Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 190

No Charges for Corey Lewandowski

In the first piece of good news for Donald Trump and his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, in weeks, Lewandowski won’t face charges for battery in Florida, Palm Beach County State Attorney David Aronberg announced Thursday.

After a March 8 press conference at Trump National in Jupiter, Florida, Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields was trying to ask the Republican frontrunner a question when Lewandowski grabbed her and yanked her away, nearly pulling her to the ground. Trump and Lewandowski initially both dismissed Fields’s account as fabulism, even though Washington Post reporter Ben Terris also witnessed it. A frustrated Fields then filed a police report, and police arrested Lewandowski on March 29. Surveillance footage confirmed that Lewandowski had grabbed Fields.

Related Story

The Many Scandals of Donald Trump: A Cheat Sheet

“As state attorney I made the decision that this office will not be filing charges against Corey Lewandowski for battery,” Aronberg said at a press conference. “Law enforcement arrests are based on probable cause. State prosecutions, however, rely upon a good-faith basis that sufficient evidence exists to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Aronberg wrote in a memo there was no reasonable doubt that Lewandowski had grabbed and yanked Fields. Aronberg also noted that Lewandowski had lied about the incident soon afterwards. But he said that the aide could probably offer a defense that was protecting Trump, and that there was insufficient evidence to contradict that and prosecute him.

Fields, who resigned from Breitbart along with several other staffers after the organization refused to stand behind her, could still file civil charges against Lewandowski, and she tells TheBlaze that she’s considering defamation suits against both the staffer and the candidate.

Escaping criminal prosecution will surely be a load off Lewandowski’s mind. (His lawyers have maintained all along that no crime was committed.) But the primary damage to Lewandowski and to Trump’s campaign may have been done outside of the justice system. Lewandowski has found himself marginalized within the Trump campaign, as the stumbling front-runner brings in more seasoned political hands, from delegate manager Paul Manafort to former Scott Walker aide Rick Wiley. Trump has lost ground in national polls and lost the last two contests, while Ted Cruz's team has run circles around him in state delegate selection.

Between the dropped charges and an expected win in the New York primary on Tuesday, Trump should have a smoother few days. But his path to 1,237 delegates and the Republican nomination isn’t getting any easier.

Legalizing Assisted Suicide in Canada

Americans interested in ending their lives through medical-assisted suicide will not be allowed to take advantage of new Canadian legislation introduced Thursday that would legalize the practice. The law, aimed to aid people with terminal, painful, and grievous conditions, excludes non-Canadians interested in so-called “suicide tourism.”

The proposed legislation would allow people who have a serious and incurable medical condition in an advanced stage, where their death “reasonably foreseeable,” to seek medical assistance in dying. That may come through a physician administering a substance or prescribing a medication that will lead to a person’s death. The bill requires a 15-day reflection period, unless a physician decides to speed up the process. Canadian officials on Thursday said the law would ensure the “autonomy” of people to make this decision.

Announcing the new legislation on Thursday, Jody Wilson-Raybould, the Canadian minister of justice, said the measure would ensure a peaceful death. “We are continuing to embark on a discussion that is incredibly personal, that is incredibly emotional,” she said in a press conference. “This gives dying patients the dignified choice of a medically assisted death.”

Later, she added, “We need to provide the most comfort to people when they are nearing the end of their lives.”

No one would be excluded—even those with mental illness, officials said. However, they must meet all government requirements on the severity of their illness. Officials said there are measures to further study mental illness, as well.

While assisted suicide is legal in the U.S. states of Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, it is not legal across the rest of the country. In June, California will begin to allow assisted suicide, as well. Albania, Colombia, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland also allow assisted suicide. In Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, assisted suicide is legal in limited circumstances.

Last year, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that consenting adults with a “grievous and irremediable” medical condition that causes “enduring suffering” have the constitutional right to end their lives through the assistance of a physician. In its ruling, the Court wrote this right was “critical to their dignity and autonomy.”

The ruling came after two British Columbia families challenged the ban on assisted suicide set in place by a Court decision from 1993. Previously, those who aided in suicide could have been sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Originally, the Canadian Supreme Court gave parliament a year to pass new legislation to regulate doctor-assisted suicide, following its February 2015 ruling. However, a court order from the Supreme Court gave the new Liberal government a four-month extension to write and pass a new law.

