Can Low-Wage Industries Survive Without Immigrants and Refugees?
Case Farms’ history shows how many sectors like meatpacking depend on immigrants and refugees. Now business leaders fear President Trump’s policies will create a labor shortage.
by Michael Grabell, ProPublica
Tim McDonagh, special to ProPublica
One afternoon this fall, I knocked on the door of a redbrick apartment building in Akron, Ohio, looking for a Bhutanese refugee who’d lost the tips of his fingers at a Case Farms chicken plant in a vacuum-pressure machine known as a “fat sucker.”
In the apartment’s tiny living room, a young man told his story in halting English. As he spoke, I realized that his name was different from the one I had, and, instead of losing his fingertips in a fat sucker at the company’s Canton plant, he’d lost his pinkie to a saw at its plant in nearby Winesburg. I had the wrong guy, but I’d stumbled on yet another Bhutanese refugee who’d sacrificed part of his body for the company.
The Bhutanese ended up at Case Farms in 2011 by way of a refugee resettlement agency. It was a marriage of the desperate. The refugees needed work that didn’t require speaking English or an American education. Case Farms needed workers who would accept the low pay and grueling, cold and monotonous conditions that U.S. safety inspectors have repeatedly deemed extremely dangerous.
The Bhutanese were only the latest crop of foreign labor to stand on Case Farms’ chicken lines, slicing breasts and wings for fast-food restaurants and grocery stores across the country. For decades, the company had largely relied on Mayan immigrants fleeing violence in Guatemala, many of whom were not allowed to work in the United States. Case Farms’ history with the Mayans reveals how U.S. companies subvert immigration laws to take advantage of undocumented immigrants, but it also illustrates a broader — and perhaps underappreciated — truth about the American economy: So much of it depends on a never-ending global scramble for low-skilled labor.
President Donald Trump rode into office vowing to restrict the flow of refugees and unauthorized immigrants. The rhetoric played well among Rust Belt voters who had seen their industries decline just as Latino immigrants began arriving to take jobs they didn’t want, seemingly transforming the towns they used to know. But Trump’s efforts to make good on those promises could substantially disrupt the companies that provide America’s food, build its homes, and supply workers to clean hotels and office buildings and unload shipping containers for retail stores.
Just as technology firms and hospitals have come to rely on high-skilled immigrants secured through visa programs, low-wage industries depend heavily on migrants from the world’s hotspots, secured through refugee programs as well as other means. That reliance has prompted some of the nation’s meatpackers to fear that under Trump the global marketplace may shut down, resulting in labor shortages that, they say, will drive up prices and reduce food supplies. “A legal immigration system that works is the best way to address illegal immigration,” Cargill chief executive David MacLennan wrote recently. “We must not close our minds or our borders.”
Poultry and meatpacking companies have long drawn labor from the bottom rung of society. Jurgis Rudkus, the hero of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was a new Lithuanian immigrant. As processing plants moved out of union-heavy cities closer to farms, they relied on poor, rural whites and, after the country desegregated, African Americans. By 2006, 46 percent of meat and poultry processing workers were Hispanic. In recent years, slaughterhouses have turned to refugees, from Bosnians in Iowa to Somalis in Kansas. Tyson Foods is based in Springdale, Arkansas, which has become home to thousands from the Marshall Islands who hold special status because of nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War.
Case Farms managers told ProPublica they are careful to follow immigration law and say they treat workers properly, wherever they are from.
When Case Farms started in Winesburg in 1986, it mostly employed young Amish women, but they left as the company expanded and hired workers from Rust Belt cities nearby. Its second plant in Morganton, North Carolina, also had trouble staffing its lines. At the time, manufacturing was thriving in the Southeast and the white and African-American workers the company had employed — even the Hmong refugees who settled there after the Vietnam War — left for better-paying jobs at local furniture factories.
So Case Farms joined others in the industry in a search for Latino workers, recruiting along the Texas border and in farm labor towns in Florida. The number of Latinos working in the poultry and meatpacking industry grew exponentially in the 1990s. The North American Free Trade Agreement played a role by eliminating steep agricultural tariffs, which caused chicken exports to Mexico to more than sextuple and, according to some critics, devastated Mexican farmers, leading many to seek work across the border.
Case Farms eventually found the Mayans, who began settling in Morganton in the early 1990s, and a few years later started arriving around Winesburg. Case Farms recruited many of them directly from Florida, but a Guatemalan pastor I met in Ohio said the company gave him a 15-passenger van to transport immigrants from its plant in Morganton to work at its plant in Ohio. The recruitment and migrant stream that followed turned Rust Belt cities in the Appalachian foothills into immigrant gateways that now claim some of the largest populations of Awakateko and Ixil speakers in the United States.
As the Mayan workers gained strength, eventually unionizing and going on strike, the company recruited a series of immigrant groups — Cubans, Romanians, Chinese, North Africans and Burmese — seemingly pitting immigrant communities against each other.
Manorath Khanal, a Bhutanese refugee who works for Case Farms as a liaison to employees. The Bhutanese are one of a series of migrant and refugee communities the company has turned to for labor.
In one instance, some employees told the National Labor Relations Board that the human resources manager promised Case Farms would give everyone a raise if they could help him get the newcomers to sign papers decertifying the union, which was led by Guatemalans. The Burmese initially refused through a translator, one employee said. So the employee and a colleague waited until the translator left and explained the deal to a new worker who spoke a little English. “She asked me, ‘Oh, more money?’ ” the woman told the NLRB. “And I said, ‘Yes, more money.’ Afterward, she said something in her language to the rest and everyone signed the little pieces of paper to get rid of the union.”
The Burmese didn’t last long, and for a while, it seemed the Bhutanese might not either.
The Bhutanese began arriving in Akron in 2008, settling in a neighborhood that had been home to Italian and Polish immigrants before them. They had been living in U.N. camps in Nepal since the early 1990s, when the small kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas began expelling tens of thousands of ethnic Nepalis, viewing them as a threat.
Manorath Khanal works at Case Farms in human resources and has recruited scores of Bhutanese to work there. I met him at his apartment in Cuyahoga Falls. It was the end of the Hindu holiday Diwali and he wore garlands of orange and purple flowers. Khanal, 42, recalled that when he was a teenager in Bhutan, soldiers entered his village and began arresting people, who were never seen again. One night at midnight, his family fled, crossing the swollen rivers near the border in India, and got into the back of a big truck that took them to Nepal.
He became a leader in the refugee camp and helped negotiate resettlement in the United States. Eventually, Khanal was flown to Phoenix, where he worked cleaning airplanes, before moving in 2012 to Ohio, where Case Farms hired him as a trainer in Winesburg. There weren’t many Bhutanese in the plant at the time, and retention was bad. Khanal told me he was brought in to help the company communicate with the Bhutanese workers and address concerns. “We don’t have enough good supervisors on the production floor,” Khanal said. “They hardly understand what is the meaning of being human, what is humanity, what is respect, what is motivation.”
As the labor market and the flow of immigrants have tightened, Case Farms appears to be making an effort to hold on to the ones it has. The company now gives workers a day off for Diwali. It helps underwrite the Bhutanese association’s office in Akron as well as an annual cultural celebration and soccer tournament. At the national convention of Bhutanese organizations in 2013, two of the three speakers on the entrepreneurship panel were from Case Farms. Conditions are improving, Khanal said, but workers tell him they’re treated differently when he’s not there.
A Bhutanese human resources assistant named Upendra Luitel said some things the company does make him uncomfortable. “Most of the employees, they are having some kind of hurt in their hands,” he said. Yet workers have to pay to replace wet gloves, he said, even though the moisture makes their hands cold, increasing the pain. Last year, Luitel said, the company started giving disciplinary points to workers who called in sick — even if they had a doctor’s note.
Case Farms said they instituted the rule because workers had abused a more lenient policy regarding absences.
Back at the apartment, Gambhir Rai, the man who lost his finger, showed me how the saw blade severed his left pinkie at the knuckle and skidded over his ring and middle fingers. “At the time, I’m new in everything, I’m new in America,” he said, explaining that he didn’t know what to do after the 2014 accident. Rai, 35, said he received about $4,000 in workers’ compensation for his finger in addition to weekly checks while he was out of work.
He returned to the plant but quit in February, tired of the long commute and what he felt was ill treatment. Rai said many Bhutanese are happy to have the work at Case Farms when they first arrive, figuring they’ll work there for a short time while getting settled. “Anywhere we work, we love to do our job, we work hard,” he said. “Everybody worries about the job and the future.”
Rai now works at an auto parts warehouse in Akron, which has begun hiring in the Bhutanese community. It’s much different than Case Farms, he said, raising the question — as many worker advocates do — whether the low-wage labor shortage stems from a lack of refugees or simply a lack of respect. “They don’t say, ‘You’re not working this way. You’re not doing good,’” he said. “I get the response, ‘You’re a good worker. You’re a hard worker. You’ve done a lot.’ At Case Farms, I never get like that.”
Michael Grabell covers economic issues, labor, immigration and trade. He has reported on the ground from more than 30 states, as well as some of the remotest villages in Alaska and Guatemala. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times and on Vice and NPR. He has won a Gerald Loeb Award for business journalism and an IRE Medal for investigative reporting and is a three-time finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists.
It’s a great time to be an investigative journalist. Sure, no president has done more to demonize media than President Trump. But nor has anybody done more to boost our standing than Trump.
Millions of Americans have put their faith in us. A few weeks after the election, a friend of mine, pondering the reality of one-party government in Washington, looked at me soberly and summed up her sentiment: “You are our Congress now.”
What she meant, of course, was that we need to keep doing our job: to ferret out facts and expose wrongdoing. It seemed straightforward enough.
But as my friend was talking, one thought kept running over and over in my mind: How the hell are we going to do this?
At ProPublica, our stories often take months, and occasionally longer than that. How could we cover something as fast moving as a new administration? We also tend to stay away from areas other reporters are already covering. If lots of reporters are already digging into something, why would we want to as well? One of our advantages is that we don’t have to be comprehensive. We can and should skip stories where we’re unlikely to distinguish ourselves.
We could have made the decision to stick with those inclinations — to veer away from the pack and focus on areas where others were now even less likely to be.
But we didn’t do that.
Instead, on Inauguration Day, we announced what we would be covering — many, many areas related to the new administration. The same day, we reported Trump hadn’t fulfilled his promise to hand over control of his businesses. Two weeks later, we reported that Trump’s daughter Ivanka had failed to do the same.
We’re still in flux. We definitely don’t have all the answers. Like many newsrooms, we’re still grappling with how to handle coverage of the new administration. But we have found a few principles to be helpful.
