RSN: Barbara McQuade | Are Trump's Passports the FBI's Smoking Gun?
02 September 22
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DOJ’s latest filing suggests the proximity of Trump’s personal identification to top secret government documents could prove the former president is personally culpable.
On August 8, agents removed from Trump’s home 33 boxes of sensitive government documents, including more than 100 records classified at the highest levels. In a 36-page brief responding to Trump’s motion to appoint a special master to review the material seized by the FBI, the Justice Department explained that three of the classified documents were recovered from Trump’s private office, known as “the 45 Office.”
According to DOJ’s recent brief, classified documents in that office were “commingled” in a desk drawer with three passports. While the government did not disclose the name on the passports, Trump himself has complained that during the search, the FBI “stole” his three passports. It seems a safe bet that the passports DOJ recovered were Trump’s.
The significance of the passports is enormous. As DOJ explained in an understated footnote, “The location of the passports is relevant evidence in an investigation of unauthorized retention and mishandling of national defense information.”
In other words, the presence of the passports in the same drawer as the classified records tends to tie the unauthorized possession of these documents to Trump himself. A photo included with the filing shows the items that were recovered from his office. Among the classification markings on the documents are “Top Secret,” meaning that the disclosure of the material could cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States.
A routine practice in drafting search warrants is to include a request to seize identity documents that can connect the subject of the investigation with the premises. That helps to make the evidentiary tie between the person and any contraband that might be found at the location. For example, if searching for illegal drugs in a house where multiple people come and go, agents will seek authority to seize identity documents like a driver’s license, photographs or other personal possessions located in the same room as the contraband. Finding both of these items together tends to connect the person to the contraband. Here, the presence of Trump’s passports alongside the classified documents supports an inference that he himself possessed the classified documents.
To the extent Trump may be inclined to pin all blame on his lawyer who signed a document in June attesting that all of the classified documents had been returned, the documents in his personal desk drawer are a problem for him. The former president would need to explain away the notion that he himself possessed these documents long after the government asked for their return, and despite personal assurances from Trump when Counterintelligence Section Chief Jay Bratt visited Mar-a-Lago in June to inspect the storage of documents. At the time, Trump told Bratt, “Whatever you need, just let us know.”
The former president’s continued retention of the documents, even after the repeated requests to return them, suggests a willful violation of the law.
After the filing, Trump doubled down on the argument that he had declassified the documents, an apparent concession to being caught red-handed with them in his desk drawer. While Trump’s claim may work as a talking point among his supporters, it will fail in court. Not only is the claim improbable, and would amount to a reckless abuse of power, but it is legally irrelevant.
None of the crimes for which the magistrate judge found probable cause for the search require as an element of the offense that the documents be classified.
One statute makes it a crime to retain government records. Another statute prohibits willful retention of “national defense information.” The third prohibits concealing documents to obstruct justice. Trump could declassify these documents all day and it would not make a bit of difference in his guilt or innocence of those charges.
Passports usually permit entry to other nations. These have opened the door for investigators.
Civilians are being evacuated along humanitarian corridors from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol under the control of Russian military and pro-Russian separatists, March 24, 2022. (photo: Getty)
A report from Human Rights Watch documents Russia’s deportation and screening of Ukrainians, but cautions the full extent is not yet known
For months, Nataliya stayed behind, even as some neighbors chose to go to Russia as the conflict escalated. Then last May, Russian forces occupying the village told residents that a corridor had been opened to Ukrainian-controlled territory. Nataliya and others boarded a bus that they were told was headed to Kharkiv. But when the bus stopped, she realized they were in Shebekino, a city just across the border.
“I suddenly realized that we were in Russia,” Nataliya told human rights investigators. “We didn’t even go through a border crossing.”
Over the next days, Nataliya and others from her village were taken to a motorsport complex turned makeshift transit camp for thousands of Ukrainians, she told investigators. Russian officials photographed her, took her fingerprints, and made her fill out an immigration form. After a few days sleeping in tents, most people boarded buses to other destinations in Russia, but Nataliya managed to take a train to Moscow, then traveled to Poland and back into Ukraine, eventually reaching Kharkiv.