Without this new legislation, people would have to face a “cruel choice” about ending their lives, argued civil-liberties groups. “They either have to take their lives prematurely, at a time when they still can, or be trapped in intolerable suffering or seek the assistance of someone else outside of the legal framework,” Josh Paterson, the executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, told the National Post.

The debate will be both contentious and emotional. Though 77 percent of Canadians support assisted suicide, according to a Forum poll from August, some groups object to the policy. Will Johnson, the president of Canadian Physicians for Life, speaking with the National Post, said there would be “an unconscionable amount of chaos” in the health-care system as a result of this new policy, adding he’s suspicious of what might be “whispered in the ear of their sick, or we hope not depressed, relative.”

After the bill goes through the House of Commons, the Senate must act by the June 6 deadline.

This Very Common Cellphone Surveillance Still Doesn't Require a Warrant

The government does not need a warrant to access the location data created on an ordinary, often minute-to-minute basis by cellphones and logged with cell providers, the Sixth Circuit for the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday.

The ruling adds to a growing consensus among federal appeals courts that law enforcement can request this type of data—called “cell-site location information,” or CSLI—without violating the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search or seizure. But it only complicates the legal situation of their use, which is now so complex that driving across the border from Illinois to Kentucky changes how federal authorities can use the technology.

Every time a cellphone checks in with its provider—to send a text message, to start or end a voice call, or just to get a push notification—it lodges a time-stamped piece of location information with the nearest cell tower. This data, CSLI, isn’t as precise as a GPS coordinate, but in urban or suburban areas it can narrow someone’s location down to less than two miles and give their angular relationship to the nearest cell tower. String a set of these time-stamped points together and you can disprove an alibi or reconstruct an escape route.

Right now, CSLI comes in three flavors. The first is “real-time,” where police work with a cell provider to access location data immediately after it’s created. This usually does require a warrant. The second is a “tower dump,” when authorities ask for all the phones that have communicated with a certain tower during a period of time. There’s not a lot of law about how tower dumps work, but as of September of last year cops rarely sought a warrant for them.  

The third is historical CSLI, where law enforcement requests a backlog of location data created by a certain phone. This does not require a warrant, and hundreds of these requests happen per day. In 2015, AT&T alone handled more than 58,000 requests for historic CSLI. (By contrast, it received about 17,000 real-time CSLI warrants and fewer than 1,500 tower-dump requests.) Warrantless CSLI may be the most common kind of cellphone surveillance that Americans are subject to.

The just-decided Sixth Circuit case, U.S. v. Carpenter and Sanders, is a good example of how this looks in practice. Between December 2010 and March 2011, there were a string of robberies of T-Mobile and Radioshack stores in and around Detroit. The robber, not named in the suit, confessed soon after the crimes and shared his cellphone number with the FBI. The agency requested his call records, then made a second request: the call records and cell-site location information for 16 additional phone numbers.

With this data, it identified the defendants in the suit—Timothy Sanders and Timothy Carpenter—as the alleged organizers, getaway car drivers, and lookout men for the robberies.

In making this critical second request, it asked for more than just a couple of days of location data. In fact, it asked for more than 215 days of combined CSLI, almost seven months of information total. The defendants and the American Civil Liberties Union contended that all this geographical data, when taken together, constituted a warrantless search.   

“When police obtain months’ worth of cellphone data comprising thousands of individual locations, like they did in this case, they should have to get a search warrant from a judge,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, the ACLU attorney who argued the case in front of the Sixth Circuit, in a statement.

The ACLU turned to two recent Supreme Court rulings for support. In the first, Riley v. California in 2014, the justices held that authorities couldn’t search a smartphone’s data without a warrant. In the second, U.S. v. Jones in 2012, they ruled that attaching a GPS tracker to a car without seeking a warrant first violated the Fourth Amendment.

The Sixth Circuit rejected the ACLU’s reasoning. Riley covered the wealth of internal data that a phone can store, including emails, notes, photos, and text  messages; and not the limited kind of location data logged on corporate servers, wrote Judge Raymond Kethledge in the majority opinion. And the precise GPS tracking at issue in Jones, he said, doesn’t approach the general locational awareness permitted by CSLI.

