15 June 23
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At the former President’s arraignment in Miami on Tuesday, it was impossible to say whether his fate was more likely to be a return to the White House—or prison.
Every American should be afforded the opportunity to observe Trump sitting silently for an hour. As it was, a half-dozen members of the public and a few dozen representatives of the press had their names drawn out of a hat by the clerk of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. In April, at Trump’s arraignment in Manhattan on thirty-four counts of falsifying business records, the former President said fewer than a dozen words. On Tuesday, facing federal charges—including willful retention of national-security defense information and conspiracy to obstruct justice—Trump said absolutely nothing. His lawyers did the talking for him. “Your honor, we most certainly enter a plea of not guilty,” Blanche said, a few minutes into the proceeding.
There had been speculation before the hearing that Trump wouldn’t be formally arraigned on Tuesday. Two of the lawyers who had been handling the case left his legal team last week, after the indictment against him was unsealed. Since the case will be tried in Florida, Trump needed a lawyer admitted to the bar in the state. But who would take such a case, with such a client, and at the last minute? Representing Trump right now means accepting a nonzero chance of ending up in legal trouble oneself. Federal prosecutors, led by the special counsel Jack Smith, built their indictment against Trump in part using notes kept by one of Trump’s own lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran, who will now likely be called as a witness in the case. But there was Kise, a veteran Florida lawyer with deep ties to the state Republican Party, sitting to Trump’s left. There always seems to be someone in a red hat or blue suit ready to step in for Trump, no matter the fate of the last guy.
Arraignments are usually considered perfunctory affairs, particularly in cases against wealthy defendants who can afford bond and stay out of pretrial detention. But nothing about the criminal prosecution of a former President is perfunctory. As was the case in April in Manhattan, Trump’s arraignment on Tuesday involved extensive discussion of Trump’s extraordinary circumstances. Prosecutors allege that Trump kept classified national-security documents in sloppily stored banker’s boxes at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, and at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and that he engaged in a series of deceptions and scheming maneuvers when asked to return them. While discussing whether the judge presiding over the arraignment, Jonathan Goodman, would prohibit Trump from contacting witnesses in the case, Blanche argued that such a rule would be impossible for Trump to abide by, since the case involved so many elements of Trump’s life: his staff, his security detail, his clubs.
Trump’s co-defendant in the case is Waltine Nauta, a former White House military valet who has continued to work for Trump since the former President left office. The government says that Nauta was the other member of Trump’s conspiracy to keep the classified documents. Nauta was sitting at the defense table to Blanche’s right, his shiny bald head a contrast with Trump’s shiny blond head. Goodman said it was his understanding that Nauta was with Trump “on a daily or nearly daily basis.” Nauta’s presence meant that Trump had some familiar company in the courtroom. As was the case in Manhattan, no member of Trump’s family attended the hearing in Miami. There has been much talk about what kind of venue Florida will be for a Trump trial, and whether a jury here will be friendlier to the former President than one in New York. Calls had gone out for Trump supporters to protest the proceeding on Tuesday. But, for much of the morning, Trump fans were rivalled in number by the feral chickens that live on the grass outside the Wilkie D. Ferguson, Jr., Courthouse.
Eventually, the judge, the prosecutors, and Trump’s lawyers hashed out a plan wherein Trump agreed not to discuss the facts of the case directly with anyone whom prosecutors put on a list of potential witnesses. Otherwise, the prosecutors seemed to go out of their way to demonstrate that they did not want the case to restrict Trump in any way. He was not asked to surrender his passport. He was not asked to check in with pretrial services. He did not have to put up bail. Trump is running for President, after all. After about forty-five minutes, the hearing was over. Trump stood as the judge exited, and then he turned to look at the gallery for a moment before walking out through a side door. His head was set low on his shoulders. He was grimacing.
