Chris Hedges's Blog, page 21

Ahead of Extradition Hearing, Hundreds March for Assange in London

LONDON—Hundreds of supporters of Julian Assange marched through London on Saturday to pressure the U.K. government into refusing to extradite the WikiLeaks founder to the United States to face spying charges.

Famous Britons, including Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde and fashion designer Vivienne Westwood joined the crowd protesting the U.S. espionage charges against the founder of the secret-spilling website. An extradition hearing for Assange is due to begin in a London court on Monday.

WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson told a rally outside Parliament that the prosecution of Assange represented “a dark force against (those) who want justice, transparency and truth.”

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U.S. prosecutors have charged the 48-year-old Australian computer expert with espionage over WikiLeaks’ publication of hundreds of thousands of confidential government documents. If found guilty, he could be sentenced to up to 175 years in prison.

American authorities say Assange conspired with U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into a Pentagon computer and release secret diplomatic cables and military files on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Assange argues he acted as a journalist and is therefore entitled to First Amendment protection. He also maintains the documents exposed wrongdoing and protected many people.

Civil liberties groups and journalism organizations, including Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders, have urged the U.S. to drop the charges, saying they set a chilling precedent for freedom of the press.

More than 40 jurists from the U.K., the U.S., France and other countries published a letter Saturday asking the British government to reject the extradition request. They accused the U.S. of “extra-territorial overreach” in seeking to prosecute an Australian who was based in the U.K.

Assange is currently incarcerated in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, having previously spent seven years inside the Embassy of Ecuador.

He holed up in the South American country’s U.K. diplomatic mission in 2012 to avoid being sent to Sweden to face questioning over rape and sexual assault allegations. That case has since been dropped.

Assange was evicted from the embassy in April 2019 and arrested by British police for jumping bail seven years earlier.

Assange’s legal team argues that the case against him is politically motivated. His lawyers said they would present evidence they claim shows that Assange was offered a pardon if he agreed to say Russia was not involved in leaking Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign.

Emails embarrassing for the Democrats and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign were hacked before being published by WikiLeaks in 2016.

Assange’s lawyers say the offer was made in August 2017 by then-Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who claimed to be acting on behalf of President Donald Trump.

The White House called the claim “a complete fabrication and a total lie.”

Rohrabacher said in a statement that he told Assange “that if he could provide me information and evidence about who actually gave him the DNC emails, I would then call on President Trump to pardon him. At no time did I offer a deal made by the President, nor did I say I was representing the President.”

The Latinx Vote Might Carry ‘Tio Bernie’ to Victory

There’s no denying Latinx voters are falling in love with “Tío Bernie.” As a supporter of Bernie Sanders myself, I’d been reading indications of this phenomenon for many months “con mi corazón en la boca,” a Spanish saying that translates roughly to “with baited breath.” Sanders has led the Democratic field among Latinxs in poll after poll, with a recent survey showing 48% favor the Vermont senator nationwide. In Nevada, that number climbs to 64%.

National @MorningConsult Poll Among

Black Voters:

Biden 34% (-1 From Pre NH Primary Poll)

Sanders 30% (+3)

Bloomberg 19% (+3*)

Warren 8% (-)

Buttigieg 4% (-)

Hispanic Voters:

Sanders 48% (+10)

Bloomberg 17% (+1)

Biden 13% (-4)

Buttigieg 8% (+2)

Warren 7% (+4)

— Political Polls (@PpollingNumbers) February 13, 2020

According to the company Plus Three, the progressive stalwart also received $8.3 million in donations from Latinxs in 2019, amounting to 36% of all contributions from the minority group — a number that puts him ahead of all other Democratic contenders in 49 states and every major city.

I witnessed this fervent support firsthand during a December rally in Venice Beach, California, where an estimated 20,000 attendees, musical guests and speakers switched seamlessly between Spanish and English, sometimes in the same breath. Many of the organizers, including youth leader Jocelyn García, who brought her parents onto the stage, spoke about the struggles immigrants, first-generation Latinxs and the greater community are facing in a country whose president has vilified them at every turn.

 Latinxs weren’t the only ones “feeling the Bern” that day on Venice Beach (I recall a young mother, with a headscarf depicting the U.S., walking with her children and a family speaking Swedish nearby), but they were certainly the largest group present. Two Latinx women confided to me that they hadn’t voted in the 2016 general election, let alone the primaries. “We just didn’t think it mattered,” said Jamie Gonzalez, a first-generation Sanders supporter.

This kind of political disillusionment is not uncommon. As Shawn Navarro, a 33-year-old Sanders volunteer in Las Vegas, told NPR recently:

[Latinos] are tired of listening to talking points from Democrats who come to their neighborhoods, ‘speak a little bit of Spanish’ and ‘eat tacos,’ but then don’t deliver any real results. It’s why, he says, exit polls found that Donald Trump and Mitt Romney, ‘who was far less offensive,’ performed roughly equally with Latinos in the 2016 and 2012 elections.

There is a huge distrust among the Latinx community with the Democratic Party that they’re not following through on their promises. Bernie is the exact opposite. He has a real authenticity.

It’s not just authenticity or “barrio cred” that Sanders has going for him, but policy, too. When I asked Gonzalez what drew her and her friend Carol to a Sanders rally, she rattled off several of his major proposals: Medicare-for-all, a $15 minimum wage and the elimination of student debt. Judging by the cheers each of these proposals drew at the rally, Gonzalez and Carol were hardly alone in their enthusiasm for Sanders’ platform.

Sanders’ success with this voting bloc is less surprising than it might appear to our mainstream media. After largely failing to reach many people of color in the 2015 primaries, he has rectified his mistake, presenting himself to the Latinx community as a grandchild of immigrants. Sanders has also hired more than 100 Latinx staffers nationwide, including Belén Sisa as his deputy press secretary. A native of Argentina, she caught the public’s attention after posting online a photo of herself with her tax forms to remind Americans that undocumented immigrants do, in fact, pay taxes. Sisa is one of the many “Dreamers” protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and her hire has affirmed Sanders’ commitment to the program.

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The Democratic candidate’s promise to safeguard immigrant communities does not end there. Sanders has called for a slew of sweeping changes, including a moratorium on all deportations and an end to the construction of a border wall. He also pledges to use his executive authority to remove the threat of deportation for all undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for at least five years. Perhaps more significantly, he has called for the dissolution of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

This plan doesn’t just distinguish him from his fellow Democratic candidates but from President Obama, who infamously earned the nickname “deporter in chief” after expelling more immigrants than his two predecessors combined. The Obama administration’s approach to immigration also partly explains young Latinxs’ lack of interest in former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. According to Voto Latino’s Danny Turkel, the biggest obstacle for candidates like Biden has been “a significant lack of investment in the Latinx electorate on the part of the political establishment.” 

“In 2018, 48% of Latinx voters reported not being contacted by a single political party or campaign,” Turkel told Truthdig. “That indicates the apathy that Washington has toward courting and engaging our voters.”

While Turkel notes that Democratic candidates have largely failed to connect with Latinx voters, Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), told Time that “Sanders has the strongest Latino outreach of any campaign.” On a national scale, that’s manifested largely in the form of Spanish mailers, but also community events, some cleverly called names like “Tamales for Tío,” where Latinxs of all ages and backgrounds have come together to discuss the campaign’s core ideas. Another method has been having callers from states like Florida reach out to their Midwestern counterparts in both Spanish and English as part of a grassroots movement across the country.

Perhaps one of the most important things the democratic socialist has done this election cycle is simply show up and listen. As Turkel pointed out, this simple form of engagement has become rare for a generation of politicians divorced from the people they are meant to be representing. Just look at what Sanders achieved in Iowa, a state where only 3.4% of eligible voters are Latinxs. Per Politico:

Sanders is one of the few 2020 contenders who has spent substantial time with Latinos in Iowa, according to Latino operatives and leaders in the state. He has gone to Lotería game nights put on by LULAC and was the only top-tier candidate who appeared at the group’s forum. He’s also held “Unidos Con Bernie” aimed at the Latino community.

And according to The Hill, his approach clearly paid off: 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) won big among Latino voters in this week’s Iowa caucuses, according to previously unreleased data from the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Initiative.

In the state’s four Spanish-language caucus sites, Sanders, obtaining 428 votes against a combined 14 divided between former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and entrepreneur Andrew Yang.

This is the first presidential election in which Iowa Democrats have made Spanish-language satellite caucus sites available.

‘All of them [voted for Sanders]. It’s amazing what you do when you go to the community to listen to them and then hire them,’ said Sanders senior adviser Chuck Rocha, the architect of the campaign’s Latino strategy.

Sanders has earned the support of Cardi B, sitting down to discuss politics with the Dominican American rapper at a nail salon in August (he has since encouraged her to run for office). The co-chair of his campaign is San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, who was thrust into the national spotlight after the Trump administration all but refused to assist Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. And one of his most prominent surrogates is perhaps the most recognizable Latinx politician in the country. I’m speaking, of course, about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who has credited Sanders with inspiring her to run for office.

