Hunt new recruits

Russia’s Wagner Group uses Twitter and Facebook to hunt new recruits

Facing mounting losses in Ukraine, Russian mercenaries have been using the American social media companies to enlist fresh blood.

BY CLOTHILDE GOUJARD

Russia's paramilitary Wagner Group has been using Twitter and Facebook to recruit medics, drone operators and even psychologists to aid fighting operations, including in Ukraine, according to exclusive research seen by POLITICO. 

Job ads for Wagner, which has mercenaries operating in several countries, have reached nearly 120,000 views on the two social media platforms over the last ten months, according to Logically, a U.K. disinformation-focused research group. 

Sixty posts in dozens of languages – including French, Vietnamese and Spanish – shared information about fighting, IT, driving and medical positions apparently available with Wagner. They also included contact phone numbers, Telegram accounts and touted monthly salaries of 240,000 rubles (€‎2,800) with benefits including health care. 

While the researchers couldn't directly attribute the messages to Wagner with total certainty, the posts carry the footprint of the militia and its supporters.

“We only know that this is using the exact same language as previously verified Wagner accounts on places like Telegram or VK,” said Kyle Walter, head of research for Logically. VK is a popular Russian social media.

It isn't clear what success the recruitment campaigns have had. Yet the incitement to violence – and promotion of Russian attacks against Ukraine — almost certainly represent breaches of Facebook and Twitter's separate terms of service that outlaw such material.

Separate analysis from a Western government official, shared with POLITICO, confirmed that at least two phone numbers included in these social media posts linked directly either to the Wagner Group or to Russia’s intelligence service.

“Some of these efforts are actual propaganda films in combination with phone numbers so that you can directly contact representatives of the Wagner Group,” said Walter. “As we continue to view Wagner as a more and more dangerous threat in the world, the fact that these posts are circulating online is very concerning.”

Twitter responded to a request for comment with an automated poop emoji. The social media company last week quit a European Union charter to fight disinformation. The bloc's new content law to stamp out illegal content and falsehoods, the Digital Services Act (DSA), is also set to enter into force on August 25. Serious violations of the law could lead to fines of up to 6 percent of a company's global revenue.

“We designated the Wagner Group as a dangerous organization, meaning it cannot have a presence on our platforms,” said a Meta spokesperson. They added that the company also removes content containing “praise or substantive support for Wagner when we become aware of it, including posts that aim to recruit for them.”

Wagner is active in conflicts in Mali and Central Africa but has been particularly high-profile fighting for Russia since it invaded Ukraine last year. The militia recently led much of the heavy fighting in Bakhmut, the eastern Ukrainian town which has seen brutal attritional battles for territory.  

The group has lost some 20,000 fighters in Ukraine, according to its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, and has been trying to attract new recruits. 

One post in French boasted that Wagner employees get “paid time off, healthcare, well-paying jobs and the opportunity to work all over the world.” A salary of 240,000 rubles and a “good bonus for results” was advertised.

“Join us now to defend Russia's honor and a multipolar world!” read another post in French on Facebook. A third Facebook post in French promoted “life insurance” and working for “a team focused on efficiency and winning.” 

"Yevgeny Prigozhin directly from Bakhmut, invites volunteers from 22 to 55 years old to work at PMC Wagner!" read part of a tweet in Indonesian.

The Wagner Group and several of its leaders have been targeted by U.S. and EU sanctions, with some countries taking further steps to curb its activities. The U.S. in January labeled the group as a transnational criminal organization responsible for widespread human rights abuses. French lawmakers voted in May to designate Wagner as a terrorist entity.

The research on the job ads was conducted over a one-month period from mid-April to May 19 and collected posts on Facebook and Twitter as far as July 2022. At the time the research was closed, 58 of the 60 posts remained up (two were removed by Facebook after being contacted by POLITICO).

“They identify tactics that work and I think once they saw that they could get away with posting certain content on these platforms, people just continued to post more,” said Walter.

Plans to resign

Utah Republican Chris Stewart plans to resign from House

The departure would reduce the party’s five-seat majority in the House and set up a special election.

By KELLY GARRITY and OLIVIA BEAVERS

Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) plans to resign from Congress, according to a Republican familiar with the matter.

