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lastsonlost · 4 years

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Seriously, what does this bitch have to do before people Stop defending her.

Amber Heard ridicules Johnny Depp for claiming he is a victim of domestic violence in an explosive tape recording, exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com

She says: 'Tell the world Johnny, tell them... I Johnny Depp, a man, I'm a victim too of domestic violence... and see how many people believe or side with you'

Heard adds: 'You're bigger and you're stronger... I was a 115lb woman... You're going to get up on the stand, Johnny, and say, ''she started it''? Really?'

'I have never been able to overpower you... there's a jury and there's a judge will see that there's a very big difference between me and you'

The divorcing couple spoke over the phone in June and July of 2016, with Heard ultimately yielding to Depp's plea to settle out of court for $7m

Their truce crumbled in December 2018 when Heard wrote an op-ed saying she was a domestic violence victim, although not naming anyone

Depp hit her with a $50m defamation suit, saying she implied he was the abuser, which caused him to lose his prized role of Captain Jack Sparrow

In their legal battle, both accused the other of domestic violence and DailyMail.com published a recording in which Heard confessed to 'hitting' Depp

Amber Heard ridicules Johnny Depp for claiming he is a victim of domestic violence in an explosive tape recording obtained by DailyMail.com - telling the Pirates of the Caribbean actor: 'See how many people believe you.'

The estranged couple were barred from talking to one another in May 2016 when Heard filed for divorce and sought a restraining order to escape her 'abusive' A-lister husband.

But the pair continued to clash over the phone, arguing bitterly about who was responsible for the blood-curdling violence that marred their toxic 15-month marriage and accusing one another of leaking to the press, DailyMail.com can reveal.

It's unclear if Heard realizes she is being taped during the expletive-flecked, 30-minute recording, the second bombshell audio released exclusively by DailyMail.com in the space of a week.

You are f**king killing me. Your f**king people are trying to kill me,' complains father-of-two Depp, as he begs Heard to go through private mediation rather than thrashing things out in open court.

'You've turned me into a... my boy goes to school and has kids go, so your f**king dad's a wife beater?'

Tearful Heard denies pushing Depp, 56, 'under a bus' and accuses the actor's associates of circulating details to the press of her arrest record and lurid rumors she was a stripper.

The 33-year-old actress also rejects accusations that she instigated the wild, physical violence that she pinned on Depp in divorce papers,

suggesting a court would be unlikely to take the side of a man over a slender female.

The full list of audio clips can be found in the Daily Mail article.....

Part 2

Do you know I'm a 115, well not anymore, but I was a 115lb, almost 115lb woman,' Heard protests. Adopting a jeering tone, she says: 'You're going to get up on the stand, Johnny, and say, she started it? Really?'

The former lovebirds spoke several times on the phone throughout June and July of 2016, skirting the restraining order by having a family member initiate the calls, according to a well-placed source.

Heard would ultimately yield to Depp's plea to settle out of court, retracting her allegations the following month as the pair announced a $7 million divorce settlement.

Their marriage was 'intensely passionate and at times volatile, but always bound by love,' according to a joint statement issued on August 16, 2016.

'There was never any intent of physical or emotional harm.'

The truce crumbled in December 2018, however, when Heard penned an op-ed for the Washington Post lamenting her experiences as an alleged domestic violence victim, though never naming anyone.

Heard is currently dating her new girlfriend Bianca Butti and was seen arriving at the 4th Annual Women's March in Downtown Los Angeles last month.

The actress has said she is bisexual and previously dated women, including photographer Tasya van Ree from 2008 to 2011.

Depp responded to Heard's op-ed last year with a $50 million defamation suit, saying the 'hoax' account implied he was the unnamed abuser and caused him to lose his prized role of Captain Jack Sparrow.

'Ms. Heard is not a victim of domestic abuse; she is a perpetrator,' his suit alleges, accusing his ex-wife of manufacturing evidence and faking injury photos.

Heard doubled down with a 300-page filing of her own, cataloging the years of abuse she suffered at the hands of 'the monster', whom she met on the set of The Rum Diary in 2011 and married in February 2015.

The actress stood by those claims last week when DailyMail.com published a separate recording from October 2015 in which she confessed to 'hitting' Depp as well as throwing pots, pans and vases at him.

"I'm sorry that I didn't, uh, uh, hit you across the face in a proper slap, but I was hitting you, it was not punching you. Babe, you're not punched,' Heard says on the tape, recalling an incident the previous night.

It's understood that she and Depp routinely recorded conversations consensually during the breakdown of their marriage, paving the way for yet more bombshell recordings to emerge.

The latest audio clip published by DailyMail.com begins with Depp imploring Heard to reach an out of court settlement rather than waging war in public.

It appears to have been taped at Depp's end of things and the conversation has already begun when the audio supplied to DailyMail.com begins.

'I've been through the f**king hurt. You've been through the f**king hurt. I love you more than anything in life,' he tells his soon-to-be ex-wife.

'I do not want to go into a f**king court with you. I do not want to f**king tarnish your name... I want this to be done peacefully, between us.

'And if you don't like the way that mediation is going, take me back to court kid. Cause I can't. 'This is the last f**king chance Amber. This is it. Once I file those papers we don't turn around man.'

Heard insists, however, that it's Depp's team who are refusing to mediate, refusing to sign a gag order and leaking damaging stories about her to the gossip site TMZ.

'Everything has been a defensive move because I'm being called a liar and a gold-digger,' she says.

'And I am not lying about any of this s**t, and I am not after a dime of your money.'

Depp suggests the pair should write a 'mutual letter' declaring that the divorce will be settled privately.

'Listen to me,' he warns the Hollywood beauty. 'Defending yourself by throwing someone under the bus is not going to look good.'

Heard fires back: 'It's not about that. It would not be about me throwing you under the bus.

'You know what it would be? It would be released through documented people, coming on the record, and, having the protection to do so, that haven't had yet.

'It would be eyewitness statements. It would be evidence. Tons of it. And it would be through years.'

Heard goes on to ridicule Depp's doubts over the facial injuries she turned up with at court when she applied for the restraining order on May 27, 2016.

She also claims to have a trove of incriminating texts, paraphrasing a message to her publicist Jodi Gottlieb ahead of an appearance on The Late Late Show with James Cordon: 'I think, I've had accident, um, I think I may have, I busted my nose and two black eyes tomorrow'.

She tells Depp: 'No one is going to believe that one of the two alternatives, that I'm in a fight club or I've been getting, going through hair and makeup. . .through all these years where I have corroborating text messages between people that match those dates of those time stamped validated photos.'

Heard warns Depp that her lawyers are urging her to make a formal police statement, saying that a criminal prosecutor told her it was 'most solid evidence, case of domestic violence case we've ever seen'.

She declined to do so, however, because she did not want to hurt Depp further,

Heard says, complaining that their public spat has already led to her receiving death threats.

The blonde actress also denies that it was her who rang the cops during the May 21, 2016 dust-up that took place the day before she filed for divorce.

Depp was accused of hurling a cellphone in Heard's face at their downtown Los Angeles loft but two LAPD officers later said in a deposition that they found nothing to suggest a crime took place.

The actor-musician reminds Heard about an incident in which his building manager, Travis, had 'to come up and f**king pull me away from you' though it's not clear which incident Depp is referring to.

Heard also refers to Depp's security guards, 'who by the way,' she says 'have said to me multiple times that I am going to get killed.'

She adds: 'I'm sorry because the last time it got crazy between us I really did think I was gonna lose my life. And I thought you would do it on accident.

'And I told you that. I said oh my god, I thought the first time.'

Depp replies: 'Amber, I lost a f**king finger man, c'mon. I had a f**king, I had a f**king mineral can, a jar, a can of mineral spirits thrown at my nose. '

Their exchange seems to refer to a violent incident that took place in Australia one month into their marriage in which Depp suffered a severed finger.

He claimed his then-wife 'went berserk' when he asked her to sign a 'postnup' agreement, hurling a Vodka bottle at him which shattered on a marble counter-top and ripped off the tip of his finger.

Heard maintains in court filings, however, that Depp cut the digit off himself during an argument while he was 'drunk and high on ecstasy.'

'You can please tell people that it was a fair fight, and see what the jury and judge thinks. Tell the world Johnny, tell them Johnny Depp, I Johnny Depp, a man, I'm a victim too of domestic violence,' she says on the tape.

'And I, you know, it's a fair fight. And see how many people believe or side with you.' Depp cuts in: 'It doesn't matter; fair fight my a**.'

Heard replies: 'Because you're big, you're bigger and you're stronger. And so when I say that I thought that you could kill me, that doesn't mean you counter with you also lost your own finger.

'I, I'm not trying to attack you here, I'm just trying to point out the fact of why I said call 911. Because I was, you had your hands on me after you threw a phone at my face.

'And it's got crazy in the past, and I truly thought I need to stop this madness before I get hurt.'

Seemingly stunned by his former flame's version of events, Depp can simply reply: 'Oh my god.'

He reminds his ex-wife that she will have to repeat her allegations under oath in court.

'Do you believe all this Amber? Do you believe all this,' Depp asks.

'Yes, the f**k, yes, yes,' Heard replies.

'Do you believe you're an abuser? he asks. 'Do you believe you abused me physically?'

Heard replies: 'Do you know I'm a 115, well not anymore, but I was a 115lb almost 115lb woman. . .have I ever been able to knock you off of your feet? Or knock you off balance?

'You're going to get up on the stand, Johnny, and say, ''she started it''? Really? I have never been able to overpower you that's the difference between me and you. . .and that's a difference, that's a whole world, and there's a jury and there's a judge will see that there's a very big difference between me and you.'

Depp finally seems to lose his cool when his ex-wife accuses him of spreading rumors she was a stripper, snapping: 'I will f**king see you in court.'

He adds: 'You don't want to make f**king nice nice? I'm trying. I'm trying.

'But you know what? I loved you for so many f**king years but you know what? You didn't exist. You don't exist. You're not there. You're not there.

'You are a f**king made up thing in my head. And I can't believe you are doing this to me.'

The 31-minute recording ends with Depp saying he needs a moment to himself before a door can be heard slamming in the background.

Heard has thus far failed to have her ex-husband's defamation case thrown out or moved from Virginia, where the Washington Post is based, to California. However she did succeed in having it pushed back from last December to August of this year.

Depp's attorney Adam Waldman confirmed the recorded conversation took place while Depp was subject to a restraining order but said Heard initiated the call.

'Ms Heard delivers a chilling message to Johnny Depp any real abuse survivor will instantly recognize: Nobody will believe you. So you better do what I want,' Waldman told DailyMail.com.

'Ms Heard may continue to masquerade as a 'survivor' but the audio tape speaks for itself.'

Heard legal team offered a radically different perspective when provided with a transcript of the tape recording by DailyMail.com, complaining the recording was taken without Heard's consent and was also 'doctored'.

DailyMail.com has decided to publish the audio in its entirety so readers can form their own opinions.

'The latest recording provided to the Daily Mail continues Mr. Depp's ongoing efforts to abuse Ms. Heard,' her spokeswoman said.

'On the transcript of this recording (which notes that it is only a portion of a longer conversation), Ms. Heard repeatedly makes it clear to Mr. Depp that he was physically violent and abusive, that she feared for her life, and that even Mr. Depp's own security guards told her that if she stayed in the relationship, 'she was going to get killed'.

'What is most important on the tape, however, is not what Mr. Depp says, but what he does not say - not once on the tape does he deny Ms. Heard's statements about his violent attacks and the damage they caused, including her broken nose and black eyes.

'In fact, Ms. Heard specifically recalls that during a portion of the conversation not provided to the Daily Mail, Mr. Depp asked Ms. Heard whether she was recording the call and when she answered that she was not, admitted that she was not lying about the fact that he had abused her. As a result, Mr. Depp's use of this doctored recording at this time is not only a fraud and a crime, but an act of desperation.'

Amber Heard's spokeswoman provided the following statement from Dr. Laura Brown, a trauma expert and former president of Society for the Psychology of Women:

'Abuse is attempting to control a victim by any means necessary, including pushing this kind of news story. It is not unusual for victims of physical and emotional abuse to respond by acting to defend themselves.

'But because intimate partner violence is about coercion and control every bit as much as it is about acts of violence, abusers often respond to these acts of self-defense with attempts to reassert control.

'They do so through attempts at coercion, which often include projecting accusations of abuse at their victims for having had the audacity to attempt to defend themselves.

'It is not unusual for the perpetrator of intimate partner violence to try to use the self-defense responses of their targets to claim the mantle of victimhood for themselves.

'This is classic DARVO- Defend, Avoid, Reverse Victim and Offender – the construct developed by Dr. Jennifer Freyd.

'When society and the media buy into these false abuser narratives, they are enabling the perpetrator to re-abuse the victim. We should not be fooled by a DARVO narrative.'

From the audio conversation..

'You're going to get up on the stand, Johnny, and say, ''she started it''?' Amber Heard and Johnny Depp clash over the phone during divorce

JOHNNY DEPP: But I'm telling you now, if I file, if they file the f**king papers tomorrow, which means the s**t I've got to file before we go to court on Friday, if they file those papers, first of all, it's very bad for both of us.

AMBER HEARD: Well, your people are not going to file anything that's bad for you, trust me.

JD: No, no what you're saying, you've got to do something to protect yourself which means throwing me under the bus for the, some video about me beating you?

AH: Not me. I have to respond. I mean I'll have to go and pursue, no I'll pursue the whole course of action, because here's what you don't understand. If, if we do this, and basically will know. I called my lawyers and I said why aren't we negotiating now, what's going on, where are we, and they're like everything's under court.

JD: No, they won't settle. Your agents won't settle. Your lawyers won't settle baby. I'm telling you.

AH: We want to mediate. We even have a mediator, found a mediator and everything. But that was all worked out. But the thing that Laura [Wasser, Depp's attorney] wouldn't agree to, she did not want to agree to a mutual gag order. That's the problem, she doesn't want the gag order, why Johnny? Why? Why wouldn't she? Why wouldn't she want both parties not to talk about this in the press?

AH: I just want you to know. I'm not doing anything and have not been doing any move. Look it up, the timeline. Nothing was on the offense. Everything has been a defensive move because I'm being called a liar and a gold-digger. And I am not lying about any of this s**t, and I am not after a dime of your money.

JD: It's hurting You. It's hurting You. And it's hurting me. But the worst f**king thing is (unintelligible). Do you want to go to court Amber? Seriously? Do you want to go to court with this? I'm offering you an opportunity for us to make this finish in peace. Peaceful, man. We walk away. You go do what you gotta do, I go do what I gotta do. I, I, I've been through the f**ing hurt. You've been through the f**king hurt. I love you more than anything in life. I do not want to go into a f**king court with you. I do not want to f**king tarnish your name. I do not want to f**king tarnish. I don't want nothing. I want this to be done peacefully, between us. And if you don't like the way that mediation is going, take me back to court kid. Cause I can't. This is the last f**king chance Amber. This is it. Once I file those papers we don't turn around man. I know you hate me, and I know you whatever, I'm telling you now, there's no call, it doesn't need to happen like this. Please, for f**ks sake trust me man.