At the Venice Beach rally, I watched Ocasio-Cortez speak about progressive policies with a passion and eloquence matched only by Sanders himself. Their friendship has been evident from the start — watch the clip below of AOC surprising Sanders in Iowa — but the two have also co-sponsored key legislation, such as  the Green New Deal:

.@AOC instagram stories with bernie are just

Study: Twitter Bots Amplified Climate Denial Messages to Help Trump

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Common Dreams. 

A new analysis of 6.5 million tweets from the days before and after U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intention to ditch the Paris agreement in June 2017 suggests that automated Twitter bots are substantially contributing to the spread of online misinformation about the climate crisis.

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Brown University researchers “found that bots tended to applaud the president for his actions and spread misinformation about the science,” according to the Guardian, which first reported on the draft study Friday. “Bots are a type of software that can be directed to autonomously tweet, retweet, like, or direct message on Twitter, under the guise of a human-fronted account.”

As the Guardian summarized:

On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots. This proportion was higher in certain topics—bots were responsible for 38% of tweets about “fake science” and 28% of all tweets about the petroleum giant Exxon.

Conversely, tweets that could be categorized as online activism to support action on the climate crisis featured very few bots, at about 5% prevalence. The findings “suggest that bots are not just prevalent, but disproportionately so in topics that were supportive of Trump’s announcement or skeptical of climate science and action,” the analysis states.

More broadly, the study adds, “these findings suggest a substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages about climate change, including support for Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement.”

Pro-Trump, anti-environment bots are dominating a significant part of the climate discussion on Twitter. (A better approach to anonymity would help change this.)
https://t.co/Wugn7rZpZ9 pic.twitter.com/Yewlk7cUB5

— Andrew Stroehlein (@astroehlein) February 21, 2020

Thomas Marlow, the Brown Ph.D. candidate who led the study, told the Guardian that his team decided to conduct the research because they were “always kind of wondering why there’s persistent levels of denial about something that the science is more or less settled on.” Marlow expressed surprise that a full quarter of climate-related tweets were from bots. “I was like, ‘Wow that seems really high,'” he said.

In response to the Guardian report, some climate action advocacy groups reassured followers that their tweets are written by humans:

This tweet has been written by a human, but a QUARTER of all tweets about the #ClimateCrisis are produced by bots, according to a new study.

The result? A distortion of the online conversation to "include far more climate science denialism…"https://t.co/ZvRBVceuZa

— Friends of the Earth

Study Suggests Twitter Bots Amplified Climate Denial Messages

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Common Dreams. 

A new analysis of 6.5 million tweets from the days before and after U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intention to ditch the Paris agreement in June 2017 suggests that automated Twitter bots are substantially contributing to the spread of online misinformation about the climate crisis.

Brown University researchers “found that bots tended to applaud the president for his actions and spread misinformation about the science,” according to the Guardian, which first reported on the draft study Friday. “Bots are a type of software that can be directed to autonomously tweet, retweet, like, or direct message on Twitter, under the guise of a human-fronted account.”

As the Guardian summarized:

On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots. This proportion was higher in certain topics—bots were responsible for 38% of tweets about “fake science” and 28% of all tweets about the petroleum giant Exxon.

Conversely, tweets that could be categorized as online activism to support action on the climate crisis featured very few bots, at about 5% prevalence. The findings “suggest that bots are not just prevalent, but disproportionately so in topics that were supportive of Trump’s announcement or skeptical of climate science and action,” the analysis states.

More broadly, the study adds, “these findings suggest a substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages about climate change, including support for Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement.”

Pro-Trump, anti-environment bots are dominating a significant part of the climate discussion on Twitter. (A better approach to anonymity would help change this.)
https://t.co/Wugn7rZpZ9 pic.twitter.com/Yewlk7cUB5

— Andrew Stroehlein (@astroehlein) February 21, 2020

Thomas Marlow, the Brown Ph.D. candidate who led the study, told the Guardian that his team decided to conduct the research because they were “always kind of wondering why there’s persistent levels of denial about something that the science is more or less settled on.” Marlow expressed surprise that a full quarter of climate-related tweets were from bots. “I was like, ‘Wow that seems really high,'” he said.

In response to the Guardian report, some climate action advocacy groups reassured followers that their tweets are written by humans:

This tweet has been written by a human, but a QUARTER of all tweets about the #ClimateCrisis are produced by bots, according to a new study.

The result? A distortion of the online conversation to "include far more climate science denialism…"https://t.co/ZvRBVceuZa

— Friends of the Earth

Bloomberg Says 3 Women Can Be Released From NDAs

WASHINGTON — Mike Bloomberg said Friday he’d free three women from confidentiality agreements that bar them from speaking publicly about sexual harassment or discrimination suits filed against him over the last three decades.

The billionaire former mayor of New York also said his company, Bloomberg LP, will no longer use such agreements “to resolve claims of sexual harassment or misconduct going forward.”

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His remarks come after days of intense scrutiny over the treatment of women at the company he’s led for three decades, and amid pressure from Democratic presidential rival Elizabeth Warren to allow the women to share their claims publicly. Bloomberg didn’t automatically revoke the agreements, but told the women to contact the company if they would like to be released.

The three agreements he’s willing to open up relate specifically to comments he’s alleged to have made. His company reportedly faced nearly 40 lawsuits involving 65 plaintiffs between 1996 and 2016, though it’s unclear how many relate to sexual harassment or discrimination.

At Wednesday’s debate, Bloomberg called such nondisclosure agreements “consensual” and said women who complained “didn’t like a joke I told.” The remarks were viewed by some as out-of-touch with the post-#MeToo era, which has prompted far more serious scrutiny of sexual harassment and innuendo by men in the workplace. Bloomberg is one of the country’s richest men, worth an estimated $60 billion.

It was the first time Bloomberg was truly put on the spot in an otherwise choreographed campaign, where he’s been promoting his message via television advertising and scripted speeches rather than debates and town halls with voters.Bloomberg will face his rivals again Tuesday at a debate in South Carolina.

Bloomberg said in a statement he’d done “a lot of reflecting on this issue over the past few days.”

“I recognize that NDAs, particularly when they are used in the context of sexual harassment and sexual assault, promote a culture of silence in the workplace and contribute to a culture of women not feeling safe or supported,” it continued.

One of the women covered by Bloomberg’s announcement is Sekiko Sekai Garrison, 55, who filed a complaint against Bloomberg and his company in 1995. She did not respond to a phone message seeking comment on Friday.

Garrison’s complaint, reviewed by The Associated Press, was filed when she was about 30 and alleged Bloomberg told her to “kill it” when she told him she was pregnant with her first child. The lawsuit details several other alleged personal interactions with Bloomberg and describes a misogynistic corporate culture where women were typically paid less than men, subject to routine sexual harassment and demoted or fired if they complained.

In the alleged incident, Garrison said Bloomberg approached her near the office coffee machines and asked about her married life. When she told him she was pregnant with her first child, he said “kill it,” in a serious monotone. He allegedly then repeated it and called her “number 16,” a reference to the number of pregnant women employees.

Bloomberg has denied making the remarks. But Garrison said he left her a voicemail apologizing and calling the remark a joke. She resigned from the company.

Lawyer Bonnie P. Josephs, who filed the 1995 complaint on Garrison’s behalf, told AP on Thursday that she later handed the case off to another attorney. Josephs said she was then told that Garrison had settled the case against Bloomberg for a “six-figure sum” and signed a nondisclosure agreement.

A longtime Bloomberg aide confirmed that case was one of the three agreements Bloomberg mentioned in his statement, in which an NDA was signed that directly related to Bloomberg. The other two cases never went to court and are not public.

On Friday, Bloomberg said his company would undertake a review of its policies on equal pay and promotion, sexual harassment and discrimination and the use of “other legal tools” that prevent cultural change. He also pledged to push policies if elected president that expand access to childcare and reproductive health and guarantee 12 weeks of paid leave.

“I will be a leader whom women can trust,” he said.

__

Ronayne reported from Sacramento. Associated Press reporter Michael Biesecker contributed.

American Women Seek Over $66M in Damages From U.S. Soccer

Players on the U.S. women’s national team are seeking more than $66 million in damages as part of their gender discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation.

The damages were included in slew of papers filed Thursday night in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles ahead of a trial scheduled to start May 5.

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Among the documents filed were the separate collective bargaining agreements of the U.S. men’s and women’s teams, which had not previously been made public.

Players on the women’s national team sued the federation last March alleging institutionalized gender discrimination that includes inequitable compensation between the men’s and women’s teams.

Each side in the class-action lawsuit asked for a summary judgment in their favor. The estimate of damages, including interest, was provided by Finnie Bevin Cook, an economist from Deiter Consulting Group, which was retained by the suing players.

The collective bargaining agreements showed a disparity in bonuses but also highlighted the different pay structures between the two teams.

“Women’s national team players are paid differently because they specifically asked for and negotiated a completely different contract than the men’s national team, despite being offered, and rejecting, a similar pay-to-play agreement during the past negotiations,” U.S. Soccer said in a statement. “Their preference was a contract that provides significant additional benefits that the men’s national team does not have, including guaranteed annual salaries, medical and dental insurance, paid child-care assistance, paid pregnancy and parental leave, severance benefits, salary continuation during periods of injury, access to a retirement plan, multiple bonuses and more.”