The Salt Lake Tribune was the first to report on Stewart’s plans Tuesday.

According to The Tribune, Stewart could resign as early as this week, reducing Republicans’ already-slim majority in the House. The vacancy could become a headache for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who has repeatedly struggled to get his party to coalesce around legislation — most recently, on the bill he negotiated with the White House to raise the debt ceiling.

Stewart’s retirement would trigger a special election. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, would have a week to set the dates for a primary and a general election.

Stewart, who represents Utah’s 2nd Congressional District, first assumed the office in 2013. He most recently won reelection in 2022, defeating Democratic challenger Nick Mitchell by close to 30 percentage points.

Stewart’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment

Fights subpoena in leak lawsuit

Fox News, backed by Trump White House lawyer, fights subpoena in leak lawsuit

The network is trying to protect a source who disclosed details of an FBI probe into a Chinese American scientist.

By KYLE CHENEY and JOSH GERSTEIN

A former Fox News reporter is fighting in court to scuttle a subpoena demanding that she reveal the source behind a series of stories that aired confidential details of a counterintelligence probe into a Chinese American scientist.

That scientist, Yanping Chen, is suing the FBI for damages, claiming that the leaked information was part of a campaign to damage her after federal prosecutors ended their six-year investigation of her without bringing charges. Chen, who operated a graduate education program based in Arlington, Virginia, also subpoenaed Fox and Catherine Herridge, now of CBS — to force her to disclose the source of several 2017 stories.

Notably, Fox News and Herridge are being represented by Patrick Philbin, a former top lawyer from Donald Trump’s White House. Philbin, who decried media leaks during Trump’s first impeachment trial, appeared in court Tuesday to help Herridge fend off the effort to expose her source.

The FBI initially suspected that Chen had lied on immigration forms about her work on the Chinese space program, and she was the subject of two search warrants and seizures of her devices. But she was informed in 2016 that she would not be charged with any wrongdoing.

Within a year, Herridge was reporting on key aspects of the probe, as well as on the divisions within the government about the decision not to charge Chen. Chen says the reports were followed by a sharp drop in enrollment and funding for her graduate program.

Herridge’s reporting included “snippets of her immigration forms, a summary of an FBI interview with her daughter, and personal photographs of her and her husband,” according to U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper.

Chen sued the FBI, DOJ, Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security in 2018 seeking damages, an admission of wrongdoing from the government and prosecutions of any violations of the Privacy Act that may apply to her case. But after dozens of depositions failed to unmask the potential leaker, Chen turned her sights to Fox News and Herridge, which Chen’s attorneys say is a last resort.

The lawsuit has steadily advanced for five years despite generating little attention. Yet it represents the collision of a wide range of Washington interests and issues, carrying implications for how journalists’ First Amendment protections are balanced against the need to prevent leaks of sensitive government information that implicates privacy rights. Cooper noted in court Tuesday that while Congress passed the Privacy Act almost five decades ago, lawmakers have “not seen fit to pass a reporters’ shield law.”

“For better or worse,” the judge added.

Philbin, who works in the Washington office of the firm helmed by former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, sought to conduct Tuesday’s proceedings under seal, a nod to the voluminous details about the case that have been redacted from public view and the potential implications for the FBI’s counterintelligence operations. But Cooper declined, at first, to close the hearing to the public, instead urging Philbin to make broader legal arguments without delving into the sensitive details of the case. Cooper later sealed the hearing to permit the parties to delve into the sensitive details of the case.

During the public portion of the hearing, Philbin contended that Chen had failed to pursue all possible leads about the source of the leak before turning to a subpoena for Herridge. Chen’s inquiry centers around the existence of a PowerPoint document that contained details of the FBI’s probe that later wound up on Fox. Philbin said that while Chen narrowed down potential sources of the leak who “possessed” the PowerPoint to a handful of officials, she omitted a much larger number of people who had “access” to the file. That includes a counterintelligence “squad” of eight to 12 people who worked in an office where the PowerPoint was stored on a CD, he said.

Philbin’s comments prompted Justice Department senior litigation counsel Carol Federighi to interject, warning that he appeared to be veering into subjects meant to be kept from public view. Federighi intervened a second time when Philbin began to describe some binders that included pictures similar to information contained in the PowerPoint.

