Chris Hedges's Blog, page 30

Trump’s Trying to Ride the Pentagon to Reelection

Donald Trump likes to posture as a tough guy and part of that tough-guy persona involves bragging about how much he’s spent on the U.S. military. This tendency was on full display in a tweet he posted three days after an American drone killed Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad:

“The United States just spent Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment. We are the biggest and by far the BEST in the World! If Iran attacks an American Base, or any American, we will be sending some of that brand new beautiful equipment their way… and without hesitation!”

That tweet was as much a message to the American public as to Iran’s rulers. Its subtext: that Donald J. Trump (and he alone) has restored the U.S. military to greatness after two terms of neglect under the less-than-watchful eye of Barack Obama, that he’s not afraid to use it, and that he deserves credit for everything he’s done, which means, of course, widespread political support. Never mind that Washington has “only” spent about one-third of his claimed $2 trillion on military equipment since he took office and that Pentagon spending reached a post-World War II record high in the Obama years. No surprise there: Trump has never let the facts get in the way of a good story he’s dying to tell.

He has, by the way, made similar claims to his most important audience of all: his donors. At a January 17th get-together with key supporters at Mar-a-Lago, his lavish Florida resort, he bragged that Pentagon spending had increased by $2.5 trillion on his watch. In fact, that figure is closer to total Pentagon spending in the Trump years. For his claim to be accurate, the Pentagon budget would have had to be $0 in January 2017 when he entered the Oval Office. Still, however outlandish what he says about the military may be, the underlying theme remains remarkably consistent: I’m the guy who’s funding our military like never before, so you should keep supporting me big time.

Don’t get me wrong. In collaboration with Congress, Donald Trump has indeed boosted the Pentagon budget to near-record levels. At $738 billion this year alone, it’s already substantially higher than U.S. spending at the peaks of the Korean and Vietnam Wars or during the Reagan military buildup of the 1980s. It’s more than the total amount spent by the next seven nations in the world combined (five of which are U.S. allies). Only Donald Trump could manage to distort, misstate, and exaggerate sums that are already beyond belief in the service of an inflated self-image and ambitious political objectives.

Political Manipulation and “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs”

President Trump’s recent antics should come as no surprise. His use of Pentagon spending and military assistance for political gain has been hiding in plain sight since he entered the Oval Office. After all, that’s what the impeachment charges against him were all about. He was manipulating U.S. military aid to Ukraine to strong-arm its government into generating dirt on Joe Biden whom Trump, obsessed by poll numbers, saw at the time as his most threatening rival.

And don’t forget the president’s penchant for dipping into the Pentagon budget to pay for his cherished wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, a vanity project that plays extremely well with his political base. So far, he’s proposed taking $13.3 billion from the Defense Department’s budget to fund that “big, fat, beautiful wall,” $6.1 billion of which has already been granted to him. For good measure, Trump pushed the Pentagon to award a $400 million contract for building part of the wall to Fisher Sand and Gravel, a North Dakota firm owned by one of his donors.

For Trump, the Ukraine scandal and the wall aside, the real politics of Pentagon spending — that is, of translating military dollars into potential votes in 2020 — will come, he hopes, from his relentless touting of the alleged jobs being generated by weapons production. His initial major foray into portraying the buying and selling of arms as a jobs program for the American people occurred during a May 2017 trip to Saudi Arabia, his first foreign visit as president. He promptly announced a $110 billion arms deal with the Saudi regime that would, he swore, mean “jobs, jobs, jobs” in the United States.

In reality, the agreement itself — and the jobs to come from it — were both far less than advertised, but the message was clear enough: this country’s deal-maker extraordinaire was selling weapons over there and bringing jobs back in a major way to the good old U.S. of A. Even though many of the vaunted arms deals he boasted about had been reached during the Obama years, he had, he insisted, gotten the Saudis to pay through the nose for weaponry that would put staggering numbers of Americans to work.

The Saudi gambit was planned well in advance. In the middle of a meeting with a Saudi delegation in a reception room next door to the White House, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner suddenly called Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson. He asked her about a missile-defense system the administration wanted to include in the mega-arms package the president was planning to announce during his upcoming visit to the Kingdom. According to a New York Times account of the meeting, the Saudis’ jaws dropped when Kushner dialed up Hewson in front of them. They were amazed that things actually worked that way in Trump’s America. That call apparently did the trick, as the Lockheed missile-defense system was indeed incorporated into the arms deal to come.

The arms-sales-equals-jobs drumbeat continued when Trump returned home from his foreign travels, most notably in a March 2018 White House meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. There, in front of TV cameras, the president brandished a map showing where tens of thousands of U.S. jobs linked to those Saudi arms deals would supposedly be created. Many of them were concentrated in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan that had provided his margin of victory in the 2016 election.

His trumpeting of employment linked to Saudi arms sales went further over the top when he claimed that more than half a million American jobs were tied to the sales his administration had negotiated. The real number is expected to be less than a tenth of that total and well under .03% of the U.S. labor force of more than 164 million people.

Much as Trump would like Americans to believe that U.S. weapons transfers to the brutal Saudi dictatorship are a boon to the economy, they are, in reality, barely a blip on the radar screen of total national employment. The question, of course, is whether enough voters will believe the president’s Saudi arms fairy tale to give him a bump in support.

Even after the Saudi regime’s murder of journalist and critic Jamal Khashoggi, the president continued to argue that the revenues from those arms deals were a reason to avoid a political rupture with that nation. Unlike on so many other issues, Trump’s claims on arms sales and jobs are maddeningly consistent, if also maddeningly off the mark.

Trump to Ohio: “You Better Love Me”

Perhaps the president’s most blatant linkage of Pentagon spending-related jobs to his political future came in a March 2019 speech at an Army tank plant in Lima, Ohio. After a round of “U.S.A! U.S.A.!” chants from the assembled crowd, Trump got right down to it:

“Well, you better love me; I kept this place open, that I can tell you. [Applause.] They said, ‘We’re closing it.’ And I said, ‘No we’re not.’ And now you’re doing record business… And I’m thrilled to be here in Ohio with the hardworking men and women of Lima.”

Of course, the president wasn’t actually responsible for keeping the plant open. In the early 2010s, the Army had a plan to put that plant on “mothball” status for a few years because it already had 6,000 tanks — far more than it needed. But that plan had been ditched before Trump ever took office in no small part due to bipartisan pressure from the Ohio congressional delegation.

Misleading statements aside, the Lima plant is doing just fine at a time when the Pentagon budget is running at nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars per year, and Trump is capitalizing on it. He repeatedly returned to the jobs argument in his Lima speech, and even reeled off a list of other parts of the country involved in tank production:

“Our investment will also support thousands of additional jobs across our nation to assemble these incredible Abrams tanks. The engines are from Alabama, transmissions are from Indiana, special armor from Idaho, and the 120-millimeter gun — and the gun parts from upstate New York and from Pennsylvania. All great places. In Ohio alone, almost 200 suppliers churn out parts and materials that go into every tank that rolls off this factory’s floor. Incredible.”

Trump may not be able to find all the places in which the U.S. is at war on a map, but he’s made a point of getting well briefed on where the money that fuels the U.S. war machine goes, because he views that information as essential to his political fortunes in 2020.

The Domestic Economics of Weapons Spending

What Trump failed to mention in his Lima speech is that much of America is not heavily dependent on Pentagon weapons outlays. The F-35 combat aircraft, the most expensive weapons system in history and widely touted as a major job creator, is a case in point. The plane’s producer, Lockheed Martin, claims that the project has created 125,000 jobs spread over 45 states. The reality is far less impressive. My own analysis suggests that the F-35 program produces less than half as many jobs as Lockheed claims and that more than half of them are located in just two states — California and Texas. In fact, many of them are located overseas.

Most states are not heavily dependent on Pentagon spending. According to that institution’s own figures, in 39 of the 50 states less than 3% of the economy is tied to it. In other words, 97% or more of the economic activity in most of the country has nothing to do with such spending.

In reality, despite the dreams and claims of the president, the national economy as a whole, as well as the economies of the vast majority of states, would be far better off if Pentagon spending were reduced and the funds freed up were invested elsewhere. That’s because it’s actually a particularly poor job creator. Spending on infrastructure or green-energy projects, for example, would create one and one-half times as many jobs as Pentagon spending does. Putting the same money into the public education system would create roughly twice as many jobs. In 2019, in a paper for Brown University’s Costs of War Project, Heidi Peltier showed that shifting $125 billion per year from the Pentagon to green manufacturing would result in a net increase of 250,000 jobs nationwide.

As for places that do depend on Pentagon dollars in a significant way, recent polling shows that even residents of those areas are willing to support cuts in the Department of Defense’s bloated budget. Writing in the Nation, Guy Saperstein of the New Ideas Fund and Ploughshares Fund President Joe Cirincione note: “Our polling suggests that the majority of voters will still call for cuts in Pentagon spending even if it affects their local communities, both because they believe their communities will recover and the money could be spent in more productive ways in the long run.”

That sentiment was remarkably strong in such communities, with 77% of poll participants agreeing with the statement that “members of Congress who use the Pentagon budget to send more jobs to their districts should find ways to support their local economies by building things that actually improve people’s lives.”

The best option for creating alternative jobs for workers displaced by a reduction in Pentagon spending is large-scale investment in green energy and sustainable infrastructure. Not only could a comprehensive Green New Deal create millions of new jobs, but it would provide employment across a broad range of occupations, potentially absorbing workers from defense, coal, and other industries. The only issue is political will, no small problem in Washington in the Trump years. Even a progressive president would undoubtedly encounter serious difficulty enacting such changes if the Senate remains in Republican hands after the 2020 elections.

Will Trump’s Gamble Work?