JD: Continuing through court is going to end up nothing but bad for you, and for me. It's just going to be bad. In any case, no matter whether we ruin each other or not, it's going to be f**king heartbreaking, it's terrible. Let's write a mutual letter that says look, in lieu of what's transpiring out there in the world with all this f**king crazy s**t, we have decided to take this private. We're not going to go to court, right now, over this. We are going to try to work something out, together. And then at least, at the very f**king least. I know you want to respond, and I know you want to defend yourself. Listen to me. Defending yourself by throwing someone under the bus is not going to look good.

AH: I'm not. It's not about that. It would not be about me throwing you under the bus. You know what it would be? It would be released through documented people, coming on the record, and, having the protection to do so, that haven't had yet. It would be eyewitness statements. It would be evidence. Tons of it. And it would be through years. And it would be unbelievable. Unbelievable, um, to imagine that either I'm (a) in a secret fight club, or (b) I've had um...

JD: A secret what?

AH: A secret fight club. Or that I have been plotting to do this for three years, and, while taking pictures of it, and documenting it, just saving it up for the right time when I'm not asking for any money and have nothing financial to gain from it. But no one is going to believe that. No one is going to believe that one of the two alternatives, that I'm in a fight club or I've been getting, going through hair and makeup or going through makeup through all these years where I have corroborating text messages between people that match those dates of those time stamped validated photos of either corroboration between people hearing us.

AH: All of that won't be me throwing you under the bus, that will be evidence, in the case. Which I will have to, it will be criminal as well, because I cannot go on Friday and file without filing a police statement first. And the only reason I haven't filed a police statement, which has been used against me by the way, every day, and the only reason I won't do it, haven't done it, is because I don't want to hurt you and that means it goes out of my hands and every, we had a third party guy, a third party prosecutor come and a criminal lawyer come, and they went, the problem is hearing from you like your biggest struggle, this is just, is that it is the most solid evidence, case of domestic violence case we've ever seen. And if you get this over to them or any part of it they will prosecute him. And I felt like, I would never want that. For you. Because I don't even, it's hard for me, I don't even call myself, like, in my head it's hard for me to even accept any sort of victimdom, ever. And I don't want to hurt you.

JD: I understand. I understand. And I don't want to hurt you either. I'm only going to say this. I love you. I love you. I've always loved you. And I know that, look, you do whatever you feel you have to do. I'm telling you now it's a mistake to go to court. If you want to go to court, we'll go to court. I would rather take care of it in a different way, I think it would be very good for you, and it would be very good for me. But you know what?

AH: I've been called a liar.

JD: Baby, you know what?

AH: And I've been called a golddigger.

JD: Baby. Baby. Amber, I didn't call you those things. I didn't call you those things.

JD: It's been going on too long Amber and we've got to stop this. It's got to stop it.

AH: I don't know how to get my reputation back.

JD: We write a letter together. Saying that we are going to take this out of the public eye. Saying that we are going to try and work this out on our own. Saying that the media has created such a f**king hateful storm that it's sickening. That we love each other. And that we want to make sure each other's OK. Have we had fights in the past, have we had this or whatever, f**k it, whatever, they already know all that s**t, it don't matter. Here's the deal.

AH: Oh, it matters. I have been, I have been, you have no idea, every ounce of my credibility has been taken from. And done so in a dishonest way. You know.

JD: Amber, the abuse, the abuse thing is, is we've got to deal with that, yeah. We've got to deal with that Amber.

AH: We don't have any way of, my credit, It's my credibility.

JD: Then why did you put that out there?

AH: I did not. You forced me, your team, forced me to by going on the offense.

AH: Well I'm sorry. I'm sorry because the last time it got crazy between us I really did think I was gonna lose my life. And I thought you would do it on accident. And I told you that. I said oh my god, I thought the first time.

JD: Amber, I lost a f**king finger man, c'mon. I had a f**king, I had a f**king mineral can, a jar, a can of mineral spirits thrown at my nose.

AH: You can please tell people that it was a fair fight, and see what the jury and judge thinks.

Tell the world Johnny, tell them Johnny Depp, I JOHNNY DEPP, A MAN, I'M A VICTIM TOO OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE.

JD: Yes.

AH: And I, you know, it's a fair fight. And see how many people believe or side with you.

JD: It doesn't matter, fair fight my a**.

AH: That's exactly. Because your big, you're bigger and you're stronger. And so when I say that I thought that you could kill me, that doesn't mean you counter with you also lost your own finger. I, I'm not trying to attack you here, I'm just trying to point out the fact of why I said call 911. Because I was, you had your hands on me after you threw a phone at my face. And it's got crazy in the past, and I truly thought I need to stop this madness before I get hurt.

JD: Oh my god.

AH: And I never think about myself that way. I never defend myself that way. I never see myself as a victim.

JD: There's also Travis coming to get me, there's Travis having to come up and f**king pull me away from you.

JD: You're going to have to do this under oath too you know.

AH: I will because the unfortunate part is I can talk about all of this.

JD: Do you believe all this Amber? Do you believe all this?

AH: Yes, the f**k, yes, yes.

JD: You believe I'm an abuser?

AH Yes.

JD: You believe I'm an abuser?

AH: In May, In December, in, in April

JD: Do you believe you're an abuser?

AH: No.

JD: Do you believe you abused me physically?

AH: Do I physically believe, I mean do I believe I physically abused you?

JD: Yes?

AH: Do you know I'm a 115, well not anymore, but I was a 115lb almost 115lb woman and you have the capacity...

JD: That's not the question. That's not the question.

AH: Have I ever been able to knock you off of your feet? Or knock you off balance?

JD: You started. You started these things.

AH: You're going to get up on the stand, Johnny, and say, 'she started it'? Really? I have never been able to overpower you that's the difference between me and you.

JD: Why did you try?

AH: And that's a difference, that's a whole world, and there's a jury and there's a judge will see that there's a very big difference between me and you.

JD: You cannot automatically, you cannot think that it's just my side. You are f**king killing me. Your f**king people are trying to kill me. You've turned me into a, my boy has to go to school, my boy goes to school and has kids go 'so your f**king dad's a wifebeater'? You don't think about that Amber.

AH: You don't think also my family, and all the death threats? Me and every single person in my immediate circle of friends and family is getting also matters? And you don't think I, you don't think I?

JD: Death threats?!!

AH: Your people put this out. Why, why, why, why did your security go on the record and lie? Why, that's a proactive measure. Why did your divorce attorney get to file for divorce period? At all? Second, why did she have to go and leak to TMZ? Why if you wanted it private, is TMZ being fed information literally by Laura Wasser and Marty Singer every step of the way? My, my my my arrest records. Who put that in the media? The rumors that I was a stripper? Or, of course I can expect that. I've known every step of the way, every single step of the way everything you give 'em.

JD: I give 'em? I give 'em? That's it. I give 'em? I'll see you in court. No. I'll f**king see you in court. I will f**king see you in court. I never f**king said that. I never told anyone that. You f**king trusted me with that and I never f**king told anyone that. And you know what, Amber?

AH: Thank you.

JD: This is not, no, this is me. This is me saying I tried. And thank you. And I will see you in f**king court. You don't want to make f**king nice nice? I'm trying. I'm trying. But you know what? You, I loved you for so many f**king years but you know what? You didn't exist. You don't exist. You're not there. You're not there. You are a f**king made up thing in my head. And I can't believe you are doing this to me.

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angrybell · 5 years

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Things I have to get off my chest about Senator Kamala Harris (aka why no one should ever vote for her)

So you think Kampala Harris is a really great candidate for president. Really?

Was she a good DA? Her first elected office. Well, no, she was not. Her office somehow managed to get less convictions at trial than her predecessor (believe me, if you knew the sordid history of what her predecessor did to the office, it would amaze you). SF Weekly did a review of her office and reported that her prosecutors, “won a lower percentage of their felony jury trials than their counterparts at district attorneys’ offices covering the 10 largest cities in California[.]” Yeah, LA county was outperforming her, and their jury pool back then was a nightmare for prosecutors.

Was she an honest prosecutor? Nope. She was found to have hidden information about a crime lab technician which was discoverable under California law. This was information she was legally required to turn over to defense attorneys. This lead to 600 convictions being overturned and dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct.

Since this was SF, a bluer than blue city in a deep blue state, she received a promotion to Attorney General. Failure and abuse of power was rewarded.

As Attorney General, she directed her office to cover up prosecutorial misconduct. What does that mean I’m plain English? She protected prosecutors who falsified evidence.

This was not a one time thing either. Her prosecutors were cited for this multiple times. Just like when she was the SF DA.

In one case, the local DA added lines to the transcript of an alleged confession. Without them, there was no admission of guilt. Basically, they falsified the confession, so that the defendant would plead guilty. The only way it was caught was because the defense attorney fought for the tapes of the interrogation and got them. Now, the trial judge, when shown the evidence did the right thing: he dismissed the indictment completely.

Then-Attorney General Harris, who likes to portray herself as noble for not opposing the Prop 8 lawsuit, instructed her appellate prosecutors to take the issue up on appeal. She literally told them to defend lying and falsification of evidence.

This case was not the first time she’d had been caught defending a known lie to the courts. In a series of cases coming out of the Sierra Pacific/Moonlight fires, the investigators committed more outrageous misconduct. The state agency, CalFire (which handles wildfires in California) basically hid/destroyed evidence. And the Attorney General’s Office helped cover it up.

The conduct of the CA DOJ under Harris was so egregious, the Ninth Circuit was talking about making a referral for prosecution for perjury during the oral arguments in the Baca case.

In the Baca case, there was evidence that the prosecutor had actually suborned perjury. Harris’ appellate team tries to sweep it under the rug. Harris has her prosecutors fight tooth and nail to deny the appellate court access to transcript of hearing where the perjury came to light.

Did Harris’ DOJ prosecute these rogue DAs for their crimes? Nope. Did any of the appellate attorneys within her own office suffer any consequences? From what I’ve read, not a one has been disciplined in any fashion.

Clearly, she’s happy to tolerate and protect corruption. Is this what makes her a good choice give her your vote?

As Attorney General, she tried to force non-profit groups to release their donor lists. She was of the opinion that the government had the right to know the identity of everyone who donated to every group. Why? There’s no reason except for the purpose of harassment. Which is exactly what was happening as soon as the non-profits handed over their donor information. Witnesses at the trial testified to being harassed and intimidated because their private information was leaked.

Put another way, do you want Trump to have this power? No? Then you shouldn’t want Harris, or anyone else to have this power.

Fortunately, this program of Harris’ was stopped by the federal courts. And before you say “oh it was because a Republican judge”, the judge who enjoined the program was appointed by Lyndon B Johnson.

One of the reasons the judge ruled against Harris was because it was clear that the purpose of her program was not a proper one. Judge Real wrote, “As made abundantly clear during trial, the Attorney General has systematically failed to maintain the confidentiality of Schedule B forms.”

It was not an accident that the information was leaked. It was by design. She was blatantly using her power as AG to oppress people who disagreed with her.

And you want to reward her with your votes and give her more power? Do you think that she won’t turn on you if you end up disagreeing with her?

Think about that.

What has she done as Senator? Has she sought to find a way to broker compromise on issues where that is possible? If you look at her voting record, that’s not the case.

Has she gotten any legislation passed? She’s sponsored 76 bills, resolutions, and amendments to bills. She’s gotten the same bill passed twice. She’s gotten a couple of Senate resolutions thanking various groups for their service (my favorite was Buffalo soldier one).

So what’s the bill she’s gotten passed twice? It’s to outlaw lynching. Something I find hilarious because for more than a century, the Democrats blocked anti-lynching laws in Congress. Of course, the last lynching happened in 1981, so clearly it’s a pressing matter. In case your curious, it was a unanimous vote.

Is this a demonstration of her political skill? Not really. Being opposed to lynching in politics is as controversial as being in favor the sun rising in the East.

Being a politician means more than just winning elections in a state that is so in your favor, with a party machine that picks its people according to the wishes of the party leaders (and she clearly has thei favor). It means getting things done. So far, she’s done nothing. She’s built no alliances. She’s moved no bills through Congress.

She hasn’t even gotten a post office named and Bernie Sanders has been able to do that at least once.

What is she good at? She’s good at getting media attention and showing up to celebrate hard fought victories achieved by other people. The scene of her showing up in The Case Against 8 is one of the most disgusting displays of political opportunism I’ve seen in recent years. They fought the case. They went through it all. And she swooped in for a fucking photo op after doing nothing but making sure their victory was incomplete.

She’s not a good politician. She a good media whore.

Is that what you want in the next person to take the oath as the next President of the United States?

Where do you stand on your civil liberties? She’s anti-2nd Amendment, which I realize is a plus for people who are inclined to vote Democrat. What should trouble you is that she is also opposed to the 1st Amendment’s freedom of speech guarantee. How do we know this? She has called for Supreme Court Justices to be conformed who would overturn Citizens United.

Now, I realize that the propaganda is that Citizens United allowed “bad” money into elections, but that’s not true. the holding of the case deals with the power of the government to restrain free speech. The case is about a small group of people, who formed a corporation, to speak out on certain topics. One of those was to oppose Hillary Clinton and her proposed policies. If SCOTUS has ruled the other way, the ability of people to get their voices heard would be subject to government restraint. Or to put it in clearer terms: censorship. It would ensure only the wealthy would have a say in elections (who else has enough money to self fund a protest movie? Or ad?)

Think it would only restrain groups like Citizens United (you know, the evil right wing ones)? Nope. It would also apply to unions, the Sierra Club, and all the other “good” groups.

She has some other troubling positions that implicate the 4th Amendment. She is in favor of law enforcement doing a DNA dragnet through commercial DNA testing services, looking for familial DNA to develop leads on cases. I don’t know about you, but giving the federal government free reign to develop a DNA database is troubling.

Senator Harris is also proponent of civil asset forfeiture. As much as detested the Obama Administration, at least they were trying to make it harder to do. She is so much of a fan, she tried to make easier for the government to forfeit your property. Now, if you don’t know what civil asset forefeiture is, you’re not alone. In my experience, it’s one of the least understood things that the government does by lay people.

Essentially, civil asset forfeiture (“CAF”) is a law that allows the government to seize the assets of criminals. Sounds harmless right? Well, it’s an easy power to abuse. Under CAF rules she was supporting, the state would be able to forfeit the property if there was a “substantial probability” that it was obtained by criminal acts. Now, that sounds good but it’s really a lower standard. Remember, to be convicted of a crime, you have to be convicted only if there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. To make it worse, the presumption works against the person who has lost their property to the state asset seizure. You have to prove the negative. Prosecutors love this, because they almost always win (I do have the dubious honor of having lost one of these cases as a prosecutor).

