“Do you want to continue with this medication?” asks an actor portraying a doctor in a new political ad, holding a pill bottle out to a fictional patient. When the patient nods, the fake doctor turns left to two people in dark suits, who frown and shake their heads. “I’m sorry,” the doctor tells the patient. “Insurance companies and Washington bureaucrats — these guys are working together to swipe $500 billion from Medicare to pay for Pelosi and Schumer’s out-of-control spending spree.”

The ad was put out last month by the 60 Plus Association, a Koch–funded 501(c)(4) group founded in 1992 by a Republican Senate staffer as a conservative alternative to AARP. Contrary to the ad’s claims, the spending package Democrats are now trying to push through Congress — using the filibuster-proof reconciliation process — would expand Medicare benefits to cover dental, vision, and hearing and allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices. AARP has described the group, which does not disclose its donors, as one of several “front groups that purport to represent older Americans but instead push industry friendly political messages.” It is one of five dark-money groups that recently joined a coalition asking members of Congress to vote against the historic social spending package known as the Build Back Better plan, the centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s agenda.

As right-wing Democrats in Congress have obstructed the Build Back Better plan, conservative dark-money and corporate interest groups representing the fossil fuel and pharmaceutical industries have recognized an opportunity to thwart Biden’s agenda. Major trade associations like Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, and the American Petroleum Institute, along with a web of conservative and dark-money groups tied to former President Donald Trump, congressional Republicans, and the Koch network, are funding ads and lobbying against the package. According to new research from the nonpartisan watchdog group Accountable.US, at least 13 conservative and dark-money groups have spent millions on ads and lobbying efforts since April.

On Wednesday, One Nation, a dark-money group with ties to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Pfizer, launched a $10 million ad campaign against the package. One Nation President Steven Law, McConnell’s top lieutenant outside the Senate, said “infighting” over the package “has created opportunities to weaken or stop it.”

Five other groups are part of the Save America Coalition, a $10 million campaign to kill the package launched September 17 by the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit run by former Trump administration officials seeking to preserve the former president’s policy agenda. The coalition tends to claim that the spending package would increase taxes, utility bills, and prescription drug prices for working people. But all of the groups or their backers have supported past Republican efforts to bolster the fossil fuel industry, privatize social security, end Medicare, and cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy.

Biden’s spending package would expand Medicare, extend the child tax credit, and pay utility companies to switch to renewable energy sources that don’t emit greenhouse gases. The plan, which would reverse corporate tax cuts implemented under Trump, would fund itself through tax increases on corporations and the wealthy. The package includes a provision that would allow the federal government to negotiate with manufacturers on the price of some prescription drugs and save $456 billion over the next decade, according to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation. The provision mirrors a drug pricing reform bill — much despised by the GOP, right-wing Democrats, and the pharmaceutical industry — that House Democrats passed in 2019 and is named for the late Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D-Md. The bill stalled in the Senate.

Other provisions in the package would cut tax breaks to fossil fuel companies and increase the costs of drilling on federal land. Fossil fuel companies are lobbying against the corporate tax increase and claim that the package could result in job cuts.

“Congress is trying to place further restrictions on U.S. development and impose new taxes on American energy while advancing misguided power sector proposals that fail to recognize the critical role of natural gas in driving further emissions reductions,” said Frank Macchiarola, senior vice president of Policy, Economics, and Regulatory Affairs for the American Petroleum Institute, in a statement to The Intercept. “This import-more-oil strategy is a backward approach to addressing our shared climate goals and will only serve to stifle job creation, weaken U.S. energy security and undermine the nation’s economic recovery.”

When the Save America Coalition launched last month, it pledged “to defeat Biden’s reconciliation efforts.” It is led by the America First Policy Institute and includes several dark-money  and corporate interest groups like FreedomWorks and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a group funded by the Koch brothers. Trump Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, well known for his close relationship with the oil and gas industry as governor of Texas, run the institute’s policy areas on national security and “energy independence.”

Not long after he resigned from the White House, Perry was appointed in January 2020 to rejoin the board of the general partner of Energy Transfer, the major Dallas oil pipeline firm behind the Dakota Access pipeline. Current America First Policy Institute president and CEO Brooke Rollins was formerly Perry’s general counsel and policy director, and her husband is the president and a board member of HKN Energy Ltd., an oil firm that operates in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Rollins went on to become president and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which reportedly helped draft Perry’s policy proposals as governor. At least eight former Texas Public Policy Foundation staff members, including Rollins, went on to work in the Trump White House.

In a response to questions about the group’s lobbying against the Biden agenda sent to Texas Public Policy Foundation spokesperson Adam Burnett, Vance Ginn, the group’s chief economist, wrote: “I don’t know the answer to the first few questions. I’d recommend not responding,” in an email that appeared to accidentally include this reporter. Burnett declined to comment.

Another member of the Save America Coalition is FreedomWorks, a Koch-aligned dark-money group that helped start the tea party and organize protests last year to oppose Covid-19 lockdowns and “count legal votes” after Biden won the presidential election. In a statement to the Intercept, FreedomWorks spokesperson Peter Vicenzi denied reporting that the group had helped organize “Stop the Steal” protests, writing that “FreedomWorks organized rallies urging officials to abide by the laws on the books and ensure that every legal ballot was accurately counted.”

FreedomWorks claims that the reconciliation package is “flooded with Green New Deal policies, cradle-to-grave welfare programs, and an unsustainable expansion of entitlement programs like Medicare.” The group criticized the bill’s provision to raise taxes on tobacco, saying the goal was “not to discourage tobacco consumption, but to pay for their socialist plan,” and claimed that the package’s Medicare negotiation provisions would raise drug costs. The group has previously pushed theories denying the existence of climate change.

Another conservative coalition group formed to fight Biden’s agenda in March. Led by former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short, the Coalition to Protect American Workers is planning a seven-figure ad buy targeting congressional Democrats’ stances on provisions in the reconciliation package. Short, a Koch operative whose wife worked for the Koch Foundation and other Koch-funded groups, was the subject of a complaint to the FBI from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics and Washington that claimed Short held stock in companies that were impacted by the federal Covid-19 pandemic response. Last month, CREW filed an ethics complaint against Short because he did not file a required financial disclosure report when he left the White House in January.

A third coalition is Conservatives for Property Rights, a group that includes the 60 Plus Association, which released the anti-drug pricing reform ad last month. Despite its televised claims to want to defend Medicare, the 60 Plus Association backed former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan’s 2011 plan to end the program and turn it into a capped voucher system, as well as former President George W. Bush’s push to privatize Social Security.

Industry groups are “masquerading as advocates for everyday families while they’re really fighting to keep billion-dollar corporations from paying their fair share.”

Also targeting the drug pricing reform attempts is PhRMA, which launched a seven-figure ad buy in September opposing reconciliation proposals. PhRMA is also a top donor to American Action Network, a 501(c)(4) dark-money group that launched a $5 million ad campaign in August and is lobbying in 39 districts, many of them represented by moderate Democrats. The group claims that the reconciliation package would increase taxes on small businesses and working families and released a poll last month from seven congressional districts showing general opposition to the $3.5 trillion plan for “new social welfare spending.” American Action Network shares a communications director with the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC.

PhRMA spokesperson Sarah Sutton said the group’s lobbying efforts have focused only on the bill’s provisions related to drug pricing and that “it is misleading to suggest we are lobbying against the broader bill when our focus is on policies that impact patient access to medicines and future innovation.” American Action Network did not respond to a request for comment.

The Common Sense Leadership Fund, a 501(c)(4) group with deep ties to congressional leadership that started in March, launched ads targeting Democratic senators in swing states like Mark Kelly of Arizona and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire. The group, which claims that the reconciliation package would increase the cost of living for working-class families, is led by President Kevin McLaughlin, a GOP political strategist and former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee; Lester Williamson, former NRSC finance director; and Kevin Golden, who was McConnell’s 2020 campaign manager and was on McConnell’s payroll as recently as February. In 2017, McLaughlin lobbied on tax policy for corporations and related interest groups that have strongly opposed the reconciliation package and corporate tax increases, including Business Roundtable and Walmart.

Industry groups fighting the package are “masquerading as advocates for everyday families while they’re really fighting to keep billion-dollar corporations from paying their fair share,” said Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US. “Any lawmaker that is a target of this smear campaign need only look at the mountain of polling to know the American people are fully behind Biden’s plan to finally make corporations contribute to investments that will lower costs and build a stronger economy for all.”

Corporate executives want to avoid taxes, shirk responsibility for the climate crisis, and maintain their profits, Congressional Progressive Caucus Whip Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., said in a statement to The Intercept. “It is shameful, but not surprising, that some of the most well-funded and criminal corporate lobbyists in the world are doing everything in their power to kill the President’s agenda.”

Business Roundtable, a corporate lobbying group that represents the country’s top CEOs including Apple and Walmart, launched a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign in recent months to fight corporate tax increases in the package. A Business Roundtable spokesperson said the group has not announced a position on the package itself but opposes its corporate tax increases. Asked about the Congressional Budget Office estimate of federal savings resulting from the bill’s drug pricing provisions, the group’s president and CEO Joshua Bolten pointed to an August analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation that found that in the short term, the corporate tax “is borne entirely by owners of capital” and that “only in the longer run” did its methodology assign “some of the burden of the corporate tax to those taxpayers who earn labor income in addition to owners of capital.”

Walmart, which has avoided paying billions of dollars in taxes, has also lobbied against corporate tax increases in both the reconciliation and infrastructure packages.

“Big corporations are using their inside games to lobby against popular provisions in the Build Back Better plan and keep the tax system rigged for the wealthy and rich corporations,” said Senate Committee on Finance member Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. “It’s time to stand against corporate interests and stand up for hardworking Americans so we can get this done.”

“Fossil fuel executives would like to escape any responsibility for the climate catastrophe that they created and to sink any bill that would cut into their bottom line. Billionaires would like to do anything they can to oppose a bill that would force them to actually pay their taxes. And drug executives would like to keep drug prices high so that they continue to profit off Americans’ suffering,” said Omar. “This is what we’re up against. But we know that organized people will always defeat organized money.”

The post Conservative Dark-Money Groups Push Deceptive Ads Against Biden’s Agenda appeared first on The Intercept.

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On Monday, the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, or MICRC, approved draft maps of the state’s new congressional and legislative districts. The 13-person nonpartisan body, whose members were randomly selected in August 2020, was formed after the state approved a 2018 ballot initiative to have an independent commission, rather than the state Legislature, conduct its redistricting process. But in the months since the commission started holding public hearings on the process in May, the Michigan-based group Fair Maps has alleged that the MICRC hid or deleted public comments that were critical of the commission, with its leader calling the MICRC “one of the least transparent public bodies in Michigan.” Supporters and critics of the MICRC say the statements could help lay the groundwork for future lawsuits to inhibit redistricting.

Fair Maps launched this year with the stated goals to “participate in every aspect of Michigan’s redistricting process”; to achieve “fair and independent redistricting”; to represent “the interests of everyday voters at commission meetings”; and to “educate and equip the general public.” The group is run by Tony Daunt, a Republican operative, former state party staffer, lobbyist, and conservative activist who has filed several unsuccessful election-related lawsuits against Michigan’s secretary of state, including an attempt to block the redistricting commission.

Daunt, the group’s executive director, was a logistics manager for the Michigan Republican Party in 2004 while it was chaired by Betsy DeVos, who went on to become former President Donald Trump’s secretary of education. Daunt was the party’s logistics director from 2009 until 2013, when, after a brief stint working for former Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, he became the executive director of the Michigan Freedom Fund — the conservative, Devos-funded group that organized protests against Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s pandemic stay-at-home orders. He ran the Michigan Freedom Fund until May 2021, when he left and joined Fair Maps. Daunt is one of at least two Fair Maps members and was one of at least three Michigan Freedom Fund members with ties to DeVos. Fair Maps did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

In 2019, the year after the MICRC was established, Daunt joined 14 people in filing a federal lawsuit that challenged the commission’s eligibility requirements. The suit asked the court to declare the commission unconstitutional and stop the secretary of state’s office from conducting its selection process, which excludes people who in the past six years have run for or been elected to office, worked as lobbyists, or been employed by a political party or the state Legislature. At the time, Daunt was a registered lobbyist, an officer and member of the local GOP, and a member of its governing body. He and his fellow plaintiffs were ineligible for the redistricting commission.

A federal district judge dismissed the case in July 2020, and an appellate court upheld the decision in May of this year. Daunt left the Michigan Freedom Fund and joined Fair Maps the same month.

Fair Maps has led the efforts to undermine the MICRC, with Daunt telling a local news organization last month that his group had not ruled out suing the commission for missing a September 17 deadline to release the draft maps. (The U.S. Census Bureau published its redistricting census data in August, four months later than usual.) On September 28, Fair Maps published a statement attacking the MICRC and claiming that the body “made a mockery of the promise of transparency voters were guaranteed in 2018.” The group’s Twitter account was suspended as of September 21.

“He’s not advocating for fair maps or maps that give the Democrats a chance, he’s trying to influence the commission and the process to benefit Republicans.”

Since its establishment in 2018, the MICRC has received its own share of criticism from supporters and local media. Former Michigan Republican Party chair and Lincoln Project adviser Jeff Timmer said the body still has a long way to go to make maps that meet the federal requirements of the Voting Rights Act and don’t favor Republicans. Timmer, who was a principal map drawer in Michigan during Republican-controlled gerrymandering in 2001 and 2011, said the maps first released by the MICRC still heavily favored Republicans. In 2019, the year after voters approved the ballot initiative to form an independent redistricting commission, a federal judge found that Michigan’s congressional maps were gerrymandered in the GOP’s favor.

Numerous reporters have drawn attention to comments by MICRC members regarding concerns about the way the body has been “picked apart and analyzed” and been the recipient of “snark” from the press. In its September 28 statement, Fair Maps also accused MICRC spokesperson Edward Woods III of focusing “his fire on the free press.”

“‘Fair Maps’ to the AFL-CIO and MI Dems = maps that outright give Democrats a majority,” tweeted Meghan Reckling, Fair Maps grassroots adviser and chair of the Livingston County Republican Party, on September 16. “Anything short of that they will scream the maps are gerrymandered.”

