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Tuesday, April 18, 2023
POLITICO NIGHTLY: Why Fox News had to settle the Dominion suit
Dominion v Fox settles: Fox admits to election lies; pays 3/4 of a billion dollars. Justice? Hardly
As opening statements were about the begin in the defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News, the parties reached a settlement. Fox agreed to pay $787.5 million for the defamatory lies Fox intentionally told about Dominion. Does this represent justice? Hardly.
Jim Jordan makes DESPERATE FILING to Federal Judge
Michael Popok of Legal AF reports on Jim Jordan and House Judiciary Committee trying to convince a federal judge that they have proper “legislative purpose” to “oversee” the Manhattan DA’s Trump prosecution because he once was a president and $5,000 in federal funds may have been used somewhere in time to investigate him, at the same time his committee concedes that it is all political show without proper purpose during its “field trip” hearing in New York.
BREAKING: Fox gets CRUSHED in Devastating MAJOR Dominion UPDATE
Fox reached a settlement right before opening statements were set to take place in Dominions defamation trial. MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports.
Ojeda Live: Tuesday Night Topics
Join Major (ret) Richard Ojeda tonight as he breaks down the hot topics, memes and more!
Dominion lawyer reacts after settlement with Fox News for $787.5 million
Stephen Shackelford, the lawyer who was set to give the opening statement for Dominion in its defamation lawsuit against Fox News, discusses with Nicolle Wallace his reaction to the settlement.
Trump's ATTACKS his own party and it BACKFIRES immediately
Donald Trump released his latest ad attacking Ron DeSantis, and the backlash was swift. MeidasTouch contributor Gabe Sanchez reports on 'What Was That?'
BREAKING: Fox gets CRUSHED in Devastating MAJOR Dominion UPDATE
Fox reached a settlement right before opening statements were set to take place in Dominions defamation trial. MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports.
FOCUS: Eugene Robinson | Clarence Thomas's Explanations Fail the Laugh Test
18 April 23
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Silly me.
I was never sympathetic. I believed Anita Hill, who testified at Thomas’s confirmation hearing in 1991 that he had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at two government agencies. And for Thomas, a far-right Republican apparatchik, to take the seat on the nation’s highest court vacated by the retirement of Thurgood Marshall, an icon of the civil rights movement, was always an abomination.
But I did understand how a Black man born in Pin Point, Ga., in 1948 might have a great big chip on his shoulder. I understood how growing up under the jackboot of Jim Crow might lead him to the philosophy of Black self-sufficiency articulated by Malcolm X, which Thomas espoused in his youth. And I almost — but not quite — understood how a deep distrust of government, perhaps along with some personal issues involving self-image and self-worth, might have produced his tear-it-all-down judicial nihilism.
It was hard for me to believe that Thomas could be as much of a puppet of the most reactionary forces in American society as he seemed. But now, there is overwhelming evidence that that’s exactly what he is.
Thanks to reporting this month by ProPublica, we now know that Thomas and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a hard-right Republican activist, have been treated to lavish vacations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars by Harlan Crow, a politically active Texas billionaire. These jaunts included a vacation in Indonesia in 2019 that involved flights on Crow’s private jet and an island-hopping tour on a superyacht — a nine-day trip that alone would have cost the couple more than $500,000. If they had paid for it themselves. Which they did not.
There were also other trips on Crow’s jet and frequent stays at properties he owns in the Adirondacks and in East Texas, according to ProPublica. Accompanying the Thomases as guests, at times, were conservative business executives and thought leaders.
And for some reason, Thomas failed to report any of these gifts — any of them — on the disclosure forms he is required to submit annually.
Nor did Thomas disclose the fact that Crow purchased the Georgia house the justice’s mother lives in, then made tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of improvements to the dwelling, ProPublica subsequently revealed.
We should have seen this coming. From 2003 to 2007, on his disclosure forms, Thomas checked the box labeled “none” for his wife’s income. During that period, Ginni Thomas earned more than $686,000 from the conservative Heritage Foundation. When called on the lie, Thomas said it was an error “due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.”
Likewise, regarding the trips he took at Crow’s expense, Thomas issued a statement claiming that early in his time on the Supreme Court, he “was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.”
Stop laughing. All right, yes, it is hilarious. Thomas expects the nation to take seriously his views on the subtlest contours of the Constitution. He also expects us to believe he cannot understand a clear and simple instruction on a disclosure form; that he sees no distinction between “personal hospitality” and trips halfway around the world by private jet; and that he sees nothing wrong about having a member of the board of the conservative American Enterprise Institute purchase and fix up his mother’s house.
A little context: In 1969, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas resigned after it was learned that he had accepted, then returned, $20,000 from a Wall Street financier. At the time, Chief Justice Earl Warren felt it was important that Fortas step down to preserve the court’s reputation.
Thomas accepted gifts from Crow worth many times that amount, even counting for inflation, and failed to report them. And then there is all the money Ginni Thomas has received from right-wing organizations that lobby on issues before the court — plus her outrageous involvement in the “Stop the Steal” putsch that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.
Thomas doesn’t believe in affirmative action or protecting voting rights, though he benefited from both. He does believe in living the good life among millionaires and billionaires whose interests he just happens to protect in his opinions.
My mental image of Thomas used to be of him sitting on the Supreme Court bench during arguments, silent and scowling. Now, I see him on vacation, smoking a cigar with Crow and his buddies, laughing as though he doesn’t have a care in the world. The joke is on us.
