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Four Years After Ferguson, White Prosecutor Is Ousted by Black Official

FERGUSON, Mo. — Four years after the deadly police shooting that triggered racial unrest in Ferguson and helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement, a Ferguson black city councilman scored an election upset and ousted the white prosecutor criticized over his handling of the case.

Wesley Bell’s stunning defeat of seven-term St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch in Tuesday’s Democratic contest all but assures Bell of victory in November. The Republicans have not put up a candidate.

“People did not think it could be done,” the 43-year-old Bell said in an interview Wednesday. “The message we would tell people is, ‘You don’t have to believe it, yet, just support it.'”

Bell said what resonated with voters was his platform of reforms such as holding police more accountable, revising the cash bail system and ending prosecution of low-level drug crimes.

“The easy narrative is to say it’s just about Ferguson,” he said.

Still, the change began four years ago.

On Aug. 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, was shot to death by white Ferguson officer Darren Wilson after a street encounter escalated into a fight. Wilson said he fired in self-defense, while some witnesses claimed Brown had his hands up. The killing led to months of often violent protests.

A St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Wilson. Many protesters and others accused McCulloch of steering the panel to its decision. McCulloch, 67, declined an interview request Wednesday but has emphatically denied any effort to sway the grand jury.

The uprising in Ferguson fired the political ambitions of some of the black activists. Bruce Franks Jr., who led several protests in Ferguson, defeated a longtime incumbent to win election to the Missouri House in 2016. Another protest leader, Cori Bush, lost Tuesday in her bid to unseat nine-term U.S. Rep. William Lacy Clay, but received 37 percent of the vote.

Bell got 57 percent to McCulloch’s 43 percent in St. Louis County, which borders the city of St. Louis and is the biggest county in Missouri, with a population of about 1 million.

“I think the Ferguson events certainly had something to do with this,” University of Missouri-St. Louis political scientist David Kimball said. “Certainly that case got a lot of attention and generated a lot of criticism of McCulloch, so I’ve got to believe that was a factor.”

Rashad Robinson, a spokesman for Color of Change PAC, one of the civil rights groups that backed Bell, called his victory “a powerful rejection of Bob McCulloch and his decision not to pursue justice in the communities he was elected to serve.” Color of Change sent text messages to more than 95,000 voters and put up a billboard on Bell’s behalf.

Bell is a lawyer who has worked as a municipal prosecutor and judge for small towns near Ferguson. He said he felt the pain of Brown’s death especially hard because he has a son about the same age. He did not protest but instead began hosting conversations about community policing and decided to run for City Council.

“I saw my place as being one to help bring people together,” Bell said.

At the time of Brown’s death, Ferguson, where about two-thirds of the 21,000 residents are black, had just once black person on its six-member City Council. Bell and another African-American, Ella Jones, were elected in 2015 as the protests continued to rage.

During his campaign for prosecutor, Bell said, he went out of his way to make it about larger criminal justice issues, not about McCulloch’s handling of the Brown case. When a campaign worker posted “bye bye Bob” on the Facebook page leading up to the election, Bell made him take it down.

Bell, who, like McCulloch, is the son of a police officer, outlined a far different approach for the prosecutor’s office under his leadership. He said he will appoint independent special prosecutors for allegations of wrongdoing by officers. He said he will support police “200 percent” as long as they act appropriately.

“But if we find an officer has violated the law, he should be held accountable,” Bell said.

He wants to reform the cash bail system that keeps impoverished defendants behind bars, often for months, while they await trial, and plans instead to free more of them with monitoring devices.

He said he will not file charges in low-level, nonviolent marijuana cases and will dismiss pending charges. And he said he will never seek the death penalty.

Are Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Cronies Secretly Running the VA?

Last February, shortly after Peter O’Rourke became chief of staff for the Department of Veterans Affairs, he received an email from Bruce Moskowitz with his input on a new mental health initiative for the VA. “Received,” O’Rourke replied. “I will begin a project plan and develop a timeline for action.”

O’Rourke treated the email as an order, but Moskowitz is not his boss. In fact, he is not even a government official. Moskowitz is a Palm Beach doctor who helps wealthy people obtain high-service “concierge” medical care.

More to the point, he is one-third of an informal council that is exerting sweeping influence on the VA from Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida. The troika is led by Ike Perlmutter, the reclusive chairman of Marvel Entertainment, who is a longtime acquaintance of President Trump’s. The third member is a lawyer named Marc Sherman. None of them has ever served in the U.S. military or government.

Yet from a thousand miles away, they have leaned on VA officials and steered policies affecting millions of Americans. They have remained hidden except to a few VA insiders, who have come to call them “the Mar-a-Lago Crowd.”

Perlmutter, Moskowitz and Sherman declined to be interviewed and fielded questions through a crisis-communications consultant. In a statement, they downplayed their influence, insisting that nobody is obligated to act on their counsel. “At all times, we offered our help and advice on a voluntary basis, seeking nothing at all in return,” they said. “While we were always willing to share our thoughts, we did not make or implement any type of policy, possess any authority over agency decisions, or direct government officials to take any actions… To the extent anyone thought our role was anything other than that, we don’t believe it was the result of anything we said or did.”

VA spokesman Curt Cashour did not answer specific questions but said a “broad range of input from individuals both inside and outside VA has helped us immensely over the last year and a half.” White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters also did not answer specific questions and said Perlmutter, Sherman and Moskowitz “have no direct influence over the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

But hundreds of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and interviews with former administration officials tell a different story — of a previously unknown triumvirate that hovered over public servants without any transparency, accountability or oversight. The Mar-a-Lago Crowd spoke with VA officials daily, the documents show, reviewing all manner of policy and personnel decisions. They prodded the VA to start new programs, and officials travelled to Mar-a-Lago at taxpayer expense to hear their views. “Everyone has to go down and kiss the ring,” a former administration official said.

