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On a freezing winter evening more than 20 years ago, Darrell Night was picked up by police as he left a party in an apartment building in the Canadian city of Saskatoon.
As they drove him to the edge of the city, Night, who was drunk at the time, began to grow fearful. For years, he’d heard stories of so-called “starlight tours” in which the police abandoned Indigenous people in the bitter cold.
“I thought I was dead. All those rumours I heard in the past they were all coming true,” he said in the documentary Two Worlds Colliding. “I told them ‘I’ll freeze to death out here, you guys … The driver said: ‘Thats your f-ing problem’… and then they drove away.”
On that evening in January 2000, the temperature hovered at around -25C (-13F). Night was wearing only a light denim jacket, and didn’t have any gloves or a hat. He managed to survive after finding a nearby power plant and pounding on a door in a desperate attempt to get help.
He credited his survival to chance: he knew the location where he’d been dropped and the only place where he could run to safety. But a few days later two other men – Rodney Naistus and Lawrence Wegner – were found frozen to death in the same area Night had been dropped off.
During a traffic stop, Night decided to tell a veteran police officer about his experience.
That conversation eventually led to an exposé of one of the country’s worst examples of racism in policing, straining the public’s trust in the force and highlighting the deep mistrust Indigenous peoples held against the city’s police.
After Night died earlier this month aged 56, the Cree man has been as hailed as a selfless figure who exposed the brutality of the police force.
University of Alberta professor Tasha Hubbard, who directed the documentary Two Worlds Colliding, said Night’s decision to come forward showed “tremendous courage”.
“He had real empathy for the men who had died,” she told the Guardian. “I think he felt that responsibility to speak up.”
Night died on 2 April and a wake and funeral were recently held at the band hall of the Saulteaux First Nation in Saskatchewan.
The province continues to grapple with the reality of police violence against Indigenous people. Boden Umpherville, 40, was hospitalised in early April after he was Tasered, pepper sprayed and beaten with police batons during an arrest. His family is preparing to take him off life support and the police watchdog is investigating.
Night’s story shocked Saskatoon residents two decades ago but confirmed what many Indigenous people had suspected or experienced. It prompted an investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, police firings, criminal charges and a public inquest.
The intense public scrutiny also led investigators to revisit the case of Neil Stonechild, a 17-year-old Cree teen who was found dead in a field in the north-west outskirts of Saskatoon in 1990. Temperatures when he was last seen were close to -30 degrees.
At the time, Saskatoon police initially investigated the death and determined that there was no evidence of foul play, but his family claimed the death was never properly investigated.
A public inquest found that police conducted a “superficial and totally inadequate investigation” into the death of Stonechild” and that the teen was last seen bloody and in a police vehicle, but investigators were unable to determine the exact circumstances that led to his death.
Police initially suggested the allegations against officers involved in the “starlight tours” were isolated incidents, but in 2003, Saskatoon police chief Russell Sabo admitted there was a possibility that the force had driven other Indigenous people to the city limits and left them in the cold, including a woman in 1976, according to reporting by the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
Officers Dan Munson and Ken Hatchen, who abandoned Night that January evening, were later found guilty of unlawful confinement. Both were fired and sentenced to six months in jail.
“[They] have given me a different perspective towards the police,” Night said in his victim impact statement. “I have no trust whatsoever towards policemen.” The province’s court of appeal upheld the Hatchen and Munson convictions in 2003.
In recent years, the police force has been accused of removing references to “starlight tours” on Wikipedia, according to reporting by the StarPhoenix. Police acknowledged to the newspaper that the entry had been “deleted using a computer within the department” but said investigators couldn’t determine who attempted to delete the entry.
Despite multiple public inquiries into the practice, no Saskatoon police officer has been convicted for their role in the freezing deaths of any Indigenous men.
“Darrell Night understood that he wasn’t just speaking for himself when he came forward. There was a sense of responsibility for others,” said Hubbard. “And it’s a real statement to the legacy of courage he’s left us with.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
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As a description of the problem of Clarence Thomas, however, corruption too has its limits. Morally, corruption rotates on the same axis as sincerity — forever testing the purity or impurity, the tainted genealogy, of someone’s beliefs. But money hasn’t paved the way to Thomas’ positions. On the contrary, Thomas’ positions have paved the way for money. A close look at his jurisprudence makes clear that Thomas is openly, proudly committed to helping people like Crow use their wealth to exercise power. That’s not just the problem of Clarence Thomas. It’s the problem of the court and contemporary America.
