RSN: Ken Klippenstein | Anthony Ornato, Top Secret Service Official Sought by Investigators for Role in Jan. 6, Retires Unexpectedly
01 September 22
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Anthony Ornato, Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for operations, announced his retirement just two days before a planned interview with Inspector General investigators.
“We can confirm that Anthony Ornato retired from the U.S. Secret Service today in good standing after 25 years of devoted service,” Secret Service spokesperson and special agent Kevin Helgert told The Intercept on Monday evening.
Ornato had finally agreed to an interview with Department of Homeland Security investigators on August 31 after multiple attempts to arrange one. According to a memo sent by the DHS Office of Inspector General to the head of the Secret Service, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and DHS general counsel, the inspector general had been attempting to interview Ornato since June 29 and spent all of July and much of August following up.
For example, Ornato cited vacation as a reason he couldn’t attend an interview. “I believe my counsel spoke to you and / or your team, but I am traveling out of district on annual leave and am not available on the dates provided,” Ornato wrote in an email on August 24. “When I am back from vacation, I will circle back with you and your team.”
This is one in a string of access issues the inspector general has experienced in relation to January 6, as The Intercept reported last week.
Ornato has indicated that he still intends to attend the interview, according to an email obtained by The Intercept, but since Ornato will be a private citizen, investigators won’t have testimonial subpoena authority to compel his cooperation.
Ornato was a longtime Secret Service agent before President Donald Trump took the unprecedented action of appointing him to a White House position as deputy chief of staff for operations.
The Intercept reported in July that the Secret Service erased text messages from January 5 and 6, 2022, after they were requested by oversight officials. Congress had also sent document preservation requests to the Secret Service.
Ornato may have played a key role in the insurrection at the Capitol. On January 6, he reportedly sought to relocate Vice President Mike Pence to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, which could have delayed the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
According to explosive testimony from Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson to the House January 6 committee, Ornato told her that he was in the car with Trump when the president demanded to be driven to the Capitol, against advice, and allegedly lunged for the steering wheel.
Ornato has reportedly met with the January 6 committee twice, in January and March, as part of its investigation, discussing Trump’s knowledge of Pence’s location during the unrest on January 6.
After President Joe Biden entered the White House, Ornato was moved to the role of assistant director of the Secret Service’s Office of Training.
'Maybe he can't escape the law, or the facts, forever.' (photo: Getty)
Maybe he can’t escape the law, or the facts, forever.
With Tuesday night’s Justice Department filing in response to the search of Mar-a-Lago for classified stolen documents, it’s safe to assume we are quickly achieving peak table pounding. In part because the Artist Formerly Known as President (there should be an unpronounceable symbol for this phrase) has burned right through his last competent attorneys, the yelling like hell has consisted mainly of posting about QAnon and 4Chan as opposed to any recognizable or coherent legal analysis.
One of the principal things achieved by the 36-page filing released by the Department of Justice was to brush back claims of executive privilege or blanket declassification that had been trotted out in recent weeks to defend Donald Trump’s possession of stolen documents. Prosecutors instead indicated that Trump’s lawyers had “never asserted that the former president had declassified the documents or asserted any claim of executive privilege.” The rest of the document contends Trump and his lawyers lied to and misled federal officials, and that, perhaps most importantly, Trump “lacks standing to seek judicial relief or oversight as to presidential records because those records do not belong to him.” In other words, he cannot claim that the stolen documents belong to him, as they were stolen.
It is slightly amusing to consider that Trump and his attorneys in fact brought all of this down upon themselves with their request for a special master. The legal argument upon which he seems to have settled on today is that the FBI is bad at housekeeping and made a mess during the raid. (Marie Kondo #protip? If those classified nuclear documents don’t spark joy, it’s probably time to give them away).
It’s easy to forget that what the Artist Formerly Known as President is now ensnared by is not simply the law, but also the facts. That’s why attempts to compare what he did to what Hillary Clinton did are so fatuous. What Clinton did not participate in was persistent and knowing obstruction. She cooperated with authorities and testified on multiple occasions. Facts still matter, which is why waving around the text of the Espionage Act and threatening riots on the streets as if this were an apples-to-apples comparison to Clinton might make for good television, but it isn’t law.
