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The vehicle is a key part of the justice’s just-folks persona. It’s also a luxury motor coach that was funded by someone else’s money.
With some time to kill before an event that night, he headed to a dealership just west of the airport. There sat a used Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon, eight years old and 40 feet long, with orange flames licking down the sides. In the words of one of his biographers, “he kicked the tires and climbed aboard,” then quickly negotiated a handshake deal. A few weeks later, Justice Thomas drove his new motor coach off the lot and into his everyman, up-by-the-bootstraps self-mythology.
There he is behind the wheel during a rare 2007 interview with “60 Minutes,” talking about how the steel-clad converted bus allows him to escape the “meanness that you see in Washington.” He regularly slips into his speeches his love of driving it through the American heartland — “the part we fly over.” And in a documentary financed by conservative admirers, Justice Thomas, who was born into poverty in Georgia, waxes rhapsodic about the familiarity of spending time with the regular folks he meets along the way in R.V. parks and Walmart parking lots.
“I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States,” he told the filmmakers, adding: “There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer being around that.”
But there is an untold, and far more complex, back story to Justice Thomas’s R.V. — one that not only undercuts the mythology but also leaves unanswered a host of questions about whether the justice received, and failed to disclose, a lavish gift from a wealthy friend.
His Prevost Marathon cost $267,230, according to title history records obtained by The New York Times. And Justice Thomas, who in the ensuing years would tell friends how he had scrimped and saved to afford the motor coach, did not buy it on his own. In fact, the purchase was underwritten, at least in part, by Anthony Welters, a close friend who made his fortune in the health care industry.
He provided Justice Thomas with financing that experts said a bank would have been unlikely to extend — not only because Justice Thomas was already carrying a lot of debt, but because the Marathon brand’s high level of customization makes its used motor coaches difficult to value.
In an email to The Times, Mr. Welters wrote: “Here is what I can share. Twenty-five years ago, I loaned a friend money, as I have other friends and family. We’ve all been on one side or the other of that equation. He used it to buy a recreational vehicle, which is a passion of his.” Roughly nine years later, “the loan was satisfied,” Mr. Welters added. He subsequently sent The Times a photograph of the original title bearing his signature and a handwritten “lien release” date of Nov. 22, 2008.
But despite repeated requests over nearly two weeks, Mr. Welters did not answer further questions essential to understanding his arrangement with Justice Thomas.
He would not say how much he had lent Justice Thomas, how much the justice had repaid and whether any of the debt had been forgiven or otherwise discharged. He declined to provide The Times with a copy of a loan agreement — or even say if one existed. Nor would he share the basic terms of the loan, such as what, if any, interest rate had been charged or whether Justice Thomas had adhered to an agreed-upon repayment schedule. And when asked to elaborate on what he had meant when he said the loan had been “satisfied,” he did not respond.
“‘Satisfied’ doesn’t necessarily mean someone paid the loan back,” said Michael Hamersley, a tax lawyer and expert who has testified before Congress. “‘Satisfied’ could also mean the lender formally forgave the debt, or otherwise just stopped pursuing repayment.”
Justice Thomas, for his part, did not respond to detailed questions about the loan, sent to him through the Supreme Court’s spokeswoman.
The two men’s silence serves to obscure whether Justice Thomas had an obligation to report the arrangement under a federal ethics law that requires justices to disclose certain gifts, liabilities and other financial dealings that could pose conflicts of interest.
Vehicle loans are generally exempt from those reporting requirements, as long as they are secured by the vehicle and the loan amount doesn’t exceed its purchase price. But private loans like the one between Mr. Welters and Justice Thomas can be deemed gifts or income to the borrower under the federal tax code if they don’t hew to certain criteria: Essentially, experts said, the loan must have well-documented, commercially reasonable terms along the lines of what a bank would offer, and the borrower must adhere to those terms and pay back the principal and interest in full.
Richard W. Painter, a White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, said that when it comes to questions of disclosure, the ethics treatment of gifts and income often parallels the tax treatment. But those intricacies aside, he said, “justices just should not be accepting private loans from wealthy individuals outside their family.” If they do, he added, “you have to ask, why is a justice going to this private individual and not to a commercial lender, unless the justice is getting something he or she otherwise could not get.”
The Times’s unearthing of the loan arrangement is the latest in a series of revelations showing how wealthy benefactors have bestowed an array of benefits on Justice Thomas and his wife, Virginia Thomas: helping to pay for his great-nephew’s tuition, steering business to Mrs. Thomas’s consulting firm, buying and renovating the house where his mother lives and inviting the Thomases on trips both domestic and foreign that included travel aboard private jets and a yacht.
Justice Thomas has pointed to interpretations of the disclosure rules to defend his failure to report much of the largess he has received. He has said he was advised that the trips fell under an exemption for gifts involving “personal hospitality” from close friends, for instance, and a lawyer close to the Thomases contended in a statement that the justice did not need to disclose the tuition because it was a gift to his great-nephew, over whom he had legal custody, rather than to him.
The Thomases’ known benefactors include wealthy men like the Dallas real estate developer Harlan Crow, the conservative judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and several members of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, which honors people who succeed despite adversity. Among them: the longtime Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga, who flew the justice around on his jet.
Mr. Welters, while also a Horatio Alger member, stands apart. For one thing, the two men’s friendship predates Justice Thomas’s time on the federal bench. They met around 1980, when both were members of a small, informal club of Black congressional aides to Republican lawmakers — Mr. Welters worked for Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York and Justice Thomas for Senator John C. Danforth of Missouri.
“It wasn’t exactly fashionable to be a Black person working for a Republican, and it was comforting to meet others in the same boat,” the justice wrote in his autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son.”
They had much in common. Like Justice Thomas, Mr. Welters was raised in poverty, sharing a cramped tenement in Harlem with his parents and three brothers and, after his mother’s death when he was 8, shining shoes under an elevated subway to help make ends meet.
