A good article that explains âsadopopulatismâ, or how the Trump justifies policies that hurt their own people by âfighting their enemiesâ.
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Powerful words from Ambassador Marie Yovanovich, who just resigned from Foreign Services, after being ousted as Ambassador of Ukraine. She took her job seriously and her patriotism to heart.
We did this because it is the American way to speak up about wrongdoing. I have seen dictatorships around the world, where blind obedience is the norm and truth-tellers are threatened with punishment or death. We must not allow the United States to become a country where standing up to our government is a dangerous act. It has been shocking to experience the storm of criticism, lies and malicious conspiracies that have preceded and followed my public testimony, but I have no regrets. I did â we did â what our conscience called us to do. We did what the gift of U.S. citizenship requires us to do.
Unfortunately, the last year has shown that we need to fight for our democracy. âFreedom is not freeâ is a pithy phrase that usually refers to the sacrifices of our military against external threats. It turns out that same slogan can be applied to challenges which are closer to home. We need to stand up for our values, defend our institutions, participate in civil society and support a free press. Every citizen doesnât need to do everything, but each one of us can do one thing. And every day, I see American citizens around me doing just that: reanimating the Constitution and the values it represents. We do this even when the odds seem against us, even when wrongdoers seem to be rewarded, because it is the right thing to do.
I had always thought that our institutions would forever protect us against individual transgressors. But it turns out that our institutions need us as much as we need them; they need the American people to protect them or they will be hollowed out over time, unable to serve and protect our country.
The State Department is filled with individuals of integrity and professionalism. They advance U.S. interests every day â whether they are repatriating Americans vulnerable to a pandemic, reporting on civil unrest, negotiating military basing rights or helping a U.S. company navigate a foreign country. As new powers rise, alliances fray, and transnational threats require international solutions, our diplomats are more than ready to address these challenges.
But our public servants need responsible and ethical political leadership. This administration, through acts of omission and commission, has undermined our democratic institutions, making the public question the truth and leaving public servants without the support and example of ethical behavior that they need to do their jobs and advance U.S. interests.
âŚ
These are turbulent times, perhaps the most challenging that I have witnessed. But I still intend to find ways to engage on foreign policy issues and to encourage those who want to take part in the important work of the Foreign Service. Like my parents before me, I remain optimistic about our future. The events of the past year, while deeply disturbing, show that even though our institutions and our fellow citizens are being challenged in ways that few of us ever expected, we will endure, we will persist and we will prevail.
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An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter
âIf you think of independents as a fixed pool of voters that change preferences,â she says, âwell, that has implications for how you campaign after them. But if you are talking about the preference of independents changing because the pool of independents changes, well that is a different fucking banana.â
This is fas-cin-at-ing.
Ok the new political theory is that the group of voters traditionally defined as independent, are not the same set of voters changing their minds each election. Instead they are just a pool of different voters each time, like contestants left out of a game of musical chairs. Dr. Bitecofer goes on to explain how itâs more about activating certain groups to vote vs. persuading them.
What do you all think of this new theory?
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I think there will be some overlap, but itâs not surprising that you get people who vote sporadically. Those less involved are likely to drift in and out of the process depending on what catches their attention or drives them, and letâs face it: thereâs quite a large pool of the population that doesnât vote regularly.
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Itâs an interesting point of view. Is it really possible to see which different people turned out to vote in each election? And it dovetails into the get out the vote rhetoric in each election. I do agree that more people vote against a candidate than for a candidate.
I need to think about this some more. Iâm mentally debating with myself. 
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Thought provoking for sureâŚ
My takeaway is that elections are dependent on surges in turnout aloneâŚVoters - perhaps no longer termed Swing Voters are pretty much motivated by whatâs at stakeâŚ2018 being a big turnout for both Demâs and Râs (FL, GA)
and the Demâs like the Tea Party-ers were motivated big time to get rid of the R dominated Congress.
2018 also had more college-educated voters who wanted that Congressional change more than the non-college educated who wanted the same Administrative set up.
One would think that 2020 will be a huge turnout because much is at stake for a larger slice of the population - Women, College-educated and more minorities (but not sure what that looks like in the Electorial College vote)
The real âswingâ doesnât come from voters who choose between two parties, she argues, but from people who choose to vote, or not (or, if they do vote, vote for a third party). The actual percentage of swing voters in any given national election according to her own analysis is closer to 6 or 7 percent than the 15 or 20 most analysts think are out there, and that larger group, Bitecofer says, are âcloset partisansâ who donât identify with a party but still vote with one.
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Thatâs the kicker right there, maybe these people donât realize, they only vote when properly motivated.
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Thatâs kind of what I was talking about. Some folks donât vote unless something, or somebody, grabs them. Itâs hard to predict at times what or who that will be. Americans also donât always answer polls on their affiliations truthfully, if at all, which can make gauging real numbers difficult.
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I like this attitude.
To Sway Swing Voters, Try Empathy
A Brooklyn organization trains canvassers to engage with prospective voters about their hopes and disappointments, not just give them a candidateâs talking points.
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Message: Suck it up DemsâŚagree to disagree (on which candidate is best) but back the leading contender.
NYTimes:
The Question All Democrats Need to Ask Themselves
Moderates worry that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren arenât just wrong on big issues, but too left wing to get elected. Progressives worry that Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bloomberg are uninspiring centrists who resemble recent presidential losers and wouldnât solve Americaâs problems even if they won.
My message to panicking Democrats is: Take a deep breath, and donât make your job harder. Neither side of the party can ensure that its preferred candidate will win the nomination. But both can help avoid the outcome they fear most â Trumpâs re-election.
The current moment, when everybody is wearing a veil of ignorance about the nomination, is a good time for Democrats to ask themselves a question: If the primaries donât turn out as you hope, will you still do everything in your power to deny Trump a second term?
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A long but worthwhile read.
Weâre in the Golden Age of White Collar Crime
1 A Slow-Motion Looting
OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS, nearly every institution of American life has taken on the unmistakable stench of moral rot. Corporate behemoths like Boeing and Wells Fargo have traded blue-chip credibility for white-collar callousness. Elite universities are selling admission spots to the highest Hollywood bidder. Silicon Valley unicorns have revealed themselves as long cons (Theranos), venture-capital cremation devices (Uber, WeWork) or straightforward comic book supervillains (Facebook). Every week unearths a cabinet-level political scandal that would have defined any other presidency. From the blackouts in California to the bloated bonuses on Wall Street to the entire biography of Jeffrey Epstein, it is impossible to look around the country and not get the feeling that elites are slowly looting it.
And why wouldnât they? The criminal justice system has given up all pretense that the crimes of the wealthy are worth taking seriously. In January 2019, white-collar prosecutions fell to their lowest level since researchers started tracking them in 1998. Even within the dwindling number of prosecutions, most are cases against low-level con artists and small-fry financial schemes. Since 2015, criminal penalties levied by the Justice Department have fallen from $3.6 billion to roughly $110 million. Illicit profits seized by the Securities and Exchange Commission have reportedly dropped by more than half. In 2018, a year when nearly 19,000 people were sentenced in federal court for drug crimes alone, prosecutors convicted just 37 corporate criminals who worked at firms with more than 50 employees.
With few exceptions, the only rich people America prosecutes anymore are those who victimize their fellow elites. Pharma frat boy Martin Shkreli, to pick just one example, wasnât prosecuted for hiking the price of a drug used to treat HIV from $13.50 to $750 per pill. He went to prison for scamming investors in a hedge fund scheme years before. Meanwhile, in 2016, the CEO whose company experienced the deadliest mining disaster since 1970 served less than one year in prison and paid a fine of 1.4 percent of his salary and stock bonuses the previous year. Why? Because overseeing a company that ignores warnings and causes the deaths of workers, even 29 of them, is a misdemeanor .
Construction magnate Bruce Karatz provides an infuriating case study of how the criminal justice system treats wealthy defendants. In 2010, Karatz was convicted of failing to disclose in a financial statement that he had secretly âbackdatedâ his stock options (think Biff with the Sports Almanac in âBack to the Future IIâ) to boost his pay by more than $6 million. Prior to his sentencing hearing, his lawyer submitted letters of support from former mayor of Los Angeles Richard Riordan and billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad. Prosecutors recommended six-and-a-half-years in prison; the judge gave Karatz five yearsâ probation and eight months of house arrest in his Bel Air mansion. After two years, the judge terminated the remainder of the sentence. Karatz later received a civic award from The Malibu Times for volunteer work he did to make a good impression for his sentencing hearing.
Country-club nepotism and Gilded Age avarice are nothing new in America, of course. But the rich are enjoying a golden age of impunity unprecedented in modern history. âAmerican elites have become more brazen than they were even five years ago,â said Matthew Robinson, a professor at Appalachian State University and the author of several books on âelite devianceââ all the legal and illegal social harms caused by the wealthy.
Elite deviance has become the dark matter of American life, the invisible force around which the countryâs most powerful legal and political systems have set their orbit. Four members of the Sackler family, the owners of Oxycontin maker Purdue Pharma, have retained the services of former SEC head Mary Jo White as their personal lawyer. Epsteinâs dinner party guest lists included Harvard professors, billionaire philanthropists and members of political dynasties in at least two countries. In 2017, the pharmaceutical company Novartis spent about 14 percent of its annual lobbying budget on payments to a shell company controlled by ex-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.