We’ve become so accustomed to the great greased watermelon that is the former president it’s impossible to imagine that, after escaping the clutches of the Mueller probe, two impeachment efforts, and a hailstorm of prosecutions in New York, he might finally be good and caught. The tricks he’s used for decades to evade accountability—the high-paid lawyers, the bullying and intimidation of opposing parties and witnesses, and the presidency itself—seem to be failing him this time. As has been the case with Trump and Trumpism, the pressing issue the rest of us must grapple with isn’t so much whether the slow rolling rule of law can finally catch up with him but whether, should he be indicted and tried, the rule of mob will somehow bring down the whole house of cards with it.
Maybe the best evidence for the possibility that something approximating sanity lies ahead is the relative silence from the very quarters that would ordinarily be howling the loudest. The thing these folks need to explain—before they can justify Trump’s conduct in holding onto secret documents, compromising sources and methods, and then lying about it—is what he was doing with these documents, some of which were tucked into a desk drawer with his passports (i.e., he knew what they were and he knew where they were) in the first place. Until and unless Trump supporters are confident that former presidents can declassify every national security document that crosses the transom forever using nothing but their eyebrows, and then use it for whatever purposes they seek, what we are going to hear a lot of in the coming weeks is less an actual coherent defense and much more a continuation of “but her emails.”
It’s not, then, just that the law seems finally to have caught up with Donald Trump. It’s that the facts finally have, too; the same facts Attorney General Merrick Garland had vowed to follow wherever they led. The facts here are indisputably bad for the former president, which is why he keeps trying to argue the law. Unfortunately for him, the law is also indisputably bad for him. The table pounding doesn’t seem to be amassing much traction anymore, although he and Sen. Lindsey Graham will certainly keep working the lawless and disaffected into a possibly dangerous lather. But this doesn’t feel like a movement that is ascendant and it doesn’t feel like a movement that is converting a whole ton of new adherents. New Quinnipiac polling shows that Americans, by a margin of 50 percent to 41 percent, think Trump should be prosecuted on criminal charges over his handling of classified documents, and nearly 6 in 10 think he acted inappropriately in handling those documents. That isn’t the dawning of reason, but it is a trend line.
There is still an immense amount that we don’t know. But based on what we do learn each day, this is a significant win for facts, law, and accountability. That is a good deal more than we have witnessed in a long time.
Lukoil chairman Ravil Maganov is just the latest to join a long list of bizarre deaths plaguing figures in the oil and gas industry. (photo: Reuters)
Lukoil chairman Ravil Maganov is just the latest to join a long list of bizarre deaths plaguing figures in the oil and gas industry.
Ravil Maganov, the chairman of the board of Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil company, is said to have fallen from the 6th floor of the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow. The 67-year-old is just the latest Russian executive linked to the oil and gas industry to die in bizarre circumstances in recent months.
Russia’s RIA Novosti reports that the hospital confirmed his death and said investigators were working at the scene, though no further details were provided on how he died.
“Maganov fell out the window of his room at [the hospital] this morning. He died of his injuries,” an unnamed source cited by the Interfax news agency said.
The press service of Lukoil also confirmed Maganov’s death, making no mention of his fall out a window.
“We are deeply saddened to inform you that Ravil Maganov … passed away after a serious illness. Ravil Ulfatovich made an invaluable contribution not only to the development of the company, but to the entire Russian oil and gas industry,” the company said in a press release quoted by Interfax.
In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February, Lukoil took the rare step of condemning the war, telling shareholders in a letter at the time that the company stands for “the immediate cessation of the armed conflict.”
Maganov’s sudden death comes just a few months after Alexander Subbotin, a former top Lukoil executive, was found dead in May. An investigation into his death is said to be ongoing, though Russian state media put out a number of bizarre details at the time, citing sources who said Subbotin had been found dead in a shaman’s home where “voodoo rituals” were performed and that he’d been severely intoxicated.
Just a month earlier, Vladislav Avayev, the former vice president of Gazprombank, a privately-owned subsidiary of Gazprom, was found dead of a gunshot wound in Moscow, along with his wife and daughter. Investigators said they suspected a murder-suicide.
A day after Avayev’s body was found, Sergei Protosenya, the former deputy chairman of gas company Novatek, was found hanging in a villa in Spain, with his wife and daughter also found dead on the premises with stab wounds. Just as in the case of Avayev, local police said their preliminary theory was murder-suicide.
In February, Gazprom executive Alexander Tyulyakov was found hanged in his St. Petersburg garage, with police saying they’d discovered a suicide note near his body. His death came just a few weeks after Gazprom Invest exec Leonid Shulman was found dead at a cottage in the Leningrad region, with law enforcement sources also describing his death as a suicide.