Reckling ran unsuccessfully last year as a candidate in a Republican primary for the Michigan House of Representatives, receiving support from the DeVos family and the Great Lakes Education Project, a charter school advocacy group founded by DeVos. Six members of the Devos family gave maximum contributions to Reckling’s campaign on July 15, 2020, totaling $6,300. On September 27, she took to Facebook to applaud a recent decision by the Board of State Canvassers to approve a ballot petition for a restrictive voter ID law.

“Today, the Michigan Board of Canvassers approved the language for the Secure MI Vote ballot petition,” Reckling wrote. “We must ensure that every voter is required to verify their identity through a government-issued photo ID.” Daunt was appointed to the board in January.

Daunt’s role with Fair Maps is to advocate “for maps that benefit the Republicans,” said Timmer, who knows and has worked with Daunt. “He’s not advocating for fair maps or maps that give the Democrats a chance, he’s trying to influence the commission and the process to benefit Republicans.”

Since Daunt’s departure from the Michigan Freedom Fund, the group has continued to target the MICRC. The group claims that the commission could “make gerrymandering worse” and has personally attacked MICRC members online. Like Fair Maps, the Michigan Freedom Fund is run by people who for years have worked closely with the DeVos family and affiliated political groups.

On September 3, the Michigan Freedom Fund posted a statement claiming that one of the MICRC’s independent commissioners had posted “years’ worth of offensive, racist and misogynistic tweets.” The post, titled “Tweets so offensive we can’t even quote them,” did not provide any specific examples. (Tweets posted between 2010 and 2013 by Commissioner Anthony Eid, now 28, reviewed by The Intercept included comments about genitalia and rape and appeared crass but nonthreatening.) The Michigan Freedom Fund’s statement also claimed that Eid was not an independent but rather a “vocal far-left Democrat who has long supported radical Democrats like Bernie Sanders,” an independent.

On September 9, the Michigan Freedom Fund called on Eid and one other MICRC member to resign, claiming that both had lied “to gain a seat as an ‘independent’ member of the Commission.” Eid declined to comment but directed The Intercept to Woods, the MICRC spokesperson, and to previous statements from the commission on the Michigan Freedom Fund’s claims.

“The MICRC believes the press should be held accountable for its conduct and provide the same analysis for proponents and opponents of the MICRC work,” Woods said in a statement to The Intercept. According to the commission’s legal counsel and partisan fairness expert, he added, “the draft proposed maps follow the Federal Voting Rights Act and meet the standards for partisan fairness.”

Michigan Freedom Fund Chair Greg McNeilly and Executive Director Tori Sachs both have ties to the DeVos family. Prior to joining the Michigan Freedom Fund in May, Sachs was the executive director of Michigan Rising Action, a dark-money group started in September 2019 by a Republican PAC to hold “liberal groups and their special interest networks accountable” and to advance “conservative principles.” The group is run by Eric Ventimiglia, who worked under DeVos while she was education secretary.

Sachs also managed the 2018 U.S. Senate campaign for Michigan Republican John James, who was backed by the DeVos family in his unsuccessful bid to unseat Democrat Debbie Stabenow. After James lost in 2018, Sachs became a consultant and the executive director of Better Future Michigan, a super PAC that backed her former employer when he ran again in 2020, this time against Democratic Sen. Gary Peters. James hired DeVos’s niece as his 2020 assistant communications director, and six members of the family gave Better Future Michigan a total of $800,000. James’s 2020 and 2018 campaigns were the subject of numerous complaints to the Federal Election Commission by groups like the Michigan Democrats and End Citizens United, both of which accused his campaign of coordinating with dark-money groups, including Better Future Michigan.

McNeilly, the Michigan Freedom Fund chair and Republican political strategist, was chosen in August to succeed Dick DeVos as president and CEO of the Windquest Group, an investment management firm based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for which he had been chief operating officer since 2011. (Dick’s wife, Betsy DeVos, also previously chaired the firm.) McNeilly managed Dick’s 2005 gubernatorial campaign and was the executive director of the Michigan GOP from 2003 to 2005 and political director from 1998 to 2000, both under Betsy as chair. From 2001 to 2003, McNeilly was the executive director of Choices for Children, a nonprofit previously led by Betsy that advocated for charter schools. In 2000, McNeilly was the communications director for the DeVos-funded political committee Kids First! Yes!, part of a pro-school voucher coalition, which Dick also previously led. McNeilly also served on the board of the DeVos-funded Great Lakes Education Project.

The Michigan Freedom Fund did not respond to requests for comment.

In the last several months, Sachs has posted frequent criticism of the MICRC on Facebook and Twitter, including a false claim that “Out of the 6 officers Michigan’s ‘Independent’ redistricting commission has had, exactly 0 have been a Republican.” (The randomly selected 13-person body includes four Democrats, four Republicans, and five members not affiliated with either major party. It’s not clear if Sachs was referring to the MICRC’s 13 commissioners or its four staffers.)

Asked about efforts by DeVos-aligned Republican operatives to undermine the commission, Woods said, “Like other Michigan residents, we welcome them to draw fair maps free from gerrymandering and according to the seven ranked redistricting criteria.”

Some DeVos-linked figures have been fighting the redistricting commission since before it existed. In 2018, another person in the Daunt family was a plaintiff in Citizens Protecting Michigan’s Constitution v. Secretary of State, an unsuccessful lawsuit to keep the MICRC proposal off the state ballot. The Michigan Supreme Court ultimately found that the proposal did not violate the state constitution and allowed it to appear on the ballot that year. Daunt was described in the suit as a registered voter in Genesee County and the “parent of a person otherwise disqualified from serving on the proposed commission.”

The post Groups Linked to Betsy DeVos Seek to Undermine Michigan Redistricting Commission appeared first on The Intercept.

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Bipartisan negotiations on police reform fell apart once and for all this week, four months after Congress missed its symbolic deadline to pass a package designed to raise standards for accountability and transparency in law enforcement. Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., blamed his counterpart in leading negotiations on the bill, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., for walking away from talks this week after Republicans rejected Democrats’ final offer.

Booker told reporters that Republicans would not get on board with measures that even the Fraternal Order of Police had agreed to compromise on or standards for law enforcement accreditation that were in place under former President Donald Trump. One major sticking point had emerged over efforts to change some parts of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that protects police officers from civil suits.

“The effort from the very beginning was to get police reform that would raise professional standards, police reform that would create a lot more transparency, and then police reform that would create more accountability,” Booker told reporters on September 22 after leaving a meeting with Scott. “We were not able to come to agreements on those three big areas.”

Negotiators failed to agree on measures to collect data on use of force, police killing, or bias within police departments. Criminal justice reform advocates had long criticized the bill for taking a piecemeal approach that wouldn’t fundamentally change policing because it did not drastically cut public investment in law enforcement.

“Even though we could get the FOP, the Fraternal Order of Police, to agree to changing a national use of force standard, [and] we could get them to agree to changing, in effect, qualified immunity, we could not get there with our Republican negotiators,” Booker said.

Despite Booker’s comments, it’s unclear what compromise, if any, the FOP had accepted. The union opposed changes to qualified immunity and standards for prosecuting use of force. And Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., told Fox News on Wednesday that the Los Angeles police union “actually was supporting the reform process, but some of the national organizations disagreed, and Senator Scott would never get to yes.”

Booker doubled down on Democrats’ attempts to compromise by using a Trump executive order, which conditioned Department of Justice grants to state and local law enforcement on proof of certain training standards, as a starting point. “When it comes to creating accreditation standards in alignment with what Donald Trump put in an executive order,” Booker said, “we couldn’t get that when it comes to raising professional standards.”

In response to Booker’s comments, a spokesperson for Scott said that he “agreed with the language in the Trump executive order; however, the provision they attached that would diminish police resources was a bridge too far.” The provision in question conditioned grants to law enforcement on having proper accreditation, as was the case in Trump’s order.

Moderate Democrats who were not directly part of negotiations also played a major role in derailing talks. Several centrists openly criticized the push from groups on the left to reallocate funding for law enforcement toward community infrastructure and social services, and they blamed their slim margins in last year’s midterm elections on calls to “defund the police.” Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., one of the largest recipients of police funding in Congress as of June 2020, said during an infamous caucus call about election results that he had been forced to “walk the plank” on qualified immunity. New Jersey’s largest police union withdrew its endorsement of Pascrell last summer after he voted for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a House bill that Democrats tried to advance as a basis for the package and that reformed, but did not fully end, qualified immunity. Pascrell won reelection with 65.8 percent of the vote.

In late April, Scott had proposed a compromise on qualified immunity that would shift liability from individual officers to their departments or municipalities. In a May 2 interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Scott said he was finding Democratic support for his proposal and wanted to “make sure that the bad apples are punished.” Scott praised the 2017 conviction of the officer who shot and killed Walter Scott in 2015 in his home state of South Carolina, as well as the April conviction of Derek Chauvin for killing George Floyd. Axios reported that after Chauvin’s conviction, congressional aides felt less pressure to pass a major police reform package. And Scott’s tone would soon change.

One comment from a moderate appears to have pushed the course of negotiations south. On May 9, House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., told CNN that Democrats should be open to passing a bill that didn’t touch qualified immunity. In an interview two days later, Scott’s office declined to comment on the record but denied that Scott was against eliminating qualified immunity, and said he was still pushing his compromise proposal. The next day, in response to comments from Bass that the package needed to eliminate qualified immunity, Scott said he was “on the exact opposite side.” A June draft of the legislation included a proposal similar to Scott’s.

“Between this and Haiti, Black people naturally are wondering what they are getting for their vote,” one senior Democratic staffer told The Intercept. “Clyburn’s comment hindered negotiations, and the fact that it came from the highest-ranking African American in Congress gives cover for the number of moderates that had no intention of honoring the commitment they made as they marched or tweeted Black Lives Matter last summer.”

Scott denied reports that talks started to break down after Clyburn’s remarks, and he expressed optimism in the early months of summer that negotiators would reach a deal soon. But by August, Politico reported that proposed changes to qualified immunity were taken off the table.

In a statement Wednesday, Bass said that Democrats’ counterparts were “unwilling to come to a compromise” and that negotiators had “no other option than to explore further avenues to stop police brutality in this country. I will not ask our community to wait another 200 days.” She called on President Joe Biden and the White House to ”use the full extent of their constitutionally-mandated power to bring about meaningful police reform” in the form of an executive order.

Later that day, Bass told Fox News that there was no single sticking point that led to the breakdown in negotiations. Things collapsed because Booker couldn’t get Scott to agree on compromises, she added. “It was not over qualified immunity. It really wasn’t.”

The post How Moderate Democrats Derailed Police Reform appeared first on The Intercept.

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It’s difficult to think of a greater threat to Buffalo, New York’s real estate developers than India Walton, the socialist affordable housing advocate who in June won the Democratic mayoral primary over incumbent Byron Brown, 51 to 46 percent.

Walton, an organizer and nurse, co-founded and served as executive director of a community land trust in 2017 to create affordable housing in Buffalo’s Fruit Belt neighborhood and combat gentrification fueled in large part by traditional real estate development. As mayor, she would have the power to expand that land trust and grow the tax base in Buffalo’s gentrified neighborhoods. For the city’s biggest developers, her mayorship could represent a complete paradigm shift.

So it’s little surprise that a good number of those developers, many of them Republicans, are backing Brown’s last-ditch attempts to get on the ballot for the November 2 general election or, in the event that he’s unable to do that, to run a write-in campaign.

The involvement of conservative developers is no fluke: Close to one-third of the signatures Brown submitted in his August 17 petitions to appear as an independent candidate on the November ballot came from members of right-leaning parties, local NBC affiliate WGRZ reported. Other major GOP donors, as well as a Washington, D.C., real estate mogul who was convicted in 2006 of wire fraud and accused of bribing an official for government contracts, have contributed to Brown’s campaign. And unlike in the New York City mayoral race, in which President Joe Biden and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo congratulated primary winner Eric Adams early on, Walton has received no such declarations of national Democratic support.

Yet it’s still unclear whether Brown will appear on the ballot at all. After losing the primary to Walton, Brown quickly launched a write-in campaign for the general election. That effort came per the request of some in Buffalo who don’t want to see Walton take office, including conservative developer Carl Paladino, who also floated the idea of running against her after Brown’s primary loss. (Brown distanced himself from the developer, who is now telling voters they should stay home.) Around the same time, Brown also submitted petitions to appear on the November ballot (under a newly formed “Buffalo Party”). But his petition came long after the May 25 deadline to submit such a request had passed, and the issue is now tied up in courts — where, again, developer influence raises red flags. Brown’s campaign is now fighting several simultaneous legal battles in state and federal court in the hopes that a final ruling will find New York state election law unconstitutional — just before ballots are to be printed — and allow him to appear on the ballot.

On September 3, federal Judge John Sinatra Jr. ruled in Brown’s favor in a case brought by his supporters to allow him on the ballot. Sinatra’s brother, Nick Sinatra, is the founder and chief executive officer of Sinatra and Company Real Estate, often shortened by the company to Sinatra & Co., and a major supporter of Brown’s. He has given at least $10,400 to Brown’s mayoral campaigns since 2013, including contributions from the company, and $2,000 since his last election in 2017. Buffalo’s development industry has contributed significant amounts to Brown’s mayoral campaigns since the early 2000s, and Buffalo developers were among the wealthy donors to pour last-minute cash into Brown’s primary campaign in June.

Judge Sinatra was also previously a partner at a firm that gave handsomely to Brown’s mayoral campaigns and has routinely represented Brown and the city in legal matters to the tune of millions of dollars — including a 2010 lawsuit over retaliation against a whistleblower in the police department.

On the day of Sinatra’s ruling, a state Supreme Court judge also ruled in Brown’s favor in a separate case brought by his campaign. A judge with the appellate division of the state Supreme Court issued a stay on that ruling, which previously found New York’s state election law unconstitutional and sought to overturn the earlier decision by the Erie County Board of Elections, the elections board for the county in which Buffalo is located, and allow Brown to appear on the ballot.

“What this looks like is the entire political establishment closing its fist to prevent a candidate from the left from winning an election in Buffalo.”