And this clubbiness has human costs. Tax evasion, to pick just one crime concentrated among the wealthy, already siphons up to 10,000 times more money out of the U.S. economy every year than bank robberies. In 2017, researchers estimated that fraud by Americaâs largest corporations cost Americans up to $360 billion annually between 1996 and 2004. Thatâs roughly two decadesâ worth of street crime every single year. As the links between corporations and regulators become increasingly incestuous, the future will bring more crude-soaked coastlines, price-gouging corporate behemoths and Madoff-style Ponzi schemes. More hurdles to suing companies for poisoning their customers or letting bosses harass their employees. And more uniquely American catastrophes like the opioid crisis and the price of insulin.
Perhaps the greatest myth about white-collar crime is that Americans struggle to understand itâas if chemical companies toxifying rivers or insurance executives gouging their customers fail to stimulate our moral intuitions. In fact, surveys consistently show that the vast majority of the population considers white-collar crime more harmful than street crime and powerful offenders more odious than common criminals.
Those intuitions are correct: An entrenched, unfettered class of superpredators is wreaking havoc on American society. And in the process, theyâve broken the only systems capable of stopping them.
2 An Increasingly Desperate Pantomime Of Legal Enforcement
EVERY YEAR, AT BRANDED COCKTAIL receptions and bloated buffet breakfasts, government agents spend two days hobnobbing with the tax-haven attorneys they spend the rest of the year investigating.
The Offshore Alert conference takes place in Miami each spring, in London each fall and in âkey offshore jurisdictionsâ all year round. Officially, participants come to discuss âwealth creation, preservation and recovery.â Less officially, the tax lawyers come to learn what the feds will crack down on next year. The government investigators come to fish for future jobs. Imagine a yearly picnic where sheriffs give drug dealers tips on hiding baggies from pat-downs and leave with a new set of endorsements on LinkedIn.
In person, the conference is even more surreal than it sounds. From across a cologne-scented hotel lobby, I watched tanned attorneys fresh off flights from the Caribbean mingle with ashen IRS agents who bring business cards from Kinkoâs because the agency wonât pay to get them printed anymore. I listened to officials from the FBI and SEC lay out enforcement priorities as cryptocurrency investors and Russian bankers took notes. At lunch, I talked âGame of Thronesâ with a Senate advisor, a government auditor and a Bahamanian lawyer who later offered to set me up a shell corporation for $5,000.
The finance types were frosty during the dayâan investor who appeared to be wearing monogrammed slacks wouldnât tell me his first nameâbut they loosened up at the happy hours. An offshore tax advisor bragged that he could take his clientsâ tax rates from 49 percent to 15 percent and complained that they were constantly pushing him to go lower. Another told me that most of his clients arenât trying to hide money from the government but from their second or third wives. âThe first one raised their kids so they feel like sheâs entitled to something,â he explained. âItâs the trophy wives they want to lock out.â
Jack Albertson is a government investigatorâthatâs not his real name and he wonât let me get more specific about his job descriptionâwho has been coming to Offshore Alert for years. When I ask him how this cops-and-robbers conflagration even exists, he tells me Iâm thinking about it the wrong way. He, like all the other investigators here, knows that many of the lawyers who attend are hiding their clientsâ money sketchily or outright illegally. He even knows how theyâre doing it. The tactics for hiding money from tax authorities are not particularly sophisticated and have barely changed in the last 50 years. Set up a shell company and buy an appreciating assetâIowa farmland, a London apartment, a New York pizzeria, something common enough that it wonât attract attention.
Contrary to the âCatch Me If You Canâ myth, Albertson said, solving financial crimes is not a cat-and-mouse game between cunning investigators and slippery con artists. Most of the time it is simply the blunt application of resources to a series of unimaginably tedious tasks. âInvestigators can already crack almost any offshore account if they have enough time and money,â he said. âThe problem is that they only get that for a few cases a year.â
Over the last four decades, the agencies responsible for investigating elite and white-collar crimeâroughly speaking, the IRS, SEC, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and FBIâhave seen their enforcement divisions starved into irrelevance. More than a third of the FBI investigators who patrol Wall Street were reassigned between 2001 and 2008. Enforcement funding at the IRS has fallen by 23 percent over the last decade. And, worst of all, every time a scandal exposes the governmentâs inadequacy, Congress steps in to squeeze the regulators even harder.
The most instructive case of this deliberate stunting is the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Founded in 1972, the CPSCâs job is to make sure the things you buy wonât pierce, poison or burn you. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan slashed its budget as part of his crusade against bureaucratic waste. In the 1990s, Clinton instructed the agency to produce more data as part of his push for government accountability. No matter which party was in power, every administration gave the CPSC more to do and less money to do it with. By 2007, it had shrunk from its initial 786 employees to just 420.
That same year, Mattel announced a recall of more than 1 millionâ of its childrenâs toys that had been contaminated with lead paint. Despite the companyâs sophisticated international operations and billions in revenues, it had never bothered to inspect the Chinese sub-contractors. By then, the CSPC had fewer than 100â inspectors to monitor all imports to the United States. The Los Angeles-area ports where a chunk of the tainted toys arrived was overseen by a single part-time inspector.
Congress responded to the scandal by compounding the mistakes that had caused it. Lawmakers agreed to double the CPSCâs budget and increase its staff, but also obligated the agency to carry out dozens of new activities, including the creation of a public database to track safety hazards for every single product sold in the U.S.
The new mandate swallowed up all the agencyâs new funding and more. Soon, the CPSC was dedicating nearly all of its time to lead abatement in childrenâs toys, neglecting millions of products that posed far greater risks to children, like flammable blankets or dangerous table saws. The product database filled up with unconfirmed complaints and spammy comments. Mattel, meanwhile, faced no consequences for manufacturing the lead-tainted toys beyond a $2.3 million fineâroughly 0.006 percentâ of its net income. According to Rena Steinzor, the author of âWhy Not Jail? Industrial Disasters, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction,â the same cycle has repeated itself across every form of elite deviance, from tax compliance to financial regulation to environmental protection. In 2010, following a series of tax-haven scandals, the IRS set up a âwealth squadâ to investigate the ultra-rich âbut only staffed it with enough agents to perform 36 audits in its first two years.
After the Enron-led avalanche of corporate bankruptcies in the early 2000s, Congress gave the SEC enough funding to hire 200 new auditing staff. At the same time, however, lawmakers obligated the agency to review the filings of every publicly traded U.S. financial firm every three yearsâa mandate far larger than the agencyâs new staffing levels. Then, after the financial crisis, it happened again: The Dodd-Frank act tasked the SEC with monitoring even more companies and trillions of new assets while increasing its enforcement staff by less than 10 percent.
This cycle has left Americaâs regulators with no choice but to engage in an increasingly desperate pantomime of white-collar law enforcement. On the outside, they report impressive performance statistics to avoid even more budget cuts. Behind the scenes, theyâve retreated to investigating only the defendants they know are guilty and the crimes they know where to find.
The primary beneficiaries of this shift are American elites. Rich people generate mountains of financial data. Millionaires can have over 100 bank accounts; billionairesâ tax returns run to 800 pages long. For people who earn most of their income from working (i.e. almost everyone), the IRS has an automatic system that compares individualsâ reports to the records submitted by their employers and banks. For the wealthy, who make much of their income from interest and investments, the agency has nothing to compare their reports against. The only way to tell if a rich person is cheating on their taxes is to sit down and go through them line by line.
âLetâs say you get a tip that some billionaire is hiding a bunch of money offshore and not paying taxes on it,â said Arthur VanDesande, who spent 25 years as a criminal investigator for the IRS. âAnd you manage to narrow the tax evasion down to 20 of his bank accounts. OK, now you have to prepare 20 subpoenas, get them signed by a judge and deliver them to the banks. But when you go to Bank of America, they say, âWe donât accept subpoenas at this location, you have to go to our authorized representative in Orlando.â So then you go to Orlando and and you find out the money is linked to an offshore account. So then you have to write to the embassyâŚââ
Due to the IRSâ lean resources, VanDesande did most of this legwork himself. âYou type your own shit, you make your own copies, you write every single affidavit. Sometimes you feel like, âIâm a senior-level person with a college degree. Why am I calling Wells Fargo and sitting on hold for 45 minutes?ââ
Only some of this drudgery can be outsourced to lower-level staffers. White-collar cases involve understanding arcane laws, absorbing thousands of pages of documents, traversing international jurisdictions and coordinating a vast array of agencies from the Secret Service to the Post Office. They require investigators to be Jack Ryan, Magnum P.I. and Leslie Knope all at once. Even though auditing millionaires and billionaires is one of the most cost-effective government activities imaginableâan independent report estimated in 2014 that it yielded up to $4,545 in recovered revenue per hour of staff timeâthe IRS investigated the returns of just 3 percent of American millionaires in 2017.
In addition to reducing their caseload, Americaâs white-collar enforcement agencies have started prioritizing crimes they can prosecute in bulk. In 2017, the Department of Justice took on 889 prosecutions for identity theft (which, according to a 2010 survey, is estimated to cost individuals $371 out-of-pocket) and just 24 for antitrust violations. According to a ProPublica report, 43 percent of all tax filers audited by the IRS earn less than $56,000 per year. Roughly one in six of the SECâs enforcement actions in fiscal 2019 were against financial firms for filing paperwork lateâa six-fold increase since 2004.
Helen Richmond, a paralegal in a white-collar prosecutorâs office (thatâs not her real name), said most of the defendants her office pursues are âeither dumb or unlucky.â Sheâs worked on cases against money launderers who named stolen items on their wire transfers and fraudsters who sent emails with recipe-like details of their schemes. Criminals with even a scrap of sophistication, Richmond said, mostly avoid detection.
