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Monday, May 22, 2023
Republicans are suddenly clutching their pearls — give me a break!
Bess Levin | Trump May Need to Make Room in His Summer Break for a Georgia Indictment: Report
22 May 23
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Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney investigating the ex-president, has hinted that charges are coming in August
The New York Times reports that, in a letter sent yesterday to 21 Fulton County officials, Willis announced that, due to security concerns surrounding her investigation and the potential criminal charges that could come from it, she will scale back staffing in her office by about 70% and have the majority of people work remotely between July 31 and August 18, when grand juries will be in session. (While a special grand jury spent months hearing evidence in the Trump investigation, Willis must now get approval from a regular grand jury for any possible indictments.) The district attorney noted in the Thursday letter that exceptions to the remote work plan would include “my leadership team” and “all armed investigators.” She added that she “respectfully request(s) that judges not schedule trials and in-person hearings during the weeks beginning Monday, Aug. 7, and Monday, Aug. 14.” As the Times notes, “the moves suggest that…Willis…is expecting a grand jury to unseal indictments during that time period.” The outlet also noted that Willis’s timetable was already pushed back at least once as she negotiated cooperation deals, so, obviously, that could happen again; however, the dates laid out in her most recent letter seem pretty specific.
For his part, Trump’s attorneys are still trying to quash the special grand jury’s final report, and get both Willis and the judge presiding over the inquiry thrown off the case. In response to that attempt, Willis wrote in a filing this week that Trump and Co. “are not content to follow the ordinary course of the law. They seek to ‘restrain’ a criminal investigation before any charges are filed or even sought.” In February, when asked about the recommendations the special grand jury made re: which individuals should be charged, jury forewoman Emily Kohrs told the Times it was “not a short list.” Asked whether the ex-president was on it, she added: “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science.” Speaking to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in March, another juror said of the group’s report: “A lot’s gonna come out sooner or later. And it’s gonna be massive. It’s gonna be massive.”
Last year, Willis sent a letter to the Atlanta field office of the FBI, requesting a risk assessment of the courthouse in downtown Atlanta and for the bureau to “provide protective resources to include intelligence and federal agents,” noting that Trump had described her and other prosecutors investigating him as “vicious, horrible people” during a rally and demanded protests in their cities. Shortly before his indictment by the Manhattan district attorney for a series of hush money payments he made before the 2016 election, Trump called for “death and destruction.” In another letter, sent to the local sheriff last month, Willis laid out “the need for heightened security and preparedness in coming months due to this pending announcement.”
Trump typically spends the summer at his New Jersey golf course, which would be less than a three-hour flight, should he need to show up at the courthouse to be arraigned (again).
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Ukrainian tanks move towards Bakhmut in the battle to control the eastern city. (photo: Aris Messinis/AFP)
UK PM says at G7 summit that end to war will need to recognise country’s territorial integrity
The UK prime minister said the last session at the G7 summit in Japan had involved a “conversation about peace” in Ukraine and what it should look like, with more neutral countries India and Brazil also taking part.
Speaking after the end of the gathering in Hiroshima, the site of one of the US atomic bombings in 1945, Sunak said G7 leaders had been united about “making it very clear about what the principles of peace should be based on” in Ukraine.
“Those calling for peace that is really a ceasefire should recognise that is not a just and durable peace. I think that is recognised in the statement that a just and durable peace is one that should be based on the UN charter about respect for territorial respect and sovereignty. Those are the values that underpin the international system … no one wants peace more than President Zelenskiy and the people of Ukraine but they have to be based on these principles.”
Sunak has previously criticised China’s proposal of a 12-point plan for a ceasefire in Ukraine saying it lacked credibility, and warned against taking any calls for a ceasefire from Russia seriously.
He has also previously made clear he believes it “will end as all conflicts do, at the negotiating table, but that is a decision for Ukraine to make”, adding “what we need to do is put them in the best possible place to have those talks at an appropriate moment that makes sense for them”.
The G7 summit had a central focus on the Ukraine war, with Volodymyr Zelenskiy making a surprise visit to Japan to join world leaders as his forces prepare for a counteroffensive against Russia. A major focus of Sunak and others has been persuading countries from the global south, including India, to shift towards more support for Ukraine from a broadly neutral position.
The Ukrainian president met Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, for the first time since the invasion, inviting him to join Ukraine’s peace formula. Afterwards, Zelenskiy said the two had also discussed Ukraine’s needs in mobile hospitals and removing landmines.
Modi told Zelenskiy he was keen to help and that for him the war was an issue of humanity and human values. “I assure you that for its resolution, India and I personally will do everything within our means,” he said.
Zelenskiy is due to give a press conference on Sunday after meeting world leaders to make his case for further military support.
A major breakthrough for Zelenskiy came on Friday when the US president, Joe Biden, gave the green light for American F16 fighter jets sold to other countries to be relicensed to Ukraine. Sunak said the UK was preparing to train Ukrainian pilots ready to fly F16 planes later this summer.
Earlier in the summit, Sunak noted that the G7 had once been the G8, before Russia was expelled in 2014 for its illegal annexation of Crimea and “flagrant abuse of human rights and the rule of law”.