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Alex Shephard | Conservatives Have Some Very Creative, Very Dumb Excuses for Clarence Thomas's Corruption
18 April 23
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Don’t let their friends distract you: The Supreme Court justice and his megadonor pal have had a malign influence on the judicial system.
The arrangements that have been assiduously documented by ProPublica over the past week are bad for reasons that are more or less self-evident. It certainly all has the appearance of corruption—it is, generally speaking, not good for a judge to accept so many luxurious trifles from someone who funds groups that sometimes bring cases to their court. It’s undoubtedly another severe blow to the Supreme Court’s reputation, which was already in tatters. That Thomas brazenly refused to report the gifts is fundamentally unethical. The fact that no one is going to do anything about this—not John Roberts and certainly not Congress—only underlines the rot at the heart of two branches of the American government.
Thomas and Crow’s defenders have largely used the same argument to defend both men: Sure, this all may look bad to some, but what everyone is forgetting is that these are good guys—great guys!—and anyway, there’s nothing to see here, just two chums, chumming it up. Cherry-picking the most bombastic accusations—that Crow’s gifts are bribes; that Crow’s huge collection of Nazi memorabilia makes him a “Nazi sympathizer”—they concoct a defense of the men that basically amounts to, “No, they’re not,” in the style of a famous satirical editorial from The Onion. (While I would agree that owning, say, a signed copy of Mein Kampf does not on its own make you a Nazi sympathizer, it seems abundantly clear that Crow’s collection of memorabilia related to totalitarianism and fascism amounts to a wholesale kitschification and trivialization of the horrors of the twentieth century. But I digress.)
This, from legal scholar Ilya Shapiro of “lesser black woman” fame, is a particularly dumb and obtuse example of this line of argument, but it’s representative of the larger thrust and parry that’s going on among Thomas’s defenders as news of these scandalous dealings continues to emerge. Shapiro’s claim is that Thomas is super conservative and would have voted the way Crow prefers regardless of how many nights the two spent yachting around the Mediterranean. This is probably true; it also doesn’t matter one whit.
Revealingly, Shapiro uses the absolute narrowest definitions of bribery and corruption—essentially arguing that Thomas wasn’t given a briefcase full of bronze gnomes to vote a certain way in a smoke-filled room while both men laughed with sinister intent, so therefore everything is on the up and up. But we can stipulate that it wasn’t Crow’s loot that convinced Thomas to become a right-wing jurist—the idea that this is even up for debate is a rhetorical ploy designed to distract us from the many reasons that Thomas and Crow’s relationship is deeply corrupt.
Thomas may not have deliberately changed his votes at Crow’s behest, but a chummy relationship between a right-wing megadonor who literally funds organizations that appear before the Supreme Court and a justice on that court, involving the bestowing of many lavish gifts—which said justice then hides from the public—is clearly crooked. Crow’s relationship with Thomas is based entirely on the former’s wealth and the latter’s influence. It obviously speaks to Thomas’s own contempt for his critics and opponents: He is identifying as a member and agent of a vast right-wing machine. He is, more importantly, using his position in government to enrich himself—it is obvious that Thomas would not be the beneficiary of Crow’s largesse if he were not on the Supreme Court.
That all of this is amoral on its face should be clear to anyone who values a functional democracy. Having a member of the Supreme Court hobnobbing around and taking all kinds of presents from a billionaire megadonor goes against bedrock principles of self-government. A civic-minded judge or lawmaker labors diligently to avoid even a hint of impropriety; Thomas has done no such thing and instead has gleefully filled his pockets. The idea that Shapiro—or anyone else—knows Thomas’s heart is silly. It’s also irrelevant: We don’t need to connect the dots to determine which bronze gnome wrought which Supreme Court decision. The appearance of a conflict of interest is sin enough.
To accept what Thomas and Crow have cooked up between themselves is to accept rampant corruption on the Supreme Court, full stop. It shows that the court has no ability to police itself and no interest in doing anything that might ameliorate the continued and growing influence of right-wing megadonors on its justices—particularly Thomas. Undoubtedly Crow and Thomas’s close relationship has influenced the justice’s thinking. Surely Crow has expressed his opinions on ideological matters during those many hours they’ve spent together, sunning in the Riviera.
Crow derives a benefit from keeping Thomas steeped in lavish gifts—all that boodle may not be necessary to push Thomas to rule a certain way, but it sure helps influence other people in Crow’s orbit. He can present himself as someone who has the ear of one of the most powerful jurists in the country. He can also send the message that there are rich rewards to be reaped by staying in the plutocrat’s good graces. And so the failure to do anything about Thomas and Crow’s relationship sends a message to right-wing justices everywhere. If you hold the line—and rule in the manner Crow prefers—you too can one day rake in gifts, vacations, playdates, and weird trips to an absurd “park” containing dozens of statues of fallen dictators. Corruption is welcome. Thomas may not have changed any of his votes at Crow’s behest—but that doesn’t mean others won’t.
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Russian soldiers. (photo: Creative Commons)
Source: the SSU, which has posted the conversation of a Russian citizen who was sent to Ukraine's east in December 2022
Quote from the Russian soldier: "We had to kill minors, women, everyone. Can you believe it? Instant elimination, like, "Just f**king shoot them". I'm ready [to do it], but to be honest, I was f**king shocked. They explained it all to us: doesn’t matter whether they’re fourteen, eighteen, or if it’s a girl – just kill them on the spot. Let's start the mop-up operation."
Details: The Russian soldier’s wife is not surprised by what her husband says. "What else could you do?" she replies. After all, she’s heard on TV that apparently, "all the civilians had already left".
