14 August 23
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The impossible task of containing Donald Trump
Trump could not talk to potential witnesses about the case except through lawyers, Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya told him, and he could not commit a crime on the local, state, or federal level. Both are standard directives to defendants. But then Upadhyaya added a warning that seemed tailored a bit more specifically to the blustery politician standing before her: “I want to remind you,” the judge said, “it is a crime to intimidate a witness or retaliate against anyone for providing information about your case to the prosecution, or otherwise obstruct justice.”
When Upadhyaya asked Trump if he understood, he nodded. Fewer than 24 hours later, Trump appeared to flout that very warning—in its spirit if not its letter—by threatening his would-be foes in an all-caps post on Truth Social: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” Over the following week, he attacked a potential witness in the case, former Vice President Mike Pence (“delusional”); Special Counsel Jack Smith (“deranged”); and the federal judge assigned to oversee his case, Tanya Chutkan, an appointee of former President Barack Obama (Smith’s “number one draft pick,” in Trump’s words).
Trump’s screeds highlight a challenge that will now fall to Chutkan to confront: constraining a defendant who’s both a former president and a leading candidate to take the White House—and who seems bent on making a mockery of his legal process.
“She’s in a tight spot,” Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in Michigan, says of Chutkan. Conceivably, the judge could find Trump in contempt of court and toss him in jail for violating the terms of his pretrial release. But even though in theory Trump should be treated like any other defendant, former prosecutors told me that he was exceedingly unlikely to go to prison over his pretrial statements. And Trump probably knows it. (Whether Trump will go to prison if he is convicted is another hotly debated matter.)
“I’m sure she would be very reluctant to do that, in light of the fact that he’s running for president,” McQuade told me. “So I think as a result, he has a very long leash, and I think he will simply dare her to revoke [his freedom] by saying the most outrageous things he can.”
At a pretrial hearing today, Chutkan issued her first warnings to Trump’s lawyers about their client, according to reporting by Steven Portnoy of ABC News and Kyle Cheney of Politico. “Mr. Trump, like every American, has a First Amendment right to free speech,” she said. “But that right is not absolute.” She said Trump’s presidential candidacy would not factor into her decisions, and she rebuffed suggestions by a Trump lawyer, John Lauro, that the former president had a right to respond to his political opponents in the heat of a campaign. “He’s a criminal defendant,” she reminded him. “He’s going to have restrictions like every single other defendant.”
Chutkan said she would be scrutinizing Trump’s words carefully, and she concluded with what she called “a general word of caution”: “Even arguably ambiguous statements from parties or their counsel,” the judge said, “can threaten the process.” She added: “I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings.”
Chutkan had called the hearing to determine whether to bar Trump and his lawyers from publicly disclosing evidence provided to them by prosecutors—a standard part of the pretrial process. The evidence includes millions of pages of documents and transcribed witness interviews from a year-long investigation, and the government argued that Trump or his lawyers could undermine the process by making them public before the trial. Despite her warnings to Trump’s team, she sided with the defense’s request to narrow the restrictions on what they could disclose, and she did not add other constraints on what he could say about the case.
Yet the effect of Chutkan’s courtroom comments was to put Trump on notice. If he continues to flout judicial warnings, she could place a more formal gag order on him, the ex-prosecutors said. And if he ignores that directive, she would likely issue additional warnings before considering a criminal-contempt citation. A further escalation, McQuade said, would be to hold a hearing and order Trump to show cause for why he should not be held in contempt. “Maybe she gives him a warning, and she gives him another chance and another chance, but eventually, her biggest hammer” is to send him to jail.