He added: “Nine years on, it sends an incredibly powerful message to have my friend and Ukraine’s President Zelenskiy with us in Hiroshima. It tells the world that the G7 stands united with the people of Ukraine in the face of a terrible onslaught. And it demonstrates that brute force and oppression will not triumph over freedom and sovereignty.”
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Joe Biden arrives at the Marine Corps Air Station in Iwakuni, Japan, ahead of the G-7 summit in Hiroshima. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
On the latest round of the Republicans’ dangerous game.
On Tuesday, Biden reinforced the point by announcing that he would cut short an important overseas trip to the Pacific region in order to return to Washington for the debt talks. With default looming—coming, perhaps, as soon as early June, according to the Treasury Department—this seemed like a politically advisable course, but the optics were nonetheless terrible. The President will still attend the G-7 meeting in Hiroshima, Japan, but skip his planned stops in Australia and Papua New Guinea. Both visits had been designed to showcase the U.S.’s top foreign-policy priority—shoring up American alliances in the region as part of the growing confrontation with China.
The change in Biden’s plans did not go over well. Papua New Guinea had scheduled a national holiday for this coming Monday to celebrate the first time a sitting American President would visit the suddenly strategic island nation. Oops. Party cancelled. In Australia, Biden’s decision was seen as a significant political embarrassment for the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese—“a disappointment, a mess, and a gift to Beijing,” as a headline in the Sydney Morning Herald put it. Albanese, who had announced, a mere nine hours before the White House pulled out, that Biden would address a special joint session of the Australian Parliament, ended up scrapping a planned summit of leaders from Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S., a coalition of countries known as the Quad. He complained about “the blocking and the disruption that’s occurring in domestic politics in the U.S., with the debt-ceiling issue.” Back in Washington, even the President’s supporters were embarrassed. Although Biden had to put himself “in the center of action,” Representative Jake Auchincloss, a Democratic up-and-comer from Massachusetts, said, “it’s painful to see a public-relations gift for the Chinese Communist Party.”
Sending a message to the rest of the world about American leadership has clearly not been the foremost concern of Republicans on Capitol Hill. Never mind that some of these same Republicans are the loudest voices demanding more and tougher confrontation with China. For months, the brewing debt-ceiling fight has been the capital’s equivalent of background noise, some weeks louder, some weeks quieter, but always there, waiting for the inevitable moment when the U.S. would come close to default and the real politics would begin. It was merely a coincidence, albeit a highly symbolic one, that Biden was at the G-7 summit, in Japan, the same week that he finally gave in to Republican demands to negotiate spending cuts as a price for a debt-ceiling increase and named a team—the White House aide Steve Ricchetti and the Office of Management and Budget director Shalanda Young—to do it. The official spin from Democrats is that the White House has not actually capitulated, since the talks are about the budget, not the debt limit itself. “We have not budged from our position that default should not be used as hostage-taking,” the Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, said. Except, of course, that is exactly what is happening.
One of the problems is that we’ve been here before, in 2011 and 2013, when, just like today, a Democrat was in the White House and Republicans controlled the House. The script is all too familiar: there were dire warnings, talks about talking, and then frantic last-minute negotiations. Each time, a default was averted, but only barely. (In 2011, a deal was reached two days before the predicted date of default, after financial markets went crazy and Standard & Poor’s downgraded the U.S. credit rating for the first time in history.) Few observers believe a default will happen this time, either. Which makes the present crisis a very artificial one indeed, manufactured by Republicans who now see a ritual act of economic self-sabotage as a surefire way to extract concessions that they could not otherwise secure.
This, alas, was always the G.O.P.’s plan if it managed to win back the House in this past fall’s midterms—as early as last October, weeks before the election, leaders of the extreme Freedom Caucus faction said openly that they were looking forward to using the debt ceiling as “leverage.” “Debt-limit terror,” as the former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers called it in an interview with Politico last year, was both foreseeable and foreseen. But, like the return of Donald Trump as the 2024 Republican front-runner, the fact that a political crisis was entirely predictable has not in any way prevented it from happening.
Democrats “made a horrible mistake” by agreeing to negotiations in 2011, the Democratic senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, told Punchbowl News this week, arguing that, this time, the Democrats should call the G.O.P.’s bluff and run out the clock. That way, Republicans would either have to cave and agree to raise the debt ceiling without attaching extraneous provisions, or they would take the country into default and own the political consequences. Other Democrats, concerned that the White House will eventually agree to Republican demands—which include strict budget caps, work requirements on federal assistance to the poor, and the rollback of key provisions in Biden’s signature legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act—are publicly pushing the untested legal theory that the Fourteenth Amendment allows Biden to bypass Congress and act unilaterally to secure the public debt. “Get rid of the debt-limit hand grenade forever,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, urged the President in a video he posted on Twitter. “This blackmailing has to end,” Senator Jeff Merkley, of Oregon, another supporter of invoking the Fourteenth Amendment, said.