Police across the U.S. are using an obscure cellphone tracking tool. (photo: Allen G. Breed/AP)
Police have used “Fog Reveal” to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices, and harnessed the data to create location analyses known among law enforcement as “patterns of life,” according to thousands of pages of records about the company.
Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracing the movements of a potential participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The tool is rarely, if ever, mentioned in court records, something that defense attorneys say makes it harder for them to properly defend their clients in cases in which the technology was used.
The company was developed by two former high-ranking Department of Homeland Security officials under former President George W. Bush. It relies on advertising identification numbers, which Fog officials say are culled from popular cellphone apps such as Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on a person’s movements and interests, according to police emails. That information is then sold to companies like Fog.
“It’s sort of a mass surveillance program on a budget,” said Bennett Cyphers, a special adviser at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group.
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This story, supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, is part of an ongoing Associated Press series, “Tracked,” that investigates the power and consequences of decisions driven by algorithms on people’s everyday lives.
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The documents and emails were obtained by EFF through Freedom of Information Act requests. The group shared the files with The AP, which independently found that Fog sold its software in about 40 contracts to nearly two dozen agencies, according to GovSpend, a company that keeps tabs on government spending. The records and AP’s reporting provide the first public account of the extensive use of Fog Reveal by local police, according to analysts and legal experts who scrutinize such technologies.
Federal oversight of companies like Fog is an evolving legal landscape. On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission sued a data broker called Kochava that, like Fog, provides its clients with advertising IDs that authorities say can easily be used to find where a mobile device user lives, which violates rules the commission enforces. And there are bills before Congress now that, if passed, would regulate the industry.
“Local law enforcement is at the front lines of trafficking and missing persons cases, yet these departments are often behind in technology adoption,” Matthew Broderick, a Fog managing partner, said in an email. “We fill a gap for underfunded and understaffed departments.”
Because of the secrecy surrounding Fog, however, there are scant details about its use and most law enforcement agencies won’t discuss it, raising concerns among privacy advocates that it violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.
What distinguishes Fog Reveal from other cellphone location technologies used by police is that it follows the devices through their advertising IDs, unique numbers assigned to each device. These numbers do not contain the name of the phone’s user, but can be traced to homes and workplaces to help police establish pattern-of-life analyses.
“The capability that it had for bringing up just anybody in an area whether they were in public or at home seemed to me to be a very clear violation of the Fourth Amendment,” said Davin Hall, a former crime data analysis supervisor for the Greensboro, North Carolina, Police Department. “I just feel angry and betrayed and lied to.”
Hall resigned in late 2020 after months of voicing concerns about the department’s use of Fog to police attorneys and the city council.
While Greensboro officials acknowledged Fog’s use and initially defended it, the police department said it allowed its subscription to expire earlier this year because it didn’t “independently benefit investigations.”
But federal, state and local police agencies around the U.S. continue to use Fog with very little public accountability. Local police agencies have been enticed by Fog’s affordable price: It can start as low as $7,500 a year. And some departments that license it have shared access with other nearby law enforcement agencies, the emails show.
Police departments also like how quickly they can access detailed location information from Fog. Geofence warrants, which tap into GPS and other sources to track a device, are accessed by obtaining such data from companies, like Google or Apple. This requires police to obtain a warrant and ask the tech companies for the specific data they want, which can take days or weeks.
Using Fog’s data, which the company claims is anonymized, police can geofence an area or search by a specific device’s ad ID numbers, according to a user agreement obtained by AP. But, Fog maintains that "we have no way of linking signals back to a specific device or owner,” according to a sales representative who emailed the California Highway Patrol in 2018, after a lieutenant asked whether the tool could be legally used.
Despite such privacy assurances, the records show that law enforcement can use Fog’s data as a clue to find identifying information. “There is no (personal information) linked to the (ad ID),” wrote a Missouri official about Fog in 2019. “But if we are good at what we do, we should be able to figure out the owner.”
Fog’s Broderick said in an email that the company does not have access to people’s personal information, and draws from “commercially available data without restrictions to use,” from data brokers "that legitimately purchase data from apps in accordance with their legal agreements.” The company refused to share information about how many police agencies it works with.
“We are confident Law Enforcement has the responsible leadership, constraints, and political guidance at the municipal, state, and federal level to ensure that any law enforcement tool and method is appropriately used in accordance with the laws in their respective jurisdictions,” Broderick said.
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Kevin Metcalf, a prosecutor in Washington County, Arkansas, said he has used Fog Reveal without a warrant, especially in “exigent circumstances.” In these cases, the law provides a warrant exemption when a crime-in-process endangers people or an officer.
