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It wasn’t just that Yevgeny Prigozhin was attacking Putin’s authority he was saying out loud what many outside of Russia have been saying since the full scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 began. Prigozhin has attacked the entire rational for the war. He has defined the war as unnecessary, corrupt, more about a pursuit of wealth for Russian oligarchs than any attempt to de-Nazify anything or anyone. “The war was needed by oligarchs. It was needed by the clan that is today practically ruling in Russia.”
Prigozhin would know. Himself regarded as a Russian oligarch who reaps enormous illicit profits from illegal and corrupt mining, logging and trafficking in gold and diamonds. Not mention the shockingly violent methods he and his forces engage in. Prigozhin’s alarming transgressions, and true motives not withstanding he did pull the mask off Putin’s war in Ukraine. That is why many of the residents in Rostov, the first Russian city Prigozhin’s forces occupied actually welcomed and celebrated his arrival and message.
The war is clearly not popular among Russians. The draconian tactics employed by Putin’s security forces to stifle dissent have sowed a level fear and anger not readily apparent to many observers outside Russia. The embrace of Prigozhin was not so much an endorsement of his methods as it was a rejection of Putin and specifically the very unpopular war in Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin awoke Saturday morning believing Moscow would soon be besieged and his grip on Power threatened. The situation was deemed so menacing that Russian security forces shut down multiple highways into Moscow and mobilized significant domestic forces to protect the capitol itself. A visibly shaken Putin believing the assault was imminent took to the airwaves spewing invective and threats in all directions.
The good news for Putin is that after an unlikely intervention by the perennially marginalized Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko he managed to strike an eleventh-hour deal to avoid a likely very bloody confrontation with Prigozhin and survives, for now. The bad news is that his war in Ukraine continues and he continues to be tethered to it.
Putin’s mask is off. His weakness and vulnerability have been reveled. The question is not can he survive long term, but can Russia, will Russia manage a power transition without utter chaos, instability and the potential for major human trauma. Putin has been bad not only for the world, he has been bad for Russia. Russia doesn’t need a revolution as much as it needs an evolution.
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A Wagner Group mercenary. (photo: CBC)
ALSO SEE: Wagner Forces Stand Down,
but Reckoning for Putin Remains
But this wasn’t a Ukrainian city in the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion. It was the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, overrun on the morning of June 24 by its own countrymen.
An armed insurrection began in Russia the day before, and, before it abruptly came to an end, looked poised to soon break out into open, large-scale violence. The notorious Wagner mercenary force, once often called “Putin’s private army,” occupied two major regional capitals and began a march on Moscow.
Its leader, outspoken war criminal Yevgeny Prigozhin, turned his sights not only on his arch-rivals, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and head of the Russian General Staff Valerii Gerasimov, but, de facto, on the entire Russian regime including dictator Vladimir Putin.
“No one is planning to come and surrender at the request of the president, the FSB, or anyone else,” said Prigozhin in an audio recording published by his press service around midday on June 24. “We are patriots, and those who are resisting us are those who have rallied around the bastards (Shoigu and Gerasimov).”
Having occupied Rostov-on-Don, columns of Wagner troops, tanks, and armored vehicles were spotted driving north along the M-4 highway from the city of Voronezh on the way to Moscow – normally an 8-hour drive. In the afternoon, Igor Artamonov, governor of Lipetsk Oblast, sitting between Voronezh and Moscow, reported Wagner equipment moving through the region.
Having not publicly responded to the launch of the coup attempt when it began on the previous night, Putin finally gave a video address to the nation, looking tired and visibly angry.
“This is a stab in the back of our country and our people,” said Putin, who compared the events to the Russian revolution of 1917, which ended the Russian Empire and “stole Russia’s victory” in the First World War.
The rest of Russia’s security architecture, publicly loyal to the regime, committed to defend the Russian capital from Wagner’s march. Video posted on social media over June 24 showed Russian troops and armored personnel carriers placed in and around the southern entrance to Moscow, but there have not yet been reports of heavy ground fighting.
Then, less than 24 hours after it began, Wagner’s march on Moscow was declared over. At 20:30 p.m. local time, Prigozhin announced that he was turning his forces around, and returning to base.