Historical CSLI is “as much as 12,500 times less accurate than the GPS data in Jones,” wrote Kethledge. “And cellphone locational data are even less precise in suburban and rural settings [than urban ones]. Areas of this scale might encompass bridal stores and Bass Pro Shops, gay bars and straight ones, a Methodist church and the local mosque.”

Instead, Kethledge vindicates the federal privacy test that has been in effect since the late 1970s: the third-party doctrine, which holds Americans do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy to data created and logged by an outside corporation. This law differentiates between the private content of a communication and the information needed to convey it, and it’s why police need a warrant to wiretap a phone call but not to request call records.

But the Sixth Circuit’s ruling was not unanimous. While Judge Jane Stranch concurred with Kethledge’s decision, she disagreed that long-term historical CSLI was straightforwardly Constitutional. Fourth Amendment protection isn’t just a matter of precision, she said, approvingly citing a line from the Supreme Court’s 1942 decision in Skinner v. Oklahoma:

There may be situations where police, using otherwise legal methods, so comprehensively track a person’s activities that the very comprehensiveness of the tracking is unreasonable for Fourth Amendment purposes.

Stranch writes that CSLI sits uncomfortably between the law governing location information and the law governing business records. “I do not think that treating the CSLI obtained as a ‘business record’ and applying that test addresses our circuit’s stated concern regarding long-term, comprehensive tracking of an individual’s location without a warrant,” she writes. Ultimately, she writes, the Sixth Circuit or a higher court may need to develop a new legal test to determine exactly what kinds of search require a warrant.

The day when the Supreme Court formulates that test, however, may now not come for years. In upholding the constitutionality of warrantless CSLI requests, the Sixth Circuit joins two other federal appeals courts, the Fifth and the Eleventh Circuit. All three courts have now ruled that seeking months of historical cell-site data without a warrant is perfectly legal.

As recently as last year, that looked like it might change. Last summer, the Fourth Circuit ruled that this kind of warrantless CSLI request was illegal. The ACLU also asked the Supreme Court to take up a case on the same question. But the high court declined the petition, and, in October, the Fourth Circuit decided to rehear the CSLI case again as a full court. This vacates its earlier ruling and removes the brief circuit split.

So the legal status of warrantless cellphone tracking remains messy: a drive up Interstate 95 would take you through states where a warrant is required for all CSLI, for just historical CSLI, for some historical CSLI—and where no warrant is required at all. The ACLU has created a map of what protections exist in each state. I’ve embedded it below. There’s a good chance that it will get even more complicated before it starts to improve:

ACLU

Proof of Life For Nigeria’s Kidnapped Girls

A video obtained by CNN appears to shows some of the remaining kidnapped Nigerian girls who were taken by Boko Haram two years ago from a school in the country’s northeastern region. It’s the first video evidence that some of the girls may still be alive since their abduction from the town of Chibok.

“I am speaking on 25 December 2015, on behalf of all the Chibok girls and we are all well,” one of the girls says into the camera.

Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls in April 2014, and the two-minute video claims to show 15 of those girls still alive. Someone close to the negotiations for their rescue handed the video to CNN, the broadcaster reported, and its digital marking reportedly dates it to last Christmas. The video shows the girls in two lines against beige-painted cement wall, their bodies covered entirely with black hijabs except for their faces. A voice off camera asks them their names, and from where they were taken. The Nigerian government told CNN it has a copy of the video, but cannot confirm its authenticity. The country’s Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, told CNN the government had concerns the girls seemed too young, and that they’d not aged as much as expected, given their two years in captivity.

Hundreds of girls kidnapped, no answers for parents -- until now. https://t.co/lEueVsFZW2 #BringBackOurGirls pic.twitter.com/iSafk0JBwj

— CNN International (@cnni) April 14, 2016

The kidnapping two years ago caused an international plea for their release, with regular protests in Nigeria. Relatives and critics condemned then president, Goodluck Jonathan, for his slow response. Lately, the Nigerian military––with the help of other nations, including the U.S.––has fought Boko Haram, and it’s believed the Islamist group is growing weaker. But that hasn’t deterred its fighters from further attacks.

A report released Tuesday, on the second anniversary the of Chibok girls’ kidnapping, noted that suicide attacks by Boko Haram had climbed from 32 in 2014, to 151 last year; many of them were carried out by children and young girls. Boko Haram operates in Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon, and its violence is blamed for the mass displacement of 2.3 million people.