So what does all this tell you? Senator Harris has a history of abusing power, violating the law, and protecting government corruption. If that’s how you like your candidates, then she a perfect choice. If you care about someone who will not intentionall violate the law, use the government to harass and intimidate her opposition, or be effective at upholding the law and constitution, find someone else.

Please stop rewarding her track record of failure and abuse of power!

#kamalaharris #kamala harris #democrats

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individuationfic · 5 years

Text

Hoping I’ve Got It All Right Chapter 5: I’m Just As Dangerous As You

AO3

The next time they venture into the Palace, Morgana claims they need codenames.

“We don’t know what effect shouting our real names in Kamoshida’s Palace will have on the real Kamoshida,” he explains. “Our plan could be ruined if he somehow figures out what we’re doing. The masks and costumes help, but we should be as careful as possible.”

“What do you suggest, then?” Akira asks.

Before Morgana can answer, Ryuji starts wiggling like a little kid and his hand shoots up in the air. “Ooh! Can I be ‘Skull?’ Y’know, ‘cause of my mask?”

The conversation that ensues probably takes more time than it’s worth but it makes Shiho smile, so Akira decides not to complain.

“Skull, Mona, Widow, Panther, and Joker… Were all of these codenames tied to your masks?”

“Only Skull and Panther’s codenames are based off of their masks. And Fox and Crow’s, eventually. Everyone else’s are too abstract for that.”

“Please explain how the other codenames came to be.”

“The won’t give you clues to the others’ identities, Prosecutor-san. They would be pretty bad codenames otherwise.”

“Humor me.”

“Mona is just a shortened form of his name. Widow decided on hers in the spirit of a black widow spider.”

“And you?”

“Why, Prosecutor-san, what else could you call a trump card if not Joker?”

Akira decides to text Dad and Papa after he drops Shiho off at her apartment. He’d offered to let her sleep at the café again, but she refused. I can’t rely on you forever,” she’d said.”You’ve been really supportive, and I appreciate it, I really do, but I need some time alone to really process everything.”

So he makes her promise to reach out if she needs anything, gives her a hug, and pulls his phone out of his pocket when she’s safely inside. He’s always had a great relationship with Dad and Papa, and this is the first time in his life he’s ever wondered how to start a conversation with them.

[Akira]: You guys remember how I’m a triplet, right?

[Tatsuya]: Of course. We helped you look for them for years.

[Jun]: Why do you ask?

[Akira]: I found my sister.

[Jun]: !!!!!!!!

[Akira]: Her name is Suzui Shiho. She goes to Shujin, too.

[Jun]: That’s great, Akira!

[Tatsuya]: What is she like?

[Akira]: Something awful happened to her recently. Our friends and I are trying to help, but it’s been hard on her.

[Jun]: The poor dear…

[Jun]: Is there any way we can help?

[Akira]: I don’t really think so. She’s doing her best to come to terms with it right now so all we can do is be there for her while she does.

[Tatsuya]: That’s a very mature thing to do, Akira. Good job.

[Akira]: Thank you, Dad.

[Jun]: How are things otherwise? Is school going okay?

[Akira]: Shiho’s friend Ann sits in front of me in class, so we’ve become friends, too. She’s ¼ American and doesn’t look Japanese at all.

[Tatsuya]: Well, neither do you.

[Akira]: Fair enough.

[Jun]: Have you joined any clubs?

[Akira]: I don’t think any clubs will let me join.

[Jun]: Why not?

[Akira]: Someone leaked my records. The whole school knows about my assault charge.

[Jun]: Oh, honey, are you okay?

[Akira]: Yeah.

[Tatsuya]: I can’t believe the school would let that happen. Do you want me to call the principal?

[Akira]: There’s nothing that can be done about it now.

[Tatsuya]: You still shouldn’t have to deal with that.

[Akira]: I can manage.

[Akira]: My cat’s nagging at me to go to bed, so I’ll text you later. Love you.

[Jun]: Love you too, sweetie.

[Jun]: Wait. Cat?

[Jun]: AKIRA?

Akira plugs his phone in and lays on his bed. Morgana wastes almost no time curling up on the center of his chest. “Your dads seem nice,” he says.

“Yeah,” Akira says, “they are.”

They have to dedicate a whole afternoon to getting through the tower because of the swinging axes.

“If Shadows hae the keys,” Skull gripes as they head back into the fray, “why didn’t they drop them the first time we kicked their asses?”

“Us becoming aware we need the keys brought them into existence,” says Mona.

“That sounds like bullshit.”

“It’s cognition.”

Joker spots a Shadow in golden armor and snaps to get everyone’s attention. “Widow, Skull, with me. Panther and Mona, focus on keeping us healed up.”

“Got it, Joker,” Panther says, and the rest of them nod in agreement.

“Let’s do this.” And then they pounce.

Now that the path to the Treasure is secured, they have to think about the calling card.

They gather on the roof after classes end to begin planning. Shiho sits gym style in front of Akira and lets him braid a scarlet geranium into her hair. The color looks good in her dark hair; maybe he can convince Ann to help him get Shiho more colorful clothes. Ryuji is leaning against the wall, and Ann is sitting, legs crossed at the knee, on one of the abandoned desks that litter the rooftop. All in all, Akira thinks, we really do look like a group of delinquents.

After a few moments of silence, during which Akira can feel Ann and Ryuji staring at him as he works, Ryuji finally says, “Okay, what’s up with you two? How’re you so close when Akira only moved here like a week ago?”

Shiho looks up at him over her shoulder. There’s a little bit of humor glittering in her eyes, Akira is pleased to note. “What do you think, Akira? Should we tell them or make them guess?”

“We could give them a hint or two.” Usually he would just be honest about it, but if playing along cheers Shiho up a little, he’ll gladly do it. He glances up at their friends and smirks. “I’ll go first: we’ve known each other our whole lives.”

Ann jolts a little at that. “But how? Shiho was raised in Tokyo and you… weren’t.”

Shiho leans back against Akira’s legs. “I was raised here, yeah, but until I was four, I lived in Sumaru City.”

“It’s a great place,” Akira adds “It’s on the coast. Hey, Shiho, remember that time you and Ren buried me in the sand at the beach and I got that awful sunburn on my face?”

Next to his thigh, Morgana shifts a little. Before Akira can comment on it, Shiho laughs and says, “Amamiya-san was so mad at us!”

“She was always mad at us,” Akira points out. “The other kids kept making fun of me, so Ren would beat them up, and you would encourage him, so he’d do it more…”

“Hey, no one gets to pick on my baby brother but me.”

“I’m, like, an hour younger than you, at most. Stop calling me your ‘baby’ brother.”

Ryuji makes a noise not unlike a dying whale and Akira and Shiho’s heads whip over to look at their friends. It’s then that Akira realizes he and Shiho let the cat out of the bag a little early. “You’re siblings?!” Ryuji demands.

“As entertaining as this is,” Morgana says, voice strangely snappish, “can we focus on the calling card?”

And so the conversation turns to a more serious topic.

Akira agrees to let Ryuji handle the calling card, but drags him to a nearby supermarket before letting him go home. He has to search the produce section for a while before he finds what he’s looking for: unplucked celery flowers. They’re small, white, and unassuming—to the untrained eye, that is. But Akira knows better. Akira knows they mean “lust.”

He grabs a handful off some celery stalks and holds them to Ryuji. “Use these in the calling card,” he says.

“You know flowers?”

“My dad’s partner owns a flower shop.”

“Don’t cha think that could link you to… the thing?”

God bless Ryuji, but he’s not very good at being subtle. “It’s not like I advertise knowing a lot about flowers, and I doubt I’m the only person in Tokyo who does.”

“If you’re sure, man…”

“I am.” He softens his voice. “Please, Ryuji. If you’re putting your neck on the line writing it, let me have something to do with it, too.”

Ryuji swallows hard and clenches his jaw. A hard sort of vulnerability enters his eyes. “I’ll do my best.”

Akira squeezes his shoulder. “I know you will. I trust you.”

That was the right thing to say, because Ryuji’s answering smile could outshine the sun.

Akira grins when he sees the calling card—or, rather, calling cards—plastered on the bulletin board the next morning. They’re not professional by any means (the logo Ryuji came up with is lacking, and the flowers are just taped onto the cards in a blank space), but the message is clear.

He knows this could end up on the news, so he takes a photo of the board and sends it to Dad and Papa and pretends to be confused. Then he pockets his phone and goes to his friends. They have a heist to pull off, after all.

The fight against Kamoshida’s Shadow is a lot easier than any of them anticipated. As soon as they take out his healing factor, he goes down laughably quickly.

After, when they Have Kamoshida’s crown in their possession, Widow steps forward. Her eyes are cold beneath her black lace mask. “You hurt me,” she tells Kamoshida’s quivering Shadow. “You beat me and berated me and tried to break me.”

Amazingly, the Shadow tries to defend himself. “You don’t understand! I was under so much pressure!”

“That doesn’t justify what you did to me!” Widow’s shout echoes, harsh. “Nothing could!”

“I—” The Shadow slumps. “You’re right.” He tilts his head to the side, baring his neck. “If you’re going to kill me, just make it quick.”

Joker sees Widow’s grip on her cane go white-knuckled and moves to restrain her, but is beaten to the punch. Panther places on pink-gloved hand over Widow’s and wraps her other arm around her shoulders. “He’s going to pay for what he did to you and to everyone else,” Joker hears her whisper. “But he has to be able to confess what he did.”

Widow sighs and goes slack in Panther’s grip, and Joker takes the opportunity to step forward and address Kamoshida’s Shadow. “Go back to yourself. Go back without your broken, distorted heart, and confess all of your sins. Only then can you begin working to redeem yourself.”

And the Shadow disappears, and the castle begins to crumble around them.

Shiho comes back to the café with Akira that night. Morgana hops out of Akira’s bag and into Shiho’s arms once they’re off the train, and the way she cradles him to her chest tells Akira she really needs to talk about what happened today.

Sakura-san raises an eyebrow at them but doesn't otherwise comment as Akira leads Shiho up to his attic. Shiho sinks into the couch and waits for Akira to sit beside her before she starts talking. “I thought confronting him would make me feel better,” she says, “but it didn’t. I’m still scared.”

Akira gently puts an arm around her and tugs her into a loose embrace against his shoulder. Morgana shifts a little so he’s half on Shiho’s lap and half on Akira’s, purring so hard Akira can feel it in his chest. “There’s no set timeline for your recovery,” he tells her, his voice gently above a whisper. “Take as much time as you need.”

“We’re all here for you,” Morgana adds. “None of us are whole, not really. I don’t think there’s a group of people out there who can understand you better than us.”

If the fabric of his shirt where Shiho’s face is pressed into it is a little damp, he doesn’t mention it, and the three of them fall asleep like that, almost restful for the first time in a long time.

#individuation #ao3fic #persona series #persona 5

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anexplanationofunfortunateevents · 7 years

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another one bites the dust

“The traitor James Comey.....”

[Heads-up that a lot of links here are to sites like CNN, so if you need to do something about autoplay, I’d recommend it.]

Former FBI Director James Comey is a weak-willed megalomaniac, a self-deluded misogynist* who bears as much responsibility as any single person in the world for where we are today.

Hearing he had been fired was the most frightened I have been for this country since Election Night. Maybe since 9/11.

FBI directors do not get fired. They have special ten-year terms which are supposed to insulate them from politics. In the entire history of the agency, exactly one FBI director was fired for old school cut-and-dry abuse of agency resources – and even then, only after his department got a lot of civilians killed in two high-profile failures.

Until now. Comey, as far as we know, was the only person in the federal government running an investigation into Russiagate who wasn’t a Republican elected official. And Trump fired him.

Look, if Comey was the only one who was hurt, that’d be one thing. If a legitimate Department of Justice sent him packing for his antics during the election, I’d be fucking thrilled. This isn’t about justice. It’s not about him. It’s about the rule of law.

It’s probably most helpful to walk this through by the timeline, both to untangle a lot of seemingly unrelated threads and because it really matters how fast this has been happening.

Two weeks ago: Rod Rosenstein, a career DOJ lawyer, is confirmed as the Deputy Attorney General. Because AG/live-action Dr. Seuss villain Jeff Sessions recused himself from Trump-Russia investigations after he was caught lying at his own confirmation hearing about the extent of his own contacts with Russian intelligence during his time with the Trump campaign, Rosenstein is supposed to be the final authority on this investigation.

Last Tuesday, 5/3: Comey testifies at an open Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Nutshell takeaways:

Comey gets defensive and agitated when pressed on his likely definitive last-minute intervention in the 2016 election because of EMAILS!!!!11!**

Senate Democrats ask a lot of tellingly specific hypotheticals, which Comey tacitly validates with a lot of “I can’t tell you because that would interfere with the investigation”-type answers.

Senate Republicans try to derail the hearing with concern-trolling about leaks.

Comey says he wants to find and discipline the agents who leaked information about Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s laptop to disgraced former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Also Tuesday, 5/2: Trump tweets that Comey was "the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds!” I expect it to disappear (also illegal, as long as his cheating ass is squatting in our house) so here’s a screen shot:

Sometime last week: Comey asks Rosenstein to increase the staff and budget for the Trump-Russia task force – specifically, to look into Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort’s shady foreign finances.

Also last week: Trump grows increasingly “frustrated” (scared) over the persistence of the Trump-Russia investigations. At some point, Trump tells Sessions and/or Rosenstein to find a reason to fire Comey.

Sometime this week: Federal prosecutors secretly issue subpoenas concerning the disgraced former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

Monday, 5/8: Former Acting AG Sally Yates and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testify in an open hearing in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Takeaways:

As anticipated, Yates confirms that she informed the administration that Flynn had lied about contacts with Russian Ambassador Kislyak and was potentially compromised, but they did not fire him until the story broke publicly eighteen days later.

Clapper takes away one of their favorite talking points. A while back, he had told the press that he had not seen any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, which of course they loudly proclaimed was him saying he knew there was no collusion. On Monday, he clarifies that he personally had not seen the case at that point because investigations into American citizens aren’t in his wheelhouse. (Listen to Clapper explain this reasoning in plain English here.)

Clapper confirms that foreign intelligence agencies alerted American spooks about troubling contacts between Trump and Russia, supporting an April report in The Guardian, which in turn partly validated the Steele dossier. (The pee-pee tape remains an unsupported allegation, but more and more of the serious stuff is checking out.)

Late Monday (5/8) night: News breaks that Comey lied when he was questioned about why he intervened in the election. He claimed, untruthfully, that he alerted Congress about Huma Abedin’s laptop because she habitually forwarded “hundreds and thousands” of potentially classified emails to be printed by her husband. According to The Liberal Media – wait, no, sorry, Rebecca Ballhaus from the conservative stalwart Wall Street Journal – it wasn’t “hundreds and thousands,” it was two email chains, neither of which had information that was classified at the time.