Donald Trump isn’t the first president to try to parlay Pentagon funding into political support, but he’s been more aggressive and systematic in his efforts than any president in memory. That doesn’t necessarily mean the ploy will work. Admittedly, there are high profile weapons projects in key swing states like Ohio (tanks), Pennsylvania (artillery), and Wisconsin (combat ships and armored vehicles). Still, in 2020, many voters are visibly looking for more than just business as usual, as evidenced by significant support for initiatives like the Green New Deal.

Running as the candidate of the military-industrial complex while ignoring urgent problems like climate change may not prove to be the magic formula for political success Trump expects it to be. That could be especially true if his opponents put forward concrete plans to create new non-military jobs in areas particularly dependent on the Pentagon budget.

Ten months from now we’ll know whether Trump’s attempt to ride the Pentagon to reelection was a wise gamble or ultimate foolishness. In the meantime, tax dollars going into the U.S. military continue to rise.

Sanders Nabs New Hampshire In Major Boost to Campaign

Sen. Bernie Sanders was declared the winner of the presidential Democratic primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday night less than three hours after polls closed in the Granite State—a victory seen as a massive boost for the campaign of the U.S. senator from Vermont and one which comes on the heels of winning the popular vote in the Iowa caucus last week.

Major news outlets—including the Associated Press, CNN, and NBC News—called the race for Sanders just before 11:00pm ET.

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At his victory rally in Manchester, Sanders said, “Our victory tonight is the beginning of the end for Donald Trump.” He added that his campaign is “not just about defeating Trump, but transforming this country” by building a mass, multi-racial and multi-generational working class movement to overthrow the status quo.

“Tonight New Hampshire sent a message that working people are ready for a political revolution in this country. This is what it will take to defeat Donald Trump,” Sanders declared. “This victory isn’t about me; it’s about us. Tonight is about what our supporters, volunteers and grassroots donors built in New Hampshire.”

Watch Sanders’ victory speech:

As of this writing, with 85% of precincts reporting, Sanders was declared the winner with approximately 25.8% of the vote.

We just won the New Hampshire primary. What we have done together here is nothing short of the beginning of a political revolution. Join us live at our primary night rally in Manchester! https://t.co/OmKd1xIumv

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 12, 2020

Sanders had polled well going into the state’s primary, a contest he also won in 2016. But after the fiasco in Iowa last week—when inconsistencies and errors in reporting denied Sanders the ability to claim victory on the night of the election—there was pressure on the senator to perform well in New Hampshire.

Update: we won an incredible against-the-odds victory, despite all the elites trying to stop us, despite all the corporate power trying to destroy us, and despite all the naysayers on this website trying as hard as they can to demoralize us. Onward. https://t.co/KBe7pOvm2j

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) February 12, 2020

James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute and a prominent Sanders supporter, expressed elation. “I can feel the momentum heading West to Nevada, South to South Carolina, and then on to Super Tuesday,” Zogby tweeted. “We’re going to win this thing!”

Hey everyone, Bernie is 2-0 https://t.co/T2rluvxdVY

— Carl Beijer (@CarlBeijer) February 12, 2020

“I can feel the momentum heading West to Nevada, South to South Carolina, and then on to Super Tuesday. We’re going to win this thing!”

—James Zogby, Sanders supporterBehind Sanders—though results were being tallied and subject to shift as precincts continued to report—was former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg in second place (24.4%), Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota in third (19.8%), Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts in fourth (9.3%), and former Vice President Joe Biden (8.4%)—who has so far in the race been considered the party frontrunner—coming in fifth.

Shortly before the contest was called, NBC News reported that neither Biden nor Warren would meet the necessary threshold to win any pledged delegates for the Democratic National Convention later this year.

new NBC projection: Warren & Biden will be under 15% statewide AND in both congressional districts.

that would mean 0 national pledged delegates for them; Sanders, Buttigieg, Klobuchar would split the 24 available delegates.

— Taniel (@Taniel) February 12, 2020

Meanwhile, as the results came, two candidates—both Sen. Michael Bennet and Andrew Yang—announced they were suspending their campaigns.

Thank you @AndrewYang for running an issue-focused campaign and working to bring new voters into the political process. I look forward to working together to defeat the corruption and bigotry of Donald Trump.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 12, 2020

According to early metrics and exit poll reporting, it appears Sanders was propelled to victory with the help of first-time and younger voters, which make up a large part of his energetic base, but also had strong results across demographics and in precincts located in various parts of the state.

Sanders Seeks N.H. Win as Democrats Cull Presidential Field

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Polls closed across New Hampshire Tuesday night as fiery progressive Bernie Sanders fought for Democratic front-runner status in the first-in-the-nation primary. The party hoped for results that would bring some clarity to a presidential nomination fight that has so far been marred by dysfunction and doubt.

As Sanders predicted victory, former Mayor Pete Buttigieg hoped to seize the backing of his party’s establishment with a strong finish. Joe Biden wanted to avert political disaster after leaving the state hours before the final polls closed at 8 p.m.

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New Hampshire began culling the Democrats’ unwieldy 2020 class even before the final results were known. Political newcomer Andrew Yang, having attracted a small but loyal following over the last year, was suspending his campaign. So was Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, who ran as a just-the-facts moderate in a race in which liberal candidates grabbed the headlines.

“Tonight is not the outcome we fought so hard to achieve. It is bitterly disappointing for many of us, but it shouldn’t be,” Yang told supporters in New Hampshire, noting that he outlasted several senators, governors and congressmen.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, among the front-runners for months, was doing poorly in early results but told cheering supporters, “Our campaign is built for the long haul, and we are just getting started.”

She said Sanders and Buttigieg are “both great candidates,” and congratulated “my friend and colleague” Amy Klobuchar who was having her strongest night so far.

Still, nine candidates remained in the competition for the chance to take on President Donald Trump this fall. Tuesday’s contest comes just eight days after Iowa caucuses injected chaos into the race and failed to report a clear winner.

While the action was on the Democratic side, Trump easily won New Hampshire’s Republican primary. He was facing token opposition from former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld.

New Hampshire Democrats headed into Tuesday’s primary with a focus on matters of fairness.

Just over 1 in 10 said they were “very confident” that their party’s process for choosing a presidential nominee was fair, according to a wide-ranging AP VoteCast survey. At the same time, nearly 8 in 10 also viewed the economy as unfair, although there was little consensus on which candidate would do the best job of stewarding the world’s largest economy.

For Sanders, the New Hampshire primary was an opportunity to build on his dominance of the party’s left flank. A repeat of his strong showing in Iowa could severely damage progressive rival Warren, who faced the prospect of an embarrassing defeat in a state that borders her home of Massachusetts.

While Sanders marches forward, moderates are struggling to unite behind a candidate. After essentially tying with Sanders for first place in Iowa, Buttigieg, the 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, began his day as the centrist front-runner. But Klobuchar was mounting a spirited bid for the same voters.

Having already predicted he would “take a hit” in New Hampshire after a distant fourth-place finish in Iowa, Biden was essentially ceding the state. He was traveling to South Carolina Tuesday as he bet his candidacy on a strong showing there later this month boosted by support from black voters.

More than a year after Democrats began announcing their presidential candidacies, the party is struggling to coalesce behind a message or a messenger in its desperate quest to defeat Trump. That raised the stakes of the New Hampshire primary as voters weighed whether candidates were too liberal, too moderate or too inexperienced — vulnerabilities that could play to Trump’s advantage in the fall.

Some candidates sought to undercut the importance of the New Hampshire election, but history suggested otherwise. No Democrat has ever become the party’s presidential nominee without finishing first or second in New Hampshire.

Democrats were closely monitoring how many people showed up for Tuesday’s contest. New Hampshire’s secretary of state predicated record-high turnout, but if that failed to materialize, Democrats would confront the prospect of waning enthusiasm following a relatively weak showing in Iowa last week and Trump’s rising poll numbers.

Trump, campaigning in New Hampshire Monday night, sought to inject chaos in the process. The Republican president suggested that conservative-leaning voters could affect the state’s Democratic primary results, though only registered Democrats and voters not registered with either party can participate in New Hampshire’s Democratic presidential primary.

“I hear a lot of Republicans tomorrow will vote for the weakest candidate possible of the Democrats,” Trump said Monday. “My only problem is I’m trying to figure out who is their weakest candidate. I think they’re all weak.”

Trump also attacked Michael Bloomberg, who was showing signs of strength in polling around the country but wasn’t on the New Hampshire ballot. The president highlighted Bloomberg’s comments during a 2015 appearance at the Aspen Institute in which he said the way to bring down murder rates was to “put a lot of cops” in minority neighborhoods because that’s where “all the crime is.”

Biden — and the Democratic Party’s establishment wing — may have the most to lose in New Hampshire should the former two-term vice president underperform in a second consecutive primary election. Biden has earned the overwhelming share of endorsements from elected officials across the nation as party leaders seek a relatively “safe” nominee to run against Trump.

Biden’s campaign sought to cast New Hampshire as one small step in the path to the presidential nomination, with contests coming up in more diverse states that award more delegates including Nevada and South Carolina, where Biden hopes to retain his advantage among minority voters.

“Regardless of what happens on Tuesday, we plan to move forward,” Biden senior adviser Symone Sanders said.

The stakes were dire for Warren as well in a contest set just next door to her Massachusetts home. She has positioned herself as a mainstream alternative to Bernie Sanders but is suddenly looking up at him and Buttigieg as Klobuchar fights to peel away female support.

Warren released an afternoon memo seeking to downplay New Hampshire’s results. Campaign manager Roger Lau outlined a “path to victory” through 30-plus states where the campaign has paid staff on the ground as he highlighted alleged weaknesses in Warren’s Democratic rivals.

Buttigieg, young and with no governing experience beyond the mayor’s office, is trying to emerge as the leading Biden alternative for his party’s moderate wing. He has aggressively courted moderate Democrats, independents and what he calls “future former Republicans” as he tries to cobble together a winning coalition, just as he did in Iowa, where he finished in a near tie with Sanders for the lead.