If the bureaucracy resists the trio’s wishes, Perlmutter has a powerful ally: The President of the United States. Trump and Perlmutter regularly talk on the phone and dine together when the president visits Mar-a-Lago. “On any veterans issue, the first person the president calls is Ike,” another former official said. Former administration officials say that VA leaders who were at odds with the Mar-A-Lago Crowd were pushed out or passed over. Included, those officials say, were the secretary (whose ethical lapses also played a role), deputy secretary, chief of staff, acting under secretary for health, deputy under secretary for health, chief information officer, and the director of electronic health records modernization.

At times, Perlmutter, Moskowitz and Sherman have created headaches for VA officials because of their failure to follow government rules and processes. In other cases, they used their influence in ways that could benefit their private interests. They say they never sought or received any financial gain for their advice to the VA.

The arrangement is without parallel in modern presidential history. The Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 provides a mechanism for agencies to consult panels of outside advisers, but such committees are subject to cost controls, public disclosure and government oversight. Other presidents have relied on unofficial “kitchen cabinets,” but never before have outside advisers been so specifically assigned to one agency. During the transition, Trump handed out advisory roles to several rich associates, but they’ve all since faded away. The Mar-a-Lago Crowd, however, has deepened its involvement in the VA.

Perlmutter, 75, is painstakingly private — he reportedly wore a glasses-and-mustache disguise to the 2008 premiere of “Iron Man.” One of the few public photographs of him was snapped on Dec. 28, 2016, through a window at Mar-a-Lago. Trump glares warily at the camera. Behind him, Perlmutter smiles knowingly, wearing sunglasses at night.

When Trump asked him for help putting a government together, Perlmutter offered to be an outside adviser, according to people familiar with the matter. Having fought for his native Israel in the 1967 war before he moved to the U.S. and became a citizen, Perlmutter chose veterans as his focus.

Perlmutter enlisted the assistance of his friends Sherman and Moskowitz. Moskowitz, 70, specializes in knowing the world’s top medical expert for any ailment and arranging appointments for clients. He has connections at the country’s top medical centers. Sherman, 63, has houses in West Palm Beach and suburban Baltimore and an office in Washington with the consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal. His legal work focuses on financial fraud, white collar investigations and damages disputes. His professional biography lists experience in eight industries, none of them related to health care or veterans.

Moskowitz and Sherman helped Perlmutter convene a council of health care executives on the day of the Trump-Perlmutter photograph, Dec. 28, 2016. Offering more private healthcare to vets was a signature promise of Trump’s campaign, but at that point he hadn’t decided who should lead an effort that would reverse the VA’s longstanding practices.

A new name surfaced in that meeting: David Shulkin, who’d led the VA’s health care division since 2015. Perlmutter then recommended Shulkin to Trump, according to a person familiar with his thinking. (Shulkin did not respond to requests for comment.)

Once nominated, Shulkin flew to Mar-a-Lago in early February 2017 to meet with Perlmutter, Sherman and Moskowitz. In a follow-up email a few days later, Moskowitz elaborated on the terms of their relationship. “We do not need to meet in person monthly, but meet face to face only when necessary,” he wrote. “We will set up phone conference calls at a convenient time.”

Shulkin responded diplomatically. “I know how busy all of you are and having you be there in person, and so present, was truly a gift,” he wrote. “I found the time we spent, the focus that came out of our discussions, and the time we had with the President very meaningful.”

It wasn’t long before the Mar-a-Lago Crowd wore out their welcome with Shulkin. They advised him on how to do his job even though they sometimes seemed to lack a basic understanding of it. Just after their first meeting, Moskowitz emailed Shulkin again to say, “Congratulations i[t] was unanimous.” Shulkin corrected him: “Bruce- this was not the confirmation vote- it was a committee vote- we still need a floor vote.”

Perlmutter, Moskowitz and Sherman acted like board members pounding a CEO to turn around a struggling company, a former administration official said. In email after email, officials sought approval from the trio: for an agenda Shulkin was about to present to Trump for a research effort on suicide prevention and for a plan to recruit experts from academic medical centers. “Everything needs to be run by them,” the first former official said, recalling the process. “They view themselves as making the decisions.”

The Mar-a-Lago Crowd bombarded VA officials with demands, many of them inapt or unhelpful. On phone calls with VA officials, Perlmutter would bark at them to move faster, having no patience for bureaucratic explanations about why something has to be done a certain way or take a certain amount of time, former officials said. He issued orders in a thick, Israeli-accented English that can be hard to understand.

In one instance, Perlmutter alerted Shulkin to what he called “another real-life example of the issues our great veterans are suffering with when trying to work with the VA.” The example came from Karen Donnelly, a real estate agent in Palm Beach who manages the tennis courts in the luxury community where Perlmutter lives. Donnelly’s son was having trouble accessing his military medical records. After a month of dead ends, Donnelly said she saw Perlmutter on the tennis court and, knowing his connection to Trump, asked him for help. Perlmutter told her to email him the story because he’s “trying to straighten things out” at the VA, she recalled. (Donnelly separately touched off a nasty legal dispute between Perlmutter and a neighbor, Canadian businessman Harold Peerenboom, who objected to her management of the tennis courts. In a lawsuit, Peerenboom accused Perlmutter of mounting a vicious hate mail campaign against him, which Perlmutter’s lawyer denied.)

Perlmutter forwarded Donnelly’s email to Shulkin, Moskowitz and Sherman. “I know we are making very good progress, but this is an excellent reminder that we are also still very far away from achieving our goals,” Perlmutter wrote.

Shulkin had to explain that they were looking in the wrong place: Since the problem was with military service records, it lay with the Defense Department, not the VA.

Perlmutter, Moskowitz and Sherman defended their intervention, saying, “These were the types of stories of agency dysfunction and individual suffering that drove us to offer our volunteer experience in the first place — veterans who had been left behind by their government. These individual cases helped raise broader issues for government officials in a position to make changes, sometimes leading to assistance for one veteran, sometimes to broader reforms within the system.”

Right after meeting Shulkin, Moskowitz connected him with his friend Michael Zinner, director of the Miami Cancer Institute and a member of the American College of Surgeons’ board of regents. (Zinner declined to comment.) The conversation led to a plan for the American College of Surgeons to evaluate the surgery programs at several VA hospitals. The plan came very close to a formal announcement and contract, internal emails show, but stalled after Shulkin was fired, according to the organization’s director, David Hoyt.

