12 April 23
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He’s rocketing toward a Republican nomination – and alienating independent voters crucial in the general election
Just after Trump said he would be arrested, he moved into the lead – 47% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters preferred him, compared with 39% for DeSantis. Now, after his arraignment, Trump’s lead has widened – 57% to 31%.
What’s going on? Trump’s high-decibel howls of anger and grievance and his vitriolic charges of a “deep state” aligned against him are rallying Republicans to his side.
He has raged against his indictment in language evoking racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories. He has whipped up a fury of threats against the judge, the prosecutor and their families. And of course he continues to repeat his lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
But the commotion isn’t increasing Trump’s odds of being elected president in November 2024. To the contrary, it’s reducing those odds.
Only about 28% of American voters identify as Republican. And as Republicans move back to Trump, another group of voters that will probably determine the outcome of the 2024 election is turned off by his vitriol.
I’m talking about independents.
Those who describe themselves as independent compose over 40% of American voters – a larger percentage than either self-described Republicans or Democrats.
This independent share of the voting population is on the rise, as young people decline to identify with either party.
You wouldn’t know any of this from media coverage of politics, which focuses almost entirely on the deepening, bitter conflict between red and blue America. Hey, conflict sells.
Not that independents are moderates. They simply dislike angry partisanship.
Independents also oppose the Republican party’s stances on abortion, transgender rights, gun controls and the climate.
In Wisconsin, where about the same number of voters have registered Democratic as have registered Republican, independents make all the difference.
Last Tuesday’s victory of Judge Janet Protasiewicz – flipping control of the state’s supreme court to liberals for the first time in 15 years – was presumably due to independents who favor abortion rights and oppose the state’s radical gerrymandering.
Nationally, independents helped stop the “red wave” in the 2022 midterms (albeit by a slim margin of 49% to 47%), breaking their tendency to vote against the party holding the White House in midterm elections.
Why? Because most independents loathe Trump as much as Democrats do and they oppose everything Trump has inflicted on America – including an army of election deniers and an anti-abortion supreme court.
In 2020, independents preferred Biden over Trump, 52% to 37%.
True, independents haven’t been wildly enthusiastic about Biden. They’ve worried about the economy, and, like other voters, tend to blame or credit the occupant of the Oval Office for the economy’s performance.
When Trump’s star was fading and DeSantis’s brightening, it seemed possible that some independents might be drawn back to the Republicans in 2024. But if Trump is the Republican candidate, as seems increasingly likely, most independents will support Biden, as they did in 2020.
Trump’s indictment – presumably to be followed by other indictments – is reminding independents of Trump’s broader attack on democracy that culminated on 6 January 2021.
In the four weeks following the attack, so many voters abandoned the Republican party that about 50% of Americans briefly identified as independents.
Trump’s latest rounds of incendiary posts and speeches are reminding independents that he represents everything they most detest about American politics.
So, as fast as Trump blasts his way to the Republican nomination, he’s turning off independent voters who will be crucial in the general election.
The prospect of a 2024 contest between DeSantis and Biden might seem less terrifying than one pitting Trump against Biden, but the latter is more winnable by Americans – including independents – who favor democracy over autocracy.
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Justin Jones speaks to supporters before he was reinstated by the Nashville Metropolitan Council. (photo: Michael A. McCoy/The Washington Post)
A letter from senators Schumer and Warnock asks investigators to examine whether state lawmakers had their rights violated
In a letter to be delivered on Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) call on Attorney General Merrick Garland to “use all available legal authorities” to conclude whether federal statutes were violated and “take all steps necessary to uphold the democratic integrity of our nation’s legislative bodies.”
The letter, obtained by The Washington Post, is the first formal effort by U.S. Senate lawmakers in response to the removals. The Republican-dominated Tennessee House expelled Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, both Democrats, on Thursday after they led protesters in chants for gun control from the floor of the chamber.
The senators argue that the removals may have violated Jones’s and Pearson’s First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly, the rights of citizens of Memphis and Nashville to be represented by the legislators of their choice and rights the pair have under the 14th Amendment or civil rights statutes prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race.
Jones and Pearson are both Black men in their late 20s who were expelled by the chamber’s GOP supermajority for participating in “disorderly behavior.” The two protested alongside fellow Democratic Rep. Gloria Johnson, who is White. She was not expelled.
State Rep. Lowell Russell (R) has explained that he voted to expel Jones and Pearson but not Johnson because she “did not participate to the extent that Jones and Pearson did.”
Jones was later reinstated by the Nashville Metropolitan Council, and Pearson is expected to be reinstated by Memphis authorities.
The office of Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the senators’ letter.
The letter cites the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1966 ruling in Bond v. Floyd as a potential precedent to draw from in arguing that the expulsions in Tennessee were unlawful. In that case, the high court found that the Georgia House of Representatives’ refusal to seat a Black lawmaker, Julian Bond, over his stance on the Vietnam War was unconstitutional.
“There are some who would try to distinguish Georgia’s exclusion of Bond for his speeches about the war outside the legislative chamber from Tennessee’s repressive and vindictive expulsion of two duly elected members for their robust expressions of views in the well of the chamber in alleged violation of its rules of decorum,” said Laurence Tribe, a professor emeritus of law at Harvard University. “But to me, that is a distinction without a difference.”