Judges have sanctioned high-profile defendants in other cases recently. In 2019, the Trump ally Roger Stone was barred from posting on major social-media platforms after Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that he had violated a gag order she had issued. (Stone did honor this directive.) The Trump foe Michael Avenatti, who represented Stormy Daniels in her case against Trump and briefly considered challenging him for the presidency, was jailed shortly before his trial on extortion charges after prosecutors accused him of disregarding financial terms of his bail. “He was just scooped up and thrown into solitary,” one of his former lawyers, E. Danya Perry, told me. She said that Avenatti was thrown into the same jail cell that had held El Chapo, the Mexican drug lord. (Avenatti later claimed that his treatment was payback ordered by then–Attorney General Bill Barr; the prison warden said he was placed in solitary confinement because of “serious concerns” about his safety, and Barr has called Avenatti’s accusation “ridiculous.”)
Neither Stone nor Avenatti, however, is as high-profile as Trump, arguably the most famous federal defendant in American history. And Perry doubts that Chutkan would imprison him before a trial. Trump has ignored warnings from judges overseeing the various civil cases brought against him over the years and has never faced tangible consequences. “He has done it so many times and he has managed to skate so many times that he certainly is emboldened,” Perry said.
Indeed, Trump has also suggested he would ignore a gag order from Chutkan. “I will talk about it. I will. They’re not taking away my First Amendment rights,” Trump told a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Wednesday.
Trump’s political motives for vilifying his prosecutors and once again portraying himself as the victim of a witch hunt are obvious: He’s trying to rile up his Republican base. Trump also seems to be executing something of a legal strategy in his public statements about the trial. He’s called Washington, D.C., “a filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment,” possibly reasoning that these remarks will force the court to agree to his request to shift the trial to a venue with a friendlier population of potential jurors, such as West Virginia.
That’s less likely to work, according to the former prosecutors I interviewed. “I’d be shocked to see that be successful,” Noah Bookbinder, a former federal prosecutor who heads the anti-corruption advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me. “It’s sort of like the old joke about the child who kills his mother and father and then asks for mercy because he’s an orphan. I just don’t see a court going for that.”
Trump’s attacks also present a problem for Smith, the special counsel. On one hand, prosecutors have a clear interest in ensuring that their witnesses do not feel intimidated; on the other, Smith could feel that trying to silence Trump would play into the former president’s victim narrative. Justice Department prosecutors alerted Chutkan to Trump’s “I’m coming after you” post in a court filing, and during today’s hearing they voiced concerns that if not restricted, Trump could disclose evidence to benefit his campaign. (A Trump spokesperson said the former president’s warning was “the definition of political speech,” and that it referred to “special interest groups and Super PACs” opposing his candidacy.) But Smith’s team did not ask Chutkan to fully gag Trump or even admonish him. “You see the prosecutors being very, very restrained,” Bookbinder said. “With a lot of defendants who were bad-mouthing the prosecutor and witnesses, they would have immediately gone in and asked for an order for the defendant to stop doing that.”
Bookbinder described the citation of Trump’s post as “a brushback pitch” by the government, a signal that they are watching the former president’s public statements closely. But like Chutkan, Smith might be reluctant to push the matter very far. Fighting with Trump over a gag order could distract from where the government wants to focus the case—on Trump’s alleged crimes—and it could indulge his desire to drag out the trial, Bookbinder noted. But the special counsel has to weigh those concerns against the possibility that an out-of-control defendant could jeopardize the safety of prosecutors and witnesses. “My strong suspicion is that Jack Smith doesn’t want to go there,” Bookbinder said. “I think at some point he may have little choice.”
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (photo: AP)
Democrats make demand in letter to attorney general Merrick Garland and condemn judge’s ‘blatant disregard for judicial ethics’
“We write to urge the Department of Justice to launch an investigation into … Clarence Thomas for consistently failing to report significant gifts he received from Harlan Crow and other billionaires for nearly two decades in defiance of his duty under federal law,” the Democrats said.
As well as Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive popularly known as AOC, the letter was signed by Jerrold Nadler of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House judiciary committee; Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a professor of constitutional law; Ted Lieu of California; and Hank Johnson of Georgia.
This week saw the publication of a bombshell ProPublica report which said Thomas had taken 38 undeclared vacations funded by billionaires and accepted gifts including expensive sports tickets.