While journalists have won considerable protection in state courts and enjoy near-immunity from subpoenas by prosecutors in federal criminal cases due to DOJ regulations adopted by Attorney General Merrick Garland, Privacy Act lawsuits remain treacherous for members of the press.

In 2008, a judge handling a Privacy Act lawsuit brought by former government scientist Steven Hatfill ordered former USA Today reporter Toni Locy to pay escalating fines of up to $5,000 a day and attorneys’ fees for defying an order to identify her sources for stories about a federal investigation into Hatfill’s potential ties to deadly anthrax attacks in 2001.

Locy said she could not recall which sources provided specific information about Hatfill, but a judge rejected that.

While Locy’s appeal of that contempt order was pending, the U.S. government settled with Hatfill for $5.8 million, mooting the contempt fight.

Shortly after the settlement, the Justice Department informed Hatfill’s attorneys that investigators had ultimately concluded that Hatfill was not involved in the anthrax mailings.

Chen’s effort to seek damages comes just three months after the Biden administration shut down a China-focused anti-espionage program, known as the China Initiative, claiming it had created a false perception about Chinese Americans and U.S. residents from China.

Philbin has been a figure of intense interest in recent years for his presence in the White House during the crucial chaotic weeks at the end of Trump’s term, when Trump attempted to subvert the 2020 election and rebuffed calls to calm his supporters for hours as violence raged at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Philbin has interviewed twice with prosecutors now working for special counsel Jack Smith. But he’s also been seen entering the federal courthouse for various civil matters that he and his firm are involved in.

Philbin had a harsh assessment about media leaks during Trump’s 2020 impeachment trial on charges that he abused his power and obstructed Congress over allegations that he pressured Ukraine’s president to launch a criminal probe of Joe Biden. At the time, Philbin assailed congressional Democrats for what he said was animus toward Trump, exemplified by leaks from closed-door depositions.

“The testimony that took place was selectively leaked to a compliant media to establish a false narrative about the president. If that sort of conduct had occurred in a real grand jury, that would have been a criminal violation.”

Proliferation of AI deep fakes

White House press shop adjusts to proliferation of AI deep fakes

While there are huge potential upsides with AI, the unanticipated bumps could be severe, especially amid the coming presidential election.

By ELI STOKOLS and LAUREN EGAN

When an image showing what looked to be a bombing at the Pentagon started to spread online last week, the stock market dipped momentarily. Kayla Tausche, who covers the White House for CNBC, quickly started fact checking. Popping into Lower Press — the cluster of desks and offices behind the briefing room where many press aides work — she found principal deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton and asked about the reports.

“There was initially confusion about where it was coming from (I said ‘RT-style unconfirmed viral accounts’) and then exasperation,” Tausche told West Wing Playbook.

Dalton moved quickly, connecting with the Pentagon and National Security Council before telling Tausche there did not appear to have been a bombing. Once additional tweets suggested the phony image had been generated by artificial intelligence, Tausche followed up with Dalton to apologize for the diversion.

“She said, with visible frustration, that she is dealing with these types of inquiries on a daily basis, with greater and greater frequency,” Tausche added.

The White House press shop has found itself on one of the many front lines of the AI battles. Aides there, who collectively handle hundreds of media inquiries a day, have already been briefed by experts on the potential national security risks posed by images and videos that have been altered using AI, according to an administration official.

Outside the press shop, the White House has scaled up its efforts to assess and manage AI’s risks, impressing on AI companies during meetings on campus that it’s their responsibility to ensure their products are safe. It updated the strategic plan for AI research and development for the first time in four years and last week launched a process to work toward developing an AI bill of rights.

“Everyone is trying very hard to be sensitive, to issue these warnings but without predicting what could happen, and that’s because they don’t know,” said Kara Swisher, a prominent tech-focused journalist. “Most people, if they’re being honest, would tell you they don’t know what’s going to happen.”

The administration’s knockdown of reports of the Pentagon bombing — backed by a tweet from Arlington, Va., first responders — was part of a swift debunking that helped the market recover after the S&P fell 0.3 percent, a momentary loss of some $500 billion in value.

