Senate Confirms Trump’s Anti-Abortion Pick to Lead the FDA

On Tuesday night, the Senate 56 to 44 voted to confirm Martin Makary as Trump’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner.

Three Democrats—Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) —joined Republicans in the confirmation vote to appoint Makary, formerly a surgeon and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, to lead the agency’s 18,000 employees and spearhead the regulation of products as vast and varied as food, cosmetics, and medical devices.

As I wrote back in January, as commissioner, Makary will also wield immense power to help facilitate—or stymie—anti-abortion Republicans’ efforts to roll back access to abortion pills, which now account for more than half of all abortions and have helped the total number of abortions increase since the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in June 2022. The pills have become much easier to access since 2021 whenthe FDA ruled that mifepristone—the first drug in the two-drug regimen, which also includes misoprostol—could be distributed by mail or at pharmacies instead of requiring that they be obtained in person at a clinic or hospital.

But Makary has made no secret about his anti-abortion views. AsI previously wrote:

The head of the FDA, housed within HHS,could lead the agency’s efforts to reinstate the in-person requirement to access abortion pills—which would prevent them from being legally mailed to patients, creating a massive blow to access—and in the longer term revoke FDA approval of the drugs entirely, as Project 2025 recommends. Markary…has been open about his anti-abortion views. After Dobbs was handed down, Markary joined ex-Fox host Tucker Carlson on-air and described false information about fetuses’ abilities to feel pain in utero, as the Center for Reproductive Rights points out. All this makes it clear why the conservative political advocacy group CatholicVote celebrated Makary as a pro-life pick who could reverse FDA approval of the pills. Reproductive Freedom for All, an abortion rights advocacy group, on the other hand, called Makary “a known anti-abortion extremist” after Trump announced his nomination.

It’s worth noting, though, that if Markary did try to roll back the agency’s approval of abortion pills, he would face an immediate legal challenge under the Administrative Procedure Act, which prevents agencies from acting in ways that are “arbitrary or capricious,” according to Rachel Rebouché, reproductive law scholar and dean of Temple Law School. (A spokesperson for the FDA said the agency would not comment on pending litigation or hypotheticals.)

Attacks on the pills—seeking to both reinstate the in-person requirement and eventually roll back FDA approval of the medicationentirely,as both Project 2025 and anti-abortion advocates have outlined—come as more than 100 scientific studies have proven they are safe and effective. One study published last year that confirmed they are also safe and effective when prescribed virtually and mailed to patients.

But this didn’t stop Makary, and some Republican senators, from peddling misinformation suggesting that the pills are dangerous during his March 6 confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. He refused to commit to upholding FDA approval of medication abortion when asked the question bySen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). Instead, his reply was evasive: “You have my commitment to follow the independent scientific review process at the FDA.”

FDA nominee Martin Makary just dodged a simple, straightforward question from @PattyMurray on whether he would uphold nearly TWO DECADES of evidence that mifepristone is safe and effective.

That tells you all you need to know about how he'll lead the agency if confirmed. pic.twitter.com/kNMsznYdX7

— Reproductive Freedom for All (@reproforall) March 6, 2025

At the March 6 hearing, Hassan—one of the Democratic senators who ultimately voted to confirm Makary—followed up, noting that when they met previously, Makary told her he was not familiar with mifepristone. “Have you reviewed the data, and do you agree that mifepristone is safe and effective?” Hassan asked. “I did read those articles,” Makary replied, adding that he was not unfamiliar with the drug itself, but rather with the evidence regardingits safety and efficacy.

“The concern is whether you are going to unilaterally overrule the data that currently exists for political reasons,” Hassan pressed. Makary again declined to clarify. “Senator, you have my commitment that once I’m in office I will do a review of the data,” he replied, adding, “I have no preconceived plans to make changes to the mifepristone policy.” Hassan concluded her time by stating, “I wish you were hedging a little bit less today.” A spokesperson for Hassan did not immediately respond to a question from Mother Jones about why she voted to confirm Makary in light of her comments, and his responses, during his hearing.

Makary’s response to anti-abortion Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-Mo.) question about whether he would reinstate in-person requirements for obtaining the drugs inspired less confidence than his claim to Hassan that he has no “preconceived plans” to restrict mifepristone. “I do think it makes sense to review the totality of data and ongoing data,” Makary said. “I know, personally, of OB doctors who prefer to insist…that mifepristone be taken, when necessary, in their office, as they observe the person taking it. And I think their concern there is if the drug is in the wrong hands, it could be used for coercion.”

The reproductive coercion argument has long been discredited, but abortion opponents brought it to the Supreme Court last year when they sought to restrict mifepristone access. As I wrote then of the argument:

And like many arguments from the anti-abortion side, the claim that medication abortion prescribed through telehealth contributes in any significant way to domestic abuse is baseless: Experts told me it’s unsupported by evidence and ignores many of the ways reproductive coercion actually manifests—as well as the many benefits telehealth abortion can provide for people experiencing intimate partner violence.

Meanwhile, legitimate research suggests that increasing numbers of abortion restrictions nationwide are what is driving reproductive coercion.

Unsurprisingly,abortion rights advocates greeted the news of Makary’s confirmation with despair. “Martin Makary’s confirmation jeopardizes two of the most important aspects of the FDA: independence and decision-making rooted in science,” Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in a statement Tuesday night. “Trump just succeeded at giving yet another extremist the green light to chip away at birth control, medication abortion, and more.”

In a statement provided to Mother Jones, Anna Bernstein, principal federal policy advisor at the reproductive research and policy center, the Guttmacher Institute, said that Makary’s confirmation “could further erode abortion access nationwide.”

“Makary’s refusal to acknowledge the well-established safety of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in a medication abortion regimen, during his confirmation hearing signals a willingness to prioritize political pressures over scientific evidence,” Bernstein added.

Freya Riedlin, senior federal policy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Mother Jones that Makary “has indicated he is open to playing politics with medicine and pregnant people’s lives.”

“The FDA needs a leader committed to protecting access to quality health care for everyone—not someone with a documented history of opposing reproductive health care access and spreading inaccurate health information,” Riedlin added.

Responding to his confirmation, Sen. Murray wrote on X: “We need an FDA Commissioner who will put science over politics to protect the health and safety of all Americans. That means opposing far-right efforts to restrict safe & effective medication abortion—at minimum. I voted NO on Dr. Makary to lead the FDA.”

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“You’re Here Because of Your Tattoos”

On Friday, March 14, Arturo Suárez Trejo called his wife, Nathali Sánchez, from an immigration detention center in Texas. Suárez, a 33-year-old native of Caracas, Venezuela, explained that his deportation flight had been delayed. He told his wife he would be home soon. Suárez did not want to go back to Venezuela. Still, there was at least a silver lining: In December, Sánchez had given birth to their daughter, Nahiara. Suárez would finally have a chance to meet the three-month-old baby girl he had only ever seen on screens.

But, Sánchez told Mother Jones, she has not heard from Suárez since. Instead, last weekend, she found herself zooming in on a photo the government of El Salvador published of Venezuelan men the Trump administration had sent to President Nayib Bukele’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. “I realized that one of them was my husband,” she said. “I recognized him by the tattoo [on his neck], by his ear, and by his chin. Even though I couldn’t see his face, I knew it was him.” The photo Sánchez examined—and a highly producedpropaganda video promoted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the White House—showed Venezuelans shackled in prison uniforms as they were pushed around by guards and had their heads shaved.

The tattoo on Suárez’s neck is of a colibrí, a hummingbird. His wife said it is meant to symbolize “harmony and good energy.” She said his other tattoos, like a palm tree on his hand—an homage to Suárez’s late mother’s use of a Venezuelan expression about God being greater than a coconut tree—were similarly innocuous. Nevertheless, they may be why Suárez has been effectively disappeared by the US government into a Salvadoran mega-prison.

Mother Jones has spoken with friends, family members, and lawyers of ten men sent to El Salvador by the Trump administration based on allegations that they are members of the Venezuelan organized crime group Tren de Aragua. All of them say their relatives have tattoos and believe that is why their loved ones were targeted. But they vigorously reject the idea that their sons, brothers, and husbands have anything to do with Tren de Aragua, which the Trump administration recently labeled a foreign terrorist organization. The families have substantiated those assertions to Mother Jones, including—in many cases—by providing official documents attesting to their relatives’ lack of criminal histories in Venezuela. Such evidence might have persuaded US judges that the men were not part of any criminal organization had the Trump administration not deliberately deprived them of due process.

On March 14, President Donald Trump quietly signed a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act—a 1798 law last used during World War II. The order declared that the United States is under invasion by Tren de Aragua. It is the first time in US history that the 18th-century statute, which gives the president extraordinary powers to detain and deport noncitizens, has been used absent a Congressional declaration of war. The administration then employed the wartime authority unlocked by the Alien Enemies Act to quickly load Venezuelans onto deportation flights from Texas to El Salvador.

In response to a class action lawsuit brought by the ACLU and Democracy Forward, federal judge James Boasberg almost immediately blocked the Trump White House from using the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport Venezuelans, and directed any planes already in the air to turn around. But in defiance of that order, the administration kept jets flying to El Salvador. Now Suárez and others like him are trapped in the Central American nation with no clear way to contact their relatives or lawyers.

Suárez, whose story has also been reported on by the Venezuelan outlet El Estímulo, is an aspiring pop musician who records under the name SuarezVzla. His older brother, Nelson Suárez, said his sibling’s tattoos were intended to help him “stand out” from the crowd. “As Venezuelans, we can’t be in our own country so we came to a country where there is supposedly freedom of expression, where there are human rights, where there’s the strongest and most robust democracy,” Nelson said. “Yet the government is treating us like criminals based only on our tattoos, or because we’re Venezuelan, without a proper investigation or a prosecutor offering any evidence.” (All interviews with family members for this story were conducted in Spanish.)

“Well, you’re here because of your tattoos,” the ICE agent reportedly said. “We’re finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos.”

The Justice Department’s website states that Suárez’s immigration case is still pending and that he is due to appear before a judge next Wednesday. Records provided by Nelson Suárez show that Arturo has no criminal record in Venezuela. Nor, according to his family, does Suárez have one in Colombia and Chile, where he lived after leaving Venezuela in 2016. They say he is one of millions of Venezuelans who sought a better life elsewhere after fleeing one of the worst economic collapses in modern history. (Just a few years ago, Secretary Rubio, then a senator from Florida, stressed that failure to protect Venezuelans from deportation “would result in a very real death sentence for countless” people who had “fled their country.”)

The stories shared with Mother Jones suggest that Trump’s immigration officials actively sought out Venezuelan men with tattoos before the Alien Enemies Act was invoked and then removed them to El Salvador within hours of the presidential proclamation taking effect.

“This doesn’t just happen overnight,” said immigration lawyer Joseph Giardina, who represents one of the men now in El Salvador, Frizgeralth de Jesus Cornejo Pulgar. “They don’t get a staged reception in El Salvador and a whole wing for them in a maximum-security prison…It was a planned operation, that was carried out quickly and in violation of the judge’s order. They knew what they were doing.”

Arturo Suárez performing and speaking with his baby daughter from detention.Courtesy Arturo Suárez

The White House has yet to provide evidence that the hundreds of Venezuelans flown to El Salvador—without an opportunity to challenge their labeling as Tren de Aragua members and “terrorists”—had actual ties to the gang. When pressed on the criteria used for their identification, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pointed to unspecified “intelligence” deployed to arrest the Venezuelans she has referred to as “heinous monsters.” Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has insisted—without providing specific details—that the public should trust ICE to have correctly targeted the Venezuelans based on “criminal investigations,” social media posts, and surveillance.

Robert Cerna, an acting field office director for ICE’s removal operations branch, said the agency “did not simply rely on social media posts, photographs of the alien displaying gang-related hand gestures, or tattoos alone.” But Cerna also acknowledged that many of the Venezuelans deported under the Alien Enemies Act had no criminal history in the United States, a fact he twisted into an argument to seemingly justify the summary deportations without due process. “The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat,” Cerna wrote. “In fact, based upon their association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”

The relatives who talked to Mother Jones painted a vastly different picture from the US government’s description of the men as terrorists or hardened criminals. Many said their loved ones were tricked into thinking they were being sent back to Venezuela, not to a third country. (The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to a detailed request for comment asking for any evidence that the Venezuelans named in this articlehave ties to Tren de Aragua.)

Before leaving for the United States in late 2023, Neri Alvarado Borges lived in Yaritagua, a small city in north central Venezuela. His father is a farmer and his mother supports his 15-year-old brother, Nelyerson, who has autism.

Neri Alvarado with his brother Nelyerson in 2023.Courtesy María Alvarado

Alvarado’s older sister, María, stressed in a call from Venezuela that her brother has no connection to Tren de Aragua. She said her brother was deeply devoted to helping Nelyerson—explaining that one of his three tattoos is an autism awareness ribbon with his brother’s name on it and that he used to teach swimming classes for children with developmental disabilities. “Anyone who’s talked to Neri for even an hour can tell you what a great person he is. Truly, as a family, we are completely devastated to see him going through something so unjust—especially knowing that he’s never done anything wrong,” María said. “He’s someone who, as they say, wouldn’t even hurt a fly.”

Still, Alvarado was detained by ICE outside his apartment in early February and brought in for questioning, Juan Enrique Hernández, the owner of two Venezuelan bakeries in the Dallas area and Alvarado’s boss, told Mother Jones. One day later, Hernández went to see him in detention and asked him to explain what had happened. Alvarado told Hernández that an ICE agent had asked him if he knew why he had been picked up; Alvarado said that he did not. “Well, you’re here because of your tattoos,” the ICE agent replied, according to Hernández. “We’re finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos.”

The agent then asked Alvarado to explain his tattoos and for permission to review his phone for any evidence of gang activity. “You’re clean,” the ICE officer told Alvarado after he complied, according to both Hernández and María Alvarado. “I’m going to put down here that you have nothing to do with Tren de Aragua.”

For reasons that remain unclear, Hernández said that another official in ICE’s Dallas field office decided to keep Alvarado detained. María Alvarado said her brother told her the same story at the time.

Hernández spoke to Alvarado shortly before he was sent to El Salvador. “There are 90 of us here. We all have tattoos. We were all detained for the same reasons,” he recalled Alvarado telling him. “From what they told me, we are going to be deported.” Both assumed that meant being sent back to Venezuela.

Hernández, a US citizen who moved to the United States from Venezuela nearly three decades ago, searched desperately for Alvarado when he didn’t show up in his home country that weekend. He was nearly certain that Alvarado was in El Salvador when he first spoke to Mother Jones on Thursday. “I have very few friends,” he said. “Very few friends and I have been in this country for 27 years. I let Neri into my house because he is a stand-up guy…Because you can tell when someone is good or bad.” Later that day, on Alvarado’s 25th birthday, Hernández got confirmation that his friend was in El Salvador when CBS News published a list of the 238 people now at CECOT.

A centerpiece of Bukele’s brutal anti-gang crackdown, CECOT is known for due process violations and extreme confinement conditions. Last year, CNN obtained rare access to the remote prison, which can hold up to 40,000 people. The network found prisoners living in crowded cells with metal beds that had no mattresses or sheets, an open toilet, and a cement basin. Visitation and time outdoors are not allowed. A photographer who was allowed into the prison as the Venezuelans arrived earlier this month wrote for Time magazine that he witnessed them being beaten, humiliated, and stripped naked.

The Trump administration has indicated in court records that the El Salvador operation was weeks, if not months, in the making. In a declaration, a State Department official said arrangements with the Salvadoran and Venezuelan governments for the countries to take back US deportees allegedly associated with Tren de Aragua had been made after weeks of talks “at the highest levels”—including ones involving Secretary of State Rubio—and “were the result of intensive and delicate negotiations.”

As part of the deal, the US government will pay El Salvador $6 million to hold the Venezuelan men for at least one year. Calling the agreements a “foreign policy matter,” Rubio has claimed the outsourcing of deportees’ detention to Bukele’s “excellent prison system” is saving money for US taxpayers.

It is unclear if, or when, anyone sent to CECOT will be able to return to Venezuela. A Human Rights Watch program director noted in a declaration that the organization “is not aware of any detainees who have been released from that prison.” During an appeals court hearing on March 24, the ACLU’s lead counsel Lee Gelernt said, “We’re looking at people now who may be in a Salvadoran prison the rest of their lives.”

Neri Alvarado working at the bakery and the autism awareness tattoo with his brother’s name.
Courtesy María Alvarado

Joseph Giardina’s client Frizgeralth de Jesus Cornejo Pulgar thought he was set to return to Venezuela on a deportation flight. Carlos, Frizgeralth’s older sibling, said his 26-year-old brother called their sister, who lives in Tennessee, from the El Valle detention center in Texas. He said Frizgeralth told her he was going to be deported to Venezuela later that day. “He was happy that he was going to be here with us,” Carlos said from Caracas in a video call with Mother Jones.

But Frizgeralth never arrived. Eventually, the family heard from the girlfriend of another Venezuelan set to be deported on the same flight as Carlos. She had identified him in videos shared on social media of the men who had been sent to the prison in El Salvador. On March 19, Carlos started scouring the internet and spotted his brother in a TikTok video. In it, Frizgeralth has his freshly shaved head pressed down, a rose tattoo on his neck peeking out from under a white t-shirt.

“We felt very powerless and in a lot of pain,” Carlos said. “To see how they mistreat a person who doesn’t deserve any of that. It’s not fair.”

“I never imagined being imprisoned just for getting a tattoo.”

Frizgeralth arrived in the United States in June 2024 after crossing the Darién Gap and waiting several months in Mexico for a CBP One appointment. The Biden-era program, which the Trump administration has since terminated, allowed migrants to schedule a date to present lawfully at a US port of entry. Carlos said Border patrol agents let Frizgeralth’s girlfriend and their other brother, as well as two friends, through but they held Frizgeralth back. He ended up detained at Winn Correctional Center, an ICE facility in Louisiana.

In messages to his family from detention, Frizgeralth expressed concern he was being investigated because of his tattoos. He explained that none of the 20 or so images—including one on his chest of an angel holding a gun—he has tattooed on his body have any connection to gang activity. He also described feeling discouraged from hearing stories in detention of Venezuelans who had recently been redetained and said ICE agents picked them up over suspicions about their tattoos.

Frizgeralth even had a declaration from his tattoo artist confirming the harmless nature of the artwork. “I never imagined being imprisoned just for getting a tattoo,” Frizgeralth, who owns a streetwear clothing brand with Carlos, wrote. “I never imagined being separated from my family. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, not even my worst enemy if I had one. It’s horrible, it’s mental torture every day.”

Like Suárez and Alvarado, Frizgeralth had no criminal record in Venezuela, documents show. Giardina said his client also had no known criminal history in the United States. Nor did he have a final deportation order. During his preliminary court hearings, the US government never claimed or presented evidence that Frizgeralth had ties to Tren de Aragua. “He was doing everything he was supposed to do,” Giardina said. “He got vetted and checked when he came into the country. He was in detention the entire time. It’s insanity.” If anything, Giardina said, his client had a strong claim for asylum based on political persecution. He said Frizgeralth was being targeted by the colectivos, paramilitary groups linked to the Maduro regime.

About a week prior to his deportation, they moved Frizgeralth to Texas. His next hearing, which is scheduled for April 10, still appears on the immigration court’s online system. “To detain them in this maximum security prison with no access to lawyers, no charges, just because you’re saying they’re terrorists…,” Giardina said. “I mean, what the hell?”

Génesis Lozada Sánchez said she and her younger brother Wuilliam are from a rural Venezuelan “cattle town” called Coloncito near Colombia. Following Venezuela’s economic collapse, both she and Wuilliam lived in Bogota, where her brother saved up for the journey to the United States by making pants at a clothing factory. After he reached the border last January, Wuilliam was detained for more than a year, Génesis said.

On Friday, March 14, he called a cousin in the United States to say that he was about to be deported to Venezuela. “But to everyone’s surprise, that’s not what happened. They were kidnapped,” Génesis said. “Why do I say kidnapped? These people have no ties to El Salvador. They haven’t committed any crimes there. And they’re not even Salvadoran. They don’t even cross into El Salvador after going through the Darién Gap on their way to the United States. So, it’s a kidnapping. They tricked these guys into signing papers by telling them they were being sent to Venezuela.”

Like other men sent to El Salvador, Wuilliam has tattoos. But Génesis said that they have nothing to do with Tren de Aragua and that her brother has no criminal record. His goal had been to make enough money in the United States to help support their parents and to save up enough to hopefully open a clothing factory back home.

