27 May 23
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The former president has angrily complained in response to predictions that if the Justice Department is going to charge him, then “What about Joe Biden?”
This month, several legal and political counselors to Trump have bluntly informed him that they expect the Justice Department to charge him in the criminal investigation into his hoarding of highly classified documents following the end of his presidency, two sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone. The feds have also been probing whether or not Trump tried to obstruct the investigation prior to last year’s FBI raid of the ex-president’s Florida estate.
This, of course, comes on the heels of Trump’s indictment by local prosecutors in Manhattan in April for falsifying business records. Later this summer, officials in Fulton County, Georgia, are expected to decide whether or not to indict Trump on election fraud charges.
Trump’s attorneys and confidants have told Trump that though they view the federal investigation as “bullshit,” they would be surprised at this point if he wasn’t charged — particularly for alleged obstruction of justice — and have urged Trump to prepare for yet another historic fight. “Looks like they’re going for it,” one of the sources says. “People close to the [former] president have discussed with him what we think is going to happen soon, and how he and everyone else needs to be ready for it … it would be crazy not to.”
In at least one of these recent conversations, the former president angrily complained in response to these predictions that if the Department of Justice is going to charge him for keeping classified documents, then “what about Joe Biden?” according to the other person familiar with the matter. (A small number of classified documents have been discovered at a number of locations connected to Biden, including his garage; the Department of Justice has named a second special counsel to look into the matter.)
It is still unclear if the Justice Department will ultimately bring charges against Trump, though there are signs that this particular investigation is nearing its final phase. Some in the broader conservative movement have also braced for the possibility that Trump — currently the front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination — will face indictment across a range of investigations. These potential indictments stem from the Georgia probe into election interference to the Mar-a-Lago documents probe.
“I would just presume indictments in all the jurisdictions,” Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch and a close ally of Trump, said in a brief interview on Wednesday. “The Democrats are so nervous about Trump running, they’ll do anything.”
Trump’s own former attorney general, Bill Barr, also said in a recent interview that the documents case is the one Trump should be “most concerned about.”
“He wouldn’t get in trouble probably just for taking them. … The problem is what did he do after the government asked for them back and subpoenaed them,” Barr told CBS News. “And if there’s any games being played there, he’s going to be very exposed.”
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that two Trump employees moved boxes of papers last June, the day before DOJ lawyer Jay Bratt visited Mar-a-Lago with federal agents to collect classified material after a subpoena had been issued a month earlier. Investigators reportedly view the behavior as suspicious and a possible sign of obstruction.
Over the past week, both the special counsel’s office and Trump’s legal team have made public moves suggesting that the documents probe is moving toward a conclusion. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that the special counsel investigation appears to be wrapping up after an exhaustive series of interviews and grand jury appearances by Trump aides and employees.
In another sign that a charging decision could be near, Trump himself posted a letter from his lawyers to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding a meeting “at your earliest convenience” to discuss the special counsel probe. Tim Parlatore, an attorney who represented Trump in the documents investigation before stepping away last week, told the Journal that the letter represented an attempt to head off charges but personally doubted the probe would result in charges.
Prosecutors have reportedly been looking into whether Trump attempted to obstruct justice by withholding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence sought by the National Archives after his presidency ended. Since his appointment in November 2022, special counsel Jack Smith has obtained a stunning and rapid series of courtroom victories. Smith’s office persuaded a judge to force Trump attorney Evan Corcoran to appear before the jury and testify as a witness against his client under the crime-fraud exception, which waives attorney-client privilege in the event that legal advice is used “for the commission of a fraud or crime.”
The probe first began after the National Archives sought to recover a set of missing boxes from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and discovered that the former president had retained classified documents at the Florida club. The revelation prompted a Justice Department subpoena to Trump for all outstanding classified documents and a certification from attorney Christina Bobb that the former president’s team had conducted a “diligent search” of the property. But investigators remained suspicious, and in August 2022, executed a search warrant, yielding more highly classified documents.
Trump has since claimed that he issued a blanket declassification order during his presidency and, as Rolling Stone reported, the FBI began grilling the former president’s National Security Council staffers about whether they’d heard of the alleged order. But as Barr, Trump’s former attorney general put it, “I don’t think that argument is gonna fly.”
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Henry Kissinger. (photo: Brooks Kraft/Corbis Historical/Getty Images)
It’s Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday today. The fact that this monster is celebrated instead of in jail tells you that he’s part of a much bigger problem — and that problem is America’s global empire.
However many people might have wanted to do that over the decades, Kissinger remains with us. Today is his hundredth birthday. And he continues to be treated as a respected elder statesman. That should tell you everything you need to know about America’s global empire.
At Least He Likes Sports
Tributes have been flowing to Dr Kissinger all week. At CNN, foreign correspondent David Andelman enthuses that “at 100, Henry Kissinger is still teaching us the value of ‘Weltanschaüng.’” (Weltanschaüng roughly translates to “worldview,” and here it means something like “a comprehensive understanding of how the world works.”) On the website of the International Olympic Committee, IOC president Thomas Bach calls Kissinger a “great statesman” and “political genius” who is also a “great sports enthusiast” and has long been involved with the Olympics.
None cared to mention his various crimes.
As Richard Nixon’s national security advisor — and then secretary of state, a role he took on without giving up his original job — Kissinger personally oversaw a bombing campaign that killed 150,000 civilians in Cambodia. And among many other atrocities he abetted, he helped overthrow Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of Chile. Kissinger notoriously said that he didn’t see “why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.”