“Now, the time has come when blood may be spilled. Understanding all the responsibility for the fact that on one side, Russian blood will be spilled, we are turning our columns around.”
Prigozhin’s immediate future moves are unknown, but the man who leads what was once Russia’s most feared and effective fighting forces has few good options. Still, whatever his final fate may be, it is likely to be end of what has been the darkest actor in Russia's war against Ukraine.
The Wagner mercenary company joined Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine in its first weeks, having already fought for years on the side of Russian proxies in Donbas.
After the Russian military suffered an embarrassing defeat in Kyiv and northern Ukraine, Wagner began to play a more prominent role in Russia’s assault on cities in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. Provided with top-of-the line equipment including T-90 tanks, Wagner soon gained a reputation for being one of the most effective fighting forces at Moscow’s disposal, especially when on the attack.
Starting in July but ramping up over autumn last year, Wagner began recruiting tens of thousands of convicts from Russia’s prison system into its ranks. Videos showed Prigozhin making personal recruiting pitches to hundreds of prisoners at a time, promising them an official pardon after finishing a six-month contract with the mercenary group, but warning that their chances of survival on the battlefield in Ukraine would be low.
While Ukraine found success in counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson, humiliating the Kremlin but especially the Defense Ministry, Wagner stepped up its offensive operations in Donetsk Oblast, taking the lead in the Russian assault on Bakhmut.
Over months of brutal winter fighting in Bakhmut and the surrounding countryside, Wagner’s tactics developed a unique signature. Using its combination of highly-trained mercenaries and disposable prisoners, Wagner inched forward against Ukrainian positions in small, methodical, squad-sized infantry assaults backed by sustained artillery fire.
Over this period, Wagner also became notorious for systematic war crimes against both Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilians, with two Wagner fighters confessing to the mass execution of civilians after giving orders to “clean up” captured areas in interviews to independent Russian journalist Vladimir Osechkin.
In mid-January, Russian forces led by Wagner took the salt-mining town of Soledar north of Bakhmut, marking the first major settlement taken by Moscow since the previous summer. In a message announcing the victory, Prigozhin emphatically claimed that no other Russian forces had taken part in the attack other than Wagner, evidence of the growing internal competition for favor from the Kremlin.
Another early sign came in February, when Prigozhin reported that Wagner had ceased the recruitment of convicts, having had access to the prisons presumably blocked by the defense ministry, which soon began recruiting from them itself.
Then, in what proved to be the beginning of an ongoing gripe over ammunition, on Feb. 21 Prigozhin accused the ministry of being directly responsible for the deaths of Wagner fighters having starved Wagner of the artillery and rocket rounds needed for the fight.
“Please, tell me who I need to apologize to so that my guys will die at half the rate they are now!” said Prigozhin at the time.
Later, the mercenary boss claimed to have received more ammunition, but it proved to be only a temporary ceasefire in a dispute that would quickly spiral into open conflict.
After Bakhmut
As winter turned to spring and Russia’s assault on Bakhmut continued, Prigozhin’s relationship with the defense ministry was understood to be tense, yet manageable, as Wagner continued to coordinate operations with regular military units, which had taken over front-line positions on the flanks of the city.
On May 5, standing in the dark in front of dozens of corpses laid neatly in rows, Prigozhin delivered his angriest and most confrontational outburst yet at the Russian defense ministry.
“Shoigu, Gerasimov, where is the f***ing ammunition?” he shouted at the camera, before threatening to withdraw Wagner from Bakhmut if his forces weren’t given more supplies.
Prigozhin didn’t follow through on his threat to leave the city, with Wagner forces completing the capture of the last streets of Bakhmut by May 20.
By then, Wagner was understood to have suffered extremely heavy losses over the months of fighting, with Prigozhin himself declaring that around 20,000 of his men had been killed in the battle for Bakhmut.
Wagner’s mission to take the city had been accomplished, and holding it would now be the Defense Ministry’s job, as Prigozhin withdrew his mercenaries back to base to lick their wounds and prepare for their next deployment.
With Wagner returning to base and regular Russian units bracing for the Ukrainian counteroffensive, there seemed to be a chance that Prigozhin’s conflict with the defense ministry would gradually die down, though Wagner’s future role in the war remained murky.
