RSN: David A. Graham | Trump Can't Hide From the Mar-a-Lago Photo
01 September 22
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The Department of Justice keeps outsmarting the former president in its efforts to recover the government’s classified materials.
The Department of Justice now finds itself in just such a can’t-miss scenario in its legal battle with Donald Trump over documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago. Given the delicate political calculation, any error could strengthen the former president, weaken the rule of law, and imperil the Constitution. But so far, the federal government has been a step ahead of Trump at every turn.
The latest demonstration came in a filing late last night, in which prosecutors dramatically swept away the most recent excuses from Trump and his allies, who have insisted that the former president cooperated with the government and acted in good faith. The filing provides evidence that Trump and his team not only didn’t hand over all classified materials, but actively sought to conceal them by misleading the FBI. And a striking photograph, showing cover sheets with bold red block letters reading TOP SECRET // SCI, preempts any claim that Trump might simply not have realized the documents were classified.
This has been the pattern of the story of Trump’s mishandling of presidential records from the start. In January, the National Archives and Records Administration retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago. By February, NARA had already told DOJ about classified documents, according to a letter from the agency’s head to Representative Carolyn Maloney. Although a lawyer for Trump requested that NARA not disclose the contents of the boxes to the FBI, government lawyers were already a step ahead, pointing out that “there are important national security interests in the FBI and others in the Intelligence Community getting access to these materials … Some include the highest levels of classification, including Special Access Program (SAP) materials.”
Meanwhile, DOJ had concluded that the 15 boxes were not all of the documents Trump had improperly removed. In early May, prosecutors subpoenaed Trump to turn over documents. This was an important milestone in the investigation, because Trump has claimed that he would have been happy to hand over any documents: “They could have had it anytime they wanted—and that includes LONG ago. ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK,” he wrote on his struggling website Truth Social.
In fact, they did ask—and with the force of law behind the request. A representative for Trump swore that the president’s aides had performed “a diligent search” of the boxes removed from the White House and produced all documents covered by the subpoena. The representative also said that all of the relevant documents had been stored in one particular room.
Neither of these claims was true. The Justice Department obtained evidence that suggested that Trump had not turned over all the documents, and that other ones were stored in other locations at Mar-a-Lago. Using that information, DOJ asked a judge to approve a search warrant, and on August 8, FBI agents arrived at the club and seized more documents, including some stored in desks in Trump’s office there.
Using the dry language of legal filings, DOJ’s filing yesterday effectively calls Trump’s aides a passel of bald-faced liars: “That the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former President’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.”
Since the search, Trump has cycled through a series of excuses. First, he insisted that the search was politically motivated and questioned whether there were really serious classified materials present, but then filings showed there were.
He claimed to have cooperated with the government, but filings show that he repeatedly did not. His defenders have complained about the FBI search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, noting that the agency never raided Hillary Clinton during its investigation of her mishandling of classified info, but the difference is that Clinton cooperated with a subpoena.
Trump has also claimed that he had declassified the relevant documents by standing order or said they are subject to executive privilege, but DOJ was once again a step ahead, pointing out that when they handed the documents over on June 3, “neither counsel nor the custodian asserted that the former President had declassified the documents or asserted any claim of executive privilege.” (Beyond that, DOJ argues that Trump can’t invoke executive privilege to prevent circulation of documents within the executive branch.)
The Justice Department’s success so far doesn’t guarantee future success, and it doesn’t offer any definitive signs about whether prosecutors might charge Trump with crimes or whether they will be content to have recovered documents.
But the government’s ability to firmly and consistently turn away Trump’s defenses explains why so many of his regular defenders have tried to remain on the sidelines. It is not that they are abandoning him; it’s that they would prefer to wait rather than adopt talking points that might be made ridiculous by the next filing in the case. (Trump, who has no shame, has no such hesitations.)
But the photograph of the classified materials is prosecutors’ deftest maneuver thus far. The image is attached as the final exhibit and 54th page in a 54-page filing, but it might as well be the front cover of the filing. Trump has long grasped the power of a striking visual to make an impression, and were he not on the receiving end, he might even appreciate the artfulness. Not only has the Justice Department been prepared for Trump at each turn so far, but it has even coopted his methods.
Head of GCHQ rebuffed late-night request from National Security Agency amid strained relations in Five Eyes intelligence coalition. (photo: Laura Poitras/AP)
Head of GCHQ rebuffed late-night request from National Security Agency amid strained relations in Five Eyes intelligence coalition
Sir Iain Lobban, the head of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), was reportedly called with the request in the early hours of 6 June 2013 but rebuffed the suggestion that his agency should act as a censor on behalf of its US partner in electronic spying.
The late-night call and the British refusal to shut down publication of the leaks was the first of several episodes in which the Snowden affair caused rifts within the Five Eyes signals intelligence coalition, recounted in a new book to be published on Thursday, The Secret History of Five Eyes, by film-maker and investigative journalist Richard Kerbaj.
According to Kerbaj, Lobban was aware of the importance of the particularly special relationship between the US and UK intelligence agencies but thought “the proposition of urging a newspaper to spike the article for the sake of the NSA seemed a step too far”.
“It was neither the purpose of his agency nor his own to deal with the NSA’s public relations,” Kerbaj writes.