As both men climbed the ladder as political appointees in the Reagan administration, their friendship grew. They stayed close after Justice Thomas joined the federal appeals court in Washington in 1990 and Mr. Welters left government to found AmeriChoice, a Medicaid services provider that he sold to UnitedHealthcare for $530 million in stock in 2002 and continued to lead until retiring in 2016. Mr. Welters and his wife, Beatrice, named Justice Thomas the godfather of one of their two boys, according to The Village Voice.
When Justice Thomas’s 1991 Supreme Court nomination ran into trouble after a former subordinate, Anita Hill, accused him of sexual harassment, Mr. Welters stood by his friend, providing behind-the-scenes advice, according to a book on the hearings written by Mr. Danforth.
And in 1998, the year before the motor coach purchase, Justice Thomas returned the favor. That is when Mr. Welters and his wife, through their foundation, started the AnBryce scholarship program, which gives underprivileged students a full ride to New York University’s law school, along with networking opportunities and career support. Justice Thomas lent his considerable imprimatur to the program, interviewing applicants in his Supreme Court chambers, mentoring scholars and later hiring one graduate as a clerk.
By that point, the justice had become fixated on owning an R.V., and not just any R.V., but the Rolls-Royce of motor coaches: a custom Prevost Marathon, or as he once put it, a “condo on wheels.”
A Toy for the Rich
Justice Thomas was turned on to the luxury brand by Bernie Little, a fellow Horatio Alger member and the flamboyantly wealthy owner of the Miss Budweiser hydroplane racing boat. Mr. Little had owned 20 to 25 custom motor coaches over the years, Mr. Thomas told C-SPAN in 2001.
Back in those days, a basic Prevost Marathon sold for about a million dollars, and could fetch far more depending on the bells and whistles. It was a rich man’s toy, and the company marketed it that way.
“You drive through a neighborhood in South Florida and you see these $10 million homes,” Bob Phebus, Marathon’s vice president, told The South Florida Business Journal in 2006. “You condense that down, put it on wheels and that’s what we have. It’s the same guy that will have a 100-foot yacht and a private aircraft. They’re accustomed to the finer things in life.”
At the time, the Thomases’ primary source of income was the justice’s salary, then $167,900. He had yet to sell his autobiography, and property and other records show that the couple had significant debt: They had purchased their house in 1992 for $552,000 with 5 percent down, then refinanced it two years later, taking out a 15-year mortgage of $496,000. Plus, they had at least one line of credit of between $15,000 and $50,000.
So, in Justice Thomas’s telling, he began searching for a used Prevost at Mr. Little’s suggestion, one with enough miles on it to depreciate the value. “The depreciation curve — it’s very steep,” he made a point of saying in the 2001 C-SPAN interview.
All these years later, he still hasn’t told some of his closest friends how he was really able to swing the purchase.
“He told me he saved up all his money to buy it,” said Armstrong Williams, a longtime friend who worked closely with Justice Thomas in the Reagan administration.
The title history documents reviewed by The Times show that when the motor coach was sold for $267,230 to the Thomases in 1999, it had only 93,618 miles on it, relatively few for a vehicle that experts say can easily log a million miles in its lifetime. It came equipped with plush leather seating, a kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom in the back. In addition to its orange flame motif, it had a large Pegasus painted on the back, according to Jason Mang, the step-grandson of the previous owner, Bonnie Owenby.
“It was superluxury, really bougie,” he recalled.
On Nov. 19, 1999, after spotting the motor coach on the lot of Desert West Coach in Phoenix and putting a hold on it, Justice Thomas attended a dinner at the conservative Goldwater Institute. In a speech that night, he said he had never yearned to be a federal judge. “Pure and simple, I wanted to be rich,” he said.
Wayne Mullis, the owner of the now-defunct Desert West, said in an interview that Justice Thomas never discussed obtaining traditional financing with him, and that “as far as I know, he paid for it.”
Indeed, Justice Thomas would have been hard-pressed to get a loan from a traditional lender. Banks, and even finance companies that specialize in R.V. loans, are particularly reluctant to lend money on used Prevost Marathons because the customized features are hard to value, according to three leading industry executives interviewed by The Times.
“As a rule, the majority of buyers are cash buyers — they don’t finance the Prevost, generally,” said Chad Stevens, owner of an Arizona-based dealership specializing in high-end motor coaches, whose clients include celebrities and politicians. “In 1999, you would need a very strong down payment and a strong financial portfolio to finance one. It is a luxury item.”
While the terms of Mr. Welters’s loan to Justice Thomas are unclear, rules governing loans of more than $10,000 between friends and family are not.
Loans can be reclassified as gifts or income to the borrower, either of which would have to be reported by the justice under court disclosure rules, if any portion of the debt is forgiven or discharged as uncollectable. But even if a lender does not take those steps, a loan can still be considered a reportable gift or income if it doesn’t meet certain standards.
Loan terms should be spelled out in a written agreement, with a clearly defined, regular repayment schedule, tax experts said. Lenders must charge at least the applicable federal interest rate, which was a little over 6 percent in December 1999, when the deal to buy the motor coach closed. And if a borrower is in arrears, lenders must make a good-faith effort to collect, even to the point of going to court.
“Absent that, it’s more of a gift,” said Rich Lahijani, tax director of Edelman Financial Engines, an independent wealth planning and investment advisory firm.
The title history records held by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles do not contain detailed information about the loan itself. What they show is that when the Thomases drove their motor coach back home to Virginia, they registered it in Prince William County, which does not charge personal property tax on R.V.s stored there, unlike Fairfax County, where they live.
And as of late last month, when The Times reviewed the records, they still listed Mr. Welters as the lien holder, notwithstanding the signed release he said he gave Justice Thomas in 2008 so he could obtain a new, clear title.
Mr. Welters said he could not explain why he was still listed as the holder of the lien. After he gave Justice Thomas the paperwork, he said, “I don’t know what process the borrower should have followed.” (To clear the title, the paperwork should have been brought to the D.M.V., where the lien release would have been recorded and a replacement title issued.) As for Justice Thomas, that was among the matters he declined to discuss with The Times.
‘A Warm, Safe Place’
As details about Justice and Mrs. Thomas’s subsidized trips to vacation homes and resorts have become public in recent months, his professed preference for traveling by motor coach has become something of a “yeah, right” punchline.
