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‘We are going to be homeless’: How mobile homeowners are being forced out in metro Phoenix

AZ Central – The Arizona Republic

‘We are going to be homeless’: How mobile homeowners are being forced out in metro Phoenix

Catherine Reagor, Juliette Rihl and Kunle Falayi, – October 22, 2022

Homeowners in mobile home parks across metro Phoenix are getting evicted.

Many own the mobile home but rent the small lot it sets on.

“This is more than just a notice to get out,” said Priscilla Salazar, whose family has lived 11 years in the Weldon Park mobile home community near 16th Street and Osborn Road. “We are going to be homeless.”

Like Valley apartments, some mobile home park owners are raising rents when leases expire and evicting tenants who can’t pay.

In other cases, owners are shutting the parks down so the land can be used for something else, including housing that mobile homeowners can’t afford. Some mobile home park buyers are clearing out tenants and flipping the infill sites for big profits.

Mobile homes have long been one of the most affordable housing options for metro Phoenix residents, but the growing number of parks closing or becoming pricier is putting many residents in a bind. New affordable parks aren’t being built, and many mobile homeowners can’t afford to live elsewhere or move their homes to other communities in the Valley, alarming housing advocates and prompting government officials to seek solutions.

In mid-September, tenants of Weldon Court received a notice that their park would be closing. It had been sold for $5.48 million to an investor from California just days before. Tenants were given six months to move out.

The Weldon Court mobile home park was recently sold, and mobile homeowners in the community were given six months to move out.

“This is our little mini Phoenix. This is our community,” said Salazar, whose children have grown up in the park. Many tenants are low-income families or seniors on fixed incomes.

Residents of Weldon Court and two other Valley mobile home parks that are evicting tenants or raising rents recently protested at the Arizona Capitol and Phoenix City Council chambers. The other two parks with residents fighting their landlords are Las Casitas — which is now called Beacon — at 19th Avenue and Buckeye Road, and Periwinkle, at 27th Avenue and Colter Street.

Mobile home park buying spree

Like with affordable Phoenix-area apartments, investors are snatching up mobile home parks in the Valley.

Since the beginning of 2021, at least 30 trailer, manufactured and mobile home parks have sold for almost $260 million, according to an Arizona Republic analysis of real estate records.

The Valley has been a hub for factory-built homes since after World War II. Many GIs returning home headed to the Southwest. Some hitched a travel trailer to their cars and put down roots and wheels in metro Phoenix.

Most of the metro Phoenix mobile home parks to sell during the past five years are prime infill sites.

The mobile home park buying and closure spree comes as Arizona is facing a shortage of 270,000 homes.

“It’s horrible for people who own their mobile home and have been living in a park for decades,” said Pamela Bridge, director of litigation and advocacy at Community Legal Services. “Investors are raising rents and our office is seeing so many more evictions in older parks.”

She said many longtime residents in Phoenix-area mobile home parks have paid off their homes and made improvements on them, but they can’t afford to move them and can’t find other parks where they can rent a space.

“These people have done nothing wrong,” she said. “We need to leave these mobile home park owners in stable situations.”

Jerry Suter, an 83-year-old veteran who has lived at the Periwinkle Mobile Home Park for 28 years, planned to live out the rest of his days there. He called the park’s closing “devastating” and “traumatic.” With an income of $1,290 in Social Security payments each month, he said he can’t afford to live anywhere else.

Grand Canyon University bought the park six years ago, decided to close it and plans to build student housing.

“They’re going to literally have to drag me out of there,” Suter said. “I’m not giving up my trailer.”

Phoenix has about 20,000 mobile homes, which represents about 3.1% of all of the area’s homes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s far more than the number of mobile homes that can be found in cities with similar populations, including Houston, San Diego and Philadelphia.

But the supply of mobile homes and parks is shrinking. About 5% of Phoenix homes were in mobile home parks in 2018.

The rapid disappearance of mobile home parks is due, in part, to transactions like this: In 2018, homebuilder Taylor Morrison bought the former Scottsdale Wheel Inn Ranch RV and Mobile Home Park, where residents were evicted by another owner a few years before. Similar scenarios with investors buying the parks, evicting the tenants and then selling to a developer are happening across metro Phoenix.

The Phoenix city manager’s office recently created a task force to research potential solutions to the mobile home dilemma. The task force will present its findings to the City Council next month.

District 8 Councilmember Carlos Garcia, whose district includes Las Casitas mobile home park, said he wants to find a way to keep people in their homes or, if the evictions move forward, find new places for the residents to live.

“To me, all options are on the table,” Garcia said. “Priority is to make sure these families don’t end up on the streets.”

Finding more time: GCU-owned mobile home park extends deadline before forcing residents to leave

Few choices for mobile homeowners

Sylvia Herrera (left) and Raquel Hernandez meet during an emergency meeting at the Beacon mobile home park (formerly Las Casitas mobile home park) on Sept. 20, 2022, in Phoenix. The residents were asked to sign a four-month lease and are worried about being evicted by the new owner. Hernandez recently bought her mobile home in the park.

Residents of Beacon mobile home park were given a new lease in late September. Their rent will increase by 88% over the next four years, it said.

Elvia Ramirez, who lives in the park with her children, started looking for somewhere else to move. But the single mother of four, who works as a receptionist and has lived in the park since she was a teenager, hasn’t been able to find something within her budget.

“Even the mobile homes are too expensive now,” said Ramirez, 33. If she doesn’t secure a new home, she said, she and her kids will probably have to move in with family.

The median price of a U.S. mobile home is now $61,400, according to a LendingTree study. That’s up 35% since 2016.

Many mobile homes are several decades old, and some are even trailers, the oldest type of mobile house. Some of the parks in metro Phoenix sold since early last year are more than 70 years old.

Many parks won’t rent to owners of older mobile homes because their houses may not be up to code. Also, some with additions can’t be moved without damaging them.