Molly Levinson, spokeswoman for the plaintiffs, disputed the federation’s assertions.

“In the most recent CBA negotiation, USSF repeatedly said that equal pay was not an option regardless of pay structure,” Levinson said in a statement. “USSF proposed a `pay to play structure’ with less pay across the board. In every instance for a friendly or competitive match, the women players were offered less pay that their male counterparts. This is the very definition of gender discrimination, and of course the players rejected it.”

The lawsuit has drawn worldwide attention. When the U.S. won the World Cup final last summer in France, fans in the crowd chanted “Equal Pay! Equal Pay!”

Earlier this month, the players union for the men’s national team urged the federation to sharply increase pay for the women’s team, while also accusing the governing body of making low-ball offers in current contract negotiations with the men’s team.

Also among the documents filed Thursday were numerous pre-trial depositions. Megan Rapinoe, the reigning FIFA Player of the Year, was deposed Jan. 16. She said Russell Sawyer, an outside lawyer for the USSF, stated during a bargaining session in June 2016 that “market realities are such that the women do not deserve to be paid equally to the men.”

USSF President Carlos Cordeiro was asked during a Jan. 29 deposition about a statement he made when campaigning that “our female players have not been treated equally.”

“I felt then and I still feel to a degree, that the lack of opportunity for our female players was really what was at the root of some of their issues,” Cordeiro said. “The fact that the Women’s World Cup generates a fraction of revenue and a fraction of what the men get paid is a reflection, frankly, of lack of opportunity. … Women’s soccer outside of the United States doesn’t have the same degree of respect.”

Former USSF President Sunil Gulati, speaking during a Dec. 17 deposition, discussed the distinctions between men’s and women’s soccer.

“There is an absolute difference, which not everyone seemed to agree to, but do I think that it’s less attractive or less entertaining? I’m not saying that. Or relative quality, I’m not saying that,” he said. “But I’m also not saying, in terms of absolute level of — whether it’s speed or strength, they’re the same. I think most people would accept that, too.”

A U.S. man who was on the roster for all 16 qualifiers during the failed effort to reach the 2018 World Cup earned $179,375 in payments from the U.S. Soccer Federation.

An American woman received $52,500 for being on the roster for the five World Cup qualifiers last year plus $147,500 for her time at the World Cup, including a $37,500 roster bonus and $110,000 for winning the title in France.

The USSF keeps 16-21 women’s players under contract in each year of the current labor deal, which runs through 2021, and pays each a $100,000 salary. The federation also pays a minimum 22 players assigned to a club in the National Women’s Soccer League, with each receiving $70,000 to $75,000 this year.

Women receive 75% of salary on maternity leave for up to one year, and a player has the longer of three months or two training camps to return to full fitness. A player can receive 75% of salary for up to three months when adopting a child and a $50 daily stipend for child care during training and play. The USSF also pays for health, dental and vision insurance for the women.

When the men last qualified for the World Cup in 2014, their player pool got a $2 million payment, and each player earned $55,000 for making the roster and $5,500 per match. The player pool earned $175,000 per point for the group phase, a total of $700,000, plus $3.6 million for reaching the round of 16.

The USSF in its filing pointed out it received $9 million from FIFA for the men reaching the second round of the 2014 World Cup, but $2 million for the women winning in 2015 and $4 million for their victory in 2019.

There is parity is per diems: the women get $62.50 daily while in the U.S. and $75 internationally, the same as the men received under terms of their expired deal that covered 2015-18. And men and women both receive $1.50 per paid attendance for home matches controlled by the USSF.

___

AP Sports Writer Anne Peterson contributed to this report.

Weinstein Jury Is Split on Most Serious Counts

NEW YORK — Jurors deliberating in Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial indicated Friday that they are deadlocked on the most serious charges, but the judge told them to keep trying.

In a note sent to the judge during their lunch break, jurors asked if it were permissible for them to be hung on two counts of predatory sexual assault while reaching a unanimous verdict on other charges.

After consulting with prosecutors and Weinstein’s lawyers, Judge James Burke told the jury of seven men and five women to keep working toward a unanimous verdict on all charges and sent them back to continue deliberating.

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Weinstein’s lawyers said they would accept a partial verdict, but prosecutors said no and Burke refused to allow it.

The jury, in its fourth day of deliberations, has been particularly focused on the key aspect of two counts of predatory sexual assault: “Sopranos” actress Annabella Sciorra’s allegations that Weinstein raped and forcibly performed oral sex on her in the mid-1990s. Those charges carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.

In all, Weinstein, 67, is charged with five counts stemming from the allegations of Sciorra and two other women — an aspiring actress who says he raped her in March 2013 and a former film and TV production assistant, Mimi Haleyi, who says he forcibly performed oral sex on her in March 2006.

To convict Weinstein of a predatory sexual assault charge, jurors must agree on two things: that Weinstein raped or sexually assaulted Sciorra and that he committed one of the other charged offenses. The predatory sexual assault charge requires prosecutors to show that a defendant committed a prior rape or other sex crime, but doesn’t have the statue of limitation constraints that would bar Sciorra’s allegations from consideration on their own.

Weinstein has maintained any sexual encounters were consensual.

The Associated Press has a policy of not publishing the names of people who allege sexual assault without their consent. It is withholding the name of the 2013 rape accuser because it isn’t clear whether she wishes to be identified publicly.

Jurors started the day Friday by listening to a reading of Sciorra’s cross-examination and follow-up questioning by prosecutors. About 90 minutes into the reading, the jurors notified the judge they had “heard enough” and resumed their deliberations.

Sciorra testified nearly a month ago. She was the first accuser to do so in the closely watched #MeToo trial.

The jury has already focused on emails that Weinstein sent regarding Sciorra, including ones to the private Israeli spy agency he allegedly enlisted to dig up dirt on would-be accusers as reporters were working on stories about allegations against him in 2017.

Sciorra, now 59, told jurors how the once-powerful movie mogul showed up unexpectedly at the door of her Manhattan apartment before barging in and raping and forcibly performing oral sex on her in late 1993 or early 1994.

On cross-examination, Sciorra was grilled about why she opened her door in the first place and didn’t find a way to escape if she was under attack.

Weinstein lawyer Donna Rotunno asked: “Why didn’t you try to run out of the apartment? Did you scratch him? Try to poke him in the eyes?”

Prosecutors say Sciorra weighed only about 110 pounds (50 kilograms) in those days, making her no match for the 300-pound (135-kilogram) Weinstein.

“He was too big” to fight off, she told the jury. “He was frightening.”

Sciorra went public in a story in The New Yorker in October 2017 after one of the few people she says she told about the incident, actress Rosie Perez, got word to reporter Ronan Farrow that he should call her.

Sciorra didn’t get involved in the criminal case until later. Her allegations weren’t part of the original indictment when Weinstein was arrested in May 2018, but after some legal shuffling they were included in an updated one last August.

Weinstein’s lawyers fought to get her nixed from the case in the run-up to the trial, arguing to no avail that prosecutors shouldn’t be allowed to use her claims because they predated the enactment of the predatory sexual assault charge in 2006.

Weinstein’s lawyers have also argued that it’s plainly unfair to make the producer defend himself against something alleged to have happened more than a quarter-century ago. They contend prosecutors shoehorned Sciorra into the case to get a marquee name on the witness stand.

“Annabella was brought into this case for one reason and one reason only,” Rotunno said in her closing argument last week. “She was brought in so there would be one witness who had some star power, one witness you may recognize and one witness whose name may mean something.”

The CIA’s Complicity in Recent Global Atrocities Revealed

In another astounding revelation about the extent of United States’ global surveillance operations, The Washington Post recently published a piece about a Swiss company, Crypto AG, that was actually owned by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and West Germany’s intelligence agency. Crypto AG provided encryption services to over a hundred governments worldwide for decades. Unbeknownst to those governments, the CIA had access to the encryption tools and could therefore read high-level internal governmental correspondence from countries including France, Egypt, Venezuela and many others.

On this week’s edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer speaks with William Binney, a leading intelligence expert who worked at the National Security Agency for 30 years, about this shocking information that is only now being made public, roughly two years after the program ended in 2018. In the exchange, Scheer highlights why the revelation is not only incredibly worrying in terms of the power it allowed the U.S. to wield for decades, but because of its historical implications.

“What it means, as I understand it, is that people high up in the U.S. government, right up through the president, would have known of every assassination attempt, every terrorist attempt, every torture, everything done in any of these other societies — as I say, be it Saudi Arabia, be it Egypt, be it Venezuela, be it Guatemala,” says an outraged Scheer.

“We had knowledge of what they were doing, what they were plotting,” he goes on, “aren’t we complicit in actually learning about what they’re doing — that they’re going to kill somebody or torture them — and not intervening, or deciding to ignore it?”

“I certainly would agree with that, what you’re saying there,” Binney responds. “They hold some responsibility for not taking action to stop events, yeah.”

When Scheer asks Binney to explain what’s at the foundation of the Crypto AG operation, the former NSA agent bluntly gets to the heart of the matter. “It’s a standard operation to try to get other people to buy the crypto systems that you’ve built,” Binney says, “because that means you fundamentally own them.”

