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The Federalist Society’s leader is hoping to pluck a “get out of jail free” card from Donald Trump’s back pocket.
The investigation, Leo claimed, amounted to “political retaliation” against him and the conservative justices, which violated his free speech rights. He and his lawyers asserted that he is “entitled by the First Amendment to engage in public advocacy, associate with others who share his views, and express opinions on important matters of public concern.” While that is undoubtedly true in the broad sense, it is strange to see him describe his interactions with Supreme Court justices as engaging in public advocacy and associating with those who share his views.
“For similar reasons, your inquiry cannot be reconciled with the Equal Protection component of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment,” he continued. Leo argued that he was being singled out for a “politically based difference in treatment” compared to other individuals who had given trips and gifts to various justices over the years. He described Senate Democrats’ rhetoric toward him over the years as “disparate treatment” and said it violated the Constitution’s equal-protection provisions.
Most importantly, however, Leo also cast doubt on whether Congress had any power to enact ethics reforms for the Supreme Court. “And regardless of its other constitutional infirmities, it appears that your investigation lacks a valid legislative purpose, because the legislation the Committee is considering would be unconstitutional if enacted,” he told the senators. Since he believed the court did not have that power, Leo said he was not obligated to cooperate.
His stonewalling underscores the degree to which Congress’s investigatory powers over the other branches of government have been curtailed by Trump v. Mazars, a 2020 ruling by the Supreme Court. The case involved a series of subpoenas issued by House committees to obtain former President Donald Trump’s financial records for various investigations. Lower courts had sided with lawmakers on their validity, but the justices concluded that they should give more deference to the presidency.
“When Congress seeks information ‘needed for intelligent legislative action,’ it ‘unquestionably’ remains ‘the duty of all citizens to cooperate,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for a 7–2 majority, quoting from precedent. “Congressional subpoenas for information from the President, however, implicate special concerns regarding the separation of powers. The courts below did not take adequate account of those concerns.” Leo and others have contended that those concerns also apply to Congress’s interactions with the Supreme Court, and by extension to him.
Congress’s investigatory powers are as old as the republic itself. Naturally, not all of these inquiries went unchallenged: When the Senate tried to learn more about the drafting of the Jay Treaty, George Washington invoked (and thereby established) executive privilege to refuse to hand over the papers. But the baseline assumption was that Congress had broad investigatory powers and that they were vital for the business of drafting legislation and carrying out public policy goals.
Courts repeatedly upheld that position over the last two centuries. In the 1927 case McGrain v. Daughtery, for example, the justices unanimously ruled that Congress could compel witnesses to testify before it as part of its inquiry into the Teapot Dome scandal. Even when it upheld privileges against testifying before Congress in some circumstances, the Supreme Court recognized that this was only an exception to the general rule.
“There can be no doubt as to the power of Congress, by itself or through its committees, to investigate matters and conditions relating to contemplated legislation,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the 1955 case Quinn v. United States. “This power, deeply rooted in American and English institutions, is indeed coextensive with the power to legislate. Without the power to investigate—including, of course, the authority to compel testimony, either through its own processes or through judicial trial—Congress could be seriously handicapped in its efforts to exercise its constitutional function wisely and effectively.”
Warren also noted some obvious exceptions. In Quinn, which involved a witness called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he noted that the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination always applied. Nor can Congress usurp the executive branch’s law enforcement powers. Finally, he wrote, the power to investigate “cannot be used to inquire into private affairs unrelated to a valid legislative purpose.”
Roberts, Warren’s eventual successor as chief justice, elevated that last exception in Mazars. He noted that at oral argument, the legislative branch declined to identify a limit to what amount to a “valid legislative purpose.” That led him to assume the worst. “Any personal paper possessed by a president could potentially ‘relate to’ a conceivable subject of legislation, for Congress has broad legislative powers that touch a vast number of subjects,” he wrote.
After acknowledging that Congress historically had those “broad legislative powers,” however, Roberts then sought to justify limiting them with worst-case scenarios. “Without limits on its subpoena powers, Congress could ‘exert an imperious controul’ [sic] over the Executive Branch and aggrandize itself at the President’s expense, just as the Framers feared,” he wrote, quoting from the Federalist Papers. “And a limitless subpoena power would transform the established practice of the political branches. Instead of negotiating over information requests, Congress could simply walk away from the bargaining table and compel compliance in court.”
To that end, he laid out a four-part test for courts to use when weighing congressional subpoenas against the presidency. They are not meant to be used sequentially, so I will describe them slightly out of order. The first part of the test instructed courts to determine “if other sources could reasonably provide Congress the information it needs in light of its particular legislative objective.” The second part required courts to ensure that the subpoena must be “no broader than reasonably necessary to support Congress’s legislative objective.” And the fourth part urged courts to “carefully scrutinize” the “burdens” imposed by such a subpoena upon the presidency by a “rival” branch so they do not consume too much of a president’s “time and attention.”
It is the third part, however, that got the most attention: The courts, Roberts wrote, “should be attentive to the nature of the evidence offered by Congress to establish that a subpoena advances a valid legislative purpose.” (Roberts also suggested there may be more parts to this test in the future but left that decision to future cases.) He advised the courts to pay particular attention to whether the stated purpose was clear and detailed enough. “That is particularly true when Congress contemplates legislation that raises sensitive constitutional issues, such as legislation concerning the presidency,” he noted.
Mazars’ new test has already obstructed important congressional work. In perhaps the most famous episode so far, multiple witnesses invoked the “valid legislative purpose” prong to resist subpoenas by the House January 6 committee. The litigation allowed key figures like former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, to delay compliance in hopes of running out the clock before the next election. Even when they prevailed, committee members had to spend limited time and energy laying out a painstaking rationale for each subpoena for the courts to draw upon for a matter where Congress’s investigative power should be indisputable.
In his letter to the committee, Leo also took issue with how the bill’s particular mechanics for addressing recusal by Supreme Court justices would work. But he also cast doubt on its constitutionality in broader terms. “More generally, any attempt by Congress to enact ethics standards for the Supreme Court would falter on constitutional objections,” he wrote. “There is no enumerated power in Article I of the Constitution that authorizes Congress to regulate the inner workings of the Supreme Court. Ethics standards imposed by Congress on the Supreme Court would therefore necessarily be unconstitutional.”