Worry Less About Zigging When Others Zag
Rather than tacking away from important topics that already have the country’s attention, sometimes it makes sense to look for opportunities within them.
Take the work last year of the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold, who, of course, could serve as an example in any number of these tips. Countless journalists were covering Trump’s campaign. The size of the scrum covering his candidacy probably set a record. But how many reporters were really digging into Trump’s charity? It turned out none, until Fahrenthold.
That doesn’t mean you should chase the week’s news, or worry about matching what other outlets are doing. What it means is deciding you’re going to go after the most important and vital topics, and then giving yourself the task of producing revelatory coverage within them.
A hypothetical I’ve occasionally invoked: Imagine you had been a reporter during the civil rights era and were looking back at your career decades later. What would you have hoped to cover? (I’ve heard BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith tell his staff something quite similar: Write now what you think you’ll be proud of at the end of your career.)
Stop Hoarding and Start Sharing
ProPublica has been collaborating with other newsrooms since we started nine years ago. But over the past few months, we’ve landed on new ways of working with others.
On a Friday night in late March, the White House announced it was making many staffers’ financial disclosure forms “available.” But it didn’t post them online or even disclose which staffers had filed the forms.
To get the documents, reporters first had to guess who had filed the disclosures. Then, they had to fill out a form on the White House’s website for each person. It was like dealing with the world’s worst customer service department — only we were trying to wrangle purportedly public information.
Then, one of our editors, Tracy Weber, had an idea: Why not call our friends at other outlets and coordinate. Within minutes, The New York Times and Associated Press had agreed to work with us and post all the documents we gathered.
In another instance, we talked with the Times’ Eric Lipton about our joint interest in documenting the legion of lobbyists joining the administration. The chat led to a very simple and quick collaboration: We shared data on administration hires with the Times, which used it to publish a hard-hitting story that cited our contribution.
It was just one example of many where even the simple act of comparing notes has paid off. That’s clearly not the proper approach all the time. But it can be plenty of the time.
Do It Out In the Open
For years, we’ve reached out to readers to fuel our journalism. But we’ve been much more aggressive about it recently.
One thing has been to simply say what we’re working on — even if it’s just broadly. On Inauguration Day, we not only laid out our areas of coverage, but we also gave contact information for each of our reporters. And at the bottom of many of our stories now is a reporter’s contact info, and, crucially, an explanation of what information they’re seeking.
Do you have information about the Trump administration’s beachhead teams and their role at federal agencies? Contact Justin at justin@propublica.org or via Signal at 774-826-6240. Here is a guide for how to leak to ProPublica.
It’s not fancy, but it’s effective.
Sometimes readers don’t have insider tips, but they can still contribute. In February, a reader wrote us about a letter she received from Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt criticizing Obamacare. The letter was filled with misleading formation. We wondered if that was true of other congressional letters, so Charles Ornstein and Terry Parris Jr. asked readers to share any similar letters they’d gotten. Again, we coordinated to get the word out with other outlets: Vox, Kaiser Health News and STAT News. Readers sent in hundreds of letters. The result: We were able to lay out how legislators were sending their constituents correspondence “full of lies and misinformation.”
Others are also embracing the approach, and getting results: Last month, the Trump administration disclosed donors who funded the president’s $100 million inauguration committee. The administration posted them as super-unhelpful, non-searchable PDFs. So reporters got together to fix that, turning the documents into data. Then, the Huffington Post’s Christina Wilkie invited readers to dig in and background the donors. It turns out, some of the names were straight-up fake.
You Won’t Be Able to Neatly Plan and Package Your Stories — and That’s Okay
Just about the only certainty with this administration is that nobody knows what will happen. That means if you’re going to cover one of the most consequential stories of our time, you’re probably not going to be able to, say, carefully plot out a year’s worth of stories in advance.
But that doesn’t mean just writing what’s in front of you, either. In fact, it’s more crucial than ever to think carefully about which waters to swim in. You just may need to be at peace with the uncertainty about where exactly your coverage is heading. You may even have some false starts. And there’s no guarantee it will work at all.
Success will require the typical alchemy needed for great journalism — doggedness, imagination, and luck. It will also require a leap of faith. Making that leap seems only fair given the faith that readers have put in us.
FBI director James Comey generated national headlines last week with his dramatic testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, explaining his “incredibly painful” decision to go public about the Hillary Clinton emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop.
Perhaps Comey’s most surprising revelation was that Huma Abedin — Weiner’s wife and a top Clinton deputy — had made “a regular practice” of forwarding “hundreds and thousands” of Clinton messages to her husband, “some of which contain classified information.” Comey testified that Abedin had done this so that the disgraced former congressman could print them out for her boss. (Weiner’s laptop was seized after he came under criminal investigation for sex crimes, following a media report about his online relationship with a teenager.)
The New York Post plastered its story on the front page with a photo of an underwear-clad Weiner and the headline: “HARD COPY: Huma sent Weiner classified Hillary emails to print out.” The Daily News went with a similar front-page screamer: “HUMA ERROR: Sent classified emails to sext maniac Weiner.”
The problem: Much of what Comey said about this was inaccurate. Now the FBI is trying to figure out what to do about it.
FBI officials have privately acknowledged that Comey misstated what Abedin did and what the FBI investigators found. On Monday, the FBI was said to be preparing to correct the record by sending a letter to Congress later this week. But that plan now appears on hold, with the bureau undecided about what to do.
ProPublica is reporting a story on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton emails and raised questions with government officials last week about possible inaccuracies in Comey’s statements about Abedin.
It could not be learned how the mistake occurred. The FBI and Abedin declined ProPublica’s requests for comment on the director’s misstatements.
Here are four ideas we’ve used to guide our Trump administration coverage. Read the story.
According to two sources familiar with the matter — including one in law enforcement — Abedin forwarded only a handful of Clinton emails to her husband for printing — not the “hundreds and thousands” cited by Comey. It does not appear Abedin made “a regular practice” of doing so. Other officials said it was likely that most of the emails got onto the computer as a result of backups of her Blackberry.
It was not clear how many, if any, of the forwarded emails were among the 12 “classified” emails Comey said had been found on Weiner’s laptop. None of the messages carried classified markings at the time they were sent.
Comey’s Senate testimony about Abedin came as he offered his first public explanation for his decision to reveal the existence of the emails on Oct. 28, days ahead of the 2016 election and before FBI agents had examined them.
When agents obtained a search warrant that allowed them to read the messages, they turned out to be mostly duplicates of emails the bureau had obtained earlier in the investigation. Comey announced just before Election Day that nothing had changed in the Clinton case, which had been closed four months earlier without criminal charges.
During his testimony, Comey said that part of the reason for revealing the existence of the messages was that some appeared to fill an eight-week gap in records from early in Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. Comey said the FBI viewed them as “the golden missing emails that would change this case” because they might provide insights into Clinton’s intent when she set up her private server.
Comey testified that investigators searching Weiner’s laptop in the days before the election also found that “somehow, her emails are being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information, by [Clinton’s] assistant, Huma Abedin.” Abedin, he later testified, “appears to have had a regular practice of forwarding emails to him, for him I think to print out for her so she could then deliver them to the Secretary of State.”
After Comey painted this troubling picture, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz demanded to know why Abedin and Weiner hadn’t been charged with mishandling classified information, calling the failure to do so “puzzling.”
“You said Ms. Abedin forwarded hundreds or thousands of classified emails to her husband on a non-government, non-classified computer,” said Cruz. “How is — how does that conduct not directly violate the statute?”
Comey offered a partial clarification, telling the Texas senator: “…if I said that, I misspoke. She forwarded hundreds and thousands of emails, some of which contain classified information.” Comey agreed both Abedin and Weiner “potentially” might have committed a crime, but said the FBI found no basis for concluding either had acted with criminal intent. Comey said the FBI had been unable to discuss the matter with Weiner “because he has pending criminal problems of other sorts.”
Abedin’s lawyer issued a statement after Comey’s Oct. 28 letter, saying Abedin had no idea how her exchanges with Clinton got on Weiner’s laptop, and no idea that they were there.
The results are in for ProPublica’s latest reader survey, to which we had more than 5300 respondents.
For the first time since we began doing such surveys, our readers include more women than men. Back in 2010, readers were 63 percent male and 37 percent female. Today, the split is 58 percent female, 42 percent male.
How you get your news has also changed considerably. Fully 75 percent get their national news primarily online. In 2015, that was 67 percent — where it had been hovering since 2011. Today, 6 percent consider a printed newspaper their primary source of national news, a drop from 14 percent in 2015 and 21 percent in 2008.
In another big change, our readers have gotten younger on average. Back in 2015, 65 percent of you were 55 years of age or older. Today, that’s 49 percent.
You are a very educated group: fully 85 percent have a college degree, and nearly half have a graduate degree. By way of comparison, just over a third of Americans have obtained a bachelor’s degree. Forty-three percent of you have a household income over $100,000, with 37 percent between $50,000-$100,000.
Eight-four percent of you are white (down from 88 percent in 2015), 3 percent Latino, 3 percent Asian, and 2 percent black. (The remainder are a combination of “other” and preferring not to answer.)
In general, respondents really like what we do: 92 percent approve of the length of our stories, and 79 percent approve of how often we publish them. Among the types of stories we provide, 94 percent value our investigative journalism and 87 percent appreciate our explanatory reporting. Fully 44 percent of respondents have donated to us in the past couple of years; we appreciate it. (We had more than 26,000 donors last year, and have had more than 17,000 so far this year.)
Fifty-one percent of you think ProPublica’s reporting is non-ideological (as we intend it to be), 24 percent think we’re moderate and another 24 percent think of us as liberal; less than 1 percent of you believe we are conservative. But, reflecting the nation’s growing ideological news divide, while our audience has nearly doubled in the last two years it has become more preponderantly liberal — 74 percent identify that way; 19 percent describe themselves as moderate, 6 percent as non-ideological, and just over 1 percent as conservative. In the United States overall, Gallup recently reported that Americans are 36 percent conservative, 34 percent moderate and 25 percent liberal.
We greatly appreciate everyone who took time to provide us with this feedback. While unscientific, these results are extremely useful as we try to understand who you are, what you value about ProPublica, and how we can better serve you.
Ruddy Quezada, a 54-year-old man wrongfully convicted of a deadly drive-by shooting in 1993, has won a $4.5 million settlement from New York state, according to court papers.
Quezada spent 24 years in prison for murder before winning his freedom in 2015 when, after decades of failed appeals, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office conceded that prosecutors involved in his case had withheld critical evidence during his trial.
It turns out Brooklyn prosecutors for years hid the evidence Ruddy Quezada had sought to win a new trial. Who should pay? Read the story.