In the days leading up to Tuesday’s primary, Buttigieg has come under increasing attack from Biden and Klobuchar, who seized on his lack of experience. And from the left, Sanders attacked Buttigieg’s reliance on big-dollar donors, which sparked jeers of “Wall Street Pete” from Sanders’ supporters.

After New Hampshire, the political spotlight shifts to Nevada, where Democrats will hold caucuses on Feb. 22. But several candidates, including Warren and Sanders, plan to visit states in the coming days that vote on Super Tuesday, signaling they are in the race for the long haul.

___

Steve Peoples reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Will Weissert, Holly Ramer and Thomas Beaumont contributed from New Hampshire.

Actor Jussie Smollett Faces 6 New Charges in Chicago

CHICAGO — Actor Jussie Smollett was indicted Tuesday for a second time on charges of lying to police about a racist and anti-gay attack he allegedly staged on himself last year in downtown Chicago.

The indictment came from a special prosecutor who was appointed after Cook County prosecutors dropped the same charges last March.

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Special prosecutor Dan Webb said in a statement that Smollett faces six counts of disorderly conduct, charges that stem from four separate false reports that he gave to police in which he contended he was a victim of a hate crime “knowing that he was not the victim of a crime.”

Smollett, who is black and gay, was originally charged with disorderly conduct last February for allegedly staging the attack and lying about it to investigators. The allegations were dropped the following month with little explanation, angering police officials and then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Tina Glandian, Smollett’s attorney, did not immediately return a call for comment Tuesday.

Smollett told police he was walking home early on Jan. 29, 2019, when two masked men approached him, made racist and homophobic insults, beat him and looped a noose around his neck before fleeing. He said his assailants, at least one of whom he described as white, told him he was in “MAGA country” — a reference to President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

Several weeks later, authorities alleged that Smollett had paid two black friends $3,500 to help him stage the attack because he was unhappy with his salary as an actor on “Empire” and wanted to drum up publicity for his career.

A judge in August appointed Webb, a former U.S. attorney, as a special prosecutor to look into why the original charges were dropped. Webb also was looking into whether calls that Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx had with a Smollett relative and a former aide of former first lady Michelle Obama unduly influenced the decision to drop charges. Foxx recused herself from the case but continued to weigh in.

At the time, Judge Michael Toomin, who assigned the case to Webb, raised the possibility that Smollett could be charged again.

In his news release, Webb said he concluded that prosecuting Smollett was “in the interest of justice” for a number of reasons, including the extensive details of Smollett’s false account as well as the resources that the police department threw at the investigation.

Attorneys and the judge noted that in Smollett’s case, double jeopardy does not apply because he was never prosecuted.

The city has sued Smollett, seeking reimbursement of more than $130,000 for overtime paid to officers who were involved in investigating Smollett’s report. Smollett’s attorneys have said the city should not be allowed to recover costs from Smollett because it accepted $10,000 from the actor “as payment in full in connection with the dismissal of the charges against him.”

Smollett’s case has become an issue in Foxx’s bid for a second term. Those looking to unseat the first black woman to hold the county’s highest law enforcement position, have blasted her handling of the matter as haphazard and indecisive. They say it indicates she has bad judgment and favors the rich and powerful in deciding who will be prosecuted.

Foxx’s campaign committee issued a biting statement Tuesday referring to former FBI Director James Comey’s decision to briefly reopen an investigation into Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s email shortly before the presidential election in 2016 that Donald Trump would win.

“What’s questionable here is the James Comey-like timing of that charging decision” … which can only be interpreted as the further politicization of the justice system, something voters in the era of Donald Trump should consider offensive,” the statement from Friends for Foxx said.

Smollett has not had any notable film or television roles announced since his departure from the Fox series was announced in April 2019. Producers have the option to bring him back during the sixth and final season but have said they have no plans to do so.

“Empire” has 10 episodes left. It is scheduled to return on March 3.

Michael Bloomberg’s Defense of Racist Policing Unearthed in Leaked Audio

In November, Michael Bloomberg visited the Christian Cultural Center, a large, predominantly black church in Brooklyn, New York, to make an apology. “I got something important wrong,” Bloomberg said. He was referring to stop-and-frisk, a policy that studies show disproportionately impacted black and Latino communities, which were most often targeted by the New York City Police Department.

Bloomberg began began the speech — which Gothamist, a New York City news site, pointed out was just twelve minutes long — by touting the decline in city murders during the Bloomberg administration. He also referenced what he saw as improved police-community relations, and black residents’ positive view of the NYPD.

The apology, and the speech as a whole, played down not only the impacts of stop-and-frisk enforcement during Bloomberg’s mayoral tenure, but how fiercely he defended the policy for years afterward. One of those earlier defenses began circulating widely on social media Tuesday morning after a recording was released from a speech Bloomberg gave at the Aspen Institute in 2015. Benjamin Dixon, a podcast host, posted an audio clip of the speech with the hashtag #BloombergIsARacist.

Audio of @MikeBloomberg’s 2015 @AspenInstitute speech where he explains that “you can just Xerox (copy)” the description of male, minorities 16-25 and hand to cops.

Bloomberg had video of speech blocked.

Perhaps because of the problematic explanation he gives for #StopAndFrisk pic.twitter.com/Fm0YCi4ZRy

— Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) February 10, 2020

“Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O.,” Bloomberg said in the speech. “You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city.”

His speech also included offensive remarks regarding minority youth and guns: “These kids think they’re going to get killed anyway because all their friends are getting killed,” Bloomberg said. “So they just don’t have any long-term focus or anything. It’s a joke to have a gun. It’s a joke to pull a trigger.” He added, “And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them.”

He must have sensed afterward that his remarks wouldn’t go over well. The Aspen Times reported at the time that Bloomberg representatives “have asked the Aspen Institute not to distribute footage of his recent appearance in Aspen, where the three-term New York City mayor made pointed comments concerning minorities and gun control.”

As Gothamist explained in November, this speech was not an anomaly, but part of a pattern of defending discriminatory policing practices:

The three-term mayor was not some passive actor granting tacit authority to his police department to continue the stops—he made strident, threatening, and at sometimes bizarre public pronouncements about why New Yorkers needed stop and frisk, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, and a federal judge’s ruling that it was unconstitutional. Even after mayor-elect Bill de Blasio pledged to end the City’s appeal of that ruling, Bloomberg spent taxpayer resources fighting it until the day he left office.

In a statement Tuesday morning, Bloomberg responded to pushback surrounding the recording’s release. “By the time I left office, I cut it [stop-and-frisk] back by 95%, but I should’ve done it faster and sooner. I regret that and I have apologized — and I have taken responsibility for taking too long to understand the impact it had on Black and Latino communities,” he said.

4 Lawyers Quit Case After DOJ Decision on Stone Prison Time

WASHINGTON — Four lawyers who prosecuted Roger Stone quit the case Tuesday after the Justice Department said it would take the extraordinary step of lowering the amount of prison time it would seek for President Donald Trump’s longtime ally and confidant.

The decision by the Justice Department came just hours after Trump complained that the recommended sentence for Stone was “very horrible and unfair.” The Justice Department said the sentencing recommendation was made Monday night — before Trump’s tweet — and prosecutors had not spoken to the White House about it.

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The four attorneys, including two who were early members of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia team, had made up the Justice Department’s trial team and had signed onto a Monday court filing that recommended up to nine years in prison for Stone.

The department’s decision to back off the sentencing recommendation raised questions about political interference and whether Trump’s views hold unusual sway over the Justice Department, which is meant to operate independently of the White House in criminal investigations and prosecutions.

Attorney General William Barr has been a steady ally of Trump’s, clearing the president of obstruction of justice even when special counsel Robert Mueller had pointedly declined to do so and declaring that the FBI’s Russia investigation — which resulted in charges against Stone — had been based on a “bogus narrative.”

On Monday night, prosecutors had recommended Stone serve seven to nine years behind bars after being convicted of charges including lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing the House investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to tip the 2016 election. The recommendation raised the prospect that Stone could receive the harshest sentence of any of the half-dozen Trump aides charged in Mueller’s probe.

In a tweet early Tuesday, Trump said the case against Stone was a “miscarriage of justice.” A Justice Department official said authorities decided to step in and seek a shorter sentence because they had been taken by surprise by the initial recommendation. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said prosecutors had told the department to expect a shorter recommendation.

It is extremely rare for Justice Department leaders to reverse the decision of its own prosecutors on a sentencing recommendation, particularly after that recommendation has been submitted to the court. Normally, United States attorneys have wide latitude to recommend sentences on cases that they prosecuted.

The departures came abruptly after the decision by Justice. Jonathan Kravis resigned his position as an assistant U.S. attorney. He had been a veteran prosecutor in Washington, and though not part of Robert Mueller’s original team, was nonetheless involved in multiple cases brought by the special counsel’s office. Besides the Stone prosecution, Kravis had also signed onto the case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, which resolved with a guilty plea, and against a Russian troll farm accused of sponsoring a cover social media campaign aimed at dividing public opinion during the 2016 presidential election.

Aaron Zelinsky quit the case and his job in Washington, and would go back to his job as a federal prosecutor in Baltimore. He was working there when he was selected in 2017 for the Mueller team.

He was involved in cases aimed at determining what knowledge the Trump campaign had about Democratic emails that were hacked by Russia and what efforts Trump aides made to get information about them. He was also involved in the prosecution of George Papadopoulos, the former Trump campaign aide who played a critical role in the FBI launching its investigation in the summer of 2016.

A third prosecutor, Adam Jed, who was an early member of Mueller’s team, also withdrew from the case. His status at the Justice Department was not clear. Before joining Mueller’s team, he worked on civil cases there.