Beyond the Bond case, there are few relevant precedents on which to draw, potentially complicating any Justice Department effort. It is also unclear whether the department would have the appetite to delve into a politically fraught case at a time when local authorities are already acting to restore the lawmakers to their jobs.
“I can imagine a scenario in which the two legislators bring cases citing constitutional claims, but I think that those claims turn upon these really difficult questions of fact about the reasons for the expulsion,” said Aziz Huq, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago.
“I think those cases would be challenging to win and I don’t see any immediate payoff from those cases for these legislators given one’s been reinstated and the other one is likely to be reinstated,” Huq said.
In their letter, Warnock and Schumer praised the state representatives for “courageously participating in nonviolent demonstrations” that “challenged procedural rules.”
“We do not believe that breaking decorum is alone sufficient cause for employing the most draconian of consequences to duly-elected lawmakers,” the senators wrote. “This is un-democratic, un-American, and unacceptable, and the U.S. Department of Justice should investigate whether it was also unlawful or unconstitutional.”
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Recruits in Ukraine last month. The leak of American intelligence documents could affect Ukraine's long-expected spring offensive. (photo: Mauricio Lima/The New York Times)
What you need to know about those top-secret files that got posted on Discord.
The files reveal closely held information about US operations, like a suggestion there are up to 100 NATO special operations officials in Ukraine, and details about casualty counts for both Russia and Ukraine. They indicate that the US has infiltrated Russian intelligence groups and has inside knowledge of hacking attempts on a Canadian pipeline. And they show in some detail what the US has gleaned from spying on partners such as Israel, Egypt, and South Korea.
And most bizarrely, the documents surfaced more than a month earlier on anonymous, decentralized web forums dedicated to gaming, like a Discord channel devoted to Minecraft, and after that on 4chan.
The classified files emerged as recently photographed folded documents that may have appeared as daily briefings for the military’s top leaders. If they are authentic, the documents represent a major intelligence breach and offer insights into the US role in defending Ukraine from Russia’s invasion and other major geopolitical arenas.
For now, the documents’ ambiguous provenance, the somewhat surprising platform on which they were first posted, the signs that at least several were doctored, and the inability to independently verify them mean it’s difficult to draw sweeping conclusions. The motive for the documents’ publication is obscured by the jokey online exchanges in which they were shared.
But the US government seems to be treating the documents as legitimate. The Justice Department opened an investigation into the leaks, the Defense Department and several other government agencies are together assessing any impact on national security, and Pentagon leaders are angry and scrambling to undo the damage.
Gavin Wilde, a Carnegie Endowment expert who previously worked in the White House and at the National Security Agency, says the documents expose the contradiction between the incredible intelligence-gathering capacity of US agencies and their apparent sloppiness in handling sensitive information. “It’s just the latest indication that the intelligence bureaucracy is both remarkably adept and remarkably inept in this new misinformation environment,” he told me. “The way we think about counterintelligence clearly needs to be more coherent.”
“That’s a paradox to me,” Wilde continued, “that on one hand, these documents appear to show an intelligence community that excels at what it’s charged with doing, while being kind of catastrophically inept at another aspect of what it’s supposed to do. ... It really vexes me that it took over a month for them to gain popular notice.”
What the leaks reveal
The documents, according to several former officials I spoke with, seem to be photographed from a briefing book for a high-level US military leader and perhaps shared with allies. The number of individuals who might have access to such documents, these sources speculated, might number into the hundreds or even low thousands. What was most noteworthy is the scope of the information, which includes a variety of maps that show Ukrainian and Russian positions and in-depth intelligence reports.
“The documents appear — and I want to emphasize appear — to potentially reveal sources and methods,” says Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel of the National Security Agency from 2015 to 2020 and now works as an adviser to the consulting firm Beacon Global Strategies.
This may compromise the US’s ability, for example, to spy on Russia.
The breadth and depth of the documents are also important. The documents are current — dated in late February or early March of this year — and cover a wide range of topics, beyond just Ukraine. While 100 documents is a lot, it’s not near the scale of the leaks published by Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden. Asked if the leak was contained or whether more files were out there, White House spokesperson John Kirby said, “We don’t know. We truly don’t.”
Among other surprising findings, the documents reveal the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad supported protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he pushed for a major judicial overhaul in the country. The Washington Post cites a document that says Mossad leaders “advocated for Mossad officials and Israeli citizens to protest the new Israeli Government’s proposed judicial reforms, including several explicit calls to action that decried the Israeli Government, according to signals intelligence.” Israel has not provided weapons to Ukraine, and a document from February 2023 shows “scenarios that could drive Jerusalem to provide lethal aid” to Ukraine.
Then there are revelations about Egypt, which, as one of the US’s closest Middle East partners, has received billions of dollars in military aid. But a leaked document reveals a scheme to possibly support Russia with armaments. According to the Washington Post, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi had “recently ordered subordinates to produce up to 40,000 rockets to be covertly shipped to Russia.”