Metcalf also leads the National Child Protection Task Force, a nonprofit that combats child exploitation and trafficking. Fog is listed on its website as a task force sponsor and a company executive chairs the nonprofit’s board. Metcalf said Fog has been invaluable to cracking missing children cases and homicides.
“We push the limits, but we do them in a way that we target the bad guys,” he said. “Time is of the essence in those situations. We can’t wait on the traditional search warrant route.”
Fog was used successfully in the murder case of 25-year-old nurse Sydney Sutherland, who had last been seen jogging near Newport, Arkansas, before she disappeared, Metcalf said.
Police had little evidence to go on when they found her phone in a ditch, so Metcalf said he shared his agency’s access to Fog with the U.S. Marshals Service to figure out which other devices had been nearby at the time she was killed. He said Fog helped lead authorities to arrest a farmer in Sutherland’s rape and murder in August 2020, but its use was not documented in court records reviewed by AP.
Cyphers, who led EFF’s public records work, said there hasn’t been any previous record of companies selling this kind of granular data directly to local law enforcement.
“We’re seeing counties with less than 100,000 people where the sheriff is using this extremely high tech, extremely invasive, secretive surveillance tool to chase down local crime,” Cyphers said.
One such customer is the sheriff’s office in rural Rockingham County, North Carolina, population 91,000 and just north of Greensboro, where Hall still lives. The county bought a one-year license for $9,000 last year and recently renewed it.
“Rockingham County is tiny in terms of population. It never ceases to amaze me how small agencies will scoop up tools that they just absolutely don’t need, and nobody needs this one,” Hall said.
Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Kevin Suthard confirmed the department recently renewed its license but declined to offer specifics about the use of Fog Reveal or how the office protects individuals’ rights.
“Because it would then be less effective as criminals could be cognizant that we have the device and adjust their commission of the crimes accordingly. Make sense?” Suthard said.
Fog has aggressively marketed its tool to police, even beta testing it with law enforcement, records show. The Dallas Police Department bought a Fog license in February after getting a free trial and “seeing a demonstration and hearing of success stories from the company,” Senior Cpl. Melinda Gutierrez, a department spokeswoman, said in an email.
Fog’s tool is accessed through a web portal. Investigators can enter a crime scene’s coordinates into the database, which brings back search results showing a device’s Fog ID, which is based on its unique ad ID number.
Police can see which device IDs were found near the location of the crime. Detectives or other officers can also search the location for IDs going forward from the time of the crime and back at least 180 days, according to the company’s user license agreement. But, Fog’s data can go back as far as June 2017, according to emails from a Fog representative to Florida and California law enforcement agencies.
While the data does not directly identify who owns a device, the company often gives law enforcement information it needs to connect it to addresses and other clues that help detectives figure out people’s identities, according to company representatives’ emails.
It is unclear how Fog makes these connections, but a company it refers to as its “data partner” called Venntel, Inc. has access to an even greater trove of users’ mobile data.
Venntel is a large broker that has supplied location data to agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI. The Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog is auditing how the offices under its control have used commercial data. That comes after some Democratic lawmakers asked it to investigate U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s use of Venntel data to track people without a search warrant in 2020. The company also has faced congressional inquiries about privacy concerns tied to federal law enforcement agencies’ use of its data.
Venntel and Fog work closely together to aid police detectives during investigations, emails show. Their marketing brochures are nearly identical, too, and Venntel staff has recommended Fog to law enforcement, according to the emails. Venntel said “the confidential nature of our business relationships” prevented it from responding to AP’s specific questions, and Fog would not comment on the relationship.
While Fog says in its marketing materials that it collects data from thousands of apps, like Starbucks and Waze, companies are not always aware of who is using their data. Venntel and Fog can collect billions of data points filled with detailed information because many apps embed invisible tracking software that follows users’ behavior. This software also lets the apps sell customized ads that are targeted to a person’s current location. In turn, data brokers’ software can hoover up personal data that can be used for other purposes. Fog did not specifically say how it got the data from Starbucks and Waze.
For their part, Starbucks and Waze denied any relationship to Fog. Starbucks said it had not given permission to its business partners to share customer information with Fog.
“Starbucks has not approved Ad ID data generated by our app to be used in this way by Fog Data Science LLC. In our review to date, we have no relationship with this company,” said Megan Adams, a Starbucks spokesperson.
“We have never had a relationship with Fog Data Science, have not worked with them in any capacity, and have not shared information with them,” a Waze spokesperson said.