“What this looks like is the entire political establishment closing its fist to prevent a candidate from the left from winning an election in Buffalo,” said Rob Galbraith, senior research analyst at the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit that does public interest research. (Galbraith has contributed to and done phone banking for the Walton campaign.) “The conflict of interest is so clear that it’s a very useful illustration of a larger dynamic that’s going on,” he added. “The entire power elite in Buffalo and western New York is somewhat determined to try to stop Walton after she sort of slipped one by them in the primary.”

The Brown campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Brown has long been dogged by allegations of corruption and criticism for his dealings with developers. A Cleveland developer sued Brown in 2011 for corruption and racketeering over allegations that the mayor axed a housing project because the developer wouldn’t give a job to one of his supporters. The mayor’s former deputy, Steve Casey, cooperated with an FBI probe into corruption linked to a consulting firm he founded. The firm pleaded guilty to wire fraud in July.

During the mayoral primary, Brown’s developer relationships and real estate interests were again a frequent point of criticism.

Brown appointed two lawyers, Shannon M. Heneghan and Peter J. Savage III, who previously represented Sinatra & Co. to Buffalo City Court in 2019. A 2018 analysis by the Public Accountability Initiative showed that Sinatra & Co. owed more than $800,000 in property taxes and continued to receive close to $1.5 million in public subsidies for myriad projects and through subsidy programs. One such program is the statewide 485-a program, which awards tax breaks to developers that repurpose old properties for mixed use, passing millions of dollars of taxes on to the city. The program has been criticized by housing advocates and officials who say developers have exploited it to extract rents above market rate, avoid their fair share of taxes, and build brand new properties rather than repurposing old ones. Just after the report was published, Brown appeared in a public relations video for Sinatra & Co.

“Pretty much everywhere you look there’s some threads drawing Brown and Sinatra together,” said Galbraith, the Public Accountability Initiative analyst.

Sinatra & Co. has spent more than $310,000 on lobbying on real estate issues since 2013, according to public filings with the New York State Joint Commission on Public Ethics. Sinatra & Co. hired the lobbying firm Masiello, Martucci and Associates to do much of that work. The lobbying firm has also represented the city of Buffalo. The firm’s president, Anthony Masiello, who was himself mayor of Buffalo from 1994 to 2005, is also supporting Brown’s write-in campaign and appeared on stage with Brown at its launch. (In addition, a former partner, Carl Calabrese, a Republican political strategist and former Erie County executive, had previously lobbied for Sinatra & Co.)

Brown announced the launch of his write-in campaign on June 28 at a landmark property owned by Douglas Jemal, the multimillionaire developer convicted of wire fraud whom Trump pardoned last year, who contributed $5,000 to Brown’s campaign on June 22, the day of the primary.

Before he became a federal district judge, Sinatra was a partner at Hodgson Russ LLP, one of Buffalo’s biggest and most influential law firms. The 400-person firm has been a strong supporter of Brown’s campaigns since the early 2000s. The firm contributed more than $64,000 to Brown’s mayoral campaigns since 2006, including $21,000 since his last election in 2017. While at the firm, Sinatra contributed $2,000 to former Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y, who later pushed for Sinatra’s nomination and invested millions in Nick Sinatra’s real estate company, including a $1 million loan. (Nick gave more than $17,000 to Collins’s campaigns.)

In 2019, Collins resigned and pleaded guilty to insider trading. (He was pardoned by Trump last year.)

New York’s Democratic senators split on their support for Sinatra during his 2019 confirmation vote. Sen. Chuck Schumer voted to support Sinatra. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand voted against him and cited his membership in the Federalist Society as indicating views “far outside the judicial mainstream,” adding that he had “expressed pro-corporation views in the past.”

During a September 3 hearing in the federal case, Sinatra said he was asked why he did not recuse himself from the Brown case and said he saw no reason to do so. Sinatra did not respond to requests for comment through a clerk.

“Here we have just a heap of personal connections to the outcome of this election that I would say unequivocally is a conflict of interest.”

“The standard for a judge is to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest,” said Galbraith. “Here we have just a heap of personal connections to the outcome of this election that I would say unequivocally is a conflict of interest.”

The federal court set a hearing for appeals from both sides for Thursday. Brown’s team is claiming that a change by the state Legislature earlier this year that moved up campaign filing deadlines was unconstitutional.

Walton’s campaign is arguing that the law stands and said that while it isn’t appealing Brown’s case based on the appearance of a conflict of interest with some of the mayor’s developer friends, the issue is still relevant.

“Byron Brown’s legal actions epitomize the reasons voters rejected him in the Democratic primary in June: his contempt for everyday Buffalonians, his bullying of anyone who isn’t wealthy and well-connected, and his flagrant disregard for the law,” Walton said in a statement to The Intercept. If elected mayor, Walton said the city would “finally stop padding the windfall profits of the billionaire real estate developers to whom Byron Brown is accountable.”

Walton’s campaign says the legal battle is draining significant funds from its coffers. Her campaign estimates that the cost of legal proceedings will total between $50,000 and $100,000.

“Our campaign is financed by grassroots contributions from ordinary people; Byron Brown is determined to drain our funds through expensive legal challenges,” Walton said.

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An infrastructure proposal that would raise the corporate tax rate is facing opposition in Congress from companies that have dodged tens of billions of dollars in taxes over the last decade. Several such companies are lobbying against corporate tax increases and measures designed to crack down on tax havens in President Joe Biden’s economic proposal. 

Biden’s American Jobs Plan would raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent to help fund projects to rebuild highways and roads, expand high-speed broadband, build and renovate schools, and expand and upgrade power lines. Meanwhile, his American Families Plan would allocate $1.8 trillion over 10 years for education, child care, and national paid leave. To help fund those programs, he proposed a 39.6 percent capital gains tax for millionaires — almost double the current rate of 23.8 percent — and an increase in the marginal income tax rate for the top 1 percent, from 37 percent to 39.6 percent. 

Highway construction on Interstate 285 near the interchange with State Road 400 in Sandy Springs, Ga., on July 14, 2021.

Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Companies that use such practices to avoid taxes and lobbied earlier this year on issues related to tax rates in Biden’s American Jobs Plan include Walmart, Oracle, Accenture, Bristol Myers Squibb, Shell, and Walgreens. Executives at companies that have historically avoided paying taxes, like Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, FedEx, and DuPont, have spoken out publicly against Biden’s proposed tax increases.  

Shell and Walgreens lobbied earlier this year on corporate tax issues in the American Jobs Plan. Walmart hired a lobbying firm tasked with “monitoring of tax proposals related to infrastructure” in the plan and proposed legislative efforts related to Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. Accenture hired another firm to “monitor the American Jobs Plan as it relates to corporate taxes.” Oracle and Bristol Myers Squibb, a multinational pharmaceutical company, used the same firm hired by Accenture to monitor and lobby on similar issues in the proposal. Oracle also used that firm to monitor the American Rescue Plan, Biden’s first Covid-19 relief package, for provisions related to corporate taxes. Oracle spokesperson Jessica Moore said the company “has not lobbied on Corporate Tax issues since the new Administration.”

Nonprofit and media reports in recent years have found that those companies are among dozens of multinational corporations that have avoided tens of billions of dollars in taxes in recent years, and have used a variety of tax evasion mechanisms both in the U.S. and overseas, leading some to face fines and even criminal charges. 

A Reuters report last year found that from 2018 to 2019, Shell reported $2.7 billion through offshore tax havens and avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes. In 2019, Australia charged Shell $755 million for six years’ worth of taxes the company did not pay. The company reported that after getting tax refunds related to the closure of oil platforms, it paid no corporate income tax in the U.K. in 2018 on $731 million in profits. In 2013, India alleged that Shell had evaded taxes by underpricing a transfer of shares in 2009 by $2.8 billion. 

A 2016 report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, Citizens for Tax Justice, and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that Bristol Myers Squibb held $25 billion across 23 tax haven subsidiaries. In 2012 the company set up a tax haven subsidiary in Ireland, which the IRS later described as an “abusive” tax shelter that could allow the company to avoid paying $1.4 billion in taxes. 

Between 2008 and 2014, Walmart held more than $23.3 billion in offshore accounts and avoided paying more than $4.59 billion in U.S. taxes, according to a 2016 Oxfam report. In an arrangement internally known as “Project Flex,” the company routed money through an allegedly fictitious Chinese subsidiary, Quartz reported, which allowed it to avoid paying $2.6 billion in U.S. taxes between 2014 and 2017. The 2016 report from the U.S. PIRG, CTJ, and ITEP also found that Walmart reported zero tax haven subsidiaries despite having as many as 75. A 2013 report from CTJ found that the company held $19.2 billion in profits in offshore tax havens and did not disclose the U.S. tax rate it would pay if that money were repatriated.

A 2015 report from Americans for Tax Fairness found that Walmart put $76 billion of assets in 78 subsidiaries across 15 tax havens where the company did not have stores. The report found that in 25 of 27 countries where Walmart has stores, the company operates through shell companies held in tax havens. In Luxembourg, where Walmart does not have stores, the company has 22 shell companies to which it transferred ownership of more than $45 billion in assets since 2011. The report claimed that in 2014, Walmart took $2.4 billion in low-interest loans from its tax haven subsidiaries, allowing U.S. affiliates to access foreign earnings without paying U.S. taxes, which the report said “may transgress the intent of U.S. law.” A 2014 analysis by the same group found that Walmart avoids paying $1 billion a year in taxes by exploiting U.S. tax loopholes, and that the company used various methods to dodge paying taxes on $21.4 billion in offshore profits in 2013 — more than double the profits it dodged taxes on in 2008. A 2011 report from Good Jobs First found that Walmart used tax avoidance schemes, including deducting rent payments to itself, to avoid $400 million in local and state taxes each year. 

Walgreens is among several major retailers that have been accused of using a legal tactic to reduce their property taxes by pursuing reductions in the assessed value of their properties. After public outcry, the company backed off a decision in 2014 to move its U.S. headquarters overseas, a change that would have allowed the company to avoid some $4 billion in taxes. The 2016 report from U.S. PIRG, CTJ, and ITEP found that Walgreens had 71 subsidiaries in tax havens, including 23 in Luxembourg alone. 

Buildings stand at the Oracle Corp. headquarters campus in Redwood City, California, on March 14, 2016.

Photo: Michael Short/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A 2016 Oxfam report found that Oracle held more than $38 billion in offshore accounts between 2008 and 2014 on which the company avoided paying $8.3 billion in U.S. taxes. The 2016 U.S. PIRG, CTJ, and ITEP report found that the company held $42.6 billion in five subsidiaries in offshore tax havens on which the company paid a 3.8 percent tax rate. The 2013 report from CTJ showed that in that fiscal year, Oracle held $20.9 billion in offshore tax havens on which if paid a 30 percent tax rate while the U.S. tax rate was 35 percent.  

In 2019, Oracle Corporation Australia was charged more than $300 million for avoided, withheld, and backed taxes. Oracle Korea was fined $275 million in 2017 for alleged tax evasion that allowed the firm to dodge taxes for seven years by using tax havens abroad. A 2012 study commissioned by a member of the British Parliament found that Oracle had paid nothing in corporate taxes in the U.K. that year on a projected 446 million pounds in profits. Oracle declined to comment on these findings.

In 2019, Accenture paid $200 million in a settlement following reporting from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on leaked documents — the 2014 “Lux Leaks” scandal — revealing that major multinational companies avoided global taxes by entering into secret tax agreements with the government of Luxembourg. In 2010, acting through PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Accenture processed a transfer of intellectual property rights from Switzerland to Ireland through Luxembourg. Documents obtained as part of Lux Leaks showed that the value of the assets rose almost 600 percent in 48 hours from $1.2 billion to $7 billion, zero of which was taxed in Luxembourg. The company successfully lobbied the U.S. government in the early 2000s to move its place of incorporation to Bermuda to avoid taxes. When the government planned to change tax policies that would jeopardize Bermuda’s tax haven status, the company — which says it has no headquarters — moved its place of incorporation to Ireland. Accenture did not provide comment by the time of publication.

A 2012 report by the Sunday Times found that Accenture was able to lower its tax rate in the U.K. to less than 3.5 percent, while the nation’s standard rate was 24 percent. 

Frederick Smith, chair and CEO of FedEx, speaks during the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Aviation Summit in Washington, D.C., on March 7, 2019.

Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Congress has been struggling to pass the much-awaited bipartisan bill, and negotiations are ongoing (the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops last month put talks somewhat on hold). It’s unclear whether the measure will have enough support to pass. Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress but have had little luck moving forward on a number of Biden’s administrative goals even as calls to abolish the filibuster gain support.

Meanwhile, executives at other major companies that have reportedly dodged billions of dollars in taxes around the world have also spoken out against Biden’s plan to increase their taxes. 

In April, Joseph Wolk, Johnson & Johnson’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, criticized the proposed corporate tax increase because it would make the U.S. “the highest-rated developed country in the world with respect to tax rates,” and said that the issue is something “we need a little more fact-based dialogue on and making sure that we remain competitive.” Following news of Biden’s proposal, strategists at JPMorgan Chase said the administration’s policies were “no longer so unambiguously positive.” Asked about Biden’s plan in May, JPMorgan Chase Chair and CEO Jamie Dimon said, “We already waste tremendous sums of money,” and the “notion that you can have uncompetitive corporate taxes and you can be a competitive nation is a little crazy.” FedEx Chair and CEO Fred Smith came out against Biden’s proposal in April and wrote in an email to staff that it would “reduce capital investment and significantly degrade U.S. competitiveness.” The same month, DuPont EVP and CFO Lori Koch said the proposed changes would put companies based in the U.S. “at a disadvantage” because they “would be subject to higher tax rates on their foreign earnings than their foreign competitors.”

Between 2013 and 2015, Johnson & Johnson reportedly dodged more than $1.7 billion in global taxes, including more than $1 billion in the U.S. alone, according to a 2018 Oxfam report. A 2016 report from the same group found that the company had avoided paying more than $16 billion in taxes between 2008 and 2014 by housing some $53 billion in offshore accounts. Johnson & Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.