The leaked files offer new details about personnel losses in the Russia-Ukraine war, which both sides of the conflict have tried to keep secret. The New York Times says, “One document reports the Russians have suffered 189,500 to 223,000 casualties, including up to 43,000 killed in action,” while another notes that “as of February, Ukraine had suffered 124,500 to 131,000 casualties, with up to 17,500 killed in action.” Pro-Russia accounts on the social media platform Telegram doctored some of those casualty numbers before recirculating the documents.
Several maps show detailed troop movements, the state of Ukrainian and Russian weaponry, and even the “Mud-Frozen Ground Timeline,” by month, which could be helpful in assessing the path of tanks on the battlefield. One top-secret document lays out the shortcomings of the Ukrainian military and says Ukraine would only make “modest territorial gains” in its counteroffensive.
Some of that information may already be outdated, but given the dates printed on the files, it may give Russia and other US adversaries the ability to reverse-engineer the sources of US intelligence.
“This has the real potential for actually genuinely hurting national security,” says Gerstell. “In prior leaks, people said that, but what they really meant was it was politically embarrassing or awkward or hurt our relationships with allies. And this is a little different.”
Why did these documents get leaked, and what happens now?
It’s not at all clear who the source of the leak might be — a disgruntled US civilian or uniformed official? Someone simply trying to win an argument online? The timing might imply someone who is trying to shape the US and NATO response to an imminent Ukrainian counteroffensive. But that could be meant to box in the Western response to push for unmitigated support, or to embarrass the US, or to show the depth of US assistance to Ukraine on the ground.
Whatever the content of the files, the leak itself is likely to be favorable to Russian President Vladimir Putin in at least two regards: netting a propaganda win and showing valuable insights into how US agencies work.
Though some analysts have argued that its origin is Russian intelligence, it’s not clear why they would want to blow up such a goldmine of a source and publicize inside information. And the hastiness of the files being posted on seemingly arbitrary forums suggests it’s not an influence operation or malevolent intelligence agency. “I cannot comment on this in any way. You and I know that there is in fact a tendency to always blame everything on Russia,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
The Biden administration will now be racing to ensure that the leak is plugged. That may result in a major tightening of access, and probably in some cases a blanket shutdown of certain intelligence sharing, perhaps to the detriment of US policymaking as different channels get more siloed. “It will definitely kick off another cycle of caution, where everybody kind of starts to lock things down and start to reassess how much they’re comfortable sharing with each other,” Wilde told me.
In a statement, Discord said that they were cooperating with the investigation and could not provide any additional details.
“This is information that has no business in the public domain,” Kirby told reporters from the White House lectern. “It has no business, if you don’t mind me saying, on the front pages of newspapers or on television. It is not intended for public consumption, and it should not be out there.”
But now that it is out there, it reveals the very human aspects of the high-tech wars the US is engaged in. For all of the advanced weaponry the US is giving Ukraine, this is a war between humans, and when you have a lot of humans with access to highly secret information, there is always the potential for a breach. People make mistakes, and they apparently love to show off their access in posts on platforms like Discord.
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Garrett Foster's fiancee, Whitney Mitchell, center, at a memorial in Austin in July of 2020. (photo: Ana Ramirez/AP)
One day after a jury convicted U.S. Army Sgt. Daniel Perry of murder for shooting and killing Garrett Foster at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he wants Perry to receive a pardon.
"I am working as swiftly as Texas law allows regarding the pardon of Sgt. Perry," Abbott said over the weekend, via Twitter.
Here's a recap of the case and what is happening now:
What happened between Foster and Perry?
Foster and Perry encountered each other at a street protest on July 25, 2020 — about two months into national protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota.
Perry, who was stationed at Ft. Hood, was in downtown Austin working as an Uber driver that night when he turned onto a street crowded with protesters, including Foster. Both men were carrying firearms legally.
Foster, 28, was carrying an AK-47 at the protest, which he attended with his fiancée. Perry was armed with a revolver — and as Foster approached Perry's car, Perry shot him repeatedly.
Witnesses said Perry was driving dangerously close to protesters; they also said Foster didn't raise his weapon toward Perry. But the defense team said Perry feared for his life, and that Foster had raised his gun. Prosecutors said Perry instigated the incident after running a red light.
A Travis County jury convicted Perry of murder on Friday.
Why does Abbott want to exonerate Perry?
The governor didn't go into detail about why he believes Perry should be pardoned, but he cited Perry's attorney's explanation that Perry shot Foster in self-defense.
"Texas has one of the strongest 'Stand Your Ground' laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney," Abbott said.
How soon could the governor pardon Perry?
Under Texas law, Abbott can't act on his own. He can only grant a pardon after the Board of Pardons and Paroles has made a recommendation on a case. But, Abbott notes, he can ask the board to look at particular cases, like Perry's.
"I have made that request and instructed the Board to expedite its review," Abbott said. Leaving no doubt about what he expects the outcome to be, the governor added, "I look forward to approving the Board's pardon recommendation as soon as it hits my desk."
The pardons and paroles board confirmed to NPR on Monday that it has received Abbott's request and his recommendation for a pardon.
"The board will be commencing that investigation immediately," the agency told NPR. "Upon completion, the board will report to the governor on the investigation and make recommendations to the governor."
It did not provide an estimate of how long the review might take.
What is the district attorney's office saying?
Travis County District Attorney José Garza says it is "deeply troubling" that Abbott is intervening in the case, noting that the legal process around the case isn't yet complete.
