Historic Justice.......

Takeaways from the historic Justice Department court filing on the Mar-a-Lago search

By Jeremy Herb, Marshall Cohen and Tierney Sneed

Former President Donald Trump has pushed an "incomplete and inaccurate narrative" in his recent court filings about the Mar-a-Lago search, the Justice Department said in a historic court filing late Tuesday night.

Prosecutors fleshed out new details about the ongoing criminal investigation into Trump's potential mishandling of classified documents, which he took from the White House to his resort and home in Florida. Trump and his allies have denied any wrongdoing.

In total, the US government has recovered more than 320 classified documents from Mar-a-Lago since January, including more than 100 seized in the August search, DOJ says.

The filing is in response to Trump's bid for a "special master" in a civil lawsuit against the Justice Department, weeks after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago. The judge handling the case, a Trump appointee, has said her "preliminary intent" is to bring in a special master. A hearing is scheduled for Thursday.

Here are some key takeaways from the filing, what we learned and where we go from here.

Docs were moved and possibly hidden from investigators

Documents were "likely concealed and removed" from a storage room at Mar-a-Lago as part of an effort to "obstruct" the FBI's investigation, the Justice Department said in its filing Tuesday.

What's more, the DOJ said that the search "cast serious doubt" on his lawyers' claims that there had been a "diligent search" to return classified material in response to a grand jury subpoena.

A Trump lawyer signed a statement to the Justice Department in June attesting that all of the classified material at Mar-a-Lago had been returned.

"That the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the 'diligent search' that the former President's counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter," DOJ wrote.

DOJ rejects Trump criticisms and falsehoods about FBI search

The Justice Department filing gave federal investigators the chance to rebut -- on the record -- many of the claims that Trump, his lawyers and his political allies have been making as they've harshly attacked the FBI's unprecedented search of his residence.

DOJ wrote that the filing included a "detailed recitation of the relevant facts, many of which are provided to correct the incomplete and inaccurate narrative set forth in Plaintiff's filings."

The filing cited numerous examples refuting claims that have come from Trump's team about the search and what happened in the lead-up to it.

For instance, a top DOJ official contends that federal investigators were limited in what they could look through when visiting the Mar-a-Lago resort in June -- contrary to the Trump team's narrative of total cooperation.

Trump lawyers didn't claim docs were declassified

DOJ's account also undermined claims by Trump and his allies that the former President had declassified the materials in question.

"When producing the documents, neither counsel nor the custodian asserted that the former President had declassified the documents or asserted any claim of executive privilege," the filing said.

"Instead, counsel handled them in a manner that suggested counsel believed that the documents were classified: the production included a single Redweld envelope, double-wrapped in tape, containing the document," prosecutors added.

A picture is worth a thousand words

The final page of the 54-page court filing was a photo showing classified document cover sheets arrayed on the floor of Trump's office at Mar-a-Lago, including documents with highly sensitive material like human sources.

The photo drove home the message that the Justice Department appeared to be making Tuesday laying out its most robust defense yet of the search.

The government took custody of documents from Mar-a-Lago three times this year: Trump voluntarily turned over 15 boxes to the National Archives in January, Trump's team turned over some materials under subpoena in June, and FBI agents seized another 33 boxes during the search of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month.

Prosecutors said that FBI agents recovered over 100 unique classified documents during the search of Mar-a-Lago on August 8. (Investigators didn't disclose how many of these were "top secret.")

About the passport

Trump has attacked the FBI for taking his passports, though they were later returned, claiming they were outside the scope of the warrant and improperly seized.

But the government asserted that the passports were found in a desk draw that contained classified documents, with government records "comingled with other documents."

"The location of the passports is relevant evidence in an investigation of unauthorized retention and mishandling of national defense information; nonetheless, the government decided to return those passports in its discretion," DOJ wrote.

A special master would impede review of national security risks, DOJ says

The Justice Department argued in its court filing Tuesday that appointing a special master to review the materials taken from Trump's residence would harm national security, arguing it would delay the intelligence community's ongoing review of documents that were kept at Mar-a-Lago.

"Appointment of a special master would impede the government's ongoing criminal investigation and -- if the special master were tasked with reviewing classified documents -- would impede the Intelligence Community from conducting its ongoing review of the national security risk that improper storage of these highly sensitive materials may have caused and from identifying measures to rectify or mitigate any damage that improper storage caused," Justice Department lawyers wrote.

The department highlighted those risks as it argued that the special master would be "unnecessary," given that the DOJ's internal filter team had already finished its work segregating potentially privileged documents from the seized materials for privileged documents, and "the government's investigative team has already reviewed all of the remaining materials, including any that are potentially subject to claims of executive privilege."

"Furthermore, appointment of a special master would impede the government's ongoing criminal investigation," DOJ argued.

DOJ's filing sets the stage for Trump's reply and Thursday's hearing

With the revelations from the new filing, the clock is ticking for Trump to reply in another court submission due Wednesday and then in court Thursday afternoon.

The deadline for Trump to file a written response to the department's brief is 8 p.m. ET Wednesday.

Then on Thursday, both sides will argue before US District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, in the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach. On Saturday, Cannon signaled she was inclined to grant Trump's request for a special master in the order she handed down Saturday laying out the briefing schedule. But she said that she had not yet made a final determination on the matter.

Gorbachev's haunting words

Mikhail Gorbachev's haunting words on what the world really needed

Opinion by David A. Andelman

In so many ways, the world we know today would not be the same without Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the former Soviet Union who died at the age of 91 on Tuesday.

It is not impossible to think that communism might still reign in the eastern half of Europe. The Soviet Union might have been held together as a single, deeply troubled, increasingly impoverished nation, rather than today's 15 more-or-less sovereign states. The Kremlin could quite possibly still be locked in an increasingly dangerous nuclear arms race with Washington.

But Gorbachev set the stage for a dramatic change of direction for the two superpowers of the day, one that might never have taken place without so many elements of his rich and textured life converging during his six years in power. There would likely be no independent nation of Ukraine -- or, for that matter, there would not be so many members of the NATO alliance today.

There is so much more that might have changed, perhaps for the better, doubtless for the worse, had Gorbachev never propelled himself into the leadership role. Little of this was what he set out to accomplish when he took power in the Soviet Union as general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985.

There remains a question -- whether without Gorbachev and the manifold reforms he launched in the increasingly sclerotic Soviet system and the military and security apparatus that underpinned it, the USSR could have survived longer.

At a private dinner before US President Ronald Reagan's first inauguration in 1981, his chief Soviet adviser, the late Harvard historian Richard Pipes, confided in me that by the end of Reagan's years, the Soviet Union would cease to exist. America would have spent them to death. That was the goal he said he shared with Reagan. Effectively, Gorbachev had no choice but to play into this hand.

Gorbachev was at once a product of the system he eventually tried to dismantle or at least reform dramatically. He was also a realistic observer of its vast and pernicious failings. "The slightest deviation from the established course was nipped in the bud," he would write later. "Should you come up with your own ideas -- be prepared for trouble. You could even land in jail."

But he also recognized what it took to succeed. He needed friends and mentors in high places. One of these was Yuri Andropov, former head of the KGB, who took over as the Soviet leader when Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982. There were many who believed Andropov held the key to breaking up the bloated and corrupt apparatus that had led the Soviet Union since Joseph Stalin and that he would lead the USSR to become a viable competitor with its arch foe, the United States.

Andropov died suddenly in 1984 after just 15 months in office. Gorbachev waited in the wings as Konstantin Chernenko, a Brezhnev clone and Andropov's successor, was anointed the new leader. But Chernenko lasted only months. In March 1985, after Chernenko died of a heart ailment and emphysema, it was Gorbachev's turn.

And it was not an easy debut. Oil prices, the backbone of the Soviet economy, were collapsing. Eventually, Gorbachev contemplated turning the nation into a capitalist market and economy, but recognized the futility of that idea. He did fully embrace the twin notions of "glasnost" or maximum openness, twinned with "perestroika" or restructuring. To these ends, he embarked in his earliest years in power on a host of reforms -- attacking corruption at all levels of the Communist Party, authorizing multi-party elections in Soviet cities, lifting restrictions on the media.

But he did recognize one reality. What was really bleeding the Soviet Union dry was the arms race. He had to find some way to put a stop to that.

This was the grim reality Gorbachev faced when he proposed a make-or-break summit with President Reagan, then headed to Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986 for two long, fraught days of talks. It was the first time I'd ever seen Gorbachev in action. It was a masterful performance. Here clearly was a man of force, vision, great power and endurance.

But he left the American side utterly bewildered. What they had not seen coming was Gorbachev's surprise proposal to end the nuclear arms race and dismantle the entire nuclear arsenals of both sides -- zero nukes under one critical condition: Reagan would have to agree to halt any development outside a laboratory or deployment of his Star Wars anti-missile system that had been so close to the American president's heart. Gorbachev recognized that the Soviet Union could never hope to match this system without a catastrophic level of expenditures that would utterly destroy the Soviet economy. Reagan refused.