At issue was the testimony of the case’s single eyewitness, a man named Sixto Salcedo. Salcedo recanted his testimony after defense lawyers tracked him down in the Dominican Republic in 2001. In a sworn affidavit, Salcedo said he had been coerced into testifying falsely against Quezada when a New York Police Department detective threatened him with jail time if he didn’t.
ProPublica reported on Quezada’s then pending appeal in 2013 as part of a larger examination of prosecutorial misconduct in New York City.
Salcedo had been arrested on what’s known as a material witness order, a powerful, discretionary tool used by prosecutors to hold reluctant witnesses in custody until they agree to testify. Prosecutors at Quezada’s original 1993 trial told the court that Salcedo had agreed to testify on his own accord. They did not share a copy of the material witness order signed off on by a judge with the defense.
Material witness orders are meant to be used as a kind of last resort, usually when prosecutors worry that a key witness might flee out of fear. A hearing is supposed to take place where a judge can explore the witness’ hesitation to testify. Defense attorneys and others have alleged that prosecutors under former Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes routinely skipped this crucial step in the 1990s, often bringing witnesses to a hotel overnight before the courts opened. By morning, witnesses like Salcedo wound up bullied into testifying.
Hynes, while in office, said he had not approved of any inappropriate use of material witness orders. The district attorney’s office today says it has reformed the use of the orders to prevent abuses.
In Quezada’s case, prosecutors failed to disclose the material witness order, despite multiple opportunities to do so beginning with his original trial in 1993.
At the time, Ephraim Shaban, the prosecutor who had signed the material witness order and handled the original trial, instead told the jury they should believe Salcedo because he was the rare witness who “came forward” and “was not hesitant.”
In 2003, Quezada appealed for a new trial, citing Salcedo’s recantation. In legal filings, the district attorney’s office called Salcedo’s claim incredible and insisted he testified truthfully. To back up this argument, the office said there was no evidence of a material witness order used to compel Salcedo’s testimony.
“There is no copy of a material witness order in the file,” Marie-Claude Wrenn, a veteran prosecutor who handled the appeal, wrote in court papers, adding that Shaban did not recall one being necessary.
A year later, documents uncovered during the appeals process showed, Wrenn discovered the material witness order in the trial file. She gave it to her boss. The office still did not turn the order over to Quezada and continued to deny its existence for another seven years.
It wasn’t until 2011, with a federal court considering a new trial for Quezada, that Wrenn produced the order.
In 2013, a federal judge ordered a state court to once again review Quezada’s claims.
That court granted a hearing two years later, in the spring of 2015, and Quezada’s attorneys questioned both Wrenn and Shaban under oath.
Wrenn admitted to finding the order, but not until 2011.
Shaban said he did not remember the order until he was shown a copy of it in 2011 that he himself had signed. He said he would not have turned it over to the defense after the witness had been located per the office’s policy at the time.
In late August 2015, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, then led by the late Ken Thompson, said it could no longer defend Quezada’s conviction. A search had unearthed an email by Wrenn telling her boss of the material witness order in 2004.
Wrenn resigned shortly after Quezada’s release.
Thompson, who won his seat as Brooklyn district attorney in 2013 after accusing his predecessor of condoning misconduct, allowed Shaban to stay on.
At the time, a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office told ProPublica it “had found no evidence of misconduct on the part of Shaban during the original trial or the appeal process.”
Today, that spokesman said the office maintains a policy against making statements on such settlements.
But he did affirm that Shaban still works in the office as the deputy chief of a trial bureau.
Quezada filed his lawsuit in November 2016, saying in court filings that his wrongful conviction “was a direct consequence of acute and systemic prosecutorial, investigative and police misconduct,” including “the fabrication of evidence; and the presentation of false testimony and arguments” on the part of the Brooklyn district attorney.
The settlement with the state is just a first step. Quezada still has a $44 million lawsuit pending against New York City.
A state Supreme Court judge quashed the complaints of a New York City tenant this week, ruling that landlords in downtown Manhattan who received tax breaks to convert aging office buildings into apartments can be exempt from limits on rent increases.
Joel Roodman, a tenant at 85 John Street, was sued by his landlord, Kibel Companies, in 2015 after Roodman objected to a 31-percent rent increase, which put his rent at $9,500 per month. Roodman argued his apartment should be subject to rent stabilization because of the tax break Kibel was receiving that year.
A lawyer for Roodman said he was considering an appeal. There have been two other court rulings on how to apply the tax break, which have reached opposite conclusions.
The tax break, known as 421-g, was created in the 1990s by the state legislature with the strong support of then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The legislation required that apartments built with help from the tax break should be rent-stabilized. At the time, the posh historic office buildings of the financial district faced high vacancies as corporate tenants moved to more modern buildings in midtown. The tax break helped revitalize the neighborhood, spurring the creation of some 10,000 units. But the vast majority of them were never subject to rent stabilization, despite the specific language included in the law.
ProPublica examined the history of 421-g and found that Giuliani, then-Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and the real-estate industry moved behind the scenes after the Assembly passed the bill — but before it was voted on by the Senate — to exempt apartments renting for more than $2,000 a month from rent stabilization. They did this without rewriting the language of the bill approved by the Assembly. Instead, Giuliani and Bruno exchanged letters declaring their intent to exempt the pricier apartment units. The letters were read into the Senate record but were never seen by the Assembly.
“This was really an attempt to undermine the democratic process, which is really poor in New York as it is,” Eric Lane, dean of the Hofstra School of Law, told ProPublica last year. “Let me assure you that these shenanigans were ways to create a legislative record without going back and amending the bill.”
Giuliani submitted testimony on behalf of the building’s owner. Marc Mukasey, a spokesperson for Giuliani, declined to comment when contacted by ProPublica last year.
In his decision, Supreme Court Judge Schlomo Hagler said there was “clear legislative intent” to exempt apartments renting for more than $2,000 a month from rent stabilization. He pointed to the Senate debate — noting there was no Assembly debate at all — and wrote that no senator objected to the content of the Giuliani-Bruno letters. Only one senator, Franz Leichter, opposed the bill, which passed 53-1.
New York’s Legislature wanted to give tax breaks in Lower Manhattan in exchange for limits on rent increases. The mayor and the real estate lobby had another idea. Read the story.
“Notwithstanding Senator Leichter’s vigorous opposition, the Legislature rejected his position and overwhelmingly voted to provide the generous tax abatements to owners to encourage the development of Lower Manhattan,” Hagler wrote. “As such, it appears that the main purpose of the Plan was to stimulate economic development, and not to primarily establish rent regulation for luxury housing.”
Joseph Burden, a lawyer for Kibel, said the decision was “comprehensive, well-reasoned and grounded upon an in-depth statutory analysis, thorough examination of legislative intent, and prior case law.”
Serge Joseph, a lawyer for Roodman, said the issue is far from decided, noting that as many as four other cases have been filed and are still pending on the 421-g question.
“We are disappointed, and disagree with Justice Hagler’s decision,” Joseph said.
As mayor, Giuliani also signed a City Council bill in 1994 — a year before the 421-g bill — allowing for hundreds of thousands of apartments to exit rent regulation if their rents topped $2,000 a month. Three years later, the state legislature adopted the Council bill, stripping the city of the possibility of repealing it. Since then, 250,000 apartments that were once stabilized have become free-market units, ProPublica found.
Cloudflare, a major content delivery network that has a variety of white supremacist websites as clients, has said it will change its policies to allow people to more safely lodge complaints about the material on the hate sites.
Cloudflare’s announcement comes on the heels of a ProPublica article detailing the company’s dealings with sites such as The Daily Stormer, a virulently racist neo-Nazi operation whose owner has promised to strike back at critics. The article revealed that Cloudflare’s standard arrangement with clients included passing along personal information of people who had complained to the company about The Daily Stormer and other sites.
In an interview, Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, said the company would soon permit people in certain instances to complain anonymously and would be more selective in its decisions to share with its clients the personal information — names and email addresses, for instance — of people who reported objections.
“We have to have ways for people to report that abuse and not have people feel they are being bullied or threatened,” he said.
Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, operates more than 100 data centers spread across the world, serving as a sort of middleman for websites — speeding up delivery of a site’s content and protecting it from several kinds of attacks. Cloudflare says that some 10 percent of web requests flow through its network.
In the interview this week, Prince said Cloudflare would continue to have the racist sites as paying customers. Prince said Cloudflare does not regulate content and will not bar a customer unless they are determined to be a technical threat — like a site serving malware — or if his company is served with a court order.
“Whenever you have a private organization which is making what are essentially law enforcement decisions, that is a risk to due process. And I think due process is important,” Prince said.
Prince said the company’s amended policy to allow anonymous complaints would for now involve people reporting violent threats or child pornography. He said it was unclear at the moment if he would extend that protection to those reporting abuse generally, which is how the complaints ProPublica reported on were filed. Those complaints were filed in response to white supremacist content that called for urging people to commit suicide and an array of racist and anti-Semitic content.
In one online post, Andrew Anglin, the owner of The Daily Stormer, said of those reporting his site, “We need to make it clear to all of these people that there are consequences for messing with us. We are not a bunch of babies to be kicked around. We will take revenge. And we will do it now.”
ProPublica’s article last week included accounts from people who had been harassed after filing complaints with Cloudflare. Those people said they had been unaware it was standard policy for Cloudflare to share their information with the sites being complained about.
In the interview this week, Prince blamed some of those outcomes on the companies hosting the hate sites. He said the hosts in some cases had actually been the ones forwarding people’s names and emails to the sites’ owners.
“What we did not anticipate is that the hosts themselves couldn’t be trusted with this information,” he said.
Cloudflare, a prominent San Francisco outfit, provides services to neo-Nazi sites like The Daily Stormer, including giving them personal information on people who complain about their content. Read the story.
Prince said the company — which has at least 6 million clients — internally tracks clients that cause concern. According to Prince, it does that so Cloudflare can donate money to organizations that battle those groups. He said the company donates the fees paid by sites such as The Daily Stormer.
“We track customers that we’re aware of that were flagged by our team — we know how much they have paid us and we know what the team decides is the right place to redirect those funds,” he said.
He would not say exactly how much or which organizations the company donates the money to, but said it has been hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past four or five years.
The fact that Cloudflare has so many clients that employees note as objectionable is a result of its policies on censorship. With the exception of technical threats like phishing and malware — where the company takes action and throws up a warning to someone visiting a harmful page — Cloudflare usually requires a court order to reject a client.
Prince has frequently talked about his company’s commitment to free speech, but acknowledged he does not have to have such lax policies.