Another bargain-hunting strategy is to try cases in administrative proceedings rather than civil courts, an innovation that reduces hearings from months to hours. The downside, though, is that these cases largely play out in secret, resulting in fines rather than prison time and donât compel defendants to testify, turn over evidence or admit guilt. In 2007, the SEC filed 60 percent of its settlements in civil courts. In 2015, that proportion was 17 percent. In 2014 and 2015, the agency didnât file a settlement against a single U.S. Wall Street firm.
According to former OSHA assistant secretary David Michaels, these strategies are designed to achieve the all-consuming yet unstated goal of every regulation agency in America: Make yourself look more powerful than you are. The best way to do this is to focus on the cases that will yield the maximum deterrence for the lowest cost. At OSHA, Michaels said, âwe would issue press releases announcing waves of random inspections so employers would look at their hazards. We never told them we only planned to do a few inspections.â
Similarly, the IRS has explicitly instructed agents to prioritize cases likely to generate headlines. (Ever wonder why so many B-list celebrities get busted for tax evasion?). Federal investigators go after media punching bags like Martin Shkreli, Martha Stewart and Fyre Festival scammer Billy McFarland to make the public think criminal prosecutions are routine. Theyâre not: In a case-by-case analysis of the 216 alleged large-scale corporate frauds discovered between 1996 and 2004, researchers found that the media uncovered twice as many as the SEC.
And so, after decades of operating in survival mode, white-collar enforcement agencies are better at reporting success than producing it. In a 2016 study, a Georgetown University School of Law professor named Urska Velikonja discovered that while the SEC reported a steady rise in prosecutions between 2002 and 2014, most of the increase was statistical padding. When a trader was charged with fraud and then lost her license to trade securities, for example, the SEC logged the sanctions as two separate cases. When the agency was in danger of posting sluggish performance stats for the year, investigators filed dozens of slam-dunk cases in September to catch up. As Velikonja put it, âtheyâre engaging in their own version of accounting fraud.â (The SEC declined to comment.)
For the agents charged with cracking offshore tax schemes and protecting consumers from lead-painted Elmo collectibles, this charade is profoundly demoralizing. âWe killed a generation of agents,â VanDesande said. âIf you investigate mom and pop grocery stores for 20 years, you lose the ability to do Bernie Madoffs.â
VanDesande has spent months building cases only to have the DOJ toss them with little explanation. Richmond, the paralegal, tells me federal and state prosecutors have been playing hot potato with one of her cases for months because they canât justify an expensive prosecution for a fraud that adds up to the low six digits. During his first year on the job, Lewis Winters, an SEC examiner (and another government employee who couldnât use his real name), had an investigation of a shady CEO rejected by the agencyâs enforcement division. Even though he had found plenty of violations, the crimes just werenât ⌠grand enough for the agency to pursue.
âIt felt personal,ââ Winters said. âWhy did I spend three months examining this guy if enforcement just goes, âmehâ?â
3 Defining Deviance Downward
ENRON USED TO BE CONSIDERED the capstone to the Golden Age of white-collar prosecutions, a shining example of the system working like itâs supposed to. Weeks after the company filed Americaâs then-largest corporate bankruptcy, federal agents searched its headquarters and discovered a $63 billion game of three-card monte. Using an intricate network of off-the-books shell companies, Enron executives made loans look like income and debt look irrelevant. The year before the company collapsed, its leaders had falsified 96 percent of its net income and 105 percent of its cash flow.
Between 2002 and 2006, the FBIâs Enron Task Force filed charges against more than 30 architects of Enronâs fraud. Investigators discovered a âshred roomâ at the companyâs financial auditor, Arthur Andersen, and convicted the company of obstruction of justice. Four Merrill Lynch bankers were found guilty of helping Enron falsify its financial returns by purchasing three Nigerian barges. Task force agents convinced the companyâs chief financial officer to testify against his higher-ups by threatening to charge his wife with a felony. He flipped; they convicted her of a misdemeanor.
Eventually, after a five-year investigation, Enron founder Ken Lay and former CEO Jeffrey Skilling were convicted of securities fraud and a meal deal of lesser charges. Though Lay died at a rented mansion in Colorado shortly afterwards, Skilling got 24 years in prison. At the time, it was one of the longest white-collar sentences in U.S. history. Prosecutors called it a victory. Skillingâs lawyers called it just the beginning.
As soon as the nation turned its attention elsewhere, Skillingâs lawyers began quietly dismantling his sentence. They filed appeals objecting to the statutes used to convict him, the trialâs Houston location and the questionnaires filled out by potential jurors. In 2013, citing the âextraordinary resourcesâ it had spent prosecuting and defending Skillingâs conviction, the Department of Justice agreed to cut ten years off Skillingâs sentence if he promised not to file any more appeals. He was released in February 2019 after serving less than half his original sentence.
The rest of the FBIâs victory has crumbled under the same blitzkrieg of high-priced lawyering. The Supreme Court overturned Arthur Andersenâs conviction in 2005. The convictions of three of the Merrill Lynch bankers were vacated after they convinced an appeals court that they were merely trying to âsolidify business relationshipsâ rather than acting for personal gain. In the end, just 18 people served prison sentences (by comparison, more than 500 served time for the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s). Fourteen of them served fewer than four years. Andrew Fastow, the mastermind of Enronâs network of shell companies, now makes his living lecturing business school students and fraud investigators about how he did it.
Nearly every high-profile corporate scandal has the same overlooked epilogue. The wealthy have always attempted to spend their way to lighter sentences, but in the last two decades, the American judicial system has become increasingly willing to let them.
âWeâve seen a concerted effort to define deviance downward,â said Paul Leighton, a professor at Eastern Michigan University and the co-author of âThe Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison.â âWeâve made felonies into misdemeanors, misdemeanors into torts and torts into regulatory offenses.â
Honest services fraud, for example, is the subsection of mail and wire fraud that prohibits companies from lying to customers to get their business and CEOs from lying to investors after theyâve already been hired. Think of a mechanic telling you that your perfectly functional transmission is busted, then telling you it will cost $2,000 to fix it. He hasnât defrauded you exactlyâhe really will replace your transmissionâbut he used his position of authority to scam you into paying for something you didnât need.
Since 1909, prosecutors have used the honest services fraud provision to go after companies that lie to boost their stock price and politicians who give golfing buddies lucrative procurement contracts. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff, a former white collar prosecutor, once referred to the statute as âour Colt 45, our Louisville Slugger, our Cuisinart.â
But over the last three decades, the Supreme Court has taken the law apart piece by piece. In 1987, the Rehnquist Court ruled that the statute should never have been used to protect the so-called âright to honest services.â In 2010, the court restricted its application to public-sector bribery and kickbacks. From now on, the lying mechanic is breaking the law only if someone else is paying him to scam you.
Based on that ruling, several white collar criminalsâincluding, wait for it, Jeffrey Skillingâhad their sentences or convictions vacated. This year, two former Chris Christie underlings will tell the Supreme Court that orchestrating the âBridgegateâ conspiracy, in which they deliberately orchestrated traffic jams to get revenge on a Democratic mayor, is no longer illegal under the new, narrowed definition. If the Supreme Court agrees, the law will get even weaker.
Other white collar statutes have suffered the same slow strangulation. In 2006, a district court judge reaffirmed the right of companies to pay the legal fees of their executives, effectively giving every C-suite defendant the same deep pockets as their corporate employer. Since 1996, the Supreme Court has consistently blocked plaintiffs from receiving punitive damages, arguing that large punishments deprive corporations of their due process rights. In 2016, the court ruled that federal bribery law only applies to politicians who traded official acts for personal benefitâthe kind of immediate, explicit kickback that rarely happens outside of corporate HR training videos.
âCriminal law used to be more closely aligned to our moral intuitions,â said Will Thomas, a University of Michigan professor who studies corporate liability. âWe still talk about it like itâs a guiding moral force, but itâs a much more administrative process now.â
Today, Thomas explained, judges are more willing to disregard the consequences of their rulings (like, say, an Enron-scale fraud going unpunished) in favor of resolving obscure procedural ambiguities. In 2017, for instance, a case against New York financier Benjamin Wey was dismissed after he successfully argued that the search warrant used to gather evidence against him was overly broad and vaguely worded.
The confounding thing about these challenges is that they often highlight real weaknesses in the criminal justice system. American law is a contradictory jungle of century-old statutes and arbitrary definitions. Lying to government investigators, for example, is prohibited by at least 215 separate laws, each with their own standard of proof. Mens rea , the concept of âguilty mindâ central to establishing criminal liability, has more than 100 definitions across various statutes.
So of course wealthy defendants win cases by arguing that fraud statutes and insider trading rules are poorly written. They are. But so are the rest of the laws. (Numerous state anti-gang statutes, for example, define âgangâ so imprecisely that they could apply to most sororities.) The only difference is that white-collar defendants have the ability to dispute every step of the process used to convict themâand a judicial system all too happy to oblige.
One of the most conspicuous aspects of white-collar cases is the doting, near-veterinary care with which judges try to prevent defendants from facing harsh punishment. In 2014, a Colorado judge ruled that two farm owners whose tainted cantaloupes caused a listeria outbreak and killed 33 people couldnât be sent to prison because it would interfere with their ability to earn income for their families. As he announced a sentence of five years probation, the judge explained, âI must deliver both justice and mercy.â
According to a study by the Federal Judicial Center, four out of five judges in federal courts (where the vast majority of white-collar cases are decided) are white. A 2010 survey found that they have an average age of nearly 70. Their base salary is $210,000 per year.