But by all accounts, he loves the anonymity, the freedom and the community it affords. He has hosted at least one event at the Supreme Court for a Marathon owners’ club.
When he hits the road, he often goes unrecognized, which at times has allowed him to travel without a U.S. Marshals’ security detail. Chris Weaver, who worked at Desert West Coach, said the justice had frequently gotten his motor coach serviced there before it closed. “Nine out of 10 times, he was just wearing sweats and a T-shirt,” he said.
Traveling largely through red-state America has also meant that when he is recognized, more often than not it is by fans. Juan Williams, a Fox News commentator who has known Justice Thomas since the Reagan administration, said the motor coach was both the fulfillment of a boyish fantasy and a metaphorical “womb.”
“He talked about the R.V. a lot,” he said. “It was a warm, safe place where he didn’t have to be attacked by liberals and Blacks on the left. What he liked about it was not being pilloried.”
In a 2019 Q. and A. at the court, Justice Thomas said he had made it to nearly two dozen states, and declared himself the proud owner of a KOA campground discount card.
But the Thomases’ road trips have hardly been limited to sleeping at campsites and Walmart parking lots.
In a 2009 call-in to a morning radio talk show, for instance, Mrs. Thomas said they were driving their motor coach through the Adirondacks, on their way to “meet some families from Texas.” ProPublica has reported that the Thomases have spent part of nearly every summer for the past two decades in the Adirondacks as a guest of Mr. Crow, who owns a lakeside resort there with more than 25 fireplaces, three boathouses and a painting of the justice, his host and other guests smoking cigars.
When the Thomases aren’t houseguests, they have stayed at upscale Marathon-endorsed destinations like the Mountain Falls Luxury Motorcoach Resort in Lake Toxaway, N.C.
There, the justice met Larry Fields, who owns a motor-coach-cleaning business. Mr. Fields said that for several days he had had no idea who Justice Thomas was, telling him he would have to wait in line to have his Prevost washed, which he patiently did.
“He was a great guy,” Mr. Fields recalled. “I think we talked about how great Reagan was. He was low-key. It was just him and his wife and a dog.”
Upkeep on a motor coach like the justice’s is an expensive constant, and other friends have chipped in to help. While he did not disclose Mr. Welters’s assistance in buying the motor coach, he did report that some former clerks got together and bought him deep-cycle batteries for $1,200 the year after he acquired it. He also reported that in 2002, Greg Werner, who ran a large, family-owned, Nebraska-based trucking company, gave him tires worth $1,200.
And over time, Justice Thomas made the motor coach his own. In a photo The Times obtained that appears to date back to the early 2000s, picturing his great-nephew as a child, the motor coach no longer sported the sizzling orange flames and Pegasus logo. Instead, it was painted in an elegant black-and-gold geometric pattern.
But if the custom coach changed, the justice’s friendship with Mr. Welters endured.
While Mr. Welters was an executive at UnitedHealthcare, Justice Thomas twice recused himself from cases involving the company, in 2003 and 2005. As is the general custom of the court, he did not explain why.
In 2010, Justice Thomas traveled to the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, Port of Spain, at the invitation of the Welterses. By then, the couple had become major Democratic fund-raisers and President Obama had named Ms. Welters ambassador to the island nation. Local newspapers captured the justice and Mr. Welters talking to students at a school.
In disclosures, Justice Thomas wrote that the “U.S. Embassy Port of Spain” had paid for his flight. But flight records obtained through the plane-tracking services of MyRadar show that the Welterses’ private Gulfstream G-6 flew from Washington Dulles International Airport and back on the days that Justice Thomas arrived on and departed the Caribbean island.
And Matthew Cassetta, a retired embassy official who helped arrange the visit, said Ms. Welters customarily “offered the plane to people who came down,” always at her own expense to save the taxpayers money.
(Ms. Welters declined to comment on the flights or the loan, except to say, “I just want to tell you that friendships come and go, and that’s what I want to say.”)
The same year, in a speech accepting an award from the Horatio Alger Association, Justice Thomas singled out Mr. Welters as one of his “friends for the whole journey.”
“And for Tony, a special thank you, who understood relationships and who was always there as a friend in the worst times of my life,” he said. “It is a friendship I will treasure forever.”
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Rescue workers at the blood transfusion center in Kupiansk. (photo: Telegram/Volodymyr Zelenskiy/Reuters)
Ukrainian president says ‘dead and wounded reported’ after strike on facility in Kharkiv
A separate attack struck a key factory, both incidents on Saturday coming just hours after Kyiv hit a Russian tanker in the Kerch Strait.
The incidents were the latest since Moscow exited a deal last month that had ensured Ukraine could still export grain despite the ongoing conflict.
Russian forces struck the blood transfusion centre in the Kharkiv region of north-east Ukraine, Zelenskiy said, adding that “dead and wounded are reported”.
A “guided air bomb” hit the centre in Kupiansk, a city a few dozen kilometres from the Russian border, he said.
“Rescuers are extinguishing the fire,” he wrote on social media, adding: “This war crime alone says everything about Russian aggression.”
The strike came shortly after Zelenskiy said Russian missiles had hit a factory belonging to Motor Sich, which makes plane and helicopter engines and other components.
It is one of several companies requisitioned by the Ukraine government since Moscow’s invasion. The site is near Khmelnytskyi in western Ukraine, around 300km (190 miles) south-west of Kyiv.
The region, home to a major Ukrainian airbase, has been regularly targeted by Russian strikes in recent months.
In his evening address, Zelenskiy remained defiant, insisting that “no matter how many such Russian attacks there are, they will still do nothing for the enemy”.
Earlier on Saturday, Ukraine claimed it “blew up” a Russian tanker, the Sig, that was transporting fuel for Russian troops, a Ukrainian security source told AFP.
The tanker was hit at about 11:20pm (20:20 GMT) on Friday south of the Kerch Strait, Russia’s Federal Agency for Sea and Inland Water Transport said.
The ship was holed at the waterline in the area of the engine room but was still afloat, the agency said.
In a video obtained by AFP purporting to show the attack, a vessel is seen approaching a large ship before the connection cuts off.