But days later, another AI-generated deep fake popped up in the form of a video showing a purported Microsoft Teams call between anti-Russia activist Bill Browder and former Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko arguing for the easing of sanctions against Russian oligarchs. Both fakes were easy enough to spot for those familiar with AI. But as the technology develops and improves, AI-generated text, audio and video could quickly become indistinguishable from that produced by human beings.

On Tuesday, prominent industry officials, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, issued a succinct but jarring statement aimed at seizing the attention of global leaders: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the statement said.

When asked about the statement, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t say if the president shares the belief that AI, if mismanaged, could lead to extinction. She only acknowledged that AI is “one of the most powerful technologies that we see currently in our time” and that the administration takes risk mitigation seriously.

There are various proposals floating for regulating AI — and Big Tech more broadly — on Capitol Hill, including legislation released earlier this month by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) to create a new federal agency to oversee the technology.

“We remain concerned about an uptick in deepfake videos and manipulated images spreading on social media platforms,” said White House assistant press secretary Robyn Patterson. “As the technology for creating fake videos and images improves, it’s important for the media and the public to be aware of this trend, which we expect to grow, if not exponentially.”

While there are huge potential upsides with AI that are already triggering a global arms race to harness and capitalize on the technology, the unanticipated bumps could be severe, especially amid the coming presidential election.

“It’s not that one piece of content is going to be devastating; it’s the collective, scaled approach to inauthenticity that’s the problem. People can do this at scale now,” said Sarah Kreps, a professor at Cornell University’s Brooks School Tech Policy Institute and one of three AI researchers invited to speak to Biden’s new working group on the matter within the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. “It can look like massive numbers of citizens are supporting a particular issue when they’re not.”

In a country where sectarian partisanship has already given rise to misinformation and the spread of conspiracy theories, AI may only deepen the public’s growing mistrust of facts. “It just creates this ecosystem of distrust in a democracy where trust is such a foundational pillar,” said Kreps.

Debt ceiling crisis

Obama agreed to $2.1 trillion in spending cuts to end 2011 debt ceiling crisis. Here’s what happened next.

By Tami Luhby

The nation is days away from defaulting on its obligations. The Republican House speaker, pushed by conservatives in his party, demands deep spending cuts. The president, a Democrat, works on negotiating a package to avert a fiscal calamity.

No, it’s not 2023.

It’s 2011, when then-President Barack Obama agreed to a debt ceiling deal with then-House Speaker John Boehner that called for more than $900 billion in upfront spending cuts and deficit reduction, as well as the creation of a joint congressional committee that would find at least $1.2 trillion in additional belt tightening.

The situation is similar to the one President Joe Biden, who served as Obama’s vice president, is facing today. He and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican, are pushing their parties to swiftly approve their agreement to address the current debt limit drama before the US could start missing payments on June 5.

Today’s House Republicans may want to look back at the results of their predecessors’ hard-fought deal. Things didn’t proceed as planned, and a chunk of the reductions was ultimately pared back through a subsequent series of bipartisan bills.

“Once Congress took a look at the programs and what was required, they realized they couldn’t make cuts that deep,” said Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute who was involved in the 2011 negotiations.

What happened after the 2011 deal was signed

The joint committee in 2011 was tasked with finding additional deficit reduction measures to offset a $1.2 trillion increase in the debt ceiling. If members failed in their mission, automatic cuts that would slow the growth of expected spending would kick in over the next decade.

The committee did not accomplish its goal, which triggered the spending caps, known as sequestration.

However, Congress then watered down the deficit reduction provisions by repeatedly increasing the caps on discretionary spending in the following years – though lawmakers also included other measures to offset some of those changes.

“We basically unwound this bill little by little,” said John Diamond, director of the Center for Public Finance at Rice University’s Baker Institute.

In the end, spending was curtailed by about $1.5 trillion out of the total $2.1 trillion agreed to in the 2011 deal, Riedl said. This included $855 billion in cuts to discretionary spending over the decade. The reductions affected agencies and programs, including defense, education, justice and the Internal Revenue Service, among others. The deal also slapped a 2% cut in payments to Medicare providers as part of reductions to mandatory spending programs.