The typical rent for a mobile home lot in the Phoenix area was about $400 to $500 a month in 2019, according to housing advocates. Now, rents are rising above $1,000 per lot in some Valley parks.

Help available to mobile homeowners

Arizona has a fund to help, but some mobile homeowners don’t hear about it, and others cannot fully benefit from it because of the age of their residences.

For some owners, the fund isn’t enough to help them move, so they take less than $2,000 in state funds to walk away from their mobile home.

Under Arizona law, mobile home park residents who are displaced because of redevelopment are eligible to receive up to $12,500 from the state’s relocation fund.

But many of the mobile homes are so old, they cannot be moved to another park, either because they would fall apart or because they don’t meet current wind-resistance codes.

Residents who have to leave their homes in place because they can’t be moved can get only $1,875 from the fund, which is managed by the Arizona Housing Department.

Many residents and housing advocates said more help is needed.

“Now I have to abandon my home and give it to the university,” Suter said. “What am I gonna buy for $1,875?”

Patricia Dominguez said her family recently spent $4,000 on a new roof for their home — more than double what they will be reimbursed if they abandon it.

“What they’re offering is nothing compared to the love, and the blood, and the sweat and tears that we’ve all put into our unit,” said Dominguez. Her mother and sister, Salazar, live in Weldon Court.

Community organizer Sylvia Herrera, who is working with residents of all three parks to get more time and money before eviction, said the state relocation fund is “deceiving” because many people can’t move their trailers and therefore can’t access the full relocation amount.

“These are not really resources if you can’t qualify,” she said.

Tara Brunetti, assistant deputy director of the Arizona Department of Housing’s Manufactured Housing Division, said park owners must notify the agency if they plan on closing a park and give tenants 180 days’ notice.

“That gives us time to reach out to the residents” and offer them help, she said. “We are definitely seeing more applications for the fund now.”

The fund has more than $7.6 million to help mobile home park residents.

Sylvia Herrera leads an emergency meeting of residents at the Beacon mobile home park (formerly Las Casitas mobile home park) on Sept. 20, 2022, in Phoenix. The residents were asked to sign a four-month lease and are worried about being evicted by the new owner.

The state program does offer more money than it did five years ago, but it took a legislative move to get the increase.

Mobile homeowners and their advocates are hoping for a different kind of fix.

Some cities, including Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, have updated their zoning laws to help prevent mobile home residents from displacement.

A 2018 Austin city ordinance zoned existing mobile home parks as a “mobile home residence district.” That means if the landowner wanted to use the land for a different purpose, they would need City Council approval to change the zoning.

Portland passed a similar ordinance the same year.

In 2018, when a new owner began evicting longtime residents from the Tempe Mobile Home Park near Arizona State University, the city of Tempe stepped in and helped get rent concessions from the landlord. Tempe also set up meetings for the tenants to negotiate with the new owner and get aid from the Arizona Housing Department.

That former mobile home park is now high-end apartments.

“I believe there should be laws or community work in cities and counties that come up with long-term solutions for people in the park. These people are a vital part of our community,” said Bridge, of Community Legal Services. “We want their children to remain in schools and for the parents to be able to get to their jobs nearby.”

Out-of-state buyers

In 2018, investors spent more than $225 million on 40 metro Phoenix mobile-home parks. It was a record year for mobile home park sales in the Valley.

Then, big Wall Street-backed investment firms were behind most of the sales. Now, big and small investors are driving the trend, but almost all are out-of-state buyers.

The biggest Phoenix-area mobile home park sale since the beginning of 2021 was $84.5 million for the Royal Palm park in Phoenix at 19th and Dunlap avenues. Property records show Chicago-based Continental Communities is the new manager.

Bridge said she has come across several cases of new out-of-state mobile home park owners not giving tenants or the state enough move-out notice.

Mobile home evictions are tracked differently than other rental evictions, and the data to tally the total isn’t available in Arizona.

“Because of the housing crisis, there is no affordable housing. Trailer parks are the most affordable housing right now that you can find,” Herrera said. “People are just trying to retain that, trying to hold on to living in mobile home parks.”

Coverage of housing insecurity on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Arizona Community Foundation.

DOJ Slams Trump Filing Claiming 9 Mar-A-Lago Files Are His ‘Personal’ Property

HuffPost

DOJ Slams Trump Filing Claiming 9 Mar-A-Lago Files Are His ‘Personal’ Property

Mary Papenfuss – October 21, 2022

The Department of Justice has fired back at Donald Trump’s claim that nine White House files seized from his Mar-a-Lago compound by the FBI are his “personal” property.

The files include two documents related to U.S. immigration policy, six requests for clemency to the then-president, and a letter to him from someone in a military academy, according to the DOJ’s letter, filed Thursday in Florida to U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie, the special master appointed to review the confiscated documents.

The Justice Department dismissed the notion that any of the materials belong to Trump. It pointed out that the pardon requests, for example, “were received by plaintiff in his capacity as the official with authority to grant reprieves and pardons, not in his personal capacity.”

The DOJ letter cited the Presidential Records Act, which states that all documentary materials created or received by a president, his staff or his office in the course of official activities are government property that should go to the National Archives when a president leaves office.

Trump also claimed that four documents should be withheld from investigators because of executive privilege. They include the two immigration policy documents, which Trump’s team said were “predecisional materials,” and two documents about meetings.

The Justice Department argued that the former president can’t claim the immigration documents are both his personal records and protected by executive privilege. The claims are contradictory and he must argue one or the other, the filing said.

Dearie made a similar point about mixed and confusing claims concerning the documents in a conference call with the parties earlier this week. He pointed out that there’s “certainly an incongruity there” when Trump’s lawyers insist that some documents are protected both by executive privilege and as Trump’s personal records.

Dearie also complained on the call that Trump’s legal team hadn’t offered much substance in either case to support its claims.