“We are a private company. And so we’re not bound by the First Amendment. We don’t have to let everyone use our network,” he said.
Some internet companies that either serve or host content do restrict the kinds of sites they work with.
Prince said he does not fault companies who do restrict content, nor does he believe they are censoring the internet, saying they “can make whatever determination they want” with the platforms they create.
ProPublica’s article last week provoked criticism directed at Cloudflare. Some people said on Twitter that they had decided to stop doing business with Cloudflare. Others simply registered their dismay online.
“Cloudflare has no obligation to enable a site like The Daily Stormer. That site can exist without Cloudflare. Most sites do,” wrote one commenter on ProPublica’s story.
According to Prince, this hands-off policy is in part because he is concerned about the influence of personal opinions in an era where control of the internet itself rests in fewer hands.
“And when those companies make determinations they extend beyond being merely private companies, and they need to be very cognizant and thoughtful of the level of power and control that they have,” he said.
This piece is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica.
On Tuesday, when Donald Trump abruptly dismissed the FBI director, James Comey, his administration insisted that he was merely following the recommendation of his attorney general and deputy attorney general, the two most senior officials in the Justice Department.
In a three-page memorandum attached to Comey’s termination letter, the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, cited concern for the FBI’s “reputation and credibility.” He said that the director had defied Justice Department policies and traditions and overstepped his authority in the way he handled the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
This was a puzzling assertion from the Trump administration, not least because Trump is widely acknowledged to have reaped the benefits of Comey’s actions on Election Day. After the FBI director sent his letter to Congress, on Oct. 28, about the discovery of new Clinton emails and the Bureau’s plans to assess them, Trump praised Comey for his “guts” and called the news “bigger than Watergate.”
In the aftermath of Comey’s firing, Democrats and some Republicans in Congress have proposed a far more credible explanation for Trump’s action, accusing the President of trying to halt the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the election and possible collusion with his campaign. Some of those legislators, as well as many critics in the press, have said that Trump has ignited a constitutional crisis, and they called for the appointment of an independent prosecutor to carry out the Russia investigation.
The FBI sent a letter to Congress correcting inaccurate testimony, six days after Comey mischaracterized what the FBI discovered on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Read the story.
Comey’s dismissal came just as his Russia probe appeared to be widening. Just last week, the FBI director went to Rosenstein, who had been in his job only for a few days, to ask for significantly more resources in order to accelerate the investigation, according to The New York Times. Tensions between the Trump administration and Comey had been escalating already, and Trump’s fury over the FBI’s Russia probe remained full-throated. On Monday, Trump tweeted that the inquiry was a “taxpayer funded charade.”
It is now clear that the aim of Rosenstein’s memo was simply to provide a pretext for Comey’s firing. White House officials may have thought it would be a persuasive rationale because Comey has come in for criticism from leaders of both political parties. Trump had been harboring a long list of grievances against the FBI director, including his continued pursuit of the Russia probe. On Thursday, Trump confirmed in an interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt that, even before he received the deputy attorney general’s memo, he had already made up his mind to dismiss Comey. In the end, Comey’s conspicuous independence — for so long, his greatest asset — proved his undoing, making him too grave a threat to Trump but also giving the president a plausible excuse to fire him.
Rosenstein’s memo does reflect genuine frustration inside the Justice Department about the FBI’s handling of the Clinton emails, and betrays long-standing fissures between the two institutions, which are headquartered across from each other on Pennsylvania Avenue. Rosenstein, a Trump appointee who was previously the U.S. attorney in Maryland, titled his memo “Restoring Public Confidence in the F.B.I.” In the wake of Comey’s ouster, the FBI’s impartiality and competence remains an essential issue, making understanding what actually happened in the Clinton email inquiry urgent as well.
Comey’s announcement about the discovery of the new Clinton emails did break with written and unwritten Justice Department guidelines against interfering with elections. Last week, during testimony before Congress, Comey cast the move as a singularly difficult decision and an act of principled self-sacrifice, driven by events far beyond his control. “I knew this would be disastrous for me personally,” he said. “But I thought this is the best way to protect these institutions that we care so much about.’’
A close examination, however, of the FBI’s handling of the Clinton emails reveals a very different narrative, one that was not nearly so clear-cut or inevitable. It is one that places previously undisclosed judgments and misjudgments by the Bureau at the very heart of what unfolded.
“I could see two doors and they were both actions,” Comey recounted in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “One was labelled ‘speak’; the other was labelled ‘conceal.’ ... I stared at ‘speak’ and ‘conceal.’ ‘Speak’ would be really bad. There’s an election in eleven days — lordy, that would be really bad. Concealing, in my view, would be catastrophic, not just to the FBI but well beyond. And, honestly, as between really bad and catastrophic, I said to my team, ‘We got to walk into the world of really bad.’ I've got to tell Congress that we’re restarting this, not in some frivolous way — in a hugely significant way.”
But by the time Comey elected, on Oct. 28, to speak, rather than conceal, he and his senior aides had actually known for more than three weeks that agents sifting through files on a laptop belonging to the former congressman Anthony Weiner, as part of a sex-crimes investigation, had stumbled across emails sent by Clinton when she was secretary of state. The agents had been unable, legally, to open the emails, because they fell outside the bounds of their investigation of Weiner.
FBI officials kept the discovery to themselves. Without consulting or even informing the Justice Department lawyers who had worked on the email inquiry, FBI officials concluded that they lacked the evidence to seek a search warrant to examine the emails right away. Several legal experts and Justice Department officials I spoke to now say that this conclusion was unnecessarily cautious. FBI officials also ruled out asking Weiner or his wife, Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s closest aides, to allow access to the laptop — permission their lawyers told me they would have granted.
Instead, New York agents working the Weiner investigation, which centered on allegations of an explicit online relationship with a 15-year-old girl, were told to continue their search of his laptop as before but to take note of any additional Clinton emails they came across.
In the days that followed, investigators slowly sorted through the laptop’s contents, following standard protocols in a case that was anything but standard, and moving with surprisingly little dispatch to assess the significance of the emails.
After weeks of work, the agents concluded that the laptop contained thousands of Clinton messages, a fact they waited at least three more days to share with Comey. Finally, as Comey recounted before Congress last week, the FBI director convened his top aides in his conference room at Bureau headquarters to weigh the political and institutional consequences of what to do next.
At this point, Comey and his deputies were venturing far beyond their typical purview as criminal investigators. Under normal circumstances, department policies discouraged public discussion of developments in ongoing cases of any kind; with the election fast approaching, there was the added sensitivity of avoiding even the perception of interference with the political process. But FBI officials worried that agents in New York who disliked Clinton would leak news of the emails’ existence. Like nearly everyone in Washington, senior FBI officials assumed that Clinton would win the election and were evaluating their options with that in mind. The prospect of oversight hearings, led by restive Republicans investigating an FBI “cover-up,” made everyone uneasy.
One more misjudgment informed Comey’s decision. FBI officials estimated that it would take months to review the emails. Agents wound up completing their work in just a few days. (Most of the emails turned out to be duplicates of messages collected in the previous phase of the Clinton investigation.) Had FBI officials known that the review could be completed before the election, Comey likely wouldn’t have said anything before examining the emails. Instead, he announced that nothing had changed in the Clinton case — on Nov. 6, just two days before the election, and after many millions had already cast their ballots in early voting.
The debate over Comey’s effect on the 2016 election and, now, his historic dismissal, is likely to persist for years. In the months since Donald Trump became the nation’s 45th president, a number of media organizations — most recently, The New York Times — have scrutinized Comey’s handling of the Clinton emails. They have also examined Comey’s accompanying silence about the Bureau’s investigation of possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, an inquiry that began in July of 2016.
Clinton traces her loss directly to Comey; she asserted recently that if the election had been held on Oct. 27, “I would be your president.” Trump retorted, in a tweet, that the FBI director was “the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds!’’
This account is based on interviews with dozens of participants in the events leading up to the election. They include current and former officials from the FBI and the Justice Department who were eager to have their actions understood but unwilling to be quoted by name. Comey himself declined my requests for an interview. Back in early January, however, he replied politely to a written interview request, acknowledging that he was aware of my “ongoing work.” He wrote from an email address whose whimsical name, he said, “the Russians may have a harder time guessing.”
Comey added a note of intrigue, suggesting that there were unappreciated complexities to the story that hadn’t yet become known: “You are right there is a clear story to tell — one that folks willing to actually listen will readily grasp — but I’m not ready to tell it just yet for a variety of reasons.”
Comey leaves after testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 3, 2017. (Zach Gibson/Getty Images)
During his testimony before Congress last week, Comey said that the possibility that he’d influenced the outcome of the Presidential election made him “mildly nauseous.” Previously, over two decades of public service, Comey had made independence from partisan politics the foundation of his political identity. Comey, who is 56 years old, had been the rarest of creatures in Washington: A Republican even Democrats could love.
A registered Republican for most of his adult life, Comey had made a point of telling a congressional committee last July that he was no longer affiliated with either party. (His distance from partisan politics extends to the voting booth; records show that Comey hasn’t voted in a primary or general election in the past decade.)
Comey rose to prominence through the Justice Department, first as a federal prosecutor in New York and Virginia, and then as the United States attorney in Manhattan, and the deputy attorney general under President George W. Bush. From early on, colleagues say, Comey carefully cultivated a reputation for integrity and nonpartisanship. Until the events of the past year, it had always served him well. “He knew what was the right thing to do,” a former federal prosecutor who worked with Comey told me. “But he figured out how to execute it in a way that, whatever the result, Jim Comey would be protected. I say that respectfully. He has an exceptional gift for that.”
Comey liked to map out the ramifications of major decisions, often in lengthy meetings with deputies. At critical moments in his career, Comey showcased his independence — too eagerly, in the view of some who accuse him of “moral vanity.” “I think he has a bit of a God complex — that he’s the last honest man in Washington,” a former Justice Department official who has worked with him told me. “And I think that’s dangerous.”
Daniel Richman, a Columbia law professor and close friend of Comey who has served as his unofficial media surrogate, acknowledged Comey’s penchant for public righteousness. “He certainly does love the idea of being a protector of the Constitution,” Richman said. “The idea of doing messy stuff and taking your lumps in the press.” But Richman, who worked with Comey as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, insisted that Comey’s motivations were sincere. “More than most people, he thinks that when it comes to making really difficult decisions, transparency and accountability have incredible value,” Richman said.