In October 2013, the then prime minister, David Cameron, later threatened the use of injunctions or other “tougher measures” to stop further publication of Snowden’s leaks about the mass collection of phone and internet communications by the NSA and GCHQ. However, the DA-Notice committee, the body which alerts the UK media to the potential damage a story might cause to national security, told the Guardian at the time that nothing it had published had put British lives at risk.
In the new book, Kerbaj reports that the US-UK intelligence relationship was further strained when the head of the NSA, Gen Keith Alexander, failed to inform Lobban that the Americans had identified Snowden, a Hawaii-based government contractor, as the source of the stories, leaving the British agency investigating its own ranks in the search for the leaker. GCHQ did not discover Snowden’s identity until he went public in a Guardian interview.
‘It was a chilling reminder of how important you are, or how important you’re not,” a senior British intelligence insider is quoted as saying in the book.
The material leaked by Snowden also included secret documents from the Canadian, Australian and New Zealand signals intelligence agencies, the other Five Eyes members. They all shared information with the NSA through a shared database. Their embarrassment was heightened by revelations that they had spied on allies and partners in the G20.
The Five Eyes allies were outraged that a contractor like Snowden, working as a computer systems administrator, could get access to their secrets, and that because of US government outsourcing, there were 1.5 million Americans with top security clearance like Snowden.
However, when Five Eyes officials met in Australia in the summer of 2013, only the British representatives openly questioned US practices. The other allies were not prepared to challenge the Americans out of anxiety that they could be cut off from the flow of intelligence.
British officials also decided to bite their tongues when it came to frustration with their US counterparts, because of the value of the intelligence and funding provided by the NSA. Sir Kim Darroch, the former UK national security adviser, is quoted in the book as saying: “The US give us more than we give them so we just have to basically get on with it.”
Darroch and Lobban were approached for comment.
Democrat Mary Peltola is projected to win the Alaska special general election for the state’s sole House seat, ABC News reports. (photo: AP)
The results come more than two weeks after the state used ranked-choice voting to determine which candidate will finish out the term of GOP Rep. Don Young, who died in March.
Peltola, who is the executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, served 10 years in the state Legislature and campaigned as “Alaska’s best shot at keeping an extremist from winning.”
“It is a GOOD DAY,” Peltola tweeted following the election results. “We’ve won tonight, but we’re still going to have to hold this seat in November.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., lauded Peltola for “making history as the first Alaska Native ever elected to the Congress.”
“Her valuable and unifying perspective, deep experience in public service and commitment to working families will strengthen the work of our Caucus and the Congress,” Pelosi said in a statement.
Peltola finished fourth in a crowded nonpartisan primary in June, when 48 candidates battled to secure one of the four spots on the Aug. 16 special election ballot. But heading into Wednesday’s final tabulation, Peltola was leading the pack.
The special election was the state's first test of ranked-choice voting, which was implemented after a 2020 ballot measure. The same system will be used in November.
With 93% of votes counted in the ranked-choice results Wednesday night, Peltola had 51.5% of the vote to Palin's 48.5%.
Voters cast their ballots more than two weeks ago to determine who will serve out the final four months of Rep. Don Young's term after he died in March at age 88. The longtime GOP lawmaker represented Alaska for almost 50 years in Congress.
No candidate won more than 50% of the vote in the Aug. 16 election, which triggered runoffs under the new system, in which voters ranked the candidates in order of preference.
Based on the ranked-choice system, the last-place candidate is eliminated, and votes are redistributed to the remaining candidates according to voters’ ranked preferences. The rounds continue until one of two remaining candidates with the most votes wins.
The elimination process didn't start until Wednesday, the last day elections officials could receive absentee ballots.
Palin, the GOP's vice presidential candidate in 2008, will have another chance at reviving her political comeback. She will compete against Peltola and Begich again in November to determine who will serve a full two-year term in the House. The three candidates received the most votes in the primary; the fourth qualifying candidate, independent Al Gross, later dropped out of the race.
Following her loss, Palin called ranked-choice voting a "mistake" for Alaska, a state where then-President Donald Trump beat Joe Biden by 10 percentage points in the 2020 election.
“Ranked-choice voting was sold as the way to make elections better reflect the will of the people. As Alaska — and America — now sees, the exact opposite is true," she said in a statement. “Though we’re disappointed in this outcome, Alaskans know I’m the last one who’ll ever retreat. Instead, I’m going to reload."
Begich on Wednesday congratulated Peltola and went after Palin, saying she "cannot win a statewide race because her unfavorable rating is so high."
"The biggest lesson as we move into the 2022 General Election, is that ranked choice voting showed that a vote for Sarah Palin is in reality a vote for Mary Peltola. Palin simply doesn’t have enough support from Alaskans to win an election," Begich said in a statement. "As we look forward to the November election, I will work hard to earn the vote of Alaskans all across the state.”
Environmental monitors from Yamino, Peru, walk through a coca field outside their village. (photo: Angela Ponce/The Washington Post)
The man, who had shown up unannounced in this remote Indigenous village speaking Spanish with a Colombian accent and calling himself “Fernando,” was proposing to pay Odicio $127,000 for each planeload of cocaine paste that took off from his community’s land.