In fact, the feud only escalated after Wagner’s withdrawal from the front. In a May 24 interview with pro-war Russian journalist Konstantin Dolgov, Prigozhin slammed the failure of Russia’s “special military operation,” and threatened that if elites continued to vacation overseas while ordinary soldiers were being killed en masse, Russia could face revolution.
In early June, Wagner fighters kidnapped Roman Venevitin, the commander of Russia’s 72nd Motorized Rifle Brigade which had been fighting nearby around Bakhmut, forcing him to confess that his troops had shelled Wagner forces near the city.
As Prigozhin continued to accuse the Defense Ministry of corruption amounting to outright treachery, Shoigu hit back in an attempt to end Wagner’s relative independence once and for all.
On June 10, he decreed that all soldiers fighting for “volunteer detachments,” including private military companies like Wagner, must sign a contract directly with the Defense Ministry by the end of the month, an order which Prigozhin immediately refused to comply with.
When Putin publicly endorsed the new rule four days later, Prigozhin likely realized he was running on borrowed time.
In a final outburst before launching his coup attempt, on the morning of June 23, Prigozhin publicly tore apart Russia’s main propaganda justification for launching its full-scale war against Ukraine.
“The Armed Forces of Ukraine were not going to attack Russia with the NATO bloc,” he said, further adding that Ukrainian forces did not shell civilians in Donbas for eight years, as Russian state-backed mouthpieces constantly repeat.
By the evening, the coup had begun, with Prigozhin accusing the military of striking a Wagner base in the rear with missiles. The location wasn’t specified, though open-source intelligence outlet Bellingcat said that clues from the video suggest it was in occupied Ukrainian territory.
The Russian defense ministry immediately denied the strike, which cannot be independently verified. By then, however, Wagner was already on the move.
Moving forward
In a war that has regularly thrown up moments which shocked and surprised the world, this is perhaps the most astounding.
Speculation of an elite coup in Moscow was popular in the frantic first months of the war, but soon dissipated as oligarchs, generals and officials alike towed the line and stayed loyal to Putin, who has spent over two decades designing Russia’s security structure to protect himself from exactly such a moment.
But in Prigozhin, who built up a reputation as one of the only people capable of battlefield success in Russia’s war against Ukraine and was rewarded with more resources, Putin likely created the only player that could ever realistically mount such a challenge.
A perfect storm of a coup leader, Prigozhin is an undoubtedly charismatic and ambitious leader at the head of a hardened, loyal, and well-armed military force, with a habit of speaking about the war with a brutal honesty that violates many aspects of Kremlin propaganda.
Although the lack of a stronger response from the Russian air force raises questions and some individuals seem to be lying low, Russia’s military and internal security structure all looked to have backed Putin.
Taking small regional capitals by storm was one thing, but marching on Moscow, a city of 15 million and the center of Russian power, with no airpower, was always going to be an incomparable challenge. Had Wagner troops made it to the outskirts of the city, it is difficult to picture what the fighting could look like, nothing of the like has been seen before.
Wagner forces were making quick progress towards Moscow, and if able to keep moving, were expected to reach the capital by the late evening on June 24. The speed of Wagner’s advance leaves little doubt that the coup attempt was planned.
Even if this bizarre yet entertaining episode of the war is over, the focus of the Russian leadership was jerked away from the war against Ukraine to an unprecedented and formidable internal threat.
The city of Rostov, briefly occupied by Wagner forces, serves as the headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District, and is a key logistical and command center for the Russian war effort. However, there has been no evidence so far of significant Russian ground units guarding the front line in occupied Ukraine being redeployed to quash Prigozhin’s mutiny.
Along with the rest of the world, Ukraine watched the chaos unfold closely. Though some Ukrainians on social media egged on Prigozhin’s coup wishing maximum chaos for Russia, others reminded them of the scale of the death, destruction, and suffering that Wagner has brought to Ukrainians.
“The most disgusting fact is that the civil war in Russia started over a dispute about how to kill Ukrainians more efficiently,” Ukrainian journalist Maksym Shcherbyna wrote on Twitter.
In the words of President Volodymyr Zelensky, the brief coup attempt was an inevitable consequence of Russia’s all-out aggression against Ukraine.