"In this case, a jury of twelve listened to testimony for nearly two weeks, upending their lives to painstakingly evaluate the evidence and arguments presented by both the State and the Defense," Garza said in a statement emailed to NPR.
He also noted that the jurors deliberated for over 15 hours before reaching the unanimous decision that Perry was guilty of murder — a decision Abbott now wants to overturn.
Even without Abbott's actions, Garza said, the case would be reviewed by state and federal courts to ensure proper legal procedures were followed.
Has Perry been sentenced?
No — and while the pardon review gets under way, Perry is facing a sentence of up to life in prison.
Criminal District Judge Clifford Brown was to set a date for the sentencing at a hearing this week.
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Shanae Smith-Cunningham, left, and Anya Cook, shown in Lauderhill, Fla., experienced complications with their pregnancies in December because of pre-viability PPROM. (photo: Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
New abortion restrictions have disrupted the standard of care for a pregnancy complication both women experienced late last year
She was about to deliver her baby alone in the bathroom of a hair salon. On this Thursday afternoon in mid-December, about five months before her due date, she knew the baby would not be born alive.
Cook tried to tune out the easy chatter outside, happy women with working wombs catching up with their hairdresser. At 36, she’d already experienced a long line of miscarriages, but none of the pregnancies had been more than five weeks along. Now she had to deliver a nearly 16-week fetus — a daughter she’d planned to call Bunny.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
As soon as the fetus hit the water, blood started flowing between her thighs. Blood splattered on the white toilet seat and across the floor. She panicked, her hands shaking as she picked up her phone to call her husband, Derick.
“Baby,” she said, “I need you to come to the bathroom.”
Over the course of the day, according to medical records, Cook would lose roughly half the blood in her body.
She had intended to deliver the fetus in a hospital, a doctor by her side. When her water broke the night before — at least six weeks ahead of when a fetus could survive on its own — she drove straight to the emergency room, where she said the doctor explained that she was experiencing pre-viability preterm prelabor rupture of the membranes (PPROM), which occurs in less than 1 percent of pregnancies. The condition can cause significant complications, including infection and hemorrhage, that can threaten the health or life of the mother, according to multiple studies.
At the hospital in Coral Springs, Fla., Cook received antibiotics, records show. Then she was sent home to wait.
Cook’s experience reflects a new reality playing out in hospitals in antiabortion states across the country — where because of newly enacted abortion bans, people with potentially life-threatening pregnancy complications are being denied care that was readily available before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.
When abortion was legal across the country, doctors in all states would typically offer to induce or perform a surgical procedure to end the pregnancy when faced with a pre-viability PPROM case — which is the standard of care, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), and an option that many women choose. Especially before the 20-week mark, a fetus is extremely unlikely to survive without any amniotic fluid.
But in the 18 states where abortion is now banned before fetal viability, many hospitals have been turning away pre-viability PPROM patients as doctors and administrators fear the legal risk that could come with terminating even a pregnancy that could jeopardize the mother’s well-being, according to 12 physicians practicing in antiabortion states.
The medical exceptions to protect the life of the mother that are included in abortion bans are often described in vague language that does not appear to cover pre-viability PPROM, doctors said. That’s because the risks of the condition are often less clear-cut than other medical emergencies, such as an ectopic pregnancy, in which a fertilized egg grows outside of the uterus, dooming the fetus and posing an immediate danger to the mother’s life.
A 2022 study on the impact of Texas’s six-week abortion ban found that 57 percent of pre-viability PPROM patients in Texas who were not given the option to end their pregnancies experienced “a serious maternal morbidity,” such as infection or hemorrhage, compared with 33 percent of PPROM patients who chose to terminate in states without abortion bans. According to 2018 ACOG guidance, “isolated maternal deaths due to infection” have been reported in early PPROM cases.
Florida’s abortion law, enacted last year, bans the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy except when an abortion would either “save the pregnant woman’s life” or “avert a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” The law includes another exception for a “fatal fetal anomaly,” which generally would not apply in a pre-viability PPROM case, according to several doctors, because there is no fetal anomaly but a lack of amniotic fluid, which limits the fetus’s chances of survival.
The state’s Republican-led legislature is swiftly moving toward passing a far stricter law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. The new measure — which passed the Florida Senate last week and is awaiting final passage in the House — adds exceptions for rape and incest but does not address PPROM.
One of the sponsors of Florida’s 15-week abortion ban defended the current law as written, saying the existing exception should be sufficient to cover cases with serious health risks. An explicit exception for PPROM is not necessary, she added.
“The bottom line is we value life, and we would like to protect life,” said former Florida state senator Kelli Stargel (R). “We don’t want to give a gaping exception that anyone can claim.”
Of all the pregnancy complications affected by abortion bans, pre-viability PPROM is one of the most widespread, according to doctors interviewed for this story. The condition is common enough that one day after Cook was turned away from the hospital, the same thing happened to one of her closest friends. Shanae Smith-Cunningham, 32, was 19 weeks into her pregnancy when her water broke.
This story of what happened to the two friends is based on over 200 pages of medical records provided by the patients and on internal hospital documents, as well as text messages, videos and social media posts. In addition to Cook and Smith-Cunningham, The Washington Post interviewed friends and family members who witnessed the events, and several of the doctors involved in the women’s care.