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Fog Data Science LLC is headquartered in a nondescript brick building in Leesburg, Virginia. It also has related entities in New Jersey, Ohio and Texas.
It was founded in 2016 by Robert Liscouski, who led the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Division in the George W. Bush adminstration. His colleague, Broderick, is a former U.S. Marine brigadier general who ran DHS’ tech hub, the Homeland Security Operations Center, during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A House bipartisan committee report cited Broderick among others for failing to coordinate a swift federal response to the deadly hurricane. Broderick resigned from DHS shortly thereafter.
In marketing materials, Fog also has touted its ability to offer police “predictive analytics,” a buzzword often used to describe high-tech policing tools that purport to predict crime hotspots. Liscouski and another Fog official have worked at companies focused on predictive analytics, machine learning and software platforms supporting artificial intelligence.
“It is capable of delivering both forensic and predictive analytics and near real-time insights on the daily movements of the people identified with those mobile devices,” reads an email announcing a Fog training last year for members of the National Fusion Center Association, which represents a network of intelligence-sharing partnerships created after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Fog’s Broderick said the company had not invested in predictive applications, and provided no details about any uses the tool had for predicting crime.
Despite privacy advocates’ concerns about warrantless surveillance, Fog Reveal has caught on with local and state police forces. It’s been used in a number of high-profile criminal cases, including one that was the subject of the television program “48 Hours.”
In 2017, a world-renowned exotic snake breeder was found dead, lying in a pool of blood in his reptile breeding facility in rural Missouri. Police initially thought the breeder, Ben Renick, might have died from a poisonous snake bite. But the evidence soon pointed to murder.
During its investigation, emails show the Missouri State Highway Patrol used Fog’s portal to search for cellphones at Renick’s home and breeding facility and zeroed in on a mobile device. Working with Fog, investigators used the data to identify the phone owner’s identity: it was the Renicks’ babysitter.
Police were able to log the babysitter’s whereabouts over time to create a pattern of life analysis.
It turned out to be a dead-end lead. Renick’s wife, Lynlee, later was charged and convicted of the murder.
Prosecutors did not cite Fog in a list of other tools they used in the investigation, according to trial exhibits examined by the AP.
But Missouri officials seemed pleased with Fog’s capabilities, even though it didn’t directly lead to an arrest. “It was interesting to see that the system did pick up a device that was absolutely in the area that day. Too bad it did not belong to a suspect!” a Missouri State Highway Patrol analyst wrote in an email to Fog.
In another high-profile criminal probe, records show the FBI asked state intelligence officials in Iowa for help with Fog as it investigated potential participants in the events at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
“Not definitive but still waiting to talk things over with a FOG rep,” wrote Justin Parker, deputy director of the Iowa Department of Public Safety, in an email to an FBI official in September 2021. It was unclear from the emails if Fog’s data factored into an arrest. Iowa officials did not respond and the FBI declined to comment.
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Metcalf, the Arkansas prosecutor, has argued against congressional efforts to require search warrants when using technologies like Fog Reveal.
He believes Americans have given up any reasonable expectation of privacy when they use free apps and likens EFF’s objections to tech like Fog to a “cult of privacy.”
“I think people are going to have to make a decision on whether we want all this free technology, we want all this free stuff, we want all the selfies,” he said. “But we can’t have that and at the same time say, ‘I’m a private person, so you can’t look at any of that.’ That just seems crazy.”
Although he is not an official Fog employee, Metcalf said he would step in to lead training sessions including the tool for federal prosecutors, federal agencies and police, including the Chicago Police Department, the emails show.
That kind of hands-on service and word-of-mouth marketing in tight-knit law enforcement circles seems to have helped increase Fog’s popularity.
The Maryland State Police is among the many agencies that have had contracts for Fog Reveal, and records show investigators believed it had a lot of potential.
“Companies have receptors all over. Malls, shopping centers, etc. They’re all around you,” wrote Sgt. John Bedell of the Criminal Enforcement Division, in an email to a colleague. The agency purchased a year of access to Fog in 2018.
“Picture getting a suspect’s phone then in the extraction being able to see everyplace they’d been in the last 18 months plotted on a map you filter by date ranges,” wrote Bedell. “The success lies in the secrecy.”
Elena Russo, a spokesperson for the agency, confirmed it had a Fog license previously but that it had lapsed. “Unfortunately, it was not helpful in solving any crimes,” she wrote in an email.