The evidence for these crimes has never been in doubt. It’s all a matter of public record. So why hasn’t “Dr K” ever seen the inside of a jail cell?
The ugliest truth about Kissinger is that he isn’t a unique monster. He is an unusually plainspoken representative of a monstrous system of US global hegemony.
Kissinger and Nixon
Nixon didn’t live to see his own hundredth birthday. He died at the age of eighty-one in 1994. But a posthumous centennial birthday celebration was held for the disgraced former president in 2013. Kissinger spoke at that event, ending his remarks by proposing a toast to Nixon as a “patriot, president, and, above all, peacemaker.”
It’s true that Nixon was willing to pursue pragmatic détentes with America’s superpower rivals, China and the Soviet Union. But when I watched the clip of Kissinger’s “peacemaker” toast, all I could think about was an infamous snippet from the 1970 conversation between Kissinger and his deputy Alexander Haig in which Kissinger relays Nixon’s instructions for the bombing of Cambodia. Kissinger knew some members of the administration might have qualms about extending the war to a neutral country, but he made it clear that the commander in chief didn’t want to hear it.
K: Two, he wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?
H: (Couldn’t hear but sounded like Haig laughing.)
A few years later, Nixon and Kissinger would burnish their “peacemaker” credentials by finally throwing in the towel after several years of ratcheting up bloodshed in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Perhaps this is the achievement Kissinger was fondly remembering when he toasted his old boss’s memory.
If so, Kissinger was conveniently forgetting that he and Nixon had been spurning essentially the same deal the whole time they’d been escalating the war. In fact, even before Nixon arrived at the White House, he’d worked to sabotage his predecessor Lyndon Johnson’s Paris peace talks — encouraging the South Vietnamese delegation to stonewall in the hopes of getting a better deal when Nixon assumed office.
That much no one bothers to deny. There is some controversy about the extent of Dr Kissinger’s role. In his CNN tribute, David Andelman defends Kissinger by arguing that while “some have suggested that it was Kissinger who sought to slow the process toward peace during Nixon’s presidential campaign,” the evidence from the White House tapes points to H. R. Haldeman as Nixon’s primary accomplice in “monkey wrenching” the talks. But even Adelman allows that Dr Kissinger “may well have tipped off Nixon’s campaign team to Johnson’s thinking.”
A small point, maybe, to hold against an Important Statesman who throws around words like Weltanschaüng.
A Story of Continuity
When Congress brought articles of impeachment against Nixon for corruption and obstruction of justice, Michigan Democratic representative John Conyers proposed including an article on the illegal bombing of Cambodia — which had initially been kept secret from the US public. The proposal was defeated 26 to 12. As Conyers reflected in an article later that year, this may have been because raising the issue of war crimes in Southeast Asia would have impugned “previous administrations” and Congress’s own failure to constrain presidential war-making power.
When Nixon left office, Kissinger stayed on, continuing to serve his highly unusual dual role as national security advisor and head of state for Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford. And every single president between Ford and Joe Biden — Democrats and Republican alike — has at some point extended an invitation to Dr K to come to the White House to discuss matters of war and diplomacy.
Some of those visits may have even afforded Kissinger a chance to catch up with old friends. That ghoul softly laughing on the other end of the line as Kissinger relayed Nixon’s instructions for the indiscriminate mass murder of Cambodian civilians, Alexander Haig? He served as commander of US European Command and NATO supreme allied commander for most of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Ronald Reagan made him secretary of state.
Kissinger Isn’t the Only Kissinger
Oddly, Kissinger hasn’t been to the Biden White House, or at least not yet. I’d like to believe that the current president is disturbed by Kissinger’s long history of involvement in prosecutable crimes against humanity. But Biden’s history suggests otherwise.
Does it bother Biden that Kissinger killed lots of civilians in Cambodia? Senator Biden showed no such qualms about the “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq when he backed that war in 2003.
Does it bother Biden that Kissinger plotted coups against elected leftists in Latin America? Vice President Biden doesn’t seem to have uttered a peep of protest when President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton supported the coup against Honduran president Manuel Zelaya.
And while we’re on the subject of Hilary Clinton, it’s worth remembering that she touted her relationship with Henry Kissinger — whom she called a friend and trusted advisor — when she was running for president in 2016. When her primary challenger Bernie Sanders responded by bringing up Salvador Allende, the response from both Clinton and the moderator might as well have been, “Salvador who?”
Kissinger has never deigned to conceal his complicity in clear violations of US and international law that killed vast numbers of innocent people. The fact that he’s reached the age of one hundred as a free man isn’t an oversight; it’s a symptom of a much deeper pathology.
A willingness to bend the global rules — order an assassination here, massacre some villagers there, depose an elected leftist or two in countries that, come on, don’t really matter anyway — was integral to how the United States managed its spheres of influence around the world long before Henry Kissinger came on the scene.
It’s not like Dwight Eisenhower needed advice from Henry Kissinger, who was just about finishing up graduate school at the time, when he decided to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company by overthrowing the government of Guatemala in 1954. And Secretary Clinton may or may not have picked up a phone to consult with a very elderly Dr K about how to handle the crisis in Honduras.