About 15 minutes after Anya delivered the fetus, paramedics charged through the hair salon doors with a stretcher, she and her husband, Derick Cook, recalled. Paramedics slipped the fetal remains inside a red biohazard bag and rushed Anya to a nearby hospital.
When Hany Moustafa, the OB/GYN on call that day, started the procedure to clear remaining pregnancy tissue out of Anya’s uterus, she was still bleeding profusely, he said, describing Anya’s condition with her consent. She was “critically ill” and “mechanically ventilated,” according to medical records.
The doctor stepped out into the waiting room to talk to Derick, who had followed his wife to the ER.
Moustafa told Derick that his wife could die in the operating room, both men recalled.
“I will do my very best,” the doctor said. “But the rest is up to God.”
Four months earlier, on a sweltering afternoon in mid-August, Anya told her husband to meet her at the park. She waited under her favorite tree, close enough to the playground that she could hear children laughing, with eight pink and blue balloons.
“How many do you see?” she asked as Derick walked toward her, while she filmed him on her phone.
“Four and four?”
“We have four boys and four girls,” she said.
After so many miscarriages, Anya and Derick had finally decided to try in vitro fertilization. Now they had eight embryos, frozen in liquid nitrogen.
One of them was Bunny.
Anya wanted a baby more than anything. The miscarriages only made her more determined. She bought pregnancy tests in bulk on Amazon — the cheap, off-brand kind so she could use three or four a day.
“This is everything to me,” she said she told friends and family members who asked, after several miscarriages, if she might consider adoption. “I deserve to have my own biological child.”
By the time she started IVF last spring, Cook was developing a reputation as a mentor for other women in the Fort Lauderdale area struggling with fertility. She would spend hours answering questions on a local Facebook support group — consulting on the pros and cons of estrogen patches, and the most opportune days to have sex.
Cook met Smith-Cunningham in the summer of 2021, when Smith-Cunningham posted a question about a fertility drug she’d been considering. They messaged back and forth, slipping into an easy blend of English and Patois once they realized they were both from Jamaica.
When they got pregnant around the same time — Smith-Cunningham first, then Cook three weeks later — they started texting every day. They exchanged links for cribs they liked and debated the best color for a nursery. Cook put Smith-Cunningham’s doctors appointments on her calendar so she would always remember to check in.
“2nd trimester!!!!!!!” Cook texted her friend at 4:03 a.m. on the day Smith-Cunningham entered her 13th week of pregnancy.
“I hope its good to me lol,” Smith-Cunningham responded later that morning.
“I hope so too,” Cook said.
Smith-Cunningham had moved to the United States from Jamaica to be with her husband in 2019. A plane ride away from her mother and all her friends, her husband working long hours, Smith-Cunningham had already experienced one miscarriage and was scared to go through another pregnancy alone.
“I don’t have a sister,” she said. “Anya was my safe place.”
After so much disappointment, Cook and Smith-Cunningham agreed that they would help each other keep their expectations in check, pledging not to buy anything baby-related until they were both safely past the 20-week mark.
But then, one Sunday morning in mid-December, Derick suggested he and Anya check out Pottery Barn Kids — and Anya decided she didn’t want to wait anymore.
In rhinestone sandals and biker shorts that showed off her bump, she strolled up and down the aisles with Derick on her arm, feeling the gaze of other women in the store. They went to Target next for a maternity swimsuit. Then to Yard House for a celebratory steak.
“I felt finally that I belonged,” Anya said. “I felt like my body was no longer broken.”
Anya’s water broke the following Wednesday, just after 10 p.m., as she was walking out of a TGI Friday’s.
She felt a rush of warm liquid on her legs, whipping around to see if someone had doused her with a glass of water. Then she put her hand in her underwear.
“Derick, look,” she remembers saying, holding out her wet fingers. “Something’s not right.”
Anya spent an hour in the waiting room of the Broward Health hospital in Coral Springs, amniotic fluid dripping onto the floor, she and Derick recalled. When the doctor finally saw her, he delivered the distressing news, they said: Anya was experiencing PPROM — and because of the state’s abortion law, he could not induce labor. She could not stay at the hospital, either, she said she was told.
Because she was so early in her pregnancy, she recalled the doctor saying, there was no chance her baby would survive.
Cook wanted to scream. There must be some kind of protocol for this situation, she thought — she couldn’t possibly be the first woman in Florida to have this condition since Roe v. Wade was overturned. Was there a supervisor she could talk with? Anyone else who could help?
“You’re not telling me anything,” Anya recalled saying. “So, basically, I have no options.”
The doctor at Broward told her to go home and “return immediately” if her symptoms worsened, according to medical records. A nurse offered some antibiotics to minimize the chance of infection, Anya recalled, then promised to pray for her.
Medical records from the visit, which Cook provided to The Post, show that Cook was “gushing amniotic fluid” when she arrived at the hospital, with no fluid present around the fetus. The records say that the fetus was showing cardiac activity, with a heart rate of 131 beats per minute.
The Post, with Cook’s consent, read relevant portions of the records to four physicians, all of whom agreed that Cook had a clear case of pre-viability PPROM, making her high-risk for infection and hemorrhage.