Nataliya’s ordeal is one of several documented in a Human Rights Watch report published Thursday, which paints the most detailed picture yet of so-called filtration and forcible transfers of Ukrainians by Russian forces. Allegations that thousands of Ukrainians seeking to flee the fighting were forced to undergo interrogations and an invasive screening process, and that many were deceived or pressured into moving to Russian-controlled territory or across the border into the Russian federation itself, have emerged consistently over the last several months. But access to people subjected to forced screenings and transfers has been a challenge, making it difficult for investigators to understand their scope and scale. In April, Russian authorities shut down Human Rights Watch’s office in the country along with those of a dozen other human rights organizations, making it impossible for the group to investigate alleged abuses from within Russia.
In the new report, based on dozens of interviews, including 18 with people who traveled to Russia and were ultimately able to leave, Human Rights Watch concludes that an unknown number of Ukrainians were transported to Russia in “organized mass transfers” conducted in a manner and context that rendered them illegal forcible transfers — a war crime and potential crime against humanity. Forcible transfers include cases in which a person consents to move “only because they fear consequences such as violence, duress, or detention if they remain, and the occupying power is taking advantage of a coercive environment to transfer them,” the rights group wrote.
“When Russian forces transfer Ukrainian civilians from areas of active hostilities to areas of Ukraine under Russian occupation or to the Russian Federation, under the guise of evacuations, they are not merely removing civilians from the hazards of war,” the report concluded. “They are implementing policy ambitions articulated by Russia’s leadership in the lead up to and during the current conflict.”
Russian and Ukrainian officials have each pointed to the movement of tens of thousands of Ukrainians across the border as supporting evidence for their narratives about the conflict, but observers argue that the full picture is more complex and nuanced. Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said earlier this summer that 1.2 million Ukrainians had been forcibly taken to Russia, including 240,000 children. Russian officials, for their part, claimed that over 2.8 million Ukrainians had entered the Russian federation from Ukraine, including 448,000 children, at least half of which came from areas of Ukraine that had been under Russian control since 2014. The Ukrainian and Russian governments did not respond to requests for comment from The Intercept.
While Human Rights Watch documents the forcible transfer of several people, the group couldn’t determine how many Ukrainians have been forced into Russia that way, and it warned against drawing generalized conclusions about the movement of people amid ongoing conflict. Some Ukrainians felt they had no choice but to go to Russia, which they saw as the only way to escape relentless shelling — and a decision made under such conditions, Human Rights Watch notes, amounts to forcible transfer. While in Russia, some of the people transferred there were pressured to sign declarations stating that they had witnessed war crimes by Ukrainian forces, the group added.
But many Ukrainians also made the journey to Russia or Russian-controlled territory voluntarily, either because they held pro-Russian views, had family ties in Russia, or as a way to travel on to other destinations after the Ukrainian government imposed martial law, forbidding most adult males from leaving the country.
“One really needs to be very careful in determining in each case whether a forcible transfer has occurred, and one cannot generalize and say, ‘OK, the Russians are saying it’s 2 million Ukrainians so we then say, 2 million Ukrainians have been forcibly transferred to Russia,’” Belkis Wille, the report’s lead researcher, told The Intercept. “There are some Ukrainians who have chosen to go to Russia, including because they wanted to transit on to Europe. … Even if we had the numbers on how many people went to Russia, that doesn’t mean that that many people were forcibly transferred.”
Human Rights Watch also noted that because reaching transferred Ukrainians remains a challenge, and because many were too fearful to speak to investigators, its report was based almost exclusively on interviews with those with access to social media or to a network of activists who helped them eventually leave Russia. “Their experiences are not necessarily representative of the many other Ukrainians who are still in Russia, who neither went there or remain there by choice,” the group wrote, calling for further research “to understand the full range of abuses that forcibly transferred Ukrainians in Russia may have experienced and be experiencing.”
Kharkiv and Mariupol
According to the report, most of those who were forcibly transferred to Russia or Russian-controlled territory came from the region around Kharkiv and from the city of Mariupol, which was under siege for 10 weeks before falling under Russian control in May. As several Ukrainian government attempts to evacuate civilians from Mariupol to Ukrainian-controlled territory failed throughout the siege, thousands of residents attempted to leave the destroyed city, escaping at times on foot, under heavy shelling, through streets filled with dead bodies. Many of these civilians were made to believe that in order to be allowed passage out of areas with active hostilities they had to submit to a “filtration” process by Russian forces, which included surrendering their phones and passports, having their biometrics recorded, and undergoing body searches and interrogations about their jobs and political views.