The Ukrainian source said the “successful special operation”, which involved a naval drone and explosives, was carried out jointly with the navy in Ukrainian territorial waters.
The Sig oil and chemical tanker is under US sanctions for supplying jet fuel to Russian forces in Syria, who are supporting President Bashar al-Assad.
The Russian foreign ministry condemned the attack on a “civilian vessel”, adding that the crew had not been injured.
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An upcoming referendum in Ohio has become a proxy fight for abortion. (photo: Jake Olson/BBC)
A pro-choice referendum looked poised to win in the conservative state of Ohio this November. Now, Republican state legislators are accused of moving the goalposts.
Mr Curtin, retired after a 38-year career in journalism and another four in state politics, loves the game. But this summer, Mr Curtin's umpire equipment has been neglected, shoved somewhere in the basement of his Columbus home so he could focus on the rules of Ohio politics instead.
"I'm not doing one game," he said. "And I miss it. But this fight's too important to lose."
The fight in question is over Issue 1, a deceivingly dull and procedural-sounding referendum on the minimum threshold required to pass constitutional amendments.
The premise is simple: voters will decide on 8 August whether that threshold should remain at 50% plus one, or be raised to 60%.
But Ohio's vote has become a proxy war over abortion, one of the many state-wide battles that have broken out since the US Supreme Court rescinded the nationwide right to abortion last June.
That's because Issue 1 is not the only referendum looming. In November, Ohioans will vote on another constitutional amendment, one that would protect abortion access up until foetal viability, around 24 weeks of pregnancy.
The proponents of issue 1 claim that Tuesday's vote is simply to protect the state's constitution from outside influence.
But its opponents - a diverse coalition featuring political wonks like Mr Curtin, a retired Supreme Court judge and all of Ohio's past living governors - have called foul. They claim Issue 1 is a backhanded attempt to change the rules mid-game, raising the voter threshold just in time to thwart the abortion vote.
"Look, everybody knows what's going on here. Everybody knows," Mr Curtin said. "This was just bad faith."
Since Roe v Wade was overturned last June, the country's abortion fight has increasingly played out in state ballot initiatives. There have been six so far, each one a win for abortion rights.
If Ohio's vote is passed, it will be the most sweeping affirmation of reproductive rights in a state controlled by a firm Republican majority, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis and a leading authority on the US abortion debate. "It will confirm that there's some sort of consensus around abortion rights, even in conservative states."
And according to recent surveys, if all Ohioans were to show up for the vote now, abortion would win. The constitutional amendment is supported by 58% of Ohioans, with 32% opposed, according to a July poll from USA Today and Suffolk University.
But if Issue 1 is passed first, and the threshold is raised to 60%, the abortion rights amendment may be finished.
"They [anti-abortion campaigners] very clearly looked at this and said: we cannot win if we don't change the rules," said Kellie Copeland, executive director of Pro-Choice Ohio.
Issue 1 has had the full-throated support of Ohio's chief election official, secretary of state Frank LaRose.
"To allow a bare majority of 50% plus one to change the very ground rules that the state operates on is just not good public policy," he told the BBC.
Mr LaRose, 44, is a veteran of the US Special Forces and now an enthusiastic envoy for the Republican Party, crisscrossing the state for more than 65 pro-Issue 1 events. He is charming, conservative and politically ambitious. In November - at the same time the abortion referendum is held - Mr LaRose will be on the ballot for the US Senate.
In public, Mr LaRose has kept the focus squarely on the constitution. But at a fundraising dinner in May, Mr LaRose made explicit the importance of Issue 1 for the anti-abortion movement.
"I'm pro-life. I think many of you are as well," Mr LaRose said, in a video recorded by Scanner Media. "This is 100% about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution. The left wants to jam it in there this coming November."
In an interview with the BBC, Mr LaRose acknowledged that the "looming abortion amendment" helped bring the Issue 1 vote forward. "But that's not the only reason," he said.
To his opponents, Mr LaRose had been caught saying the quiet part out loud.
"There's an old standard that our grandparents taught us that bears repeating: if you want any credibility in life... never deny the obvious," Mr Curtin said. "Here is Mr LaRose denying the obvious."
There have been other accusations of hypocrisy. Earlier this year, Republicans passed a law eliminating nearly all August elections, citing their high cost and low turnout. Then, in an apparent u-turn, they put Issue 1 on the calendar for 8 August.
Even some of Mr LaRose's fellow Republicans have spoken out against Issue 1.
"You're talking about changing a part of the Ohio constitution that has been in effect for well over 100 years," said former Ohio Governor Bob Taft, a Republican. "And it's worked, it's worked well, the system is not broken."
In the 111 years since Ohio first granted voters the power to introduce citizen-led amendments, just 19 of 71 proposed measures have passed. Ohio's current policy requiring a simple majority is in line with most of the 17 US states that allow citizen-initiated amendments. And in 2015, Ohioans added a new restriction, passing an amendment that prohibited anyone from changing the constitution for their own financial benefit.
"This is an elaborate scheme to suppress the vote of Ohioans… It's unconscionable," said former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor, also a Republican.
Whatever Mr LaRose's motivations, Issue 1 has been embraced by Ohio's anti-abortion lobby. Mike Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life, said he "led efforts" to get signatures from state politicians to put the measure on the ballot.
"In speaking with Frank LaRose I said 'now's our time to do this'," he told the BBC.
Mr Gonidakis, like Mr LaRose, rejected criticism that Issue 1 was underhanded. "It's not changing the goalposts if Ohioans weigh in and vote on it," he said.
Experts said they see Ohio's Issue 1 as part of a broader tactic employed by anti-abortion advocates to circumvent public opinion in service of their ultimate goal, outlawing abortion entirely - a goal that is unsupported by most Americans.
"They think if voters had a straight up and down decision on abortion it wouldn't go their way, so they're trying to do what they can to prevent that from happening," said the University of California's Ms Ziegler.
As a result, anti-abortion leaders and their Republican allies have found paths around popular support - either relying on the court system or on politicians willing to promote abortion policy regardless of voters' wishes.