A spokeswoman for Broward Health, Jennifer Smith, did not directly address PPROM, and declined to make the doctor who treated Cook available for an interview. But she said in an interview that Cook was “not at risk” when she left the hospital after her water broke.
“There was no indication she needed any interventional care,” said Smith, the hospital’s vice president for corporate communications and marketing.
Broward’s policy on pregnancy termination, obtained through a public records request to the public hospital, mirrors the language in Florida’s abortion law.
Cook “did not necessitate an abortion in the emergency department,” Smith wrote in a statement. “Had her condition failed to improve or worsened to result in a threat to her life or irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function, Ms. Cook would have been admitted for further care and treatment.”
Cook had no idea how many women experienced PPROM until she got home from the hospital the night she was turned away. Lying in bed, she spent hours scrolling through a PPROM message board on Facebook. She allowed herself the smallest glimmer of hope, because a few of the women said their babies had survived.
She texted Smith-Cunningham a rundown of her situation just after 1 a.m. — only to delete the messages a few hours later.
She didn’t want to scare her friend.
At the salon the next morning — while the stylist was still curling her hair — Cook got a message from Smith-Cunningham.
“Woke up this morning and feel my panty wet... My water break... my life feel like it end,” wrote Smith-Cunningham, then about 19 weeks along, at least three weeks before a fetus can survive on its own.
“Me too,” Cook texted from the salon chair at 11:01 a.m.
“What you mean... U too,” Smith-Cunningham asked.
“My water broke,” Cook wrote. “I was at the er last night.”
Less than an hour later, Cook shut herself inside the bathroom.
When Smith-Cunningham’s water broke, she was in St. Ann, Jamaica, visiting her mother for a few weeks before the baby came.
The nurse on call at the hospital that day explained that she was experiencing PPROM, Smith-Cunningham said, the same diagnosis her friend had received 600 miles away the night before. The baby was not going to make it.
As soon as possible, Smith-Cunningham said she was told, the doctors wanted to induce her.
Abortion is illegal in Jamaica, but the law includes exceptions to preserve a woman’s physical and mental health.
Smith-Cunningham called her husband in Florida, worried about the level of medical care she might receive in Jamaica. For a procedure this important, they agreed, she should be at an American hospital they trusted, with her regular OB/GYN.
While they knew there was a chance she could deliver on the flight home, they decided it was worth the risk. Her husband flew to Jamaica, and together they booked the first flight back to the United States.
As Smith-Cunningham was preparing to fly home to Fort Lauderdale, unaware of the new abortion law that would prevent doctors from ending her pregnancy, Cook was in the operating room at Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, Fla., where she had been rushed from the hair salon after passing the fetus in the bathroom.
Moustafa, the OB/GYN on call, said he quickly realized that Cook was losing too much blood.
Out in the waiting room, Moustafa laid out the situation for Derick, Cook’s husband: The surest way to save Cook’s life, he said, was to perform a hysterectomy, a procedure that removes the uterus, rendering a patient infertile.
Derick explained how hard they’d been trying for a baby.
“Please,” he said, according to the two men. “Please try to save my wife and her uterus.”
The last few hours had been some of the most difficult of Derick’s life. When he got to the bathroom, Anya asked him to sever the umbilical cord dangling between her legs, Anya and Derick recalled. Derick thought he remembered seeing a doctor on TV cutting the cord with scissors. He didn’t have scissors, so he pulled.
The cord broke apart, and his wife kept bleeding.
Back in the waiting room, Derick found a quiet corner, opened a Bible, and got down on his knees. His body went into a trance, he said. He pleaded with God loud enough that other people could hear him, offering up his job, his soul, even his life — anything.
By the time Cook’s mother arrived 45 minutes later, the Bible was wet with Derick’s tears.
Doctors can’t say for sure what caused Cook’s bleeding, according to medical records. Any pre-viability PPROM patient has a high risk of severe hemorrhage, said several doctors. Moustafa said he feels confident that Cook experienced placenta accreta, a separate condition where the placenta becomes embedded in the uterine wall and won’t detach with the fetus.
Cook would have had placenta accreta even if she’d been induced at the hospital when she was diagnosed with PPROM, said several doctors familiar with the case, but her experience probably would have been considerably less traumatic. When the bleeding started, she would have already been surrounded by doctors ready to begin treatment.
“Once you start losing that much blood that quickly it becomes absolutely life-threatening,” said Moustafa. “Every minute counts.”
Cook was sedated for more than 12 hours, according to records, finally waking up the next morning. The doctors were able to preserve her uterus, Cook learned. However, the damage from the procedure that stopped the bleeding may have permanently affected the arteries that carry blood to the uterus, several doctors said, further reducing her chances of carrying a healthy pregnancy.
If Cook had placenta accreta, she most likely would have had to undergo the same procedure even if she had delivered the fetus at a hospital when she was diagnosed with PPROM, said several OB/GYNs.
As soon as she felt well enough to talk on the phone, Cook called Smith-Cunningham, eager to check in on her friend.
Smith-Cunningham was back in the United States and still pregnant — bedridden and waiting, after HCA Florida Northwest Hospital had sent her home after two visits.