“Everyone who chooses the path of evil destroys himself,” the president wrote on social media. “(Those) who send columns of troops to destroy the lives of another country and cannot stop them from fleeing and betraying when life resists.”
“Russia's weakness is obvious,” the text continued. “Full-scale weakness. And the longer Russia keeps its troops and mercenaries on our land, the more chaos, pain, and problems it will have for itself later.”
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Skyvan PA-51 was used to ‘disappear’ perceived enemies of Argentina’s dictatorship in the 1970s and 80s. (photo: Giancarlo Ceraudo/Guardian UK)
The Short SC.7 Skyvan carried no crucial cargo nor VIP passengers. Rather, the plane will be another means for Argentines to reckon with the brutal history of their country's 1976-1983 military dictatorship.
The plane, which was discovered in the U.S., is the first ever proven in a court to have been used by Argentina’s junta to hurl political detainees to their deaths from the sky, one of the bloody period’s most cold-blooded atrocities.
Argentina’s government will add the plane to the Museum of Memory, which is in what was the junta's most infamous secret detention center. Known as the ESMA, it housed many of the detainees who were later tossed alive from the “death flights” into the ocean or river
One of the victims linked to the returned plane was Azucena Villaflor, whose son Néstor disappeared and presumably was murdered early in the dictatorship. After he went missing, she founded the group Mothers of Plaza de Mayo to demand information about disappeared children, and then was herself detained and killed.
“For us, as family members, it’s very important that the plane be part of history, because the bodies as well as the plane tell exactly what happened,” Cecilia De Vincenti, Villaflor’s daughter, told The Associated Press.
The plane’s return was enabled by Italian photographer Giancarlo Ceraudo, who spent years seeking out “death flight” planes. This one had later delivered mail in Florida and more recently carried skydivers in Arizona.
Throughout his quest, Ceraudo said, countless people failed to understand why he remained steadfastly focused on finding the junta's aircraft, especially since the bodies of many of the dictatorship's victims are still undiscovered.
“The planes had to be recovered because they were an important piece, like the (Nazi) gas chambers, a terrible tool,” Ceraudo said in an interview.
Argentina’s junta is widely considered the most deadly of the military dictatorships that ruled much of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. It detained, tortured and killed people suspected of opposing the regime. Human rights groups estimate 30,000 were slain, many of whom disappeared without a trace.
Some of them vanished aboard the “death flights.”
During an extensive 2012-2017 trial, survivors testified that the flights took place at least weekly. According to witnesses, prisoners often were told that they were being released and sometimes were forced to dance to loud music in celebration. Then they received a supposed vaccination that was in fact a strong sedative. As the drug took effect, they were hooded, bound and loaded aboard a plane.
The trial, at which 29 former officials were sentenced to life in prison, proved that the dictatorship used death flights as a systematic mode of extermination. It specified that the Skyvan just returned to Buenos Aires was used to kill Villaflor and 11 other detainees.
Prosecutors say it is impossible to know how many detainees in all were thrown from the planes. But at least 71 bodies of suspected death flight victims washed up along the coast — 44 in Argentina and 27 in neighboring Uruguay, according to the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, a non-governmental group.
Between December 1977 and February 1978, the bodies of five women, including Villaflor, two other members of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and two French nuns who were helping mothers search for their loved ones washed up. They were buried without identification, and their bodies were not identified until 2005.
Ceraudo teamed up with Miriam Lewin, a journalist and ESMA survivor, in the search for the planes.
The pilots of the flight that carried Villaflor to her death were convicted in part due to flight logs that Ceraudo and Lewin were able to find after tracking down the PA-51 Skyvan in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 2010.
“The records led us to the pilots, and from those names, we were able to locate them within the repressive structures that operated in the service of the systematic extermination plan,” said Mercedes Soiza Reilly, who was prosecutor in the 2012-2017 trial.
Through a painstaking search that included deep dives into websites in which plane spotter hobbyists kept track of aircraft, Ceraudo and Lewin were able to locate the planes.
Of the five Skyvan planes known to have been used in death flights, two had been destroyed in the 1982 war with Britain over the Falkland Islands. The three others were sold in 1994 to CAE Aviation, a Luxemburg-based firm. One of those planes was sold to GB Airlink, which used it to provide private mail services to the Bahamas from Florida.