The report followed extensive reporting by ProPublica and other outlets including the New York Times regarding Thomas’s close and financially beneficial relationships with Crow, a real-estate magnate, and other influential businessmen.
Thomas, 75, denies wrongdoing, claiming never to have discussed with his benefactors politics or business before the court. He has said he did not declare those benefactors’ gifts, over many years, because he was wrongly advised.
Ethics experts say that Thomas broke federal law by failing to declare such largesse.
Supreme court justices are nominally subject to the same ethics rules as all federal justices but in practice govern themselves.
The chief justice, John Roberts, has rebuffed requests for testimony in Congress. Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee have advanced supreme court ethics reform but it will almost certainly fail, in the face of Republican opposition.
Calls for Thomas to resign or be impeached and removed have proliferated but are also almost certain to fail. Confirmed in 1991, Thomas is the most senior of six conservatives on a nine-member court tipped dramatically right by three justices installed during the presidency of Donald Trump.
In their letter to Garland on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow Democrats noted that Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, is “a far-right activist who often champions conservative causes that come before the court”.
They were addressing, they said, “a matter of critical importance to the integrity of our justice system”.
Outlining reporting about Thomas, the representatives said his “consistent failure to disclose gifts and benefits from industry magnates and wealthy, politically active executives highlights a blatant disregard for judicial ethics as well as apparent legal violations.
“No individual, regardless of their position or stature, should be exempt from legal scrutiny for lawbreaking … as a supreme court justice and high constitutional officer, Justice Thomas should be held to the highest standard, not the lowest and he certainly shouldn’t be allowed to violate federal law.”
Refusing to hold Thomas accountable, the Democrats said, “would set a dangerous precedent, undermining public trust in our institutions and raising legitimate questions about the equal application of laws in our nation.
“The Department of Justice must undertake a thorough investigation into the reported conduct to ensure that it cannot happen again.”
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Annelise Cochran before Tuesday's destructive Maui fire. (photo: Annelise Cochran)
In the dark, cold water off Lahaina on Tuesday night, Annelise Cochran clutched one of her neighbors for warmth, both women shivering and struggling to breathe through the smoke and fumes. Cochran felt like she was losing consciousness.
“I don’t know if it was the smoke or the cold or the fumes,” Cochran, 30, recounted in a telephone interview. “It was the closest I’ve felt to death.”
Cochran and her neighbor survived the inferno in Lahaina by spending more than five hours in the water next to a rock wall at the edge of town. Another of their neighbors, an 86-year-old man who for a time survived nearby, did not live through the night, she said.
The fire that took the town was swift and brutal. Early that morning, Cochran had seen reports of a wildfire nearby, but that wasn’t unusual for Lahaina, where she has lived for seven years. In the afternoon, the wind whipped up, so strong that Cochran began taking videos of the flying leaves.
Cochran, a Maryland native who works as a training manager for an ocean conservation nonprofit, went to take a shower. When she dressed and went outside at around 4 p.m., the smoke was growing thicker and she began to hear fire alarms in nearby buildings going off.
There was no text message telling her to evacuate, no emergency siren, she said. Then, to her shock, she saw flames in a parking lot about a block away. She ran to her apartment to grab a few essentials and jumped into her car.
She turned toward the water, hoping to drive out of town to safety, but found the road blocked by abandoned cars. She picked up a tourist who later decided to leave her car because he wanted to head in a different direction than Cochran did; she never saw him again.
When the building next to her car began to burn, she said, she got out and headed for the water. She found two of her neighbors, a middle-aged woman named Edna and an 86-year-old man named Freeman, who had difficulty walking. They all went over the barrier wall, down to the hulking black rocks below to escape the flames.
They spent hours in the water, occasionally scrambling onto the rocks, trying to stay away from flying embers and noxious fumes, but also moving closer to the flames when they began to feel dangerously cold. Cochran saw people grab debris and float off into deeper waters, which horrified her: She works on the ocean and knows the dangers of currents and hypothermia.