Among scores of people I interviewed, not even Comey’s harshest critics believe that he acted out of a desire to elect a Republican president. Comey built his reputation by taking on powerful figures of both parties. Most famously, while serving as acting attorney general under George W. Bush, he’d raced to the hospital bedside of the ailing attorney general, John Ashcroft, to confront administration officials seeking Ashcroft’s reauthorization for a domestic surveillance program that the Justice Department considered illegal. Comey’s congressional testimony, in 2007, about the confrontation raised his public profile, earning him encomiums from both parties. In 2013, after Comey completed a seven-year interlude in the private sector, Barack Obama chose the Republican lawyer as the director of the FBI. “To know Jim Comey is also to know his fierce independence and his deep integrity,” the president declared, in a Rose Garden ceremony. The Senate confirmed him 93 to 1.
The FBI is a division of the United States Department of Justice, and its director reports to the attorney general. But, from the start of his 10-year term at the FBI, Comey asserted a belief in the agency’s right to chart its own course. “The FBI is in the executive branch,” Comey likes to say, “but not of the executive branch.”
The investigation of Clinton’s emails was exactly the sort of challenge Comey seemed to have spent his career preparing for. The FBI formally opened its probe on July 10, 2015, just three months after Clinton announced her candidacy for president. “We all recognized it was a no-win situation,” the former FBI Executive Assistant Director John Giacalone, who helped oversee the investigation’s first seven months, said. At the outset, the goal was to finish the investigation by the end of 2015 — before the first primary votes were cast. It took twice that long, barely ending before the party conventions in July 2016.
The focus of the inquiry, run out of FBI headquarters because of its sensitivity, was whether Clinton’s use of an unclassified email system housed on private servers in the basement of her Chappaqua home violated any laws or allowed hackers and foreign governments to access government secrets. It was staffed by a core team of a dozen FBI agents and analysts, along with two prosecutors from the Justice Department’s National Security Division and two from the Eastern District of Virginia.
Much of their time was taken up trying to find and examine all of the roughly 62,000 messages from Clinton’s four years as secretary of state, which began in January 2009; two of Clinton’s lawyers had deleted about half of the emails, deeming them purely personal. This had sent the FBI on an often frustrating hunt for the missing emails. Agents fanned out to locate, examine and reconstruct scattered hardware and data backup systems from Clinton’s private network, as well as all the BlackBerrys, iPads, computers and storage drives that Clinton, her aides and her lawyers had used. Forensic recovery would eventually help the FBI to find 17,448 deleted emails, including thousands that agents deemed work-related.
Even as thousands of messages remained elusive, the investigators ultimately reached consensus that the evidence didn’t warrant criminal charges, which required proof of intentional misconduct, gross negligence or efforts to obstruct justice. After nearly a year and more than 90 interviews, they had identified 81 message chains deemed to be classified that passed through her private server. Clinton’s practices were sloppy, irresponsible and in defiance of State Department policies, but investigators found no proof of criminal conduct — just a misguided effort by Clinton to maintain control over what the public, and her opponents, could learn about her.
As the inquiry neared its end, Comey, who had closely monitored it from the start, requested summaries of more than 30 government prosecutions involving mishandling of classified information. He waded through the records, seeking to understand the cases’ rationale and how they had been resolved. In the end, he agreed with the investigators’ unanimous conclusion: Clinton should not face criminal charges.
Clinton on the campaign trail in November 2017 (Scott Eisen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
By June 2016, the FBI and the Justice Department were jointly weighing the question of how to reveal their decision in the midst of the presidential campaign. FBI and Justice officials had been discussing for weeks a major departure from the usual handling of a criminal inquiry that ended without charges.
The final interview, with Clinton herself, was scheduled for Saturday, July 2, at FBI headquarters. Agents planned to spend the next week completing a confidential memo detailing their findings, assuming nothing new materialized. Then, in accord with standard Justice Department procedure, the supervising prosecutors and agents, along with top officials from both the Justice Department and the FBI, would privately brief the attorney general, Loretta Lynch, on their recommendation against bringing charges. She would accept, closing the case.
Lynch was a widely respected 17-year Justice Department veteran who had previously served as the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, under President Bill Clinton and, then, President Obama. In April 2015, a Republican-controlled Senate confirmed her to replace Eric Holder as attorney general. The first African-American woman to serve as attorney general, Lynch was a graduate of Harvard Law School, the daughter of a librarian and a Baptist preacher and the sister of a Navy SEAL. She’d prosecuted corrupt politicians from both parties and was viewed as a career prosecutor, not a political figure. But the Trump campaign and conservative websites called her integrity into question. Any exoneration of Clinton, they said, would be tainted because Lynch was an Obama appointee.
So the Justice Department and the FBI together plotted an unusual strategy. Over weeks of meetings, they discussed a plan in which Comey and Lynch would appear together at a news conference. After announcing the FBI’s recommendation and the attorney general’s acceptance of it, they would affirm their mutual confidence in the thoroughness and integrity of the investigation. Given the public appetite for more information, officials also considered sending a limited summary of their findings to the inspector general for the intelligence community. He had referred the matter for investigation in the first place, and could choose to make the summary public.
“It hadn’t all been sketched out,” a former Justice Department official familiar with the matter told me. “But there were conversations about how it could go. There were these discussions between the buildings, leadership to leadership. Everyone knew how this rolled out was really important.”
Comey had his own ideas. Unbeknownst to his Justice Department colleagues, Comey had resolved to proceed alone with the announcement. Since May, he had been holding a parallel series of meetings with top FBI confidants to thrash through his plan. He would publicly announce — and explain — the Clinton decision without Lynch at his side. “We had discussions for months about what this looked like,” Michael Steinbach, who retired as the FBI’s executive assistant director for national security in February 2017, said. “This, for us, was the best course of action, given the political situation that we were in — for us to do it independently.”
As Comey saw it, according to Steinbach and others familiar with his thinking, the public doubted Lynch’s independence and would be less likely to accept the decision if she were involved in announcing it.
Comey and his aides had another motivation for acting alone. In their view, the American people were entitled to hear the investigators’ views of Clinton’s conduct, something they believed Lynch would not allow. Justice Department policies frown upon officials commenting on investigations, especially if they are making subjective remarks about people whom prosecutors have declined to charge. But with Election Day just four months away, FBI officials felt that it was essential to provide a fuller accounting “that allowed the American people to make an informed decision,” Steinbach said. “Our concern, as we got closer to the election, was to make sure that the American people understood we found no evidence of a crime but we did find evidence of misconduct.’’
FBI officials began drafting a lengthy statement that explained their recommendation not to prosecute but was, nevertheless, harshly critical of Clinton. “For the director to get that out, he’s either doing it alone or he’s not doing it,” Steinbach told me. “DOJ’s not going to let it happen.”
Then, on the evening of June 27, former President Bill Clinton and Lynch both happened to be on the tarmac at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, and the ex-president strode aboard her government plane. When news of the visit inevitably spilled out, both Lynch and Clinton insisted that they’d merely discussed golf and family matters during a 30-minute conversation.
For those who felt that the Obama administration was doing everything it could to help Hillary Clinton win, the encounter was conclusive proof. “SNAKES ON A PLANE,” the New York Post screamed. “Bill’s shady meeting taints probe.” Lynch declined to recuse herself from the case but said that she fully expected to accept whatever recommendation the FBI agents and career prosecutors made.
The tarmac episode reinforced Comey’s conviction to act on his own. The FBI interviewed Clinton the following Saturday, July 2. Justice Department officials settled in to wait for a draft of the FBI’s report.
Instead, at about 10:30 a.m. on July 5, Justice Department officials received an informal heads-up: In 30 minutes, Comey was going to hold a live televised press briefing at FBI headquarters. Before stepping in front of cameras, Comey sent an email to all FBI employees with a copy of his prepared remarks and an explanation of why he was speaking so freely and on his own. “I am doing that,” Comey wrote, “because I think the confidence of the American people in the FBI is a precious thing, and I want them to understand that we did this investigation in a competent, honest, and independent way.”
Moments later, Comey delivered what he called “an update on the FBI’s investigation.” He told reporters, “This is going to be an unusual statement in at least a couple of ways. First, I’m going to include more detail about our process than I ordinarily would, because I think the American people deserve those details in a case of intense public interest. And, second, I have not coordinated this statement or reviewed it in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what I’m about to say.”
Comey then described Clinton as “extremely careless” in handling “very sensitive, highly classified information.” As “any reasonable person” in her position “should have known,” Comey declared, a private, unclassified email server “was no place for that conversation.” Despite these statements, Comey concluded that, because there was no evidence of intentional misconduct or efforts to obstruct justice, “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
Late the following afternoon, Lynch met with the FBI director, agents and prosecutors for their formal briefing. In a two-sentence statement, the Justice Department announced that the attorney general had accepted their “unanimous recommendation.”
Partisan outrage was immediate. Conservative media and Trump surrogates accused Comey of protecting Clinton and preventing rank-and-file FBI agents from pursuing the truth. During nine hours of congressional hearings in which Comey elaborated further on his opinions of Clinton’s conduct, Republicans repeatedly questioned his reasoning for ending the investigation without charges.
Perhaps more worrisome to Comey was the rising discontent within the FBI. The retired assistant director James Kallstrom, a Trump backer who had run the New York field office from 1995 to 1997, became a fixture on Fox News and Fox Business, where he attacked Comey’s “nonsensical conclusion” in the Clinton probe and highlighted the “disgust” of “hundreds” of active and retired agents, including some “involved in this thing” who “feel like they’ve been stabbed in the back.” Kallstrom said, “I think we’re going to see a lot more of the facts come out in the course of the next few months. That’s my prediction.”
For their part, Justice Department officials were incredulous at Comey’s decision to proceed without them. On Tuesday, in his Comey memo, Rosenstein said that the FBI director was “wrong to usurp the Attorney General’s authority” by announcing “his own conclusions about the nation’s most sensitive criminal investigation.” He added, “It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement,” and “the Director ignored another longstanding principle: we do not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation.”
A recent report in The New York Times raised the prospect of another factor in Comey’s calculations. Early last year, another FBI investigative team had found a memo or email hacked by the Russians in which a Democratic operative expressed confidence that Lynch would protect Clinton. According to the Times, Comey worried that if Lynch were involved in the Clinton announcement and the Russians leaked the document, then voters would not trust the inquiry.
But Comey did not confront Lynch, demand that she recuse herself or raise the matter with the deputy attorney general, Sally Yates, former Justice Department officials told me. Instead, he sent an aide to confer with David Margolis, a respected senior Justice Department official, who has since died. Margolis never raised the issue with department leadership. Two former officials who have seen the document told me that it was never a real concern. Comey and his defenders, they insisted to me, are now engaged in “revisionist history.”
In May 2016, just as the FBI’s investigation into the Clinton emails was nearing its final stages, a young woman in Indiana named Sydney Leathers received a Facebook message from someone she did not know.