This year, after Argentina's government decided to buy the plane after a campaign by De Vincenti and other human rights activists, it was located in a skydiving outfit in Phoenix.
“What an incredible story, right?” said De Vincenti. “Because they were thrown out without a parachute, and now they’re using it for that, for parachuting.”
Getting such an old plane back was not easy. It was stuck in Jamaica for two weeks after its engine broke shortly after takeoff from the island. It was also stuck for a few days in Bolivia due to inclement weather.
In seeking justice for the junta's victims, Argentina has held 296 trials relating to dictatorship-era crimes against humanity since 2006, after amnesty laws were struck down. In those, 1,115 people have been convicted, according to the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
Putting the plane on display will help Argentines understand the reality of the dictatorship, activists say.
“It is very important, because there are generations upon generations who were born and lived in democracy and did not suffer the terror of those years,” Lewin said.
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A school of fish. (photo: Gavin Parsons/Alamy)
Warmer, saltier water from the Atlantic is threatening the species that live further north.
Merten was studying the region’s biodiversity using environmental DNA, a method that allows scientists to figure out which species are living nearby by sampling the tiny pieces of genetic material they shed, such as scales, skin, and feces. And here, in a stretch of the Arctic Ocean 400 kilometers north of where they’d ever been seen before: capelin.
And they were everywhere.
The small baitfish found in the northern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans is an ardent colonizer. Whenever the ocean conditions change, capelin can easily expand their range, says Merten, a marine ecologist at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, in Germany.
It is difficult to estimate an animal’s abundance based solely on the amount of its DNA in the water. Yet in Merten’s samples, capelin was the species most frequently encountered—far more than typical Arctic fish such as Greenland halibut and Arctic skate. To Merten, the evidence of so many capelin so far north is a bold sign of a worrying Arctic phenomenon: Atlantification.
The Arctic Ocean is warming quickly—the Fram Strait is nearly 2 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in 1900. But Atlantification is about more than rising temperatures: It’s a process that is reshaping the physical and chemical conditions of the Arctic Ocean.
Because of the oceans’ global circulation patterns, water routinely flows from the Atlantic into the Arctic; currents carry warm and relatively salty Atlantic water north. This warm Atlantic water, however, doesn’t mix well with the Arctic’s surface water, which is relatively cool and fresh. Fresher water is less dense than saltier water, so the Arctic water tends to float on top, trapping the saltier Atlantic water deep below the ocean’s surface.
As sea ice disappears, however, the Arctic Ocean’s surface is heating up. The barrier between the layers is degrading, and Atlantic water is mixing more easily into the upper layer. This may be kicking off a feedback loop, wherein warmer surface water melts more sea ice, further exposing the ocean’s surface to sunlight, which heats the water, melts the ice, and allows Atlantic and Arctic water to blend even more. That’s Atlantification: the transformation of the Arctic Ocean from colder, relatively fresh, and ice-capped to warmer, saltier, and progressively ice-free.
Merten’s discovery of abundant capelin in the Fram Strait—as well as the DNA she found from other Atlantic species, such as tuna and cockeyed squid, far outside their typical range—is further proof of just how quickly Atlantification is playing out. And its consequences could be enormous.
In the Barents Sea off Russia, for example, a long-term study presents a grim picture of how Atlantification can disrupt Arctic ecosystems. As the Barents Sea has grown warmer and saltier, Atlantic species have been “moving in and taking over,” says Maria Fossheim, a fisheries ecologist with the Institute of Marine Research in Norway, who led that study.
Fish communities in the Barents Sea, Fossheim says, have shifted north 160 kilometers in just nine years—“three or four times the pace that [previous studies] had foreseen.” By the end of her study, in 2012, Fossheim found that Atlantic species had expanded throughout the Barents Sea, while Arctic species were mostly pushed out.
Merten’s findings suggest that the Fram Strait may be heading in a similar direction. Because her study is the first to examine the diversity of fish in the Fram Strait, however, it is unclear how recent these changes really are. “We need these baselines,” Merten says. “It could be that [capelin] already occurred there years ago, but no one ever checked.”
Either way, they’re there now. The question is: What will show up next?