Other reporting and court briefs further support the families’ suspicions that their loved ones were primarily targeted for deportation because of their tattoos. In one instance, a professional soccer player, whose attorney said had fled Venezuela after protesting against the Maduro regime and being tortured, was accused of gang membership based on a tattoo similar to the logo of his favorite team, Real Madrid.

John Dutton, a Houston-based immigration attorney, said that he started noticing ICE officers detaining Venezuelans during check-ins due to their tattoos earlier this year. “If they notice they have a tattoo, they’re just taking them into custody,” he explained. “No more questions to ask.” Dutton estimated he now has about a dozen clients who have been arrested because of tattoos.

One of his clients, Henrry Albornoz Quintero, was due in court for a bond hearing last Wednesday after being taken into detention at a routine ICE check-in. “I show up. The judge asked me where my client is,” the Houston lawyer said. “I asked the same question to the DHS attorney. She looked at her notes, shuffled papers around as if she’s gonna find the answer in there, looks up, and said, ‘Judge, I don’t know.’”

Dutton told the judge that his client might be in El Salvador; his relatives had recognized him in one of the images of people at CECOT. The judge then decided not to hear the case on the grounds that he no longer had jurisdiction. “You could tell he wanted to help me,” Dutton added. “He just couldn’t. There’s nothing he could do.”

The next day, Albornoz’s name appeared on the list of people imprisoned in El Salvador. So far, Albornoz is the only one of Dutton’s clients to be sent there. His wife is nine months pregnant with their first child.

“They didn’t just deport these people and then set them free,” says Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University. “They sent them to El Salvador, where that country, at the behest of the United States, is incarcerating them for at least a year in their prison system. This is not just deportation without due process. This is imprisonment without due process in a foreign prison system that has terrible conditions. That’s a pretty blatant violation of the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause, which says that you can’t take away people’s life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

Until Thursday, March 20, Barbara Alexandra Manzo still wasn’t sure if her brother Lainerke Daniel Manzo Lovera was among those sent to El Salvador and transferred to CECOT. The family hadn’t heard from him since that Saturday, when he called from El Paso, Texas, to say they were deporting him to Venezuela or Mexico. Her confirmation also came when she saw his name on the CBS News list.

Barbara Alexandra told Mother Jones that Lainerke didn’t even have a tattoo before he left Venezuela in December 2023. He got one—a clock on his arm—while living and working in Mexico, waiting for a CBP One appointment. It was a gift from a roommate who had been given a date before he did. Last October, Lainerke showed up at the border and was sent to ICE detention; first in San Diego, then briefly in Arizona. He had a court hearing scheduled for March 26.

“My son went to look for a better future, the American Dream,” his mother Eglee Xiomara said in a video. “And it didn’t come true. That was the worst trip he has ever made in his life.”

Lainerke has yet to meet his six-month-old daughter, who was born in the United States. “He’s never been in prison,” Barbara Alexandra said. “[We’re wondering] if he’s ok or if something is happening to him. And we’ll never know because we have no recourse.”

Nelson Suárez fears that he, too, could meet the same fate as his brother Arturo, the Venezuelan musician. Even during the first Trump administration, the fact that Nelson has Temporary Protected Status and a pending asylum case would have been enough to protect him from deportation. But there are no guarantees that it will be now. If Judge Boasberg’s temporary restraining order is lifted or overturned, he could be immediately deported to Venezuela, or sent to El Salvador, without due process. He doesn’t know if he will walk out of a scheduled check-in with ICE in May free or in chains.

“I’m really scared,” he said last week. “My three daughters are here with me. My wife is here. My kids are in school. I don’t know what could happen. Since this happened to my brother, I really haven’t been able to sleep. I have no peace, no sense of calm. I’m afraid to go out on the street. But at the same time, we have to go out to work and get things done.”

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Trump’s New Executive Order Is an “Astonishing and Unprecedented Voter Suppression” Effort

On Tuesday afternoon, President Trump signed a far-reaching executive order that Eliza Sweren-Becker, senior counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting rights and elections program, described as “an astonishing and unprecedented voter suppression” effort. It would upend how Americans register to vote, how they cast their ballots, and how their votes are counted.

“We are at an astonishing moment where the President of the United States is issuing policy directives with the unmistakable intent of stopping Americans from participating in our democracy,” Sweren-Becker says.

“If this policy were implemented it would block tens of millions of Americans from voting.”

Legal experts across the political spectrum believe the order is unconstitutional, since the states, with some oversight from Congress, have the power to set the rules for federal elections according to the Constitution, not the president. “Under our American system, voting and voter registration are predominantly responsibilities of the states, with Congress constitutionally empowered to add some overlays through legislation of general applicability,” wrote Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Cato Institute. “A president cannot change those basics by putting out an executive order, nor may he commandeer the states, through funding blackmail or otherwise, into acting as instruments of his pleasure.”

The executive order includes a laundry list of suppressive policies that the voting rights group Fair Fight Action called a “MAGA fever dream.”

Here are four aspects of the order that most concern voting rights advocates.

1. It would prevent millions of Americans from registering to vote.

The centerpiece of the order is a requirement that voters show proof of citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections. It directs the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to mandate that information on a federal voter registration form.

There’s two big problems with that proposal. The first is that Trump can’t order the EAC to do that, since it is an independent agency created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002. The EAC has already been blocked by the courts from requiring documentary proof of citizenship on the federal voter registration form; instead, voters already have to attest to their citizenship, under penalty of perjury.

The second is that millions of Americans don’t have or can’t easily get the documents that Trump wants to require. According to the Brennan Center, nine percent of American citizens, roughly 21 million people, don’t have ready access to citizenship documents, like a birth certificate or passport. Trump’s proposal is even more restrictive than the SAVE Act, the voter suppression bill passed by the GOP-controlled House last year and set to be considered again soon. That’s because it does not specify that birth certificates or naturalization papers can be used to determine US citizenship for the purposes of registering to vote. Since driver’s licenses in most states don’t specify citizenship, voters would have to use a passport to register to vote, but 146 million Americans do not have one, with passport ownership interestingly far lower in red states than blue ones.

“If this policy were implemented it would block tens of millions of Americans from voting,” says Sweren-Becker.

2. It would severely limit voting by mail.

The order claims that mail-in ballots must be received by Election Day or else states will lose federal funding or face lawsuits by the Justice Department if they don’t comply. Currently 18 states allow mail-in ballots to be received some time after the election if they are postmarked by Election Day, including blue states like California and New York and red states like Kansas and Utah. Election law expert Rick Hasen calls the argument behind this provision “a bonkers theory.”

“It would certainly disrupt the way that voting is conducted across many states in the country,” adds Sweren-Becker. “And it is again a very clear attempt to just limit the number of Americans who can participate in our elections.”

3. It would allow Elon Musk to subpoena voting records

The order gives the Department of Homeland Security and the Musk-led DOGE the power to cross-check state voter registration lists with federal immigration databases and subpoena state voting records to search for alleged voter registration fraud. The DOJ can take action against states that don’t comply. This appears to lay the groundwork for massive, error-prone voter purges.

“It appears extraordinarily dangerous to give DOGE the ability to review all of that material and sift through voter registration records without the protections that are required and the very present risk of abuse of that information,” Sweren-Becker says.

There’s a lot of evidence in recent years of states attempting to remove alleged non-citizens from the rolls in ways that disenfranchised many legitimate American voters. For example, before the 2024 election, Alabama attempted to remove 3,251 suspected non-citizens from its voter rolls. But it turned out that at least 2,000 eligible voters on the list had been slated for removal before the courts put a stop to the purge.

Indeed, much of the executive order rests on the false claim that the United States does not “adequately…prohibit non-citizens from registering to vote.” In fact, it’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote in US elections and such fraud is exceedingly rare. An audit in Georgia last year found only 20 suspected noncitizens on the rolls out of 8.2 million registered voters. A similar review in North Carolina found only nine possible non-citizens registered to vote in the state out of more than 7.7 million total voters.

The latest proposal brings to mind the disastrous effort by Trump’s 2017 “election integrity” commission to subpoena sensitive voting records from all 50 states, which led to a widespread bipartisan backlash as both red and blue states refused to comply. The commission abruptly shut down without finding any evidence of voter fraud.

4. It gives Trump King-like power to make it harder to vote

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the executive order, aside from all of the suppressive policies, is how it purports to give the president power over elections that he does not have.

“Don’t waste time on which parts of his elections order might be good, bad or a mixed bag [or] were they enacted by a legitimate authority such as a state legislature or Congress (as the case may be),” CATO’s Olson wrote on Bluesky. “Trump is trying to usurp power not rightfully his. That’s the key point and that’s where to focus.”

Trump is trying to push the unitary executive theory to the extreme. And even if he loses in court, the order could have dangerous ramifications. It could embolden states to enact similar policies. And Trump could use any loss in court as a pretext to make more bogus claims of voter fraud and attempt to overturn future elections.

“What I’m most concerned about is that the president and this administration are trying to rewrite election law unilaterally and completely alter the way that elections are run in order to stop American voters from participating in elections,” Sweren-Becker says.

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They Lied, Again

Amid efforts to downplay the extraordinary security lapse exposed by the Atlantic after Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally included in a group chat with top Trump administration officials discussing war plans, the magazine on Wednesday published new exchanges that confirmed operational details—including launch times—of the upcoming mission to bomb Houthi targets across Yemen were discussed in the Signal chat.

The decision to publish the messages, Goldberg and reporter Shane Harris wrote, came as the administration, including President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, smeared the publication and denied that classified information was discussed in the chat.

“The statements by Hegseth, [Director of National Intelligence Tulsi] Gabbard, [CIA director John] Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions,” the magazine wrote. “There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.”

The messages, which you can read in their entirety here, appear to undermine the Trump administration’s claim that war plans were not included in the Signal chat. Yet in another staggering refusal to bend to reality, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt asserted that the release amounted to a concession by the Atlantic that the scandal was a “hoax.”

The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT “war plans.”

This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin. pic.twitter.com/atGrDd2ymr

— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) March 26, 2025

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Exclusive: Trump Fired This Top Watchdog. Now He’s Speaking Out.

Fraud, waste, and abuse.

That’s what inspectors general are tasked with investigating throughout the federal government. For decades, these watchdogs have been a key layer of oversight, working to ensure agencies are spending taxpayer money wisely. But in his first week in office, President Donald Trump did something unprecedented. He fired at least 17 IGs—more than any president in history—without notifying Congress or providing a substantive rationale for doing so, both of which are required by federal statute.

Trump, instead, said he would “put good people in there that will be very good.”

On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks with one of those fired IGs, Larry Turner of the US Department of Labor. This is his first extended interview since being fired.

“It was a power purge to get rid of the people, the watchdogs, that actually provide oversight,” he says of Trump’s mass firings. “We are really the eyes and the ears for the American public.”

Trump has authorized Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to root out the same kind of fraud, waste, and abuse that congressionally authorized IGs are typically responsible for investigating.

Turner has spent much of his career as an IG, including stints at the Department of Defense and the Army. Since 2021, he’d overseen hundreds of employees who worked to publicize waste within the Labor Department. His office uncovered widespread unemployment insurance fraud after the COVID-19 pandemic. So far, 2,000 people have been for filing fraudulent claims that cost U.S. taxpayers $47 billion.

Turner is now one of eight IGs suing the Trump administration to be reinstated. He describes Trump’s effort to oust IGs as a threat to democracy itself.

“They have basically dismantled the civil service,” Turner says. “What they have done is cruel.”

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app.

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Senator Grills Tulsi Gabbard on Omission of Climate From Annual Threat Assessment

This story was originally published b_y Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Much of the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday was taken up by questions about the use of a private, encrypted messaging app by leaders of the US intelligence community to discuss the details of an upcoming attack on Yemen. The Signal chat included the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the national security adviser Michael Waltz, as well as the editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was apparently added by mistake in what many security analysts consider an appalling and even mortifying security breach.

But while concerns about this “sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior” (per Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia) dominated the hearing, there was also a brief, telling exchange between Sen. Angus King of Maine and Gabbard, in which King grilled her about the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment by the US intelligence community, which made no mention of climate change for the first time in 11 years.

“I’ve been on this committee now for—this is my 13th year,” said King. “Every single one of these reports that we have had has mentioned global climate change as a significant national security threat except this one. Has something happened? Has global climate change been solved? Why is that not in this report, and who made the decision that it should not be in the report, when it’s been in every one of the 11 prior reports?”

The omission “ignores the hundreds of American lives lost and nearly $200 billion in damage from climate-fueled disasters in 2024.”

In her response, Gabbard implied that climate change was no longer considered a direct threat to US national security. “I can’t speak to the decisions made previously, but this annual threat assessment has been focused very directly on the threats that we deem most critical to the United States and our national security,” she said. “Obviously, we’re aware of occurrences within the environment and how they may impact operations, but we’re focused on the direct threats to Americans’ safety, well-being, and security.”

King pressed her again, asking about the connection between climate change and “mass migration, famine, dislocation, political violence.” He specifically mentioned the 2019 annual threat assessment under the first Trump administration, which included a section on “Environment and Climate Change.”

That report stated, “Global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond. Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security. Irreversible damage to ecosystems and habitats will undermine the economic benefits they provide, worsened by air, soil, water, and marine pollution.”

Again, Gabbard responded, “For the intelligence community being aware of the environment that we’re operating in is a given. What I focused this annual threat assessment on and the IC focused this threat assessment on are the most extreme and critical direct threats to our national security.”

King repeatedly asked if Gabbard gave explicit instructions to the authors of the report to not include climate change, and Gabbard eventually replied, “I don’t recall giving that instruction.”

In response to an email asking if Sen. King wanted to elaborate on his concerns about omitting climate change from the threat assessment, a representative replied: “I think the exchange was fulsome and speaks for itself. (At least Sen. King’s side of it).”

Director Gabbard’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Previous intelligence reports, like the 2021 National Intelligence Estimate, have found “that climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to US national security interests as the physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions mount about how to respond to the challenge.”

The 2024 Annual Threat Assessment mentioned climate nine times and stated: “The accelerating effects of climate change are placing more of the world’s population, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, at greater risk from extreme weather, food and water insecurity, and humanitarian disasters, fueling migration flows and increasing the risks of future pandemics as pathogens exploit the changing environment.” Echoing the 2021 report mentioned above, the report went on to say, “The risks to US national security interests are increasing as the physical effects of climate and environmental change intersect with geopolitical tension and vulnerabilities of some global systems.”

For the latest Annual Threat Assessment to make no mention of climate change whatsoever, while the evidence and impacts of climate crisis continue to mount, is a striking change from prior years and a dangerous one, according to security and defense experts contacted by the Bulletin.

“If the last 11 threat assessments by the intelligence community have cited climate change as a significant national security threat, it kind of begs the question, ‘what’s changed?’” said Sherri Goodman, former deputy undersecretary of defense and the author of Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security. “Temperatures keep getting hotter, fire is more intense, sea level rise—all the indicators of climate [change] continue to shine red, and if we ignore it, then we do so at America’s peril, because we know that our adversaries like China, Iran, North Korea, and even Russia are continuing to account for the adverse effects of climate change on our national security and our global security.”

Just because the new report ignores the threats climate change poses to national security doesn’t make those threats go away—it just makes the intelligence community and the leaders of the United States less aware and able to respond to those threats.

“The omission of climate change ignores the hundreds of American lives lost and nearly $200 billion in damage from climate-fueled disasters in 2024, the warmest year in human history,” said Rod Schoonover, co-founder of the Ecosecurity Council and former Director of Environment and Natural Resources at the National Intelligence Council. “By trading objective reality for ideology, the intelligence community leadership is deliberately handicapping its ability to comprehensively analyze the very security landscape it’s tasked with understanding.”

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What the Hundreds of Venezuelans Trump Sent to El Salvador Are Up Against

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump used the Alien Enemies Act to deport 238 Venezuelans from the United States—sending them not to their home country, but to a prison in El Salvador notorious for its harsh conditions.

The administration accuses them of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, butsome of them deny the allegations, with witnesses and expertsto back them up. When they arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, they were shackled and led to their crowded cells.None of them had received a deportation hearing. “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act,” US Judge Patricia Millett, who is hearing a case about their removal, said on Monday.

The Terrorism Confinement Center, also known as CECOT, is the biggest prison in Latin America. Juanita Goebertus, who leads Human Rights Watch’s America’s division, recently testified to a US court about the dismal conditions there. “We are terribly concerned,” she told me.

At CECOT, according to CNN journalists who had a rare look inside, men are held 23.5 hours a day in cells containing about 80 inmates each, with no programs for rehabilitation. The lights are on 24/7, unless you’re in solitary confinement, where it’s pitch black. The Salvadoran government says that no prisoner who enters the prison will ever leave.

US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is visiting El Salvador on Wednesday to tour the prison and meet with President Nayib Bukele; his administration received $6 million from the US government to house the Venezuelan immigrants, who now face tough circumstances on several levels. For one, El Salvador is in a state of emergency, so “you don’t have due process laws,” Goebertus said. I spoke with her late last week to understand more about these unprecedented deportations.

How unusual is this situation, where the United States has sent hundreds of immigrants without a hearing to a country where they’re not from?

It’s highly unusual. In principle, the US can establish agreements with what US law calls “safe third countries.” For example there’s been an agreement with Canada: The general premise is that even if a person has an asylum claim that the US has to respond to, the US is sending that person to a place where that person will still be able to file that claim. So it’s legal. During the first Trump administration, there were agreements signed with El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. However, those agreements were disbanded by the Biden administration.

The reason this [deportation to El Salvador] is so strange and unprecedented is that we have no evidence that new third-country agreements have been signed, neither with El Salvador nor with Costa Rica or Panama, the other two countries that are now receiving deportees from other nationalities under the Trump administration. About 300 people were deported to Panama—people from Iran, Afghanistan, China, Russia, several places in Africa like Cameroon. Some were sent back to their countries by Panama, and some of them remain with temporary status in Panama for 90 days. In Costa Rica, there’s 200 people, 80 are children, and they’re still detained at an immigration center.

As for how unprecedented it is: El Salvador is unlike Costa Rica and Panama, which have operating legal systems with judicial independence. In El Salvador, because of the state of emergency, you don’t have due process laws. This is certainly in violation of being a “safe third country.” This is not a system that will protect asylum claims.

[Editor’s note: In 2022, Bukele declared a state of emergency to tackle gang violence. In doing so, he suspended constitutional rights in El Salvador, including the right to an attorney. Since then, about 87,000 people have been arrested across the country, more than 1 percent of the population.]

How concerned are you for these Venezuelans?

We are terribly concerned, first because of the violation of migration procedures in the US. Second because these people have been deported under a claim that they’re criminals, without any evidence. There’s been extensive reporting that several of the people deported had no criminal activity. We are starting to document cases, and in several of them we’ve been able to establish no membership in Tren de Aragua.

“El Salvador is a place where the jail system is severely violating the human rights of inmates.”

Thirdly, we’re concerned because El Salvador is a place where the jail system is severely violating the human rights of inmates. This is very clear to the US administration, and yet they are deciding to send people.

Tell me about CECOT.

We haven’t been able to enter CECOT: As far as we know, no human rights association has been allowed inside.

CECOT has been described by the Salvadoran government as a place to confine leaders of gangs. As far as we have been able to document, nobody who has entered has been able to leave. It was first announced to have a capacity of 20,000 detainees, but then the Salvadoran government later reported it had a 40,000-person capacity. We have never been able to document that it created any infrastructure change to double its capacity.

There’s been a problem of overcrowding in El Salvador prisons historically, so building new spaces would be desirable. This jail, however, has been used by the Bukele regime to promote his propaganda. All those images of supposed gang members with their tattoos, coming in stripped? They’re taken at CECOT.

How do conditions there compare with conditions in US detention facilities?

Since Human Rights Watch has not been able to enter CECOT, what we have been able to describe are the conditions in other [Salvadoran] prisons. In the three years of the state of emergency, 350 people have died in custody without any explanation or any investigation of the Salvadoran government. These are places in which we’ve documented torture, lack of access to medication, lack of access to adequate food. We’ve documented the extensive restrictions on due process, the fact that people are held without being seen by a judge, without evaluating evidence, without warrants, without the presence of a lawyer, without being able to contact family. There are hearings of 500 people at the same time. People have in many cases been imprisoned for over a year without legal recourse.

What hope do the deported Venezuelans have of getting out? Do they have any recourse?

