The Supreme Court is set to rule this term in a case that could lead to the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. A federal agency tasked with protecting consumers from predatory lending and banking practices, the CFPB is being sued by two trade groups representing industries it regulates: The groups filed their suit in 2018 over a rule aimed at protecting borrowers from payday lenders.

The case is the latest step in a yearslong conservative fight to dismantle the CFPB. At least 13 states, including red states like Arkansas and Georgia, have limited or made payday lending illegal, and others have passed recent ballot initiatives to crack down on the industry. 

“The attorney generals are collecting millions of dollars in campaign contributions to undermine the only serious effort to regulate payday loans.”

Despite widespread approval among Republican voters to regulate or prohibit payday lending, Republican officials in more than 20 states are backing industry groups in the suit. All but two of the 28 members of the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, sought to intervene in the case. The move came after payday lending and banking industry groups regulated and fined by the CFPB poured out millions of dollars in campaign contributions, according to an analysis of the donations set to be published Wednesday by the watchdog group Accountable.US.

“These are states where supermajorities of Republican voters disapprove of payday lending and want meaningful regulation,” said Chris Peterson, a professor at the University of Utah College of Law who previously advised CFPB’s director and worked in the agency’s enforcement office. “But the attorney generals are collecting millions of dollars in campaign contributions to undermine the only serious effort to regulate payday loans. The hypocrisy is galling.” 

The groups that sued — the Community Financial Services Association of America and the Consumer Service Alliance of Texas — objected to a rule prohibiting payday lenders from saddling consumers with overdraft fees by charging people with insufficient account funds multiple times after a first transaction failed. They argued that the CFPB’s funding structure was unconstitutional and that Congress has to authorize any withdrawals of money from the Treasury Department. The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in the case on October 3.

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Groups regulated by the CFPB and others that supported the original suit have given at least $7.7 million to RAGA since April 2018, when industry associations first sued the agency over the automatic withdrawal rule. Since the suit was filed, payday lenders and banks regulated by the CFPB have given RAGA more than $3.2 million, and groups that filed amicus briefs supporting the suit have given RAGA more than $4.5 million, according to Accountable.US. (The CFPB, RAGA, and the Community Financial Services Association of America did not respond to requests for comment.)

In July, 26 Republican attorneys and RAGA members signed a petition asking the Supreme Court to allow them to intervene in the case on behalf of the lending industry. The court denied the petition last week. 

“As this Court has recognized before, consumer protection is the States’ traditional domain,” the Republican attorneys general wrote in their petition. “Given how the States have engaged with consumer-protection issues for so long, they have a special understanding of how an unbounded CFPB can damage the consumer-financial markets—and impair the States’ own abilities to regulate those markets.”

RAGA Goes Far Right

RAGA’s activity has grown increasingly politicized in recent years, since former President Donald Trump won office. The association pushed lawsuits friendly to industry donors and received at least $9.5 million from a group with close ties to conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo, The Guardian reported in June.

Though industry contributions given to RAGA are not staggering, races for attorney general are relatively cheap compared to the stratospheric levels of funding in some national elections — usually costing between tens of thousands and a few million dollars. The donations of nearly $8 million from payday lenders and banks also represent a significant chunk of RAGA’s annual haul. The group raised $24.8 million last year, and its Democratic counterpart raised $25.5 million. 

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Major donors to RAGA since the 2018 suit against CFPB include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform, Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Visa, Mastercard, the student loan servicer Navient, the for-profit University of Phoenix, TitleMax, and Community Choice Financial, which serves “unbanked and underbanked consumers.” INFiN, another alliance of financial services industry groups that Community Financial Services Association of America helped create in 2020, gave RAGA $40,000 last year. 

It’s anyone’s guess how the court might rule in the case, but conservative justices might consider how a decision favoring the lending industry could impact broader national policy. A ruling that CFPB’s funding structure is unconstitutional could have future implications for policy impacting other institutions with similar funding structures like the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, which sets the country’s monetary policy.

A decade ago, the argument that CFPB’s funding structure was unconstitutional might not have stood up in court, but Trump’s remaking of the federal judiciary has emboldened pro-industry groups to try their luck. 

The argument is part of a political effort to curb the federal government’s authority to regulate predatory lenders, Peterson said. “In many cases against the CFPB,” he said, “one of the things we’re seeing is that arguments that would have been dismissed as outside the mainstream 10 or 15 years ago are starting to get traction among judges recently appointed to the federal bench.”

The post Payday Lenders Gave Millions to Republican Group That Backed Supreme Court Suit to Annihilate CFPB appeared first on The Intercept.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been slowly taking over the mechanisms of governance in the state by swapping out officials he doesn’t like — even if they were elected by voters — and replacing them with people who will bend to his will.

Lately, DeSantis has set his sights on the justice system. Earlier this month, he removed an elected prosecutor from office over a political disagreement — the second he has taken out. State Attorney for Orange-Osceola counties Monique Worrell, the governor claimed, hadn’t pursued the charges he wanted. A year earlier, he suspended former Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren, who had said he wouldn’t criminally charge people who sought abortion care under Florida’s latest abortion ban. 

Now, Florida is opening a new front in the battle between state politicians and elected stewards of the law, taking the first steps to launch what could become an ideological gerrymandering of the justice system. In Florida, 20 circuit courts serve two main purposes: as regional courts for certain types of cases, as well as appeals courts for the smaller county court systems. DeSantis’s allies are seeking to remake those circuit districts.

On June 30, the Florida Supreme Court, which oversees the circuit courts, created a new commission to review the judicial circuits. The commission was created after a request from Republican state House Speaker Paul Renner, who had written a June 15 letter to the court asking that it review judicial circuits to account for recent demographic shifts and consider consolidating them.

“This is judicial gerrymandering, plain and simple,” said Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani. Eskamani represents the district where Worrell was elected and is running for reelection next year. 

“The intent is to create these larger circuits that water down the vote of the more progressive areas.”

“If you consolidate the circuits, Monique Worrell will not be reelected. And that’s a 100 percent what their plan is,” Eskamani said. “The intent is to create these larger circuits that water down the vote of the more progressive areas.”

The commission launched against the backdrop of a national effort to limit or void the authority of elected prosecutors in more than 15 states. Its commission’s decisions could impact judges and elected state attorneys, public defenders, and circuit clerks. Authorized by a Supreme Court dominated by DeSantis appointees and Federalist Society members, the commission creates a new way for the DeSantis administration to remove elected officials it might disagree with. 

Comparing DeSantis’s push to efforts in other states to restrict the authority of prosecutors, Eskamani said, “This is out of that same exact playbook.” 

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Redrawing Judiciary Districts

If the commission’s review process results in redrawn maps, circuit judges could also face challenges to their reelection efforts, said Neil Skene, a legal historian who wrote a history of the Florida Supreme Court. 