In return, Odicio, the elected leader of the Cacataibo people, would stop complaining to authorities about the drug traffickers destroying the rainforest to make way for coca fields, processing labs and airstrips.
The money would be transformative. Many of the estimated 4,000 Cacataibo, tucked out of the world’s view here in the lush Peruvian Amazon, live without electricity or running water. They get by largely on subsistence farming, hunting and fishing.
Still, Odicio turned it down.
“I couldn’t sleep after that, but I couldn’t betray my people,” he says. “I couldn’t have lived with myself. No good will come to us from narcotrafficking.”
For the 36-year-old leader of the Native Federation of Cacataibo Communities, rejecting the offer in September 2020 was the beginning of a nightmare that continues to this day. Graphic death threats by phone, text, social media and, worst of all, passed on by his neighbors, led him to take his family into hiding. He now returns to Yamino only occasionally and is poised to give up his leadership role among the Cacataibo.
His fears are well founded. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, an estimated 20 Indigenous leaders — four of them Cacataibo — have been killed in this frequently lawless territory, many by hit men believed to have been hired by narcotraffickers or associated loggers, as the cultivation of coca spreads from the Andean foothills to the Amazonian lowlands.
“If we continue like this, with the advance of narcotrafficking, this region will become a second VRAEM,” says Angel Gutiérrez, the interim governor of Ucayali, referring to Peru’s principal coca-growing zone. The VRAEM — the Valley of the Apurímac, Ene and Mantaro rivers — produces as much of the leaf as Bolivia.
The reasons for the spread are complex. Ricardo Soberón, head of the national counternarcotics agency Devida, cites rising demand and the slowdown of trade through Peru’s Pacific ports during the pandemic. That made the migration of cultivation eastward, closer to the Colombian, Brazilian and Bolivian borders, a logical alternative.
Soberón believes another factor might be an increased police and military presence in the VRAEM. The hilly, forested terrain is also the hideout of the last remnants of the Shining Path, who focus more now on providing protection for the narcos than Maoist revolution. The group’s leader, Víctor Quispe Palomino, known as Comrade José, was wounded in clashes with security forces this month but remains at large in the valley.
Yet clamping down on cultivation in one part of the Peruvian Amazon, a frontier zone twice the size of California, often just causes it to surge in new areas in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Critics warn there can be no solution without addressing the fundamental economics — including demand in the world’s largest market for cocaine: the United States.
With three harvests a year, each typically yielding $700 to $1,400 per hectare before labor, pesticides and other costs, coca is far more profitable than other Amazonian crops, even with the risks associated with the illicit trade.
The encroachment of cultivation on Yamino and similar communities has piled further pressure on the region’s Indigenous groups, who were already struggling with inequality, acculturation and the loss of languages. The narcotraffickers’ bloodletting is the latest assault on the Indigenous groups’ unique cultures, which developed over millennia in the rainforest but have been under assault since the rubber boom kicked off in the 19th century, including massacres by the Shining Path in the 1980s and 1990s and rampant illegal logging more recently.
Many Indigenous communities here in Ucayali are now hemmed in by coca fields, their leaders’ lives under threat. The Washington Post, accompanied by volunteer monitors from Yamino, saw several coca plantations, and the toxic remains of processing labs, a short bushwhack from Odicio’s village.
In Brazil, the main driver of deforestation is beef. In Peru, it’s believed to be coca. The country is the world’s second-largest source of the plant, whose leaf is the key ingredient in cocaine, after Colombia.
Cultivation in Ucayali jumped from 1,734 hectares in 2019 to 10,229 hectares in 2021, according to Devida. Meanwhile, the regional government’s forestry agency has spotted 57 clandestine airstrips carved into the rainforest.
Given prohibition, global demand and the comparatively low returns for cacao, coffee and other legal crops, Soberón says, that growth has been inevitable — as has been the narcoviolence that has come with it.
“What has happened to Herlin is directly connected to the international price of coffee,” he says. “That price should be factoring in cocaine avoided, carbon sequestered and Indigenous people still alive.”
In theory, threatened defenders of the Peruvian Amazon are protected by formal guarantees of safety from the Peruvian state. But Odicio says those guarantees aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Police visit Yamino about once a year, he says, and have not assigned armed officers to protect him.
“We can’t go to the police or prosecutors because they act so slowly anyway,” he says. “And before they do, word gets out that we have tipped them off. We’re completely on our own.”
Gutiérrez, the interim governor — he was appointed after the elected governor was detained in December for alleged graft — acknowledges the problem.
“Corruption is institutionalized at every level in Peru,” he says. “That’s the sad reality. It’s why citizens don’t trust their authorities.”
He also notes a lack of resources: The Ucayali police have just a handful of pickup trucks and speedboats to cover 40,000 square miles of jungle.
“The solution cannot be to just eradicate, eradicate, eradicate,” he says. “Without economic development, it’s going to be very difficult.”
President Pedro Castillo, a populist leftist whose base is the rural poor, including coca growers and Indigenous peoples, has been notably absent on the subject.
The neophyte leader, the target of five separate graft investigations and barely hanging on to power after a calamitous first year, met with Indigenous leaders in June but made no commitments.
One of those leaders — Berlin Diques, the head of ORAU, the principal Indigenous federation in Ucayali — is scathing. “It was uplifting when Castillo was elected,” he says. “People felt there was finally a president who would help us. But he’s broken every single promise. He’s just the same as all the others.”