By Tuesday evening, a fourth prosecutor, Michael Marando, had left the case.

After the attorneys quit the case, Justice Department officials filed a revised sentencing memorandum with the judge, arguing its initial recommendation could be “considered excessive and unwarranted under the circumstances,” but that it would defer to the court. None of the original prosecutors in Stone’s case signed onto the revised memo.

Sentencing decisions are ultimately up to the judge, who in this case may side with the original recommendation. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson has repeatedly scolded Stone for his out-of-court behavior, which included a social media post he made of the judge with what appeared to be crosshairs of a gun.

The judge barred Stone from social media last July after concluding that she repeatedly flouted his gag order.

Meanwhile, Democrats decried the decision, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer calling for an investigation by the DOJ’s Inspector General.

“The rule of law and this grand, grand tradition of this wonderful Justice Department is being totally perverted to Donald Trumps’ own personal desires and needs,” the New York Democrat said. “And it’s a disgrace.’’

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said it would be a blatant abuse of power if the Justice Department intervened on behalf of Trump.

“Doing so would send an unmistakable message that President Trump will protect those who lie to Congress to cover up his own misconduct, and that the Attorney General will join him in that effort,” the California Democrat said.

Trump later told reporters that he didn’t speak to Justice officials. “I would be able to do it if I wanted,” he said. “I have the absolute right to do it. I stay out of things to a degree that people wouldn’t believe, but I didn’t speak to them.”

Federal prosecutors also recently softened their sentencing position on former national security adviser Michael Flynn, saying that they would not oppose a probation of punishment after initially saying that he deserved up to six months in prison for lying to the FBI. The Flynn prosecution is also being handled by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington.

In the the initial memorandum Monday evening, prosecutors asked for Stone to serve between 87 and 108 months in federal prison — the sentence they said was in line with federal guidelines. Such a sentence would send a message to deter others who might consider lying or obstructing a congressional probe or tampering with witnesses, they said.

The prosecutors wrote in the court papers that “Stone’s actions were not a one-off mistake in judgement” and that he “decided to double – and triple – down on his criminal conduct by tampering with a witness for months in order to make sure his obstruction would be successful.”

Stone has denied wrongdoing and consistently criticized the case against him as politically motivated. He did not take the stand during his trial and his lawyers did not call any witnesses in his defense.

Witnesses in the case testified that Trump’s campaign viewed Stone as an “access point” to the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks, which was in possession of more than 19,000 emails hacked from the servers of the Democratic National Committee and tried to use him to get advance word about hacked emails damaging to Hillary Clinton.

Prosecutors charged that Stone lied to Congress about his conversations about WikiLeaks with New York radio host Randy Credico — who had scored an interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2016 — and conservative writer and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi.

___

AP writer Jill Colvin contributed to this report.

Nevada Could Be the Iowa Caucus Fiasco Redux

As new details emerge about what went wrong with the Iowa Democratic Party’s vote counting meltdown in its presidential caucuses, the Nevada State Democratic Party is racing to replace the app that failed in Iowa with new and untested online voting tools in its caucus on February 22—a scenario suggesting some difficulties seen in Iowa may resurface.

Meanwhile, in Iowa, where Bernie Sanders’ campaign has said it will seek a partial “re-canvass” (recount) after the IDP announced that Pete Buttigieg would probably receive 14 national convention delegates and Sanders would receive 12 delegates, the IDP has said that it will not be looking at the ballots (voter-signed presidential preference cards). Instead, the IDP will examine the summary sheets of vote totals signed by the caucus chair and campaign precinct captains, even though the New York Times has reported inaccuracies on those worksheets. That discrepancy implies that questions about the IDP’s vote counting will linger.

In other words, as party-run contests in Iowa continue and are poised to take the stage in Nevada, the riskiest, most controversial and possibly least assuring aspects of these 2020 elections are coming from decisions made by state party officials. These officials tend to be younger and more confident than skeptical of digital technology, and have sided with their vendors more than outside experts.

That state party role has not been recognized in the most detailed press reports offering explanations or more conspiratorial reports casting blame about Iowa’s meltdown. Yet top party officials in both states have resisted warnings from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) about the risks of debuting new digital voting systems. Those warnings have come from the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC), which oversees state delegate selection plans, the DNC’s technology staff, and an expert advisory board created by the DNC staff.

The RBC’s 2020 rules envisioned caucus states offering a remote participation option to voters who could not be physically present at the caucuses. But as the months progressed and the details of that system raised reliability and security concerns, the RBC reversed course. In late August, it rejected plans by Iowa and Nevada to offer voters a telephone keypad-based voting option. At the time, the RBC also warned these two states about using online voting systems.

However, Nevada and Iowa pressed ahead with retooling some of their digital voting systems, saying that these would be used by party officials and volunteers, not by voters. The states could push the edge of the envelope because the RBC has limited jurisdiction over how state party-run contests use technology.

“The Rules Committee jurisdiction has never involved counting the votes, because most of the time it is done by state law” affecting government-run party primaries, said Elaine Kamarck, an RBC member from Massachusetts and presidential scholar who said the panel’s main job is overseeing state plans to allocate delegates to the Democratic National Convention. “It never occurred to us to get into the business of [overseeing] vote counting.”

Thus, tech-friendly state party officials, more so in Nevada than Iowa, had a loophole of sorts and pressed on. The fact that state parties, not the DNC, pay for their presidential caucuses strengthened their resolve. So, too, did the months that they had spent developing the telephone voting option (before the RBC killed it).

As reported in most detail in the Nevada Independent, Nevada now plans to give every precinct caucus chair a party-programmed iPad that will import the results from four days of early voting (at the start of each precinct caucus), calculate the candidate rankings in two rounds of voting, and electronically file the results. (Iowa’s app failed to transmit these local results and to compile state totals.)

After the Iowa meltdown, Nevada State Democratic Party chairman William McCurdy II said in a statement, “We will not be employing the same app or vendor used in the Iowa caucus.” The Nevada Independent spoke to caucus chairs being trained in the newest system only days before it will debut. Those volunteers said that the party was describing the use of an iPad as not the same as an app.

“In the [training] video, a party staffer tells volunteers that the new mechanism ‘is not an app’ but should be thought of as ‘a tool,’” the Independent reported. “Asked by a volunteer how results would be transmitted from one place to another, the staffer demurred. ‘Those are all excellent questions, and we’re still working out some of the details around those so I’ll make sure that everyone has more information as we’re able to share it,’ she said.”

Late on Monday, February 10, four days before early voting is set to begin, the Nevada state party updated campaigns about their latest plans, according to the Independent. The party will be using party-provided iPads to check in voters using preloaded county voter rolls (as PDF files). Voters will fill out a paper presidential preference card, but also enter their information on the iPad as a Google form “which will be accessed through a URL,” the Independent reported, citing a party memo. Thus a paper and electronic record of their vote will be created.

The system is reliant on caucus chairs accessing Wi-Fi in 80 early voting sites across the state. It was not clear from the Independent’s report what elements of this system would be used or modified for use in hundreds of precinct caucuses on February 22. In Iowa’s precinct caucuses, getting online was an issue for several campaigns using sophisticated turnout-tracking apps, because attendees in those locations were widely using their phones and competing for the bandwidth.

The Nevada party was still recruiting precinct chairs for those caucuses, according to people with ties to Joe Biden’s campaign in New Hampshire. That update suggests that there may be issues with using an unfamiliar system while running the event.

Nevada party officials have not responded to Voting Booth’s request to comment.

Whether the DNC Rules Committee can step in and order Nevada to fine-tune the vote counting technology to be used—as it affects how 2020 national convention delegates are allocated—is an open question. Meanwhile, party officials from other states with government-run presidential primaries are watching and are frustrated.

“Just use paper ballots, count them by hand, and call in the results,” said an exasperated state vice-chair (a baby boomer) who said that she was friends with McCurdy, but was angry with her younger “techie” peers. (Those comments came before the latest details about Nevada’s early voting system were released.) The Iowa meltdown reminded her of the Obama White House’s rollout of the Obamacare website, where young staffers overlooked what could go wrong when a system debuts.

Not a Stop-Bernie Conspiracy

What Iowa’s meltdown and Nevada’s continuing pursuit of untested digital voting tools is not, however, is a stop-Bernie conspiracy from the DNC.

That allegation came from some progressives after the IDP app frustrated precinct chairs (many could not log in) and system software failed to tally results. Nor was it intentional sabotage because the CEO of the firm (ACRONYM) that funded the app’s developer (Shadow) is married to a Buttigieg consultant, nor because of meddling by Buttigieg’s wealthy donors, as others alleged.

“The DNC was doing what Bernie wanted. They were not trying to get rid of him,” said the state party vice-chair. “Accusing [DNC Chairman] Tom Perez of trying to get rid of Bernie Sanders is ridiculous. He has been trying to appease Bernie since the beginning.”

Those remarks refer to the DNC’s post-2016 effort to heal the divisions between centrists who supported Hillary Clinton and progressives who backed Sanders. The DNC’s Unity Reform Commission recommended, and the full DNC adopted, many of Sanders’ demands. The most high-profile was that so-called superdelegates (mostly elected officials who comprise one-sixth of the national convention delegates) will not get to vote on the first ballot—to elevate voters over party leaders.

Another Sanders demand, which is relevant for what is unfolding in 2020’s party-run caucus and primary states, is greater transparency in releasing the vote counts. In 2016, the IDP simply announced the delegate equivalents to their state convention without any further evidence. At 2:30 a.m. on the morning after 2016’s caucuses, the party chair announced that Clinton had won 699.57 “state delegate equivalents” while Sanders had won 695.49 equivalents.

Looking at 2020, the DNC and caucus state parties agreed to release the number of participants, results from two rounds of voting, and delegate allocations. That new transparency, in part, led Iowa and Nevada party officials to look to digital tools to accelerate more intricate reporting and statewide tallies.