For one thing, Leo’s assertion that Congress has no power to regulate “the inner workings” of the court is not as clear-cut as he makes it sound. After all, Congress has enacted laws that decide how many justices amount to a quorum, when their annual term begins and ends, and who serves as chief justice during a vacancy or incapacity. Like every other federal employee, the justices are already bound by certain financial-disclosure laws, so the claim that Congress has no power whatsoever in this context is one that’s been conceded by the court for decades.
The Mazars test, if applied in Leo’s case, would also effectively require the courts to decide the constitutionality of proposed legislation before Congress can enact it. If the Senate opted to formally subpoena Leo, he would then argue that any proposed legislation Congress could enact on the matter would be unconstitutional. If he is correct, then the subpoena fails under Mazars. If he is incorrect, then the subpoena can go forward under Mazars. How can the lower courts apply Mazars without deciding whether prospective legislation is constitutional?
This is not how things are supposed to work. As Schoolhouse Rock taught millions of American schoolchildren over the years, a bill does not become a law until it is approved by both the House and the Senate and then signed by the president. One of the most important checks on judicial power is Article III’s command that the courts only hear “cases and controversies.” They can only give relief for injured parties; they can’t issue advisory opinions on what the law could be or should be, only what it is. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s bill is currently just that: a bill.
Ironically, only one justice said that Congress had no right to issue the Mazars subpoenas at all. Justice Clarence Thomas opined that Congress could only issue subpoenas that raised separation of powers questions as part of the impeachment process, effectively requiring lawmakers to put the cart before the horse when it comes to their investigations. (Justice Samuel Alito also dissented but did not go that far, instead arguing for an even more stringent test.) If Thomas had prevailed, he and Leo would be even further beyond lawmakers’ scrutiny—and that of the American public.
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Gregory Garrabrants is president and CEO of Axos Bank, which made two loans worth $225 million to Donald Trump in 2022 after the former president's main lender and several of his banks had cut ties with him. (photo: Sandy Huffaker/Washington Post)
Gregory Garrabrants, a GOP donor and CEO of online Axos Bank, approved the loans after the former president’s main lender had cut ties.
The former president’s longtime lender and several banks with his deposits had cut ties in the days around the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by his supporters, at a time when Trump had hundreds of millions in loans coming due. In February 2022, the accounting firm that had worked for him for two decades dropped Trump and advised against relying on his “statement of financial condition,” a metric banks use to evaluate the risks of a loan.
Unless he found a new lender, Trump’s business empire could have been in jeopardy.
Then a new partner came to the rescue: A little known, online-only financial firm headquartered in a suburban San Diego office park.
Axos Bank, formerly known as Bank of Internet USA, had grown from one of the first digital banks into a profitable, publicly traded company in part by specializing in loans to borrowers other banks had shied away from — all while navigating federal regulator scrutiny over its internal operations and a congressional hearing that cited its involvement in high interest rates on some loans.
One day after the warning by Trump’s accounting firm became public, Axos’s blunt-spoken president and CEO — a Republican donor named Gregory Garrabrants — signed off on a $100 million loan for Trump Tower, the 58-story Manhattan skyscraper that had long been Trump’s home and base of operations, according to the bank.
Three months later, Garrabrants approved a second deal that provided $125 million for Trump’s Doral resort, a sprawling golf course complex in Miami-Dade County he had owned since 2012. Axos also financed part of a loan that helped facilitate the $375 million purchase of Trump’s D.C. hotel by a group of investors.
The Axos loans to Trump were vital to stabilizing his post-presidential finances and enabling him to mount the campaign that now has him leading the GOP pack for the 2024 presidential nomination, according to disclosure records, loan documents and financial experts.
“It was crucial … that someone gave him credit or he could have had loans going into foreclosure,” said Bert Ely, a longtime independent banking analyst. “And that was also an important factor for him politically.”
The loans have drawn scrutiny from New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) as part of her broader suit that accuses Trump of “falsifying” records to inflate the value of his properties on financial statements to obtain earlier loans at lower interest rates. Trump “sought to avoid submitting a statement of financial condition” to Axos and instead pushed the bank to calculate his worth, James asserted in the suit, which does not accuse Axos of wrongdoing.
For more than a year, Garrabrants, 51, has refrained from speaking publicly about his decision to approve the loans. But in his first interview about the matter, he told The Washington Post in June at the bank’s headquarters and a telephone follow-up in July that the deals had nothing to do with his Republican politics. He said he made the loans because they will be profitable for his bank, adding that he did not agree with other bankers who stayed away from Trump due to allegations that he had incited the insurrection or concerns about his honesty.
It was “not my job or my role” to judge Trump’s actions, said Garrabrants, who donated $9,600 to support Trump’s 2020 campaign but said he’s never met the former president, dealing instead with Trump’s son Eric, the executive vice president of the Trump Organization.
The $100 million Trump Tower loan was made at a 4.25 percent interest rate and the $125 million loan for the Doral property at a 4.9 percent interest rate, with both maturing in 2032, according to property records. The rates are within the range of commercial loans during that period, according to Federal Reserve data, and came before much of the interest rate spike occurred last year; public records do not say whether the rates will change over the life of the loan, which analysts said makes it difficult to directly compare them to other commercial loans.
Garrabrants declined to discuss some details of the loans, including the long-term interest rate or how they are secured, while saying they were done on “market terms.” The Trump loans, which represent about 1 percent of the bank’s $20 billion in assets, are structured to guarantee profits for Axos, Garrabrants said.
“It wouldn’t matter if I was friends with someone, I’m not going to make a loan that’s no good,” he said. “I don’t like anyone that much.”
As president, Trump tried to head off claims of potential conflicts of interest with his business by handing control of the family firm to his son and pledging to avoid deals with foreign entities. But those rules no longer apply post-presidency, and Trump and his family have struck up significant business with Saudi Arabia and other partners abroad in the last two years.
If Trump returns to the White House, Axos could face intensifying scrutiny from Democratic lawmakers about the loan terms, his relationship with the bank and its treatment by regulators, observers said.
In his interview with The Post, Garrabrants rejected James’s claims that Trump had sought to avoid providing certain financial information when applying for Axos loans, saying he received all relevant details he needed to review the deals.
“He never refused any information we asked for,” Garrabrants said. “We asked for a series of items in a specific format … and he delivered the items in the specific format we asked for.”