The special master was appointed last month by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon at Trump’s request. He is tasked with reviewing about 11,000 pages of documents to determine if any should be shielded by attorney-client or executive privilege. Dearie’s name was submitted by Trump’s legal team.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled earlier this month that the Justice Department can resume reviewing the seized classified records, blocking part of a stay issued earlier by Cannon. The appeals court also prohibited Dearie from vetting the documents marked classified.

Republicans plan to torpedo key Biden policies as polls predict midterm victory

The Guardian

Republicans plan to torpedo key Biden policies as polls predict midterm victory

Chris Stein in Washington DC – October 21, 2022

<span>Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters</span> — Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

A standoff over the debt ceiling. Aid to Ukraine on the chopping block. And impeachment proceedings against homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas – or perhaps even president Joe Biden himself.

With polls indicating they have a good shot of winning a majority in the House of Representatives in the 8 November midterms, top Republican lawmakers have in recent weeks offered a preview what they might do with their resurgent power, and made clear they have their sights set on key aspects of the Biden administration’s policies at home and abroad.

Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the chamber, this week signaled in an interview with Punchbowl News that if Congress is going to approve an increase in the amount the federal government can borrow – as it’s expected to need to by sometime next year – Republicans are going to want an agreement to cut spending in return.

“You can’t just continue down the path to keep spending and adding to the debt,” said McCarthy, who is likely to be elevated to speaker of the house in a Republican led-chamber. “And if people want to make a debt ceiling [for a longer period of time], just like anything else, there comes a point in time where, okay, we’ll provide you more money, but you got to change your current behavior.”

Asked if he might demand that Social Security and Medicare, the two massive federal retirement and healthcare benefit programs that are nearing insolvency, be reformed as part of debt ceiling negotiations, McCarthy replied that he would not “predetermine” anything.

But the California lawmaker warned that members of his caucus were starting to question the money Washington was sending to Ukraine to help it fend off Russia’s invasion. “Ukraine is important, but at the same time it can’t be the only thing they do and it can’t be a blank check,” he told Punchbowl.

Then there’s the question of if Republicans will choose to exercise the House’s powers of impeachment – as they did against Bill Clinton in 1998, and as Democrats did to Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021.

The prime target appears to be Mayorkas, whom Republicans have pilloried amid an uptick in arrivals of migrants at the United States’ border with Mexico. Yet another target could be Biden himself – as Jim Banks, chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee, which crafts policy for the party, suggested on Thursday.

Political realities may pose an obstacle to McCarthy and his allies’ ability to see their plans through. High inflation and Biden’s low approval ratings have given them momentum to retake the House, but their chances of winning a majority in the Senate are seen as a toss-up. Even if they did win that chamber, they’re unlikely to have the two-thirds majority necessary to convict Biden, Mayorkas, or whomever else they intend to impeach – or even the numbers to overcome Democratic filibusters of any legislation they try to pass.

Matt Grossman, director of Michigan State University’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, questioned the GOP’s willingness to legislate. The party’s plans, as outlined in the Commitment to America McCarthy unveiled last month, appear thin in comparison to similar platforms rolled out in 1994 and 2010, when Republicans again took back Congress’ lower chamber from Democratic majorities.

“There’s a longstanding asymmetry between the parties. Republicans legitimately want government to do less,” he said.

“They’re doing pretty well electorally without necessarily needing a policy agenda, and they’re tied to, kind of, defending the Trump administration or attacking the Biden administration. There’s not much of a felt need for a lot of policy.”

There are also signs of division within the party over how the GOP should use its new majority. In his interview with Punchbowl, McCarthy said he was against “impeachment for political purposes” and focused instead on addressing crime, border security and economic issues, all familiar themes for Republicans running this year.

The split was even more pronounced when it came to Ukraine. On Wednesday, Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence called in a speech at influential conservative group the Heritage Foundation for Republicans to continue to support the country, saying “there can be no room in the conservative movement for apologists to” Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The day after, the foundation’s president Kevin Roberts put out a statement saying: “Heritage will vigorously oppose Washington’s big spenders who attempt to pass another Ukrainian aid package lacking debate, a clear strategy, targeted funding and spending offsets.”

Democrats are assured control of Congress until the end of the year, and have taken note of the apparent erosion of will to support Kyiv. NBC News reports they may push for another big military aid infusion in a year-end spending bill, intended to keep the Ukrainians armed for months to come.

It seems clear that Republicans will eventually coalesce behind a strategy to strong-arm the Biden administration for some purpose, but Grossman predicted the likely result would be similar to the 2013 government shutdown, when then president Barack Obama and the Democrats refused the GOP’s demands to dismantle his signature health care law.

“With McCarthy it just seems like he is a go along,” he said. “He’s going to be a go-along speaker and that’s going to be the case with a pretty fractious caucus.”

Trump’s years-long crusade against Ukraine has finally come home to roost as Republicans call for abandoning Kyiv

Insider

Trump’s years-long crusade against Ukraine has finally come home to roost as Republicans call for abandoning Kyiv

John Haltiwanger, Sonam Sheth – October 20, 2022

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California. Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Trump’s years-long crusade against Ukraine has finally come home to roost as Republicans call for abandoning Kyiv

US aid to Ukraine could be in jeopardy if Republicans win the House in the midterms.
Several GOP lawmakers and candidates have signaled they would support reducing or cutting off Ukraine aid.
“Ukraine unfortunately has been hijacked sometimes in domestic politics. Now and then that happens,” a Zelenskyy advisor told Insider.

In a phone call with Ukraine’s president this month, US President Joe Biden pledged continued solidarity with Ukraine as it battles Russia’s military invasion and illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory.

But that level of support could be in jeopardy if the GOP gains control of the House of Representatives in this year’s midterm elections.

The warning signs have been building for months.

In April, 10 House Republicans voted against a bill allowing the Biden administration to more easily lend military equipment to Ukraine. The following month, 57 House Republicans voted “no” on a nearly $40 billion aid package for Ukraine. Both measures ultimately passed the chamber.