But that is not the path that Biden has chosen, nor, despite his recent bluster that he was thinking of going that route, did it ever seem like a serious possibility. Talks were inevitable, and the suspense now mostly lies in the details of whatever deal is reached. Part of the Democratic skepticism is the almost palpable fear that the White House will concede too much. A deal is still not a foregone conclusion. Uncertainty remains. It could all blow up. And so success is measured, once again, in the usual small Washington increments, in which a decision to allow the talking to begin counts as progress. Smelling victory, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy does not even seem to mind being called a terrorist. “I see the path,” McCarthy told reporters on Thursday. Of course he did.
The unravelling of a superpower’s credibility does not happen in an instant but over time and as a result of repeated crises. That the crises plaguing Washington are often self-inflicted has not made them any less damaging. Biden is right to fly back to his embattled capital. The greatest threat to the international order is right here.
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A US MQ-9 drone on display in Afghanistan. A similar aircraft was used in a drone strike on May 3 to target a lead al-Qaeda figure, US officials claimed. (photo: Massoud Hossaini/AP)
Two US military officials said they may not have killed the intended target of an Al Qaeda leader in a drone strike that was carried out on May 3 in Northwest Syria, The Washington Post reported.
The US Central Command released a brief statement on May 3, claiming it had conducted a "unilateral strike in Northwest Syria targeting a senior Al Qaeda leader." According to the press release, the strike was carried out around 11:42 a.m. in local Syrian time.
But the two officials are walking back on the claim, and the family of the victim as well as terrorism experts told the Post that the man had no ties to terrorists.
The family told the publication that the man was 56-year-old Lotfi Hassan Misto, a father of 10.
Misto's son Hassan told the Post that his father carried out his morning routine as usual, eating breakfast and then tending to his sheep.
Misto then took a break for a few hours near his home and had tea with his brother. Around 11:30 a.m., Misto went back to his animals. The father was struck by a missile from an MQ-9 predator drone near the area where he had tea with his brother less than 15 minutes later.
The Post gathered photos and details of the event through interviews with Misto's family and neighbors. Images were also provided by the Syrian Civil Defense, a volunteer humanitarian organization also known as the "White Helmets."
Four terrorism experts told The Post that Misto was not referenced in any online discussions with jihadists following the attack. The experts added that it's unlikely that a senior Al Qaeda figure would be operating in the area of the strike.
"Very quickly after this strike, the White Helmets came out and identified the individual with his name and his profession. Locals came forward to say, this guy's always been a farmer. He's never had any political activities; he's never had any affiliation with armed groups," Charles Lister, the director of Syria and Countering Terrorism and Extremism programs at the Middle East Institute, told the Post. "The pace and breadth of such push-back was actually quite unusual."
A spokesperson for US Central Command did not return a request for comment that was sent outside of working hours.
Central Command spokesperson Michael Lawhorn told the Post that officials are aware of reports of civilian casualty.
"Centcom takes all such allegations seriously and is investigating to determine whether or not the action may have unintentionally resulted in harm to civilians," Lawhorn told the Post.
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A federal investigation found former U.S. Agency for Global Media CEO Michael Pack (at right) repeatedly engaged in abuses of power and gross mismanagement. Pack, shown last year at a party with conservative politician and publisher Steve Forbes, sought to stamp out all hints of anti-Trump sentiment at the agency, the Voice of America, and other networks funded by the federal government. (photo: Patrick McMullan/NPR)
"Hates Republicans," the employee had written about one in a memo. "Openly despises Trump and Republicans," they said of another. A third, the employee wrote, "is not on the Trump team." The list went on. (Firing someone over political affiliation is typically a violation of federal civil service law.)
Within two days, Pack was examining ways to remove suspect staffers, a new federal investigation found. The executives he sidelined were later reinstated and exonerated by the inspector general's office of the U.S. State Department. Pack ultimately turned his attention to agency executives, network chiefs, and journalists themselves.
The report, sent to the White House and Congressional leaders earlier this month, found that the Trump appointee repeatedly abused the powers of his office, broke laws and regulations, and engaged in gross mismanagement.
USAGM oversees the Voice of America and other international broadcasters funded by the federal government, such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Radio Television MartÃ. The networks are charged with providing straight news for societies where independent news coverage is either repressed or financially unfeasible and with modeling the value of pluralistic political debate within that coverage.
"It just takes one's breath away."
"This report is remarkable in its breadth and depth and detail of the wrongdoing that was underway at these agencies in the last six months of the Trump administration," says David Seide, an attorney with the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit public interest law firm which has represented more than 30 whistleblowers at USAGM, VOA and its sister networks since Pack took office. "It just takes one's breath away."
The 145-page report independently corroborates many of the whistleblower complaints. It also lends new weight and depth to earlier reporting by NPR, inquiries by a U.S. inspector general and rulings by a federal judge and a local District of Columbia judge.
Taken together, they depict Pack's brief tenure as an ideologically driven rampage through a government agency to try to force its newsrooms and workforce to show fealty to the White House.
Pack punished executives who objected to the legality of his plans, interfered in the journalistic independence of the newsrooms under his agency, and personally signed a no-bid contract with a private law firm to investigate those employees he saw as opposed to former President Donald Trump. The law firm's fees reached the seven figures for work typically done by attorneys who are federal employees.