I certainly won’t shed any tears when Dr Kissinger finally dies. And I’ll be ecstatic — if shocked — if he sees the inside of a courtroom before that happens. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that he’s unique. You don’t run a globe-spanning empire for this many decades, batting down geopolitical rivals, peasant revolutions, insurgencies in occupied countries, and inconvenient electorates in crucial client states, without a lot of people staffing your imperial apparatus who think like Henry Kissinger.
There may be something almost demonic in how unabashed Dr K is about his crimes. But when it comes to his basic willingness to disregard legal and moral obstacles to the United States working its will in the world?
It’s Kissingers all the way down.
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Nette Reed checks on Desi Hurd, 62, near the Human Services Campus in Phoenix, where there are several major shelters, a medical center and respite centers. (photo: Caitlin O'Hara/WP)
Cities are building special shelters for the old, and shelters are hiring trained staff to handle a wave of aging baby boomers
Instead, the grandmother and former autoworker can be found most mornings in a food line, or seeking shade under the awning of a mobile street clinic. At night, she sleeps on a floor mat at a homeless shelter. She laments the odors of human waste outside and the thieves who have victimized her repeatedly.
“My wallet’s gone,” she said. “My purse was stolen.”
She hardly stands out from the dozens of seniors using wheelchairs and walkers at a complex of homeless shelters near downtown Phoenix, or from the white-haired denizens of tents in the surrounding streets — a testament to a demographic surge that is overwhelming America’s social safety net.
Nearly a quarter of a million people 55 or older are estimated by the government to have been homeless in the United States during at least part of 2019, the most recent reliable federal count available. They represent a particularly vulnerable segment of the 70 million Americans born after World War II known as the baby boom generation, the youngest of whom turn 59 this year.
Advocates for homeless people in many big cities say they have seen a spike in the number of elderly homeless individuals, who have unique health and housing needs. Some communities, including Phoenix and Orange County in California, are racing to come up with novel solutions, including establishing senior shelters and hiring specially trained staff.
“It’s just a catastrophe. This is the fastest-growing group of people who are homeless,” said Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine and a vulnerable populations researcher at the University of California at San Francisco.
The largest shelter provider in Arizona, Central Arizona Shelter Services (CASS), is rushing to open an over-55 shelter in a former Phoenix hotel this summer with private rooms and medical and social services tailored for older people. The facility will open with 40 beds and eventually reach a capacity of 170, but that will barely begin to address the problem of keeping older people safe and healthy. CASS says it served 1,717 older adults in 2022, an increase in one year of 43 percent.
In Orange County, a Medicaid plan is creating a 119-bed, first-of-its-kind unit that essentially will serve as an assisted-living facility exclusively for homeless people, said Kelly Bruno-Nelson, executive director for the plan, CalOptima Health.
“The current shelter system cannot accommodate the physical needs of this population,” she said.
In San Francisco, Portland, Ore., and Anchorage, seniors also are staying for months in respite centers that were meant to provide a short-term stay for homeless people to recuperate. In Boise, shelter operators are hiring staff with backgrounds in long-term care to help homeless clients manage their daily needs while living for long stretches in hotels.
The homeless population is famously difficult to count. People 55 and older represented 16.5 percent of America’s homeless population of 1.45 million in 2019, according to the most recent reliable data. Dennis Culhane, a professor and social science researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, said the population of homeless seniors 65 and older will double or even triple 2017 levels in some places before peaking around 2030.
“It’s in crisis proportions. It’s in your face,” Culhane said. “Average citizens can see people in wheelchairs, people in walkers, people with incontinence and colostomy bags making their living out of a tent.”
A devastating combination of factors is to blame for the rising problem. People in the second half of the baby boom, who came of age during recessions in the 1970s and 1980s, face distinct economic disadvantages, Culhane said. Housing costs are soaring in many cities. The nation’s system of nursing homes and assisted-living facilities is not equipped to handle the needs of homeless people, who suffer from high rates of substance abuse and mental illness.
Before Phoenix officials began clearing some streets of people this month, there were about 900 people living in a few square blocks known as “The Zone” and another 900 or so living in emergency shelters on the gated Human Services Campus in the same neighborhood, shelter operators said.
In Maricopa County, which encompasses the Phoenix metro area, an annual count in January documented more than 2,000 homeless people 55 and above, and nearly a third of those were 65 or older.
Living on the street ravages the human body, street doctors and advocates say. Homeless people contract chronic diseases and other geriatric problems much earlier than average. But long waits for housing and a lack of specialized care expose them to a continued onslaught on their health.
After providing treatment for acute illnesses, hospitals often discharge homeless patients, who wind up back in shelters or even back in their sidewalk tents and makeshift lean-tos, in what health practitioners in Phoenix ruefully call “treat-and-street.”
The threat of relapses and rehospitalizations is large. Aid workers said seniors’ medicine is often stolen by younger homeless people on the streets. It is not unusual to assist clients with dementia.
Staff at CASS pass out adult diapers. Some unhoused seniors remain at the CASS shelter for a year or more while they await placement in subsidized housing, assisted living or a nursing home. But CASS is not licensed to provide nursing-home-level care, and staff are not trained as nursing assistants. So patients cannot remain if they have advanced geriatric care needs and require help with activities of daily living such as dressing, eating and going to the bathroom.
“They need a higher level of care than the current shelter system can provide,” said Lisa Glow, chief executive of CASS. “There have been times here where we had to turn people away, where it’s really heartbreaking. They come in a wheelchair, late at night, and they can’t take care of themselves.”