Skene said that “the likely approach will be to add one or more ‘red’ counties to the major ‘blue’ counties like Hillsborough and Orange and perhaps Jacksonville and Tallahassee.”

The move by the court to review judicial circuits comes just over a year after state lawmakers approved salary increases for circuit court judges and state Supreme Court justices, budgeting $50 million for the newly created Sixth District Court of Appeal. 

“I do something nice for you, and you might do something nice for me one day. That’s what happens.”

The salary bumps included in the package are raising a question about the Supreme Court’s motives for creating the commission. “There is something of a tradition where the legislature and the court system engage in this sort of — I won’t call it an exchange of favors, but in appreciation for one thing, they will sort of identify a thing that will be important to the other and do it,” he said. “I do something nice for you, and you might do something nice for me one day. That’s what happens.”

The commission plans to hold seven meetings, including two public hearings, and expects to submit a final report by December 1 on whether or not there is a need to consolidate judicial circuits. The commission has held two meetings since July, and its first public hearing is scheduled Friday at the Orange County Courthouse in Orlando.

The state Supreme Court will receive the committee’s findings and could include any nonbinding recommendation in its annual certification opinion, which is submitted to the legislature. “The legislature regularly exercises its authority to set and fund judge positions in ways that differ from the Supreme Court’s opinion,” court spokesperson Paul Flemming told The Intercept.

During the commission’s first meeting in July, Supreme Court Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz said there was no preconceived outcome; he encouraged commission members to keep an open mind throughout the process.

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Throughout July and August, at least 25 state attorneys and judges submitted feedback to the commission. The Florida Bar sent a survey to members on August 10 asking for feedback on existing circuits. Several raised concerns with the idea of consolidating districts and said such changes could undermine community ties and public trust. 

“We are proud of our communities and choose to live in small towns for a reason,” wrote Third Judicial Circuit State Attorney John Durrett. “To tether or consume us within another Circuit, headquartered within an urban center hundreds of miles away, would only serve to create a sense of detachment and neglect,” he said. “Consolidation would not develop trust. It would undermine it.”

“I believe that re-aligning or consolidating Florida’s judicial circuits would be very disruptive to our law enforcement and our criminal justice systems,” Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle wrote. “Like education, law enforcement is, and should be, local and reflect community values; judicial circuit consolidation would serve neither of those two ideals.”

House Speaker Paul Renner, R-Palm Coast, waves prior to a joint session for Gov. Ron DeSantis’s State of the State speech on March 7, 2023, at the Capitol in Tallahassee, Fla.

Photo: Phil Sears/AP

Republican Motives

Two weeks passed between when Renner, the Republican House speaker, first sent his letter to the court and when Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz issued the order to create the commission. The process was atypically swift.

Renner sent the letter after the state legislative session ended. There had not been a broader discussion about circuits during the session, said Eskamani, the Democratic representative, and the speed of the commission’s creation was unusual.

Something like Renner’s letter or the court’s proposal often comes at the end of a process, not the beginning, Skene said. 

“You’re not gonna get an immediate response to a ridiculously obscure proposal like restructuring the court system. That just has no political appeal. But what does have political appeal: if we redraw these lines in a way that gets more Republicans and fewer Democrats elected,” he said. “Having somebody see the political opportunity in a relatively routine governance issue always helps move things very quickly.” 

The speed at which the court moved to create the commission after Renner sent his letter undermines the idea of three branches of government serving as checks on each other, Eskamani said. “To see that letter and also just how fast things moved, clearly there’s some sort of coordination here,” she said. “The commission was formed incredibly fast. They’ve already convened and now they’re coming to Orlando.” 

In response to questions about the timing of the commission’s creation, Flemming, the court spokesperson, said Muñiz’s administrative order spoke for itself. “Such an assessment is contemplated in the Court’s rules, where an annual assessment is allowed, as specified in the administrative order,” Flemming said. He added that the timing of the committee’s work is directed in part by the early start of the 2024 legislative session, which begins during January in even-numbered years.

In a statement to The Intercept, Renner cited Florida’s population growth since the last review in 1969 and the desire to cut costs through consolidation. “This request for review is a responsible, first step to understanding whether we can optimize our court system to best serve Floridians in the 21st Century,” Renner said. (DeSantis did not respond to a request for comment.)

“The most clear, obvious result of this is going to be circuits that are not going to elect Democratic public defenders, or Democratic state attorneys, or Democratic anyone.”

For judges, a seat on the circuit courts can be seen as an audition for higher appointment by the governor, Skene said. “Now it’s much more a patronage-driven process,” he said. “This is another step in the partisan-izing of the court system. That’s the big concern. And obviously, what you want is judges who are not gonna rule based on whether they like your politics.”

DeSantis has already reshaped the court system by appointing ideological allies, Eskamani said, and the commission could create opportunities for him to expand that network. “We already see this erosion of our judicial system based on the lack of merit-based decision-making. And then this, on top of it — it’s purely political.”

“The most clear, obvious result of this is going to be circuits that are not going to elect Democratic public defenders, or Democratic state attorneys, or Democratic anyone,” Eskamani said. “It’s absolutely a tool to weaken the power of voters.” 

The post Ron DeSantis’s Next Ideological Coup: “Judicial Gerrymander” in Florida appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Even if you’ve never heard “Serial,” the true crime podcast that went viral in 2014, you’ve probably heard about the case it made famous. Adnan Syed was 17 years old when he was arrested in 1999 for killing 18-year-old Hae Min Lee, his ex-girlfriend in Baltimore. A jury found Syed guilty the following year, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

After “Serial” premiered in 2014 and raised questions about the case, a Maryland court heard Syed’s appeal and he was awarded a new trial. Holes in the original prosecution were established, new suspects were identified, and DNA evidence was newly tested. After a long fight, his conviction was overturned last year, and the charges against him were officially dropped in October 2022.

In March of this year, though, Syed’s conviction was reinstated. Lee’s family had filed an appeal and argued that the state’s attorney — what the state of Maryland calls its local prosecutors — hadn’t given adequate notice for them to attend the September hearing to vacate Syed’s conviction, though Lee’s brother did attend the hearing on Zoom. Nonetheless, a panel of three appellate judges ruled 2-to-1 in the family’s favor and reinstated the conviction and ordered a new hearing.

It may be tempting to chalk up the back and forth of Syed’s case to the vicissitudes of the court system, but the rollercoaster story also speaks to clashes of political personalities exacerbated by Maryland’s shifting tides on criminal justice reforms. The airing of “Serial” and the revival of Syed’s case came in tandem with a push for criminal justice reforms in Maryland that boosted Syed’s appeal — a push that became bound up with animosity between elected officials amid the pressure cooker of state politics. Now, as the dust settles over the infighting, Syed could be sent back to prison.

The interpersonal disputes surrounding the Syed case could now lead Maryland to reshape how victims influence the legal system, said David Jaros, a law professor at University of Baltimore who runs the Center for Criminal Justice Reform.