The SSU stressed that the Ukrainian defenders, for their part, are making every effort to ensure that the Russians "go home as quickly as possible and in body bags only", and the SSU itself is doing everything possible to bring all Russian war criminals to justice.
SSU investigators are reported to be currently looking into more than 34,000 proceedings under Article 438 of the Criminal Code (violation of the laws and customs of war).
Background:
- Earlier, the Russian organisation Gulagu.net posted videos in which Russian convicts from the Wagner Group confess to murdering Ukrainian children in Bakhmut and Soledar. According to one of the killers, unarmed 15-year-old Ukrainians "can hardly be called civilians".
This was an undoubtedly dramatic last-minute turn of events, but Fox has been on the ropes for weeks now in the run-up to the Tuesday start of the trial, which finds the network in a conspicuously weak position as it begins its defense against Dominion in what is expected to be a roughly six-week-long proceeding. The trial was supposed to begin Monday, but on Sunday evening the judge delayed the start of the case amid reports of a last minute push by Fox to settle — though at the moment, it remains to be seen whether that will happen. The election-technology company is looking for $1.6 billion in damages as a result of 20 episodes of alleged defamation that largely occurred during a monthlong period from mid-November to mid-December 2020 during segments in which crank lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell claimed that Dominion was part of an elaborate — and entirely fictional — conspiracy to steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump. The segments mostly aired on shows hosted by Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro, on both Fox News and Fox Business.
Of course, no one knows how the case is going to turn out if the settlement talks fail. But watching it with a lawyer’s eye means being aware of the key signals that have already been sent — what do the judge’s comments and pretrial rulings suggest? — as well as which courtroom dynamics to study closely as the case progresses. Here are the most important things to know and watch as the Fox-Dominion trial unfolds:
1.
The big revelation about Murdoch’s role
The trial begins Tuesday, but after two years of litigation, Fox News’ lawyers had revealed for the first time in the case that Rupert Murdoch, the chair of parent company Fox Corporation, also officially holds a position at Fox News as “executive chair.” This may seem like a small and perhaps inconsequential point — Fox News’ lawyers called the title an “honorific” — but it is not. The reason is that Fox’s lawyers have fought hard throughout the litigation to insist there is a clear distinction — both legally and factually in their day-to-day operations — between Fox News and Fox Corporation. Both are defendants in the case, but Fox Corporation has deeper pockets and a large portfolio of media properties in addition to the network. As it happens, though, Murdoch himself provides an even more direct and formal link between the governance of the parent and the subsidiary than we all previously knew.
Judge Davis, a former corporate litigator himself, was understandably angry with Fox’s lawyers, who, like their adversaries working on behalf of Dominion, will be spending the weeks ahead in trial asking the judge to make countless evidentiary and procedural rulings in their favor — about what evidence the jurors should be allowed to hear, what sorts of arguments the lawyers can make in front of them, and what legal instructions will guide their final decision. “My problem,” Davis reportedly said after learning about Murdoch’s dual role, “is that it has been represented to me more than once that he is not an officer” at Fox News. Things managed to get worse the next day, when Davis announced that he would appoint an outside lawyer to determine whether Fox had tried to mislead Dominion and the court; he left open the possibility that he would tell the jury that Fox had tried to withhold unhelpful information during the case. “I need people to tell me the truth,” he told Fox’s lawyers, which is not exactly an encouraging sign of things to come when the case is nominally about whether the media outlet is populated and run by a bunch of liars.
2.
The judge’s devastating pre-trial smackdown
In recent months, the lawsuit generated an avalanche of news coverage after the parties filed lengthy motions for “summary judgment,” in which they each asked Davis to rule in their favor based on what they claimed were undisputed facts gathered in the course of discovery. Dominion’s papers included a trove of internal communications that seemed to show many Fox executives and on-air personalities casting doubt on the false claims about Dominion in real time, but many of those communications also raised eyebrows among media and political observers thanks to a bunch of juicy tidbits that had less to do with Dominion’s actual case than the apparent internal dysfunction and more broadly endemic dishonesty among major figures at the network.
Davis ruled on the competing motions a couple weeks ago, and the result for Fox was truly abysmal. Dominion largely ran the table — at least as much as reasonably could have been expected under the circumstances — and the ruling substantially narrowed the scope of the trial and, more to the point, what Dominion needs to establish in the coming weeks in order to prevail.
Davis concluded, for instance, that all of the statements at issue about Dominion — the suggestions that the company had an algorithm that allowed it to change votes, for instance, or that it had been founded in Venezuela to rig elections for Hugo Chávez — were, in fact, indisputably false. In yet another ominous sign, he underscored the point in italicized, all-caps, and bold text: “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding,” he wrote, “demonstrates that [it] is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements [at issue] relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”
The judge also ruled that Fox News in particular had “published” the statements through its broadcasts, but at the time he did not know about Murdoch’s formal role at the network. He concluded that the jury would need to resolve whether Fox Corporation itself had played a role in broadcasting the statements, particularly given evidence presented by Dominion indicating that Murdoch and his son Lachlan, who is the CEO of Fox Corporation, had weighed in on the network’s editorial direction during the relevant period.
Fox Corporation’s exposure on this point remains outstanding for trial, but Davis implied last week that he might have ruled differently in the course of the case if he had known that Murdoch also held a title as an officer of Fox News in addition to Fox Corporation.
3.