We kind of have to walk and chew gum about two really important things here:

Comey absolutely shit the bed. Most headlines say “misrepresented” or “misspoke” or “gave incorrect testimony,” but the fact of the matter is, he lied. Either he lied when he made the claim about Abedin forwarding “hundreds and thousands of emails” to her husband, or he lied when he claimed to have taken his decision to intervene in last year’s election seriously. If he took the decision seriously, he’d have been damned sure to know how much potential evidence he was talking about. He dramatically recounted a lot of details that he thought supported his decision, so he hasn’t forgotten the experience.

We didn’t hear about this from a whistleblower of conscience. We heard about it because Trump wanted a reason to fire Comey and Comey gave him one. The Yates hearing was deeply publicly damaging for Trump, and Comey’s investigation was getting hotter by the day, so someone decided it was time to cut him loose.

Tuesday (5/9) late afternoon: The Senate Intelligence Committee asks the Treasury Department for information about Trump’s finances.

Tuesday (5/9) around close of business: Comey gets the boot. Comey finds out about it when the news breaks as he’s giving a speech in the FBI LA field office. His office finds out about it when Trump’s personal bodyguard shows up at HQ with a six-page pink slip.

As Alexander Hamilton said, live by the bizarre hate-tweet, die by the bizarre hate-tweet. Or maybe that was the Dalai Lama?

Anyway, it’s actually three letters, all of which are !!?!?!?!? AF:

Letter #1 is from Trump himself, who had not been seen in public for the previous five days. Probably the most bizarre thing is the ham-fisted assertion that Comey told Trump on three separate occasions that Trump himself was not being investigated.

Letter #2 is a formal recommendation that Comey should be fired from Sessions, who is supposed to have recused himself from the Russia investigation (ie, the real reason Comey was fired), as well as from the pretextual investigation detailed in Letter #3.

Letter #3, from Deputy AG Rosenstein, says that Comey is being fired because of Comey’s epic fuck-ups against Hillary Clinton. Seriously. It could’ve been pulled from one of the press statements the Clinton campaign put out last October. Half of it is shit-talk from the dozens of op-eds that former DOJ officials put out condemning his actions. It’s 100% correct on the merits. But it’s an argument for why Comey should have been fired on October 28th, November 8th, or January 21st. He’s not any more in the wrong about that today than he was six months ago when he did it.

Wednesday (5/10): Trump meets the Russian foreign minister in the Oval Office. Russian press are invited in for the photo op. American press are not.

Wednesday (5/10): The Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenas Michael Flynn.

Thursday (5/11): Comey was scheduled for another open hearing with the Senate Intelligence Committee. Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe went instead.

So that’s where we are. As of now, Comey is scheduled to speak with the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed session next week. [UPDATE, 5/12: Comey won’t be testifying next week. 'Cause, NOW he keeps his trap shut.]

Thursday (5/11): The FBI executes a search warrant at a GOP-affiliated consulting/tech strategy firm in Annapolis, Maryland. Not the Trump campaign, the Republican party. The firm says that the search is related to a 2013 governor’s race, which is, of course, possible. (I’m finishing this post as the story is breaking, so details here may change.)

This is fucking batshit. Even on the Trump scale this is a five-alarm fire.

Firing the person who’s officially investigating his campaign is a bald assertion that Trump thinks he’s above the law.

Congressional Republicans, who as the majority party are the only ones that can check him, are backing him up in that assertion. Some, though far from all, have expressed “concerns.” (Like how they send “thoughts and prayers” after mass shootings, before turning around to make guns even easier to buy.) Not only are they letting him act with impunity, they’re accepting the transparent lie that he’s doing this because he’s just so disturbed at how Comey violated Hillary’s rights. Think about what that means. They’re joining what is now a broad bipartisan consensus that their guy is in power after an election which was tainted by the FBI director doing something that’s just as far out of line as stealing from the agency. Partisan Republicans have joined partisan Democrats, political scientists, everyone but the Faith Militant Bernie-or-Busters in acknowledging that Hillary Clinton was robbed. AND. THEY. DON’T. CARE. They’re just carrying on with a government that they’ve admitted is illegitimate.

The White House, from Trump on down, were surprised at the blow-back. I wouldn’t trust any one WH staffer to be telling the truth about something subjective like this, because they lie – but the thing is, they’re really bad at getting organized enough to tell the same lie. That is how they think. “Republicans won’t object because we’ll tell them not to, and Democrats won’t object because they’re mad at Comey.” It genuinely does not occur to them that some of us (Democrats, basically) substantively care about principles, or even that anyone might prioritize rational political self-interest over a personal grudge. That vindictive id is so central to their motivations they can’t imagine other people being any other way.

The loss of Comey is a huge blow to the Trump Russia investigation. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t trust Comey’s judgment or his ethics, because he’s shown that he possesses neither. What I did trust? His ego. Comey really cares that he looks and feels like that last honest man who’s just above it all. He was strongly motivated to go down in history as the G-man who brought down a president, instead of the dirtbag who threw an election to a traitorous disaster like Trump. That was still going to be an uphill slog, but it was better than Trump getting to hand-pick the person investigating him.

Oh. And while all this was happening, a West Virginia journalist was arrested for trying to ask Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price and Chief Gaslighter Kellyanne Conway a question and the fight against gerrymandering got even harder when the head of the 2020 census bureau quit.

This is not a drill. This is a fucking code red.

What you can do:

Okay. If you’re not panicking, don’t start. But if you are panicking....you’re not just being crazy. Do what you gotta do to come down.

Call your senators and representative. If they’re on the record supporting an independent investigation, thank them; if they’re not, tell them to get with the program. Then tweet at ‘em, get on their Facebook walls, and tell everyone you know to do the same.

Follow your local Indivisible groups or other activist organizations. There were demonstrations on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after Comey was fired; I think it’s more likely than not that there will be more this weekend.

If you are going to read more, pace yourself, check your sources, &c. A bananas news cycle like this can get overwhelming. Know when you need to step back.

Also, Trump Russia is a really important thing, but it’s not the only really important thing. If focusing your attention on other issues is more rewarding for you, do that.

Recommended reading:

TBH I don’t recommend reading all of these, because the basic point is the same, but the New Yorker, Lawfare, and Sarah Kendzior have strong takes.

You’re going to be hearing a lot of references to the 1970s Watergate scandal over the next couple of weeks. If you want to be able to judge those comparisons yourself but you’re a little hazy on the historical details (and most of us are), here’s a helpful primer.

*Naturally, nobody is acknowleging this pattern. But Comey tanked Hillary Clinton while protecting Trump. He ignored Loretta Lynch, his boss, and Sally Yates, her deputy, when they told him not to do it. He lied under oath to smear Huma Abedin as a criminal. And he couldn’t even restrain himself from interrupting Senator Dianne Feinstein when she dared question him about it. IDK how much quacking people need to hear before they’ll admit it’s a damn duck.

** An under-the-radar piece of context: Comey slipped up in referring to new and theoretically plausibly incriminating evidence as “the golden emails that would change this case.” That is, he was speaking from the perspective of someone who was actively hoping to have pretext to charge Hillary Clinton with a felony for having what was apparently the only email address in DC that wasn’t successfully hacked. This isn’t the first time, either. Twenty years ago, he was one of the OG Clinton witch-hunters, who went so far as to draft a bullshit indictment against HRC because she and Bill had lost money on a real estate investment in the mid-80s. (Seriously.) He also has a Trump-like pattern of rationalizing overincarceration and other civil liberties violations with sweeping, and sometimes racist, fact-free assertions.

Again, the issue with his firing isn’t whether or not he deserved it. He definitely deserved it. He is trash. If history is unkind to Barack Obama for any reason, it will be for appointing Comey as FBI director, and that will be completely justified. The issue is that we don’t deserve to live in a country controlled by a despot who considers himself above the law. Nobody does.

#donald trump #james comey #trump russia #authoritarianism #2016 election #politics

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Fox News fiction: How the Seth Rich conspiracy murder theory made its way to Trump's favorite cable news network

https://news.yahoo.com/fox-news-fiction-how-the-seth-rich-conspiracy-murder-theory-made-its-way-to-the-cable-news-network-100000772.html

FOX NEWS FICTION: How The Seth Rich Conspiracy Murder Theory Made It's Way To Fox News

By Michael Isikoff | Published July 23, 2019 6:00 AM ET | Yahoo News | Posted July 23, 2019 |

This is the fourth part in the Yahoo News “Conspiracyland” series. Read and listen to the first three parts here.

WASHINGTON – In the spring of 2017, then-senior White House counselor Steve Bannon got a text message from a producer for CBS’s “60 Minutes” inquiring about a wild story getting traction on internet websites and chat rooms. It involved Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer who had been shot and killed on the streets of Washington the previous July, and claims that his murder was retribution for a supposed role in leaking internal Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks.

“In the conversations I've had with Steve, he tended to go towards conspiracies,” recalls Ira Rosen, the “60 Minutes” producer who sent Bannon that text message. “He liked conspiracies, and he believed in them. He talks about the deep state. He talks about black ops.”

In the case of Rich, Bannon didn’t disappoint. When Rosen asked about rumors that a “disgruntled insider … kid’s name was Seth Rich” had sold Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, Bannon responded with no shortage of certainty.

Download or subscribe: “Conspiracyland” on Apple Podcasts

“Huge story. He was a Bernie [Sanders] guy,” Bannon wrote back in a series of text messages that falsely characterized Rich’s political sympathies. As for Rich’s death from an early-morning shooting in a neighborhood 30 blocks north of the Capitol, Bannon upped the ante. “It was a contract kill, obviously,” he texted Rosen.

Rosen doubted that Bannon — prone to flippant bomb-throwing asides in his chats with journalists — actually believed that Rich was gunned down by hired assassins. But he had little doubt what Bannon was up to.

The White House at that moment was increasingly besieged by the ongoing investigations into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, and the role it played in boosting Trump’s candidacy. But if it could be shown that it was Rich — and not Russian intelligence agents — who provided the stolen emails to WikiLeaks, then the White House could turn the Russia story on its head.

“He’s trying to whet my appetite to actually go chase the thing,” says Rosen about his email exchange with Bannon. “He was trying to spin a counternarrative, and Seth Rich fit perfectly within that counternarrative.”

Bannon declined to respond to multiple requests for comment about his text messages. And, in the end, Rosen never pursued the Rich story. He made a few phone calls to police and FBI sources in Washington, he says, and quickly determined there was nothing to what Bannon had told him.

But at that very moment, another news outlet far more sympathetic to the president — Fox News — was preparing to take up the story. The network’s pursuit of the story would soon lead to one of the most embarrassing episodes in the history of America’s biggest cable news outwork.

How Fox News came to report an inflammatory and unsubstantiated Rich conspiracy story — and then, after hawking it for a week on its top-rated shows, retract it and strike it from its website — is the subject of the next two episodes of Yahoo News’ “Conspiracyland.” The first of those episodes, ��Fox News Fiction,” is being released Tuesday.

It is a story with many twists and turns that ultimately raises a provocative question: What role did the Trump White House play in promoting one of the nastiest conspiracy theories rising out of the 2016 election?

The central player in this drama is Ed Butowsky, a hard-charging Dallas financier and inveterate political schmoozer with connections at Fox News. (He was an occasional guest commentator on the Fox Business Network.) He was also on friendly terms with a number of Trump White House officials, including Bannon and then-press secretary Sean Spicer.

During the Obama years, Butowsky had served on a “citizens’ committee” to investigate Benghazi and would often talk about how he got important information about the deadly incident into the media without leaving any fingerprints. “Behind the scenes I do a lot of work (unpaid) helping to uncover certain stories,” he once boasted. “My biggest work was revealing most of what we know today about Benghazi.”

In late 2016, Butowsky claims, he got a hot tip that caused him to plunge headfirst into the Rich story. His supposed tipster was Ellen Ratner, a liberal radio talk show host who due to family ties — her late brother Michael Ratner had been the U.S. lawyer for WikiLeaks — had met with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London during the closing days of the 2016 campaign.

Butowsky then passed along his tip, or at least his version of the tip, to the Rich family in a phone call after the election. “He had told us that a friend had gone to visit Assange, and Assange had told them that Seth had done it,” recalled Mary Rich, Seth’s mother, referring to Butowsky’s claim that her son had provided Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks. “We said, ‘It’s not true. ... Seth didn’t do that.’ And then Ed told us to look for the money that Assange had paid. And we said, ‘Trust me, there is no money.’”

Butowsky would go on to repeat the same story about his alleged tip to other potential collaborators on the Rich story. But Ratner, interviewed for the first time about this for the “Conspiracyland” podcast, vigorously disputed the financier’s claims. She did indeed meet with Assange, along with other members of her family, at the Ecuadorian Embassy just a few days before the 2016 election, she said. But, she added, neither Rich, nor any role he might have played in leaking or selling DNC emails, was ever mentioned during her meeting with the WikiLeaks founder. “It didn’t even come up,” she said. “Not at all.”

Butowsky never revealed Ratner’s identity to the Riches. They had no idea that Butowsky’s alleged tipster was prepared to contradict what he had told them. But the Riches were interested in something else that Butowsky would soon offer to help with: hiring a private investigator to find their son’s killers.

The Washington Police Department was convinced from the start that Rich’s death was the result of a botched robbery. There had been seven armed robberies in the Bloomingdale neighborhood where Rich was killed, all within the six weeks prior to his death. The cops and prosecutors had linked those holdups to drug-dealing activity in nearby housing projects.

But the cops had made little progress in identifying any suspects in Rich’s murder — a cause of no end of frustration for his parents. “I needed to hire a private investigator that can go door to door,” said Mary Rich. “And I was trying to figure out how in the world we could ever afford it, because we couldn't.”

It was at that point that Butowksy offered not only to hire the private investigator but also to foot the bill. “And I sat there and I went, ‘Oh, God, don't say this, don't say this,’ and I did,” he recalled. “I said I'll pay for it. And I have no idea why I said that.

“So then this is where everything in my life changed.”

Butowsky’s determination to pursue the Rich story was further fueled by a strange phone call he had with legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. After being put in touch with Butowsky by a former U.S. intelligence official who was a longtime source for the journalist, Hersh, who is occasionally given to loose, boastful comments, proceeded to spin out a bizarre and unverified narrative about Rich and a supposed secret FBI document.

“What I know comes off an FBI report,” Hersh told Butowsky in a phone call that the financier secretly taped. Rich “makes contact with WikiLeaks. That’s in his computer, and he makes contact. All I know is that he offered a sample, an extensive sample, you know, I’m sure dozens of emails, and said, ‘I want money.’ Then later WikiLeaks did get the password, he had a Dropbox, a protected Dropbox. And they [WikiLeaks] got access to the Dropbox.”

And how did Hersh know this? “I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me,” he told Butowsky. “And I know this person is unbelievably accurate and careful. He’s a very high-level guy, and he’ll do me a favor.”

Hersh’s claims in this secretly taped phone fall were exactly what Butowsky wanted to hear. The moneyman immediately started pressing the journalist to get him a copy of the FBI report so he could share it with his friends in the White House.