In those instances, staff work to get an alternative space as quickly as possible, such as a hotel, she said.
In Phoenix, summer heat is on the way, which poses a particularly grave threat of dehydration, heat stroke, and burns from bare feet, arms and legs coming into contact with blisteringly hot concrete and asphalt.
“Quite a lot of our patients have mobility issues,” said Mark Bueno, a primary care doctor who treats patients living on the streets from a mobile clinic run by Circle the City, a local homeless aid group. “I have patients in their 80s out here.”
In years of researching homelessness, Kushel has catalogued the countless paths to sudden homelessness for older adults. It often involves the death of a spouse or parent, which means income is lost and rent or a mortgage can no longer be paid, she said.
Other long-term chronically homeless people are simply aging on the street.
Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor, will only pay for a long-term nursing home or assisted-living bed if someone is unable to care for themselves. Many elderly homeless people are not debilitated enough to meet that criteria.
“That’s where the gap in the system is,” said Regan Smith, long-term care ombudsman program director in Maricopa County.
A pinball effect takes hold, said health-care providers, shelter operators and advocates. Homeless people bounce from homeless shelter to hospital, then to a nursing home for a short-term recuperation stay. Once that short-term stay ends, nursing homes must decide whether the person is infirm enough to qualify for long-term care. If the answer is no, they must leave the nursing home, starting the cycle over again.
In New Mexico, 69-year-old Steven Block, who has memory problems, ended up homeless in the lobby of a Coyote South hotel in Santa Fe this year after being evicted from a nursing home in Taos, Block’s family members said.
Block, a former reporter for a community newspaper in southern Colorado, abused alcohol and suffered a fall near his home in Raton, N.M., said Terrie Gulden, his brother-in-law. He suffered hip and shoulder fractures and was treated in an Albuquerque hospital, where doctors discovered he had dementia, Gulden said. He was transferred to the Taos facility in June 2022 but was discharged with no notification to the family on the last day of January, Gulden said. Block, who had some socks and a change of underwear in a garbage bag, was unable to tell his family how he ended up in Santa Fe.
“I had no idea that was happening until I got a call from a Santa Fe hotel that he was in their lobby. He had no money, no papers, no discharge papers. He was just out on the street,” Gulden said. “I can’t believe that this stuff happens across the country. I know it does, but when it happens to you, it just floors you. It’s unbelievable.”
Gulden said that after Block spent two weeks in a homeless shelter in Santa Fe, the local fire department gave him a ride to the Albuquerque airport so he could meet up with Gulden, who had flown in. Gulden brought Block back to Minnesota to be near family.
He was lucky to have relatives who could whisk him to a safer environment. Block now resides in a subsidized apartment. He has family and paid help assisting him with meals and housecleaning.
For people in Block’s circumstances without family support, some shelters utilize special units called “respite” centers.
Respite centers now number about 150 around the country, up from 80 in 2016, according to the National Health Care for the Homeless Council. They often are funded at least in part by local hospitals that want to avoid discharging homeless people back onto the streets.
They are designed to help homeless people recuperate for a few weeks after a health crisis. But with nowhere else to go, elderly people tend to stay far longer.
In Anchorage during the pandemic, shelter operators took over a hockey arena to provide socially distanced quarters for homeless people. But they quickly found that elderly people with wheelchairs and walkers could not get up the stairs from the arena floor to the mezzanine, where food was served. It highlighted the need for a vastly expanded respite unit for homeless elderly and disabled people.
Catholic Social Services has opened an expanded version of a respite center, what it calls a “complex care” facility in a former hotel, where more than 65 percent of current residents are 55 and older.
Still, residents are free to come and go, which poses problems when caring for people with dementia. One man in his 70s walked out in January and was found at the airport several days later, facility staff said. He told police he was waiting for a flight. He didn’t have a ticket.
“He had a coat on. He had a beanie on. He was well-prepared for the weather conditions. But I have no idea how he got out to the airport,” said Jessie Talivaa, program coordinator for complex care at Catholic Social Services. He did not recognize Talivaa when Talivaa showed up to retrieve him. “I said, ‘How about we go get a cup of coffee?,’ and I got him a cup of coffee and brought him straight home.”
Now the man is on a waiting list for an assisted-living facility in Anchorage. Talivaa said he is hopeful the man will get into the new place within a few months.
Yet another problem arises, however, when people approach death while in respite care, said Kushel, the San Francisco medical school professor and advocate.
“Medical respite was not intended to be palliative care, hospice care, end-of-life care,” she said, “yet some respite programs are starting to provide that service because there is nowhere else for these folks to go.”
Bueno, the Phoenix street physician, said ambulances pick up a dead person from a tent in The Zone about once a week. Reasons vary, but the combination of aging bodies, brutal living conditions and drugs is often deadly.
Nette Reed, an employee of the Human Services Campus, walks the streets early in the morning performing wellness checks on seniors.
Cheryl Sanders, 59, huddled in a pup tent, said she had returned to her spot on the street after being discharged from the hospital two weeks before, following what she said was a second heart attack. It was already hot out at about 8 a.m., and she was surrounded by heavy blankets. She appeared thin. She gratefully accepted water bottles.
She told Reed that she was ready to give up her tent and come inside a shelter, even though she said she has not gotten along with people in the shelter in the past.
“I’m tired,” Sanders said.
“You know I’ve been itching to get you off these streets,” Reed said.