Today’s deal

Fast forward to 2023. One of the major sticking points to ending the debt ceiling impasse was the depth of the spending cuts. The Biden administration had balked at returning spending to fiscal 2022 levels, which the Republicans included in their debt ceiling bill earlier this year, while McCarthy’s team held firm.

In the end, the deal announced over the weekend calls for non-defense discretionary spending to be pared back for fiscal 2024, but certain agreed-upon appropriation adjustments would make up nearly all of the difference. Non-defense spending would rise just 1% in fiscal 2025.

One important distinction between 2011 and today is that the spending caps back then were Plan B, said Warren Payne, a senior advisor at Mayer Brown, a law firm, who was a senior Republican staffer on the House Ways and Means Committee in 2011.

“People were operating under the presumption that the spending caps would never actually happen,” Payne said.

Now, the spending caps are among the GOP’s top priorities – and McCarthy succeeded in not limiting funding for defense and not raising taxes, unlike in 2011, he said.

But even if Congress passes this debt ceiling package, House Republicans may find it difficult to adhere to the caps when it comes time to actually appropriate funding for the federal government’s operations later this year.

“It’s reasonable to expect that at the end of the day, we would end up with the same pressures to increase spending,” Diamond said.

Nothing is good...

Plastics Recycling Is Far Worse Than We Thought

Not only is it a failure in scope, the process spews toxic microplastics.

MATT SIMON

The plastics industry has long hyped recycling, even though it is well aware that it’s been a failure. Worldwide, only 9 percent of plastic waste actually gets recycled. In the United States, the rate is now 5 percent. Most used plastic is landfilled, incinerated, or winds up drifting around the environment. 

Now, an alarming new study has found that even when plastic makes it to a recycling center, it can still end up splintering into smaller bits that contaminate the air and water. This pilot study focused on a single new facility where plastics are sorted, shredded, and melted down into pellets. Along the way, the plastic is washed several times, sloughing off microplastic particles—fragments smaller than 5 millimeters—into the plant’s wastewater. 

Because there were multiple washes, the researchers could sample the water at four separate points along the production line. (They are not disclosing the identity of the facility’s operator, who cooperated with their project.) This plant was actually in the process of installing filters that could snag particles larger than 50 microns (a micron is a millionth of a meter), so the team was able to calculate the microplastic concentrations in raw versus filtered discharge water—basically a before-and-after snapshot of how effective filtration is.

Their microplastics tally was astronomical. Even with filtering, they calculate that the total discharge from the different washes could produce up to 75 billion particles per cubic meter of wastewater. Depending on the recycling facility, that liquid would ultimately get flushed into city water systems or the environment. In other words, recyclers trying to solve the plastics crisis may in fact be accidentally exacerbating the microplastics crisis, which is coating every corner of the environment with synthetic particles. 

“It seems a bit backward, almost, that we do plastic recycling in order to protect the environment, and then end up increasing a different and potentially more harmful problem,” says plastics scientist Erina Brown, who led the research while at the University of Strathclyde. 

“It raises some very serious concerns,” agrees Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former US Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator, who wasn’t involved in the paper. “And I also think this points to the fact that plastics are fundamentally not sustainable.”

Kara Pochiro, spokesperson for the Association of Plastic Recyclers, notes in a statement provided to WIRED that recycling is regulated like any other industrial process in the US. “The recycling plant works closely with the local municipality to ensure the wastewater conforms with the capacity and quality required for the local sewer treatment facility,” Pochiro says. “When it is either economically or technically required, the recycling plant will install a water pre-treatment plant that partially treats the water in order to remove some of the burden from the municipal plant.” 

The good news here is that filtration makes a difference: Without it, the researchers calculated that this single recycling facility could emit up to 6.5 million pounds of microplastic per year. Filtration got it down to an estimated 3 million pounds. “So it definitely was making a big impact when they installed the filtration,” says Brown. “We found particularly high removal efficiency of particles over 40 microns.” 

But a critical caveat is that the team only tested for microplastics down to 1.6 microns. Plastic particles can get way smaller—like nanoplastics that are tiny enough to enter individual cells—and they grow much more numerous as they do. So this is likely a significant underestimate. And these researchers were finding a lot of particularly small particles. In two of the sample points, approximately 95 percent of the microplastics were under 10 microns, and 85 percent were under 5 microns. “It completely shocked me just how tiny the majority of them were,” says Brown. “But we easily could have found so many smaller than that.”

