Bryan Pata was 22 when someone killed him in the parking lot of his apartment complex after football practice in 2006. Fourteen years later, a police investigation had gone dormant. Then an ESPN investigation revealed some theories — and a suspect.
“I was nowhere around no murder. … That’s not me,” he said. “I was a football player myself. I wouldn’t do that to nobody. … I never shot a person a day in my life.”
But the Trump administration had no such objections. Even before Trump took office, his chief immigration adviser Stephen Miller, the soon-to-be appointed U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and a handpicked group of immigration restrictionists and white nationalists were debating how to shut down asylum at the border, as recounted in the book “Border Wars” by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear. In early March 2017, retired Gen. John Kelly, then-secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told CNN that he was considering separating families. “I would do almost anything to deter” Central Americans from “getting on this very dangerous network that brings them up through Mexico into the United States,” he explained. “We have tremendous experience in dealing with unaccompanied minors. … They will be well cared for as we deal with their parents.”
What the paper did have — in increasing numbers in fact — was a growing cohort of people who came to the paper with a different set of values. They were younger, which produced some of the division. A reporter who identified as “young Gen X” warned me about “toxic millennial workplace values,” while a millennial complained about the masthead’s tortured relationship to social media by arguing that “boomer is a mind-set.”
It was the same old tired Trump routine we’ve watched for four years, right through the pandemic failure: Beat your chest and bleat that you’re king of the world. Then do nothing except screw up.
Marc Polymeropoulos served in the CIA for nearly three decades working across the middle east until his career was cut short by a mysterious attack in Moscow.
When Donald Trump came out to speak just before 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday, votes were still being counted in enough states—notably Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—to make it impossible to say whether he or Joe Biden had won the Presidency. But, whichever of them does, what Trump said in his brief remarks was a reminder of why he does not deserve the office. Trump, standing in front of a phalanx of flags, claimed that the vote count had been “called off” because he won; that is not true on either count. He said that his lead in those swing states was insurmountable, which is also false, and that when “they”—he didn’t really identify “they,” except as “a very sad group of people”—realized that he was winning, they had swooped in to perpetrate “a fraud on the American public.” In saying this, he was lying to the American public. And when he told the country that there was a conspiracy afoot to “disenfranchise” people who voted for him—adding, “We won’t stand for it”—he seemed to be willfully prodding his supporters toward violence. Trump’s statement was squalid; if the country is lucky, it is just a last indignity before he is defeated. But, in those few minutes, he caused America’s troubles to multiply.
There have been many times, over the past four years, that covering Trump’s Washington felt like a foreign assignment to me, never more so than while driving around the capital these past few days and seeing boarded-up storefronts and streets cordoned off for blocks around the White House, in anticipation of unprecedented post-election violence. I have seen such scenes before, in places like Azerbaijan and Russia. This is Trump’s America. It is not the America I have known.
William O’Brien was a well-heeled doctor with a thriving Philadelphia medical practice. He was also at the center of a massive painkiller supply chain run by an outlaw biker gang.
Anna Marie thought the police should have paid more attention to a strange incident that occurred the day before. She had been upstairs cleaning when she heard yelling across the street. Through her window, she could see two men outside Anthony’s house. One was long-necked and wiry, with a hairline in deep retreat and small, coal-like eyes. He held a metal pipe. The other was bald, bearded and burly. She yelled down, threatening to call the police. The wiry man walked into the street and looked up at her. “Do you know who I am?” he said. Anna Marie had never laid eyes on him. Before the exchange went much further, the men got into a car and drove away.
An hour after the rally, I could not stop thinking about the most remarkable moment from it: Trump accusing U.S. doctors of artificially inflating the number of covid deaths in order to somehow collect money. “You know, our doctors get more money if somebody dies from covid,” he claimed. “You know that, right?” He even joked about it, imagining himself, I guess, as a doctor pulling off this scam: “With us, ‘when in doubt, choose covid.’ . . . You get, like, two thousand dollars more. It’s true.” I cannot think of a better illustration of Trump’s cynical world view: everything is a scam, corrupt, not on the level. “It’s true,” he said, over and over—which, of course, was one of many tells that it was not.
Trump and his allies had set a publicly disparaging tone against health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert. On April 18th—a particularly dire moment in the pandemic—the President’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, had bragged to Bob Woodward, “Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors.” In Colorado, nearly seventy per cent of local public-health officials reported receiving threats, and some resigned. In Washington State, one county official had to install a security system after making a simple phone call to remind a quarantining family to stay home: “Accusations started flying that we were spying, that we had put them under house arrest,” the official told NPR. In Nebraska, a former TV meteorologist and mayoral spokesman anonymously sent Adi Pour, head of the Douglas County health department, at least fifteen threatening e-mails, including one that read, “There was a lynching outside the Douglas County Courthouse a century and one year ago. You’re next, bitch”; in another, he wrote, “Maybe I will just slit your throat instead. That will get you to shut the fuck up.” (The meteorologist, Ronald Penzkowski, pleaded no contest to third-degree assault and stalking.) Fauci, after receiving death threats, was assigned a federal security detail.
Heshy Tishler, a radio host and City Council candidate, has emerged as the leader of a neighborhood’s uprising against government coronavirus measures.
In Borough Park, Tischler has become the leader of this movement. He has posted hundreds of videos on social media, in which you’ll find him using bolt cutters to break into a locked playground or harassing local health inspectors. In each video, he also plugs his weekly radio program, “The Just Enough Heshy Show,” where he reflects on topics such as whether he should apologize for calling a young Muslim girl a terrorist (initially yes; later no), and the intellectual capacity of women (“not as smart as men”). The other day, on the air, he challenged the Mayor to a fight on his deck, “man to man, because I think he’s not a man.”