Fox’s best defense strategy is already off the table
Most notably, the judge blew right through a series of claims by Fox that its broadcasts might be protected by an assortment of legal privileges that have been recognized to varying degrees in prior defamation cases — privileges that were widely seen as among Fox’s best lines of legal defense. Davis rejected the availability of a “neutral report privilege,” which permits media organizations to report on “newsworthy” allegations even if they are false, by concluding that Fox News had failed to “conduct good-faith, disinterested reporting” on the false claims. He precluded a defense under the “fair report privilege,” which allows media outlets to report on claims made by third parties in the course of official legal proceedings, because none of the statements at issue actually concerned a pending legal case. (Most of the statements had in fact been made before any of the many failed lawsuits filed on behalf of Trump.) And he held that Fox was not entitled to protection from a “privilege for opinion” since all of the allegedly defamatory statements were statements of fact, either in part or in whole.
4.
Can Dominion prove actual malice?
That leaves just two discrete — but difficult — elements of the case for Dominion to establish in the weeks ahead.
First, did either or both companies act with “actual malice”? This will require Dominion to show by clear and convincing evidence that the people responsible for broadcasting the statements either knew that they were false or acted with “reckless disregard” as to the falsity of the claims.
In approaching this question to date, Dominion has tended toward a scattershot approach. It has lumped together corporate officers and editorial employees with varying levels of authority and control across Fox News and Fox Corporation, often treating their roles and responsibilities interchangeably. It has excerpted snippets of deposition testimony and documents that sound bad in isolation while presenting little if any surrounding context — a necessary accommodation, perhaps, to the constraints of legal writing but one that will be unavailable at trial. And it has generally elided exactly who knew what and when in relation to the exact timing of the relevant broadcasts and their specific substance.
Under Supreme Court precedent, however, actual malice must be “brought home” to the people with responsibility for the allegedly defamatory publication. In other words, the plaintiff needs to identify the specific people responsible for publication of the relevant statements and establish that one or more of those people acted with actual malice. As a result, it is safe to assume that Fox’s lawyers will try to hold Dominion’s lawyers to a much more rigorous analytic framework — with a more precise focus on exactly who was doing what at specific points of time in relation to the relevant broadcasts, their specific content, and the nature of the relevant employees’ and officers’ editorial roles. Whether the jury will care remains to be seen, but this will also be about building a potential record for appeal in the event that Fox suffers a significant loss at trial.
5.
What is the alleged damage to Dominion actually worth?
The second major outstanding question at this trial is whether Dominion is entitled to some meaningful amount of financial damages — both in the way of compensatory damages for economic harm that the company suffered as well as potential punitive damages. Dominion is seeking nearly $1 billion for “the ultimate destruction of its enterprise value,” but the public information provided by Dominion in support of its extraordinary damages claim has been modest, and as Davis noted in his ruling, the issue is both hotly disputed and “intensely factual.” Fox has argued, for instance, that it is “simply unrealistic that a company that was generating as little as $10.6 million in annual EBITDA before the 2020 election could have skyrocketed to $1 billion in enterprise value in the few short years that followed.”
On this point in particular, we can expect a so-called “battle of the experts,” in which each side offers very different versions of what actually happened to Dominion’s financial condition as a result of Fox’s broadcasts. Both Dominion and Fox have prepared experts on damages and the related question of causation — whether and to what extent any economic harm to Dominion can be traced to Fox’s alleged misconduct (as opposed to other factors like, say, Trump’s crazy tweets). It is not clear whether all of the designated experts would testify at trial, but whoever takes the stand will be among the most important witnesses in the case, even though they will not have the boldface names that have attracted media attention in recent months. The lawyers will have invested considerable time both to preparing their own experts and to constructing lines of cross-examination for the other side’s experts on the most minute points with literally hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.
6.
Specific things to watch for in the courtroom
There are several important courtroom dynamics worth keeping an eye on in the days and weeks ahead that will give the smart observer a sense of where things are headed. The most obvious is what the parties choose to highlight and develop in their opening statements. Now that the case has been considerably narrowed, the lawyers should be able to provide tighter and clearer road maps to the evidence that they now believe is most pertinent to what is left of the case. It will be the first time we see the lawyers engage at length on the newly refashioned legal terrain for the case.
The idea of a trial theme may seem hazy, but lawyers devote immense effort to constructing master narratives in the hopes that they will guide the jury through the ins and outs of the case. Dominion has had a clear through-line throughout the proceeding: that many of Fox’s executives, on-air personalities, and editorial staff defamed Dominion in order to indulge their right-wing audience and boost their bottom line and that they did so to the considerable detriment of the country’s democratic process.
Until recently, Fox had leaned heavily on the idea that it was simply engaged in a form of traditional (and protected) news-gathering in the course of a complex and high-profile national issue. But now that the judge has gutted much of that defense, it will be interesting to see what, if anything, Fox’s lawyers come up with to replace it. The opening statement should be a good early answer to this key question: Have Fox’s lawyers developed a competing theme in the network’s defense?
Fox’s lawyers also have to be worried about the judge’s frustration with them in recent weeks, and it is far from clear that the pain is over. If more new evidence emerges at trial that Fox should have disclosed, the judge is not likely to go easy on them.
And, of course, the results of the inquiry into the belated disclosure of Murdoch’s dual status at Fox News and Fox Corporation remain outstanding with the possibility that more problematic revelations could surface that may both further anger the judge and lead him to tell the jury about it. That alone could be very bad for Fox: The underlying issue concerns the most prominent and important person in the corporate hierarchy, it reeks of the sort of legal gamesmanship that jurors can easily understand, and it also happens to be entirely consistent with Dominion’s theory of its case — that the network and its executives think they can do whatever they want with little to no regard for relevant legal and ethical constraints or, for that matter, the well-being of our country.