Still, as more local policing agencies sign up for Fog, some elected officials said they have been left in the dark. Several officials said there wasn’t enough information to grasp what services Fog actually provides.
“Who is this company? What are the track records? What are the privacy protections?” asked Anaheim council member Jose Moreno, remembering his confusion about Fog during a 2020 council meeting. “That night our chief had very little information for us.”
In Anaheim, the Fog license was paid for by a federal “Urban Area Security Initiative,” DHS grants that help localities fund efforts to prevent terrorism. A police spokesman said the department has not used it.
Defense attorneys worry there are few legal restrictions on law enforcement’s use of location data.
It’s a gap police agencies exploit, and often don’t disclose in court, said Michael Price, litigation director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Fourth Amendment Center.
“(Fog) is exceedingly rare to see in the wild because the cops often don’t get warrants,” said Price.
“Even if you do ask for (information) sometimes they say ‘We don’t know what you are talking about.’”
Privacy advocates worry Fog’s location tracking could be put to other novel uses, like keeping tabs on people who seek abortions in states where it is now illegal. These concerns were heightened when a Nebraska woman was charged in August with helping her teenage daughter end a pregnancy after investigators got hold of their Facebook messages.
Government’s use of location data is still being weighed by the courts, too. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that police generally need a warrant to look at records that reveal where cellphone users have been.
Nearly two years after walking off the crime data supervisor job with the Greensboro police force, Hall still worries about police surveillance in neighboring communities.
“Anyone with that login information can do as many searches as they want,” Hall said. “I don’t believe the police have earned the trust to use that, and I don’t believe it should be legal.”
The conservative activist and wife of the Supreme Court justice emailed lawmakers in two states in the weeks after the election. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
The conservative activist and wife of the Supreme Court justice emailed lawmakers in two states in the weeks after the election
The Washington Post reported this year that Ginni Thomas emailed 29 Arizona state lawmakers, some of them twice, in November and December 2020. She urged them to set aside Biden’s popular-vote victory and “choose” their own presidential electors, despite the fact that the responsibility for choosing electors rests with voters under Arizona state law.
The new emails show that Thomas also messaged two Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin: state Sen. Kathy Bernier, then chair of the Senate elections committee, and state Rep. Gary Tauchen. Bernier and Tauchen received the email at 10:47 a.m. on Nov. 9, virtually the same time the Arizona lawmakers received a verbatim copy of the message from Thomas. The Bernier email was obtained by The Post, and the Tauchen email was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and provided to The Post.
Thomas sent all of the emails via FreeRoots, an online platform that allowed people to send pre-written emails to multiple elected officials.
“Please stand strong in the face of media and political pressure,” read the emails sent Nov. 9, just days after major media organizations called the presidency for Biden. “Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our Constitution. And then please take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen for our state.”
Neither Thomas nor her lawyer, Mark Paoletta, responded to requests for comment. A Supreme Court spokeswoman did not respond to a message seeking comment from Clarence Thomas.
Ginni Thomas’s political activism is highly unusual for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice, and for years it has raised questions about potential conflicts of interest for her husband. She has said that the two of them keep their professional lives separate.
But scrutiny of the Thomases intensified this year after The Post and CBS News obtained copies of text messages that Ginni Thomas exchanged with Mark Meadows, then President Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, in the weeks following the 2020 election. Thomas repeatedly urged Meadows to keep fighting to overturn the election results. After Congress certified Biden’s victory Jan. 6, 2021, she expressed anger at Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused to intervene to keep Trump in office. “We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Thomas wrote to Meadows four days later.
Thomas was also in touch during the post-election period with John Eastman, the pro-Trump lawyer who once clerked for her husband, and whose role in the effort to overturn Biden’s win has drawn scrutiny from both the Justice Department and the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot. In early December 2020, Thomas invited Eastman to speak at a meeting of Frontliners for Liberty, which she described as a group of grass-roots activists, according to an email that Eastman published online.
The agenda for the meeting has not been publicly disclosed. But a federal judge ruling on which records had to be turned over in response to a subpoena from the committee wrote that the agenda shows Eastman discussed “State legislative actions that can reverse the media-called election for Joe Biden.” U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered Eastman to give congressional investigators emails related to Thomas and meetings of her Frontliners group, finding that the meetings “furthered a critical objective of the January 6 plan: to have contested states certify alternate slates of electors for President Trump.”
The House committee asked Thomas to sit for a voluntary interview in June. The committee also sought a broad range of documents from her, including any related to plans to overturn the election and all communications with members of Congress and their staff and Justice Department employees, according to a copy of the request published by the conservative Daily Caller.