In Trumpian flourish, Pack promised "to drain the swamp"
In a conversation with the conservative news outlet The Federalist, Pack characterized his moves with a Trumpian flourish: "to drain the swamp, to root out corruption and to deal with these issues of bias." Pack did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.
Pack is a conservative documentarian and former official at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. His appointment was held up for two years in the U.S. Senate over concerns about his highly ideological approach and whether he had been candid over the finances of his business. (His production company ultimately agreed to transfer $210,000 back to a nonprofit that he also controls, which was itself subsequently compelled to dissolve under a legal settlement he reached last year with the D.C. Attorney General's office.)
Pack, a slight man with an unassuming manner, had tight ties to major conservative figures. He briefly led the Claremont Institute in California, which is influential in Republican circles; he previously developed two documentaries for public television that Steve Bannon helped to produce. Bannon later became Trump's campaign manager and chief White House political strategist.
In early 2020, his nomination still languishing, Pack released his documentary about U.S. Justice Clarence Thomas, based on extensive interviews with the jurist and his wife, the conservative activist Ginni Thomas. He reportedly became friends with the Thomases, writing a book with the former White House attorney who helped smooth Thomas' path to confirmation in 1991.
Pack's own prospects for confirmation revived in spring 2020 when Trump's White House attacked the Voice of America, in almost unprecedented fashion. The White House publicly alleged the news service uncritically relayed Chinese propaganda about the nation's efforts to combat the outbreak of the Covid-19 coronavirus.
A litany of abuses substantiated by federal investigation
The inquiry was conducted by three outside consultants hired by USAGM and endorsed by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, the agency that investigates federal whistleblower complaints. The report concludes that Pack:
- Violated the independence of journalists working for newsrooms at the Voice of America and other international broadcasting networks funded by the government and "exercised oversight in a manner suggestive of political bias."
- Wrongly retaliated against career executives by suspending their security clearances after they filed whistleblower complaints. Their allegations were later substantiated by the State Department's inspector general's office.
- Engaged in "gross mismanagement and gross waste" when he paid a politically-connected Virginia law firm $1.6 million in agency money to investigate his executives in a confidential, no-bid contract. A former Supreme Court clerk for Thomas, John D. Adams, was the senior partner who oversaw the McGuireWoods contract with Pack at USAGM.
- Imperiled the independence of several of the international networks, politicizing them by stacking their boards with a full slate of ideological appointees all at once. He also abused his powers in trying to make their tenures irrevocable except in the case of a felony conviction.
- Broke privacy laws by releasing dossiers compiled by the law firm, McGuireWoods, on those executives he suspended to five right-wing journalists whom he had appointed to various networks funded by the boards. McGuireWoods strongly advised against releasing the dossiers publicly. They were ultimately made public by a sympathetic member of Congress.
- Sought to prevent the Open Technology Fund from receiving federal funds for three years because of his animus toward the outfit, "rather than a desire to protect the public interest." The fund helped to subsidize the development of Tor and Signal, technologies that let people access the Web and communicate securely and privately, even in repressive countries. Bannon was among those with ties to figures promoting rival technologies that sought greater subsidies from the fund.
- "[P]ut numerous internet freedom projects at risk, including in countries that are State Department priorities" by seeking to block federal dollars from flowing to the tech fund.
Violations found of journalistic independence and the civil workforce's professionalism
Not all of the actions under investigation amounted to an abuse of power, a gross waste of federal funds, or a violation of the law. For example, the inquiry found that it was within Pack's authority to remove the heads of the networks, despite objections and protests.
Even in some of those instances, however, Pack was found to have acted improperly, as when he fired the head of Radio Free Asia and directed her replacement to force her out of her subsequent, contractually protected position of executive editor at the network. "CEO Pack's actions were inconsistent with the statutory mandate that he respect the networks' journalistic integrity and independence," the report states.
Nearly every outfit overseen by the USAGM was affected by his actions — or, at times, his inactions. Pack remained mute when his newly installed VOA leaders demoted a reporter who covered the White House for pressing then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for answers about the January 6th, 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol; he took no action when the acting chief of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting provided a Trump political aide with a link to its content to distribute to a U.S. audience shortly before the 2020 elections, despite laws preventing such dissemination; and he failed to assign a standards editor for Voice of America after reassigning the longtime news executive for four months.
That last maneuver, the report found, constituted gross mismanagement.
NPR has previously reported on many of the matters under investigation, and some others that did not receive official scrutiny.
Based on exchanges among USAGM staffers, NPR previously reported that McGuireWoods intended to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the $1.6 million billed but stopped invoicing the agency late that fall. Pack was about to lose his perch and his patron, as Joe Biden won election in November. Biden would order Pack to resign as one of his first formal acts in office. A spokesperson for McGuireWoods did not return a detailed message seeking comment.
The inquiry itself was instigated by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. It received the whistleblower complaints and directed USAGM to conduct the investigation.