In 1987, four years before he joined the Supreme Court, Thomas gave a speech at the Pacific Research Institute, a San Francisco think tank that traces its roots to the economic philosophy of Milton Friedman and is dedicated to “advancing free-market policy solutions.” The target of Thomas’ speech was the midcentury liberal — economists like John Kenneth Galbraith who held money and markets in bad odor and whose attacks on rich businessmen defined the common sense of the New Deal. Thomas’ view of liberalism may seem unrecognizable today, when many Democrats are as enamored of bankers and entrepreneurs as those bankers and entrepreneurs are of themselves. But the midcentury liberal was a different animal. Thomas complained that liberals saw money and economic activity as “venal and dirty,” as a grubby means to a grubbier end. Far nobler, in the liberal view, was the “idealistic professions” of journalism, the academy and the law, where people “make their living by producing words.”
In Thomas’ speech, we can hear the primal cadence of the original culture war between the right and the left. Long before they reached the battlefields of abortion or trans rights, liberals and conservatives were fighting over the meaning and status of wealth. No mere war of economic positions, this was a civilizational struggle over who in our society deserves the highest form of recognition and respect: the man of money or the man of words? Hewlett-Packard or Hollywood, IBM or the Ivy League, Wall Street or NPR?
It doesn’t take much to see how this apparent conflict is badly posed: Where, after all, do knowledge workers and bankers get their degrees if not at elite schools? From whom does Harvard, Hollywood or NPR get its funding if not wealthy elites? Even so, conservatives choose their false dichotomies wisely. Not only are these divides culturally resonant; they are also constitutionally salient.
For liberals of the 1960s and 1970s, when Thomas was coming of age, the most sacred provision of the Constitution was freedom of speech. Like sexual intimacy or gender identity today, words were thought to be an expression of who we are, a disclosure of our deepest sense of self. That’s why liberals sought to surround them with a constitutional fence of rights and protect them from the state.
Along with a small group of far-sighted conservatives, Thomas realized that if the activity of the businessman and the banker could be redescribed as words, as speech worthy of the First Amendment’s protections, it too could achieve the status of a constitutional right. That activity included everything from advertising to campaign contributions to the language of contracts. Like regulation of speech, any policies and laws regulating those activities could be subject to the highest levels of judicial scrutiny. Under this approach, the constitutional — and civilizational — order of the New Deal could be overturned.
On the Supreme Court, Thomas has pursued this project with great vigor — and great success. Championing the power of business in the economic sphere, he has helped strike down economic policies that impinge upon what is called “commercial speech.” Championing the power of business in the political sphere, he has taken on campaign finance laws and regulations. He has chipped away at the court’s claim, in the landmark case Buckley v. Valeo, that limitations on campaign contributions are a legitimate means of eliminating “the reality or appearance of corruption in the electoral process.”
It is here, in the realm of campaigns and corruption, that Thomas has left his most permanent mark on the First Amendment — and a lengthy paper trail leading back to Harlan Crow.
Money “is a kind of poetry,” wrote Wallace Stevens. Thomas agrees. More than an aid to speech or speech in the metaphorical sense, money is speech. Not only do our donations to campaigns and candidates “generate essential political speech,” Thomas writes in a 2000 dissent, but we also “speak through contributions” to those campaigns and candidates. He’s not wrong. When my wife and I gave money to the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we were doing more than aiding their candidacies. We were voicing our political values and advocating our policy preferences, just as we did when we showed up at their rallies and canvassed for them, door to door.
In today’s world, citizens don’t simply speak into the air as they did in the Greek polis. They speak through mediums designed to amplify their message. Those mediums cost money. To speak on social media, I have to buy a computer and pay for the internet. If you speak at a rally, you’ll need a bullhorn or a sound system. If both of us are going to leaflet a farmer’s market, we’ll need to pay for photocopies, pens, clipboards and the like. Whenever we speak politically, we’re speaking through something, hoping that something will help our words reach more people than they would if we were simply standing in a corner and talking to passersby.
