Western financial institutions’ involvement with Elbit.
Human rights activists say simply declaring that fund decisions are based solely on returns does not go far enough to address ethical concerns by many investors.
“This is a weapons company, and the situation in Israel makes putting money in Elbit Systems a potentially profitable investment,” said Ward Warmerdam, an economic researcher with the Netherlands-based ethical investing research firm Profundo. “But it should concern consumers that funds they have invested are being directed towards a company that is profiting from the occupation of the Palestinian territories.”
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Research from Harvard suggests that governments need to revamp air quality rules. (photo: AP)
Research from Harvard suggests that governments need to revamp air quality rules.
The analysis, conducted by researchers at Harvard’s medical school, was released on Wednesday in the BMJ, a peer-reviewed medical journal. It’s the most comprehensive look yet at the link between the neurological condition and exposure to PM2.5 — fine particles that are 2.5 microns wide or less released by wildfires, traffic, power plants, and other sources. Dementia, an umbrella term for the loss of mental functioning that includes Alzheimer’s disease, afflicts more than 7 million people in the United States and 57 million worldwide.
The study found that the risk of dementia rose by 17 percent for every two micrograms per cubic meter increase in people’s annual exposure to PM2.5. For context, the average American is exposed to an average of 10 micrograms per cubic meter every year, much of it from burning fossil fuels; during Beijing’s most polluted years a decade ago, the city hovered around 100 micrograms.
“Two micrograms per cubic meter is not that much,” said Marc Weisskopf, the lead author of the study and a professor of environmental epidemiology and physiology at Harvard University. “You know, that could easily be the difference between being in Boston versus a rural part of Massachusetts.”
That even small increases can raise dementia risks suggests that governments need to revamp their rules. The Environmental Protection Agency places the limit at 12 micrograms per cubic meter, and the European Union puts the threshold at a comparatively lax 25 micrograms.
The Harvard study is an “alarm” the EPA should pay attention to, said Afif El-Hasan, a pediatrician and volunteer spokesperson for the American Lung Association who was not involved with the new research. He called for the agency to “get very aggressive” on reducing particulate matter with new guidelines that account for the dementia risks laid out in this new report.
“It is devastating to think that it’s, once again, another penalty that’s being paid by people who live in areas with poor air,” El-Hasan said. “It’s another penalty they have to pay, risk not only for their lungs, not only increased cancer risk or heart risks for heart problems, but mental problems as well. And it’s sad, as a society, that that has to be the case.”
In light of the thousands of scientific studies showing how particulate matter hurts people’s health, the EPA recently proposed tightening its limits for PM2.5 to nine or 10 micrograms. The agency said that these stricter standards could prevent more than 4,000 premature deaths each year and save $43 billion in health costs in 2032. But health advocates have argued that the EPA’s proposal still falls short of what’s needed. It also doesn’t take the risk of dementia into account, unlike more established research on heart and lung conditions.
“The literature has been growing rapidly recently, but it’s a little bit maybe too new for the EPA,” Weisskopf said.
For the most recent report, the Harvard researchers looked at more than 50 studies that assessed the link between dementia and air pollution, then narrowed the batch down to 16 using a new tool that can detect bias in studies. For example, many epidemiological studies rely on large stores of medical data that don’t include people who aren’t able to afford medical care. Despite concerns that scientists might have been overestimating the link between dementia and PM2.5 exposure, the study showed that, if anything, the effect was underestimated, Weisskopf said.
It doesn’t bode well, especially as climate change threatens to undo decades of progress on air pollution. The number of Americans exposed to wildfire smoke, for instance, has increased 27-fold over the last decade, with fires amped up by hotter temperatures routinely blanketing cities in the western U.S. in plumes of smoke.
It’s worth noting that pollution isn’t the only factor behind the rise in dementia, much of which can be attributed to an aging population. Previous research suggests that about 40 percent of dementia cases are preventable, as smoking, education, and cardiovascular health also play roles. Air pollution doesn’t appear to be as big a risk factor as smoking, Weisskopf said, but because it touches basically everyone, it can have a huge effect across the population.
Scientists are not sure when exposure to PM2.5 is the most harmful — when people are young, old, or throughout their entire life. Most studies only look at exposure in the years directly preceding the onset of dementia. “Until we understand that better, there’s going to be still some fuzziness,” Weisskopf said.
The study’s findings could be used to calculate the cost-benefit analyses that are used to develop environmental regulations. Establishing the link between dementia and PM2.5 has “huge societal and financial implications,” Weisskopf said, “because the amount of money that gets spent on dementia care and caring for people and treating people is enormous.” Last year, medical costs for dementia, which affects roughly one in nine Americans who are 65 and older, added up to about $592 billion in the U.S.
“Doing the right things in terms of air quality doesn’t just improve everyone’s life, make our lives longer and more productive, but it also costs society less,” said El-Hasan.
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