A trial will test both the accuracy and the limits of that broader proposition in a setting that Fox’s executives, hosts, and staff do not control. It is no doubt a deeply uncomfortable position for a media outlet that is used to telling other people what to believe. This time, a jury would get the last word.
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Russian president Vladimir Putin. (photo: Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik/AP)
Sarah Bils is a 37-year-old woman in Oak Harbor, Washington, who served at the US Naval Air Station on Whidbey Island until November of 2022, online Navy records show. Bils' identity was first uncovered by users on Twitter and Reddit, and first reported by an advocacy site mainly posting about the war known as Malcontent News.
Online, however, Bils goes by the name Donbass Devushka, and her account sometimes posts graphic images of the fighting, praises the brutal wing of the Russian military known as the Wagner group, and sometimes celebrates the death of Ukrainian fighters.
Bils told the Journal that 15 other people help her run the account.
The persona has a YouTube channel, a Twitter, and a Spotify podcast with tens of thousands of followers. On the podcast, Bils, who in previous posts claimed to be from Eastern Europe, appears to put on a phony accent.
On the bio of her Telegram — from which she posts dozens of times a day — Bils says the account is "Russian-style information warfare" that's "Bringing the multipolar world together." The account, ironically, once posted a screenshot of the popular meme reading "I'll serve crack before I serve this country" — meant to signify that someone would never join the US military.
The Telegram account was also recently associated with helping to spread four images of the dozens of leaked US intelligence documents that appeared on a Discord server called Thug Shaker Central. Many of these documents contained information on US intelligence gathering on the war in Ukraine. Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old junior-ranking US National Guard airman, was arrested on Thursday and charged on Friday with possessing classified documents pertaining to national security, and possessing national defense materials.
Bils, who had secret security clearances while serving, told the Journal she did not help to leak the documents. The Journal also noted that the documents posted on her channel were altered versions of the Discord documents, but Bils denied that her team had altered them.
"I obviously know the gravity of top-secret classified materials," she told the publication.
The documents are no longer on the account, but the Donbass Devushka Telegram channel shared a theory on April 13 that the leaks were actually an intentional effort from US intelligence officials and that Teixeira unknowingly carried out their plan.
Insider reached out to emails associated with Donbass Devushka and Bils but did not immediately receive a response.
The US Navy did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
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Layla Shweikani. (photo: Facebook)
Human rights workers and politicians were outraged when the American government stayed noticeably silent about the death of the aid worker, Layla Shweikani, 26. Her case never received the same level of attention as those of other American citizens captured abroad, including Austin Tice, a freelance journalist covering the war in Syria who was abducted outside Damascus in 2012; Jason Rezaian, a correspondent for The Washington Post, who described being subjected to psychological abuse and sleep deprivation after he was released from an Iranian prison in 2016; and Brittney Griner, a professional basketball star who was imprisoned for nearly a year in Russia.
But for five years, the Justice Department has been quietly investigating Ms. Shweikani’s killing, led by the U.S. attorney in Chicago, according to four people with knowledge of the inquiry. F.B.I. agents traveled to Europe and the Middle East to collect troves of evidence and interview potential witnesses, including the man who may have buried Ms. Shweikani. Federal prosecutors convened a grand jury, which has been hearing evidence.
The inquiry, which has not been previously reported, aims to bring to account top Syrian officials considered key architects of a ruthless system of detention and torture that has flourished under President Bashar al-Assad: Jamil Hassan, the head of the Air Force Intelligence Directorate when Ms. Shweikani disappeared, and Ali Mamlouk, then the head of Syria’s National Security Bureau intelligence service.
A federal indictment accusing the men of committing war crimes would be the first time that the United States has criminally charged top Syrian officials with the very human rights abuses that Mr. al-Assad has long denied using to silence dissent. Although the men are unlikely to be apprehended, a conviction would signal that the United States aims to hold the Syrian government responsible. Already, the United States has imposed sanctions on Mr. al-Assad and his inner circle, including Mr. Mamlouk and Mr. Hassan, over abuses like violence against civilians.
International efforts to bring top officials in Syria to justice for war crimes committed over more than a decade of conflict have been starkly limited. Few perpetrators have been prosecuted, raising the stakes of any possible charges and testing diplomatic relations. A potential indictment would “personalize the evil of this regime and make it clear you can’t do business with Assad,” said former Ambassador James F. Jeffrey, the Trump administration’s special representative for Syria engagement.
Even as it is widely acknowledged that security forces under Mr. al-Assad have systematically sought to stamp out opposition to his authoritarian rule, he has inched back onto the world stage. A few Arab countries, led by the United Arab Emirates, are trying to draw Syria back into the international fold. Critics have accused President Biden of tacitly shifting from the position held by previous administrations that no nation should ever engage with Syria, accusations the White House has denied. And after a powerful earthquake devastated Syria in February, Western nations have worked more amicably with Mr. al-Assad’s government to deliver aid.
Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, an advocacy group, said that an indictment would send an undeniable message. “No one should normalize relations with a regime that has killed an estimated 500,000 to a million people, including Americans and Europeans, and that continues to do so,” he said.
Asked to comment for this article or whether the F.B.I. had reached out, Ms. Shweikani’s father, Mohamed Shweikani, said, “I want nothing to do with running your story or the F.B.I.”
Spokeswomen for the Justice Department and the F.B.I. declined to comment.