JPMorgan Chase avoided $12 billion in U.S. taxes between 2008 and 2014 by holding more than $31 billion in offshore accounts, according to a 2016 Oxfam report. Another Oxfam report that year found that 96.8 percent of the bank’s foreign subsidiaries were housed in tax havens and that it only reported 0.9 percent of those on its 2014 10-K report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The report also noted that the bank estimated its deferred tax bill from offshore accounts at $7 billion. A 2013 report from CTJ found that in that fiscal year, the bank disclosed that it held more than $25 billion in offshore tax havens on which it paid a 23 percent tax, 12 points below the 35 percent corporate tax rate that year. 

In 2015, French prosecutors filed criminal charges against a unit of the bank for “alleged complicity in tax fraud,” the Wall Street Journal reported. The case was later thrown out because of “clerical errors.” According to the 2014 Lux Leaks report from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, JPMorgan Chase and FedEx were among companies that secured lucrative secret tax deals with the Luxembourg government that allowed them and other major companies to largely avoid global taxes. Members of the European Parliament subsequently investigated the country’s tax code and money-laundering schemes, and later took action to force Luxembourg to change its tax laws and follow new rules approved following the scandal. In 2012, the bank was in talks with the U.K. government to pay a 500 million pound settlement after it was found that the company used a tax-avoidance scheme there. The bank declined to comment. 

FedEx used tax avoidance strategies that allowed the company to pay a negative 4.6 percent tax rate in 2018, according to a 2019 ITEP report. The same report showed that DuPont used government subsidies and tax avoidance strategies to pay a negative 54.8 percent tax rate in 2018 and avoided paying $119 million in taxes that year. 

DuPont paid no net state income tax from 2008 to 2010, a net negative of $12 million, according to a 2011 report from ITEP and CTJ. A 2013 report from the same group found that the company held more than $13 billion in offshore tax havens. Before Dow Chemical and DuPont split in 2019, the merged companies agreed to pay a $1.75 million fine to the SEC after failing to disclose $3 million in perks given to Dow’s former chief executive. 

The net effect of these tax dodges is catastrophic. According to a 2016 report by Kimberly Clausing, the Eric M. Zolt Chair in Tax Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law who was appointed in February as deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis at the Treasury’s office of tax policy, the U.S. loses more than $111 billion each year due to tax dodging by multinational corporations. 

“Lobbyists have already created so many loopholes in our tax code that help the rich and powerful and big corporations,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, said in a statement to The Intercept. “The American people understand what’s going on here and this is our opportunity to put a stop to it. [Maine Sen.] Angus King and I are pushing for a corporate profits tax that is essentially a minimum tax for the richest companies — no loopholes — that will allow us to increase tax revenue and help pay for these infrastructure investments we badly need.”

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For the first six months of 2021, if you asked a stranger on the street in New York City who they thought their next mayor would be, there was a good chance they would say Andrew Yang. The ex-presidential candidate entered the mayoral race as the man of big ideas, someone who could move New York into a new phase of recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and past the tense political environment that colored the city after protests against police brutality last summer.

Not long after Yang dropped out of the presidential race last February, Tusk Strategies, the political consulting and lobbying firm that managed Mike Bloomberg’s 2009 mayoral reelection bid, recruited him to run for mayor. The firm soon employed much of the campaign’s top staff, including his co-campaign managers, senior advisers, policy director, and press secretary. But 12 years ago, Bloomberg ran as a Republican. Though he tried unsuccessfully to recruit a primary challenger to Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2016, this was CEO Bradley Tusk’s first time backing a Democrat for mayor.

At the start, Yang was lauded as a political outsider with the clarity of vision to change New York. But by the end, he started to embody the failures of the consultant and political class his supporters at one time bet against. Yang’s outlook was positive and his plans were far-reaching, until people actually started asking him questions about them. And when the assertion that crime was reaching historic highs in New York City started to change the bounds of the race, Yang’s big ideas were nowhere to be found. Despite palpable flaws in the soaring crime narrative — shootings and homicides have increased significantly, but not consistently, in 2020 and 2021, while the causes and solutions for crime surges remain far more complex than most news coverage allows — Yang ran with it, appearing loyal to some donors yet unwieldy to trusted staff.

Yang’s campaign was the natural center of attention, earning almost daily coverage in city tabloids like the New York Post and the Daily News. National outlets soon followed suit. “Can Anyone Stop Andrew Yang’s Campaign for Mayor?” read one May headline in The Atlantic. He raised $4 million, and political action committees backing him drew in millions more from Wall Street. Yang had thousands of volunteers, many of whom had supported his presidential bid and wanted to see more success from his next campaign. But in the late evening hours of June 22, as voters prepared to wait another several weeks for official results of the city’s first venture into ranked-choice voting, Yang found himself in fourth place. Not long after polls closed, he became the first of the 13 Democratic primary candidates to concede. “I am not going to be the next mayor of New York City,” Yang told attendees at his election night party.

If you’d spoken to Yang just a few days earlier, he would have sounded certain of the opposite. According to staffers who worked on the campaign, Yang believed up until the last second that he was, in fact, going to be the next mayor of New York City. And then it all came crashing down.

“Andrew was used to the way he was on the streets of New York,” getting mobbed on the street and asked for selfies, said Chris Coffey, the co-campaign manager Yang hired through Tusk Strategies. “He [and I] used to say, if 10 percent of these people vote, I’m gonna win.”

But that energy didn’t translate into votes. Despite his claim that he had more individual donors than any other candidate in the race — and what his campaign said was the highest number of donors in the history of primary and general mayoral races in the city — Yang ended up with just over 135,000 votes in total. He was eliminated in the third-to-last round of ranked-choice voting. What started as something larger than life, one staffer said, “ended up being so small.” (Three Yang 2021 staffers spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity, fearing professional reprisal.)

When the election was about economic recovery and supporting small business, Yang was good, said one staffer. But, as they put it, Yang started out as the guy who mainstreamed the concept of universal basic income and ended by bashing homeless people in the final debate of the race. “What he started with — cash relief, anti-poverty — there was hope in there,” said the second staffer. “And we lost track of that.”

Yang did not respond to requests for comment.

Andrew Yang, founder of Venture for America and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, waves during a campaign rally in New York on May 14, 2019.

Photo: Mark Abramson/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The campaign’s initial strategy was to flood local news with coverage, and it seemed to work, according to staff — until it started to backfire.

Yang began not just as the change candidate, but also as the lovable guy who was just out of touch: buying bananas in a shiny bodega, telling the comedian Ziwe Times Square was his favorite subway stop, and proposing TikTok hype houses to help bring back the city’s nightlife. But eventually, his lack of experience stopped being funny.

“You had to find ways to make him look ready for the job,” one former Yang staffer told The Intercept. “There were just flaws everywhere.”

Yang struggled most where he also thrived: in public, unfiltered, often online.

In April, he prompted swift backlash after tweeting that the city wasn’t enforcing rules against “unlicensed street vendors.” In May, voters confronted him about a tweet he wrote in support of Israel as bombs fell on Gaza. The incident lost him volunteers, many of whom later met with Yang to express their frustration.

The moments showed “ultimately, a lack of a depth of knowledge around those topics, or not understanding the nuance,” said one staffer. “And then it fit the most potent critiques of [Yang] being a newcomer to politics, or not having voted before. … It showed a lack of civic engagement, or interest.”

Then in June, just a year after a summer in which New York City police officers routinely brutalized protesters demonstrating against police brutality, Yang won the endorsement of the NYPD Captain Endowments Association, the police union to which frontrunner candidate Eric Adams once belonged. Some of Yang’s staff advised him that if he was going to pursue the endorsement to at least keep quiet about it. But he wasn’t the blank slate they might have thought him to be, and Yang touted the endorsement.

“Andrew became obsessed with it,” the staffer said. “Andrew is much more conservative than any of us knew on policing stuff.” And, as the tone of the race shifted to focus on crime, “he became increasingly conservative,” they said.

Part of the campaign’s focus at the outset had been to try to keep Yang out of long-fought local policy fights and to maintain his image as someone who wouldn’t take sides. But as the rates of homicide and gun violence spiked in areas across the country this summer, rather than maintaining control of the race turf on Yang’s terms — keeping it positive and nonpartisan — Yang and some of his top staff leaned into the idea that New York City voters wanted a law-and-order candidate. In doing so, the campaign made a strategic error, said one staffer, and let the race become defined around crime.

“Against a candidate [like Adams] who has the lived experience of being a Black man plus being a cop, Andrew Yang wasn’t going to lead the nuanced conversation about it,” the staffer said. “Because crime is a number one issue that people are concerned about doesn’t mean that’s the only thing people want to hear about. I think Maya Wiley proved that to be true.”

Yang was almost the “presumptive mayor,” said another staffer, when tabloids and some local media started hyping up a right-wing narrative that crime was overtaking the city. So when the captains union endorsement came, staff “were kind of looking for ways to shake things up, because we knew we were slipping and we tried a bunch of stuff.”

The shift in focus came in part from Yang himself, but it also came from some of the Tusk employees running his campaign, according to two staffers. “There was a big sense from certain parts of the campaign that it needed to be all crime, and talking about it in a way that felt very antiquated and unsophisticated,” said one. “What a Democratic electorate wants New York to look like after crime is addressed, and how they want that to happen, is very different than how a Republican electorate would want that. So the idea that addressing crime means you’re law and order is a false narrative. And wrong.”

At the last Democratic mayoral debate on June 16, Yang was angry. He thought the media, which at times seemed to scrutinize his campaign more than those of his opponents, had become increasingly unfair. (Some staff say he rarely read the full coverage.) At that point, Yang had been spending a lot of his time with donors, and his comments on issues like crime, homelessness, and mental illness had started sounding more like theirs.

“When you’re new to politics,” said one staffer, “and you haven’t spent decades honing your own political views, and your own sort of views on these issues, I think you’re probably more susceptible to it.“

During the debate, in response to criticism of his plan to increase institutionalization of people with mental illness who don’t have housing, Yang said, “Mentally ill homeless men are changing the character of our neighborhoods,” and that families were leaving because of it. Later in the debate, Yang doubled down, saying that city residents “have the right to walk the street and not fear for our safety because a mentally ill person is going to lash out at us.”

Yang’s comments, which, according to several former staffers, were an attempt to look tougher on crime, prompted swift public backlash from people who criticized his remarks as ableist, harmful, and misinformed. “Aside from when it happened and for a few hours afterwards, it was not an issue that I heard a lot about,” Coffey said, adding that he was surprised it came up during an interview. “Doesn’t mean that there weren’t people that were pissed. Doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a big issue. But I wouldn’t have identified it as a top 10 issue of the mayor’s race.” According to his staffers, Yang came away thinking he had done a good job.

During the final weeks of the race, as the campaign struggled to direct its focus, Yang was still raking in money. While it may have posed a narrative challenge, Tusk Strategies presented a financial boon for the campaign: Salaries of at least seven top staff members, some of whom were making upwards of $10,000 a month, were all paid directly by Tusk Strategies.

It’s unclear how much exactly Yang’s core staffers made over the six months of the campaign, because campaign finance reports show only bulk payments to Tusk, which totaled some $300,000. Other campaigns that used similar firms show payments in the same way, but Yang was the only major candidate to hire his campaign managers through an outside firm. Other campaign managers’ salaries appear in campaign finance reports. The salaries of Yang’s co-campaign managers, senior adviser, senior communications adviser, policy director, press secretary, and a subcontracted communications director do not.

According to the New York City Campaign Finance Board, questions arose earlier this cycle concerning how campaigns are required to report salaries of staff who may also work for a firm doing business with the campaign. For now, Yang’s campaign has complied with all relevant requirements. Per city campaign finance rules, each campaign is required to go under an audit, and “all campaigns are required to provide contracts and other documentation to the CFB,” NYCCFB director of public relations Matt Sollars said in a statement to The Intercept. Requests for that information won’t go out until after the November general election.

It wasn’t until just a few days before the election that Yang started to feel less sure about his chances. Even so, he didn’t think he would lose by as much as he did. He and many of his staff had trusted the campaign’s internal polling that put him within striking distance of the Democratic nomination. In the end, he made it to the sixth round of ranked-choice voting, pulling in 15 percent of the vote to Adams’s 35 percent, behind Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia.

The campaign that started as an experiment by one of New York’s most notorious lobbying firms had come to an unceremonious end. “I firmly believe that if the city had opened slower, if crime hadn’t been the dominant issue, it probably would have been different,” Coffey said.

“Andrew was always a change candidate,” a former staffer told The Intercept. “He always tried something unconventional, something a little different. Breath of fresh air — whatever you want to call it. But by the time the election had happened, we had already gotten our breath of fresh air. The city was back open, people were living their lives again. Things like the issue of reopening schools, which dominated the race as a top issue for a few weeks, are no longer top of mind. … The idea that we would’ve elected a mayor on the basis of their school reopening strategy now seems kind of silly.”

Adams spent a large portion of his campaign talking about crime, “and that guy won,” Coffey said. If the main question voters have on election day is “‘Who’s gonna keep us safe?’” he added, “then Eric Adams is gonna be mayor.”

Some media and pundits drew the same conclusions about the message voters were sending on crime — the same narrative that Yang staffers think shifted the race for good. A closer look at the results of the race shows that while Adams dominated working-class Black and brown neighborhoods of the city, residents in those same areas also voted for candidates far to his left: like Wiley or City Council candidate Tiffany Cabán. And while Adams certainly talked a lot about crime, he also had a reputation of being in favor of police reform, and as a former police officer who was beaten by cops as a teen, talked openly about racism among law enforcement. Adams’s ads balanced addressing community violence and acknowledging the need for police reform and the reality of police brutality, while Yang’s ads took a much different tone. One of Yang’s final ads of the race promoted his police captains’ endorsement as a sign that “shootings are out of control and NYC’s top brass know their former colleague, Eric Adams, isn’t up to the job.”

As for what’s next, Yang doesn’t have any firm plans. Last month, he announced his new book: “Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy.” Yang spoke openly during the campaign about his plans for publication, much to the chagrin of staff who informed him that doing so could make it look like he was only running to promote it. At one point, Yang posted a chapter of the book on his Medium site, where he published various communications during the campaign. Staffers convinced him to take it down.

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Standing outside the union hall for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Pittsburgh, Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Pa., announced his much-awaited Senate bid. “I am Conor Lamb,” he told the several dozen people in attendance. “You all know me, but I’m getting ready to introduce myself all over the state.”