The summit broke up in disarray. Gorbachev returned home in apparent defeat. But not entirely. Eventually, the spirit of Reykjavik led to other, more modest agreements -- an end to nuclear-armed intermediate-range rockets in Europe in 1987, followed a year later by a large-scale pullback of conventional troops from Europe. Further agreements and cutbacks followed in the same spirit, to the extent that the size of the two nation's nuclear arsenals would shrink from some 72,000 at their peak when the two leaders met in Reykjavik to barely 13,000 today.

"Subsequent events confirmed my judgment," Gorbachev wrote in 2019, in a preface to the book by Guillaume Serina that I translated, "An Impossible Dream: Reagan, Gorbachev, and a World Without the Bomb." Then he added, "We have had great successes. The Cold War was relegated to the past. The danger of global nuclear conflict is no longer imminent."

Back home, Gorbachev set to work dismantling the system that had proved so dysfunctional in its first seven decades, clearly unable to meet the challenges of the modern world. He completed the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 and told east European leaders they were effectively on their own.

By 1989 the nations of eastern Europe had severed their ties with the Kremlin and the process began with the republics of the Soviet Union. Reagan's 1987 challenge to Gorbachev to "tear down this Wall," had come to fruition.

While Gorbachev continued to express a belief in communism and its political party as a progressive force, after briefly surviving a failed coup attempt in August 1991 he was finally forced to resign in December of that year in favor of a febrile and alcoholic Boris Yeltsin. The Soviet Union collapsed a day later.

Gorbachev concluded the preface he wrote for our book with what might effectively be his epitaph: "What we need today is precisely this: political will. We need another level of leadership, collective leadership, of course. I want to be remembered as an optimist. Let us assimilate the lessons of the 20th century in order to rid the world of this legacy in the 21st -- the legacy of militarism, violence against the peoples and nature, and weapons of mass destruction of all types."

But one big question remains. Had Gorbachev not been in place to undertake his reforms, setting the Soviet Union on the path toward a dismantled Russian empire, would the way have been clear for a Vladimir Putin to arrive with his own even more toxic vision? As the war in Ukraine grinds on, it's a question that hangs in the air.

Stop the Nazi republicans...

Biden launches round two against Trump in bid to save Democrats in November

Analysis by Stephen Collinson

President Joe Biden gave impassioned notice Tuesday he intends to make what he bills the far-right extremism and lawlessness of Donald Trump's "MAGA Republicans" the key issue in his bid to save Democrats in November's midterm elections.

Biden found his voice in one of his most robust political speeches yet as president, days after condemning GOP "semi-fascism," as part of a three-stop blitz in the coming week in Pennsylvania -- a battleground that could decide the Senate's destiny in November.

"You can't be pro-law enforcement and pro-insurrection," Biden said in remarks specifically calling out Republicans on Tuesday. "You can't be a party of law and order and call the people who attacked the police on January 6 patriots. You can't do it."

He also implicitly rebuked Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who had warned of street riots if the former President is indicted after an FBI search of his Florida resort after taking classified documents when he left the White House.

"The idea you turn on a television and see senior senators and congressmen saying, 'If such and such happens, there'll be blood in the street'? Where the hell are we?" Biden said, ignoring Graham's later statement that he abhorred violence.

The President escalated his attacks after Trump unleashed a torrent of invective and reposts of conspiracy-laden material on his social media site, which, if anything tended to bolster Biden's point. His posts were reminiscent of rhetoric interpreted by extremists as a call to arms ahead of the US Capitol insurrection. In one post Trump elevated on his social media network, a commenter wrote, "We cant (sic) let the FBI break the American spirit."

Since the search for classified material at Mar-a-Lago, conducted on the base of a legal warrant, the bureau has reported rising threats against its premises and its agents. Biden made the fierce backlash against the bureau the centerpiece of an attempt to wrest control of an issue that Republicans have typically weaponized: law and order.

"There's no place in this country, no place, for endangering the lives of law enforcement. No place. None, never, period. I'm opposed to defunding the police. I'm also opposed to defunding the FBI," Biden said. In recent weeks some of Trump's most vehement acolytes have said the bureau's funding should be cut off.

Biden's new offensive, which he will reinforce in a prime-time address Thursday outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia, represents one of the most significant twists of the midterm campaign yet.

It shows that the President is effectively trying to make a midterm election, which was expected to turn on his low approval ratings and inflation, into a second round of Biden vs. Trump -- the 2020 election clash that he branded a struggle for America's soul.

While the White House has insisted that it had no prior knowledge of the search at Mar-a-Lago, it is now clear that Biden sees a political opening in the outburst of fury from Trump, his closest supporters and a defense offered by even mainstream Republicans again lining up behind the ex-President.

Events of the last three weeks -- as well as the ex-President's mostly successful efforts to position fellow election deniers in critical midterm races -- now mean that a significant part of the midterm campaign will be consumed by the one thing senior Republicans wanted to avoid: the character and behavior of Trump. While the ex-President remains a powerful force motivating the GOP base, he has alienated critical suburban, moderate voters in two consecutive elections in 2018 and 2020 that cost his party the chance to control political power in Washington.

Biden's high-risk approach

In some ways, Biden's strategy is a high-risk one -- though given his overall political struggles over the last year, it may be one of his only options. For all of his references to his Republican "friends" in Congress, Biden is in danger of being seen as branding all Republican voters as extremists dedicated to "semi-fascism" -- a phrase he used outside a fundraising event in Maryland last week.

The President's fierce rhetorical offensive could also destroy his reputation for moderation and his previous calls for unity, which were attractive to some voters in 2020.

And the basic dynamics of the election may be different in the country than they appear from Washington. In recent weeks, the search of Mar-a-Lago has returned Trump to the headlines. But the fact that millions of Americans are paying far more for groceries than they were a year ago hasn't changed. Nor has the reality that after an exhausting pandemic and years of political discord, majorities of voters tell pollsters they believe the nation is on the wrong track. While the fate of America's democracy and the way Biden says it is under threat from Trump is important, it's an esoteric issue when compared to putting food on the table. And while there has been a significant dip in high gasoline prices that haunted the post-pandemic economy earlier this year, the damage to Biden may have been done months ago.

It's also unclear if a hardline anti-Trump campaign will be as effective with Trump out of the White House. Last November, for example, Democrats tried to run the playbook in an off-year election in Virginia, in what came across as a lazy strategy. They paid a price when Republican Glenn Youngkin captured the governorship by stressing rising prices and parents' concern about education after months of Covid-19 school closures.

Still, while he's not in office, this time Trump is on the ballot by proxy given the countless candidates he has endorsed who have repeated his false claims about election fraud. There's a reason why Republicans were desperate for him not to declare his likely 2024 presidential campaign before the midterms; he gives Democrats a foil.

And while Democrats believe that events like the Supreme Court's overturning of a constitutional right to an abortion and some successes on Capitol Hill are also behind an improving outlook for November, it's worth noting that their hopes of staving off a red Republican wave rose just at the moment when Trump leapt back into the political spotlight.

But Biden's effort to claim the mantle of law and order from the Republican Party may also be a tough assignment -- even if several Democratic Senate candidates are touting strong records on the issue as they try to get out ahead of GOP attacks by professing their support for the police in their own campaign ads.

There is logic in Biden's argument that proclaiming support for the police while attacking the FBI is inconsistent. But the legacy of the "defund the police" mantra pushed by some liberal Democrats, which Biden has never supported, runs deep. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll in May, for instance, 47% of voters said they trusted Republicans to handle crime compared to 35% who had more trust in Democrats. And some of Trump's most searing -- albeit exaggerated -- attacks in his midterm election stump speech hit Democrats as weak on crime, while conjuring a nightmare vision of inner cities plagued by homelessness and violence.

Why Pennsylvania is so crucial

Biden's trio of visits to Pennsylvania in the span of a week -- he's also due in Pittsburgh on Labor Day -- is no coincidence. The commonwealth was one of a handful of battlegrounds that put him in the White House. And he instinctively feels comfortable on home ground -- he was brought up in Scranton, 20 miles from his Tuesday rally in Wilkes-Barre. The state's blue collar ethos gels with Biden's own political identity -- one that helped him make inroads with working-class White voters who formed much of Trump's natural constituency in the 2020 election.

And Pennsylvania will be critical again in November, as will be underscored by a rally hosted by Trump in Wilkes-Barre on Saturday night. The commonwealth will help tell one critical story of the coming election since Trump is backing two candidates who have, to varying degrees, repeated some of his falsehoods or raised questions about the 2020 election. Senate hopeful Mehmet Oz and gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano will cement Trump's power in the GOP if they beat Democratic opponents. But they are also examples of candidates who may be either too inexperienced, too out-of-touch or too extreme to win statewide. And if they lose, they will exemplify how Trump hand picking candidates could cost the GOP power.

Oz has had a tough few weeks in his campaign against his Democratic rival, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is getting back on the trail after suffering a stroke right before the May primary. Mastriano is considered the underdog in a race against Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro for the governor's mansion in Harrisburg.