In the El Salvador judicial system, no, I don’t see any legal recourse. In the US? Yes. There are proceedings, including in the District of Columbia, that could potentially order these people returned to the US. Courts could potentially order access to CECOT to their lawyers and their partners to be able to verify the conditions in which these people are being held.

[Editor’s note: On Monday, lawyers hired by the Venezuelan government presented a habeas corpus lawsuit to El Salvador’s Supreme Court on behalf of 30 Venezuelans. It’s unclear what relief they might get: The judges hearing the case are reportedly allies of President Bukele.]

What’s the relationship between President Bukele and President Trump, or do you know how they struck this deal?

There’s a clear public ideological affiliation that goes back to Bukele going to some of the CPAC meetings [at the annual gathering of US conservatives]. That could explain in part why this agreement is taking place.

The US government has assumed some Venezuelans are connected to the Tren de Aragua gang because of their tattoos. What do you think about this?

First, from experts on Tren de Aragua, it’s very clear that there’s a complete lack of investigation on behalf of the US authorities, because Tren de Aragua does not use tattoos to identify its members.

But in all the interviews we’ve made so far with families, the issue of tattoos is a recurrent element. There is a pattern of stigmatizing people because of the tattoos, regardless of the meaning of the specific tattoo. From what has already been public in some judicial proceedings in the US, tattoos that might refer to very different things are interpreted as a way of identifying gang membership. There are even in problems of US officials not understanding Spanish and what the tattoo says in Spanish.

To what extent is Tren de Aragua actually a threat in the United States?

With the Alien Enemies Act, the US is trying to refer to an invasion or a situation of armed conflict, which does not apply to the circumstance. It’s not true today and it was certainly not true a couple years ago when the amount of migrants reaching the southern border was much higher, amid a humanitarian crisis associated with the Venezuelan regime, which is a dictatorship and has had more than 7 million people displaced out of the country. That’s the reason for the migration: people trying to rebuild their lives and the future for their kids. It’s not an invasion, and certainly not a military invasion.

“With the Alien Enemies Act, the US is trying to refer to an invasion or a situation of armed conflict, which does not apply to the circumstance.”

The Trump administration has very specifically tried to depict all Venezuelans as criminals and members of Tren de Aragua. Which is very far from reality. When there have been members of Tren de Aragua who commit crimes, what needs to happen is effective prosecution of gang members, particularly concentrated on their leaders, making sure there is a serious and effective investigation into their money laundering and armed trafficking schemes, into their recruitment mechanisms in different places of the region. None of that is happening, and none of that will be able to happen while portraying general Venezuelans as members of Tren de Aragua and deporting them to places like El Salvador.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

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The NIH Just Officially Killed Diversity Statements In Its Grant Applications

Applicants seeking funding from the National Institutes of Health for,among other things, basic research, conferences, and training for young scientists will no longer be required to include diversity plans in their applications, according to a new policy publicized by the NIH on Monday, which Mother Jones is the first to report.

The NIH quietly posted the new measures on a grants webpage, waiting until Tuesday to alert employees. The directives likely do not come as a surprise, given that the NIH has terminated several grants supporting research focused on marginalized people—including, as I just reported yesterday, a project focused on training researchers to study domestic violence and maternal mortality—to comply with Trump’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion across government. The announcement is nonetheless significant, two NIH employees say, because it marks the first time the agency has explicitly said officials won’t review applications with diversity in mind. Deadlines for some of the relevant grants are just around the corner, in April and May.

One employee I spoke to, a scientific review officer who reviews grant applications, told me she and her colleagues had received internal instructions several weeks ago to disregard the parts of applications that address diversity. But publication of the guidelines, she said, “definitely reflects the priorities of an administration that doesn’t value diversity.”

The updated rules appear to eliminate the inclusion of diversity plans in seven application categories: Two that help fund science conferences, and five that support training opportunities for undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral researchers. People might have used the diversity plans in such applications to propose setting aside money for researchers from underfunded institutions to attend and participate key conferences, for example, or to explain how they would provide training opportunities to underrepresented researchers, including women and people of color, the scientific research officer told me. The requirement of the diversity plan in the conference grants was instituted at the start of President Joe Biden’s term; it is unclear when the others were first implemented.

The guidelines also target two other application components used more broadly across the NIH. One is called the Plan for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives (PEDP). Proposed by the NIH’s BRAIN Initiative in 2021, the PEDP asked applicants to explain how their team and research process would foster inclusivity—whether by including underserved populations in the research process as partners or diverse investigators on the research team, by way of a few examples.

The PEDP proved so popular within the NIH, the scientific research officer said, that other institutes began adding it to their own grant applications. The other NIH employee I spoke with, who analyzes how grants are spent, said the elimination of this component will likely “stunt research that shows impacts to different groups, whether they be by sex or by race.”

Another eliminated grant component is the trainee diversity report, which was included to help the NIH assess how “institutional training grants, career development awards, and most research education grants” were being spent, according to the agency webpage. The NIH employee described the elimination of the diversity reports as an attack on “the racial makeup of trainees in these grants”—which is troubling given that Black and Hispanic people, in particular, remain underrepresented in STEM jobs and in research.

“They don’t seem to want to know about, or care to know, about, the makeup of these trainees,” the NIH worker added.

The NIH webpage says that not only are the diversity plans not required, but that if they are submitted, they will be ignored.

Representatives for the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services, the umbrella agency that oversees it, did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.

The scientific research officer sees the updated guidelines as grim. “I think we will lose a lot as an agency,” she told me, “in understanding who’s involved in research and who we’re reaching.” The other NIH employee told me we are seeing in real time how Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to diversity “is directly going to impact science.”

Speaking to these researchers, I could not help but think of what Rebecca Fielding-Miller, an associate professor of public health at the University of California, San Diego—who’dhad an NIH grant terminated for including “equity” in the title—told me when we spoke on Sunday: “The result is going to be the systematic removal of women and people of color from the act of research. At the end of this, we’re going to end up with an academy that is more white, more wealthy, more male, more cisgender, and it’s going to reinforce the same problem.”

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Republicans Do Care About Disability—When a Democrat Screws Up

On March 22, at a Human Rights Campaign gala in Los Angeles, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tex.) made remarks referring to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, as “Governor Hot Wheels.” It’s not an original insult by Crockett: Texans have used it over the years in reference to Abbott collecting lawsuit payouts for his injury, a line of mockery that at the very least has ableist undertones.

Some members of the disability community have expressed frustration about Crockett’s comment on social media, but the biggest voices on social media admonishing Crockett are Republicans and Republican-aligned anti-DEI activists, who have evidently decided all of a sudden to care about the disability they’ve spent recent months trashing. Crockett may be facing such a strong response from the right because she is a Black woman—and her not-so-great statement is feeding them further grounds on which to attack her.

The National Republican Congressional Committee called Crockett’s comment as representative of “who they are”—they meaning the Democratic Party. Interestingly, the group has not said the same of Trump, or its own party—not when Trump called his opponents “mentally disabled,” or when he was alleged by his own relative to have said that disabled people should “just die,” or when he cruelly mocked a disabled reporter.

House Dems' top spox Jasmine Crockett applauded after attacking Texas Governor Abbott for using a wheelchair:

"Y'all know we got Governor Hot Wheels down there!"

Recent polling shows Crazy Crockett as one of the leaders of the Democrat Party. This is who they are. pic.twitter.com/eIDlJqSoEU

— NRCC (@NRCC) March 25, 2025

Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk said that Crockett “continues to embarrass herself” and noted that “Gov. Abbott was paralyzed at the age of 26 when an oak tree fell and crushed his spine while jogging”—the same Charlie Kirk who had, as I previously reported, said that American Sign Language should be removed from government broadcasts in urgent events because it distracted him.

Jasmine Crockett continues to embarrass herself, the state of Texas, and the US Congress by referring to Governor Greg Abbott as “Governor Hot Wheels.” Gov. Abbott was paralyzed at the age of 26 when an oak tree fell and crushed his spine while jogging.

This woman is trash. pic.twitter.com/ddiwCBkaHL

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) March 25, 2025

While Abbott is disabled, his political decisions have piled harm on disabled people—like pulling Medicaid funding from schools and egregiously failing to ensure a stable state power grid, which has already led to disabled people dying in cold weather. The attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, is also leading a multi-state lawsuit that could dismantle Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.

Rep. Crockett’s office has yet to respond to a request for comment.

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All the Ways Trump Officials Are Downplaying the “War Plans” Group Chat

Just after noon Eastern Time on Monday, the Atlantic published a story that seemed, on its face, too absurd to be true.

Entitled “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans,” and written by the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, the story reported that Goldberg had been, seemingly accidentally, added to a group chat on the encrypted messaging app Signal that featured Cabinet officials—and even Vice President JD Vance—discussing plans to bomb Houthi movement targets across Yemen. The Signal group’s members reportedly included a who’s who of top national security officials; among them were National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. On March 15, the US carried out the plan the chat’s members discussed and debated.

Which is to say: The details reported in the Atlantic story were, in fact, legit. Brian Hughes, spokesperson for the National Security Council, also confirmed that, telling the Atlantic that the Signal group “appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.” Hughes added, “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”

But upon publication of the story, top Democrats quickly argued otherwise. Senior Democrats on the House Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Oversight committees sent a letter Monday to Waltz, Gabbard, Hegseth, and Rubio, writing that their actions “may have constituted a security breach” and demanding they respond to a series of questions about whether classified information was shared and how often Signal is used for such conversations, among other inquiries. Senate Democrats also slammed the leak as “malpractice,” “amateur behavior,” and “an egregious threat to US national security.” Democrats also used a previously scheduled Tuesday morning Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on “worldwide threats” to question Gabbard and Ratcliffe about the leak.

Some Republicans—including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R- La.), Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)—have conceded that the leak constituted a serious mistake. But President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and several of the officials included in the group message have gone to great lengths to hide their embarrassment and claim the whole thing was, actually, no big deal—even though Hegseth, Ratcliffe, Rubio, and Waltz, for example, previously criticized former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for using a private email server, and Gabbard just this month decried “unauthorized release of classified information.”

Here are all the ways thus far that they have tried to obfuscate and downplay what national security experts are calling a massive—and possibly illegal—leak.

Claiming the information shared was not classified

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed in a post on X Tuesday morning that “No ‘war plans’ were discussed” and “No classified material was sent to the thread.” She added that “the White House is looking into how Goldberg’s number was inadvertently added to the thread.”

A few hours later, Gabbard and Ratcliffe followed Leavitt’s lead when they testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee and repeatedly claimed the information was not classified.

“My communications, to be clear, in a Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information,” Ratcliffe claimed at one point.

“There was no classified material that was shared,” Gabbard subsequently agreed.

But Democrats on the Committee were not satisfied, charging that the Trump officials should release the full transcript of the chat if the leaking of the material did not constitute a national security threat.(The Atlantic did not publish the whole chat, writing that it was withholding information that could be used by foreign adversaries and was related to specific intelligence operations and personnel.) “If there is no classified material, share it with the committee,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) told Gabbard. “You can’t have it both ways. These are important jobs. This is our national security. [You’re] bobbing and weaving and trying to filibuster your answer.”

Gabbard claims "there was no classified materials that was shared in that Signal chat." pic.twitter.com/gJP4mX7IlL

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 25, 2025

Sen. Angus King (D-Maine) also wasn’t having it. “So the attack sequencing and timing and weapons and targets you don’t consider to have been classified?” he asked Gabbard. To that, the Directorof National Intelligence said she deferred to Hegseth and the National Security Council—prompting King to again demand that officials involved in the chat release the full transcript if the material was not, in fact, classified. “You’re the head of the intelligence community,” King also reminded Gabbard. “You’re supposed to know about classifications.”

.@SenAngusKing: "So the attack sequencing and timing and weapons and targets you don't consider to have been classified?"

DNI Gabbard: "I defer to the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Council…"

King: "You're the head of the intelligence community." pic.twitter.com/R59vbevaSx

— CSPAN (@cspan) March 25, 2025

On an episode of the Bulwark podcast that aired Tuesday, Goldberg rejected officials’ claims that the information was not classified. “They are wrong,” he said.

Declining to answer questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee

At the Tuesday hearing, Gabbard repeatedly refused to even confirm whether she was on the group chat in response to a question posed by Warner. “You are not ‘TG’ on this group chat?” Warner pressed, after Gabbard’s first denial. “I’m not going to get into the specifics,” she replied.

Tulsi Gabbard refuses to answer Warner's questions about the Signal group chat pic.twitter.com/vMLfszfFMN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 25, 2025

She also declined to respond to a question from Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) about whether she was using her public or private phone to participate in the Signal chat. “I won’t speak to this because it’s under review by the National Security Council,” Gabbard said, adding the information would be shared when the reveiw was complete. “What is under review?” Reed asked. “It’s a very simple question.” Gabbard again stonewalled.

Question: Were you using your private phone or public phone for the signal discussions?

Gabbard: I won't speak to this because it's under review pic.twitter.com/nPMM5NGwOu

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 25, 2025

Trashing the Atlantic and Jeffery Goldberg

When Trump was first asked about the leak by a reporter on Monday, he appeared to be unaware of it. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said, adding later, “You’re telling me about it for the first time.” Nonetheless, he felt confident enough to trash the Atlantic: “I’m not a big fan of the Atlantic. To me it’s a magazine that’s going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine.”

President Trump, when asked about the Atlantic story in which The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief was accidentally included in a Signal group chat with his top officials discussing Yemen war plans, said he knows nothing about it.

It’s an example of Trump trying to pretend he’s above… pic.twitter.com/cqNqImhPQh

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) March 24, 2025

Musk did the same, posting on X on Monday night: “Best place to hide a dead body is page 2 ofThe Atlantic magazine, because no one ever goes there.”

Hegseth, for his part, characterized Goldberg as a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist” when speaking to reporters on Monday—even though the National Security Council had already confirmed the veracity of the chat.

NEW

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just landed in Hawaii and was asked about the Yemen Signal group chat.

His response was to attack The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Trump has long despised.

He refers to Goldberg as a “deceitful and highly discredited, so-called… pic.twitter.com/Cw1qrLX7Fh

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) March 24, 2025

Leavitt also tried to undermine Goldberg, writing in her X post that he is “well-known for his sensationalist spin.” (Goldberg, and the Atlantic, do not appear to have responded to those attacks.)

Claiming that, all in all, it wasn’t such a big deal

Officials have also tried to simply dismiss the incident as not that big of a problem.

After learning the full details of what occurred, Trump told NBC News that the incident was “the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one,” adding that Waltz “has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man.”

Musk appeared to try to downplay the significance of the leak, writing in a post on X, “Most government systems are shockingly primitive” in response to a post from author and cartoonist Scott Adams arguing the same point.

An especially telling exchange came when, during the Tuesday hearing, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) asked Ratcliffe: “Director Ratcliffe, this was a huge mistake, correct?”

To this, Ratcliffe had a clear response: “No.”

OSSOFF: Director Ratcliffe, this was a huge mistake, correct?

RATLIFFE: No

OSSOFF: This is an embarrassment pic.twitter.com/Yi5NOHdj3O

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 25, 2025

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Texas Bill Threatens Jail Time for Teaching Books Like “The Catcher in the Rye”

This story was originally published by Popular Information, an independent news outlet to which you can subscribe here.

Lawmakers in Texas are seeking to impose harsh criminal penalties on school librarians and teachers who provide award-winning works of literature to students. Identical bills in the Texas Senate and House would make it a crime for librarians and teachers to provide books or learning materials that contain sexually explicit content, punishable by up to 10 years behind bars—whether or not a book has educational or literary merit.

Currently, if someone is charged with providing sexually explicit content to a child, they can argue that the content was provided in pursuit of a scientific, educational, or governmental purpose. SB 412 and HB 267 would remove this affirmative defense. This defense exists because, while some people provide explicit content to children to harm them, books that include sexual content have long been a valuable component of secondary education. Many classic works of literature, including “The Odyssey,” “Catcher in the Rye,” “Brave New World,” and “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” have sexually explicit scenes.

Other Texas bills would require display of the Ten Commandments and allow for prayer time in the classroom.

Under SB 412, which the Texas Senate voted to advance last week and now awaits approval by the House, teachers and librarians would no longer be able to argue that sexually explicit content can serve an educational purpose. Only law enforcement officials and judges would be exempted under the new law. SB 412 also leaves in place an exception if the adult providing the sexually explicit content is married to the child, which is legal in Texas, with a judge’s approval, if the child is at least 16 years old.

In the last few years, Texas teachers and librarians have faced an onslaught of criticism from conservative activists and lawmakers for offering well-regarded works of literature to students. Books that have come under fire in Texas include Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood, and “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker.

In December, one district briefly restricted access to the Bible in an attempt to comply with a book-banning bill passed in 2023. Some activists have even targeted picture books about gender-identity or children with two parents of the same gender, saying such books are causing harm to young children.

Sen. Mayes Middleton (R-Galveston), the primary sponsor of SB 412, has sponsored several other bills during Texas’ current legislative session to ban materials from schools and libraries that don’t conform to his right-wing Christian ideology and aim to infuse religion into the classroom.

In addition to SB 412, five other bills sponsored by Middleton passed the Texas Senate last week.

SB 11 allows school districts to allocate time each day for teachers and students to pray or read from religious texts, including the Bible. SB 10 requires all classrooms to display a copy of the Ten Commandments.

SB 13 overhauls the process by which books are selected for school libraries. Instead of trained librarians, school boards would have the final say over which books are allowed on the shelves of school libraries. School districts would also be required to form library advisory boards of parents and other community members to recommend whether a book should be added or removed from a school’s collection. Finally, the bill places a blanket ban on books that have “indecent content or profane content.”

SB 18 would defund any libraries that host children’s drag queen story hours, a frequent target of conservative activists and lawmakers in Texas and other states.

SB 12 bans Texas schools from teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation; developing policies or training about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); and considering diversity in hiring decisions. One lawmaker said this bill would prevent taxpayer money from being spent to advance “political activism and political agendas.”

Multiple states, including Indiana and Arkansas, have already passed laws that make educators or librarians vulnerable to harsh penalties, or even jail time, for providing “obscene” materials to minors, the Washington Post reported. In December, a federal judge struck down parts of an Arkansas law that would have “established a criminal misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in prison, for librarians and booksellers who distribute ‘harmful’ material to a minor,” ruling that “elements of the law [were] unconstitutional.”

A 2024 analysis by the Associated Press found that in the first four months of last year, “lawmakers in more than 15 states…introduced bills to impose harsh penalties on libraries or librarians.” Legislators in multiple states, including Alabama, Georgia, and Arizona, have already introduced similar legislation this year.

In Alabama, HB 4 would change current criminal obscenity laws to include “public libraries, public school libraries, and their employees or agents in certain circumstances.” The bill, which has 50 cosponsors, gives educators and librarians “15 business days [after receiving a valid complaint] for staff to move material to an age-restricted section; remove material; cease conduct; or make an official determination that the material or conduct does not violate the law.”

Complaints can be sent by any resident in the same county as the public library or a parent or guardian of a child enrolled in the school. If the person who files the complaint does not receive notice of action within 25 days, the material can be taken to law enforcement. The bill excludes college and university libraries and librarians.

In Georgia, SB 74 would “repeal an exemption for libraries and librarians,” and make them vulnerable to “a misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature” if they knowingly sell or distribute “harmful materials to minors.” The bill includes an exception for “librarians who make good faith attempts to identify and remove material harmful to minors.” The legislation was passed by the state Senate earlier this month, and has now moved to the House.

Arizona SB 1090 states that “an employee or independent contractor of a public library in this state may not refer an unemancipated minor [or facilitate access for an unemancipated minor] to any sexually explicit material in any manner.” The legislation states that an employee of a public library “who acting with criminal negligence violates this section is guilty of a class 5 felony.” The bill passed a Senate committee in January, but, even if it passes the state legislature, it is unlikely that it will be signed into law by Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs.

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Bernie Sanders Has Been Warning About Oligarchy for Years. People Are Finally Listening.

As he waited in the shadow of a parking garage in Tempe, Arizona, to hear Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speak last Thursday evening, John Ward, a longtime Democrat from the deep-red retirement community of Sun City West, told me he “probably” hadn’t voted for the Independent Vermont senator in the past, but it felt like Sanders had become a party leader by default.

“I mean, Kamala [Harris’] not talking, Barack [Obama]’s not talking, [Joe] Biden’s not talking,” he said. “Right now, he’s the only one talking, and he’s the only one making sense.”