These manoeuvres are possible, Ms Ziegler said, because in so many cases Republican politicians fear the anti-abortion lobby more than their own constituents.
And the strategy suits the movement's internal logic, in which banning abortion is seen as the worthiest cause.
"There's a sense in which winning is more important than democracy," she said.
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Gov. Ron DeSantis and Gov. Gavin Newsom. (photo: AP)
After the Florida governor agreed to debate the California governor this week, DeSantis' team offered its own rules for the debate, which differed from what Newsom had proposed.
Newsom's team on Saturday slammed DeSantis' proposed rules for their debate on Fox News.
“What a joke," Newsom spokesman Nathan Click said in a statement in response to the proposal that DeSantis' team sent Fox News host Sean Hannity a day earlier.
"Desantis’ counterproposal is littered with crutches to hide his insecurity and ineptitude — swapping opening statements with a hype video, cutting down the time he needs to be on stage, adding cheat notes and a cheering section," Click said. "Ron should be able to stand on his own two feet. It’s no wonder Trump is kicking his ass.”
DeSantis' team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
DeSantis, who is running for the GOP presidential nomination, told Hannity on Wednesday that he would be willing to debate Newsom, a Democratic governor with whom he has frequently clashed on issues like guns, abortion, education and immigration.
“Absolutely. I’m game. Let’s get it done. Just tell me when and where. We’ll do it,” DeSantis said, agreeing to the debate idea that initially came about in June, when Hannity asked Newsom if he'd debate DeSantis.
Newsom sent a formal debate offer letter to Hannity in July that included rules such as that the debate would be moderated by Hannity, be broadcast live and 90 minutes in length, and that both governors would not use notes. Newsom also proposed Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina as potential locations.
In a letter to Hannity, dated Friday, DeSantis' team offered its own rules for the debate, which diverged from some proposed by Newsom. Some of the differences:
- DeSantis suggested four dates from between Sept. 19 to Nov. 8, while Newsom proposed two dates in November.
- DeSantis wanted a live audience with a 50-50 split, while Newsom said "no live audience."
- DeSantis does not want opening remarks, while Newsom would like both participants to get four minutes.
- DeSantis proposed that they each submit a two-minute-long video that must be approved by Fox News before it is played at the top of the debate.
Hannity on Wednesday framed the event as a “policy-based debate” between the heads of a red state and blue state, but DeSantis has said that the debate will be far more than that.
“This is the debate for the future of our country," he told Hannity.
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Hundreds of suspects on the list remain at large. (photo: Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty Images)
Online sleuths say they’ve identified more than 100 people on the FBI’s “most wanted” list of Capitol attackers. But the delay in making arrests even has some ex-agents concerned.
“Man, should I just tell the FBI to come get me or what?” Banuelos asked, according to an interview transcript first reported by Utah’s KSL.
The FBI was indeed looking for Banuelos. Five months earlier, it had uploaded pictures of him to its “most wanted” page of suspected participants in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Banuelos had been filmed flashing a gun at reporters on Capitol grounds, in apparent violation of a firearms ban. Soon after the FBI uploaded Banuelos’ picture, internet sleuths identified him and sent his name to the agency. And in his interview with Salt Lake City Police, Banuelos appeared to confirm that identity, suggesting police “look me up.”
“Yeah, I went inside and I’m the one with the video with the gun right here,” he told officers.
He wasn’t charged in the stabbing. And two years later, he hasn’t been charged in the Capitol riot, despite the publication of his name or his appearance on the FBI’s “most wanted” page, which describes him as a suspect in an assault on a member of the media. Hundreds of other suspects on the list also remain at large, despite online sleuths claiming to have identified them and passed their names to the FBI.
This July, the statute of limitations on most Jan. 6 cases passed the halfway mark, prompting concern from sleuths like those who identified Banuelos—as well as from former FBI agents.
“We hear people like Director Wray saying, ‘We’re approaching this as a big deal,’” a former high-ranking FBI official who requested anonymity told The Daily Beast, “but I’m not convinced that sense of urgency is being conveyed sufficiently to certain elements of the bureau. Or if it is, and it’s not being actioned, that’s an even bigger problem.”
Online investigators, who claim to have identified many of the people on the FBI’s “most wanted” site, expressed similar frustrations.
After the Capitol attack, self-described “sedition hunters” took information straight to FBI tiplines and avoided interacting with reporters, for fear of complicating the criminal cases, said one sleuth.
“But I think that latter view is changing,” the volunteer investigator told The Daily Beast. Like many in his community, he requested anonymity for fear of retribution from the right. “There’s a lot more impatience toward the FBI, given that we’re two-and-a-half years in at this point. Many of these IDs have been sitting in an inbox for two years, or those people have not been arrested. It can be a bit frustrating.”
By March 2023, online investigators had identified more than 100 still-at-large suspects according to USA Today.
Another online investigator who requested anonymity told The Daily Beast that frustration had spiked in her community this spring. That’s when a Republican-led House subcommittee on the “weaponization of the federal government” began taking aim at the FBI’s Jan. 6 investigations, accusing it of overreach.
“We had 27 arrests in January. We had 15 arrests in February. We had 19 arrests in March,” she recalled. “And March is when the Republican Weaponization Committee began attacking the FBI and the DOJ saying they were weaponizing the federal government and seeking to defund the FBI and the DOJ. Then came April; we had only 13 arrests. In May, we had only six arrests.”
Arrest rates rebounded in June and July, with the DOJ pressing charges against more than 80 people. But the dip made some observers nervous about political pressures facing the investigation.
Testimony before the Weaponization Committee revealed deep rifts in FBI attitudes toward the Jan. 6 investigations, the Wall Street Journal reported in March. During those hearings, several former FBI officers (including two who have lost their security clearances under disputed circumstances) testified that some agents and field offices disagreed with investigation tactics, at time refusing requests from other field offices in the case.
Reached for comment, the FBI told The Daily Beast that “investigating the violent assaults on law enforcement officers, obstruction of justice, seditious conspiracy, and multiple other federal crimes committed during the January 6 attack on the Capitol has been and remains a priority for the FBI. We work closely with the prosecutors who bring charges, and as of last month more than more than 1,069 defendants have been charged for criminal activity on January 6. Additional details can be found on DOJ’s website at https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/30-months-jan-6-attack-capitol.