While Biden put in one of his stronger campaign speeches Tuesday, his appearance didn't pass without one of his characteristic verbal slips. The President appeared to mix up Fetterman and Shapiro at one point and the offices they were seeking, potentially depriving each of their campaigns a soundbite for campaign ads. Questions also remain about Fetterman's health. He won't take part in a September debate, he said in a Tuesday statement that alluded to some of his speech and auditory processing challenges after the stroke.

These races are far too early to call since history suggests first-term presidents typically get a drubbing in midterm elections, especially those with low approval ratings, as Biden's is.

He has tipped above the 40% mark in recent weeks after a string of Democratic successes in Congress, including the first gun safety legislation in decades, which has also boosted the party's hopes. The President on Tuesday billed the new law as a way he showed he could beat the National Rifle Association, though he also stressed that as the owner of two shotguns, he didn't want to take away firearms.

Biden spoke movingly about the impact of recent school shootings and the horror of parents who had to identify their dead young children using medical records as he vowed to ban assault rifles used in many massacres.

"DNA to say 'that's my baby.' What the hell is the matter with us?" Biden said.

The President showed in his speech that he is pulling out every stop to defy historic portents of heavy Democratic losses in November. And with Trump's furious reemergence and a good spell in Congress, he has far more to work with than he had even six weeks ago. But that doesn't mean it will be enough.

A wantabee two bit Queens thug who is so corrupt, even the mafia is put off.....

The 4 major criminal probes into Donald Trump, explained

Keeping track of all the criminal investigations of Trump isn’t easy, so we did it for you.

By Ian Millhiser

If all the criminal investigations into former President Donald Trump end in conviction, then Trump will be a true renaissance man of crime.

The FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida residence because, as federal prosecutors said in a fiery court filing Tuesday, they believed not only did the former president possess “dozens” of boxes “likely to contain classified information” but also that “efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.” In that search, the FBI said it did remove over 100 classified documents, some of which reportedly contained information about nuclear weapons. That’s all part of just one investigation into possible violations of the Espionage Act, the improper handling of federal records, and obstruction of a federal investigation.

Meanwhile, a second federal investigation is looking into the January 6 attack on the Capitol and broader efforts to overturn the 2020 election, an issue that obviously could implicate the man who spent most of the 2020 lame-duck period trying to erase his loss to President Joe Biden.

In Georgia, a number of Trump allies are being subpoenaed as part of a state criminal investigation into interference with the 2020 election in their state specifically. Trump consigliere Rudy Giuliani is a target of the investigation. Trump could also be implicated, and even criminally charged, before this Georgia investigation concludes. In a post-election call with Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump told the state’s top election official that he wants “to find 11,780 votes.” Biden defeated Trump in Georgia by 11,779 votes.

Then there are two separate New York investigations into the Trump Organization and Trump’s web of surrounding businesses, which are investigating allegations that Trump misrepresented his companies’ finances in order to obtain bank loans or to reduce taxes.

New York Attorney General Letitia James’s investigation into these allegations is primarily civil (as in, non-criminal), but a parallel investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg already led to two indictments — both the Trump Organization and its CFO Allen Weisselberg were indicted in July 2021.

Weisselberg pleaded guilty to more than a dozen different counts this month. He also agreed to testify against the Trump Organization — but not against Trump himself — if called to do so. Nevertheless, Bragg is reluctant to indict Trump, according to an interview last month with former Manhattan prosecutor Mark Pomerantz.

Trump’s staff did not respond to an inquiry seeking comment on these investigations, but the former president routinely posts statements on social media denying allegations against him, often using hyperbolic rhetoric such as comparing the United States to “broken, Third-World Countries.”

Of course, all the standard disclaimers should apply. All of these investigations are ongoing and have not led to charges against Donald Trump. They may never lead to such charges. If Trump is charged, the courts must afford him a presumption of innocence until he is convicted. And even if prosecutors are convinced that they have an airtight case, they may be reluctant to file charges against a former president whose supporters have already threatened violence against people and institutions associated with the investigations into Trump — and, in at least one case, engaged in actual violence.

Nevertheless, the sheer diversity of the state and federal statutes that Trump may have violated is astounding. All told, it’s four criminal investigations — two federal and two state-based — which together scrutinize Trump’s conduct before, during, and after his presidency. Even if only one of these investigations leads to a conviction, the elderly Trump could potentially spend the rest of his life behind bars. While some of the criminal statutes Trump may have violated carry penalties of only a few years in prison, others carry maximum sentences of up to 20 years.

It’s a lot to keep track of, and many important details about these investigations are not publicly known and may never be revealed to the public unless Trump is eventually indicted. The US Department of Justice, in particular, has very strong rules and norms against speaking about ongoing criminal investigations — especially when those investigations involve major political figures.

Worse, while DOJ is reluctant to speak about its investigations into Trump, Trump certainly is not. And that means that many initial reports about these investigations may be based on dubiously accurate social media posts by Trump himself.

With these caveats in mind, here is our best attempt to explain what we do know about the criminal investigations into Trump.

The DOJ’s Mar-a-Lago classified documents investigation

The investigation into Trumpworld that most recently seized headlines is, perhaps at first glance, the most banal: a federal investigation into possible mishandling of classified documents.

In early August, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. According to a property receipt that these agents gave a Trump lawyer at the end of the search, they seized several boxes of documents, many of which they say are classified.

The FBI characterized some of these documents as “classified/TS/SCI,” a designation that refers to “sensitive compartmented information” — information “concerning or derived from intelligence sources, methods, or analytical processes” that the government typically treats with extraordinary caution. Documents containing this kind of information are normally stored in specialized facilities designed to prevent the information from getting out — and not in the personal residence of a former government official.

For obvious reasons, the FBI hasn’t been especially forthcoming about what was in the documents seized from Trump; on August 26 the Justice Department released an affidavit filed as part of the investigation, but it was heavily redacted and offered only a few new bits of information.

But the Washington Post reported that the documents seized in the search include “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons.”

An attachment to the search warrant, which a federal court made public earlier this month, also identifies three federal criminal statutes that the FBI believes Trump may have violated, all of which involve the destruction, concealment, or mishandling of certain government documents.

Most notably, the FBI believes that Trump may have violated a provision of the Espionage Act that makes it a crime to “willfully” retain certain national security information that “the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation,” rather than turning that information over to an “officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it.”

The Justice Department reportedly tried to negotiate with Trump for the return of these documents, and sought to retrieve them via a subpoena. DOJ sought a search warrant after an informant tipped them off that Trump still had classified documents at his private residence, despite the fact that one of Trump’s lawyers had signed a written statement claiming that Trump had returned all the material marked as classified that he’d stored at Mar-a-Lago. Federal prosecutors detailed that history in a court filing Tuesday.

Violations of the relevant provision of the Espionage Act can lead to a prison sentence of up to 10 years, but it is still unclear whether Trump will face criminal charges for allegedly stealing these documents — or whether those charges will come anytime soon. And there are several reasons to believe that the Justice Department will move cautiously before indicting a former president whose supporters violently attacked the US Capitol less than two years ago.

One is a recent Wall Street Journal report stating that “Attorney General Merrick Garland deliberated for weeks over whether to approve the application for a warrant to search former President Donald Trump’s Florida home.” Another is longstanding DOJ policies and traditions counseling against actions that could influence an upcoming election. It’s not impossible to imagine Trump being indicted before the upcoming midterms, but such an outcome is not likely.

What we can say is there are signs that this investigation remains active, and that it could eventually lead to criminal charges. Among other things, the Justice Department told a federal court that the redactions in the released affidavit were necessary to “protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation.”

The Justice Department investigation into January 6

Last January, Garland announced that the Justice Department has “no higher priority” than its investigation into the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and that his department “remains committed to holding all Jan. 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law.”

According to the Justice Department, more than 830 individuals have been charged for alleged criminal activity relating to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. And, if anything, DOJ appears to be stepping up these prosecutions. Last May, as part of its annual budget proposal, the Justice Department sought to hire 131 more lawyers to prosecute cases related to this attack.

It remains unclear whether this investigation is actively investigating Trump’s own role, however — and, if so, how close it is to an indictment against the former president. And the Justice Department is likely to keep an even tighter hold on any information regarding such an investigation into Trump than it has on the Mar-a-Lago investigation. Bear in mind that virtually no one outside of the Justice Department, including purportedly the White House, knew about the FBI’s impending search of Mar-a-Lago until after it had begun.

There is, however, at least one outward sign that Trump is under investigation. Last May, prosecutors subpoenaed the National Archives for the same Trump administration documents that the Archives already turned over to the US House committee investigating the January 6 attack.

While the Justice Department is unlikely to say much about whether Trump could be indicted for January 6-related crimes until after such an indictment takes place, both congressional and judicial officials have indicated that Trump most likely violated at least two federal criminal statutes during his efforts to overturn the 2020 election — one protects Congress from interference, and the other prohibits conspiracies to defraud the nation.