Those with access to private vehicles were often able to skirt the process, Human Rights Watch noted. But thousands of those who were reliant on evacuation buses to flee the violence or who were made to believe that they needed to show filtration “receipts” in order to move through Russian-controlled areas spent days and in some cases weeks in schools, community centers, tents, or vehicles waiting for clearance, often in squalid conditions and with little food. Those who failed the screening because of suspected ties to the Ukrainian military or nationalist groups were detained in Russian-controlled territory and the whereabouts of several remain unknown, according to family members interviewed by Human Rights Watch. The group warned that they may be at risk of torture and enforced disappearance.
Wille, the Human Rights Watch researcher, noted that the mass biometric data collection happening as part of the filtration process was especially concerning.
“It fits into a much bigger thing going on in Russia,” she told The Intercept, noting that Human Rights Watch has documented widespread efforts by Russian authorities to build biometric databases for surveillance and monitoring. “They’re trying to, à la Xinjiang, create something quite similar and comprehensive in Russia. And I think this gives them a big kind of ground for experimentation. … I think the consequences are significant because we don’t know yet what they’re going to be.”
Those who spoke to Human Rights Watch noted their fear and helplessness as Russian soldiers made them board buses and either lied to them or refused to disclose their destination. They described being held in filtration centers that were overcrowded and filthy.
“We felt like hostages,” said a man who was detained while walking in Mariopul to check on his grandmother and was held for two weeks in a schoolhouse in Russian-controlled territory. “We were afraid they had some dodgy plans for us.”
Another man, who spent 40 days interned in a village outside Mariupol, described inedible food and sanitary conditions that made many people sick. “But more than anything, it was the uncertainty,” he said. “We kept asking, ‘Why keep us there? When will we get the passports back?’ But [the Donetsk People’s Republic authorities] would not tell us anything coherent.”
Historical Precedent
Both “filtration” and the mass transfer of people have precedents in Russian and Soviet history, though the practices have also been widespread elsewhere. “When we talk about filtration, we should not really attribute it only to Russia,” Alexander Statiev, a history professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada, told The Intercept. “The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, for instance, it was a filtration center. The Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, it was also a screening facility.”
Soviet officials established filtration camps during World War II, targeting soldiers who had found themselves in German-controlled areas, to identify suspected defectors and collaborators. “Because of this Stalinist, permanent suspicion of spies and enemy agents, they had to undertake this filtration, this screening process,” said Statiev. Soon, the practice was extended to several million civilians who had been living in German territory.
Population transfers, often along ethnic lines, were also commonplace in Soviet Russia, added Statiev, who pointed to the deportation of 170,000 ethnic Koreans, suspected of sympathizing with the Japanese, from the Soviet Union’s far east to Central Asia.
More recently, filtration camps were a defining feature of the Chechen wars, which started in the 1990s. Some 200,000 Chechens, a fifth of the population, passed through the camps, where they were subjected to widespread and well-documented human rights abuses. “Filtration is a standard counterinsurgency procedure … but if a rebellion is popular — and in Chechnya it was popular — a lot of people support the rebels,” said Statiev, noting that there is no evidence that the filtration currently underway in Ukraine is comparable in terms of scale and treatment. “Russia did it on a very large scale in Chechnya, on a very large scale during the Second World War, but the scale of the current formulation is not really clear.”
The Russian government’s goal when encouraging or forcing Ukrainians to move to Russia is also unclear. Over the last several years, Russian officials dealing with a population decline have been trying to lure citizens of former Soviet countries to regions of the federation facing labor shortages, even though promises of support to those who agree to go often fall short. While some Ukrainians have chosen to move to Russia in the aftermath of their country’s invasion, Russian officials failed to articulate a vision for how the war and the destruction it wrought would serve their ultimate goals.
“I don’t think Russians are clear themselves. The trouble is that they started the war without rationally formulating the end game,” said Statiev. “We don’t really know what they would do with all those people. A great deal of them hate Russia as a state, not so much the people, but Russia as a state. And to find within your state so many people who hate you — what is the point?”
Police officers stand at the outer entrance of the Urumqi No. 3 Detention Center in Dabancheng in western China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, April 23, 2021. (photo: Mark Schiefelbein/AP)
Beijing has spent years trying to control the narrative, vilifying people who have spoken against the crackdown while organizing tours and news conferences promoting its position. State media have interviewed Xinjiang residents who denounced accusations against the Chinese government as lies, though evidence shows that such statements are often scripted and coerced.