From the courthouse, Trump made what the Miami Herald called “strategic detour” to Versailles, a Cuban restaurant in Little Havana where his supporters had gathered. “Are you ready? Food for everyone!” he said, before a pastor and a rabbi who were on hand took a moment to pray for him. Then Trump headed for the airport, to fly to Bedminster, one of the scenes of the alleged crime, and the site of a fund-raiser he planned to attend in the evening. On Wednesday, Trump will be seventy-seven years old. He might end up President again, or he may face a terminal prison sentence. It remains impossible to say which is more likely.
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President Biden met with Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, in the Oval Office on Tuesday. The president has so far sought to maintain the status quo on a path for Ukraine to join NATO. (photo: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times)
Some members of the military alliance want to set a timetable for Ukraine to join, though only after the war is no longer raging.
Mr. Biden, who has been cautious about getting NATO into a direct fight with Moscow, has sought to maintain the status quo of more than a decade: a vague promise that Ukraine, now arguably the most powerful military force in Europe, will eventually join the alliance, but with no set timetable.
Now a debate has broken out among the allies that is putting pressure on Mr. Biden to support a significantly faster and more certain path to membership for Ukraine. For Mr. Biden, all the options carry considerable risks, pitting his desire not to allow any fractures to appear in NATO against his standing instruction to his staff to “avoid World War III.”
Many of the allies, especially from countries bordering Russia, want to provide Ukraine with a strong political commitment on membership ahead of a NATO summit next month in Vilnius, Lithuania. Some want a timetable and specific goals to meet for true membership, though only after the war is no longer raging, Biden administration officials said.
Krisjanis Karins, the American-born prime minister of Latvia, argued that “the only chance for peace in Europe is when Ukraine will be in NATO.” Speaking Wednesday at a strategy conference in Riga, he said that any other outcome means inevitably “Russia will come back.”
The hope in the push is that once Ukraine is a full member of the alliance, Russia would not dare to try to topple the government in Kyiv because an attack on one NATO country is considered an attack on them all. Ukrainian membership has become a “consuming debate,” both in Europe and inside the Biden administration, according to one senior U.S. official who is deeply involved in the discussions.
Only Germany has sided fully with Mr. Biden, though some of the other 29 allies have their own quiet doubts about Ukraine’s readiness to fully join the alliance — and the risks that NATO nations could get sucked directly into a conflict with Russia in the future.
In a blur of memos and meetings, several American officials, led by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, appear to have taken the position that the Biden administration will be forced to be more specific about Ukraine’s path to membership, even if no date can be agreed upon in the middle of a war that has no clear end in sight.
Mr. Blinken’s view was reinforced during a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Oslo two weeks ago, when many of the allies — led by Poland and the Baltic States — insisted that Ukraine’s status had to be clarified when Mr. Biden and other world leaders meet.
While there was no consensus on how to bolster the commitment to Ukraine, it was clear that some NATO members are desperate for ways to show that 16 months of war have brought the country closer into the fold — and closer to full membership. The move would be partly intended as a message to Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that he will not be able to wait for support for Ukraine to lag, and partly as a concession to President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has long called for Ukrainian entry into NATO.
U.S. officials say that no proposal to alter the current American position is formally circulating in the White House, though they expect that to come in the next few weeks. While the Biden White House is loath to discuss internal policy debates, in this case many details have seeped out, including the argument that Mr. Biden should get out ahead of the curve, rather than appear to be catching up with the Europeans. Already this year, Mr. Biden has agreed to send M1 Abrams tanks and said he would allow Ukrainian pilots to be trained on American-made F-16s, in significant reversals.
The issue of Ukraine’s path to membership was expected to be central in a meeting Mr. Biden held with NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, on Tuesday in the Oval Office. The alliance official made what is assumed to be his last such visit, unless a last-minute push emerges to again extend his tenure.
Mr. Stoltenberg was bringing a compromise proposal to Mr. Biden, in which NATO would agree that Ukraine, battle-tested with NATO equipment and training, would not need to go through the standard process for aspiring members before it can join, according to a senior U.S. official.