The same is true of campaigns and candidates. As Thomas writes in a 1996 case, a campaign or candidate is a “go between that facilitates the dissemination” of our beliefs. These are not merely abstract or general beliefs; they are specific beliefs that we expect to “affect government policy.” When we make a political donation, we are exercising our “right to speak through the candidate” with the expectation that our “views on policy and politics are articulated,” and, should the candidate win office, she will attempt to enact those views into law. The candidate is the donor’s mouthpiece.
Thomas doesn’t pull back from the plutocratic implications of his argument. He approvingly cites a passage from a 1972 treatise on money and politics: “Some views are heard only if interested individuals are willing to support financially the candidate or committee voicing the position. To be widely heard, mass communications may be necessary, and they are costly.” Costly communications require big donations. Big donations mean big donors. “The only effect” that “‘immense aggregations’ of wealth” will have on an election, Thomas writes in yet another case from 2003, is that “they might be used to fund communications to convince voters” and that “corporations … will be able to convince voters of the correctness of their ideas.”
Influence and access are what all citizens seek. Influence peddling is not a perversion of politics; it is politics. Thomas is neither soft nor shy about that fact. He believes that liberals should stop “casting aspersions on ‘politicians too compliant with the wishes of large contributors’” and accept the materiality of modern speech. Speech needs a substrate, substrates cost money, money entails donors, donors are wealthy. Like the rest of us, they seek to have their beliefs and positions instantiated in the law.
Thomas’ approach to money in politics obviously focuses on elected officials, not appointed judges, but the throughline is clear.
Thomas’ positions have been felt across the Supreme Court’s First Amendment rulings. Where businesses used to win First Amendment cases at a much lower rate than individuals, they now win those cases at roughly the same rate as individuals. Where the typical free speech case once involved a student or a protestor, it is now just as likely to involve a corporation or a firm. That is where Clarence Thomas has led us — and left us.
With the revelations of Thomas’ connections to Harlan Crow, we can take one of two paths. We can focus on the salacious details of Crow’s largesse and Thomas’ long history of gifts from other rich people. (My personal favorite is the $1,200 in tires he got from a businessman in Omaha.) We can talk about getting Thomas investigated or impeached. We can talk about judicial ethics and how they don’t get enforced on the Supreme Court.
Or we can use the revelations as a teachable moment. For years, progressives have fought a losing battle to strengthen campaign finance laws, claiming that money is not speech. Operating under the delusion that the Roberts Court and Citizens United are solely to blame — when liberal titans William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall co-authored the Buckley decision, which held that campaign expenditures are in fact speech — progressives have sought to reverse the oligarchic turn of American society by getting money out of politics.
Perhaps, taking a page from Clarence Thomas, we can pursue a different path. If money is speech that secures outsized influence and access for the wealthiest citizens, maybe the problem is not the presence of money in politics but the distribution of money in the economy.
As radical as that claim may sound today, it has been the heart and soul of democratic argument since the founding of the republic. Noah Webster, of American dictionary fame, claimed in 1790 that “the basis of a democratic and a republican form of government is a fundamental law favoring an equal or rather a general distribution of property.” Without that equal distribution of wealth and power, “liberty expires.”
If money is speech, the implication for democracy is clear. There can be no democracy in the political sphere unless there is equality in the economic sphere. That is the real lesson of Clarence Thomas.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
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As national security disasters go, the Pentagon leaks were complete. But as great a scandal as the secrets deluge might be, the greater scandal is how lax the Pentagon appears to be with such monumentally confidential information that it could be purloined and posted on freeform internet sites 4Chan and Discord. Squawking from Congress has ensued, of course, and the Pentagon has muttered about how “serious” the damage is. There is talk that some of the documents have been altered to exaggerate the number of Russian dead. But the government is mostly ostriching the calamity right now. President Joe Biden has been silent on the issue. And on Monday, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, counseled the press to look away. Declining to confirm the provenance of the documents, Kirby said, “It has no business — if you don’t mind me saying — on the front pages of newspapers or on television. It is not intended for public consumption, and it should not be out there.”
Yes, yes! If the press and the public will only take a deep breath and ignore the rising floodwaters, the Russians and the Turks and the Israelis will ignore the tidal wave, too, and dryness will be restored to the land. Good work, Kirby!