Besides advocating for friends’ interests, some of the Mar-a-Lago Crowd’s interventions served their own purposes. Starting in February 2017, Perlmutter convened a series of conference calls with executives at Johnson & Johnson, leading to the development of a public awareness campaign about veteran suicide. They planned to promote the campaign by ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange around the time of Veterans Day.

The event also turned into a promotional opportunity for Perlmutter’s company. Executives from Marvel and its parent company, Disney, joined Johnson & Johnson as sponsors of the Veterans Day event at the stock exchange. Shulkin rang the closing bell standing near a preening and flexing Captain America, with Spider-Man waving from the trading pit, and Marvel swag distributed to some of the attendees. “Generally the VA secretary or defense secretary don’t shill for companies,” the leader of a veterans advocacy group said.

The VA was aware of the ethical questions this event raised because of Shulkin’s relationship with Perlmutter. An aide to Shulkin sought ethics advice from the agency’s lawyers about the appearance. In an email, the aide noted, “the Secretary is friends with the President of Marvel Comics, Mr. Ike Perlmutter, but he will not be in attendance.” The VA redacted the lawyer’s answer, and the agency’s spokesman would not say whether the ethics official approved Shulkin’s participation in the event.

Perlmutter did not answer specific questions about this episode. His joint statement with Moskowitz and Sherman said, “None of us has gained any financial benefit from this volunteer effort, nor was that ever a consideration for us.”

Perlmutter also facilitated a series of conference calls with senior executives from Apple. VA officials were excited about working with the company, but it wasn’t immediately obvious what they had to collaborate on.

As it turned out, Moskowitz wanted Apple and the VA to develop an app for veterans to find nearby medical services. Who did he bring in to advise them on the project? His son, Aaron, who had built a similar app. The proposal made Apple and VA officials uncomfortable, according to two people familiar with the matter, but Moskowitz’s clout kept it alive for months. The VA finally killed the project because Moskowitz was the only one who supported it.

Moskowitz, in the joint statement, defended his son’s involvement, calling him a “technical expert” who participated in a single phone call alongside others. “Any development efforts, had they occurred, would not have involved Aaron or any of us. There was no product of Dr. Moskowitz’s or Aaron’s that was promoted or recommended in any way during the call,” the trio said. “Again, none of us, including Aaron, stood to receive any financial benefit from the matters discussed during the conversation — and any claims to the contrary are factually incorrect.”

Moskowitz had more success pushing a different pet cause. He has spent years trying to start a national registry for medical devices, allowing patients to be notified of product recalls. Moskowitz set up the Biomedical Research and Education Foundation to encourage medical institutions to keep track of devices for their patients to address what he views as a dangerous hole in oversight across the medical profession. At one point, the foundation built a registry to collect data from doctors and patients. Moskowitz chaired the board, and Perlmutter’s wife was also a member. Moskowitz’s son earned $60,000 a year as the executive director, according to tax disclosures.

Moskowitz pushed the VA to pick up where he left off. He joined officials on weekly 7:30 a.m. conference calls in which officals discussed organizing a summit of experts on device registries and making a public commitment to creating one at the VA. In an email to Shulkin, the VA official in charge of the project referred to it as the “Bruce Moskowitz efforts.”

When the summit arrived, on June 4, Moskowitz and his son did not attend. It’s not clear what role they will have in setting up the VA’s registry going forward — their foundation has shut down, according to its website, and Moskowitz’s son said he’s no longer involved. But in his opening remarks at the summit, Peter O’Rourke, then the acting secretary, offered a special thanks to “Dr. Bruce Moskowitz and Aaron Moskowitz of the Biomedical Research and Education Foundation” as “driving forces” behind it.

Over the course of 2017, there was growing tension within the Trump administration about how much the VA should rely on private medical care. During the campaign, Trump championed letting veterans see any doctor they choose, inside or outside the VA system. But Shulkin warned that such an approach was likely to result in poorer care at a higher cost. His preferred solution was integrating government-run VA care with a network of private providers.

In September 2017, the Mar-a-Lago Crowd weighed in on the side of expanding the use of the private sector. “We think that some of the VA hospitals are delivering some specialty healthcare when they shouldn’t and when referrals to private facilities or other VA centers would be a better option,” Perlmutter wrote in an email to Shulkin and other officials. “Our solution is to make use of academic medical centers and medical trade groups, both of whom have offered to send review teams to the VA hospitals to help this effort.”

In other words, they proposed inviting private health care executives to tell the VA which services they should outsource to private providers like themselves. It was precisely the kind of fox-in-the-henhouse scenario that the VA’s defenders had warned against for years. Shulkin delicately tried to hold off Perlmutter’s proposal, saying the VA was already developing an in-house method of comparing its services to the private sector.

Shulkin also clashed with the Mar-a-Lago Crowd over how to improve the VA’s electronic record-keeping software (the one episode involving the trio that has previously surfaced, in a report by Politico). The contract, with a company called Cerner, would cost more than $10 billion and take a decade to implement. But Moskowitz had used a different Cerner product and didn’t like it. He complained that the software didn’t offer voice recognition, even though newer versions of Cerner’s product do. For months, the Mar-a-Lago Crowd pressured Shulkin to put the contract through additional vetting.

On Feb. 27, 2018, Shulkin flew to Mar-a-Lago — not to see Trump, who was back in Washington, but to meet with Perlmutter, Moskowitz and Sherman. The trip was supposed to close the deal on the Cerner contract, according to two people familiar with the meeting. By then, Shulkin’s stature had been badly diminished by an ethics scandal, and he expected he didn’t have much longer in the job, but he wanted to finish the Cerner deal first.