“We are asking for continued help to identify other individuals for their role in the violence at the U.S. Capitol and encourage the public to visit https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/capitol-violence for images and video of these suspects. Anyone with tips can call 1-800-CALL-FBI (800-225-5324) or visit tips.fbi.gov. As we have seen with numerous cases, the tips matter.
“Additionally, the FBI is and will always be independent. While criticism often comes with the job, we will continue to follow the facts wherever they lead, do things by the book, and speak through our work.”
The Capitol riot investigation is the largest case in the FBI’s history, experts noted.
“It’s a mammoth undertaking,” said David Shapiro, a former FBI agent who now serves as Distinguished Lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He pointed to the extraordinary volume of evidence from the attack. “How many witnesses are involved, how much digital evidence, how much testimonial evidence? All of this stuff has to be digitized, organized, indexed, copied, distributed among multiple field offices of the bureau.”
More than 1,000 people have been charged in relation to the Jan. 6 attack. Still, hundreds of people from the FBI’s “most wanted” list, alone, remain at large. Most of those remaining cases involve potential charges of assaulting a federal officer. The felony—one of the Capitol attack’s most serious charges—has a five-year statute of limitations that passed its midway point last month.
And arrests rates in Jan. 6 cases have slowed. In the first year after the attack, prosecutors charged just over 700 people for their alleged involvement in the riot. In 2022, fewer than 250 new suspects faced charges.
Mike German, a former FBI agent, noted that many of the early arrests were for less serious offenses like trespassing on Capitol grounds. The trend, combined with reports that suggested the FBI had missed signs of the impending attack, suggested to German that investigators “didn’t have a coherent view of the larger conspiracy in the beginning,” he told The Daily Beast.
“They were treating this like, ‘OK, this is a bunch of otherwise good people who got caught up in the moment and got outta hand.’ We’ll charge the ones who are most prominent by walking into the Capitol and videotaping themselves and putting their criminal activity on social media, to send a message that we’re taking this seriously.”
The FBI has insisted from the investigation’s earliest days that it is prioritizing the case. Throughout the investigation, the agency has promoted its tipline. “The FBI is seeking the public’s assistance in identifying individuals who made unlawful entry into the U.S. Capitol building and committed various other alleged criminal violations,” the FBI’s website reads.
But the former high-ranking FBI official told The Daily Beast that he had heard of individual FBI field offices displaying less enthusiasm for the case.
“I know there were questions from leadership of field offices that were far away [from D.C.], which maybe had only one or two cases,” he said, describing field office leaders as asking questions like “‘This is a misdemeanor charge, why are we pursuing this?’ ‘The guy only went into the Capitol.’ ‘How come we didn’t do this sort of thing with the antifa 2020 protesters?’”
In those cases, the former official said, national FBI leadership reassured the field offices that they had pursued the left with equal vigor.
FBI leadership has forcefully denied the right’s allegations that it is mishandling Jan. 6 investigations, with Wray calling some Republican claims about the FBI’s Jan. 6 involvement “ludicrous.”
Still with the statute of limitations in most Jan. 6 cases now halfway through, former FBI officials are underscoring the risk of letting the remaining suspects skate.
“This insurrectionist rhetoric hasn't slowed down,” German, the former agent said. “So as we have more elections coming up, the more these individuals feel that they’re immune from prosecution, the more aggressive they’ll act.”
Some, including identifiable figures like Banuelos, have been arrested in other incidents after Jan. 6. Another man, according to an independent investigation reviewed by The Daily Beast, is wanted by the FBI for alleged assault on a federal officer at the Capitol, but has so far only been arrested on charges in an unrelated case in Arkansas.
The former high-ranking FBI official said “it doesn’t make a lot of sense” why some of the identifiable suspects remain at large. He added that the issue couldn’t be attributed to a single apathetic agent, but an overall lack of urgency at the FBI.
“If a case agent is not motivated in Kansas somewhere, shame on him or her. But ultimately, that’s a leadership issue,” he said. “It’s a question for the leadership of the office. It’s a question for the leadership of the FBI. And it’s not acceptable. Particularly if we start hitting the point of statute of limitation issues, I think it’s inexcusable.”
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Porcha Woodruff, 32, of Detroit, said she gestured at her stomach when the police arrived at her house to indicate how ill-equipped she was to commit a robbery and carjacking. (photo: Nic Antaya/NYT)
Porsha Woodruff thought the police who showed up at her door to arrest her for carjacking were joking. She is the first woman known to be wrongfully accused as a result of facial recognition technology.
“Are you kidding?” she recalled saying to the officers. Ms. Woodruff, 32, said she gestured at her stomach to indicate how ill-equipped she was to commit such a crime: She was eight months pregnant.
Handcuffed in front of her home on a Thursday morning last February, leaving her crying children with her fiancé, Ms. Woodruff was taken to the Detroit Detention Center. She said she was held for 11 hours, questioned about a crime she said she had no knowledge of, and had her iPhone seized to be searched for evidence.
“I was having contractions in the holding cell. My back was sending me sharp pains. I was having spasms. I think I was probably having a panic attack,” said Ms. Woodruff, a licensed aesthetician and nursing school student. “I was hurting, sitting on those concrete benches.”
After being charged in court with robbery and carjacking, Ms. Woodruff was released that evening on a $100,000 personal bond. In an interview, she said she went straight to the hospital where she was diagnosed with dehydration and given two bags of intravenous fluids. A month later, two weeks before giving birth to her son, the Wayne County prosecutor dismissed the case against her.
The ordeal started with an automated facial recognition search, according to an investigator’s report from the Detroit Police Department. Ms. Woodruff is the sixth person to report being falsely accused of a crime as a result of facial recognition technology used by police to match an unknown offender’s face to a photo in a database. All six people have been Black; Ms. Woodruff is the first woman to report it happening to her.