“I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who’s favored to become House Speaker if the GOP retakes the chamber, recently told Punchbowl News. “They just won’t do it.”

Ukraine has repeatedly defied expectations since Russia launched its unprovoked invasion, delivering a blow to the Russian military’s prestige. With the help of Western aid and at a massive personal cost, Ukrainian forces prevented Russia from seizing Kyiv in the early days of the war and more recently launched a counteroffensive that’s shown major signs of success.

But a far-right faction of the GOP has increasingly pushed against continued assistance to Ukraine, saying the billions the US has provided to Kyiv is too costly and not worth the risk of sparking a wider conflict with Russia.

President Donald Trump (right) meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (left) — In this Sept. 25, 2019 file photo President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the InterContinental Barclay New York hotel during the United Nations General Assembly in New York.AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File

A remarkable shift

The GOP’s gradual shift away from Ukraine and toward Russia has been years in the making, but right-wing hostility toward Ukraine hit a pivotal point during Donald Trump’s presidency.

In addition to peddling the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 US election, Trump was impeached in 2019 for withholding hundreds of millions in vital aid to Ukraine as it fought a war against Kremlin-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region.

While withholding the aid, Trump and his allies pressured Zelenskyy, a political neophyte who won the 2019 election in a landslide victory, to launch an investigation targeting the Bidens ahead of the 2020 US election.

Foreign policy experts said Trump’s actions — dangling security assistance in exchange for political favors — were a threat to the US’s national security and bipartisan support for Ukraine. But the vast majority of congressional Republicans rallied to Trump’s defense, and ultimately, just one Senate Republican, Mitt Romney, voted to convict the former president over his actions.

In the years since, Trump has continued to take a controversial stance on Ukraine, praising Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justifications for invading as “genius” and “savvy.” The former president has often lauded the Russian leader, going out of his way to avoid criticizing Putin amid a historically contentious period in US-Russia relations.

Anti-Ukraine sentiment doesn’t just come from the top of the GOP. Putin has long been seen as a hero by the alt-right and white nationalists, and since Russia invaded Ukraine, many prominent right-wing politicians and media figures have moved in lockstep with the Kremlin, creating a feedback loop where each side amplifies and recycles the other’s propaganda.

On Fox News, for instance, the far-right host Tucker Carlson has repeatedly echoed a nonsense conspiracy theory, which originated in Moscow before taking root in the US, suggesting that Ukraine houses US-funded bioweapons labs.

Russian state-sponsored media outlets in turn frequently feature Carlson’s segments, and in March, Mother Jones reported that the Russian government instructed state media that it was “essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson” to spread negative information about Ukraine, the US, and NATO.

“When we see Fox News commentators, from our perspective, promote isolationist positions — that looks like support for Russia,” Mykola Kniazhytskyi, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, recently told NPR.

Some GOP opposition to continuing aid to Ukraine is tied to Trump’s “America First” policy vis-a-vis foreign affairs. Trump embraced a non-interventionist stance and was often critical of US spending abroad, particularly when it came to NATO and European security.

Congressional Republicans like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have echoed these sentiments in their criticism of US assistance to Ukraine.

It’s a remarkable shift for the Republican Party, which for years touted a hawkish position on foreign policy, especially as it related to leading adversaries like Russia. But under Trump’s stewardship, the party has become increasingly isolationist, and its growing opposition to aiding Ukraine is the latest and clearest sign of that.

Biden, meanwhile, has made the case that supporting Ukraine is part of a wider fight between democracy and autocracy. But a growing number of Republicans say sending aid to Kyiv should not be prioritized in Washington amid concerns over inflation and a potential recession.

“When people are seeing a 13% increase in grocery prices; energy, utility bills doubling … if you’re a border community and you’re being overrun by migrants and fentanyl, Ukraine is the furthest thing from your mind,” GOP Rep. Kelly Armstrong told Axios.

Democrats are more optimistic about retaining the Senate, but according to forecaster FiveThirtyEight, their chances have gone down in recent weeks based on polling in four key contests in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and North Carolina.

And in Ohio, GOP Senate candidate JD Vance has made it clear that he would vote against sending more aid to Ukraine, saying in September that “we’ve got to stop the money spigot to Ukraine eventually. We cannot fund a long-term military conflict that I think ultimately has diminishing returns for our own country.”

‘The cards have been dealt’

There are some in Kyiv who believe that US support to Ukraine will continue regardless of which party controls Congress.

“Ukraine unfortunately has been hijacked sometimes in domestic politics. Now and then that happens,” Tymofiy Mylovanov, an advisor to Zelenskyy who previously served as Ukraine’s economic minister, told Insider. “We try our best to stay away from this. We would like to stay away from this.”

“Despite all that rhetoric, the support has always been bipartisan,” Mylovanov said, adding that the amount of assistance Ukraine needs is a small fraction of the US GDP. “In terms of what it means in the budget — it means nothing. It’s not trillions of dollars,” he said.

The US has provided over $20 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014. The Biden administration has sent Ukraine $18.2 billion in military aid, including roughly $17.6 billion since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in late February.

Other Western countries have provided important assistance to Ukraine, but the US has contributed the most of any individual country so far.

Weapons the US sent, including Javelin anti-tank missiles and High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), have turned the tables on Russia by blunting its previous advantages in armored vehicles and artillery. If US aid to Kyiv suddenly dried up, it would likely curtail Ukraine’s ability to oust sizable Russian columns from dug-in positions.

Trump, meanwhile, called for a negotiated settlement to the war during a rally earlier this month. “We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine or we will end up in World War III,” he said at the time.

But Putin has shown little interest in negotiating, as evidenced by the drastic steps he’s taken in recent weeks. Beyond the illegal annexations, Putin announced a partial military mobilization — calling up hundreds of thousands of men — and imposed martial law in the regions Moscow claims are now part of Russia but does not fully control.