Shulkin brought O’Rourke, an ex-Trump campaign aide who stepped in as chief of staff after the ethics scandal led to the departure of Shulkin’s top aide. O’Rourke took the opportunity to ally himself with the Mar-a-Lago Crowd. “It was an honor to meet you all yesterday,” he wrote in a follow-up email. “I want to ensure that you have my VA and personal contact information.” He then provided his personal cell phone number and email address. (Using personal email to conduct government business can flout federal records laws, as President Trump and his allies relentlessly noted in their attacks on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign.) “Thank you for your support of the President, the VA, and me,” O’Rourke wrote. (O’Rourke didn’t answer requests for comment.)

Perlmutter welcomed the overture. “I feel confident that you will be a terrific asset moving forward to get things accomplished,” he replied.

The Mar-a-Lago Crowd grew frustrated with Shulkin, feeling like he wasn’t listening to them, and Perlmutter came to regret recommending Shulkin to Trump in the first place, according to people familiar with his thinking. That aligned them with political appointees in the VA and the White House who started to view Shulkin as out of step with the president’s agenda.

One of these officials, senior adviser Camilo Sandoval, presented himself as Perlmutter’s eyes and ears within the agency, two former officials said. For instance, in an email obtained by ProPublica, Sandoval kept tabs on the Apple project and reported back to Moskowitz and Sherman. “I will update the tracker, and please do let me know if this helps answers [sic] questions around Apple’s efforts or if additional clarification is required,” he wrote. Sandoval, who didn’t answer requests for comment, knew Perlmutter because he worked on the campaign with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is also close with Perlmutter.

In December, White House adviser Jake Leinenkugel sent Sandoval a memo outlining a plan to upend the department’s leadership. Leinenkugel would not say who asked him to write the memo. But it was clearly not intended for Sandoval alone, since it refers to him in the third person. Three people familiar with the situation said the memo was sent to Sandoval as a channel to Perlmutter. The spokeswoman for Perlmutter, Sherman and Moskowitz said they didn’t know about the memo.

The memo recommended easing Shulkin out and relying on Perlmutter for help replacing him. “Put [Shulkin] on notice to exit after major legislation and key POTUS VA initiatives in place,” the memo said. “Utilize outside team (Ike).” Although several factors contributed to Shulkin’s downfall, including the ethics scandal and differences with the White House over legislation on buying private health care, three former officials said it was his friction with the Mar-a-Lago Crowd over the Cerner contract that ultimately did him in.

Perlmutter, Moskowitz and Sherman dispute that contention. “Any decisions of the agency or the president,” they noted in their statement, “as well as the timing of any agency decisions, were independent of our contacts with the VA.”

But it wasn’t just Shulkin — all the officials that the Leinenkugel memo singled out for removal are now gone, replaced with allies of Perlmutter, Sherman and Moskowitz. The memo suggested that Sandoval take charge of the Office of Information and Technology, overseeing the implementation of the Cerner contract; he got the job in April. The memo proposed removing Deputy Secretary Tom Bowman; he left in June, and the post hasn’t been filled. The memo floated Richard Stone for under secretary for health; he got the job on an acting basis in July. Leinenkugel himself took charge of a commission on mental health (the same topic Moskowitz had emailed O’Rourke about). O’Rourke, having hit it off with the Mar-a-Lago Crowd, became acting secretary in May.

Trump initially nominated White House doctor Ronny Jackson to replace Shulkin, with Pentagon official Robert Wilkie filling in on a temporary basis. On Wilkie’s first day at the VA, Sherman was waiting for him in his office, according to a calendar record.

Within a few weeks, Wilkie made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. He tacked it onto a trip to his native North Carolina, and O’Rourke caught up with him in Palm Beach. They visited a VA hospital and rehab facility, then headed to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Perlmutter, Moskowitz and Sherman, according to agency records.

The Mar-a-Lago Crowd gave Wilkie and O’Rourke rave reviews. “I am sure that I speak for the group, that both you and Peter astounded all of us on how quickly and accurately you assessed the key problems and more importantly the solutions that will be needed to finally move the VA in the right direction,” Moskowitz told Wilkie in a follow-up email.

Perlmutter was similarly thrilled with the new regime. “For the first time in 1½ years we feel everyone is on the same page. Everybody ‘gets it,’” he said in an email. “Again, please know we are available and want to help any possible way 24/7.”

Wilkie replied that the honor was his. “Thank you again for taking time to see me,” he wrote.

Soon after, Jackson’s nomination imploded over allegations of misconduct as White House physician. (Jackson denied the allegations, and they’re still being investigated.) At that point, Perlmutter’s endorsement cleared the way for Trump to nominate Wilkie.

Wilkie, who was sworn in on July 30, now faces a choice between asserting his own authority over the VA or taking cues from the Mar-a-Lago Crowd. Wilkie reportedly wants to sideline O’Rourke and Sandoval and restock the agency leadership with his own people. But people familiar with the situation said the Mar-a-Lago Crowd’s allies are pushing back on Wilkie’s efforts to rein them in. As his predecessor learned the hard way, anyone who crosses the Mar-a-Lago Crowd does so at his own risk.

Democratic Socialist Poised to Be First Palestinian-American Congresswoman

With 96 percent of votes counted following Tuesday’s primary election in Michigan, Rashida Tlaib—who has been described as “a dynamic, minority, young progressive” and part of “the new breed of politician grabbing attention in the Democratic Party”—is slated to become the first Muslim and Palestinian-American Congresswoman.

Thank you so much for making this unbelievable moment possible. I am at a loss for words. I cannot wait to serve you in Congress.

— Rashida For Congress (@RashidaTlaib) August 8, 2018

Tlaib—who has been endorsed by several progressive groups, including the Justice Democrats, People for Bernie, and the Greater Detroit Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—is running in the reliably blue 13th District for the seat formerly held by longtime Democratic Rep. John Conyers, who retired in December following a series of sexual harassment allegations. She currently does not have a Republican opponent.

Prior to her congressional run, the 42-year-old Detroit native served in the Michigan House of Representatives until she was termed out, then worked as an attorney at an employee rights group, the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice.

.@RashidaTlaib didn’t win tonight just because of her bold vision and by building a strong grassroots campaign, but because she’s been organizing and representing her community for decades. She already had a constituency.