We know that from a lawsuit Trump lawyer John Eastman filed last January in a federal court in California, seeking to prevent the House January 6 committee from obtaining certain emails sent or received by Eastman. Among other things, Eastman claimed that the emails were protected by attorney-client privilege.

Ordinarily, communications between a lawyer and their client are protected from disclosure. But, as a federal appeals court has explained, “communications are not privileged when the client ‘consults an attorney for advice that will serve him in the commission of a fraud’ or crime.” And the January 6 committee argued that Trump may have consulted Eastman in order to violate two criminal federal laws.

One of these laws makes it a crime to obstruct Congress’s official business, while the other makes it a crime to conspire to defraud the United States. The first carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, while the other calls for a maximum sentence of five years.

Ultimately, Judge David Carter agreed that Trump most likely violated both laws. Among other things, Carter wrote, “Trump attempted to obstruct an official proceeding by launching a pressure campaign to convince Vice President Pence to disrupt the Joint Session on January 6.” The judge added that “the illegality of this plan was obvious.”

Of course, if Trump is eventually indicted for violating either statute, the Justice Department will carry a heavier burden than the January 6 committee had to overcome in order to convince Judge Carter that some of Eastman’s emails were not privileged. Trump, like any criminal defendant, will be entitled to a jury trial. And the Justice Department will have to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

But Carter’s opinion suggests that there is at least some low-hanging fruit that the Justice Department can pick if it decides to bring criminal charges against Trump.

The Georgia election investigation

Last January, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s office asked a Georgia court to convene a special grand jury “for the purpose of investigating the facts and circumstances relating directly or indirectly to possible attempts to disrupt the lawful administration of the 2020 elections in the State of Georgia.” That includes the Trump campaign’s attempt to create a slate of fake members of the Electoral College who would fraudulently tell Congress that the state’s electoral votes were cast for Trump.

Willis informed these 16 fake electors that they are targets of the investigation — meaning that they are at risk of criminal charges — although a state judge ruled last month that Willis may not herself pursue charges against one of these fake electors because she has a conflict of interest. That fake elector could still be charged by a different prosecutor who does not answer to Willis.

Willis’s investigation is also targeting at least one person in Trump’s inner circle. Less than two years ago, Rudy Giuliani was a central figure in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election — known for his clownish lawyering in a November 2020 lawsuit and for an equally clownish press conference held in the parking lot of a Philadelphia landscaping company. Earlier this month, he was in Atlanta to testify before the special grand jury. Giuliani has also been informed that he is a target of the investigation.

Meanwhile, a lawsuit involving an even more prominent Trump ally offers another limited window into what matters Willis’s office may be investigating. Last month, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was subpoenaed to testify before the Georgia grand jury. Shortly thereafter, he asked a federal court to quash the subpoena. His strongest argument is that the Constitution’s speech and debate clause, which prohibits sitting members of Congress from being questioned about their “legislative” activity but not their “political” activity, applies to this investigation.

In rejecting Graham’s attempt to quash the subpoena in its entirety — because Willis’s investigation seeks at least some information that is unrelated to Graham’s legislative duties — Judge Leigh Martin May’s opinion lays out several topics that the grand jury is likely to ask Graham about, including Graham’s “potential communications and coordination with the Trump Campaign and its post-election efforts in Georgia.”

Additionally, Willis’s inquiry wishes to explore two phone calls between Graham and Secretary Raffensperger, where Graham allegedly “questioned Secretary Raffensperger and his staff about reexamining certain absentee ballots cast in Georgia in order to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump.”

(Litigation over whether Graham has to testify is ongoing, so it remains to be seen whether he actually will. Other members of Trump’s inner circle and fellow Republicans like Gov. Kemp are also fighting subpoenas to testify in the Georgia probe.)

Of course, even if Giuliani, Graham, or others are eventually charged or convicted of a crime, it remains an open question whether any of their actions could also implicate Trump. But there are a few Georgia criminal statutes that Trump’s broad efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and specifically his “find 11,780 votes” phone call with Raffensperger, might violate.

One such law makes it a crime to willfully tamper “with any electors list, voter’s certificate, numbered list of voters, ballot box, voting machine, direct recording electronic (DRE) equipment, or tabulating machine.” And while no evidence has yet emerged that Trump personally tampered with any of these items, Georgia law also makes it a crime to, “with intent that another person engage in conduct constituting a felony,” solicit another person to commit such a felony. Meanwhile, another state law specifically makes it a crime to engage in “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud.”

If convicted of either crime, Trump “shall be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than three years.”

The New York investigations into the Trump Organization

Finally, Trump — or, at least, his businesses — are the subject of two related financial fraud investigations, at least one of which has a small chance of ending in criminal charges against Trump.

Letitia James, the New York attorney general, has spent the better part of three years investigating whether the Trump Organization, Trump’s flagship company, misled either banks or tax officials about the value of its assets — allegedly inflating their value when seeking a loan from a bank, or minimizing their value in order to reduce taxes. James even deposed Trump earlier this month as part of this investigation, although Trump spent that interview repeatedly invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

James’s investigation is civil and not criminal, but it could potentially lead to an extraordinary sanction against Trump’s business. At one point, James appeared to be laying the groundwork to invoke New York’s “corporate death penalty” statute — a law that allows the state attorney general to ask a court to effectively dissolve a business that engages in “repeated” or “persistent fraud or illegality.” In a June interview, however, James signaled that she may not “want to go that far.”

James’s investigation parallels a similar criminal investigation that is currently led by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney. Like the state-level investigation, this Manhattan investigation has been going on for a few years. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance, even had to fight off an effort to sabotage this investigation in a 2020 Supreme Court case.

The latest news about this criminal investigation, however, suggests that it is unlikely to lead to charges against Trump. While former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty last week to allegations that he did not pay taxes on $1.7 million in compensation — including an apartment, two cars, and private school tuition for family members — he agreed only to testify against the Trump Organization if called to testify in a trial against the company, and is not expected to assist a broader inquiry into Trump himself.

Meanwhile, the transition from Vance to Bragg appears to have injected more caution into the Manhattan DA’s office. Shortly after Bragg took office at the beginning of this year, a senior lawyer who played a significant role in the Trump investigation resigned from the DA’s office. “I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations,” attorney Mark Pomerantz wrote in his resignation letter, which protested Bragg’s decision “not to go forward with the grand jury presentation and not to seek criminal charges at the present time.”

In a July interview, Pomerantz said that he thought that Bragg “and the new team were focused on the risk that we could lose the case” against Trump. Again, to win a criminal case against Trump, prosecutors would have to prove that case beyond a reasonable doubt.

In any event, it is possible that either James’s investigation or Bragg’s office will uncover new evidence that will change Bragg’s mind. For the moment, however, the New York investigations appear unlikely to lead to criminal charges against Trump.

The three other investigations, by contrast, appear to be more likely to end in Trump’s indictment and possible conviction.

So what should we take away from all of this?

The purpose of a criminal investigation, and ultimately of a prosecution, is to convince a jury to convict a defendant after a full criminal trial has taken place. It is not to provide the media or the public with regular updates about what law enforcement knows about potential suspects.

Especially within the context of federal investigations, these norms exist both to protect the investigation itself — if a suspect learns too much about what information law enforcement is seeking, they could destroy evidence or tamper with witnesses — and to protect potential suspects. When someone is formally charged with a crime, they have an opportunity to vindicate themselves at trial. If they are merely the subject of accusations tossed off by government officials, they have no real way to protect or rehabilitate their reputation.

For these reasons, anyone eager to see how the investigations into Trump will end must have patience.

One other factor that voters — and, especially, journalists — should bear in mind as they evaluate what is going on with these investigations is that while the Justice Department will ordinarily be very tight-lipped about an ongoing investigation (and responsible state-level prosecutors will also not be especially forthcoming), Trump will not. And he is likely to tell lies and half-truths to mislead the public and rile up his supporters.

Here’s an example: During its search of Mar-a-Lago, the FBI took three passports from Trump’s residence. A team of investigators tasked with screening the searched materials for extraneous documents quickly discovered that they had the passports, and they were returned to Trump. In a statement, the FBI said that it “follows search and seizure procedures ordered by courts, then returns items that we do not need to be retained for law enforcement purposes.”

Compare that narrative to how Trump characterized the FBI’s brief acquisition of these passports.

A third caveat to bear in mind is that Trump, who famously confessed on video to committing sexual assault, has a history of avoiding legal consequences even when his guilt is difficult to deny. There’s also never been an indictment of a former president, at least in part because political leaders want to avoid the risk that they will face retaliatory prosecutions if their opposition takes power. Top Republicans are already trying to intimidate Attorney General Garland with threats of retaliatory investigations. And some of Trump’s supporters have turned to violence or threats of violence.

Those aren’t reasons to let a man who tried to overturn the result of a presidential election off the hook if he committed a crime, but they are likely to inspire prosecutors to tread cautiously.