Many camp survivors faced years of threats by Chinese police in attempts to silence them, leaving them with a stark choice: speak out and face the consequences, or stay quiet to protect their loved ones.
Dawut made her choice on a fateful Friday in New York three years ago. That day, she was on her way to the United Nations to share her story for the first time when she got a call.
It was her brother, telling her that the police had come for their father and urging her not to speak. She froze with fear.
“But I thought of so many fathers and mothers in the camp, how I needed to speak up for them,” she said. “I thought, I will not change my mind. I will go.”
The consequences were immediate. Relatives in Xinjiang blocked her calls and texts. Two weeks later, an ex-neighbor called, saying her father had died while in police custody. The exact circumstances are unclear.
Now, Dawut said, it was all worth it.
“I felt like I did the right thing,” she said. “I am walking the path of truth.”
The U.N. report corroborated different aspects of the crackdown reported over the years, including forced labor, pervasivesurveillance, family separations and coercive birth control measures.
But the focus of the report was squarely on the mass detentions. The rights office said it could not confirm estimates that a million or more people were detained in the internment camps in Xinjiang, but that it was “reasonable to conclude that a pattern of large-scale arbitrary detention occurred” at least between 2017 and 2019.
Interviews and AP visits to the region show that China appears to have closed many of the camps, which it called vocational training and education centers. But hundreds of thousands of people continue to languish in prison on vague, secret charges, with leaked data showing one county in Xinjiang has the highest known imprisonment rate in the world.
Among those who fled Xinjiang, there was a palpable sense of relief, as they had worried that the U.N. report would be suppressed or watered down. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet had said little after visiting Xinjiang on a government-organized tour in May, prompting criticism and concern from Uyghur groups.
Dina Nurdybay, an ethnic Kazakh who spent almost a year in detention, said she was worried when she heard Bachelet had visited Xinjiang at Beijing’s invitation. Nurdybay said she had been forced in the camps to sing and dance for journalists and officials, parrot propaganda and pretend life was great there. She worried that outside investigators would be tricked.
“It’s all lies,” she said. “You think it’s voluntary?”
Now, she said, she hopes the U.N. will help people like her escape harassment and live in peace. Every time she speaks to journalists, she said, Chinese police haul away her uncle and interrogate him for days at a time, telling him he should make her “shut up.”
Mihrigul Tursun, who testified about the camps before the U.S. Congress in November 2018, said the price she paid for speaking out was constant threats to her safety and a state-sponsored smear campaign. She’s been called a liar, followed by cars, photographed at restaurants by strangers. She is now under FBI watch, she said, after men dressed in hoodies broke her window and slipped a threatening letter under her door, forcing her to move seven times.
Before she went public, she spent sleepless nights sobbing, pondering whether to speak out. If she did, she knew she could never go back home, that she might never see her parents again.
But she remembered the women held in the cell with her. They had sworn an oath together: Whoever made it out would speak out about what they had witnessed inside, no matter the consequences.
“I feel like a dead person. They killed my dreams, they killed my hopes. I lost everything when I was in the camps,” Tursun said. “But today I feel a little better, because all that hard work has born some fruit.”
But, she added, the report is just the beginning. She won’t be satisfied, she said, until all the detention facilities are closed.
“We need results, we need action,” she said. “I need to know after the U.N. report, what can we do after that?”
Mary Peltola speaking with reporters at a campaign party on August 16th, in Anchorage, Alaska. (photo: Kerry Tasker/Reuters)
The race was an early test of the state’s new ranked-choice voting system, which promises to reduce political polarization by advancing more moderate candidates.
Alaskans approved ranked-choice voting in a 2020 ballot measure that passed with fifty-one per cent of the vote. The system, at least in the minds of its creators, is designed to reduce polarization and partisanship. In the run-up to the special election, architects of the measure tended to describe it in simple, almost childproof terms: “You’re at the ice-cream store, and you want strawberry, but they’re out of strawberry, so you get vanilla.” When I was in Alaska for the primary, the state director of Americans for Prosperity used a box of props to demonstrate how R.C.V. worked, and drag queens staged a mock election in a coffee shop. After the primary votes came in, a candidate for the state house had to call the department of elections because his campaign couldn’t figure out whether he was still in the race. “It’s trying to improve democracy, and there’s a tremendous amount of academic support for the fact that it does advance democracy,” Gregg Erickson, an Alaska economist who studies ranked-choice voting, told me. “But ranked-choice voting is fiendishly complicated. I’m one of the people who follows this pretty closely, and I’m still really confused.”