Organize your community: https://t.co/Z21NQfXgTw

— People For Bernie (@People4Bernie) August 8, 2018

Her boldly progressive platform prioritized:

promoting economic justice, from securing a $15 hourly minimum wage and defending unions to preventing cuts to social safety net programs and overturning Citizens United;
transitioning our for-profit healthcare system to the Medicare for All approach championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and a growing number of Americans;
fighting for tougher environmental regulations in Michigan and challenging the Trump administration’s moves to cripple the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA);
directing more resources to the public school system, and advocating for debt-free college and vocational training; and
guaranteeing equal rights for all by defending protections for the LGTBQ community, overturning President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, and working on immigration reform that includes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

In terms of foreign policy, Tlaib told The New Republic ahead of Tuesday’s vote that her positions “will be guided by the same values that drive my approach to domestic policy: Empathy, understanding, and respect.” She added:

I’m firmly anti-war, and I think that’s in large part influenced by my perspective as a Palestinian-American and having family and friends throughout the Middle East. I’ve seen firsthand how devastating military conflict is, and I think if more members of Congress actually knew the realities of war and regime change, they wouldn’t be so callous about dropping bombs in distant countries. We should be solving our problems with diplomacy, not by increasing our military spending budget.

Emerging as the victor among the “crowded field of Democrats” who ran in Tuesday’s primary, Tlaib’s “aggressive and direct” campaign has at times drawn comparisons to that of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old Democratic socialist who has garnered national attention since she defeated 10-term incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in June to represent New York’s 14 District.

Andy Goddeeris, Tlaib’s campaign manager, told CNN, “We are basically running the same campaign, with the same platform, and with a very similar candidate.”

.@RashidaTlaib did it!!

She pulled an amazing win last night, and will likely be the first Muslim woman and Palestinian-American to ever serve in Congress.

She won campaigning hard on issues like Medicare for All and tuition-free college, all without taking Corp lobbyist money. https://t.co/K5hd8rI5GY

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) August 8, 2018

Immigration Judges Say Justice Dept. Undermines Independence

PHILADELPHIA—Immigration judges on Wednesday accused the Justice Department and U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions of undermining a Philadelphia judge’s independence by having cases removed from his court, apparently because the federal officials deemed him too slow to make decisions on deportation orders.

A grievance filed by their union asks for the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review to acknowledge in writing that it will not interfere with the “decisional authority” of judges in the assignment or reassignment of cases.

“The decisional independence of immigration judges is under siege,” said Los Angeles Judge A. Ashley Tabaddor in her role as president of the National Association of Immigration Judges. “If allowed to stand, the agency can simply forum-shop its cases for the outcome it wishes to achieve.”

The grievance stems from a case of a Guatemalan immigrant who had come to the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor and had missed several court hearings.

Judge Steven A. Morley had suspended the case to examine whether proper notice had been sent to the man. The agency then reassigned the case to a supervisory judge who traveled from Virginia to hear the matter and issued a deportation order.

The union says dozens of additional cases were also removed from Morley, and they would like them to be returned to his docket.

Tabaddor said the union sees the reassignment of Morley’s cases as part of a larger problem of influencing how the immigration courts function, “turning immigration judges into an arm of law enforcement.”

No one was immediately available to comment at the Justice Department.

Tabaddor said she was unaware of other immigration judges who have had cases reassigned for these reasons, but said all the judges are currently facing issues with executive orders installing quotas and deadlines that are scheduled to go into effect in October.

The judges’ union said the Justice Department’s action not only undermined Morley’s authority but “also threatens the ability of all immigration judges nationwide to fairly apply the immigration laws of the United States consistent with due process rights of parties.”

GOP Congressman From New York Charged With Insider Trading

NEW YORK—Republican U.S. Rep. Christopher Collins of western New York state was arrested Wednesday on charges he fed inside information he gleaned from sitting on the board of a biotechnology company to his son, helping themselves and others dodge hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses when bad news came out.

Collins, 68, is a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump who was among the first two sitting members of Congress to endorse his candidacy for the White House.

An indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court charges Collins, the congressman’s son and the father of the son’s fiance with conspiracy, securities fraud, wire fraud and making false statements to the FBI.

Prosecutors said the charges stem from Collins’ decision to share with his son insider information about Innate Immunotherapeutics Limited, a biotechnology company headquartered in Sydney, Australia, with offices in Auckland, New Zealand. Collins was the company’s largest shareholder, with nearly 17 percent of its shares, and sat on its board.

According to the indictment, Collins was attending the Congressional Picnic at the White House on June 22, 2017, when he received an email from the company’s chief executive saying that a trial of a drug the company developed to treat multiple sclerosis was a clinical failure. After a public announcement, the company’s stock price plunged 92 percent.

Collins responded to the email saying: “Wow. Makes no sense. How are these results even possible???” the indictment said. It said he then called his son, Cameron, and, after several missed calls, they spoke for more than six minutes.

The next morning, according to the indictment, Collins began selling his shares, unloading enough over a two-day period to avoid $570,900 in losses before a public announcement of the drug trial results.

Prosecutors said the son traded on the inside information and passed it to a third defendant, Stephen Zarsky. Their combined trades avoided over $768,000 in losses, authorities said. They said Zarsky traded on it and tipped off at least three others.

Collins, a conservative who was first elected in 2012 to represent parts of western New York between Buffalo and Rochester, has denied any wrongdoing. When the House Ethics Committee began investigating the stock trades a year ago, his spokeswoman called it a “partisan witch hunt.”

“We will answer the charges filed against Congressman Collins in court and will mount a vigorous defense to clear his good name,” his attorneys, Jonathan Barr and Jonathan New, said in a statement Wednesday. “It is notable that even the government does not allege that Congressman Collins traded a single share of Innate Therapeutics stock. We are confident he will be completely vindicated and exonerated.”

All three defendants were in federal custody Wednesday and were expected to make their initial court appearance in the afternoon. Prosecutors also planned to hold a news conference.

Collins has a track record of publicly backing Trump, most recently calling for an end to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into campaign collusion and blaming the Obama administration for failing to push back on Russia.