Russia has also ramped up missile and drone attacks against civilian areas while destroying key infrastructure across Ukraine.

But Mylovanov, the former economic minister who is also the president at the Kyiv School of Economics, said that while Russia wants Ukraine to surrender, the “Ukrainian people will not have it.”

“People think that what happens in Kyiv is decided either in Moscow or Washington or Brussels, or maybe Beijing. It is not, it’s decided in Ukraine,” Mylovanov said.

“The cards have been dealt,” he added, and it’s up to the US if it wants to be at the table.

As FBI probed Jan. 6, many agents sympathized with insurrection, according to newly released email

USA Today

As FBI probed Jan. 6, many agents sympathized with insurrection, according to newly released email

Will Carless, USA TODAY – October 15, 2022

A “sizable percentage” of FBI employees felt sympathy towards the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, and considered the riot at the U.S. Capitol “no different than the BLM protests,” according to a warning email sent to a top FBI official by someone with apparent connections to the bureau.

In the email, which is included in a trove of documents released by the bureau this week, the sender’s name is redacted. The documents indicate the message came from an email address outside the bureau, though the subject line is “Internal concerns.”

The email was sent to Paul Abbate, now the second highest official at the FBI, who responded an hour later, thanking the sender for the message.

USA TODAY investigation: FBI agents monitor social media. As domestic threats rise, the question is who they’re watching

FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate at a news conference in 2021.

The Jan. 13, 2021, email contained a stark warning about attitudes toward the insurrection within the bureau:

“I literally had to explain to an agent from a ‘blue state’ office the difference between opportunists burning and looting during protests that stemmed legitimate grievance to police brutality vs. an insurgent mob whose purpose was to prevent the execution of democratic processes at the behest of a sitting president,” the email states. “One is a smattering of criminals, the other is an organized group of domestic terrorists.”

And it relayed concerns from agents within the bureau:

“I’ve spoken to multiple African American agents who have turned down asks to join SWAT because they do not trust that every member of their office’s SWAT team would protect them in an armed conflict.”

More: Police were warned about right-wing extremism as far back as 2009

Michael German, a former FBI special agent and a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program at New York University and an outspoken critic of the bureau, said the email didn’t surprise him.

“It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t expect already, but I think it’s important to substantiate the suspicions me and many other people had,” German said. “They clearly are on notice about a much more serious problem within the FBI.”

An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the email.

While there may be some sympathy towards the Capitol rioters within the FBI, the bureau’s investigations have nonetheless contributed to Justice Department prosecutions of almost 900 people who were there that day. Scores of defendants have received jail time for their crimes. Dozens more have agreed to cooperate with the prosecutions.

But there has been pushback. Earlier this year, FBI special agent Stephen Friend was suspended for refusing to participate in prosecutions of Jan. 6 protesters. Friend’s stance was praised by Republican lawmakers, who called him “patriotic.”

The FBI email sheds more light on a problem that has been endemic in American law enforcement for decades, said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, who has studied white supremacists since the 1980s.

“The situation has been serious enough that the FBI for almost 20 years, has been warning of insider threats from cops,” Beirich said. “And the thing is, nobody’s done anything about it.”

Military extremists: How the Navy and Marine Corps quietly discharged white supremacists

A 2009 warning about extremists recruiting members of the military and police officers went largely ignored by the federal government, and resulted in the ostracizing of the author of the study, a senior Department of Homeland Security official.

Ten years later, a 2019 study by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that hundreds of active duty police officers were active inside racist, Islamophobic and anti-government groups on Facebook. Another study by the Plain View Project compiled hundreds of hateful and racist posts made on Facebook by police officers. Last year, USA TODAY found more than 200 people who claimed they worked for police departments in a leaked database of members of the Oath Keepers, an armed extremist group that is now the subject of one of the biggest prosecutions emerging from Jan. 6.

Oath Keepers trial: 1800s-inspired defense meets most significant Jan. 6 prosecution yet

And as USA TODAY reported last month, the FBI itself has also been heavily criticized for directing domestic extremism investigations overwhelmingly towards left-wing targets.

The FBI has a long and troubled history of focusing on groups on the left of the political spectrum while largely turning a blind eye to domestic extremists on the far-right, Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told USA TODAY.

“Both historically speaking and in current events, we’ve seen the amount of surveillance that has been marshaled specifically against groups fighting for racial justice increased exponentially than from what we’ve seen being monitored on the right,” said Guariglia, who holds a doctorate in the history of police surveillance.

Beirich said given the conservative nature of law enforcement, there is bound to be some “overlap” into far-right extremism within the ranks. The biggest problem is a lack of action taken by departments to root out extremists on the payroll, she said.

“Even right now, there aren’t policies in a whole lot of departments about what to do with these guys — there’s no screening mechanisms,” Beirich said. “There’s no effort to really deal with it.”

A Trump aide was caught on security camera moving boxes from a Mar-a-Lago storage room before and after the DOJ subpoenaed Trump for top-secret documents

Insider

A Trump aide was caught on security camera moving boxes from a Mar-a-Lago storage room before and after the DOJ subpoenaed Trump for top-secret documents: NYT

Cheryl Teh – October 13, 2022

Walt Nauta, a longtime Trump aide, was seen moving boxes out from a storage room the FBI searched.
The incidents were caught on security footage, The New York Times reported.
Nauta was seen moving boxes before and after the DOJ demanded top-secret files be returned in May.

A Trump aide was caught on security camera moving boxes out of a storage room in Mar-a-Lago, per a report from The New York Times. The Times did not view the security footage and Insider was not independently able to verify its contents.

The Times spoke to three people familiar with the matter, who said longtime Trump staffer Walt Nauta was seen on Mar-a-Lago’s security footage moving boxes out of a storage room that was later searched by the FBI. This took place both before and after the Department of Justice issued a subpoena in May ordering Trump to hand over classified documents, per the NYT’s sources.

