Climate Change - The Facts

Despite the refusal of the U.S. Government to acknowledge the Facts
Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.

7 facts about climate change that are 100% true, no matter what Trump says

Robert Mueller's Testimony

Trump is strangling Iran. It’s raising tensions across the Middle East.

By Fareed Zakaria

The best illustration of the incoherence of the Trump administration’s strategy toward Iran came last week in a White House news release. “There is little doubt that even before the deal’s existence, Iran was violating its terms,” it read. The White House has not subsequently explained how a country can violate the terms of a deal before that deal existed.

This is not the only example of incoherence. When President Trump announced last month that he had called off military strikes against Iran, he said it was because he learned that an estimated 150 Iranians would have died in those attacks. Instead he has further tightened economic sanctions against Iran. The sanctions being levied are having a “massive and crippling” effect on the country, said Jeffrey Sachs, an economist who has studied the effects of such measures. “Sanctions like these are known to cause a significant rise in mortality,” he noted. “Given the size of Iran’s population, around 81 million, this is sure to be far larger than 150 deaths.”

And keep in mind, the people who would have died in the military strikes probably would have been Iranian soldiers. Those who are now dying because of sanctions are newborn babies, mothers, the elderly and sick. An academic study points out that sanctions produce widespread drug shortages, and that those who suffer most are “patients struggling with cancer, multiple sclerosis, blood disorders, and other serious conditions.”

The Trump administration has created a humanitarian crisis in Iran and a geopolitical crisis in the Middle East with no strategy for resolving either. The Iran pact had forced Tehran to commit that it would never develop nuclear weapons, to ship away 98 percent of its enriched uranium, destroy its plutonium reactor, and agree to limits and intrusive inspections for 10 to 25 years. The international inspectors — as well as the intelligence agencies of the major powers — confirmed that Iran was adhering to the deal.

By withdrawing from the pact, the Trump administration has allowed Iran to start moving away from these limits. For example, Tehran had agreed that it would not develop more than 300 kilograms of low-enriched uranium until 2030. It had kept within those parameters since 2015. Iran exceeded that limit last week, justifying its move by pointing out that the United States had itself abrogated the pact.

The United States’ actions toward Iran have also created a rift within the Western alliance. Europe had been strongly supportive of Washington’s Iran policy, and the joint pressure had worked well in bringing Tehran to the negotiating table. Now the Europeans are in open revolt against Washington’s unilateralism and have even made efforts to establish an alternative payment mechanism to the dollar for trade with Iran.

Other nations in the Middle East sense Iran’s weakness and are moving to take advantage. Israeli officials have privately briefed Western diplomats that they might decide to strike at Iran’s existing nuclear facilities in the near future. Saudi Arabia has celebrated the U.S. campaign of maximum pressure as it pursues a broad anti-Iranian policy on several fronts.

As the noose tightens around Iran, it has been reacting with incremental actions by its own military or, more often, associated militias — from Yemen to the Persian Gulf. Each of these then produces a response from Saudi Arabia or the United States.

In other words, Trump has sharply ratcheted up regional tensions with no good plan for resolving them.

The Trump administration is hoping for capitulation from the Iranians, in which they will return to the negotiating table and accept a deal far more onerous than the one they signed in 2015. It’s possible that this will happen but much more likely that this regional cold war will get more tense and the likelihood of miscalculation or accidental war will rise.

Even if there were some kind of temporary Iranian concessions, born out of desperation, they will surely not last. Wounded, embittered powers always find a way to return with a vengeance. The Trump administration seems to forget that the Iranian civilization has been a major player in the Middle East for thousands of years. It has a population more than double the size of Iraq’s and is more strategically located. It has a strong tradition of nationalism and statecraft and a history of resisting foreign domination.

The path to stability in the Middle East does not lie in strangling Iran. That will only sow the seeds of resentment and revanchism, creating a more unstable region and one in which the United States will find itself mired for decades. Alas, this is the path on which we find ourselves moving.

Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Debate About the Best Way to Get Donald Trump Out of Office

By Amy Davidson Sorkin

 

As Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi roamed Normandy on Thursday (she had brought along a contingent of dozens of members of Congress for the official commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of D Day, including veterans from both sides of the aisle), her party was debating what it meant to want someone behind bars. Was it too tough, or not tough enough? Politico had reported that, in a meeting of “top Democrats,” on Tuesday night, Representative Jerrold Nadler, of New York, had argued in favor of having the Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, begin proceedings for the impeachment of President Donald Trump. Politico cited “multiple Democratic sources familiar with the meeting” who said that Pelosi demurred, telling Nadler, “I don’t want to see him impeached. I want to see him in prison.”

 How did “lock him up” become a motto for forbearance and patience? The logic here is that it is constitutionally complicated to indict a sitting President. Indeed, Robert Mueller, the special counsel whose investigation of Russian meddling in the election and related matters is now closed, believed that Justice Department guidance precluded him from making such a move. (If he had done so, the crime would almost certainly have concerned obstruction of justice, rather than collusion.) The calculation would be different, obviously, if Trump were not President. And, as it happens, there is an election next year, which could lead, fairly quickly, to his exit from the White House. In other words, the way to hold him to account criminally is to first hold him to account electorally.

But, others in the Democratic Party say, impeachment is also a way to remove a President from office. That is, indeed, the means to do so that the Constitution gives to Congress. The Democrats view Pelosi as overly cautious. Trump, being a bully, has begun insulting Pelosi in terms that he apparently thinks will get those close to her to turn against her. In Normandy, shortly before Trump delivered his remarks, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham asked him about the prospect of Mueller testifying before Congress. Trump replied that Mueller had “made a fool of himself” in the past. (The backdrop for those remarks was a field full of the graves of fallen soldiers; Pelosi, in her own interview with Andrea Mitchell, on MSNBC, said that talking about impeachment wasn’t why she had come to France. She also praised Europe’s “spirit of collaboration.”) Trump added, “Nancy Pelosi—I call her Nervous Nancy—Nancy Pelosi doesn’t talk about it. She’s a disaster. She’s a disaster. Let her do what she wants—you know what? I think they’re in big trouble.”

And they think he’s in big trouble. At this point, though, it would be hard to find many people who believe that, if the Democratic-controlled House passes bills of impeachment—an indictment, in effect—the Senate would convict him, which is the role that the Constitution gives to that body. There may be wishful thinking about evidence emerging that is so shocking that Senator Lindsey Graham stops his games of golf and flattery with the President (Pelosi has also suggested that members of her caucus wait for such a moment), but it would be reckless to launch such an operation under the assumption that it would. For one thing, on the subject of Trump, this group of Republicans doesn’t seem to shock easily. The ones who do tend to retire, either with an impassioned speech or by just slinking away. Campaigns are messy, but, if the goal is removing Trump, an election may be more efficient than removal by impeachment, and also more democratic, in the end.

And isn’t that the Democrats’ goal? The odd thing about Pelosi’s reported prison comment is that the purpose and the measures it offers seem blurred. Is the point really just to find whatever is the best way, electoral or legislative, to lock Trump up, yielding an emotionally satisfying mug shot of him and elegant photos of Melania sitting behind the defendants’ table? Is it to get back at him, in the name of proving that there is justice in the world? Or is it to make sure that, in January of 2021, there is a new President in the White House who can actually deliver justice, particularly to vulnerable populations? If the Democrats win in 2020, how much does it matter what happens to Trump next? Perhaps quite a lot; accountability and truth could use some bolstering. But it might be worth recognizing that this isn’t such a simple question.