In one of his final actions in office, Pack wrote that he did not accept the agency's authority to instruct him to initiate the investigation. He called the agency's structure "unconstitutional" and said of those who lodged complaints against him, "They have an axe to grind." That refusal, too, was seen as a breach of Pack's duties.
The Office of Special Counsel appointed a panel of three outside experts, including the former acting chief of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, a former senior executive of the Export-Import Bank, and a former investigative reporter who has worked for the special counsel's office.
NPR spoke to seven current and former staffers at USAGM and outlets and outfits it funds. Each said the report reflected a climate of crisis, fear and reprisal.
In sum, Pack's seven-and-a-half month stint running the agency exemplified Trump's contempt for the press and for the professional federal workforce that prides itself on nonpartisanship. (Pack echoed Trump's designation of that workforce as the "Deep State.")
Yet the people with whom NPR spoke also, independently, noted this account of Pack's tenure may not represent only a past era.
On May 10, Congressman Andy Ogles, a Republican from Tennessee, introduced legislation to prohibit any federal funding for the Open Technology Fund, as Pack had sought to do. Trump announced his support for Ogles' 2024 re-election bid on the next day.
And the conservative Heritage Foundation has drawn up proposals for whom should be hired at federal agencies, should Trump or another Republican win the White House in 2024.
Among the project's leaders is John McEntee, the former personnel chief in the Trump White House who helped set up the cadre of partisans that formed Pack's inner circle at USAGM.
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Meta's headquarters in Dublin. The $1.3 billion fine against the company is a record under the General Data Protection Regulation law. (photo: Paulo Nunes dos Santos/Bloomberg)
The Facebook owner said it would appeal an order to stop sending data about European Union users to the United States.
The penalty, announced by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, is potentially one of the most consequential in the five years since the European Union enacted the landmark data privacy law known as the General Data Protection Regulation. Regulators said the company failed to comply with a 2020 decision by the E.U.’s highest court that data shipped across the Atlantic was not sufficiently protected from American spy agencies.
The ruling announced on Monday applies only to Facebook and not Instagram and WhatsApp, which Meta also owns. Meta said it would appeal the decision and that there would be no immediate disruption to Facebook’s service in the Europe Union.
Several steps remain before the company must cordon off the data of Facebook users in Europe — information that could include photos, friend connections, direct messages and data collected for targeting advertising. The ruling comes with a grace period of at least five months for Meta to comply. And the company’s appeal will set up a potentially lengthy legal process.
European Union and American officials are negotiating a new data-sharing pact that would provide legal protections for Meta to continue moving information about users between the United States and Europe. A preliminary deal was announced last year.
Yet the E.U. decision shows how government policies are upending the borderless way that data has traditionally moved. As a result of data-protection rules, national security laws and other regulations, companies are increasingly being pushed to store data within the country where it is collected, rather than allowing it to move freely to data centers around the world.
The case against Meta stems from U.S. policies that give intelligence agencies the ability to intercept communications from abroad, including digital correspondence. In 2020, an Austrian privacy activist, Max Schrems, won a lawsuit to invalidate a U.S.-E.U. pact, known as Privacy Shield, that had allowed Facebook and other companies to move data between the two regions. The European Court of Justice said the risk of U.S. snooping violated the fundamental rights of European users.
“Unless U.S. surveillance laws get fixed, Meta will have to fundamentally restructure its systems,” Mr. Schrems said in a statement on Monday. The solution, he said, was likely a ”federated social network” in which most personal data would stay in the E.U. except for “necessary” transfers like when a European sends a direct message to somebody in the United States.
On Monday, Meta said it was being unfairly singled out for data-sharing practices used by thousands of companies.
“Without the ability to transfer data across borders, the internet risks being carved up into national and regional silos, restricting the global economy and leaving citizens in different countries unable to access many of the shared services we have come to rely on,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, and Jennifer Newstead, the chief legal officer, said in a statement.
The ruling, which is a record fine under the General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R., had been expected. Last month, Susan Li, Meta’s chief financial officer, told investors that about 10 percent of its worldwide ad revenue came from ads delivered to Facebook users in E.U. countries. In 2022, Meta had revenue of nearly $117 billion.
Meta and other companies are counting on a new data agreement between the United States and the European Union to replace the one invalidated by European courts in 2020. Last year, President Biden and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union, announced the outlines of a deal in Brussels, but the details are still being negotiated.
Meta faces the prospect of having to delete vast amounts of data about Facebook users in the European Union, said Johnny Ryan, senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. That would present technical difficulties given the interconnected nature of internet companies.
“It is hard to imagine how it can comply with this order,” said Mr. Ryan, who has pushed for stronger data-protection policies.
The decision against Meta comes almost exactly on the five-year anniversary of G.D.P.R. Initially held up as a model data privacy law, many civil society groups and privacy activists have said it has not fulfilled its promise because of lack of enforcement.
Much of the criticism has focused on a provision that requires regulators in the country where a company has its European Union headquarters to enforce the far-reaching privacy law. Ireland, home to the regional headquarters of Meta, TikTok, Twitter, Apple and Microsoft, has faced the most scrutiny.