As a child, Ms. Shweikani traveled to Syria to see family, and she earned a computer science degree in 2012 from Arab International University, according to her LinkedIn account. After working for a few years as a software engineer, she relocated in 2015 from suburban Chicago to Damascus to join a grass-roots network of humanitarian relief workers. But Mr. al-Assad tightly controls all official aid efforts in his country and he has treated citizen-run efforts as a threat, accusing them of terrorism.
By the time the authorities detained Ms. Shweikani on Feb. 19, 2016, along with her father and her fiancé, who were also in the country, almost every member of her relief group had been taken into Syrian custody. She would spend nearly a year in prisons on the outskirts of Damascus where cramped conditions, illness and torture run rampant: a detention facility at the Mezze airport, the Adra civilian prison and the Saydnaya military prison, where witnesses believe she was tried and executed.
Syrian guards tortured Ms. Shweikani, witnesses would later tell Justice Department investigators, recounting how they vowed to kill her father and fiancé, who had been detained for only a few days. The guards eventually forced her to falsely confess to crimes against the state, including terrorism.
Some of the worst abuse she endured is believed to have been at the Mezze detention center, which was then controlled by Mr. Hassan. One former detainee described the stark conditions there after he was arrested in 2012 as part of the government’s crackdown on Homs, once the heart of the resistance against Mr. al-Assad.
“You’re blindfolded, handcuffed and naked,” said Mohamed, who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of retribution. “Your cell is so full that you sleep standing up. You don’t know what time it is. But you know that you’re always awaiting torture.” He had scabies and lice, and his skin was deteriorating. Some prisoners died of gangrene from mutilations and amputations, others of starvation and suffocation.
Guards suspended him by his wrists, feet barely touching the floor, alternately beating him and leaving him hanging for hours to listen to the screams of men, women and children as guards set upon them.
“I confessed to anything they wanted me to,” he said.
Eventually, Ms. Shweikani was moved to Adra prison, where the Obama administration dispatched the Czech ambassador, Eva Filipi, to meet her in December 2016 because it had cut off formal diplomatic relations with Syria. Convinced that Ms. Shweikani had confessed under torture, she relayed that to officials in Washington, two former officials said.
But before the U.S. government could intervene, Ms. Shweikani was transferred in late December to the Saydnaya military prison. After a brief field trial, she was convicted. Investigators believe she was hanged. She died at 7:07 a.m. on Dec. 28, 2016, according to a government document obtained by Zaman Al Wasl, a Syrian news service.
At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Syria in 2018, Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, disclosed Ms. Shweikani’s death to the public.
“She became the first American citizen that we know of to be killed by the Assad regime,” Mr. Kinzinger said, adding, “Whatever response the administration decides to take will shape how the regime and its backers treat other Americans.”
At the hearing, Ambassador Jeffrey confirmed that Ms. Shweikani died “in Syrian government hands.”
Four months later, at a private White House meeting, President Donald J. Trump told Republican lawmakers that he was unlikely to respond to a killing by the Syrian government, according to two people familiar with the conversation. Even though human rights groups had details supporting allegations of torture and murder, Mr. Trump said he was not inclined to address the matter because of Mr. al-Assad’s claims about aid workers and extremism.
But two F.B.I. agents privately told Mr. Kinzinger that the bureau would not be dissuaded from investigating her death, the people said. Former and current U.S. officials involved in scrutinizing Ms. Shweikani’s activities also expressed doubt about Syria’s accusations of terrorism.
While investigators gathered ample information that placed Ms. Shweikani in the prisons and testimony about her brutal treatment, the bigger challenge was directly linking Syria’s top intelligence officials to her torture and death. But they made inroads, largely with the help of Syrian activists, victims and nongovernmental organizations that for years have collected evidence of Syria’s activities.
At least one prisoner testified to seeing Mr. Hassan at Mezze prison while Ms. Shweikani was there. The gravedigger’s papers authorizing him to dispose of the bodies from Syria’s prisons were signed and stamped by Mr. Mamlouk. He said in an interview with The New York Times that Mr. Hassan ordered his work.
Nearly every night, intelligence officers called him on a military communications device to meet tractor-trailer trucks that ferried bodies to mass graves. “Sometimes it was impossible to open the truck because the pressure built up inside from the decay,” he said.
The trailers tilted the corpses into vast trenches. “Hundreds of bodies flowed out. Some human beings looked skeletal because they were starved. Others had their guts spilling out. I would see a river of parts,” the gravedigger said. “Those that got stuck on the ledge, me and my team would have to get them into the hole.” The smell lingered in his nose and mouth for days.
But the bodies from Saydnaya were different, arriving in cars, a few dozen at a time. “Their bodies were still warm, just executed,” the gravedigger said. “I always saw the mark of the noose on their neck and their hands and legs tied. They were always naked.”
Prosecutors in Germany and France have spent years establishing criminal cases against Mr. al-Assad’s lieutenants, underlining some of the difficulties in pursuing justice for atrocities committed in countries like Syria.
In January 2022, a German court handed down a landmark life sentence against Anwar Raslan, a Syrian colonel, for crimes against humanity, including the torture of more than 4,000 Syrian prisoners. In 2018, German prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Hassan, but they have yet to apprehend him.
In March, prosecutors in France indicted and issued arrest warrants for Mr. Mamlouk and Mr. Hassan related to the killing of two men with dual French-Syrian citizenship.
If the Justice Department were to charge Mr. Hassan and Mr. Mamlouk, it is highly unlikely that the men would enter a country willing to extradite them to the United States. But human rights lawyers say the prosecution would still be valuable, revealing more about the atrocities that continue to be committed in Syria.