Lamb’s entry into the race has been the topic of much discussion of late. A moderate front-line Democrat, Lamb narrowly won reelection to the House last year and has been eyeing the seat since Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Penn., announced his retirement last year.

In his speech to Pittsburgh union workers on Friday, and in a video his campaign posted Friday morning announcing his entry into the race, Lamb portrayed himself as an antagonist to former President Donald Trump. “I talk with Pennsylvanians every day who have come to believe that our democracy is in crisis. And they’re right,” he said in the video. “The other side denies reality and worships Trump. They’re making it harder to vote, and lying about our elections.”

Such rhetoric marks a 180-degree turn for Lamb, whose voting record has actually been very generous to the former president.

During Lamb’s first session in Congress, he voted almost 70 percent of the time in line with Trump’s positions on issues like opposing a carbon tax, expressing support for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and denouncing calls to abolish ICE, and making signature pieces of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent. During Lamb’s next session, that number was closer to 10 percent. During his last, the number was zero percent.

Lamb also voted in favor of a measure by former Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, to fund a border wall under Trump and to extend the ongoing war in Iraq (he was one of just two Democrats to vote for extension). In addition, he voted against the HEROES Act, one of his party’s signature Covid-19 reliefs packages. Other votes Lamb took in recent years include a vote last year against a measure that would have prevented Trump from using military force against protests; a vote against a bill to decriminalize marijuana; and a vote in favor of a failed measure that would have prevented tax-paying families with an undocumented parent from receiving stimulus checks.

But Lamb’s Senate strategy appears to include carefully distancing himself from that record. “Here is the real danger, if they will take such a big lie and place it at the center of their party, you cannot expect them to tell the truth about anything else,” Lamb said of the Republican Party’s attempts to undermine the 2020 election results — a party with which he voted over much of his time in Congress. And that makes sense: Lamb will enter a field of frontrunners in the Democratic primary, namely Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, who are significantly to his left. Lamb, a lifelong moderate, was always expected to take a more centrist lane in the race. But he and Fetterman will be battling over some of the same voters in Pennsylvania’s western and Allegheny County regions.

Lamb won reelection to the House last year by a slim margin of 2 percentage points, which he blamed during a now-infamous post-Election Day House Democratic caucus call on the push from organizers to defund police forces. What Lamb left out was that several of his recent votes — including his vote against the HEROES Act — hadn’t sat well with many of his constituents. Or that while his 2020 House race was close, he still won by a more comfortable margin than in his 2018 special election to the House.

It was always an open question of whether Lamb’s congressional seat would survive upcoming redistricting, or whether it would survive in a way that would make him viable next cycle, said one Democratic strategist close to the race. “He’s got a really nice profile,” they added. “He also has problems. He’s voted with Trump more than any other Democrat.”

Lamb’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post In Senate Bid Launch, Conor Lamb Appears to Misremember His Own Record appeared first on The Intercept.

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As the 2022 midterm elections draw closer, Democrats in Congress are taking on a new strategy: blaming Republicans for voting to defund the police. And according to Democratic aides, the change in messaging is coming straight from the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Establishment Democrats have spent months under fire, from both Republicans, who claimed that Democrats wanted to weaken law enforcement, and from members of their party’s own progressive wing, who were critical of the way the party bent to some of those attacks. Now those same moderate Democrats are fighting back — namely by highlighting Republicans’ vote against the American Rescue Plan, Congress’s coronavirus aid package and Democrats’ only major legislative achievement this session.

Pelosi was instrumental in the passage of the American Rescue Plan, which allocated money toward pandemic relief, increased the child tax credit, and expanded health care coverage; President Joe Biden signed the package into law in March. Given that every Republican in Congress voted against it, the bill is also now providing Democrats with new ammunition.

Localities have started to spend the first rounds of funds released in the package to hire more police officers, retain existing officers, and keep other first responders from being laid off, which means that Democrats now “actually have the ability to talk about specific localities where people are being kept on the police force,” said one senior Democratic aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “And we’re able to talk about it more concretely as opposed to theoretically.” In addition, they added, the GOP response to the January 6 attack on the Capitol made it easier for Democrats to highlight the party’s hypocrisy. “Once Americans saw Republicans disrespect the officers who protected them on January 6, it became a lot easier for us to point out hypocrisy on policing.”

Ahead of the 2022 midterms, Democrats still plan to push the message that they are the party of economic recovery, but the attack on funding for law enforcement will certainly be a new part of their offensive strategy. “Members are excited to punch back,” the aide said. “Republicans have spent an entire year essentially lying about what Democrats support and what Democrats have voted for. The fact that Democrats have really settled on a line here to push back on it, and to really go on offense, excites Democrats.”

At least a dozen Republican districts have either hired or retained police officers with funds from the American Rescue Plan, according to the aide, including the districts of Reps. Dan Crenshaw of Texas and Elise Stefanik of New York, both of whom have repeatedly claimed that Democrats want to defund the police. “These are places where you’re going to see Democrats hold them accountable and talk about the fact that they voted against funding for their own local police departments,” the aide said.

Several members have already started to implement the new strategy. “The former President and Radical Republican are disrespecting police officers,” Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., tweeted Thursday. “My colleagues on the other side of the aisle in @HouseJudiciary this morning were yet again talking about ‘supporting the police,’ ‘funding the police.’ But they voted against the opportunity to fund the police in the American Rescue Plan. Watch what they do, not what they say,” Rep. Val Demings, D-Fla., Orlando’s former police chief, tweeted the previous day. Earlier this month, Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa., tweeted the same slogan: “4 Months Ago: All Republicans voted against #AmericanRescuePlan including funding for Police. 1 Month Ago: 21 Republicans voted against honoring Police for their work during the 1/6 Capitol riot. Now: Capitol Police may run out of funds. Watch what they do, not what they say.”

The Democratic National Committee is also using the new line of attack. After Capitol Police officers testified to Congress on Tuesday during the first hearing of the select committee investigating the January 6 riot, the DNC issued a press release describing the GOP as the caucus that “voted against additional funding for police” and criticized Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., for “*counterprogramming* police officers testifying about the day they protected those very same members of Congress from the violence of January 6.” While Republicans “disrespect the police officers,” the press release continued, the House committee “is hearing from police officers on that violent day and the country is reminded Republicans are siding with violent rioters and Donald Trump over justice and our police.”

The strategy isn’t necessarily designed to be effective with Republican voters, according to another Democratic aide, but to give cover to moderate members who complained that calls to defund the police hurt their margins in the 2020 election. “The majority is made in the suburbs. It gives cover for them when they go back to their district, because it gives them a return message, it gives them something to fire back with,” said the second Democratic aide. Part of the criticism last cycle from Beltway strategists and moderates was that Republicans were accusing Democrats of wanting to defund law enforcement, and “we didn’t have anything to say back. Now, you have something to say back.” Democrats would be “foolish” not to carry the strategy into the midterms, they added. “The American Rescue Plan and the child tax credit is what you will run on in the midterm,” and part of that is hitting Republicans for their votes.

The new messaging has already provoked a response from the GOP, at least on Twitter. In a CNN Town Hall on Wednesday, anchor Don Lemon asked Biden how he responded to criticisms from Republicans that the party wants to defund the police. Biden said he didn’t support that and that he didn’t know any communities that didn’t want police. The House GOP Twitter account quote-tweeted a clip of Biden’s answer and wrote, “So why do Democrats’ [sic] support defunding the police?”

Pelosi’s deputy communications director, Robyn Patterson, replied to the House GOP tweet: “Republicans can’t name a single Congressional Democrat who voted to defund the police. Fox News, however, can name 210 House Republicans and 50 Senate Republicans who voted to.”

In a follow-up statement to The Intercept, Patterson added, “Our top message will always be the economy and the money we’re putting into the pockets of working and middle class families. But as long as Republicans lie about crime, we’re going to force them to own their hypocrisy and explain why House Republicans voted to defund their own police departments, disrespect the officers who defended Capitol from violent Insurrectionists, and against common sense legislation to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.”

It’s not clear that the entire caucus is on board. Several progressive members have advocated to reallocate funds away from law enforcement agencies and toward community services, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y.; Cori Bush, D-Mo.; and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass. And the American Recovery Plan wasn’t the first time Republicans voted to do just that. In 2019, the House passed by voice vote an amendment from Ocasio-Cortez to move millions of dollars away from the Drug Enforcement Agency and toward opioid recovery and treatment programs.

“There’s a lot of hubbub and resistance, particularly from Republicans, on the idea of defunding and reallocating certain resources,” Ocasio-Cortez said during a virtual town hall in June with Bowman in response to an audience question on how each member would shift funds away from the New York Police Department. “Before last year’s protests in 2019, I was able to get almost the entire Republican party to successfully vote for a defund amendment in our appropriations,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Because when it’s in the context of their communities, it’s very easy for them to see — oh yes, we shouldn’t be treating addiction as a crime. We should be treating it as a public health issue.”

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Grainy black-and-white security footage shows a backyard with a shed and a modest deck framed on either side by statuettes of a dog and an owl. Lights glow in the distance from neighboring homes, street lamps, and passing cars. It’s a quiet night — Halloween 2020.

Several minutes into the video, a light on the side of the shed flashes on, and four people run by. One appears to be limping slightly. A woman walks out of the house onto the deck, looking in the direction of the running figures. Abruptly, she turns and goes back into the house. A minute or so passes. The shed light turns back on as two figures run through the frame in the opposite direction. The woman runs across the yard to open the shed door, and the video ends.

The woman didn’t know it at the time, but she had witnessed the aftermath of a shooting. Earlier that night in Topeka, Kansas, two men — then-39-year-old Army veteran and Walmart employee Robert Sinner and his then-34-year-old brother, Justin — had confronted a car full of five teenagers they thought took a Donald Trump sign from a used auto lot near their house. The Sinners live around the corner from the car dealership; the day before the shooting, the owner of the lot, Rick Wright, told them that the teenagers had been repeatedly taking his Trump sign.

It appears that the Sinners were expecting a conflict when they approached the teenagers the next evening. According to court filings, they claim that they noticed a group of people “behind their house” trying to steal the Trump sign. The Sinners were armed with a handgun and a rifle when they approached the car, according to a police report, and when the boys tried to drive off, the men started shooting. They fired more than 30 shots, continuing after the car had driven away and putting one of the boys in the intensive care unit for 10 days with a bullet in his back. A crash followed, and two other boys were taken to the emergency room with gunshot wounds. The Sinners claimed that the boys had tried to run them over and clipped Justin with the side of the car.

When officers arrived at the scene, they took the word of the vigilante shooters and let them go home. It took a week for Shawnee County District Attorney Mike Kagay to file charges against Robert; no charges have been filed against Justin. Robert was charged with four felonies, including three charges of aggravated battery and one charge of criminal discharge of a firearm.

But the same day he charged Robert, the district attorney brought charges against the teenage driver. Both Sinner men were listed in a police report as victims of aggravated assault by a motor vehicle. During a preliminary hearing on March 29 to discuss the teen’s motion for defense under the state’s stand-your-ground law, Kagay’s office dropped charges against the teenager without giving a specific reason. (Robert Sinner also filed a motion for immunity from prosecution under the state’s stand-your-ground law, which justifies use of deadly force in defense of self or a third person, and does not require that a person retreat before using force. A judge denied that motion in March.) Meanwhile, Sinner is not in custody and it’s likely that his trial won’t be set for months, or even until next year, given the backlog of cases facing court systems around the country as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. This month, according to an attorney working with the families, Sinner allegedly showed up at the workplace of the mother of one of the teens.

All of the boys were juveniles at the time — though one has since turned 18 — and The Intercept spoke only to their parents for this story. Their parents say life hasn’t been the same for them since the shooting. They’ve since gone back to school, but they don’t feel like kids anymore. And it’s hard to focus when they know their assailants have been at home, free, since October. The families want to see charges of attempted murder, which they say Kagay has brought in other less serious cases, and much more swiftly.

The only available footage of the incident leaves more questions than answers. Another video from the auto lot’s security camera sheds better light on the course of events that night. The Topeka Police Department now has that footage and declined to release it under a public records request because Sinner is still awaiting trial. Only the home security footage was obtained by The Intercept. The witness in that video did not respond to requests for comment.

The shooting would have been disturbing no matter when it happened. But the fact that it took place just five months after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, setting off worldwide protests for police and criminal justice reform, made it more sinister. Tensions had long been brewing in Topeka, a place where recent spurts in economic development have brought prosperity to some areas of the city, while others have continued to decline. Topeka’s downtown and southwest suburbs are bustling with entrepreneurs, while areas like North Topeka, where the shooting happened, are home to poorer residents.

To many advocates, the DA’s reluctance to restrict the Sinners’ movements — or to charge Justin at all — was a sign that things in Topeka haven’t changed much, even after major protests following Floyd’s killing. “I know I would have been thrown under the jail,” said PJay Carter, president of Black Lives Matter Topeka, who has been helping to support the families since the shooting, including by referring them to one of the attorneys on the case. “I have been thrown under the jail twice for way less.”

There’s been little local attention to the shooting outside of the efforts of individual organizers helping the families — all of whom came to the U.S. from Mexico and many of whom English is a second language — navigate the fallout and the court system.

Kagay’s decisions to charge Sinner with aggravated felonies, to charge the driver, and not to charge Justin are “political,” Carter said. Kagay is a Republican and “has constituents that he needs to answer to and keep happy.” (Kagay’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)

Had the shooters not been white, and the boys not Latino, Carter thinks things might have turned out differently. Police collected close to 40 rounds from the crime scene, Carter said. “If the shoes were on the other feet — the Latinos dispersed 40 rounds at a white kid?” he said. “It’d be national news.”

Maria Escobar, the mother of the teen who was shot in his back, thinks that dynamic is certainly at play. “From the beginning it was like they pushed us aside,” she said in Spanish. “Because we are Hispanic, and the shooters are white, they’re from here. At first I felt like I didn’t have to be fighting, because it’s not my country, I don’t feel like I have rights. Even though my son was born here, his parents are not from here.”

She felt powerless when she saw how relaxed Sinner looked in court, she told The Intercept. “I saw Robert very calm, very confident and relaxed in court. And that made me feel helpless.”