“We solve a lot of problems” with that report — and not just “letting a mother and father know what happened to their son,” he said in the phone call. “There’s so many people throughout Trump’s four years or maybe eight years who are always going to fall back on the idea that he’s not legitimate and the Russians got him elected. This changes all of that.”

But no sooner did Butowsky start pressing him than Hersh backed off. He had no access to the FBI report, he emphasized to Butowsky, and he couldn’t actually vouch for what his “high level” source told him. “It doesn’t make it true,” Hersh told him.

Months later, when Butowsky ignored Hersh’s cautionary words and started publicizing his remarks in that phone call, the journalist walked back what he had said in its entirety.

“I was not read anything by an FBI friend,” he told Butowsky in a previously unreported email that contradicted what he had previously said in that taped phone call. “I have no firsthand information, and I really wish you would stop telling others information you think that I have and that I have no reason to believe is accurate.” (When contacted by Yahoo News, Hersh declined to be interviewed on tape for the “Conspiracyland” podcast. But he emphasized he never published anything about the supposed FBI report on Rich because he never had any corroboration that such a document actually existed.)

But Butowsky was not to be put off. He reached out to a Fox News contributor —Rod Wheeler, a former Washington police homicide detective — and hired him as the private investigator for the Rich family. Then he took Wheeler to the White House to meet with press secretary Sean Spicer so he could brief him on his efforts to investigate the Rich murder.

What happened at this White House meeting would later be a matter of dispute. Spicer and Butowsky would both insist that nothing happened at all. As soon as Wheeler brought up the Rich case, they insisted, Spicer shut down the conversation and emphasized that it was not a White House issue.

That’s not how Wheeler remembered it. Spicer gave him his business card and his personal cellphone number, Wheeler told CNN’s Chris Cuomo, and offered to do what he could to facilitate the private investigation by putting him in touch with an official at the Justice Department. “If you need some more help, give me a call,” Spicer told him, according to Wheeler’s account. (Spicer declined to comment.)

Perhaps even more important, Butowsky put Wheeler in touch with a Fox News reporter, Malia Zimmerman, who was working to prove what Hersh had originally said in that secretly taped phone call. On May 10, the day after FBI Director James Comey was fired, she claimed to Butowsky she had talked to a federal investigator who wished to remain anonymous but had supposedly seen an FBI forensic report documenting emails between Rich and WikiLeaks.

It was an enormous break — if true. But Zimmerman knew she needed more sources for the article to pass muster with her editors, and she began reaching out to Wheeler to get him to provide on-the-record quotes to support her story.

When Wheeler at first balked, Butowsky decided to turn up the heat, leaving a highly provocative voicemail for the detective.

“Hey, Rod, it’s Ed,” Butowsky said on a voicemail message he left on Wheeler’s home answering machine on May 24. “A couple of minutes ago, I got a note that we have the full attention of the White House on this. And tomorrow, let’s close this deal.“

Then he followed up with an even more eyebrow-raising text message to Wheeler. “Not to add any more pressure but the president just read the article, he wants the article out immediately,” he wrote Wheeler.

Butowsky insists he has never spoken to Trump in his life and that he was only joking with Wheeler in these messages. He invoked the interest of the White House, he says, as a way to pressure him to return Zimmerman’s phone calls.

“I was teasing with him to tell him, let's get this thing done,” said Butowsky. “I was bulls***ting with Rod, of course.”

Whatever the truth about the White House involvement, Butowsky’s tactics worked. Wheeler got back to Zimmerman. She told him her mysterious source was “this FBI guy, a former FBI guy” whom she considered credible. Wheeler agreed to provide a few on-the-record quotes to corroborate Zimmerman’s story even though, as he would later admit, the only thing he knew about the sole source for the article was what Zimmerman had told him. “My investigation up to this point shows there was some degree of email exchange between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks,” he said.

Then, even as Zimmerman was finishing up the article she was about to send to her Fox News editors in New York, Wheeler jumped the gun, prematurely revealing what her article would say to a different reporter for the Fox News affiliate in Washington, D.C.

The affiliate then went public with a story that would set off a political and media explosion — even though everything in it was wrong.

Next week on “Conspiracyland”: “Fox News Fallout.”

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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June 5 was the biggest primary day of the year — but it may take some time before all of the election results are clear. Many of the most-watched races are in California, which closes polls late, counts votes slowly, and uses the unusual “top two” system that means both first- and second-place winners need to be declared — potentially dragging on proceedings for days.

But seven other states went to the polls Tuesday, and many held primaries with national ramifications. New Jersey, an important state in Democrats’ efforts to take over the House of Representatives, chose its nominees in key races. Montana picked a Republican nominee in a key Senate race the national party is closely watching. Iowa, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Dakota held their primaries too. On top of all that, there was another state Senate special election in Missouri that Democrats could celebrate.

Here, then, are some key winners and losers for the states other than California that had June 5 primaries.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie Alex Wong/Getty Images

In a state that’s voted consistently Democratic on the presidential level for decades, Republicans have done a decent job at winning some important political offices. Not only did Chris Christie serve eight years as New Jersey’s governor, but Republicans have controlled at least five seats of the state’s 12-member congressional delegation since the last redistricting.

But all that is in danger in the age of Trump. Democrat Phil Murphy won the governorship last November, and now several GOP-held congressional districts are among Democrats’ top targets in the country.

Already, two formidable Republican incumbents who’ve each been in Congress for 24 years — Rep. Frank LoBiondo in the Second District, and Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen in the 11th — chose to retire rather than face tough reelection fights this year. Rep. Leonard Lance, in the Seventh, also faces a difficult battle in a district Hillary Clinton won.

Now that the primary results are in, Democrats have gotten the candidates they wanted in these three races. In the Second, they’ll field moderate Jeff Van Drew, who’s represented much of the district for a decade in the state Senate. In the 11th, they’ll put up former Navy pilot and prosecutor Mikie Sherrill, a female veteran who’s been a blockbuster fundraiser. Then, in the Seventh, the nominee will be former Obama State Department official Tom Malinowski.

These outcomes aren’t really surprising. New Jersey has an unusual primary ballot rule in which the county party’s endorsement is actually printed on the ballot, which gives a big boost to candidates with the party’s backing. Still, the party has got its preferred nominees, and the national consequences could be big because New Jersey’s House Republicans look likely to face their toughest election races in decades.

Sen. Bob Menendez Drew Angerer/Getty

Since his indictment on corruption charges in 2015, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) has been under a cloud. Accused of using his Senate office to do favors for a wealthy Florida eye doctor in exchange for private jet flights and fancy vacation accommodations, Menendez stepped aside as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As his trial approached in 2017, there seemed to be a high chance that, whatever the outcome, he wouldn’t run for another term.

But in November of last year, jurors couldn’t unanimously agree on a verdict for any of the charges against Menendez. So a mistrial was declared, and the Justice Department ended up dropping the case rather than trying to prosecute him again. Menendez soon got his foreign relations post back and announced he’d run for a third full term.

You might think, then, that Menendez would have drawn a primary challenger running on an anti-corruption (or at least an “I have never been indicted”) platform. But, of course, this is New Jersey we’re talking about, and the state’s hierarchical Democratic machine remained united behind him.

One primary challenger quit the race after failing to raise much money, and Menendez was left with only one little-known opponent, community news website publisher Lisa McCormick, who hadn’t disclosed raising or spending any money at the time of the last campaign finance filing deadline.

Menendez won, of course, but his win wasn’t particularly impressive — at press time, he had 62 percent of the vote to McCormick’s 38 percent. If he had drawn a serious opponent, would he have lost renomination? We’ll never know. Menendez will face wealthy pharmaceutical executive Bob Hugin, who’s poured $7.5 million of his own money into his campaign already, in the general election.

Amid all the primaries, there were a few state legislature special elections as well — and in one state Senate contest, in Missouri, Democrats flipped another seat formerly held by Republicans.

Democrat Lauren Arthur, a two-term state representative and former schoolteacher, beat her Republican opponent by about 19 points in a district Donald Trump won by 4. On the one hand, the election was held just days after Missouri’s Republican governor Eric Greitens resigned amid sexual misconduct allegations — so GOP voters might not have been thrilled to head to the polls.

On the other hand, this adds to a lengthy list of special elections in which state legislature seats have flipped from Republican to Democratic. And Missouri’s an important state for Democrats this fall, with Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) facing a tough reelection challenge from state attorney general Josh Hawley (R).

In October 2016, after the tape leaked in which GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump bragged that he liked to “grab” women “by the pussy,” Rep. Martha Roby (R-AL) had had enough. She withdrew her endorsement of Trump weeks before the election, saying, “Donald Trump’s behavior makes him unacceptable as a candidate for president, and I won’t vote for him.”

But of course, Trump won. And this year, Roby, now running for a fifth term in the House, came under fire for her criticism of him. At press time, she only had about 39 percent of the vote in her GOP primary — meaning she’d head to a runoff against Bobby Bright (who, oddly enough, held the seat before Roby as a Democrat but has since switched to the GOP).

Meanwhile, up in New Jersey, longtime conservative activist Steve Lonegan hoped to secure the GOP nomination to take on Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D) in the Fifth District. But Lonegan had harshly criticized Trump back in 2016 — and luckily for his opponent John McCann, there was footage of Trump firing back that he could put in his ads. (“I’ve known Lonegan for 25 years, he’s a loser!” Trump had said.) Lonegan lost.

So with Lonegan losing and Roby facing a runoff, it’s a reminder that in today’s Republican Party, if you stick your neck out and criticize President Trump too much, GOP voters may very well punish you.

Deb Haaland for Congress

New Mexico’s First Congressional District, which includes Albuquerque, has an open seat race this year because the incumbent is running for governor. And the winner of the three-way Democratic primary was Deb Haaland — who’s now the favorite to become the first Native American woman ever elected to Congress.

Haaland chaired the state’s Democratic Party and worked for the Obama campaign in 2012. Joshua Holland interviewed Haaland for the Nation recently, and the candidate said her top policy priorities would be fighting climate change, supporting a “renewable energy revolution,” and Medicare for all. Trump lost this district by over 16 points, so Haaland starts the general election as the obvious frontrunner and likely will make history this fall.

Kristi Noem Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

Back in 2010, Kristi Noem defeated a Democratic incumbent to become South Dakota’s sole representative in the US House. Since then, she’s been viewed as a rising star in the GOP. Shortly after the 2016 election, she announced she’d run for governor, hoping to become the state’s first female governor.

But to win the GOP nomination, she had to get past the state attorney general, Marty Jackley. And the campaign got very ugly indeed, with accusations flying over whether Jackley delayed a settlement payment to a sexual harassment victim because of her connection with Noem.

In the end, Noem won, making her candidacy a rare bright spot in a series of troubled attempts by House Republicans to seek higher office this year. She’ll be up against state Sen. Billie Sutton (D) in the general election, but she’s the overwhelming favorite in the deep red state.

Original Source -> 4 winners and 2 losers from the first set of this week’s primary elections

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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ralphmorgan-blog1 · 7 years

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Russia cloud settles in over Trump’s White House

Washington (CNN)The Russia "cloud" is growing over President Donald Trump and threatening to wreck another week for the embattled White House as one of his closest allies tries to avoid a public spectacle on Capitol Hill.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions' announcement that he would testify before Senate Russia investigators caught everyone -- including the intelligence committee -- by surprise. Now, before he even testifies, the focus is both on Sessions and whether or not he would appear before the TV cameras like former FBI Director James Comey did last week, when 19.5 million Americans watched.

RELATED: Source: Sessions' plans to testify surprised Senate intelligence panel members

Trump team has struggled to move the focus away from Russia.

The White House is hoping this week to drive a message focused on his agenda. His daughter, and top adviser, Ivanka Trump, is leading events focused on workforce development and college affordability.

But Russia -- and Trump's own tweeting -- threaten to swallow that effort whole, much like last week's largely forgotten "Infrastructure Week." In addition to Sessions' possible testimony, the question remains whether or not Trump taped his conversations with Comey.

The President himself tweeted early Sunday morning touting his economic record.

"The #FakeNews MSM doesn't report the great economic news since Election Day. #DOW up 16%. #NASDAQ up 19.5%," Trump wrote in the first of two tweets.

Minutes later, Trump demonstrated the White House's messaging problem, immediately shifting to Comey and kicking off another news cycle: "I believe the James Comey leaks will be far more prevalent than anyone ever thought possible. Totally illegal? Very 'cowardly!'"

Adding to the tension for the White House are fast-approaching deadlines in Congress to approve a health care bill before a September 30 deadline and agree on a tax reform plan -- both top campaign promises, which appear to be longshots.

Trump's chief White House liaison to the Hill, Marc Short, admitted last week in a call with reporters that Russia questions had sucked much of the oxygen out of the room.

Trump makes surprise visit at couple's wedding

Sessions: Will he or won't he?

The attorney general is coming off a disastrous week of his own. After the White House wouldn't give Sessions a full-throated public endorsement, Comey told senators that Sessions may have had a third, undisclosed meeting with the Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak.

RELATED: If there are tapes, can the White House be forced to turn them over?

He had been scheduled to answer questions before the House and Senate spending committees Tuesday, but instead wants to show up to the intelligence committee instead. That possibility could mean a closed hearing, unlike the drama of last Thursday with Comey.

In an odd twist for Congress, senior members of the Senate intelligence committee were unsure if Sessions would even be allowed to appear.

"I don't know whether it will happen -- don't know whether it's going to be public," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, told CNN's Brianna Keilar on "State of the Union" Sunday.

Feinstein, who used to chair the Senate Intelligence Committee and is the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, tossed a curveball back at the attorney general, arguing he should testify publicly before the seasoned lawyers and prosecutors of the Judiciary Committee.

"I challenge the jurisdiction, to some extent. I'm on both committees, as you know," she said. "There is an opportunity to look at the law with respect to obstruction of justice, to hold a hearing, and also to have those relevant people come before the Judiciary Committee."

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee believe Sessions is trying to use their venue to duck public scrutiny.

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the committee, who pressed Comey last week on why Sessions' was involved in his firing if he had recused himself, argued that Sessions had no reason to seek a classified briefing.

"The American people also deserve to hear the attorney general's answers to these questions, as well as others related to his meetings with the Russians and his failure to disclose those meetings to the Senate Judiciary Committee," Wyden wrote Sunday in a letter to intelligence panel leaders. "None of this needs be classified."

The test comes as some special counsel Robert Mueller appears to be ramping up his probe -- hiring away a handful of seasoned federal criminal investigators that could hint at deeper, more serious legal trouble for Trump and his team.

Meanwhile, Trump's own Russia team, led by Marc Kasowitz, brought on veteran Republican communicator Mark Corallo, a former spokesman to former-Attorney General John Ashcroft who is steeped in crisis communications from his time helping defend Karl Rove in the midst of Valerie Plame case.

Trump Jr.: No ambiguity in my father's orders

Moving on?