It is likely, in other words, that a cloud of uncertainty will loom over Trump’s fate for quite a while.

Student loan forgiveness.

The “fairness” debate over student loan forgiveness, explained

Why economists are fighting over whether canceling debt is a good idea.

By Libby Nelson

For many of the 43 million Americans with federal student loan debt, President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in debt is unequivocally good news.

But in the days since the policy was announced, it has also led to pushback, debate, and controversy — arguments that are likely to be studied for months and adjudicated by researchers for years, if not decades.

There are two leading — and overlapping — criticisms of the loan forgiveness plan. One question is whether debt forgiveness is the right thing to do. It asks whether forgiving student loans is the best way to spend an estimated $500 billion, given that some, though not all, of those who benefit have college degrees and relatively high household incomes.

The other is about whether debt forgiveness is the right thing to do right now. If households freed from the burdens of their debts spend more money, it could drive inflation higher — meaning that the consequences of loan forgiveness would be borne by everyone, and soon. To dampen inflation, the Federal Reserve is actively trying to get consumers to spend less.

It’s unsurprising that Biden’s political opponents have raised these concerns. But the criticism has also extended to some economists who have served in previous Democratic administrations or consider themselves sympathetic to Biden’s goals. “Pouring roughly half trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning is reckless,” Jason Furman, President Barack Obama’s chief economist, tweeted when Biden’s plan was announced.

Not all economists agree with Furman’s view. But the fact that the inflation debate is happening at all is a sign of how broader economic trends have shifted.

The push for student debt forgiveness was born a decade ago in the depths of the Great Recession, when even college graduates struggled to find work. Inflation was low and falling. It’s become reality under very different economic circumstances, and that shift is part of what’s fueling the current debate.

The first debate: Is loan forgiveness the right thing to do?

The Biden administration crafted its student debt forgiveness proposal in an attempt to avoid benefiting the wealthiest families. To be eligible for $10,000 in loan forgiveness, student debtors must have earned less than $125,000 (or $250,000 for a married couple) in the 2020 or 2021 tax years.

Students who receive Pell Grants to attend college — meaning they came from low-income families, overwhelmingly earning less than the median household income in the United States — are eligible for an additional $10,000 in debt relief. This is an extra boost for those who started higher education without the safety net of intergenerational wealth.

The proposal would entirely wipe out student debt for 20 million people — nearly half of the 43 million Americans who borrowed to pay for college and are still paying the loans back. An analysis from the Education Department found that almost 90 percent of the benefits would go to people earning less than $75,000 per year, though because any loans taken out before July 2022 are eligible for forgiveness, that figure includes current students and very recent graduates whose salaries could rise in the near future.

The reaction from Biden’s opponents has been to call forgiveness unfair, both to those who didn’t attend college and to those who already paid off their loans.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who would have perhaps the most to gain from a political backlash to the program, called the idea “a slap in the face to every family who sacrificed to save for college, every graduate who paid their debt, and every American who chose a certain career path or volunteered to serve in our Armed Forces in order to avoid taking on debt.”

This attitude is in line with how policymakers in the United States have typically viewed higher education. The federal government helps some students from poor families by offering Pell Grants that don’t have to be paid back, although the grant, which tops out at just under $7,000, means the majority of recipients still need loans. But the bulk of federal financial aid to students comes in the form of loans.

The American system of higher education finance is based on the idea that a college degree primarily benefits the individual who earns it. The federal government issues a small leg up by offering loans at a cheaper rate than a private bank would offer to an 18-year-old with no credit history or a young adult trying to support a family while earning a degree. (The current rate on an undergraduate student loan is just under 5 percent, compared to up to 14 percent from a private lender.)

A few assumptions underlie all of this: that most student loan borrowers are young people working toward bachelor’s degrees, that they will graduate, and that the degree will help them earn back more than enough to pay their debts. Hence the pushback against loan forgiveness: Why help out a 20-something who majored in philosophy at an expensive private college, instead of the 50-year-old next door with no degree at all?

But those assumptions are no longer always true. Biden’s plan is intended to fit the reality of the student loan program as it exists today. The lines between those who will benefit from debt forgiveness and those who are left on the sidelines are blurrier than blue-collar versus white-collar, working-class versus middle-class, old versus young.

One in five people with outstanding student loans is over age 50, some of whom likely borrowed on their own behalf (including those who pursued graduate degrees) and some of whom took out loans to pay for their children’s education. Many student debtors are no longer young adults starting at a four-year college; they’re older and more likely to attend a community college or for-profit program. An analysis by Mark Huelsman, director of policy and advocacy at the Hope Center for College, Community and Justice at Temple University, found that almost 40 percent of those who entered college in the 2011-12 school year and took on student debt never earned a credential.

Forgiveness will be especially helpful to those in default — the terrifying Upside Down of the financial aid system, where, after at least 9 months of missed payments, the Education Department can garnish wages and even Social Security checks in order to get its money back. The typical defaulter did not graduate and owes just under $10,000.

There are other versions of the fairness argument circulating. One holds that forgiveness is unfair to those who borrowed but paid off their debts — an argument that could be raised against any social program on behalf of those who were born too early to benefit from it.

The counterpoint to these critiques is that critics are holding student debt forgiveness to a fairness standard applied to few other government programs or benefits. Forgiveness could be life-changing for millions of people, especially those struggling with default, the argument goes, while hurting no one.

Which is where the other part of the critiques come in.

Is it the right thing to do right now?

The student debt forgiveness movement emerged about a decade ago from the crucible of the Great Recession. Students were borrowing more than ever to pay for college and, amid the cratering economy, were struggling to find jobs that would help them pay their loans back.

In 2012, the unemployment rate for bachelor’s degree holders was around 4.5 percent, and nearly 8 percent for college dropouts and those with two-year degrees. Interest rates were low. A prominent argument against student debt for the next eight years was that it was slowing down the economy: Young adults burdened by debt were being held back from buying homes, starting businesses, and spending money.

Few could foresee that by the time forgiveness became a reality, unemployment for bachelor’s degree recipients would have halved, interest rates would have more than doubled, and inflation would be the overriding economic concern. Even in 2019, when loan forgiveness became a serious issue in a Democratic primary campaign for the first time, inflation was rarely mentioned; by the 2020 election, with the economy contracting from the shock of the coronavirus pandemic, student debt forgiveness seemed to have a plausible path to becoming reality as a form of stimulus.

In the past year, though, things have changed. With consumer prices up 8.5 percent over a year ago, some economists now argue that debt cancellation is too big a risk. The concern is that, freed from loan debt or facing reduced payments, student borrowers will spend more at a time when the Federal Reserve is trying its best to get Americans to spend less and cool down the economy.

How much of an effect this will have — if it has one at all — is the subject of further debate.

The federal government paused repayment on most student loans during the pandemic, so millions of borrowers have not had to make a payment on their student loans in two years. The majority of student loan debtors will need to return to making some kind of payment in January, when the pause expires, even if it’s less than they would have had to pay before forgiveness.

The student loan pause was always supposed to end eventually, and it will in January. But for the past two years, the moratorium was extended multiple times, leading to an unusual situation: tens of millions of people owed student debt but didn’t have to make any payments.

Now, this situation is at the heart of the debate over inflation. When economists warn that student debt will drive up prices for everyone, what are they comparing it to? The current situation, where no one is making payments at all?

An analysis by Goldman Sachs economists found that the impact of forgiveness on inflation is likely to be offset by most borrowers resuming payments when the student loan pause ends in January. People who have had their loans forgiven will continue to pay what they’ve been paying for the past two years (nothing), meaning that their household spending should be unaffected. But people who owed more than Biden could forgive, or who earned too much to qualify for forgiveness, will have to resume making payments after two years of not doing so, meaning they’ll actually have less money to spend on everything else.

Or is the proper comparison an alternate path, where Biden allowed payments to resume for all loans, meaning that more people would owe more money per month than they will under the new plan?

Furman estimated that the loan forgiveness plan, even with the resumption of payments for most borrowers in January, could drive up inflation by 0.2 to 0.3 percentage points, compared to the alternative of resuming payments for everyone at their existing debt loads. If inflation continues to rise, prices will become more expensive for all households, meaning that American consumers broadly would pay for the consequences of debt forgiveness.

Ultimately, this argument about inflation is also tied up with the concerns about fairness. If student debt forgiveness drives inflation slightly higher, is that worth it?

Critics argue that it is not: “Student loan debt relief is spending that raises demand and increases inflation,” former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers tweeted last week. “It consumes resources that could be better used helping those who did not, for whatever reason, have the chance to attend college. It will also tend to be inflationary by raising tuitions.”

But that position is not universal. “I am not in favor of framing student-loan policy as a lever for managing inflation,” Sue Dynarski, a Harvard professor, an expert on higher education finance, and a former forgiveness skeptic, wrote in the New York Times on Tuesday. “Eliminating food subsidies for poor families — SNAP, as the food stamp program is known today — would definitely slow the economy, but that doesn’t mean we should do it.”