Trump is vowing to designate the movement as a terrorist organization. But its supporters believe that they are protecting their communities—and that confronting fascists with violence can be justified.
Across Oregon, 911 calls inquiring about Antifa arsonists flooded dispatch services, and checkpoints manned by armed citizens slowed evacuation efforts. During a public Zoom conference, a captain in the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office related accounts of “suspected Antifa” members felling telephone poles “in the hopes of starting further fires.” The sheriff soon repudiated these reports, but not before a Clackamas County deputy was captured on video telling a local resident, “Antifa motherfuckers are out causing hell.” In a separate video, the deputy warned people that if they killed miscreants they could be charged with murder; however, he advised, if “you throw a fucking knife in their hand after you shoot them, that’s on you.” (The deputy was placed on leave and is under investigation.) Several law-enforcement agencies, including the F.B.I., beseeched citizens to stop spreading the false Antifa stories. But at a rally Trump insisted, “They have to pay a price for the damage and the horror that they’ve caused.” Some critics noted that, in 2018, Trump pardoned Dwight and Steven Hammond—Oregon ranchers who had been convicted of igniting fires on federally managed land.
Shipping logs show that every month in the years after World War II, thousands of barrels of acid sludge laced with this synthetic chemical were boated out to a site near Catalina and dumped into the deep ocean — so vast that, according to common wisdom at the time, it would dilute even the most dangerous poisons.
The Intercept’s version of events is largely confirmed through a series of emails shared by Greenwald. In a single email, editor Peter Maas pushed back on a few parts of Greenwald’s sprawing 6,000+ word essay, offering suggestions — as editors are wont to do — for ways to improve and clarify its meandering and self-contradiction. Greenwald interpreted this lone email as “censorship” on behalf of the Democratic Party, and quit his job, for which he was being compensated between $350,000 and $520,000 annually for writing a weekly column.
The President has survived one impeachment, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. What happens when his Presidential immunity is gone?
No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense. But, as Donald Trump fights to hold on to the White House, he and those around him surely know that if he loses—an outcome that nobody should count on—the presumption of immunity that attends the Presidency will vanish. Given that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Nixon. The Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said of Trump, “If he loses, you have a situation that’s not dissimilar to that of Nixon when he resigned. Nixon spoke of the cell door clanging shut.” Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. Few people have evaded consequences more cunningly. That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if he loses to Joe Biden. Even if Trump wins, grave legal and financial threats will loom over his second term.
Here, Taylor was bizarrely understated in his metaphors and his statements of the facts. Suggesting that refugees be declared “enemy combatants” is not in the same category of derangement as assuming your nephew might take interest in your mountain-climbing trip. And Nielsen didn’t “insinuate”—she explicitly equated people arriving at the southern border with gang members, drug smugglers, and other “dangerous criminals.” She did this in a speech on the state of homeland security that she delivered in March, 2019, when Taylor was her right-hand man. At the time, he was either already writing his book or about to start.
Before dawn on January 23, 2019, Mark McConnell arrived at the Key West headquarters of the military and civilian task force that monitors drugs headed to the United States from the Southern Hemisphere. McConnell, a prosecutor at the Department of Justice and a former marine, left his phone in a box designed to block electronic transmissions, and passed through a metal detector and a key-card-protected air lock to enter the building. On the second floor, he punched in the code for his office door, then locked it behind him. On a computer approved for the handling of classified information, he loaded a series of screenshots he had taken, showing entries in a database called Helios, which federal law enforcement uses to track drug smugglers. McConnell e-mailed the images to a classified government hotline for whistle-blowers. Then he printed backup copies and, following government procedures for handling classified information, sealed them in an envelope that he placed in another envelope, marked “secret.” He hid the material behind a piece of furniture.
Vince Ramos wanted Phantom Secure to be the Uber of privacy-focused, luxury-branded phones—flood the market with devices, and sort out the law later. Then the FBI investigated him.
“Sinaloa Cartel that’s what up,” Ramos said. “And my boy is Punjabi cartel lol. Straight up,” he added. The rest of his text suggested he was currently at the Spearmint Rhino stripclub in Vegas with Richard Sherman, then a star for the Seattle Seahawks. Bob Lange, vice president of communications for Sherman’s current team the San Francisco 49ers, wrote in an email “I spoke with Richard and he does not know this gentleman.”
Over the past four years, the Trump administration has destroyed or distorted vast swaths of information vital to public life and safety. This is an account of the damage.
Whenever President Donald Trump is questioned about why the United States has nearly three times more coronavirus cases than the entire European Union, or why hundreds of Americans are still dying every day, he whips out one standard comment. We find so many cases, he contends, because we test so many people. The remark typifies Trump’s deep distrust of data: his wariness of what it will reveal, and his eagerness to distort it. In April, when he refused to allow coronavirus-stricken passengers off the Grand Princess cruise liner and onto American soil for medical treatment, he explained: “I like the numbers where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.” Unable—or unwilling—to fix the problem, Trump’s instinct is to fix the numbers instead.
No consensus exists regarding how to counter the explosion of false information online, or its exploitation by politicians. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a former tech executive, told me that the amplification of information online, rather than the posting of it, could become a useful focus for regulation. “Should you have a right to say crazy, stupid, false things?” he asked. “Maybe you should have that right. But do you have that right then to have it amplified?” Warner called finding a way to create “guardrails” for the Web extraordinarily difficult. But, he said, “for companies to say, ‘We bear no responsibility’—it doesn’t pass the smell test.” Americans increasingly agree: a recent Knight Foundation survey found that seventy-three per cent of respondents wanted to see Internet companies find ways to exclude false or hateful information. Many also said that the news media was politically biased and contributed to polarization; sixty-two per cent said that it is becoming increasingly difficult for citizens to be well informed.