Trump's allies attempted to move the national storyline away from Russia on the Sunday talk shows, arguing that Comey's testimony about former Attorney General Loretta Lynch to call the Hillary Clinton email investigation a "matter" was more compelling.

"I'm calling for an end to the investigations about the President Trump's campaign colluding with the Russians. There's been no evidence of it. I don't think that should continue," Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel said on "Fox News Sunday."

But even Republicans in the Capitol have continued pressing for answers in the Russia probes. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Feinstein, formally requested Comey's memos of his meeting with Trump from Comey's friend Daniel Richman.

House Russia investigators, led by Texas Republican Rep. Michael Conaway and California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, sent a formal request to the White House for any records of Trump's private meetings with Comey.

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=> *********************************************** Source Here: Russia cloud settles in over Trump’s White House ************************************ =>

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yasbxxgie · 7 years

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The Strange Case Of Tennie White: Did the EPA prosecute and jail a Mississippi lab owner for her activism?

On a muggy Thursday morning in June, I drove through the gates of the Federal Correctional Institute in Tallahassee to meet a convicted criminal who, as far as I can tell, is the only person connected to two huge environmental contamination cases in Mississippi to ever serve prison time.

Yet, strangely, the convicted felon I was on my way to meet wasn’t a polluter. On the contrary, Tennie White, who was prosecuted by a joint team made up of attorneys from the Environmental Protection Agency and the environmental crimes division of the Justice Department, had spent her professional life exposing contamination. She was an environmental lab owner who was particularly vocal about protecting poor African-American communities. Before she was charged and prosecuted, White had spent much of her time volunteering for an organization she had co-founded to help these Mississippians contend with pollution.

Although White, who is 57, had spent years closely involved with dramatic cases that stood out even in a state with more than its share of the country’s industrial pollution — two of which in particular resulted in severe harm to many people and millions of dollars in cleanup costs — White’s prosecution wasn’t obviously related to any of these incidents. Indeed, the crime White had been convicted of didn’t seem to have any environmental consequences at all.

White was convicted in 2013 of “faking laboratory testing results and lying to federal investigators.” Maureen O’Mara, the special agent in charge of the EPA’s criminal enforcement program in Mississippi, explained in a press release that White’s conviction was essential to safeguarding the public’s health and that her “case demonstrates that individuals who falsify environmental records and try to mislead the government will be prosecuted and held accountable.”

During White’s trial, the federal prosecutor, Richard Powers, put it more simply: “This case is about lying.” White hadn’t been able to produce the original results for three wastewater tests an auto parts manufacturer named BorgWarner had hired her to perform, Powers explained to the jury at the start of her weeklong trial. He promised to convince them that she had never done the tests and had lied about them to EPA investigators. He successfully did so. On May 23, 2013, a jury found Tennie White guilty, and three months later, she was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison.

So when I heard White was being released to a halfway house after serving 27 months of her sentence, I decided to go down to meet her at the Federal Correctional Institute in Tallahassee to see for myself whether Tennie White was a fraud and a cheat, as the government attorneys contended, or perhaps, someone more complicated.

Rev. Steve Jamison is a big presence, tall with broad shoulders, a square jaw, and a thin, regal mustache that frowns over his mouth. Listening to his slow, precise baritone, it’s easy to understand how he wound up preaching.

In the mid-1980s, within a few years of founding the Maranatha Faith Center, Jamison was searching for a new building to accommodate his growing congregation. When he heard that a stone-faced A-frame church, complete with pews and stained-glass windows, was for sale on the north side of Columbus, Mississippi, he jumped at the chance.

Kerr-McGee Chemical Corporation was a giant energy and chemical company perhaps best known for operating the nuclear power plant where Karen Silkwood was poisoned by plutonium. But Jamison hadn’t seen the Meryl Streep movie about Silkwood when he bought the church. He knew the company simply as the owner of the factory just down the road. He didn’t even know what the plant made.

That changed in 1999, when Jamison decided to add a sanctuary onto his building to accommodate his growing congregation. His first step was to remove a culvert from the parking lot of the property so they could lay the foundation. Having worked many years in construction, Jamison didn’t hesitate to get down in the ditch with his crew. After only a few hours of digging, a strange, greasy jelly began to accumulate in the ditch. It looked like shiny beads, droplets that would ooze up from the soil. And as he and his crew dug deeper, more of it pooled in the dirt.

Jamison called the city, which sent a worker to investigate, who advised him that the goo was likely creosote, and that Jamison ought to call Kerr-McGee. Jamison did and soon one of the plant’s managers arrived at the site. “He said, ‘Well, that’s not our product,’” Jamison recently recalled. “And if it was, it wouldn’t hurt you.”

The plant had been using creosote, an oily mixture made with coal tar, as well as a toxic compound called pentachlorophenol, to preserve the wood of railroad ties since 1928, which also happens to be around the time that scientists were publishing the first studies linking creosote and cancer. Kerr-McGee acquired the plant from a company called Moss American in 1963. By the mid-1980s, Kerr-McGee was the country’s second largest supplier of railroad ties. By the time the manager was paying his visit to Jamison, it was clear that contact with creosote could cause kidney and liver problems, chemical burns, convulsions, and even death. That same year, in a groundwater monitoring report Kerr-McGee was required to file with the state and EPA as a result of earlier contamination, it measured several toxic components of creosote at dangerous levels on its property near Jamison’s church. One, napthalene, which is thought to cause anemia, cataracts, and cancer, was present at 25 times the drinking water level set by the EPA.

But Jamison knew little about railroad ties or chemicals, so he took the Kerr-McGee man at his word. He and his small crew returned to work, digging farther down and unearthing more and more of the weird, oily substance. Several weeks later, the plant manager called again, according to Jamison. “This time, he said, ‘We want to be a good neighbor. Would you mind if we came over and just removed that debris from the culverts so you can use them easily?’”

Jamison accepted the offer. But to his dismay the Kerr-McGee crew arrived wearing hazmat suits. He and his workers had just spent more than a month in direct contact with what he finally understood to be a dangerous substance — wearing no protection. Several members of the crew had already developed skin rashes and breathing problems. Jamison himself had begun to feel unwell while he was digging.

“Before I went into that ditch to work, I had perfect blood pressure, I had good kidneys,” said Jamison. “After six weeks of direct exposure, I came out, and my blood pressure was being controlled by four pills two times a day, and my kidneys were functioning at less than a third of their normal function.”

Jamison hired a local attorney, Wilbur Colom, and in 1999, the company offered him a $3 million settlement, according to Jamison. He refused the offer, and a subsequent one for $4.5 million, he said, because the money came with a catch: He wouldn’t be able to tell anyone what had happened. Keeping the toxic goo secret and leaving others in harm’s way “didn’t seem like the pastoral thing to do.”

But plenty of people involved in the Columbus mess didn’t seem to be holding themselves to such high standards. According to Jamison, one of the deacons of the First Assembly of God of Columbus, the mostly white church that had sold him the property, later told him that several people in the congregation had known about the contamination and that it made the property essentially worthless.

The deacon has since died, and the current pastor of the First Assembly of God, Jody Gurley, disputed Jamison’s account. “There was never any environmental testing done or required,” said Gurley, who has only led the church for the past five years but has spoken about the sale with members of his congregation who remember it. “It wasn’t like they were trying to dump the property off,” he said. But Gurley added that Jamison might have expected the contamination. “Because of the location, I’m not surprised. You could see runoff from Kerr-McGee. You could always see the runoff.”

Jamison also learned that Kerr-McGee had known for years about the dangers of its plant. In 1997, one of Kerr-McGee’s environmental project managers, Steven Ladner, contacted the EPA’s office of solid waste to report creosote contamination at seven of its plants, including the one in Columbus. Ladner told agency staffer C. Pan Lee that the sites had “quite extensive contaminated areas” that would make cleanup difficult, according to a transcript of the call.

Yet Kerr-McGee managers publicly downplayed or lied about the extensive contamination at the plant, according to more than a dozen former workers interviewed on tape by a local documentary filmmaker. Creosote spills occurred daily, they said. And many big spills that should have been reported to authorities were kept secret and covered up with soap powder, dirt, gravel, or sawdust. Plant workers also did extensive cleanups before visits and inspections.

Mark Finch, who worked at the Kerr-McGee plant for 10 years, was repeatedly warned that reporting leaks and spills to the EPA was “not a good career move.” After accurately filling out reports and sending them to the federal agency, Finch was fired in 2002.

After Jamison filed his lawsuit over the contamination at Maranatha, Kerr-McGee attorneys instructed some of the plant workers not to speak to lawyers or the press. “They told us it was best for us to keep our mouths shut or we’d be in trouble,” said Jerrie Lewis Brooks, who worked at the Columbus plant for 15 years.

Jamison even contacted Johnnie Cochran, the attorney famous for taking high-profile cases, including O.J. Simpson’s. At first it seemed that Cochran was going to take the case, and he went down to Mississippi in 2001 to talk about how the plight of the Maranatha congregation fit into the larger pattern of environmental injustice in America. “Black communities make easy victims for careless corporations,” he told the crowd that assembled to hear him. “If you continue looking the other way when the powerless are wronged, then nothing will ever change.”

Cochran told Jamison that his was “the perfect case of Goliath and David.” But about two months after Cochran agreed to represent the church, the pastor saw him on TV signing a contract with the NFL Players Association. “One of Kerr-McGee’s lawyers that I knew was there as the NFL lawyer,” said Jamison. And when he suggested to Cochran that getting a job through the lawyers representing his opponents might pose a conflict, Jamison said, Cochran dropped his case.

Just after he discovered the creosote, it seemed Jamison would get the help of the state environmental agency, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, to whom he reported the discovery. In late 1999, the MDEQ issued an order requiring Kerr-McGee to clean his property. But for the next eight years, the ditch remained just as it was — half-dug in the lot outside the church. In 2004, the plant shut down, and still no one came to clean up his property, leaving Jamison unable to complete his extension. It wasn’t until 2007 that the city of Columbus used money from a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to pave it over.

From that point on, Kerr-McGee’s lawyers contended that Jamison’s property had been remediated. Jamison’s attorney hired a consultant named Lois George to test the soil and she reported to him, and to the court, that there was no creosote on the land.

Kerr-McGee no longer exists as a company, but at the time a spokesperson named Debbie Schramm said, “Our environmental performance has been nationally recognized for environmental responsibility, and our plants operate safely and have not harmed anyone.”

Jamison, though, remained convinced there was still creosote on the church property. He had seen how much of it had oozed from the ditch. And he had watched the workers from the city do their work. He knew that none of them had removed or processed the soil before paving it over, but he was unable to prove his suspicions. The city claimed he couldn’t remove the concrete to dig in his own churchyard because the culvert was now government property.

It was only when Jamison hired Tennie White, someone his friend recommended as both knowledgeable about contamination and beyond the reach of his powerful neighbor, that he was able to get to the truth of what lay in the soil under his church.

While Kerr-McGee was fighting Rev. Jamison in court, the company was also working on a much bigger plan to avoid the consequences of its pollution. The pastor of the small church in Columbus, it turned out, was only a tiny part of the company’s environmental troubles: The company had already settled some 15,000 suits over creosote contamination and Jamison’s was just one of 9,450 more that were pending. Kerr-McGee also had many other businesses, including uranium mines, oil refineries, gas plants, offshore drilling operations, and plutonium pellet factories, and virtually all of them had left environmental messes behind.

After more than 70 years of operation, Kerr-McGee’s toxic legacy took the form of agricultural chemicals, rocket fuel, decaying nuclear isotopes, and all manner of harmful substances spread over more than 2,700 contaminated sites in 47 states including Florida, New Jersey, Idaho, Illinois, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. The cost of cleaning these sites — and compensating all the people who had been harmed by them — was so great it threatened the giant energy company’s very future.

The extent of the unpleasant financial consequences of the toxic messes was made clear to the company in 1999, when the EPA told Kerr-McGee it would have to pay more than $178 million to clean up a creosote factory in Manville, New Jersey. Soon after, the company began seeking advice on how to free itself from its unwanted environmental baggage. In 2000 one of its investment bankers, Lehman Brothers, came up with a plan.

The idea of “Project Focus” was to separate the profitable part of Kerr-McGee from the liabilities that were weighing it down. By early 2000, the company’s board of directors had begun to put the plan into action by creating a new company into which they transferred their profitable assets, including oil and gas holdings worth billions of dollars.

What was left after the transfers was Kerr-McGee’s moderately profitable business making a white pigment called titanium dioxide — that and responsibility for what turned out to be billions of dollars worth of environmental liabilities, $442 million in pension costs, and $186 million in “other post-employment benefits.”

Kerr-McGee put this company — with only $40 million in cash and its titanium dioxide business to offset all those debts — up for sale in 2005. The liabilities were so great they threatened to drag the whole business under, as was made clear in a sketch Lehman Brothers Managing Director Chris Watson drew on a whiteboard to illustrate the structure of the deal. In the drawing, according to court documents, the titanium dioxide business was depicted as a flower sharing a pot with weeds that the banker labeled as “Kerr-McGee’s environmental legacies.”

Kerr-McGee tried to put a positive spin on the debt-laden enterprise when it announced its separation in 2005 with an upbeat press release: “Current market conditions for this industry now make it an ideal time to unlock this value for our stockholders.” The market saw through the scheme, however, and no buyers stepped forward. So later that year, Kerr-McGee spun off its liabilities and debts into a new company called Tronox Inc.

It was 2009 when Tennie White first stumbled across the name Tronox. She had gone to the EPA’s reading room in Washington, D.C., on behalf of Jamison to read the files relevant to the Columbus site. The name surprised her. Up to a certain point in time, all the documents listed Kerr-McGee as the party responsible for the contamination. Suddenly, in the most recent files, Tronox had appeared.

By the time White was puzzling over the significance of Tronox, the weeds had already won out. In 2009, overcome with debt less than three years after it was created, Tronox filed for bankruptcy, leaving Jamison and more than 7,000 others who lived on or near the contaminated sites with little hope of getting justice. They couldn’t get compensation from Tronox because it was bankrupt. Nor could they turn to what was left of Kerr-McGee. In 2006, just six months after the spinoff relieved the company of its unappealing debt burden, Anadarko, another giant energy company, had snapped up the profitable part of Kerr-McGee for $18 billion.

Kerr-McGee, the Goliath Jamison had been battling for a decade, had disappeared.

Tennie White got her first environmental job in 1981 through an ad in the paper. Newly married with a young son, she would have been happy with almost any job. But she truly loved the one she found as a lab analyst for a Jackson-based company called Environmental Protection Systems. Though she knew nothing about the work when she started, the company taught her how to collect and prepare soil and water samples and run various tests on them. The work fascinated her. Each test had its own precise protocol and she never knew until she ran it what the results would be.

In 1995, after about 10 years with Environmental Protection Systems and several years working for a metal finishing company, White went out on her own, founding an environmental laboratory that did asbestos removal as well as tests for an ever-shifting cast of contaminants at different industrial sites. Over the years, even as the particulars of the work changed, White began to notice that certain things remained the same. A lot of the sites she was hired to test were in small towns that had been polluted by big companies. And the people who lived there were often poor and didn’t understand the dangers the contamination posed.