“People still chose just to drift out,” she said. “I feared for those people’s lives.”
The worst part of the ordeal, she said, came when cars along the shoreline began to explode, sending toxic fumes and intense heat rolling toward the water. That’s when Cochran and Edna felt near collapse. The women held each other as they shook and tried to stay awake, Cochran said. They talked about their families and promised each other they’d make it.
At one point, Cochran said, she called out to Freeman, who was a little farther down the rocky beach, and asked how he was. He just smiled and made a shaka gesture with his hand — middle fingers down, thumb and little finger out — to indicate he was all right, even though Cochran knew he was suffering. Later, she said, she saw him slumped against the wall, unmoving. She believes he succumbed to the fumes.
“I just ache for his family,” Cochran said. She and several dozen other people were rescued from the water by firefighters around midnight and she has spent the last few nights at shelters. Her body is covered with bruises and lacerations; her feet and face are burned.
“I feel blessed to be alive,” she said.
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A water station for immigrants containing sealed jugs of fresh water sits along a fence line near a roadway in rural Jim Hogg County, Texas, on July 25. (photo: Michael Gonzalez/AP)
Barrels of life-saving water that a human rights group had strategically placed for wayward migrants traveling on foot had vanished.
Usually, they are hard to miss. Labeled with the word "AGUA" painted in white, capital letters and standing about waist-high, the 55-gallon (208-liter), blue drums stand out against the scrub and grass, turned from green to a sundried brown.
The stakes of solving this mystery are high.
Summer temperatures can climb to 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 degrees Celsius) in Texas' sparsely populated Jim Hogg County, with its vast, inhospitable ranchlands. Migrants — and sometimes human smugglers — take a route through this county to try to circumvent a Border Patrol checkpoint on a busier highway about 30 miles (48 kilometers) to the east. More than 60 miles (96 kilometers) from the U.S.-Mexico border, it can take several days to walk there for migrants who may have already spent weeks crossing mountains and desert and avoiding cartel violence.
"We don't have the luxury of losing time in what we do," said Ruben Garza's, an investigator with the Jim Hogg Sheriff's Office. Tears streamed down his face as he recalled helping locate a missing migrant man who became overheated in the brush, called for help but died just moments after his rescue.
Exact counts of those who die are difficult to determine because deaths often go unreported. The U.N. International Organization for Migration estimates almost 3,000 migrants have died crossing from Mexico to the U.S. by drowning in Rio Grande, or because of lack of shelter, food or water.
Humanitarian groups started placing water for migrants in spots on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico in the 1990s after authorities began finding bodies of those who succumbed to the harsh conditions.
John Meza volunteers with the South Texas Human Rights Center in Jim Hogg County, where the population of about 5,000 people is spread over 1,100 square miles (2,850 square kilometers) — larger than the state of Rhode Island. He restocks the stations with gallon jugs of water, trims away overgrown grass, and ensures the GPS coordinates are still visible on the underside of the barrel lids.
On one of his rounds in July, Meza said, 12 of the 21 stations he maintains were no longer there.
The Associated Press compared images captured by Google Maps over the last two years and confirmed that some barrels that were once there were gone.
But to where?
Wildfires are common in this part of Texas, where dry grass quickly becomes fuel. Road construction crews frequently push or move aside obstructions for their work. But as Garza, the sheriff's investigator, walked along a path designated by GPS coordinates for the barrels, there were no signs of melted, blue plastic. And nothing indicated the heavy barrels had been moved. Though volunteers fill them only partway, they can weigh up to about 85 pounds (38 kilograms).
The investigator drove up and down the main highway where many of the water stations were installed near private property fence lines making note of the circumstances of each missing barrel.
Empty water bottles sat on the ground near the round impression left behind by the heavy barrel in one site. At another, the grass was trimmed, and fresh earth was laid bare to create buffers against fire.