Carter thinks local media coverage bears some of the blame for how prosecutors treated the Sinners. Most outlets relied on reports from the police, who took the Sinners at their word, Carter said, adding that local news reported the story with bias from the start. “This wasn’t reported as ‘some civilians tried to murder some kids over defending a Trump sign that wasn’t theirs or on their property.’” The delay in charging Robert and the absence of any charges against Justin send “a message to the community that as long as you’re doing this for this, then it’s OK,” Carter said. “You won’t go to jail for attempting to murder someone over a Trump sign.”

Rick Wright, the owner of the used auto lot, also thought local media presented the story with bias — but against the Sinners. Wright told The Intercept that local reporting suggesting that the Sinners hunted down the teens was inaccurate and suited to fit a media agenda, and that the teens had tried to hit the Sinners with their car. “The shooting didn’t happen over a yard sign. It happened because somebody tried to run them down,” Wright said.

But the Sinners claimed that the sign was in their yard when it wasn’t. The men left their home to go after the boys and had tried to block the only route the teens could have used to escape. Wright’s expressed concern over previous attempts to take the sign raises a few questions: Why would it be appropriate for the Sinners to respond at all and not, for example, law enforcement? And if the shooting didn’t happen over a yard sign, then why did it happen?

Several hundred protesters rally around the south steps of the Kansas statehouse to protest George Floyd’s death in Minnesota, on May 30, 2020, in Topeka, Kan.

Photo: John Hanna/AP

“There’s tensions between all sorts of different things” in Topeka, said Josh Luttrell, an attorney representing the family of one of the teens in the case. Luttrell ran against Kagay last year for district attorney and lost by just under 16,000 votes. “You have racial tensions, you have economic tensions, you have a system that treats people differently and has different outcomes for people, and that’s becoming more and more apparent,” Luttrell said. “In all of that, you kind of lose sight of the fact that these were kids.” The fact that the dispute took place over a sign and that one of the brothers would be protected for firing into the car “is crazy to me,” he said. “They’re so lucky that he didn’t die. And for what?”

The district attorney has handled a number of recent cases in which his office brought much more severe charges against alleged shooters in incidents in which no one was physically harmed and in cases in which people had less severe injuries than those suffered by the teens, according to advocates who have been studying the DA’s charging practices while working with the families since the shooting. Danielle Twemlow, an organizer who has been working with the families of the teens to help them navigate the charges and is part of a support group that meets with the families weekly, said she came across several such cases while researching Kagay’s charging practices in efforts to understand his suggestions in the case. For example, in one recent case, a teenager was charged with attempted first-degree murder and aggravated assault after trying to steal a valuable backpack from a victim and firing 10 shots into their car.  In another case, in which someone allegedly fired multiple rounds that all missed the victim, the DA’s office charged the suspect with attempted first-degree murder. In another incident in 2019, a grandfather who was running a generator in a garage went to sleep inside his home with his grandchildren, and his granddaughter died. Kagay’s office charged him with first-degree felony murder.

“Kagay did not act immediately on arresting the Sinners, on charging the Sinners, which really makes it feel like there was an agenda,” Twemlow said. “It’s really just beyond me how Justin Sinner has not been charged.” Sinner’s lawyer declined to comment.

The level of the charges against Robert, and the fact that Justin has not been charged, Twemlow said, make clear that “it’s not fair and equitable, and that he’s not taking it seriously.” After reviewing a handful of similar cases, Twemlow said she called Kagay’s office to ask for data on how it had suggested charges in the past. She wanted to know if the office had been “keeping track so he knows he’s being equitable and just,” she explained. Twemlow said Kagay’s office told her it does not keep that data and that she could review public records instead. “If he really isn’t holding a lot of bias in how he makes these sentence recommendations, then he should be more transparent about how that process happens for him,” she said.

“They don’t want to ruffle feathers or have to fend for themselves in a vulnerable moment when they run into these people at the store or something.”

Things had been intense in Kansas last summer, as they were across the country. Protests against police brutality met with brute force from law enforcement as the 2020 presidential election loomed. As has been the case in many cities over the last year, Topeka saw a bump in organizing activity around issues of racism, policing, and the politics of violence. Kagay attended a Black Lives Matter rally in Topeka in May and said he wanted to find a way to help residents feel safe.

In August 2020, a mural of Floyd was vandalized in Topeka, and a man found a noose next to a “Black Lives Matter” sign he had posted in his yard. A few months earlier, some 30 miles east in Lawrence, someone drew a sign with an image of Floyd in a noose and a note criticizing Black Lives Matter. Topeka’s mayor, who had expressed support for protests last summer, received threats ahead of a discussion of proposed police reforms with the city council. Ahead of the meeting, a Black Lives Matter Topeka protest in downtown Topeka met a “Back the Blue” rally organized by a retired Topeka police officer. The man had started a local “Blue Shield” group on Facebook that month to oppose local calls for police and criminal justice reform. (The group moved from Facebook to an uncensored social media site called Wimkin in November.)

Just over two months after the shooting, when a mob attacked the U.S. Capitol, several people from Topeka were arrested as part of the attack, including a 2019 city council candidate who had helped promote and attended the “Back the Blue” rally and was active in the “Blue Shield” group. With national political leaders split along party lines over how to respond to the Capitol rioters, many local officials have tried to sweep contentious issues — like the Halloween shooting — under the rug. That means that any chance the Sinners would face tougher charges for the incident — which stemmed from the allegation that the teens took a Trump sign — has been all but erased.

“It’s been really heated,” Twemlow said, adding that she thought those tensions contributed to Kagay’s decision not to bring harsher charges against Robert and not to charge Justin at all. “It was like he didn’t want to take the chances of making his base angry.”

Carter, the Black Lives Matter Topeka president, agreed. “I feel like this was definitely Trump-inspired,” he said of the shooting. “The fact that it was over a Trump sign, and they felt justified in it. And also, there’s been no repercussions for that. Still to this day — like as of this moment.” According to the DA, the law doesn’t suggest that the Sinners need to face consequences, Carter said. “It’s like, OK, if you’re doing it for Trump, it’s OK? Kind of like what’s happening with the Capitol. They’re making a lot of arrests and things of that nature, but what really is happening with that? … It doesn’t take the government that long to get things done. I know that from experience.”

The shooting didn’t get the same attention that colored some protests last summer in Topeka. And overall, local interest has died down, but some outlets did cover a small rally the families held in April at the soccer field where the boys play together. Part of the reason there haven’t been major protests over the shooting is that the Sinners are still out there, Carter said. The families feel vulnerable and have tread lightly since it happened.

“It’s open season and there’s nothing they can do to actually complain about it, because the system and the government is not built in a way to protect them,” Carter said. “They don’t want to ruffle feathers or have to fend for themselves in a vulnerable moment when they run into these people at the store or something. … They want justice, but they want to be safe and protected as well. And it’s unfortunate we’re living in a day and a time where you can’t really expect both without a fight.”

The post Eight Months Later, a Vigilante Shooting Over a Trump Sign Divides Topeka appeared first on The Intercept.

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Before giving her victory speech on Tuesday night, India Walton raised a fist in the air. “I hate to say I told you so,” she said.

Walton is a nurse, an organizer, and a nonprofit executive who received more than 50 percent of Tuesday’s vote in the Democratic primary for mayor of Buffalo, New York. She’s also a socialist, an abolitionist, and a member of the Buffalo chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Her opponent, Byron Brown, was an incumbent seeking a record fifth term backed by the local Democratic machine, the Buffalo News Editorial Board, the New York State Nurses Association, and the Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union. He has not yet conceded. There is no Republican candidate in the race.

As the Democratic nominee in a heavily Democratic city without a Republican contender, Walton will all but definitely win Buffalo’s general mayoral election in November. A former member and representative for 1199 SEIU (the union that endorsed her opponent), and backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party, and the Buffalo Teachers Federation, Walton will be the first mayor in the U.S. identifying as a socialist in more than half a century. She was born in Buffalo and moved to nearby Lackawanna at age 14, when she had her first child and moved out of her mother’s house to live in a group home for young mothers. At 19, she gave birth to premature twins, and she has said her poor treatment by medical professionals inspired her to become a nurse. Walton went on to work as an organizer and to co-found and lead a community land trust to create permanent affordable housing.

Walton’s is a major win for the progressive left, which struggled to coalesce behind one candidate in the New York City mayoral race. Walton ran on a community-centered approach to public safety that prioritized independent oversight of police, harm reduction, and restorative justice. She also focused on strengthening tenants’ rights; declaring Buffalo a sanctuary city and refusing to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and prioritizing small, minority, and women-owned businesses for local contracts.

In an April interview with The Intercept, Walton said her campaign was “not hyperlocal,” as some may have assumed.

“A lot of these mid-sized cities sort of live in a bubble. We are a microcosm of what’s happening across the nation, but the story is often not told from our perspective,” she explained. “Because I came into this from the standpoint of an organizer and an activist, I knew that in order to take on the establishment, we were going to have to build some type of alternative infrastructure.”

According to Walton, however, that kind of organizing power hasn’t held sway in Buffalo and western New York for long. She said the area was “owned pretty much by the incumbent [mayor] and local major parties.”

Brown, the incumbent, seemed to think he could defeat Walton by ignoring her campaign. He refused to debate her a single time and outraised her by more than 2-to-1, with a campaign war chest of upward of half a million dollars to Walton’s $150,000. The incumbent’s haul was padded by last-minute contributions from wealthy donors.

But voters in Buffalo appeared to have wanted something different. The challenger’s funding included more than 2,800 individual contributions, averaging less than $50 each, and her campaign ran on the support of more than 400 volunteers through the local chapter of the Working Families Party. The WFP had endorsed Brown in previous elections, and when the group switched to Walton this time around, it was the first instance they had not backed an incumbent in Buffalo.

Buffalo was the site of major protests against police brutality last year after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, and Walton made the issue of police accountability central to her campaign. During one protest, Buffalo police knocked a 75-year-old man to the ground and were caught on camera in a video that quickly went viral. Two of the officers involved were suspended; 57 of their colleagues resigned in protest of the suspension; and a grand jury voted to dismiss felony assault charges against the two offending officers in February. Buffalo has had a number of police shootings in recent years, although the number is lower than in other cities — but incidents of police brutality are not rare. While Walton acknowledges that crime in Buffalo is a concern for many, she emphasizes that many locals don’t necessarily believe that creating safer communities comes from giving more power to police. As right-wing outlets and law enforcement have pushed the narrative that progressives will pay for their efforts at criminal justice reform amid “soaring crime,” Democrats in Buffalo voted for the opposite.

Five years ago, Walton was working as a nurse and helped to administer a 2016 community policing survey in Buffalo that showed there was little trust between communities and police. Groups administering the survey proposed 32 policy recommendations to improve relationships with local police, including a body camera program and the collection of demographic data on stops and arrests. The findings, Walton has said, helped inform her community policing platform — and even Brown adopted some of them as part of his own agenda for police reform. Last August, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo mandated that each locality adopt such an agenda by April 1 in order to receive state funding.

Policies like body camera use and demographic data collection represent relatively modest reforms — whose efficacy has been shown not to address the root causes of police brutality — but Walton herself identifies as an abolitionist. She left that stance out of her campaign platform, however, wary that the ideology was not yet ready to implement.

“I am an abolitionist. But I am also realistic enough to know that it can’t happen in one fell swoop. Because we have not built the infrastructure to maintain safety in our communities,” Walton told The Intercept. She acknowledged that her approach has earned criticism from the activist community, adding, “I do tend to be a bit more pragmatic in the way I view things. Governance means that sometimes you don’t always get to do what you believe.”

But in the long haul, Walton said, an abolitionist future “is ultimately the world that I envision for my children — where folks just care for and about one another, and we don’t need police.”

The post Socialist India Walton Will Be Buffalo’s Next Mayor appeared first on The Intercept.

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The Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney was, for a time, seen as an opportunity to elect a progressive prosecutor to one of the most powerful DA offices in the country. But with one week to go until New York City’s primary election, the race has devolved into a contest between a self-funded millionaire with Wall Street support and a crowded field of candidates struggling to keep up.

Tali Farhadian Weinstein, former general counsel to the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, gave four contributions to her own campaign between May 20 and June 7 totaling $8.2 million — more than the total amount raised by the other seven candidates combined. A poll released last week by Data for Progress shows Weinstein, whose husband is a hedge fund manager, and former chief deputy attorney general for New York state Alvin Bragg leading among likely Manhattan Democratic primary voters. The poll asked respondents to rank their choices, but the DA election will not have ranked-choice voting.

Weinstein’s campaign has spent more than $6.25 million in the final weeks of the race, including on mailers attacking Bragg, and reported just under $3 million on hand. Major Republican donors have also contributed large sums to Weinstein’s campaign, New York Focus reported. She also interviewed for a federal judgeship during the early months of the Trump administration, the New York Times reported earlier this month.

“Tali did interview for an opportunity to serve her country and uphold the constitution of the United States,” spokesperson Jennifer Blatus said. “I think that it would have been good to see a pro-immigrant, pro-choice judge at a time of a chaotic state of affairs at the beginning of the Trump Administration.”

What’s happened in the DA’s race is “unfortunate,” said Matt Thomas, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter. (The group did not endorse any candidates in the race.) “The whole reason that there is this movement around DAs is that not only are they powerful offices, but they have unilateral executive authority that is really rare to be able to wield in progressive hands.” Though Thomas said he didn’t have insight into “why the field didn’t really clear for one candidate,” he noted that activist support was divided in this race. “A lot of the institutional left was focused on the mayor’s race and city council races.”

The race has attracted national attention and split groups on the left. Color of Change PAC endorsed Bragg in May. Sen. Bernie Sanders and the Working Families Party endorsed civil rights attorney Tahanie Aboushi. Hillary Clinton endorsed Weinstein in May.

Weinstein, who did not register as a Democrat until October 2017, has branded herself as a “proven criminal justice reformer” while at the same time campaigning as a more conservative alternative to the rest of the field, where other leading candidates are in a battle to prove who has the most progressive bona fides. Weinstein wants to crack down on violent transit crimes, enhance certain penalties for crimes against transit workers, expand eligibility for drug courts, and allow judges to consider public safety risk when setting bail — a practice New York outlawed in its 2019 bail reform law. (The incumbent DA, Cy Vance, also opposed allowing judges to assess public safety risk when setting bail.) Weinstein is also the only candidate who opposes decriminalizing sex work.