Throughout 2019, party officials told the RBC that they were on track with their new voting systems, even though there was no finished product for the DNC’s technology staff to review until well into the fall. When cybersecurity exercises were finally held, they were done in academic settings—not in a real election with more voting-system stresses and unexpected snafus.

In other words, these state party officials were overly reliant on their contractors, some of whom had roles in Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns, and some of who had connections in Silicon Valley, who were overpromising. That mistake is a rookie error in the world of election administration. And given the existing climate of paranoia and mistrust, it increases the odds that mishaps will undermine public faith in elections and the democratic process.

“Vendors promise you the world. They say, ‘Just try it.’ That doesn’t work with [career] election officials,” said John Lindback, the former state election director in Alaska and Oregon, who was worried about all of 2020’s party-run presidential nominating contests—continuing with Nevada and several other states.

“They’re setting themselves up for some issues,” he said.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Official: Sudan to Hand Over Omar al-Bashir for Genocide Trial

CAIRO — Sudan’s transitional authorities have agreed to hand over ousted autocrat Omar al-Bashir to the International Criminal Court to face trial on charges of war crimes and genocide, a top Sudanese official said Tuesday, in a deal with rebels to surrender all those wanted in connection with the Darfur conflict.

For a decade after his indictment, al-Bashir confounded the court based in The Hague, Netherlands. He not only was out of reach during his 30 years in power in Khartoum, but he also traveled abroad frequently to visit friendly leaders without fear of arrest. He even attended the 2018 World Cup in Russia, where he kicked a soccer ball playfully during an airport welcome ceremony and watched matches from luxury seating.

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The military overthrew al-Bashir in April 2019 amid massive public protests of his rule, and he has been jailed in Khartoum since then. Military leaders initially ruled out surrendering him to The Hague, saying he would be tried at home.

But the joint military-civilian Sovereign Council that has ruled Sudan since last summer has agreed with rebel groups in Darfur to hand over those wanted by the ICC to face justice in The Hague, according to Mohammed Hassan al-Taishi, a member of the council and a government negotiator.

He didn’t mention al-Bashir by name, but said, “We agreed that everyone who had arrest warrants issued against them will appear before the ICC. I’m saying it very clearly.”

He did not say when they would be handed over.

“We can only achieve justice if we heal the wounds with justice itself,” he said. “We cannot escape from confronting that.”

He spoke at a news conference in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, where the government and multiple rebel groups are holding talks to end the country’s various civil wars, including Darfur.

In the Darfur conflict, rebels from the territory’s ethnic central and sub-Saharan African community launched an insurgency in 2003, complaining of oppression by the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum.

The government responded with a scorched-earth assault of aerial bombings and unleashed militias known as the Janjaweed, who are accused of mass killings and rapes. Up to 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million were driven from their homes.

Al-Bashir, 76, faces three counts of genocide, five counts of crimes against humanity and two counts of war crimes for his alleged role in leading the deadly crackdown. The indictments were issued in 2009 and 2010, marking the first time the global court had charged a suspect with genocide.

The ICC has indicted two other senior figures in his regime: Abdel-Rahim Muhammad Hussein, interior and defense minister during much of the conflict, and Ahmed Haroun, a senior security chief at the time and later the leader of al-Bashir’s ruling party. Both have been under arrest in Khartoum since al-Bashir’s fall. Also indicted were Janjaweed leader Ali Kushayb and a senior Darfur rebel leader, Abdullah Banda, whose whereabouts are not known.

Al-Taishi also said that the transitional authorities and the rebels agreed on establishing a special court for Darfur crimes that would include crimes investigated by the ICC.

ICC spokesman Fadi Al Abdallah said the court had no comment until it received confirmation from Sudanese authorities. However, he said the country would not have to ratify the court’s founding treaty, the Rome Statute, before sending al-Bashir to The Hague.

“There is an obligation for Sudan to cooperate” with the court’s arrest warrants, he said. “The ratification of the Rome Statute itself is not a requirement for the surrender of suspects.”

Another member of the Sovereign Council said the government delegation to the Juba talks has a “green light” from military leaders in the council, including its head, Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, to announce that Sudan will hand over al-Bashir.

“We want to reassure the armed groups that we are serious and want to achieve peace as soon as possible,” he said.

The Sovereign Council member also said any extradition “might take months,” because he is wanted for other crimes in Sudan related to the “revolution” and the Islamist-backed military coup in 1989. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media.

The decision could face a backlash from within Sudan’s military, from which al-Bashir emerged, and also from Islamists in the country.

Al-Bashir’s lawyer, Mohammed al-Hassan, warned that handing him over would have “dire political and security repercussions” for Sudan. He said he hoped Burhan “keeps his obligation that al-Bashir or any Sudanese won’t be handed over to the International Criminal Court.”

“This matter will not happen easily,” he told the AP by phone.

Handing over al-Bashir is a sensitive issue in Sudan as the country tries to steer toward democratic and economic reforms. The deputy head of the Sovereign Council, Gen. Mohammed Hamadan Dagalo, commands a paramilitary unit that was involved in crushing the Darfur insurgency. The transitional government is under pressure to end its wars with rebel groups as it seeks to rehabilitate the battered economy, attract much-needed foreign aid and deliver the democracy it promises.

“The fledgling post-Bashir Sudan government is demonstrating a serious commitment to human rights principles in its first months in office.” said John Prendergast, expert and co-founder of the Sentry watchdog group. “Finally seeing a small measure of justice done for the mass atrocity crimes in Darfur will hopefully breathe new life into global efforts in support of human rights and genocide prevention.”

If al-Bashir is handed over, it would be only the second time a country has surrendered a foreign leader to the ICC. Ivory Coast transferred former President Laurent Gbagbo in 2011 to The Hague, where he was acquitted last year of crimes against humanity charges linked to alleged involvement in post-election violence.

Al-Bashir would be the highest profile figure yet to appear before the ICC, which was founded in 2002 but has been unable to gain acceptance among major powers, including the United States, Russia and China.

“Although the ICC has generated important legal precedents, it has had few important cases brought to verdict,” said Jens David Ohlin, vice dean of Cornell Law School. “Al-Bashir is the ICC’s ‘white whale.'”

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, tweeted that handing al-Bashir over to the ICC is “potentially a huge and long-awaited step for justice for the people of Darfur.”

__

Associated Press writer Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed.

Meet the ‘Mafia’ That Plunged the Border Patrol Into Crisis

On a Saturday evening in late September, Deputy Chief Scott Luck gathered with family and friends in the crystal-chandeliered ballroom of the Trump National Golf Club, nestled along the shores of the Potomac River in Virginia, to celebrate his retirement after 33 years in the U.S. Border Patrol.

The party was adorned with a who’s who in Border Patrol leadership, past and present. There was the unmistakable figure of Luck’s boss, Chief Carla Provost, tall and broad with her trademark fringe of brown bangs, and her longtime friend Andrea Zortman, who helps oversee foreign operations for the agency. A full contingent of retired former chiefs-turned-consultants were on hand, too, including David Aguilar, 64, who’d headed the Border Patrol as well as its parent, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and Michael Fisher, 55, who’d succeeded Aguilar as Border Patrol chief. Rowdy Adams, 59, another retired senior-level CBP official, also attended the celebration.

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The guests had kicked in $75 apiece to cover food and a gift for the send-off, but hovering over the party was a mix of weariness and defiance: It wasn’t just the end of Luck’s career, it was the end of an era at the agency — their era. And the widespread critiques currently pummeling the embattled patrol and its more than 19,600 agents would be, implicitly, their legacy.

Unbeknownst to most outsiders, almost all of the immigration honchos at Luck’s party that night were longtime colleagues who’d served as young agents in the remote border town of Douglas, Arizona, when the Border Patrol was just a small, backwater agency.

The group, called “the Douglas mafia” by some agents, began climbing the ranks together after the 9/11 attacks as the Border Patrol nearly tripled in size and budget. They’d ridden two decades of escalating political polarization over immigration to the top of the agency. They brought with them an entrenched us-against-them defiance that they’d fostered in the Arizona desert, when, feeling maligned and misunderstood, they’d forged their own way.

For better or worse, they’d had a hand in shaping virtually every aspect of the agency’s leadership and culture.

But the feeling in the room that night, said some in attendance, was relief that many of them would not be around to lead it much longer. Provost, 50, who’d started as a naive 25-year-old from a rural Kansas police force, had been planning her exit from Washington for months. Sandi Goldhamer, 56, her longtime partner who’d also gotten her start in Douglas, was already at their new home in Texas. Goldhamer had retired quietly last spring as associate chief in charge of national policy after her role in the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, which resulted in thousands of children being separated from their families with no plan to reunify them.

The two women, along with Zortman, 46, had risen to the top despite the agency’s infamous lack of female agents, the least of any federal law enforcement agency.

The group had overseen or witnessed crises in the past — including lawsuits over excessive use of force and revelations of corruption within the patrol’s own ranks. But the last three years, catalyzed by ever-harsher Trump administration policies, had thrust the insular agency into unprecedented turmoil. The arrival of tens of thousands of asylum-seekers at the border had forced agents into new roles, for which they had little training. A series of high-profile scandals had focused scalding attention on the agency: Children died in its custody. Reporters uncovered a racist, misogynist private Facebook page with some 9,500 current and former Border Patrol members, including, at one point, Provost. Misconduct charges rose and a longtime agent was even prosecuted as a serial killer.

The Border Patrol they’d guided was experiencing not just a crisis of confidence among legislators and the public, but from within.

Some senior agents said they can’t help but blame the current state of the Border Patrol on the Douglas agents for fostering a culture that favored loyalty over competency. “I still believe in our mission. But we need restructuring, we need change,” said one longtime senior agent from Texas, who asked to remain anonymous because he’s not authorized to speak to the media. “It’s a group following each other on their coattails with the same ideas, because everyone thinks the same way. And a lot of people skipping rank based on who they know, not on their experience.”