This form of “ownership” is one NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed to the global public with his leaks about the extent of American surveillance on its own people, as well as on the leaders of our allies, such as Angela Merkel. To Binney, whose long career in U.S. intelligence provides him with unique insight into American surveillance operations, the story points to a larger issue with the way the U.S. views itself.

“[This idea America has about itself] comes from cowboy movies,” Binney says. “We were the guys that wore the white hats. We’re always right, and everybody else is wrong, and we’re doing right and they’re doing wrong.”

“It’s the hypocritical side of intelligence,” he later says, “looking at the Department of Justice and FBI and police enforcement, what spies are doing against us is bad, but what we do against everybody else is not, it’s good. Because we are the good guys. After all, we’ll try to keep the peace in the world. And in fact, we end up giving more, starting, getting involved in more wars than we can shake a stick at, and they seem to be never ending.

“We have a double standard on how we think; we have no real value system that’s governing everything,” he concludes, in a stark condemnation of U.S. government operations.

Listen to the full discussion between Binney and Scheer, as they touch upon issues of privacy, diplomacy, American innocence and the valiant efforts of Snowden to unveil America’s massive surveillance apparatus to the world. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

— Introduction by Natasha Hakimi Zapata

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case it’s William Binney, who was a code-breaking expert for the U.S. military before he joined the National Security Agency, where for over 30 years he worked on intelligence matters and ended up being the technical leader for intelligence.

And I’ve spoken to Mr. Binney before, but I’m particularly interested now because of a new story in The Washington Post, a great investigative story in which they joined with German sources, Swiss sources, and so forth. And it’s on an over 30-year-old program; it went until 2018, it goes back to 1970—maybe a longer program, almost a half-century program, even going back to after World War II. And it’s about a company called Crypto, Crypto AG. And this company ended up being owned by the CIA and West German intelligence, back in the days before Germany was united. And what they did was basically provide encryption tools, going back to the earlier tools before there was an internet, but ending up with very sophisticated programs, to allow governments that paid for this service—I believe it was about 123 governments of the world; that did not include China or the Soviet Union, because they were suspicious of the program.

But this Swiss-based company provided encryption, meaning that governments could keep their correspondence with their embassies and their security agencies from foreign eyes. And it was governments as varied as Egypt and Greece and Italy and France and so forth. And there’s a real question about whether this intelligence-gathering, which accounted for about half of the communications of all of these governments—it’s really so far-reaching, it almost defies subscription. And it seems to be an accurate—it’s based on a CIA report. So I thought, you know, who better to explain this to me than a veteran of the National Security Agency, which along with the CIA actually owned this company that was spying on every government, practically, in the world. So tell me what you know about it, William Binney.

William Binney: Well, Bob, I think it’s just that it’s a standard operation to try to get other people to buy the crypto systems that you’ve built. [Laughs] Because that means you fundamentally own them. So the basic principle with any country’s intelligence service that knows anything—ah, that’s probably primarily why the Russians and Chinese didn’t buy into this company—is that you never buy crypto material or crypto information from foreign countries. You invent it yourself and control all the knowledge of it within your country. Otherwise you’re not secure. It simply means that if you buy something from overseas, you’re exposing the basic communications that you have, and where you use it, to be read by the other countries that own that—in this case it was BND and the NSA, or CIA. So—

RS: Yeah, but they were lying about it. Wait a minute. This was ostensibly a private company which also was under contract with companies like Motorola in this country, and Siemens in Germany. And this was all deep secret stuff. And so these countries like Egypt, or anyone else in the world, didn’t know that this equipment that was encrypting their information was actually being done by foreign governments—by the CIA, the NSA on the U.S. side. And I bring it up because we’re making a big deal right now, the U.S. government, about the Chinese company Huawei being involved in the construction of the new 5G internet. And they say oh, well, the Chinese government gets access through them—in fact the U.S., through the CIA and NSA, and people on the highest level, always knew about this, actually set the standard for this intrusion on the security of the rest of the world.

WB: That’s correct. Yeah. And it’s been well known by countries who have smart intelligence agencies, that that’s a standard practice—that other intelligence agencies set up front companies, and these front companies—that’s why you have to be very careful where you get material information from. Because you’re setting yourself up to be bringing in the tapping points from other countries. In other words, if you import material from them by switches, or you know, servers, any kind of crypto material or anything like that, you’re embedding that in your system, making your system their system. And that’s why they talk about the Huawei 5G stuff, because that’s an embedding of the Chinese system in ours, and it then gives them that access—same thing that we’ve been doing for decades, and in this program for more than 50 years.

RS: Yeah. And in this program, though, as The Washington Post points out, it almost defies comprehension. Because what we’re talking about, in their description—and this is all based on an internal CIA report, as well as a German intelligence report—the systems that they were put in were designed for the CIA, NSA, through this company Crypto to enter—right?—the system, to decode them, to read the material—they were designed to be easily penetrated by U.S. intelligence. And this means that the U.S. government on the highest level had knowledge of every assassination—they used that as examples—that, say, Latin American dictators ordered. Things that were being done throughout the world to oppress people, to torture them, to kill them, to overthrow other governments. All of this was known in real time, at the highest level of the U.S. government. And you’re kind of taking it to be less exciting or important than I am suggesting. I think this is—

WB: Oh, no. No, no, Bob, I’m not—I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that the practice of doing this, setting up front companies like that, by CIA and BND—this is what they—you should have changed the Crypto name to CIA/BND. That’s what they should have—that was really what they were buying material from, they were buying it from that joint effort of those two intelligence agencies. That’s a standard intelligence practice and has been, you know, since at least World War II. So you know, that’s nothing new on the intelligence side. So you know, maybe it’s a surprise to a lot of reporters in The Washington Post, but in the intelligence community, that’s standard practice.

There’s another point that I don’t think they emphasized enough, and it’s really much more important than any of the other ones, simply because any communications between the companies that realized you don’t do this—you don’t buy crypto material from foreign countries, or companies in foreign countries; you control that process yourself—those countries, like Russia and China, their thinking and their relationships are also compromised. Because anybody who was using these devices, communicating through their embassies with the Chinese or the Russians, and getting responses for them, we wouldn’t be able to read, like, one-half of the communications between them, and therefore deduce the kinds of thinking and the processes that were going on in China and Russia also. So it had much greater impact in terms of that than anything else, I think.

RS: No, but I mean—all right, I want to get—you’re making it sound routine, but you lived your life inside of the NSA and—

WB: Yeah, for us in the business, that’s routine.

RS: Yeah, but what I’m saying is the average American does not know that for 50 years, our government was spying on allies—on others, on virtually every government in the world. And you know, we were shocked when Edward Snowden revealed that Angela Merkel in Germany had her phone surveilled by the agency that you worked for. But this seems to me an admission of far more extensive spying on virtually every government in the world—except, ironically, China or Russia, who were so suspicious they had their own encryption means. But the fact is, you know, Bobby Ray Inman, you worked for him, didn’t you, at the NSA? Or was that the CIA?

WB: Yeah, he was the director there for a while while I was there, yeah.

RS: Yeah. And he brags about it; he says this was the greatest coup of all. But what it means, as I understand it, is that people high up in the U.S. government, right up through the president, would have known of every assassination attempt, every terrorist attempt, every torture, everything done in any of these other societies—as I say, be it Saudi Arabia, be it Egypt, be it Venezuela, be it Guatemala. We had knowledge of what they were doing, what they were plotting. Aren’t we then complicit not only in creating a standard of surveillance of every country in the world, and their data and their activities—then we bemoan when others do it. But also, aren’t we complicit in actually learning about what they’re doing—that they’re going to kill somebody or torture them—and not intervening, or deciding to ignore it?

WB: I certainly would agree with that, what you’re saying there, Bob, yeah. They hold some responsibility for not taking action to stop events, yeah.

RS: But we’re talking about just about every major nefarious event that has happened in, as I say, almost a half-century. Just, you know, it petered out at the end, but it was still going at 2018. And—

WB: Yeah, I think you’re right, they probably had knowledge of most of them. I don’t know what percentage, you know; it would be dependent on the coverage of collection of data to be able to decrypt it and read what they were saying, you know.

RS: Yeah. Well, the estimate in The Washington Post was, I think, as high as 50% of these communications, OK. So that means—well, for one example, for instance, when Sadat and Jimmy Carter were negotiating a peace agreement, Jimmy Carter had all of the conversations that Sadat was having with his own government, with his own government’s agencies—that was all made available to Jimmy Carter. And Anwar Sadat, the head of Egypt, didn’t know that. So he was negotiating with the American president, and the American president had all of this information, because they were able to tap in—right?—to all of their diplomatic and intelligence communications, or at least 50% of it. Doesn’t this sort of mock—I just want to—yeah?

WB: I agree with you, Bob. Yeah.