Trump’s demands at his rallies to jail any number of people who have opposed him have been far wilder than anything that Pelosi has said. Those calls have also caused people on all sides to recoil, rightly, at the idea that imprisonment is somehow the normal price for political defeat. Of course, Trump’s targets—reporters, for example, in addition to Democratic politicians—have not been all but accused of obstruction of justice by a special counsel. For some, Trump presents their purported crime as simply not being nice to him. Still, it would be good for Democrats to consider where they want to go with the prison-or-impeachment talk, and why. To put it another way, what is the least Trumpian, most Trumpism-defeating way to try to insure that Trump is not President for another term?

Hear Robert Mueller's full statement

 Special counsel Robert Mueller announces his resignation from the Department of Justice and offers insights into his investigation.

Mueller Objected to Barr’s Description of Russia Investigation’s Findings on Trump

By Mark Mazzetti and Michael S. Schmidt

WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, wrote a letter in late March to Attorney General William P. Barr objecting to his early description of the Russia investigation’s conclusions that appeared to clear President Trump on possible obstruction of justice, according to the Justice Department and three people with direct knowledge of the communication between the two men.

The letter adds to the growing evidence of a rift between them and is another sign of the anger among the special counsel’s investigators about Mr. Barr’s characterization of their findings, which allowed Mr. Trump to wrongly claim he had been vindicated.

It was unclear what specific objections Mr. Mueller raised in his letter, though a Justice Department spokeswoman said on Tuesday evening that he “expressed a frustration over the lack of context” in Mr. Barr’s presentation of his findings on obstruction of justice. Mr. Barr defended his descriptions of the investigation’s conclusions in conversations with Mr. Mueller over the days after he sent the letter, according to two people with knowledge of their discussions.

Mr. Barr, who was scheduled to testify on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the investigation, has said publicly that he disagrees with some of the legal reasoning in the Mueller report. Senior Democratic lawmakers have invited Mr. Mueller to testify in the coming weeks but have been unable to secure a date for his testimony.

A central issue in the simmering dispute is how the public’s understanding of the Mueller report has been shaped since the special counsel ended his investigation and delivered his 448-page report on March 22 to the attorney general, his boss and longtime friend. The four-page letter that Mr. Barr sent to Congress two days later gave little detail about the special counsel’s findings and created the impression that Mr. Mueller’s team found no wrongdoing, allowing Mr. Trump to declare he had been exonerated.

But when Mr. Mueller’s report was released on April 18, it painted a far more damning picture of the president and showed that Mr. Mueller believed that significant evidence existed that Mr. Trump obstructed justice.

“The special counsel emphasized that nothing in the attorney general’s March 24 letter was inaccurate or misleading,” a Justice Department spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, said in response to a request for comment made on Tuesday afternoon. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.

Over the past month, other signs of friction between the attorney general and the special counsel have emerged over issues like legal theories about constitutional protections afforded to presidents to do their job and how Mr. Mueller’s team conducted the investigation.

In congressional testimony in April before the report was released, Mr. Barr demurred when asked whether he believed that the investigation was a “witch hunt” — Mr. Trump’s preferred term. It “depends on where you’re sitting,” Mr. Barr replied.

“If you are somebody who’s being falsely accused of something, you would tend to view the investigation as a witch hunt,” he said, an apparent reference to the president.

Mr. Barr’s testimony stood in contrast to comments he made during his confirmation hearing in January. “I don’t believe Mr. Mueller would be involved in a witch hunt,” he said then.

A rift between the men appeared to develop in the intervening months as the special counsel wrapped up his inquiry.

The Justice Department received Mr. Mueller’s letter four days after Mr. Barr sent his conclusions to Congress. In response, the attorney general and the special counsel spoke on the phone, and Mr. Mueller laid out his concerns about the initial descriptions of the report.

At the time, the Justice Department had begun redacting the report and Mr. Mueller raised the question about whether more of it could be released.

“The attorney general ultimately determined that it would not be productive to release the report in piecemeal fashion,” Ms. Kupec said. “The attorney general and the special counsel agreed to get the full report out with necessary redactions as expeditiously as possible.”

Mr. Barr and senior Justice Department officials were frustrated with how Mr. Mueller ended his investigation and drafted his report, according to the three people.

They expressed irritation that Mr. Mueller fell short of his assignment by declining to make a decision about whether Mr. Trump broke the law. That left Mr. Barr to clear Mr. Trump without the special counsel’s backing.

But Mr. Mueller did lay out evidence against the president. After explaining that he had declined to make a prosecutorial judgment, citing as a factor a Justice Department view that sitting presidents cannot be indicted, the special counsel detailed more than a dozen attempts by the president to impede the inquiry. He also left open the door for charges after Mr. Trump leaves office.

“If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state,” Mr. Mueller and his investigators wrote. “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.”

Mr. Mueller’s report, the attorney general and the other senior law enforcement officials believed, read like it had been written for consumption by Congress and the public, not like a confidential report to Mr. Barr, as required under the regulations governing the special counsel.

Some of the special counsel’s investigators have told associates that they were angry about Mr. Barr’s initial characterization of their findings, government officials and others have said, and that their conclusions were more troubling for Mr. Trump than Mr. Barr indicated in his four-page letter. That proved to be the case.

In one instance, Mr. Barr took Mr. Mueller’s words out of context to suggest that the president had no motive to obstruct justice. In another instance, he plucked a fragment from a sentence in the Mueller report that made a conclusion seem less damaging for Mr. Trump.

Investigators wrote, “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Mr. Barr’s letter quoted only the passage that the investigation had found no conspiracy or coordination.

It is not clear whether members of Mr. Mueller’s team were angered by these points in particular, or whether Mr. Mueller’s letter cited them.

Despite the disagreement about the report, members of Mr. Mueller’s team worked alongside senior Justice Department officials to redact sensitive information from the report before it was released.

Hours before the public release of the Mueller report, Mr. Barr said during a news conference that he had “disagreed with some of the special counsel’s legal theories” about what constitutes presidential obstruction of justice. He also said repeatedly that the special counsel had found “no collusion” between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. Mr. Trump often uses the term, but Mr. Mueller’s investigators pointed out it had no legal standard and left it out of their judgments.

Instead, investigators wrote that they had not found evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russians.

Mr. Barr also said during the news conference that some of Mr. Trump’s efforts to thwart the investigation needed to be put in “context.”

“There is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” he said.

Joseph Stiglitz: Corporate greed is accelerating climate change. But we can still head off disaster

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is also the co-chair of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, and the chief economist of the Roosevelt Institute. His latest book, People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent, will be released by W.W. Norton on April 23. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.  

America's economy has not been working for a large portion of the country. Workers at the bottom of the income scale earn wages, adjusted for inflation, that are not much higher than what they were 60 years ago, while the income of a typical full‐time male worker hasn't budged much from 40 years ago. In addition, life expectancy is in decline. But the economy is not only failing American citizens. It's failing the planet, and that means it's failing future generations. 

There are many reasons for our plight, including corporate power and greed centered on immediate profits and little regard for the impacts business decisions have on low-income Americans and the environment. Corporations have translated their economic power into political power, lobbying for policies that give them free rein to despoil the environment; and the swamp President Donald Trump promised to drain has been overflowing. At the same time, Trump has publicly asserted that climate change is a hoax, and yet his administration has repeatedly been forced to admit it is a reality — in response to climate lawsuits such as Juliana v. United States, for which I'm an expert witness.