Ranked-choice voting aspires to stifle the ascent of extreme candidates by, among other things, holding nonpartisan primaries. “Forcing us to choose between the two parties automatically truncates the choices,” Scott Kendall, one of the lawyers who authored the ballot reform, told me. More than sixty per cent of Alaskans don’t affiliate with any major party, and the state has a long history of electing independent governors and senators through write-in campaigns. “The word ‘primary’ is used as a verb now—as a threat,” Rebecca Braun, a former Alaska policy adviser, told me. “If you have a moderate Republican who is working in a bipartisan way, the Party will say, we’re going to primary you.” Ranked-choice voting, she went on, “allows you to vote for your actual favorite candidate and then hedge your bet.”
Proponents of the practice hope Alaska can be a microcosm for the rest of the country. “We truly have almost no party system,” Kendall told me. “There are only around seven hundred thousand of us in Alaska. Relationships come into play, and the more local you get, the less partisan. A Republican might say, You know what, my kids play basketball with Mary [Peltola’s] kids, or a Democrat might say, I remember when Sarah Palin did x back when she was governor, and I liked that.” As Jason Grenn, the executive director of Alaskans for Better Elections, put it, “Alaska’s like one small town, so a lot of the time it’s the person, not the party.” In an open primary, he added, candidates are incentivized to cross party lines: “Maybe you’ve never knocked on a Republican door before, but guess what, now you have to. You’ve never talked to a liberal in your life, but it’s time.” Larry Persily, a frequent commentator on Alaska politics, told me, “it gives people permission to vote their heart.” For instance: “I don’t like Biden, but I care about fishing.”
Palin, of course, complicated all of this. In a system designed to “fight polarization,” she was a uniquely polarizing candidate for Alaska in 2022, endorsed by Donald Trump and returning to state politics after quitting as governor more than a decade ago. (At a rally in Anchorage, in July, Trump said, “You never know who won in ranked choice. You could be in third place and they announce that you won the election. It’s a total rigged deal.”) The question hanging over the final count was, when the second tally happened, would Begich’s votes combine with Palin’s to give the celebrity Republican a surprise win? Michael Carey, the former editorial-page editor of the Anchorage Daily News, told me that “if Palin had won this election, there would be many people, especially Democrats, who will be telling R.C.V. supporters that we were promised stable, even-handed governments, and here we have one of the most divisive people in Alaska and America. That would be really hard to overcome.” He went on, “it certainly takes unusual circumstances to elect a Democrat in Alaska. It’s very hard to win as a Democrat.” Second-choice votes in the ranked tabulation ultimately cemented Peltola’s lead over Palin.
Peltola’s victory may mean that voters are willing to stick with the system for the time being. When I called the congresswoman-elect after her win on Wednesday night, she was in a conference room at a co-working space, and friends occasionally burst in to hug and congratulate her. It happened to be her forty-ninth birthday. Back in April, Peltola was a virtually unknown salmon advocate, and tribal fish director. “This race showed that Alaskans have an appetite for someone who isn’t partisan, and for campaigns that are positive,” she told me. “I’m optimistic about ranked-choice voting—it certainly made this possible.” She went on, “This also speaks to the risk of labelling people and parties. Alaskans and Americans are, by and large, very middle-of-the-road. We tend to elect people based on the person, not the party.” Though the victory for a Democrat is historic, Peltola seemed to be working with ranked-choice voting’s playbook of downplaying the importance of the party: “Alaskans are, by and large, conservative. I certainly wouldn’t call myself a liberal.”
The Republican Party was, for the most part, deeply opposed to ranked-choice voting, casting it as a crooked progressive plot. And the confusion surrounding it, even if genuine, played into their messaging: as Erickson, the economist, put it, “they say, This just shows how the bureaucracy and the coastal élites are rigging our elections in ways you can’t possibly understand.” Palin had called ranked-choice voting a “convoluted newfangled system” that leaves Alaskans “frustrated, confused, and discouraged” and allows “Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi to lock up the state.” Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, called Peltola’s victory “a scam.” But it’s not just Republicans who are skeptical. “The organized political parties see it as a real threat,” Erickson said. “If you’re a Democratic Party functionary or official, you might hate it.” To some critics, the two-party system is fundamental to American democracy. John Lindback, who, as a former chief of staff to Alaska’s lieutenant governor, once had administrative oversight over the state’s elections, told me, “The ranked-choice people jump in after every controversy and they say, We have the answer for you. Now the cure is, we’re going to bring moderation back to American politics. But there’s absolutely nothing to indicate that will be the case.”