Herron, the former autoworker, said in two interviews on consecutive days that said she has moved back and forth between her native Mississippi and Phoenix several times in recent years, traveling by Greyhound bus to be near family. Herron said she has endured sporadic homelessness for years.
She lived in an assisted-living facility for a time in 2022, she said, but even at the subsidized rate it consumed $600 of her $800-per-month Social Security payment. She moved in with a nephew, but that didn’t last and she wound up at one of several shelters at the Human Services Campus. Early this month she was waiting to move into a subsidized apartment that would cost her one-third of her monthly Social Security income.
It would probably leave enough for cable TV payments, she said.
For now, for diversion, she said she likes to ride the light rail cars that glide through downtown Phoenix. She enjoys hearing kids laughing on the train. She wears motivational wristbands; one says “Never Give Up,” the other says “One Day at a Time.”
Tears well near the surface. They overflow when talk turns to her adult children.
“They see me at Christmas,” Herron said, her voice quavering. “They call me Mama.”
READ MORE ![Happy Birthday, Bob! [Dylan]](https://www.rsn.org/images/001/053979-bob-dylan-052723.jpg)
Bob Dylan performing. (photo: Chris Pizzello/AP)
Born in 1941 in Duluth, Minn., Dylan has a discography that's been covered by a wide range of musicians drawing from many genres: The Byrds, Nina Simone, Guns N' Roses, Cat Power, Jerry Garcia, Eddie Vedder, and Rage Against The Machine.
Then, of course, there's the unquestionable brilliance of Jimi Hendrix's "All Along The Watchtower," which has influenced the way Dylan himself performs the song live.
"My old songs, they've got something — I agree, they've got something," Dylan once said in a 2016 Rolling Stone piece by novelist Jonathan Lethem. "I think my songs have been covered — maybe not as much as 'White Christmas' or 'Stardust,' but there's a list of over 5,000 recordings. That's a lot of people covering your songs, they must have something. If I was me, I'd cover my songs too."
We hope you enjoy this playlist. Happy birthday, Bob. Here's to many more.
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Members of the Oath Keepers militia group stand among supporters of Donald Trump occupying the east front steps of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. (photo: Jim Bourg/Reuters)
Army veterans Jessica Watkins and Kenneth Harrelson brought weapons to Virginia before marching into the Capitol in 2021, but were acquitted of seditious conspiracy
Army veterans Jessica Watkins and Kenneth Harrelson were acquitted of seditious conspiracy but convicted on other felony counts in November at trial with Rhodes and his on-the-ground leader, Kelly Meggs. Rhodes and Meggs were convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced Thursday. Rhodes received 18 years in prison, the longest for any Jan. 6 defendant. Meggs was sentenced to 12 years.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta told Watkins after a two-hour sentencing hearing: “Nobody would suggest you’re Stewart Rhodes; I don’t think you’re Kelly Meggs. But your role in those events is more than that of just a foot soldier.”
He added, “As someone who takes a greater role in a conspiracy, you bear a greater responsibility not just for your conduct but for the conduct of those you bring to it.”
Watkins, 40, of Woodstock, Ohio, recruited three other people and was recorded on Jan. 6 on a walkie-talkie-style app saying she was walking with a group of about 30 to 40 people to the Capitol and “sticking together and sticking to the plan,” before she eventually met up with a group led by Meggs. The group marched single-file up the east Capitol steps and joined a mob that entered the Columbus doors by force.
Harrelson, 42, a former Army sergeant from Titusville, Fla., received firearms training with Meggs in Florida and, according to prosecutors, served as “Meggs’ right-hand man” in setting up video meetings and relaying instructions to other Florida Oath Keepers about stashing weapons for a “Quick Reaction Force” if violence erupted. Harrelson recorded himself yelling “Treason!” at Capitol occupants as he entered with Meggs.
Outside of Rhodes and Meggs, Watkins received the longest sentence to date for any Jan. 6 defendant who has not been convicted of assaulting a police officer. But Harrelson received a fraction of his co-defendants’ time and close to the 45-month average sentence for 22 other Jan. 6 defendants who were convicted of obstructing Congress but not found guilty of conspiring with an organized group or of committing violence.
Mehta found that Watkins’s and Harrelson’s actions qualified for an enhanced terrorism sentencing penalty for offenses calculated to coerce the government, but the judge slashed years off the penalties sought by prosecutors. Mehta noted that Watkins, like Harrelson, had been acquitted of conspiring to use force to oppose government authority, and that she turned herself in and cooperated short of pleading guilty.
The judge added that of 2,000 to 3,000 communications exchanged by co-conspirators, he found only “a couple dozen” by Harrelson. That suggested lesser intent and explained why the jury also acquitted him of conspiring to obstruct Congress, while he was convicted of actually obstructing it, plotting to interfere with police and destroying evidence, the judge said.
“What distinguishes you from everyone else so far is that there not a single word on a Signal communication that anyone would consider extremist, radicalized, encouraging someone to engage in violence, or words like ‘civil war,’ ‘revolution,’ or thinking about death,” Mehta said. “You are not someone who bears the same responsibility or culpability as the others.”
Defense attorney Brad Geyer called Harrelson “a horse of a different color” and urged the judge to send his client to his family.
Watkins was accused of merging her local Ohio armed group with the Oath Keepers in 2020. She became a recruiter and organizer in advance of the Capitol attack, bringing firearms and other weapons and storing them outside Washington.