It is, as one of those high-priced lawyers might say, improbable that these demographic and economic facts exert no influence whatsoever on judgesâ rulings. In a 2012 review of sentencing data in Florida, researchers found that âhigh-statusâ white collar criminals, such as doctors scamming Medicaid, were 98.7 percent less likely to receive prison terms than welfare fraudsters. A 2015 study found that judges showed increasing mercy as fraud offenders moved up the income scale: Criminals who stole more than $400 million got sentences that were less than half of the minimum recommended by federal guidelines. Criminals who stole $5,000 or less served sentences well over the minimum.
âWhen you zoom out, you see all the ways that bias accumulates throughout the system,â said Justin Levinson, a University of Hawaii professor and the editor of âImplicit Racial Bias Across The Law.â Sentencing guidelines prescribe lighter punishments for first-time offenders and criminals who can afford to pay restitution. Evidence rules make it nearly impossible to seize records or computers from corporations. Jury selection weeds out the poor, the less educated and minorities.
And then thereâs the matter of criminal liability. For many low-level crimes, prosecutors have to prove that a defendant should have known a crime was taking place. If a renter deals drugs out of her apartment, her landlord can be prosecuted. If you loan your friend your car and he commits a murder while driving it, you can be charged with murder, too. For executive-level crimes, however, the bar of criminal liability is set impossibly high: Prosecutors have to prove that defendants knew their actions were illegal and did them anyway. This myopic focus on intent means that white-collar trials often come down to the question of whether the defendant was the kind of person who would commit a criminal act.
John Lauro, an attorney who has represented healthcare and financial executives, said he always emphasizes the complexity of white-collar crimes to the juryâ financial disclosures are so technical! How could my client possibly know that stock wasnât going to pan out? He also plays up the upstanding-citizen angle. The first thing he does when he lands a new client, he said, is visit their homes and meet their families.
âI bring in things like their marriage, their kids and whether they coach little league,â he said. âThe prosecution always wants to dehumanize them. They call my client âthe defendant.â Iâll call him by his first name until a judge tells me to stop.â
The only way to get around this, said Sarah Larkin, a securities fraud prosecutor in Manhattan (she couldnât speak on the record, so thatâs not her real name), is to make every crime seem as simple as possible. Itâs lying, itâs cheating, itâs stealing. She structures every trial like a crash course, spending days explaining how the stock market works and what acronyms like SEC, CDO and GAAP stand for. Before she can convince jurors that the defendant lied on a financial statement, she has to do a week-long âBig Shortâ interlude to teach them what a financial statement even isâwithout the help of Margot Robbie in a bathtub.
âAnd after all that,â she said, âyou still have to make the case for why this person who looks very upper-middle-class and has a family sitting in the back row should be branded a criminal. Itâs a heavy lift.â
The near-impossibility of establishing white-collar defendantsâ motives combines with the high standard of reasonable doubt to create a paradox. Most Americans have a visceral aversion to greedy executives in general . Introduce them to a single banker and a specific crime, however, and their moral outrage often melts away. As Sam Buell, a Duke University law professor, told me: âPut people on a jury and theyâll say, âGee, it seems like this guy was doing his job, so I donât think it was a crime.ââ
Take the case of Brian Stoker, a Citigroup employee who was charged in 2011 with marketing risky investments (one trader called them âdogsh!tâ in an internal communication) as safe bets. According to the SEC, the bank made $160 million while investors lost $700 million. In his closing argument, Stokerâs attorney showed the jury an illustration from a âWhereâs Waldoâ book. Their client was a nobody, he suggested, a scapegoat for the culture of high-stakes gambling that had taken over the entire financial sector. Why make him a patsy when everyone else was doing the same thing?
The jury declared Stoker not guilty. But in the same envelope as their decision, they included a handwritten note. âThis verdict,â it read, âshould not deter the S.E.C. from continuing to investigate the financial industry.â In other words: Keep trying to lock up greedy bankers. Just not this one.
And this is it, the Rosetta Stone for understanding why judges are so comfortable explaining away the misconduct of corporate executives; why Congress never strengthened the castrated white-collar statutes; why so few pharmaceutical executives have been imprisoned for the opioid crisis and only a single banker went to prison for the financial crash. American law is incapable of prosecuting crimes in which elites use their legitimate power for nefarious ends.
âThe way businesses harm people is the same way they interact with them normally,â Albertson said. Banks collect debts and foreclose on homes every day. Banks give out home loans every day. When they entice customers into unaffordable mortgages or foreclose on borrowers tricked into signing loans they canât afford, the courts canât tell the difference.
This insight also explains why the legal system applies the opposite logic to organizations run by the rich and organizations run by the poor. Teenage gang members who argue that they committed crimes due to the culture of the Crips or the Latin Kings receive harsher sentencesâstealing money for yourself is bad; stealing money for a criminal organization is worse. Corporate defendants who claim they committed crimes due to the internal culture of Goldman Sachs or HSBC, on the other hand, get lighter sentencesâhow could an individual possibly be held accountable for something everyone else was doing?
And so, as they lose the ability to prosecute high-level crimes and elite offenders, many of Americaâs criminal justice institutions have simply stopped trying. Of the 649 companies prosecuted by the Department of Justice since 2015, only eight were convicted in court. The rest either took settlements or negotiated themselves a deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreement.
These arrangements, like so many other aspects of Americaâs white-collar enforcement apparatus, represent the cynical perversion of a benign idea. Deferred prosecution agreements were created in the 1930s to allow first-time juvenile offenders to avoid jail time if they followed probation rules and didnât reoffend. Since the early 1990s, prosecutors began extending the principle to corporations: If you agree to investigate your own crimes, turn over evidence against your employees and change your internal policies, we wonât take you to court.
Since then, deferred prosecutions have become one of the primary engines of American impunity. They donât require companies to explicitly admit guilt and donât apply steeper punishments to repeat offenders. While courts often appoint independent monitors to make sure corporations comply with the terms of their probation, these reports arenât released to the public. Since 1999, only three companies have ever been prosecuted for violating the terms of their agreements.
âCriminal law isnât just about deterrence, itâs about moral education,â said John Coffee, the director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School. âYou show the public that a crime occurred and how terrible its impact was. Weâre missing that catharsis now.â
4 The Conundrum Of Overdue Consequences
FOR MULTINATIONAL GROCERY STORE CHAINS, self-checkout kiosks are a no-brainer. They save space, cut costs and speed up lines for shoppers. There is, however, one downside: Allowing customers to scan their own groceries dramatically increases the proportion of people who shoplift.
What self-checkout kiosks provide, researchers have found, is plausible deniability. If a security guard spots you slipping a pack of Tic-Tacs into your pocket, thereâs no way to cast yourself as anything but a thief. If he catches you keying in a $10 bag of trail mix as a $2 bag of lentils, you can call it a mistakeâ oops, I must have typed in the wrong code! Perpetrators, especially middle-class white ones, know that if they get caught, everyone from the store manager to a small-claims court judge is likely to give them the benefit of the doubt. Self-checkouts turn shoppers into shoplifters by providing them with an opportunity to steal and a ready-made excuse to get away with it.
Nearly all criminological research indicates that crime rates depend more on environments and incentives than the intrinsic morality of offenders. Itâs why shootings spike on hot days and drivers speed up on wider streets. People arenât good or bad; they drift into good or bad behavior when one or the other is rewarded.
You can see where Iâm going with this. Since the 1980s, Wall Street, Congress and the courts have systematically encouraged American elites to commit more and larger graft. âCorporate culture warps people,â said Mihailis Diamantis, a University of Iowa professor who specializes in corporate crime. âTheyâve been placed in institutions that facilitate lawbreaking and predispose them to break the rules.â Since 2009, the percentage of employees at large companies who report that theyâve been pressured to commit ethical breaches has doubled. In a 2015 study, more than half the auditors for the countryâs largest companies said they had been asked to falsify internal audit reports. In Ernst & Youngâs 2016 Global Fraud Survey, 32 percent of American managers said they were comfortable behaving unethically to meet financial targets.
And just like those shoppers standing in front of that unmanned kiosk, the scriptures of corporate America discourage white-collar criminals from reckoning with the reality of their crimes. Larkin, the Manhattan prosecutor, said that when she used to prosecute murderers, they would strike a plea deal and then immediately open upâhereâs why I stabbed him, hereâs where I hid the knife. Once she switched to elite criminals, she was floored by their utter refusal to take responsibility. âThey minimize and make excuses,â she said. âThey believe in their own brilliance. They keep saying what they did wasnât really wrong.â
Jack Blum, a former staff attorney for the U.S. Senate, calls this impunity âthe most urgent issue in America.â In Russia and Ukraine, as government capacity deteriorated during the 2000s, oligarchs increased spending on bribes, lobbying and parallel systems of powerâtheir own private security forces, their pet media institutions. The same thing is already happening here: According to a 2016 analysis, political lobbying and regulatory maneuvering have eclipsed research and development as the primary reason for rising corporate profits. In a country of declawed regulators and untouchable executives, dishonest companies will increasingly drive out honest ones.
So how do we stop this? The obvious temptation is to bring back the glory days of white-collar prosecutions, to lengthen the sentences for CEO dirtbags and finally arrest the bankers that got us into the financial crisis. It felt good to hear that Martin Shkreli cried at his sentencing hearing, damn it. America deserves the catharsis of overdue consequences.