Where do we go from here?

One thing virtually all sides of the debate agree on is that one-time forgiveness is not enough. It is, by design, a one-off — siblings from the same family who graduate from college a few years apart, having borrowed the same amount to pay for it, could end up with debt loads that differ by thousands of dollars.

The Biden administration is hoping to make income-based student loan repayment more generous, outlining changes that would require borrowers to pay 5 percent of discretionary income per month (down from 10 percent in the current program).

But there is currently no federal plan to actually make college cheaper for students, to reduce borrowing, or to hold colleges accountable for whether students can pay off their loans. That’s not for lack of ideas or for lack of trying. The Obama administration proposed rating colleges based on the “value” they provide to students, an attempt that ultimately went nowhere.

In 2016, both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton called for the federal government to partner with states to make college tuition cheaper. It inspired many of the same debates that loan forgiveness has provoked — should college be subsidized for everyone, and if so, by how much? But the “free college” program was ultimately one of the first things dropped from Democrats’ legislative agenda.

The scope of Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan might seem radical. But by leaving the ultimate structure of how American higher education is paid for unchanged, it’s actually a less dramatic departure than any of the alternatives.

More damning claims.......

The DOJ’s latest filing has even more damning claims against Trump

Including that he may have obstructed justice by hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

By Ben Jacobs

The photograph of highly classified documents strewn across the floor at Mar-a-Lago beside a box of framed Time magazines had already gone viral Wednesday morning as perhaps the defining image of the ongoing investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified information.

The image was attached to a 36-page filing from the Department of Justice in the ongoing court battle by Trump to have a special master review the documents seized by federal agents when they searched Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private Florida club and residence, in August. And it’s by no means the most damning claim from the overnight court filing, which you can read below.

In the filing, the DOJ asserts that Trump was likely taking efforts to obstruct justice: “The government also developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.”

Trump’s lawyers claimed to the DOJ there were no other classified documents at Mar-a-Lago in June. After handing over what they claimed were the remaining classified documents in a sealed legal envelope, a Trump lawyer “represented that there were no other records stored in any private office space or other location at the Premises and that all available boxes were searched.” That envelope contained “38 unique documents bearing classification markings including . . . 17 documents marked as TOP SECRET.”

The August search warrant at Mar-a-Lago produced “over a hundred classified records including information classified at the highest levels,” including three classified documents that “were located in the desks in the ’45 [Trump’s personal] Office.’”

The filing also contains detailed arguments against the appointment of a special master to review the documents, which Trump has claimed is necessary to review the documents to determine if they contain any privileged material. The DOJ noted a review by a filter team for any privileged information had already been completed. It also pushed back against Trump’s claims of executive privilege to justify holding on to the documents that the National Archives had requested under the Presidential Records Act, noting that there is no precedent for invoking executive privilege “to prohibit the sharing of documents within the Executive Branch.”

Trump’s lawyers are due to file a response on Wednesday, and a hearing is scheduled for Thursday in the matter before Aileen Cannon, a Trump-nominated federal judge in South Florida.

On his personal social media site, Truth Social, Trump said Thursday morning “Terrible the way the FBI, during the Raid of Mar-a-Lago, threw documents haphazardly all over the floor (perhaps pretending it was me that did it!), and then started taking pictures of them for the public to see. Thought they wanted them kept Secret? Lucky I Declassified!”

Trump has claimed that he had somehow automatically declassified any documents at Mar-a-Lago. There is no evidence that he did so, and his lawyers have not made the same claims in court filings.

Nepotism baby....

They hate to see a nepotism baby winning

The pure satisfaction of the term “nepotism baby.”

By Alex Abad-Santos

An Oscar-winning performance in Cabaret. Creating the Church of England. Turning someone into a spider. The downfall of Ellen DeGeneres. A vagina-scented candle. The Iraq War. Dating Anna Kournikova. The other Iraq War. Eternal salvation.

Nepotism babies have accomplished a lot, but it’s only recently that we’ve given them a satisfying name.

To be clear, the practice of nepotism — people parlaying their own success to benefit their friends and family members, children primarily — predates all of us, going back to the days of the old gods and young Earth. As does the act of identifying, bemoaning, and maybe even admiring it. “Nepo baby” is simply an extension of the “see something, say something” approach to nepotism.

Yet the musicality of the phrase, the hilarity of reducing an adult human to a tiny helpless infant, and the stickiness of the label all ensure that we never forget nepotism when it comes to this person and their accomplishments.

But “nepotism baby” and its current popularity is more than just an insult or identifier. The phrase also says a lot about how we’re attempting to grapple with the systems of power that make up our world. The feelings we may have toward a nepotism baby — frustration, admiration, indifference, schadenfreude — say as much about us as they do about the children of privilege.

Nepotism babies are all around us

“Nepotism baby” or “nepo baby” exploded back in May, when a Twitter user at the handle @MeriemIsTired noticed that Maude Apatow, star of HBO’s Euphoria, was the daughter of actress Leslie Mann and producer-director Judd Apatow. Maude is in the same industry as her successful parents, shares her father’s last name, and has acted in their projects for years, so it’s not as though she ever intended her parentage to be a secret.

At the time, however, the civilian nepotism detective wasn’t immediately familiar with how movies like Anchorman, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Superbad, which Judd Apatow produced or directed, had the late aughts in a cultural stranglehold. Mann appeared in some of those movies and has been a comedic stalwart worthy of greater recognition since Big Daddy in 1999. (God, she was so good in Blockers.)

No doubt the tension between people of a certain age knowing Maude Apatow had famous parents and shock at younger people only now finding out the obvious truth helped launch a feeding frenzy around the term. It was so frantic that Euphoria showrunner Sam Levinson, a nepo baby himself, somehow eluded scrutiny.

The term “nepotism baby” itself is mildly redundant, like “false pretense” or “6 am in the morning,” in that nepotism already means the practice in which someone gives their family members, particularly their children, a benefit. But there’s a satisfying roundness to it. It’s also quite pleasing in any context to casually insult adult humans by referring to them as babies, because babies cannot help themselves.

Try it. In your head, think about a nemesis you have. Now imagine calling them a baby. Imagine them as a helpless little loser baby. Stop smiling.

“Nepotism baby” is a tool

Beyond the satisfaction it provides linguistically and in terms of pure meanness, what makes “nepotism baby” so popular is that it also functions as a tool, a simple way for our brains to deconstruct the bigger idea of upward mobility in inequality. Every human is someone’s child, but not everyone’s parents are a blue link on Wikipedia.

Shai Davidai is a professor at Columbia’s business school and studies the way people in the United States make sense of economic success. He explained that Americans tend to have a strong, optimistic belief in meritocracy — the idea that hard work demonstrates exceptional skill, and that if you have both, you will be rewarded accordingly.

“I’ve studied how and when people realize that moving up the ladder may actually be very difficult. That happens when they are faced with high inequality,” Davidai says.

Things like the circulation of statistics about the size of a billionaire CEO’s tax-free salary aren’t what drive home the problem of inequality — Davidai tells me that most Americans have a hard time grasping the concept of how enormous $100 million really is, and how astronomically $1 billion dwarfs that number.

Rather, it’s examples that they can easily relate to, like a friend or a coworker getting a leg up, that allow them to understand unequal treatment. If we think we’re on the same footing as someone, and that person benefits from nepotism — say, getting a promotion that could’ve gone to us — that triggers an emotional response. These localized interactions are where and how Americans have traditionally been able to understand and call out nepotism.

Today, however, the world has gotten smaller. Through the internet and social media, it’s easier than ever to compare ourselves and our personal situations to an infinite number of people. It’s also easier than ever to dig up information, like Maude Apatow’s parents (not a secret) or Zoey Deutch’s famous mom (maybe more obscure). Since actors are so visible and because movies and television are industries in which nepotism and affluence go hand in hand, Hollywood nepotism babies are among the easiest to spot.

This supercharged familiarity means nepotism babies of all stripes can trigger an emotional response.

“The reaction becomes an emotional response, and the realization is not about nepotism itself. I think nepotism is the tool that leads to the realization that ‘my life is going to be harder than I assumed,’” Davidai says. “Unless we have vivid images, like someone we can think about, inequality is still abstract. Nepotism babies, they deprive us of that feel-good ‘American dream’ story.”

Nepotism babies are not a monolith

“I am not offended by the term ‘nepotism baby,’” nepotism baby and journalist Ben Dreyfuss told me. “It is a funny term! Maybe I’m delusional, but I also don’t think it’s even a term that implies malice? Like, if you call me a ‘nepotism baby,’ I am not going to assume you hate me.”

Dreyfuss is the son of Richard Dreyfuss, the actor who starred in American Graffiti, Jaws, and Stand By Me. Ben Dreyfuss’s primary occupation is journalism, which means he isn’t a nepo baby through and through — but he does have acting credits to his name. And he has written about Jaws.