At the time, Thomas indicated she would comply. “I can’t wait to clear up misconceptions. I look forward to talking to them,” Thomas told the Daily Caller, her former employer.
Less than two weeks later, on June 28, Paoletta told the committee that while Thomas remained willing to sit for an interview, he did not believe there was “sufficient basis” for her to do so.
In a letter obtained by The Post, Paoletta — a longtime close associate of the Thomases — described Ginni Thomas’s text messages to Meadows as “entirely unremarkable” and said they do not suggest she had any role in the attack on the Capitol. He cast her invitation to Eastman as simply an invitation to speak, not an endorsement of his views or “any indication of a working relationship.” He also said she played no role in organizing the email campaign to Arizona lawmakers and did not draft or edit the form letters she sent.
In an interview, Bernier, the Wisconsin lawmaker, said it would have been appropriate for the state legislature to consider decertifying the 2020 results in the weeks following the election if evidence had emerged of significant voter fraud. “But as we went through the process and the legal challenges were made and discounted by the judicial system, there was nothing proven as far as actual voter fraud,” she said.
Bernier said she had not realized that Thomas was among the thousands of people who emailed her after the election, but she said Thomas “has a First Amendment right to speak her mind.”
“I was married for 20 years. I took on some identity of my husband, but I had my own mind,” Bernier said. “Just because you’re married to someone doesn’t mean that you’re a clone.”
Tauchen did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Thomas’s Nov. 9 email was one of thousands sent via the FreeRoots platform that inundated Bernier and Tauchen’s offices in the weeks after the election, records show.
The Wisconsin State Journal reported in January 2021 that of more than 10,000 pages of emails received during that period by Bernier and state Rep. Ron Tusler (R), then the chair of his chamber’s elections committee, the majority were “mass-generated form letters making nonspecific claims about alleged irregularities, a right-wing fraud-finding effort and a clip from Fox’s Sean Hannity show.”
The fact that Thomas sent one of the FreeRoots emails to Bernier has not been previously reported. “Please do your Constitutional duty!” read the subject line of the message she sent.
According to the records disclosed by Bernier’s office to The Post, Thomas was the fourth of more than 30 people who sent that particular form email Nov. 9 and 10. The first sender of that email, three hours before Thomas, was a person named Stephanie Coleman, according to the records.
A woman named Stephanie Miller Coleman is the widow of one of Clarence Thomas’s former clerks. She was listed as the co-administrator, with Thomas, of a private Facebook group for Frontliners. The page listing the group’s administrators is no longer publicly visible.
Coleman did not respond to a message seeking comment.
Ginni Thomas’s communications with key players in the effort to overturn the election have led to calls for her husband to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election and attempts to subvert it. Clarence Thomas has given no indication that he intends to do so.
This year, eight Supreme Court justices declined Trump’s request to block congressional investigators from gaining access to White House records that might shed light on the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Thomas was the only justice to dissent, siding with Trump.
Mohammad al-Halabi, former Gaza chief for World Vision, was sentenced after already serving six years behind bars. (photo: Mohammed Salem/Reuters)
Mohammad al-Halabi, former Gaza chief for World Vision, was sentenced after already serving six years behind bars.
Mohammad al-Halabi, former head of operations at World Vision in Gaza, was sentenced by the Beersabe’ (Beersheba) district court on Tuesday, which ruled he would serve another six years in addition to the six he has already spent in prison.
The court convicted al-Halabi in June on charges of sending millions of dollars to Hamas, which governs the besieged Gaza Strip, an accusation he and his lawyer have consistently denied.
Al-Halabi’s lawyer reiterated his claim of innocence following Tuesday’s sentencing. “He says that he’s innocent, he did nothing and there is no evidence,” Maher Hanna said, adding that they would appeal the verdict to the Israeli Supreme Court.
“On the contrary, he proved in the court above any reasonable doubt that he made sure that no money will be [given] directly to Hamas.”
According to Hanna, if al-Halabi, a father-of-five, had admitted to wrongdoings, he would have been released.
“But he insisted that truth also has value. And for his personal values, and for the international humanitarian work values, he insisted on the truth, and he cannot admit a thing that he did not do,” the lawyer said.
Israeli forces arrested al-Halabi in June 2016 at the Beit Hanoun (Erez) border crossing as he was returning to Gaza from work-related meetings, on allegations of transferring humanitarian funds of varying amounts up to $50m to support Hamas.
Al-Halabi spent six years behind bars and had more than 160 hearings before he was convicted.