Asked about Weinstein’s opposition to the 2019 bail reform law, Blatus said, “Tali believes in taking the safety for her fellow New Yorkers into account at every stage of a criminal proceeding.” On Weinstein’s position on decriminalizing sex work, Blatus said Weinstein supports a state Senate bill that “would decriminalize those involved in prostitution, while still holding pimps and buyers accountable.”

Bragg has raised $2.35 million; Assemblymember Dan Quart has raised just under $1.8 million, which includes some contributions from older committees; Aboushi has raised $1.24 million; public defender Eliza Orlins has raised just over $1.15 million; former prosecutor Lucy Lang has raised just over $1.5 million, including $500,000 she gave to her own campaign; defense attorney and former prosecutor Liz Crotty has raised just over $700,000; former prosecutor Diana Florence has raised $566,700.

Orlins’s campaign has accepted at least two large-dollar contributions from major GOP donors. The campaign declined to comment. Quart’s campaign returned parts of contributions from an individual and his associated LLCs that exceeded campaign finance limits after reporting from City and State last week.

“With a super PAC advertising against us, our campaign is making sure that voters across Manhattan get a clear sense of the difference between the candidates in this race,” said Blatus, Weinstein’s spokesperson.

Vance, the incumbent, took office in 2010 and is not running for reelection. He faced criticism for his office’s handling of sexual assault cases, and a group of survivors called on him to resign last year. He originally declined to bring charges against film producer Harvey Weinstein in 2015 and did so only after the takeoff of the #MeToo movement.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has jurisdiction over some of the most powerful interests in the country, including Wall Street and the Trump empire; the winner of the DA race will take over the criminal investigation into Donald Trump and his business associates.

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In Baltimore’s Fells Point neighborhood, a group of 37 restaurant and business leaders are threatening to withhold taxes and other fees until city officials enforce traffic and parking laws, stop “illegal open-air alcohol and drug sales,” and “empower police to responsibly do their job.”

The businesses sent their complaints in a June 8 letter addressed to Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, City Council President Nick Mosby, Councilmember Zeke Cohen, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, and Police Commissioner Michael Harrison. The letter comes as cities across the country are seeing a spike in homicides and gun violence, while other types of violent crimes have largely decreased. Three people were shot in Fells Point last weekend.

“What is happening in our front yard — the chaos and lawlessness that escalated this weekend into another night of tragic, unspeakable gun violence — has been going on for far too long,” the business leaders write. They go on to demand the restoration of “basic and essential municipal services,” including picking up trash, enforcing traffic and parking laws through ticketing and towing, stopping open-air sale of alcohol and drugs, and empowering police to fight “a culture of lawlessness.”

But Mosby, the state’s attorney, told The Intercept that the solutions outlined in the letter would do little to curb the recent uptick in violence, and that her office has been focused on prosecuting homicides and nonfatal shootings. “In a city like Baltimore, where our nonfatal shootings and our homicides are up, our resources should be reallocated to ensure that we’re going after violent offenses,” Mosby said. She added that Baltimore only solves one out of four homicides a year, and the city stacked up a huge backlog of cases throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. The Baltimore Police Department reported a higher homicide clearance rate last year at 32 percent.

In office since 2015, Mosby gained national fame for charging the six police officers who took part in the arrest that killed Freddie Gray. Last year, amid the pandemic, her office met with public health experts to try to minimize exposure to the virus in local jails and among law enforcement officers. As a result of those conversations, Mosby stopped prosecuting low-level offenses experts have found do not have a significant positive overall impact on public safety: drug possession, paraphernalia, sex work, trespassing, minor traffic offenses, open-container alcohol, and urinating and defecating in public. Her office dismissed more than 1,400 cases for such offenses, eliminated warrants for individuals who had been charged with them, and pushed Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan to reduce the prison and jail population.

Mosby is one of several reform-minded prosecutors across the country facing backlash for their decarceral approach to criminal justice and being blamed for spikes in gun violence and other crimes in major cities from Philadelphia to San Francisco. The response is nothing new, she said, but it “is undermining.” One of the shootings to which the business leaders objected took place “feet away from police officers, and yet here’s this misconception that somehow these policies are to blame because we’re not prosecuting open-container? It’s illogical. Because we’re still prosecuting assault, we’re still prosecuting attempted murder, we’re still prosecuting malicious destruction of property.”

Hogan, a Republican, has fought Mosby at nearly every turn; in 2019, he called on the state attorney general to pursue cases her office declines to prosecute and announced that he would use state funds to carry out the effort. In 2020, however, Hogan issued two executive orders that resulted in the release of close to 2,000 people, after Mosby’s repeated urging. Mosby’s office also opened a sentencing review unit in December to review and reduce excess sentences for juvenile lifers and elderly people behind bars.

Mosby’s office monitored the impact of their policies over the last year and found that between February 2020 and 2021, Baltimore’s overall incarceration rate went down 18 percent, with an 80 percent reduction in drug arrests in 2020. Between March 2020 and 2021, Baltimore saw a 20 percent reduction in violent crime, excluding nonfatal shootings and homicides, and a 36 percent reduction in property crimes, which Mosby attributes not directly to her policies but to greater stability and leadership of the Baltimore Police Department. Unlike in cities like Philadelphia, where the police have fought District Attorney Larry Krasner at every turn, Mosby’s office claims to have a good relationship with BPD.

Mosby said her office fundraises for young people to help curb gun violence during the summer, and not one of the business owners who signed the letter has contributed. She added that her office has held nine town halls to explain her policies, but none of the businesses participated.

Lance Sovine, a letter signatory who owns the Fells Point gift shop E.C. Pops, claimed that city officials lost all control of the neighborhood during the pandemic. “They have to realize that we’ve made an investment to be there. We’ve continued to pay our rent at a huge loss to ourselves, but we believe in Fells Point,” Sovine told The Intercept. He added that he had nothing against the elected officials, but wanted them to come hold a press conference at “2 a.m. this Saturday night” in Fells Point to see what business owners are facing. “It’s called ‘eat what you cook,’” Sovine said. “You know what? They won’t do it. That needs to be a direct quote.”

Asked about the focus by the state’s attorney’s office on prosecuting violent crime, and evidence that cracking down on low-level offenses can lead to death for Black people, Sovine said he understood the concern. “I’m frustrated with that as well,” he said, adding that he’s also frustrated by people driving dirt bikes up and down sidewalks, vendors selling alcohol on the street to minors, and DJs playing loud music in the square.

“I’m with it. I understand. What happens, sometimes it’s ridiculous,” Sovine said, referring to the police killing of 20-year-old Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, in April. Shortly before he was killed, Wright told his mother over the phone that police had pulled him over for having an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror. Police later said they pulled Wright over for driving with expired tags.

“We’re not trying to destroy our own community,” Sovine said. “We’re trying to say, ‘Hey, what’s going on in our community is unacceptable.’”

In their letter, business owners complain that they had obtained “expensive liquor licenses” and were subject to routine code inspections, while individual vendors are “illegally selling large volumes of alcohol, marijuana, and a range of other illicit substances … [and] are brazen individuals who conduct their business in plain sight because they know Baltimore City will do nothing to prevent or punish them.” Two of the establishments are part of a restaurant group that local residents accused of racial discrimination last year for barring people from entering, the Baltimore Sun reported.

While right-wing pundits often use Baltimore as a stand-in to describe increasing homicides across the country, the city has seen a reduction in other violent crimes. There’s evidence that the increase in shootings in major cities is a result of ease of access to guns.

“This is a resource issue, and it’s counterproductive to use our limited law enforcement resources on these lower level offenses,” Mosby said, noting that many such offenses often lead to a death sentence for people of color. “Freddie Gray merely made eye contact with police in a high-crime neighborhood, and decided to run. Sandra Bland failed to put on a turn signal. She ended up dead. Eric Garner, allegedly selling loose cigarettes. George Floyd, allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill during a global pandemic for groceries. Daunte Wright — it’s either air fresheners or expired tags.”

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At a House Judiciary Committee hearing on oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Thursday, Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., asked FBI Director Christopher Wray for information the bureau had collected on her work as an organizer and activist before her time in Congress. In 2014 and 2017, Bush protested in Ferguson, Missouri, and St. Louis — after police killed 18-year-old Michael Brown and after a judge found the officer who killed 24-year-old Anthony Lamar Smith not guilty, respectively — and the FBI is known to have collected data on several of the demonstrations in which she participated.

On June 4, Bush sent a letter to Wray requesting that the bureau deliver access to all information it had collected on her protest and organizing activities before Wray’s scheduled testimony on Thursday. Her office said the inspector general for the Department of Justice responded Thursday to a different letter she sent in February, asking about the disparate treatment of protesters last summer and the people who participated in the January 6 attacks on the Capitol. According to Bush’s office, the inspector general’s review is pending.

“Public reporting leaves little doubt that the FBI did, in fact, investigate and surveil those who were protesting for racial justice against police brutality,” Bush wrote. “I was one such protester.” She had not received a response by Thursday morning.

“When can I expect to hear back from the bureau regarding that information?” Bush asked Wray at Thursday’s hearing, referring to the data the FBI had compiled on her protest activity. Wray replied that he had only recently learned about the letter, that the bureau receives thousands of requests for files, and that he would have his staff follow up to help her understand how the process works. Bush went on to ask him whether the bureau had deputized federal agents and law enforcement agents in response to civil unrest last summer; if the FBI was authorized to use force in response to the Capitol attacks; and why Wray had stated, earlier in the hearing, that the FBI doesn’t surveil First Amendment protests when there is ample evidence to the contrary. 

Federal authorities have long surveilled and infiltrated activist movements in the United States, with a particular focus on Black social justice and civil rights organizers, including Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., the Black Panthers, and Black Lives Matter. As The Intercept reported in 2015, the Department of Homeland Security has routinely monitored activists since the 2014 uprising in Ferguson. The FBI’s counterterrorism division identified a fictional “black identity extremism” movement as a threat until as recently as 2017, and it warned that “perceptions of police brutality against African Americans” drove “an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will likely serve as justification for such violence.” 

The practice continued last summer, when the FBI flew an advanced spy plane over Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C. — the same vehicle they used to surveil protests in Baltimore after police killed Freddie Gray in 2015. Meanwhile, the agency says it does not monitor “First Amendment-protected activities” without a tip or open investigation; the bureau cited that as a reason it did not catch social media activity related to planning the January 6 attacks on the Capitol.

“For so long we’ve been criminalized and intimidated,” Bush said. “And I’ve watched this. And I’m one of those people. I have a unique position now to be able to ask those hard and key questions that nobody else can ask the director the same way that I can — coming directly from the movement and still being very much a part of that same movement.” Bush said she was targeted as an activist “quite a bit” and believes that she was under surveillance, adding that “the FBI has this history of surveilling Black activists and protesters and civil rights leaders.”  

Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, pauses during a House Intelligence Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on April 15, 2021.

Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

To further suppress protests for racial justice, federal and local governments have also resorted to stacking criminal charges against activists to increase their penalties and passing new laws to criminalize specific kinds of demonstrations. Earlier this year, dozens of states introduced anti-protest laws designed to crack down on protests against police brutality, and some states rebranded “anti-terror” bills to apply to activities associated with protests for Black lives. In April, Florida adopted some of the most chilling anti-protest legislation in the country: a new law granting civil immunity to a person who drives their car through a crowd of protesters. As The Intercept reported last month, much of the push behind such legislation was driven by law enforcement groups.

“For so long we’ve been criminalized and intimidated. And I’ve watched this. And I’m one of those people.”

Hundreds of people who participated in protests last summer were charged with high-level felonies, including charges of terrorism for several teenagers. In October, federal agents arrested Anthony Smith, an influential activist in West Philadelphia known for helping topple a statue of former mayor and Philadelphia Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo, claiming that he had “aided and abetted” in the arson of a police car in May. In July, Smith had been a lead plaintiff in a civil rights suit against the city after police shot rubber-tipped bullets at protesters and tear-gassed hundreds of demonstrators marching through an enclosed tunnel. Smith was released from pretrial detention after local activists organized a petition and sent more than 70 letters of support to the judge in Smith’s case. His trial is pending. 

“I remain concerned that many law enforcement agencies continue to characterize Black protestors as a threat to public safety rather than as citizens who are more than justified in exercising their First Amendment right to organize and voice their grievances,” Bush wrote, pointing to the bureau’s past use of the term “black identity extremism.” She added that she would introduce legislation to “correct the Bureau’s excesses, if necessary.”

Bush said she couldn’t yet discuss specifics of the legislation, but her office is working on a protester’s bill of rights, similar to local proposals in Missouri. “We know that we want to protect our protesters and curb any intimidation tactics,” Bush said, noting that states across the country, including Missouri, introduced or passed anti-protest legislation this year. 

“We’re not protesting because we don’t have anything else to do. We’re protesting because we’re trying to save Black life. So where are those measures?”

“Rather than using last year as an opportunity for the racial reckoning that it should have been, lawmakers we saw all across this country proposed, and then they passed, all of these dozens of punitive measures to prevent protest instead of actually dealing with what was the real issue,” Bush said. “Where is the police accountability? We’re not protesting because we don’t have anything else to do. We’re protesting because we’re trying to save Black life. So where are those measures?” Bush said she and Missouri state Rep. Rasheen Aldridge, who also came out of the activist movement in Ferguson, spoke out against similar proposals in Missouri, and the bills died in session.

Following the January attacks on the Capitol, Bush introduced a resolution calling on the House Ethics Committee to investigate whether members of Congress violated their oath of office in seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. “It’s not going away, but we’re not at the point where we’re able to move that the way I would like to see it move,” Bush said. Given that the Senate couldn’t pass a bipartisan commission to investigate the attacks, she said, the resolution is more important than ever, but its chances of moving are bleak. “We won’t let it go. But we saw how hard it is to even get the commission passed.”

When people call the Movement for Black Lives a “terrorist organization,” Bush said, “it couldn’t be further from the truth. When the truth is that white supremacist groups have been behind over 60 percent of the attacks last year. The real threat that we need to take seriously, they don’t want to touch.” On top of that, she said, “We have to be very clear that the bureau has a white supremacy problem in their ranks.” The FBI has long been aware of the issue of white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement, The Intercept has reported. 