For Dreyfuss, the term on its own is merely a statement of fact, an assessment of his privilege. He acknowledges that the phrase can be used derisively as a way to reduce someone’s achievements. Dreyfuss isn’t a stranger to criticism or people being mad at him online. He says that instead of fretting about being called a nepotism baby, though, nepotism babies should take the insult in stride because of said privilege.

“You should find the humor in it more!” Dreyfuss says. “The humorous way of looking at it is this: The people calling you a nepotism baby on TikTok or whatever are also privileged little babies of modernity, and they have microwaves and running water and a long life expectancy, and they have it better than virtually any person who has ever lived at any previous time on Earth — except for you and some other people currently alive. None of us are starting at the bottom.”

Whether the phrase is full of spite or a neutral assessment may well depend on who is using it, and against whom.

The person who realized Maude Apatow is a nepotism baby was shocked because they like Euphoria. Same goes for the people who gush over Maya Hawke’s performance in Stranger Things or Dakota Johnson for taking down Ellen DeGeneres. On the other side of that, when a nepo baby flops, privilege and favoritism are among the first things people call out. Nepotism babies did not choose this fate, but they should never fly too close to the sun. Or secretly work for Lockheed Martin.

“It would be very easy if someone was untalented, very lazy, and was in a successful movie, right? The issue is, these ‘nepotism babies’ are usually talented,” Davidai says.” Our complexity is trying to figure out why they are talented and famous. Is it because of something about them, or is it because of the fast lane they got in life? We don’t like that complexity.”

Davidai also theorizes that while we’re all likely to say nepotism is bad when other people take advantage of it, we’re less likely to have the same response when we could benefit from it. Find me someone who would reject being Rihanna’s baby and I will show you a liar, a scenario I just made up in my head but that feels correct.

A more enriching way to think about the nepotism baby discourse might be to consider how our society values people who aren’t born with as much privilege.

If nepo babies are born with an inherent head start, that means there are also people who do not have those advantages. Nepotism babies catch spite but don’t necessarily make us think about changing the larger system at hand and helping those less fortunate. Naming the problem is simple; considering the wider picture outside of ourselves is harder, never mind creating actual solutions.

“When people talk about meritocracy, they generally think, ‘Do people like me succeed?’ But they forget that, well, the United States is a diverse place. And there are a lot of people trying to succeed who may not be like you,” Davidai says. Nepo babies are just step one in understanding the economic, racial, and cultural systemic forces that shape our reality.

Dreyfuss, the nepo baby journalist, agrees.

“It doesn’t make you a bad person to be born into a better situation than someone else. You had no control over that,” Dreyfuss says. “It also doesn’t make you a bad person for taking advantage of the benefits and opportunities that come with that. But it does make you a bad person to insist that you’re Horatio Alger.”

In other words — nepotism baby or not — we could all stand to see our positions in the world a little more clearly.

Dependent...

Europe’s Plan to Wean Itself off Russian Gas Just Might Work

Russia has made good on threats to reduce supply—leaving the EU in a bind.

MATT REYNOLDS

In 1970, West German politicians and gas executives signed a landmark deal with the Soviet Union that would shape the next half-century of European energy policy. West Germany promised to supply the USSR with steel pipes, while in exchange the USSR would extend a gas pipeline to the border of West Germany and start pumping Soviet gas beneath the Iron Curtain and into Western Europe. The trade deal was one form of Ostpolitik—a wider policy of thawing relations between the USSR and West Germany that would earn then West German chancellor Willy Brandt the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971.

Brandt—who died in 1992—may not have imagined just how intertwined the two former enemies would become. By the time of German reunification in 1990, gas from the USSR accounted for more than 30 percent of the country’s gas consumption. By 2021, Russia was supplying around 40 percent of the European Union’s natural gas, with some smaller countries, such as Latvia, almost completely reliant on Russia for their supplies. Germany, with its heavy steel industry and gas-powered heating, relied on Russia for just under half of its natural gas.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 exposed deep fissures in the EU’s energy policy. After EU sanctions on Russia, the Russian state-controlled energy firm Gazprom announced it was slashing gas exports through one of its main pipelines to about 20 percent of capacity. The share of Russian gas entering Europe has dropped to 15 percent, squeezing already-inflated prices to new highs. In the UK, which is sensitive to gas prices on international markets, average energy bills are projected to reach nearly four times their January 2019 levels.

“It is important to acknowledge for the EU that increasing this dependency on Russia has been a policy failure,” says Ganna Gladkykh, a researcher at the European Energy Research Alliance. The continent is now facing two challenges. First, a cold winter—or several—with gas supplies stretched to their limit, could mean forced blackouts and industry shutdowns. Second, Europe must reduce its dependence on Russian gas, striking new deals with different suppliers and stepping up its renewable rollout. At the end of that road, Europe may find itself in a new era of energy security—no longer reliant on an unpredictable neighbor to the east, but with new dynamics that may bring their own problems.

But first: the crunch. In late July, European Union member states agreed to reduce their gas demand by 15 percent between August 2022 and March 2023. The measures are voluntary, but the EU Council has warned that they may be made mandatory if gas security reaches crisis levels. Some countries have already taken small steps to limit energy demand. Cities in Germany are switching off public lighting, lowering thermostats, and closing swimming pools in order to reduce dependence on Russian gas. France has banned shops from running air-conditioning while doors are open, while Spain—which does not import much Russian gas—now prohibits air-conditioning from being set to less than 27 degrees Celsius (80 degrees Fahrenheit) in public places.

Natural gas is used in three primary ways: for generating electricity in power plants, for heating homes and offices, and in industries like steelmaking and fertilizer manufacture. Although there are alternatives to gas in power plants—German chancellor Olaf Scholz has raised the possibility of extending the life of nuclear power plants in order to cut down gas usage—it’s much harder to find alternatives to gas for industry and heating. The EU also has rules that protect households, hospitals, schools, and other essential services from gas-rationing measures.

About a quarter of natural gas in the EU goes to industry—which means that sector may well have to shoulder a large part of the burden of gas reduction, says Chi Kong Chyong, a research associate at the University of Cambridge. The EU is encouraging companies to switch to other forms of fuel, and it has asked member states to draw up lists of which businesses should be asked to stop production in the event of sudden gas shortages. German steelmarker ThyssenKrupp has said it could cope with restricted production, but warns that it may face shutdowns or damage in the event of a gas shortage. The chemical firm BASF has said it will slow down fertilizer production in response to high gas prices.

“The really urgent and tricky thing is heating,” says Gladkykh. About half of German homes are heated by gas, accounting for about one-third of all the country’s gas consumption. Because consumers are protected from gas rationing by law, the German government is limited in what it can do to limit gas consumption in homes. But advisers to German climate and economic minister Robert Habeck say that high gas prices will likely cause households to reduce their usage anyway. In other words, people will turn their heating down simply because they can’t afford to keep it on.

While the EU is trying to curb gas usage, it’s also frantically trying to fill up its gas reserves before winter hits. It has set a target of refilling storage to 80 percent of capacity by November 1, which it is on target to reach, although at a cost 10 times higher than the historical average. All of this means that the EU should be able to weather a winter of tight gas supplies, but in the long run it will need to find a way to reduce its reliance on Russian gas altogether.

Even if a cease-fire in Ukraine is negotiated, it’s unlikely that the EU will go back to sourcing so much of its gas from Russia. “It’s difficult to imagine that we’d be going back to the situation that we had prior to the invasion in Ukraine,” says Chyong. To plug these future gaps, the EU and its member states are negotiating new gas supply deals with Azerbaijan and Italy as well as increasing capacity to receive shipments of liquified natural gas from the US and Qatar. But these aren’t quick fixes—it will take years to ramp up gas supply from new countries.

In May the European Commission published its plan to end the EU’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels. The €210 billion ($213 billion) plan calls for a huge scaling-up of renewable energy generation, including a scheme to double installed solar panel capacity in the EU by 2025 and a doubling of the rate of heat pump installation. The EU currently has a target to produce 40 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, but the commission is proposing to increase that target to 45 percent. The plan also includes support for industries to replace gas with hydrogen, biogas, and biomethane to further reduce dependence on Russian fossil fuels.

“This crisis is a time when we ought to be doubling down on our transition to low-carbon energy,” says Jim Watson, professor of energy policy at University College London. Yet the commission’s plan to get away from Russian gas includes an extra €10 billion of investment in additional gas infrastructure. This might sound like a small sum, says Gladkykh, but it locks the EU into purchasing gas for years to come. “We need to be really careful that this does not create new dependencies that do not lead to net zero goals,” she says.

And in the medium term it may be that households are forced to reduce their energy intake—not because of government directives, but because the sheer cost of energy forces people to find ways to reduce their bills. Heat pumps are much more efficient than gas boilers at heating homes, but the high price of electricity reduces some of the cost-saving benefits. Gas prices are likely to stay high for a few years, says Chyong, and that may be enough to push people to install heat pumps—at least for those who can afford them. Rising fuel prices could push half of UK households into fuel poverty by next year, according to one study. By 2030 the EU should have overturned its reliance on Russian gas for good, but getting there will mean several tough years of energy squeezes.