Other officials said that would raise questions about what would replace that process, including obtaining assurances that Ukraine, which has a history of corruption and is under wartime martial law, does not turn authoritarian.
But NATO is a military alliance first and foremost, and it includes numerous countries with patchy democratic credentials, including Turkey and Hungary.
In brief remarks to reporters at the White House, Mr. Stoltenberg did not address NATO membership for Ukraine directly. He said there would be new commitments to spend more on defense at the NATO summit, and noted that new equipment and training for Ukrainian forces “is making a difference on the battlefield as we speak,’’ insisting Ukraine was making progress with its long-awaited counteroffensive.
“President Putin must not win this war because that will not only be a tragedy for Ukrainians, but it will also make the world more dangerous,” he said. “It will send a message to authoritarian leaders all over the world, also in China, that when they use military force, they get what they want.”
In Vilnius, NATO will present Mr. Zelensky with a set of commitments from member states to continue to supply Ukraine with weapons, ammunition and money in the medium term — not subject to the fate of the current counteroffensive or the electoral calendar.
NATO is also expected to elevate its relations with Ukraine from a NATO-Ukraine Commission, founded in 1997, to a NATO-Ukraine Council, a higher level of engagement and integration.
The symbolism is clear: In 2002, a dozen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was given exactly the same treatment — complete with an office inside the NATO compound in Brussels. At the time, Russia was termed an “equal partner” with NATO members, but it all ended after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Now, Ukraine could be playing the role inside NATO that Russia once did.
The issue of how to define Ukraine’s future in the alliance has overtaken a second question, how to come up long-term security assurances for Ukraine. Mr. Biden’s aides are telling members of Congress they want to move to something akin to what they call “the Israel model,” which has a 10-year-long security commitment with the United States.
While Ukraine’s would almost certainly be shorter, the idea, administration officials say, would be to convince Mr. Putin that the flow of arms and training to Kyiv will not flag — and to bleed some of the politics out of episodic debates about how much aid to commit to Ukraine in the next six months or a year.
But those are not security “guarantees” of the kind Mr. Zelensky seeks. Those pushing for a stronger commitment to Ukraine argue that only NATO membership, and protection by its vow of collective defense, can guarantee the country’s security.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former NATO secretary general who is now an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, told the Guardian last week that “if NATO cannot agree on a clear path forward for Ukraine, there is a clear possibility that some countries individually might take action.” He argued that “the Poles would seriously consider going in,” among others.
Kaja Kallas, the prime minister of Estonia, said in a recent interview with The New York Times that she understood that Ukraine would not be invited to join the alliance at next month’s summit meeting. But Ukraine must be offered membership, she said, “when conditions are right” — when the fighting stops.
But others argue more quietly that a stronger commitment to Ukrainian membership only plays into that Russian narrative that the war is a NATO effort to destabilize Russia’s government. And it could give Mr. Putin more incentive to continue the war, or to escalate it.
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Former President Donald Trump arrives to deliver remarks at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in Bedminster, N.J., on June 13, 2023. (photo: Ed Jones)
Also, no Democrat has ever headed the FBI.
“When the Justice Department gets reduced to pure politics, you have a problem,” said Shapiro on his eponymous show. He continued:
Now I hear people screaming, ‘But you just said that Trump may have committed criminal activity here, the allegations against him are very strong.’ That’s true [but] the only way that you actually restore the credibility of the justice system is to have Republicans prosecute Republicans and Democrats prosecute Democrats. … If the basic line here is the Republicans are just supposed to accept that Republicans who are guilty of crimes get indicted, and Democrats who are guilty of crimes get slots on CNN and MSNBC, that is not a workable solution for anyone. … The double standard is what is going to destroy the credibility of the institution.
Shapiro is correct that there is a stunning double standard in the investigation and prosecution of prominent U.S. politicians. Where he went wrong was in claiming that up is down and black is white — i.e., that this double standard favors Democrats.