The Pentagon — and Kirby, who previously worked as a military and diplomatic affairs analyst for CNN — have enough egg on their faces to start an omelet factory. They don’t know how these secrets escaped their cage, they don’t know who engineered the breakout, they don’t know if additional secrets were snagged. They seem to know nothing and to be engaged in the magical thinking that if we turn away the problem will disappear.
According to press reports, the stash of classified documents appears to have been printed and photographed before being posted online and were likely printed from a secure printer by an authorized user. One unnamed U.S. official told the New York Times that hundreds, if not thousands, of military and U.S. officials have security clearances that would permit them access to the documents. The Pentagon is going to need a wide dragnet if they hope to catch the leaker.
The paradox of the national security machine is that in order for the secrets it gathers to be of any practical use, they must be shared widely enough to be put to work. It’s vital for hundreds if not thousands of policymakers and military officials to know, for example, the burn rate on Ukrainian and Russian artillery shells and anti-aircraft missiles. Or the content of the Russian government’s plans. Or what the Wagner Group is up to. But the secrets lose their fizz the minute the Russians know what the American forces know. Worse than that, the Russians can use the spilled secrets to determine how the secrets got spilled in the first place, blinding future attempts by the American apparatus.
Finding a balance between holding secrets too tightly and handling them like easily lost pocket change would make a good thesis topic for George Smiley. Judging the debts and assets of the intelligence breach can’t be fully ascertained without access to additional secrets about how the Russians and others are responding. The Pentagon has gone on record saying that the leaks “could lead to people losing their lives,” which is the standard official comment when secrets leak and the implied reason flacks like Kirby don’t want the press to report on them. These claims of “lost lives” are always contested, as they were when the Wikileaks cables were unspooled in 2010, and when Edward Snowden shared top-secret documents in 2013, with the admonitions often being downgraded from “lives lost” to “caused harm.”
That said, it’s incontrovertible during wartime that unique “information” that’s freed up can be used by either side to launch deadly attacks. But in this case, some of the “secrets,” such as both Ukraine and Russia running short on munitions, have been previously reported in the press. Likewise, the Russians have known since the dawn of the Ukraine war that our spies were reading their mail because the Biden administration made it a tool of diplomacy to inform the world that we had learned Russia’s “secret” military plans. It’s hard at this point to see how the revelations about Egypt, Turkey, the Wagner Group and the attempted shoot-down of a British spy plane will directly lead to the loss of life. But I suppose John Kirby will take a stab at it when he brushes the omelet off his face.
Sarcasm aside, the leaks may prove disastrous for the United States, Ukraine and its NATO allies in the war. But until that is proven, we should feel free to interpret the government’s reaction to the breach as acts of deflection designed to escape blame for maintaining such a loose grip on these vital secrets. Bring on the coverage of the damage done by these leaks, but don’t forget the equally urgent story: On whose watch were the leaks allowed to happen and what is being done to prevent a new gusher?
******
I’ve got nothing against John Kirby, who answered my single query to him at the beginning of the war. I’m just against Kirbyism. Send secrets to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed has a Discord account. My Mastodon and Post accounts are jealous because I joined Substack Notes. My RSS feed shoots down spy planes before breakfast.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
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BERLIN — Germany’s center-right opposition wants to raise the heat on Chancellor Olaf Scholz by launching a parliamentary investigation into his alleged connection to a massive tax evasion scandal.
The case — which dates back over five years to the time when Scholz was still mayor of the Hamburg city-state — is linked to the broader so-called “Cum Ex” affair, under which the German state was defrauded by over €30 billion as some banks, companies, or individuals claimed tax reimbursements from authorities for alleged costs that never occurred.
The scandal already hung over the Social Democratic politician’s election campaign in 2021 but had little impact in the end as Scholz’s potential involvement remained unclear. Now it is heating up again after new details emerged that put his previous defense in question.
The Hamburg regional parliament plans to summon Scholz this spring — which will be for the third time — to an investigative committee looking into the scandal. And now the center-right CDU/CSU bloc also wants to set up an inquiry at the national level in the Bundestag.
“We will request a parliamentary committee of inquiry into the Scholz-Warburg tax affair in the German Bundestag in the first parliamentary week after the Easter vacations,” said the CDU’s Mathias Middelberg, deputy parliamentary group chairman, on Tuesday.