Flood-Ravaged

Flood-Ravaged Pakistan Faces “Monsoon on Steroids”

UN secretary general declares south Asia a climate crisis hotspot.

SHAH MEER BALOCH and DAMIAN CARRINGTON

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has warned that Pakistan is facing a “monsoon on steroids” as the government issued more flood warnings for the next 24 hours.

Heavy rains over two months have caused the worst flooding in more than a decade and damaged more than 1 million homes.

Guterres said on Tuesday that south Asia was a hotspot for the climate crisis and that the catastrophic flooding in Pakistan that has left tens of millions needing help was a warning to every nation of the destruction wreaked by human-caused global heating.

“The Pakistani people are facing a monsoon on steroids—the relentless impact of epochal levels of rain and flooding,” he said. “It breaks my heart to see these generous people suffering so much.” The UN has issued an urgent appeal for $160 million to provide help.

“People living in these [climate crisis] hotspots are 15 times more likely to die from climate impacts,” Guterres said. “As we continue to see more and more extreme weather events around the world, it is outrageous that climate action is being put on the back burner, putting all of us, everywhere, in growing danger.”

In Pakistan, Balochistan and Sindh provinces have had more than four times the average rainfall of the last three decades

Majid Ali Bughio, 30, left his home town in Sindh with 20 extended family members in the early morning on Monday after they heard of breaches in a nearby embankment.

Bughio said by telephone that he had asked his family members to go towards Karachi, as many parts of Dadu and Badin districts were under water. “We need ration, food, medicines and emergency help from the Sindh government and the government must help us to vacate. We have been left on our own,” he said. “More than 70 percent of the population in the [wider city of Khairpur Nathan Shah] have left. The shops and all bazaars are deserted and many villages are underwater.”

Flash floods fueled by the climate crisis have affected more than 33 million people, officials have said. The National Disaster Management Authority said on Monday the death toll from the monsoon rains and floods in Pakistan had reached 1,136—with 75 killed in the last 24 hours. The NDMA said that more than 1 million houses had been damaged.

In an immediate warning issued on Tuesday, Pakistan’s Flood Forecasting Division said that over the next 24 hours a very high level of flooding was likely to continue in the Kabul River, which flows into Pakistan’s Indus River.

The Indus highway, in Sindh, was submerged under two feet of water. The highway connects Sindh with Punjab and Balochistan provinces.

A video shared by residents showed a coach that had slipped on the highway while water was flowing and authorities were involved in the rescue of passengers. Local people say there were no casualties.

The local media reported that there was a rise in waterborne diseases in Sindh and other parts of Pakistan. In some parts of Sindh, there has been a 100 percent increase in diseases.

The flash flood triggered by an abnormal monsoon has washed away bridges, roads, houses, livestock and people across the country.

Gul Hasan, 38, in Khairpur Nathan Shah, had sent his three children and wife to upper parts of Sindh, while he stayed in his home town. He said: “I did not leave because after some of my neighbors had left yesterday, people barged into their houses and stole their belongings.”

“This is so sad at this hour of calamity we are witnessing such issues. I will leave my home town after I leave the luggage and other stuff on the rooftop and water comes to the city completely and I know that now no one can steal our decades of savings.”

Just Racist?

Dog Whistle or Just Racist?

The speech isn’t coded so much as loaded.

TIM MURPHY

Republican strategist Lee Atwater is the godfather of the modern political dog whistle. He didn’t go around calling it that—I can’t actually find any evidence that he even used the term—but in a 1981 interview about how the GOP won the South, Atwater offered a concise description.

“By 1968 you can’t say ‘[n-word]’—that hurts you, [it] backfires, so you say stuff like, uh, ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’” Atwater explained. “And you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about ‘cutting taxes.’”

Atwater was speaking anonymously to a political scientist from his perch as a staffer in Ronald Reagan’s White House. He was also telling on himself. He got his start working for the arch-­segregationist Strom Thurmond. Later, as a campaign manager for George H.W. Bush, he would push the Willie Horton ad, which tied Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis to a Black man who committed multiple violent crimes while out on furlough from prison. On the surface, it was just a factual criticism about a weekend-release program. On a different frequency, it was screaming at white voters about a racist trope. Plausible deniability was crucial. Atwater told reporters that he at first hadn’t known Horton was Black.

The Horton ad, and the campaign manager behind it, captured something essential about the past and future of the Republican party. Over the last half century, Republican politicians and ad-makers have repackaged and sold white reactionary politics—on education, public services, housing, immigration, and crime—with an evolving set of euphemisms and signifiers. They learned to suggest what they should not say, without tripping the censors of the largely white political press. They learned to “dog whistle.”

For a long time, the term meant something different—it was shorthand for the incomprehensible. The term played on its literal meaning: a particularly high frequency most humans couldn’t hear. Al Gore’s tax plan was described as a dog-whistle because voters wouldn’t understand it. Barney the Purple Dinosaur, who kids loved but left adults baffled, communicated via dog whistle. If someone in the 1990s referred to “the human dog whistle,” they meant Mariah Carey, not Pat Buchanan.

Outside of political polling (and weirdly, Australia), the term’s modern use did not gain popularity until the second Bush’s presidency. At the time, liberal despair was fusing with a sort of evil genius theory of politics. Democrats were obsessed with unlocking the secrets of political framing. They attributed Republicans’ success to the weaponization of the same—with Karl Rove playing the role of “Bush’s Brain.” It was around this time that Atwater’s description of “coded” speech, now de-anonymized and taken out of archives and to the op-ed pages, started getting passed around like samizdat.

With Sherlockian fervor, commenters wondered if Bush was winking at evangelical voters when he referred to a “wonder-working power,” or if his reference to Dred Scott sent a message to anti-abortion activists about overturning precedent. This search for subtext often made things more complicated, and subtle, than they were. Plenty of people who lack gravitas borrow some from the pulpit. And you didn’t need a decoder ring to know where Republicans stood on Roe.

Still, there was—and is—an artfulness to calling out “dog whistling” when done right; it puts a name to a particularly cynical sleight of hand. It was during the rise and presidency of Barack Obama that this detective “dog whistle” usage exploded and took on its final form. According to LexisNexis, references began to spike during the 2008 campaign. As opponents tried to slow Obama down, to weaponize Obama’s race and upbringing while denying that they were doing either, they found other ways to spell it out. Former Democratic strategist Mark Penn saying Obama had a “limited” connection to “basic American values and culture”? Dog whistling. Newt Gingrich referring to Obama as “the food stamp president”? Tweet tweet.

In 2012, the historian Rick Perlstein published the full Atwater audio at a time when the strategist’s words felt especially prophetic. You couldn’t listen to AM radio or spend very long on the campaign trail without hearing one goon after another dance up to the line. These people pronounced omnibus with a hard R.

But emphasizing code words also created an artifice of detachment. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews complained that the Clinton campaign was “sending out dog-whistle signals” to “bad people” about Obama. Dog whistling was invariably a tool of people who were presumed to “know better.” The search for hidden messages often let politicians off easy, by disembodying the message from the messenger—as if these people were merely renting, not owning, the words. 

During the Trump era, liberals searched obsessively for signs in invisible ink, and it led them to some pretty desperate places. It’s how people ended up accusing a Jeopardy! contestant of making a white supremacist hand gesture. Or accusing a lawyer at a Supreme Court confirmation hearing of making a white supremacist hand gesture. Or accusing a bunch of cadets at a football game of making a white supremacist hand gesture.

Such sleuthing missed a major tonal shift in conservative politics in recent years. Perlstein, whose books on the making of the modern right are an essential guide, argued in 2017 that Trump had swapped the dog-whistle style for “train-whistle conservatism, in which you are allowed to talk about very racist ideas in quite flagrant ways.”

Our former president was the least subtle man in American life. The point of his rhetoric wasn’t to see what he could get away with; it was to be deliberately transgressive—to be seen as defiantly saying what others were too timid to, and to get other people mad at him while he did it. Trump, we were told over and over again, said “the quiet part out loud.” He was “a modern-day George Wallace”—according to Wallace’s own adviser. To be a MAGA Republican is to be both bigoted and proud to be called a bigot.

This should be clarifying. There was no too-cute play for plausible deniability; Trump read aloud from both Atwater’s script and Atwater’s director’s notes, and in doing so broke down any enduring illusion among people who follow or write about politics that the two could be separated. Our politicians aren’t dog-whistling racism to win racist votes in a calculated game. They’re just racist. And realizing that is for the best. After all, the euphemisms politicians use are never just euphemisms. When racist white people talk about “the schools” or “the neighborhood,” those aren’t stand-ins for something deeper and more nefarious: Those are the deeper and more nefarious things, the load-bearing pillars of structural racism. This speech isn’t coded so much as it’s loaded.

The allure of the “dog whistle” is that political rhetoric is a mysterious field filled with hidden messages. But most of this stuff isn’t secret. So maybe just call it what it is; after all, you heard it too.