“There are just a variety of unique strands of interpersonal issues as well as a highly publicized case that received unusual amounts of media attention,” he said. “One of the things that’s troubling is that those factors may be playing a role in creating the precedent and establishing policy on what the role of victims are within this process.”

“It is troubling that perhaps there will be the shadow, at least, hanging over this case that the result is not based on sound legal reasoning or policy, but rather these other political factors,” Jaros said. “This is not the case that we want shaping and deciding the very complex question of the role that the victim’s family should play in the court room.” 

Amy Berg, Susan Simpson, Asia McClain, and Rabia Chaudry of the television show “The Case Against Adnan Syed” speak during an event in Pasadena, Calif., on Feb. 8, 2019.

Photo: Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

Marilyn Mosby v. Brian Frosh

At the center of the wrangling over the Syed case was a long-standing feud between the former Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh and the former State’s Attorney for Baltimore Marilyn Mosby. Mosby, who handled the review of the Syed case, had been pushing a slew of criminal justice reforms in the background as Syed pursued his high-profile appeal. Mosby, however, was in the limelight herself, facing federal trial for perjury and fraud related to mortgage applications to purchase a home and condo in Florida. In a September television interview, Frosh suggested that Mosby had timed a motion to vacate Syed’s conviction to distract from her own legal woes.

For Mosby, comments like Frosh’s revealed that more than a push for justice was at work in Syed’s appeal. Evidence of guilt, she said, was not driving Frosh’s support for putting Syed back behind bars, but rather interpersonal and political disputes. She told The Intercept, “There was definitely a personal animus from Frosh when he went into court and said the case wasn’t sustainable based on victim’s rights.” Frosh, for his part, told The Intercept that political disagreements with Mosby were unrelated to how his office handled Syed’s appeal: “Politics played absolutely no part in our office’s work on the case.”

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The pressure on Mosby’s office was not unique. A movement to address inequities in the criminal justice system and hold police misconduct to account helped sweep dozens of reform prosecutors into office since the mid-2010s. As the prosecutors moved to divert resources to violent crimes over low-level offenses, open wrongful conviction units, and prosecute police misconduct, the backlash was swift. Opponents of reform have been quick to blame these prosecutors for the rise in particular crimes that accompanied the coronavirus pandemic.

In states from California to Pennsylvania, reform prosecutors have faced increasing scrutiny and political attacks, with conservative officials and police unions leading the charge. At least 17 states have introduced legislation to limit the authority of reform prosecutors since 2017, and reform prosecutors are facing increasingly aggressive recall attempts. There are parallels between Mosby’s clashes with Frosh and reform prosecutors fighting with state-level officials in other places, but the interpersonal dimensions of the Syed case make it more complex than other disputes.

“What strikes me as very unusual about this is this kind of internecine battle between Mosby’s office and the AG’s office on it,” said Daniel Medwed, a professor at Northeastern University School of Law who studies wrongful convictions. “That’s what makes this more complicated.”  

“What strikes me as very unusual about this is this kind of internecine battle between Mosby’s office and the AG’s office on it.”

In Maryland, Mosby didn’t fall neatly into the reform prosecutor mold, but she became the target of attacks by Frosh and other politicians who blamed her policies for rising crime in Baltimore. In 2019, Maryland’s Republican Gov. Larry Hogan called on Frosh, a Democrat, to take violent crime cases away from Mosby, claiming that her office repeatedly released people without charges. Frosh said his office would do anything it could to cooperate with the governor. Last year, Hogan blamed Mosby’s office for a spike in homicides.

In late September, Frosh explicitly linked the Syed case to his soft-on-crime attacks on Mosby. After her office filed the motion to vacate Syed’s conviction, Frosh told reporters she should have worked harder to prosecute murder suspects. “If state’s attorney Mosby were concentrating as hard on trying murder cases and putting murderers behind bars as she has on this case,” Frosh said, referring to the Syed case, “I think our state would be quite a bit safer.”

A tribute to Hae Min Lee in a Woodlawn High School yearbook. Lee was abducted and killed in 1999.

Photo: Hayes Gardner/The Baltimore Sun/Tribune News Service via Getty Image

Attorney General’s Involvement

The fight between Mosby and Frosh over Syed’s case came to a head last March. Mosby’s office and Syed’s defense team had agreed to new DNA testing. Mosby filed a motion to vacate Syed’s conviction in September, saying her office had found evidence of Brady violations — failures to hand over potentially exculpatory evidence — by the attorney general’s office. At the time, Mosby said Frosh made a “willful decision” to withhold the evidence. Mosby’s office officially dropped charges against Syed in October.

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It was around the time that the motion to vacate was filed that a former associate of Frosh’s intervened. Kathleen Murphy had first prosecuted the Syed case in 1999 in her past role in the state’s attorney’s office. From there, she went on to direct the criminal division in Frosh’s office, where she again worked on Syed’s case, handling the attorney general’s involvement. Last September, Hogan appointed Murphy to be a judge at the Baltimore County District Court.

After the appointment, but before she joined the bench, Murphy became involved again in the Syed case, but not in her official capacity: She placed a call to Steve Silverman, a partner at the private law firm Silverman Thompson, to ask for an attorney to represent Lee’s family, according to Mosby, Silverman’s partner Brian Thompson, and another person with knowledge of the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a pending case.

Silverman had been involved with the case and was planning to represent the family, according to Thompson. Instead, Steve Kelly, an alum of Silverman Thompson who worked at a separate firm when Murphy placed her call, took on the case instead. Kelly changed firms in June and is no longer listed on the case. (Silverman declined to comment, and Kelly did not respond to a request for comment. Attorneys for Young Lee, Hae Min Lee’s brother, declined to comment for this story while the case is pending.)

“It’s not unprecedented for prosecutors to try to assist victims,” said Medwed, the law professor. “I’m not aware of situations where they’ve called private lawyers.”

“It’s not unprecedented for prosecutors to try to assist victims. I’m not aware of situations where they’ve called private lawyers.”

Skirmishes between Frosh and Mosby continued to shape the legal fight between Syed and Lee’s family. In criminal appeals in Maryland, the attorney general is supposed to represent the state’s attorney. In the Syed case, however, Frosh frequently disparaged Mosby’s handling of the case in the press. Eventually, he supported the family’s appeal against Syed’s release, blasting Mosby in court for giving inadequate notice to Lee’s family to attend the hearing to vacate his conviction.

Frosh also criticized Mosby’s office for requesting new DNA testing in the case. He later told The Intercept in an interview that his attorney general’s office had already tested the DNA evidence, though Mosby said the evidence had not yet been tested.

One other wrinkle in the handling of the case by the attorney general’s office hangs over the Syed appeal. Thiru Vignarajah had worked the case from the attorney general’s office but was asked to leave his position in 2016 after an internal investigation into conduct toward his subordinates, several of whom claimed he harassed and abused them. When Vignarajah left for a private firm, though, he asked to take the Syed case with him.