So what does Peltola’s surprise victory mean for the future of ranked-choice voting? Maybe not much—it’ll take several election cycles to measure whether it has any impact on the current dysfunction of U.S. electoral politics. “Ranked choice could decrease polarization, or in trying to find a middle ground it could push people further right or left,” Erickson told me. In November, Alaska will hold more than sixty ranked-choice elections. The test now is whether these lofty-sounding ideas—to court moderates, to build cross-partisan coalitions, to move past fixation on party labels—will play out in practice, or just further demoralize and baffle voters. In the meantime, it certainly adds to the political theatre. “It’s provided a hobby for political pundits and election watchers,” Persily, the political commentator, said. “Now, with the wait for results, the Band-Aid gets pulled off slowly, and you can keep wondering—is the next tug going to reveal something?” He continued, “It’s inside baseball. Most people have more to think about than how many Begich supporters will pick Palin for their second choice. School started and there’s a shortage of bus drivers. Among politicos, a lot of e-mails are going back and forth theorizing which way it’s going to go. The general public is just sort of, like, O.K., let me know when it’s over.” After all, it’s just a four-month term, he said. “And now, the whole thing starts all over again.”
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, R-GA, speaks at the America First Agenda Summit on July 26, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Jabin Botsford/Washington Post)
The request from Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) cited evidence obtained by the committee showing Gingrich was in communication with senior advisers to President Donald Trump, including Jared Kushner and Jason Miller, regarding television advertisements that amplified false claims about fraud in the 2020 election.
“These advertising efforts were not designed to encourage voting for a particular candidate. Instead, these efforts attempted to cast doubt on the outcome of the election after voting had already taken place,” Thompson said in a letter to Gingrich giving notice of the request for an interview. “They encouraged members of the public to contact their state officials and pressure them to challenge and overturn the results of the election. To that end, these advertisements were intentionally aired in the days leading up to December 14, 2020, the day electors from each state met to cast their votes for president and vice president.”
Thompson also wrote that the committee has obtained evidence that suggests Gingrich was involved in the fake elector plot designed to encourage Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress to affect the outcome of the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.
In an email sent on Nov. 12, 2020, Gingrich asked White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone: “Is someone in charge of coordinating all the electors? Evans makes the point that all the contested electors must meet on [D]ecember 14 and send in ballots to force contests which the house would have to settle.”
Gingrich, according to the letter, also continued to press Meadows on the evening of Jan. 6, 2021, after the attack, asking, “[a]re there letters from state legislators about decertifying electors[?]”
Committee investigators spent much of Congress’s August recess interviewing witnesses, chasing new threads that have cropped up throughout the course of the investigation, and tracking down information that has yet to be turned over to the committee and people who have so far refused to cooperate.
Investigators have continued to receive a steady stream of new documents — including a tranche of records from the Secret Service and two years worth of text messages from Alex Jones that were accidentally turned over to the lawyer for plaintiffs suing the conspiracy theorist.
Investigators also have been working to recover missing texts messages from the Secret Service and Defense Department after the committee learned earlier this summer that the two agencies wiped communications from phones of former and current officials who are viewed by the committee as key witnesses for understanding the response to the insurrection. They expect to recover some of the missing information from carriers — like time stamps, recipients and senders of texts and calls, and voice mails, but they are unsure they will be able to obtain the actual content of the communications, according to people familiar with the committee’s work who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal committee conversations.
The committee has been particularly interested in digging deeper into the role the Secret Service played around Jan. 6, amid suspicions about the agency’s transparency with congressional investigators.
“We are going back to all of the relevant people — both motorcades — to dig in on a lot of more detail,” said a person involved with the investigation, referring to testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson about what happened as Trump was leaving the Ellipse after his speech that day. Hutchinson testified under oath that those details were conveyed to her by Anthony Ornato, a Secret Service agent who also served as Trump’s deputy chief of staff.
People involved with the committee’s work say it wasn’t until investigators heard from a “national security” professional working at the White House on the day of the attack, who testified anonymously, that the committee was able to obtain Secret Service radio chatter around Pence’s evacuation from the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Investigators went back to the Secret Service to demand that radio traffic recording even though they had requested it a year ago. The committee is still unsure it has obtained all of the recordings of relevant channels, as there are over two dozen radio channels that the Secret Service communicates on in the Washington area.