Depending on the recycling facility, that wastewater might next flow to a sewer system and eventually to a treatment plant that is not equipped to filter out such small particles before pumping the water into the environment. But, says Enck, “some of these facilities might be discharging directly into groundwater. They’re not always connected to the public sewer system.” That means the plastics could end up in the water people use for drinking or irrigating crops.

The full extent of the problem isn’t yet clear, as this pilot study observed just one facility. But because it was brand-new, it was probably a best-case scenario, says Steve Allen, a microplastics researcher at the Ocean Frontiers Institute and coauthor of the new paper. “It is a state-of-the-art plant, so it doesn’t get any better,” he says. “If this is this bad, what are the others like?”

These researchers also found high levels of airborne microplastics inside the facility, ready for workers to inhale. Previous research has found that recycled pellets contain a number of toxic chemicals, including endocrine-disrupting ones. Plastic particles can be dangerous to human lung cells, and a previous study found that laborers who work with nylon, which is also made of plastic, suffer from a chronic disease known as flock worker’s lung. When plastics break down in water, they release “leachate”—a complex cocktail of chemicals, many of which are hazardous to life. 

Recycling a plastic bottle, then, isn’t just turning it into a new bottle. It’s deconstructing it and putting it back together again. “The recycling centers are potentially making things worse by actually creating microplastics faster and discharging them into both water and air,” says Deonie Allen, a coauthor of the paper and a microplastics researcher at the University of Birmingham. “I’m not sure we can technologically engineer our way out of that problem.”

Recycling is also a game of diminishing returns. A plastic bottle is easy enough to process, but you can only do that a few times before the material degrades too much to be recycled again. And as plastic products have gotten more complex—multilayered pouches for baby food, for instance—they’ve gotten harder to recycle. The industry’s literal dirty secret is that mountains of plastic waste are being shipped to economically developing countries, where the stuff is often burned in open pits, poisoning surrounding communities and sending still more microplastics and chemicals into the atmosphere. If recycling was actually effective in its current form, the industry wouldn’t have to keep producing exponentially more plastic—it’s now churning out a trillion pounds a year.  

Still, researchers like Brown don’t think that we should abandon recycling. This new research shows that while filters can’t stop all the microplastics from leaving a recycling facility, they at least help substantially. “I really don’t want it to suggest to people that we shouldn’t recycle, and to give it a completely negative reputation,” she says. “What it really highlights is that we just really need to consider the impacts of the solutions.” 

Scientists and anti-pollution groups agree that the ultimate solution isn’t relying on recycling or trying to pull trash out of the ocean, but massively cutting plastic production. “​​I just think this illustrates that plastics recycling in its traditional form has some pretty serious problems,” says Enck. “This is yet another reason to do everything humanly possible to avoid purchasing plastics.”

Impeachment

Trump’s Tirades Couldn’t Save Ken Paxton From Impeachment

Most Republicans in the Texas House voted to boot the allegedly corrupt attorney general.

RUSS CHOMA

The Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Saturday to impeach Republican Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. Paxton, a conservative star who has made a name as a culture warrior and MAGA firebrand, was impeached on multiple articles including bribery and abuse of public trust. The impeachment vote went through easily—121 to 23—with the support of not only Texas House Democrats but also the vast majority of the chamber’s Republicans—a harsh rebuke for Paxton who has led a number of GOP court battles, including appealing to the US Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election.

Despite the heavy support from Texas Republicans to impeach Paxton, former president Donald Trump and his close allies raged against the vote. Before and after the vote, Trump posted angry invectives on Truth Social against Texas GOP legislators.

“The RINO Speaker of the House of Texas, Dade Phelan, who is barely a Republican at all and failed the test on voter integrity, wants to impeach one of the most hard working and effective Attorney Generals in the United States,” Trump complained, saying that Paxton, who has been under investigation by the FBI for years, shouldn’t be impeached because he was recently reeelected. 

Before the vote, Trump also made ominous threats that he would target Texas Republicans who voted to impeach Paxton.