Garrabrants declined to comment when asked if he or the bank had been contacted by anyone from James’s office regarding her case against Trump.
Trump and his spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. He has denied James’s allegations and described her lawsuit as a political attack. The former president has recently downplayed the importance of loans to his finances.
“I don’t need banks,” Trump said in April, while not mentioning the Axos loans. “I have a lot of cash. I built a great business with my family.”
Edward Hemmelgarn, who closely follows Axos as president of Shaker Investments, which invests in the bank, said it likely was able to secure the loans with much stiffer terms than Trump usually accepts because of his urgent need for a lender.
“I assume the only reason Donald Trump was willing to put up with it is because no one else was willing to make a loan,” Hemmelgarn said, adding, “I am assuming the bank has been very careful about this because of the high profile of Donald Trump.”
‘It was the banks’ problem’
Trump had a long history of relying on banks for hefty loans to shore up his business, shifting the risk to others as much as possible.
While portraying himself as a business genius, Trump filed six corporate bankruptcies. He created a publicly traded company that eventually saw its share price tumble from $36 to 17 cents. By the early 1990s, long before he got into politics or starred on reality TV, Trump faced numerous financial crises as he tried to keep afloat a New York-based real estate empire.
So when he first came to Deutsche Bank in the 1990s seeking massive loans, a managing director at the bank, Mike Offit, knew it was a risk.
“He’d had problems with a bunch of properties,” Offit recalled in an interview. “Your immediate response is, 'God, why would I want to get involved in that?’”
But after examining a proposed $125 million loan on a New York City office building and a separate deal on a condominium project, Offit calculated that the reward vastly outweighed the risk and signed off.
“You look at the property and if the property is great and meets the criteria for making a loan, absent some horrific reason not to, you make it because that’s how you make money,” he said. The deal was so favorable that Offit concluded “I can make 10 times the normal profit” at a low risk.
Both deals proved hugely profitable for the bank, said Offit, who left Deutsche in 1999. With Deutsche on his side, Trump rebuilt his brand and played the starring role in “The Apprentice,” the NBC series that presented precisely the titan image he wanted the world to see.
But the relationship soured after Offit left Deutsche and the 2008 financial crisis crashed real estate values. Facing difficulties repaying a massive loan on a 92-story Chicago tower, Trump sued Deutsche Bank by claiming it helped to cause the recession, and the bank countersued, noting that Trump had written in a book of his about his loans, “I figured it was the banks’ problem, not mine. What the hell did I care?”
After resolving the suit, Trump later borrowed another $170 million from Deutsche for his D.C. hotel. But the bank, which declined to comment for this story, finally refused his request for another $50 million in 2016, citing his presidential run as posing “an unacceptable level of reputation risk.”
And after Trump sought reelection in 2020, Deutsche cut ties with him, citing his company’s failure to answer the bank’s questions about James’s investigation — a decision made public after the Jan. 6 attack.
Signature Bank, where Trump had deposits, announced shortly after Jan. 6 that it was closing his account and urged Trump to resign, according to an archived version of its website. Two other banks where Trump held deposits also closed his accounts after the attack on the Capitol, The Post reported.
As he left the White House, Trump’s businesses also faced head winds. Trump Tower was put on a “watch list,” an indication of concern about the ability to repay a loan as its occupancy rate fell, according to a Wells Fargo analysis reported by Bloomberg. His Doral resort, meanwhile, had seen its revenue plummet by more than 40 percent in 2020, according to Forbes.
By February 2022, when his accounting firm, Mazars, issued its warning about Trump’s financial statements and ended its relationship with him, the former president’s family company faced having to repay more than $300 million to Deutsche and $55 million to another bank, according to Trump’s financial disclosure and other public records.
Failing to pay, in the worst case scenario, could have led to lawsuits and foreclosures.
Growing scrutiny into practices
As Trump searched for a new lender in the months after Jan. 6. A broker came to an Axos official with a proposal: giving Trump a new $100 million loan on Trump Tower.
Unlike many other bankers, Garrabrants was not put off by the risk. That’s how he’d made his career.
A former attorney who had clerked for a Republican-appointed federal judge, Garrabrants was a senior vice president of IndyMac bank before it failed during the 2008 housing collapse. He told the Los Angeles Business Journal that “they got caught on the wrong side of the tsunami,” leading the bank to be undercapitalized, a lesson that would guide his career. He said his role at IndyMac was in a division unrelated to the problems that led to the failure.
Garrabrants was appointed CEO and president of Bank of Internet in October 2007, helping boost the decade-old bank into a formidable institution by continuing to forego storefront locations and leaning into a lower cost, online-only operation. But Garrabrants’s approach drew intensifying scrutiny.
In 2016, the Houston Municipal Pension System filed a shareholder suit alleging in part that years earlier the bank and Garrabrants were “routinely overriding … internal controls.” The suit, which echoed some allegations in a lawsuit filed by a former Axos auditor, said the bank “issued loans to foreign nationals who had criminal or suspicious background” and claimed Garrabrants had threatened to “destroy” an ex-employee if they shared damaging information. A lawyer for the pension system declined to comment.
The bank denied the allegations, saying it had never revised a financial statement, had received “clean audits” and won approvals from regulators. Last year it settled the case for $14 million without admitting wrongdoing, according to court filings and the bank. Garrabrants said in the interview that the bank’s insurance company paid the settlement, which he said was less than the potential cost of litigation.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Treasury Department also opened probes into matters related to the bank’s practices, according to public documents; both were closed without charges.
After the SEC closed its probe in 2017, Garrabrants’s bank purchased an interest in a $57 million loan to Fortress Investment Group, which had backed a project linked to the family firm of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and top White House adviser, according to the bank and contemporaneous media reports. Asked by reporters at the time about whether there was any connection between the loan and the SEC’s decision, Garrabrants described the claim as a “tin-hat conspiracy.” The SEC did not respond to a request for comment.
Garrabrants told The Post that it was not a loan to Jared Kushner or the family company directly, and that he didn’t talk at the time to Kushner. A Kushner spokeswoman, asked via email for comment, said in a statement that “Jared never spoke to Axos Bank, Bank of the Internet, or the SEC about any of this. He had no knowledge of this matter until this email.” Fortress did not respond to a request for comment.