 

Climate change is real, and it includes not only an increase in the average temperature, but also more extreme weather events including droughts, floods and hurricanes that have led to a large number of deaths. The United States has borne enormous costs as a result of the warming planet — in 2017, more than 1.5% of GDP. By the end of this century, some sectors of the US economy, including agriculture and energy, could lose hundreds of billions of dollars a year because of climate change, according to the latest report issued by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. 

 

So there is a real urgency to respond to our economic malaise and our climate crisis. The good news on this Earth Day is that these are problems of our own making, and that means a change toward pro-Earth policies can make a big difference. Even better, the major investments we need to respond to the crisis would be a spur to the economy. This is one of the central messages of the Green New Deal. 

 

The transition to the "green economy," in which we rely on renewable energy, won't happen on its own, however. It will require a mobilization of resources — the kind we saw during the New Deal and the Second World War. 

 

Government will have to take the lead, and it will require public investments — including in infrastructure and research — and regulations. Environmental regulations such as the Clean Air Act can and have worked, and typically are very cost‐effective. Without these measures, our air would be even more unbreathable than the air in New Delhi or Beijing today. 

 

Dealing effectively with climate change is well within our reach; in fact, I recently co‐chaired an international commission that showed that the global goals of limiting the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius were clearly achievable. It would make so much more sense to spend money retrofitting our economy to reduce the risk of disastrous climate change rather than spending money to deal with the enormous economic and human costs of coping with its consequences. 

 

Some of the required resources would come simply from eliminating the huge subsidies we provide for fossil fuels, or from taxing corporations that inflict damage on our environment. This would encourage corporations to work hard to prevent it. But there are broader changes that would help grow the economy, providing some of the needed resources: curbing the excesses of corporate power more generally would lead to a more efficient economy and to more equality. So, too, would curbing the abuses of corporate governance, like CEOs paying themselves so much at the expense both of workers and investment. Policies that reduce discrimination in the labor market and provide more flexibility in hours are examples of supply‐side measures that work. And over the long run, education policies that help all citizens live up to their potential would also help the economy grow.

 

The mobilization during World War II had some long‐term salutary effects on our economy and society: It brought women into the labor force and it helped transform us from an agrarian to an urban society. The mobilization required to fight climate change has a similar potential. As we restructure our economy and society away from a high‐carbon economy and toward a more sustainable one, we should seize this opportunity to create the society that benefits all of us, as well as the planet.

Robert S. Mueller, III Link to the Report

Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The
2016  Presidential Election
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Special Council Robert S. Mueller, III

The Real Economic Story of Our Time

Robert Reich's video speaks for its self!

The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz on the Investigation That Led to the Third-Largest Financial Penalty the FEC Ever Issued

By Jeremy Scahill
 
Jeremy Scahill: Earlier this month, the Federal Election Commission issued a historic fine and cited The Intercept’s 2016 investigative series called “Foreign Influence.” That series was written by Jon Schwarz and Lee Fang, and through dogged reporting, they managed to expose a major violation of campaign finance law’s strict prohibition against foreign money being used in U.S. federal elections. Their reporting was so critical that the FEC, which rarely catches these sorts of violations, actually punished both the Chinese-owned company which donated the money, and the Super PAC which received it, fining them a combined total of $940,000. Before Citizens United in 2010, corporations couldn’t spend money to directly advocate for federal candidates. After Citizens United and related court decisions, corporations that were formed in the U.S.—even ones that are completely owned and controlled by foreigners—could send money to super PACs in unlimited amounts. Enter Jeb Bush in 2016. That’s right, Jeb. 

Jeb Bush: I think the next president needs to be a lot quieter but send a signal that we’re prepared to act in the national security interests of this country, to get back in the business of creating a more peaceful world. Please clap. 

Jeremy Scahill: Jeb’s sad campaign was backed by a super PAC called “Right to Rise USA.”  They received over a million dollars in donations from a California corporation called American Pacific International Capital, or APIC. That company, APIC, was controlled completely by two Chinese citizens living in Singapore. So remember, it’s illegal for foreign nationals to contribute money in connection to U.S. elections. But APIC and Jeb Bush’s “Right to Rise USA,” tried to get away with using the loophole created by Citizens United. Because APIC was incorporated in California, it was technically not foreign. And the financial contribution would have been fine if they had not egregiously violated one part of the law still on the books. That part of the law limits this sort of foreign influence. When foreign-owned corporations make political donations, only U.S. citizens are supposed to make the decision. My colleagues at The Intercept, along with reporter Elaine Yu in Hong Kong, got Gordon Tang, the Chinese national at the head of APIC, to admit that he helped make the decision to donate to Jeb Bush. And that was very illegal. Here is The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz to walk us through this bizarre tale. 

Jon Schwarz: So, in 2010, the Supreme Court famously decides in Citizens United, that U.S. campaign finance law was wrong. Before Citizens United, you could only contribute money for U.S. political campaigns in limited amounts. It had to come from individual citizens. After Citizens United, corporations, unions could put unlimited amounts of money. It could go to super PACs for instance, and as long as they were theoretically not coordinating with individual candidates, they could take this unlimited amount of money and then spend it however they wanted, promoting anything. Very soon after the Citizens United decision in 2010 was Obama’s State of the Union Address, and in it, he said —

Barack Obama: With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections. 

Jon Schwarz: What is the significance of that? If you look at the law, what is says is this: Foreign nationals are forbidden from putting money into U.S. elections. A foreign national is a foreign individual, it is a foreign government, and it is a foreign corporation. What happens if there is a U.S. corporation that is a wholly owned subsidiary of a foreign corporation? Well, according to U.S. law, that corporation counts as a U.S. national, meaning that a completely foreign-owned corporation could now, post-Citizens United, put as much money as they wanted into U.S. politics. 

Barack Obama: I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests; or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people. And I’d urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps correct some of these problems. 

Jon Schwarz: So six years later, Ellen Weintraub, then on the Federal Election Commission, now the chairman of the FEC, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about this issue about: Are foreign-owned corporations going to able to spend without limit in U.S. elections? 

Jon Schwarz: Lee Fang and I thought this is an interesting question. We decided to look into it, see what corporations were giving money to U.S. super PACs, and find out whether there was foreign ownership of any of them. And within 10 minutes of trying to find this out, we saw something that looked tremendously suspicious, which was a corporation called American Pacific International Capital located in San Francisco. 

Just a little bit of Googling found information that suggested this was in fact 100 percent foreign owned and it had given $1.3 million to the “Right to Rise USA” super PAC, which was supporting Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential candidacy. 

Jeb Bush: We’re 17 months from the time for choosing. The stakes for America’s future are about as great as they come. Our prosperity and our security are in the balance. So is opportunity in this nation where every life matters and everyone has the right to rise. 

Jon Schwarz: What we found out after speaking to Charlie Spies, who was the treasurer of “Right to Rise USA” and one of the most prominent campaign finance lawyers in the United States, was that Spies had actually written a memo explaining step-by-step how you could put foreign money into U.S. elections and have it be legal. We also spoke to Gordon Tang, who was the Chinese businessman behind APIC. 

[Audio: Gordon Tang, speaking in Cantonese, tells reporter Elaine Yu why the company gave over $1 million to Right to Rise USA, the main Super PAC supporting Jeb Bush.]

Jon Schwarz And to our great shock, he essentially unknowingly confessed to having broken U.S. campaign finance law. There are still some remaining weak prohibitions that you should be able to abide by that really can’t be easily enforced that will only create problems for you if reporters call you and you accidentally confess.