Three years earlier, Leathers had earned notoriety as Anthony Weiner’s most famous sexting partner. Leathers, then a 23-year-old college student, had come forward, at first anonymously, with details about her online relationship with the disgraced former congressman, who had gone by the screen name Carlos Danger. Leathers’s story inspired countless tabloid headlines and ended Weiner’s political comeback as a candidate for mayor of New York City. Leathers quickly cashed in, selling her story to tabloid media, letting “Inside Edition” record her cosmetic surgery makeover, starring in porn films and charging for phone sex and webcam services.
The messages Leathers received in 2016 were from someone who identified herself as a 15-year-old in North Carolina. The sender said she had been sexting with Weiner, but Leathers was skeptical. “I just thought it was a crazy person,” she told me.
Leathers changed her mind after the girl sent screen shots from months of exchanges with the former congressman. The teenager wanted to go public, but Leathers urged her to call the police instead. “I don’t claim to be a morality queen,” Leathers said. “I don’t care if he was sexting another adult. But, if it’s a child, it’s another story. I felt a little protective of her.”
After it became clear that the teenager was determined to tell her story, Leathers said she shifted to “damage control.”
“How can I at least make you some money?” she said she asked the teenager. “I basically said, ‘The only way you should do this is if they pay you.’ Certain outlets will pay you to talk, and I had made deals with a lot of them.” Leathers’ agent alerted dailymail.com, the online version of a British tabloid with which she’d previously done business. Both Leathers and the girl received a sizable fee; the teen’s father, an attorney, helped negotiate her payment.
On July 30, Leathers took another step. She had not communicated with Weiner for years, but she decided to send him a private Facebook message that amounted to a half-warning, half-scold:
“This is super awkward but you need to know something. There’s a 15-year-old girl named [redacted] messaging me and she’s claiming you guys sext and skyped. And that you know how old she is. For once I’m keeping my mouth shut. I want nothing to do with this. Frankly, I hope it isn’t true. But she showed me a screenshot that looks legit to me. How have you not learned your lesson? This is another level of fucked up. I suggested to her not to talk to the press so you’re welcome but you may want to refrain from messaging anyone under 18 for gods sake. If she is really someone you’ve been talking to, you better cut that off quickly. She’s talking about potentially messing with Hillary’s campaign. I am kind of pissed to be put in this situation to be honest.”
The Daily Mail story appeared on Sept. 21. The 2,200-word article was accompanied by dozens of screen captures, displaying half-clad photos and suggestive texts that Weiner had sent the teenager, a high school sophomore whose name was withheld. She told the Daily Mail that she had contacted Weiner, then 51, in late January 2016. During online video chats, she said, Weiner had invited her to undress and masturbate. She said he’d urged her to engage in “rape fantasies.” The girl’s father said that he’d learned of the relationship in April but did not alert the police because his child believed the relationship was “consensual” and “I didn’t want to exacerbate anything that she has mentally going on.” The article included four pictures of Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, including one of her with Hillary Clinton.
Abedin was perhaps Clinton’s closest aide, often described as a surrogate daughter. She had met Clinton in 1996, while she was a White House intern, and spent her entire adult life working for her. When Abedin married Weiner, in 2010, Bill Clinton officiated at the ceremony; the couple had a son a year later.
When the FBI began investigating the Clinton emails, in 2015, agents had taken special interest in Abedin because she was one of the four aides who served as conduits for most of Clinton’s State Department messages, screening them, forwarding them and printing them out for her boss. When agents interviewed Abedin on April 5, 2016, she told them that she had used Yahoo and state.gov accounts while working in the State Department, as well as an email address on Clinton’s private basement server, huma@clintonemail.com.
They asked Abedin what devices she used for email, at work and home, and whether she’d kept any archive. According to FBI notes of the interview, Abedin said that she had already turned over everything she had to the State Department. The agents did not ask to inspect any personal computers at her Manhattan apartment, where she lived with Weiner and their son. Her lawyer would later publicly insist that Abedin had no idea that her exchanges with Clinton were on his laptop. The couple has since separated.
The Daily Mail story raised the possibility of serious criminal charges for Weiner. If he had encouraged an underage female to take explicit photos or video of herself, he could be charged with producing child pornography, a felony that carries a minimum prison term of 15 years. FBI agents in New York immediately began investigating.
On Sept. 26, after federal prosecutors in New York obtained a search warrant, and the FBI collected Weiner’s iPhone, iPad and laptop. Agents began examining the computer — a silver, 15.6-inch 2015 Dell Inspiron 7000 — for any pictures, videos or other evidence involving Weiner’s teenage sexting partner. An agent sorting through the contents of the hard drive came across a jolting find: a State Department memo and some emails between Abedin and Hillary Clinton. The documents were not covered by the sex-crimes warrant, which meant that the FBI had no legal right to examine them.
The presidential election was five weeks away.
The agent went to the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for guidance. Prosecutors there wanted no part of the email case, which had been staffed by a special team of agents, FBI analysts, and Justice Department lawyers working out of FBI headquarters, in Washington. The New York prosecutors told the agent to seek advice from that team. They said nothing to their own bosses at Justice Department headquarters.
By Oct. 3, senior officials at the FBI — including Comey — had been alerted that the Weiner laptop contained an unknown number of Clinton emails. By this point, the email controversy had receded as an issue in the presidential race. Any news of the discovery would surely have profound consequences for the Clinton campaign, especially as the election drew ever closer. Yet, over the following three weeks, FBI agents proceeded unhurriedly with their investigation, on the premise that what they knew of the discovery was not, as one official put it to me, “investigatively significant.”
FBI officials decided not to share news of the new emails on the laptop with the Justice Department prosecutors who had worked with them on the Clinton case. A former high-ranking Justice Department official, who dealt frequently with the FBI, blamed the failure on institutional distrust. “There is a general tendency, with everything at the Bureau, to keep things inside the Bureau until they figure out what to do,” he told me.
Without the involvement of their Justice Department colleagues, the FBI eschewed options that might have expedited matters. Former Justice Department officials familiar with the case told me that the FBI’s failure to move more quickly in this phase of the investigation represented a serious blunder. “It probably would have helped to have the prosecutors on the investigation involved at the earliest moment,” the former high-ranking official told me.
A crucial question was whether the discovery of the first few emails and a State Department document was sufficient to obtain a new search warrant to locate and examine all the Clinton messages right away. The former federal magistrate judge John Facciola, now an adjunct law professor at Georgetown University, told me that he would have granted such a warrant request, even after the discovery of just a “handful” of Clinton emails. The FBI’s earlier investigation had revealed that some messages from the Clinton server contained improperly stored classified information, Facciola noted. “If the headers show transmittal from Clinton to Abedin, it follows as night to day that others bearing that header may also be classified, and we have a right to search. What more you need than that, I don’t know.”
Former Justice Department officials told me that they also could have sought consent from Weiner and Abedin to examine the emails without a warrant. Lawyers for both told me that they were never asked and would have readily acceded. FBI officials, who were not fond of consent agreements, reportedly did not do this because they worried that Weiner would have sought concessions on any sex-crime charges; lawyers familiar with the matter dismiss the notion that he had any bargaining leverage.
Officials at FBI headquarters instructed the New York agent examining Weiner’s hard drive for evidence of sex crimes to continue his work as before and to keep a log of any further Clinton emails he came across.
By all accounts, this phase of the process went slowly. The software that the Bureau used to inventory the contents of Weiner’s laptop kept crashing. It would take about ten days before agents were able to retrieve a complete record of the messages saved on the laptop, showing dates, senders and recipients. But, even then, the FBI did not immediately seek a warrant.
By mid-October, inside the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, the handful of officials who knew about the discovery of the Clinton emails were openly wondering what was going on. Any effort to obtain a second warrant would have to go through their office, and they had heard nothing.
On Friday, Oct. 21, Joon Kim, the deputy U.S. attorney for the Southern District, called an official in the deputy attorney general’s office at Justice Department headquarters to ask what was being done about the Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop. Recognizing the importance of the call, Kim wrote a memo noting it.
For Justice Department officials, the call was the first they’d heard of the emails. The following Monday, FBI and Justice Department lawyers finally gathered in Washington to discuss what to do. The New York agents had finished tabulating the emails between Abedin and Clinton, and they numbered in the thousands. FBI investigators who had been part of the Clinton inquiry decided that they were eager to examine the new emails.
Throughout their yearlong investigation, FBI investigators had been frustrated by their inability to locate all of Clinton’s emails, especially those sent during the first eight weeks of her tenure as secretary of state, a troubling gap in their records. Some of those now appeared to be on Weiner’s laptop, and they might reveal incriminating information about Clinton’s motivation in setting up the private server in the first place. Investigators recognized that, in all likelihood, the new emails would not change the decision to close the case without charges. Most were probably duplicates of what the FBI had already seen. It seemed improbable that agents would find written proof that Clinton intended to violate the law. Still, it seemed foolish not to examine the emails. The Justice Department lawyers readily agreed to seek a court order, leading Comey’s deputies to schedule a meeting with their boss on the morning of Oct. 27.
More than three weeks had passed from the time that Comey and his top deputies had been alerted to the initial discovery of Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop. Yet, in his congressional testimony, Comey described what he heard in his briefing that Thursday morning as a startling new development. “The Anthony Weiner thing landed on me on October 27 and there was a huge — this is what people forget — new step to be taken,” he said. “We may be finding the golden missing emails that would change this case. If I were not to speak about that, it would be a disastrous, catastrophic concealment.”
Comey immediately approved plans to seek a new warrant. Such warrants are typically obtained in secret before a magistrate judge and not made public, but Comey told his deputies that he wanted to send a letter to congressional leaders the next day.
Justice Department policies bar employees from interfering with elections and discourage taking any action that might be perceived as interference in the weeks before votes are cast. Election Day 2016 was less than two weeks off; early voting had already begun in 36 states.
Comey would justify his Oct. 28 disclosure as a matter of moral obligation: He’d told two congressional committees that the investigation was complete, and plans to review the new material meant that that was no longer true. Before Congress last week, he characterized his decision as a choice between “speak” and “conceal.”
In his memo released on Tuesday, Rosenstein scorned this characterization. “‘Conceal’ is a loaded term that misstates the issue,” he wrote. “When federal agents quietly open a criminal investigation, we are not concealing anything; we are simply following the longstanding policy that we refrain from publicizing non-public information. In that context, silence is not concealment.”