It is common for the attorney general to hire outside counsel, which is what Vignarajah’s pro bono work on the Syed case was, Frosh said. “There was no compensation, it was just him finishing up work that he had been doing when he was in the office,” Frosh said. “It was not an unusual thing to do.” Jaros, the law professor, told The Intercept that attorneys typically do not transfer cases to private firms.

As a relatively new prosecutor with a heavy caseload, Mosby’s office welcomed the move. Frosh gave the green light and assigned Vignarajah to the case.

Marilyn Mosby, Maryland state attorney for Baltimore city, speaks during a news conference pertaining to a case against Adnan Syed on Oct. 11, 2022, in Baltimore.

Photo: Julio Cortez/AP

Maryland Supreme Court

Syed’s appeal remains in limbo while attorneys for Lee’s family fight to keep his conviction intact. The outcome of the case is now up to the Maryland Supreme Court. A decision by the court, which agreed to take the case in June, is expected by the end of this year. (Syed’s defense attorney declined to comment while the case is pending.)

Mosby said it was untrue that her move to vacate Syed’s conviction was motivated by politics. She said Syed had applied as early as 2021 to have his case evaluated by a unit created by her office after Maryland passed a law allowing review of juvenile sentencing. She would not, however, have a chance to see the case through. Embattled by her indictment for perjury and fraud, Mosby lost reelection last year.

The new state’s attorney, Ivan Bates, quickly reversed some of her criminal justice reforms. While Bates previously said he would drop charges against Syed, he has since expressed concern with the handling of the case.

Frosh’s office framed the decision to reinstate Syed’s conviction as a win for victim’s rights, and the Lee family’s attorneys applauded it. Mosby maintains that Lee’s family knew about the hearing and agreed to attend on Zoom.

“Crime victims have never had a weak voice in the process, so I think that’s a hard argument to make,” said Jaros, the University of Baltimore law professor, speaking of Frosh’s framing of the case. “We’re seeing an unusual willingness to involve the system in this case and reverse decisions and potentially create new precedent based on circumstances that are really somewhat unique to this case.”

The post “Serial” Podcast’s Adnan Syed Might Go Back to Prison Because of Toxic Maryland Politics appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Four elected prosecutors filed suit against the state of Georgia on Wednesday to stop a new law that gives appointees of the state’s Republican governor the power to remove elected district attorneys from office. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill into law in May.

“This is a trend that we’re seeing across the country of state governments that don’t like how local communities want to address concerns about public safety,” said Josh Rosenthal, legal director at Public Rights Project, which is working on the suit. “When local communities are making choices that these conservative state governments don’t like, state governments aren’t respecting the will of the voters. They’re taking that power away from local communities.”

“When local communities are making choices that these conservative state governments don’t like, state governments aren’t respecting the will of the voters.”

The Georgia bill is one of at least 37 preemption measures — proposals that seek to limit the power of elected prosecutors — introduced in recent years across 17 states. Such bills have multiplied since 2017 after reform prosecutors started winning elections in greater numbers.

The laws work in different ways, sometimes prohibiting constituents in certain jurisdictions from electing their own prosecutors, restricting a prosecutor’s authority over certain crimes, or creating new pathways to remove them from office altogether.

In Georgia, the law puts discipline and removal of prosecutors in the hands of a commission made up of political appointees. The measure allows the commission to discipline prosecutors for decisions based on any policy, written or otherwise, to not prosecute certain offenses, like low-level drug possession or sex work. Prosecutors removed by the commission are disqualified from running again for 10 years.

Several of the laws have targeted jurisdictions that recently elected reform-minded prosecutors, including in Missouri, Texas, and Mississippi.

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The lawsuit in Georgia is attempting to restore power to prosecutors who were elected by constituents by having the new law declared to be against the state’s constitution. The prosecutors on the suit are Sherry Boston, Jonathan Adams, Jared Williams, and Flynn Broady, who represent seven counties in Georgia with a total population of more than 1.8 million people.

Kemp’s Ideological War

Republican state officials including Kemp have claimed without evidence that prosecutors to their left are causing the moral decline of cities and driving crime. In December, two weeks before the start of the 2023 legislative session that saw the bill passed, Kemp had publicly criticized what he described as “far-left local prosecutors [who] are failing their constituents and making our communities less safe.”

Efforts to undercut the power of reform prosecutors, though, frequently center on ideological disagreements. Key issues of disagreement between state-level officials and local prosecutors have included Republican efforts to eliminate the right to abortion and overturn the 2020 election, and the future of the movement for criminal justice reform.

The pattern has played out in other states with centrist or right-wing government administrations. Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended Andrew Warren, the prosecutor in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa Bay, last year after Warren said he wouldn’t charge people who sought abortions.

“These are not things you would expect to see in the United States. This is what authoritarians do.”

“These are not things you would expect to see in the United States,” Warren told The Intercept. “This is what authoritarians do. They use the power of prosecution to protect their allies and to punish their enemies. This is a very slippery slope to go down.”

Hot-button culture war issues like the prosecution of abortion and gender-affirming care were also at play in the passage of Georgia’s law. The state had passed an aggressive abortion ban in 2019. Several prosecutors have pledged not to enforce criminal abortion bans, the same kind of affirmation that exposed Warren to removal in Florida. Also in Georgia, Fulton County attorney Fani Willis has been preparing to charge former President Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the results of the state’s 2020 presidential election. (The governor’s office said it would not comment on pending litigation.)

The movement to subvert elected prosecutors gained steam as reform-minded candidates have gained ground in elections since the mid-2010s, including in Georgia. The state, in that time, has also been confronting issues of racial and ideological diversity among district attorneys. Prior to the 2020 election in Georgia, only five elected prosecutors were people of color. Now there are at least 14, several of whom campaigned on criminal justice reform and represent districts where people of color are the majority.

The Georgia bill has also drawn criticisms from prosecutors who don’t identify as reformers.

“Although I may disagree with some DAs’ decisions in other communities, I believe it is their right to make those decisions,” said Adams, who joined the lawsuit and represents a conservative community. 

Crimes like adultery, fornication, and sodomy are still on the books in Georgia, but many prosecutors decline to prosecute them. Adams had a situation in September where a woman filed an application for a warrant to arrest her husband for adultery. “If I didn’t have that policy against prosecuting that crime, her husband would have had an arrest, would have had to be booked into the jail, may have lost his job or had some other impact,” he said. “Every unmarried person in the entire state of Georgia having sexual activities is committing a criminal offense.”

Conservative lawmakers could be setting a precedent that could come back to bite them, Adams said, potentially facing edicts in the future by a more liberal governor or legislature. He said, “Down the road, we’re gonna have to face this on the other side.”

Undermining Democracy

The new Georgia law’s critics are concerned about its poorly explained grounds for discipline of prosecutors.