RS: Well— [Laughs]

WB: That’s really—see, what it gets down to is the intelligence community, what they were—I’m sure what they were doing back then was, if they said—well, like for example President Carter. If there was any knowledge of an assassination coming up, and if they told him, you know, he would, like, probably give a—he might have a high-percentage chance that he would compromise it openly in the public. Like, for example, I think President Reagan did make some comment at some time in his presidency where he fundamentally let the cat out of the bag. So they were probably arguing that we needed to make sure and emphasize that nobody says anything publicly, and that they needed to caution even the president if they had knowledge of that and told him about it. So—which I’m sure they did.

RS: Well, and this involved blowing up buildings and killing people, and arresting people and torturing, and going to war and lying about it, and everything else. There’s this tremendous amount of information. I wonder how much would people on the intelligence committees of the House or the Senate—people like Dianne Feinstein or Adam Schiff, for instance, on the House side, for the democrats and the republicans—how much of this would they have known? Were they in the dark about this? That’s not made clear in The Washington Post report.

WB: Ah, no, what it would do would be, it would be coming out under Gamma reporting. That would be the reports that we issued from NSA, and those would—like the case of Hillary Clinton, had some of that on her server and she took some of the extracts out of Gamma reports. Which didn’t tell them, it doesn’t tell the customer—which they look at Congress as a customer—it doesn’t tell them exactly how they got the information. It just says this is sensitive information from sensitive programs that are in operation in the NSA or CIA, whichever it is. So they would at least know that it had a degree of reliability from that Gamma type reporting.

RS: So they would know that we were tapping into, say, Anwar Sadat’s communication with his government, his own government—with his embassy, with his armed forces. But they wouldn’t know the specifics of how that was gathered; they would be given the information. And as oversight agencies, who after all are branches of Congress who are supposed to be providing oversight—certainly after the seventies, the Church Committee report, that’s what the Senate Intelligence Committee was supposed to be doing. They were the ones, then, that should have known that there was this spying on all of our—I want to make this clear—on our allies. Not just supposed enemies, on our allies. And wouldn’t they have thought that was a violation of norms of international law, of decency, of respect for others? Or was that just routine?

WB: Ah, also most likely treaties in between the countries involved. So you know, it’s like if I’m putting something here in your country, you don’t spy on me, and if I put something in your country I don’t spy on you. That’s kind of—in treaty agreements between countries, when they have relationships set up, yeah. I would also say that, you know, that compared to what’s going on today, that’s—you know, that’s a drop in the bucket. They’re just spying on fundamentally every U.S. citizen—you, me, everybody. They’re getting copies of this radio program you’re broadcasting.

So you know, this is just a mess we’re in. I mean, we have created—these intelligence agencies fundamentally are not controllable by any government in the world. Their own agencies they can’t control. I mean, look at how much control they have over at CIA, or FBI or DOJ or the NSA, when they try to run a soft coup against President Trump. Or you know, or any of the other countries around the world—they have similar inadequacy in terms of oversight. I mean, their oversight’s a joke, really; worldwide, it’s just a joke. They just have absolutely no control over any of these intelligence agencies. They’ll go do whatever they want, once they close that secret door, you’re out. And the only thing that Congress does, when they call it ”oversight,” they send their staffers up to NSA or down to CIA or wherever, DIA, whatever agency they go to, and they get briefed by a set of briefers that have cleared their briefings through the liaison offices, with the congressional liaison offices, you know. And that’s the story that that agency wants to tell Congress, and that’s the story that Congress gets, and they don’t have anything else to judge it by. And they won’t tell them.

RS: So let me just understand this. I hope you’re not getting blasé about all this. But—

WB: No, I’m still rather pissed off about it, if you ask me.

RS: But I—well, I mean, you know, people—there hasn’t been that much response to The Washington Post story. That was really what surprised me. You know, I thought this would be really huge. I mean, you have a sort of—I mean here we have, at the very same time they’re making a big deal—I said it before, you know, can you trust a Chinese internet company to be constructing—and in The Washington Post report they have Motorola and Siemens, the German company, which is one of the biggest in the world. And they’re just in there with this company called Crypto, refining their system. So they were in on, or had to be in on, the fact that they were surveilling governments like Italy—you know, governments all over the world, some of which we claim to be close allies of. I think it was 123 governments around the world. No one blew the whistle.

And in The Washington Post story, it’s very interesting, they say that when Edward Snowden revealed the extent of NSA surveillance and spying and so forth, there was real shock at the dimension. But actually this story shows that Snowden’s revelation only captured part of it. You know, he showed some of the surveillance of foreign governments and leaders; as I say, a case in Brazil, Germany, and what have you. But according to this Washington Post report, this was routine for most of a half century. Just routinely spying on every leader anywhere in the world, whether they were considered democrats or dictators or communists or fascists or what have you. All of their most private information was made available to the U.S. national security agencies, and presumably some of the people they briefed. And it’s far more extensive than what Snowden revealed.

WB: Actually, I wouldn’t say that, Bob. Because there’s one side that showed the worldwide access points to the Five Eyes that Snowden put on the web, that showed in there, one of the entries at the bottom with the little dots designating where they were occurring all over the map. So it showed the different points that were embedded with implants. And in there, this computer network exploitation, CNE part of it, says that it had greater than 50,000 implants in the world. Now, one of these little implants for crypto recovery or crypto reading of anybody’s communication could be one implant. So you can maybe have a dozen implants for a country, and you can cover, basically, its governmental communications. Something like that, depending on the size of the government, you know.

RS: Yeah, but you’re the expert. You were the head of technical expert—I forgot the title, but you know—

WB: Technical director. [Laughs]

RS: You were the technical director for intelligence worldwide at one point. But most of us looking at that chart—many people never looked at that chart; I looked at it. And I really didn’t know what those dots were until I read The Washington Post report, I guess. And however they got that information, it showed up as one of those dots. But as I say, yes, you could not ignore Snowden, and The Washington Post report makes that very clear. But this shows that it was far more invasive—you would have thought, well, they’re going into Egypt or Greece to find some bad actors or some terrorists, or you know, some people who are against that government. No—they were going in to find what the heads of Italy, or any other country, were saying to their own ambassadors, to their own people, their own advisors, their own defense ministers. So it’s not just like looking for some bad actors, some terrorists. The U.S. government—

WB: No, and it also had the side benefit, Bob—I’m just trying to point out—of giving you one side of the access into Russia and China, with Russia and China responding to different countries around the world. You can at least see the one side of the conversation, so you can begin to understand what the Chinese were saying to them or the Russians were saying to them. So it gave them—it basically was compromising that, too. So you actually could get in that way indirectly. You know, so you’re not going directly at the Chinese encrypted communication or the Russians’ encrypted communication, but you’re going at things that you can break.

I’ll give an example. In World War II, before the invasion of France, the Japanese ambassador to Germany was given a tour of the wall, the defensive wall from France all the way up to Norway. All the positions and all of that. He dutifully reported that back to the Japanese government, and he used the Japanese code system to do it, and that was one of the code systems we were reading. So when we read that, we got the entire layout of the defense positions of the German army in Europe. So that helped in the invasion, OK. That’s the kind of information you could get indirectly, having an access point like that.

RS: OK, but just for people who didn’t read The Washington Post story—and it’s not getting the publicity that I want—let me just give one example. There was England at war over the Falklands with Argentina. Now, Argentina was not thought to be a terrorist adversary of the United States. It was an adversary with England over the Falklands, OK. And your agency that you worked for, the National Security Agency, and the CIA, were in control of a company that was able to get all of the details of what the Argentine military and government was doing, what they were saying, and then handed that over to the English.

That’s in the report. That’s a degree of intrusion, you know, of surveillance, of even ostensibly friendly or neutral governments, that is absolutely startling. And as I say, with it comes some ownership or responsibility. If you’re also plugging in to dictators and learning they are going to do nefarious things, but you don’t warn the people who are going to be assassinated or tortured or what have you, because that will compromise your access, right? And so we have actually been complicit in many of these crimes.

WB: That’s correct. If you have knowledge and don’t take action, you’re complicit.

RS: So what I’m saying is—and again, you’re a professional, and you’re a cool customer here. And I’m this guy who’s read this report, and I’m just thinking, why isn’t this more shocking to people? That’s, I guess, my basic question. Are we so inured to this sort of thing that we say, well, if the U.S. government does it, it’s OK, it must make sense; but if anybody else does anything even the slightest bit like this, oh, we think it’s just terrible? Isn’t that where we are?

WB: Yes, it is, Bob. And it comes from the basic, you know, cowboy movies. We were the guys that wore the white hats. Yeah, we’re always right, and everybody else is wrong, and we’re doing right and they’re doing wrong.

RS: So your agency that you were at—and they say most of the people at the NSA didn’t really know about this particular company, Crypto AG, right?

WB: That’s correct.

RS: That was a deeply held secret, right? And in fact, people who worked for that company, one of whom was arrested in Iran, they thought they were just innocent contractors selling good encryption material around the world. And then when Iran—yeah, go ahead.

WB: Yeah. You hit it right on the head, that’s exactly right. What you do is you use people who don’t know what’s really happening, and let them be the ones to spread the word, so to speak, and spread the capability around. And that’s exactly what they did with this program. And only a very few people, I’m sure—the ones they had to have were the ones in control of the ultimate technology that got produced and sold. Once you had control of that, and kept the knowledge of it to a very close few people, then the rest of them in the company wouldn’t know. In fact, they wouldn’t even know who owned the company, which obviously, I’m sure most of them didn’t—or any affiliated companies, they wouldn’t even know who owned those companies either.