Parents of the Chibok girls and many more protesters had planned demonstrations this week in the capital of Nigeria, Abuja, hoping to pressure the government to act more urgently to fight for the girls’ return. But Boko Haram has said it will only release the girls in exchange for its imprisoned fighters.

Some of the mothers CNN showed the video to recognized their daughters. One of the people CNN showed the video to was a young girl, a classmate who’d left the school early the day Boko Haram came. She watched the video and picked out several of her friends, CNN reported. In all, there are more than 200 girls still missing.  Since they disappeared, many of the girls were feared dead, and some reports have said Boko Haram has brainwashed them to fight and kill alongside the terrorist group. This video is the first evidence that at least some may still be alive.

Patrolling the South China Sea

Defense Secretary Ash Carter said U.S. ships had already conducted patrols with the Philippines in the South China Sea, which China claims almost in its entirety. And, he added, U.S. troops and military equipment would be sent on regular rotations to the Philippines.

Stars and Stripes reported that the two countries have twice conducted joint patrols in the South China Sea, in March and in April; regular joint patrols will continue in the future, it reported.

Reuters adds:

The initiatives are designed so that the United States does not increase its permanent footprint in its former colony, but they demonstrate that the two countries are increasing security cooperation amid joint concerns over China's actions in the region's disputed waterways.

About 5,000 U.S. troops are in the Philippines as part of the annual Balikatan exercise, which ends Friday; 275 will remain until the end of the month when they will be replaced by follow-on personnel.  

In his comments to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, published last month, President Obama said the U.S. policy in the South China Sea had “surprised China, frankly, and have very much served our interest in strengthening our alliances.” Still, Carter insisted the U.S. actions weren’t targeted at China, but Voltaire Gazmin, his Filipino counterpart, said the presence of U.S. forces “will deter uncalled-for actions by the Chinese.”

Close Encounters of the Russian Kind

The U.S. military has released the above photo of a Russian warplane flying too close for the Americans’ comfort over a Navy destroyer in international waters in the Baltic Sea.

The U.S. European Command (EUCOM) said in a statement Wednesday that in the past two days Russian military aircraft have made “multiple, aggressive” flights near the USS Donald Cook, a missile destroyer that is usually stationed in Rota, Spain, but is at present conducting routine patrols in the Baltic Sea.

On Monday, a pair of Sukhoi Su-24 fight jets made “numerous, close-range and low altitude passes” near the destroyer, leading the U.S. military to suspend flight operations until the Russian craft had left the area. On Tuesday, a Russian KA-27 Helix helicopter conducted seven sets of “circles at low altitude around the ship,” EUCOM said. Forty minutes later, two Su-24 jets whizzed by 11 times.

EUCOM released several short clips of the flybys, including this one:

“The Russian aircraft flew in a simulated attack profile and failed to respond to repeated safety advisories in both English and Russian,” EUCOM said. “We have deep concerns about the unsafe and unprofessional Russian flight maneuvers.”

Late last month, the U.S. announced it would increase its military presence in eastern Europe in response to an “aggressive Russia. This weeks’ flybys occurred just as NATO announced it would hold its first formal meeting with Russia, the alliance’s Cold War-era adversary, in almost two years next month. “It is not a return to business as usual, but we do need dialogue,” a NATO spokeswoman told Reuters. These flights will probably come up.

The Los Angeles Police Shooting Deemed Unjustified

A civilian oversight board ruled on Tuesday that a Los Angeles Police officer was not justified in the fatal shooting of a homeless man near the Venice boardwalk last year.

The Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners agreed with a report written by Police Chief Charlie Beck that said when officer Clifford Proctor shot Brendon Glenn last May, the choice to use lethal force was “not objectively reasonable,” and was out of line with LAPD policy.  

The board voted unanimously in a closed session to deem the 2015 shooting unjustified, which is not legally binding, but places pressure on the L.A. County District Attorney to file criminal charges against the officer, a rare occurrence in a department with a history of police abuse. If the district attorney decides to prosecute, Proctor would be the first Los Angeles police officer to be charged in an on-duty shooting in 15 years.