Intrigue has swirled around what was kept in the storage room, and whether anything was removed from it before the DOJ searched Trump’s property. The Times’ piece dropped hours after The Washington Post reported that Trump himself explicitly directed employees to move boxes of White House documents from the storage room. These boxes were taken from the storage area to the former president’s private residence after Trump advisers received the DOJ’s subpoena in May, per The Post.

The FBI also interviewed Nauta several times before it raided Mar-a-Lago on August 8, according to one of The Times’ sources.

After the raid, the FBI carted off 11,000 documents from Mar-a-Lago, including some that were marked “CLASSIFIED.” Investigators found documents inside a closet in Trump’s office and a storage area in the property’s basement. Some of the documents the FBI found were so sensitive that investigators needed further clearance to view them. Among the documents retrieved was classified information on a foreign country’s nuclear defenses, The Washington Post reported.

The DOJ is currently investigating whether Trump broke three federal laws — including the Espionage Act — by keeping the files at his Florida residence. In an August court filing, the Justice Department said it had evidence “that government records were likely concealed and removed” from the storage room at Mar-a-Lago, and that “efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.”

Nauta’s lawyer, Stanley Woodward Jr., declined to comment on The Times’ reporting. Taylor Budowich, Trump’s spokesman at his post-presidential press office, told The Times the Biden administration was “colluding with the media through targeted leaks in an overt and illegal act of intimidation and tampering.”

Budowich and Woodward Jr. did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.

Republicans Plan to Use Debt Limit Leverage to Reduce Social Security, Medicare: Report

The Fiscal Times

Republicans Plan to Use Debt Limit Leverage to Reduce Social Security, Medicare: Report

Michael Rainey – October 12, 2022

Republicans in the House are planning to use a potential showdown next year over raising the federal debt limit to make changes in Social Security and Medicare, Bloomberg’s Jack Fitzpatrick reports.

The developing plan hinges on Republicans winning control of the House in the midterm elections, an outcome that is looking likely. Four GOP lawmakers who are vying for leadership of the House Budget Committee in the event of a Republican victory told Fitzpatrick that the need to raise the debt ceiling could give them the leverage they need to force Democrats to make concessions.

“The debt limit is clearly one of those tools that Republicans — that a Republican-controlled Congress — will use to make sure that we do everything we can to make this economy strong,” Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), the senior Republican on the current Budget Committee, said.

Republicans are still discussing exactly what changes they might try to enact. “What would we consider a win?” said Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-PA), who is interested in the top spot on the Budget Committee. “What would we consider to be a fiscally responsible budget?”

Although the details are still up in the air, one theme is clear: House Republicans want to reduce federal spending, and the major entitlement programs are a target. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) Carter said that Republicans’ “main focus has got to be on nondiscretionary — it’s got to be on entitlements.”

Shrinking the safety net: One option reportedly being discussed is raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare, the two largest mandatory spending programs. Each faces financial squeezes in the coming years as the baby boomers age and continue to retire. Under current rules, the Social Security system would be forced to cut benefits starting in 2034, while Medicare could run short of funds by 2028.

Earlier this year, the Republican Study Committee released a plan to raise the eligibility age for Social Security to 70 and the eligibility age for Medicare to 67. The increases would be phased in over time and once the target is reached, the eligibility age would then be indexed to life expectancy. The lawmakers also called for increased means testing in the Medicare program, and a privatization option for Social Security.

Other options being considered include more stringent work requirements and income limits for what Smith called “welfare programs,” including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program more commonly known as food stamps. And new caps on discretionary spending could limit spending increases over 10 years.

One thing that won’t be cut: defense spending. Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX) told Bloomberg that he wants to cut nondefense spending in order to provide more money for the military.

Willing to risk “catastrophe”? Republicans say they are leery about pushing too far in their demands, but many experts think that any effort to use the debt limit as leverage in negotiations is unacceptably risky. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that defaulting on U.S. debt payments — which would occur if the U.S. failed to raise the debt ceiling — would cause a “catastrophe” in the global economy.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) accused the GOP of taking huge risks in order to cut important social programs. “House Republicans are openly threatening to cause an economic catastrophe in order to realize their obsession with slashing Medicare and Social Security,” a Pelosi spokesperson told Bloomberg. “As House Republican leaders’ own words constantly reveal, dismantling the pillars of American seniors’ financial security is not a fringe view in the extreme MAGA House GOP, it is a broadly held obsession at the core of their legislative agenda.”

House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth (D-KY) also criticized Republican plans. “Holding the full faith and credit of the United States hostage to implement an extreme and unpopular agenda is not governing, it’s desperation,” Yarmuth said in a statement. “Congressional Republicans are so hellbent on gutting Social Security and ending Medicare as we know it that they are willing to risk economic catastrophe to get it done. This is a desperate attempt to shower the wealthy and big corporations with even more tax giveaways by intentionally sacrificing the needs of American families.”

Democrats do have one option for disarming Republicans ahead of a debt ceiling showdown: They could attempt to raise the ceiling on their own during the lame-duck session at the end of the year, potentially denying the GOP the use of that weapon. But both Yarmuth and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) told Bloomberg there has been no discussion among Democrats about such a plan.

The bottom line: Taking a page from the tea party playbook from a decade ago, expect to see Republicans attempting to force spending reductions in the next Congress — reductions that could involve fundamental changes in the way the country’s top safety net programs operate.

Ron Johnson Gets Old Promise Brutally Flipped Back On Him By Local Newspaper

HuffPost

Ron Johnson Gets Old Promise Brutally Flipped Back On Him By Local Newspaper

Lee Moran – October 12, 2022

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reminded Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) of his previous pledge to serve only two terms as it urged voters to send him packing in the 2022 midterm elections in a damning editorial published Wednesday.