Ward arrived hours early to catch Sanders at the latest stop on his Fighting Oligarchy tour, but already, the line snaked around the block to get into the hockey arena on the campus of Arizona State University. The rallies, which Sanders began organizing in February to apply pressure to Republican lawmakers in their home districts, have been growing and growing. According to organizers, nearly 87,000 people attended five events last week—a stunning showing 20 months away from the midterm elections. Before an event at a high school football stadium in Tucson on Saturday—where people started arriving at 6 a.m. for an 11:30 start—I met a high school student who had persuaded her grandmother to come with her all the way from Redlands, California. It had taken them half a day, stopping every three hours to recharge their car. (No, they clarified, it was not that kind of electric car.)

The Fighting Oligarchy tour is drawing larger crowds than the Sanders presidential campaign ever did, but it’s also drawing a different sort of crowd. Although there were still more “Feel the Bern” T-shirts than you could count, at two stops in Arizona last week, most of the people I talked to were, like Ward, not longtime supporters. A significant number had not attended a political event or a protest before. Many of these voters found Sanders’ long-running message of a growing oligarchy newly resonant at a time when the richest man in the world has been given carte blanche to dismantle public institutions. Above all, they showed up because they wanted to hear elected officials express the sort of frustration and rage Democratic voters have been feeling for months. They wanted to be where the fight was. Sanders’ rallies offer both a lifeline and a warning to a party that hasn’t yet found its footing: Start going after President Donald Trump—or voters might start going after you, too.

Rallygoers watch Bernie Sanders deliver remarks from the Catalina High School football stadium bleachers.Sam Van Pykeren/Mother Jones

You couldn’t go far at these rallies without running into someone who was dealing firsthand with the fallout from Trump and Elon Musk’s attack on the federal bureaucracy. The very first person I talked to before Thursday’s rally in Tempe told me he was moving back to Puerto Rico after being fired from the IRS. In Tucson on Saturday, I met an educator from a border community whose special education programming was getting wiped out due to cuts at the Department of Education. Sitting in the top row of bleachers inside the event, a woman from Nogales whose company buys produce from Mexico spent five minutes patiently explaining the process of importing fruit, and how the impending tariffs will force distributors to shut down.

For seniors, Social Security was front of mind. When I talked to Lisa Melton outside the arena in Tempe, she said she was now planning on tapping into the program a year early and taking an annual $2,000 hit because she didn’t trust what the Trump administration was going to do it. I don’t know if that’s a sound strategy; I do know that she was terrified.

“I tried to sign up for Social Security about a month ago,” said Therese Wagner, a bit further up the line. “I got in and then it got error messages and I thought, Elon Musk is fucking with our Social Security already.”

Wagner eventually managed to apply, but rallygoers feared that things were only going to get worse. A retired bus driver named Kevin James volunteered that he’d recently got so upset after trying to talk to a human at the Social Security Administration that he called the White House right after.

“I politely said, ‘I would like to express concern and displeasure,’” he said. “Click.”

These people are as furious at Republicans right now as you might expect. Musk would probably find a warmer reception on Mars. But what separates the energy of the Sanders-led Fighting Oligarchy tour from the 2017-era Resistance is that a lot of the anger is trained at their own party. Democratic voters’ approval of congressional Democrats has fallen 35 points since last year, according to a recent survey, and rallygoers at the two Arizona stops took aim what they perceived as a toothless approach to the new administration.

“We have to take matters into our own hands, because the people who should be fighting for us aren’t.”

As she waited in the stands in Tucson on Saturday morning, Samantha Schrieber offered a characteristic response when I asked about what Democratic leaders have been doing.

“They’ve been doing something? What have they been doing?,” she said. Then she laughed. “They haven’t been doing shit.”

Attendees at the Arizona rallies were the focus group of Chuck Schumer’s nightmares. They talked about “backbone” about as often as they talked about “fascism.” The strategy seemed to be to “play dead and just wait for everyone to vote for them,” one young voter complained. The Senate minority leader was “bringing a pillow to a gunfight,” said a cannabis worker. Watching the party fold over the budget was “incapacitating,” said a disabled veteran, who was thinking of running for office now himself. A woman who had just protested outside her Republican congressman’s office told me simply: “We have to take matters into our own hands, because the people who should be fighting for us aren’t.”

To a lot of the people I spoke with, too many Democrats were still searching for comity in a political climate that had moved beyond it.

“Democrats kind of lean on, like, ‘They’re not all bad, we can all get along’ kind of thing,” said Adonis Gonzalez, who was selling “Deport Elon” and “Smash the Oligarchy” buttons outside the hockey arena. “I feel like right now we don’t necessarily need that message. I think we need a message of, ‘Hey, there are bad people trying to do bad things and we should as good people come together and stop them.’”

Sanders was once criticized for saying billionaires shouldn’t exist. But the argument has caught on.Sam Van Pykeren/Mother Jones

At Sanders’ rallies, Musk was as big of a villain as President Donald Trump.Sam Van Pykeren/Mother Jones

The speakers on stage during the tour sought to channel this frustration into immediate action and longer-term transformation. Sanders, who has said he went on tour only after seeing the tepid response to Trump from the Democratic Party, chose his rally locations strategically. They are all either in competitive but Republican-held House districts, or close to them. In Michigan earlier this month, he targeted second-term Rep. John James. In Colorado on Friday, it was first-term Rep. Gabe Evans. In Arizona, Ocasio-Cortez promised that Democrats would unseat veteran Republican David Schweikert, who held onto his suburban Phoenix seat in November in one of the country’s closest races. The hope is that with sustained public pressure on vulnerable Republicans, Democrats can convince enough of them to block Trump’s objectives in a narrowly divided chamber.

“Trump helped me immensely in educating the American people to what oligarchy is,” Sanders said.

Sanders is, in large part, still giving the speech about oligarchy he’s been giving for the last decade. But the 83-year-old was a bit more soulful, as he spoke with urgency about threats that are now not just theoretical but existential. There were nods to both the nation’s founders, and its second founding at the end of the Civil War—at various stops on the tour, he and the crowd have recited a portion of the Gettysburg Address together. It’s like a tea party rally for people who believe the 14th Amendment is real.

“From the bottom of my heart I am still convinced that they can be defeated,” he said on stage in Tempe.

Part of the reason for that optimism was the presence of a handful of considerably younger allies joining him on tour, including Texas Rep. Greg Casar and Ocasio-Cortez, who told the crowd in Tempe, “We’re gonna throw these bums out and fight for the nation we deserve” before she even introduced herself.

And “these bums” might not all be Republicans. The Bronx Democrat, who as Sanders noted won her seat after primarying a member of the Democratic leadership, drew huge applause when she told the crowd, “you all have shown that if a US Senator isn’t fighting hard enough for you, you’re not afraid to replace her with one who will”—a reference to both Republican Martha McSally and the Democrat-turned-independent Kyrsten Sinema, who declined to run for re-election in the face of plummeting Democratic support.

Musk and Trump—Vice President JD Vance was never mentioned—were trying “steal our healthcare, social security, and veterans benefits in order to pay for their tax cuts,” Ocasio-Cortez said. Pugilism was the name of the game. “We’re gonna fight, fight, fight,” she said. Attendees deserved people “with the courage to brawl for the working class.” In Tempe, she used the word “fight” 13 times.

“My queen!” someone at Arizona State shouted.

Ocasio-Cortez laughed. “Your representative,” she said.

Technically, the congresswoman from the Bronx isn’t that, either. (In fact, she was full of praise for the four Democrats currently representing Arizona in Washington.) But on stage, Ocasio-Cortez and her allies were holding themselves up as, in effect, the true opposition—an alternative power center that will stand up for working people when the people who promised to do so fade away.

“We’re gonna throw these bums out and fight for the nation we deserve.”

Sam Van Pykeren/Mother Jones

After their speeches in Tucson had wrapped up on Saturday, and the announced crowd of 20,000 had begun to trickle out, Bernie and Casar chatted with reporters for a few minutes in the high school gym where the rally was originally slated to be held—before the surge in interest pushed it outdoors. It had been a hectic three-state tour, and Sanders had spoken for half an hour under a scorching high-desert sun. As he dropped into a folding chair, the senator looked spent. But he let out a loud laugh when I asked if it felt like people were more attuned to his message about “oligarchy” now, in Trump’s second term.

“Trump helped me immensely in educating the American people to what oligarchy is,” he said.

The inauguration crystallized things, he said. The three richest men in the world, sitting alongside the richest cabinet in history, made for a powerful symbol. “It doesn’t take Bernie Sanders to point out that you now have a government of the billionaires by the billionaires and for the billionaires—I think that’s clear and apparent to everyone.”

Now that people have come around to Sanders’ diagnosis of the problem, he hopes they will accept that the prescriptions he and his allies are offering. Anyone who has been listening to him for a while will recognize the applause lines—free health care, free college, new organizing protections for unions. He’s recently started using Musk’s obsession with artificial intelligence and automation at DOGE to argue in his speeches that what’s happening to federal workers now will come for your industry too—if it hasn’t already. But a major part of his pitch is the need to overhaul the Democratic party. I asked Sanders what he thought about the rumblings about a liberal tea party.

While he commended the party’s accomplishments on social issues and civil rights, he reiterated a point he’s made in the past. “I think very few people who understand politics can deny that by and large, for the last 30, 40 years, the Democratic Party has turned its back on the working class of this country, and that is the working class out there,” Sanders said, referring to the crowd outside. “They want leadership like Greg and Alexandria to stand up, and they want more people. They’re tired of Democratic hacks. They’re tired of Republicans.”

“I mean, we are taking on everybody,” he continued. “Taking on the oligarchy, taking on the Republican Party, taking on the Democratic leadership, taking on the corporate media, taking on Wall Street. It ain’t easy and this change is not gonna happen overnight.”

Casar, the chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, put the point a bit more sharply, when I asked why it seemed like his colleagues had been caught flat footed.

“The biggest divide right now within the Democratic party [is] between fighters and folders, it’s not just between the sort of the typical left–right constellation that you usually talk about in political media.”

Democrats who rolled over in this moment were “playing some sort of political game,” he said, but “most people don’t think of their lives as a political game. They think of their lives as their only life on earth, and they want somebody to say, ‘we’re going to do everything we can to protect our democracy and keep your life from getting worse.’”

“We either have to listen to our voters, channel that energy and turn this into an organizing moment,” he said, “or, you know, face the consequences from our voters.”

Sanders and his younger colleagues are hoping to channel this dissatisfaction into a movement that can remake the Democratic Party and wrest power back from the billionaire class. But a public uprising powered, to such a large extent, by the anger and anxieties of mainstream Democrats could still end up in a much different direction.

By the time we wrapped up in the gym in Tucson, the crowd had emptied out, and only a few stragglers remained. Lois Bursuk, a school psychologist, and Linda Laraia, a retired VA nurse, were cooling off under a tree by the main entrance. They were fed up with what they were seeing in Washington, and had each taken their own steps to resist Trump. Bursuk had recently joined hundreds of protestors outside the nearby office of Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani.

“They just inspire me to keep going, because they’ve been on this platform now for a decade, and I’m grateful that they’re there,” she said of Sanders and his colleagues.

But Laraia, when asked, offered a far different choice for a Democratic champion going forward.

“Okay, I’m gonna put in a plug for somebody I want to run for President,” she said.

“Mark Cuban.”

Additional reporting by Nadia Hamdan and Sam Van Pykeren.

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Elon Musk Revealed Why He’s Spending Millions to Flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court

On March 22, Elon Musk hosted conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel and US Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) for a discussion on X about the importance of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election on April 1. It began 36 minutes late and was beset with technical difficulties, as Musk repeatedly talked over Schimel.

But once things got straightened out, Musk made it clear why he is offering voters $100 a pop to sign a petition opposing “activist judges” and spending $18 million through various political groups—a record for any donor in a Wisconsin judicial contest—to elect Schimel and flip the ideological majority of the court.

“This is a very important race for many reasons,” Musk said. “The most consequential is that [it] will decide how congressional districts are drawn in Wisconsin, which if the other candidate wins, instead of Justice Schimel, then the Democrats will attempt to redraw the districts and cause Wisconsin to lose two Republican seats. In my opinion that’s the most important thing, which is a big deal given that the congressional majority is so razor-thin. It could cause the House to switch to Democrat if that redrawing takes place.”

Musk’s fear is that the court, if it retains a progressive majority, will strike down the congressional lines that give Republicans a 6-2 advantage in the US House delegation. (Democrats have made similar claims.) The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gave that map an F for partisan fairness, saying it had a “significant Republican advantage.” The court has yet to take up a lawsuit challenging the congressional map, but if they were to eventually strike it down, that could help Democrats retake the House, which would allow Democrats to scrutinize the unprecedented role Musk is playing in shredding the federal government, accessing sensitive personal information on millions of Americans, and the $38 billion in federal funding his businesses receive.

Musk was essentially admitting that his spending spree in Wisconsin has nothing to do with the state itself, and everything to do with protecting his own power. (It should also be noted that Tesla is currently suing the state for blocking the company from opening car dealerships there.) That’s a prevailing theme for the Trump administration. At the same time Musk and Trump are threatening to impeach federal judges for rulings they don’t like, they’re going all-out to put their handpicked judges on the bench, who they’re confident will rubber-stamp their radical agenda and extend their plan for oligarchy to the states.

And Schimel, a former state attorney general and judge in suburban Milwaukee, is a willing accomplice. What’s most notable about his campaign, other than the amount of money he’s attracted from Musk, is how obsequious he has been toward Trump. He attended Trump’s inauguration and practically begged for an endorsement from the president, which finally arrived on Friday night. He said he wanted to “nationalize the race” so that large donors, like Musk, would spend millions of dollars on his behalf.

Musk was essentially admitting that his spending spree in Wisconsin has nothing to do with the state itself, and everything to do with protecting his own power.

He appeared at a “Mega Maga Rally” on the campaign trail in March, posing in front of a 50-foot blowup doll of Trump with a “Vote Brad Schimel” sign on it. He wore a Trump-as-garbage-man costume on Halloween. He was pictured on a boat wearing a shirt that said, “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president.” This is ethically dubious behavior from a judge who could hear cases involving the president.

More substantively, he has defended some of Trump’s most extreme actions and amplified some of his most dangerous rhetoric. He told the right-wing group Turning Point USA that he is running for the court to provide a “support network” for Trump and combat the lawsuits against his administration. He claimed the January 6 insurrectionists did not receive fair trials and defended Trump for pardoning 1,500 of them.

He told supporters that “the Wisconsin Supreme Court screwed [Trump] over” by keeping a Green Party candidate off the ballot in 2020 and declined to say whether he would have voted to overturn the 2020 election (the court came one vote short of doing so). He criticized the one conservative judge, Brian Hagedorn, who voted with the liberal justices to uphold the election as “soft-headed” and called the progressive female justices “dumb as a sack of hammers,” “addled,” and “crazy.”

He has echoed Trump’s election disinformation, telling a conservative radio host recently that Republicans needed to make the election “too big to rig” so that Democrats in Milwaukee could not steal it. “So we don’t have to worry that at 11:30 in Milwaukee, they’re going to find bags of ballots that they forgot to put into the machines,” Schimel said, repeating one on the most prevalent conspiracy theories spread by Trump in 2020. (In reality, some votes are often counted later in the day because of a state law, which the GOP-controlled legislature refuses to change, prohibiting election officials from processing absentee ballots before 7 a.m. on Election Day.) That earned a rebuke from a bipartisan group, the Democracy Defense Project, that includes Schimel’s Republican predecessor as state attorney general, JB Van Hollen.

“We don’t discourage people from voting early but phrases like ‘too big to rig’ cast doubt on our election process in Wisconsin, when just the opposite is true,” the group’s board responded.

Musk has spread his own election misinformation. He first mentioned the race on X in January, writing that it was “very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!” He was referencing a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision in July 2024 reinstating mail-in ballot drop boxes, even though there is no evidence that the use of drop boxes has led to voter fraud.

Even worse, one of the dark money groups he funds, Building America’s Future, created a deceptive front group called Progress 2028 that purports to be a progressive alternative to Project 2025 and is running digital ads and sending out text messages praising Schimel’s opponent, Dane County Judge Susan Crawford for positions she has not actually taken. “Judge Susan Crawford would reform cash bail (and) supports second chances, not incarceration,” one text message said. “Say thank you.” These fake ads are meant to tie Crawford to unpopular positions and motivate conservative activists.

“Musk’s group takes things to an unacceptable new low,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote in a strongly worded editorial. “Disinformation is misinformation on steroids. It is not just stretching the truth or even innocently sharing mistruths, it is deliberately false and misleading. Progress 2028’s actions are corrosive not only for cleverly weaving truths with targeted false information, but because they also foment distrust in the electoral system and democracy.”

Musk and his advisers are betting that the onslaught of dark money against Crawford and the strategy of aggressively tying Schimel to Trump will motivate Trump’s supporters to return to the polls on April 1. “This is entirely winnable, and you know, if we do win it, again, we have to thank Elon for all the support he’s given this race,” Ron Johnson said on the livestream with Musk. Andrew Romeo, the senior adviser for Building American’s Future, wrote on March 20 that “Schimel is in the midst of a monumental comeback,” moving from down 13 points to within 5 of Crawford in their recent survey and could win the race by “closing the enthusiasm gap with the base.”

At the same time, Democrats believe that casting the race as a referendum on Musk is a winning strategy for them. “Knowing that Musk is trying to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court is propelling a wave of energy into supporting Susan Crawford and defeating Brad Schimel,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me recently.

On the livestream with Schimel, Musk seemed dismayed by the turnout to date. “If you look at the early voting data so far, Democrats are winning, which is not good,” he said.

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Mike Huckabee Was Paid $50,000 to Visit Qatar

Mike Huckabee prepared for his Senate confirmation hearing to be ambassador to Israel by visiting the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in Queens on Sunday. Huckbee’s visit to the shrine of the messianic Chabad-Lubavitch sect of Hassidic Jews was a signal that the former Arkansas governor, a booster of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, wants to tout his alignment with the Israeli religious right and their American allies. Huckabee’s views have drawn opposition to his nomination from left-leaning Jewish groups and lawmakers.

But the visit—during which Huckbee was escorted by Joseph Frager, a gastroenterologist and rabbi who is executive vice president of the Israeli Heritage Foundation, a right-leaning pro-Israel group—was also a reminder of ties Huckabee may be less eager to highlight.

In 2018, a lobbyist for Qatar paid Huckabee $50,000 to make a brief visit to that country’s capital city, Doha. As Mother Jones reported that year, it was one of a series of trips for high-profile Americans organized by lobbyists hired by the wealthy Gulf state. Huckabee’s visit, which Frager also helped arrange, came at a crucial moment for Qatar, as it scrambled to improve its standing in Washington and among influential pro-Israel pundits, many of whom had faulted Qatar for past funding of Hamas. At the time, Qatar was being blockaded by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other countries in the region.

Upon returning to the United States, Huckabee tweeted positively, if vaguely, about Qatar. The former governor did not disclose at the time that he had been paid to travel there. That was revealed later when a lobbyist working for Qatar filed paperwork that characterized the fee as an “honorarium for visit.”

Just back from a few days in surprisingly beautiful, modern, and hospitable Doha, Qatar I will appear on @FoxNews at 9am ET and @Varneyco on @FoxBusiness at 8:45 to bring Fancy Nancy some "crumbs" to sprinkle on her caviar topped @FiveGuys burger.

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) January 12, 2018

Frager in 2018 also registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for Qatar and reported that that he, too, was paid $50,000 by the country’s lobbyists, to help arrange Huckabee’s visit. In comments back then, and in a phone interview this week, Frager said that his goal in arranging the trip was to help secure Qatar’s assistance in retrieving the bodies of two Israeli soldiers held by Hamas. “I was trying to help get them out of Gaza,” he said Monday. He declined to address details of his efforts or the payment he received.

Huckabee did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. But a person involved in arranging the trip said the payment was, in effect, an appearance fee, which Huckabee required before traveling. “He was very straightforward about the money,” the person said. “He knew what he wanted.”

That payment appears to have been part of Huckbee’s thriving career as a right-wing pundit, pitchman, author, and speaker, which, according to the financial disclosure form he filed in connection with his nomination, earned the former presidential candidate millions of dollars over the past year.

Huckabee reported receiving $62,000 as a spokesperson for Espired, a right-leaning education company that sells books and videos for children. Its titles include The Kids Guide to the Truth About Climate Change, which downplays the significance of global warming; the laudatory Kids Guide to President Trump; and the less positive Kids Guide Joe Biden.