RS: No, this was—

WB: You know, and they—I’m sorry?

RS: Yeah, this was a deeply held secret. So in other words, this was a Swiss company that was pretending to be privately owned and responsible to its shareholders or what have you, and in fact was owned by the NSA and CIA, and a West German, a German intelligence agency. And I just want to read from The Washington Post story, it said—

WB: But if I could insert something here, Bob, I would never call it a Swiss company. It was a CIA/BND front company located in Switzerland.

RS: Yes. Well, that’s fair. So it says here in The Washington Post, ”Even so”—you know, because we’re not doing it now, and it ended in 2018, which is hardly ancient history. It says ”Even so, the Crypto operation is relevant to modern espionage. Its reach and duration help to explain how the United States developed an insatiable appetite for global surveillance that was exposed in 2013 by Edward Snowden. There are also echoes of Crypto in the suspicions swirling around modern companies with alleged links to foreign governments, including the Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky, a texting app tied to the United Arab Emirates and the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.” So what’s so odd here is we have blasted a Russian company, we blast a Chinese company, we say you can’t trust their technology, they will build in ways of getting all that information. And yet the U.S. government, through the CIA/NSA, for half a century, set the gold standard for surveilling other governments and destroying their secrecy, right?

WB: Yeah.

RS: So it’s hypocrisy. I don’t know—

WB: Yes it is, yeah. Well, and that’s the spying business.

RS: OK. I’ll just say, The Washington Post’s story says, quote, again, ”It is hard to overstate how extraordinary the CIA and BND histories are.” The BND is the German history. I mean, that’s a pretty strong statement, it’s hard to overestimate, right? It says here, you know, ”Sensitive intelligence files are periodically declassified and released to the public. But it is exceedingly rare, if not unprecedented, to glimpse authoritative internal histories”—this is the CIA—”of an entire covert operation.”

And it says, ”The Post was able to read all of the documents, but the source of the material insisted that only excerpts be published.” But so this is—again, I want to be moderate and reasoned in my evaluation—I don’t know why this isn’t being made into a bigger story. You know—here, this is another thing they said: ”The papers”—because they were internal documents, you know, both written by the CIA and by German intelligence. It says, ”The papers largely avoid more unsettling questions, including what the United States knew — and what it did or didn’t do — about countries that used Crypto machines while engaged in assassination plots, ethnic cleansing campaigns and human rights abuses. The revelations in the documents may provide reason to revisit whether the United States was in position to intervene in, or at least expose, international atrocities, and whether it opted against doing so at times to preserve its access to valuable streams of intelligence.” So we’re talking about deep corruption in the deep state, deep immorality in the deep state.

WB: I agree. Yeah. Like, my policy pretty much within intelligence—like for example, if I was there—I wasn’t in a position to do this, but if I had been there and I saw some of the material coming through in NSA, that would have tipped off that the attack was coming, and that certain people were involved, like those that came into San Diego and later, coordinated with others throughout the country and then collectively moved to takeoff points for the offensive on 9/11, to the hotels and airports adjacent to the airports they took off from.

Why, the first people I would have called would have been the FBI, and I’d just call them on the encrypted phone and say, I’ve got this knowledge, you need to do something about this. And tell them who it was, where it was, and how many there were, you know. And I would have just done that, if I couldn’t get a report out. So, that’s me, though. I’m, you know, other people might not have done that. But I would.

RS: But if the U.S. government didn’t do anything about it, then they’re complicit.

WB: That’s correct. I absolutely agree.

RS: OK. So just, you know, before we wrap this up, I just want people to understand this is not Bill Binney and Robert Scheer fantasizing about something. This is, The Washington Post has obtained—

WB: No, it’s real, yeah.

RS: Yeah, they’ve attained the actual studies—

WB: Any intelligence agent, we would classify this as a black program, or a SAP, a special access program. Where only the, you know, the person is obligated only to go to at least the Gang of Eight, the ranking senior and ranking members of House and Senate, and also the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. That’s the Gang of Eight. And they didn’t have to notify anybody else beyond that.

RS: Yeah. And so it says here, again, quoting from The Washington Post analysis of this, ”From 1970 on”—that’s a good chunk, OK?—That’s the half-century. ”From 1970 on, the CIA and its code-breaking sibling, the National Security Agency”—where Bill Binney, who I’m talking to, worked for 30 years—the CIA and the National Security Agency controlled—this is The Washington Post saying this—”controlled nearly every aspect of Crypto’s operations — presiding with their German partners over hiring decisions, designing its technology, sabotaging its algorithms and directing its sales targets.” OK.

So when we say you can’t trust a Chinese company like Huawei, because they might have some ties with their government even though they are privately owned—well, who are we kidding? We had made this the norm for almost every product sold about encryption to almost every country in the world. And then with a straight face, you say trust an American product but not a Chinese product in building the 5G network, because the Chinese sabotage their machines—and the U.S. government sabotaged every one of these encryption machines that they wanted to listen to? Hello?

WB: Yeah. I mean, you know, hey, let’s take the case of the Mueller report charging the GRU agents, you know, who were supposed to be spies. So he was charging spies for being spies. And I said well, you know, the reciprocal relationship could also occur; that means that that’s—we’re going to do that; then the rest of the countries in the world should charge our spies and NSA and CIA, all of them for being spies, you know. In the same way, in the same vein, for the same reasons.

RS: Yeah. So what is going on? Have we just gotten used, we accept as normal—

WB: Yeah, this—yeah, to me, Bob, this is what—this is what countries get, what people get in the countries, once they say ”take care of me” to their government. Once you say that, and you don’t follow what your government’s doing—I mean, the reason we have a Second Amendment is to protect ourselves against our government, not a foreign one. So our founding fathers didn’t trust our own government, so why should we? But instead, what are we doing? We’re trusting them blindly, saying you know, save us, you know, take care of us. You know, don’t make me think about things that are bad, you know; I just don’t want to deal with it, you deal with it. You know, that’s what it is, and we’re leaving that all up to our government without having any effective way of oversight or validation of anything that they’re telling us. I mean, look at how many times Clapper and Alexander and all the intelligence people were in front of Congress testifying under oath and lying! You know, and getting caught at it! So, you know, that’s what we get for letting this happen. We as a country, and we as a people.

RS: So let’s have a final word, then, about Edward Snowden and his role. Because you know, again, if Edward Snowden had not shown the volume—the volume of the spying that your agency did, right? People always—huh?

WB: I invented it for them, too.

RS: Yeah. And—

WB: [Laughs] And I’m not proud of that, Bob. That’s why I speak out against it.

RS: Yeah. But I just want to cut to the chase here, because you know, right now we have a case where people, a lot of people on the liberal side don’t like Donald Trump. And there’s a lot, I would argue, not to like about Donald Trump—but there’s a Trumpwashing. You know, it’s as if everything bad started with this guy. And you know, and so if you’re against him, that lets you off the hook. You’re a good liberal, you’re a good civil libertarian, because you know, you’re arguing that he’s worse. And we’re talking about a program here that was conducted under democrats and republicans. And a program—and again, I don’t want to be lost in the weeds here. You know, because we deal a lot with this notion of American innocence: if we do it, it may be a mistake, it may be an error, but it’s in a good cause. And here is a case where every American president, certainly since 1970, knew or was informed on some level—is that a fair statement? Would they have had to know about this? Hello?

WB: Yes, that’s exactly right.

RS: OK. So every American, go look it up who the presidents were, but every American president since 1970. And certainly Jimmy Carter, a guy I happen to like, and interviewed, and respect in many ways, certainly as an ex-president. But Jimmy Carter was one of them. Every one of those presidents, not just, you know, Richard Nixon—Ford, right, go up through the whole list. Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and of course the first President Bush and the second President Bush, and Bill Clinton.

Go right through the whole list. All of them knew that when they were saying hello to the leader of almost any country in the world, that that leader did not know that their most private conversations had been made available to that American president. Talk about duplicitous. And I mean, again, Carter and Sadat—that Carter, sitting there, knew that the people briefing him from the CIA and the NSA had access to every bit of communication—or at least 50% of it, by this account—that he was sending back to his own government, his own intelligence, his own military, his own negotiators, his own diplomats. And that was taken by every American president, democrat or republican, to be the norm. That you get to spy on every other government’s most private, secret material. But if they do it to you, they become outlaw states. Isn’t that the story here?

WB: Yeah, it’s the hypocritical side of intelligence, yeah. And the flip side of it, looking at the Department of Justice and FBI and police enforcement, that what spies are doing against us is bad, but what we do against everybody else is not, it’s good. Because we are the good guys. After all, we’ll try to keep the peace in the world. And in fact, we end up giving more, starting, getting involved in more wars than we can shake a stick at, and they seem to be never ending. I mean, that’s the problem. Yep. We have a double standard on how we think; we have no real value system that’s governing everything.