That’s because Democrats seem to be somehow, for all intents and purposes, barred from several key roles in the U.S. justice system, even under Democratic presidents. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was established in 1935 and has had eight directors in the subsequent 88 years. Literally none of them has been a Democrat. (This does not include figures who’ve served as acting director, generally for short periods.)
Similarly, no Democrat has been named as a special counsel (or special prosecutor or independent counsel, the names for similar earlier positions) for a significant investigation for 50 years. As The Associated Press puts it, special counsels are outside attorneys appointed by the attorney general when the AG perceives the Justice Department as “having a conflict or where it’s deemed to be in the public interest to have someone outside the government come in and take responsibility for a matter.”
It’s impossible to know exactly why Democrats aren’t permitted to fill these positions. But Democrats of recent generations seem to be diehard institutionalists, desperately yearning for Republicans to accept that a “fair” system can find Republicans guilty, so they never appoint a Democrat. Meanwhile, Republicans couldn’t care less what Democrats think, so they also never appoint a Democrat.
Take special counsels first. Jack Smith, who leads the prosecution of Trump, is a registered independent. One of his previous jobs was overseeing the Justice Department’s public integrity section. There he unsuccessfully prosecuted John Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate, in a campaign finance case with some similarities to the charges Trump has been indicted for in New York state. The most Democratic thing about Smith is that his wife was one of three producers of a positive documentary about Michelle Obama.
The most recent Democratic special prosecutors for a prominent investigation date from the Watergate scandal. Archibald Cox, who’d been solicitor general in the Kennedy administration, was appointed in May 1973 and then fired by Richard Nixon five months later. According to New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, “the Washington mill dismissed Archibald Cox as too soft.”
Cox was replaced by Leon Jaworski, a Texas Democrat — i.e., the kind of Democrat who’d voted for Nixon in 1960 and 1968, and in 1980 founded “Democrats for Reagan.”
As far as Democratic special counsels go, that’s pretty much it. Arthur Christy, who investigated President Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff Hamilton Jordan, was a Republican. Gerald Gallinghouse, who investigated Carter’s 1980 campaign manager Timothy Kraft, was a former Democrat who’d become a Republican a decade before his appointment.
Next up was Lawrence Walsh, who ran the Iran–Contra inquiry during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. Walsh was a lifetime Republican, who’d been deputy attorney general in the Eisenhower administration and an early Ronald Reagan supporter. Republicans went absolutely berserk attacking Walsh and did everything possible to obstruct his work. (Interestingly, as of this writing, the Wikipedia page for Walsh falsely claims he was a Democrat.)
During the same period, Whitney North Seymour Jr. investigated Reagan deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver. Seymour was a Republican.
During the Clinton administration, the inquiry into the Whitewater affair was first run by Robert Fiske, a Republican. He concluded that White House aide Vince Foster had indeed committed suicide, rather than being taken out by one of the many assassins on Bill and Hillary’s payroll. Republicans believed this raised “questions about Fiske,” so he was replaced by Kenneth Starr. Starr, a Republican, somehow investigated Whitewater by digging into Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky, which led to Clinton’s impeachment. The Whitewater assignment was wrapped up in 2003 by Robert Ray, a Republican.
Another independent counsel was appointed during the Clinton administration to look into the FBI’s siege of Waco, Texas. The man chosen for the job (by Clinton’s attorney general) was John Danforth, a Republican.
Shockingly, the streak of Republicans was broken during the George W. Bush administration when Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed in 2003 to look into the Valerie Plame affair. Fitzgerald was a self-declared independent.
Then it was back to Republicans. Robert Mueller, who was picked to head the investigation into any intersection between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, is a Republican. John Durham, appointed by Trump’s Attorney General William Barr to look at the origins of the FBI’s investigation into Trump and Russia, is a Republican. Robert Hur, chosen by Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents, is a Republican.