Additionally, Huckabee said he was paid $245,000 in “consulting fees” by an Arkansas company called Asian American Advisors that has worked as a registered lobbyist for companies based overseas. Asian American Advisors did not respond to questions about what Huckabee did. Huckabee, whose daughter is the governor of Arkansas, also reported receiving $81,000 for consulting from Poynter Law Group, a medical malpractice-focused firm in Little Rock.

Huckabee netted another $108,000 from One Share Health, a Christian healthcare sharing organization. Such organizations resemble insurers but provide cheaper coverage that is frequently less comprehensive.

Huckabee was also paid $415,000 as a spokesperson for the American Behavioral Research Institute, a private outfit that sells dietary supplements. In 2023, the company paid a $925,000 settlement after district attorneys in California accused it of making misleading health claims and improperly renewing subscriptions automatically.

Huckbeee reported receiving $148,000 from Fox News and $57,000 from NewsMax for “studio fees.” He was paid $1.9 million by Ozarks Mountain Media Group, and he received $1.1 million from Trinity Broadcast Network and $353,000 from Founders Intent LLC for hosting duties.

Huckabee also reported receiving speaking fees, usually for $20,000 or $24,000, and honorariums, most for about $10,000, for around two dozen appearances. Those included a January event with the Israeli Heritage Foundation, the group that arranged Huckabee’s Sunday visit to the Rebbe’s grave. The January event earned Huckabee $10,000.

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Oil and Gas Multinationals Seek New Tax Breaks Under Trump

This story was originally published b_y Inside Climate News a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

If the only things certain in life are death and taxes, you might say corporate lobbyists spend much of their time trying to avoid at least one of the two. Few industries understand this better than oil and gas, which has benefited for at least a century from some tax rules that save them billions of dollars in payments annually.

The world’s nations have agreed to phase out fossil fuel subsidies globally. The Biden administration pledged to axe them domestically. Still, they persist.

Now, with Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration determined to enact $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and desperately looking for revenue and spending cuts to pay for them, some environmental advocacy groups are highlighting the tax benefits that flow to one of the world’s most profitable industries, which the Biden administration estimated at $110 billion over the decade ending in 2034.

The oil and gas industry, meanwhile, is playing both offense and defense, trying to maintain the benefits it has while working to enact at least one new one, which would shield some oil companies from a tax enacted as part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

“They make huge payments to governments around the world, including to some in some pretty shady places.”

One of the biggest sources of new revenue from the IRA was a corporate alternative minimum tax, which was meant to prevent companies that reported large profits to investors from using loopholes to pay little to no taxes.

The minimum tax applies to all industries. For oil and gas, it has hit some of the large independent drillers in particular (as opposed to the “integrated” majors like ExxonMobil and Chevron). The money involved is significant: According to a new analysis by United to End Polluter Handouts, a coalition of environmental and progressive groups, at least three companies—EOG Resources, APA Corp. and Ovintiv—reported paying nearly $200 million collectively to the Treasury under the minimum tax since it was enacted in 2022.

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) has introduced a bill that would change the calculus by allowing oil companies to deduct some of their largest expenses against the minimum tax. Lankford’s bill is included as a priority in the policy blueprint of the American Exploration & Production Council, which represents large independent oil and gas companies.

Lukas Shankar-Ross, an author of the new minimum-tax analysis and deputy director of the climate and energy justice program at Friends of the Earth, pointed out that the Lankford bill would either deepen deficits or force more cuts to programs like Medicaid or other assistance for low-income Americans.

“I think it is as shameful a thing for me to imagine as is possible now,” Shankar-Ross said.

The oil and gas sector is the top industry contributor to Lankford’s campaigns in recent years, giving more than $546,000 since 2019, according to OpenSecrets.

A spokesperson for Lankford said, “Promoting American energy independence is a reversal of the Biden Administration’s policies. Strong domestic energy production makes us less reliant on adversaries, and empowering oil and gas producers makes the United States stronger. Nobody is looking at cutting Medicaid benefits in order to pay for tax cuts, but fraud, waste, and abuse in the program should be examined.”

When it comes to the largest oil and gas companies, however, their focus might be elsewhere. When the American Petroleum Institute issued its five-point policy roadmap for the Trump administration and Congress in November, it highlighted a need to maintain what it called “crucial international tax provisions.”

Just one of those provisions, the so-called dual capacity taxpayer rule, is expected to save oil and gas companies $71.5 billion over a decade, according to Biden administration estimates.

Broadly speaking, federal tax law allows corporations to credit taxes they pay to foreign governments on overseas income against their US tax bills to avoid being taxed twice. The dual capacity taxpayer rule allows oil companies wide latitude in defining what exactly constitutes a tax payment, with the result being that they can count royalties and other payments as taxes, said Zorka Milin, policy director at the Financial Accountability & Corporate Transparency Coalition, which works to combat harmful impacts of illicit finance.

In fact, in some cases U.S. oil and gas companies might pay more in taxes and other payments to foreign governments than they do to the United States.

Exxon paid billions in overseas royalties alone in 2023, including $1.8 billion to the United Arab Emirates, $1 billion to the Canadian province Alberta, and $761 million to Nigeria. Chevron paid about $2 billion in royalties to foreign governments.

Milin said it is unclear how much of these royalty payments Exxon, Chevron and other oil companies might have claimed as credits against their US taxes, but it could run into the billions of dollars annually.

“They make huge payments to governments around the world, including to some in some pretty shady places, and what is adding insult to injury is a lot of those payments are used to offset payments they pay here in the US,” Milin said. “That’s one way in which our tax code is subsidizing these companies to go abroad and drill, baby, drill, but not domestically.”

Exxon, Chevron and the American Petroleum Institute did not respond to requests for comment.

Alex Muresianu, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, which supports pro-growth tax policies, said many of the oil industry-specific tax rules do not qualify as subsidies. Several of the rules, such as one that allows oil companies to deduct their drilling costs upfront, rather than over a well’s productive life, put the industry on an equal footing with other sectors, he argued. Oil companies often have high costs upfront that generate returns over many years, which can put them at a tax disadvantage with other industries, Muresianu said.

When it comes to royalties, these payments to mineral owners are generally tax deductible. But the dual capacity taxpayer rule offers a far better deal by turning them into a credit, an important distinction. Say Company A earned $100 million in profits, paid $5 million in royalties and paid the full 21 percent corporate income tax. Taking the royalty payments as a credit rather than a deduction would save it nearly $4 million. (US tax laws are complex, so limitations might apply.)

Milin argued that Congress ought to look at the foreign tax breaks, especially as they are searching for more revenue, because these benefits effectively subsidize oil companies to drill overseas. “When we have a more explicitly America First international economic policy on trade, on other issues, I think they are likely to look at the ways in which the tax code as it stands is inconsistent with that,” Milin said.

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As Trump Dodges Court Orders, Samuel Alito Suggests Obeying Judges Can Be Optional

Justice Samuel Alito wants to know what a state should do if a court orders it to draw a new congressional map under faulty logic. Put more broadly, what should a litigant do if it believes that a court has made an order in error?

The answer, of course, is to obey the court order. Decisions can be appealed, and sometimes confronted through the political process. But if anyone could simply discard a court order they disagreed with, we would not be governed by the rule of law.

There is a through line connecting attacks on voting rights and flagrantly ignoring bedrock democratic principles.

Alito’s query in Monday’s oral arguments in a redistricting case from Louisiana laid out a very different approach—one that is particularly troubling at this very moment, as the Trump administration is repeatedly disobeying court orders. The administration has not declared a right to ignore the courts, but its lawyers are toeing the line of malpractice in multiple cases by dodging court orders. Whether it is refusing to turn around planes carrying nearly 300 migrants to a labor camp in El Salvador or to release federal funding that the administration claims it can refuse to spend, the Trump administration is currently trying to blow past the orders of federal judges to enact its anti-democratic agenda.

Monday’s complicated case concerned how Louisiana drew a second majority-Black district as the result ofrulings from both a federal district court and the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in another case, Robinson v. Landry. Alito wanted to know if obeying this court order was actually required:

“What if the Robinson decision were plainly wrong?” Alito asked. “Would you still have a good reason to follow it?”

Louisiana’s solicitor general, Benjamin Aguiñaga, agreed that a wildly bad decision might be the rare kind of situation in which a state could not rely on a court order to justify its new map. But Alito pressed on, positing even weaker cases where a court might be ignored:

“What if it weren’t wildly wrong?” the justice asked. “You look at it and it’s wrong. They misapplied something.”

Several other justices likewise questioned the correctness of Robinson before Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stepped in to point out how dangerous this entire line of thinking is to the rule of law. “I’m still a little confused as to why it matters whether the court order was right or not,” Jackson said. “You were still being compelled by a court to do what you did in this case. Correct?”

Aguiñaga agreed, and Jackson continued: “Having a likely [Voting Rights Act] violation is all that was necessary for the state to take the steps that it did. So, I just don’t know that we need to even engage in the thought process of ‘What if the court order was wrong?’ It existed, and if it existed, then it seems to me that there is a good reason for Louisiana to have followed it.”

In other words, court orders are not optional. Aguiñaga, a former Alito clerk, agreed. “I’m not going to stand here and say that the Robinson courts were right,” he said at another point, “but I will say that what is set in stone is what they said. That is the law, and we took that as gospel.” That’s how it’s supposed to work.

Monday’s case, Louisiana v. Callais, isn’t about Donald Trump’s second term power grabs. Instead, it’s yet another case presenting the Supreme Court an opportunity to make it harder to enforce the Voting Rights Act’s protections for minority voters—and one that took a convoluted path to the high court. In June 2022, a federal district court ruled that, under the VRA, Louisiana must create a second majority-Black district in a state where Black voters were a third of the population but held a majority in only one of the state’s six congressional districts. That is the Robinson litigation. While the Supreme Court temporarily blocked that ruling for the 2022 election, its 2023 ruling concerning a similar situation in Alabama prompted the Fifth Circuit to reaffirm that Louisiana had likely violated the VRA. The state’s Republican-controlled legislature reluctantly held a special session in January 2024 to create a new majority-Black district that favored Democrats.

A group of “non-African American” Louisiana voters then challenged that map, calling it “an odious racial gerrymander,” and in April 2024 a federal district court panel, with two Trump-appointed judges writing for the majority, struck it down, arguing that race had unconstitutionally been the predominant factor in drawing the district—even though Louisiana had been specifically ordered by another federal court to create the majority-Black district.

Civil rights groups and the state of Louisiana appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, which allowed the new district to take effect for the 2024 election, leading to the election of Democrat Cleo Fields. The case represented an unusual instance when Black voters and a Republican-controlled Southern state were more or less on the same side—and also a rare example of the Supreme Court delivering a victory for minority representation, given the Court’s well-documented hostility to voting rights. That includes gutting the Voting Rights Act on multiple occasions and holding that partisan gerrymandering can’t be challenged in federal court.

For many in the GOP, a slow withdrawal from democracy led to ditching it entirely.

But the uneasy alliance between civil rights groups and Louisiana is fraying. Though Louisiana defended the constitutionality of its congressional map, it also asked the Court to rule that racial gerrymandering claims, like partisan gerrymandering claims, can’t be brought before the Court. That would make it next to impossible for litigants to counter gerrymandered maps that target voters based on partisanship, race, or both. It has also argued, in separate litigation, that the core provision of the Voting Rights Act barring discrimination is unconstitutional.

The Louisiana case should be relatively straightforward, given its similarity to the Alabama case, Allen v. Milligan, decided by the Court less than two years ago. But civil rights opponents are trying to use it as a vehicle to further roll back representation for communities of color and deal another blow to the Voting Rights Act. And the GOP-appointed justices on Monday appeared eager to assist in this project, possibly even at the expense of Allen v. Milligan, a very recent decision.

As the Trump administration slashes agencies, halts spending without Congressional approval, and deports immigrants without due process—to name just a few of the dozens of illegal actions the new administration has carried out—Monday’s case seemed like a quaint concern, far removed from the current authoritarian threat facing the country. And in some ways it is—just another possible loss for voting rights, in a long line of decisions that have chipped away at access to the ballot.

But there is a through line connecting the attack on the voting rights of Black people and the will to flagrantly ignore bedrock democratic principles like following court orders. The GOP, with the assistance of the Roberts Court, has for more than a decade unwound minority voting rights. That lack of commitment to democracy creates a permission slip to take a sledgehammer to the Constitution by, for example, acting outside the law.

The third lawyer to argue Monday was Edward Greim, who represented the non-Black Louisianans trying to toss out the new map on the grounds that it relied too heavily on race. In 2020, Greim was one of the lawyers who tried to halt vote-counting in order to help President Donald Trump win the election. According to the Wisconsin Examiner, Greim later represented a fake elector from Wisconsin who was part of the plot to overturn the election results. Greim is a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association and the Federalist Society, where he is on the executive team of its Free Speech & Election Law Practice Group. That resume illustrates the line that links litigation meant to weaken the democracy and the willingness to attack it head on.

There are many Republicans and former Republicans who showed no angst at whittling away the Voting Rights Act but who, when confronted with Trump, refused to be part of his authoritarian project. But for others, the slow withdrawal from democracy was surely part of the journey to deciding to ditch it entirely. The fact that the Roberts Court may now toss even its own recent precedents in order to make it even harder for Black people to vote—and do so while questioning the value of following court orders—at the same time that the Trump administration is bulldozing the separation of powers and other bedrock democratic principles is not a coincidence. It’s part of the same project, the slow part and the fast part together.

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Domestic Violence and Maternal Mortality Are Rising. The NIH Just Defunded a Project to Study Both.

Rebecca Fielding-Miller, an associate professor of public health at the University of California, San Diego, was in a faculty meeting on Friday discussing how the Trump administration’s cuts to funding will affect academic research when she got some unexpected, and unfortunatelyrelevant, news: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) intended to terminate a grant of approximately $400,000 for one of her projects.

Fielding-Miller, who researches infectious diseases and gender-based violence, along with some colleagues who do similar work, received the funds last fall to support a project focused on training up to a dozen early-career researchers on how to better study intimate partner violence (IPV) during pregnancy. The lead researchers were just about to start recruiting mentees for the year-and-a-half-long program, Fielding-Miller said.

As the researchers wrote in their description of the project, it planned to focus on a vital yet understudied issue. Research has found homicide is a leading causeof maternal mortality in the US, and IPV plays a key role. The project also seemed particularly timely, given that increasing nationwide restrictions on abortion have given abusers another way to control and trap pregnant partners, as I have reported. Research published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons last year found that pregnant people in states with abortion bans are at a higher risk of homicide perpetrated by a partner—and that there’s “a dire need for universal screening and interventions.”

As Liz Tobin-Tyler, an associate professor of health services, policy, and practice at Brown University, notes, a project like the one Fielding-Miller was helping lead is exactly what’s needed at this moment—particularly as shelters and hotlines assisting people experiencing IPV also face drastic federal funding cuts. “It sounds like what they were attempting to do is not only to encourage young researchers to be working in this area, but to also make it a prominent area of research going forward—which it needs to be, if we’re going to address the maternal mortality and violence against women crises,” said Tobin-Tyler, who was not involved with Fielding-Miller’s study.“If we’re not studying the problem sufficiently, and then there are other federal funding cuts to serve the populations that are being harmed, we’re really undermining the work at multiple levels.”

“If we’re not studying the problem sufficiently, and then there are other federal funding cuts to serve the populations that are being harmed, we’re really undermining the work at multiple levels.”

The White House did not respond to questions from Mother Jones, but the NIH saw Fielding-Miller’s project differently. “Research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness,” the termination letter from the NIH said. In response to questions from Mother Jones about why the grant—entitled “Restoring equity to measuring and preventing perinatal intimate partner violence”—was canceled, Emily Hillard, deputy press secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the NIH, said: “At HHS, we are dedicated to restoring our agencies to their tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science. As we begin to Make America Healthy Again, it’s important to prioritize research that directly affects the health of Americans.” Three other projects that received funding under the same NIH grant have not been canceled as of Monday_,_ researchers involved in those studies confirmed.

For Fielding-Miller, the only upside of learning about the cancellation was the timingat the end of the faculty meeting—”So I could go to my office and cry,” she told me by phone on Sunday. We discussed the project that would have been, the need to conduct more research on IPV and pregnancy, and the longer-term effects she anticipates resulting from the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach to research affecting marginalized people.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity. Fielding-Miller said her views do not represent those of the University of California.

Rebecca Fielding-Miller worries even fewer researchers will study the intersection of domestic violence and pregnancy outcomes in the future.Photo courtesy of Rebecca Fielding-Miller

Explain a bit about the project that you were working on. What was its goal?

Pregnancy is a really dangerous time for women in violent relationships, and there’s also just not a lot of good research on violence, in large part because the NIH has not prioritized it. So there was a very small request for people to develop these training programs to support more people to go into this type of research. In particular, we were interested in how to teach people how to measure IPV, because it’s a surprisingly hard thing to measure.

Our grant was meant to last about a year and a half. We planned to recruit some early career researchers—people at the assistant professor level, especially clinician-researchers, maybe somebody who is an OB-GYN or a family doctor who also does public health research—and pair them with a mentor. Then we would do some training on how to measure IPV and best practices in violence research. The goal was to jumpstart careers in this cohort so that more people would be doing high-quality research on IPV in the perinatal period. It was a pretty big bang for your buck. After a year of training, we would have 12 new people who were experts in this who weren’t experts before. We would document this model and this curriculum, and then put it out there and say, “Here’s a very low budget, low effort curriculum for training folks.”

President Donald Trump has said he would “protect” women and make women “happy, healthy, confident, and free.” Vice President JD Vance and others in the GOP have tried to encourage more Americans to have more kids as birth rates have declined. So why do you think the NIH would cancel this grant?

My guess is that we had two strikes against us—“equity” in the title of the project, and we mentioned a background fact in the application, that IPV is worse for sexual and gender minorities. I’m assuming that whatever knock-off AI they’re using flagged that. We absolutely would have welcomed people who wanted to do this kind of research on sexual and gender minorities because it’s important, but it was not the specific focus of the grant.

It’s been very hard to get violence research funded. I have been told by the pre-Trump NIH that a project that I submitted was less significant because it had a gender-based violence component. I know that what we do is important. I know that violence against women, violence against people who are not cisgender men, it’s a part of reinforcing power structures, and so I find it almost complimentary and affirming that what we do matters because it is about directly addressing the type of power structures that bring people like the current president into office. I think it suggests that one of the first things that Congress needs to pour money into is this kind of work, because ensuring that women, minorities, and people who don’t conform are physically safe is a cornerstone of democracy. In some ways their immediate attack emphasizes how vital it is.

“There is just this implicit bias that violence against women is not an important public health area or a significant area of study.”

Why is this area of research so understudied?

There’s been some really interesting research about what is more likely to be considered significant science, or impactful science, and what isn’t. There is just this implicit bias that violence against women is not an important public health area or a significant area of study. But that wasn’t always the case: In the 70s, the National Institute of Mental Health had a Center for the Prevention of Rape and Sexual Violence because social movements pushed for that to happen. It’s really important for people to think about that because there will be a “putting things back together” phase after they finish dismantling this—and it’s important to know that we can have that again.

What should we know about the prevalence of perinatal IPV and how it affects pregnant people and infants?

The thing that a lot of people find really shocking is that IPV kills more people during pregnancy and immediately after the baby is born than obstetric complications do. The science is not very good on the exact reasons why that is, and it’s certainly not very good on how to prevent it. But this is usually a time of increasing conflict and increasing attempts for partner control. And so, when a person decides that it’s time to leave a relationship and pregnancy and childbirth, are some of the most dangerous times for someone with a violent partner.

What happens now that you don’t have the NIH funding for this study?

We’re going to lose people who are early in their careers. The people who research violence against women and violence against sexual and gender minorities tend to be women and sexual gender minorities. So they yanked diversity supplements and all these mechanisms that were explicitly about making the academy more diverse. Now they are implicitly doing it in the research funding that they pull. The result is going to be the systematic removal of women and people of color from the act of research. At the end of this, we’re going to end up with an academy that is more white, more wealthy, more male, more cisgender, and it’s going to reinforce the same problem. We’re only going to do the science that people who are majority white, cisgender, male, and wealthy think is important. There’s a risk of a major negative feedback loop in what is seen as important and in whose experiences, voices, and lives are seen as important.

It’s already an extremely underfunded field. Most of the good research on IPV comes out of South Africa. They’re doing really extraordinary, cutting-edge work there. The administration also has cut off, or is attempting to cut off, collaborations with South Africa.