Lawyers and human rights groups have pointed out that his trial was marred by due process violations, including prolonged detention without charge, the keeping of evidence Israel claims to hold against him as “secret,” and that he was exposed to torture.
World Vision said in a statement that the 12-year sentence was “deeply disappointing” and that it falls “in sharp contrast to the evidence and facts of the case”.
The organisation said it “condemns any and all acts of terrorism or support for such activities … we do not see evidence of these things in this case.”
“The arrest, six-year trial, unjust verdict and this sentence are emblematic of actions that hinder humanitarian work in Gaza and the West Bank,” said World Vision.
“It adds to the chilling impact on World Vision and other aid or development groups working to assist Palestinians.”
Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday that the sentencing was “a profound miscarriage of justice”.
“Holding al-Halabi for six years based on secret evidence, which multiple investigations rejected, made a mockery of due process. Detaining him for six more is just cruel and inhumane,” Israel and Palestine director Omar Shakir said on Twitter.
“He should long ago have been released. The al-Halabi case exposes how Israel uses its legal system to provide a veneer of legality to mask its ugly apartheid over millions of Palestinians,” he added.
In 2017, the Australian government, which is a significant donor to World Vision, concluded in a probe that no money was used for transferring funds to Hamas.
Earlier this month, Israeli forces shut down and criminalised seven Palestinian human rights and civil society organisations in the occupied West Bank.
In Gaza, al-Halabi’s mother described the anguish of following what she called an unjust trial.
“I felt like I was having a nervous breakdown, and I was screaming,” Amal al-Halabi said.
“This is injustice. Where is the international community and where are Mohammed’s human rights?”
Nearly 200,000 people in Mississippi's capital don't have water to drink, flush toilets, or fight fires. (photo: Mark Felix/AFP)
ALSO SEE: How Jackson, Mississippi, Ran Out of Water
Nearly 200,000 people in Mississippi’s capital don’t have water to drink, flush toilets, or fight fires.
The city and state have already begun distributing bottled water to residents, but the crisis could also disrupt other essential services. “Until it is fixed, we do not have reliable running water at scale,” Reeves said in the briefing. “The city cannot produce enough water to fight fires, to flush toilets and to meet other critical needs.” This week, Jackson has temperatures over 90 degrees and city schools have switched to virtual classes because of the situation.
Heavy rains and flooding from the Pearl River have caused serious complications with one of two treatment plants that provides water for Jackson. With the plant not functioning as normal, raw reservoir water is being pushed into pipes that feed Jackson’s water supply, leading to the governor’s warning. According to a statement from Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, who also declared a state of emergency, the shortage is likely to last “the next couple of days.”
Flooding comes amid an increase in devastating climate change-driven floods in Kentucky, Missouri, and other communities across the country. The Pearl River floods are also impacting communities beyond Jackson, including the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, which issued a boil water advisory on Monday.
The city of Jackson has been dealing with a substandard water system for years. In March 2020, the EPA found the system had the potential for bacteria like E. Coli in the water, issued an emergency order to address the system’s deficiencies, and has been working with the state and city since then to improve the system. After a storm froze pipes across the city in 2021, many residents lost access to clean water for weeks. Last October, lawyers representing hundreds of Jackson children sued the city over water system failures and mismanagement that led to “hundreds, if not thousands” of children to be poisoned by lead across the city. Since July, Jackson has been under a boil water advisory because tests revealed potentially contaminated water.
Local advocates say that the city’s water problems are rooted in a history of racism and neglect. The city suffers from old infrastructure that was designed to support a larger population. After the civil rights movement led to the integration of schools and other public facilities in the 1960s, white people fled the city by the thousands. According to the Jackson Free Press, nearly 20,000 white people left the city between 2000 and 2010. When white people left, the city lost both tax revenue and institutional support. Today, the city is roughly 80 percent Black. Similar circumstances have led to water crises in Flint, Detroit, and other cities.
That history has also contributed to tensions between the city and state governments. Lumumba, who is Black, has clashed with Reeves, who is white, and other state officials over funding and management of Jackson’s water system. In the wake of the 2021 freeze crisis, weeks passed before any coordinated effort between the state and city to fix the situation took place. Lieutenant Governor Delbert Hosemann has previously blamed water issues on Black leadership in Jackson. Lumumba, who has said the issue has always been state funding, was not invited to Reeves’ briefing on Monday.
“We will do everything in our power to restore water pressure and get water flowing back to the people of Jackson,” Reeves said.
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