Georgia’s state constitution allows for prosecutorial discretion and a right to free speech, Rosenthal, the legal director, said. The state already has several mechanisms that provide oversight of prosecutors, including the state bar, rules of professional conduct enforced by the state Supreme Court, the power of impeachment by the general assembly, and prosecutors’ own elections.

“Because the grounds for discipline are so vaguely written, it’s really handing a blank check to this new commission — which is appointed entirely by the governor and his political allies — to discipline essentially whomever they want,” Rosenthal said. “That kind of blank check is an opportunity for political shenanigans instead of expecting the will of the voters in each of these communities.”

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Georgia lawmakers have also found other ways to limit the jurisdiction of reform-minded attorneys. Williams, one of the prosecutors on the lawsuit, was elected as the first Black prosecutor in the Augusta Judicial Circuit in 2020. Shortly thereafter, Republicans carved out the whitest county from Williams’s jurisdiction and created the state’s first new judicial circuit in four decades.

Williams had run as a reformer following the high-profile murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, the latter hailing from a county in Williams’s circuit. 

“The community made a very intentional choice in moving away from the traditional style of prosecution that had dominated my circuit for 150 years,” Williams told The Intercept. 

That message won bipartisan support across three counties. For opponents of the move to cut his district, people in Williams’s jurisdiction spent hours knocking doors and fundraising in the Augusta heat, only to have the Legislature turn around and strip them of their choice before he was even sworn in.

“What’s different?” Williams asked. “What’s changed such that now it’s a good idea to have this political commission that has the authority to Monday-morning quarterback the very tough choices that prosecutors have to make every day?” 

The answer lies in politics, Williams said: Running on punitive policies is unpopular at the ballot box, so conservative lawmakers have turned to a political game. Prosecutors should be able to concentrate on violent crimes like murder and not divert limited resources to low-level offenses like nonviolent marijuana possession. 

“It is the same thing that we’re seeing across the nation,” Williams said. “There are people who are resistant to the change and those people are in the minority, but they often have a good deal of authority, and they wield it in ways that are unconstitutional.”

Update: August 2, 2023, 11:00 a.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a comment from Gov. Brian Kemp’s office that was received after publication.

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Two years after the murder of George Floyd ignited worldwide protests against police brutality, President Joe Biden ordered federal law enforcement agencies to update their policies on use of force. A new report, however, finds that the nation’s largest law enforcement agency ignored the spirit — if not the letter — of that order. 

The Department of Homeland Security has failed to accurately compile data on use-of-force incidents, according to a report issued Monday by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, or GAO. “We found the data were not sufficiently reliable for the purposes of describing the number of times agency law enforcement officers used force,” the watchdog agency wrote. 

DHS updated its use-of-force policy in February to limit the use of no-knock entries, require more frequent training, and ban chokeholds unless deadly force is authorized. The changes brought DHS into compliance with Biden’s May 2022 executive order, which required federal law enforcement agencies to align their use-of-force practices with new Department of Justice policy. The order also included guidelines for improved data collection and reporting on federal agencies’ use of force.

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GAO’s report, authorized by Congress last year, determined that several agencies under DHS have been regularly undercounting use-of-force incidents. From April 2022 to July 2023, GAO audited four DHS agencies: Customs and Border Protection, the Federal Protective Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Secret Service. “If officers used force multiple times during one event, the agency counted only one instance of force,” said Gretta Goodwin, a GAO director for homeland security and justice.

Customs and Border Protection reported using force on a group of 62 subjects as a single use-of-force incident.

After an encounter at the U.S. border, for example, Customs and Border Protection reported using force on a group of 62 subjects as a single use-of-force incident. GAO’s analysis also found that Federal Protective Service officers described using force 146 times in data from 2021 and 2022, while Federal Protective Service reported only 36 use-of-force incidents. In one case, according to GAO, Federal Protective Service counted 27 separate uses of force across 15 reports as a single incident. 

“We brought this to their attention, like ‘You’re not being transparent, and this clearly is an undercount,’” Goodwin said. “We asked them to pay more attention to that and to do an actual count of the use of force.” DHS did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

The report’s findings are notable given how DHS agencies like Customs and Border Protection have typically counted uses of force against officers, said Katherine Hawkins, a senior legal analyst at the Project on Government Oversight. Customs and Border Protection has historically inflated data on use of force against officers to justify violence against migrants, The Intercept has previously reported. “This sort of sounds like the exact opposite, which is striking,” Hawkins said. 

GAO also noted that DHS does not have a plan or system to monitor or analyze the use-of-force data it does collect under the updated policy. “According to officials, they have not developed a plan because it is too early to look at trends in the use of force data,” GAO wrote.

While each agency has an internal board that reviews uses of force, GAO found that in 2021 and 2022, DHS review boards determined most use-of-force incidents complied with agency rules.

This is an unsurprising trend, according to Hawkins, who noted that review boards were set up years ago to decrease use of force within Customs and Border Protection but typically found that such incidents were justified. There is no system in place to track board determinations and little transparency on how they analyze cases. “I don’t have a lot of faith in the review boards,” Hawkins said. “It’s kind of a black box.”  

The four audited DHS agencies have use-of-force guidelines that reflect the standard of officer “reasonableness” established by the 1989 Supreme Court case Graham v. Connor. The court held that claims of excessive police force should be judged from the perspective of a “reasonable” officer responding to circumstances in a particular incident. The ruling has since given immense leeway to police, who often invoke the standard to justify using excessive force against civilians.

“When something goes up to one of the review boards, how are they making the determination that this is within or outside of policy?” Goodwin said. She added that GAO is interested in how DHS uses the information gleaned from its review boards. “What are they learning from it? What information, what lessons learned are they taking? And is that affecting how they do the training? Is that affecting any edits or updates they make to their policy?”

The report made two recommendations to DHS. GAO called on the agency to issue clarifying guidance on how its component agencies submit data on incidents when force is used multiple times, and it recommended that the secretary of homeland security create and implement a plan and timeline to analyze use-of-force data. 

In a July 7 letter responding to a GAO request for comments on the report, DHS concurred with the office’s recommendations. The agency said it would create a plan to analyze the data by the end of this year, issue guidance on its reporting by January 2024, and complete the use-of-force data analysis in 2025. GAO will receive an update on the status of the recommendations within six months.

The post Federal Law Enforcement Agencies Routinely Undercount Use-of-Force Incidents appeared first on The Intercept.

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement flouted guidance from the Biden administration to narrow its immigration arrests and prioritize deportation for migrants that pose threats to border security, public safety, and national security. 

Shortly after President Joe Biden took office, his administration ordered ICE to prioritize action against people who posed security risks. A new report from the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy group, found that about a third of ICE arrests between February and November 2021, in Biden’s first year in office, involved people who were not considered risks to security or public safety. Half of ICE requests for local authorities to hold a migrant — called “detainers” — during the same period were carried out against people who were not considered security risks. 