It is the third case involving the Detroit Police Department, which runs, on average, 125 facial recognition searches a year, almost entirely on Black men, according to weekly reports about the technology’s use provided by the police to Detroit’s Board of Police Commissioners, a civilian oversight group. Critics of the technology say the cases expose its weaknesses and the dangers posed to innocent people.
The Detroit Police Department “is an agency that has every reason to know of the risks that using face recognition carries,” said Clare Garvie, an expert on the technology at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “And it’s happening anyway.”
On Thursday, Ms. Woodruff filed a lawsuit for wrongful arrest against the city of Detroit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.
“I have reviewed the allegations contained in the lawsuit. They are very concerning,” Detroit’s police chief, James E. White, said in a statement in response to questions from The New York Times. “We are taking this matter very seriously, but we cannot comment further at this time due to the need for additional investigation.”
The Wayne County prosecutor, Kym Worthy, considers the arrest warrant in Ms. Woodruff’s case to be “appropriate based upon the facts,” according to a statement issued by her office.
The Investigation
On a Sunday night two and a half weeks before police showed up at Ms. Woodruff’s door, a 25-year-old man called the Detroit police from a liquor store to report that he had been robbed at gunpoint, according to a police report included in Ms. Woodruff’s lawsuit.
The robbery victim told the police that he had picked up a woman on the street earlier in the day. He said that they had been drinking together in his car, first in a liquor store parking lot, where they engaged in sexual intercourse, and then at a BP gas station. When he dropped her off at a spot 10 minutes away, a man there to meet her produced a handgun, took the victim’s wallet and phone, and fled in the victim’s Chevy Malibu, according to the police report.
Days later, the police arrested a man driving the stolen vehicle. A woman who matched the description given by the victim dropped off his phone at the same BP gas station, the police report said.
A detective with the police department’s commercial auto theft unit got the surveillance video from the BP gas station, the police report said, and asked a crime analyst at the department to run a facial recognition search on the woman.
According to city documents, the department uses a facial recognition vendor called DataWorks Plus to run unknown faces against a database of criminal mug shots; the system returns matches ranked by their likelihood of being the same person. A human analyst is ultimately responsible for deciding if any of the matches are a potential suspect. The police report said the crime analyst gave the investigator Ms. Woodruff’s name based on a match to a 2015 mug shot. Ms. Woodruff said in an interview that she had been arrested in 2015 after being pulled over while driving with an expired license.
Five days after the carjacking, the police report said, the detective assigned to the case asked the victim to look at the mug shots of six Black women, commonly called a “six-pack photo lineup.” Ms. Woodruff’s photo was among them. He identified Ms. Woodruff as the woman he had been with. That was the basis for her arrest, according to the police report. (The police did not say whether another woman has since been charged in the case.)
Gary Wells, a psychology professor who has studied the reliability of eyewitness identifications, said pairing facial recognition technology with an eyewitness identification should not be the basis for charging someone with a crime. Even if that similar-looking person is innocent, an eyewitness who is asked to make the same comparison is likely to repeat the mistake made by the computer.
“It is circular and dangerous,” Dr. Wells said. “You’ve got a very powerful tool that, if it searches enough faces, will always yield people who look like the person on the surveillance image.”
Dr. Wells said the technology compounds an existing problem with eyewitnesses. “They assume when you show them a six-pack, the real person is there,” he said.
Serious Consequences
The city of Detroit faces three lawsuits for wrongful arrests based on the use of the technology.
“Shoddy technology makes shoddy investigations, and police assurances that they will conduct serious investigations do not ring true,” said Phil Mayor, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan.
Mr. Mayor represents Robert Williams, a Detroit man who was arrested in January 2020 for shoplifting based on a faulty facial recognition match, for which the prosecutor’s office later apologized.
In his lawsuit, Mr. Williams is trying to get the city to agree to collect more evidence in cases involving automated face searches and to end what Mr. Mayor called the “facial recognition to line-up pipeline.”
“This is an extremely dangerous practice that has led to multiple false arrests that we know of,” Mr. Mayor said.
The Toll
Ms. Woodruff said she was stressed for the rest of her pregnancy. She had to go to the police station the next day to retrieve her phone, and appeared for court hearings twice by Zoom before the case was dismissed because of insufficient evidence.
“It’s scary. I’m worried. Someone always looks like someone else,” said her attorney, Ivan L. Land. “Facial recognition is just an investigative tool. If you get a hit, do your job and go further. Knock on her door.”
Ms. Woodruff said that she was embarrassed to be arrested in front of her neighbors and that her daughters were traumatized. They now tease her infant son that he was “in jail before he was even born.”
The experience was all the more difficult because she was so far along in her pregnancy, but Ms. Woodruff said she feels lucky that she was. She thinks it convinced authorities that she did not commit the crime. The woman involved in the carjacking had not been visibly pregnant.
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Scientists work in a makeshift medical clinic while researching for signs of mercury contamination in animals, at the Los Amigos Biological Station, in Los Amigos, in the Madre de Dios region, Peru, May 24, 2023. (photo: Alessandro Cinque/Reuters)
The researchers placed the small-eared pygmy rice rat into a plastic chamber and piped in anesthetic gas until it rolled over, asleep. Removing the creature from the chamber, they fitted it with a miniature anesthetic mask and measured its body parts with a ruler before gently pulling hairs from its back with tweezers.
The hairs, bundled into a tiny plastic bag, would be carried to a nearby lab at the Los Amigos Biological Station for testing to determine whether the rat is yet another victim of mercury contamination.
Los Amigos lies in the rainforest of southeastern Peru's Madre de Dios region where some 46,000 miners are searching for gold along river banks in the country's epicenter of small-scale mining.
Tests like this are providing the first extensive indications that mercury from illegal and poorly regulated mining is affecting terrestrial mammals in the Amazon rainforest, according to preliminary findings from a world-first study shared with Reuters.
Absorbing or ingesting mercury-contaminated water or food has been found to cause neurological illness, immune diseases and reproductive failure in humans and some birds.
But scientists don't yet know its full effects on other forest animals in the Amazon, where more than 10,000 species of plants and animals are at a high risk of extinction due to destruction of the rainforest.