Other Republican figures who’ve held the position include Alexia Morrison, Larry Thompson, Arlin Adams, and Joseph diGenova — who’s such a big Republican that he was was hired by Trump to help overturn the 2020 election. But to be clear, it is not the case that literally no Democrat has been appointed to run such an investigation in the last five decades. There is definitely at least one: Curtis Emery von Kann, who was in charge of the crucial inquiry into Eli Segal, a White House assistant to Bill Clinton. Segal was in charge of AmeriCorps while simultaneously helping a nonprofit called Partnership for Public Service raise money, for free. Von Kann, who was a registered Democrat as of 1985, found that Segal had committed no wrongdoing.
Everything is crystal clear, however, when it comes to directors of the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover, who served in the position for 36 years, was formally an independent but privately a staunch Republican. His immediate successor Clarence Kelley, appointed by Nixon, was a Republican.
Then Carter appointed William Webster, a Republican. Reagan appointed William Sessions, a Republican. Clinton appointed Louis Freeh, a Republican. George W. Bush appointed Robert Mueller, a Republican. Barack Obama appointed James Comey, at the time a Republican. (He’s now officially unaffiliated.)
Then Trump fired Comey and appointed the current FBI Director Christopher Wray, a Republican. When Biden took office, he kept Wray in place.
Incredibly enough, these basic facts are rarely discussed in the corporate media. Democrats appear to have accepted that the rules forbid any Democrat from holding one of these positions because it just wouldn’t be fair. Meanwhile, Shapiro and other right-wing figures who cry out to the heavens about the inequity of our justice system somehow leave these facts out of their presentation. It’s enough to make a cynic suspect that even-handed justice is not their agenda at all.
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Neely's death at the hands of Daniel Penny was ruled a homicide, according to the medical examiner. (photo: AP)
New York grand jury indicts Daniel Penny, sources say, over death of Neely, a well-known subway performer, in May
Penny, 24, was captured in videos recorded by bystanders putting Neely in a chokehold on 1 May while they rode on an F train in Manhattan.
The killing drew national attention and sparked protests in May by those angered by the police’s delay in arresting Penny, who is white, for killing Neely, a Black man.
At an initial court appearance last month, Penny was charged with one count of second-degree manslaughter.
The charge or charges in the grand jury indictment will not be unsealed until Penny appears in court at a later date, a person familiar with the case said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Neither the district attorney’s office nor Penny’s defense lawyer immediately responded to requests for comment. Grand jury proceedings are secret, but New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, acknowledged the indictment in a statement, saying “a trial and justice can move forward”.
Penny was arraigned on 12 May at the Manhattan criminal court on a charge of second-degree manslaughter, a felony crime that carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. Judge Kevin McGrath released Penny on a $100,000 bond and ordered him to surrender his passport and to return to court on 17 July.
As required to bring an indictment on felony charges in New York, prosecutors from the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, presented evidence to a grand jury of 23 Manhattan residents.
Most defendants do not testify to a grand jury themselves, but the New York Times reported that Penny planned to appear before the grand jury under oath.
Neely, a 30-year-old former Michael Jackson impersonator who struggled with mental illness, had been shouting about how hungry he was and that he was willing to return to jail or die, according to eyewitnesses.
Penny has said he acted to defend himself and other passengers on the train, and did not intend to kill Neely. Witnesses have said Neely did not physically threaten or attack anyone before Penny grabbed him.
Penny was questioned by police that day but would not be arrested and make an initial court appearance until 11 days after the killing.
His actions have been defended by conservative broadcasters and Republican politicians around the country, and a legal defense fund for him has drawn nearly $3m in donations.
In an interview with the New York Post, Penny defended his own actions and denied that he was acting as a vigilante, insisting: “I’m not a white supremacist … I’m a normal guy.
“I’m deeply saddened by the loss of life,” he said during that interview. “It’s tragic what happened to him. Hopefully we can change the system that’s so desperately failed us.”
Neely’s family criticized Penny for offering neither “an apology nor an expression of regret” and that his statements about Neely’s record amounted to “a character assassination”.
The killing renewed debate about gaps in the city’s support systems for homeless and mentally ill New Yorkers.