On Monday, Irish authorities said they were overruled by a board made up of representatives from E.U. countries. The board insisted on the €1.2 billion fine and forcing Meta to address past data collected about users, which could include deletion.
“The unprecedented fine is a strong signal to organizations that serious infringements have far-reaching consequences,” said Andrea Jelinek, the chairwoman of the European Data Protection Board, the E.U. body that set the fine.
Meta has been a frequent target of regulators under the G.D.P.R. In January, the company was fined €390 million for forcing users to accept personalized ads as a condition of using Facebook. In November, it was fined another €265 million for a data leak.
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Deemmeris Debra'e Burns shows the spot on a rural road in Satartia, Miss., where he lost consciousness when a carbon dioxide pipeline ruptured, an experience he thinks is a warning for America. (photo: Julia Simon/NPR)
Burns' first thought was a pipeline explosion. He didn't know what was filling the air, but he called his mom, Thelma Brown, to warn her to get inside. He told her he was coming.
Brown gathered her young grandchild and great-grandchildren she was watching, took them into her back bedroom, and got under the quilt with them. And waited.
"They didn't come," Brown says. "Ten minutes. I knew they would've been here in five minutes, but they didn't come."
Little did she know, her sons and nephew were just down the road in the Cadillac, unconscious, victims of a mass poisoning from a carbon dioxide pipeline rupture. As the carbon dioxide moved through the rural community, more than 200 people evacuated and at least 45 people were hospitalized. Cars stopped working, hobbling emergency response. People lay on the ground, shaking and unable to breathe. First responders didn't know what was going on. "It looked like you were going through the zombie apocalypse," says Jack Willingham, emergency director for Yazoo County.
Now, three years after the CO2 poisoning from the pipeline break, some in Satartia see the incident as a warning at a critical moment for U.S. climate policy. The country is looking at a dramatic expansion of its carbon dioxide pipeline network, thanks in part to billions of dollars of incentives in last year's climate legislation. Last week, the Biden administration announced $251 million for a dozen climate projects that focus on CO2 transport and storage.
There are now about 5,300 miles of CO2 pipelines in the U.S., but in the next few decades, that number could grow to more than 65,000 miles, says Jesse Jenkins, professor of engineering at Princeton University who has researched scenarios to reduce U.S. emissions.
But the rupture in Satartia underscores growing concerns across communities that face the prospect of more CO2 pipelines being built to address climate change. Safety advocates and community residents worry about pipeline safety and gaps in federal regulation, says Bill Caram, executive director of the nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust. "We're looking at those pipelines being a lot closer to people and communities than they are right now," Caram says. "We are not yet ready."
Carbon dioxide hampers emergency response
The expected growth in CO2 pipelines is tied to a nationwide push for more carbon capture and storage. That's the idea of sucking up carbon dioxide generated by things like power plants, cement-makers and steel factories and storing it underground before it heats the planet. Fossil fuel companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron and their congressional allies like Joe Manchin pushed for higher tax credits for carbon capture in last year's climate legislation.
Now the government is on the verge of pouring over $10 billion into this technology through a combination of grants and loans, with billions more available through tax credits, according to analysis from the Bipartisan Policy Center. Pipelines are needed, because when companies suck up carbon dioxide, they often can't store it where they capture it. They use pipelines to send it to underground locations with the right geology for storage, which can be states away. "Do we want to capture carbon dioxide and store it? If you do, we're going to need pipelines," Jenkins says. "One follows from the other."
But people in the South and Midwest who face the prospect of new pipelines in their communities see what happened in Satartia as a potential warning. The rupture occurred at 7:06 p.m. and spewed CO2 for about four hours. The 911 center in Yazoo County, Miss., was flooded with emergency calls. The Climate Investigations Center obtained recordings of the 911 calls and shared them with NPR.
In one 911 call, a mother pleaded for help because her daughter couldn't breathe, her hacking audible in the background. Another 911 caller stranded on the highway described what was happening to her friend: "She's laying on the ground and she's shaking. She's kind of drooling out of the mouth. I don't know if she's having a seizure or not. Can you send somebody quick!"
Humans always breathe some carbon dioxide, but too much causes a thirst for oxygen, disorientation and heart malfunction. Extreme exposures to carbon dioxide can lead to death by asphyxiation. The use of carbon dioxide to kill pigs in abattoirs is now under scrutiny over whether it complies with federal laws on humane slaughter.
Carbon dioxide in open air can disperse. But third-party air monitoring that night in Satartia showed that potent clouds of CO2 can sometimes hang in the air for hours.
It quickly became clear that the cloud of carbon dioxide was hampering the emergency response. Combustion engines need oxygen to work, and as the carbon dioxide displaced oxygen in the air, many cars stopped running.
"I don't know what's going on," said the caller on the highway. "My car stopped, it won't move, and we just got outta the car and started walking."
Jerry Briggs, a fire coordinator from Warren County, was searching the area in a utility terrain vehicle when he and his team found a red Cadillac with what looked like three men passed out inside. At first Briggs wasn't sure if they were alive. When they broke open the car windows, they found Burns, his brother and cousin, all unconscious.