Hours after Glenn died, Beck told reporters he was “very concerned” about the events of the shooting, a comment the local police union has described as unfair to Proctor, and even “selling out” to critics. Police reports say Glenn, who was black, had shouted racial epithets at Proctor, who is also black, and repeatedly ignored the officer’s orders. But Beck concluded Glenn’s actions did not require the use of deadly force.

Proctor said he shot Glenn twice when the officer saw Glenn reach for his partner’s holster. Both officers at the scene wore body cameras, but it was security footage from a nearby bar that seemed to trouble Beck. That footage has not been made public, but from a LAPD report published by The Los Angeles Times, the security video doesn’t seem to jibe with Proctor’s story. Beck wrote that “at no time during the struggle can Glenn’s hand be observed on or near any portion” of the second officer’s holster.

On May 5, Proctor and his partner––who has not been publicly identified––responded to a call reporting that an unarmed homeless man and his dog were bothering customers near the busy boardwalk. When they arrived, they found Glenn, a 29-year-old skateboarder often found in Venice’s bohemian, drifter scene, in front of a restaurant and seemingly intoxicated.

Glenn shouted at the officers, threatening to release his dog, a pitbull labrador mix, if they approached, according to the chief’s report. Proctor responded by saying, “Don’t come over here with your dog. I will shoot your dog.”

In his report, Beck wrote that the officers should have deescalated the situation because “operational success is based on the ability of the officers to effectively plan and approach each incident in a safe manner.” The lack of discussion between the officers about handling Glenn, or calling for backup when Glenn later pushed a bar bouncer at the scene, “was a substantial deviation, without justification, from approved Department tactical training,” Beck wrote.

After Glenn and the bouncer began shoving each other, one of the officers grabbed Glenn’s arm and Glenn tried to break free, according to the report. The officer grabbed Glenn’s hair and forced him to the ground, and both officers dug their knees into Glenn’s back. Glenn struggled, reaching his hand around. Proctor said “everything was happening so fast and everybody’s hands were flailing around … when I realized I didn’t have control …. proper control because he had spun us around and I saw …. his hand on my partners holster, that’s when I drew [the gun].”

Proctor said his first shot didn’t faze Glenn, so he fired again. After Beck watched security footage, he concluded that another officer with similar training wouldn’t agree “there was a substantial risk that the situation may escalate to the point where deadly force may be justified.”

The other officer with Proctor would later say Glenn’s hand didn’t near the holster, and the security footage, based on Beck’s report, appears to support this claim.

After Glenn’s death, protestors in Venice demanded Proctor be charged for the killing, and the LAPD held a contentious town hall meeting.  In January, Beck recommended charges against the officer.

Video footage of police shootings—from cellphones, body cameras, or security cameras––have highlighted the potential for discrepancies between officers’ reports and actual events. And more and more, video evidence unsubstantiated what officers have said was a necessary escalation of force––often lethal force.

Footage of the 2015 shooting of Walter Scott by South Carolina officer Michael Slager. showed Scott was shot running away, and at a greater distance than the officer had reported. The first police reports filed after the death of Eric Garner in 2015 didn’t mention that officer Daniel Pantaleo used a chokehold––a move prohibited by the New York Police Department––to take Garner down. But cellphone footage captured by a bystander made it pretty clear Pantaleo had choked Garner. In the case of Laquan McDonald, Chicago officer Jason Van Dyke said the 17-year-old charged police with a knife––a story corroborated by five other officers–––but dash camera footage that a judge ordered released 13 months after the 2014 shooting discredited that story. Van Dyke was charged with murder after the footage was made public.

V. James DeSimone, the lawyer representing Glenn’s family in a wrongful-death lawsuits against the city and police chief, told The Los Angeles Times  Tuesday that “simply put, without the video there would most likely be no call for this officer’s prosecution or for a finding that this officer was out of policy.”

Hillary Clinton's Agenda for Black America

Hillary Clinton has been dominating Bernie Sanders among black voters in the Democratic primary, but it has not been a good couple of weeks for her campaign on the topic of race relations.