Jon Schwarz: If Gordon Tang had just kept his mouth shut, if he hadn’t told us, oh yes, you know, I said this seems like a good idea to me, then they would have been fine. They would have been able to, as Obama said, spend without limit in U.S. elections and there really should not have been any legal consequences. They just got sloppy. What’s crucial here is this fact: there’s sort of the law as written and the law as possible to be enforced. The law as written says: Yes, foreign-owned corporations can participate now in U.S. elections, but foreign nationals can’t participate in the decision making in terms of putting the money into the U.S. electoral process. 

Now, we were expecting that when this article came out, it would make huge news. You know, foreign interference in U.S. elections. It’s proven now. Obama called it, here it is. Essentially, nothing happened. No one paid any attention. It was the summer of 2016. It was around the time of the U.S. Democratic and Republican conventions. What we thought was an enormous story went nowhere. 

Now what happened then was: The Campaign Legal Center, which is sort of an election law watchdog in Washington, picked up our article, used the information in it to say, hey, this seems like a clear violation of very significant U.S. campaign finance law. They filed a complaint with the FEC. And then, no one heard anything for two and a half years. The FEC generally does not enforce U.S. campaign finance law. The Republican Party pretty much as policy now believes that campaign finance law is illegitimate and they simply at the FEC block it from being enforced. So we thought nothing was going to happen. And then, to our surprise, something did. 

Rachel Maddow: You don’t hear news like this all that often. You hardly ever hear about it on this scale. But a super PAC from the 2016 campaign, a super PAC that supported Jeb Bush for president, has just been hit by federal officials with a huge fine for accepting donations from foreigners. 

Jon Schwarz: It became public that the FEC was issuing the third largest fine in its history, the largest fine since Citizens United, almost $1 million. Both APIC, the foreign-owned corporation, and “Right to Rise,” the Jeb Bush super PAC, had to pay fines. Now, what it suggests is not just the fact that this was going on, that this happened for sure in 2016. But that with people who are more careful, it is probably going on in ways that can’t be detected. 

The reality is, foreign countries, foreign corporations, foreign individuals have very, very good reasons to try to influence U.S. politics. If I were a foreigner, I would try to influence U.S. politics. Of course, you have to. We’re the most powerful country on earth. You would be a fool not to try to do this. And as I say, people who are more sophisticated about it should be able to pull this off without detection. 

So, what does this mean right now? What it means is that post-Citizens United this absolutely can happen. It means that we don’t know what is happening. I would also encourage people to think about the fact that there is foreign influence on U.S. politics in all kinds of ways that was already legal before Citizens United. There’s tons of money that flows into think tanks in Washington. There’s tons of money that flows into lobbying organizations in Washington in ways that are perfectly legal but involve foreign influence on U.S. politics.

I hope that other reporters will look at this and realize that this was just out there in the open for anybody to find. Like, this information is probably there for other corporations, we just don’t know it yet. And this is actually something that anybody could do. Like, anybody can go look through the campaign finance filings. They’re on the FEC’s website. They’re at the Center for Responsive Politics. If you are interested in this issue, even if you’re not a journalist, go comb through this and send it to reporters. I guarantee you that they’ll be interested to hear about anything you find. 

Jon Schwarz: That was my colleague at The Intercept, Jon Schwarz. You can check out that series at theintercept.com. It was called “Foreign Influence.” Jon spoke to our assistant producer, Elise Swain.

In retrospect: Donald J. Trump

On January 20th, 2017, Donald J. Trump took power as president of the United States. He had openly campaigned on carnage. He ran for president promising to give the rich more, to bring back torture, to wage a war against immigrants, and to build his wall. He was gleeful in pledging to make America’s healthcare system even worse. He promised to bring back torture, to fill Guantanamo back up, to kill the families of suspected terrorists. He said he would ban Muslims from entering the United States. He encouraged police to be more brutal, has given aid and comfort to Nazis and white supremacists. He openly promised to wage war against women and their bodies, to pummel the environment, to benefit the already ultra-rich. He is corrupt to the bone, has been for a very long time, and he’s proud of it. He brought into his inner circle a dangerous cabal of neo-fascists, white supremacists and, more recently, neoconservatives.

And what now?

Trump’s Order to Open Arctic Waters to Oil Drilling Was Unlawful, Federal Judge Finds

By Coral Davenport

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WASHINGTON — In a major legal blow to President Trump’s push to expand offshore oil and gas development, a federal judge ruled that an executive order by Mr. Trump that lifted an Obama-era ban on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean and parts of the North Atlantic coast was unlawful.

The decision, by Judge Sharon L. Gleason of the United States District Court for the District of Alaska, concluded late Friday that President Barack Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawal from drilling of about 120 million acres of Arctic Ocean and about 3.8 million acres in the Atlantic “will remain in full force and effect unless and until revoked by Congress.” She wrote that an April 2017 executive order by Mr. Trump revoking the drilling ban “is unlawful, as it exceeded the president’s authority.”

The decision, which is expected to be appealed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, immediately reinstates the drilling ban on most of the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Alaska, a pristine region home to endangered species including polar bears and bowhead whales where oil companies have long sought to drill. Along the Atlantic coast, it blocks drilling around a series of coral canyons that run from Norfolk, Va., to the Canadian border which are home to unique deepwater corals and rare fish species.

In addition, Friday’s ruling by the judge, an Obama appointee, has broader implications for Mr. Trump’s effort to push drilling across the American coastline and on public lands.

Specifically, the Arctic Ocean drilling case could give legal ammunition to opponents of Mr. Trump’s efforts to roll back protections for two million acres of national monuments created by Mr. Obama and President Bill Clinton.

The case adds to a growing roster of legal losses for Mr. Trump’s efforts to undo Mr. Obama’s environmental legacy. Experts in environmental law estimate that the Trump administration has now lost about 40 environmental cases in federal courts.

Most immediately, the decision will force the Interior Department to withdraw the waters of the Arctic Ocean from its forthcoming plan detailing where the federal government intends to lease federal waters to oil companies for offshore drilling. A draft of that plan published last year called for drilling off the entire United States coastline.

The White House referred questions on the matter to the Interior Department, where a spokeswoman declined to comment.

And although Friday’s court decision relates specifically to a law on offshore drilling, it could also hamstring Mr. Trump’s efforts to erase or reduce the creation of large protected areas of public lands by previous presidents.

“The statutes and the Supreme Court have been silent on the authority of a president to modify or reduce a predecessor’s protections of these public lands, waters and monuments,” said Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law School. “But these decisions are showing that if a president wants to reverse a predecessor’s environmental policy, they have to give a cogent reason why. Just saying ‘energy dominance’ is not enough. Saying ‘I won the election’ is not enough.”

Professor Parenteau predicted that the case was likely to reach the Supreme Court, though probably not for several years.

Both Mr. Obama’s efforts to use his executive authority to ban drilling in the Arctic Ocean, and Mr. Trump’s efforts to undo that ban, are legally unprecedented.

In using his executive authority to permanently ban drilling in most of the Arctic Ocean, Mr. Obama relied on an obscure provision of a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which governs how the executive branch uses federal waters for offshore energy exploration.

The law includes a provision that lets presidents put those waters off limits to oil and gas drilling. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon and Mr. Clinton used the law to protect sections of the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans, but those protections came with time limits, usually one to two decades.

In late 2016, as he sought to legally cement environmental protections before Mr. Trump, then the president-elect, took office, Mr. Obama used what both supporters and critics called a creative and unusual interpretation of that law to set a permanent ban on drilling in most of the Arctic Ocean. 

Three months after taking office, Mr. Trump issued an executive order rescinding the ban. That made him the first president to seek to revoke a decision by his predecessor to use the law to protect federal waters.