The second time, Smith-Cunningham recalled, the doctor explicitly mentioned Roe v. Wade. The doctor held her hand, she said, and apologized that she couldn’t do anything to help.
HCA Florida Northwest provides abortions in cases where a physician believes “a medical emergency exists or the fetus exhibits a fatal anomaly,” Jennifer Guerrieri, the hospital’s vice president of strategic communications, said in a statement.
“Our focus is on providing the best possible care for our patients. Our hospital policies and procedures align with state and federal regulatory requirements.”
Smith-Cunningham told Cook she was terrified of bleeding out and getting infected.
“You need to keep going back to the hospital,” said Cook, who stayed in the hospital for six days. “I don’t want the same thing to happen to you.”
Smith-Cunningham switched out her sanitary pad for the 10th time that day, hoping a fresh layer in her underwear would minimize her chance of infection.
Her best shot at avoiding complications, she thought, was to do as her friend had suggested. She tried Memorial Regional Hospital — this time with her cervix dilated four centimeters — pleading with the doctor to at least have her admitted.
To stay at the hospital, Smith-Cunningham said she was told, she had to be more dilated or actively miscarrying. Memorial Regional declined a request for comment.
“If no one induces me, I’m going to die,” she said to her husband, thinking of her friend hemorrhaging in the ER.
Ivonne Reynolds, Smith-Cunningham’s regular OB/GYN, suggested that she leave Florida. Reynolds tried to find a doctor that would treat her in New York, where Smith-Cunningham has family.
“We were trying to find a location where she could get a termination done without all this back-and-forth before she gets infected,” Reynolds said in an interview.
Waiting to hear back from Reynolds, Smith-Cunningham spent Christmas Day in bed. She kept searching the same questions online: How do you know when a premature baby is coming? How can you tell when you’re getting an infection? Can you have sepsis with a normal white blood count?
At 2 a.m., she sat on the toilet with a mirror pointed up at her vagina. She saw a dark spot she hadn’t noticed before.
“I think it might be the baby,” Smith-Cunningham told her husband.
By the time she got to the hospital, she was fully dilated. She delivered the fetus eight hours later.
Smith-Cunningham and Cook scheduled follow-up appointments with their fertility specialist for the same morning in early February. They both wanted an answer to the question that had been weighing on their minds since December.
After everything they’d been through, would either of them ever be able to have a baby?
They’d each talked with Daniel Christie, their fertility and IVF doctor, soon after their water broke, filling him in on how the new abortion law had affected their care.
At the February appointment, Cook went in first.
“You have gotten beaten up, young lady,” Christie said as he pushed a saline solution through a catheter and into her uterus, studying the image on the ultrasound screen.
Cook knew this was the moment she would finally get the verdict, lying flat on the examination table, her eyes shut tight. Christie usually talked her through every little thing he saw on the screen, as he was looking, cheerfully reporting on the status of her uterus.
This time, he said nothing.
Once he removed the metal speculum, Christie informed Cook that she would have to undergo surgery to remove the remaining pieces of placenta — a procedure that he said could further reduce her chances of carrying to term.
“I’m not thrilled about it,” he told her. “But we don’t have a choice.”
Cook stayed behind in the room to support Smith-Cunningham, holding her friend’s hand as Christie delivered similar news: Smith-Cunningham — who also had retained pieces of placenta, a common outcome in PPROM pregnancies — would require the same surgery.
The surgery worked for Smith-Cunningham, but not for Cook.
On March 29, Christie informed Cook that she would require yet another operation to remove additional pregnancy tissue that remained in her uterus; the procedure could further limit her future fertility.
“I feel her sometimes still inside of me,” Cook said through tears, back on the examination table for the third time in a month.
“It’s just so much, Dr. Christie. It’s just so much.”
The next day in Tallahassee, a lawmaker Cook and Smith-Cunningham had never met shared their story on the Senate floor, as the six-week abortion ban moved closer to final passage.
“I have two constituents in my district who are living with the very real consequences of the bill that we passed not a year ago,” said Florida state Sen. Lauren Book (D).
Although Book didn’t know their names, she had heard about Cook and Smith-Cunningham from Christie a few months before.
“The woman is not at imminent risk ... and so women are being sent home in the state of Florida,” said Book, pressing the bill’s sponsor, Republican Sen. Erin Grall, on how doctors should respond under the law. “Is that the intention of the policy?”
Grall argued that these situations are covered by the bill’s medical exception.
“If the mother is going to develop something in which will threaten her life because of the pregnancy, then they would be able to take the child,” Grall said.
Grall added that doctors are playing "games and politics” in these situations, willfully misinterpreting Florida’s abortion ban when it clearly allows them to perform an abortion.
Nikki Zite, an OB/GYN at the University of Tennessee and an ACOG spokeswoman, said the idea that physicians would put patients at risk for political gain is “upsetting and offensive.”
“If lawmakers want pre-viable PPROM to be a situation where it is not controversial for physicians to act without fear of criminalization, then they need to clarify that,” said Zite.
Florida’s six-week abortion ban passed the Senate with a vote of 26 to 13, without a specific exception for PPROM.
In South Florida, Cook and Smith-Cunningham both plan to start trying to get pregnant again.
They worry the same thing will happen again — this time, with an even stricter abortion law in place.
“Getting pregnant now feels like a death sentence,” said Cook.