“Assad is still in power,” said Clémence Bectarte, a lawyer for the International Federation for Human Rights who represented the family of the two victims in France’s recent indictment. “Prosecutions are the only way at the moment for victims to articulate their quest for justice.”
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A Russian missile. (photo: Getty Images)
THE DISCORD LEAKS | Egypt made detailed plans to export rockets at Moscow’s request, but after a diplomatic offensive from Washington, later approved artillery production for Kyiv
The Washington Post last week reported on another document that exposed a covert scheme by Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi in February to provide Russia with up to 40,000 122mm Sakr-45 rockets, which can be used in Russian multiple-launch rocket launchers. Sisi instructed his subordinates to keep the project secret “to avoid problems with the West,” the document said.
But the new documents, which The Post obtained from a trove of material allegedly posted on Discord by a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, appear to show Sisi in early March backing away from plans to supply Moscow, a move that would have represented a major rebuke to Cairo’s most generous Western ally, the United States.
Egypt, though it has a long-standing diplomatic and military relationship with Russia, has for decades been a principal American ally in the Middle East and receives more than $1 billion a year in U.S. military aid.
In an apparent diplomatic win for the Biden administration, a new leaked document stated that Egypt shelved the Moscow deal and approved selling 152mm and 155mm artillery rounds to the United States for transfer to Ukraine.
Washington has sought to enlist new supporters — and desperately needed ammunition — for Kyiv’s fight against Russian forces. Egypt intended to use its capacity to produce weapons for Ukraine as “leverage” to obtain advanced U.S. military items, the document said.
Taken together, the documents provide new insight into the Biden administration’s quiet but high-stakes diplomacy with countries that have sought to stay on the margins of Washington’s intensifying standoff with Moscow. They also show how great power competition has allowed Egypt to seek new advantages as its relationship with the United States grows less crucial.
“The mere fact of competition creates openings for easy wins with the U.S., and you can imagine that this will be to the detriment of the democracy and human rights agenda,” said Michael Hanna, U.S. program director at the International Crisis Group.
The documents do not indicate whether Cairo later revived the Moscow plan or whether it has yet supplied the United States with the ammunition for Ukraine.
The Post earlier reported that Egypt has denied producing rockets for Russia, and a U.S. government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to address sensitive information, told The Post there was no indication Egypt had executed the plan.
Presented with the new documents, a spokesman for the Egyptian Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the leaked materials. After the initial report on Russian rocket production, Egyptian state-run media reported that officials denied the claim, saying it had “no basis in truth.”
A senior Biden administration official said, “Egypt is a close partner and we are regularly engaged with its leadership on a host of regional and global issues.”
The United States faces challenges ramping up its own production of artillery shells and other items needed in Ukraine and has sought help from partner nations worldwide in advance of what U.S. officials predict will be challenging spring fighting season. Conversely, Washington has slapped sanctions on its adversary Iran over shipments of arms to Russia and issued warnings to China against doing the same.
One Western ambassador in Cairo said the leaks suggest Egypt “underestimated the U.S. response to a possible arms supply to Russia” and wanted to “maximize their benefit from both sides.”
The top-secret documents — informed in part by signals intelligence, or eavesdropping — detail a month of intelligence reports from early February to early March and were intended for top Pentagon officials.
The first, dated Feb. 17, reports that Egypt took steps in late January and early February to secretly supply rockets to Russia, including setting a price and making plans for obtaining brass to make the rockets. In a conversation on Jan. 31, Minister of State for Military Production Mohamed Salah al-Din told Sisi that he advised Russian delegates that their agreed price of $1,100 per unit could rise to $1,500 due to a potential increase in brass prices. The Russians were ready to “buy anything,” he told Sisi. The Egyptian president also told Salah al-Din, according to the document, to request “specialized equipment” from Russia to improve the accuracy of the rockets or the quality of the Egyptian factories making them.
A second and undated document, likely from mid-February, states that Egypt began creating a rocket production line for the Russian military. Russian delegates had requested to purchase 15,000 rockets at the $1,100 unit price, the document states, but Sisi ordered subordinates to purchase the necessary materials to produce up to 40,000.
Like Ukraine’s army, Russian forces have expended enormous amounts of weaponry in the grinding war and need to be resupplied.
Egypt’s president appears to have put a stop to the rocket plan following visits from U.S. officials, including Brett McGurk and Barbara Leaf, the top White House and State Department officials for Middle East issues, who traveled to Cairo in late February, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who visited in early March.
The Wall Street Journal reported that month that Austin asked Egyptian leaders to provide Ukraine artillery rounds during their talks in Cairo but got no clear agreement. But an intelligence document dated March 9, the day after Austin’s visit, states that Egypt had approved selling 152mm and 155mm artillery rounds to the United States for transfer to Ukraine.
That document, part of a daily intelligence update for senior Pentagon leaders, said that Egypt planned to use the U.S. request for ammunition to push Washington for a long-term military aid deal and to obtain specific American equipment, including F-35 stealth fighter jets and Patriot air defense systems. The document said that Egypt would require American help for establishing a production line for the shells, a licensing agreement and raw materials.
Austin’s visit is the subject of another document, apparently from mid-March, that summarizes conversations between Sisi and two senior officials on March 8, the day the Egyptian president and the U.S. defense secretary held talks in Cairo.
In the March 8 conversations, Sisi appeared to suspect the possibility his discussions were being surveilled and issued Defense Minister Mohamed Zaki what the document described as a warning to “‘be careful’ about discussing presumably military requests from other countries, like Russia.” He and Zaki referenced “military contracts” with Russia but did not explicitly reference the rocket production plan, the document reported.