Environmental groups promptly sued the administration over the move. They welcomed Friday’s court decision.

“Since coming into office, Trump has been on an one-man campaign to undo the work of his predecessor,” said Niel Lawrence, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, who took part in the oral arguments in the Alaska case. “What this opinion confirms is that there are constitutional limits to that.”

Erik Milito, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry and which joined the Trump administration’s case, said, “While we disagree with the decision, our nation still has a significant opportunity before us in the development of the next offshore leasing plan to truly embrace our nation’s energy potential and ensure American consumers and businesses continue to benefit from U.S. energy leadership.”

Experts said that Judge Gleason’s decision could affect the legal outcome of Mr. Trump’s efforts to roll back certain protections created by his predecessors on public lands.

Just as presidents have used the 1953 offshore-drilling law to protect federal waters, they have used a different law, the 1906 Antiquities Act, put in place by President Theodore Roosevelt, to designate and protect millions of acres of lands as permanent public monuments. Presidents throughout the past century have created such monuments. 

While at least two presidents have used their authority to shrink the size of monuments created by their predecessors, Mr. Trump has done so at a more drastic scale. In December 2017, Mr. Trump cut about two million acres from two national monuments in Utah: the Bears Ears monument, created by Mr. Obama, and the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument, created by Mr. Clinton. At the time it was the largest rollback of federal land protection in the nation’s history.

Already, lawsuits on the issue are making their way through federal courts. Professor Parenteau and others predicted that Judge Gleason’s decision could possibly have a bearing on those cases. 

That is because, in the language of both laws, Congress gave the president the right to occasionally designate public lands and waters for protection. However, each of the laws is silent on whether a successor can reduce or revoke those protections.

If Mr. Trump’s challengers win in court, the decision could affirm future presidents’ right to set bans of offshore drilling that could be undone only by Congress (as opposed to a later president) and similarly could set a precedent that presidential decisions to expand protections of public land could be revised or reversed only by Congress.

If Mr. Trump prevails in court, future presidents could potentially use an executive order to shrink any of the dozens of monuments created by their predecessors or similarly revoke presidential decisions to protect federal waters.

Correction: March 30, 2019

An earlier version of this article misstated the year that a draft of an Interior Department plan for leasing federal waters was published. It was last year, not 2017.

Robert Mueller May Not Have Found Evidence of Collusion, But His Report Proves the System Worked

James Risen

Brian Frosh is no Robert Mueller.

The little-known Maryland state attorney general lacks Mueller’s resume and gravitas. But Frosh is one of a legion of government officials, both in Washington and around the country, who are prepared to continue the fight against Donald Trump as Mueller’s special counsel probe comes to an end.
On Sunday, William Barr, Trump’s new attorney general, issued a summary of the findings of Mueller’s investigation, saying that the special counsel ultimately found no evidence that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election.

While Trump predictably declared himself exonerated, the most important fact was that Mueller was able to complete his investigation. That the special counsel conducted a comprehensive inquiry and followed it through to its natural end is an important sign that the U.S. system of checks and balances is bouncing back, and that the slide into a Trump autocracy has been halted.
That was not always a sure thing. Early in his presidency, Trump appeared eager to bulldoze the traditions, norms, and checks and balances that regulate the U.S. government and limit presidential power. And it looked like he might just get away with it. Trump fired FBI director James Comey to try to get rid of the Trump-Russia investigation, and then considered firing Mueller after he was named special counsel.

Eventually, Trump realized that would cause a firestorm of protest, and he backed down.

In hindsight, that seems to have been a watershed moment in the Trump presidency. Mueller was able to hang on by his fingernails and went on to investigate some of the most troubling questions ever raised about a president, including whether Trump had conspired with a foreign power to gain the White House.

While he ultimately concluded that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, Mueller’s investigation still led to a series of guilty pleas and convictions of a number of high-profile people in Trump’s orbit.
Yet Mueller’s most important legacy may be that he helped keep the system of checks and balances from dying just long enough for others to take up the mantle.

That leaves plenty of room for officials like Frosh, who, along with the attorney general of the District of Columbia, has filed a lawsuit against Trump, arguing that the president’s continued business dealings – specifically, the operation of Trump’s hotel in Washington – violate the Constitution by enabling the president to receive “emoluments,” or payments, from foreign governments and states. Frosh and DC Attorney General Karl Racine argue that even as president, Trump has continued to have a financial interest in the hotel, which has become a cesspool of lobbyists and other favor seekers, including foreign officials who stay there when they are visiting Trump.

“I got a quick education in emoluments after Trump got elected,” Frosh told The Intercept. “It is very clear. The framers of the Constitution were very concerned that the president would be for sale, both to foreign governments and to others. These are bright lines, and no other President has tested these lines. Trump just blew through them.”

Frosh’s lawsuit has received a mixed reception in the courts, but it is just one of a growing number of signs that Trump is being curbed.

Mueller’s full report has not been made public, but in his letter to congressional leaders summarizing the special counsel’s findings, Barr wrote that Mueller found that the Russians did try to intervene in the 2016 election through two main avenues. The Internet Research Agency, a Russian organization, conducted a social media disinformation campaign to interfere in the election, while the Russian government conducted computer hacking operations against the Democrats and then leaked Democratic emails through intermediaries, including WikiLeaks.

However, Barr wrote, “the Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”

Barr also said that Mueller didn’t decide whether Trump should be prosecuted for obstruction of justice as part of the inquiry. He said that Mueller laid out the evidence but “did not draw a conclusion – one way or the other – as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction.” Mueller didn’t conclude that Trump had committed a crime, but also did not exonerate him, Barr wrote. Since Mueller didn’t make a decision, Barr noted, he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded that there is not enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of justice.

One factor in their decision was Mueller’s conclusion that the evidence didn’t show that Trump was guilty of an underlying crime related to Russian meddling in the election, Barr wrote. His letter provided very few other details about Mueller’s findings.

Trump supporters will see the special counsel’s report as a vindication of the president, but its completion can also be read another way. Trump now faces a whole series of other inquiries, some of which stemmed from Mueller’s original investigation. Those other investigations likely include inquiries resulting from the case against Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, as well as a probe of Trump’s inaugural committee.

Even as federal prosecutors have continued those inquiries, state officials have also joined the fray. In addition to Frosh from Maryland and Racine from the District of Columbia, other Democratic law enforcement officials, including Letitia James, New York’s newly-elected attorney general, have vowed to aggressively confront Trump. Earlier this month, meanwhile, the Manhattan District Attorney indicted former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort on charges related to mortgage fraud, after Manafort had already been convicted in Mueller’s investigation.

Of course, one critical reason that the system of checks and balances is recovering is that the Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 mid-term election. Democratic control of the House means there can be aggressive congressional investigations into Trump for the first time. For the first two years of Trump’s presidency, the Republican-controlled Congress enabled Trump, and Republican leaders allowed themselves to become Trump’s lackeys. But now the House Intelligence Committee, Oversight, and Judiciary committees are all ready to pick up where Mueller left off.

“I think Congress is roaring back to life,” observed Kim Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore.

Of course, Trump still has lots of advantages as he faces the next round of prosecutorial investigations and congressional inquiries. The Justice Department’s longstanding legal opinion is that a sitting president cannot be indicted in a federal criminal case, and any federal prosecutor who seeks to charge Trump will have to overcome that legal advice. (State prosecutors, however, would not face the same obstacle.) In addition, the Republicans still control the Senate, which makes impeachment virtually impossible, even if prosecutors find evidence of serious wrongdoing by Trump.