“I share President Trump’s continued frustration as the left continues to try to nullify the 2016 Presidential election with claims of Russian interference,” he said.

On Wednesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan said he was removing Collins from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, calling insider trading “a clear violation of the public trust.”

In a written statement Wednesday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the charges against Collins “show the rampant culture of corruption and self-enrichment among Republicans in Washington today.”

Collins ran unopposed in the Republican primary and holds what’s largely considered a safe Republican seat in a state that went to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. He’s being challenged in November by Democrat Nate McMurray, a Grand Island, N.Y. town supervisor.

The congressman held nearly 17 percent of Innate’s stock. When the drug trials failed, the public announcement caused the company’s stock price to plunge 92 percent.

The advocacy group Public Citizen filed a request for an investigation of Collins’ stock dealings with the Office of Congressional Ethics and the Securities and Exchange Commission in January of 2017.

Tom Price, who was Trump’s first secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, also came under scrutiny for his purchases of Innate stock while he was a Republican member of Congress from Georgia.

Democrats made an issue of Price’s purchase at his Senate confirmation hearings in early 2017, after the Wall Street Journal reported that company officials had said Price was allowed to buy the stocks at a low price. Price, who bought around 400,000 shares of the stock, said he’d learned of the firm through Collins but said the price he received was available to any investor.

Price resigned as health secretary last September under criticism for taking pricey charter flights at taxpayers’ expense.

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Associated Press writers Alan Fram in Washington and Larry Neumeister in New York contributed to this story.

Democrats Pick Gay, Native American Nominee in Kansas Primary

TOPEKA, Kan.—Sharice Davids shattered the mold for a congressional primary winner from ruby red Kansas on Wednesday, becoming the state’s first Native American and gay nominee for Congress.

The 38-year-old attorney and activist prevailed in a close six-candidate Democratic primary Tuesday and will face four-term Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder. Democrats are targeting Yoder this fall because Democrat Hillary Clinton narrowly won the district in the 2016 presidential race.

Republicans hold all four Kansas seats in the U.S. House but Democrats hope to flip two of them in November.

Davids was raised by a single mother and earned a law degree from Cornell University. She was a White House fellow during Barack Obama’s presidency. And she’s a former mixed martial arts fighter who introduced herself to fellow Democrats with a video showing her in the ring and landing solid kicks to a large punching bag. That proved a compelling story for many Democratic voters in a competitive Kansas congressional race.

“In a lot of ways, my candidacy and my campaign is just another extension of the non-traditional path that I have in my life,” she said in an interview before the primary. “What people are seeing is that the traditional way that politics has been done is just not working for so many people.”

Davids, from Kansas City, Kansas, endorsed by EMILY’s List, which works to elect women who support abortion rights. She’s called for treating gun violence as a public health crisis and supports expanding Medicaid’s health coverage for more Americans. She’s critical of tax cuts championed by President Donald Trump.

But her closest primary opponent, Kansas City, Kansas, labor attorney Brent Welder, picked up the endorsed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the patriarch of the democratic socialist movement. Sanders campaigned for Welder with New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, its rising star.

Davids is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, of Wisconsin. Her mother served more than 20 years in the Army before working for the U.S. Postal Service.

Davids spent eight years working her way through college and law school. She also was fighting competitively: Online sites devoted to mixed marital arts say she compiled a 1-1 record in professional bouts and a 5-1 record in amateur contests, from 2006 through 2014.

Her Election Day schedule began with a 5:30 a.m. mixed marital arts workout.

Battling 18 Blazes, California Faces Its Worst Fire Season

LAKEPORT, Calif.—The largest wildfire ever recorded in California needed just 11 days to blacken an area nearly the size of Los Angeles — and it’s only one of many enormous blazes that could make this the worst fire season in state history.

Some 14,000 firefighters from as far away as Florida and even New Zealand are struggling to curb 18 fires in the midst of a sweltering summer that has seen wind-whipped flames carve their way through national forest land and rural areas, threaten urban areas and incinerate neighborhoods.

“For whatever reason, fires are burning much more intensely, much more quickly than they were before,” said Mark A. Hartwig, president of the California Fire Chiefs Association.

California is seeing earlier, longer and more destructive wildfire seasons because of drought, warmer weather attributed to climate change and home construction deeper into the forests.

Some of the largest fires have erupted just within the past few weeks as the state has seen record-setting temperatures — and the historically worst months of wildfire season are still to come.

In Northern California, the record-setting Mendocino Complex — twin fires being fought as a single conflagration — gained ground Tuesday but more slowly because its own smoke covered the area and lowered the temperature, according to the California Department of Forestry.

The flames, which had burned 457 square miles (1,184 square kilometers), were raging in mostly remote areas and no deaths or serious injuries were reported but 75 homes were destroyed.

The blaze that broke out July 27 initially spread quickly because of what officials said was a perfect combination of weather, rugged topography and abundant brush and timber turned to tinder by years of drought.

Resources also were thin at first because thousands of firefighters already were battling a fire hundreds of miles north. That fire, which spread into the city of Redding, killed six people and destroyed more than 1,000 homes. The so-called Carr Fire was less than half contained.

In becoming the biggest fire in California history, the Mendocino Complex fire broke a record set just eight months ago. A blaze in Southern California in December killed two people, burned 440 square miles (1,140 square kilometers) and destroyed more than 1,000 buildings.

California’s firefighting costs have more than tripled from $242 million in the 2013 fiscal year to $773 million in the 2018 fiscal year that ended June 30, according to Cal Fire.

“We’re in uncharted territory,” Gov. Jerry Brown warned last week. “Since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition, and it’s going to continue getting worse. That’s the way it is.”

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Associated Press writers Don Thompson in Sacramento, California, and Lorin Eleni Gill and Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco also contributed to this report.

Trillions and Trillions: Speculation Fuels Absurd Overvaluation of Tech Stocks

There are approximately 1 trillion stars in the Andromeda Galaxy, one for every dollar in Apple’s current market capitalization. Andromeda is 2.5 million light-years distant from our own Milky Way, however, so by the time any Andromedans read this, Apple will be long gone, melted or drowned like the rest of the artifacts of our Ozymandian civilization.