“Hopefully Republicans in the Texas House will agree that this is a very unfair process that should not be allowed to happen or proceed—I will fight you if it does,” Trump posted. “It is the Radical Left Democrats, RINOS, and Criminals that never stop. ELECTION INTERFERENCE! Free Ken Paxton, let them wait for the next election!”

As my colleague Tim Murphy has detailed, while Paxton has had electoral success—he is in his third term—he has been under clouds of scandal for most of his time in office.

In 2020, a group of staffers in the attorney general’s office—all conservative Republicans—grew alarmed by what they considered a pattern of unusual and unethical behavior from Paxton on behalf of a real-estate developer and major donor named Nate Paul. 

Paxton intervened in an ongoing lawsuit involving Paul, in a way that seemed designed to benefit him. Days before some of Paul’s foreclosed properties were set to be sold off, Paxton also got his office to issue a non-binding legal opinion to block the auction from happening. Paxton kept on trying to get his staff to start an investigation, on Paul’s behalf, into claims that the FBI had conducted an improper search of his properties—and when they made clear that they would not, Paxton hired a special counsel with no prosecutorial experience to do just that. At the same time, Paul had allegedly done a few things for Paxton personally—he had hired a woman that Paxton was allegedly having an affair with, and he had done some renovations at Paxton’s house. Believing that their boss might be operating “under duress,” these Paxton staffers reported the AG to the feds. Paxton promptly fired them.

And that’s just the latest scandal. As Tim wrote in a larger profile of Paxton last year, Paxton has faced legal and ethical questions since before his time in office as Texas attorney general.

The Texas GOP has been gripped by the Paxton impeachment drama for much of the last week. As news broke that a House panel investigating whether to impeach Paxton was nearing the release of a report, Paxton went into attack mode, accusing House Speaker Phelan of being drunk on the floor of the House and reportedly threatening legislators, calling them to warn of “political consequences” if they voted to impeach him.  

Texas Governor Greg Abbott—himself a popular and nationally prominent conservative—hasn’t spoken out publicly about Paxton. Senator Ted Cruz joined Trump in backing the attorney general, saying on Saturday that no other conservative has “battled the abuses of the Biden family more ferociously.”

Because of the impeachment, Paxton has now temporarily been removed from office and will face a trial in the Texas Senate—where his wife is a senator—to determine if he should be permanently removed from office.

I don't want to live in the U.S. of Flor-i-daaaaaaaaaa

Ron DeSantis Faces Three New Lawsuits After Signing New Voter Suppression Bill

The new law could devastate community voter registration drives.

ARI BERMAN

Hours before announcing his 2024 campaign for the presidency on Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law allowing him to continue to serve as governor while he pursues the GOP presidential nomination. While that was the headline, the new law contains a series of provisions making it harder to vote in the state, including new restrictions on mail-in ballots, efforts to make it easier to purge voting rolls, and limitations on third-party voter registration groups that could gut community registration drives.

As a result, DeSantis is facing three new federal lawsuits from organizations including the NAACP, League of Women Voters, and the Hispanic Federation, which argue that the new restrictions violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, including the right to free speech and association, and fundamental protections of the right to vote.

Voting rights groups say the new rules for grassroots voter registration groups are particularly burdensome. According to a summary by Democracy Docket, the new law:

• Requires organizations to reregister for every single election cycle,
• Prohibits prefilled information on registration applications,
• Shortens the amount of time organizations have to return registration applications from 14 days to 10 and increases the fine associated with late delivery,
• Bans noncitizens and individuals with certain felony convictions from handling voter registration applications and imposes fines for each violation of this requirement, and
• Increases the total aggregate fine that an organization can be levied in each calendar year from $50,000 to $250,000.

Voting rights groups told the GOP-controlled legislature before the bill’s final passage that these measures “create an overwhelming chilling effect, and groups will have to decide between risking fines of magnitude they cannot shoulder, or simply cease undertaking voter registration activities altogether.” The lawsuit by the League of Women Voters said the restrictions will have “devastating consequences” that could lead it to “severely curtail” voter registration drives.

The new law is likely to have a disproportionate impact on voters of color, who are five times more likely than white voters to be registered by a third-party group.

And it’s not the first time DeSantis has signed a bill making it harder to vote and targeted communities of color.