First, Bill Clinton got into it with a group of Black Lives Matter protesters last week, passionately defending the 1994 crime bill that was enacted during his presidency, along with Hillary’s 20-year-old use of the term “super-predators” to describe violent gang leaders. Clinton’s finger-wagging drew criticism from prominent African Americans—the Reverend Al Sharpton called his lecturing “inappropriate”—and the former president all but apologized the following day. Then, over the weekend, Hillary Clinton was called out for participating in a skit with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio that included an awkward and racially charged joke referencing “CP time”—an old negative stereotype about blacks. (Clinton deferred to City Hall on the flap, telling Cosmopolitan that it was “de Blasio’s skit.”)

So when Clinton appeared before Sharpton’s National Action Network, there was a bit more drama surrounding her speech than there otherwise might have been. Would she take the opportunity to revisit the crime bill or again voice regret—as she did in February—for the use in 1996 of the term “super-predator”? Would she mention the ill-received joke with de Blasio?

The answer, on both accounts, was nope.

Clinton delivered the kind of speech that has become her hallmark: substantive and detailed, if not exactly stirring, and one that hit political and policy notes as if she were checking them off a list. She heaped plenty of praise on President Obama but made no mention of either her husband or de Blasio.

While praising the legacy of Obama and Jackie Robinson, who made his barrier-breaking debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers 69 years ago this week, Clinton called out the racial divisions that have persisted during the last few years and the charged rhetoric of the Republican primary race. “America’s long struggle with racism is far from finished,” she said. “Ugly currents that lurked just below the surface of our politics have burst into the open, and everyone sees this bigotry for what it is. And it is up to all of us to repudiate it.”

“These are not just the problems of economic inequality. They are also the problems of racial inequality.”

Clinton made only indirect references to Senator Bernie Sanders, who is addressing the conference in Manhattan on Thursday. But when she talked about the yawning gap in median incomes, death rates, and incarceration rates between blacks and whites, she clearly took sides in a recurring debate on the left over how to address racial inequities in the context of income inequality. “These are not just the problems of economic inequality. They are also the problems of racial inequality,” Clinton said.

Without delving deeply into the root causes of mass incarceration, the former New York senator noted that she devoted the first major policy address of her campaign to proposals for criminal-justice reform. But she said that sentencing and prison reform was “just the beginning of our work.” “Years of underinvestment and neglect,” Clinton said, “have hollowed out many predominately African American communities.”

To that end, she pledged to spend $125 billion as part of a “breaking every barrier” agenda, including $25 billion for programs to help young people and ex-prisoners find jobs. She decried the response to the lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan, which she said “would never have happened in a wealthy suburb of Detroit.” Clinton said she would set a national goal of eliminating lead as a major public-health threat within five years.

Introducing Clinton, Sharpton noted their long alliance but reminded the crowd that he had not endorsed any candidate yet. Instead, he said he wanted to hear specifics, “not a sound bite,” from the candidates. “Black America must be taken seriously,” he said. “We must be taken seriously, because no one can win unless we vote seriously in November.”

In that respect, Clinton gave Sharpton exactly what he wanted. Acknowledging during the middle of her remarks that she was getting pretty wonky, Clinton appeared to ad-lib: “The Reverend asked me to be substantive. Well, I’m giving it to ya. Because, you know what? When somebody asks for your vote, they should tell you what they’re going to do, not what they hope to do.”

When she was finished, Sharpton signaled his approval. Clinton had concluded with a call to action and a reference to the Bible. “Let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart,” she said.

These are words to live by and I believe these are words to govern by.  Think of the future we can build if we work together and don’t grow weary doing good. The men on both sides of me have not grown weary. This organization has not grown weary. It is our obligation and our challenge not to grow weary either until every American has the dignity, the justice, and the opportunity they deserve.

As the crowd cheered and Sharpton reclaimed the podium, he said: “Thank you, Reverend Hillary Clinton.” If Clinton missed any notes that Sharpton wanted her to hit, he was certainly hiding it well.

The Show That Left Louis C.K. With Millions in Debt

Louis C.K.’s independent television show Horace and Pete is about as simple a production as is imaginable: It involves two sets (a bar and the apartment upstairs), mostly stationary camera-work, and an ensemble of famous actors who are happy to work cheaply. It nevertheless costs $500,000 per episode to make—very little for television, but when you’re filming 10 episodes, that adds up. C.K. put $2 million of his own money into the show, which has won him rave reviews, and self-producing it for his website certainly offered him total creative freedom. But as the TV-funding model shifts and expands in the online TV era, is it possible his experiment was too much, too soon?