RS: Well, that’s what Bobby Ray Inman, who was deputy director of the CIA in the late 1970s and early eighties, and served as director of the NSA, your agency—he was asked, do I have qualms? He said: zero. It was a very valuable source of communications, and that was it. You know, so it really goes—and then you know, I have one last point to just throw in here. People doing this, selling this equipment, installing it—when they got arrested, as in the case of this fellow in prison in Iran, our government said oh, you know, no, that has nothing—he wasn’t a spy. This guy didn’t know. He didn’t know that he was working for the CIA. He didn’t know. Yeah, he thought he was—or for the NSA. He thought he was working for a Swiss-based company that was selling encryption machines, material. And then, so when he got arrested, people all over the world said, well, that’s a terrible government. They arrested this guy, he wasn’t a spy. But he was unwittingly a spy.

And we did that to hundreds and hundreds of people. The Washington Post points out, there’s a lot of angry people who work for this company that the CIA owned. And they feel they were set up. They thought they were making machines that were good. And they didn’t know they were selling a machine that had been sabotaged to do the opposite of what people were paying for, which was to make all of their protected information instantly available to the U.S. CIA and NSA. And when others do it to us, we cry foul, but we think we have a birthright—a birthright to do that.

WB: Like I say, Bob, we wear the white hats. That’s the way people look at it.

RS: We wear the white hats. But you know, as journalists—I’m a journalist, and I really want to applaud The Washington Post. I’m not one of those who’s happy that billionaires are saving journalism, whether it be the L.A. Times or The Washington Post. I’m critical of that as a model of a free press. However, I have to admit in this case, as with the Afghanistan papers, in this case the people working there, the journalists, are still doing some really, really important journalism. So my hat’s off to them.

And, you know, let me just give a shout out, and I don’t know if I’ll ever do that anytime soon, to Jeff Bezos. Because he didn’t stop this from being published. The sad fact is, however, that this report in The Washington Post, and internationally in different papers that are outlets that work with The Washington Post, really has not gotten the attention it deserves. And I would hope that people would now, after listening to this, check it out. So thank you again, William Binney, for being an independent source of information about a very secret world that you helped create, and now sound the alarm about. Take care.

WB: Thanks, Bob.

Where Have You Gone, Smedley Butler?

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

There once lived an odd little man — five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet — who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. For all but a few activist insiders and scholars, U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a century ago, this strange contradiction of a man would become a national war hero, celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and then, 30 years later, as one of this country’s most prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents.

Raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and educated in Quaker (pacifist) schools, the son of an influential congressman, he would end up serving in nearly all of America’s “Banana Wars” from 1898 to 1931. Wounded in combat and a rare recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor, he would retire as the youngest, most decorated major general in the Marines.

A teenage officer and a certified hero during an international intervention in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900, he would later become a constabulary leader of the Haitian gendarme, the police chief of Philadelphia (while on an approved absence from the military), and a proponent of Marine Corps football. In more standard fashion, he would serve in battle as well as in what might today be labeled peacekeeping, counterinsurgency, and advise-and-assist missions in Cuba, China, the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, France, and China (again). While he showed early signs of skepticism about some of those imperial campaigns or, as they were sardonically called by critics at the time, “Dollar Diplomacy” operations — that is, military campaigns waged on behalf of U.S. corporate business interests — until he retired he remained the prototypical loyal Marine.

But after retirement, Smedley Butler changed his tune. He began to blast the imperialist foreign policy and interventionist bullying in which he’d only recently played such a prominent part. Eventually, in 1935 during the Great Depression, in what became a classic passage in his memoir, which he titled “War Is a Racket,” he wrote: “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service… And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”

Seemingly overnight, the famous war hero transformed himself into an equally acclaimed antiwar speaker and activist in a politically turbulent era. Those were, admittedly, uncommonly anti-interventionist years, in which veterans and politicians alike promoted what (for America, at least) had been fringe ideas. This was, after all, the height of what later pro-war interventionists would pejoratively label American “isolationism.”

Nonetheless, Butler was unique (for that moment and certainly for our own) in his unapologetic amenability to left-wing domestic politics and materialist critiques of American militarism. In the last years of his life, he would face increasing criticism from his former admirer, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the military establishment, and the interventionist press. This was particularly true after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland and later France. Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind, hindsight undoubtedly proved Butler’s virulent opposition to U.S. intervention in World War II wrong.

Nevertheless, the long-term erasure of his decade of antiwar and anti-imperialist activism and the assumption that all his assertions were irrelevant has proven historically deeply misguided. In the wake of America’s brief but bloody entry into the First World War, the skepticism of Butler (and a significant part of an entire generation of veterans) about intervention in a new European bloodbath should have been understandable. Above all, however, his critique of American militarism of an earlier imperial era in the Pacific and in Latin America remains prescient and all too timely today, especially coming as it did from one of the most decorated and high-ranking general officers of his time. (In the era of the never-ending war on terror, such a phenomenon is quite literally inconceivable.)

Smedley Butler’s Marine Corps and the military of his day was, in certain ways, a different sort of organization than today’s highly professionalized armed forces. History rarely repeats itself, not in a literal sense anyway. Still, there are some disturbing similarities between the careers of Butler and today’s generation of forever-war fighters. All of them served repeated tours of duty in (mostly) unsanctioned wars around the world. Butler’s conflicts may have stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to China, whereas today’s generals mostly lead missions from West Africa east to Central Asia, but both sets of conflicts seemed perpetual in their day and were motivated by barely concealed economic and imperial interests.

Nonetheless, whereas this country’s imperial campaigns of the first third of the twentieth century generated a Smedley Butler, the hyper-interventionism of the first decades of this century hasn’t produced a single even faintly comparable figure. Not one. Zero. Zilch. Why that is matters and illustrates much about the U.S. military establishment and contemporary national culture, none of it particularly encouraging.

Why No Antiwar Generals

When Smedley Butler retired in 1931, he was one of three Marine Corps major generals holding a rank just below that of only the Marine commandant and the Army chief of staff. Today, with about 900 generals and admirals currently serving on active duty, including 24 major generals in the Marine Corps alone, and with scores of flag officers retiring annually, not a single one has offered genuine public opposition to almost 19 years worth of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars. As for the most senior officers, the 40 four-star generals and admirals whose vocal antimilitarism might make the biggest splash, there are more of them today than there were even at the height of the Vietnam War, although the active military is now about half the size it was then. Adulated as many of them may be, however, not one qualifies as a public critic of today’s failing wars.

Instead, the principal patriotic dissent against those terror wars has come from retired colonels, lieutenant colonels, and occasionally more junior officers (like me), as well as enlisted service members. Not that there are many of us to speak of either. I consider it disturbing (and so should you) that I personally know just about every one of the retired military figures who has spoken out against America’s forever wars.

The big three are Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson; Vietnam veteran and onetime West Point history instructor, retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich; and Iraq veteran and Afghan War whistleblower, retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis. All three have proven to be genuine public servants, poignant voices, and — on some level — cherished personal mentors. For better or worse, however, none carry the potential clout of a retired senior theater commander or prominent four-star general offering the same critiques.

Something must account for veteran dissenters topping out at the level of colonel. Obviously, there are personal reasons why individual officers chose early retirement or didn’t make general or admiral. Still, the system for selecting flag officers should raise at least a few questions when it comes to the lack of antiwar voices among retired commanders. In fact, a selection committee of top generals and admirals is appointed each year to choose the next colonels to earn their first star. And perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that, according to numerous reports, “the members of this board are inclined, if not explicitly motivated, to seek candidates in their own image — officers whose careers look like theirs.” At a minimal level, such a system is hardly built to foster free thinkers, no less breed potential dissidents.

Consider it an irony of sorts that this system first received criticism in our era of forever wars when General David Petraeus, then commanding the highly publicized “surge” in Iraq, had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to serve as the chair of that selection committee. The reason: he wanted to ensure that a twice passed-over colonel, a protégé of his — future Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster — earned his star.

Mainstream national security analysts reported on this affair at the time as if it were a major scandal, since most of them were convinced that Petraeus and his vaunted counterinsurgency or “COINdinista” protégés and their “new” war-fighting doctrine had the magic touch that would turn around the failing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, Petraeus tried to apply those very tactics twice — once in each country — as did acolytes of his later, and you know the results of that.

But here’s the point: it took an eleventh-hour intervention by America’s most acclaimed general of that moment to get new stars handed out to prominent colonels who had, until then, been stonewalled by Cold War-bred flag officers because they were promoting different (but also strangely familiar) tactics in this country’s wars. Imagine, then, how likely it would be for such a leadership system to produce genuine dissenters with stars of any serious sort, no less a crew of future Smedley Butlers.

At the roots of this system lay the obsession of the American officer corps with “professionalization” after the Vietnam War debacle. This first manifested itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier tradition, end the draft, and create an “all-volunteer force.” The elimination of conscription, as predicted by critics at the time, created an ever-growing civil-military divide, even as it increased public apathy regarding America’s wars by erasing whatever “skin in the game” most citizens had.

More than just helping to squelch civilian antiwar activism, though, the professionalization of the military, and of the officer corps in particular, ensured that any future Smedley Butlers would be left in the dust (or in retirement at the level of lieutenant colonel or colonel) by a system geared to producing faux warrior-monks. Typical of such figures is current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley. He may speak gruffly and look like a man with a head of his own, but typically he’s turned out to be just another yes-man for another war-power-hungry president.