We have a lot of experience with this not being a high-priority area. A lot of us who do violence research also do work around mental health or HIV, because that’s how you can get this work funded. So we will go back to being tactical, being strategic, and looking for money in the couch cushions as we always have. But it’s going to be harder.

If you or someone you care about is experiencing or at risk of domestic violence, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline by texting “start” to 88788 or calling 800-799-SAFE (7233) or going to thehotline.org. The Department of Health and Human Services has also compiled a list of organizations by state.

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What Was the Plan Behind This Fake CDC Website?

A fake website meant to look like a CDC webpage was put up sometime this month and quickly taken offline, but not before diligent information manipulation researchers noticed several signs that it was likely connected to Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization founded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The site falsely suggested a link between vaccines and autism, using “testimonial” videos made by CHD and long-debunked scientific disinformation. While the site has been taken down, the question remains: what, exactly, was the plan here?

“This episode should dispel any suggestion that anti-vaccine groups are simply interested in helping parents.”

The fake website, RealCDC.org, was first spotted in late January by intel threat researcher Kyle Ehmke. While the page displayed no content then, he noted it was hosted through the same Cloudflare web nameserver as CHD’s website and other domains related to CHD.

By March 20, according to Ehmke’s later research, and as corroborated by archived versions of the site, the page was populated with content meant to look exactly like an official CDC website, replicating its fonts, links, and presentation.

But there was a crucial difference: the fake site included a series of papers and other purported evidence claiming “increased risks of various chronic conditions, including ASD [autism spectrum disorder]” from vaccines. It also included testimonial videos from parents claiming their children had been sickened by vaccines, with scaremongering titles like “MMR Vax Gave My Son Autism,” “We Signed His Life Away,” and “Mother of 3: I Will Never Vaccinate Again.” The videos featured on the site are all hosted by Children’s Health Defense.

The site also contained accurate information about the fact that vaccines don’t cause autism, making what Dr. Bruce Gellin, who previously directed HHS’ vaccine program, described to the New York Times as “a mixture of things that are legitimately peer-reviewed and things that are bogus.” Among the papers was one authored by former physician Mark Geier, whose license to practice has been suspended or revoked in every state where he once held one, and his son David, who has no medical training; both Geiers have a long history in the anti-vaccine movement and as witnesses in court cases attempting to link vaccines and autism.

The site was also independently investigated by E. Rosalie Li, the founder of the Information Epidemiology Lab, which studies information manipulation and malign influence, especially around the intersection of public health and national security, and who, in addition to the Cloudfare account, found further evidence linking it to Children’s Health Defense. Both Li and Ehmke found that RealCDC.org redirected to CHDstaging.org, which has been used by Children’s Health Defense to power projects like its community discussion forum and a site promoting Vaxxed 3, the latest installment in a series of CHD films promoting discredited claims about COVID-19 and vaccine safety. Overall, the CHD sites and RealCDC use “identical infrastructure,” Li says_,_ “that would be unlikely if they were just random websites” unrelated to one another.

“You click on the videos and it goes to the CHD website,” she told Mother Jones.

The situation was another awkward one for Kennedy, who has maintained that he became chairman-on-leave of CHD during his presidential campaign and then left the organization entirely in December 2024. The Department of Health and Human services told the Times that Kennedy had “instructed the Office of the General Counsel to send a formal demand to Children’s Health Defense requesting the removal of their website.”

Li told Mother Jones that the fake CDC site went offline after she published her findings on Substack on Friday, and that her readers reported they couldn’t access the site on Saturday. Children’s Health Defense didn’t respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones, nor did Mary Holland, the organization’s president and general counsel.

“This episode should dispel any suggestion that anti-vaccine groups are simply interested in helping parents access information,” Li told Mother Jones. “Providing the public with health-related information carries a responsibility to ensure accuracy and completeness. What appeared on that website seemed to be a calculated effort to exploit public trust in the CDC to advance an ideology—weaponizing parental concern at the expense of public health.”

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Ed Martin Is Trampling the Rule of Law. And He Won’t Shut Up About It.

When Elon Musk ordered a government-wide email blast directing federal employees to list their recent accomplishments, most senior officials paused to consider their options. In the Justice Department, US attorneys around the country discussed the matter over an email list they share, with many deciding to seek more guidance before instructing career prosecutors on how to respond. One questioned whether the email was even real.

But Ed Martin, an acolyte of President Donald Trump named interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, charged ahead. “It’s legit and we’ve already replied,” he told his fellow US attorneys. “Great leadership.”

Just 33 minutes after the Office of Personnel Management directive hit inboxes, Martin urged lawyers under him to comply, though he suggested they respond carefully. “DOGE and Elon are doing great work!” Martin wrote in one of his frequent communiques to hundreds of assistant US attorneys and support staff. “We are happy to be participate.”

“We are happy to be participate.”

For Martin—a right-wing activist and serial political candidate who has enthusiastically defended January 6 rioters—this was just one more typographically challenged missive in a campaign to turn a powerful legal office into a partisan weapon. Since taking on the gig in January, he’s compensated for his lack of prosecutorial experience by loudly proclaiming his desire to help Trump and Musk use the DOJ to punish their foes. Trump quickly returned the favor, nominating him to hold the post indefinitely.

Martin, who did not respond to questions from Mother Jones, has announced investigations into his own staff for their role in January 6 cases and has volunteered to support Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Orwellian “Weaponization Working Group,” which purports to take aim at abuses of the justice system during the Biden administration. Martin has threatened former special counsel Jack Smith and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and has used X to indicate plans to investigate administration critics. He has even tried to leverage a dubious criminal probe to seize climate grant money awarded by the Biden administration.

The US Attorney in DC is investigating Georgetown Law School, demanding that "if DEI is found in your courses or teaching in anyway [sic]," the law school should "move swiftly to remove it"

Federal prosecutors don't control classrooms. pic.twitter.com/UCJhSe4uMp

— Adam Steinbaugh (@adamsteinbaugh) March 6, 2025

As he posts his way to prominence, Martin has bombarded his staff with chatty emails recounting his daily activities, then repeatedly berated them after those emails leaked. In a new administration defined by a mixture of malevolence and ineptitude, Martin has emerged as an avatar: a typo-spewing henchman of the moment, eager to help Trump transform the Justice Department into a political tool—and unable to shut up about it.

Eagle Ed

Martin, whom associates call outwardly affable, presents as a guy pleased and a bit surprised by his elevation.

“He has a little bit of buffoonery and a ‘Mr. Smith comes to Washington’ vibe,” said one person who has worked in the DC US attorney’s office.

His emails and other communications tend to read like daily journal entries. “Life is very different for me and my family these days,” Martin wrote in a February 4 Substack post. “I am up earlier and into the office in downtown DC. Home late. Pretty tired by then.”

“There is so much to tell you,” he added. “One aspect: my new office is large.”

If Martin is pinching himself at his new position, he has reason. While US attorneys are often experienced prosecutors or rising political prospects, Martin, 54, is more of a journeyman. He spent much of the past two decades as a conservative activist in Missouri, running a series of political organizations—a sort of far-right change agent who sometimes leaves behind litigation and enemies.

As chief of staff for Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt in 2007, Martin fired a state attorney, Scott Eckersley, who had warned against deleting emails that state law required be retained. In a lawsuit, Eckersley alleged that Martin and other officials had falsely accused him of “accessing group sex websites on his state computer” and had defamed him to the media. The state attorney general’s office ultimately agreed to pay Eckersley a $500,000 settlement in the matter.

Martin ran for Congress in 2010; he started and ended Senate and House campaigns in 2012, before committing to the state attorney general race that year. None of his campaigns were successful.

After a stint running Missouri’s GOP and heading several conservative nonprofits, Martin landed in 2015 as president of the Eagle Forum, an organization founded by conservative hero Phyllis Schlafly, then 90 years old. Within a year, Martin had been fired by the group’s board and accused by Schlafly’s daughter, Anne Schlafly Cori, of manipulating the aging icon to commandeer her organizations and legacy. In 2016, Cori and other group members sued Martin for alleged acts that included impersonating Schlafly in Facebook posts and other correspondence. “During Martin’s brief tenure, the Eagle Forum…has experienced unprecedented chaos,” the plaintiffs asserted in their complaint. Martin denied those claims.

In March 2016, with Martin at her side, Schlafly endorsed Trump. She died September 5, 2016. Her name appeared posthumously alongside Martin’s as an author of the book The Conservative Case for Trump, published the next day.

A year later, Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice then running for Senate, claimed Schlafly among his endorsers. Moore’s webpage, Roll Call reported, said: “Phyllis Schlafly, Late President, Eagle Forum; inference of Ed Martin.”

Martin by then had launched a new group, Phyllis Schlafly’s American Eagles. And he retained control of another Schlafly-founded nonprofit, the Eagle Forum Education and Legal Defense Fund. Tax filings by the latter group show Martin’s salary as president, which fluctuated, peaked at just over $204,000 in 2020. He’d received more than $1.4 million in total from the group as of 2023. He still uses the X handle @EagleEdMartin.

Martin netted more than $322,000 from yet another former Schlafly nonprofit, America’s Future, while serving as its president beginning in 2016. In 2021, Martin’s final year leading that group, he received more than $83,000 for the job, which, according to tax filings, took him eight hours per week. That year, the group appointed Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser and a prominent far-right conspiracy theorist, as its board chair. America’s Future also hired Flynn’s brother Joe and sister Mary to top jobs. Within a few years of Martin’s departure, America’s Future was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to members of the Flynn family. Asked about this, Joe Flynn, a sometime-spokesperson for the family, texted: “Fuck off quote me.”

Stop the Steal

Martin moved to Virginia in 2017 and spent much of the first Trump administration as a far-right pundit. He lost a gig as a CNN contributor after complaining about appearing on the network alongside “Black racists.” He ran a feeble 2019 campaign for the Board of Supervisors in Fairfax County, Virginia. He also designed a coloring book based on Trump’s 2017 “covfefe” typo tweet. In it, aspiring artists can color in outlined images of Kanye West and Candace Owens under a West tweet boasting that he had a signed MAGA hat, or they can complete a connect-the-dots puzzle of a MAGA hat on a page advertising a free downloadable song sharing a “#CovfefeIsLove” message.

Wondering what that page is on #TheMovement? It's a page from Can't Trump This Covfefe: Top Trump Tweets – The MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL Coloring and Activity Book for All Ages (but especially adults)! https://t.co/3hoC7nzEsL pic.twitter.com/4aB5J1WzSc

— Ed Martin (@EagleEdMartin) June 5, 2018

Martin gained focus following the 2020 election, organizing pro-Trump protests alongside Ali Alexander, the “Stop the Steal” activist who claimed he “came up with the idea” to pressure Congress on January 6 to not certify Biden’s victory.

Martin “was kind of like a mentor,” Alexander said in a December 2021 deposition conducted by the House January 6 committee. According to Alexander, the two men “prayed together every morning.”

In depositions, other January 6 rally organizers expressed various concerns about Alexander, who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars without setting up a nonprofit group or accounting for the funds. But Martin offered his own nonprofit as a place for Alexander to park cash, Alexander told the committee. Martin’s group acted “as a sponsor for collecting Stop the Steal funds” for the rally, Alexander testified. Alexander did not respond to inquiries from Mother Jones.

In late 2020, Martin was in regular contact with Vincent Haley, a White House aide, according to previously unreported text messages released by the January 6 committee. Shortly after the election, Martin urged Haley to “push” a pardon for Michael Flynn, who had pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI but was never imprisoned. The Trump DOJ already had dropped the case against Flynn, but Martin suggested that the former general would be more willing to join Stop the Steal rallies once pardoned. “He’d come to dc for the rally/March,” Martin texted Haley on November 10. “We need that guy loosed.”

“I have recommended it,” Haley responded. It is not clear whether Martin’s pressure had any impact, and Haley didn’t respond to Mother Jones’ questions. But Trump pardoned Flynn on November 26, 2020. Flynn then spoke at DC rallies on December 12 and January 5.

“They know they’re going to jail.”

Martin also spoke at those rallies. And he was outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as rioters attacked police. But Martin, who was not charged with a crime, saw no evil. “Rowdy crowd but nothing out of hand,” Martin tweeted at 2:53 p.m. that day. “Ignore the #FakeNews.” In a video he posted the next day, Martin repeated false claims that the attack had been orchestrated by left-wing infiltrators. “Now we know that it was antifa,” he said. “It was plants.”

Martin’s efforts drew a subpoena from the January 6 committee. He ignored it, failing to appear for a scheduled deposition. He went on to become a vocal advocate for attackers facing legal charges and represented several people charged with taking part in the riot.

Martin was no ordinary defense attorney. He suggested that the defendants should receive “reparations” and pushed a bizarre and unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that “January 6 was staged by Mr. Coffee,” a supposedly unidentified man seen drinking coffee near the gallows display constructed outside the Capitol that day. Martin pursued this theory vigorously, posting “missing person” flyers featuring grainy images of the man around Washington.

On the right-wing podcast circuit, he called for “accountability” for those who had investigated January 6. “One of the reasons I think that we should fear for this election,” he said last summer, “is because there’s hundreds of Democrats and some Republicans—Liz Cheney—that they know they’re going to jail.”

“A Great Failure of Our Office”

Martin began working as US attorney on Inauguration Day, the day Trump granted clemency to 1,600 January 6 defendants. The president’s vaguely worded declaration largely left implementation to the DOJ. Martin took on that task with alacrity.

When a judge barred Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, whose 18-year sentence Trump had commuted, from entering DC, Martin intervened, successfully arguing that the order was improper. Rhodes—who has since shown up on Capitol Hill—later told reporters that the judge “got slapped down by Ed Martin.”

As an interim US attorney, Martin can serve a maximum of 120 days, unless the Senate confirms him to fill the job permanently. He wasted no time in reshaping the office in his image, demoting key attorneys who’d worked on January 6 cases and initiating an internal investigation of prosecutors who charged defendants with violating a particularly harsh obstruction statute—18 USC 1512—that the Supreme Court later ruled did not apply to most of the rioters.

For Martin, the DOJ’s use of the that provision had long been an obsession. “Who ordered the 1512?” he asked on Charlie Kirk’s podcast in 2023. “If it was [Merrick] Garland, or [former Deputy Attorney General] Lisa Monaco, or Joe Biden, or Hunter…that guy or gal needs to end up in jail.”

In a January 27, 2025, email that began by lamenting the Washington Commanders’ playoff loss the day before, Martin asked DC prosecutors to hand over material relevant to his probe into this matter, which he dubbed the “1512 Project.”

“Obviously, the use [of the statute] was a great failure of our office,” he wrote to his staff, “and we need to get to the bottom of it.” The next day, he reminded employees to cough up information about their own activities. “Please be proactive – if you have nothing, tell the co-chairs,” he wrote. “Failure to do so strikes me as insubordinate.”

News of this investigation was quickly reported. “Wow, what a disappointment to have my email yesterday to you all was leaked almost immediately,” Martin wrote in another email. “Again, personally insulting and professionally unacceptable. I guess I have learned my lesson.”

Maybe not. A few days later, Martin was again chastising his staff after Reuters reported that he had put his name on a January 21 DOJ filing requesting that a judge dismiss charges against one of Martin’s personal January 6 clients, whom Trump had just pardoned. Martin, it emerged, had not withdrawn as the man’s attorney, putting him on both sides of the case, an ethical breach that drew a bar complaint. (In a February 5 filing, he told the judge that he had not actually represented that defendant since 2023 and asked to withdraw from the case.)

“I have said repeatedly over the past few days that we must protect our lawyers, staff, and all on our team from doxing, from attacks and from any threats,” he wrote in a February 5 email to his staff complaining about that “leak.” He urged them to join a training “to protect ourselves from unethical behavior.” This admonishment came a few paragraphs after Martin’s description of his visit to Frederick Douglass’ house in DC—“It’s a fascinating site and I encourage you to visit”—and a meeting with DC District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg and other judges: “It was an off the record conversation, but I can say it was an extraordinary one.”

“Noone Is Above the Law”

Martin has also made repeated public offers of DOJ assistance in combating the Trump administration’s enemies. Shortly after Wired reported the names of engineers working for Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency—prompting a flurry of social media attention and public complaints from the billionaire—Martin posted an image of a letter to Musk on X. In it, he typed, “Dear Elon,” which he then crossed out and replaced with a handwritten “Elon.”

“I ask that you utilize me and my staff to assist in protecting the DOGE work and DOGE workers,” Martin wrote. “Any threats, confrontations, or other actions in any way that impact their work may break numerous laws.” Five hours later, Martin posted that his office already had found that “certain individuals and/or groups have committed acts that appear to violate the law in targeting DOGE employees.”

Martin released a new letter February 7—which he clarified had been “sent only via X.” He again crossed out a typed “Elon” in favor of a handwritten “Elon.”

Follow up.
Sent only via X: to ⁦@elonmusk⁩ pic.twitter.com/FVO7pDFf3Q

— Ed Martin (@EagleEdMartin) February 7, 2025

“Thank you for the referral of individuals and networks who appear to be stealing government property and/or threatening government employees,” Martin wrote. “If people are discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.”

He added, misspelled and in bold: “Noone is above the law.”

Martin has since routinely used his X account to publicly suggest that the Trump DOJ might take action in response to allegations lobbed on social media. “Duly noted,” he wrote in response to a request from the Homeland Security Department X account that he look into an unsubstantiated DOGE claim that a “Biden transition team member” had rigged a contract. “We are on it.”

As large protests against DOGE began last month, Martin retweeted a post by Mike Cernovich, a commentator known for his role in boosting a false conspiracy theory related to Pizzagate back in 2016. Cernovich was now suggesting that Trump fans take advantage of Martin’s presence at the DOJ to “attend far left wing rallies, capture the reaction, and where appropriate, seek criminal prosecution.”

Martin in January personally wrote to Schumer, threatening legal action over a 2020 speech warning Supreme Court justices against curtailing abortion rights. “You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price,” Schumer said at the time. The Democratic senator wasn’t threatening actual violence, but he expressed regret for his statement the day after he made it, saying he meant “there would be political consequences.” And his chief of staff appears to have explained that in a response to Martin’s query.

But Martin, in a February email, asserted that Schumer had ignored him, calling the snub “a personal disappointment and professionally unacceptable.” That’s nearly the same phrase Martin used to berate his staff for email leaks. He urged Schumer to “complete this inquiry before any action is taken. I remind you: no one is above the law.”

Days later, Martin forced the resignation of Denise Cheung, a 24-year DOJ veteran, after she declined to launch a criminal probe and freeze assets of an environmental group awarded a contract by the Biden administration. Martin then personally submitted a seizure warrant application, an extraordinary move for a US attorney. A magistrate judge rejected the request, finding the application lacked sufficient evidence of a crime, the Washington Post reported.

pic.twitter.com/utpmdIEmk7

— U.S. Attorney DC (@USAO_DC) February 24, 2025

The same week, Martin helped defend the administration from a lawsuit filed by the Associated Press, which had been barred from some White House events over the news organization’s refusal to adopt “Gulf of America” in its style guide. “As President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers, we are proud to fight to protect his leadership as our President,” he declared in a graphic posted on X by the US attorney’s office while a court hearing in the case was taking place. The AP, he complained, was refusing “to put America first.”

On February 17, Trump officially nominated Martin for the permanent US attorney job. His conduct so far could complicate his Senate confirmation. Even Sen. Josh Hawley, Martin’s fellow Missouri election denier, has declined to commit to backing him. But the same antics that leave some Republican lawmakers wary of Martin appear to make him exactly who the president wants.

Meanwhile, Martin is still firing off communiques. A few days after ousting Cheung, he sent his staff pictures from a meeting with Joe diGenova, a pro-Trump former DC US attorney who once claimed Fox News “is compromised when it comes to” George Soros. “These weeks have been a whirlwind,” Martin commented. “Meeting so many new people.”

In a March 15 Substack post, Martin again groused about his emails leaking. “Personally insulting and professionally unacceptable,” he wrote. “But regularly happening.” He added that he is “actively and carefully (quietly!) investigating. And when I find the leaks, you will find the accountability.”

The same day, Martin renewed his search for “Mr. Coffee,” posting a video he’d previously made suggesting “the real architects of January 6” were connected to the FBI. “Worth a look, no?” the interim US attorney wrote. “Who lied to us?”