Neely was well known to some people who work with homeless New Yorkers and had been in and out of city shelters over the years. Neely was in a cycle of mental health crises, arrests and hospitalization that would continue until his death. Over the last decade, police reportedly arrested Neely 42 times for infractions such as drug use and fare beating, and responded to another 43 calls for an “aided case”, meaning someone reported that Neely was sick, injured or mentally ill.
Earlier this year, Adams said he intended to reduce the number of homeless people seeking shelter in the subway by increasing police patrols and expanding outreach to mentally ill people, including the use of involuntary hospitalizations.
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Starbucks Workers United, the union organizing U.S. Starbucks stores, says store managers around the country have been curtailing or removing displays during a monthlong celebration of LGBTQ+ people. (Photo: AP)
But Starbucks Workers United, the union organizing U.S. Starbucks stores, says store managers around the country have been curtailing or removing displays during a monthlong celebration of LGBTQ+ people. In some cases, the union said, managers told workers that Pride displays were a safety concern, citing recent incidents at Target where some angry customers tipped over merchandise and confronted workers.
“There has been no change to any policy on this matter and we continue to encourage our store leaders to celebrate with their communities, including for U.S. Pride month in June,” the Seattle coffee giant said Tuesday in a statement.
Starbucks has been outspoken in its support for LGBTQ+ employees for decades and said Tuesday that support is “unwavering.” It extended full health benefits to same-sex partners in 1988 and added health coverage for gender reassignment surgery in 2013.
The company is also currently selling Pride-themed tumblers in its stores designed by Toronto artist Tim Singleton, who is gay.
But Ian Miller, a union organizer and Starbucks supervisor in Olney, Maryland, said the company’s tone has changed this year, citing his own store manager informing him that he needed prior approval to put up Pride decorations and that the company was seeking more “uniformity” in its stores.
The manager also allegedly cited the backlash against Bud Light when it partnered with a transgender influencer and then tried to walk back its support. Its U.S. sales subsequently plummeted.
Miller said the manager ultimately let an employee put up small rainbow flags in the store, but the company credit card wasn’t used to buy them, as had been allowed in the past.
“It’s disrespectful and counterintuitive,” Miller said.
Miller’s manager declined to comment Tuesday when contacted by The Associated Press. Starbucks didn’t respond to questions about the policies at Miller’s store.
Miller’s store is one of more than 300 Starbucks stores that has voted to unionize since 2021. Starbucks opposes the unionization effort.
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Guatemalan journalist José Rubén Zamora, president of the newspaper El Periódico, arrives handcuffed and under police escort to listen to a Guatemalan court's ruling in a case against him, at the Palace of Justice in Guatemala City, on Wednesday. (photo: ohan Ordoñez/AFP)
José Rubén Zamora founded Guatemala's El Periódico newspaper in 1996. The paper went on to become one of the most respected investigative outfits in the country.
But last year, after it published reports uncovering corruption in government contracts, Zamora was arrested.
On Wednesday, a panel of judges found Zamora guilty of money laundering related to allegations over funds of nearly $40,000.
Zamora, 66, denied any wrongdoing and said the money came from the sale of a painting and would help fund the newspaper. He argued that the court was stacked against him because he had become a thorn in the side of the government.
In addition to prison time, Zamora received a fine of more than $38,000, but he was cleared of other charges of blackmail and influence peddling.
With Zamora under investigation and in prison, the combined political and financial pressures eventually forced the newspaper to close in May.
Speaking to journalists outside the court before the sentencing, Zamora said he maintained his innocence and claimed the government "treated us like criminals, they destroyed evidence."
The Committee to Protect of Journalists, a New York-based advocacy group, described the conviction as "shameful" and a "stark testament to the erosion of freedom of speech in the country."
More than 20 journalists have fled the country in the past year, according to a journalists' collective that uses the hashtag #NoNosCallarán, Spanish for "They won't silence us."