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The Concord Fund was the top donor in 2022 and the two prior years to the Republican Attorneys General Association. (image: BCJ/Shutterstock)
Concord Fund, linked to Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo, a lavish supporter of Republican Attorneys General Association
The Concord Fund, the top donor in 2022 and the two prior years to the Republican Attorneys General Association (Raga), boasts strong links to Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo. Leo helped Donald Trump pick three conservative supreme court justices and now helps spearhead a dark money network that has secured $1.6bn from a single donor.
Since its founding in 1999, Raga has raised and spent tens of millions of dollars to help elect GOP attorneys general – including many who have mounted corporate-friendly lawsuits – but has come under fire from watchdog groups and other critics of the growing role of dark money and special interest industry funding. Many Raga members have waged legal fights against climate change rules and other business regulations.
Other leading donors to Raga in 2022 include an arm of the US Chamber of Commerce, energy giant Koch Industries, and tobacco behemoth Altria, according to the liberal research group the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).
Raga members have been criticised as a “pay-to-play” operation for filing lawsuits in support of business interests that help fund the attorneys general group, including fossil-fuel companies opposing climate-change rules. Further, Raga sparked strong concerns during Trump’s fight to block Joe Biden from taking office when an affiliate, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, spent $150,000 on robocalls to boost attendance at Trump’s January 6 rally. Those robocalls urged “patriots” to attend the rally and said: “We will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal.”
Prior to the Trump rally, in late 2020, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton filed an emergency motion with the supreme court backed by 17 Raga attorneys general to overturn Joe Biden’s wins in four states, a legal stratagem that the high court quickly dismissed.
Former Republican Idaho attorney general Jim Jones told the Guardian he was dismayed by Paxton’s legal challenge to the 2020 election, calling it “the highpoint of irresponsibility. They had no facts and no law.”
Speaking about Raga members and their focus, Jones said: “They’ve become political operatives instead of the people in their states to safeguard the rule of law. They seem to be pandering to rightwing extremist groups to gain office in the first place and then to retain office.”
Jones added that Raga “seems to be focused on culture war issues and protecting industries that cause detriment to the health of Americans, such as fossil fuels and tobacco.”
Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse has also emerged as a leading critic of the increasing amounts of dark money backing Raga and the legal support that many Raga attorneys general have given to fossil fuel companies and other special interests.
“I think the danger here is that [AG] offices that are putatively held for the benefit of the public interest have become law firms for private special interests,” Whitehouse, a former Rhode Island attorney general, told the Guardian.
Whitehouse’s point was underscored in 2021, when Paxton and 19 other state attorneys general sued to block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating power-plant carbon emissions. The legal battle culminated in a supreme court ruling last year, upholding the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate such emissions, but limiting its scope and pleasing coal company interests.
Similarly, many Raga members have joined another growing legal battleground for fossil fuel interests. Earlier this year, 25 GOP attorneys general, including Paxton, sued the labor department over a new rule that allows retirement plan sponsors more leeway to consider environmental, social and governance matters when making investments. A press release from Paxton’s office in January erroneously claimed that the labor rule favoured what he dubbed “woke” investing, above retirement savings.
Besides Paxton, some of Raga’s most active supporters of fossil-fuel interests include attorneys general from South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi, according to a Union of Concerned Scientists report.
Paxton, who was recently impeached by the Texas house on 20 charges including bribery and other misconduct, has received more funding from fossil-fuel interests than any other sector, according to the nonpartisan OpenSecrets. Fossil fuel giants including Koch, ExxonMobil and Chevron since 2002 kicked in over $3.9m to his campaigns.
Critics notwithstanding, Raga’s fundraising operation features wooing of corporate donors at wealthy locales, including Sea Island Georgia, where it held a “retreat” in May, and one slated for Pebble Beach, California in August that is billed as a “Victory Fund Golf Retreat”.
In the 2022 election cycle, Raga raised $34.5m, according to CMD. After news broke in early 2021 about how Raga’a affiliate paid for the robocalls, some longtime corporate donors held back funding for a while. Later, most returned to the fold.
Inside Raga, the robocall brouhaha quickly led to the resignation of executive director Adam Piper, who issued a statement condemning the violence at the Capitol. Although Raga tried to downplay any other ties to the Trump rally, Paxton was a speaker there.