The Interior Ministry, which has been led by seven different ministers since Castillo took office in July 2021, did not respond to requests for comment. A Justice Ministry spokesman agreed there was a need to provide more support to threatened Indigenous leaders but said the government was working to “visibilize” the issue.
Yamino’s monitors spend half their time patrolling the village’s 112 square miles of communally shared forest using a drone provided by the environment ministry. They also tell the coca growers — often landless migrants escaping grinding poverty in the Andes — that they must leave. Some growers are amicable, monitors say, but others threaten them with machetes and rusty shotguns.
“They know perfectly well they’re on our land,” says César López, 36. “But they can be quite stubborn. Some of them even ask what we’re doing here.”
The monitors are careful to avoid the armed men who guard the fields on behalf of the Peruvian, Colombian and Brazilian gangs who buy the coca. From there, it’s processed and shipped north to the United States and elsewhere. It’s legal to grow coca in Peru, but only for domestic use — principally, the chewing of dried leaves as a mild stimulant. But the crop now greatly exceeds domestic consumption.
At night, strange explosions have shaken the rainforest around Yamino, an effort to intimidate the community, locals say. In the neighboring village of Mariscal Cáceres, they say, armed strangers have halted traffic on the main road in recent weeks to ask the whereabouts of Cacataibo leaders and, on one occasion, pistol-whip a villager.
Traffickers are also now operating in a 580-square-mile reserve for the last remaining uncontacted Cacataibo, according to the Ucayali forestry service, which has conducted overflights. The reserve was created last year after a two-decade campaign, but is now marred by coca fields and two airstrips.
The reserve is the starting point of a corridor inhabited by some of the last tribes on Earth still living in isolation. It runs 300 miles northeast to the Javari, the Brazilian reserve where journalist Dom Phillips, a former Washington Post contributor, and Indigenous advocate Bruno Pereira, were killed in June.
“We can defend our own land, up to a point, but we can’t go in there to defend our uncontacted brothers,” said Ucaremachi, a Yamino villager. “They’re the most vulnerable, even more than us, but if we tried to help them, it would be a bloodbath.”
Soberón, the Devida chief, admires the goal of Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s new leftist president. Petro wants to start an international discussion on ending the U.S.-backed war on drugs by decriminalizing and regulating cocaine. But given opposition to that approach from Washington and elsewhere, Soberón says, it’s a “little bit utopian.”
In the meantime, Devida is promoting premium coffee and cacao, which earn more than most alternatives to coca. But here, Soberón warns that demands in North America and Europe for traceability and certification for these fair-trade and organic products are financially impossible for Peruvian small farmers — pushing them back toward coca.
As for Odicio, and other threatened Indigenous leaders in the rainforest, that policy debate is the least of their worries. “My family could be killed,” he says. “It’s a constant anxiety. They could show up at any time. You just don’t know.”
Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate.(photo: Steve Helber/AP)
Christina Bobb and Evan Corcoran face scrutiny over their communications with the justice department, legal experts say
The lawyers – Christina Bobb and Evan Corcoran – face becoming ensnared in the investigation because they liaised with the justice department during the government’s months-long effort to retrieve boxes of presidential records and classified documents from Trump’s Florida home.
At issue is an interaction that took place on 3 June in which, according to a court filing submitted by the justice department in a separate but related case on Tuesday, the two lawyers made representations that they had complied with a grand jury subpoena that subsequently proved to be false.
That day, the justice department’s chief of counterintelligence, Jay Bratt, and three FBI agents travelled to Mar-a-Lago to collect the documents that had been subpoenaed, the filing said, and Bobb and Corcoran turned over a taped, Redweld envelope of classified materials.
But before Bratt departed, Bobb produced and signed a letter certifying that all and any documents responsive to the subpoena were being turned over, while Corcoran indicated that the records the government had sought were confined to one storage room, the filing said.
The trouble for the two Trump lawyers is that the justice department then developed evidence through multiple sources that additional presidential and classified documents remained at Mar-a-Lago – which proved to be the case when the FBI searched the property two months later.
In its own filing Wednesday night, Trump’s lawyers decried the search as having taken place in “the midst of the standard give-and-take” between a former president and the National Archives and Records Administration over presidential records. It said the department had “gratuitously” made public certain information, including a photograph of classified documents taken from the home.
According to the search warrant and court filings, the justice department is investigating among other crimes whether there was potential obstruction of justice with respect to how Trump and his lawyers have seemingly been resistant to return documents belonging to the government.
The justice department’s account of the 3 June episode – what it has described as a “likely” effort to conceal presidential and classified documents sought by the government – raises the prospect that both Bobb and Corcoran could become witnesses in the obstruction investigation.
But the case, and how the justice department might approach the issue, remains complex.
The question for federal prosecutors becomes whether the two Trump lawyers willfully misled the justice department so that Trump could keep the documents, or whether the lawyers made the representations because they themselves were misled by Trump.
To establish the exact circumstances surrounding Bobb’s confidence in signing the certification, and Corcoran’s confidence in his statements, legal experts said, the justice department would probably have to move to subpoena both of the lawyers for communications and testimony.