Watkins texted others, telling them to prepare for violence to keep Trump in office, beginning on Nov. 9, 2020, six days after the election, and she spoke of getting recruits “fighting fit by innaugeration” and uniting Oath Keepers and other extremist groups. “Be prepared to fight hand to hand,” she wrote. “Now or never.”
Like Rhodes, she expressed hope that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act and mobilize private militias so he could remain in power. Watkins entered the Capitol with other Oath Keepers in military-style gear before joining rioters in a Senate hallway, yelling “Push” and “Get in there” as they confronted police protecting the Senate chamber.
Watkins was acquitted of destroying federal property, but found guilty of conspiring to obstruct and actually obstructing an official proceeding of Congress, rioting, and plotting to impede officers.
Both obstruction charges are punishable by the same maximum 20-year prison sentence as seditious conspiracy.
Addressing the court in an orange jail suit, Watkins apologized for impeding police and Congress and for inspiring anyone to enter the Capitol, and said she was ashamed of contributing to the country’s political division. She maintained, as she testified at trial, that she was arming herself because she believed disinformation propagated widely by “Infowars” host Alex Jones and other far-right leaders that a Biden presidency would allow the United Nations and China to invade the United States.
“Violence is never the answer,” Watkins said. “My actions there were impermissible. … Today you’re going to hold this idiot responsible.”
But Watkins maintained that she thought that the 2020 election result “needed a thorough audit to ensure reliability,” and prosecutors said she continued to blame police for the riot as recently as in a January call from jail.
“Boohoo. The poor little police officers got a little PTSD. Wah,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexandra Hughes said Watkins was recorded saying, as well as, “The police are responsible for inciting January 6.”
“She remains unbowed,” Hughes said, arguing that a “significant sentence” was required as a “deterrent for those who would use force to derail a political process they disagree with.”
Defense attorney Jonathan Crisp said that Watkins “never talked about overthrowing the government. She talked about fighting to support it,” and was recruited by the Oath Keepers as a medic.
Crisp said Watkins would have pleaded guilty to all counts but seditious conspiracy, but prosecutors did not let her, and she would not contest her convictions. He noted that Watkins — a trans woman — was “rejected by her family,” the Army and colleagues she served with in Iraq.
He explained her comments about police as coming from someone who has been “demonized” and part of a group wrongly made “a poster child” for Jan. 6, even though they showed up after the Capitol was breached and committed little violence. At the same time, Crisp said, Watkins as a former soldier viewed police as being unprepared to manage the crowd, provoking it with tear gas, and complaining about the physical risks of their jobs afterward.
“There is cognitive dissonance between yes, this was truly horrible,” and, “It’s part of the job … and I think that she struggles with that,” Crisp said. “That doesn’t exonerate the acts of crime. … It doesn’t dismiss the trauma.”
Mehta credited Watkins for her service but said her fears about the consequences for the country if Biden won were “delusional.”
He said Watkins’s personal suffering as a trans woman could make her a role model at a time when people confronting questions over their sexual identity “are so regularly vilified and used for political purposes.”
But, the judge concluded, “It doesn’t white out what you did.”
Prosecutor Jeff Nestler argued that Harrelson knew that the Oath Keepers were bringing guns for “offensive,” not defensive, purposes and that he ranked just behind Meggs in a leadership role. Harrelson patted down an officer at the Capitol to see if he had body armor and yelled “Treason” there, knowing that the penalty for traitors is death, the prosecutor said.
“What they are saying is that people in this building deserve to be killed for serving their constitutional duties. That is what people including Harrelson thought,” Nestler said.
But Harrelson said he voted only once in his life, in 2018, and went to the Capitol on Jan. 6 only because Meggs called him three days earlier for “a security job.”
“I have no gripes against the government then or now,” Harrelson said, apologizing to police he encountered and to his wife and children for “demolishing” their lives.
“I got in the wrong car at the wrong time, and went to the wrong place with the wrong people,” he said. “I should have paid more attention at what was being said on my phone. … I should have paid attention and stopped it. … I should have done more, and I apologize.”
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Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (photo: AFP)
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had an edge on his challenger, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, ahead of a critical vote to shape Turkey’s future.
Mr. Erdogan’s schedule included a visit to the grave of a former prime minister who was hanged during a military junta in 1961 and an address to his own supporters in Istanbul. Mr. Kilicdaroglu was scheduled to lay out his plans to financially support struggling families in a meeting with voters in the capital, Ankara. Pre-recorded addresses by both men were scheduled to air on TRT, the state-run broadcaster.
Neither candidate surpassed the 50 percent of votes needed for an outright win in the first round of the election, on May 14, prompting Sunday’s runoff.
In the time since, they have campaigned fiercely. Mr. Erdogan, 69, has held multiple events per day to characterize his rival as weak and incompetent. Mr. Kilicdaroglu, 74, has worked to increase turnout by younger voters and to court ultranationalists by taking a harder line on refugees, vowing to deport millions of them in the next year.
Mr. Erdogan has led Turkey since 2003, when he became prime minister. Initially, he was widely hailed as an Islamist democrat who promised to make the predominantly Muslim country and NATO member a bridge between the Muslim world and the West. More recently, critics have accused him of pushing Turkey toward one-man rule and exacerbating a cost-of-living crisis.
After the first round, Mr. Erdogan, who has long staved off challengers with a fiery populist style, appears to be in a strong position to win another five-year term.