A government spokesperson said that “as a matter of principle,” Berlin does not comment on decisions announced by Bundestag members “out of respect for the constitutional body,” according to media reports.
Katja Mast, the Social Democrats’ chief whip, said the CDU/CSU is not following any interest in knowledge, but rather party tactical interests. “They bring up allegations that have long been refuted,” she said, adding that the committee in Hamburg had clarified all questions.
The CDU/CSU group has enough votes in parliament to be able to set up an investigative committee. The Left party also said it would back such a request. Parliamentary investigative committees can hear witnesses and experts and request access to documents. Although the findings are summarized in a non-binding report, the political consequences, such as for upcoming elections, could be significant.
In a letter to the CDU/CSU parliamentary group seen by POLITICO, chairmen Friedrich Merz and Alexander Dobrindt said that the case should be investigated due to its “significant” importance for German national politics.
Scholz has come under scrutiny because of his links to one Hamburg-based bank involved in the tax evasion scheme: During his time as mayor, he met on three separate occasions in private with one of the owners of the M.M. Warburg & Co. bank, which was already under investigation at the time by the Hamburg tax office. Officials were planning to reclaim €47 million, which they believed were ill-gotten gains in connection with the fraud.
However, in the end, the finance authority let the statute of limitations on the payment demand expire — and years later, after details of Scholz’s meetings with the banker emerged, critics began questioning whether the top Social Democrat might have intervened in favor of the bank.
Although the chancellor has constantly denied having intervened, he has also given no answer on what was discussed during the private meetings. Instead, Scholz said on several occasions during the past two-and-a-half years that he cannot remember the content of the discussions.
That defense is now being called into question as details emerged of a previous and longtime confidential Bundestag committee hearing with Scholz in July 2020, in which he appeared to easily remember details of his meetings with the banker. His critics argue that Scholz only started to claim having no memory of the meetings when their political and possibly criminal explosiveness became clear.
“This comprehensive memory gap of the chancellor after an initial memory of a concrete meeting … raises a multitude of questions to be clarified,” the letter from the CDU/CSU states.
Scholz and his allies have repeatedly rejected such criticism as politically motivated and stressed that past investigations found no wrongdoing. Scholz also highlighted that in the end, the bank did repay the €47 million, albeit only after it was ordered to do so by a court. The Hamburg Public Prosecutor’s Office said in March that it does not see any initial suspicion against the chancellor in the affair.
That hasn’t discouraged the opposition from planning to dig deeper, though.
“The chancellor would like to see … a line drawn under the clarification of this tax affair. But it is precisely the task of parliament to control the government, to look closely, especially with so many unanswered questions,” said CDU lawmaker Matthias Hauer.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
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London: A group of international students, including many from India, have delivered a petition to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak urging him to act against the “unjust” revocation of their visas following an English test scandal.
The issue dates back to 2014 when a BBC Panorama’ investigation showed some cheating had occurred at two of the UK’s testing centres for a compulsory language test required for visas.
The UK government responded by a widespread crackdown on such centres, which had the fallout of the revocation of tens of thousands of students’ visas linked with those centres.
The Migrant Voice voluntary group has been supporting the students impacted and coordinated the latest petition delivered at 10 Downing Street on Monday.
“This is one of the biggest scandals in contemporary British history. The initial government reaction was unjust and has been allowed to drag on for years,” said Nazek Ramadan, director of Migrant Voice.
“It could have been resolved by a simple solution, such as allowing the tests to be retaken. The students came here to get a world-class education and best student experience in the world, but instead their lives have been wrecked. It is time for the government to step in and end this nightmare. All it takes to bring this to an end is leadership,” she said.
With no right to stay, work or in a few cases to appeal, most of the accused students returned home.
Those who stayed to clear their names have struggled with homelessness, huge legal fees, stress-induced illnesses and have missed family weddings, births and deaths, the petition appeals.
Parliamentary and watchdog reports over the years have highlighted some flaws in the Home Office evidence used in the case in the past. Although some students won their legal challenges, scores of other students many of them Indian are still in limbo.
Migrant Voice is now underlining the importance of Sunak “addressing the injustice at a time when numbers of students and migrant workers form part of UK-India trade negotiations”.
The group has been running the #MyFutureBack campaign for the affected students for over nine years now and urging the UK government to allow these students the chance to clear their names of alleged cheating.