This is not the first time investigators have come up against the Trump administration’s poor and improper record-keeping practices, and lawmakers on the panel are still interested in identifying which documents Meadows allegedly burned in his office fireplace, according to testimony from Hutchinson.
Several people familiar with the committee’s work said the panel continues to explore the handling of documents by Meadows. According to these people, there is still information from Hutchinson’s closed-door depositions that has yet to be made public and needs further corroboration.
Last month, Meadows made arrangements to return records to the Archives in the wake of the FBI’s search of Trump’s Florida residence, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive information.
Meadows has been working with the Archives to recover records related to various requests since last year. He was initially engaged with officials from the independent federal agency that preserves government and historical records after they discovered that Trump had inappropriately taken presidential records that belonged to the Archives to Mar-a-Lago, according to the people.
Lawmakers on the committee are pressing for more information related to the testimony from the anonymous national security staffer featured during the eighth hearing — and are interested in tracking the flow of developments at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, recorded by staff on Trump’s National Security Council in a chat log.
While the committee hopes to again interview Ornato and Robert Engel, Trump’s former detail leader, there is concern that the two agents are trying to run out the clock. Testimony from Hutchinson and others placed Ornato and Engel, who have both retained private counsel, at the center of various claims regarding Trump’s actions on Jan. 6.
The committee has also interviewed some of Trump’s Cabinet secretaries — including Mike Pompeo, Steven Mnuchin, Robert O’Brien and Elaine Chao — regarding internal conversations following the insurrection about invoking the 25th Amendment, which provides for the removal of a president on grounds of incapacitation, mental health or physical fitness.
While there was never a vote on the 25th Amendment, the committee wants to show how seriously many Cabinet secretaries took invoking the amendment — and how the threat may have affected Trump’s thinking in the days after Jan. 6.
“The possible invocation of the 25th Amendment is important because it bolsters the case about just how wrong Trump’s behavior was and is an important part of lawmakers’ continued campaign to educate the American people about his wrongdoing,” said former House impeachment co-counsel Norman Eisen.
While the committee’s work so far was largely linear and followed a chronological timeline, it is now likely to take on disparate topics.
With Republicans positioned to possibly take back the House in November, lawmakers on the panel had at one point been figuring out when the last possible moment is to get the report to the government printing office to make sure it is entered into the Congressional Record by Jan. 3, 2023.
“We are not going to close down the committee until the final day,” one aide said.
The report will likely be written in chapters, and lawmakers are expected to be charged with overseeing various sections. The committee was ultimately unable to agree on a third-party writer to draft the report, in part due to concerns about partisan perceptions.
Christian Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union, speaks at a rally outside an Amazon facility on Staten Island in New York, Sunday, April 24, 2022. (photo: Seth Wenig/AP)
After workers in Staten Island, N.Y., voted to join the Amazon Labor Union this spring, the company appealed the result. A federal labor official presided over weeks of hearings on the case and is now recommending that Amazon's objections be rejected in their entirety and that the union should be certified.
"Today is a great day for Labor," tweeted ALU president Chris Smalls, who launched the union after Amazon fired him from the Staten Island warehouse following his participation in a pandemic-era walkout.
The case has attracted a lot of attention as it weighs the fate of the first – and so far only – successful union push at an Amazon warehouse in the U.S. It's also large-scale, organizing more than 8,000 workers at the massive facility.
Workers in Staten Island voted in favor of unionizing by more than 500 votes, delivering a breakthrough victory to an upstart grassroots group known as the Amazon Labor Union. The group is run by current and former workers of the warehouse, known as JFK8.
The union now has its sights on another New York warehouse: Workers at an Amazon facility near Albany have gathered enough signatures to petition the National Labor Relations Board for their own election.
However, Amazon has objected to the union's victory, accusing the NLRB's regional office in Brooklyn – which oversaw the election – of acting in favor of the Amazon Labor Union. Amazon also accused the ALU of coercing and misleading warehouse workers.
"As we showed throughout the hearing with dozens of witnesses and hundreds of pages of documents, both the NLRB and the ALU improperly influenced the outcome of the election and we don't believe it represents what the majority of our team wants," Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement on Thursday, saying the company would appeal the hearing officer's conclusion.