There was another motivation for Comey’s decision to “speak”: FBI officials feared that news of the new emails would leak out, damaging the Bureau and its director. The primary source of anxiety was the FBI’s own New York field office, which was handling the Weiner case and harbored deep pockets of anti-Clinton sentiment. New York agents had already been griping to the media about headquarters’ curbs on their investigation of the Clinton Foundation. Two prominent Trump surrogates with close local FBI ties — Kallstrom and Rudy Giuliani, a former U.S. Attorney and New York mayor — had for weeks been warning about agent fury over Comey’s decision in the email case. Lately, Giuliani had been chortling on Fox News about the Trump campaign’s plans for “some pretty big surprises” that “you’re going to hear about in the next few days.” (He would later claim that he had advance knowledge of the new emails.)
Comey and his aides had considered saying nothing about the discovery until agents could assess its significance, but only if their task would be completed by the election. “If we were of the belief we’d get through it before the election, we wouldn’t have said anything,” Steinbach said. But, given the number of Clinton-related messages on Weiner’s laptop (the FBI had identified 49,000 as “potentially relevant”), no one felt confident promising the FBI director that they could be examined in time. “I was thinking, I hope we can get this done in a couple of months,” Steinbach told me.
Mark Pollitt, a Syracuse University information studies professor who ran the FBI’s national computer forensics lab program during his career as a special agent, said that this mistaken judgment was likely born of excessive bureaucratic caution. “If you know this one’s going to go to the director and attorney general and maybe the president of the United States, we’re going to give them the worst-case scenario so we don’t get yelled at for dragging our feet,” he said. “I’m not going to say I can get it done in a particular time frame and then not make that deadline.”
This time, Comey decided to alert the Justice Department of his plans. Officials there tried vigorously to dissuade him from sending the letter. Heated discussions took place between a Comey deputy and an official in the deputy attorney general’s office, acting as surrogates for their bosses. The Justice official retrieved a transcript of Comey’s congressional testimony to point out that the director had never explicitly promised an update of every development in the case. Comey’s deputy acknowledged that this was the case but said the director’s view was that it didn’t matter; he had a “duty” to correct the “impression” he’d left that the FBI’s work was done. According to the former Justice official, Comey’s deputy also made clear that the FBI director was “very concerned” about a leak — that the news “was coming out anyway.”
The Justice official reminded Comey’s deputy about department policy regarding overt investigative steps before an election. Criticism was inevitable, he argued; the best defense was to consistently follow the normal process. The FBI’s response: “This one’s different.”
“This wasn’t a policy-position disagreement,’’ the former Justice Department official told me. “Comey felt this was his credibility on the line. He was the one who had testified before Congress. Their view is, ‘We get the policy and procedures. But he’s the one who had to personally suffer the fallout if he doesn’t update the Hill. It’s his ass in the sling.’”
Lynch and Yates had the power to order Comey not to send the letter. But Comey’s high-minded characterization of his “obligation” made that option seem perilous to senior Justice Department officials. If they gave Comey such an order, it wasn’t clear that he would comply. And if he did, there was a chance that it could be portrayed as the attorney general ordering the FBI director to hide information from Congress. None of that would play well, especially in the aftermath of the tarmac incident. So the Justice Department officials stuck to pleading through staff.
Comey deliberated with his deputies into Thursday night about exactly what to say, generating multiple drafts of his letter. The first ran just two sentences; later versions offered far more detail, then somewhat less, as Comey and his staff struggled to find the right balance. Steinbach joined a conference call about the language while shopping for Halloween pumpkins in Virginia with his daughter. “The intention was to write a statement that was as politically neutral as possible — that did not allow for incorrect inference,” one person familiar with the situation told me. Predictably, that would prove impossible.
During a conference call the next morning with a half-dozen participants, FBI officials read portions of their draft to their Justice Department counterparts, who argued that the letter was certain to be used to political advantage by Trump. They urged Comey to add language that made clear that the director was making the disclosure because of the obligation he felt from his testimony, not because of the gravity of the discovery — and that the emails had been found on the laptop of an aide’s husband, not in Clinton’s possession.
Comey declined to make any changes. He dispatched his three-paragraph letter to 16 congressional leaders shortly before noon on Friday, Oct. 28. It disclosed the discovery of new Clinton emails “that appear to be pertinent,” as well as plans to “assess their importance,” before noting, “The FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work.”
Comey explained his actions more fully in an email to FBI staff:
“Of course, we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. At the same time, however, given that we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression. In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter and in the middle of an election season, there is significant risk of being misunderstood.”
The J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, D.C., headquarters of the FBI. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Within hours, “law enforcement officials” disclosed to the press that the “unrelated case” was the Weiner sexting investigation. Trump, who’d previously been bashing Comey, celebrated the news at a New Hampshire rally. Clinton’s “corruption is on a scale we have never seen before,” he declared, amid chants of “Lock her up!” “We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office.” Democrats, who had praised Comey since July, were outraged. A Clinton spokesman blamed Comey for “unleashing a wildfire of innuendo.”
Clinton’s campaign set up a war room at its Brooklyn headquarters to respond to the news. The campaign highlighted an open letter signed by 99 former Justice Department officials from both parties who declared that they were “astonished and perplexed” by Comey’s actions. “The strategy was not to debate what Comey had done,” the Clinton pollster Joel Benenson told me. “The strategy was to aggressively discredit his actions with these bipartisan prosecutors.”
As the campaign — and debate over Comey’s actions — churned on, the FBI faced enormous pressure to complete its review of the new emails before Election Day, on Nov. 8. The government obtained its search warrant on Sunday, Oct. 30, two days after Comey’s letter, and agents immediately began scouring a copy of Weiner’s hard drive, which an agent had already carried to Washington from New York.
Exactly how thousands of Clinton emails ended up on Weiner’s laptop remains somewhat mysterious. In his testimony last week, Comey said that Abedin had forwarded “hundreds and thousands” of emails — including some containing classified information — to her husband’s email account, so that Weiner could print out the messages for delivery to Clinton. But two sources familiar with the matter told me that Abedin forwarded only a handful of Clinton emails to her husband for printing. Most of the old Clinton messages found on the laptop trace to backups of Abedin’s BlackBerry, which might have been first stored on a desktop computer at the couple’s home before ending up on Weiner’s laptop inadvertently, as part of a bulk transfer of old files. After Abedin’s lawyer and I pressed the FBI to clarify the matter, and I wrote an article about it, the Bureau released a letter correcting Comey’s testimony.
FBI agents had told their bosses that reviewing the new emails would take them well past Election Day. But, as the 10-member team began working around the clock, the process quickly accelerated. The FBI agents rapidly ruled out huge batches of messages that weren’t work-related, “de-duped” thousands of emails they’d seen before, and isolated the relative few — about 6,000, according to Comey — that required individual scrutiny. Potentially classified emails went to analysts for review.
Midway through a final all-night push, on Saturday, Nov. 5, two agents left FBI headquarters for a pizza-and-soda run. Outside, they found lime-green spray-painted graffiti near the building’s main entrance, some of it covering the FBI seal. It read “ASSHOLE” and “CORRUPT.”
At about 2:30 a.m. on Sunday, the FBI agents finished their work, and the team’s leader dispatched a message to their bosses. They had found new State Department messages but none, after all, from the missing period at the start of Clinton’s term, and nothing that suggested a criminal motive. Twelve email threads contained classified information; none of them were new.
That afternoon, Comey wrote to Congress again, revealing that the FBI had completed its review without finding anything to change the conclusions that he had announced back in July.
The days after Comey’s revelation had been devastating to Clinton’s campaign. “Comey put a hole through the wall, and Trump drove a Mack truck through it,” Benenson told me. The news dominated the home-stretch coverage; even the announcement that the review was over didn’t help. “You are in no good position at that point,” Benenson said. “Any discussion of emails and investigations is going to be a losing proposition.”
Trump’s campaign made the most of the Comey letter. “Decades of lies, coverups, and scandal have finally caught up with Hillary Clinton,” a new Trump TV ad intoned. “Hillary Clinton is under FBI investigation again, after her emails were found on pervert Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Think about that! America’s most sensitive secrets, unlawfully sent, received and exposed by Hillary Clinton, her staff, and Anthony Weiner. Hillary cannot lead a nation while crippled by a criminal investigation!”
“The Trump campaign was using it to the hilt,” Benenson said. “They took Comey’s statement, and they drove it. The most effective thing they did with it is to say, ‘This will never end. If she’s president, it will never end.’”
The “Comey effect” set in quickly. In a uniquely volatile electorate, enamored of neither candidate, weighing Trump’s temperament versus Clinton’s ethics, many of those who had finally been ready to vote for the Democrat fled. Her numbers slipped in key states. “It was enough of a lingering concern that at the end they said, ‘Screw it. I’m not going to vote for her,’” Benenson said. “They went with the third-party candidate or stayed home.”
Many analysts concluded that Comey’s actions tilted the presidency to Trump. Nate Silver, the polling guru at the website FiveThirtyEight, said that Comey’s letter produced a swing of about three points in the popular vote in the handful of states that won Trump the presidency. In a post-campaign interview, the Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio put it this way: “When you really drill down on this election, if you change the vote in five counties, four in Florida, one in Michigan, we’d be having a totally opposite conversation right now.”
FBI officials remain bitter at how Clinton and her supporters have blamed them for Trump’s election. “I don’t find it credible,” Steinbach said. “It’s a mess she helped create from start to finish, with start being when she elected to use a private server. Even if you were to assume the investigation influenced the election, her actions created the environment. You can second-guess how it played out. But our guiding principle was to protect the American people and the Constitution of the United States.”
In January, the Justice Department’s inspector general announced that he would review charges that Comey’s public disclosures about the Clinton investigation violated department policies. Comey issued a statement saying that he welcomed “thoughtful evaluation and transparency” on the matter. Some of Comey’s friends and colleagues had weighed making public a letter of support for him, before eventually deciding against it. In conversations with reporters, they began seeking to explain his actions.
Some of the most withering criticism of Comey focused on his refusal, before the election, to disclose the FBI’s investigation into the possibility of collusion between the Russian government and Trump associates — even as he spoke at length about Clinton’s emails. In late March, quoting two anonymous sources, Newsweek reported that Comey had actually wanted to talk about the Russian political meddling, through a personal, bylined newspaper column, but the White House had blocked him from doing so. People familiar with the matter told me that the Obama administration had wanted to respond in a more direct way, through an official finding. That came on Oct. 7, through a statement about Russian hacking from the secretary of Homeland Security and the director of National Intelligence. Comey declined to be included on the statement, telling administration officials that he believed it was too close to the election.
During conversations I had with Richman, he began to hint at something in the Russian email hack that had influenced Comey’s decision to go it alone with his July 5 announcement on the Clinton inquiry. “It’s not just the stupid tarmac visit,” he told me in late February 2017. “You don’t get to always defend yourself when you’re in his position.” Two months later, the The New York Times disclosed the existence of the document claiming that Lynch would protect Clinton.