After Trump left office too, Paxton and 10 other attorneys general signed an amicus brief last September attacking the FBI raid for “ransacking” Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence to recover a large cache of classified and other documents he retained improperly, as Special Counsel Jack Smith charged in the 37-count indictment of Trump.
Raga’a spending in the last elections on behalf of attorney-general candidates included almost $9m to support ones who falsely denied or questioned Trump’s loss to Biden, according to ProPublica.
In an internal move that may have enhanced its ties to the Concord Fund, Peter Bisbee, who ran the Rule of Law Defense Fund that paid for the robocalls and previously worked at the Federalist Society when Leonard Leo served as executive director, was tapped in April 2021 to be Raga’s executive director
The Concord Fund was formerly known as the Judicial Crisis Network, and spent tens of millions during the Trump years to help his three supreme court nominees win Congressional approval. Concord is led by Carrie Severino, who once served as a law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas.
Concord, a key group in Leo’s sprawling dark-money ecosystem, gave Raga $4m in 2022, or about 15% of its total fundraising for the year. Leo’s dark-money operations have garnered attention for notching $1.6bn in 2022 from Chicago businessman Barre Seid, as the New York Times first disclosed.
Some former federal prosecutors have also voiced concerns about Raga’s large influx of dark money.
“The mix of politics, secret money and attorneys general is always potentially toxic,” Paul Pelletier, former acting chief of the fraud section at Justice, told the Guardian.
“Normalising such large dark money donations to Raga creates not only an unseemly perception of an attempt to use the levers of attorneys general solely for a political end but worse, may foment corruption.”
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A U.S. Border Patrol agent checks the passports of immigrants after they crossed the border with Mexico. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The court found that Texas and Louisiana, the two states that challenged the administration's guidelines, lacked standing to bring the suit, formally known as United States v. Texas.
The ruling was 8-1, with only Justice Samuel Alito dissenting. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinion for the majority, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett concurred in the judgment, with Gorsuch and Barrett contributing opinions of their own.
The decision in the case marks a major victory for the Biden administration and a vindication of the executive branch's broad powers to dictate — and in this case, narrow — the enforcement of federal immigration laws without interference from lawsuits.
At the center of the dispute is a memo issued in 2021 by the Biden administration that directed ICE agents to prioritize the arrest of immigrants with serious criminal records, national security threats and migrants who recently entered the U.S. illegally. The policy generally shielded unauthorized immigrants who have been living in the U.S. for years from being arrested by ICE if they did not commit serious crimes.
The Biden administration has argued the memo, signed by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, allows ICE to concentrate its limited resources — and 6,000 deportation agents — on apprehending and deporting immigrants who pose the greatest threats to public safety, national security and border security. The policy, administration officials have argued, relies on the recognition that the government can't deport the millions of people living in the country unlawfully.
But Republican officials in Texas and Louisiana challenged the memo in federal court, saying it restrained ICE agents from fully enforcing immigration laws that govern the detention of certain migrants. After the states convinced lower court judges to block the policy, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case last year.
In his majority opinion, Kavanaugh called the bid by Texas and Louisiana "an extraordinarily unusual lawsuit."
"They want a federal court to order the Executive Branch to alter its arrest policies so as to make more arrests," Kavanaugh wrote. "Federal courts have traditionally not entertained that kind of lawsuit; indeed, the States cite no precent for a lawsuit like this."
Kavanaugh said the judiciary was "not the proper forum" to resolve a dispute about immigration arrests, saying such policies could be altered through congressional appropriations and oversight, changes to the law and federal elections. Had the high court accepted Texas and Louisiana's arguments, Kavanaugh warned, such a ruling could have allowed states to interfere in federal law enforcement beyond immigration matters.
"If the Court green-lighted this suit, we could anticipate complaints in future years about alleged Executive Branch under-enforcement of any similarly worded laws—whether they be drug laws, gun laws, obstruction of justice laws, or the like," he wrote. "We decline to start the Federal Judiciary down that uncharted path."
In a scathing dissent, Alito said the court's majority had incorrectly granted the executive branch "sweeping" powers, arguing that the states did have standing to sue over the ICE arrest policy.
"To put the point simply, Congress enacted a law that requires the apprehension and detention of certain illegal aliens whose release, it thought, would endanger public safety," Alito wrote. "The Secretary of DHS does not agree with that categorical requirement. He prefers a more flexible policy."