The agent said he’d worked with many of the leaders of the group at Border Patrol’s Washington, D.C., headquarters over the years, and the experience had led him to conclude that many of the agency’s problems were self-inflicted. “We grew too fast,” he said. “And there are people in leadership who are not performing at the levels they should.”

Provost, Goldhamer, Zortman, Luck and Aguilar all declined or did not respond to requests for interviews for this article, as did the Border Patrol.

“I feel like we’re leaving a terrible legacy for those who follow,” the senior agent said. Soon he, like so many others in leadership, would retire, leaving a gap that he believes the agency is ill-equipped to fill. Lately, as the patrol lurches from one crisis to another, the agent said he’s tried to figure out how everything had gone “sideways,” adding, “I’ve been asking myself, ‘Where did we go wrong?’”

In the beginning, they were just a bunch of young, mostly novice agents shunted off to a small outpost two hours southeast of Tucson, Arizona. But the ill-equipped border station in Douglas was on the verge of becoming the largest, and busiest, in the nation.

In July of 2000, Rowdy Adams was sent to Douglas station as the patrol agent in charge to help oversee its rapid expansion. “I’d never dealt with anything that complex or that big,” recalled Adams, whose spiky, once-blonde hair is now streaked with gray. When he arrived, agents were working out of trailers because they’d run out of places to put everyone. “They had a station built for 40 people, and we had something in the neighborhood of 450 or 500 agents,” he said. “I mean, it was crazy, but we made do with what we had.”

Up until the 1990s, the Border Patrol had been little more than a congressional afterthought, with fewer than 4,000 agents nationwide. Then, the North American Free Trade Agreement passed, which, coupled with a crippling peso devaluation in Mexico, helped spur a mass migration of workers north. The number of apprehended border crossers spiked to nearly a million in 1994 and kept on rising. Congress responded by passing the restrictive Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and doubling down on more border fencing and agents.

The Border Patrol had already been experimenting with extended enforcement operations in San Diego and El Paso, Texas — flooding those areas with armed agents — which reduced traffic, but just like in a game of whack-a-mole, the crossers would surface somewhere else. By 2000, that somewhere else was Douglas, a sleepy borough of 14,000 inhabitants bordering the much larger Agua Prieta, Sonora.

Back then, most migrants were single men from Mexico looking for work. They were processed quickly then sent back across the line, said former agent Kevin Smith, who spent his entire career in Douglas and retired there in 2014. “We were making 1,000 apprehensions a day and not even catching 10%,” he said. “We were so overwhelmed.”

The border town had already gained an outsized infamy after Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who would later lead the Sinaloa Cartel, built his first cross-border drug tunnel there, a 270-foot long engineering marvel that included a hidden door under a hydraulic-lifted pool table. In the ensuing years, a wave of investigations and arrests of U.S. border agents with ties to drug traffickers and human smugglers fed the town’s notoriety. By 1996, the Los Angeles Times noted that Douglas was known as “the most corrupt town on the 1,900-mile U.S.-Mexico border.”

The resources opened up by Congress continued to pour into Douglas anyway. A new station was built on 29 acres of seized property, at a cost of $23 million. By 2003, Douglas station was the largest in the nation, with 550 permanent agents and an additional 100 on rotation from other parts of the country. It had grown so big, so fast that there was little managerial oversight, Adams said. His primary task at the time, he said, was to hire more supervisors and get the organization under control, “to make sure that people were doing what they were supposed to be doing.”

Provost had landed at Douglas in 1995, one of a handful of women in a notoriously macho culture.

“I’d like to say we had maybe 6-7% women at Douglas station,” Adams said. “It’s a tough gig. We’re in remote locations. And if you want to have a family, and all that, it’s going to have an impact.”

Provost, athletic and with a can-do Midwestern pragmatism, was determined to make her mark, recalled Michael Fisher, who first met Provost in Douglas and rose through the ranks as her superior.

Fisher’s first encounter with Provost came late one night while he and a tactical team, clad in black and with their faces covered in black grease paint, were tracking a group of migrants in the desert east of Douglas. “We heard a sound, and all of a sudden I saw this person go by on a bicycle,” Fisher said. “We thought it was a scout or something, so we started running and got into position and flashed our lights and announced that we were Border Patrol agents.”

The bicyclist, Fisher said, doubled back, and he was surprised to see a woman in a Border Patrol uniform on a mountain bike. He said he asked what she was doing in the desert alone in the middle of the night.

“Well, what are you doing here?” the agent shot back, Fisher remembered.

“I told her we were tracking the group,” Fisher said. “And she said: ‘Like hell you are. That’s my group.’ And then she rode off into the desert. And I was like, ‘Wow, who was that?’”

Later, he would find out it was Provost, a supervisor on the Border Patrol’s recently created bike unit. “I was impressed,” he said. “She stood her ground.”

Goldhamer, originally from Tallahassee, Florida, was also determined to succeed in the testosterone-filled workplace. Petite, with long brown hair that she wore in a tight bun, Goldhamer stood out because she was always one of the first to volunteer, Adams said. “She just did what she needed to do. Even if it was the shit job for the evening, she would take that and embrace it without complaint,” he said.

By the early aughts, apprehensions at Douglas were up to 2,400 a day, according to Adams. The station was praised for being one of the first to implement new biometric technology linking its IDENT fingerprint database with other law enforcement databases to screen people for criminal backgrounds. But the Border Patrol was not screening its own agents thoroughly enough. The station had grown too fast, with too few checks and balances in place, to weed out the bad actors within its own ranks. “I’d love to take credit for picking nothing but rock stars,” Adams said of the agents he’d promoted at the time. “But it didn’t always turn out that way.”

In those early years in Douglas, Adams and others said, the agents, including those who would come to be the Douglas mafia, saw firsthand many of the problems that would plague the agency in coming years.

One night in late September 2000, Goldhamer noticed an acting supervisor named Dennis Johnson talking with a Salvadoran woman they’d just apprehended. With several people to process for the return to Mexico, Goldhamer lost sight of them, according to court records. Johnson drove the handcuffed woman into the desert and sexually assaulted her. Then he took her to another port of entry at Naco, 25 miles west of Douglas, and sent her back to Mexico. The assault was only discovered because the woman made a complaint to a Mexican customs agent who then reported it to his U.S. counterpart, the court records show.

Adams, as patrol agent in charge, said he took the call that night from the agent in Naco. He needed to quickly piece together what had happened. Goldhamer helped him identify Johnson’s patrol vehicle. “We quietly seized the vehicle and did the DNA samples,” he said, “and that’s what wound up getting him convicted.” Goldhamer later testified at Johnson’s trial. Johnson’s attorney argued that the woman had initiated oral sex and then made up a the story to stay in the United States, but a jury found him guilty of sexual assault and kidnapping.

But Johnson’s trial was a rare occurrence, then and now.

In 2001, the Justice Department’s inspector general opened an investigation into a sprawling kickback scheme in which numerous agents detailed to Douglas from other stations were furnished with falsified receipts from supervisors, who’d rented them rooms in their homes, or from hotel managers or apartment landlords. Agents claimed the $55-a-day housing allowance when they’d actually paid much less, pocketing the difference. Some also received gym memberships and cash incentives.

In its final report in 2002, the inspector general said it found “troubling practices” on the part of several agents. The U.S. Attorney’s office declined to prosecute, and the cases were referred to internal affairs at the Immigration and Naturalization Service (then the parent agency of Border Patrol) for disciplinary action.

Nearly a year later no action had been taken. In 2003, the Border Patrol was rolled into U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as part of the newly created Department of Homeland Security. The independent federal Office of Special Counsel, advocating for two agents from Douglas who had alerted investigators to the scheme, released a scathing report. The agents, Larry Davenport and Willie Forester, had alleged that David Aguilar — then chief of the Tucson sector — had been aware of the kickbacks but didn’t intervene. Davenport said he also reported his concerns to Adams and other supervisors but was told to “mind his own business.”

Davenport, according to the Federal Times, was told by Adams and another supervisor that “if he wanted to move up in the Border Patrol … he had to get along.” Neither Davenport nor Forester could be reached for comment.

The Office of Special Counsel was incensed. “Owing to the sheer numbers involved, it stretches credulity that 45 employees at a single Border Patrol station engaged in a kickback and fraud scheme for a number of years … without the knowledge of management,” the report noted, according to the Arizona Daily Star in 2005. By not investigating or disciplining senior leadership, the office wrote in a letter to then-President George W. Bush, “there is a real risk of creating the appearance of a whitewash.”

When asked about the investigation, Adams said it was an “awful lot of noise from the Office of Special Counsel and they never proved anything.” The allegations were brought about by “two individuals who were uncomfortable with the changes being made, in which they were being held accountable,” Adams said. Davenport and Forester eventually left the agency.

By 2006, migratory traffic on the border was starting to shift again. This time moving west toward the California state line. “Douglas was starting to cool down,” Provost remembered in an official CBP biography published last year. “I had 11 1/2 years there, and Yuma was the hot spot.”

She applied for a move to Yuma and was promoted to assistant chief patrol agent. Goldhamer followed Provost and became a supervisor. Zortman, who had worked in media relations for the Border Patrol in Douglas, also made the leap to Yuma.

With a mandate from Bush to add 6,000 more agents by the end of his presidency, the Border Patrol embarked on a hiring spree. But, as had happened in Douglas, the rush to hire so many new agents led to problems. By mid-2007, the average level of experience for a Border Patrol agent was just four to five years, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report, and in some units less than 18 months. The agency didn’t have a “uniform field training program,” the report said, so that new agents could “become proficient in the safe, effective, and ethical performance of their duties.” This created a patchwork of rules and regulations that differed from sector to sector.