Related Story

Horace and Pete Is Louis C.K.'s Take on American Melodrama

C.K. could have made Horace and Pete for FX, the network that houses his now-dormant comedy Louie, but he would likely have had to moderate the content of his show, which features a lot of explicit language and episodes that run anywhere from 40 to 75 minutes. Instead, as he told Howard Stern, he decided to fund it himself and sell it online, hoping the sales of the first four episodes would recoup his costs and fund the rest of the season. According to C.K., that hasn’t happened—he’s “millions of dollars in debt,” he said, with a laugh. That doesn’t mean Horace and Pete wasn’t worth the gamble, but it did follow an expensive model very few artists can imitate—suggesting the broader TV industry isn’t going to be changing any time soon.

The classic independent film-financing model sees producers scraping together money from a motley crew of studios and financiers, often from all over the world, to make a movie and then try to recoup costs by selling the distribution rights and splitting the box office receipts. “Indie TV” couldn’t exist in any form before the Internet because there was simply no way to get it on the air without teaming up with a network. Now, the humble web series is a recognized art form, and the best of them—like Broad City, or Vimeo’s High Maintenance—end up with real TV deals. But Horace and Pete was different: C.K. wasn’t angling for network attention, but striking out to make something not beholden to studio notes, that didn’t require act breaks for commercials, and that could generate revenue entirely from word of mouth.

His appearance on Stern predictably engendered a lot of debate over whether Horace and Pete was worth the trouble. Jason Zinoman of The New York Times wrote a well-reasoned critical piece saying that like many works of art, Horace and Pete perhaps could have benefited from studio interference to smooth out its rougher edges. Dan D’Addario of Time said that C.K.’s decision to trust his fanbase to shell out $31 total for the 100 episodes he produced (they cost between $2 and $5 per episode) was risky considering how the current TV landscape is already flooded with content. The easy access, advertising strength, and brand recognition offered by a network (and its many online and on-demand appendages) can spur people to check out a new show. Paying $5 via Paypal to LouisCK.net is an extra hurdle many won’t bother to clear.

Strangely, C.K.’s troubles echo those of one of the world’s biggest companies—Amazon, which benefits from some 60 million Prime subscribers but has struggled to attract viewers to its original programming (even the Emmy-winning hit Transparent remains relatively niche). A dodgy online interface, a homepage that buries original TV content, and unavailability on streaming devices like Apple TV haven’t helped. Horace and Pete had the same problems, just on a much smaller scale. The comedian has a huge subscriber base in the form of legions of devoted fans who have bought his stand-up specials through his website for years. But you can only watch Horace and Pete through your computer, which cut off a lot of viewers who might otherwise be interested—especially older viewers who might have found the stagey, throwback feel of the show appealing.

Paying $5 via Paypal to LouisCK.net is an extra hurdle many viewers won’t bother to clear.

There’s still time for Horace and Pete to make money. C.K. sparked a whole new publicity campaign simply by addressing his debt on Stern, and he told the radio host that funding continues to come in for the show as he mounts an Emmy campaign for it. “I believe that ... by the summer, the show will have paid itself off,” he said, also predicting that eventually he’d sell it to “another outlet,” even though most TV studios wouldn’t be able to air the show because of its language. If C.K. does end up selling the show, then he’ll have followed the path of most self-funded web series, which serve more as auditions for bigger studios than anything else.

Broad City, a web series created by the comedians Abbi Jacobson and Illana Glazer and uploaded to YouTube, caught Amy Poehler’s eye in 2010—she shepherded it to Comedy Central. The Chris Gethard Show was an online talk show self-funded by its titular star (which took advantage of New York City’s public access broadcasting network to look relatively professional)—it was acquired by Zach Galifianakis, Will Ferrell, and Adam McKay, who brought it to Fusion. Drunk History has become an Emmy-nominated hit—it started out as an irreverent online recap of historical events delivered by sloshed comedians in their homes.

Horace and Pete was something grander, down to its surprise announcement: C.K. dropped an entirely new show on unprepared audiences with a brusque email saying only “Horace and Pete episode one is available for download. $5. Go here to watch it. We hope you like it. Regards, Louis.” And there’s no doubt it worked on some level: Horace and Pete is without a doubt the most-discussed web series ever released, commanding the kind of attention only an already established artist can. But even that lofty status hasn’t yet amounted to a profit. C.K. got to make exactly the show he wanted, and that may have been worth it, but it’s still a luxury few artists can afford.