Nonetheless, he is facing competition from a newly unified opposition that has appealed to voters’ disillusionment with his stewardship of the economy and what they call his autocratic tendencies. They are backing Mr. Kilicdaroglu, a retired civil servant who has vowed to strengthen Turkish democracy and improve ties with the West.
What’s at stake?
The runoff election will be watched around the world for how it could shape the future of Turkey, one of the world’s 20 largest economies and a NATO ally of the United States. The outcome will echo far beyond Turkey’s borders.
At the top of voters’ concerns is the economy. The national currency has lost 80 percent of its value against the dollar since the last election in 2018. Annual inflation, which surpassed 80 percent at its peak last year, was down to 44 percent last month but remains stubbornly high, leaving many Turks feeling poorer.
Also looming over the vote are the catastrophic earthquakes in February that left more than 50,000 people dead. The government, which has been criticized by some for its initially slow response to the natural disaster, has estimated that the quake damage amounts to $103 billion, or about 9 percent of this year’s economic output. The crisis has also raised questions about whether the government bore some responsibility for a raft of shoddy construction projects in recent years that contributed to the high death toll.
The election outcome could also affect Turkey’s geopolitical position. The country’s relations with the United States and other NATO allies have been strained as Mr. Erdogan has strengthened ties with Russia, even after the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year, and hampered the alliance’s efforts to expand.
When Mr. Erdogan became prime minister, many Turks saw him as a dynamic figure who promised a bright economic future. And for many years his government delivered. Incomes rose, lifting millions of Turks into the middle class as new airports, roads and hospitals were built across the country. He also reduced the power of the country’s secular elite and tamed the military, which had held great sway since Turkey’s founding in 1923.
But in recent years, especially since he became president in 2014, critics have accused Mr. Erdogan of using the democratic process to enhance his powers, pushing the country toward autocracy.
All along, Mr. Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party remained a force at the ballot box, winning elections and passing referendums that allowed him to seize even more power, largely with the support of voters who tended to be working-class, religiously conservative and from smaller Turkish cities away from the coasts.
But economic trouble began after 2013. The value of the national currency eroded, foreign investors fled and, more recently, inflation spiked.
A skillful politician and formidable orator, Mr. Erdogan earned a reputation for taking advantage of crises to consolidate his power. After an attempted coup in 2016, his government jailed tens of thousands of people accused of belonging to the religious movement formerly allied with Mr. Erdogan that the government accused of cooking up the plot to oust him. More than 100,000 others were purged from state jobs.
Who is the opponent?
The opposition candidate, Mr. Kilicdaroglu, built his campaign in opposition not only to Erdogan’s polices, but also to his brash style. Mr. Kilicdaroglu received 44.9 percent of votes in the first round versus 49.5 percent for Mr. Erdogan.
In his initial campaign, Mr. Kilicdaroglu fashioned himself as a steady Everyman. But after far-right nationalist politicians did better than expected in the first round, he adopted tougher stances, accepting the endorsement of an ultranationalist and vowing to swiftly deport refugees from Syria and other countries.
Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party and its allies also made a strong showing in the parliamentary vote, which has helped the president’s case to voters that they should support a unified government in the coming weeks.
The candidate who came in third in the presidential election, Sinan Ogan, has endorsed Mr. Erdogan in the runoff, which will probably give the president an additional boost.
Were these elections free and fair?
The turnout in the first round of voting was extremely high, over 80 percent of the 64 million eligible voters in Turkey and overseas, according to Turkey’s election council.
As the results from the first round poured in, Mr. Erdogan told supporters that he was prepared to face a runoff, assuring voters he that had “always respected” the decision of the people and that he expected “the same democratic maturity from everyone.” But as in previous elections, Mr. Erdogan had used his expanded presidential powers to tilt the playing field in his favor.
In recent months, he has increased the minimum wage, bolstered civil servant salaries, increased assistance to poorer families and changed regulations to allow millions of Turks to receive their government pensions earlier, all to insulate voters from the effects of rising prices.
In December, a judge believed to be acting in support of Mr. Erdogan barred the mayor of Istanbul, a potential presidential challenger at the time, from politics after convicting him of insulting public officials. The mayor has remained in office pending appeal.
This would not be the first time that potential opponents of Mr. Erdogan have been sidelined.
Selahattin Demirtas, of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, ran his presidential campaign from prison in 2018. The Turkish authorities have accused him of affiliation with a terrorist organization. Rights organizations have called his imprisonment politically motivated.
Turkey has fought a decades-long battle with Kurdish militants whom Turkey, the United States and the European Union consider terrorists.
The Turkish news media, which is largely controlled by private companies close to Mr. Erdogan, has given Mr. Erdogan much more airtime than the other candidates while avoiding cost-of-living issues and trumpeting his response to the earthquake crisis as heroic.
What’s next?
The runoff is scheduled for Sunday. Polls close at 5 p.m. local time, and results are expected a few hours later.
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A sea creature spotted on a recent expedition of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. (photo: SMARTEX Project/Natural Environment Research Council/smartexccz.org)
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The vast majority of animals in a potential deep-sea mining hot spot in the Pacific are new to science, according to an analysis published Thursday
And that’s just what’s been discovered so far in the ocean’s biggest hot spot for future deep-sea mining.
To manufacture electric vehicles, batteries and other key pieces of a low-carbon economy, we need a lot of metal. Countries and companies are increasingly looking to mine that copper, cobalt and other critical minerals from the seafloor.