But retribution has been the governmentâs approach for decades. Every corporate scandal since the savings and loan crisis has produced a wave of prosecutions and a sprint to strengthen white-collar punishments. The maximum penalty for the most common securities fraud charge is already 20 years in prison and a $5 million fine. Bernie Madoff is 120-odd months into a 150-year sentence. It might feel good, but thereâs little indication that handing out life sentences for the bankers who caused the last crash will prevent the next one.
Thatâs because criminologists have consistently found that increasing the likelihood of punishment works better than increasing its severity. In a study of wastewater discharge from chemical plants, researchers noticed that managers who received large but inconsistent fines actually started emitting more toxic chemicals. The harsh penalty may have made them resentful for being singled out for something everyone else was doingâand the low probability of getting caught twice encouraged them to increase their lawbreaking to catch up with their competitors. Locking up one corporate criminal out of a million might make the other 999,999 feel even more entitled and invincible than they do now.
And yet elites, like everyone else, do change their behavior after experiencing immediate, reliable consequences. Three independent studies have found that when the wealthy get their taxes audited, they cheat less the following year. In 2008, Norway offered a âtax amnestyâ to its richest residents. If they reported their overseas wealth and paid taxes on their hidden income, they would be immune from prosecution. For the next four years, the targets of the amnesty reported a 60 percent increase in their net worth and paid 30 percent more in taxes.
âIf you follow a company over its life cycle, studies have found that most of them engage in some kind of lawbreaking and almost all of them reoffend,â said Sally Simpson, a University of Maryland professor and the author of âUnderstanding White-Collar Crime: An Opportunity Perspective.â âThe way you get deterrence is by showing them theyâre being watched.â
In a 2016 review of dozens of studies on corporate crime and deterrence, researchers found that nearly every individual strategy for punishing companies and executives had little to no deterrent effect on its own. The only thing that consistently worked was to combine themâ warnings from government agencies, surveillance of the worst actors, harsher punishments for repeat offenders and, yes, at the top of the ladder, criminal prosecutions for corporations that refused to shape up.
This is hardly some exotic, untested concept. When it comes to every other form of crime, law enforcement agencies are perfectly comfortable cracking down on offenses at every level. This is the country that invented three-strikes laws and âbroken windowsâ policing. When it comes to street gangs and drug distribution networks, the criminal justice system has no problem simplifying complex criminal liability questions into four simple words: You should have known .
âThe law is just a way of saying that an immoral act is something weâre not going to tolerate anymore,â said Robinson. âItâs up to us to decide whatâs a crime and what isnât. We do it all the time.â
Weâve just never done it for the immorality of elites.
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Trumpâs words, bullied kids, scarred schools
The presidentâs rhetoric has changed the way hundreds of children are harassed in American classrooms, The Post found
Two kindergartners in Utah told a Latino boy that President Trump would send him back to Mexico, and teenagers in Maine sneered âBan Muslimsâ at a classmate wearing a hijab. In Tennessee, a group of middle-schoolers linked arms, imitating the presidentâs proposed border wall as they refused to let nonwhite students pass. In Ohio, another group of middle-schoolers surrounded a mixed-race sixth-grader and, as she confided to her mother, told the girl: âThis is Trump country.â
Since Trumpâs rise to the nationâs highest office, his inflammatory language â often condemned as racist and xenophobic â has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the presidentâs insults and the cruel way he delivers them.
Trumpâs words, those chanted by his followers at campaign rallies and even his last name have been wielded by students and school staff members to harass children more than 300 times since the start of 2016, a Washington Post review of 28,000 news stories found. At least three-quarters of the attacks were directed at kids who are Hispanic, black or Muslim, according to the analysis. Students have also been victimized because they support the president â more than 45 times during the same period.
Although many hateful episodes garnered coverage just after the election, The Post found that Trump-connected persecution of children has never stopped. Even without the huge total from November 2016, an average of nearly two incidents per school week have been publicly reported over the past four years. Still, because so much of the bullying never appears in the news, The Postâs figure represents a small fraction of the actual total. It also doesnât include the thousands of slurs, swastikas and racial epithets that arenât directly linked to Trump but that the presidentâs detractors argue his behavior has exacerbated.
âItâs gotten way worse since Trump got elected,â said Ashanty Bonilla, 17, a Mexican American high school junior in Idaho who faced so much ridicule from classmates last year that she transferred. âThey hear it. They think itâs okay. The president says it. . . . Why canât they?â
Asked about Trumpâs effect on student behavior, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham noted that first lady Melania Trump â whose âBe Bestâ campaign denounces online harassment â had encouraged kids worldwide to treat one another with respect.
âShe knows that bullying is a universal problem for children that will be difficult to stop in its entirety,â Grisham wrote in an email, âbut Mrs. Trump will continue her work on behalf of the next generation despite the mediaâs appetite to blame her for actions and situations outside of her control.â
Most schools donât track the Trump bullying phenomenon, and researchers didnât ask about it in a federal survey of 6,100 students in 2017, the most recent year with available data. One in five of those children, ages 12 to 18, reported being bullied at school, a rate unchanged since the previous count in 2015.
However, a 2016 online survey of over 10,000 kindergarten through 12th-grade educators by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that more than 2,500 âdescribed specific incidents of bigotry and harassment that can be directly traced to election rhetoric,â although the overwhelming majority never made the news. In 476 cases, offenders used the phrase âbuild the wall.â In 672, they mentioned deportation.
For Cielo Castor, who is Mexican American, the experience at Kamiakin High in Kennewick, Wash., was searing. The day after the election, a friend told Cielo, then a sophomore, that he was glad Trump won because Mexicans were stealing American jobs. A year later, when the president was mentioned during her American literature course, she said she didnât support him and a classmate who did refused to sit next to her.
ââI donât want to be around her,â â Cielo recalled him announcing as he opted for the floor instead.
Then, on âAmerica nightâ at a football game in October 2018 during Cieloâs senior year, schoolmates in the student section unfurled a âMake America Great Againâ flag. Led by the boy who wouldnât sit beside Cielo, the teenagers began to chant: âBuild â the â wall!â
Horrified, she confronted the instigator.
âYou canât be doing that,â Cielo told him.
He ignored her, she recalled, and the teenagers around him booed her. A cheerleading coach was the lone adult who tried to make them stop.
After a photo of the teenagers with the flag appeared on social media, news about what had happened infuriated many of the schoolâs Latinos, who made up about a quarter of the 1,700-member student body. Cielo, then 17, hoped school officials would address the tension. When they didnât, she attended that Wednesdayâs school board meeting.
âI donât feel cared for,â she told the members, crying.
A day later, the superintendent consoled her and the principal asked how he could help, recalled Cielo, now a college freshman. Afterward, school staff members addressed every class, but Hispanic students were still so angry that they organized a walkout.
Some students heckled the protesters, waving MAGA caps at them. At the end of the day, Cielo left the school with a white friend whoâd attended the protest; they passed an underclassman she didnât know.
âLook,â the boy said, âitâs one of those fâing Mexicans.â
She heard that school administrators â who declined to be interviewed for this article â suspended the teenager who had led the chant, but she doubts he has changed.
Reached on Instagram, the teenager refused to talk about what happened, writing in a message that he didnât want to discuss the incident âbecause it is in the past and everyone has moved on from it.â At the end, he added a sign-off: âTrump 2020.â
Just as the president has repeatedly targeted Latinos, so, too, have school bullies. Of the incidents The Post tallied, half targeted Hispanics.
In one of the most extreme cases of abuse, a 13-year-old in New Jersey told a Mexican American schoolmate, who was 12, that âall Mexicans should go back behind the wall.â A day later, on June 19, 2019, the 13-year-old assaulted the boy and his mother, Beronica Ruiz, punching him and beating her unconscious, said the familyâs attorney, Daniel Santiago. He wonders to what extent Trumpâs repeated vilification of certain minorities played a role.
âWhen the president goes on TV and is saying things like Mexicans are rapists, Mexicans are criminals â these children donât have the cognitive ability to say, âHeâs just playing the role of a politician,â â Santiago argued. âThe language that heâs using matters.â
Ruizâs son, who is now seeing a therapist, continues to endure nightmares from an experience that may take years to overcome. But experts say that discriminatory language can, on its own, harm children, especially those of color who may already feel marginalized.
âIt causes grave damage, as much physical as psychological,â said Elsa Barajas, who has counseled more than 1,000 children in her job at the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health.
As a result, she has seen Hispanic students suffer from sleeplessness, lose interest in school, and experience inexplicable stomach pain and headaches.
For Ashanty Bonilla, the damage began with the response to a single tweet she shared 10 months ago.
âUnpopular opinion,â Ashanty, then 16 and a sophomore at Lewiston High School in rural Idaho, wrote on April 9. âPeople who support Trump and go to Mexico for vacation really piss me off. Sorry not sorry.â
A schoolmate, who is white, took a screen shot of her tweet and posted it to Snapchat, along with a Confederate flag.
âUnpopular opinion but: people that are from Mexico and come in to America illegally or at all really piss me off,â he added in a message that spread rapidly among students.
The next morning, as Ashanty arrived at school, half a dozen boys, including the one who had written the message, stood nearby.
âYouâre illegal. Go back to Mexico,â she heard one of them say. âFâ Mexicans.â
Ashanty, shaken but silent, walked past as a friend yelled at the boys to shut up.
In a 33,000-person town that is 94 percent white, Ashanty, whose father is half-black and whose mother is Mexican American, had always worked to fit in. She attended every football game and won a school spirit award as a freshman. She straightened her hair and dyed it blond, hoping to look more like her friends.