By the time Jamison reached out to White to see if she would help him prove there was creosote contamination on his property, White had worked as a lab analyst on many similar cases, in which various industries had left chemicals in the soil and water.

For years, White had a straightforward role in these cases — to run tests. She had enjoyed letting the test results speak for themselves. But now she found herself in a different position. She had recently been to Hattiesburg, in southern Mississippi, where Kerr-McGee had also insisted there was no creosote contamination. While she was attending a community meeting there, she began to fully appreciate, for the first time, how the numbers she had been calculating for years affected actual men, women, and children.

“The people became real,” was how she remembered it recently. Some of the Hattiesburg residents told her about the smells that used to waft down their streets from the plant and the rashes their children had suffered for years. In the late 1980s, she had done some testing on the site of a local Ford dealership and found creosote, and on that more recent visit, she saw children playing in what she was pretty certain was contaminated mud.

From reading through the state’s files, White knew that Mississippi had handled other cases of creosote contamination differently. For instance, in Wiggins, Mississippi, a town that was about two-thirds white, both the EPA and the state environmental agency had designated a similar situation an emergency and remediated the contamination in less than a year. The neighborhoods affected by creosote contamination in Hattiesburg and Columbus, by contrast, were mostly black, and the problems there had gone unaddressed for many years.

When she was growing up, White’s parents used to tell her about their own childhoods in rural Mississippi towns during the Jim Crow era. She used to think that the indignities they suffered — having to get off the sidewalk when white people were coming and knowing you weren’t supposed to look them in the eye — were relics of the past. But the disrespect she saw in the contamination of these poor black communities felt directly connected to the struggles of her parents’ generation.

Cleaning up only contamination that affected white people — and knowingly leaving that found in poor black neighborhoods — was just another form of racism. And, as she told the city council of Hattiesburg in June 2008, it was criminal.

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Tennie White testifies before the Hattiesburg, Mississippi, City Council in June 2008.

White took a close look at the report prepared by Lois George, the environmental consultant Jamison’s lawyer had hired and realized that the detection levels for the contaminants had been set higher than the action levels the EPA had set for those chemicals. White says she repeatedly asked George to provide the original test results on which her report was based, but never received the data. Lois George declined a request to comment for this article, citing client confidentiality.

From her years analyzing samples, White knew that “if you want to cover up some environmental contamination, you just raise the detection limits and then there appears to be nothing there.” So White and Jamison came up with a plan they hoped would force the government to test the soil again. Although city officials had warned Jamison not to move the concrete, on June 4, 2009, they rented a backhoe and did just that. Then White placed a call to 911 to report an open hole — a situation she knew obligated authorities to respond immediately, under state law. The MDEQ sent someone to the site but didn’t test the substance they had unearthed.

White then called the EPA, which a week later sent investigators who hauled off boxes of soil — many of which proved to be contaminated. In July, White wrote to Lisa Jackson, then head of the EPA, “on behalf of 24,700 citizens of Columbus,” to get the EPA’s help with the cleanup. In October, White wrote to the EPA again, noting that 8,976 people living within one mile of the Kerr plant, including 1,030 children, were being exposed to “unacceptable levels of Creosote and Creosote Break Down products.”

The EPA issued its final analytical report on the Columbus site in March 2011, which noted that levels of six carcinogenic semi-volatile organic compounds exceeded the recommended action levels, sometimes by more than six times. The contaminated spots included the playing field of the local middle school. By September 2011, the agency had designated a 90-acre tract that included the plant a superfund site. The cleanup, which began more than two years ago, is expected to cost some $67 million and last at least another three years. Since remediation of the area nearest Jamison’s church began in mid-October, J5, the construction management at the firm in charge of the project, removed some 600 tons of creosote-contaminated soil, according to Robyn Eastman, a director at J5. Eastman says he expects to remove another 600 tons before the section is finished in December.

Along the way to what was arguably her biggest achievement, White managed to anger pretty much every authority figure she encountered. The woman who had once taken comfort in sticking to the numbers began firing off outraged letters.

When the MDEQ failed to respond to her requests to test for creosote in Columbus, she went above their heads, contacting the federal authorities directly. In October 2009, she made an official complaint charging that the MDEQ and the EPA were guilty of environmental injustice. After investigating her complaint, the EPA’s office of the inspector general responded that the agency hadn’t found any evidence it had done anything wrong. In a letter, White replied “that OIG couldn’t find mud after a raging flood.”

She also wrote to the attorney general of Mississippi and suggested that the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality had failed to test the samples in Columbus because the affected locals were mostly poor and black. She sent copies of the letter to the FBI, the EPA, and the Justice Department.

Two months later, she wrote to Lisa Jackson, then the head of the EPA, suggesting that “the residents of Columbus appear to be participating in a Tuskegee Controlled Experiment to determine the health effects of Dioxins, Phthalate Esters and PAHs on African-Americans.” She posted pieces online accusing both the EPA and the MDEQ of environmental racism.

And while the gap between black and white infant mortality is often described as a complex mystery caused by a mix of factors, including income, nutrition, and education, White seemed to feel it all could be explained by environmental racism. While a more measured person might have described the different treatment of black communities as contributing to the problem, White laid responsibility for Mississippi’s startlingly high African-American infant mortality rate directly at polluters’ feet.

“Her mantra was, ‘You’re killing my babies,’” said Jamison.

In the latter part of 2009, after she had worked on the Columbus site for about a year, White teamed up with Jamison and a labor organizer named Sherri Jones to find a way to connect the people in small towns in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Tennessee who were struggling with similar environmental problems. Together, they felt, these communities had a better shot at calling attention to their problems than on their own.

With the creation of the Coalition of Communities for Environmental Justice, White completed her transition from lab analyst to activist. She traveled throughout the state, often with Jones and Jamison, talking about environmental issues in black communities. She went to Columbia, where the former Reichhold Chemical plant had illegally buried thousands of drums of chemical waste. She went to Palmers Crossing, the African-American community in Hattiesburg where creosote was found. And she went to Grenada and Pickens, other Mississippi towns that, like Columbus and Hattiesburg, had been contaminated with creosote from Kerr-McGee plants.

White also went back to Crystal Springs, a small town about half an hour south of Jackson, where her testing had turned up contamination almost a decade earlier.

In 2000, BorgWarner, an auto parts manufacturer, hired an environmental consultant who contracted White to test the soil around property that BorgWarner had recently bought from another company. After two days of testing, she found several toxic chemicals, including carcinogenic PCBs, at well above the legal limit. One chemical, Aroclor 1268, was present in soil samples at more than 2,000 times the safety level set by the EPA. The contaminated areas included backyards where children played as well as the local high school’s football field, where students and their families were being unwittingly exposed to carcinogens.

White reported her findings to the plant manager, who said he didn’t want to report the contamination to the state. Such a response was fairly typical, she said, as was her own: According to state law, the company had 24 hours to notify the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality of the results. “And if they didn’t, I would have to.”

In the intervening years, after the people of the town had sued over their exposure to the carcinogenic chemicals, that discovery had wound up costing BorgWarner, which owned a plant there, some $50 million in remediation costs, and lawsuits over contamination ran the company at least an additional $39 million.

BorgWarner declined to comment for this article.

In 2009, White and Jones attended a meeting of the Crystal Springs City Council and offered advice to the members about how to find clean water. White told them that BorgWarner, as the polluter, was responsible for coming up with a source of clean water — not the residents of Crystal Springs.

To Jones, White was a perfect addition to the coalition. She understood environmental law and the technical terms and reports that were beyond the grasp of most of the affected people. She was committed, working long hours without pay. Perhaps most importantly, over her more than 20 years as a lab analyst, she had done testing in several of the communities that were part of the coalition. “She knew where all the bones was buried,” said Jones.

Their plan — to support the communities and highlight environmental racism in the Deep South — seemed to be working. “They were beginning to get attention,” said Heather Sanchez, a graduate student who wrote her master’s thesis about the coalition’s work in Hattiesburg. People began to call them when they encountered environmental problems. And residents of the various towns began sharing contacts and information.

But people close to White became concerned that her outspokenness might get her into trouble. Jones, who lived in Jackson at the time, traveled with her whenever he could. When he couldn’t, he made sure to talk with her on phone while she drove.

“This is Mississippi,” said Jones. “We worried about her life.”

Jamison was worried, too. “We tried to get Tennie to calm down,” he said. “She’s very passionate. I said, ‘Tennie, you’re fighting some big, big boys here. Let’s take it one at a time.’”

So in 2012, when White was charged with fraud by the EPA, the organization she so often criticized, and the charges involved a company she had helped a community challenge, Jamison, Jones, and others who had been working closely with her felt they knew exactly what had happened.

“She was framed,” said Jamison. “It was that simple.”

When the givernment agent first appeared at the door of her lab on July 24, 2009, Tennie White assumed he was from the FBI and had come to talk about her work in Columbus. White had recently filed a complaint arguing that Kerr-McGee was placing people in harm’s way and had notified the FBI because she hadn’t gotten any response from either the EPA or MDEQ.

But the man who came to her office in Jackson was actually from the EPA. Matthew Anderson was a special agent in the EPA’s criminal investigations division, part of an elite team of armed “green cops” who run down environmental criminals. They interview suspects, sort through evidence, and put together cases that they then hand off to prosecutors.

Anderson wanted to talk about tests that BorgWarner had hired White to do in Water Valley, a small town south of Oxford. The company, which makes parts for car transmissions, releases the water it uses to wash the parts into the nearby Otoucalofa Creek. To ensure that the levels of certain metals are within required limits, it has to test its wastewater each month. In October 2008, BorgWarner asked White to submit a discharge monitoring report that summarized the test results to the company. And she had. But Anderson said he wanted the original test results. White told him that Robert Wilson, the BorgWarner employee who had hired her to do the tests, had the originals. She also said that she would send the results to Anderson.

Six months later, in January 2010, Anderson returned with another EPA special agent, Ricky D. Knight, and this time, after asking White about the test results, the two men left with her computer hard drive. On it, they testified during the trial, were files in which White had copied a signature that had been on a report another environmental lab had produced about the Columbus site — and affixed the copied signature to the BorgWarner report.

The trial, which was held in the U.S. district courthouse in Jackson, hinged on the question of what happened to the original test results — and whether White had actually performed the three tests, each of which cost the company $150. The copied signature, they argued, was evidence that White had been in the process of falsifying the original test results.

White’s two court-appointed attorneys argued that there was no evidence BorgWarner’s output to the creek ever caused any harm — a contention that the government prosecutors never disputed. They pointed out that because the wastewater went into a creek that wasn’t a federal waterway, the whole matter was outside the EPA’s jurisdiction and that there was no contract between BorgWarner and Tennie. The defense attorneys also argued that, because Tennie was supposed to give the test results to a private company and not the EPA, their dispute wasn’t a federal matter. (The EPA itself had used this argument when responding to White’s complaint about their failure to look into the testing done in Columbus by Lois George; because George’s data hadn’t been submitted to the EPA, the agency claimed, it was outside its jurisdiction.)

Oddly, though the EPA was helping prosecute her case and many of the witnesses testifying against her were from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, White’s attorneys never mentioned her long history confronting these organizations. And though BorgWarner’s employees made up most of the witnesses for the prosecution, her attorneys never told the jury that she had been involved in a case that had cost the company so dearly. Her attorneys declined to be interviewed for this article.

Perhaps the strangest part was that White’s lawyers never called to the stand the person who seemed to hold the answer to whether she had performed the tests: Robert Wilson, the BorgWarner employee who hired White and was in the best position to evaluate whether she had performed the tests. Though prosecutors referred to him by name more than 100 times during the trial, they never asked Wilson to testify either.

I reached Robert Wilson by telephone at his home in LaGrange, Georgia, and later followed up via email. When I asked why he didn’t testify during White’s trial, he had a strange answer: The prosecuting attorneys had him “holed up in the basement” of the courthouse. They had told him he would be there until he testified but then never called him to the witness stand.

Wilson, it turned out, had known White since the mid-1990s and had worked with her since 2003 doing lead removal, asbestos inspections and abatement, and other environmental work. When Wilson took a position as an environmental health and safety manager for BorgWarner in 2008, he noticed that the lab the company was using to test its wastewater had a turnaround time of more than three days. So he asked White, who he felt confident could produce the results within one day, if she would run the tests and she agreed.

Wilson went on to extol White’s professional virtues, noting the diligence she brought to the work. “I’ve seen her stay up till 1 and 2 in the morning because they’d bring up 100 samples that are timed. She’d sit at that microscope for hours at a time,” said Wilson. “She was meticulous for each sample. Normally people’d get jaded. They’d check 57 in a row and figure the last four would be good. Not her. She’d check every last one.”

Wilson and White were friendly during the time they worked together, playing chess at lunchtime and having good-natured competitions over their knowledge of environmental law. Wilson still has one of the statutes they had argued about pinned to his bulletin board, describing it as “the one time out of 100 that we discussed that she was wrong.”

When I asked whether he thought White was guilty of the fraud charges related to those tests, Wilson didn’t hesitate. “I don’t believe it, I’m sorry,” he said, adding, “You can stack those agents yay high and I still won’t believe you.” After reading the transcript of the trial, which I sent him, Wilson later admitted that it was possible and that the testimony had “put a doubt” in his mind. But, he added, “Whether it’s probable is a whole other matter.”

As Wilson sees it, his colleague and friend had no reason to lie. “What is her motivation for risking her whole career and reputation for a $150 test? That makes no sense to me whatsoever.” On the other hand, Wilson believed companies might want to punish her or banish her from the environmental field. “She stepped on the wrong toes,” is how explained her prosecution, which he described as “a charade.” “I even tried to warn her at that time that you need to watch yourself because these people don’t play. You have the possibility of causing them multimillion dollars in lawsuits and expenses and, Tennie, they’ll come after you with a sledgehammer.”

The EPA special agents who came to ask him about White in 2009 or 2010 did seem eager to dig up anything negative about White. Wilson was working at Siemens Energy in Ridgeland, Mississippi, at the time and Anderson, Knight, and a third man came to his office, according to Wilson. The agents told him that White had implicated him in the fraud case and he responded that he didn’t believe them. The agents, Wilson said, then “changed tactics and just questioned me about the time I had worked with her.”

Wilson said that sometime in 2013, Special Agent Anderson flew from Florida to see him again and described their visit this way: “He asked a lot of questions that were more of a personal nature than professional and seemed to want personal information on Ms. White. When it got to the point that he asked if we ever had a sexual relationship, I invited him to leave my office and not to contact me again.”

“At that point they were grasping at straws. They were trying to decimate her personal life or character assassination,” said Wilson. “It became a quest to decimate this lady not only professionally but personally as well.” The agents also dug up White’s financial information, including the fact that she had defaulted on a bank loan she took out to pay for her lab, which the prosecution later presented in court.