One group of generals, however, reportedly now does have it out for President Trump — but not because they’re opposed to endless war. Rather, they reportedly think that The Donald doesn’t “listen enough to military advice” on, you know, how to wage war forever and a day.

What Would Smedley Butler Think Today?

In his years of retirement, Smedley Butler regularly focused on the economic component of America’s imperial war policies. He saw clearly that the conflicts he had fought in, the elections he had helped rig, the coups he had supported, and the constabularies he had formed and empowered in faraway lands had all served the interests of U.S. corporate investors. Though less overtly the case today, this still remains a reality in America’s post-9/11 conflicts, even on occasion embarrassingly so (as when the Iraqi ministry of oil was essentially the only public building protected by American troops as looters tore apart the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in the post-invasion chaos of April 2003). Mostly, however, such influence plays out far more subtly than that, both abroad and here at home where those wars help maintain the record profits of the top weapons makers of the military-industrial complex.

That beast, first identified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is now on steroids as American commanders in retirement regularly move directly from the military onto the boards of the giant defense contractors, a reality which only contributes to the dearth of Butlers in the military retiree community. For all the corruption of his time, the Pentagon didn’t yet exist and the path from the military to, say, United Fruit Company, Standard Oil, or other typical corporate giants of that moment had yet to be normalized for retiring generals and admirals. Imagine what Butler would have had to say about the modern phenomenon of the “revolving door” in Washington.

Of course, he served in a very different moment, one in which military funding and troop levels were still contested in Congress. As a longtime critic of capitalist excesses who wrote for leftist publications and supported the Socialist Party candidate in the 1936 presidential elections, Butler would have found today’s nearly trillion-dollar annual defense budgets beyond belief. What the grizzled former Marine long ago identified as a treacherous nexus between warfare and capital “in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives” seems to have reached its natural end point in the twenty-first century. Case in point: the record (and still rising) “defense” spending of the present moment, including — to please a president — the creation of a whole new military service aimed at the full-scale militarization of space.

Sadly enough, in the age of Trump, as numerous polls demonstrate, the U.S. military is the only public institution Americans still truly trust. Under the circumstances, how useful it would be to have a high-ranking, highly decorated, charismatic retired general in the Butler mold galvanize an apathetic public around those forever wars of ours. Unfortunately, the likelihood of that is practically nil, given the military system of our moment.

Of course, Butler didn’t exactly end his life triumphantly. In late May 1940, having lost 25 pounds due to illness and exhaustion — and demonized as a leftist, isolationist crank but still maintaining a whirlwind speaking schedule — he checked himself into the Philadelphia Navy Yard Hospital for a “rest.” He died there, probably of some sort of cancer, four weeks later. Working himself to death in his 10-year retirement and second career as a born-again antiwar activist, however, might just have constituted the very best service that the two-time Medal of Honor winner could have given the nation he loved to the very end.

Someone of his credibility, character, and candor is needed more than ever today. Unfortunately, this military generation is unlikely to produce such a figure. In retirement, Butler himself boldly confessed that, “like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical…”

Today, generals don’t seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And more’s the pity…

In South Carolina, Sanders May Get Boost From Billionaire Steyer

SPARTANBURG, S.C. — Billionaires are the consistent villains in Bernie Sanders’ campaign narrative. He rails against what he perceives as the undue influence their wealth wields and how that contributes to the yawning inequalities of American life.

His criticisms are unsparing, and his most recent target is Mike Bloomberg, a rival for the Democratic presidential nomination and one of the world’s richest people.

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But another billionaire in the race, Tom Steyer, has largely escaped Sanders’ wrath. And perhaps with good reason: It could well be Steyer who helps propel Sanders to success in the crucial state of South Carolina.

Steyer’s aggressive courtship of black voters in the state, coupled with tens of millions of dollars in advertising, has put him in a surprisingly strong position that could siphon support from former Vice President Joe Biden. That would create a lane for Sanders that undercuts Biden’s case that South Carolina will be his electoral firewall.

Over the past few weeks, Steyer has largely had South Carolina to himself, as the most of the other candidates focused on New Hampshire and Nevada. Most of the field, including Biden and Sanders, attended a march and rally in Columbia on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Sanders hasn’t returned since, and Biden made a brief, last-minute stop the night of the New Hampshire primary.

Early polls showed Biden with a commanding lead in South Carolina, particularly among the black voters who make up as much as two-thirds of its Democratic electorate. Biden also has compiled the most endorsements from black lawmakers and other officials.

Michael Bailey, a spokesman for the Democratic Black Caucus of South Carolina, said Biden’s stout presence may have led some campaigns to think they had no path to victory in the state.

“A lot of the other candidates assumed that Biden had it wrapped up, so we’re not going to put our resources there. We’re going to battle in other states and try to make up,” Bailey said.

But Sanders has had a presence in the state since his previous campaign in 2016: an existing infrastructure from Our Revolution, a super PAC that supports him, providing a ready-made organization. In late 2018, thousands turned out to see Sanders at Our Revolution’s “Medicare for All” rally in Columbia. Each month, the group schedules meetings and has a presence at events throughout the state.

Since launching his 2020 bid, Sanders has held campaign events in rarely visited, lower-income communities and, as many candidates have done, spoken in black churches on Sundays.

“What I’ve come to understand is that he’s someone who fights social injustice,” said state Rep. Ivory Thigpen, an African American legislator who is backing Sanders. “And fighting for social injustices is in the DNA of African Americans. … My mama said a long time ago, ‘real’ crosses all barriers.”

Sanders is also getting help from an unexpected source: Republicans. Last month, a group of GOP leaders from South Carolina’s upstate region announced a push to encourage fellow Republicans to cross over and support Sanders in the Democratic primary. It was an effort to boost the candidate they see as the weakest general election matchup with President Donald Trump.

But Sanders’ biggest help may be Steyer’s money. He has spent more than $60 million on ads in the state and has doled out more than $300,000 to support Democratic Parties at the state and county levels, according to his campaign, and has also forged inroads particularly in the black community. On Monday, a fifth member of the Legislative Black Caucus officially endorsed Steyer. Two others, including the caucus chair, are on his campaign’s payroll as senior advisers.

Some of that support, said one longtime state lawmaker, can be seen as cutting into Biden’s appeal to moderate black voters, a move that could be making room for Sanders’ more progressive backers.

“I think that he’s creating space for others and narrowing the lane,” said state Sen. Gerald Malloy, an unaffiliated member of South Carolina’s Legislative Black Caucus. “Tom Steyer has the willingness to reach out to minority voters in ways that other candidates can’t or haven’t.”

For Bailey, Steyer’s candidacy was garnering more support than just from disaffected Biden supporters.

“I don’t think it’s just that he’s taking votes away from the vice president — he’s taking votes from everybody, and he’s bringing new voters to the polls,” he said.

Some of Steyer’s efforts have been unconventional. His wife, Kat Taylor, recently rented a home in Columbia, where she has hosted several open houses and plans to use as an East Coast base of operations as long as her husband is in the presidential race.

“I’ve said from the beginning, if you want to be a Democratic candidate for president, you’ve got to appeal to everybody across the country, and you’ve got to appeal to the diverse Democratic Party coalition,” Steyer said after a campaign block party earlier this month in Winnsboro, a small, central South Carolina town. “South Carolina has a big African American population, it’s a critical state, and so it’s really important to anybody who cares about the Democratic Party and wants to represent this party.”

But part of the appeal, said both Malloy and Charles Steele, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is also issue-based, in no small part because of Steyer’s repeated mentions of his support both for reparations and for funding for historically black colleges and universities. For Steele, Steyer’s motivation to take on such topics seemed to be driven by a force more powerful than politics.

“To hear Mr. Steyer talk about HBCUs, and to talk about reparations, is something that’s divinely said, that came from heaven,” said Steele, who says he isn’t officially endorsing Steyer but has appeared on the campaign trail with him in South Carolina. “He didn’t say that from flesh and blood because many people run from that issue.”

With less than two weeks until the primary, voters are taking note. Waiting on Steyer at an environmental justice event on Monday, Malina Butler, a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of South Carolina-Upstate, said she had initially been a supporter of Sanders, whose candidacy she saw as exciting, but without the substance she wants.

“I like the crowd and hype, but at the end of the day, I still need to know who you are,” Butler said.

Told about Steyer by her mother, who is “all in” for his candidacy, Butler said she wasn’t really interested in Biden, saying it wasn’t enough just to have served with President Barack Obama.

“People my age, they like him because he was with Obama, and I feel like that’s not really saying much,” she said.

Johnnie Cordero, the chairman of the Democratic Black Caucus of South Carolina and a Steyer supporter, said this week that what he sees as Steyer’s momentum shows that candidates shouldn’t be taking any support for granted.

“Anybody who comes into South Carolina thinking that they have the vote is in for a rude awakening — and we know who that refers to,” he said.

___

Associated Press writer Tom Foreman Jr. contributed to this report from Columbia, S.C.