“They are playing with people’s lives with this law,” said Smith-Cunningham.
At least, the friends agreed, they would go through it together.
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Foreign Ministry officers hold portraits beside the coffins of Guatemalan migrants whose remains arrived at the La Aurora Air Force Base in Guatemala City, April 11, 2023. (photo: Moises Castillo/AP)
The decision to file charges against Francisco Garduño, the head of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute, was announced late Tuesday by the federal Attorney General’s Office.
It followed repeated calls from within Mexico, and from some Central American nations, not to stop the case at the five low-level officials, guards and a Venezuelan migrant already facing homicide charges in the case.
On Wednesday, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that even though the Attorney General’s Office was investigating Garduño, prosecutors had revealed few details and it was not exactly clear what they would charge him with.
“We are going to wait and we are going to make decisions in the (right) moment,” López Obrador said.
Anger initially focused on two guards who were seen fleeing the March 27 fire, without unlocking the cell door to allow the migrants to escape. But President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said earlier Tuesday that they didn’t have the keys.
The Attorney General’s Office said several other officers of Garduño’s agency will also face charges for failing to carry out their duties, the statement said, but prosecutors did not explain what specific charges or identify the officials.
Prosecutors said the case showed a “pattern of irresponsibility”
The press office of the immigration agency that Garduño heads did respond to messages and phone calls requesting comment.
Prosecutors said that after a fire at another detention center in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco killed one person and injured 14 in 2020, the immigration agency knew there were problems which needed to be corrected. but alleged they failed to act.
There have long been complaints about corruption and bad conditions at Mexico’s migrant detention facilities, but they have never been seriously addressed.
López Obrador’s comments about the guards in last month’s fire in the border city of Ciudad Juarez came on the same day that the bodies of 17 Guatemala migrants and six Hondurans killed in the fire were flown back to their home countries.
It was unclear what effect López Obrador’s comments might have on the trial of the guards, who were detained previously over the fire.
“The door was closed, because the person who had the keys wasn’t there,” López Obrador said.
A video from a security camera inside the facility shows guards walking away when the fire started in late March inside the cell holding migrants.
The guards are seen hurrying away as smoke fills the facility, and they did not appear to make any effort to release the migrants.
Three Mexican immigration officials, a guard and a Venezuelan migrant are being held for investigation in connection with the fire. They face homicide charges.
The migrant allegedly set fire to foam mattresses at the detention center to protest what he apparently thought were plans to move or deport the migrants.
In Guatemala City, relatives of the victims gathered at an air force base with flowers and photos of the deceased to mark their return.
“My son, my love,” a female voice could be heard calling out, amid sobs from those present as the coffins were unloaded and placed in a line, and relatives were allowed to approach them.
Mexican military planes carried the bodies six migrants to Honduras and 17 to Guatemala. Authorities say 19 of the 40 dead were from Guatemala, but two bodies were still in the process of having their identities confirmed.
An additional 11 Guatemalans were injured in the fire.
Guatemalan Foreign Minister Mario Búcaro accompanied the bodies, which were to be taken overland to their hometowns in nine different provinces.
Some bodies of Salvadoran migrants were returned to El Salvador last week. So far, 31 bodies have been sent back to their home countries.
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Lake Tahoe's clarity is at the best it's been in 40 years due to a zooplankton boom. (photo: Brant Allen/UC Davis TERC)
Scientists attribute the ‘unprecedented’ visibility of the water body to a boom in the population of zooplankton
On Monday, researchers from the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) released their annual report showing that the lake’s average visibility in 2022 was at 71.7ft – compared with 61ft in 2021 – which was largely due to a spike in clarity in the last five months of the year.
Such a sudden improvement “is, I believe, totally unprecedented”, said Geoffrey Schladow, TERC director, to the San Francisco Chronicle. “We’ve never plotted data like this, where the last five months of the year were totally different” from the remainder of the calendar year.
The dramatic change can be attributed to an uptick in the concentration of zooplankton, tiny critters that are specialized to consume particles that inhibit the lake’s visibility and an unexpected depletion in the numbers of Mysis shrimp that normally would eat those zooplankton. According to Schladow, the zooplankton, especially the Daphnia and Bosmina species, “largely disappeared from the lake after they were grazed down following the introduction of the Mysis shrimp in the 1960s”.
Other factors can affect changes in lake clarity including winter runoff, the warming of the lake’s surface and the concentration of particles such as silt, algae or clay. But TERC’s research says the primary factor in the lake’s recent clarity sits squarely with the Daphnia and Bosmina zooplankton.
“These events support the hypothesis we put forward several years ago that the food web is a major factor in controlling lake clarity,” said Brant Allen, a TERC boat captain.
However, the assistance provided by nature’s cleanup crew may be only short-term. Mysis shrimp populations are expected to rebound and as they consume zooplankton, the clarity will return to what we have seen in the past 20 years.
Because of this, Schladow said, future management options should look at controlling the shrimp population. “We have a brief window of time to monitor the lake in the absence of Mysis and then track the impacts of their return.”
Julie Regan, executive director of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, said the emerging trend is welcome news for Lake Tahoe at a time when the ecosystem is experiencing more extreme storms, wildfire and warmer temperatures.
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