The case over the ICE arrest memo is part of a broader legal feud between the Biden administration and Republican-led states that have challenged — and oftentimes, halted — most of its major immigration policy changes.
Texas and other Republican-controlled states have successfully convinced judges to delay the termination of Title 42 border restrictions and reinstate a policy that required asylum-seekers to await their U.S. court hearings in Mexico. The states have also secured rulings that blocked a proposed 100-day moratorium on most deportations, closed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for so-called "Dreamers" to new applicants and halted a quick migrant release policy designed to alleviate overcrowding in border facilities.
In a statement, Mayorkas said the Department of Homeland Security looked "forward to reinstituting" the ICE enforcement guidelines in the wake of Friday's ruling.
"The Guidelines enable DHS to most effectively accomplish its law enforcement mission with the authorities and resources provided by Congress," he said.
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A fishing cat. (photo: Cloudtail the Snow Leopard/Flickr)
In some parts of the world, tipping points have already been surpassed, and in others, the danger of that happening may come sooner than we might think.
According to The Conversation, more than 20 types of ecosystem have already experienced “regime shifts” and more than 20 percent — including the Amazon rainforest — are on the precipice of it.
A new study by UK scientists shows how these tipping points can augment and advance one another.
“It could happen very soon,” said professor Simon Willcock of Rothamsted Research, who was co-leader of the study, as The Guardian reported. “We could realistically be the last generation to see the Amazon.”
The study, “Earlier collapse of Anthropocene ecosystems driven by multiple faster and noisier drivers,” was published in the journal Nature Sustainability.
Humans are stressing ecosystems in a myriad of ways — from replacing natural habitats with agricultural, residential and commercial development to using toxic pesticides that contaminate soils and waterways that feed into the ocean. When you combine environmental stresses with the extreme weather caused by climate change, the time frame when regime shifts leading to ecological collapse happen could occur 38 to 80.9 percent earlier, the study said.
“Accelerating stress levels, increasing frequencies of extreme events and strengthening intersystem connections suggest that conventional modelling approaches based on incremental changes in a single stress may provide poor estimates of the impact of climate and human activities on ecosystems,” the authors of the study wrote. “Put simply, the choices we make about ecosystems and landscape management can accelerate change unexpectedly.”
Of great concern to the scientists are ecosystems that are already under stress being hit with climate extremes. This could transfer amplified or novel stresses to another ecosystem, creating an “ecological doom-loop,” the scientists wrote in The Conversation.
In order to get an idea of the amount of stress ecosystems are capable of withstanding, the researchers used computer models that simulated how an ecosystem would react to circumstantial changes and how it would work in the future.
They used two models that represented lake water quality and forests and two that represented Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, and India’s Chilika lagoon fishery.
Feedback mechanisms were key to both models, helping to balance and stabilize the ecosystem when stresses weren’t too strong to be absorbed. An example the researchers used was catching adult fish on Lake Chilika when there were plenty, which could be a stable practice.
When stresses are too much to be absorbed by the ecosystem, it suddenly reaches a tipping point and collapses. Again using the example of Lake Chilika, fishers could catch more juvenile fish when stocks weren’t as plentiful, which would make renewal more difficult.
The computer modeling software was used in more than 70,000 scenarios, and, with all four models, stresses along with extreme events moved a predicted tipping point up by 30 to 80 percent.
So an ecosystem collapse that was predicted for the 2090s due to one stress, like rising global temperatures, could happen in the 2030s by adding in factors like pollution, extreme rainfall or an abrupt uptick in the use of natural resources, the scientists wrote.
About 15 percent of the ecosystem collapses happened when the main stress didn’t change, but extreme events or novel stresses were added. That means sustainably managing ecosystems doesn’t guarantee they won’t be susceptible to added events pushing them past the tipping point.
The scientists emphasized that earlier studies had suggested the consequences of exceeding tipping points would start to show themselves beginning around 2050, but the findings of this study suggest it could happen much earlier.
“There is no way to restore collapsed ecosystems within any reasonable timeframe. There are no ecological bailouts. In the financial vernacular, we will just have to take the hit,” the scientists wrote in The Conversation.
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