Such a step would immediately run into an issue about attorney-client privilege, since the kind of information the justice department would be trying to extract for a potential obstruction case targeting Trump would be protected communications between Trump and his lawyers.
The privilege exists to protect the rights of defendants who might have committed an offense, since they need to be able to speak candidly with their lawyers about what happened without the fear that prosecutors could use their discussions against them at a trial.
The protection can be removed through the so-called crime-fraud exception. But even if there were a crime-fraud exception in Trump’s case, his lawyers could still invoke their fifth amendment right against self-incrimination if they had knowingly misled the government on his behalf.
Ultimately, the issue for the justice department is whether the attorney general, Merrick Garland, gives his approval to move ahead with an extraordinary prosecution for obstruction against the former president, and whether Garland does so against his lawyers.
If Garland chooses to take that step, federal prosecutors would probably move to find ways to compel Bobb and Corcoran’s testimony to reveal whether Trump obstructed the return of presidential records and classified materials, the legal experts suggested.
If Garland decides against pursuing an obstruction indictment, then, even though justice department investigators might seek testimony from Bobb and Corcoran anyway, they are unlikely to secure meaningful information unless it also litigates the privilege issues in court.
People close to the former president’s top lawyers broadly did not appear to believe either Bobb or Corcoran would be compelled to testify against Trump and remove themselves from the legal team. And as of Wednesday, neither had retained their own counsel, one of the people said.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty)
Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani was sentenced to 45 years in prison "apparently for simply tweeting her opinions," Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) announced on Tuesday.
The Saudi Specialized Criminal Court convicted al-Qahtani of "using the Internet to tear the [country's] social fabric" and "violating the public order by using social media" under the country's Counter-Terrorism Law and Anti-Cyber Crime Law, according to DAWN.
The group said it's investigating al-Qahtani's case but not much is known about what her posts said, other than that she criticized Saudi leaders.
al-Qahtani's sentence comes weeks after the Saudi government sentenced Salma al-Shehab, a 34-year-old mother and women's rights activist, to 34 years in prison for her tweets.
"In both the al-Shebab and al-Qahtani cases, Saudi authorities have used abusive laws to target and punish Saudi citizens for criticizing the government on Twitter," Abdullah Alaoudh, Director of Research for the Gulf Region at DAWN, said.
The group said the back-to-back sentences "shows how emboldened Saudi authorities feel to punish even the mildest criticism from its citizens."
The Saudi Specialized Criminal Court was originally made in 2008 to oversee terrorism and security issues in the country but, since then, "routinely targets minorities and dissenters," according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Cleared land on Fernandez Leon's Property. (photo: Rafael Vilela/The Washington Post)
Deforesters are plundering the Amazon. Brazil is letting them get away with it.
“This is it,” said Valle, 39, pulling off the highway. A roving state environmental inspector, he traveled throughout this remote land that was increasingly under threat from a wave of destruction that had leveled the forests to the east. His job was to slow its advance. The challenge felt futile most days. But especially today.
His crew was in southern Acre, where the federal government under President Jair Bolsonaro — a longtime critic of environmental regulation — no longer staffed a single inspector. That meant his state agency, the Acre Environmental Institute, now bore the burden of enforcing environmental law in this area of more than 3,600 square miles along the border with Bolivia.
Valle pulled out his target list. The map showed 16 points of illegal devastation — pinpricks of red piercing an expanse of green and brown.
He sighed. This was enough work for two weeks. Not the two days they’d been given.
“We don’t have enough people,” Valle said.
This mismatch — too few inspectors for too much deforestation — is one of a cascading series of shortfalls and failures that are enabling criminals to raze the world’s largest rainforest with impunity. Law enforcement misses the majority of deforestation in the Amazon. The fines that the few state and federal inspectors here write are seldom paid. The occasional cases that spill into the criminal justice system languish for years. And in the rare instance of a criminal conviction, it almost never draws a prison sentence, The Washington Post found in a review of a year’s worth of cases.
The violent and lawless erasure of the Amazon is perhaps the world’s greatest environmental crime story. Scientists warn that the forest, seen as vital to averting catastrophic global warming, is at a tipping point. But in Brazil, home to about 60 percent of the Amazon, nearly one-fifth has already been destroyed. And virtually no one, law enforcement officials say, has been held accountable.
“No one goes to jail,” said Luciano Evaristo, former chief inspection officer of Ibama, the federal environmental law enforcement agency. “For example, in 2016, we took apart a large deforestation ring in the south of Pará state. They deforested 50 square miles. There were 23 arrests. In the end, no one’s in jail. And this was the biggest deforestation ring in Brazil.”
Environmental agencies have similarly struggled to punish even those accused of only minor deforestation — such as the man the inspection team was driving to visit. At the end of the path, they found rancher Francisco Nonato de Souza coming out of his house. They accused him of illegally deforesting 45 acres and handed him a $17,000 fine.
Nonato glowered. He looked at the crew’s heavily armed police escort.
“You come out here for this bit of deforestation but do nothing about the guys who deforest 120 or 150 acres?” he said. “Those guys over there” — his chin jutting into the distance — “they knocked it all down. Burned it. Planted grass. Nothing happened to them.”
Valle defended their work. Nonato was the first on their list in southern Acre. But they still had 15 cases to investigate.
The rancher was unmoved.