Axos practices also drew scrutiny in a 2021 hearing where Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said the bank had evaded a state rate cap by partnering with a firm that charged a family business 92 percent interest. Garrabrants said in The Post interview that the bank is no longer involved in such loans.
As the bank grew, Garrabrants became one of the best-compensated executives in the industry. Garrabrants’s 2018 compensation package had the potential to reach as much as $34.4 million, due in part to performance awards, the Los Angeles Times reported. When the pandemic hit in 2020, digital-only Axos was well-positioned to pick up customers, and its customer base grew exponentially.
Garrabrants, meanwhile, consistently contributed to Republican candidates, though he was not initially a Trump donor. After backing Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz, respectively, in the 2012 and 2016 presidential cycles, he backed Trump in 2020 as well as making contributions to the Republican Party and other GOP candidates, totaling about $66,000 between 2012 and 2022, according to filings.
“I’m a Republican,” Garrabrants said. “I’m not particularly politically active. But you can look at my political leanings from my donations.”
While the bank continued to be little known to the general public, it was gaining notice as a place where big borrowers who faced pushback from mainstream banks could find a willing lender — albeit sometimes at a higher interest rate and stiffer terms. Garrabrants said the image was unfair, stressing that the bank had specialized in large single-family loans to individuals with complex finances.
If any borrower had complex finances, it was Trump.
A willing lender
As Garrabrants pondered whether to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to the former president, he decided to personally investigate the risks.
In early 2022, Garrabrants met Eric Trump for the first time, and the pair went for a tour of Trump Tower. The bank CEO said his due diligence led him from upper-floor offices to the bowels of the building, where he even poked around the mechanical room.
He was impressed. “I walked the building and went through each individual plan, went through some of the underlying data. I walked the neighborhood, looked at other projects in that area, went through the lease,” Garrabrants said, noting the mechanical room was “clean as a whistle.”
Garrabrants personally signed off on the $100 million loan, he said. James, in her suit against Trump said the Trump Organization in February 2022 pushed the bank to “leave it to the lender” to determine his worth, rather than submitting the same kind of “statement of financial condition” he had provided for prior loans.
Three months later, Garrabrants authorized the $125 million loan to Trump for his Doral property. Unlike Trump Tower, Garrabrants was familiar with Doral after attending financial conferences there, he said.
While banks are required to obtain a company’s financial statement before making a loan, there is no industry-wide standard document and it is up to each institution to determine how to collect the information, according to Kyle Welch, an associate professor of accounting at George Washington University.
Garrabrants told The Post his bank had verified Trump’s information by its own methodology and was at the head of the line for repayment. He also discounted the value of statements of financial condition in general, saying, “I’ve never run into a borrower who thinks their property is worth what I think it’s worth.”
Eric Trump did not respond to an interview request, instead sending a statement to The Post: “Axos is an amazing bank and it is a pleasure to work with them.”
Garrabrants said he was barred for privacy reasons from disclosing certain conditions of the two loans. But he said that in loaning to the former president, he knew it would “be subject to additional scrutiny.”
“So what we wanted to make sure we did was structure the loan in a manner that was even at a higher bar than it normally would be, because I expected that there would be folks who would be interested in it,” he said. He declined to say what higher conditions were imposed.
Axos also played a role in another key deal: the sale of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. The May 11, 2022 purchase of that money-losing property fetched $375 million, much more than analysts had expected, enabling Trump to pay off his $170 million Deutsche Bank loan and make a profit of more than $100 million.
Axos had gotten involved in the deal two months before the closing.
CGI Merchant Group, the buyer of the hotel’s lease, got some of its financing from an investment group called MSD Partners. That group’s investors include computer mogul Michael S. Dell. MSD, which has often done business with Axos, asked the bank to help provide financing for the deal. They signed an agreement on March 1, 2022, MSD said in a statement to The Post. Dell was a passive investor and was not involved in the decision to provide the financing, his spokesman said.
MSD and Axos declined to specify the amount provided by the bank, but the bank is described in property records as having a “senior participation interest” in the loan, meaning it would be repaid ahead of others.
CGI Merchant Group, which partnered with Hilton to relaunch the hotel, did not respond to a request for comment. MSD Partners declined to comment beyond confirming the timing of its participation.
Garrabrants, asked whether the hotel deal could have happened without Axos’s support, responded that he believed it would have occurred regardless because he had to compete with other institutions before closing the deal.
Timely loans bolster net worth
Trump says that his finances have improved from the perilous days after Jan. 6, 2021, according to his latest personal financial disclosure report with the Office of Government Ethics.
Trump claimed in his July report that he has earned more than $1 billion in the past two years, with millions from speaking fees and significant revenue from new business partners — including new ventures tied to Saudi investors. Trump claimed he has paid off three of his four loans from Deutsche Bank, the disclosure said. He also reported earning $159 million from the Doral golf resort, indicating it has recovered from the pandemic lull.
While Trump provided more information than required in the disclosure, his family company is privately held, making it difficult to fully assess his claims of vast wealth.
Axos, meanwhile, has performed better than many other financial institutions. As of June 30, the stock of parent company Axos Financial has grown 2,128 percent since Garrabrant’s appointment in October 2007, compared to the Nasdaq Composite, which has increased 380 percent during that time, the bank said. Nonetheless, its long-term rating was downgraded by Moody’s Investors Service in March, in part due to the bank’s real estate exposure. The stock has dropped from around $61 a share in January 2022 to $47 as of Wednesday, following a broader decline in banks. The Moody’s report did not mention the Trump loans and the company declined to comment on its rating. Garrabrants said that action was part of a broad downgrade of the banking sector and stressed Axos is still “investment-grade rated,” which he said shows the bank is financially solid.
It has been growing steadily in recent years and now is the nation’s 101st-largest bank as other banks have suffered failures — including Signature Bank, which was closed by regulators in March.
Trump’s Axos loans are being repaid on schedule, Garrabrants said.
The civil fraud case instituted by James is scheduled for trial in October, with the state seeking to fine him $250 million and stop him from doing business in New York. Among the state’s allegations is that Trump’s falsifying of statements of financial condition saved him $150 million over a 10-year period in lowered interest costs.
The case could force Trump to reveal more about his finances and how he has obtained his loans. James has included the sale of his D.C. hotel in her complaint, alleging that it was the result of a Deutsche loan “he was able to obtain by using his false and misleading statements.” Trump was deposed by James’s office in April, but the contents so far have not been made public.