Reuters accompanied the researchers in Madre de Dios over three days in late May and reviewed their previously unreported findings. Their data showed mercury contamination from informal gold mining making its way into the biodiversity hotspot's mammals — from rodents to ocelots to titi monkeys.
Leaders from the eight countries around the Amazon meeting in Brazil next week will discuss how to end illegal gold mining.
The rapid expansion of mining in the rainforest over the past 15 years is seen by regional governments as an environmental and health threat. Colombia has proposed a regional pact to end illegal mining, although has not suggested a deadline to reach that goal, a government spokesperson told Reuters.
A research team from the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, the California nonprofit Field Projects International and Peruvian partner Conservación Amazônica have collected fur and feather samples from more than 2,600 animals representing at least 260 species, including emperor tamarins and brown capuchins, in the 4.5 square kilometer (1.7 square mile) area around the Los Amigos station.
While the scientists began testing for mercury at Los Amigos in 2021, some of the samples were gathered as early as 2018.
Of the 330 primate samples tested so far, virtually all showed mercury contamination -- and in some cases the levels were "astounding," said biologist Mrinalini Erkenswick Watsa of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
Erkenswick Watsa said they could not share specific readings before their findings are published in peer-reviewed journals.
But a study last year led by biogeochemist Jacqueline Gerson of the University of Colorado Boulder, drawing on the same data generated at Los Amigos, found that songbirds living around the station had mercury levels as much as 12 times higher than those in a forest farther away from gold mining.
During Reuters' visit to Los Amigos, scientists caught rodents in metal traps baited with peanut butter and snagged birds and a bat in mist nets floating through the forest.
A MINING BOOM
The vast majority of small-scale or artisanal miners in the Amazon are mining illegally in protected areas, or working informally - outside reserves but without explicit permission from the government.
Informal miners even in government-designated mining corridors, which includes much of the Madre de Dios region, operate with little regulatory oversight.
Some researchers say this means that many small-scale mining operations disregard environmental laws restricting deforestation and the use of toxic liquid mercury to separate precious metal from sediment.
Some of that mercury is then absorbed into the environment and, in some cases, into endangered species.
"When someone buys their gold engagement ring, they could be causing the Amazon to get a little bit sicker," said Erkenswick Watsa.
Peruvians have mined gold for centuries. Artisanal mining boomed in the Madre de Dios region during the 2008 Great Recession as gold prices spiked, driven up by investors fleeing financial markets and national currencies for a safe place to put their money.
Tracking artisanal miners is notoriously difficult. It is thought to make up about a fifth of worldwide gold production and is valued between $30 billion and $40 billion, according to nonprofit Artisanal Gold Council (AGC) which promotes the sustainable development of the sector.
That's around 500 metric tons annually as of 2023, up from about 330 metric tons in 2011, AGC data shows. Peru, the largest gold producer in Latin America, churns out around 150 metric tons of artisanal gold every year, according to the AGC.
In Madre de Dios, about 6,000 miners work with formal permission while roughly 40,000 operate informally or illegally, according to a 2022 USAID report.
The Peruvian government declared a state of emergency in Madre de Dios in 2019 and deployed 1,500 police and soldiers to the region to crack down on illegal mining.
The operation pushed many miners out of protected areas and into a government-designated mining corridor, according to satellite monitoring project MAAP.
Peru's environment ministry did not respond to questions about mercury contamination.
In 2021, mining arrived on Los Amigos' doorstep. The station sits on the edge of the mining corridor and overlooks a barren curve across the river where miners have stripped away the forest and replaced it with mining pits.
"This is a region in Peru where there's been an economic boom, and it's been associated with gold mining," said Gideon Erkenswick, a researcher and Mrinalini's husband, who has come to Los Amigos since 2009 to study wildlife diseases and primates. "This place is being transformed by it."
The Peruvian government estimates that illegal miners dump about 180 metric tons of mercury in Madre de Dios annually.
The miners mix mercury with fine river silt in oil drums. The mercury binds to the gold fragments, resulting in lumps known as amalgams. Burning the amalgams turns the mercury to vapor which floats into the atmosphere, leaving only gold behind.
This gaseous mercury has been found to infiltrate the forest through pores in plant leaves, according to research published in Nature Communications last year.
Mercury vapor sticks to dust and aerosol particles, floating down through the canopy and landing on leaves. When it rains, that mercury is washed to the forest floor.
MERCURY MENAGERIE
Shortly after dawn, biologist Jorge Luis Mendoza Silva gently untangled a brilliant red, yellow and orange band-tailed manakin bird from a fine-mesh net.
Back in the sampling tent, the scientists tweezed clumps of the manakin's breast feathers to be sent for analysis, before the bird is returned unharmed to the wild.
The machine incinerates the feathers at extremely high temperatures, measuring the emitted mercury.
Animals ingest mercury through their diet — plants, insects, or other animals. Those higher up the food chain generally have higher levels as they accumulate the mercury contained in their prey.
But scientists at the Los Amigos station are unsure where the mercury contamination in monkeys comes from, given fish or other foods traditionally high in the heavy metal aren't typically on the menu.
Animals could be accumulating mercury from the water they drink, or the air they breathe, said Caroline Moore, a veterinary toxicologist with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance studying mercury at Los Amigos.
How this will affect their health is not clear. The effects of mercury could show up in population size, she said. If mercury levels are high enough, it could prevent animals from reproducing.
"Are we noticing any changes in the number of babies that, for example, the tamarins are having?" Moore asked.
Those kinds of questions cannot be answered without more data, she said. In the years to come, scientists hope to create a long-term dataset in Peru and other mining hotspots to understand how mercury could be affecting imperiled mammals globally.
"It is widespread throughout the Amazon Basin, it's widespread throughout the Congo Basin and Indonesia — this is a global tropics issue," said ecotoxicologist Chris Sayers at the University of California Los Angeles, who has studied the impact of mercury on birds in Madre de Dios.
Reporting by Jake Spring in Los Amigos Biological Station, Peru, and Gloria Dickie in London; Additional reporting by Marco Aquino in Lima and Oliver Griffin in Bogota; Editing by Katy Daigle and Suzanne Goldenberg
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