Sarbjeet is a 46-year-old Indian student who has been separated from her children for 13 years, as she feels she cannot return home to India with the allegations hanging over her.
Sanjoy, another Indian student impacted, is being sued by the company that sponsored him and has also been denied the ability to go to the US because his visa withdrawal prevents him from resuming his studies in another country.
The BBC programme had revealed cheating on a compulsory language test, known as the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC), at two London test centres by some international students.
The UK government reacted by placing Educational Testing Service (ETS), the company that ran 96 TOEIC test centres, under criminal investigation, while also asking the company to investigate the allegation.
As a result of the investigation by ETS, the UK Home Office suddenly terminated the visas of over 34,000 overseas students, making their presence in the UK illegal overnight.
A further 22,000 were told that their test results were “questionable”. More than 2,400 students have been deported and thousands left voluntarily. The remaining, estimated in hundreds, have been campaigning to clear their name over the years.
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )
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Wednesday’s vote came nearly two years after Biden tapped Garcetti to become U.S. ambassador to India. Even hours before the first Senate roll-call, the outcome was uncertain, a rarity these days on the floor. Garcetti’s Senate backers remained confident this week that he would be confirmed, despite some Democrats privately predicting a tight vote.
“I don’t think either, on the Dems’ or our side, we know exactly where every vote is,” Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said ahead of the vote.
The Foreign Relations Committee approved Garcetti’s nomination for a second time last week, with support from two Senate Republicans: Todd Young of Indiana and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee. Garcetti lost a handful of Democratic votes, however, leaving his fate in the hands of the Senate GOP — an unusual position for a Biden nominee.
Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) all voted against advancing Garcetti.
Biden first nominated Garcetti in July 2021, and the Foreign Relations Committee held a confirmation hearing in December 2021. But Garcetti’s nomination later ground to a halt amid the Jacobs allegations. Biden re-nominated him in January. Garcetti and the White House pushed hard for final confirmation, with his parents even hiring a lobbyist to help him get over the finish line.
“There was finally a decision, when the president renominated him, that he was entitled to a vote,” observed Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).
Last year, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) published a report on the allegations that said “it is more likely than not that Mayor Garcetti either had personal knowledge of the sexual harassment or should have been aware of it.” The White House, however, has consistently stood by Garcetti, who was one of Biden’s early backers in the 2020 presidential race.
“This is an opportunity for those that say that they’re going to believe that people that are assaulted to cast their vote accordingly, and if they don’t, then it’s kind of a hypocritical situation,” Grassley said.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), a staunch Garcetti ally, defended him Tuesday, describing him as “a really qualified candidate that had dispersions made against him that were disproved by the facts.”
Jordain Carney and Anthony Adragna contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
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Steil’s interest, shared by others on the committee, in using the panel to highlight both state laws that they support and make recommendations, though GOP lawmakers stressed they wouldn’t be requirements, is likely to spark partisan tension; particularly in an era of frequent, politically motivated challenges to election security.
“Twenty years ago, the committee was relatively unknown, because it didn’t cover topics that the broader public was interested in. I think that shifted dramatically,” Steil said in an interview about his plans for the committee.
Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) — who McCarthy pitched on joining the Administration panel — acknowledged he wasn’t “aware too much” of what it did before but has come to view it as “one of the most important and unknown committees in Congress” because of its lanes of jurisdiction.
And Administration has a more bipartisan history than the highly visible Judiciary and Oversight Committees, perhaps due to its relatively low-profile status that tends to attract less bombastic members to its ranks. When it comes to matters such as Blanton’s reported on-the-job misconduct, that increased freedom to work across the aisle may well spell more results in divided government.
Other higher-profile priorities of Steil’s, however, are going to test the panel’s bipartisan aura.
Two tension points in particular threaten to rip at committee camaraderie: how Republicans approach an investigation into Capitol security during the Jan. 6 attack and a renewed GOP desire to flex oversight sway over D.C. Steil and other Republicans are eyeing reviving legislation that would impose new voting rules on the district. The House has already passed legislation aimed at overturning a D.C. bill allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections.
Both areas are likely to touch a nerve with Democrats, though 42 of them sided with Republicans to oppose the action by the D.C. council.