“They knock it all down,” he said. “And nothing happens.”
Valle didn’t reply; he knew environmental authorities were about to fall even further behind. His was the only inspection team that traveled throughout the state. The year was shaping up to be perfect for deforestation: hot and dry. And the last agent to perform inspections from the south Acre field office, disillusioned by the mission and tired of the risks it entailed, had just announced he was quitting. So when tomorrow came, and Valle’s crew departed for another part of the state, they’d be leaving the forest here defenseless.
More than 3,600 square miles. And no one to enforce the environmental law.
Brazil had once promised something different. Rising from the yoke of a military dictatorship that had promoted rapacious development of the Amazon, the country vowed a radical new approach to the environment. The 1988 constitution described the environment as “essential” and called upon the government and civil society to safeguard it. Soon came official plans to crack down on deforesters, and the law enforcement agencies to do it.
The tools: Fines that could soar into the millions. Land-use embargoes that prohibited the commercial use of illegally deforested or degraded land. Criminal charges that could put deforesters in prison.
“A revolution” is how former environment minister Marina Silva described it in an interview.
But in the decades since, law enforcement officials say, nearly every tool has been dulled to the point of ineffectiveness, snagged by bureaucracy, case overloads and a grinding appellate system that has long stymied the country’s criminal justice system. The atrophy has deprived Brazil of what should be its most potent weapons against deforestation: credible regulations and the threat of consequences for those who violate them.
“It’s the economic theory of crime,” said Jair Schmidt, a government environmental analyst who studies law enforcement failings. “Will you make more money from deforestation than you stand to lose if you are cited for an infraction?”
In the beginning, the answer was unclear. Ibama, the country’s chief environmental enforcement agency, was founded in 1989 and professionalized with a civil service exam in 2002. It would be years before it was writing more than 10,000 citations a year. Then years more before deforesters knew how seriously to take them. Between 2004 and 2012, according to government data, deforestation fell 83 percent.
But there was a hidden flaw: As the number of citations rose, the number of people charged with adjudicating them didn’t. The backlog swelled. Thousands of cases languished, some for as long as 15 years. At least 28,100 fines issued since 2000 have expired, government records show, because of the statute of limitations. Between 10 and 15 percent of fines are paid. But they are the smallest ones, law enforcement officials say, for the pettiest abuses. Less than 1 percent of the money owed for environmental abuse is generally paid, according to government audits.
“Infractions aren’t generating the dissuasive effect that they should have,” Ibama officials reported this year in an internal technical note obtained by The Post. “Offenders think it’s worth it to continue with their undue use of natural resources and that the risk of timely punishment is low.”
Ibama didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In the federal criminal justice system, which adjudicates more-serious allegations of environmental abuse, the risk of punishment is just as slight.
The Post examined all 764 criminal cases filed in 2016 by federal attorneys in the Amazon.
Six years later, more than half were still pending.
Only 125 cases — 16 percent of the total — had resulted in a conviction. Some of those convictions were subsequently dismissed for exceeding the statute of limitations; others drew sentences of community service or a fine. The Post was not able to find one prison sentence.
“What you saw in your analysis is what we see every day,” said Daniel Azeredo, a federal attorney who has led some of the government’s largest prosecutions of accused deforesters. “We don’t have people in prison for environmental crimes. What we do have is a trade. We are trading massive areas of the Amazon for very small punitive penalties.”
Offenders enjoy several advantages in the court system. Crimes of deforestation are limited to maximum sentences of four years. The appellate system effectively freezes cases. And the legal resources at the command of deforesters are enormous — many hire expensive defense attorneys now specialized in environmental law.
Prosecutors named grocery store owner Ezequiel Antônio Castanha the “Amazon’s biggest deforester” in 2014 and won a conviction in 2019. But Castanha was not sent to prison. (Prosecutors are appealing. Castanha declined to comment.) Federal attorneys called São Paulo businessman A.J. Vilela the same thing in 2016. But his case is still pending. (Vilela didn’t respond to requests for comment. He has denied any wrongdoing.) José Lopes, one of the Amazon’s biggest farmers, was accused by federal attorneys in 2019 of forming a militia to invade public lands and conduct “large-scale deforestation,” but never convicted. (Lopes contested the charges. Citing a lack of evidence, prosecutors have requested a dismissal.)
In the Amazon, nearly 95,000 people were incarcerated as of December. But only one-tenth of 1 percent of them were being held for an environmental crime, according to the National Prison Department. There isn’t a state in the Brazilian Amazon that doesn’t face illegal deforestation, but in some, not one person was incarcerated for environmental abuse.
One such state was Acre, where a state environmental agent named Marcel Pedralino had decided to call it quits.
At the field office of the Acre Environmental Institute, the requests had been piling up for weeks. One was from a local judge, asking for verification that a ranch was respecting a land embargo. Another came from a judicial official wanting a deforestation investigation on 45 remote acres. And in the back of the sleepy office, one more request now sat on Pedralino’s desk.
Pedralino, the last person in the office who investigated such infractions, squinted at the page. “Damage to the forest,” a colleague had written. “Uncontrolled fire.”
He looked around. Shuffled some files.
“Where is that stack of papers?” Pedralino asked.