“At the end of the day, ICE was not following its own rules.”

“ICE was going outside of these priorities,” said Raul Pinto, a senior staff attorney at the American Immigration Council who drafted the report, of Biden’s orders. “At the end of the day, ICE was not following its own rules.” 

The Biden administration issued guidance on new ICE enforcement priorities in January and February 2021. Former President Donald Trump’s policies made it an official priority to target anyone who was in the U.S. without authorization.

The new Biden guidelines called on the agency to prioritize groups of people considered by the Department of Homeland Security — ICE’s parent agency — to be threats to national security, border security, and public safety, and to use discretion in cases that fell outside of those categories. 

A February 2021 memo required officers to obtain written permission for arrests, detainers, and removals of people who were not considered security risks. The memo also required ICE to collect data on enforcement actions and submit weekly reports of all enforcements and removals. 

In the nine months after that guidance was issued, ICE directed at least a third of its enforcement actions against people who were not considered threats to security. ICE officers approved enforcement action in nonpriority cases 89.5 percent of the time. In 11 percent of the cases reviewed, enforcement action was taken before an ICE officer requested approval.

The report says, “This data suggests that ICE’s pre-approval process did not serve as a significant check on the agency, but largely as a rubber stamp for approval of officers’ actions.” 

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The American Immigration council report was published four days after the Supreme Court ruled against states that had fought the narrowed enforcement guidelines in court. Texas and Louisiana had both challenged the change. On June 23, the high court ruled 8-1 in the Biden administration’s favor, allowing the guidelines to stand. 

The ruling was a win for the White House, which has struggled to enforce some of its efforts to reverse Trump’s anti-immigrant policies with Republican officials seeking to block changes in court. 

The Supreme Court decision also puts pressure on Biden’s administration to more aggressively pursue the humanitarian immigration proposals he ran on in 2020. 

“It’s up to DHS leadership and ICE leadership to ensure that their field level staff, law enforcement officers, are actually doing what the higher-ups are asking of them.”

Immigration advocates applauded the decision, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the agency would resume adoption of the narrowed enforcement guidelines. 

It’s not clear that’s happened yet, said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University. The court’s decision puts the power back in the Biden administration’s hands, he said: “It’s up to DHS leadership and ICE leadership to ensure that their field level staff, law enforcement officers, are actually doing what the higher-ups are asking of them.” 

The data in the American Immigration Council report covers the first months of Biden’s administration. It takes time to implement policy change in a sprawling agency like the Department of Homeland Security, García Hernández said. But ICE also has a history of slow-walking immigration policy shifts under Democratic administrations — a dynamic that goes back to the Obama administration. “That background makes it reasonable to be skeptical of how willing ICE officers are to shift away from the Trump administration’s heavy-handed enforcement tactics and toward the Biden administration’s more humanitarian-focused approach,” he said.

The White House directed questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not reply to a request for comment. 

Finalized guidelines issued by Mayorkas in September, which went into effect in November 2021, removed some data collection and reporting requirements from the administration’s original policy memo.

Reporting on detention requirements is mandated by Congress, but agencies have tremendous leeway over what information it reports and how it’s reported, García Hernández said: “This is one of the difficulties of tracking what ICE does.”

Immigration advocates said the court’s decision cleared the way for the Biden administration to walk back Trump’s indiscriminate removal policies. Without standardized reporting on enforcement actions, it will be difficult to ensure that happens, said Pinto, of the American Immigration Council. The organization is trying to push the administration to improve data collection on enforcement actions. 

“Had it not been for the data collection requirements in the February 18 memo, we would not know that almost 35 percent of law enforcement actions were for activities that were outside the priorities,” Pinto said. “Data keeping is extremely important for oversight of ICE.”

The post ICE Disobeyed Biden’s Order to Drop Trump’s Blanket Deportation Policy appeared first on The Intercept.

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Shortly after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took office in 2019, the state Supreme Court threatened to dissolve the Florida Bar Association if it didn’t get rid of its diversity programs.

The court had taken a sharp right turn after DeSantis selected three new justices with the help of Federalist Society board co-chair Leonard Leo. Leo led a secret panel of advisers that vetted DeSantis’s judicial nominees before he took office.

The revelation came on the heels of a slew of news stories on conservative donors buying influence on the U.S. Supreme Court — where Leo, again, was among the conservative legal activists who helped to install a conservative majority. The top federal court has since made landmark rulings against abortion rights and in favor of business interests. And Leo isn’t done yet: He funnels money to a network of right-wing organizations orchestrating key Supreme Court cases on red-meat conservative issues.

In Florida, Leo was working to overturn a 40-year status quo of judiciary balance and restraint. The state Supreme Court had fostered an image of independence after corruption scandals that forced two justices to resign in the early 1970s. When DeSantis took office, concerns about improprieties disappeared. The governor has a long history with the Federalist Society — he was a member at Harvard Law School — and his judicial nominees are backed by the group.

The ideological project DeSantis is pushing Florida is no secret. He unabashedly appoints political allies to posts across the state. Such picks have shown up in the judiciary, nonpartisan election offices, and state boards that oversee public schools and colleges, medical practices, business, and real estate.

DeSantis’s appointments, budget decisions, and fundraising tactics have come under heightened scrutiny since he announced a presidential run last month. None of the appointments, however, eclipse the lasting change of his state Supreme Court takeover. DeSantis has named five of the court’s seven members, all of whom are members of the Federalist Society.

“I don’t think he’s appointing chumps, but he’s clearly put a more ideological litmus test on his justices than others have,” said Neil Skene, who published an official history of the court. Vetting justices by patronage was common starting under President George Bush in the early 2000s, Skene said, but DeSantis is at the vanguard of making purely ideological appointments.

Leonard Leo speaks at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. on April 23, 2019.

Photo: Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images

He is not the first to award contracts to donors or administrative posts to political operatives, but DeSantis does it at an unprecedented scale. The thoroughness of his cronyism has had a chilling effect in Florida: There is a perception among politicians and residents alike that nothing can get done if you’re seen a DeSantis foe, said Barbara Petersen, executive director of the Florida Center for Government Accountability.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Petersen said. Public servants are dismayed at what’s happening to their state, she said: “People are afraid of him.”

No Diversity Policies

After the scandals in the 1970s, successive Florida governors sought to improve the diversity of viewpoints on the state Supreme Court.

“The idea behind all of that, of course, is to make sure that all of Florida is represented on its highest court,” said Craig Waters, who worked at the court for 35 years and was its communications director until he retired last year. “It makes sure that a state Supreme Court does not become an echo chamber, but a true debate society. If you have members of a state Supreme Court that are careful of each other and watching each other, it prevents anything happening that might lend itself to a lack of public trust and confidence. It’s very important that the justices police each other.”

That stopped under DeSantis.

“What I see today is a court that lacks diversity and that lacks that internal policing mechanism that has served it so well in the past.”