“At the time, there was such a need they would take almost anyone with a passing score to promote,” said one senior agent in California, who asked to remain anonymous because he’s not authorized to speak with the media.

Adams, who had been promoted to headquarters in Washington by this time, agreed that the rapid influx of new agents had some negative consequences. “We were promoting people in those days before they were really ready for the job,” he said.

The senior agents from California and Texas said that during the Border Patrol’s buildup in the Bush years, too many with connections to leadership were promoted with little supervision, or consequences for wrongdoing.

It was during this time that Zortman became an acting field operations supervisor in Yuma and was given oversight over several other agents. In the spring of 2009, one of them was Julia Monsivais, a 24-year-old former college softball star who was just months away from finishing her two-year probationary period and achieving her dream of becoming a Border Patrol agent.

Shortly after Zortman became Monsivais’ boss, the young agent, who was gay, told a colleague that Zortman had asked her out on a date while they were on patrol. “Julia told me she turned her down,” said the colleague, who has since left the patrol and asked to remain anonymous because he fears retaliation. “And from that day on she was targeted. She’d be written up for any little thing. I remember once she’d missed a belt loop on her pants and she was reprimanded for it.”

Over the next two months, Monsivais was written up and reprimanded numerous times, according to the former agent and her roommate at the time, Jamie McGalliard, a close friend who worked at a local high school. When Monsivais “denied those passes from Zortman,” McGalliard said, “that’s when a lot of the stuff really started to come into play, you know, getting written up and things like that. It was just continuous harassment from that same supervisor.”

Monsivais documented the harassment in a notebook, McGalliard said, and reached out numerous times to other supervisors, asking them to intervene. “She went through the proper chain of command. She called the right people, but nobody did anything to help her,” she said.

On the night of July 17, 2009, Monsivais received a phone call while they were out together at a bar, then told McGalliard and her other roommates that “Zortman did me in.” After arriving home, she shot and killed herself with her service weapon, said McGalliard, who later found her body.

Margret Monsivais said her sister believed that she was about to be fired because of the numerous write-ups she’d received.

“My daughter was a Type A personality,” said her father, Mark Monsivais. “She was national softball champion for a reason. She was very competitive and took losing very hard. She’d wanted to be in law enforcement since she was in middle school. And this was her dream.”

Mark Monsivais said he asked Border Patrol leadership to provide his daughter’s personnel records and investigate her suicide. When he got no response, Monsivais said he turned to the union, but it was also unable to obtain her personnel file. “It was us against the Border Patrol,” he said. “And Zortman was protected. I don’t know why but she was.”

After Monsivais’ suicide, Zortman was promoted to a supervisory agent, overseeing the field training of new recruits. Union officials wrote a letter to the chief of the Yuma sector that September, objecting to Zortman’s promotion, particularly her oversight of new recruits. “Currently there is still an investigation on incidents that occurred in the last few months,” the letter said. “The local feels this assignment is not in the best interest of the service, nor the local.”

Today, Zortman is an assistant chief in charge of foreign operations in Washington, D.C., and in the highest levels of Border Patrol leadership. Still close friends with Provost, Zortman helped organize the Border Patrol chief’s retirement party in January.

Zortman and the Border Patrol declined to answer questions about Monsivais.

“What happened in Yuma with Julia’s death, there should have been some discipline coming out of that,” said a longtime agent who worked with Zortman in Yuma. “She was never held accountable, which was a big mistake.”

The former agent, a combat veteran, who worked alongside Monsivais said he resigned not long after her death. “I just couldn’t take it anymore,” he said. “The agency is like a jellyfish with no spine. We’re talking people who went from working at a 7-11 or a gas station and who now have a gun and think of the immigrants as animals and can’t wait to shoot somebody. For me, Julia’s suicide was the tipping point.”

Agents trace the rise in agencywide influence of the Douglas group to David Aguilar’s move in 2004 from Arizona to Washington, D.C. Aguilar was made chief of the Border Patrol and was appointed acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2011. As Aguilar moved up, so did some of the agents who worked with him.

A South Texas native, Aguilar is a gifted orator and savvy political operator who, some agents say, valued loyalty above all else when he ran the Border Patrol. “As long as you had loyalty to him,” the senior agent from California said. “He would take that over competency.”

Adams, one of those who followed Aguilar to Washington, had a slightly different view. “You always value loyalty because when you pick folks for a job you want to make sure that they’re not going to make an independent decision, something that you didn’t know about.” But, he added, “I don’t think loyalty above all else even begins to describe David.”

After Border Patrol was folded into CBP, its leadership was consolidated in Washington, D.C., and expanded fourfold to more than 200 senior positions, Fisher said. “Many of us in the field had worked with David, and we agreed to come up and help get this new, larger organization off the ground,” he said. “It was just a huge undertaking. We had to build a new headquarters and develop a new organizational structure, then try to figure out how to work within CBP and DHS.”

When Aguilar moved to CBP, Fisher took over as chief of the Border Patrol. Adams became a senior adviser for CBP operations despite his previous role helping to manage a multibillion-dollar project to build a “virtual border wall,” made up of radar and surveillance towers and ground sensors. Plagued by delays and technological errors, the project, awarded to Boeing, was scrapped by Congress in 2011 after spending $1 billion on 53 miles of virtual fencing in Arizona.

By 2012, it was clear that the Border Patrol had other serious problems. Excessive use of force and corruption were on the rise. An investigation by the Arizona Republic into use of force at the agency found that agents had killed at least 42 people — 13 of them U.S. citizens — since 2005. “In none of the 42 deaths is any agent or officer publicly known to have faced consequences — not from the Border Patrol, not from Customs and Border Protection or Homeland Security, not from the Department of Justice, and not, ultimately, from criminal or civil courts,” the paper wrote.

Under pressure from Congress, Aguilar requested that the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based law enforcement think tank, examine the Border Patrol’s use-of-force policies. PERF looked at 67 cases of lethal force and found instances where agents shot at vehicles and unarmed suspects that were not an immediate threat. Their findings were unequivocal: “Too many cases do not appear to meet the test of objective reasonableness with regard to the use of deadly force.”

Instead of releasing the critical PERF report, CBP fought to keep it secret, even from Congress, releasing only a summary after legislators and civil rights groups demanded to see the full report. Unlike other law enforcement agencies, the Border Patrol also refused to make its use-of-force policies or the names of its agents involved in fatal shooting investigations public, saying the information was “law enforcement sensitive.”

James Tomsheck, who served as assistant commissioner for internal affairs at CBP from 2006 to 2014, said Aguilar saw the Border Patrol as a military organization, often comparing it to the Marines, and surrounded himself with people who wouldn’t challenge his views. “He believed that use of force was not restrained in the same way that use of force is restrained by domestic law enforcement as defined by the Constitution, and that the Border Patrol should function under different rules of engagement at the border.”

Further angering reformers, Fisher rejected some of the PERF report’s key recommendations, including that agents not use lethal force against unarmed drivers or rock throwers, practices that had long been criticized. Border Patrol agents had shot and killed several people, some of them across the border in Mexico, for instance, alleging that they had thrown rocks at agents over the border wall.

In an interview, Fisher said adopting less lethal methods would have endangered his agents. “I’ve known agents who have almost died from being rocked along the border,” he said. “And I think it was completely ridiculous that they wanted that prohibition.”

Rampant corruption was another growing problem. Ronald Hosko, a retired FBI assistant director for the criminal investigative division, told Reveal in 2014 that, in briefings, CBP leaders estimated a corruption rate of 20% or higher among their employees. “Shocked by that ‘integrity gap,’” the outlet wrote, “the FBI adjusted its priorities to focus its anti-corruption efforts on federal employees, with an emphasis on border agents and officers.”

By the time Aguilar retired in 2013, the Border Patrol was reeling from a growing number of fatal shootings and headline-grabbing corruption busts.

“Aguilar didn’t have to work to develop the insular culture. He just had to carry on and let it be,” said Christopher Montoya, a retired Border Patrol agent who worked in Douglas for several years. Montoya, now a master’s student in Latin American studies at the University of Arizona, has published essays critical of his former agency. “Could the Tucson police chief get away with some of the stuff the Border Patrol does? Of course not,” he said. “But the Border Patrol doesn’t work like that. We like to wash our dirty laundry at home.”

By 2014, amid mounting criticism from both congressional leaders and advocates, the Border Patrol could no longer avoid the calls for reform. The Obama administration appointed Gil Kerlikowske, a former police chief, as CBP commissioner with a mandate to clean up the agency. One of his first moves was to release the PERF report and a revised use-of-force policy handbook.

The move created two camps: Border Patrol loyalists, including Adams and Fisher, who believed the agency was being unfairly targeted. And professional law enforcement groups, including the International Association of Chiefs of Police and PERF as well as members of Obama’s Domestic Policy Council, who believed the patrol needed to adopt standardized rules of enforcement in line with other domestic law enforcement agencies. “There was a lot of politics and gamesmanship going on, and not a lot of love for the Border Patrol, if you will,” Adams said.

Traditional law enforcement practices, Adams said, “don’t really translate when you’re out in the middle of the desert between Douglas and the New Mexico state line and don’t have the ability to reach a cellphone or grab the radio and radio something in. You may not have backup coming for several hours, much less a two-minute response time.”

A panel of law enforcement experts was convened to help “restore public confidence through more transparency.” The Homeland Security Advisory Panel, headed by New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton and Karen Tandy, a former administrator for the Drug Enforcement Administration, found that the CBP’s internal affairs department had just 218 investigators for 60,000 employees — 44,000 of them in law enforcement. And those investigators were only qualified to conduct administrative investigations, not criminal ones.

“No chief of police of a major police department could be held accountable for the conduct of his personnel if he had no internal affairs capacity and could not investigate corruption and other serious misconduct within his organization’s ranks,” the panel wrote in its preliminary report. The panel made 53 recommendations, including boosting the number of internal affairs investigators by 350 and revising use-of-force policies to avoid lethal encounters.