A new analysis of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a vast mineral-rich area in the Pacific Ocean, estimates there are some 5,000 sea animals completely new to science there. The research published Thursday in the journal Current Biology is the latest sign that underwater extraction may come at a cost to a diverse array of life we are only beginning to understand.
“This study really highlights how off the charts this section of our planet and this section of our ocean is in terms of how much new life there is down there,” said Douglas McCauley, an ocean science professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara who was not involved in the study.
It also underscores a conundrum of so-called clean energy: Extracting the raw material needed to power the transition away from fossil fuels has its own environmental and human costs.
Advocates for deep-sea mining say the toll of getting those metals is at its lowest under the sea, away from people and even richer ecosystems on land. “It just fundamentally makes sense that we look for where we can extract these metals with the lightest planetary touch,” said Gerard Barron, chief executive of the Metals Company, one of the leading firms aiming to mine the seafloor for metals.
But the discovery of so much sea life reveals how little we know about Earth’s oceans — and how great the cost of renewable energy may be to life below the waves.
Life at the bottom of the abyss
At the bottom of the ocean, miles below the surface, is a potato. A bunch of potatoes. Or more precisely, a bunch of rocks that look like potatoes.
After a shark’s tooth or clam’s shell descends the depths to the seafloor, layer upon layer of metallic elements dissolved in the seawater build up on those fragments of bone and stone over millions of years.
The results are submarine fields of potato-size mineral deposits called polymetallic nodules. For a society in need of those minerals, the nodules are unburied treasure, sitting right there on the sea floor ready to be collected.
One of the biggest assemblages of nodules sits at the bottom of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a region twice the size of India sandwiched between Mexico and Hawaii. The only light that deep comes from occasional flashes of bioluminescent animals.
Despite decades of interest in mining this abyss, little is known about the region’s baseline biodiversity. So a team led by the Natural History Museum in London analyzed over 100,000 records from years of research cruises sampling sea creatures.
For some expeditions, scientists plunged boxes to the bottom and winched them back to the surface, much like an arcade claw game. For others, researchers used remote-controlled underwater vehicles to snap pictures or scoop up some “poor, unsuspecting starfish or sea cucumber,” said Muriel Rabone, the researcher at Natural History Museum who led the paper.
The team found between 6,000 and 8,000 animals, with about 5,000 being completely new to science. One of the world’s few remaining intact wildernesses, the extreme depths and darkness of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, or CCZ, have fostered the evolution of some animals found nowhere else on Earth.
Among them is the gummy squirrel, a neon-yellow sea cucumber that may use its long tail to surf underwater waves and roam the seabed like “wildebeests traveling across the Serengeti,” said Adrian G. Glover, another co-author from the Natural History Museum.
Another animal spotted is a beady-eyed, stubby-armed cephalopod called the Casper octopus, discovered in Hawaii in 2016 and named for its ghostly white appearance due perhaps to a lack of pigment in its food.
Or at least scientists think they’ve seen the octopus in the CCZ. “These are only visual observations, so we can’t be sure it is the same species,” said Daniel Jones of the National Oceanography Centre in England, another paper co-author.
Many animals find shelter in the nodules themselves. Tiny ragworms burrow into them, while glass sponges, which use silicon to build their eerie, crystal-like skeletons, grow out of them. Little is known about how any of these species interact and form ecosystems.
“It’s a surprisingly high-diversity environment,” Glover said.
The need for nodules
That biodiversity has led over 700 marine science and policy experts to call for a pause on mining approvals “until sufficient and robust scientific information has been obtained.” Too little is known, they say, about how mining may hurt fisheries, release carbon stored in the seabed or put plumes of sediment into the water. Old underwater mining test sites show little sign of ecological recovery.
The bottom of the ocean was once thought to be “a bit of a desert,” said Julian Jackson, senior manager of ocean governance at the Pew Charitable Trusts, which funded the paper and wants a moratorium on deep-sea mining.
“But now we understand that actually there’s vast amounts of biodiversity in the abyssal plains,” he said.
Proponents of deep-sea mining argue it comes with fewer ethical trade-offs than does land-based extraction. Deep in the ocean, there are no Indigenous communities to move, no child labor to exploit and no rainforests to raze. Right now, the top nickel-producing country is rainforest-rich Indonesia.
“You couldn’t dream up a better place to put such a large, abundant resource,” said Barron, the executive at the Metals Company based in Vancouver. His firm has also provided funding to Natural History Museum researchers.
The company says it has designed its robotic vehicle to pick up nodules with as little sediment as possible. But Barron admits that it’s a “bad day” for any organism sucked up. “This is not about zero impact,” he said, but about minimizing the global impact of mining. “I don’t know of anything that has zero impact.”
For now, there is no commercial extraction in the CCZ, where no one nation is in charge. Environmentalists and mining executives are waiting for a U.N.-chartered body called the International Seabed Authority to issue regulations around underwater mining. But the small Pacific nation of Nauru, which is the Metals Company’s partner, invoked a clause in the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea to speed up the process.
If all goes according to plan, the Metals Company expects to begin mining by late 2024 or early 2025. Opponents worry that isn’t enough time to make sure it can be done safely. Jackson said it is “completely undecided about how we’re going to oversee and enforce any of these regulations.”
“That’s a very live debate at the moment,” he added.
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