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Fossil Fuel Execs Urge Canada’s Leaders to Follow Trump’s Lead, Declare Energy Emergency

This story was originally published b_y Canada’s National Observer a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Oil and gas executives in Canada are calling on Canadian federal leaders to take their cues from US President Donald Trump—they’re asking the government to declare a national energy crisis to fast-track expensive fossil fuel infrastructure that would increase production and export capacity.

“By declaring a Canadian energy crisis and key projects in the ‘national interest,’ the federal government will be able to use all its available emergency powers to ensure that the dramatic regulatory restructuring required to expand the oil and natural gas sector is rapidly achieved,” reads an open-letter from 14 oil and gas executives, addressed to Prime Minister Mark Carney, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, and Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet.

If the country boosts fossil fuel production, even if paired with carbon capture technology, global carbon emissions would still rise because the vast majority of emissions from fossil fuels comes when the fuel is burned. Climate science is clear that the planet will continue to warm to dangerous levels—leading to worsening extreme weather, premature deaths, lost species and disrupted economies—until greenhouse gas emissions reach net-zero (in other words, reduced until any remaining emissions created are offset by their removal from the atmosphere).

“Full decarbonization will require non-fossil fuel alternatives rather than a shift from coal to gas.”

The companies behind the letter include pipeline giants Enbridge, TC Energy, South Bow, and Pembina Pipeline, as well as major oil and gas producers like Imperial Oil, Suncor, Canadian Natural Resources, MEG Energy, Cenovus Energy, Tourmaline Oil, Strathcona Resources, Arc Resources, Veren, and Whitecap Resources.

According to an analysis of company spending plans, collectively, the signatories to the letter are already planning to spend more than $280 billion over the next decade increasing oil and gas supply and reaching new markets. But the companies now say to expand they need the Canadian government to “reset its policies and regulatory frameworks.”

Specifically, the fossil fuel executives say federal environmental assessment requirements and the West Coast ban on tanker ships of a certain size, are “impeding development and need to be overhauled.” They also want to see major projects approved within six months of filing an application, a commitment from the federal government to abandon industrial carbon pricing and its promised cap on oil and gas pollution, and for Ottawa to increase the amount of loans it is willing to backstop for Indigenous groups who want to invest in new oil and gas projects.

Environmentalists derided the request.

“As the source of almost one third of Canada’s carbon pollution, letting oil and gas CEOs off the hook for doing their fair share to fight climate change would make Canada a climate pariah, just like the Trump administration,” said Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada in a statement. “We can’t ignore that oil companies backed Trump’s rise to power and now demand Canada copy his declaration of an energy emergency to give them an unfair advantage against their clean energy competitors.”

The company officials say Canada is at a turning point and the country should grow its fossil fuel economy by boosting production and rapidly building new pipelines and LNG export terminals to reach new markets. The group claims that exporting Canadian LNG can help the world lower its carbon emissions, especially if Asian countries are willing to swap coal-fired electricity generation for gas—a position wildly at odds with climate science.

According to a recent study from Cornell University, emissions from American LNG are 33 per cent higher than coal emissions, when processing and shipping are taken into account. The findings add to a growing pile of evidence that the “bridge fuel” argument for LNG put forward by fossil fuel companies, is bunk. In China, for instance, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found growing LNG imports have not reduced the country’s coal demand due to cost, energy security concerns, and the “meteoric rise” of renewables.

In 2023, carbon emissions from the fossil fuels Canada exported were 47 percent higher than its own domestic carbon emissions.

“LNG is likely to play a trivial role in supporting the clean energy transition in China’s power sector. Even outside China’s power sector, LNG is doing little to displace coal consumption,” said Ghee Peh, an energy finance Asian coal markets specialist with IEEFA in a statement. “Chinese investments in coal-based iron and steelmaking capacity still far exceed natural gas-based processes, and full decarbonization will require non-fossil fuel alternatives rather than a shift from coal to gas.”

The call to ramp up fossil fuel production for exports comes as Canada and the United States square off in a trade war, triggering public debate about building new pipelines to reach new markets. But ramping up fossil fuel exports goes against the grain of global energy forecasts from the authoritative International Energy Agency, which expects global oil demand to peak by 2030.

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has embraced many items on the oil and gas industry’s latest wishlist. Like the executives behind Wednesday’s letter, he is calling for the removal of industrial carbon pricing, scrapping the oil and gas pollution cap, enticing Indigenous nations to support resource extraction projects with financial incentives, and repealing the federal environmental assessment for major projects.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said she “wholeheartedly” supports the letter from oil and gas executives, accusing the federal government, which spent more than $34 billion building the Trans Mountain expansion pipeline to help companies reach new markets, of doing “everything they can to keep our oil and gas in the ground.”

“To leave this treasured resource in the ground would be an outright betrayal of current and future generations of Canadians,” she said in a statement.

The oil and gas industry is Canada’s largest and growing source of carbon emissions domestically, but its exports to other countries are even more damaging to the planet. In 2023, the most recent year data is available, the oil and gas sector’s exported emissions surpassed 1 billion metric tons—significantly more than the country’s domestic total.

Since 2012, Canada’s domestic emissions have fallen about 6 percent, from 744 million metric tons (Mt) of CO2e to 702 Mt in 2023. Over the same period, exported emissions from fossil fuels have grown 58 percent, from 652 Mt to 1,030 Mt.

Even if the fossil fuel industry’s requests to the government to boost production and exports are ignored, emissions are still projected to get worse in the coming years thanks to the opening of the Trans Mountain expansion pipeline last year, and this year’s scheduled opening of LNG Canada.

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“Send Them to Jail”: GOP Officials Keep Saying Trump Can Arrest People for Protesting

When Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, he made a solemn pledge.

“After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America,” he declared. “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.”

It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

In the first two months of Trump’s second term, we’ve seen the “immense power of the state” weaponized so often that it’s difficult to keep track. The president and his administration have sought to investigate and punish law firms that represent Trump’s foes, news outlets whose reporting displeases the right, and universities whose policies or curricula Republicans dislike.

In perhaps the most chilling abuse thus far, the administration arrested and is attempting to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a green card-holder and outspoken Palestinian activist who was a graduate student at Columbia University during last year’s protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Khalil has not been accused of any crime. Rather, the administration has made the constitutionally dubious argument that he was legally targeted because Secretary of State Marco Rubio “has reasonable grounds to believe that his presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

In their public comments, Trump’s aides and allies have explained what Rubio’s legalese means in practice: Khalil is being punished because he is an immigrant who participated in protests that Trump doesn’t like. “This is somebody that we’ve invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he’s put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity,” Troy Edgar, Trump’s deputy Homeland Security secretary, told NPR earlier this month.

Later in the interview, Edgar was asked whether he believes that “any criticism of the government” is “a deportable offense.”

“Let me put it this way,” Edgar responded. “Imagine if [Khalil] came in and filled out the form and said, ‘I want a student visa,’ and they asked him, ‘What are you going to do here?’ And he said, ‘I’m going to go and protest and join in antisemitic activity.’ We would have never let him into the country.”

In other words, yes, the Trump administration explicitly considers protest to be a deportable offense.

And the administration has been clear that this policy—that purportedly “anti-American, antisemitic, pro-Hamas protest will not be tolerated”—is not limited to Khalil. During a briefing on March 11, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for a “rough estimate” of how many similar arrests of non-citizens the administration planned to make.

“I don’t have an estimate,” Leavitt responded. “I do know that DHS, based on very good intel that they have gathered at the direction of the president’s executive order, which made it very clear to the Department of Homeland Security that engaging, as I said, in anti-American, antisemitic, pro-Hamas protest will not be tolerated.”

Leavitt added that the administration has been “using intelligence to identify individuals on our nation’s colleges and universities…who have engaged in such behavior and activity, and especially illegal activity.”

The key word in that sentence is “especially,” which implies that the administration is also targeting law-abiding dissidents. Protests do not become “illegal activity” simply because Trump claims to believe they are “anti-American, antisemitic, pro-Hamas.” And, again, Khalil hasn’t been charged with any crimes.

If you are counting on the GOP-controlled Congress to push back on Trump’s efforts to trample the right to protest, you are likely to be disappointed. As Trump was promising on the campaign trail to deport pro-Palestinian protesters, Republican lawmakers, including Rubio, showed they were willing to do his bidding. And one day after Leavitt’s comments about Khalil, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.)—a close Trump ally who serves on Senate committees overseeing the military and education—went on Fox Business Network to defend the arrest.

“When it comes to protesters, we gotta make sure we treat all of them the same: Send them to jail,” Tuberville announced. “Free speech is great, but hateful, hate, free speech is not what we need in these universities.”

Tommy Tuberville: "When it comes to protesters, we gotta make sure we treat all of them the same: send them to jail."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 12, 2025 at 6:19 PM

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Report: The White House Easter Egg Roll Is for Sale

The White House is offering a new corporate sponsorship opportunity-slash-potential-ethics-catastrophe: The annual Easter Egg Roll.

According to a CNN report published Sunday, the Trump administration is soliciting sponsors for the nearly 150-year-old tradition—which is slated for April 21 and features games and activities for kids—through a production company that is helping stage the event. For sums ranging from $75,000 to $200,000, participating companies can get their logos or names slapped on Easter baskets and signage, along with an invitation to a brunch hosted by First Lady Melania Trump and a private tour of the White House, among other perks, according to a document obtained by CNN.

“Sponsors of WHEER [White House Easter Egg Roll] provide financial support, activities, and giveaways to enhance the event while gaining valuable brand visibility and national recognition,” the document says, per CNN’s report.

Corporate backing for the Easter Egg Rollis itself something of an annual tradition. But according to CNN’s reporting, this year’s “unprecedented” planned event goes well beyond prior arrangements:

The Egg Roll, which began during the Rutherford B. Hayes administration in 1878, has long been privately funded without taxpayer dollars, largely through the American Egg Board, which also provides tens of thousands of eggs for the occasion. And all money raised by [the production company] Harbinger will go to the White House Historical Association…

Donald Sherman, the chief counsel and executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), said he had “never seen anything like this before” associated with a White House.

“I understand that there are corporate sponsors for the Easter Egg Roll,” Sherman told CNN. “What I have not seen before is sort of the outright solicitation and the use of the imprimatur of the White House to give corporate sponsorship.”

Previous egg rolls have been a source of tension between those involved with planning and the [White House] Counsel’s Office. Multiple administrations had to tell Coca-Cola that thousands of Dasani water bottles donated for the event could not be served in Coke-branded coolers, for instance, because of the branding restrictions placed by the White House lawyers.

CNN also quoted Richard Painter—who served as an ethics attorney in the White House counsel’s office under President George W. Bush—as saying that what Trump is planning “would have been vetoed in about 30 seconds in my day…We’re not running this like a football stadium where you get all logos all over the place for kicking in money.” On X, Painter pointed to a federal law barring the use of public office for private gain, writing, “Back in the day, the White House staff followed rules.”

Of course, potential ethical entanglements haven’t always stopped Trump administration officialsin the past; it was only about two weeks ago, after all, that Trump and ElonMusk turned the White House driveway into a Tesla sales lot, with Trump buying a car on the spot to show his support for the company in the face of increasing nationwide protests and plummeting stock prices. And just a few days ago, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged Fox viewers to “buy Tesla…[the stock] will never be this cheap again.”

Trump and Musk turned the White House driveway into a Tesla lot, with Trump buying a car on the spot.Molly Riley/White House/Planet Pix/ZUMA

CNN reports that all money raised from Easter Egg Roll sponsorships will be put in an account run by the White House Historical Association, a private educational nonprofit. According to an anonymous source familiar with the planning of the event who spoke to CNN, excess funds raised will go toward other White House events, such as July 4 or Halloween celebrations.

Regardless, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called the news “absurdly corrupt” in a Facebook post.

The White House is working with the same event production company—Harbinger, founded by former Mitt Romney campaign staffers—that produced the Easter Egg Roll during Trump’s first term, CNN reports. Spokespeople for the White House and Harbinger did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.

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Alaska Natives Want the Military to Finally Clean Up Its Toxic Waste

This story was originally published b_yGrist a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In June 1942, Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian islands in Alaska prompted the US military to activate the Alaska territorial guard, an Army reserve made up of volunteers who wanted to help protect the US. So many of the volunteers were from Alaska’s Indigenous peoples—Aleut, Inupiak, Yupik, Tlingit, and many others—that the guard was nicknamed the “Eskimo Scouts.”

When World War II ended and the reserve force ceased operations in 1947, the US approached the Indigenous Yupik people of Alaska with another ask: Could the Air Force set up “listening posts” on the island of Sivuqaq, also known as St. Lawrence Island, to help with the intelligence gathering needed to win the Cold War?

Viola Waghiyi, who is Yupik from Sivuqaq, said the answer was a resounding yes. “Our grandfathers and fathers volunteered for the Alaska territorial guard,” she said. “We were very patriotic.”

But that trust was abused, Waghiyi said. The US military eventually abandoned its Air Force and Army bases, leaving the land polluted with toxic chemicals such as fuel, mercury, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which are known as “forever chemicals” because they persist so long in the environment. The contamination was largely due to spilled and leaking fuel from storage tanks and pipes, both above ground and below ground. More chemical waste came from electrical transformers, abandoned metals, and 55-gallon drums.

Now, Waghiyi is the environmental health and justice program director at the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, an organization dedicated to limiting the effects of toxic substances on Alaska’s residents and environment. Last week, the organization filed a complaint to the United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, in partnership with the University of California-Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic.

Their complaint calls for the United Nations to investigate how military waste on Sivuqaq continues to violate the rights of the people who live there, such as the right to a clean and healthy environment and Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land.

“By exposing the Yupik people of Sivuqaq to polluted drinking water sources, air, and soil, and by contaminating local native foods; by causing pervasive human exposure to hazardous chemicals through multiple routes; by toxifying the broader ecosystem; and by not cleaning up contamination sufficiently to protect human health and the environment, the US Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers violated human rights long recognized in international law,” the complaint says.

“We wanted our lands to be turned back in the same condition when they turned over.”

This submission from Alaska is part of a larger, global effort to raise awareness of military toxic waste by the United Nations. The UN special rapporteur on toxics and human rights is collecting public input on military activities and toxic waste until April 1. The information collected will be used in a report presented to the UN General Assembly in October.

The two shuttered bases in Sivuqaq, Alaska, are now classified as “formerly used defense,” or FUD, sites, overseen by the US Army Corps of Engineers, and more than $130 million has been spent to remove the contamination. John Budnick, a spokesman for the US Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska, said the cleanup is considered complete but that the agency is reviewing the site every five years “to ensure the selected remedies continue to be protective of human health and the environment.”

“We have completed the work at Northeast Cape, but additional follow-up actions may result from the monitoring phase of the Formerly Used Defense Sites Program,” he said. The last site visit occurred last July and an updated review report is expected to be released this summer.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency similarly concluded in 2013 that an additional EPA cleanup wouldn’t significantly differ from what the Army Corps of Engineers is doing and declined to place the sites on the EPA’s list of hazardous waste cleanup priorities.

A 2022 study found that so far, federal cleanup efforts have been inadequate. “High levels of persistent organic pollutants and toxic metals continue to leach from the Northeast Cape FUD site despite large-scale remediation that occurred in the early 2000s,” the authors concluded.

The persisting pollution has garnered the attention of Alaska’s state Department of Environmental Conservation, which oversees the cleanup of contaminated sites. Stephanie Buss, contaminated sites program manager at the agency, said her office has asked the Army Corps of Engineers to do additional cleanup at Northeast Cape.

“These active contaminated sites have not met closure requirements,” she said. The second former base, Gambell, was classified as completed but still lacks land use controls, she noted.

“DEC takes community health concerns seriously and will continue to provide oversight of the conditions at its active sites in accordance with the state’s regulatory framework to ensure an appropriate response that protects human health and welfare,” Buss said.

That same 2022 study found that 89 percent of the fish around the Northeast Cape base contained mercury exceeding the levels the EPA deemed appropriate for people who rely on subsistence fishing. “All fish sampled near the FUD site exceeded the EPA’s PCB guidelines for cancer risk for unrestricted human consumption,” the researchers further found. Waghiyi said the contamination displaced 130 people, and has left her friends and family with a lasting legacy of illness.

“It’s not a matter of if we’ll get cancer, but when,” Waghiyi said. Her father died of cancer. Her mother had a stillborn child. Waghiyi herself is a cancer survivor and has had three miscarriages.

“We feel that they have turned their back on us,” Waghiyi said of the U.S. military. “We wanted our lands to be turned back in the same condition when they turned over.”

The US military has a long history of contaminating lands and waters through training and battles sites, including on Indigenous lands. Citizens of the Navajo Nation in Arizona and Yakama Nation in Washington continue to raise concerns about the ongoing effects of military nuclear testing on their lands and health.

In the Marshall Islands, fishing around certain atolls is discouraged due to high rates of toxicity due to nuclear testing and other military training. On Guam, chemicals from an active Air Force base have contaminated parts of the islandʻs sole-source aquifer that serves 70 percent of the population. Last year, a federal report found that climate change threatens to unearth even more US military nuclear waste in both the Marshall Islands and Greenland.

In 2021, the Navy in Hawaiʻi poisoned 90,000 people when jet fuel leached from aging, massive underground storage tanks into the drinking water supply after the Navy ignored years of warning to upgrade the tanks or remove the fuel. The federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to remove unexploded ordnance from the island of Kahoʻolawe, a former bombing range in Hawaiʻi, but the island is still considered dangerous to walk on because of the risk of more ordnance unearthing due to extensive erosion.

The complaint filed last week by the Alaska Community Action on Toxics calls for the United Nations to write to federal and state agencies and call upon them to honor a 1951 agreement between the government and the Sivuqaq Yupik people that prohibited polluting the land.

The agreement said that the Sivuqaq Tribes would allow the Air Force to construct surveillance sites to spy on the Soviet Union, but they had four conditions, including allowing Indigenous peoples to continue to hunt, fish and trap where desired and preventing outsiders from killing their game. Finally, the agreement said that “any refuse or garbage will not be dumped in streams or near the beach within the proposed area.”

“The import of the agreement was clear: The military must not despoil the island; must protect the resources critical to Indigenous Yupik inhabitants’ sustenance; and must leave the island in the condition they found it, which ensured their health and well-being,” the Alaska Community Action on Toxics wrote in their complaint.

“This is a burden we didn’t create,” Waghiyi said.

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Trump Declares War on “Frivolous” Lawsuits

Late Friday night, the White House released the latest tranche of Trump executive actions and directives aimed at further kneecapping some of the nation’s most famous lawyers and law firms the president believes are obstructing his agenda or have tangled with him in the past.

One of the late-night directives is entitled “Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court.” Both terrifying and hilarious given its author, the memoinstructs Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to aggressively pursue court sanctions and disciplinary actions against lawyers and law firms that engage in “grossly unethical misconduct,” which it mainly seems to define as lawyers and lawsuits Trump doesn’t like. Singled out for persecution are immigration lawyers and “Big Law” firms with pro bono practices that represent immigrants or litigate against the federal government, as well as Democratic Party lawyer Marc Elias.

The memo then states:

“I hereby direct the Attorney General to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States or in matters before executive departments and agencies of the United States.”

Trump launching a war on “frivolous” lawsuits is pretty rich given his long misuse of the legal system. As a private citizen, Trump was involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits, many of which involved his refusing to pay people for work they did for him.

For instance, ahead of his 2005 wedding to Melania, Trump ordered two crystal chandeliers for the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago from an 82-year-old Latvian immigrant in West Palm Beach who specialized in making replicas of chandeliers that hung in Versailles. He then allegedly stiffed the man on most of the bill, and when the owner complained to the local paper, Trump sued him claiming the installation work was shoddy.

The businessman ended up having to settle for only a third of what he was owed. “My client [was] just a small businessman. No big corporation. He just didn’t have the money to fight Mr. Trump,” his lawyer told Mother Jonesin 2016_,_ adding that Trump’s behavior in the chandelier case is apparently “his modus operandi.”

Or consider the time in 1984 when Trump sued the Chicago Tribune for $500 million because its architecture critic made fun of his plan to try to build the world’s tallest tower in New York City, calling it “aesthetically lousy.” (The case was dismissed, but it still cost the paper $60,000 in legal fees.)

Trump’s litigiousness didn’t end after he became president. In 2023, he filed a $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN for using the term “the Big Lie” to describe his false claims that he won the 2020 election. (It was dismissed.) That same year, a federal judge ordered Trump and his lawyer Alina Habba to pay the defendants nearly $1 million for filing a frivolous suit against Hillary Clinton, a handful of FBI officials, and the Democratic Party alleging that their claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election had hurt his campaign.

“Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries,” the judge wrote in his order tossing the case. “He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer.”

That’s one thing to be said for the expertise behind his new memo: Trump certainly knows a frivolous suit when he files one.

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This Week’s Reveal Podcast: The Deputies Who Tortured a Mississippi County

When Andrea Dettore-Murphy first moved to Rankin County, Mississippi, she didn’t believe the stories she heard about how brutal the sheriff’s department could be when pursuing suspected drug crimes.

But in 2018, she learned the hard way that the rumors were true when a group of sheriff’s deputies raided the home of her friend Rick Loveday and beat him relentlessly while she watched.

A few years later, Dettore-Murphy says deputies put her through another haunting incident with her friend Robert Grozier. Dettore-Murphy was just the latest in a long line of people who said they witnessed or experienced torture by a small group of deputies, some of whom called themselves the “Goon Squad.”

For nearly two decades, the deputies roamed Rankin County at night, beating, tasing, and choking suspects in drug crimes until they admitted to buying or selling illegal substances. Their reign of terror continued unabated until 2023, when the deputies were finally exposed.

“Rankin County has always been notorious,” says Garry Curro, one the Goon Squad’s many alleged victims. “They don’t follow the laws of the land. They make their own laws.”

This week on Reveal, reporters Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield with Mississippi Today and the New York Times investigate the Goon Squad, whose members have allegedly tortured at least 22 people since the early 2000s.

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While Washington DC Burns, Trump Golfs

It’s been 61 days since President Donald Trump promised that he would end the war in Ukraine on “day one” of his new administration, and the war is still going strong. Shadow president Elon Musk and his DOGE boys are upending Washington, laying waste to federal agencies and deploying law enforcement to break into the nonprofit Institute of Peace. Consumer confidence is in the toilet, inflation is threatening a resurgence, and the country is possibly headed for a self-inflicted recession. But never fear! The president will be hard at work this weekend, forcing taxpayers to subsidize his New Jersey golf club while he works on his backswing.

Trump’s official schedule for Saturday involves spending the day at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster until around 5:45 pm, at which point he will fly off to Philly to catch the NCAA wrestling championships.

This will be the seventh weekend, or 17th day of Trump’s second presidency, spent golfing at one of his own clubs, more than a quarter of his time in office. Earlier this month, HuffPost calculated that the golf outings had already cost taxpayers more than $18 million, much of which went directly into Trump’s own company coffers. The outlet also suggested Trump was on track to exceed the $151 million he spent during his first term, when he made 428 visits to a Trump Organization property and played an estimated 261 rounds of golf.

Clearly all that hard work is paying off! Last Sunday, Trump announced on Truth Social that he’d won his third consecutive championship at his golf club in Palm Beach:

“I just won the Golf Club Championship, probably my last, at Trump International Golf Club, in Palm Beach County, Florida. Such a great honor! The awards dinner is tonight, at the Club. I want to thank the wonderful Golf Staff, and all of the many fantastic golfers, that participated in the even. Such fun!”

Of course, critics note that Trump only wins golf tournaments when they’re held at his own clubs. He’s notorious for cheating. Last year, for instance, he boasted about winning the senior tournament in West Palm Beach even though he didn’t play the first round of the event.

In 2019, the sportswriter Rick Reilly wrote in his 2019 book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump:

“Trump doesn’t just cheat at golf. He throws it, boots it, and moves it. He lies about his lies. He fudges and foozles and fluffs. At Winged Foot, where Trump is a member, the caddies got so used to seeing him kick his ball back onto the fairway they came up with a nickname for him: ‘Pelé.‘ ”

Trump will cap off his leisurely Saturday by flying at taxpayer expense to Philadelphia to attend the NCAA wrestling tournament, one of his favorite sporting events. Fox News reports he will be joined by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). Jordan is the former Ohio State University assistant wrestling coach who has famously been accused of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse allegations against a team doctor.

Trump clearly invited Jordan to join him to troll the libs. After all, the straight-laced and ultra-religious Jordan has never been known as the life of the party. (“He is wound tighter than a baseball,” former House Speaker John Boehner and fellow Ohio Republican once told the Washington Post.) But the notorious House brawler has endeared himself to Trump with his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and vigorous impeachment defense. Trump may not enjoy Jordan’s humorless presence, but he will no doubt enjoy the joke of his attendance.

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Author and Activist Bill McKibben on Climate Progress in the Age of Trump 2.0

This story was originally published b_yYale e360 a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the first six weeks of the new Trump administration, it’s become clear that the president intends to undo not just Joe Biden’s environmental legacy, but an entire generation’s worth of action on climate change. The administration has announced it is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. It has frozen Inflation Reduction Act grants, stopped issuing permits for offshore wind development, and declared an “energy emergency” to boost fossil fuel production. The White House appears to be preparing to go after the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” which undergirds EPA regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, while cutting EPA spending by 65 percent.

How should environmentalists respond? Activist and author Bill McKibben has been a leading voice on climate change since 1989, when he published The End of Nature, the first book on the subject aimed at a general audience. McKibben spoke to e360 contributing writer Elizabeth Kolbert about the urgency of the moment, the role of protest, the future of clean energy, and where he sees glimmers of hope.

If you care about the future of the planet, what do you do at a time like this?

I think it’s fair to despair a little bit. I mean, we should acknowledge what a remarkable moment it is that the government of the most powerful country on Earth, at least for the moment, is rejecting flat-out the science that’s been developed over many decades, often by scientists working for the government, about the single most dangerous thing that’s ever happened in human history. And the level of irresponsibility, indeed just craziness, is off the charts.

The Inflation Reduction Act represented the first significant act by the US Congress to deal with climate science. It was a far from perfect bill, but powerful in many ways. So powerful that the fossil fuel industry needed to do what it could to shut it down and to shut down the energy transition to the extent that it could. And hence, the oil industry spent unprecedented sums of money—the number I saw most recently was $455 million—on the last election cycle.

“I sense in everyone’s despair and upset a sort of hunger for some kind of joyful possibility, for something to rally around.”

I’d say the two slight saving graces are, one, as the US retreats from leadership here, there are others, especially the Chinese, who have been stepping up to fill this vacuum. I have a lot of problems with the Chinese government and don’t particularly look forward to their hegemony. But on issues around energy, they’ve been more responsible than we have and built out most of the world’s clean energy at this point.

And the second saving grace is that though they can delay this energy transition, they can’t stop it. It’s rooted in the simple fact that we now live on a planet, as of the last three or four years, where the cheapest way to produce energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. And that won’t change. So, Americans may be denied some of the fruits of that technological revolution, and it will be delayed in ways that make the climate crisis far worse, but it’s not as if [the Trump administration] has complete control of this situation.

The moratorium that the Biden administration put on export permits for liquefied natural gas was a big climate win. You were very much a part of that. But now Trump seems to be using the threat of tariffs to get countries to increase their liquefied gas imports from the US.

This scares me a ton. It’s one thing for us to derail our own energy future, and it’s another to try and derail everybody else with what is essentially a shakedown. My guess is that it’ll work in the short run, and it’ll backfire in the long run. Europeans have figured out in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine that it was foolish to be dependent on the good graces of Vladimir Putin for their energy supply. Anyone who puts themselves more under the thumb of Donald Trump than they need to is a fool.

You’ve indicated you are worried about civil disobedience as a form of climate activism, because instead of looking at a night in jail, people might now be looking at a year or more of jail, as some activists in the UK have gotten.

I think that we need to continue to use all the tools that we have, and we will. But I do think that at the moment civil disobedience of the sort that we’ve been doing a lot of in recent years is unlikely to be particularly effective. I think that the Trump-MAGA world welcomes resistance of that kind. They like those kinds of fights. It energizes them. They’re cruel, and cruelty really is their kink in a lot of ways.

We’re gearing up to do this big national day of action in September. It’s called Sun Day. I think it’s going to be a huge celebration of possibility. And I think that that’s more dangerous right now to the MAGA agenda. They depend on people staying in a fearful crouch, convinced that whatever they have is under threat from somebody. And the idea of Sun Day, instead, is that we’re on the edge of this extraordinary possibility for solar.

I’m excited about figuring out how we do huge parades of e-bikes, and inaugurate dozens of community solar farms, and have thousands of Americans opening their homes so their neighbors can see their heat pumps. And get millions of people who already have solar panels to put a green light in the window that night to tell everybody that they’re powered by the sun.

I sense in everyone’s despair and upset—all of which is completely justified and correct—a sort of hunger for some kind of joyful possibility, for something to rally around as well as stuff to rally against.

The Inflation Reduction Act put billions of dollars towards clean energy manufacturing. So far something like 80 percent of the manufacturing investments spurred on by the law have gone to red states. Do you see any payoff for that with support for clean energy in those states?

I don’t know. The laws of normal political gravity in America don’t seem to be operating. That’s why we’re doing the Sun Day thing. We need to build again, and maybe from the ground up, a real constituency demanding action. And it’s got to include workers at that factory. It’s got to include solar panel installers. It’s got to include local officials who would like to keep energy money close to home instead of sending it off to Saudi Arabia.

There’s some hope that climate action will continue at the state and local level. Do you see that happening?

There are lots and lots of things that localities can do to make things much easier. For example, it costs about three times as much to put solar on your roof in this country as it does in Europe or Australia. The panels are the same price. The soft costs, which are mostly around permitting and marketing, are much, much higher because we have this endless welter of regulations that gets in the way of what should be a very simple act: just giving someone a permit, if they should even require one, to put a solar panel, a safe thing, on their roof. And so those are the kinds of barriers that we can continue to knock away in blue states and blue cities and really in some red states.

Last year in Germany, a million and a half people put solar panels on their balconies of their apartments. And in many cases, those were supplying 20 percent of the electricity they used. You can’t do that in this country. You can’t go to IKEA the way you can in Germany and just buy a solar panel and hang it from your balcony and plug it in. It’s illegal. And those are the kind of things that can and should shift.

One of the things that the new administration really has taken a sledgehammer to is every environmental justice program.

[Environmental justice] manages to combine the things they hate most in the world: clean energy and sensitivity to American history. It’s truly terrible. Just in terms of sheer honesty, we need to keep reckoning with the fact that the people who’ve done the least to cause the problems that we face suffer the most from them, here and around the world. And because these are people who are paying a huge percentage of their income for energy, in a rational world, that’s where we’d be concentrating this stuff first.

We also seem to be looking at the government potentially not doing any climate research under Trump.

At this point we’ll be very lucky if we keep operating the observatory at Mauna Loa [in Hawaii, which measures global carbon dioxide levels]. It has provided the single most important scientific instrument in the history of the world. But if there’s any good news in this, it’s that most of the really crucial science has been done. It’s certainly a kick in the teeth to watch what’s going to happen at NOAA and everyplace else. But my prediction is that the­­ Chinese will pick up a lot of this slack, because they’ve understood that this is their ticket to some kind of moral high ground on this planet.

“Our species is now fully capable…of moving from an energy source that’s concentrated in a few hands in a few places to one that’s diffuse and ubiquitous.”

The US has always had an uneven role in global climate negotiations, waffling in and out. But this time it feels different.

You can make an argument that it might not be the worst thing in the world to have the US out of the way, because we’re the reason that Kyoto didn’t work, we’re a big part of the reason that Copenhagen didn’t work, just on and on and on. And that’s a kick in the teeth because America is really where we learned about the climate crisis—it was from great research. And America is where the first wind turbine and the first solar cells and other key things came from. But, as I say, the slight silver lining to that cloud is we’ve been in many ways a stumbling block as much as a boost to getting anything done.

I’m wondering if you are feeling at all hopeful right now.

In a world where there are a lot of bad things going on, the one overwhelming good thing is this sudden emergence of this possibility [of clean energy]—a possibility that I think most people haven’t fully recognized yet. Even those of us who want it still refer to it as alternative energy, and that’s no longer the truth. It’s not the Whole Foods of energy, pricey and a bit nice. It’s the Costco of energy: cheap, available in bulk on the shelf, ready to go.

Our species is now fully capable, in short order, of moving from an energy source that’s concentrated in a few hands in a few places to one that’s diffuse and ubiquitous, available everywhere. And I think that’s the most subversive and liberating possibility that we really have at the moment on this planet. And in the places that have started to do the work, we get the sense of what’s possible.

What are some of those places?

California last year used 25 percent less natural gas than it did the year before to generate electricity. They reached a tipping point. They have enough batteries and enough solar panels out there that day after day they’re supplying more than 100 percent of their electricity renewably. And Texas is now putting up clean energy faster than California.

Pakistanis over the last three years imported enough solar panels to build out the equivalent of half their national electric grid. Truly amazing what happened inside of 12 months just because they had access to a lot of cheap Chinese solar panels. The same thing seems to be happening in parts of southern Africa.

And so those numbers—25 percent less fossil fuel in a year—those are numbers big enough to take a bite out of the 3 degrees Celsius [of warming] that we’re aimed at right now. And I think this is the only way forward. I do not think humans are going to change their behaviors in large numbers in short order in ways that will reduce our emissions. I think this is the path.

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Caving to Trump’s Demands, Columbia University Says It Will Ban Mask-Wearing

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Columbia University has agreed to terms set by the Trump administration in order to retain its federal funding. This includes a mask ban, and it’s unclear whether and how health exceptions would be implemented for people who, for example, are immunocompromised. The administration’s anti-mask demand seems to be in response to students at Columbia’s encampment wearing medical and other masks, which are really not that effective in concealing one’s identity.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, too, is reportedly trying to get lawmakers to include a mask ban in the state’s budget bill. High-grade masks remain the most efficient preventative safeguard against Covid, flu, and other communicable respiratory diseases. When Hochul first proposed mask bans last year, some New Yorkers I spoke with were angry that the bans were being proposed in the name of Jewish safety.

When Rikki Baker Keusch, a disabled New York-based Jewish community organizer, saw that Hochul was seriously thinking about a mask ban, they were livid. Taking Covid precautions has also become the norm in the Jewish community they are a part of in New York City. “We required everyone to test [for Covid] before Seder,” said Baker Keusch, who wears masks to protect themselves from infectious diseases during pro-Palestinian protests. Getting Covid again while at a demonstration would set back “all of the health progress I’ve barely been able to make since my last Covid infection,” Baker Keusch said.

As I reported, North Carolina passed the first state-level ban on masks in response to pro-Palestinian protestors. That was followed by a ban in Nassau County, New York, where police officers did not receive adequate training on what health exemptions could look like.

There are reasons for concern that a mask ban on a university campus could likewise be poorly implemented. “You’re not allowed to interrogate somebody about their private health information, or family member’s or loved one’s health information,” New York Civil Liberties Union senior attorney Beth Haroules told me previously, a fact Nassau County officials had apparently overlooked.

The date when a mask ban would be implemented at Columbia, and the parameters of the ban, have yet to be announced.

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As Powerful Law Firms Roll Over for Trump, One Lawyer Has Had Enough

On the heels of Donald Trump’s executive order targeting several top law firms over ties to the president’s perceived enemies and decisions he opposes, Trump on Thursday announced that he had reached an agreement to drop his attack against one of the firms, Paul, Weiss. The deal, according to a Truth Social post, will renege Trump’s threat to suspend the security clearances of the firm’s attorneys in exchange for Paul, Weiss to dedicate $40 million in pro-bono services throughout his term.

The deal was widely seen as a remarkable act of capitulation by one of the most powerful law firms in the country. And now, an associate at Skadden Arps, another top firm, is speaking out.

In a company-wide email that was publicized online, Rachel Cohen, a third-year finance associate, condemned her employers for failing to speak out against the Trump administration’s retaliatory efforts. Cohen said that her letter should be considered a resignation unless any meaningful action emerged.

“This is not what I saw for my career or for my evening, but Paul Weiss’ decision to cave to the Trump administration on DEI, representation, and staffing has forced my hand,” she wrote. “We do not have time. It is either now or never, and if it’s never, I will not continue to work here.”

Though she appears to be the most outspoken, Cohen is not alone in her anguish. Earlier this week, more than 300 attorneys joined Cohen’s open letter to so-called Big Law firms that encouraged their employers to defend the profession against the Trump administration’s attacks.

“We call on our employers, large American law firms, to defend their colleagues and the legal profession by condemning this rapid purge of ‘partisan actors,’ a group that seems to be synonymous with those the president feels have wronged him,” the letter states.

Trump’s executive order is one part of a long revenge campaign against people who’ve gotten on the president’s bad side. As our staff recently reported:

The last 10 years Donald Trump spent running for president had an organizing principle: They ruined America, and we have to take it back. The “theys” were a varied group: immigrants, whistleblowers, trans people, journalists, Democrats, civil servants, independent-minded Republicans. But Trump’s option for dealing with resistance was the same: unsparing retribution, often trampling the norms of a legal and political system attempting to thwart his antidemocratic power grabs.

As of this morning, Cohen does not appear to have access to her corporate email account.

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Greenpeace Verdict Stems From “Weaponization of the Legal System,” Advocates Say

This story was originally published b_y the Guardian a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The verdict against the environmental group Greenpeace finding it liable for huge damages to a pipeline company over protests has been described by advocacy groups as a “weaponization of the legal system” and an “assault” on free speech and protest rights.

A North Dakota jury decided on Wednesday that Greenpeace will have to pay at least $660 million to the pipeline company Energy Transfer, and is liable for defamation and other claims over protests in 2016 and 2017.

Rebecca Brown, the president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law issued a statement highlighting the threat the decision poses to free speech and the right to protest. She says the verdict is “a calculated attack on the sovereign rights of the Standing Rock Sioux and all indigenous peoples defending their land and water. This case is a textbook example of corporate weaponization of the legal system to silence protest and intimidate communities.”

ClientEarth, a nonprofit and partner to Greenpeace, said that the verdict highlighted the growing trend of big polluters using the legal system to intimidate and silence critics and that corporations want to send the message that “no organization that challenges the polluting industries is safe” in a statement on social media.

“This ruling is a blatant attempt to silence dissent and crush the power of grassroots activism.”

Energy Transfer was “frivolously alleging defamation and seeking money damages, designed to shut down all voice supporting Standing Rock,” Janet Alkire, the tribal chair for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, said in a statement.

“The case is an attempt to silence our Tribe about the truth of what happened at Standing Rock, and the threat posed by DAPL to our land, our water and our people. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe will not be silenced,” the statement said.

Energy Transfer counsel during the case, Trey Cox, said that the verdict showed that Greenpeace’s actions had been unlawful. “It is also a day of celebration for the constitution, the state of North Dakota and Energy Transfer,” he said following the decision.

Kevin Cramer, a Republican senator for North Dakota, also celebrated the verdict on social media, writing in a post on X: “Today, justice has been done with Greenpeace and its radical environmentalist buddies who encouraged this destructive behavior during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests with their defamatory and false claims about the pipeline.”

But experts and nonprofit groups expressed alarm over the verdict and what it means for constitutional rights in the US.

EarthRights, another non-governmental, nonprofit group, says that the Dakota Access pipeline protests were “overwhelmingly peaceful” and that the organization “proudly joins Greenpeace USA in speaking up against brazen legal attacks and ensuring that the environmental movement only continues to grow stronger, despite the appalling result in North Dakota.”

The case is being described by legal experts as a classic example of a SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation)—a form of civil litigation increasingly deployed by corporations, politicians, and wealthy individuals to deliberately wear down and silence critics including journalists, activists, and watchdog groups. These cases often result in significant legal costs for the defendants, which is viewed as “a win” for the suing entity even if they don’t win the lawsuit.

The international environmental organization 350.org called the verdict against Greenpeace a “devastating legal ruling.”

“This ruling is a blatant attempt to silence dissent and crush the power of grassroots activism,” the group said in a statement. “It sends a dangerous message: that fossil fuel giants can weaponize the courts to silence those who challenge the destruction of our planet.”

They also warn that the fossil fuel industry is increasingly turning to “lawfare”—the use of courts and legal action as weapons of intimidation.

Brice Böhmer, the climate and environment lead at Transparency International, said: “In the face of a climate emergency, it is unconscionable that organizations committed to protecting our planet from the devastating consequences of fossil fuel extraction should be prosecuted in this manner. “As the world struggles under the weight of an existential climate crisis, it cannot be right that environmental defenders are being silenced by a weaponized legal system.”

Greenpeace says it plans to appeal the verdict, and some legal experts say it has a good case to do so. The appeal would go straight to the state supreme court, as North Dakota does not have an appellate level court.

Kelcy Warren, Energy Transfer’s billionaire founder, is a major donor to Donald Trump.

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