And hanging over everything is the 2020 presidential election. If Trump wins, he may be emboldened once again to try to destroy the nation’s system of checks and balances.

James Comey: What I Want From the Mueller Report

By James Comey

Mr. Comey is a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The country is eagerly awaiting the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report. Many people know what they want it to say — what they feel it simply must say — namely, that Donald Trump is a criminal who should be removed from office. Or that he is completely innocent of all wrongdoing.

But not everyone knows what it “must” say. Even though I believe Mr. Trump is morally unfit to be president of the United States, I’m not rooting for Mr. Mueller to demonstrate that he is a criminal. I’m also not rooting for Mr. Mueller to “clear” the president. I’m not rooting for anything at all, except that the special counsel be permitted to finish his work, charge whatever cases warrant charging and report on his work.

President Trump’s constant attacks on the special counsel, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department over the past two years raised the prospect that he would interfere to stop the special counsel’s work. It is deeply concerning that the president of the United States would try to protect himself by torching the institutions of justice. But he hasn’t used his authority to end Mr. Mueller’s work. (That would have been a crisis of a different order — shutting down the investigation, rather than just trying to undermine its credibility.) So we are in a position to wonder and hope about the report’s content.

 Wondering is fine. But hoping for a particular answer is not. The rule of law depends upon fair administration of justice, which is rooted in complete and unbiased investigation. We are best served when an investigation finds all relevant facts and illuminates the fullest possible view of the truth.

I have no idea whether the special counsel will conclude that Mr. Trump knowingly conspired with the Russians in connection with the 2016 election or that he obstructed justice with the required corrupt intent. I also don’t care. I care only that the work be done, well and completely. If it is, justice will have prevailed and core American values will have been protected at a time when so much of our national leadership has abandoned its commitment to truth and the rule of law.

I am rooting for a demonstration to the world — and maybe most of all to our president and his enablers — that the United States has a justice system that works because there are people who believe in it and rise above personal interest and tribalism. That system may reach conclusions they like or it may not, but the apolitical administration of justice is the beating heart of this country. I hope we all get to see that.

The interests of justice will also be best served by maximum transparency about the special counsel’s work. I don’t know all the considerations that will go into deciding precisely what to say about the completion of that work and when to say it. But because the Department of Justice is guided first and always by the public interest, it should provide details about finished investigations when the public needs to know them, as it traditionally has.

I do have one hope that I should confess. I hope that Mr. Trump is not impeached and removed from office before the end of his term. I don’t mean that Congress shouldn’t move ahead with the process of impeachment governed by our Constitution, if Congress thinks the provable facts are there. I just hope it doesn’t. Because if Mr. Trump were removed from office by Congress, a significant portion of this country would see this as a coup, and it would drive those people farther from the common center of American life, more deeply fracturing our country.

Critics of Mr. Trump should hope for something much harder to distort, or to nurse as a grievance, than an impeachment. We need a resounding election result in 2020, where Americans of all stripes, divided as they may be about important policy issues — immigration, guns, abortion, climate change, regulation, taxes — take a moment from their busy lives to show that they are united by something even more important: the belief that the president of the United States cannot be a chronic liar who repeatedly attacks the rule of law. Then we can get back to policy disagreements.

I just hope we are up to it.

How Did the F.A.A. Allow the Boeing 737 Max to Fly?

By John Cassidy

With virtually every day that has passed since the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which killed a hundred and fifty-seven people, more disturbing news has emerged. On Sunday, a spokesperson for Ethiopia’s ministry of transport said that the black box that was recovered from the wreckage of Flight 302 indicated that “clear similarities were noted between Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610,” which crashed last October, killing a hundred and eighty-nine people.

The plane involved in the Lion Air tragedy was also a Boeing 737 Max 8, and investigators suspect that the cause of that crash was a malfunctioning automated-flight-control feature, which caused the aircraft’s nose to dip repeatedly during its initial ascent out of the airport in Jakarta. The automated-flight-control feature on the 737 Max, which is called a Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), was designed to prevent a high-speed stall. It works by tilting part of the horizontal stabilizer in the tail of the plane, and investigators at the Ethiopian crash site have found physical evidence that this part of the plane was, indeed, configured to dive.

Radar data has indicated that both planes jerked up and down in erratic fashion after takeoff. The captain of the Ethiopian Airlines flight reported a “flight control” problem to the air-traffic control tower. Data from the black box of the Lion Air plane showed that its pilots repeatedly pulled back on the control yoke to try to disengage the MCAS and level the flight path of the plane. “The pilots fought continuously until the end of the flight,” an official from the Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee said in November, after the plane’s black box was recovered.

This is all frightening enough, and it raises serious questions about why Boeing didn’t tell airlines and pilots much more about the MCAS—in particular, how to disengage it in an emergency—before the 737 Max was put into service in 2017. Boeing has delivered three hundred and seventy-six of these planes to airlines around the world. Practically all of them have now been grounded out of safety concerns.

Boeing has promised a software fix to address some of the potential problems created by the MCAS. That’s too little, too late, of course, and it doesn’t address the even larger issue of how the 737 Max was allowed to fly in the first place. On Sunday, the Seattle Times, the home-town newspaper of Boeing’s commercial division, published the results of a lengthy investigation into the federal certification of the 737 Max. It found that the F.A.A. outsourced key elements of the certification process to Boeing itself, and that Boeing’s safety analysis of the new plane contained some serious flaws, including several relating to the MCAS.

The Boeing analysis “understated the power of the new flight control system,” the Seattle Times article said. “When the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther than was stated in the initial safety analysis document.” The Boeing analysis also “failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of the system repeatedly pushing the airplane’s nose downward.”

In the case of the Lion Air flight, investigators suspect the MCAS was reacting to faulty data gathered from a single flight sensor mounted on the fuselage. According to the Seattle Times article, the Boeing analysis assessed the failure of the MCAS system as “as one level below ‘catastrophic.’ But even that ‘hazardous’ danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor—and yet that’s how it was designed.”

How can a manufacturer of something as complex and potentially dangerous as a passenger jet be allowed to play such a large role in deciding whether its product is safe? It turns out that the F.A.A., with congressional approval, has “over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes,” the Seattle Times said. In the case of the 737 Max, which is a longer and more fuel-efficient version of previous 737s, Boeing was particularly eager to get the plane into service quickly, so it could compete with Airbus’s new A320neo.

Early on, employees of the F.A.A. and Boeing decided how to divide up the certification work. But halfway through the process “we were asked by management to re-evaluate what would be delegated,” a former F.A.A. safety engineer told the Seattle Times. “Management thought we had retained too much at the FAA:”

“There was constant pressure to re-evaluate our initial decisions,” the former engineer said. “And even after we had reassessed it … there was continued discussion by management about delegating even more items down to the Boeing Company.”

Even the work that was retained, such as reviewing technical documents provided by Boeing, was sometimes curtailed.

“There wasn’t a complete and proper review of the documents,” the former engineer added. “Review was rushed to reach certain certification dates.
The new revelations don’t stop there. “Federal prosecutors and Department of Transportation officials are scrutinizing the development of Boeing Co.’s 737 MAX jetliners,” the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. “A grand jury in Washington, D.C., issued a broad subpoena dated March 11 to at least one person involved in the 737 MAX’s development, seeking related documents, including correspondence, emails and other messages,” a source told the paper. (The Justice Department and Department of Transportation declined to comment on the Journal’s reporting.)