Separately, Alvin Bragg (D), the district attorney in New York City, is continuing to investigate a similar financial fraud case but has not decided on whether to file charges.
The James case could also draw more scrutiny, even indirectly, to Trump’s business with Axos. Ely, the banking analyst, said it is inevitable that the Axos loans will be viewed in a political lens, with questions asked about whether a borrower or lender has leverage over the other. In past instances, Trump’s lenders have been drawn into an array of investigations, most recently with Deutsche probed by congressional Democrats.
“Trump is like flypaper,” Ely said. “He draws regulatory attention, and there is reputational risk in that for a bank.”
Offit, the former Deutsche banker who once approved loans for Trump, said the negative publicity would have dissuaded him from getting into business with the former president.
“It’s just not worth it,” said Offit. “At some point, you can’t make enough money.”
But Garrabrants said his job is “not to be politicizing banking … would it really be the case you’d want a society where somebody who was prominent would be denied financial services from any institution? … I think the answer is, ‘No.’”
Asked his views about Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021 — which the former president indicated earlier this month had made him the target of a federal grand jury probe — Garrabrants declined to respond directly, saying, “if I ever decide to run for political office, which I have no intention to do so, but if I do that, I’ll make sure that I am prepared to answer a wide variety of questions about different political events that occur.”
Nor did Garrabrants express concern about Trump’s history of corporate bankruptcies, his lawsuit against Deutsche, or his statement that “what the hell did I care” if banks were repaid.
“All I can say is that, if people don’t pay, I take their stuff,” Garrabrants said. “And I make sure their stuff is worth way, way more than enough to pay me.”
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It’s clear that abortion bans can make pregnancy more dangerous, but experts say it may take years for maternal mortality data to reveal the toll. (photo: Thomas Northcut/Getty)
It’s clear that abortion bans can make pregnancy more dangerous, but experts say it may take years for maternal mortality data to reveal the toll.
The case of Mylissa Farmer, a Missouri woman, is one example. Last August, her water broke less than 18 weeks into her pregnancy, when her fetus was not viable. She was at risk for developing a life-threatening infection if she continued the pregnancy. Yet during three separate visits to emergency rooms, she was denied abortion care because her fetus still had a heartbeat. Doctors specifically cited the state’s new abortion law in her medical records and said they could not intervene until her condition worsened. She eventually traveled to Illinois for care.
Even for people who don’t develop sudden life-threatening complications, doctors note that carrying a pregnancy to term is inherently risky because rapid physical and hormonal changes can exacerbate chronic health conditions and trigger new complications. If more people are forced to continue unwanted pregnancies, there are bound to be more pregnancy-related deaths: A study by the University of Colorado estimates a 24% increase in maternal deaths if the United States bans abortion federally. They predicted the increase would be even higher for Black patients, at 39%. Currently, 14 states have total abortion bans.
Additionally, when abortion is illegal, it makes the procedure more dangerous for those who still try to terminate their pregnancies. The World Health Organization found that unsafe or illegal abortions account for up to 10% of maternal deaths worldwide.
As the United States enters its second post-Roe year, advocates say it’s important to gather data on the impact abortion bans are having on the health of pregnant people to help both policy makers and voters understand the life-or-death consequences of the restrictions. Without such accounting, they say, the public may remain ignorant of the toll. Maternal mortality rates would be a crucial gauge of impact.
Despite the stakes, experts say, at least in the short term, it may be difficult or impossible to track the number of lives lost due to limits on abortion access.
ProPublica spoke to four members of state maternal mortality review committees. Here are some of the challenges they see to drawing any clear conclusions from maternal mortality data in the near future.
The Data Can Be Inconsistent
Each state has its own system for compiling the data maternal mortality researchers work with. The quality of the data varies vastly by state. It can involve comparing birth and fetal death records, scanning through obituaries, and sometimes begging coroner’s offices to send death records. Many states are still working toward a complete system.
“It really depends on the rigor of the contributing entities,” said Dr. Michelle Owens, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist and the clinical chair for Mississippi’s maternal mortality review committee. “We rely so heavily upon the information we glean from these sources, and if that information is not as reliable … it will definitely have a negative impact on our work and understanding of what the contributing things may have been and what the gaps are.”
All the maternal mortality experts that ProPublica spoke with noted issues with the “pregnancy check box” used in death certificates to denote whether a patient was pregnant at the time of death or within the previous year. In Florida, Dr. Karen Harris, an OB-GYN and a member of Florida’s maternal mortality review committee, has observed the check box “overselect some patients who were never pregnant, or not pregnant in the last year, and it underselects patients who were pregnant.”
Sometimes the check box is wrong because of clerical errors, the researchers said. Other times, it’s simply not filled out because no autopsy was performed to verify whether the person was pregnant. That information could be important in measuring deaths that happen early in pregnancy — including murders. Homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant or recently pregnant Americans, and researchers also would like to measure how abortion bans, which could force people in abusive relationships to carry unwanted pregnancies, affect those numbers.
Studying pregnancy-associated deaths within a year of pregnancy helps researchers account for any additional factors like substance abuse, unstable housing, suicide or mental health problems. These could be important in identifying deaths connected to continuing an undesired pregnancy.
The data can also be slow — some states, like Florida, provide data to the committee for the past year right away. But others are years behind. Currently, many states have only released data through 2019.
Records May Not Address Abortion Access
One of the thorniest questions facing maternal mortality experts: How can they determine if abortion access was a factor?
Dr. Lynlee Wolfe, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Medical Center and a member of the state’s maternal mortality review committee, wishes maternal mortality review reports could include a check box for the question, “Did inability to get an abortion play a role?”
“But you often can’t dig that out of notes,” she said. “I think what we’re asking is kind of an untrackable number.”
The experts said they could look into causes of death that may be linked to a patient’s inability to get an abortion when they’re having an emergency pregnancy complication: Sepsis, hemorrhage and heart issues, for example, are all worth studying to see if medical records might indicate if doctors delayed ending the pregnancy because the fetus still had a heartbeat.
But beyond that, when the pregnancy was unwanted or exacerbated broader health concerns, it could prove very difficult to determine if abortion access was a factor in the patient’s decision-making.