Meanwhile, Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, a $5 billion 1970s shopping-mall food court, is nicknamed “the spaceship,” though apparently not because the space cadets it houses can’t seem to stop walking into the glass walls. For the privilege of hosting the world’s most valuable public company and 25,000 of its employees, the city of Cupertino collects an extraordinary $17,000 a year in tax revenue, something akin to the annual property tax on a nice five-bedroom in Nassau County, N.Y.

A recent proposal to charge the company a head tax, increasing its annual contribution to $9.4 million—a burdensome two hundredths of 1 percent of Apple’s 2017 net income—was quashed on the vague promise that Apple would one day fund a local Hyperloop, a fantastical transportation technology that would put small train cars inside large versions of the pneumatic tubes from the drive-through bank your mom used to deposit checks into in 1986. It would move six or seven people at a time in a mere five minutes along a route that a tram carrying a hundred could traverse in ten.

I guess what I am saying is that this number, 1 trillion, is absurd.

It is also not terribly meaningful, except perhaps as a signpost on the route to the next recession. It is not, for instance, tied to any particular measurement of Apple’s performance as a company. Apple’s total balance-sheet assets are about $375 billion. At something like its present rate of profitability, it would take two more decades to earn a trillion bucks, and there is no particular reason to imagine it can indefinitely maintain current income levels.

The iPhone is more than a decade old and hasn’t improved meaningfully in several generations. Newer iterations have mostly grown more inconvenient, as Apple has turned its innovative energies to selling dongles and otherwise scamming customers into its proprietary peripherals ecosystem to goose revenues. Its last really good device, the iPod, is dead. All that remains of that elegant little improvement on a Walkman is the bloated, gaseous carcass of iTunes, around which its poor customers clutter like seabed scavengers around a decomposing whale.

Rather, its market capitalization, a pure reflection of stock price, is a product of speculation. Oh, sure, institutional investors care about quarterly earnings, but no one is really making bets on new products in the pipeline. They’re just watching pigeons fly like augurs in the ancient world. They are not investing in Apple; they are investing in Apple stock, something between a separate emanation and a magical élan vital.

There are plenty of overvalued companies, and Apple is only the most ridiculous because of the combination of the transcendent hugeness of its valuation and the cultish devotion of its most avid consumers, who respond to the company’s ever-blander aesthetic like John Ruskin swooning over 19th century Venice. But we should worry when whole trillion-dollar pieces of our economies are effectively make-believe, when, as was the case in 2007-2008 and in the dot-com blowup before that, a small spark of panic anywhere can swiftly cause a run on the whole rickety thing.

And we should worry as well because companies like Apple, besides making gadgets, have essentially locked up huge libraries of the cultural patrimony of our era—our music and literature and correspondence and movies and television. What happens if one, or several, of these new for-profit Alexandrias starts to burn? Forget the instantaneous evaporation of notional wealth. Who is going to run into Amazon’s sweltering server farms to rescue the scrolls? (The threat of a “digital dark age” is underdiscussed, despite the post-apocalyptic tendencies of contemporary art and politics, although it occasionally pops up in science fiction novels, such as Charlie Stross’ 2006 “Glasshouse.”)

The overvaluation of tech stocks and the dangers of a sector-wide collapse—even a modest correction—is only a small piece of the over-financialization of the entire global economic system. It is, for instance, only a symptom of our fixation on firms’ equity market capitalization that lets us call Apple the first trillion-dollar company in the first place. JPMorgan Chase & Co., for example, has a market cap of just under $400 billion, but that bank alone has $2.5 trillion in assets under management. Well, you can argue that that is really other people’s money, but so is Apple’s own trillion.

And in reality, Apple can do considerably less with all that equity than JPM can do with its piles upon piles of OPM. Globally, there are 30-odd banks with managed assets near or in excess of $1 trillion. The largest bank in China has over $4 trillion. Much of this money swirls about in the vast oceans of global credit markets, upon which equities like stocks are just the white froth on top of a fathomless sea. Money upon money upon money, without chains of title or clear owners—the pure communism of the super-super rich.

At some point in the future, if we survive, I expect historians will look back at us roughly as we look back at pre-Reformation Europe, a society so bound up by the universality of its common faith that from its own limited vantage it could not see the coming crackup. That said, I do think that everyone alive today, with the exception of paid professional optimists like the irrepressible Steven Pinker, senses the static charge of the coming storm. Nevertheless, it is hard to appreciate the true immensity of the holy architecture of global capital, and it’s no remedy to observe, correctly, that it is mostly made up. After all, gods do not have to be actual to be real.

It’s become a cliché to say that Facebook, a modest $500 million little brother to Apple, is more like a country than a company, populated by over two billion users and allegedly casting a deranging shadow of misinformation across the political systems of the world’s largest and most powerful nation-states. But Facebook’s subversion of notional national sovereignties is neither especially novel nor particularly egregious; it’s just very obvious because the company is run by a silly, callow and unsubtle young man. Financial firms, petrochemical companies, pharmaceutical concerns—they have all long transcended national borders, often working in the interests of powerful states, which are themselves generally unconcerned with any borders other than their own.

The question is what this will look like as this all begins to disentangle, as the pressures of climate change drive the largest human migrations in history and the ability of national and international political institutions to defend the global flow of capital and trade begins to crack and fade. I haven’t the slightest inkling of an answer, but I know that it will not look like a trillion-dollar glass donut on a leafy campus beside a magic train.

Department of Justice Raises Pointed New Questions in AT&T-Time Warner Merger

In June, following a grueling six-week trial, a federal court approved AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner for approximately $85 billion in cash and stocks. At the time, critics cautioned that the ruling could trigger a wave of mergers that punish consumers and consolidate wealth among the corporate class. In a brief filed Monday, the Justice Department went one step further, claiming the trial judge disregarded “[the] fundamental principles of economics and common sense.”