At the hearing on Thursday, House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., asked Wray if the bureau was conducting an internal review “to root out white supremacy and other extremist ideology” or if it would commit to doing so. Wray said the bureau takes the “insider threat” very seriously and would provide Nadler with more information on existing procedures and related internal review processes.

Bush told The Intercept that she didn’t know before coming to Congress that she could request this kind of information, and many activists still don’t realize that they can do so. She added that she wants people to know that they can call her office if they need help with a public records request.

“You gotta push back against what seems like this system of intimidation and suppression,” Bush said. “The more we do this, they will have to do something.”

The post Cori Bush Demands FBI Data on Her Protest Activity appeared first on The Intercept.

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Just over a month after the staff of Nevada’s Democratic Party quit rather than work alongside an incoming slate of candidates backed by the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, taking $450,000 and severance with them, the party’s new leadership has raised that money back with some to spare.

The Nevada Democrats have raised $530,000 from more than 16,500 contributions since the March 6 elections, when a progressive slate of five candidates — one incumbent and four newcomers — took over the party, beating the preferred picks of the local machine. The figure includes $100,000 raised on their own within a few weeks of the election and a boost in contributions with help from national progressive allies like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., who sent fundraising emails over the last several weeks on the party’s behalf.

The battle between the state’s progressive coalition, which includes the Nevada organization Left Caucus and a growing contingent of DSA, and the local party apparatus, led by allies of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, reached national prominence in 2016. During Sanders’s 2016 run for president, Reid and then-Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz chastised the Sanders campaign for shutting down Nevada’s Democratic caucus. The tension escalated when Sanders won the caucus in 2020, and progressives who built local infrastructure during the 2016 cycle started to see the fruits of their labor. After Sanders ended his second presidential bid, they were determined to keep that momentum. But the party had other ideas.

When Judith Whitmer, founder and chair emeritus of Left Caucus, won the March 6 election for state party chair, her predecessors did not only almost empty the state party’s accounts, but they also funneled the money to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and notified Whitmer that all their consultants had terminated their contracts. The DSCC will use the money to support the 2022 reelection campaign of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev. In the runup to March 6, Cortez Masto asked Whitmer to drop out of the race and approached her opponent, Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom, a Sanders ally who is more established in the state party, to run. 

Some former party staff have since reached out to the new team to support the transition, Whitmer told The Intercept, and things have been going more smoothly since the election.

“The outpouring of support nationwide has been incredible,” Whitmer said, pointing to small-dollar donations and contributions from groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Our Revolution. The party also has good relationships with the DNC and the Association of State Democratic Chairs, she added, which “puts NV Dems in a good position to really move forward on the work that we want to do.” That work includes boosting Democratic enthusiasm for the 2022 midterms, when voter turnout is likely to dip; going door to door to educate people about their benefits under the latest federal coronavirus relief package; and working to build support for signature policies like Medicare for All.

“We see it as a unique opportunity, even though there was a little bit of a bumpy transition,” Whitmer said.

Only a few smaller consultants stayed on after the election, so the party will need to develop consulting relationships “pretty much from scratch,” Whitmer said, and make efforts to work with minority consultants. As they work to keep voters engaged during the midterms and elect down-ballot candidates, Nevadans will be paying close attention to whether the White House keeps its promises to the state’s Black and Latino voters who delivered for President Joe Biden, which could impact voter enthusiasm in 2022.

Despite the promising fundraising results, the party will have to combat Republican fearmongering about an influx of socialist thinking in the Democratic Party. The messaging seems to have reached at least one prominent Democrat outside party leadership: John J. Lee, the supposedly Democratic mayor of North Las Vegas who voted twice for former President Donald Trump, said last month’s elections made him switch to the Republican Party, according to the Nevada Independent. But the new party plans to meet the challenge head-on: They will explore running their own candidates in Republican-leaning districts, something the machine has historically discouraged.

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The Biden administration is expected to announce support this week for the temporary extension of a Trump-era policy expanding mandatory minimum sentencing to cover a range of fentanyl-related substances. More than 100 civil rights, public health, and criminal justice advocacy groups sent a letter last week urging Congress and President Joe Biden to oppose any extension of the Trump policy. 

The administration can’t extend the policy without congressional action, which it is expected to support during a Wednesday hearing on substance use before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, according to two groups on the letter and several Democratic aides. The aides note that the administration will likely request additional time to explore the policy’s ramifications and has not yet decided whether it will adopt a full extension.

Biden ran on a platform that included criminal justice reform and an end to mandatory minimum sentencing, a practice he helped establish during his time as a senator in the 1980s and ’90s. Criminal justice and drug policy advocates say extending the Trump policy would be an abandonment of those promises and a return to the kinds of strategies that escalated the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and the opioid epidemic. Current laws impose a five-year mandatory minimum sentence, and a 40-year maximum sentence, for selling substances with trace amounts of fentanyl analogues in a mixture weighing between 10 and 100 grams.

“Class-wide scheduling would exacerbate pretrial detention, mass incarceration and racial disparities in the prison system, doubling down on a fear-based, enforcement-first response to a public health challenge. As we approach the 50-year milestone of President Nixon’s announcement of the War on Drugs, there is ample evidence that these unscientific policies destroy communities, entrench racial disparities, and do nothing to reduce drug supply or demand,” the letter reads. “We must learn from the lessons of the past: It is time for Congress and the Biden administration to embrace a public health approach to drug use.”

The Trump administration started classwide scheduling of fentanyl analogues in 2018. The policy put a wide range of substances with a chemical structure similar to fentanyl on Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, expanding the application of mandatory minimum sentencing laws to all fentanyl analogues. “But chemical structure alone cannot predict how a drug will affect the human brain,” the letter claims, citing a neurobiologist’s testimony before the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, “and not all fentanyl analogues are harmful.”

The Trump policy, set to expire in May, gives the Drug Enforcement Administration unlimited power to determine the legality of substances while cutting scientists and public health experts out of the conversation. This limits their ability to study certain prohibited drugs, which can prove crucial for developing therapies. Spokespersons from the Justice Department “repeatedly, erroneously, have claimed that failure to enact class-wide scheduling would ‘legalize’ harmful fentanyl analogues,” the letter continues, citing a Washington Post op-ed by former Attorney General Bill Barr with the title, “Fentanyl could flood the country unless Congress passes this bill.” The sale of fentanyl analogues can be prosecuted whether or not they are scheduled, and the policy imposes harsher sentences for possession. 

According to a report by the United States Sentencing Commission, prosecution of federal fentanyl offenses increased by close to 4,000 percent between 2015 and 2019, and prosecution of fentanyl analogues increased by well over 5,000 percent since 2016. As the letter points out, those prosecutions involved significant racial disparities, “with people of color comprising almost 75% of those sentenced in fentanyl cases in 2019.” The same was true of sentencing for fentanyl analogues, with people of color comprising 68 percent of people sentenced.

“Congress and the Biden administration should be wary of expanding the reach of these penalties by adopting a policy explicitly designed to expedite drug prosecutions and increase penalties,” the signatories wrote. “Any further extension of the Trump administration’s class-wide scheduling policy threatens to repeat past missteps with crack cocaine that policymakers are still working to rectify.”

Fentanyl has been back in the national spotlight alongside the trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd, as conservative commentators and law enforcement point to the drug’s presence in Floyd’s system in their attempts to exculpate Chauvin for his death. “It’s been a very visible example of how mythology and fear around fentanyl and racism is playing out in the media right now,” said Grant Smith, deputy director of national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, one of the letter’s signatories. “Those are the exact same narratives that the Trump administration relied on to impose this policy. And if the Biden administration were to choose to extend this — which it sounds like they will — they’re really just embracing that same rhetoric. That same racist thinking.”  

Advocates wonder why the Biden administration would go out of its way to extend a policy that would mark a return to the harsh drug sentencing laws from which the president has tried to distance himself, and even in some cases, apologized for pursuing. A Government Accountability Office report released Monday on classwide scheduling of fentanyl-related substances explores potential impacts of altering the policy. In filings attached to the report, Biden’s Department of Justice argues aggressively in favor of extending the policy, writing that “alternatives to class-wide scheduling are inadequate to address the opioid epidemic.” A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

“If the Biden administration were to come out and just flat out support the classwide scheduling, I think that would be very disappointing, because it wouldn’t take into consideration the false premise that this started with,” a Democratic aide told The Intercept. “Maybe it’s understandable that they might need more time because it is a pretty fraught and dense issue. But I would hope that they would certainly look at it close enough to see that this is something that was requested based on an idea that isn’t necessary.” 

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Philadelphia’s Democratic Party boss suggested that a local judicial candidate end her campaign in exchange for his support for a future judgeship appointment, according to a memo drafted by the candidate and obtained by The Intercept.

Party leadership is challenging Court of Common Pleas judicial candidate Caroline Turner’s petition to make it onto the ballot. As that challenge is being litigated, an attorney involved in the party’s challenge arranged a meeting between former Rep. Bob Brady, who is chair of the Democratic City Committee, and Turner this week, according to Turner’s memo.

Turner is running on a progressive platform without party backing in a field that includes eight candidates supported by the party. Brady has previously used his power as the city’s Democratic leader to try to sideline an insurgent movement in Philadelphia. In 2019, for example, the party threatened to expel party committee members who backed third-party candidates, and Brady reportedly said that a council member’s endorsement of an insurgent candidate was “stupid.”

Efforts to dissuade candidates from running have been going on for decades, and in recent years have given candidates credibility with voters who have soured on business as usual. Across the country, candidates have looked for ways to demonstrate their independence from party bosses. Critics of Turner suggested she was blowing a conversation out of proportion for political gain.

In her memo, Turner wrote of her meeting with Brady, “He said if I withdrew there were 6 vacancies coming up and that he would work to get me appointed.”

Turner confirmed to The Intercept that she met with Brady this week but declined to discuss their conversation. “I will not withdraw my candidacy, and I will not stop this fight,” Turner said. “My candidacy is being attacked by those in power who benefit from a broken criminal justice system and are determined to maintain the status quo.”

Louis Agre, a lawyer for the city party said that Turner requested the meeting. “She said she wanted to show respect,” he said. Agre, who also represents Philadelphia’s 21st Ward on the city committee, said that Brady said he never asked her, or anyone else, to drop out of the race, nor did he offer support for a judgeship appointment. “He never asked her to get out of the race, he never threatened her,” Agre said.

Democratic state Rep. and former 9th Ward Leader Chris Rabb said he was aware of other cases where the party had asked candidates to drop out of races. “I have spoken to a few candidates who’ve been approached directly and indirectly from folks associated with the Democratic City Committee who have been pressured to drop out,” Rabb told The Intercept.

Turner had been moving into the May 18 election with an advantage: She randomly drew the No. 1 slot on the ballot this cycle. Candidates in local judicial races typically have low name recognition with voters, so people tend to vote for the first names that appear on the ballot. Attorneys Lopez Thompson and Terri Booker got the second and third slots. The eight candidates endorsed by the Democratic City Committee, including three sitting judges, got spots further down the ticket. (Rabb, the state representative, plans to introduce a bill that would randomize candidates’ positions on the ballot.)

Party leadership is challenging the petitions of some of the candidates they did not endorse, including Turner, arguing that some signatures were not valid. Agre said the party’s challenge had nothing to do with Turner’s position on the ballot. “We review petitions, and we thought that this one was problematic,” Agre said.

Thompson withdrew his campaign this week. Asked if he had discussions with Brady or anyone in his circle about dropping out, Thompson declined to comment. “I withdrew my candidacy for other reasons,” he told The Intercept.

After Thompson withdrew his candidacy for the Court of Common Pleas, Booker took the second spot on the ballot, and Wendi Barish is now listed third.

In the May primary election, voters will weigh in on eight open seats at the Court of Common Pleas. Also on the ballot are seats on the Supreme, Superior, Commonwealth, and Municipal courts; district attorney; city controller; judge of election; and inspector of election. There are currently two vacancies on the Court of Common Pleas, though several sitting judges are running for higher office, which means seats could open up later.

The party’s challenges to Turner’s petitions were dismissed earlier this month on procedural grounds, and the objectors appealed to the state Supreme Court to try to get the case reopened. The court could rule on the matter in the coming weeks.

Standard court procedure requires parties in petition challenges to meet to air issues before trial. According to Turner’s memo, a lawyer representing the party in its challenge, Henry Sias, set up a phone call with Turner and the attorney representing her in the petition challenges on Sunday to discuss an offer from Brady.

Sias “discussed an offer that Bob Brady was going to make to me: if I withdraw, he will support me in an appointment to judge — there are 6 appointments coming up this summer,” Turner wrote. Sias did not respond to requests for comment. Agre said Sias does not speak for the Democratic City Committee.

The next day, Turner met with Brady in person, where he outlined his offer. “He asked me if I was familiar with the appointment procedure — I said somewhat — then he said that the Governor appoints and the Senate confirms but that he would back me in that,” Turner wrote.

According to the memo, Brady told Turner that she “might have problems with a mail in ballot,” implying that the candidates he had endorsed were more well-known and would have an easier time getting votes. Voters can request a mail ballot for the election until May 11. Brady also reportedly warned Turner that she would not get the endorsement from Philadelphia’s 2nd Ward. On Thursday, three days after the meeting, the 2nd Ward endorsed her as part of a slate of candidates that includes District Attorney Larry Krasner.

“He said it was my choice and wanted a response. I said I would like to stay on the ballot. He then told me that he would not talk negatively about me but he would come at me,” Turner wrote.

Turner is running on a platform to bring restorative justice to the court system, which handles trial, family, and orphans’ divisions in Philadelphia County.

Progressive organizers in the city have been working to educate voters about judicial elections and to mobilize communities that local Democrats have not invested in. For Brady to try to undo the outreach that Turner’s campaign has done in those communities is unacceptable but not surprising, said organizer Bill Cobb, former deputy director of the ACLU Campaign for Smart Justice and a senior adviser with Turner’s campaign.

“Do you know that this is the first time that people are ever, ever hearing from somebody who’s running for judge?” Cobb said. “I mean, 50, 60, 70-year-old Black and brown people in these neighborhoods and communities, and no one has ever come to them and said, ‘I’m running for judge in the city of Philadelphia.’”

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