For example, if a patient had a heart condition that carried a 50% chance of death in pregnancy, researchers would like to see whether the patient was counseled about the risk and offered a termination.
But in a state that had criminalized abortion, “no one’s going to write that down,” said Harris, the Florida doctor. “So we won’t be able to know in the in-depth review if this was a patient choice — or if it was something that was forced upon her.”
Researchers might be able to learn more about the patient’s state of mind and whether the pregnancy was desired or not from interviews with family members and social service records, Owens, the Mississippi doctor, said. But there’s no guarantee they would have discussed their feelings about the pregnancy with family members either.
“With stigma and controversy surrounding conversations and considerations around abortions, people are hesitant to share those thoughts and feelings outside a very small circle of trust,” she said.
Risk of Political Interference
Maternal mortality review committees are funded by their states, and some are overseen by state legislatures.
The maternal mortality review members ProPublica spoke with said they did not anticipate interference with their report findings, even if they found examples where abortion access was a factor in a maternal death.
But some maternal care advocates worry such committees are vulnerable to political interference and manipulation. Last year, the Texas Department of State Health Services announced it was delaying its 2019 maternal mortality review report, originally scheduled for September 2022, until mid 2023.
Some saw the delay as a way to keep negative numbers out of the public eye during election season and postpone their release until after the 2023 legislative session had ended. A member of the review committee said she believed there was no legitimate need for the delay and that it was “dishonorably burying these women.” ProPublica reached out to the committee and the Texas health agency to ask about these concerns, but did not receive any response.
After pushback, the report was partially released in December 2022. It found persistent disparities affecting Black mothers and showed that the childbirth complication rate had risen 28% since 2018.
In July, Idaho disbanded its maternal mortality review committee, making it the only state without one. Lawmakers cited the costs of operating the committee — though members said operating costs were about $15,000 a year and covered by a federal grant. The decision came after a lobbying group argued that the committee was a “vehicle to promote more government intervention in health care” and opposed its recommendation to extend Medicaid coverage to mothers for 12 months postpartum.
The Sample Size Is Small
Maternal mortality rates in the U.S. are higher than in other wealthy countries and have been rising in recent years, so many resources are devoted to studying root causes of the trend and possible strategies for reversing it. But the actual number of deaths is statistically small: In 2021, the U.S. saw an estimated 32.9 deaths per 100,000 births, or 1,205 total pregnancy-related deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This makes it difficult to draw conclusions that are rigorous by epidemiological standards, said Dr. Elliot Main, a Stanford professor and the former medical director for the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative.
While researchers may learn of individual cases where it’s clear that abortion access was an issue in the patient’s outcome, it could take years to have a data set large enough to reveal a clear picture.
Main also pointed out that many other factors influence maternal mortality rates, which muddles the picture. “Maternal deaths are so rare and often complicated in their underlying causes,” he said. “If you see a trend over time, we have to break it down to see what’s really causing that.”
Before the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization struck down federal protections for abortion rights, U.S. maternal mortality rates were already rising. Influences include COVID-19, the opioid crisis and people having children at older ages, when they are at higher risk for complications. The U.S. also has long-standing racial and socioeconomic health care disparities affecting quality prenatal care — more than half of Georgia’s counties have no OB-GYN, for example. That can mean more patients go into pregnancy with undiagnosed health conditions and may be at higher risk for life-threatening complications.
Main and other researchers suggested that studying data on childbirth complications may provide more avenues for understanding the effects of abortion bans, because those are more common and would provide a larger data set to study.
Bans Don’t Prevent All Abortions
One reason the impact of Dobbs on maternal mortality rates could remain limited even in states that have banned abortion is that some people who want to terminate their pregnancy are still able to do so, either by traveling or by ordering abortion medication in the mail.
It’s impossible to know the full picture of how many are able to jump through the hoops and obtain abortions even when there are no legal options nearby. But WeCount, a research project led by the Society of Family Planning that has been collecting data from abortion providers, estimates that in the six months following Dobbs, about 35,000 people in abortion-ban states were able to get abortions in other states — just over half of the people estimated to have sought abortions in those states, based on numbers from the same time period the previous year. It’s unclear what happened to the other half. Some may have continued their pregnancies, others may have ordered abortion pills in the mail, which could be sent by organizations based in Europe and Mexico and not be recorded in any database.
Still, having to travel out of state to a limited number of abortion providers meant more patients were forced to wait until their second trimester, researchers said, when an abortion can be more complicated.
And while abortion pills are considered an exceedingly safe method of terminating a pregnancy through the first 10 weeks, according to the Food and Drug Administration and leading medical organizations, patients should still have the option to take them with the instruction and care of a medical provider, advocates say.
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Mustafa Hassan, center, with civil rights attorney Ben Crump, third left, and Ilyasah Shabazz, second left, at a press conference in New York on Tuesday. (photo: Ed Jones/AFP)
Mustafa Hassan says comment proved to him that police and FBI knew beforehand that there would be an attempt on activist’s life
Mustafa Hassan said he heard an officer ask of Hagan, “Is he one of us?”
“From my vantage point this was an attempt by police to assist in him getting away,” Hassan said on Tuesday in a statement to reporters, read mere feet away from where Malcolm X was gunned down in New York City’s Audubon Ballroom.
Appearing alongside the civil rights attorney Ben Crump, Hassan asserted that he prevented Hagan from being taken away by reaching out and grabbing the assassin by the collar.
Hassan, formerly known as Richard Melwin Jones, delivered a vivid description of his recollection of the day that the leader of the Organization of Afro-American Unity was assassinated.
According to Hassan, the assassination unfolded when someone shouted a racist slur along with the words “get your hands out of my pocket!”
A bomb went off as Malcolm X asked everyone to calm down, and then gunshots erupted. During the ensuing chaos, Hassan spotted a man with a gun in his hand running toward him.
Hassan said he managed to knock down Hagan, better known as Talmadge X Hayer, a member of the Nation of Islam.
After checking on Malcolm, Hassan said he went outside the ballroom to find the activist’s followers beating Hagan. That’s when he heard one of multiple police officers trying to pull Hagan away ask, “Is he one of us?”
Hassan, reading from his statement, also claimed that a police special service bureau member and undercover informant Eugene Roberts had described seeing “a dry run” on Malcolm’s life a week earlier.