Because the UTV was so cramped, they considered taking the men to safety one by one, but Briggs' colleague worried that the men wouldn't make it if they left any of them behind in the car.
Three years on, the community still suffers health impacts
Briggs' team helped get Burns, his brother and cousin to the hospital. The medical team at the hospital sent them home after a few hours. But the following day, struggling to breathe, Burns came back to the hospital. He, his brother and cousin ended up taking oxygen tanks around with them for several months.
They aren't the only ones in the community with ongoing respiratory issues, says Markus Stanley, chief of staff and medical director of the emergency department at Merit Health River Region, a hospital in nearby Vicksburg, Miss.
Stanley treats patients who were in the area the night of the pipeline rupture, including residents and first responders. "I've had several patients say, 'My lung problems have gotten a lot worse since I was exposed to that,'" Stanley says. His patients with asthma "do show some increased frequency and severity of their asthmatic exacerbations."
Carbon dioxide poisoning can also affect the brain, says Steven Vercammen, an emergency room physician in Belgium who has studied carbon dioxide intoxication. "The brains are the most vulnerable for the decrease in oxygen," Vercammen says. "If your brain [does] not have enough oxygen, it will start to die. Depending on which parts of the brain are affected, you will see different symptoms. Most often you see that there are effects on cognitive function."
Burns says that after spending more than an hour unconscious in a car filled with CO2, he still has headaches, difficulty concentrating and muscle tremors. He gestures to his shaking hand. "I'm an outside worker, you know what I'm saying?" Burns says. "No inside building job. Never had that. I've always did construction or lumber mill work and, you know, I can't do that now."
Burns also saw a psychiatrist for the anxiety attacks he had after that night. "They gave me some pills for it, but I'd rather not take those 'cause they had you sleeping most of the time," he says.
Satartia opens up questions over pipeline regulatory gaps
Federal regulators who investigated found that the pipeline operator, Denbury Inc., violated several regulations that night, including in its emergency response. When the pipeline ruptured in Satartia, Denbury knew there was an issue almost immediately, according to the government's report.
In an earnings call a few days after the event, David Sheppard, Denbury's then-senior vice president for operations, said the company's CO2 operations center "detected a pressure loss ... immediately triggering our emergency response protocol." Sheppard also said on the call that "no injuries to local residents, our employees, our contractors were reported in association with the leak."
But emergency responders in Satartia say that after the pipeline rupture, Denbury didn't alert them. "I never heard from 'em," county emergency director Willingham says. "It just didn't happen. Nobody contacted us to let us know."
Only after a local emergency responder called Denbury did the company confirm what had happened, according to the government report. That was at 7:48 p.m., more than 40 minutes after the rupture. "We may have — could have — had a better response had we known what was going on," says Willingham.
Regulators also found that the company failed to recognize the risks that the weather and soil posed to the pipeline. Unlike the Mississippi Delta, which is famously flat — "an area you can watch your dog run away for three days," Willingham says — nearby Satartia is hilly. Federal regulators determined that all the rain in the weeks and months beforehand caused the uneven ground to shift, and the pipeline to rupture.
Denbury recently "agree[d] to the findings of violation" — though it said it did "not admit to any of the alleged violations or risks identified" by the government — and paid the government a $2.8 million penalty. Burns, his brother, cousin and others in the community are suing the company. Denbury did not reply to NPR's request for comment about the lawsuit.
In an emailed statement to NPR, a Denbury spokesperson says they fully cooperated with regulators to investigate what happened and worked with local officials to address the impacts. "Denbury is an industry leader in carbon dioxide transportation and we remain committed to continually improving pipeline safety," the statement said.
John Satterfield, the director of regulatory affairs for Summit Carbon Solutions, a company that's constructing CO2 pipelines across the Midwest, says the incident in Satartia speaks to problems with the pipeline operator, Denbury, and not problems regulating the wider industry.
"It's not as if there's some huge gap in the regulatory schema," says Satterfield, whose company is building new CO2 pipelines across North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota. "The regulations have been in place for years. There are pipelines everywhere. It's the safest mode of transporting large volumes of products across our country, and the pipelines that we're talking about building today are brand new, and they're based on the latest technology."
Other pipeline industry executives point out that the accident rate of their network is low. But Briggs, the fireman who rescued the men from the Cadillac, says when people in the industry say pipelines are safe, he gets frustrated. He thinks people need to understand the risks of CO2 poisoning, and potential pipeline ruptures. "It happened. I mean, I am living proof to tell you it happened," Briggs says. "Maybe it hasn't happened before this event, but it did happen. People were hurt, people didn't know [the pipeline] was here. Something needs to change."
"What we learned here is that we need a stronger standard"
CO2 can take different forms, like gas, liquid and dry ice. Jesse Arenivas is chief executive of EnLink, which is building a CO2 pipeline network in Louisiana to support customers such as ExxonMobil. He says for the first project, the company plans to transmit about 70% of the CO2 as a gas and transmit the rest as a liquid.