Some of the committee’s work will remain bipartisan. Blanton’s ouster, for example, has renewed conversations about giving Congress the ability to fire the architect of the Capitol, who is currently a presidential appointee.
New York Rep. Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the committee, said in a brief interview that he, Steil and their aides have already had a “good series of conversations” about working together broadly. Morelle also wants to talk specifically with the Wisconsin Republican about empowering lawmakers to oust the Capitol’s top manager in the future.
The cross-aisle possibilities don’t end there. Lawmakers’ ability to own and trade stocks, where the committee has partial jurisdiction, has created unlikely cross-aisle bedfellows and GOP leadership interest in the past.
And there’s interest on both sides of the committee in reforming the three-member Capitol Police Board — comprised of the House sergeant at arms, the Senate sergeant at arms and the architect of the Capitol — which makes critical campus security decisions. Its structure faced new scrutiny in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack by a mob of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters, with two of its three officials resigning in the aftermath.
“I think it’s just a construct that may have worked twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago. I don’t think it works today,” Morelle said.
Where panel Republicans go first is still under discussion. The conference deemed the Administration Committee the new hub for the now-defunct Jan. 6 select committee’s documents, a potential treasure trove for Republicans who are eager to turn the investigative spotlight back on Democrats. A GOP committee aide confirmed to POLITICO that in doing so they also requested “the same access” to Capitol security footage that the previous panel had, which the Capitol Police granted.
McCarthy asked the select committee last year to preserve its findings. And in an apparent deal that has sparked fierce pushback from Democrats, the California Republican granted Tucker Carlson access to thousands of hours of Capitol security footage from Jan. 6, 2021. The parameters of the agreement haven’t been made public. Meanwhile, Morelle and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who chaired the Jan. 6 committee, are expected to brief Democrats on the implications of the arrangement Wednesday.
Focusing on the Jan. 6 committee’s work could be an odd fit for Steil, who isn’t known as a partisan bomb thrower. GOP lawmakers and aides say that identity makes Steil valuable on a panel that, should tempers boil over, could threaten to bog down basic operations of the House.
Steil’s vote to certify Biden’s Electoral College win also puts him in the minority of House Republicans as well as committee chairs. Thirteen of the 22 Republicans wielding committee gavels supported an objection to at least one state’s results, based on a POLITICO review.
Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) — looked at by the Democratic-run select committee because of a Capitol complex tour he gave on Jan. 5, 2021 — said in an interview that conversations are already underway about investigating security decisions during the next day’s riot.
“I think that is something that we do need to work on,” Loudermilk said.
The Jan. 6 select committee had looked into security as part of its investigation and pointed out certain failures in its much-anticipated final report. But much of the panel’s focus was on the actions of Trump and those close to him before, during and after the attack.
For now, Republicans are holding back on pledges to dig back into the work of the select committee itself. Steil said there would be a “role” for the Administration Committee but that he hadn’t “reached any conclusions as to exactly what that process will look like.”
Meanwhile, Morelle vowed Democrats would “strongly oppose any efforts to go back and create a revisionist version of history.” And even GOP Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.), asked about revisiting either the work of the Jan. 6 committee or security during the attack, noted that there had been several investigations already and advised her party to not “continue to labor on that issue” and instead focus on staff and member security.
But a broader review of the Capitol Police is in the committee’s plans, and could be a foothold for folding in security decisions on Jan. 6. Members of the committee, in interviews, said they wanted to specifically look at the department’s culture, funding and training as well as to review member security amid increasing violent threats.
Additionally, while Republicans are likely to avoid any attempt at relitigating Trump’s 2020 loss when they get around to ballot security, the GOP priority is still likely to highlight partisan divisions even without stepping directly into the presidential election. Democrats view many new state-level voting laws implemented after the 2020 cycle as attempted ballot restrictions, particularly among minority communities. Morelle said the panel’s Democrats wanted to highlight expanding access to the ballot box.
And Republicans’ consideration of legislation to enforce new voting rules in D.C., including prohibiting same-day voter registration, has sparked backlash from the capital city’s House delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, who warned it was a preview of the “wide-ranging home-rule attacks” a GOP-controlled House would launch.
And while Steil might be rhetorically low-key, he won’t back down from a fight.