Crump and his associate Ray Hamlin said the “is he one of us” comment may now give Malcolm X’s family a basis to bring a legal claim seeking damages from the New York police department as well as the federal government.
Such a claim would accuse both entities of “fraudulent concealment” and “material misrepresentation of facts” because, the attorneys argue, it indicates that police authorities had informants in the building and, by extension, knew there would be an attempt on Malcolm’s life.
“We’re focused on the FBI, the federal government and the New York City police department,” Hamlin told the Guardian. He also said that the phrase Hassan heard “gives us indication that members of law enforcement were aware that there were people working with them in order to achieve the death of Malcolm X”.
Crump added: “It tells us they knew something was going down. Even though they didn’t know who was doing it, they all knew and they came because it was the assassination of Malcolm X. They were saying is this guy with us because they knew they had planted Black people in there who were informants.”
Crump also accused authorities of intentionally “trying to keep information away fraudulently from people seeking justice, that being Malcolm X’s family”.
“They sent a directive that no one is to tell about our presence in the Audubon Ballroom and then sat by as two innocent people were wrongfully convicted,” Crump said.
Crump’s remarks referred to New York City’s agreement in October to pay $26m to settle lawsuits filed on behalf of two men whose convictions in the assassination were thrown out after a judge found “serious miscarriages of justice” had taken place.
The two men, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, each spent more than 20 years in prison after their hasty arrests and a trial that relied on evidence since deemed questionable.
A two-year investigation led by the Manhattan district attorney’s office found that prosecutors, the FBI and the police had withheld key evidence that probably would have led to acquittals if presented to a jury.
Tuesday’s briefing with reporters was at the Malcolm X … Dr Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, which is on the site of the Audubon in Washington Heights. Attendees included Malcolm X’s daughters Qubilah and Ilyasah Shabazz, who were in the ballroom that night with their mother, Betty Shabazz, when their father was shot 21 times as he sought to gain support for the newly formed Organization of Afro-American Unity, after he broke from the Nation of Islam.
Ilyasah said she and her family still had many unanswered questions.
“I think the truth should be told,” Ilyasah said.
Qubilah Shabazz declined comment. She was arrested in 1995 in connection with an alleged plot to kill Louis Farrakhan, then the leader of the Nation of Islam, who has faced but denied accusations of having a hand in Malcolm X’s assassination.
Hassan said he was not the only one to believe authorities were involved in Malcolm X’s assassination. “I realized that almost immediately,” he told the Guardian.
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Russian soldiers in St. Petersburg on August 25, 2022. (photo: Olga Maltseva/AFP)
Though Beijing has publicly called for peace, customs records obtained by Politico reveal that likely-Russian buyers have taken orders for hundreds of thousands of bulletproof vests and helmets produced by Chinese manufacturer Shanghai H Win, which has seen a surge in business since the war began last year.
This amounts to what the report described as a "China-sized loophole" in sanctions: China appears to be sending Russia so-called dual-use technology — gear that offers both civilian and military use – which leaves exporters enough deniability to avoid interrogation from the West.
Russia's imported over $100 million-worth of Chinese drones in 2023, about 30 times more than Ukraine has, and shipments of ceramics — a key body armor material — has seen a 69% increase from China to Russia to $225 million.
In the same stretch, Ukraine's ceramics imports from China have plunged 61% to $5 million.
Drones and dual-use goods, however, won't trigger a response from authorities in the European Union, sources told Politico, as they aren't something that would have been explicitly agreed upon in sanctions.
Buyers importing these goods look characteristic of Russian shell companies meant to conceal dealings. Silva, one buyer of Shanhai H Win products, located in the Eastern Siberian region Buryatia, took in an order of 100,000 bulletproof vests and 100,000 helmets. Yet it appears to be a brand new firm — it was registered in September last year and reported zero profits for 2022.
Russian company Legittelekom, which Politico describes as a Moscow freight forwarding company, and another called Rika, made similar orders.
These dual-use products are listed as "airsoft helmets," and appear harmless and not for military use, but it's common practice to mislabel dual-use items for their civilian use, rather than what they're used for in the battlefield.
Earlier in July, Cindy Zheng, a researcher at the RAND Corporation think tank, warned that China's cheap weapons exports could see a boost from Russia's war. The arms could appear attractive to Moscow, Zheng said, since the prolonged conflict has curtailed its defense budget and China has few scruples about arms sales.
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Viewers are divided over whether the film should have shown Japanese victims of the weapon created by physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Experts say it's complicated. (photo: NBC News; Universal Pictures)
Viewers are divided over whether the film should have shown Japanese victims of the weapon created by physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Experts say it's complicated.
Viewers are divided, with many criticizing the lack of Japanese representation as the erasure of the hundreds of thousands of victims of Oppenheimer's creation. Others, including director Christopher Nolan, argued that the film zeroes in on the scientist’s experience and perspective alone — one that is distinct and separate from the victims’.
Experts say that the issue of representation is more nuanced. They emphasized that while no one film has the responsibility to illustrate Japanese victims’ perspective, “Oppenheimer” does little to challenge the long history of glorifying the work of white men, and risks perpetuating the persistent, often reductive, portrayals of Japanese victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“I don’t think we should depend on Hollywood to tell our stories with the nuance and the depth and the care that they really deserve,” Nina Wallace, media and outreach manager at Densho, a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving the stories of those of Japanese descent. “But it is true that these institutions that are in positions of power, positions of influence, put more value on stories of men like Oppenheimer, like Truman, than it does on the Asian and indigenous communities that suffered because of decisions that those men made.”
Based on the 2005 biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the film was released Friday and follows the physicist’s ascent into his role as the director of the clandestine weapons lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico, as part of the Manhattan Project, the top-secret U.S. effort to make the first atomic bomb.
Oppenheimer’s work led to the deaths of more than 200,000 people by some estimates, as well as a generation of “hibakusha,” or survivors of the blast — many of whom continue to contend with the impacts of the bomb to this day. And the movie has largely been billed as a contemplation over the moral dilemmas facing the scientists.
However, Nolan doesn’t show the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the devastating aftermath in the cities. While there’s a scene that depicts American leaders discussing where to drop the bomb — with then-Secretary of State Henry Stimson depicted as arguing against Kyoto because of his honeymoon there — victims of the blasts never appear on screen. In another scene, Oppenheimer gives a speech and, while looking into the crowd, visualizes some of the predominantly white audience as the victims of his bomb.