Garza suspected state road crews moved three barrels that had been along an unpaved road, but the Texas Department of Transportation denied it. The investigator also noted a "tremendous amount" of wildfires could be to blame. He's also speaking with area ranchers in hopes of showing the disappearances may be a simple misunderstanding, not a crime.
"They probably have a logical explanation," he said, with no apparent lead.
But in other states along the southern border, missing water stations have been ascribed to spiteful intentions.
The group No More Deaths in 2018 released video of Border Patrol agents kicking over and pouring water out of gallon jugs left for people in the desert.
No More Deaths said that from 2012 to 2015, it found more than 3,586 gallon jugs of water that had been destroyed in an 800-square-mile (2,072-square-kilometer) desert area in southern Arizona.
Laura Hunter and her husband, John, started putting out water along popular smuggling routes in Southern California in the 1990s. They note their effort is not affiliated with political or religious groups, but that their work is often attacked.
"Every single year, we have vandalism, of course, you know, people that don't agree with what we do," Laura Hunter said.
The Hunters met with Eddie Canales, the executive director of the South Texas Human Rights Center, about 15 years ago and provided the design for the low-cost water stations. In light of the news, they offered some advice.
"I would replace them all with some used barrels, just replace them all," John Hunter said. "And then I would put a couple of cameras on those and get the guy's license plates and his face."
Canales said he plans to work with volunteers to replace the missing stations in the coming days.
The number of migrants crossing through South Texas and subsequent deaths decreased this year after President Joe Biden's administration instituted new border polices. A medical examiner's office who covers eleven counties including Jim Hogg has received the bodies of 85 migrants who died this year. It represents less than half the number sent to that office in 2022. Most of the migrants who died this year suffered fatal heat strokes.
But that could change, especially if legal challenges to the Biden administration's policies are successful.
For now, the mystery about the barrels' disappearance remains unsolved. But Meza, the volunteer who restocks the barrels in Jim Hogg County, plans to continue his work
"If that was intentional, that's a pretty malicious thing. You know what I mean?" Meza asked. "You're saying, 'Let these people die because I don't want to give them access to water.'"
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Texas Governor Greg Abbott is seen. The governor came under fire on Friday after it was reported that a migrant child had died while being bused from Texas to Chicago. (photo: Brandon Bell/AP)
Greg Abbott Faces More Backlash as Migrant Child Dies on Bus: 'Barbaric'
Thomas Kika, Newsweek
Kika writes: "Texas Governor Greg Abbott came under fire on Friday after a report emerged that a migrant child had died while being bused to Chicago."
The busing of migrants to major cities, particularly those run by Democratic governments, has become an increasingly common tactic of Abbott's in handling migrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border into Texas. Abbott, a Republican, has said that the practice is meant to bring greater attention and concern to the issue of undocumented migrants to Democrats, whom he has accused of not treating the issue seriously enough. His opponents, however, have decried the practice as inhumane and likened it to human trafficking as a political stunt.
This practice came under renewed fire on Friday after Texas officials confirmed that a 3-year-old boy had died on one of the program's buses en route to Chicago, the Houston Chronicle reported. Few details about what happened to the boy are available, but the Texas Division of Emergency Management claimed that "no passenger presented with a fever or medical concerns" before the trip began.
"Once the child presented with health concerns, the bus pulled over and security personnel on board called 9-1-1 for emergency attention," the division said in its official statement. "After the ambulance arrived, the bilingual security personnel translated for the parents and the paramedics who were providing care for the child. The child was then taken to a local hospital to receive additional medical attention and was later pronounced deceased."
Reactions online to the child's death were swift, with various critics of Abbott taking to social media to condemn his treatment of migrants and the busing program specifically.
"Greg Abbott is already responsible for a child dying in his razor wire buoy stunt," Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, on Friday. "Now another child has died in his stunt to abduct and ship migrants out of state. He has blood on his hands. He shouldn't be sued, he should be prosecuted."
Ben Meiselas, co-founder of the left-wing political action committee, MeidasTouch, called the report sickening and condemned Abbott's program as "barbaric."