The officer's report serves as a recommendation for a formal decision by the National Labor Relations Board, which does not have to follow the recommendation, though typically does. Amazon has until Sept. 16 to file its objections. If the company fails to sway the NLRB, the agency will require the company to begin negotiations with the union.
At stake in all this is future path of labor organizing at Amazon, where unions have long struggled for a foothold, while its sprawling web of warehouses has ballooned the company into America's second-largest private employer.
In the spring, two previous elections failed to form unions at two other Amazon warehouses. Workers at another, smaller Staten Island warehouse voted against joining the ALU.
And in Alabama, workers held a new vote after U.S. labor officials found Amazon unfairly influenced the original election in 2021, but new election results remain contested.
In that Alabama vote, the NLRB has yet to rule on ballots contested by both the union and Amazon, which could sway the results of the election. The agency is also weighing accusations of unfair labor practices by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union that's trying to organize Alabama warehouse workers.
Multiple climate activists groups, including Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion, marched from several locations in central London to Parliament Square to demand the UK government to stop investing on new fossil fuel to tackle climate changes. (photo: Getty)
The reason, say the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), is that the governments of major economies scrambled to help their residents in the wake of soaring energy costs.
“Fossil fuel subsidies are a roadblock to a more sustainable future, but the difficulty that governments face in removing them is underscored at times of high and volatile fuel prices,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement. “A surge in investment in clean energy technologies and infrastructure is the only lasting solution to today’s global energy crisis and the best way to reduce the exposure of consumers to high fuel costs.”
The new analysis, from OECD and IEA, looked at 51 major economies including the OECD and G20 countries, as well as 33 other countries that both produce and consume a significant amount of energy. The analysis covered approximately 85 percent of the world’s total energy supply. In these countries, fossil-fuel subsidies rose from $362.4 billion in 2020 to $697.2 billion in 2021. The subsidies are expected to rise even further in 2022 because energy prices and consumption are both rising too.
In 2021, fuel prices increased as the world recovered from the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, The Guardian reported. This led governments to try and use subsidies to reduce consumer prices. However, these subsidies don’t necessarily benefit people struggling the most, since wealthy households tend to burn more energy.
The analysis does not yet cover 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine and drove oil and gas prices even higher.
“Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has caused sharp increases in energy prices and undermined energy security. Significant increases in fossil fuel subsidies encourage wasteful consumption though, while not necessarily reaching low-income households,” OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann said in the statement. “We need to adopt measures which protect consumers from the extreme impacts of shifting market and geopolitical forces in a way that helps keep us on track to carbon neutrality as well as energy security and affordability.”
The current energy crisis has revealed the volatility of relying on fossil-fuels for energy. In the UK, households face an 80 percent increase in the price cap for home energy this October, an increase that could have deadly consequences. However, a Carbon Brief analysis written in July said that new wind energy paid for by auction in the UK was nine times cheaper than gas.
Environmental groups argue that countries should not respond to the current crisis by doubling down on fossil fuel subsidies.
“A period of soaring fossil fuel energy prices, when oil and gas companies are posting record-breaking profits, should be the ideal time for governments to eliminate fossil fuel production subsidies – so to see rising government support for fossil fuels now is infuriating,” Gyorgy Dallos of Greenpeace International said, as The Guardian reported. “Governments need to stick to their green pledges. On the consumer side, they urgently need to replace untargeted support measures with targeted income support to people experiencing fuel poverty.”
The analysis was based on two datasets. The OECD dataset focused on tax breaks and budget transfers for fossil-fuel production in G20 countries, according to the statement. It found that, between 2020 and 2021,
- Overall support rose from $147 billion to $190 billion
- Consumer support rose from $93 billion to $115 billion
- Producer support “reached levels not previously seen in OECD tracking efforts” and climate to $64 billion.
The IEA dataset looked at consumer subsidies by comparing international market energy prices to domestic consumer prices in 42 countries. It concluded that consumer support had risen by a factor of more than three from 2020 levels to $531 billion in 2021.
“The OECD and IEA have consistently called for the phasing out of inefficient fossil fuel support and re-direction of public funding toward the development of low-carbon alternatives alongside improvements in energy security and energy efficiency,” the two organizations concluded.
G20 countries have pledged to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies and the G7 countries pledged to end most of these subsidies by 2025, according to The Guardian. However, the recent IEA and OECD analysis suggests that they are not on track to do so.
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