The newspaper’s editorial board broke down exactly why it believes Johnson is “the worst Wisconsin political representative since the infamous Sen. Joseph McCarthy.”

It ripped the Donald Trump loyalist, who is facing a reported tight race against Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, as “an election falsifier who recklessly promoted” Trump’s 2020 lies and a “science fabulist” who baselessly questioned COVID-19 vaccines and spread pandemic misinformation. Johnson was also slammed for trying to rewrite “the sordid history” of the deadly U.S. Capitol riot.

The publication has gone after Johnson in a similarly stinging manner before.

“You’ll notice Johnson is not touting a long record of accomplishments in his ads for re-election,” the board wrote. “Instead, he and his supporters have attacked his opponent — a Black man — as ‘different’ and ‘dangerous.’”

Johnson was first elected to the Senate in 2010.

“Johnson in the past promised to serve no more than two terms,” the board concluded. “Voters should hold him to that pledge in November.”

Slavery is not gone, it has just moved out to sea

Yahoo! News

Slavery is not gone, it has just moved out to sea

Ian Urbina, Outlaw Ocean Project, Contributor – October 10, 2022

Workers on a fishing ship. — Cambodian migrant workers on a Thai fishing ship wait during an inspection. (Fábio Nascimento/The Outlaw Ocean Project, Thailand)

While forced labor still exists throughout the world, one place where it’s especially pervasive is the South China Sea — especially in the Thai fishing fleet, according to a 2016 investigation by the New York Times. Partly this is because in a typical year, Thailand’s fishing industry is short about fifty thousand mariners, according to the U.N. in 2014. As a result, tens of thousands of migrants from Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar are whisked into Thailand each year to make up this chronic shortfall. Then, unscrupulous captains buy and sell the men and boys like chattel.

With fewer fish close to shore, maritime labor researchers predict that more boats will resort to venturing farther out to sea, making the mistreatment of migrants more likely. The work aboard the fishing boats is brutal. And in this bloated, inefficient and barely profitable national fleet at a time of rising fuel prices, captains require crew members to simply do what they are told, and have little patience for complaints, no matter how long the hours, how little the food, or how paltry the pay. In short, these captains rely on sea slaves.

The Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization based in Washington, D.C., got onboard a Thai distant-water vessel that uses enslaved labor. There, three dozen Cambodian boys and men worked barefoot all day and into the night on the deck of a purse seiner fishing ship.

The third episode of the podcast series “The Outlaw Ocean,” from CBC Podcasts and the L.A. Times, tells the harrowing stories of sea slavery.

Rain or shine, shifts were between 18 and 20 hours long. At night, the crew members cast their nets when the small silver fish they target — mostly jack mackerel and herring — are more reflective and easier to spot in darker waters. During the day, when the sun is high, temperatures topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but the crew members worked nonstop. Drinking water was tightly rationed. If they were not fishing, the workers sorted their catch and mended their nets, which are prone to ripping.

One boy, his shirt smudged with fish guts, proudly showed off his missing two fingers, severed by a net that had coiled around a spinning crank. Cre members’ hands, which virtually never fully dried, had open wounds, slit from fish scales and torn from the nets’ friction. Infections are constant. Captains never lack amphetamines to help the crews work longer, but they rarely stock antibiotics for infected wounds.

A Cambodian worker on a Thai fishing ship. (Fábio Nascimento/The Outlaw Ocean Project, Thailand)

On boats like these, deckhands are often beaten for small transgressions, like fixing a torn net too slowly or mistakenly placing a mackerel into a bucket of sablefish. Dispatched into the unknown, they are beyond where society could help them, usually on so-called ghost ships — unregistered vessels that the Thai government has no ability to track. Deckhands typically do not speak the language of their Thai captains, do not know how to swim, and, being from inland villages, sometimes have never seen the sea before.

Virtually all of the crew has a debt to clear, part of their indentured servitude, a “travel now, pay later” labor system that requires working to pay off the money they often had to borrow to sneak illegally into a new country. The debt just becomes more elusive once they leave land.

There is a modern assumption, especially in the West, that we got rid of slavery. But debt bondage is still very much present. The Cambodian boys and men who are held captive are killed if they try to escape. This is what modern-day slavery looks like. Until we modernize our understanding of that, we won’t know how to identify it, much less do anything about it.

(Ian Urbina is the director of the Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on environmental and human rights concerns at sea globally)

Florida’s Leaders Opposed Climate Aid. Now They’re Depending on It.

The New York Times

Florida’s Leaders Opposed Climate Aid. Now They’re Depending on It.

Christopher Flavelle and Jonathan Weisman – October 4, 2022

A helicopter carries evacuees from Pine Island, Fla., on Saturday, Oct. 1, 2022. (Hilary Swift/The New York Times)

Hurricane Ian’s wrath made clear that Florida faces some of the most severe consequences of climate change anywhere in the country. But the state’s top elected leaders have opposed federal spending to help fortify states against and recover from climate disasters, as well as efforts to confront their underlying cause: the burning of fossil fuels.

Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott opposed last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law, which devotes some $50 billion to help states better prepare for events like Ian, because they said it was wasteful. And in August, they joined their fellow Republicans in the Senate to vote against a new climate law, which invests $369 billion in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the largest such effort in the country’s history.

At the same time, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has blocked the state’s pension fund from taking climate change into account when making investment decisions, saying that politics should be absent from financial calculations.

In the aftermath of Ian, those leaders want federal help to rebuild their state — but don’t want to discuss the underlying problem that is making hurricanes more powerful and destructive.

As Hurricane Ian approached Florida’s coast, the storm grew in intensity because it passed over ocean water that was 2 to 3 degrees warmer than normal for this time of year, NASA data show. Its destructive power was made worse by rising seas; the water off the southwest coast of Florida has risen more than 7 inches since 1965, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Finally, warmer air resulting from climate change increased the amount of rain that Ian dropped on Florida by at least 10%, or about 2 extra inches in some places, according to a study released last week.

Rubio has secured millions of dollars to restore the Everglades as a way to store floodwaters and repair coral reefs to buffer storm surges. One of his House colleagues, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a South Florida Republican, has secured billions for climate resiliency.

But none of the top Republicans in the state have supported legislation to curb the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change.

With its sun and offshore wind, Florida could be a leader in renewable energy, said Rep. Kathy Castor, a Democrat who represents Tampa. Instead, it imports natural gas that it burns to produce electricity.

“To not admit that climate change is real and we need to address it bodes nothing but a harm for the future for Florida and the nation,” said Charlie Crist, a former Republican Florida governor who won a House seat as a Democrat and is now challenging DeSantis’ reelection.

Hurricane Ian is far from the first time Florida has felt the impacts of climate change. In Miami, the rising ocean means streets and sidewalks regularly flood during high tide, even on sunny days. In the Florida Keys, officials are looking at raising roadbeds that will otherwise become impassable.

Yet the state’s leaders have long resisted what scientists say is needed to stave off a catastrophic future: an aggressive pivot away from gas, oil and coal and toward solar, wind and other renewable energy sources.

“Attempting to reverse-engineer the U.S. economy to absolve our past climate sins — either through a carbon tax or some ‘Green New Deal’ scheme — will fail,” Rubio wrote in 2019. “None of those advocates can point to how even the most aggressive (and draconian) plan would improve the lives of Floridians.”

Scott, the former governor of Florida who is now the state’s junior senator, has argued the cost of attacking climate change is just too great.

“We clearly want to and need to address the impacts of climate change,” Scott told NPR last summer. “But we’ve got to do it in a fiscally responsible manner. We can’t put jobs at risk.”

Hurricane Ian could be among the costliest storms to hit Florida, with losses estimated in the tens of billions.

The two senators also voted against last year’s infrastructure bill, which provided about $50 billion toward climate resilience — the country’s largest single investment in measures designed to better protect people against the effects of climate change.

That bill, which passed the Senate with support from 19 Republicans, included measures designed to help protect against hurricanes. It provided billions for sea walls, storm pumps, elevating homes, flood control and other projects.

Many of those measures were co-written by another coastal Republican, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who called it “a major victory for Louisiana and our nation.” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, also supported the bill. Both states face enormous threats from climate change.

But Rubio called it “wasteful,” while Scott said it was “reckless spending.” Both voted no.

Scott and DeSantis did not respond to requests for comment.

Dan Holler, a deputy chief of staff to Rubio, said the senator opposed the infrastructure bill because it included unnecessary measures, just as he opposed the final version of relief for Hurricane Sandy in 2013 because of what he called extraneous pork barrel spending.

But the larger issue, Holler said, is that those pushing broad measures to wean the nation from fossil fuels have yet to prove to Rubio that such efforts would actually slow sea level rise, calm storms or mitigate flooding.

Other Republicans offer similar explanations. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican candidate expected to win the House district around Tampa Bay, spoke of the devastation she said she saw in Fort Myers, Pine Island and Sanibel Island.

“The damage is so catastrophic, we are going to need help,” she said Monday.

But Luna pushed back hard on the need to address climate change by cutting fossil fuel emissions. She called it “completely bonkers” that the United States would harm its own economy “while we send manufacturing to a country that is one of the top polluters of the world,” referring to China.

Crist sounded almost sympathetic as he discussed the bind that Florida Republicans find themselves in — accepting donations from the oil and gas industry, unwilling to raise the issue of climate change with their most loyal voters, while surveying the damage it is doing to their state.

The oil and gas industry is not a major source of campaign cash for politicians in Florida, where offshore drilling is prohibited. Rubio has received $223,239 from the oil and gas industry since 2017, which puts the industry at 15th on his donor list, federal records show. Scott has received $236,483 from oil and gas, his 14th most generous industry.

But the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which Scott leads, has received $3.2 million in oil and gas donations this campaign cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, eclipsed only by real estate, Wall Street and retirees. By contrast, the fossil fuel business isn’t among the top 20 industries that have given this cycle to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

“There’s an ‘ideological versus reality’ divide here that must be very excruciating to these Republican politicians,” Crist said.

Republicans in the state have taken steps to fund climate resilience and adaptation efforts but shy away from using the term “climate.” In 2017, Diaz-Balart, then the Republican chair of the House appropriations subcommittee that funds housing programs, secured $12 billion for “mitigation” measures in block grants to states and communities, $1.4 billion of that for Florida. The word “climate” did not appear in the definition of “mitigation.”

“If you’re from Florida, you should be leading on climate and environmental policy, and Republicans are still reticent to do that because they’re worried about primary politics,” Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican congressman from South Florida. “But on this, the consequences are so serious, it’s worth putting politics aside and addressing climate head on.”

While DeSantis announced a program last year to provide $1 billion over four years to local governments to address flooding, rising seas and other challenges, he has blocked his state’s pension plan from accounting for the environmental performance of companies in making investment decisions.

“We are prioritizing the financial security of the people of Florida over whimsical notions of a utopian tomorrow,” DeSantis said in a statement announcing the decision.

DeSantis’ record on other climate decisions may also come back to haunt him. As a congressman in 2013, he voted against a bill to provide extra disaster aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy — the same type of extra support that Florida is now seeking for Ian.

On Friday, Rubio and Scott wrote to their Senate colleagues asking them to support a package of disaster aid. Like DeSantis, Rubio opposed a similar measure after Sandy struck the Northeast in 2012. (Scott had not yet been elected to the Senate.)

Yoca Arditi-Rocha, executive director of the CLEO Institute, a nonprofit group in Florida that promotes climate change education, advocacy and resilience, said the state’s top elected officials need to do much more than react after disaster strikes.

“Florida will continue to be on the front lines of more destructive hurricanes fueled by a warming climate,” Arditi-Rocha said. “We need Republican leaders to step up.”