"Not sure how many migrants need to literally die on Greg Abbott's watch for us to treat what's happening at the Texas border as the national scandal that it should be," MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan posted to X.
Newsweek reached out to Abbott's office via email for comment.
Responding to those posts, several X users disputed putting the blame on Abbott and the busing program, writing that the fault is on the federal government for not taking a harder stance against border crossings. One user wrote that the child's death happened on President Joe Biden's "watch," despite the Texas government operating the program.
Abbott's administration, meanwhile, recently came under intense scrutiny after it was found that floating barriers being used on the Rio Grande River to deter migrants were equipped with circular saws. At least one dead migrant was found near one of these barriers, with Texas officials claiming that they had actually died further upriver.
Abbott's decision to employ river barriers now faces a lawsuit after the Department of Justice (DOJ) decided to sue the state and the governor over them. The DOJ says it poses a threat to navigation and presents humanitarian concerns. The Texas governor, conversely, has vowed to fight the lawsuit, pledging to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.
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A female red wolf is shown in its habitat at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, N.C. (photo: Gerry Broome/AP)
According to court filings, the USFWS committed on Wednesday to an eight-year plan to boost populations with captive-born animals in eastern North Carolina, the species' only remaining range. Just over 30 of the animals are estimated to be left in the wild, which is only a fraction of what the population was a decade ago.
The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Red Wolf Coalition, Defenders of Wildlife and the Animal Welfare Institute. The groups claimed that USFWS had violated the Endangered Species Act, putting red wolves at risk of extinction to appease politicians and ranchers.
Ramona McGee, a senior attorney and leader of the SELC's wildlife program, celebrated the settlement as a "path to restoring the red wolf to its rightful place as a celebrated success story."
"We hope to see America's wild red wolves rebound again, with generations born free and wild, as a result of this agreement," McGee said in a statement Wednesday.
A spokesperson for USFWS responded to NPR's request for comment by saying the agency had already been working to recover the red wolf population for decades.
"We are committed to increasing transparency and communication for red wolf releases and adaptive management actions," USFWS said. "The success of the Eastern North Carolina Red Wolf Population sets the stage for the Service's ability to fulfill our responsibility to recover the species — which we cannot do without the local community and our conservation partners."
Red wolves once inhabited much of the Eastern U.S. but were driven to near-extinction by hunting, habitat loss and the growth of local coyote species, which competed for resources and space.
Today, red wolves occupy only five counties in North Carolina. Just over 30 are left in the wild, according to a June 2023 count.
A USFWS program to recover the species to the wild was launched in 1987 and successfully boosted the population to around 100. That population remained stable through 2012.
But in 2015, the agency suspended its practice of breeding and releasing captive red wolves, saying it had planned to update its recovery program with more input from scientists and resume in 2020.
The Associated Press reported that the timing of the pause coincided with "pressure from conservative politicians and landowners who deemed wolves a nuisance."
Another round of litigation in 2018 blocked the USFWS from a plan to shrink the 1.7 million-acre territory set aside for red wolf conservation.
The SELC filed its lawsuit in 2020, amid a three-year span in which no red wolf pups had been seen in the wild — "an indication of the dire state of the red wolf population at that time."
As few as seven red wolves remained in the wild at the time, according to court filings. Another 250 were estimated to be living in zoos and wildlife sanctuaries as part of the captive-breeding program.
In 2021, a judge granted SELC a preliminary injunction requiring the USFWS to resume releasing some of those captive red wolves, including by placing captive-born pups into wild litters.
Of the three wolves released to the wild in 2021, one was found dead within months, falling victim to a vehicle strike, according to SELC. But the surviving wolves may have played a role in the current population upswing: Wild red wolf pups were seen in the wild again in 2022.
Under the latest settlement, the USFWS will work with scientists and experts to set metrics to measure performance on all red wolf recovery plans.
In addition to releasing captive wolves, the agency will continue its adaptive management strategies, aiming to decrease human-caused mortality, as well as sterilizing some local coyote populations.
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