“U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon had ruled for the companies, saying the government didn’t come close to proving its claims that the deal would yield higher prices and less competition in the pay-TV industry,” writes The Wall Street Journal’s Brent Kendall. “But the Justice Department … said the judge ignored the fact that corporations will do what they can to maximize profits and instead accepted without reservation the testimony of defendants’ executives.”

During the trial, the federal government argued that the acquisition amounted to a media monopoly, with AT&T dominating not only the distribution of paid-TV services but its top content as well. (Time Warner owns both HBO and the Turner networks, two of cable television’s crown jewels.) AT&T and Time Warner countered that their companies complemented one another, and that it was incumbent on them to merge in a market where more and more viewers are cutting the cord.

In a 172-page decision, Leon ruled in the multinational’s favor. But as the Journal reports, transcripts from the trial contain several “unusual moments.” They include: “Judge Leon’s raising apparent concern about the Justice Department’s use of younger attorneys, and an AT&T lawyer talking about a contribution toward a fund for the unveiling of a painting commemorating the judge.”

The Journal also suggests that Leon went out of his way to shield AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson from the Justice Department’s legal team, upbraiding one attorney for attempting to question him about an appearance on CNBC in 2016. “Don’t pull that kind of crap again in this courtroom,” the judge reportedly warned.

A former attorney for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Leon was appointed to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia by then-President George W. Bush in 2001.

AT&T was defiant amid news of the Justice Department’s filing. “After a long trial, Judge Leon weighed the evidence and rendered a comprehensive … decision that systematically exposed each of the many holes in the government’s case,” its general counsel, David McAtee, said in a statement. “There is nothing in DOJ’s brief today that should disturb that decision.”

Read the full report at The Wall Street Journal.

New Colombian President Promises ‘Corrections’ to Peace Deal

BOGOTA, Colombia — Colombia’s youngest elected president was sworn in to office Tuesday, promising to “make corrections” to a peace deal with leftist rebels that has divided the country and to crack down on lingering armed groups still roaming the countryside.

Ivan Duque, the 42-year-old protege of a powerful right-wing former president, now faces the task of implementing the historic accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia that ended a half century bloody conflict, but which remains on shaky ground. He will also have to deal with burgeoning coca and cocaine production that has strained relations with key ally Washington and negotiate a peace with a holdout guerrilla army.

“The moment has come for all of us to unite to fight against illegal groups,” Duque said in his inauguration speech to more than a dozen heads of state, promising to get tough on crime, drug trafficking groups and other armed and rebel groups.

The new president said he believed in “the demobilization, disarmament and reinsertion of the guerrilla base” into society under the accord with the FARC. But he added that “we will make corrections to ensure that the victims receive truth, proportional justice, reparations and not a repetition” after a conflict that left at least 260,000 dead, some 60,000 missing and millions displaced.

In another nod to conservatives who have demanded tougher negotiation terms with rebel groups, Duque said he will push for a constitutional reform that makes it impossible for the government to grant amnesty to individuals who have been involved in drug trafficking and kidnappings.

Duque will have to lead peace negotiations with the National Liberation Army, a guerrilla army of some 2,000 fighters that began talks with Duque’s predecessor, Juan Manuel Santos. He said the talks with the ELN will hinge on whether the group ceases its attacks on Colombia’s military and accepts international monitoring.

“We have to construct a culture that respects the rule of law,” Duque said as he spoke on a large blue stage on Bogota’s largest public square.

Duque’s detractors fear he will be little more than a puppet for Alvaro Uribe, the ex-president who led a referendum defeat of the initial version of a peace accord with the FARC rebels. Uribe is still backed by millions of Colombians, though he is perhaps equally detested by legions who decry human rights abuses during his administration.

On Tuesday, hours before the inauguration ceremony, thousands gathered at public squares in Bogota and a dozen more cities across Colombia to express their opposition to Duque. At the rallies, protesters bore white flags and signs that called for the preservation of the peace deal.

“We are ready for dialogue,” said opposition Sen. Ivan Cepeda, one of Duque’s and Uribe’s fiercest critics. “But we are also ready to mobilize and exert our opposition if he enacts policies that limit peoples’ rights.”

Duque is taking office as a spate of attacks and the killings of social activists have underlined that peace remains a relative term.

On Monday night, a motorcycle bomb exploded outside a police station in the western province of Cauca. The National Liberation Army, a smaller guerrilla group that is still in peace talks, last week kidnapped three policemen and a soldier in an attack that highlighted the government’s struggle to bring law and order to Colombia’s most remote areas.

“If Duque is not able to solve this problem and find a way to bring the state into the countryside, we’re going to keep having the same problems we’ve had for decades,” said Jorge Gallego, a professor at Colombia’s Rosario University.

The new president has promised a harder line against drug trafficking that includes bringing back the aerial fumigation of coca crops, a policy that was stopped by Santos’ administration three years ago over health concerns, but is supported by the U.S. government. Cocaine production has doubled in Colombia over the past two years, according to U.S. government estimates.

Duque has undergone a quick transformation from unknown technocrat to president of South America’s second most populous nation, thanks in large part to the support of Uribe.

Just four years ago, Duque was a Washington suburbanite with a job at an international development bank. It was there that he developed close ties to Uribe, assisting the former president when he taught a course at Georgetown University. In 2014, Uribe propelled Duque into the political limelight when he encouraged him to return to Colombia to run for a Senate seat and placed him on a list of newcomer candidates that he urged his multitude of supporters to elect.

Within Uribe’s conservative Democratic Center party, Duque’s reputation as a more moderate voice can at times put him at odds with the solidly right-wing faction. Uribe’s support is thus considered crucial for Duque to rule with the full backing of his party. But he will need to build a broader alliance to pass laws in Congress.

In the weeks since his easy victory over leftist ex-guerrilla Gustavo Petro, Duque has signaled both his loyalty to Uribe and a conviction to chart his own path. While many of his Cabinet picks have ties to Uribe, there are also a number with no links to a traditional political party.

“So far I think he has shown more independence than some sectors believed,” Gallego said. “Treating Duque as a puppet of Uribe is a very simplistic way of analyzing things.”