“What I see today,” Waters said, “is a court that lacks diversity and that lacks that internal policing mechanism that has served it so well in the past.”

Shortly after DeSantis made his first appointments, the court started chipping away at its diversity programs.

In 1949, the state Supreme Court founded the Florida Bar, an association that regulates attorneys. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the bar sought to diversify the judiciary along ideological, ethnic, and gender lines and to address judicial discrimination. The association convened a diversity symposium in 2004 and issued a report with recommendations to help improve diversity and strengthen its independence. In 2010, the Florida Bar created a committee to address diversity and inclusion.

When DeSantis’s allies arrived on the court, threats began coming down: The bar would be dissolved if it didn’t get rid of its diversity initiatives. Soon enough, the attacks proved effective. In 2021, the state Supreme Court ordered that the bar association amend its continuing legal education, or CLE, policy and eliminate a requirement for diversity among speakers and panelists in its continuing educational programs. The fight even made its way to the American Bar Association, which changed its own policies in April 2022 to bring the group into compliance with the rules imposed on the Florida Bar.

Florida Bar spokesperson Jennifer Krell Davis told The Intercept that the association had not changed its diversity programs, but that it adhered with the court’s order to eliminate diversity requirements in CLE programs. She declined to comment on a question about the court’s alleged threat to dissolve the association. “Our Leadership Academy, Path to Unity and Diversity grant programs (and others) continue to thrive under our Diversity and Inclusion committee,” Krell Davis said.

In February, the state Supreme Court went so far to dissolve the court system’s Standing Committee on Fairness and Diversity and eliminate its fairness and diversity training for judges.

The court’s public information Director Paul Flemming said the court’s opinion was self-explanatory. “The opinions of the Florida Supreme Court speak for themselves,” Flemming said. “I would refer you to what is written there: ‘Quotas based on characteristics like the ones in this policy are antithetical to basic American principles of nondiscrimination.’”

DeSantis Court Picks

How the state Supreme Court arrived here is the story of DeSantis’s picks. The court’s current chief justice, Carlos Muñiz, took an unusual path to the bench. He had previously been a Republican political operative and worked in the Trump administration as general counsel to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Muñiz was deputy attorney general and chief of staff to former Attorney General Pam Bondi, deputy chief of staff and general counsel to the former Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and deputy general counsel to former Gov. Jeb Bush.

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When DeSantis took office, Alan Lawson, a conservative and the most senior judge on the bench, was in line to be the next chief justice of the court. Court staff had been preparing for his ascension and budgeting for his administration when Lawson abruptly announced in April 2022 that he would retire. Lawson went to work as a partner at a new law firm in Tallahassee run by Republican political operatives who had broken off from one of the state’s top GOP law firms, Shutts & Bowen. Lawson told the Washington Post his decision to leave court was purely personal.

That July, less than four years after he was appointed to the state Supreme Court, Muñiz became its chief. Lawson was the first justice to be passed over for chief despite his seniority since 1976, said Skene, the expert on Florida courts. “He was not of the solidly Federalist Society group and Muñiz was,” he said. “Muñiz had a much more political job before that.”

Another DeSantis pick, Renatha Francis, worked at Shutts & Bowen before she was appointed to the court in 2020. Her original nomination was nullified because she hadn’t been a member of the bar for 10 years, as required by the state constitution. She was nominated again in 2022.

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The web of allies and appointments DeSantis has woven across the state overlaps with and influences the court. In May, after another justice abruptly stepped down to take a job at a DeSantis-linked insurance company, the governor appointed Meredith Sasso to the state Supreme Court. Several months before, DeSantis had appointed her husband, Mike Sasso, to the board of the former Reedy Creek Improvement District, where the governor has been embroiled in a battle with Disney. DeSantis appointed Sasso and four other Republicans to the board in February, including a major GOP donor and a co-founder of the far-right group Moms for Liberty who is married to the chair of Florida’s GOP.

Four days after Meredith Sasso joined the bench, her husband resigned from the improvement district board. Had Sasso remained on, it would have raised questions about his wife’s ability to participate in court decisions related to Disney without presenting a conflict of interest.

Similar questions may soon face Charles Canady, another justice who was appointed by former Democratic Gov. Charlie Crist. Canady’s wife Jennifer was elected last year to the Florida state House and quickly co-sponsored a bill that would ban abortion beyond six weeks. DeSantis signed the six-week ban into law in April, but its implementation is pending an ongoing court challenge to the state’s current 15-week ban. Jennifer Canady has been floated as the state’s next speaker of the House with DeSantis’s blessing.

“That poses a really difficult kind of situation for Canady because basically every law that gets passed and might be up for court review will come through the House of Representatives,” Skene said. “It certainly creates this interesting proposition where husband and wife might be at the head of two different branches of government.”

Cronies Everywhere

What makes DeSantis different from his predecessors is that his actions are overtly political, said Ben Wilcox, research director and co-founder of Integrity Florida, a government watchdog. DeSantis has reshaped Florida politics far beyond the judiciary, from the boards of public schools to boards of medicine.

“Because DeSantis has such an aggressive agenda, that’s why you’re seeing all these appointments to school boards, universities,” Wilcox said. “He’s really trying to push his agenda in pretty much every chance he has.”

The governor, for instance, overhauled the board of trustees at the New College of Florida and installed conservative activists. One pick to the board was the architect of the war on critical race theory. The new board quickly fired the college president and replaced her with the former Republican speaker of the Florida House. He, in turn, tapped a GOP lawmaker — whom his office had previously suspended from a county position after he was charged with impersonating a law enforcement officer — to become the next president of South Florida State College.

“He’s really trying to push his agenda in pretty much every chance he has.”

The lawmaker, state Rep. Fred Hawkins, had no higher education experience, and the school lowered the education requirements for the position just three days before he submitted his application. Three finalist candidates withdrew their applications after the governor’s office contacted members of the board, the Herald Advocate reported. Hawkins got the job.

Hawkins would prove to be yet another loop in the tangle of DeSantis cronies. Before arriving at South Florida State, Hawkins sponsored a bill that gave DeSantis power to appoint the board for the Reedy Creek Improvement District, where Disney is based. The move came just under a year after DeSantis signed a bill to revoke Disney’s special tax status after the entertainment giant publicly opposed his “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Disney sued DeSantis in April, claiming the governor weaponized the state government to retaliate against it for making First Amendment-protected speech.

DeSantis also stacked the state’s two medical boards, including an appointment for a real estate broker whose wife DeSantis had installed in a real estate appraisal board. Both medical boards voted last year to ban gender-affirming health care for trans youth.

Lobbyists

DeSantis repeatedly leveraged his position to bully Florida political figures — from elected officials to lobbyists in the state — into supporting his ambitions and pet causes.

“What he is doing, and what is now being reported, is his shakedown of lobbyists,” said Petersen, of the Florida Center for Government Accountability.