In the summer of 2015, Provost left her post as chief patrol agent for the El Centro sector and moved to headquarters in Washington, D.C., where she was appointed by Kerlikowske to oversee the reforms as CBP’s deputy assistant commissioner in the Office of Professional Responsibility. Part of her job was to work on a new, less lethal use-of-force policy.

A month after her arrival, Fisher announced his departure as Border Patrol chief amidst an internal affairs investigation into the alleged misuse of government funds to carry on an extramarital affair with a subordinate. According to Fisher, it was a “poison-pen accusation made to the commissioner’s office that wasn’t true. But I cooperated fully with the investigation.” Fisher was ultimately found not to have used government funds inappropriately but said he elected to retire. Several other high-level officials were also investigated for extramarital affairs with subordinates and other misconduct, and chose to retire.

By 2016, and for the first time in its more than 90-year history, the agency was on its way to reform and some transparency, adopting many of the changes proposed by the panel of experts and significantly reducing its lethal encounters.

But then President Donald Trump was elected, thrusting new powers and responsibilities on the agency, but also fresh controversy. Members of the Douglas group took on key new roles as one top border security official after another was appointed, then vanquished by Trump.

Provost became acting chief of the Border Patrol in April 2017, after Ron Vitiello, a favorite of the Border Patrol union, left after three months to lead CBP. Scott Luck, who’d once been Provost’s supervisor in Douglas, took second-in-command as acting deputy chief. Goldhamer, who had followed Provost to Washington, was promoted to associate chief and placed in charge of national policy overseeing unaccompanied children, and other programs.

One senior agent in a supervisory role, who asked to remain unnamed because he fears retaliation, said Goldhamer sought the promotion, “then this disaster hit.” The Trump administration launched its zero-tolerance policy. Under pressure, the agent said, Goldhamer, and others, botched the execution of the policy. Headquarters ordered agents to prosecute every adult who came across the border, but it didn’t provide a standard operating procedure, as was typical when a major policy change was announced. “We were given the order on Cinco de Mayo — I kid you not,” the agent said. “There was no SOP in place, outlining how we would do the reunifications, outlining a process of how we should proceed.”

Goldhamer also seemed unfamiliar with the intricacies of the Flores agreement, which defines conditions under which children can be held in immigration detention, he said, and allows for a waiver that can be filed after 72 hours if there are “exceptional circumstances.”

“She didn’t have a clue,” he said. “They were more concerned about the number of people who had been prosecuted. It was a total mess.” Goldhamer and CBP did not respond to requests for comment.

An audit by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general later found that CBP “adopted various ad hoc methods to record and track family separations” that “led to widespread errors.” Because there was no adequate database in place to track separated children and adults, agents had to resort to creating their own Excel spreadsheets, which were often riddled with errors. “They could not determine how many children in Border Patrol custody were separated from parents at any given time,” the audit said.

Even more damning, the inspector general discovered that the Border Patrol had conducted a test run of zero tolerance in 2017 in El Paso, separating close to 280 families. After the pilot, agents in El Paso detailed for Border Patrol leaders a number of problems that had prevented them from keeping track of separated families — most notably difficulties communicating and keeping uniform records with other government agencies charged with caring for the children. Despite the problems, the Border Patrol’s leadership went ahead with the separations the following year.

“The way I see it,” said the supervisor, “the basic foundation of our job is to take care of people, and if we can’t do that, we can’t do anything else.”

Today, yearly bonuses are being offered to keep many longtime agents from leaving the agency, he said, which is smaller now than it was under Obama because of attrition. The longtime agent said he had hoped that Provost, who became chief in August 2018 — the first woman to lead the agency — would chart a different course. But when it was discovered that she was part of a private Facebook group rife with racist and misogynistic posts that attacked both Latino Congress members and migrants alike, it was clear, he said, that Provost was too steeped in the agency’s culture to challenge the status quo.

In testimony before Congress, Provost said that she’d joined the secret group in 2017 to keep tabs on her workforce, but that she was on Facebook “very, very rarely” and was unaware of the offensive nature of the posts until they came out in the media last summer.

With Provost’s retirement, the influence of the Douglas agents is coming to an end. Provost and others of her generation oversaw a rapid, unprecedented expansion from which the agency is still suffering repercussions, agents said. Yet even with Provost gone, the Border Patrol’s entrenched culture endures. Her replacement, Rodney Scott, was also a member of the same secret Facebook group. Scott has not commented publicly on his membership and in late January, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, requested any documents linking Scott to the secret page. Like Provost, the new chief got his start in the Border Patrol in the ’90s but spent much of his career in California.

Others in top leadership are retiring, or are too mired in scandal to lead the agency, which is facing an unknown future when Scott leaves. He is the fourth chief in three years under the Trump administration. “It’s a scary time organizationally,” Adams said. Recently there was a nationwide meeting with the Border Patrol chiefs from each sector, he said. “People were sort of looking around the room going: ‘Holy Moses, who’s the next guy? He’s retiring. This guy wants nothing to do with headquarters. She’s in trouble.’ You know just looking around at one another and realizing that the bench just wasn’t as deep as they’d thought.”

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

 

Judge Clears a Path to T-Mobile’s $26.5B Sprint Bid

NEW YORK — A federal judge has cleared a major path to T-Mobile’s $26.5 billion takeover of Sprint, as he rejected claims by more than a dozen states that the deal would mean less competition and higher phone bills.

Though the deal still needs a few more approvals, T-Mobile expects to close it as early as April 1.

Once that happens, the number of major U.S. wireless companies would shrink from four to three. T-Mobile says the deal would benefit consumers as it becomes a fiercer competitor to the larger Verizon and AT&T. The deal would also create a new, but smaller competitor as satellite TV company Dish pledges to build a next-generation, 5G cellular network.

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A group of state attorneys general tried to block the deal, arguing that having one fewer phone company would cost Americans billions of dollars in higher bills. Consumer Reports said the three remaining companies would have fewer incentives to compete on prices and quality.

Judge Victor Marrero in New York said Tuesday that the companies’ insistence that the deal would cut prices and the states’ insistence that the deal would raise prices “essentially cancel each other out.” Instead, he chose to rely on what wireless executives have done in the past and what they commit to doing in the future in an industry that is changing rapidly.

T-Mobile has pushed in recent years such consumer-friendly changes as restoring unlimited data plans. Marrero said he found that T-Mobile executives were credible at trial in promising to continue competing aggressively with AT&T and Verizon.

The judge also agreed with the companies that Sprint was “at best struggling to even tread water” and would not last as a national wireless competitor. He also said that he is persuaded that the U.S. Justice Department’s side deal with Dish, which sets up the satellite TV provider as a new wireless company, would reduce the threat to competition.

Marrero’s decision comes after the Justice Department already approved the deal. Another judge still needs to approve the Dish settlement, a process that is usually straightforward but has taken longer than expected. A utility board in California also has to approve the deal.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of the leading attorneys general in the case, said her office was considering an appeal. She said Tuesday’s ruling “marks a loss for every American who relies on their cell phone for work, to care for a family member, and to communicate with friends.”

Gigi Sohn, a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy, said that while consumers are often promised benefits from mergers, “what they are left with each time are corporate behemoths” that can raise prices and destroy competition.

Sprint shares jumped $3.42, or 71%, to $8.22 in midday trading after the ruling came out. T-Mobile shares rose $8.64, or 10%, to $93.17. Verizon shares fell nearly 3% and AT&T nearly 1%.

T-Mobile launched its bid for Sprint in 2018, after having been rebuffed by Obama-era regulators. T-Mobile CEO John Legere had seen President Donald Trump’s election and his appointed regulators as a good opportunity to try again to combine, according to evidence during the trial.

T-Mobile, which promised not to raise prices for three years, repeated previous arguments that the combined T-Mobile and Sprint will be able to build a better 5G network — a priority for the Trump administration — than either company could alone.

In his ruling, Marrero said that while both Sprint and T-Mobile will provide 5G service without the combination, their standalone networks would be more limited in scope and take longer to build.

The deal got the nod from both the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission, thanks to an unusual commitment to create a new wireless player in Dish. T-Mobile agreed to sell millions of Sprint’s prepaid customers to Dish. T-Mobile also has to rent its network to Dish while the fledgling rival built its own. Dish is also required to build a 5G network over the next several years.

Dish co-founder Charlie Ergen said in a statement that the ruling will accelerate its ability to deploy 5G and that its growth as a new competitor will bring “lower prices, greater choice and more innovation to consumers.”

The states had said that Dish wasn’t certain to succeed as a wireless company and was far smaller than Sprint, and the resulting wireless market would still be worse for consumers.

Dish has spent about $21 billion over a decade buying wireless spectrum, the airwaves for transmitting data and calls, although Dish hasn’t done much with it. Analysts have long been skeptical of whether Dish intends to build its own network or sell the spectrum to others. Now Dish faces up to $2.2 billion in fines if it fails to create a 5G network that serves 70% of the country by 2023.

Some analysts have said that Dish has potential as a viable competitor, but a big question is when. Even if it meets the 2023 government-imposed deadline, it still won’t reach as many potential customers as Sprint’s current-generation 4G network does today.

George Slover, senior policy counsel for Consumer Reports, said Sprint was an established carrier with a track record of spurring competition, while Dish is an unproven newcomer that will have to build its mobile phone network and services from scratch.

The coalition of state attorneys general that brought the case were led by New York and California and were joined by Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia.

T-Mobile, based in Bellevue, Washington, is owned by the German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom. Sprint is based in Overland Park, Kansas, and is owned by Japan’s SoftBank.

___

AP Technology Writers Matt O’Brien in Providence, Rhode Island, and Mae Anderson in New York contributed to this story.