She had known those boys whoâd heckled her since they were little. For her 15th birthday the year before, some had danced at her quinceaĂąera.
A friend drove her off campus for lunch, but when they pulled back into the parking lot, Ashanty spotted people standing around her car. A rope had been tied from the back of the Honda Pilot to a pickup truck.
âRepublican Trump 2020,â someone had written in the dust on her back window.
Hands trembling, Ashanty tried to untie the rope but couldnât. She heard the laughing, sensed the cellphone cameras pointed at her. She began to weep.
Lewistonâs principal, Kevin Driskill, said he and his staff met with the boys they knew were involved, making clear that âwe have zero tolerance for any kind of actions like that.â The incidents, he suspected, stemmed mostly from ignorance.
âOur lack of diversity probably comes with a lack of understanding,â Driskill said, but he added that heâs encouraged by the school districtâs recent creation of a community group â following racist incidents on other campuses â meant to address those issues.
That effort came too late for Ashanty.
Some friends supported her, but others told her the boys were just joking. Donât ruin their lives.
She seldom attended classes the last month of school. That summer, she started having migraines and panic attacks. In August, amid her spiraling despair, Ashanty swallowed 27 pills from a bottle of antidepressants. A helicopter rushed her to a hospital in Spokane, Wash., 100 miles away.
After that, she began seeing a therapist and, along with the friend who defended her, transferred to another school. Sometimes, she imagines how different life might be had she never written that tweet, but Ashanty tries not to blame herself and has learned to take more pride in her heritage. She just wishes the president understood the harm his words inflict.
Even Trumpâs last name has become something of a slur to many children of color, whether theyâve heard it shouted at them in hallways or, in her case, seen it written on the back window of a car.
âIt means,â she said, âyou donât belong.â
Three weeks into the 2018-19 school year, Miracle Sloverâs English teacher, she alleges, ordered black and Hispanic students to sit in the back of the classroom at their Fort Worth high school.
At the time, Miracle was a junior. Georgia Clark, her teacher at Amon Carter-Riverside, often brought up Trump, Miracle said. He was a good person, she told the class, because he wanted to build a wall.
âEvery day was something new with immigration,â said Miracle, now 18, who has a black mother and a mixed-race father. âThat Trump needs to take [immigrants] away. They do drugs, they bring drugs over here. They cause violence.â
Some students tried to film Clark, and others complained to administrators, but none of it made a difference, Miracle said. Clark, an employee of the Fort Worth system since 1998, kept talking.
Clark, who denies the teenagerâs allegations, is one of more than 30 educators across the country accused of using the presidentâs name or rhetoric to harass students since he announced his candidacy, the Post analysis found.
In Clarkâs class, Miracle stayed quiet until late spring 2019. That day, she walked in wearing her hair âpuffy,â split into two high buns.
Clark, she said, told her it looked ânappy, like Marge off âThe Simpsons.â â Unable to smother an angry reply, Miracle landed in the principalâs office. An administrator asked her to write a witness statement, and in it, she finally let go, scrawling her frustration across seven pages.
âI just got tired of it,â she said. âI wrote a ton.â
Still, Miracle said, school officials took no action until six weeks later, when Clark, 69, tweeted at Trump â in what she thought were private messages â requesting help deporting undocumented immigrants in Fort Worth schools. The posts went viral, drawing national condemnation. Clark was fired.
Not always, though, are offenders removed from the classroom.
The day after the 2016 election, Donnie Jones Jr.âs daughter was walking down a hallway at her Florida high school when, she says, a teacher warned her and two friends â all sophomores, all black â that Trump would âsend you back to Africa.â
The district suspended the teacher for three days and transferred him to another school.
Just a few days later in California, a physical education teacher told a student that he would be deported under Trump. Two years ago in Maine, a substitute teacher referenced the presidentâs wall and promised a Lebanese American student, âYouâre getting kicked out of my country.â More than a year later in Texas, a school employee flashed a coin bearing the word âICEâ at a Hispanic student. âTrump,â he said, âis working on a law where he can deport you.â
Sometimes, Jones said, he doesnât recognize America.
âPeople now will say stuff that a couple of years ago they would not dare say,â Jones argued. He fears what his two youngest children, ages 11 and 9, might hear in their school hallways, especially if Trump is reelected.
Now a senior, Miracle doesnât regret what she wrote about Clark. Although the furor that followed forced Miracle to switch schools and quit her beloved dance team, she would do it again, she said. Clarkâs punishment, her public disgrace, was worth it.
About a week before Miracleâs 18th birthday, her mother checked Facebook to find a flurry of notifications. Friends were messaging to say that Clark had appealed her firing, and that the Texas education commissioner had intervened.
Reluctant to spoil the birthday, Jowona Powell waited several days to tell her daughter, who doesnât use social media.
Citing a minor misstep in the school boardâs firing process, the commissioner had ordered Carter-Riverside to pay Clark one yearâs salary â or give the former teacher her job back.
Jordyn Covington stood when she heard the jeers.
âMonkeys!â âYou donât belong here.â âGo back to where you came from!â
From atop the bleachers that day in October, Jordyn, 15, could see her Piper High School volleyball teammates on the court in tears. The sobbing varsity players were all black, all from Kansas City, Kan., like her.
Who was yelling? Jordyn wondered.
She peered at the students in the opposing section. Most of them were white.
âIt was just sad,â said Jordyn, who plays for Piperâs junior varsity team. âAnd why? Why did it have to happen to us? We werenât doing anything. We were simply playing volleyball.â
Go back? To where? Jordyn, her friends and Piperâs nine black players were all born in the United States. âJust like everyone else,â Jordyn said. âJust like white people.â
The game, played at an overwhelmingly white rural high school, came three months after Trump tweeted that four minority congresswomen should âgo backâ to the âtotally broken and crime infested places from which they came.â
It was Jordynâs first experience with racism, she said. But it was not the first time that fans at a school sports game had used the president to target students of color.
The Post found that players, parents or fans have used his name or words in at least 48 publicly reported cases, hurling hateful slogans at students competing in elementary, middle and high school games in 26 states.
The venom has been shouted on football gridirons and soccer fields, on basketball and volleyball courts. Nearly 90 percent of incidents identified by The Post targeted players and fans of color, or teams fielded by schools with large minority populations. More than half focused on Hispanics.
In one of the earliest examples, students at a Wisconsin high school soccer game in April 2016 chanted âTrump, build a wall!â at black and Hispanic players. A few months later, students at a high school basketball game in Missouri turned their backs and hoisted a Trump/Pence campaign sign as the majority-black opposing team walked onto the court. In 2017, two high school girls in Alabama showed up at a football game pep rally with a sign reading âPut the Panic back in Hispanicâ and a âTrump Make America Great Againâ banner.
In late 2017, two radio hosts announcing a high school basketball game in Iowa were caught on a hot mic describing Hispanic players as âespaĂąol people.â âAs Trump would say,â one broadcaster suggested, âgo back where they came from.â
Both announcers were fired. After the volleyball incident in Kansas, though, the fallout was more muted. The opposing school district, Baldwin City, commissioned an investigation and subsequently asserted that there was âno evidenceâ of racist jeers. Administrators from Piperâs school system dismissed that claim and countered with a statement supporting their students.
An hour after the game, Jordyn fought to keep her eyes dry as she boarded the team bus home. When white players insisted that everything would be okay, she slipped in ear buds and selected âmy mood playlist,â a collection of somber nighttime songs. She wiped her cheeks.
Jordyn had long ago concluded that Trump didnât want her â or âanyone who is just not whiteâ â in the United States. But hearing other students shout it was different.
Days later, her English teacher assigned an essay asking about âwhatâs right and whatâs wrong.â At first, Jordyn thought she might write about the challenges transgender people face. Then she had another idea.
âThe students were making fun of us because we were different, like our hair and skin tone,â Jordyn wrote. âHow are you gonna be mad at me and my friends for being black. . . . I love myself and so should all of you.â
She read it aloud to the class. She finished, then looked up. Everyone began to applaud.
Itâs not just young Trump supporters who torment classmates because of who they are or what they believe. As one boy in North Carolina has come to understand, kids who oppose the president â kids like him â can be just as vicious.
By Gavin Trumpâs estimation, nearly everyone at his middle school in Chapel Hill comes from a Democratic family. So when the kids insist on calling him by his last name â even after he demands that they stop â the 13-year-old knows they want to provoke him, by trying to link the boy to the president they despise.
In fifth grade, classmates would ask if he was related to the president, knowing he wasnât. They would insinuate that Gavin agreed with the president on immigration and other polarizing issues.
âThey saw my last name as Trump, and we all hate Trump, so it was like, âWe all hate you,â â he said. âI was like, âWhy are you teasing me? I have no relationship to Trump at all. We just ended up with the same last name.â â
Beyond kids like Gavin, the Post analysis also identified dozens of children across the country who were bullied, or even assaulted, because of their allegiance to the president.
School staff members in at least 18 states, from Washington to West Virginia, have picked on students for wearing Trump gear or voicing support for him. Among teenagers, the confrontations have at times turned physical. A high school student in Northern California said that after she celebrated the 2016 election results on social media, a classmate accused her of hating Mexicans and attacked her, leaving the girl with a bloodied nose. Last February, a teenager at an Oklahoma high school was caught on video ripping a Trump sign out of a studentâs hands and knocking a red MAGA cap off his head.
And in the nationâs capital â where only 4 percent of voters cast ballots for Trump in 2016 â an outspoken conservative teenager said she had to leave her prestigious public school because she felt threatened.