The government of Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei has insisted there is freedom of the press in Guatemala and denied any political motivation in the Zamora case, according to news reports.
Rights groups in Guatemala say the courts are being used by the country's elite to settle political scores. They say the Zamora trial is a symbol of Guatemala's decaying democracy.
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Law enforcement drive past the planned site of a police training facility that activists have nicknamed “Cop City,” following the first raid since the death of environmental activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán near Atlanta, Georgia, on February 6, 2023. (photo: (Cheney Orr/AFP)
US climate defenders have long faced serious threats, but the intensity of the crackdown on Stop Cop City protesters in Atlanta is an escalation. It’s reminiscent of conditions in Latin America, where climate protesters’ lives are frequently on the line.
The Guardian wrote in its coverage that experts believed the killing of Terán, known as “Tortuguita,” was “‘unprecedented’ in [the] history of environmental activism.” Keith Woodhouse, a professor of history at Northwestern University, told Jacobin that it was the first time in American history that law enforcement officers had shot and killed an environmental activist engaged in forest defense.
Even beyond the gratuitously violent killing of a very possibly unarmed twenty-six-year-old, the state’s response to the Stop Cop City movement has frequently been framed over the last several months as a chilling escalation of the tactics it is willing to engage in to quash environmental defense — a watershed moment, of sorts, for the US climate movement.
At the end of May, an Atlanta Police Department SWAT team working in coordination with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided a residential home in East Atlanta, arrested three board members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, and charged them with money laundering and charity fraud in an apparent attempt to kneecap their efforts to organize legal support for arrested protesters.
The Atlanta Solidarity Fund’s work has been especially vital in recent months as Cop City protesters have been subject to mass arrests and trumped-up charges including domestic terrorism. Several activists are facing up to twenty years in prison for placing flyers on mailboxes in a Bartow County neighborhood. Governor Brian Kemp has warned that “domestic terrorism will not be tolerated in this state.” His words have received backing from the Department of Homeland Security, which has listed Cop City protesters alongside mass shooters and violent white supremacists as terror threats facing the country.
To be clear: only one police officer has been injured in the course of policing, and while police say that officer was wounded by a protester, there’s evidence to suggest he may well have been hit by friendly fire. The supposed violence of the Stop Cop City protest pales in comparison to the violence the construction of Cop City will inflict — the destruction of hundreds of acres of forest, the loss of public land, and the expansion of the corporate police state in what is already one of the most surveilled, inequitable cities in the country.
As the climate crisis intensifies, the question is whether the persecution of climate defenders in the United States will intensify along with it — whether the brazenness and severity of the campaign against the Stop Cop City activists is a preview of what is to come elsewhere.
Climate defenders in the US have long faced threats to their lives and livelihoods. But the intensity of the threats protesters in Atlanta are facing is reminiscent more of the risks climate defenders routinely face in the Global South, where both activists and journalists are routinely jailed and killed in their defense of land and water. Of the 401 human rights defenders killed last year, nearly half were killed defending the climate. Of those, the majority were killed in countries like Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and Honduras — places where the United States has historically exported policing strategies and devalued life.
Now, as states and corporations race to seize land and accumulate resources, that kind of policing may be coming home.
“It’s been normal for a while that militarized states, whose purpose is the facilitation of capital, are using mechanisms and strategies of counterinsurgency . . . to repress movements defending land and water,” Jared Olson, an investigative reporter working in Latin America, told Jacobin. “Now that’s coming back north. Now you’re seeing a little bit of that increasingly creep into the United States.”
The killing of Terán may be unprecedented for the modern US climate movement, but the militarization of policing climate protesters in the country did not start this year in Georgia. The use of counterinsurgency tactics to police climate defenders in the United States goes back at least to 2016, when the global security firm TigerSwan used a variety of methods including aerial surveillance, social media monitoring, radio eavesdropping, and undercover infiltration to build dossiers on the climate defenders at Standing Rock. The Intercept reported earlier this year that TigerSwan has since pitched its counterinsurgency approach to handling pipeline protests to a variety of other oil companies. Three years before TigerSwan was contracted to work at Standing Rock, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service covertly surveilled opposition to an Enbridge pipeline project in the western part of the country.