I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the EPA for all communications relating to the investigation of Tennie White in April 2016. The agency is supposed to resolve such requests within 20 business days, but I did not receive all the documents I requested. After months of being sent from one division of the EPA to another, I reached Tom Seaton, a deputy director in the legal counsel division of the office of criminal enforcement, who admitted that my request had been “totally mishandled” and that I had “a right to be unhappy.” Seaton said he would try to send me the special agents’ emails that referred to the White case, but he never did.

Wilson reported to the small room at the bottom of the courthouse for most of the trial. But as it drew to a close, he was released and watched the closing statements from the courtroom. He described seeing rows of prosecutors. On one side, were “the DOJ lawyers from Washington. And then you had the EPA guys lined up next to them. They were an impressive sight. Then on the other side you have one court-appointed lawyer next to this poor little black woman,” Wilson said, adding. “She’d kill me if she heard me say that. To me, it looked like they just took a sledgehammer to a flea.”

“I’m amazed at the lawyers they sent from the Justice Department out of Washington, D.C., and all the trouble they went to to prosecute a small-time little black businesswoman in Jackson, Mississippi,” said Wilson. “You don’t bring that much firepower if you’re going to be stepping on ants. Somebody wanted Tennie put away.”

White insisted that she performed the three $150 tests at the center of her fraud conviction. Whether she did it or not, it seems she was guilty of at least one thing the prosecuting attorneys brought up during her sentencing. She lied about having graduated from college. Though she did attend Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, for at least three years, White never finished, according to the testimony of a Millsaps registrar.

Yet White said she had a degree when she applied for a loan to start her business in 1995. When she applied to be a HUD inspector in 2005, according to prosecutors, she went as far as to doctor one of her own undergraduate transcripts so it looked as though she had taken graduate courses. (White denies changing her transcripts.) White also lied about having a college degree twice under oath when testifying as an expert witness in unrelated trials. To me, she admitted that “she had never marched” at graduation.

Though lying about such things can be prosecuted as perjury, it rarely is. (There has been little consequence for Melania Trump, for instance, who seems to have both falsely claimed to have a college degree and lied about it under oath.) And White wasn’t being tried for perjury. But at her sentencing hearing, the prosecutors presented the forgery and lies about her degree as evidence of further criminal conduct, which, they argued, meant that she deserved to spend more time in prison than the 15-21 months laid out in the guidelines for “abuse of trust.” The judge clearly agreed, giving White 40 months in prison as well as an additional three years of supervised release and a $1,000 fine.

There are surely some environmental crimes worthy of imprisonment. In 2015, according to a summary prepared by the EPA, the agency’s enforcement division helped to convict 185 “eco-convicts,” for crimes like biofuel fraud or illegal asbestos removal. These sentences averaged about eight months of prison time.

The EPA recently decided to focus on relatively high-impact cases, according to an agency spokesperson, who sent an email in response to my inquiries for this story. This strategy is due in part to budget constraints, which have “required EPA to make hard choice across the board,” according to the email, and left the agency on track to prosecute just 88 cases this year. The number of special agents in the division is also down, with 164 currently employed, significantly below the 200 it is supposed to have by law.

The email from the EPA explained that the agency has adopted a sort of triage policy, and now focuses on “the cases that have the highest impact on protecting public health and the environment.” The statement concluded that, “Our Criminal Investigation Division works to ensure its agents are pursuing the most egregious violations and highest-impact cases in order to prevent harm to public health and the environment across the country.”

Yet many of these high-impact cases don’t result in any prison time at all, let alone the more than three years White received. As an example of a serious environmental incident the EPA pursued, the email presented the case of Freedom Industries. The agency did hit Freedom with a $900,000 fine for releasing a chemical used in coal mining into West Virginia’s Elk River, contaminating the drinking water of more than 300,000 people. The company’s top executive only received a $20,000 fine and one month in jail.

In another recent case, a man who knowingly exposed workers, including a 16-year-old boy, to asbestos by having them work in dumpsters full of it without any protection was sentenced in June to two years of probation, 150 hours of community service, and a $15,000 fine. Yet another company, which was found guilty of multiple violations of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act for using a banned pesticide and causing a family of four to fall seriously ill, received only a fine. In another case, an oil company owner was convicted of dumping oily water into a tributary of the Ohio River and received a sentence of four days in prison.

The Department of Justice declined to answer questions about Tennie White’s case, writing in an email that “the defendant was convicted after a trial by a jury of her peers and served a federal prison sentence. From our standpoint, the matter is concluded.” Nor did the EPA respond to my repeated requests to address the specifics of White’s case — and why her sentence for a crime of no environmental consequence was more severe than penalties for many others who caused serious harm. But I did speak with Doug Parker, who was the director of EPA’s criminal investigation division when White’s case was being investigated.

Parker, who founded his own consulting company after leaving the agency in April, said that White’s wasn’t the only case to center around discharge monitoring reports. Though he said he wasn’t familiar with the specifics of her case, he did say that her sentence was surprisingly long and “not one I’d expect for that” crime. When asked whether grudges might inspire some of the reports of suspicious activity to the agency, he said that investigators generally try to determine whether tipsters have an ax to grind.

When I asked him which of his cases had made him proudest, Parker pointed to the investigation of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill. He reminisced about working on an interagency task force set up to deal with the disaster, which was one of the most devastating in U.S. history. Pictures of people who had died during the incident lined the walls of the task force headquarters, he recalled, speaking to the investigators’ shared sense of purpose.

Yet, even that crime, which resulted in 11 deaths and the release of more than 3 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, resulted in no prison sentences. How could such serious crimes result in little or no jail time, while a much less consequential violation sent White to federal prison for 27 months? Parker acknowledges that “it is hard when it’s laid out like that to reconcile that,” but said that punishments don’t always line up with outrage. “When you have an egregious environmental issue, it doesn’t always translate to an egregious set of felony standards.”

That is certainly true in the case of Kerr-McGee, the company on which White was so focused before she was sent to prison. It turns out that Kerr-McGee and Anadarko were also brought up on fraud charges, accused of scheming to avoid responsibility for 2,746 contaminated sites in 47 states. In 2014, a bankruptcy court found them guilty.

Negotiations ensued between the Department of Justice, the EPA, and Anadarko. The agreement they hammered out called for Anadarko to pay $5.15 billion, which the EPA would use to clean up a number of sites, including the nation’s largest underground plume of rocket fuel, in Nevada, and 50 former uranium mines the company had dug in and around land belonging to the Navajo Nation. The award included $67 million to clean up the site in Columbus, Mississippi.

Judge Katherine Forrest, who oversaw the settlement, was clearly pleased by the deal, which was, as she noted, “the largest such recovery in American history.” And it’s certainly true that, without the EPA’s dogged pursuit of the case, the agency would never have collected the money, which is now being used to remediate the environmental mess caused by Kerr-McGee.

But the $5.15 billion recovered was only a portion of the more than $20 billion that attorneys felt was necessary to clean the sites. Most plaintiffs, including the Maranatha Church, which ultimately won its case against Kerr-McGee and is just now in the process of receiving a settlement, are receiving a fraction of what they would have seen if the company not declared bankruptcy.

Although the contamination from Kerr-McGee’s plants clearly caused harm — and more than 15,000 people who lived or worked near them have made claims over deaths and illnesses, including cancer, which they believe were caused by exposure to asbestos, creosote and other environmental toxins — none of the executives involved were charged with a crime or served any prison time.

In fact, many of them did better than that, not only avoiding serious consequences for their fraud but actually profiting handsomely from it. Kerr-McGee general counsel Gregory F. Pilcher, for instance, made $9 million off the reorganization, which was clearly designed to avoid the costs of cleaning up the contamination caused by the company. Kerr-McGee senior vice president Robert Wohleber made more than $20 million on the deal. And former Kerr-McGee chairman Luke Corbett walked away with $200 million. In all, Kerr-McGee received $761.8 million in transferred stock in the spinoff process.

All seem to have weathered what turned out to be a brief storm rather well. Corbett is now the lead independent director of OGE Energy. Wohleber went on to become the director of the Summit Midstream energy company, after directing his secretary to destroy all of his documents related to the Tronox spinoff (and having that secretary dutifully carry out his instructions and wipe his computer clean of all emails and files), according to court documents. Chris Watson, the Lehman Brothers executive who helped come up with the whole scheme, went on to become a managing director for Barclays.

The stock price of Anadarko, which is now one of the most profitable publicly traded oil and gas companies, went up after the settlement decision (presumably because the financial world viewed the deal as a good one for the company). And the company actually got a tax benefit of about $550 million from the settlement, as its press release detailed at the time. The statement also noted that “Anadarko Petroleum Corporation’s mission is to deliver a competitive and sustainable rate of return to shareholders.”

Even Tronox, which was resurrected from bankruptcy by the deal with the EPA, has since recovered and is now an international mining and chemical company in fine financial standing.

Nor did anyone from BorgWarner ever face criminal charges over the harm it caused the environment or residents in Crystal Springs, though the company was sued by more than 1,000 claimants there and wound up in a bitter dispute with the previous owner of the site, the Kuhlman Electric Corporation, over who was responsible for the contamination.

Gregory Pilcher, Robert Wohleber, Chris Watson, and Luke Corbett did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for Barclays declined to comment.

Tennie White’s prosecutors never claimed that there was any harm caused by the wastewater tests at the center of White’s case. And Wilson, who has worked in the environmental field for more than 25 years, said there was little reason to be concerned about the company’s wastewater. “They would have had to do something outside their norm to have caused any harm.”

Noting that BorgWarner didn’t have a valid permit for its wastewater, Wilson said, “I still don’t understand to this day why they went after Ms. White. If the Justice Department is going to go after anyone, it should have gone after BorgWarner for not meeting the standards of their pre-treatment permit.”

According to Wilson, if authorities were concerned about the dangers posed by the wastewater, they would have done further testing. “If you say the person didn’t test right, then you have to retest. You have to look, you have to see if there’s an out of control condition,” said Wilson, who noted that such an investigation didn’t happen. “Why didn’t the EPA and the MDEQ immediately call for tests to make sure they were in compliance? They should have had a whole team up there retesting the water, redoing testing, redoing sampling. But there was no sense of urgency there.”

For their part, prosecutors argued that White had lied about having done the tests, and that lies themselves do damage by undermining trust in the government’s environmental oversight.

“The whole system would kind of break down if we could not trust the data that was submitted to us,” Harry Wilson, the chief of the environmental permits division of the MDEQ, told the jury when testifying for the prosecution. Parker, the former head of the EPA’s criminal enforcement office, offered the same rationale for prosecuting any case in which protocol wasn’t followed, even if no harm was done: “If you don’t have that level of honesty and accurate reporting, the whole environmental compliance structure can potentially crumble.”

But for the people close to her, White’s prosecution only cemented their mistrust in government. At her sentencing hearing, Powers, the prosecutor, repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to get Jamison to admit that White had committed a crime.

Powers: And if I was to prove to you that she had committed other crimes, if I showed you evidence —

Jamison: But you haven’t. So I don’t.

Powers: If I did show you evidence, if I convinced you beyond a —

Jamison: I would not believe the evidence because I think the ability is there to manipulate them. So I would not believe them.

Powers: And isn’t it also true that the ability is there for the defendant to manipulate information she’s providing you?

Jamison: But I know her.

Jamison is recovering from his ordeal, at least financially. He received an undisclosed amount from a settlement Kerr-McGee made with some Columbus residents living near its plant. The Maranatha Church declared bankruptcy in 2003, but is now in the process of receiving a settlement from a trust set up through the bankruptcy court. Jamison is now on dialysis, however, which he believes is related to kidney damage he sustained while digging in the ditch. But a suit over his and the other workers’ injuries was dismissed.

What has not survived the lengthy journey he and White took through the system meant to protect Mississippi’s environment is his faith in government. As Jamison firmly told Powers in the courtroom, he believes there was a conspiracy to convict Tennie White.

For his part, Jones sees White’s prosecution as a modern day lynching. “If Tennie was back in the ’30s, ’40s, or ’50s, they’d simply hang her or tar and feather her,” he told me. “To put an advocate in her place in 2016, you just destroy their ability to make a living. That is Mississippi in 2016.”

Jones won’t specify who exactly “they” are — and believes it doesn’t matter. “It’s no one person, no one agency, no one company,” he said. “BorgWarner, Kerr-McGee, Anadarko — the system is the same. At the end of the day, Tennie was a problem to anybody who didn’t hold the interests of the general public at heart.”

It was hard to imagine the person I saw on the pavement outside the federal prison crossing the street by herself, let alone committing a crime that would land her in prison. White had developed cataracts during her more than two years behind bars, and they had worsened to the point where she needed help getting around. She was standing on the curb, wearing a pale gray cotton sweatsuit, holding a cane, and smiling expectantly.

The elder of her two sons, Troy, pulled up to the prison, bearing gifts he knew she’d like: fresh blueberries, strawberries, and the Holy Bible. Troy didn’t know much about his mother’s work or fully understand why she had been incarcerated, but said he knew his mother’s spirit. “She’s not a go-quietly person,” he said with an affectionate laugh.

That spirit was alive and well during White’s 27 months in prison, when she helped fellow inmates learn to read and wrote to various governmental agencies, including the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the EPA, to whom she complained about overflowing human waste and the prison’s dangerous use of untrained workers to demolish load-bearing walls.

After her release, White spent several weeks in a halfway house and several months under house arrest in Jackson. Her ankle monitor was removed on October 4 and she is now awaiting surgery for her cataracts. Afterward, she is hoping to return to her work in Crystal Springs and Hattiesburg. “The people there tell me still nothing’s being done.”

Photographs:

Tennie White outside of her home in Jackson, Mississippi. White is awaiting surgery for her cataracts; her eyesight has worsened to the point where she needs help getting around

Tennie White outside of her home in Jackson, Mississippi

Tennie White at her home in Jackson, Mississippi. White, currently on house arrest, uses her living room as a home office to continue fighting against environmental pollution

Reverend Steve Jamison in his office at Maranatha Faith Center in Columbus, Mississippi. The church sits on land polluted with creosote by the old Kerr-McGee site

Rev. Steve Jamison walks alongside a polluted ditch that flows through the property of Maranatha Faith Center in Columbus, Mississippi. The ditch is where Jamison first discovered creosote flushed out from the old Kerr-McGee site

Union Cemetery, a graveyard in Columbus, Mississippi, located between the old Kerr-McGee plant and the now-closed Sanderson Plumbing Products factory

A polluted ditch containing creosote runs along the property of the old Kerr-McGee site in Columbus, Mississippi

A local convenience store and pizza joint sits along 14th Avenue, across from the old Kerr McGee plant in Columbus, Mississippi

The old Kerr-McGee property in Columbus, Mississippi, has since been designated a superfund site

A polluted ditch containing creosote runs along the property of the old Kerr-McGee site in Columbus, Mississippi

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