Zaki told Sisi that plans for an Egyptian delegation to travel to Russia on March 12 or 13, when they would likely sign contracts, had been postponed “until the situation is clearer” following Austin’s visit. Sisi said that “caution was warranted to avoid Egypt getting into trouble unnecessarily,” to which Zaki responded that “we have not taken any measures” and that Egypt had not signed any contracts.
Cairo has recently evinced frustration with the state of the relationship with Washington. The document summarizing Sisi’s March 8 conversations reports the Egyptian president “characterized the situation as the U.S. not having anything new for Egypt and not needing anything from Egypt, with the U.S. only interested in confirming U.S.-Egypt relations.”
“ElSisi envisioned the U.S. believing Israel was doing well, the Gulf countries were fine, and Europe was supporting the U.S. regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, so as a result, Egypt’s role was secondary,” it continued.
The United States has pressed Egypt on human rights issues, including on its widespread jailing of activists and anyone who might voice opposition to Sisi. Last year, Washington withheld a small portion of its military aid to Egypt, citing concerns over this pattern of repression.
Even so, President Biden — who once pledged “no more blank checks” for Sisi — has faced scrutiny for adopting what some critics saw as an overly friendly approach to the Egyptian president, including a chummy interaction on the sidelines of the COP27 climate conference in the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh last year.
The intelligence also provides additional visibility into Egypt’s deepening military relationship with Moscow and how it may have already aided Russian forces on the battlefield. An additional, undated document in the leaked trove notes that U.S. imagery and electronic intelligence had identified four Russian SA-23 surface-to-air missile systems in Ukraine that “very likely” had been intended for export to Egypt. Cairo signed a contract with Moscow for four SA-23 batteries in 2017, and the first two were delivered to Egypt in 2020 and 2021, the document stated. It did not explicitly say whether Egypt had returned those two systems to Russia for use in Ukraine.
When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Egypt took a public position of noninvolvement, voting for an end to the invasion at the United Nations but otherwise remaining neutral, and receiving visiting officials from both Russia and the United States. But with international grain shortages due to the war in Ukraine, Egypt has relied heavily on Russia to provide wheat that has helped stave off social unrest over rising food prices and an economic crisis caused in part by fallout from the conflict. Russia also began construction on Egypt’s first nuclear power plant last year and recently signed a deal for a railway workshop in Egypt.
The two countries have a long history of military and trade cooperation, even as Egypt relies on the United States for more than $1 billion of military aid each year. Egypt’s enormous population, strategic location neighboring Israel and control over the Suez Canal have long kept it relevant internationally, and Egyptian officials have tried to represent themselves to the United States and other powerful allies as a key security partner and mediator in regional tensions.
A former National Security Council official during the Obama administration who worked on the Middle East and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations said that it was common for Egypt to use Russia as a “hedge” to push Washington. After the 2013 Rabaa massacre and military coup led by Sisi prompted the government to review aid to Egypt, Cairo indicated that it could “turn to Russia,” a threat that “resonated with some senior officials at the time,” the person said.
Behind the scenes, the leaked documents suggest, Egypt’s balancing act was more complicated.
“Ideally it is not an either or, but appeasing both ends,” the Western ambassador said. “Bottom line is, though, they cannot endanger their ties with Russia [either], so they cannot actively cooperate with the U.S. on supplies to Ukraine.”
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Joe Biden. (photo: Frank Franklin II/AP)
Energy department gives green light to exports from liquefied natural gas program, after Willow project approved last month
The US energy department approved Alaska Gasline Development Corp’s (AGDC) project to export LNG to countries with which the United States does not have a free trade agreement, mainly in Asia. Backers of the roughly $39bn project expect it to be operational by 2030 if it receives the required permits.
The project, for which exports were first approved by the administration of Donald Trump, has been strongly opposed by environmental groups.
“Joe Biden’s climate presidency is flying off the rails,” said Lukas Ross of Friends of the Earth. Ross pointed out this was the second US approval of a “fossil-fuel mega-project” in as many months.
The Biden administration last month approved the ConocoPhillips $7bn Willow oil and gas drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope, prompting criticism of Biden’s record on the climate crisis.
Alaska LNG includes a liquefaction facility on the Kenai peninsula in southern Alaska and a proposed 807-mile (1,300-km) pipeline to move gas stranded in northern Alaska across the state.
Frank Richards, the president of Alaska-owned AGDC, said the company will review the 51-page decision as it develops the project, which he said will “provide Alaskans and US allies with a significant source of low-emissions, responsibly produced energy consistent with international environmental priorities”.
The Biden administration undertook an environmental review of Alaska LNG, concluding it has economic and international security benefits and that opponents had failed to show the exports were not in the “public interest”.
The Biden administration modified the previous approval to prohibit venting of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide associated with the project into the atmosphere.
Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, said the approval of the project cleared the way for additional lawsuits seeking to stop the project.
The Biden administration is trying to approve more US LNG exports as it competes with Russia, traditionally one of the world’s largest energy exporters. Critics say the Ukraine conflict is a “false justification” for a rush to natural gas.
An expansion of LNG terminals on the Gulf coast would double or even triple current capacity to deliver natural gas, which a report by Climate Action Tracker researchers said would keep carbon emissions above levels needed for net zero.
Russia is under pressure from western sanctions for its invasion of Ukraine, and the US has boosted LNG exports to Europe after Moscow cut gas pipeline shipments to the continent.
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