The criminal investigation began well before the crash of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight. It’s not clear yet whether it is focussing on the MCAS system, the report in the Journal said. But, that article added, “In the U.S., it is highly unusual for federal prosecutors to investigate details of regulatory approval of commercial aircraft designs, or to use a criminal probe to delve into dealings between the FAA and the largest aircraft manufacturer the agency oversees. Probes of airliner programs or alleged lapses in federal safety oversight typically are handled as civil cases, often by the DOT inspector general.”

In a statement to the Seattle Times, Boeing said that the F.A.A. “considered the final configuration and operating parameters of MCAS during MAX certification, and concluded that it met all certification and regulatory requirements.” The F.A.A., in a statement issued on Sunday, said that the “737 MAX certification program followed the FAA’s standard certification process.”

Given that two brand-new 737 Maxes have plunged to earth, befuddling their pilots and costing three hundred and forty-six people their lives, these statements are hardly reassuring. We need to know a lot more about how the FAA allowed this plane to take to the air.

The Border Patrol Has Been a Cult of Brutality Since 1924

By Greg Grandin

Since its founding in the early 20th century, the U.S. Border Patrol has operated with near-complete impunity, arguably serving as the most politicized and abusive branch of federal law enforcement — even more so than the FBI during J. Edgar Hoover’s directorship.

The 1924 Immigration Act tapped into a xenophobia with deep roots in the U.S. history. The law effectively eliminated immigration from Asia and sharply reduced arrivals from southern and eastern Europe. Most countries were now subject to a set quota system, with the highest numbers assigned to western Europe. As a result, new arrivals to the United States were mostly white Protestants. Nativists were largely happy with this new arrangement, but not with the fact that Mexico, due to the influence of U.S. business interests that wanted to maintain access to low-wage workers, remained exempt from the quota system. “Texas needs these Mexican immigrants,” said the state’s Chamber of Commerce.

Having lost the national debate when it came to restricting Mexicans, white supremacists — fearing that the country’s open-border policy with Mexico was hastening the “mongrelization” of the United States — took control of the U.S. Border Patrol, also established in 1924, and turned it into a frontline instrument of race vigilantism. As the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has shown, the patrol’s first recruits were white men one or two generations removed from farm life. Some had a military or county sheriff background, while others transferred from border-town police departments or the Texas Rangers — all agencies with their own long tradition of unaccountable brutality. Their politics stood in opposition to the big borderland farmers and ranchers. They didn’t think that Texas — or Arizona, New Mexico, and California — needed Mexican migrants.

Earlier, in the mid-1800s, the Mexican-American War had unleashed a broad, generalized racism against Mexicans throughout the nation. That racism slowly concentrated along an ever-more focused line: the border. While the 1924 immigration law spared Mexico a quota, a series of secondary laws — including one that made it a crime to enter the country outside official ports of entry — gave border and customs agents on-the-spot discretion to decide who could enter the country legally. They had the power to turn what had been a routine daily or seasonal event — crossing the border to go to work — into a ritual of abuse. Hygienic inspections became more widespread and even more degrading. Migrants had their heads shaved, and they were subjected to an increasingly arbitrary set of requirements and the discretion of patrollers, including literacy tests and entrance fees.

The patrol wasn’t a large agency at first — just a few hundred men during its early years — and its reach along a 2,000-mile line was limited. But over the years, its reported brutality grew as the number of agents it deployed increased. Border agents beat, shot, and hung migrants with regularity. Two patrollers, former Texas Rangers, tied the feet of one migrant and dragged him in and out of a river until he confessed to having entered the country illegally. Other patrollers were members of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, active in border towns from Texas to California. “Practically every other member” of El Paso’s National Guard “was in the Klan,” one military officer recalled, and many had joined the Border Patrol upon its establishment.

For more than a decade, the Border Patrol operated under the authority of the Department of Labor, which in the early years of the Great Depression, before the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his appointment of Frances Perkins as secretary of labor, was a major driver pushing deportation. Perkins, even before she entered FDR’s cabinet, had already criticized Border Patrol brutality. In office, she tried to limit the abuses of immigration officials as much as she could, curtailing warrantless arrests, allowing detained migrants phone calls, and working to extend the protections the New Deal offered citizens to migrant workers, including an effort to make abusive migrant labor contracts more equitable.

Reform was short-lived. The White House, bowing to pressure from agriculturalists, placed the Border Patrol, and migration policy more broadly, under the authority of the Department of Justice. More laws further criminalizing migration reinforced the Border Patrol’s power. For example, the end of the Bracero guest-worker program, along with the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which for the first time assigned quotas to Mexico and other countries in the Western Hemisphere, now meant that thousands of seasonal Mexican workers were officially “illegal.”

Exporting Paramilitary Policing

 

At the same time, experience gained in migrant interdiction began to be exported internationally. The Border Patrol is often thought of, even by critics of its brutality, as a sleepy backwater federal agency, far removed from the Cold War’s ideological frontlines. But the Patrol played a role in expanding the radius of Washington’s national security doctrine — the tutoring of allied security forces in counterinsurgency tactics — and accelerating the tempo of paramilitary action.

The career of John P. Longan, who worked as an Oklahoma sheriff before joining the Border Patrol, is illustrative. Following stints in New Mexico and Texas, Longan was tapped to help run Operation Wetback, a mass deportation drive focused mostly on California that, as the Los Angeles Times put it, transformed the patrol into an “army” committed to an “all-out war to hurl tens of thousands of Mexican wetbacks back into Mexico.”

 Modern armies need a modern intelligence service, and Longan, operating out of an unmarked location in an old Alameda Navy installation, updated the Patrol’s ability to gather and analyze information — including information extracted during interrogations — and then act on that information quickly. A few years later, Longan transferred to the State Department’s Public Safety Program, doing tours in a number of third-world hotspots, including Venezuela, Thailand, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala. According to Stuart Schrader, in his forthcoming “Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing,” Longan was one of a number of Border Patrol agents recruited to train foreign police through CIA-linked “public safety” programs, since they were likely to speak Spanish. And having worked the southwestern borderlands, these patrollers-turned-covert operators were familiar with societies built around peonage-like labor relations; they seamlessly extended the kind of free-range immunity they enjoyed at home to poorer, oligarch-ruled nations like Guatemala.

In Guatemala, Longan used the intelligence techniques similar to the ones he developed in Operation Wetback to train local police and military officers, creating an “action unit” that could gather information — also mostly from interrogations, many of them including torture — and act on that information in a rapid manner. Within the first three months of 1966, “Operación Limpieza,” or Operation Clean-up, as Longan called his project, conducted over 80 raids and scores of extrajudicial assassinations, including the murder, during one four-day period in early March, of over 30 political activists (I describe Longan’s time in Guatemala in detail here). Likewise, through the early 1970s, the U.S. trained Latin American security forces, the majority from countries run by military governments, at the Border Patrol Academy in Los Fresnos, Texas, where, according to the Los Angeles Times, “CIA instructors” trained them “in the design, manufacture, and potential use of bombs and incendiary devices.”

In This Place, You Have No Rights

 

Starting in the 1970s, investigative journalists began to report on Border Patrol abuse. Such exposés were damning, but largely ignored. John Crewdson, for instance, won a Pulitzer in 1980 for a series of articles published in the New York Times, including one titled “Border Sweeps of Illegal Aliens Leave Scores of Children in Jails,” yet his 1983 book based on the series, “The Tarnished Door,” is out of print. Crewdson’s reporting on the Border Patrol and the immigration system deserves a revival, for it provides an important back-history to the horrors we are witnessing today.