DeSantis’s chief of staff organized government officials to solicit campaign contributions from lobbyists, NBC reported earlier this month.

“Shaking down legislators, you know: ‘Give me your endorsement, I haven’t signed the budget yet,’” Petersen said. “And damned if he did not retaliate against those people. You can see it in the vetoes. It’s stunning.”

“What he’s doing, he’s doing for the sole purpose of his political ambition — and to the detriment of Floridians. We’ve got real problems in Florida.”

The governor’s allies have also gone on to enrich themselves. In September 2020, shortly after former Florida Republican House Majority Leader Dane Eagle lost in the Republican congressional primary for a U.S. House seat, DeSantis gave him a new job. Eagle, a commercial real estate broker, was appointed as the executive director of the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity. In January, less than two and a half years into the job, Eagle announced that he would join the government affairs team at Ballard Partners, one of Florida’s biggest international lobbying firms, with extensive ties to Donald Trump.

“DeSantis continues to use his political position as Governor to feed the grift of his allies, by gifting them positions their unqualified for, allowing contracts to be diverted towards friendly vendors and pleasing donors with bills that he signs into law,” said Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani, who represents parts of Orlando, in a text message. “It’s unethical and feeds into people’s distrust of the Governor.”

With DeSantis’s budget for 2023 to 2024, critics saw a governor intent on funding his top causes at the expense of Floridians’ real concerns. DeSantis cut funding for projects to protect public lands and prevent flooding that were pushed by Democrats and Republican lawmakers who resisted his requests for endorsements in the presidential primary.

“It’s becoming more and more clear as all of this information is coming out that what he’s doing, he’s doing for the sole purpose of his political ambition — and to the detriment of Floridians,” said Petersen. “We’ve got real problems in Florida.”

The post DeSantis Stacked Florida’s Supreme Court With Cronies Who Wage His War on Wokeness — or Else appeared first on The Intercept.

A high-dollar investor in New York who generously supported George Santos’s congressional campaigns and related committees also bankrolled a group in Los Angeles seeking to oust the city’s progressive prosecutor.

Andrew Intrater, a Republican donor based in New York, has given more than $221,000 to George Santos’s congressional campaigns and related groups. In 2020, Santos claimed that Intrater was a client of his. Intrater also put more than half a million dollars into Santos’s previous employer, a company called Harbor City Capital that the Securities and Exchange Commission accused of operating a Ponzi scheme in 2021.

“This is a donor who backed a man who lied about every aspect of his life in breathtaking, unprecedented ways.”

The mendacious New York House member, though, wasn’t Intrater’s only political interest. His focus apparently also includes local politics in California, where he gave $25,000 in seed money to a political action committee opposing Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón.

Gascón, who was elected in 2020 on a criminal justice reform platform that included opposing the death penalty, fended off a second recall attempt in August and is up for reelection in 2024. A group called Cal Justice Committee, formed last year, is working to draft LA County Deputy District Attorney John McKinney, a potential Gascón opponent. Intrater is the group’s first donor.

The interest in the Los Angeles district attorney race puts Intrater at the center of a number of Republican efforts. In addition to his support of Santos, whom he has only recently begun to raise questions about, Intrater was a bit player in the Russiagate probe, thanks to his investment firm’s relationship to a Russian oligarch who is also his cousin, and funds given to Donald Trump’s election and inauguration funds, as well as to Trump’s fixer, lawyer Michael Cohen.

“This is a donor who backed a man who lied about every aspect of his life in breathtaking, unprecedented ways,” said Jessica Brand, a strategist who works with progressive district attorneys across the country, including Gascón’s. “I imagine Angelenos would like to know that McKinney is being drafted by the same man who cares so little about both ethics and the truth.”

Intrater’s investment in fighting LA’s progressive district attorney is part of the GOP’s broader fight against prosecutors like Gascón and his reform-minded peers in cities like San Francisco, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. (Intrater declined to comment for this story.)

The Republican-led fight against prosecutors elected on criminal justice reform platforms is inextricable from the party’s broader anti-democratic aims. Conservative Republicans and Democrats banded together to push a successful recall of reform-minded District Attorney Chesa Boudin in San Francisco last year, but similar attempts to impeach Larry Krasner, the Philadelphia district attorney, have so far failed.

Nationally, Republicans have made targeting progressive prosecutors a significant part of their plan for the immediate future, including proposals to withhold federal funding from states home to district attorneys who refuse cash bail or decline to prosecute certain offenses.

In Los Angeles, Gascón has survived two failed recall attempts supported by police unions and deputy district attorneys in his own office, including McKinney, the deputy district attorney Cal Justice Committee is backing to run against Gascón next year.

McKinney has not announced a campaign or filed to run for office but has been a vocal critic of Gascón. In July, McKinney said he would run against Gascón if the recall effort failed.

In an interview with The Intercept, McKinney distanced himself from the disgraced Santos and denied having any knowledge of Cal Justice’s donors.

“I don’t know anything about Cal Justice’s donors. I certainly don’t want to be associated with anything that would cast a shadow on my effort to run for DA.”

“Based on what I’ve read and seen in the media, what is going on with George Santos is utterly despicable,” McKinney said. “I don’t know anything about Cal Justice’s donors. I certainly don’t want to be associated with anything that would cast a shadow on my effort to run for DA. I expect that once my campaign gets going, we will steer clear of anyone or any organization that is controversial or associated with controversy.”

In September, McKinney was transferred to a different division in Gascón’s office in a move that he claimed was retaliation for criticizing the district attorney. Jason Lustig, who worked under Gascón as assistant head deputy for Long Beach and was also transferred to another division, chairs the Cal Justice Committee. In response, both McKinney and Lustig lambasted Gascón on Fox News. (At the time, Gascón’s office said the transfers were routine and that no employees were demoted.)

McKinney said he was familiar with Cal Justice and got to know Lustig during the recall effort. He said Lustig and others in the DA’s office encouraged him to run if the recall failed. McKinney said he was told about the committee’s website, “Draft McKinney for LA DA,” and visited it to “see what it was all about” but had no involvement with the group.

According to the website, Lustig “has been an active voice opposing District Attorney George Gascón’s policies, including appearing in the media and bringing key coalition members together.” (Cal Justice Committee did not provide comment by the time of publication.)

Though McKinney has not filed to run for office, the Draft McKinney website lists numerous endorsements, including several LA County deputy district attorneys, a police chief in Grover Beach, a retired police chief, two retired Los Angeles Police Department detectives, and a retired member of the LA County Sheriff’s Department.

McKinney is the founder of an organization called Proportional Justice, which advocates for “severe consequences” for major violent offenses, the website says: “Blanket, one-size-fits-all policies are lazy and often lead to disproportional consequences that can be either too harsh or too lenient on a particular offender.”

The post George Santos Benefactor Bankrolled Group Opposing LA’s Progressive Prosecutor appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.