Georgia is also far from the only state with a domestic terrorism law on the books that can be used to persecute climate defenders. Since 2016, more than twenty states have enacted laws restricting protest rights — with a number of those laws specifically penalizing protesters who impede “critical infrastructure.”
For Olson, the manipulation of the legal system — even more than direct physical violence — is the principal strategy states and corporations are using to slow organizing and protect extractive interests. He pointed to the arrest and arbitrary detention of a number of Guapinol defenders in Honduras as an example.
“In Latin America, oftentimes you show up expecting to see bloodshed — which does happen — but what’s generally happening on a larger scale is criminalization,” Olson said.
It’s not just states and corporations that are responding to crisis conditions. It’s also the climate movement, which, recognizing the extreme time pressure it’s under, has been changing its tactics. That’s one of the reasons Woodhouse expects the level of violence protesters face to continue to rise in the coming years, even if neither he nor Olson believe the United States will become as dangerous for climate defenders as Latin America due to their differing historical and political conditions.
“I think that there is a very high likelihood that we’re going to see more and more confrontations between activists and police and more and more heavy-handed action by police, in part just because we’re going to see more and more direct action by activists,” Woodhouse said. “That’s sort of where the climate movement has been moving in fits and starts for ten, fifteen years now.”
There’s another important way the US climate movement is increasingly mirroring its counterparts in Latin America: the Stop Cop City movement is not simply about the fate of a swath of forest, but rather about the future of the city of Atlanta and the militarized police state itself. It’s a threat to corporations and their enforcers in a way that less intersectional climate movements have not been — as evidenced in part by the simple and head-spinning fact that the majority of the funding for Cop City is coming not from the city itself or any kind of state entity but rather from the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is contributing $60 million in donations from corporations to finance the project. Donors to the foundation’s fundraising drive for the project include Bank of America, Chick-fil-A, Georgia Pacific, Rollins, and Coca-Cola, who are all betting that the police trained at the facility will help them continue to change Atlanta from a city for people to live in to a city for them to profit from.
The Stop Cop City movement has centered the fact that the training center is being built on stolen Muscogee land, the ancestral home of people driven away by the US military not two centuries ago. The climate crisis itself is the result of projects like this one, the extraction of both people and resources from the land to feed the inexhaustible capital and war machines. Seen through that lens, the killing of Terán, who was indigenous, appears not as an aberration but as a return to form.
“I think the United States was built off the murder of environmental defenders, so I don’t necessarily see this as an escalation,” Jayson Maurice Porter, a postdoctoral research associate in environment and society at Brown University, said. “I don’t see [Terán] as a first example of an environmental defender killed by the state.”
There are other, local historical echoes. Fort Moore, just outside of Columbus, Georgia, remains home to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation — the institution formerly known as the School of the Americas, where US military personnel trained scores of the worst human rights defenders in Latin America during the latter half of the twentieth century, the people whose institutions continue to brutalize climate defenders in the region today. The School of the Americas was launched as a means of fighting the Cold War and protecting US corporate interests abroad, but it shouldn’t be a surprise when those same tactics are deployed domestically too.
“There’s been all sorts of thinkers who talk about how fascism actually isn’t an aberration; fascism is just a particular moment when imperialism comes back and bites its own tail — when, for whatever reason, the colonial violence in Africa becomes Nazi violence against Jews,” Olson said.
At its core, Stop Cop City is about nothing less than fighting for democracy and habitability and the right to dissent. The level of repression the dissenters have faced is a reminder of the movement’s power, the new worlds its coalition might just be able to build.
“For this generation of environmental activists, it’s sort of second nature to bring together a lot of different issues that used to be seen maybe as distinctive and disparate,” Woodhouse said. “It’s a more totalizing critique.”
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