In 2019, he signed a law that disenfranchised 774,000 people with past felony convictions who owed fines, fees, or restitution. It gutted a ballot initiative passed by Florida voters in 2018 that was meant to restore voting rights to 1.4 million people with felony convictions.

Two years later, he signed a sweeping bill restricting mail voting, after more Democrats than Republicans cast mail-in ballots in 2020 for the first time in state history. He signed the law during an “exclusive” appearance on Fox & Friends.

A year later, a new Office of Election Crimes and Security created by DeSantis announced the arrest of 20 people on voter fraud charges, many of them Black men with past felony convictions who had been told by the state they were eligible to vote. A number of the charges have already been thrown out in court.

And in an unprecedented move, DeSantis forced his own redistricting plan through the legislature, creating four new US House seats for Republicans and dismantling two districts represented by Black members of Congress.

DeSantis has often proclaimed Florida to be a bastion for freedom under his rule, but as former Democratic State Rep. Sean Shaw told my colleague Pema Levy, “that freedom only applies to people that look like him and that think like him. And if you don’t, then this state is not free at all.”

More bad news......

'Very bad news indeed': Study sounds alarm on threat of deep ocean current collapse

Brett Wilkins

Antarctic currents that enrich 40% of Earth's deep ocean with oxygen and nutrients that are vital for marine life have slowed dangerously in recent decades and could collapse by mid-century, a study published Thursday revealed.

The research—which was published in the journal Nature Climate Change—showed that a 30% slowdown in deep water currents around Antarctica since the early 1990s.

Currents known as Antarctic bottom waters—which are driven by cold, dense waters off the Antarctic continental shelf—power a worldwide system of currents. The most important of these, known as the Southern Ocean overturning circulation, comprises two massive cells—one subducting downward and the other upwelling—that connect the various water basins in a global circulation system.

"If the oceans had lungs, this would be one of them."

"If the oceans had lungs, this would be one of them," Matt England of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Australia, a co-author of the new paper, said in a statement.

"Our modeling shows that if global carbon emissions continue at the current rate, then the Antarctic overturning will slow by more than 40% in the next 30 years—and on a trajectory that looks headed towards collapse," England added.

Steve Rintoul, co-author of the study and oceanographer at the Australian government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, toldThe Guardian that "changes in the overturning circulation are a big deal."

"It's something that is a concern because it touches on so many aspects of the Earth, including climate, sea level, and marine life," he added.

England and Rintoul were part of a team of researchers who in March published a study in Nature that found the vital deep ocean current is "on a trajectory that looks headed towards collapse" over the coming decades.

Scientists from Australia examined the deep ocean current below approximately 13,000 feet that originates in the cold, dense waters off the continental shelf of Antarctica and flows to ocean basins across the planet.

"The model projections of rapid change in the deep ocean circulation in response to melting of Antarctic ice might, if anything, have been conservative," Rintoul said Thursday. "We're seeing changes have already happened in the ocean that were not projected to happen until a few decades from now."

England toldThe Guardian in March that "in the past, these circulations have taken more than 1,000 years or so to change, but this is happening over just a few decades."

"It's way faster than we thought these circulations could slow down," he added. "We are talking about the possible long-term extinction of an iconic water mass."

The new research comes after the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service reported in February that its analysis of satellite imagery showed Antarctic sea ice coverage was 31% below average the previous month, significantly lower than the previous January low mark set in 2017.

In January, a 600-square-mile iceberg nearly the size of Greater London broke off Antarctica's Brunt Ice Shelf, although scientists said the event will affect—but was not caused by—climate change. January is summer in the Southern Hemisphere.

Ida and Dactyl

This asteroid has a moon. The robot spacecraft Galileo on route to Jupiter in 1993 encountered and photographed two asteroids during its long interplanetary voyage. The second minor planet it photographed, 243 Ida, was unexpectedly discovered to have a moon. The tiny moon, Dactyl, is only about 1.6 kilometers across and seen as a small dot on the right of the sharpened featured image. In contrast, the potato-shaped Ida is much larger, measuring about 60 kilometers long and 25 km wide. Dactyl is the first moon of an asteroid ever discovered -- now many asteroids are known to have moons. The names Ida and Dactyl are from Greek mythology.