“Washington, D.C. is a federally administered city. And so I think that that’s an appropriate place for Congress to be engaged,” Steil said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
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France’s most-watched news channel, the 24-hour BFMTV, has suspended one of its longest-serving presenters and launched an internal investigation into news packages linked to an Israeli disinformation unit calling itself “Team Jorge”.
Rachid M’Barki, an anchor at BFMTV since its launch in 2005, is on leave and at the centre of the inquiry into multiple stories broadcast on his show, Le journal de la nuit.
He was suspended last month, after a member of Team Jorge suggested to undercover reporters that the group was secretly behind a BFMTV news report about the Monaco yachting industry.
The report, broadcast last year, suggested sanctions imposed against Russian oligarchs were damaging the yachting industry in the Mediterranean principality.
When a reporter approached BFMTV to ask questions about the integrity of that package and several others broadcast by the channel, M’Barki was suspended.
The channels said in a statement that the packages did not go through the usual editorial validation procedures.
Team Jorge sells hacking and disinformation services to political and corporate clients who want to conduct covert influence-peddling campaigns. The team was exposed by the Guardian and an international consortium of reporters led by the French nonprofit Forbidden Stories.
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The Guardian and Observer have partnered with an international consortium of reporters to investigate global disinformation. Our project, Disinfo black ops, is exposing how false information is deliberately spread by powerful states and private operatives who sell their covert services to political campaigns, companies and wealthy individuals. It also reveals how inconvenient truths can be erased from the internet by those who are rich enough to pay. The investigation is part of Story killers, a collaboration led by Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters.
The eight-month investigation was inspired by the work of Gauri Lankesh, a 55-year-old journalist who was shot dead outside her Bengaluru home in 2017. Hours before she was murdered, Lankesh had been putting the finishing touches on an article called In the Age of False News, which examined how so-called lie factories online were spreading disinformation in India. In the final line of the article, which was published after her death, Lankesh wrote: “I want to salute all those who expose fake news. I wish there were more of them.”
The Story killers consortium includes more than 100 journalists from 30 media outlets including Haaretz, Le Monde, Radio France, Der Spiegel, Paper Trail Media, Die Zeit, TheMarker and the OCCRP. Read more about this project.
Investigative journalism like this is vital for our democracy. Please consider supporting it today.
The leader of the unit, Tal Hanan, a former Israeli special forces operative who uses the alias “Jorge”, was filmed boasting about his ability to manipulate the media to spread propaganda, by undercover reporters posing as potential clients.
In one secretly filmed meeting, Hanan told the reporters he was able to have stories broadcast in France and then played a video clip.
One of the undercover reporters – Frédéric Métézeau, a Middle East correspondent at Radio France – recognised the clip as a report by M’Barki broadcast on BFMTV and approached the channel about the integrity of the package last month.
Alarm about the broadcasts escalated rapidly, leading to an internal investigation, and on 11 January M’Barki was taken off air and put on leave.
It is not clear whether Team Jorge was behind the BFMTV news package and, if so, how they planted the stories and on behalf of whom. The news website Politico, which first reported on the internal investigation at BFMTV, said a dozen suspicious broadcast packages were now under investigation.
BFMTV confirmed the investigation in a statement on 2 February, saying: “An internal investigation has been ongoing at BFMTV for two weeks after the discovery of content broadcast on our programme, Le journal de la nuit, outside the usual validation channels. The journalist in charge of Journal de la nuit has been suspended since the opening of this investigation.”
Marc-Olivier Fogiel, the chief executive of BFMTV, told the Forbidden Stories consortium: “At this stage, we remain cautious. But the fact remains that we are victims.”
In a statement, BFMTV’s society of journalists (SDJ), which seeks to defend the integrity of reporting, said it had “become aware of suspicions of interference concerning a journalist from our channel”. The statement said if the details reported were correct, “they are serious and reprehensible”, and the SDJ added that it hoped the internal investigation would get to the bottom of how the packages came to be broadcast.
In a comment to Politico, M’Barki denied any intentional misconduct. He said: “They were all real and verified. I do my job … I’m not ruling anything out, maybe I was tricked, I didn’t feel like I was or that I was participating in an operation of I don’t know what or I wouldn’t have done it.”
Tal Hanan, the head of Team Jorge, did not respond to detailed questions about the unit’s activities and methods but said: “I deny any wrongdoing.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )