Are the annual climate summits working? These countries are going to the courts, instead
Ella Nilsen, CNN – November 29, 2023
Few leaders paint a picture of the climate crisis as vividly as United Nations chief António Guterres. He has accused world leaders of opening “the gates of hell” and said the planet is “heading into uncharted territories of destruction” after deadly heat waves and floods.
“The current fossil fuel free-for-all must end now,” Guterres said last year. “It is a recipe for permanent climate chaos and suffering.”
Yet the UN climate summit, known as COP, is tedious. It is full of jargon, snail-paced developments and painful consensus-building that can be broken by a single country’s veto.
Now some are asking: Is the process even working? Some small island nations — countries that are facing irrevocable change from rising seas — say no.
Over the decades, these painstaking negotiations have worked to prevent several catastrophic degrees of global warming. COP’s biggest win was the Paris Agreement, widely seen as one of the most effective environment treaties, which set a goal to limit global warming to well under 2 degrees Celsius, and preferably to 1.5 — a target that climate scientists, advocates and most countries have since rallied around.
Before those talks, the world was on track for roughly 4 degrees of warming. Countries’ pledges after Paris pushed that to 2.5 to 2.9 degrees, according to recent UN figures.
But the Paris Agreement was voluntary by design, in large part due to the influence of the US, and it relies on a system of collective shaming and competitive ambition in lieu of legal consequences. It contained “very few obligations” for major polluters, said Payam Akhavan, an attorney for the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law.
Vanuatu, Tuvalu and Antigua and Barbuda are now asking international courts to issue “advisory opinions” that could fundamentally change future COPs by compelling countries to set legally binding targets to cut climate pollution, rather than voluntary ones.
“The turn toward international litigation is an attempt to put some teeth in the toothless Paris regime, by declaring the 1.5-degree target is a binding target and not discretionary,” Akhavan told CNN.
As world leaders head to Dubai for COP28 this week, this courtroom strategy is raising eyebrows among the United States’ current and former climate negotiators, who say that while diplomacy can be stubborn and slow, it yields progress.
Even fierce climate advocates who agree COP should be more ambitious still believe the summit is a powerful and worthwhile endeavor.
“There is a lot of questioning whether this process will deliver or not,” Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of international climate nonprofit World Resources Institute, told CNN. “However, I believe COP, or some version of COP, will remain and absolutely is needed. This is the only forum that I know where poor countries actually have a place at the table that is equal, to negotiate with rich countries across a vastly important topic.”
‘Countries move farther when they move together’
COP’s detractors and advocates alike agree it is a crucial annual meeting, but also one that is plodding and technical. An errant word or piece of punctuation can derail negotiations, and it can — and often does — take years for incremental progress to happen.
“I would say it’s necessary, but maybe not sufficient,” said Sue Biniaz, the deputy for US climate envoy and former Secretary of State John Kerry.
Sue Biniaz, the US deputy climate envoy, at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, on October 31, 2022. – Frances F. Denny/The New York Times/Redux
Biniaz has a lot of experience at COPs; she was the United States’ lead climate lawyer for more than two decades and was one of the key authors of the Paris Agreement.
Both Biniaz and other former top US climate negotiators told CNN that although each climate summit is often judged as a singular event, it is more important to look at the year leading up to it.
“It’s necessary because the fact that it meets annually and puts pressure on countries is a good thing, and we’re in a lot better position with the annual COPs and the Paris Agreement than we would have been without it,” Biniaz told CNN. “At the same time, it is really difficult and challenging to get agreement among everyone in the world, particularly when you have geopolitical issues, and some countries may be more motivated to reach agreement than others.”
International politics and the dynamics within countries matter to the success or failure of COP. There is no better recent example of than the shockwave that surged through the summit when former President Donald Trumppulled the US out of the Paris agreement in 2017 — a move President Joe Biden reversed upon taking office.
In this June 2017 photo, President Donald Trump after announcing his intention to abandon the Paris Agreement in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC. – Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux
Still, former and current US negotiators say climate diplomacy has helped keep the world’s temperature from reaching truly alarming highs.
“If you look at those first assessments coming out of the scientific community back then, we were looking at an incremental temperature gain of about 7 degrees,” said Jonathan Pershing, a former Kerry deputy who now directs the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s environment program. “Seven degrees, today, is unimaginable.”
Pershing added that the fact the world’s governments are now racing to keep to below 2 degrees of warming is an “extraordinary transition.”
“The collective endeavor has fundamentally altered the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions,” Pershing said. “I think countries move farther when they move together.”
The annual summit has also become the most visible rallying point for global climate action, former US climate envoy Todd Stern told CNN. The summits used to largely be a gathering of only government climate negotiators, but each year COP becomes much larger — drawing advocates, businesses (including fossil fuel companies) and think tanks from all corners of the globe.
In this 2009 photo, Todd Stern, US special envoy for climate change, listens to questions during a press conference in the Bella Center in Copenhagen. – Jens Astrup/AFP/Getty Images
Stern thinks the growing spectacle of COP is a positive force, impossible to ignore even for groups that used to deny climate change’s existence. Even US House Republicans have sent a delegation for the past two years.
“It’s a two-week moment in the course of the year when people around the world — or at least some meaningful subset of people around the world — are paying attention to it,” Stern said. “That needs to keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger because that puts pressure on governments.”
Too little, too slow
Attorneys for the small island nations who are rocking the boat at COP say the proof it isn’t working is in the extreme heat felt around the world this year, and the global records smashed.
The world’s governments are working to hold global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius — above which scientists say a hotter world with more severe droughts and intense storms will become difficult to adapt to.
But 1.5 degrees is no longer an abstract concept; the world briefly crossed that temperature threshold this summer, though scientists caution it will take several years above that limit to say with confidence it’s been officially exceeded. This summer was a taste of life at this threshold: Wildfires raged across Europe, mighty rivers like the Mississippi and the Amazon fell to new lows, and hot-tub-like ocean water killed coral reefs and rapidly intensified hurricanes and cyclones.
“It’s not as if 1.5 is safe in any way, but we are very much on track to cross it,” said Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh, an international lawyer representing the island nation Vanuatu in climate litigation at the International Court of Justice. “Clearly we need more mitigation ambition to make sure we don’t end up with an unlivable world.”
The potential for an unlivable world weighs heavily on young COP negotiators, who are urging swift action to cut climate pollution.
Mitzi Jonelle Tan, of the Philippines, center, participates in a Fridays for Future protest calling for money for climate action at the COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in 2022. – Peter Dejong/AP/File
Hailey Campbell, a 25-year-old, Hawaii-based climate adaptation specialist who successfully lobbied for more official youth representation at COP, told CNN it is sometimes disconcerting to spend long hours and days at international summits debating the precise words on climate finance and ramping down fossil fuel use, then return to her Honolulu home and see climate impacts first-hand.
“You go back home and you’re like, ‘sea level rise is still here, [we] still need to do something about it,’” said Campbell, the co-executive director of advocacy group Care About Climate. “If I had to pick just one thing to come out of this year’s COP, it would be language to commit to an equitable phase-out of all fossil fuels.”
Two of the world’s highest courts are expected to weigh in on the small island nations’ cases as soon as next year. While the advisory opinions alone can’t force faster action from countries, it can “inject some urgency, some political will, some vision” into the annual climate talks and protect the “inalienable rights” — the very survival — of these disappearing nations, Wewerinke-Singh said.
“I think that the COP process has failed,” Akhavan said. “But we must make it work because we have no other choice.”
In an investigation published over the weekend, the Times wrote that the commutation for Jonathan Braun, a drug smuggler, had “broader implications than previously known.”
Braun was two and a half years into a 10 year sentence for running a major marijuana ring, and was also being pursued by the Justice Department for predatory lending to small businesses.
According to the Times, Braun’s family used a connection to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, to secure the commutation.
Freeing Braun reportedly jeopardized a Justice Department criminal investigation into predatory lenders, in which prosecutors had been negotiating with Braun to flip on industry insiders in exchange for clemency.
That deal went out the window when Braun was freed, the Times reported.
“What does this all tell us?” Psaki, a former White House press secretary under President Joe Biden, asked on “Inside With Jen Psaki.”
“For one, it tells us that ‘tough on crime’ Donald Trump upended a federal investigation by his own Justice Department. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”
She continued: “It also tells us how Trump and his administration ran pretty fast and loose with presidential pardons — a tremendous power that usually runs through a highly vetted process out of the Department of Justice.”
She referred to an “old quote” and maxim of dictators: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
Psaki warned: “That is how Donald Trump has operated. And that is how he will continue to operate if he ever gets the leverage of government again.”
Russia’s Putin, shown alongside Orthodox icon image, warns West against meddling
Guy Faulconbridge – November 28, 2023
Russian President Putin attends a plenary session of the World Russian People’s Council, via video link in Sochi
MOSCOW (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin, whose picture was shown between two giant images of an ancient Orthodox icon on Tuesday, warned the West ahead of elections in March 2024 that any foreign meddling in Russia would be considered an act of aggression.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has led to the most serious confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, prompting Putin to pivot towards China.
Since the invasion, Putin has changed the narrative of the war, casting it as an existential battle between sacred Russian civilisation and an arrogant West which he says is in cultural, political and economic decline.
Speaking to the World Russian People’s Council, led by the head of Russia’s Orthodox church, Patriarch Kirill, Putin’s picture was shown on a giant screen beside two copies of an ancient Orthodox icon. Such icons are stylised, often gilded, religious paintings considered sacred in Orthodox churches.
The Russian Orthodox Church is an ardent institutional supporter of Russia’s war in Ukraine, and Putin has espoused its conservatism as part of his vision for Russia’s national identity.
The Kremlin chief said that the West was gripped by racist Russophobia which casts Russians as a people of backward “slaves” and warned that the United States allegedly wanted to dismember and plunder Russia’s vast resources.
Putin, 71, cautioned that Russians themselves should remember the lessons of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the civil war and the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, which he said had allowed the division of the Russian people.
“I want to underscore: We consider any interference from outside, provocations aimed at causing inter-ethnic or inter-religious conflicts as aggressive acts against our country,” Putin said.
“I want to emphasise again that any attempt to sow inter-ethnic and inter-religious discord, to split our society is a betrayal, a crime against the whole of Russia. We will not allow anyone to divide Russia.”
The West casts Putin as a dictator who has led Russia into an imperial-style land grab that has weakened Russia and forged Ukrainian statehood, while uniting the West and handing NATO a post-Cold War mission.
Putin says that the West is now failing in Ukraine and that its attempt to defeat Russia has also failed.
The Kremlin chief claims Western attempts to isolate Russia with the toughest-ever sanctions imposed on a major economy were evidence for what he believed is historic Western racism against Russians.
The West, which denies it wants to rip Russia apart, has said it wants to help Ukraine defeat Russian forces on the battlefields of Ukraine, eject Russian soldiers and punish Putin for the war.
Putin thanked Russian businessmen for evading the West’s sanctions.
“It was by combining the efforts of the state and business that we thwarted the unprecedented economic aggression of the West: its sanctions blitzkrieg failed,” Putin said.
The presidential election campaign is due to start next month and Putin is expected to run, a step that would ensure at least another six years at the helm for the former KGB spy, who has been in power since 2012, and before that, from 2000 to 2008.
Patriarch Kirill said he would pray for Putin to continue his work for the “benefit” of Russia and its people.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
Sure, Joe Biden is pretty old: Listen, could you do what he’s doing?
Kirk Swearingen – November 27, 2023
Joe Biden Drew Angerer/Getty Images
For months, since Joe Biden’s age became the pet topic of the corporate media — you know, rather than the openly authoritarian maneuverings of the former occupant of the White House — I have said to anyone who will listen (OK, mostly to my wife, who nods agreeably) that I couldn’t do a quarter of the things that Joe Biden is doing. Honestly, not many of us could.
Not long ago on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” journalist Mike Barnicle defended Biden on the “age issue” in the same way. His comments came after host Joe Scarborough noted that Biden, beyond his normal duties as president, currently has multiple other full-time jobs:working to try to limit the conflict in the Middle East, supporting Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression, trying to stabilize relations with China. (His recent meeting with Xi Jinping reportedly went quite well.)
Here’s what Barnicle had to say about the media’s focus on Biden’s age:
Very few of us, very few in the media, really pay enough attention to the weight that this president carries each and every day. … Right now, he’s carrying two twin towers of tyranny: one in Donald Trump here domestically and the other Bibi Netanyahu in Israel, who is perhaps the biggest obstacle to a two-state solution that exists today. So, the president has that on his plate. … He has, every hour of every day, something that comes across his desk. None of us can comprehend the weight of the presidency, every hour of every day.
And as he would tell you if he were here today, it’s amazing how every country in the world looks to the United States for help, for solutions, for just almost anything you can think of. Every single day.
Read every newspaper in the country about President Biden, within the first two paragraphs they’ll point out he’s in his 80s. No kidding. He knows how old he is. You couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. Someone 45 years of age couldn’t do what he does every day. But he does it.
Scarborough pointed out that leaders and diplomats around the world admire and trust Biden and say that he fully understands the issues facing their own countries. Scarborough also commented that Biden works hard as president, while Trump notoriously spent most of his days in the White House watching cable TV until noon and often continued viewing even when he bothered to show up in the Oval Office.
Trump entered the presidency with no experience in public service and left it with next to none. He did, however, leave office with two impeachments and box after box of classified documents. One recalls that Rex Tillerson, his first secretary of state, said that getting Trump to pay attention to important issues around the world was always a challenge, partly because he was likely to listen to others and “form a view that had no basis in fact.” (We all know what Tillerson really thought of Trump.)
I understand the hand-wringing about Biden’s age. Didn’t he say he would be a one-term bridge to a better, Trumpless future? (Well, Republicans haven’t given up on their angry cult leader.) Haven’t I considered Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision to remain on the Supreme Court? Don’t I hear Bill Maher and David Axelrod unhelpfully quailing at the polls and saying that Biden can’t win because people think he’s too old? I have, and it makes me feel deeply anxious (so I stop thinking about it and go for a walk or do some push-ups).
Still, Biden is doing a lot more than I could do, and I suspect (as Barnicle said indignantly) that he’s doing a lot more than most of us could do, physically and emotionally, and he’s doing it with something we lack: a deep understanding of the deftness needed in maintaining personal relationships and the give-and-take critical to governing and diplomacy.
Biden has the experience we need in political leadership in general, especially with the Republican Party dead and gone and reduced to playacting “toughness” by elbowing House colleagues and challenging witnesses to fistfights in the Senate. Too many Republicans don’t take their oath of office seriously, and now even have to be reminded they are members of Congress. These seriously unserious people know their ideas are unpopular with the American public and thus have seriously unhinged plans for instituting minority rule permanently in any way they can.
Less than a year from now, Americans face a choice between remaining a democratic republic or morphing into a chaotic, vengefultheocracy, where millions of immigrants will be sent to holding camps before being deported (that’s the stated plan) and where women and people of color and LGBTQ folks and political “enemies” and journalists and authors and critics are targeted by those in power. For all their endless talk about the First Amendment, the MAGA insurrectionist party wants to turn it on its head, by instituting a national “religion” (Christian in name only) and silencing dissent.
Would it be ideal to have someone younger than 80? Sure it would. But that’s not reality this time around. And that imaginary 45-year-old wouldn’t have the extensive institutional and foreign policy experience that Joe Biden has. The Democratic Party has quite a few truly worthy (and perhaps even charismatic) future candidates for the highest office waiting in the wings, gaining more experience in governing and serving all the citizens in their districts or states, not just the ones who voted for them.
But those candidates will need a liberal democracy in place (i.e., basic rule of law, support for voting rights, willingness to compromise on policies and acceptance of the peaceful transfer of power) for us to find out what they can do to move us forward.
If you think 80 is really old — well, in some cases it is. People sometimes die much younger than that. In the two months since I retired, I’ve lost two close friends. But let’s list just a few older people who are still out there killing it: Paul McCartney is touring again and puts on vigorous three-hour concerts (without breaks). He turned 81 in June. Mick Jagger is still doing that chicken-strut thing he learned from Tina Turner, and celebrated his 80th birthday in July. At 97, Mel Brooks is sharper (and a lot funnier) than you or me. So is the amazing Norman Lear, at 101. Many notable scientists, philosophers, poets, artists and people in other demanding fields function at a high level, mentally and physically, deep into their lives.
Moreover, emotional well-being tends to increase in old age, as personal ambitions drop away and we allow ourselves the time to just be. (These findings do not apply to people who never grow up, by the way.) Biden stays active, eats a good diet, has social intelligence and awareness of others’ needs, has varied interests and solves complex problems daily — those, it seems, are the habits and characteristics of “super agers.” He is buoyed by a loving wife and family, because he’s earned that love. (The Beatles would approve.)
No matter how any of us may feel about Biden going for a second term at his age, it is beyond my comprehension that anyone could consider Trump, who is only a few years younger, as being more mentally or physically competent. According to his niece Mary Trump and others who know him well, has not been mentally fit for most of his life.
Physically, as a young man Trump claimed he was not fit enough to serve his country, and, by all accounts, his diet continues to be a disaster zone of highly processed food and well-done steaks served with ketchup, sometimes tossed against the wall (speaking once again to his mental state, which seems to be characterized by endless, irrational resentment).
Does Trump have any interest in or curiosity about anything beyond himself (except for a few of his favorite authoritarian leaders)? Has he ever solved a complex problem for the benefit of anyone but himself? He’s teased them endlessly but has never delivered — think those multiple, embarrassing “Infrastructure Weeks”; think “I will get it all done” to bring peace to the Middle East, fobbed off on his embarrassing son-in-law.
Trump has made it crystal clear over many years that he is vengeful and only out for himself. He now threatens those he wants to “root out” like “vermin,” jutting out his chin like his favorite historical Italian dictator and talking like his favorite German one. He also likes to fantasize that he’s a superhero.
I suspect that if it weren’t that guy the Republicans seemed determined to put up again, Biden would have determined it was safe to step aside. But it is that guy, who now has two impeachments, 91 felony indictments in four different jurisdictions, findings of liability for sexual assault and business fraud, and a history of telling lies every time he opens his mouth, including persistent whoppers about the 2020 election and about being good at business.
Liberals and progressives, broadly speaking, tend to be people who believe in reality, in facts. Whether we’re delighted about this or not, Joe Biden is running for president again. His leadership, whether you agree with every decision or not, can help us extend the American experiment and bolster democracy, as well as fight for more ways to share our nation’s prosperity and protect its cultural heritage.
The other choice will be a man who is chronologically almost as old and who seems to live in an entirely imaginary version of America in a previous era. He is mentally and emotionally unstable, to say the least, and has no interest and no ability to help anyone other than himself. Oh, and he intends to be a dictator and get revenge on his perceived enemies.
If we lose our democracy because voters tie themselves in knots about Joe Biden’s age. that will go down as ageism for the ages.
A Troubling Trump Pardon and a Link to the Kushners
A commutation for a drug smuggler named Jonathan Braun had broader implications than previously known. It puts new focus on how Donald Trump would use his clemency powers in a second term.
By Michael S. Schmidt, Maggie Haberman and Alan Feuer – November 27, 2023
In April 2022, Jonathan Braun, left, and his wife, Miriam, visited a Trump resort in Florida. Mr. Braun said they ran into the former president by coincidence.
Jonathan Braun of New York had served just two and a half years of a decade-long sentence for running a massive marijuana ring, when Mr. Trump, at 12:51 a.m. on his last day in office, announced he would be freed.
A Staten Islander with a history of violent threats, Mr. Braun had told a rabbi who owed him money: “I am going to make you bleed.” Mr. Braun’s family had told confidants they were willing to spend millions of dollars to get him out of prison.
At the time, Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department and federal regulators, as well as New York state authorities, were still after him for his role in an entirely separate matter: his work as a predatory lender, making what judges later found were fraudulent and usurious loans to cash-strapped small businesses.
Nearly three years later, the consequences of Mr. Braun’s commutation are becoming clearer, raising new questions about how Mr. Trump intervened in criminal justice decisions and what he could do in a second term, when he would have the power to make good on his suggestions that he would free supporters convicted of storming the Capitol and possibly even to pardon himself if convicted of the federal charges he faces.
Just months after Mr. Trump freed him, Mr. Braun returned to working as a predatory lender, according to New York State’s attorney general. Two months ago, a New York state judge barred him from working in the industry. Weeks later, a federal judge, acting on a complaint from the Federal Trade Commission, imposed a nationwide ban on him.
A New York Times investigation, drawing on documents and interviews with current and former officials, and others familiar with Mr. Braun’s case, found there were even greater ramifications stemming from the commutation than previously known and revealed new details about Mr. Braun’s history and how the commutation came about.
The commutation dealt a substantial blow to an ambitious criminal investigation being led by the Justice Department’s U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan aimed at punishing members of the predatory lending industry who hurt small businesses. Mr. Braun and prosecutors were in negotiations over a cooperation deal in which he would be let out of prison in exchange for flipping on industry insiders and potentially even wearing a wire. But the commutation instantly destroyed the government’s leverage on Mr. Braun.The investigation into the industry, and Mr. Braun’s conduct, remains open but hampered by the lack of an insider.
At multiple levels, up to the president, the justice system appeared to fail more than once to take full account of Mr. Braun’s activities. After pleading guilty to drug charges in 2011, Mr. Braun agreed to cooperate in a continuing investigation, allowing him to stay out of prison but under supervision for nine years — a period he used to establish himself as a predatory lender, making violent threats to those who owed him money, court filings show.Since returning to predatory lending after being freed, Mr. Braun is still engaging in deceptive business tactics, regulators and customers say.
In working to secure his release, Mr. Braun’s family used a connection to Charles Kushner, the father of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser, to try to get the matter before Mr. Trump. Jared Kushner’s White House office drafted the language used in the news release to announce commutations for Mr. Braun and others.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Braun said he did not know how his commutation came about.
“I believe God made it happen for me because I’m a good person and I was treated unfairly,” he said, adding that his supporters tried “multiple paths” to get him out of prison but he had no idea which one succeeded.
He said the 10-year sentence he received for marijuana trafficking was excessive and made him a victim of the criminal justice system. He denied any wrongdoing as a lender, and insisted that he had never talked to prosecutors about cooperating in the criminal predatory lending investigation.
He said he had never met Jared Kushner. And he said a picture from April 2022, showing him and his wife on a golf course with the former president, had nothing to do with the commutation but was a chance three-minute encounter during a visit to a Trump property in Florida for a Passover event.
“I didn’t meet him because of what happened, I just happened to be there the same time,” Mr. Braun said.
Mr. Braun’s commutation highlights what former administration officials say were major problems at the Trump White House as it considered clemency applications: the lack of rigorous vetting of applications and the sidelining of the Justice Department, which has traditionally screened candidates.
Mr. Kushner took a major role in the less structured vetting process that resulted in Mr. Braun’s commutation. The Justice Department investigators from Manhattan involved in the cooperation negotiations with Mr. Braun were never consulted.
As other convicts seeking clemency did, Mr. Braun’s family retained Alan Dershowitz, the prominent lawyer and Trump ally who worked with Jewish organizations pushing for pardons, at least one of which had received financial support from the Kushner family.
Mr. Dershowitz, who represented Mr. Trump in his first impeachment, had a direct line into Mr. Kushner’s office, and succeeded in helping win clemency from Mr. Trump for a number of other people. Mr. Dershowitz said he did not remember what steps he took to help Mr. Braun but said they were minimal.
Jared Kushner declined to comment, and Charles Kushner hung up when called by a reporter, as did Jacob Braun, Mr. Braun’s father. The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan did not respond to messages seeking comment.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump said all pardon applications “went through a vigorous vetting and review process,” but he did not address specific questions about Mr. Braun’s commutation.
William P. Barr, a Trump attorney general who had left by the time of the Braun commutation, said when he took over the Justice Department he discovered that “there were pardons being given without any vetting by the department.”
Mr. Barr added that he told Trump aides they should at least send over names of those being considered so the department could thoroughly examine their records. While the White House Counsel’s Office tried to do so, the effort fell apart under the crush of pardon requests that poured in during the final weeks before Mr. Trump left office, according to people with direct knowledge of the process.
Mr. Trump boarding Air Force One for the last time on Jan. 20, 2021. He pardoned Mr. Braun in the final hours of his presidency. Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York Times
Marc Short, the chief of staff to Mr. Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, said when the vice president’s office was approached by Mr. Trump’s aides about clemency applications, it opted not to participate.
“The pardon process at the end of the administration was so unseemly it would make the Clintons blush,” Mr. Short said, referring to the final-days pardons issued by President Bill Clinton — including one to the fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose ex-wife donated $450,000 to Mr. Clinton’s presidential library.
Threats and a 10-Year Sentence
Mr. Braun’s path to receiving a last-minute commutation began in 2009, when the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, working with the Drug Enforcement Administration, raided what prosecutors said was a stash house for a marijuana smuggling ring run by Mr. Braun.
When Mr. Braun found out about the raid, he rented a car and drove 25 hours straight from Florida to an Indian reservation in upstate New York where, dressed in all black, he was smuggled into Canada, according to court filings. He then fled to Israel.
The Justice Department placed him on a special Interpol list that asked Israel to apprehend him. By 2010, he was back in New York, the Justice Department had charged him and he was behind bars.
In the days after his arrest, prosecutors asked a federal judge to keep him in jail until he went on trial. The prosecutors said Mr. Braun could not be deterred and was violent or willing to use the specter of violence against those who owed him money or might turn on him. Mr. Braun, the prosecutors said, had access to millions of dollars in untraceable cash, and was willing to do anything to stay out of prison.
The judge ordered that Mr. Braun be held pending trial. After nearly a year and a half in custody, Mr. Braun agreed to plead guilty. As part of the plea deal, he began cooperating secretly with the government’s investigations into other drug smugglers, particularly higher profile ones abroad, according to a former law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal workings of an investigation.
In exchange, the prosecutors agreed to release Mr. Braun from jail, putting him on house arrest and delaying his sentencing on the drug charges while they pursued new cases with his help. It is unclear what information Mr. Braun provided the authorities or whether it led to convictions.
Often, a cooperator can remain free for a few months by providing investigators with useful information. Sometimes, a court will hold off sentencing for a year or two as the cooperation continues. Throughout the process, federal authorities are supposed to monitor cooperators to ensure they do not break the law.
For reasons that remain unexplained, Mr. Braun was permitted by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn to live relatively freely for nearly the next decade, and he was able to turn his focus to an enterprise rife with cash and threats: providing loans to struggling small businesses that often had nowhere else to turn.
Former prosecutors and defense lawyers said they had never heard of a defendant being allowed to delay sentencing for such a long period or using his freedom to engage in the conduct he did. A spokesman for the Brooklyn federal prosecutor’s office declined to comment on Mr. Braun’s case.
The business Mr. Braun entered is known by many names: the merchant cash advance industry, predatory lending or, in the view of some law enforcement officials, loan sharking.
Small businesses — like restaurants and contractors — have long faced a problem: They need cash on a daily basis to buy ingredients and supplies, and pay employees so they can operate while awaiting customer payments.
How Times reporters cover politics. Times journalists may vote, but they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. That includes participating in rallies and donating money to a candidate or cause.
Banks often won’t lend to them, especially small firms with troubled credit histories, providing an opening for the merchant cash advance business to offer them financing on strict, sometimes usurious, terms that include high-interest rates and exorbitant fees. (Technically, they provide cash in exchange for a percentage of future revenues, an arrangement that typically gives them access to the borrower’s books and sometimes the borrower’s bank accounts.)
An examination of court records by The Times found that between when the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn first let him out of prison in 2011 and when he reported to prison in 2020, Mr. Braun was accused of violently threatening eight people who owed him money. Another man accused Mr. Braun in a lawsuit of shoving him from the deck of a house in Staten Island in 2018.
Mr. Braun eventually reported to the federal prison in Otisville, N.Y., in 2020.Credit…Mike Segar/Reuters
Among those threatened was a real estate developer, who said Mr. Braun told him: “I will take your daughters from you,” according to court documents.
Another borrower said in an affidavit Mr. Braun told him, “Be thankful you’re not in New York, because your family would find you floating in the Hudson.”
Over that time, companies connected to Mr. Braun made 1,900 fraudulent and illegal loans, some with interest rates greater than 1,000 percent, according to the New York State attorney general.
Even as Mr. Braun was starting to become a threatening presence, the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn actually gave him more freedom. In May 2017, prosecutors and probation officers approved Mr. Braun being removed from house arrest.
Five months later, Mr. Braun threatened the rabbi of a synagogue that had borrowed money from him, according to New York’s attorney general. Mr. Braun told the rabbi he would beat and “publicly embarrass him,” adding: “I am going to make you bleed” and “I will make you suffer for every penny.”
Nearly a decade after he was first charged in the drug case, prosecutors scheduled his sentencing. Anonymous letters accusing him of violent threats were then filed on the docket of the judge overseeing his case.
Despite his cooperation with the ongoing drug investigations, the judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison. Mr. Braun tried to appeal, but weeks before the pandemic hit in early 2020, he reported to the federal penitentiary in Otisville, N.Y.
In prison, Mr. Braun’s legal troubles actually worsened. In June 2020, New York’s attorney general and the Federal Trade Commission, which was run by a Trump appointee at the time, sued him for his role as a predatory lender. The New York attorney general credited reporting by Bloomberg News — which in 2018 first documented Mr. Braun’s business practices and revealed last year that he had returned to predatory lending — as the impetus for the suit.
At the same time, a dogged New York Police Department detective named Joseph Nicolosi, who was assigned to work as an investigator for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, was trying to build a wide-ranging criminal case focused on predatory lenders.
The inquiry faced a big challenge. Unlike many financial fraud cases, where the government relies on documents to prove charges, federal prosecutors concluded they needed something more in this case: a turncoat to flip on higher-ups, explain the intricacies of lending agreements, say they knew what they were doing was wrong and serve as a narrator on the witness stand.
Finding that witness was proving difficult, but investigators believed they had a strong candidate sitting behind bars.
So in the fall of 2020, Mr. Nicolosi drove to Otisville to meet with Mr. Braun. Mr. Nicolosi had previously tried to flip Mr. Braun when he was free, but now Mr. Nicolosi — armed with a possible get-out-of-jail card in exchange for cooperation — had leverage over him as he sat marinating in the misery of federal prison.
At the meeting, which Mr. Braun’s lawyer attended, both sides discussed what a deal could look like.
Mr. Braun made clear he would do anything the government asked of him — including wearing a wire to record calls with his former business partners — if the government would agree not to prosecute him for his role in the lending business, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Ties to the Kushners
Negotiations between Mr. Braun and prosecutors stretched into the final days of Mr. Trump’s presidency. But what the prosecutors did not know was that Mr. Braun, his family and allies were pursuing an entirely different effort to help him regain his freedom through the White House’s clemency process. And among the channels they were exploiting was a tie to the Kushner family.
Mr. Braun had ties to the family of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and a former White House senior adviser. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
Mr. Braun, The Times found, was in the inaugural class of the Kushner Yeshiva High School in Livingston, N.J., which was heavily funded by Jared Kushner’s family. Mr. Braun enrolled in its first freshman class, alongside Jared Kushner’s youngest sister, Nicole.
In an interview, a merchant cash advance dealer recounted how a cousin of Mr. Braun — whom Mr. Braun put in charge of his business when he went to prison and who took on a major role in trying to get him out — had told him in the wake of the commutation that Mr. Braun’s father, Jacob Braun, had sought help from Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, about getting their pleas for a commutation before Mr. Trump.
The cousin, Isaac Wolf, was said to have recounted that Charles Kushner and Jacob Braun had known each other for many years. Mr. Wolf credited the Kushner family with coming through for Mr. Braun, the merchant cash advance dealer said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to be publicly associated with Mr. Braun.
Others who dealt with Mr. Braun also later relayed to investigators that they had been told that the Braun family helped secure the commutation by relying on their connections to the Kushner family.
The Brauns also retained Mr. Dershowitz, a Trump ally who developed such a strong relationship with Jared Kushner that he nominated Mr. Kushner for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on Middle East peace 10 days after Mr. Trump left office.
Mr. Dershowitz said Jacob Braun would call him regularly.
“Every single Friday by 3 o’clock in the afternoon: ‘Hi this is Jacob Braun, I’m so upset my son is still in prison, what can you do? It’s unfair, he’s a good boy,’” Mr. Dershowitz recounted.
Mr. Dershowitz said he handled so many clemency requests that he could not recall what he did for Mr. Braun, whom he might have talked to at the White House about his case or how much he was paid. But he said his involvement was minimal, perhaps just a phone call.
In the chaotic final weeks of the Trump presidency, the volume of clemency requests overwhelmed the White House Counsel’s Office. Requests were being fielded by numerous White House officials — and many came in through Mr. Kushner’s office.
It is unclear what type of due diligence, if any, the White House did on Mr. Braun. The New York attorney general and the F.T.C. had put out news releases about their civil actions against him in June 2020, and the suits they filed were a matter of public record. An inquiry to the Justice Department could have revealed the plea deal discussions.
Jacob Braun, Mr. Braun’s father, made contact with and retained Alan Dershowitz, seen in a 2015 photo, the prominent lawyer and Trump ally who was active in seeking clemency for convicts. Credit…Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Just hours before Mr. Trump left office on Jan. 20, 2021, the White House sent out the news release, written by Mr. Kushner’s office, announcing Mr. Braun’s commutation, along with similar summaries for the 143 convicts who received pardons and commutations in the final batch, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Kushner thought it was important to honor each person granted clemency with a personalized write-up, the person said.
The release misspelled Mr. Braun’s first name. And it overstated the time he had served in prison.
“Upon his release, Mr. Braun will seek employment to support his wife and children,” the release said.
The federal investigators in Manhattan learned of the commutation early that morning, immediately calling Mr. Braun’s lawyer to express their fury over how the president had undercut his own department’s investigation by removing all the leverage prosecutors had over Mr. Braun.
In the weeks that followed, investigators made another attempt to reach a cooperation deal with Mr. Braun, meeting with him in person. But no longer needing help getting out of prison, Mr. Braun essentially called their bluff, signaling that if they thought they had a case against him they should indict him. Since then, the prosecutors have brought no charges against Mr. Braun or anyone else with ties to him in the industry.
Back in Business
Just a few months after his release, Mr. Braun returned to working in the merchant cash advance business.
Amid the ongoing suits against him by state and federal regulators, he remained in a relatively behind-the-scenes role. While he would make major decisions, he would use an email account that did not include his name, his name was left off business documents and his interactions with customers were limited, according to court documents and a former merchant cash advance dealer.
But in the experience of at least one borrower who dealt with him, his business practices remained unchanged.
Dr. Robert Clinton is a North Carolina physician who during the pandemic turned his urgent care facility into a Covid testing center. He turned to merchant cash advance dealers because it took months for insurance companies and the federal government to reimburse him.
Mr. Braun’s companies made arrangements with Dr. Robert Clinton for loans and eventually pushed him to the brink of financial ruin. Credit…Kate Medley for The New York Times
Relying on similar tactics to what he was accused of employing before he went to prison, the companies affiliated with Mr. Braun withheld some of the financing they had agreed to provide Dr. Clinton but charged him interest on the full amount, imposed heavy fees with little or no warning and unilaterally withdrew money from Dr. Clinton’s bank accounts, according to court documents.
At one point, another merchant cash advance dealer who had lent money to Dr. Clinton called him in a panic to warn about Mr. Braun.
“You gotta get away from him and pay him off — we are all afraid of him — anytime Jon Braun is involved he could seize your assets, block your bank accounts,” the other merchant cash advance dealer told Dr. Clinton, in the doctor’s recounting of the conversation.
As Dr. Clinton’s finances deteriorated, he got a call from a man who claimed his name was Mike Wilson and that he was working for one of the Braun-affiliated lenders. The man told Dr. Clinton that he would send a private jet down to pick him up so he could bring expensive watches he had to New York to use as collateral for the money he owed, Dr. Clinton said.
In an apparent slip-up during conversations with Dr. Clinton at the time, the man said: Refer to me as Jon.
Dr. Clinton rejected the idea and, with help from a lawyer, Shane Heskin, sued the Braun-affiliated companies, saying they had fleeced him for over a million dollars.
A major portion of the suit was dismissed because North Carolina usury laws provided no protection for Dr. Clinton. Now, Dr. Clinton — who still owes other merchant cash advance dealers several million dollars — spends his days doing some telemedicine and the rest of his time trying to get money back from insurance companies and the federal government.
In a filing this summer, the New York attorney general said Mr. Braun, through his companies, “continues to commit usury.”
Mr. Braun continues to portray himself as a victim of an unfair criminal justice system.
“What is so bad about me?” he said in the interview with The Times. “I never hurt anybody, never did anything wrong to anybody.”
Mr. Braun and his companies put liens on Dr. Clinton’s business, leading to cascading financial problems that Dr. Clinton said cost him $1.6 million.Credit…Kate Medley for The New York Times
Matthew Cullen, Kirsten Noyes, Kitty Bennett, Alain Delaquérière and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
Michael S. Schmidt is an investigative reporter for The Times covering Washington. His work focuses on tracking and explaining high-profile federal investigations. More about Michael S. Schmidt
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. More about Maggie Haberman
Jonathan Swan is a political reporter who focuses on campaigns and Congress. As a reporter for Axios, he won an Emmy Award for his 2020 interview of then-President Donald J. Trump, and the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award for “overall excellence in White House coverage” in 2022. More about Jonathan Swan
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump. More about Alan Feuer
Trump’s pardoning of a Kushner-linked drug smuggler undercut a larger DOJ investigation
Lloyd Lee – November 27, 2023
Former President Donald Trump.AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack
Donald Trump pardoned Jonathan Braun, a convicted drug smuggler, on his last day in office.
Meanwhile, the DOJ hoped to use Braun in a separate probe into the predatory-lending business.
Braun’s commutation meant the DOJ lost the leverage it needed to get him to cooperate, the NYT reported.
Donald Trump’s pardoning of a convicted marijuana smuggler with ties to the Kushner family threw a wrench in the Justice Department’s larger probe into the predatory-lending industry, The New York Times reported.
On his last day in office, Trump pardoned Jonathan Braun, a Staten Island resident who at the time was serving a 10-year prison sentence for money laundering and running an international marijuana smuggling ring.
Braun’s pardon came while Trump’s Justice Department was working out its own deal with Braun to fast-track his sentence in exchange for his cooperation with a separate DOJ probe into the predatory-lending or merchant-cash-advance industry.
In the merchant-cash-advance business, lenders offer cash-strapped borrowers, such as small businesses, financing with high interest rates and fees. These terms can often leave borrowers in a vicious cycle of debt.
Braun was convicted of drug smuggling in 2011, but a law-enforcement official told the Times under the condition of anonymity that Braun was released from jail after a year and a half in custody as part of a plea deal to cooperate with investigations into other high-profile drug smugglers.
Although he was placed under house arrest, Braun was largely able to live as a free man for reasons still unknown, the Times reported. He spent nearly the next decade leading a predatory-lending operation as a “principal” of Richmond Capital group, prosecutors said in court documents seen by Business Insider.
Prosecutors accused Braun of harassing and sending threats to his clients. Braun, for example, told one merchant not to “fuck with him” and threatened, “I know where you live. I know where mother lives,” prosecutors said.
In eight years, Braun advanced about $80 million, targeting desperate small-business owners and setting interest rates often higher than 1,000% yearly, Bloomberg reported.
In a telephone interview with the Times, Braun denied any wrongdoing as a lender.
Years after his 2011 drug-smuggling conviction, Braun was sentenced to 10 years in a New York prison despite cooperating with investigators. He began his sentence in 2020, according to the NY attorney general.
But Braun’s hand in the lending industry made him a valuable asset to the Justice Department since the US attorney’s office in Manhattan was investigating the wider predatory-lending business, the Times reported.
With Braun’s experience, the DOJ hoped to cut out a deal with the convicted smuggler by commuting his sentence in exchange for providing information on other predatory lenders and possibly wearing a wire, the Times reported.
Key to gaining his clemency, The Times reported, was Braun’s connection to the family of Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump‘s husband and a senior White House advisor during the Trump Administration.
Braun was a member of the inaugural class of the Kushner Yeshiva High School in Livingston, New Jersey, which the Kushner family funded, the report said.
As a member of the first freshman class, Braun was classmates with Jared Kushner’s youngest sister, Nicole, the Times reported.
One merchant-cash-advance dealer told the Times that Braun’s cousin, Isaac Wolf, told him Braun’s father sought help from Kushner’s father, Charles, to secure a pardon.
On his last day in office, Trump pardoned Braun, releasing a statement that misspelled Braun’s first name, despite calling for drug dealers to receive the death penalty a year later at a Pennsylvania rally.
“Every pardon application went through a vigorous vetting and review process overseen by the Office of the Pardon Attorney and various White House departments, including the counsel’s office,” a Trump spokesperson said in an email to Insider. “President Trump acted upon their recommendations that were based off each individuals’ circumstances.”
The Braun family also retained Alan Dershowitz, a member of Trump’s legal counsel, during the impeachment proceedings in 2020.
Dershowitz told the Times that Braun’s father regularly called him, saying he was “so upset my son is still in prison” and asked what the attorney could do to help.
The lawyer told the publication he could not recall what he did for Braun but that his involvement could have just been a phone call.
“I believe God made it happen for me because I’m a good person, and I was treated unfairly,” Braun told the Times, adding that his supporters sought several avenues to get him out of prison.
A spokesperson for the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan could not be reached for comment during the weekend.
Trump hints at expanded role for the military within the US. A legacy law gives him few guardrails
Gary Fields – November 27, 2023
Surrounded by Army cadets, President Donald Trump watches the first half of the 121st Army-Navy Football Game in Michie Stadium at the United States Military Academy, Saturday, Dec. 12, 2020, in West Point, N.Y. Experts in constitutional law and the military say the Insurrection Act gives presidents tremendous power with few restraints. Recent statements by former President Donald Trump raise questions about how he might use it if he wins another term. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File) In this Sept. 26, 1957, file photo, members of the 101st Airborne Division take up positions outside Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. The troops were on duty to enforce integration at the school. During the Civil Rights era, Presidents Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower used the law to protect activists and students desegregating schools. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect Black students integrating Central High School after that state’s governor activated the National Guard to keep the students out. (AP Photo/File)President George H.W. Bush addresses the nation on May 1, 1992, from the Oval Office in Washington. George H.W. Bush was the last president to use the Insurrection Act, a response to riots in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of the white police officers who beat Black motorist Rodney King in an incident that was videotaped. (AP Photo/Dennis Cook, File)A fire burns out of control at the corner of 67th Street and West Boulevard in South Central Los Angeles, on April 30, 1992. On April 29, 1992, four white police officers were declared innocent in the beating of black motorist Rodney King, and Los Angeles erupted in deadly riots. George H.W. Bush was the last president to use the Insurrection Act, a response to riots in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of the white police officers who beat Black motorist Rodney King in an incident that was videotaped. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)In this June 1, 2020 file photo, President Donald Trump departs the White House to visit outside St. John’s Church, in Washington. Walking behind Trump from left are, Attorney General William Barr, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Experts in constitutional law and the military say the Insurrection Act gives presidents tremendous power with few restraints. Recent statements by former President Donald Trump raise questions about how he might use it if he wins another term. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Campaigning in Iowa this year, Donald Trump said he was prevented during his presidency from using the military to quell violence in primarily Democratic cities and states.
Calling New York City and Chicago “crime dens,” the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination told his audience, “The next time, I’m not waiting. One of the things I did was let them run it and we’re going to show how bad a job they do,” he said. “Well, we did that. We don’t have to wait any longer.”
Trump has not spelled out precisely how he might use the military during a second term, although he and his advisers have suggested they would have wide latitude to call up units. While deploying the military regularly within the country’s borders would be a departure from tradition, the former president already has signaled an aggressive agenda if he wins, from mass deportations to travel bans imposed on certain Muslim-majority countries.
A law first crafted in the nation’s infancy would give Trump as commander in chief almost unfettered power to do so, military and legal experts said in a series of interviews.
The Insurrection Act allows presidents to call on reserve or active-duty military units to respond to unrest in the states, an authority that is not reviewable by the courts. One of its few guardrails merely requires the president to request that the participants disperse.
“The principal constraint on the president’s use of the Insurrection Act is basically political, that presidents don’t want to be the guy who sent tanks rolling down Main Street,” said Joseph Nunn, a national security expert with the Brennan Center for Justice. “There’s not much really in the law to stay the president’s hand.”
A spokesman for Trump’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment about what authority Trump might use to pursue his plans.
Congress passed the act in 1792, just four years after the Constitution was ratified. Nunn said it’s an amalgamation of different statutes enacted between then and the 1870s, a time when there was little in the way of local law enforcement.
“It is a law that in many ways was created for a country that doesn’t exist anymore,” he said.
It also is one of the most substantial exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally prohibits using the military for law enforcement purposes.
Trump has spoken openly about his plans should he win the presidency, including using the military at the border and in cities struggling with violent crime. His plans also have included using the military against foreign drug cartels, a view echoed by other Republican primary candidates such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor.
The threats have raised questions about the meaning of military oaths, presidential power and who Trump could appoint to support his approach.
Trump already has suggested he might bring back retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who served briefly as Trump’s national security adviser and twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during its Russian influence probe before being pardoned by Trump. Flynn suggested in the aftermath of the 2020 election that Trump could seize voting machines and order the military in some states to help rerun the election.
Attempts to invoke the Insurrection Act and use the military for domestic policing would likely elicit pushback from the Pentagon, where the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is Gen. Charles Q. Brown. He was one of the eight members of the Joint Chiefs who signed a memo to military personnel in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The memo emphasized the oaths they took and called the events of that day, which were intended to stop certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over Trump, “sedition and insurrection.”
Trump and his party nevertheless retain wide support among those who have served in the military. AP VoteCast, an in-depth survey of more than 94,000 voters nationwide, showed that 59% of U.S. military veterans voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election. In the 2022 midterms, 57% of military veterans supported Republican candidates.
Presidents have issued a total of 40 proclamations invoking the law, some of those done multiple times for the same crisis, Nunn said. Lyndon Johnson invoked it three times — in Baltimore, Chicago and Washington — in response to the unrest in cities after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.
During the Civil Rights era, Presidents Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower used the law to protect activists and students desegregating schools. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect Black students integrating Central High School after that state’s governor activated the National Guard to keep the students out.
George H.W. Bush was the last president to use the Insurrection Act, a response to riots in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of the white police officers who beat Black motorist Rodney King in an incident that was videotaped.
Repeated attempts to invoke the act in a new Trump presidency could put pressure on military leaders, who could face consequences for their actions even if done at the direction of the president.
Michael O’Hanlon, director of research in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution think tank, said the question is whether the military is being imaginative enough with the scenarios it has been presenting to future officers. Ambiguity, especially when force is involved, is not something military personnel are comfortable with, he said.
“There are a lot of institutional checks and balances in our country that are pretty well-developed legally, and it’ll make it hard for a president to just do something randomly out of the blue,” said O’Hanlon, who specializes in U.S. defense strategy and the use of military force. “But Trump is good at developing a semi-logical train of thought that might lead to a place where there’s enough mayhem, there’s enough violence and legal murkiness” to call in the military.
Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan of New York, the first graduate of the U.S. Military Academy to represent the congressional district that includes West Point, said he took the oath three times while he was at the school and additional times during his military career. He said there was extensive classroom focus on an officer’s responsibilities to the Constitution and the people under his or her command.
“They really hammer into us the seriousness of the oath and who it was to, and who it wasn’t to,” he said.
Ryan said he thought it was universally understood, but Jan. 6 “was deeply disturbing and a wakeup call for me.” Several veterans and active-duty military personnel were charged with crimes in connection with the assault.
While those connections were troubling, he said he thinks those who harbor similar sentiments make up a very small percentage of the military.
William Banks, a Syracuse University law professor and expert in national security law, said a military officer is not forced to follow “unlawful orders.” That could create a difficult situation for leaders whose units are called on for domestic policing, since they can face charges for taking unlawful actions.
“But there is a big thumb on the scale in favor of the president’s interpretation of whether the order is lawful,” Banks said. “You’d have a really big row to hoe and you would have a big fuss inside the military if you chose not to follow a presidential order.”
Nunn, who has suggested steps to restrict the invocation of the law, said military personnel cannot be ordered to break the law.
“Members of the military are legally obliged to disobey an unlawful order. At the same time, that is a lot to ask of the military because they are also obliged to obey orders,” he said. “And the punishment for disobeying an order that turns out to be lawful is your career is over, and you may well be going to jail for a very long time. The stakes for them are extraordinarily high.”
Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and Michelle L. Price in New York, and Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.
Goodwill Church, in New York’s leafy Hudson Valley, is a special destination for The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta. This was where his family’s faith journey began. “There’s something so deeply familiar about this place, it’s hard to describe,” he said. “My parents always described this church as holy ground for our family.”
Tim’s father, Richard Alberta, was once a pastor on this pulpit, after becoming a born-again Christian here nearly 50 years ago. “I don’t know where he sat,” said Alberta. “I don’t know what the sermon was that day. But something happened: A guy who’d been an atheist for years, you know, decided that he was gonna give his life to Jesus.”
The Alberta family later moved to Michigan, where Tim’s father led Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian Church. “My life was completely wrapped up in the church,” said Tim. “It was the sun around which we as a family revolved. It was our whole world.”
Tim Alberta of The Atlantic, with CBS News’ Robert Costa. / Credit: CBS News
But Tim Alberta sought a career in journalism, writing about politics. His father urged him to stay grounded, including in a 2019 chat he’ll never forget: “He keeps saying to me, ‘Don’t spend your whole career around these people. There are so many other stories.’ And that was one of the last conversations we had.”
Days later, Tim’s dad suddenly died.
He recalled, “When I come home to my church, I’m expecting, I guess, something different from what I got.”
While some offered consolation, Alberta also got confrontation from some conservative church members objecting to his reporting on then-President Donald Trump. “A lot of folks right there at the viewing just wanted to argue about politics,” he said. “They wanted to know if I was still a Christian. And my dad’s in a box, like, 100 feet away.”
Costa asked, “The church wasn’t a sanctuary from politics; politics was now part of the church?”
“That’s right. I knew that, to some degree. And in fact, I willfully ignored it.”
Alberta’s reckoning with faith and politics is the basis for his new book “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” which documents what he calls an “age of extremism” for evangelicals. “There was a real crisis in the American church, specifically a crisis in the white evangelical church,” he said.
/ Credit: CBS News
According to Pew Research Center, about a quarter of American adults (24%) identify as evangelical. And as the Republican presidential race heats up, 68% of white evangelicals are supportive of Trump. Alberta says that reflects a shift away from norms — in the GOP and in the church.
“We should think about the American church almost in parallel to American politics,” he said. “When it gains enough influence, when it gains enough power, the fringe can overtake the mainstream. And that’s what we’ve seen happen in the church.”
The convulsions in today’s churches come after decades of evangelicals gaining influence, from Billy Graham’s stadium crusades, to the stadium rallies of Donald Trump. In recent years, evangelicals have had heated debates over the response to COVID and to Trump, all while many key Republicans (like House Speaker Mike Johnson) count themselves as one of them.
At Goodwill Church, Senior Pastor John Torres (who used to work with Tim’s dad) is uneasy about the shadow of politics over his church and others.
Costa asked Torres, “What do people say about politics?”
“That it’s bad. That it’s dirty.”
“What do they say to you about politics?”
“Don’t get involved,” Torres replied. “I don’t want somebody who’s sitting there, listening to me preach, whatever their views are, I want them to stay put. I wanna talk to them about Jesus. I don’t want to talk to ’em about politics. ‘Cause I don’t really know what I can offer them in terms of politics.”
Other evangelicals don’t mind politics — and see this moment as an affirmation of hard-won power.
Worshippers attend a concert by evangelical musician Sean Feucht on the National Mall on October 25, 2020 in Washington, D.C. / Credit: Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Costa asked, “What do you say to evangelical leaders who might hear your argument and say, ‘You missed the point: Trump wins for evangelical Christians, he wins for conservative America’?”
“Wins what?”
“Supreme Court seats, a seat at the table at the White House?”
Alberta responded, “Show me where in scripture any of that matters.”
But it does matter to many of those standing with Trump as he once again seeks the White House. Alberta said, “You have millions of evangelical Christians who voted for Donald Trump and just sort of gleefully embraced his terrible rhetoric and his un-Christlike conduct.”
“Why did they ‘gleefully’ embrace it, to use your term?” asked Costa.
“Power,” Alberta replied. “Trump campaigned for president in 2016 promising that if he was elected, Christians would have power. He gave it to them. He gave it to them in ways that, arguably, no American president has in modern history. And when you have power, you can very quickly lose sight of your principles, your values and your beliefs.”
Alberta says that, regardless, today his faith has never been better. His faith in reporting is also strong, and he says that is his own calling.
“You and I, we’re reporters,” said Alberta. “We’re not supposed to be the story. I never wanted to be the story. [But] once you see this, you can’t look away.”
Trump’s Pardoning of a Loan Shark Derailed a Federal Investigation: Report
Peter Wade – November 26, 2023
Very early in the morning on Donald Trump’s last day in office, the president announced he was pardoning Jonathan Braun, a loan shark who had been convicted of running a vast marijuana ring. Braun, who at the time was serving a 10-year sentence, was pardoned along with 142 others, including rappers Lil Wayne and Kodak Black.
Trump’s move undermined a years-long federal investigation, The New York Times reported Sunday. The paper also uncovered ties between Braun and the family of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Federal prosecutors were in the midst of negotiations hoping to secure Braun’s cooperation in a Justice Department investigation into predatory lenders in the merchant cash advance industry when Trump announced his clemency. Investigators felt that an industry insider like Braun could reveal information about predatory lending agreements, but after he was released from incarceration, prosecutors no longer had leverage they could use to compel Braun to talk.
Between 2011 and 2020, while awaiting sentencing in the marijuana case, Braun offered predatory loans to small businesses. Borrowers who took out loans from Braun say in court documents that he threatened them and their families for non-payment. During the nine years he was waiting to be sentenced, Braun was accused of making violent threats to eight people who had borrowed money from him, and a lawsuit claimed Braun had pushed a man off a deck at a Staten Island home in 2018.
A real estate developer who borrowed from Braun said in a court document that Braun threatened him, saying, “I will take your daughters from you.”
According to an affidavit, Braun allegedly told another borrower, “Be thankful you’re not in New York, because your family would find you floating in the Hudson.”
Only months following his release from prison, Braun was banned from making or collecting business loans by the state of New York. In a statement following the ban, New York Attorney General Letitia James claimed that Braun and others had been “harming small businesses through high-interest loans and undisclosed fees.” In a lawsuit, James alleged that “merchant cash advances, which are a form of short-term, high-interest funding for small businesses” offered by Braun and others “were in fact illegal, high-interest loans with astronomical and illegal rates.”
The court ordered Braun’s company — Richmond Capital Group, LLC — as well as two other companies — Ram Capital Funding, LLC, and Viceroy Capital Funding Inc. — to cancel debt owed by thousands of small businesses across the country as well as repay interest and overage charges, amounting to tens of millions of dollars.
The Times also raised questions about Braun’s connections to the Kushners. An investigation by the paper found that Braun was a member of the inaugural class of the Kushner Yeshiva High School in Livingston, N.J., which received a large amount of funding from the Kushner family.
A merchant cash advance dealer who wished to remain anonymous told The Times that a cousin who was running Braun’s business while he was in jail told him that Braun’s father, Jacob Braun, had reached out to Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, regarding the family’s hopes that Trump would pardon Braun. The cousin, Isaac Wolf, later claimed that the Kushners had helped secure Braun’s release, the merchant cash advance dealer said.
Jacob Braun also regularly called Trump ally Alan Dershowitz to plead for Braun’s release. “Every single Friday by 3 o’clock in the afternoon: ‘Hi this is Jacob Braun, I’m so upset my son is still in prison, what can you do? It’s unfair, he’s a good boy,’” Dershowitz told the paper.
Federal investigators were not made aware of the pardon until the morning it was announced and, according to The Times, they were furious that Trump had sabotaged a possible deal with Braun over predatory lending practices.
Braun, however, maintains his innocence and claims he is a victim of the justice system’s unfair practices. “What is so bad about me?” he told the paper. “I never hurt anybody, never did anything wrong to anybody.”
Russian authorities are restricting abortion access amid population and military recruiting concerns
Katie Balevic – November 25, 2023
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks to Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill at Red Square in Moscow in November 2023.Gavriil Grigorov/AP
Top Russian authorities are restricting abortion access to combat population stagnation.
The head of the Russian Church said it would boost the population like “waving a magic wand.”
Russian women’s groups say the policies are forcing women to birth unwanted children, per the BBC.
Top Russian authorities are restricting abortion access, calling the procedure a “disaster.”
It comes amid the state’s concerns over population growth, particularly where it impacts military recruiting, according to the BBC. Some one in three women claim to have gotten the procedure, and more than 500,000 pregnancies were terminated in 2022, the outlet reported.
Patriarch Kirill, the head of the highly influential Russian Orthodox Church, is leading the charge.
“As a member of the clergy, I testify that an abortion is a disaster and a tragedy for the woman [and] those close to her,” Kirill said in January, per the BBC.
The church has close ties to the Kremlin, and Kirill has been a key supporter of President Vladimir Putin.
While Russia’s population leans male for births up to 14 years old, females outpace males ages 15 and up. Over 65% of the population is aged 15 to 64, and there are 3 million more women than men in that age bracket, according to the 2023 data from the Central Intelligence Agency.
The total population of 144 million stands at 2 million less than it did in 2001 when Putin came to power, the BBC reported. In 2022, over 500,000 Russian pregnancies were terminated compared to 1.3 million live births, the outlet reported.
Putin sees it as “an acute problem,” per the BBC. Kirill says anti-abortion policies are the solution.
“The population can be increased as if by waving a magic wand: if we solve this problem and learn how to dissuade women from having abortions, statistics will go up immediately,” Kirill said, per the BBC.
The patriarch’s policies of dissuasion include doctors telling pregnant teenagers to keep their child “because they are practically from the same generation,” the BBC reported. If a woman is single, doctors are to tell the pregnant patient that “having a child is no obstacle to finding a life partner.”
Authorities are also restricting the sale of medication used in medical abortions – over the protests of women’s groups who say such moves will cause the number of illegal and botched abortions to surge.
“Officials, ultra-right politicians and the church are actively forcing women and girls to give birth to unwanted children,” the Urals Feminist Movement group said, according to the BBC.