He opened the cupboard behind him and pulled out a beige envelope. It was stuffed with all the complaints of deforestation that had never been investigated. There were dozens: “They burned all of the vegetation protecting the creek,” one reported. “Seventy acres already destroyed by fire,” another said. “Illegal extraction of wood,” added a third.
Pedralino put the additional report on the top. He closed the folder and placed it back in the filing cabinet.
He was done. His paperwork was signed, delivered and approved. He no longer worked here. He now was employed by the state sanitation service, a prospect he found far more enticing than defending the Amazon. No one gets killed tinkering with sewer systems.
“I’m no martyr,” he said. He wasn’t even an environmentalist. He of all people, he believed, didn’t deserve to go down like the cop ambushed and killed in 2016 after an environmental bust in Pará state. Or the government worker shot dead in 2019 while investigating illegal fishing in Amazonas. He didn’t want to be attacked like the Ibama agents who came under fire in 2020 in Roraima state and to not have a way to respond. The agency didn’t give him a gun. It didn’t provide a bulletproof vest. He didn’t even have a car. The office truck had been in the shop for weeks. No one knew when they were getting it back.
Pedralino glanced to his right. Elaine da Silva was typing at her computer. She was also authorized to perform inspections, but had never done one in the region and had no plans to. Not without an armed escort, which police almost never provided to the field office, unlike for Valle’s team of inspectors. No environmental offender, she believed, would listen to her, a Black woman, anyway.
So here they sat, gunless, carless, with 3,600 square miles to patrol and limited resources to do it.
“Give me a hand with this property registry,” da Silva told Pedralino, dropping a form on his desk. With no other work to do, he gave it a look.
It hadn’t always been like this. When Pedralino joined the agency in 2012, the government had seemed on the cusp of eliminating illegal deforestation. Each federal and state environmental agency staffed an inspection force. Pedralino would travel down distant roads, hand out the tickets and be on his way, free of concern for his safety.
But that was before the election of Bolsonaro. Before Bolsonaro’s environmental minister met with gold miners, loggers and land grabbers. Before the number of Ibama inspectors plummeted. Before Acre’s conservative new governor told accused environmental offenders not to pay fines issued by state inspectors. Before the rise of a politics of grievance that presented deforesters not as criminals, but as honest workers oppressed by authoritarian environmentalists. And before Pedralino realized that this job, a job for which he felt no personal affinity, was putting his life at risk.
He had always considered himself willing to do whatever was necessary to perform his work. But now, when asked to investigate deforestation, all he could see was the violence that might happen. He remembered when dozens of angry ranchers, some of them armed, surrounded his truck in 2013. He thought about the illegal logger who went to get something from his house, and Pedralino was sure it was a gun. He heard his own pleas, begging visiting environmental agents in 2019 not to destroy the logging equipment they’d confiscated — because that could trigger retaliation, and he was the one who lived here and would have to suffer the consequences.
The stress got to be too much. So late last year, Pedralino complained to his bosses that it was nearly impossible to investigate environmental wrongdoing without security. Then in early July, with nothing having changed, he told them he was quitting. And now it was a week later, and he was standing up from his desk, not feeling a bit of regret.
There was only one matter that caused him remorse: the thought that other inspectors were out there now, patrolling territory he refused to go into, taking on risks he could no longer stomach.
“That’s the hardest thing to face,” he said, “But, maybe it will prolong my life.”
Sixteen points of deforestation on the map. One now done. Fifteen to go.
Daniel Valle pulled out his target map, feeling a swell of annoyance. The phone he held was his own. The mapping app he used to locate the deforestation was a free promo. The Acre Environmental Institute hadn’t even provided the targets. They came from the state police.
Every shortfall cost time. Not having a mobile printer meant losing 30 minutes writing fines by hand. Having no access to property records meant personally pinpointing on which ranch the deforestation had occurred. Too few inspectors meant they had to drive hours just to reach their targets.
Sometimes during those long drives, they got to thinking that their challenges had been imposed intentionally, that they weren’t employed to fight deforestation but to provide political cover. So that Acre could say it was combating deforestation when really it wasn’t.
“We’re pushing with our bellies,” fellow inspector Josmario Santos Guimarães said during one such conversation, using a Brazilian expression that means not doing much of anything.
“The agencies have been shrunk so much,” lead inspector Ivan de Jesus Pereira de Araújo e Silva said during another.
Valle looked up from his map. He grabbed the wheel.
“We’ll take advantage of our current location,” he said. “This next point is close to our last inspection.”
It was easy to get frustrated, but Valle couldn’t picture himself doing any other work. Raised on a rural commune, he’d always felt connected to the forest. He remembered the cool Amazon mornings of his childhood — “cold enough to kill a monkey,” his grandmother would say — and his fear when he learned that not only was the biome in danger but that its demise could threaten the world.
He decided there could be no better way to spend his life than defending something so important. But over the years, as more of the forest disappeared, and temperatures rose, and mornings cold enough to kill monkeys grew rarer, the idealism with which he’d entered the profession was infected by cynicism. Most days, he didn’t feel like he was fighting deforestation. He was fighting the future.
They passed dirt roads branching off the highway. Each of these, he believed, was opening more territory to illegal deforestation. Some days, he’d find illegal loggers mowing away with their chain saws. Other days, blackened embers smoking from a recent blaze, or trucks laboring under the weight of giant logs. But every day, he’d hear the same story. Deforesters saying they’d done it to survive, to feed their families.