In a YouTube video, Jayne Zirkle, a high school senior, said that the trouble started when classmates at the School Without Walls discovered an online photo of her campaigning for Trump. She said students circulated the photo, harassed her online and called her a white supremacist.
A D.C. school system official said they investigated the allegations and allowed Jayne to study from home to ensure she felt safe.
âA lot of people who I thought were my best friends just all of a sudden totally turned their backs on me,â Jayne said. âPeople wouldnât even look at me or talk to me.â
For Gavin, the teasing began in fourth grade, soon after Trump announced his candidacy.
After more than a year of schoolyard taunts, Gavin decided to go by his motherâs last name, Mather, when he started middle school. The teenager has been proactive, requesting that teachers call him by the new name, but it gets trickier, and more stressful, when substitutes fill in. He didnât legally change his last name, so âTrumpâ still appears on the roster.
The teasing has subsided, but the switch wasnât easy. Gavin likes his real last name and feared that changing it would hurt his fatherâs feelings. His dad understood, but for Gavin, the guilt remains.
âThis is my name,â he said. âAnd I am abandoning my name.â
Maritza Avalos knows whatâs coming. Itâs 2020. The next presidential election is nine months away. She remembers what happened during the last one, when she was just 11.
âPack your bags,â kids told her. âYou get a free trip to Mexico.â
Sheâs now a freshman at Kamiakin High, the same Washington state school where her older sister, Cielo, confronted the teenagers who chanted âBuild the wallâ at a football game in late 2018. Maritza, 14, assumes the taunts that accompanied Trumpâs last campaign will intensify with this one, too.
âI try not to think about it,â she said, but for educators nationwide, the ongoing threat of politically charged harassment has been impossible to ignore.
In response, schools have canceled mock elections, banned political gear, trained teachers, increased security, formed student-led mediation groups and created committees to develop anti-discrimination policies.
In California, the staff at Riverside Polytechnic High School has been preparing for this yearâs presidential election since the day after the last one. On Nov. 9, 2016, counselors held a workshop in the library for students to share their feelings. Trump supporters feared they would be singled out for their beliefs, while girls who had heard the president brag about sexually assaulting women worried that boys would be emboldened to do the same to them.
âWe treated it almost like a crisis,â said Yuri Nava, a counselor who has since helped expand a student club devoted to improving the schoolâs culture and climate.
Riverside, which is 60 percent Hispanic, also offers three courses â African American, Chicano and ethnic studies â meant to help students better understand one another, Nava said. And instead of punishing students when they use race or politics to bully, counselors first try to bring them together with their victims to talk through what happened. Often, they leave as friends.
In Gambrills, Md., Arundel High School has taken a similar approach. Even before a student was caught scribbling the n-word in his notebook in early 2017, Gina Davenport, the principal, worried about the effect of the electionâs rhetoric. At the school, where about half of the 2,200 students are minorities, she heard their concerns every day.
But the racist slur, discovered the same month as Trumpâs inauguration, led to a concrete response.
A âGlobal Community Citizenshipâ class, now mandatory for all freshmen in the district, pushes students to explore their differences.
A recent lesson delved into Trumpâs use of Twitter.
âThe focus wasnât Donald Trump, the focus was listening: How do we convey our ideas in order for someone to listen?â Davenport said. âWe teach that we can disagree with each other without walking away being enemies â which we donât see play out in the press, or in todayâs political debates.â
Since the class debuted in fall 2017, disciplinary referrals for disruption and disrespect have decreased by 25 percent each school year, Davenport said. Membership in the schoolâs speech and debate team has doubled.
The course has eased Davenportâs anxiety heading into the next election. She doesnât expect an uptick in racist bullying.
âCivil conversation,â she said. âThe kids know what that means now.â
Many schools havenât made such progress, and on those campuses, students are bracing for more abuse.
Maritzaâs sister, Cielo, told her to stand up for herself if classmates use Trumpâs words to harass her, but Maritza is quieter than her sibling. The freshman doesnât like confrontation.
She knows, though, that eventually someone will say something â about the wall, maybe, or about how kids who look like her donât belong in this country â and when that day comes, the girl hopes that sheâll be strong.
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Worth a readâŚ
â The Guardian has an excerpt from the 2018 book âHow Democracies Die.â
Blatant dictatorship â in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule â has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means.
Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves. Like Hugo ChĂĄvez in Venezuela, elected leaders have subverted democratic institutions in Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Ukraine.
Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box. The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive. With a classic coup dâĂŠtat, as in Pinochetâs Chile, the death of a democracy is immediate and evident to all. The presidential palace burns. The president is killed, imprisoned or shipped off into exile. The constitution is suspended or scrapped.
On the electoral road, none of these things happen. There are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance.
Many government efforts to subvert democracy are âlegalâ, in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy â making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption or cleaning up the electoral process.
Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. This sows public confusion. People do not immediately realize what is happening. Many continue to believe they are living under a democracy.
Because there is no single moment â no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution â in which the regime obviously âcrosses the lineâ into dictatorship, nothing may set off societyâs alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracyâs erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.
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How vulnerable is American democracy to this form of backsliding? The foundations of our democracy are certainly stronger than those in Venezuela, Turkey or Hungary. But are they strong enough?
Answering such a question requires stepping back from daily headlines and breaking news alerts to widen our view, drawing lessons from the experiences of other democracies around the world and throughout history.
When fear or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled
A comparative approach reveals how elected autocrats in different parts of the world employ remarkably similar strategies to subvert democratic institutions. As these patterns become visible, the steps toward breakdown grow less ambiguous âand easier to combat. Knowing how citizens in other democracies have successfully resisted elected autocrats, or why they tragically failed to do so, is essential to those seeking to defend American democracy today.
We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share of them, including Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace.
An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place â by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them and, when necessary, making common cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates.
Isolating popular extremists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.
Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended â by political parties and organized citizens but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not.
This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy â packing and âweaponizingâ the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence) and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracyâs assassins use the very institutions of democracy â gradually, subtly, and even legally â to kill it.
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America failed the first test in November 2016, when we elected a president with a dubious allegiance to democratic norms.
Donald Trumpâs surprise victory was made possible not only by public disaffection but also by the Republican partyâs failure to keep an extremist demagogue within its own ranks from gaining the nomination.
By the time Obama became president, many Republicans in particular questioned the legitimacy of their Democratic rivals
How serious is the threat now? Many observers take comfort in our constitution, which was designed precisely to thwart and contain demagogues like Trump. Our Madisonian system of checks and balances has endured for more than two centuries. It survived the civil war, the great depression, the Cold War and Watergate. Surely, then, it will be able to survive Trump.
We are less certain. Historically, our system of checks and balances has worked pretty well â but not, or not entirely, because of the constitutional system designed by the founders. Democracies work best â and survive longer â where constitutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms.
Two basic norms have preserved Americaâs checks and balances in ways we have come to take for granted: mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that
politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives.These two norms undergirded American democracy for most of the 20th century. Leaders of the two major parties accepted one another as legitimate and resisted the temptation to use their temporary control of institutions to maximum partisan advantage. Norms of toleration and restraint served as the soft guardrails of American democracy, helping it avoid the kind of partisan fight to the death that has destroyed democracies elsewhere in the world, including Europe in the 1930s and South America in the 1960s and 1970s.
Today, however, the guardrails of American democracy are weakening. The erosion of our democratic norms began in the 1980s and 1990s and accelerated in the 2000s. By the time Barack Obama became president, many Republicans in particular questioned the legitimacy of their Democratic rivals and had abandoned forbearance for a strategy of winning by any means necessary.
Trump may have accelerated this process, but he didnât cause it. The challenges facing American democracy run deeper. The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization â one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.
Americaâs efforts to achieve racial equality as our society grows increasingly diverse have fueled an insidious reaction and intensifying polarization. And if one thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, itâs that extreme polarization can kill democracies.
There are, therefore, reasons for alarm. Not only did Americans elect a demagogue in 2016, but we did so at a time when the norms that once protected our democracy were already coming unmoored.
But if other countriesâ experiences teach us that that polarization can kill democracies, they also teach us that breakdown is neither inevitable nor irreversible.
Many Americans are justifiably frightened by what is happening to our country. But protecting our democracy requires more than just fright or outrage. We must be humble and bold. We must learn from other countries to see the warning signs â and recognize the false alarms. We must be aware of the fateful missteps that have wrecked other democracies. And we must see how citizens have risen to meet the great democratic crises of the past, overcoming their own deep-seated divisions to avert breakdown.
History doesnât repeat itself. But it rhymes. The promise of history is that we can find the rhymes before it is too late.
- This is an extract from How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, professors of government at Harvard University, published in the UK by Viking and in the US by Crown
Further reading
â Harvard professor Stephen M. Walt has been keeping a âdictatorâ checklist since 2016. He revisited the list for Foreign Policy mag a few days ago. He wrote that âafter impeachment, the president has been passing most of the checkpoints on the way to authoritarianism.â
â This 2016 piece by Vox has aged well: âThe rise of American authoritarianism.â
âIn many countries,â Anne Applebaum told me, "the end of democracy often begins with someone who mocks it, who makes fun of the institutions, who doesnât treat his opposition as a legitimate opposition but rather as traitors.
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Ripped from the headlinesâŚ
Quoting the watchdog group Freedom House : âTrump has assailed essential institutions and traditions including the separation of powers, a free press, an independent judiciary, the impartial delivery of justice, safeguards against corruption, and most disturbingly, the legitimacy of elections.â With that in mind, consider the headlines of the past week:
â Separation of powers: Trump has been challenging the legislative branchâs power of the purse by diverting Pentagon $$$ to build more border wall.