But while CO2 in its "supercritical" liquid state is regulated by the federal government, the gaseous state and other states aren't currently regulated at all. Caram of the Pipeline Safety Trust says if there's a disaster while the CO2 is a gas or other unregulated state, "I worry about a good lawyer getting an operator out of any kind of liability."
There are other potential regulatory gaps. CO2 itself is odorless. So is natural gas, but companies add an odorant to alert people to its presence. There is currently no such requirement for CO2. There's also a limited understanding of how CO2 can move through the air, says Caram. "As we're building these pipelines, we don't have a good sense of who's going to be in that potential impact area in the case of a failure," Caram says.
Tristan Brown is the deputy administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), the federal agency that regulates CO2 pipelines. He says in June 2022 his agency issued an advisory bulletin to make sure all pipeline operators looked out for geologic hazards, updating their guidance to include lessons from the Satartia pipeline rupture.
And he says the agency is making new rules around CO2 pipelines, including looking into regulating more phases of CO2, like the gaseous phase, and potentially requiring odorants. "I think what we learned here is that we need a stronger standard and so that's what we're working towards," Tristan Brown says. He also notes that the agency is increasing the number of pipeline inspectors and engineers by 20%.
Still, Yazoo County emergency director Willingham worries that with tens of thousands of miles of new pipelines and lots of processes for self-reporting, the necessary enforcement might not happen. "I think they're dependent on the operators to make sure that they're going by code," he says, "and you can't police yourself."
Some pipeline executives are learning from Satartia. Others haven't heard of it
NPR spoke with leadership at four companies building thousands of miles of new carbon dioxide pipelines across the United States. Most had heard of what happened in Satartia.
"We take those learnings, and we study those cases and we implement safeguards so we don't repeat those incidents," says Arenivas of EnLink, who says they educate local communities about what will go through the pipe.
"We are very well aware of what happened in Satartia," says Elizabeth Burns-Thompson, vice president of government and public affairs for Navigator CO2, which is building carbon dioxide pipelines across Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, South Dakota and part of Minnesota. She says the company is holding meetings with first responders and communities even before breaking ground. And they're looking at new safety precautions, including contracting with a university research team about adding an odorant to their CO2. "The odorant that we're looking at has a garlic aroma," she says.
Navigator and the company Summit tell NPR that in light of the updated regulatory advisory following Satartia, they are continuing to look at hazards from weather and soil along the entirety of their lines.
Mike Fernandez, a senior vice president at Enbridge, a pipeline company that is building carbon dioxide pipelines in Texas, said he had not heard about the Satartia incident. But he adds: "What you have to do is you have to let science and innovation kind of lead the way and you need to understand what are the risks. At the same time, what you want to do is try to diminish those risks so that they become smaller factors."
"We are pushing envelopes. We're trying to innovate. We're trying to do something different in the name of saving the planet," Fernandez says. "We all have to realize that there are pluses and minuses with every technology, and some are slightly riskier than others. And we just need to make sure if it is the right thing for us to do in order to reduce carbon dioxide then let's do it, but let's do it with caution."
But U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., who serves on the House subcommittee covering pipeline safety, questions whether all these pipelines really will help save the planet. "We should be concerned about this from a safety standard. We really have to be concerned about this from a climate perspective as well," he says.
"This entire strategy is being represented as a climate solution, when most of the time it's really not. Most of the time it's really part of the climate problem."
A climate solution, or more of a climate problem?
Huffman notes that today most of the carbon dioxide transported in pipelines is used for something called "enhanced oil recovery." That's a process where oil companies inject CO2 into oil wells to boost the pressure and pump out more petroleum.
Currently over 70% of carbon capture projects involve "enhanced oil recovery," says Bruce Robertson, energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a nonprofit think tank. The CO2 in the pipeline that ruptured in Satartia was headed to an oil field where it would have been used to extract more oil.
While extracting fossil fuels can help make carbon capture projects more profitable, it can ultimately result in more planet-heating emissions. To help meet climate goals, many future projects for carbon capture won't involve extracting oil and will simply store the CO2 deep underground. But there are still questions about carbon capture's viability as a climate solution, says Robertson. He and his colleagues analyzed some of the world's largest carbon capture projects and found most of them underperformed on emission reduction targets, and many were over budget.
"Is this a good way to spend money to reduce emissions? The answer's no. The answer is definitely no," Robertson says.
Ultimately, Huffman worries that many CO2 pipelines and carbon capture projects will end up extending the life of fossil fuel operations. "This CO2 pipeline scheme is their lifeline," he says.
Back in Satartia, Burns walks by the spot on the road where the Cadillac stalled and he lost consciousness. The site of the pipeline rupture is just through the trees, less than half a mile away.
These days, Burns avoids this patch of road. "I always stay on the highway. I try my best not to even come down." He now takes the long way to his mom's house. As for the communities across the country getting new carbon dioxide pipelines, Burns says he hopes they get more safety precautions. But mainly, he feels sorry for them.
Emergency director Willingham says in an ideal world, these CO2 pipelines wouldn't get built. If they are, he thinks everyone needs to learn about Satartia. He says: "And I think that the question that your decision-makers have to ask themselves is 'Do you want to live on that pipeline?'"
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