Nolan said he did not illustrate the aftermath or the victims because he felt that “to depart from Oppenheimer’s experience would betray the terms of the storytelling.”
“He learned about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the radio — the same as the rest of the world,” Nolan said in a discussion with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. “That, to me, was a shock. … Everything is his experience, or my interpretation of his experience. Because as I keep reminding everyone, it’s not a documentary. It is an interpretation. That’s my job.”
Wallace said it’s not on “Oppenheimer” to show the Japanese perspective, nor should the movie be seen as a factual historical resource. Nolan, a white director, is likely not the appropriate artist to sensitively highlight the experiences of hibakusha, she said. But experts added that doesn’t mean Nolan’s artistic decisions won’t have an impact on the American public’s view of Japanese civilians during World War II.
“Even within the realm of entertainment it’s still demoralizing and making, once again, unreal the experience of Asian people,” said Brandon Shimoda, a Japanese American writer and curator of the Hiroshima Library.
Shimoda said that while the Japanese civilians and citizens are not included in the film, their absence makes a dangerous statement.
“[They] are the specter on the far side of the horizon, and therefore not entirely knowable,” Shimoda said. “What we’re meant to see when we look into the skeletal face of Oppenheimer is the distance between Oppenheimer and actual human beings.”
With its large-scale marketing and investment, the movie, which raked in $82.5 million domestically and $98 million internationally in its opening weekend, holds weight due to its massive audience, as well, Wallace said. But with a range of movies that focus on the American perspective, like 2001’s “Pearl Harbor,” there remains a further shifting of the victims’ experiences. Moreover, public education doesn’t help, providing little information or awareness around the continued health issues that victims face, she said.
“I understand how showrooms and Hollywood cannot be all-encompassing. … But I think it also points societally to the lack of nonwhite, non-U.S. initiatives or perspectives,” said Stan Shikuma, co-president of the Seattle Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League. “That lack of more of a global perspective allows atrocities to continue to happen because we still dehumanize other people that we don’t know.”
Films about other perspectives, Shikuma said, often fall on the independent filmmaking community. But he emphasized that “it’s not a level playing field” and reach continues to be an issue.
“Other perspectives can be brought to film, but the funding is so uneven. Right now, millions and hundreds of millions of people will probably see this film,” he said.
To truly challenge the audience to contend with the horrors of the bombings, Shimoda said that narratives need to shift toward those who were impacted most.
“The experience and perspective of the hibakusha needs to be centered in whatever way possible,” he said. “There are people out there that are telling their stories in real time. The general white American relationship to that is to refuse those stories, and to turn instead to these dramatizations, which largely erase the people whose stories need to be told.”
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The sun rises over the Atlantic Ocean in Miami Beach. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
Scientists have long seen the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, as one of the planet’s most vulnerable “tipping elements” — meaning the system could undergo an abrupt and irreversible change, with dramatic consequences for the rest of the globe. Under Earth’s current climate, this aquatic conveyor belt transports warm, salty water from the tropics to the North Atlantic, and then sends colder water back south along the ocean floor. But as rising global temperatures melt Arctic ice, the resulting influx of cold freshwater has thrown a wrench in the system — and could shut it down entirely.
The study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications suggests that continued warming will push the AMOC over its “tipping point” around the middle of this century. The shift would be as abrupt and irreversible as turning off a light switch, and it could lead to dramatic changes in weather on either side of the Atlantic.
“This is a really worrying result,” said Peter Ditlevsen, a climate physicist at the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the new study. “This is really showing we need a hard foot on the brake” of greenhouse gas emissions.
Ditlevsen’s analysis is at odds with the most recent report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which drew on multiple climate models and concluded with “medium confidence” that the AMOC will not fully collapse this century.
Other experts on the AMOC also cautioned that because the new study doesn’t present new observations of the entire ocean system — instead, it is extrapolating about the future based on past data from a limited region of the Atlantic — its conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt.
“The qualitative statement that AMOC has been losing stability in the last century remains true even taking all uncertainties into account,” said Niklas Boers, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “But the uncertainties are too high for a reliable estimate of the time of AMOC tipping.”
The study adds to a growing body of evidence that this crucial ocean system is in peril. Since 2004, observations from a network of ocean buoys has shown the AMOC getting weaker — though the limited time frame of that data set makes it hard to establish a trend. Scientists have also analyzed multiple “proxy” indicators of the current’s strength, including microscopic organisms and tiny sediments from the seafloor, to show the system is in its weakest state in more than 1,000 years.
For their analysis, Peter Ditlevsen and his colleague Susanne Ditlevsen (who is Peter’s sister) examined records of sea surface temperatures going back to 1870. In recent years, they found, temperatures in the northernmost waters of the Atlantic have undergone bigger fluctuations and taken longer to return to normal. These are “early warning signals” that the AMOC is becoming critically unstable, the scientists said — like the increasingly wild wobbles before a tower of Jenga blocks starts to fall.
Susanne Ditlevsen, a statistician at the University of Copenhagen, then developed an advanced mathematical model to predict how much more wobbling the AMOC system can handle. The results suggest that the AMOC could collapse any time between now and 2095, and as early as 2025, the authors said.
The consequences would not be nearly as dire as they appear in the 2004 sci-fi film “The Day After Tomorrow,” in which a sudden shutdown of the current causes a flash freeze across the Northern Hemisphere. But it could lead to a drop in temperatures in northern Europe and elevated warming in the tropics, as well as stronger storms on the East Coast of North America, Peter Ditlevsen said.
Marilena Oltmanns, an oceanographer at the National Oceanography Center in Britain, noted in a statement that the temperatures in the North Atlantic are “only one part of a highly complex, dynamical system.” Though her own research on marine physics supports the Ditlevsens’ conclusion that this particular region could reach a tipping point this century, she is wary of linking that transition to a full-scale change in Atlantic Ocean circulation.
Yet the dangers of even a partial AMOC shutdown mean any indicators of instability are worth investigating, said Stefan Rahmstorf, another oceanographer at the Potsdam Institute who was not involved in the new study.
“As always in science, a single study provides limited evidence, but when multiple approaches lead to similar conclusions this must be taken very seriously,” he said. “The scientific evidence now is that we can’t even rule out crossing a tipping point already in the next decade or two.”
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