Patrollers, he reported, regularly engaged in beatings, murder, torture, and rape, including the rape of girls as young as 12. Some patrollers ran their own in-house “outlaw” vigilante groups. Others maintained ties with groups like the Klan. Border Patrol agents also used the children of migrants, either as bait or as a pressure tactic to force confessions. When coming upon a family, agents usually tried to apprehend the youngest member first, with the idea that relatives would give themselves up so as not to be separated. “It may sound cruel,” one patroller said, but it often worked.

Separating migrant families was not official government policy in the years Crewdson was reporting on abuses. But left to their own devices, Border Patrol agents regularly took children from parents, threatening that they would be separated “forever” unless one of them confessed that they had entered the country illegally. Mothers especially, an agent said, “would always break.” Once a confession was extracted, children might be placed in foster care or left to languish in federal jails. Others were released into Mexico alone, far from their homes — forced to survive, according to public defenders, by “garbage-can scrounging, living on rooftops and whatever.”

 Ten-year-old Sylvia Alvarado, separated from her grandmother as they crossed into Texas, was kept in a small cinderblock cell for more than three months. In California, 13-year-old Julia Pérez, threatened with being arrested and denied food, broke down and told her interrogator that she was Mexican, even though she was a U.S. citizen. The Border Patrol released Pérez into Mexico with no money or way to contact her U.S. family. Such cruelties weren’t one-offs, but part of a pattern, encouraged and committed by officers up the chain of command. The violence was both gratuitous and systemic, including “stress” techniques later associated with the war in Iraq.

The practice, for instance, as recently reported, of placing migrants in extremely cold rooms — called hieleras, or “ice boxes” — goes back decades, at least to the early 1980s, with Crewdson writing that it was a common procedure. Agents reminded captives that they were subject to their will: “In this place, you have no rights.”

Some migrants, being sent back to Mexico, were handcuffed to cars and made to run alongside them to the border. Patrollers pushed “illegals off cliffs,” a patrol agent told Crewdson, “so it would look like an accident.” Officers in the patrol’s parent agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, traded young Mexican women they caught at the border to the Los Angeles Rams in exchange for season tickets, and supplied Mexican prostitutes to U.S. congressmen and judges, paying for them out of funds the service used to compensate informants. Agents also worked closely with Texas agriculturalists, delivering workers to their ranches (including to one owned by Lyndon B. Johnson when he was in the White House), then raiding the ranches just before payday and deporting the workers. “The ranchers got their crops harvested for free, the INS men got fishing and hunting privileges on the ranches, and the Mexicans got nothing,” Crewdson reported.

Subsequent reporting confirms that the violence Crewdson documented continued down the years, largely unabated. The remoteness of much of the border region and the harshness of its terrain, the work that straddled the line between foreign and domestic power, and the fact that many of the patrollers were themselves veterans of foreign wars (or hailed from regions with fraught racial relations, including the borderlands themselves) all contributed to a “fortress mentality,” as one officer put it. Patrollers easily imagined their isolated substations to be frontier forts in hostile territory, holding off barbarians. They wielded awesome power over desperate people with little effective recourse. Based on information provided by local migrant advocacy groups, Human Rights Watch wrote in 1993 that in one such substation, in Harlingen, Texas, “physical abuse is often coupled with due process abuses meant to terrorize victims of brutality.” Most captured migrants, beaten or threatened with a beating, signed “voluntary departure agreements” and were “quickly repatriated.”

Between 1982 and 1990, Mexico City sent at least 24 protests to the U.S. State Department on behalf of Mexicans injured or murdered by Border Patrol agents. Just as soldiers use racial epithets for the people they are fighting overseas, Border Patrol agents have a word for their adversaries: “tonks.” It’s “the sound,” one patroller told a journalist, “a flashlight makes when you hit someone over the head.” In neighborhoods filled with undocumented residents, the Patrol operated with the latitude of an occupying army. “Mind your own fucking business, lady, and go back into your house,” one patroller ordered a resident in Stockton, California, who came out on her balcony to see him “kicking a Mexican male who was handcuffed and lying facedown on the ground.”

It wasn’t just the federal Border Patrol that engaged in such sadism, but local law enforcement as well. In 1980, a Texas lawyer affiliated with the United Farm Workers obtained videos of 72 interrogations of migrants that took place over the course of the previous seven years, recorded by the police department in McAllen, Texas. The images were disturbing: Police took turns beating one handcuffed Mexican man, bashing his head on the concrete floor, punching, kicking, and cursing as he pleaded for mercy. The tapes were made for enjoyment, as a kind of bonding ritual that would later be associated with the abuse committed against Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib: As the officers gathered “night after night,” they drank beer and watched “playbacks” of their interrogation sessions. It was, said one of the men involved, a way of initiating new recruits into the cult of border brutalism.

There have been contradictory judicial rulings, but historically, agent power has been limited by no constitutional clause. There are few places patrollers can’t search, no property belonging to migrants they can’t seize. And there is hardly anybody they can’t kill, provided that the victims are poor Mexican or Central American migrants. Between 1985 and 1990, federal agents shot 40 migrants around San Diego alone, killing 22 of them. On April 18, 1986, for instance, patroller Edward Cole was beating 14-year-old Eduardo Carrillo Estrada on the U.S. side of the border’s chain-link fence, when he stopped and shot Eduardo’s younger brother, Humberto, in the back. Humberto was standing on the other side of the fence on Mexican soil. A court ruled that Cole, who had previous incidents of shooting through the fence at Mexicans, had reason to fear for his life from Humberto and used justifiable force.

Such abuses persisted through the 1990s and 2000s. In 1993, the House Subcommittee on International Law, Immigration, and Refugees held hearings on Border Patrol abuse, and its transcript is a catalogue of horrors. One former guard, Tony Hefner, at the INS detention center in Port Isabel, Texas, reported that “a young Salvadoran girl” was forced to “perform personal duties, like dancing the Lambada, for INS officials.” (In 2011, Hefner published a memoir with more accusations of sexual abuse by, as Hefner writes, the INS “brass”). Roberto Martinez, who worked with the San Diego-based U.S.-Mexico Border Program for the American Friends Service Committee, testified that “human and civil rights violations” by the Border Patrol “run the gamut of abuses imaginable” — from rape to murder. Agents regularly seized “original birth certificates and green cards” from Latino citizens, “leaving the victim with the financial burden of having to go through a lengthy process of applying for a new document.” “Rapes and sexual abuse in INS detention centers around the United States,” Martinez said, “seem to be escalating throughout the border region.”

Brutality continued as Washington further militarized both the border and broader immigration policy — first after the 1993 signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and then years later with the creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security after the 9/11 attacks. Since 2003, Border Patrol agents have killed at least 97 people, including six children. Few agents were prosecuted. Last year, a 19-year-old Guatemalan Maya woman, Claudia Patricia Gómez Gonzáles was killed, shot in the head by a still-unnamed Texas Border Patrol agent shortly after she entered the United States.

According to a recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union, young girls apprehended by the Patrol have been physically abused and threatened with rape, while unaccompanied children have experienced “physical and psychological abuse, unsanitary and inhumane living conditions, isolation from family members, extended period of detention, and denial of access to legal medical service.”

The viciousness we are witnessing today at the border, directed at children and adults, has a long history, a fact that should in no way mitigate the extraordinary cruelty of Donald Trump. But it does suggest that if the U.S. is to climb out of the moral abyss it has fallen into, it has to think well beyond Trump’s malice. It needs a historical reckoning with the true cause of the border crisis: the long, brutal history of border enforcement itself.