â Free press: His newest budget proposal would cut funding for PBS, NPR, and the militaryâs iconic Stars and Stripes newspaper.
â Independent judiciary: Via Twitter he attacked a federal judge, the same woman who will be sentencing his friend Roger Stone .
â Safeguards against corruption: He has been smearing the Ukraine whistleblower and those who testified about the scheme to the House.
â Impartial delivery of justice: Look no further than the DOJ crisis. The NYTâs Sunday front page carried new concerns about political interference.
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Interesting article about how Trump once again took a talking point all Republicans loved and scuttled it in favor of hatred and stupidity.
The Navy Takes a Back Seat to the Wall
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The Supreme Court is poised to damage eight areas of law and policy that implicate womenâs ability to lead lives free from restrictions on their bodies, careers, and family lives.
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How conservatives learned to wield power inside Facebook
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/20/facebook-republican-shift/
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Editorial piece describing where T is buying the election, via his trade policy and targeting farmers and those affected by his (lack of coherent) trade policy with huge subsidies.
Some Democrats complain about billionaire former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg trying to buy the election, but at least heâs doing it with his own money.
President Trump is using yours.
IF OUR FORMALLY TARGETED FARMERS NEED ADDITIONAL AID UNTIL SUCH TIME AS THE TRADE DEALS WITH CHINA, MEXICO, CANADA AND OTHERS FULLY KICK IN, THAT AID WILL BE PROVIDED BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, PAID FOR OUT OF THE MASSIVE TARIFF MONEY COMING INTO THE USA!
â Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 21, 2020
Letâs break down that Friday morning tweet. Farmers are being âformally targetedâ by foreign countries because Trump picked a trade war with the entire globe, first with tariffs on solar panels, then steel and aluminum imports, and then on an increasing number of Chinese goods. The predictable result was retaliatory tariffs and other sanctions against U.S. exporters; in Chinaâs case, that included a freeze on purchases of many farm goods. Beyond that, the tariffs have held back investment and economic growth, both in the U.S. and globally.
The retaliation caused real damage to farmers, in the form of billions of dollars in lost revenue and a sharp rise in bankruptcies. Given how important agriculture-dependent red states are to Trumpâs political base, the president couldnât ignore the pain the tariffs were causing farmers. So in 2018, the administration extended $12 billion in additional subsidies to farmers as compensation for lost exports; last year, the pledge grew to $16 billion. In other words, Trump used tax dollars to attend to the wounds he opened with his trade policy.
Your tax dollars at work!
Itâs worth noting here that the relief was not applied equally across the industry. Critics say it flowed disproportionately to the farmers who needed it least, and that it favored farms in the South over those in the northern plains states and the Midwest. At the request of Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), the Government Accountability Office is investigating whether the aid is being distributed to the right farmers and in the right amounts.
At any rate, the initial trade deal Trump struck with China calls for a vast increase in purchases of U.S. farm goods, which you could applaud as a good thing for farmers, or you could critique as a managed-trade payoff to a political constituency. Or both! But that deal will take months to bear fruit, hence Trumpâs tweet Friday.
The administration hasnât distributed the full $16 billion in promised aid, and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said in mid-January that the rest would be coming soon. Thatâs probably what Trump was referring to in his tweet. The new wrinkle, though, was Trumpâs idea that the âmassive tariff money coming into the USAâ would cover the cost.
All of the revenue the feds collect is fungible, so sure â you might as well say that the tariffs being collected are paying for the farm aid. Heaven knows itâs enough money; according to calculations by the deregulatory-minded American Action Forum, the tariffs are costing almost $78 billion annually.
But Trumpâs tweet is misleading in one way: It implies that tariffs are being paid by people outside the U.S. The money isnât âcoming into the USA,â itâs being paid by importers at the ports of entry. In other words, itâs coming into the USA from Los Angeles, Louisiana, Texas, Florida and anywhere else that imported goods arrive. And then those costs are passed on to the businesses and consumers buying those goods.
Some supporters of the tariffs contend that Americans arenât really paying them. Instead, they say, theyâre being absorbed by exporters in China and elsewhere who have been forced to lower their prices to remain competitive. Or they could be negated by changes in the foreign exchange rate.
But research has shown that tariffs are, in fact, raising prices of the affected goods in the U.S. That means businesses and consumers here are paying them.
So the next time you buy a smartphone, a toaster, a washing machine or most other types of products made in China, youâll be helping U.S. farmers weather the blows inflicted by the trade war. At least, thatâs President Trumpâs version. And he should know; he started it.
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Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) writes a powerful piece on post-impeachment T - the unbridled, power-mad head of this country. I would guess that as Intelligence Chairman Adam knows a thing or two on whatâs been going on behind-the-scenes with those T is trying to influence, get rid of and call them to task.
The impeachment trial of President Trump has ended, but the threat to our democracy continues. In the short time since the trial concluded, the president has proven that the House managersâ warning to senators that he will never change was prescient.
President Trumpâs actions demonstrate the need to develop and pass legislative reforms to safeguard the checks and balances of our democracy. Building new guardrails to defend against authoritarian-minded presidents must now be a top priority for Congress.
Within days of the Senate vote, Trump began to exact revenge against officials who complied with lawful subpoenas and told the truth to Congress. He had a security escort remove Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a decorated combat veteran, from the White Houseâs National Security Council, along with his twin brother, who served as an ethics attorney.
The presidentâs vengeance against civil servants is disturbing enough, but it occurred alongside an even greater danger that has come into sharper focus this week: the politicization and potential weaponization of the Department of Justice.
Trump insists he has the absolute right to direct the actions of the department. His efforts to obstruct investigations into his own misconduct and that of his associates â firing FBI Director James B. Comey, seeking to fire Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III and much more â are well documented. And now, the president has found his Roy Cohn in Atty. Gen. William Barr, who has shown himself willing to be the presidentâs political fixer and do his bidding at the expense of the departmentâs independence.
The severity of the threat to our democracy was made plain last week in a succession of troubling actions by the Justice Department.
Last Monday, the department recommended that Roger Stone, the presidentâs longtime political advisor and self-proclaimed âdirty trickster,â be sentenced according to standard federal guidelines for the serious crimes he committed. Mr. Stone was convicted last year on seven charges related to lying to Congress about his dealings with the president and WikiLeaks â the platform publishing Russian hacked emails beneficial to the Trump campaign â and witness tampering.
Late that same evening, the president tweeted in outrage, calling the recommendation âa miscarriage of justice.â The next morning, at Barrâs urging, the department reversed course and recommended a more lenient sentence, using language so unusual for the DOJ that it looked like it could have been written by Stone himself.
Barr claims he had planned to intervene in the case before reading the presidentâs tweet, but he does not deny his personal involvement. It is exceedingly rare for attorneys general to overrule the sentencing recommendation of their career prosecutors. Doing so in a case involving the presidentâs own wrongdoing may be unprecedented.
As a result, the career prosecutors on the case demonstrated something in short supply in the White House but abundant among public servants â moral courage. One by one, they withdrew from the case, and one resigned altogether.
By the end of the week, reports emerged that Barr had ordered the review of other âpolitically sensitiveâ criminal cases, including that of President Trumpâs former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators to cover up the nature of his own interactions with the Russians. This follows yet another Barr-ordered review intended to sow doubt about intelligence community findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help then-candidate Trump, and a nearly successful effort to cover up the whistleblower complaint that ultimately led to Trumpâs impeachment.
These interventions by Barr to benefit the president have profound implications for the rule of law and our democracy. With a willing attorney general and compliant congressional Republicans, Trump is attempting to utilize the instruments of justice for his political benefit, something that would give him immense power to punish and harass his political opponents and protect his friends.
We cannot let that succeed.
Institutions are only as strong as the people who protect them. Public servants, at personal cost, stepped forward in the impeachment inquiry and in the wake of the Stone sentencing reversal. Judges have also demonstrated a vital independence from this lawless president.
Congress must also do its part through vigorous oversight, and also by enacting a new set of reforms to prevent presidential abuses akin to those passed after Watergate. Work on these is already underway.
The president has continually taken advantage of the slow judicial review process to delay oversight of his administration. In response, Congress should enact legislation to expedite judicial review of congressional subpoenas, an idea House Republicans favored unanimously under President Obama.
There is also a clear need to legislate a stronger firewall between the Department of Justice and the White House, one secured by more than regulations or norms. One first step was introduced by my fellow House impeachment manager, Hakeem Jeffries, to require logging and disclosure of White House contacts with DOJ. But more will be required to prevent an unethical president from initiating or interfering in cases that involve the presidentâs enemies, allies or family members.
Along these lines, I have introduced legislation to constrain abuse of the pardon power. President Trump has repeatedly dangled pardons to his associates as they face federal criminal investigations. The bill would ensure that, in the event the president issues a pardon in a case related to him or his family members, the complete investigative files would be provided to Congress to ensure he could not obtain the corrupt benefit of covering up his own misconduct.
Some of these reforms may not become law while Trump remains in office, but that must not stop us from getting started. The future of our democracy depends on it.
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A powerful piece on how massive gains in womenâs rights in Iran were wiped away virtually overnight by the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It shows how swiftly a situation can change, and how important it is to fight for those rights.
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https://twitter.com/BeautyAbounds4U/status/1231839685816856576
Iâve been wanting to write this for a while now, and it recently came together in my head. Itâs both about what is going on with the Trump regimeâs pogrom against immigrants, and where we go once we take back the government.