From Politician to Indie Filmmaker

“I love movies,” says Robert Mrazek, “and I’ve always loved movies.” A five-term Democratic Congressman from New York during the Reagan-Bush years, Mrazek retired from politics in 1993 to write military-themed novels and nonfiction—he now has eight books to his name—but he never lost his love of cinema. And now, at age 70, he is the screenwriter and co-director of his first film, entitled, appropriately enough, The Congressman.

The film, which stars Treat Williams and closed the Sarasota Film Festival last weekend, concerns a burned-out representative from Maine named Charlie Winship, who finds himself at the center of controversy after footage is televised in which he fails to rise for the Pledge of Allegiance on the floor of the House. He retreats to a remote lobster fishing village on the island of Monhegan—where Mrazek himself lives and writes for half of each year—and there reassesses his life with the help of the down-to-earth town librarian (Elizabeth Marvel).

Making films was always Mrazek’s ambition. It just took him a little longer to get around to it than most. After leaving the Navy in 1968, he attended the London Film School, where he studied under the director Charles Frend. But after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, Mrazek says his fledgling film career felt “kind of trivial.” So he came back to the states, where he went to work for the anti-war Indiana Senator Vance Hartke before launching his own political career, first in the Suffolk County legislature and later in the House.

But the film bug never left him altogether. In 1987, he spearheaded a U.S. Congressional Lifetime Achievement Award for his favorite director, Fred Zinnemann, of High Noon, From Here to Eternity, and A Man for All Seasons fame. “I felt he had done great service to our country culturally,” says Mrazek. “He came to Washington and he stayed with me for a week, and we became really good friends.” A year later, in 1988, Mrazek led the fight for the National Film Preservation Act, at a time when studios were colorizing black and white classics, often to the filmmakers’ great dismay.

After Congress, Mrazek says he wrote a few screenplays before one of them, a Vietnam-era love story, came to the attention of producer Fred Roos, who’d worked with Francis Ford Coppola on such films as Apocalypse Now and The Godfather Part 2. (As Mrazek says of the former, Roos “held things together when Francis was having some emotional issues.”) But the script that had attracted Roos was a “much bigger budgeted picture,” says Mrazek, “and it’s been in development, so to speak. And I thought, Bob, you’re 68 years old, if you’re going to make a picture you’d better get started.”

Of his past lifetime in elective politics, Mrazek says merely, “I feel that I took a detour for 30 years.”

So he wrote The Congressman as an intentionally smaller film and arranged to co-direct with a friend of his who also lived on Monhegan, Jared Martin, an actor perhaps best known for playing champion rodeo cowboy “Dusty” Farlow on Dallas, “when they decided that Larry Hagman’s wife ought to have a lover.” For inspiration, Mrazek looked to such classics as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Candidate, The Seduction of Joe Tynan, and Local Hero.

Getting Treat Williams to star as Charlie Winship was crucial, Mrazek says: “He felt he was on the same journey as the principal character. And when he arrived to shoot the film, he was Charlie Winship. He said, ‘I’ve been grinding my career the same way Charlie did in the House.’ He was perfect for the role. We got so lucky.”

As Williams sees it, his fit was apparent from the start. He describes the role as “one of those things that we all strive for later in life. I’ve been knocking my head against the wall for 64 years: What am I going to do for the next 20 or so?” (The answer, evidently, is that he’ll play members of Congress: He also stars as Ted Kennedy in HBO’s Clarence Thomas drama, Confirmation, which premieres this Saturday.)

The Congressman, which opens in New York and Washington, D.C. on April 29, is a self-conscious throwback of a film—as Williams describes it, “a little movie with a big heart.” Mrazek says that he deliberately chose to forgo most of the festival circuit because “it is not bleak, it is not dark, it is not violent … I’m kind of cringing at what our Rotten Tomatoes percentage is going to be.” Regardless, Mrazek is clearly enjoying his new career as a filmmaker, however long he may have postponed it. Of his past lifetime in elective politics, he says merely, “I feel that I took a detour for 30 years.”