Was it the truth? Maybe for some. Not for others.
And he was about to hear it again.
The inspectors were arriving at a 500-acre cattle ranch. An unshaven Màrcio Silva de Melo, 41, had been accused of hacking down 20 acres of forest. The cattleman looked down at his muddy boots. He said he’d done it to widen his pasture. He wanted more money to support his two daughters, ages 14 and 3.
He felt embittered. First the government had left him without support out here, he said. Now it wanted to fine him $8,000 for doing what was necessary to survive. That money, he said, would “come out of the mouths of my daughters.”
Valle listened, relieved there was no violence in the man’s voice. No one knew whether accused deforesters were armed, or how they would react. The inspectors took what precautions they could — never work alone, take security escorts, treat everyone with respect — but still, the job had become more dangerous. Just the other week, his crew had inspected a farm occupied by a man convicted of organizing the murder of a female American missionary in 2005. They now relied on police to tell them where it was safe to go — and where their presence would bring trouble.
Hoping that the next stop wouldn’t, they plunged deeper into the forest. The path led toward a huge ranching complex ringed by illegal deforestation.
A dozen men emerged from the shadows of a building. No one said anything for a long moment.
“Let the police get out first,” Valle said.
Property owner Luiz Ricardo Fernandez Leon, 56, came out to greet the inspectors, uncertain and unsmiling. Valle walked with him to the shaded porch of a farmhouse, where he said they’d discovered more than 200 acres of illegal deforestation on his property. As the rancher’s men watched, Fernandez Leon was handed several documents: a fine of $80,000 and an embargo prohibiting him from using the deforested land to grow crops, graze cattle or any other moneymaking activity.
The rancher shook his head and rubbed his eyes. He didn’t deny the destruction, but said he would fight the enforcement. Not with force — with lawyers. He planned to appeal the case. It would almost certainly be years before the matter was settled. If it ever was.
“I was not expecting this,” Fernandez Leon said. “Five years we’ve been out here, and I’ve never seen one government inspector.”
Valle knew it was unlikely he’d ever see another. He got back into the truck. A long drive loomed, and the crew had to get moving. Their next destination was along the far eastern tip of the state. Their work here was done.
Sixteen points of deforestation. They’d worked two days, and hadn’t even visited half.
Back in the office, a phone on Pedralino’s desk was vibrating.
He grimaced and picked it up. “It’s me.”
The woman on the other end sounded frantic. Headquarters needed someone to drive into the field and lift an environmental embargo. Could Pedralino go on Monday? He was already shaking his head.
“We don’t even have a car,” he said.
“What?” she said.
“Why don’t you send an email?” he said. “I don’t work here anymore. I now work in sanitation.”
“You work in sanitation?”
He suggested a solution, hung up and went back to his computer. He pulled up Google Earth. He zoomed in to show his house, a property surrounded by forest on all sides. “How I like it,” he said. Then he zoomed back out again.
The screen showed the states of Acre and neighboring Rondônia, side by side, each showing a different side of the debate over the future of the Amazon. Two of the last Brazilian states to be incorporated, they once mirrored one another: remote, forested jurisdictions of similar size and economic power.
Then their paths diverged. Acre, reeling from the 1988 assassination of conservationist Chico Mendes, chose to preserve the environment. It built a sustainable economy around ecological reserves, rubber-tapping and the harvesting of nuts. Rondônia, meanwhile, opened itself up to the cattle industry. Land grabbers stole territories. Armed disputes erupted. In a matter of decades, the state lost nearly 40 percent of its forest.
Today, Rondônia has twice as many people as Acre, three times the economic output and nearly four times as many cars. And its neighbors in Acre, increasingly critical of the conservation efforts their state once championed, want to catch up. In 2018, Acre awarded Bolsonaro 77 percent of its vote — more than any other state. Voters that year also elected a conservative new governor, Gladson Cameli, who has worked to realize Bolsonaro’s vision, growing the cattle industry and deprioritizing conservation.
Critics have lamented what they call the “Rondonization of Acre.” But few doubt that Bolsonaro will win again here in the October elections.
Pedralino zoomed in on Rondônia. The screen showed vast stretches of deforestation. He wanted to believe his 3-year-old daughter would know the Amazon as he had — gargantuan and pristine. But he started to doubt himself. All of this destruction had happened in just his lifetime. “A forest lost in a generation,” he said.
He returned the view to Acre. An expanse of uninterrupted green.
“Could it be possible,” he wondered aloud, “that what happened in Rondônia will now happen here?”
The screen swept toward the eastern tip of the state, where armed land invaders were increasingly aggressive, and where, on the ground, it looked to Valle as if the question was already being answered. He was standing in the forest, looking at a scattering of colossal logs. The inspectors had been sent to try to remove them, but had no idea how. “We’re not going to be able to solve anything here,” one of the inspectors vented, before they left for the next point of deforestation, and the next.
Pedralino closed Google Earth.
He stood up from his desk. He gathered his things and headed to the door. Whether Acre became the next Rondônia or not was no longer his problem. The Amazon would have to find itself a different martyr.
He walked outside, into the bright afternoon sun, put on his motorcycle helmet and rode off.
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