Last week, Comey finally got his chance to defend himself. Called before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he offered an emotional account of his handling of the email investigation but then made his misstatement about Abedin forwarding “hundreds and thousands” of emails to Weiner. This week, after FBI officials clarified the issue, I asked the Bureau another question: Why hadn’t agents, who had access to Abedin’s emails and could, presumably, see that she had forwarded two classified messages to her husband, taken the opportunity to examine his laptop much earlier, as part of the original email inquiry? If they had done so, what ensued in October might never have happened. The FBI declined to comment.
On Wednesday, in a farewell letter emailed to Bureau employees, Comey said he was not dwelling on his firing and urged his former colleagues not to, either. “I have long believed that a President can fire an FBI Director for any reason, or for no reason at all,” Comey wrote. “I have said to you before that, in times of turbulence, the American people should see the FBI as a rock of competence, honesty, and independence.”
Peter Elkind worked for 20 years at Fortune magazine as an investigative reporter. He is co-author of The Smartest Guys in the Room, an examination of the Enron collapse.
The U.S. has the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world, and 60 percent are preventable. The death of Lauren Bloomstein, a neonatal nurse, in the hospital where she worked illustrates a profound disparity: The health care system focuses on babies but often ignores their mothers.
As a neonatal intensive care nurse, Lauren Bloomstein had been taking care of other people’s babies for years. Finally, at 33, she was expecting one of her own. The prospect of becoming a mother made her giddy, her husband Larry recalled recently — “the happiest and most alive I’d ever seen her.” When Lauren was 13, her own mother had died of a massive heart attack. Lauren had lived with her older brother for a while, then with a neighbor in Hazlet, New Jersey, who was like a surrogate mom, but in important ways she’d grown up mostly alone. The chance to create her own family, to be the mother she didn’t have, touched a place deep inside her. “All she wanted to do was be loved,” said Frankie Hedges, who took Lauren in as a teenager and thought of her as her daughter. “I think everybody loved her, but nobody loved her the way she wanted to be loved.”
Other than some nausea in her first trimester, the pregnancy went smoothly. Lauren was “tired in the beginning, achy in the end,” said Jackie Ennis, her best friend since high school, who talked to her at least once a day. “She gained what she’s supposed to. She looked great, she felt good, she worked as much as she could” — at least three 12-hour shifts a week until late into her ninth month. Larry, a doctor, helped monitor her blood pressure at home, and all was normal.
On her days off she got organized, picking out strollers and car seats, stocking up on diapers and onesies. After one last pre-baby vacation to the Caribbean, she and Larry went hunting for their forever home, settling on a brick colonial with black shutters and a big yard in Moorestown, not far from his new job as an orthopedic trauma surgeon in Camden. Lauren wanted the baby’s gender to be a surprise, so when she set up the nursery she left the walls unpainted — she figured she’d have plenty of time to choose colors later. Despite all she knew about what could go wrong, she seemed untroubled by the normal expectant-mom anxieties. Her only real worry was going into labor prematurely. “You have to stay in there at least until 32 weeks,” she would tell her belly. “I see how the babies do before 32. Just don’t come out too soon.”
When she reached 39 weeks and six days — Friday, Sept. 30, 2011 — Larry and Lauren drove to Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, the hospital where the two of them had met in 2004 and where she’d spent virtually her entire career. If anyone would watch out for her and her baby, Lauren figured, it would be the doctors and nurses she worked with on a daily basis. She was especially fond of her obstetrician-gynecologist, who had trained as a resident at Monmouth at the same time as Larry. Lauren wasn’t having contractions, but she and the OB-GYN agreed to schedule an induction of labor — he was on call that weekend and would be sure to handle the delivery himself.
Inductions often go slowly, and Lauren’s labor stretched well into the next day. Ennis talked to her on the phone several times: “She said she was feeling okay, she was just really uncomfortable.” At one point, Lauren was overcome by a sudden, sharp pain in her back near her kidneys or liver, but the nurses bumped up her epidural and the stabbing stopped.
Inductions have been associated with higher cesarean-section rates, but Lauren progressed well enough to deliver vaginally. On Saturday, Oct. 1, at 6:49 p.m., 23 hours after she checked into the hospital, Hailey Anne Bloomstein was born, weighing 5 pounds, 12 ounces. Larry and Lauren’s family had been camped out in the waiting room; now they swarmed into the delivery area to ooh and aah, marveling at how Lauren seemed to glow.
Larry floated around on his own cloud of euphoria, phone camera in hand. In one 35-second video, Lauren holds their daughter on her chest, stroking her cheek with a practiced touch. Hailey is bundled in hospital-issued pastels and flannel, unusually alert for a newborn; she studies her mother’s face as if trying to make sense of a mystery that will never be solved. The delivery room staff bustles in the background in the low-key way of people who believe everything has gone exactly as it’s supposed to.
Then Lauren looks directly at the camera, her eyes brimming.
Twenty hours later, she was dead.
The ability to protect the health of mothers and babies in childbirth is a basic measure of a society’s development. Yet every year in the U.S., 700 to 900 women die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes, and some 65,000 nearly die — by many measures, the worst record in the developed world.
American women are more than three times as likely as Canadian women to die in the maternal period (defined by the Centers for Disease Control as the start of pregnancy to one year after delivery or termination), six times as likely to die as Scandinavians. In every other wealthy country, and many less affluent ones, maternal mortality rates have been falling; in Great Britain, the journal Lancet recently noted, the rate has declined so dramatically that “a man is more likely to die while his partner is pregnant than she is.” But in the U.S., maternal deaths increased from 2000 to 2014. In a recent analysis by the CDC Foundation, nearly 60 percent of such deaths were preventable.
While maternal mortality is significantly more common among African Americans, low-income women and in rural areas, pregnancy and childbirth complications kill women of every race and ethnicity, education and income level, in every part of the U.S. ProPublica and NPR spent the last several months scouring social media and other sources, ultimately identifying more than 450 expectant and new mothers who have died since 2011. The list includes teachers, insurance brokers, homeless women, journalists, a spokeswoman for Yellowstone National Park, a co-founder of the YouTube channel WhatsUpMoms, and more than a dozen doctors and nurses like Lauren Bloomstein. They died from cardiomyopathy and other heart problems, massive hemorrhage, blood clots, infections and pregnancy-induced hypertension (preeclampsia) as well as rarer causes. Many died days or weeks after leaving the hospital. Maternal mortality is commonplace enough that three new mothers who died, including Lauren, were cared for by the same OB-GYN.
The reasons for higher maternal mortality in the U.S. are manifold. New mothers are older than they used to be, with more complex medical histories. Half of pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned, so many women don’t address chronic health issues beforehand. Greater prevalence of C-sections leads to more life-threatening complications. The fragmented health system makes it harder for new mothers, especially those without good insurance, to get the care they need. Confusion about how to recognize worrisome symptoms and treat obstetric emergencies makes caregivers more prone to error.
Maternal Mortality Is Rising in the U.S. As It Declines Elsewhere
Yet the worsening U.S. maternal mortality numbers contrast sharply with the impressive progress in saving babies’ lives. Infant mortality has fallen to its lowest point in history, the CDC reports, reflecting 50 years of efforts by the public health community to prevent birth defects, reduce preterm birth and improve outcomes for very premature infants. The number of babies who die annually in the U.S. — about 23,000 in 2014 — still greatly exceeds the number of expectant and new mothers who die, but the ratio is narrowing.
The divergent trends for mothers and babies highlight a theme that has emerged repeatedly in ProPublica’s and NPR’s reporting. In recent decades, under the assumption that it had conquered maternal mortality, the American medical system has focused more on fetal and infant safety and survival than on the mother’s health and well-being.
At the federally funded Maternal-Fetal Medicine Units Network, the preeminent obstetric research collaborative in the U.S., only four of the 34 initiatives listed in its online database primarily target mothers, versus 24 aimed at improving outcomes for infants (the remainder address both). Under the Title V federal-state program supporting maternal and child health, states devoted about 6 percent of block grants in 2016 to programs for mothers, compared to 78 percent for infants and special-needs children. The notion that babies deserve more care than mothers is similarly enshrined in the Medicaid program, which pays for about 45 percent of births. In many states, the program covers moms for 60 days postpartum, their infants for a full year. The bill to replace the Affordable Care Act, adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this month, could gut Medicaid for mothers and babies alike.
At the provider level, advances in technology have widened the gap between maternal and fetal and infant care. “People became really enchanted with the ability to do ultrasound, and then high-resolution ultrasound, to do invasive procedures, to stick needles in the amniotic cavity,” said William Callaghan, chief of the CDC’s Maternal and Infant Health Branch.
The growing specialty of maternal-fetal medicine drifted so far toward care of the fetus that as recently as 2012, young doctors who wanted to work in the field didn’t have to spend time learning to care for birthing mothers. “The training was quite variable across the U.S.,” said Mary D’Alton, chair of OB-GYN at Columbia University Medical Center and author of papers on disparities in care for mothers and infants. “There were some fellows that could finish their maternal-fetal medicine training without ever being in a labor and delivery unit.”
In the last decade or so, at least 20 hospitals have established multidisciplinary fetal care centers for babies at high risk for a variety of problems. So far, only one hospital in the U.S. — New York-Presbyterian — has a similar program for high-risk moms-to-be.
In regular maternity wards, too, babies are monitored more closely than mothers during and after birth, maternal health advocates told ProPublica and NPR. Newborns in the slightest danger are whisked off to neonatal intensive care units like the one Lauren Bloomstein worked at, staffed by highly trained specialists ready for the worst, while their mothers are tended by nurses and doctors who expect things to be fine and are often unprepared when they aren’t.
When women are discharged, they routinely receive information about how to breastfeed and what to do if their newborn is sick but not necessarily how to tell if they need medical attention themselves. “It was only when I had my own child that I realized, ‘Oh my goodness. That was completely insufficient information,’” said Elizabeth Howell, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. “The way that we’ve been trained, we do not give women enough information for them to manage their health postpartum. The focus had always been on babies and not on mothers.”
In 2009, the Joint Commission, which accredits 21,000 health care facilities in the U.S., adopted a series of perinatal “core measures” — national standards that have been shown to reduce complications and improve patient outcomes. Four of the measures are aimed at making sure the baby is healthy. One — bringing down the C-section rate — addresses maternal health.
Meanwhile, life-saving practices that have become widely accepted in other affluent countries — and in a few states, notably California — have yet to take hold in many American hospitals. Take the example of preeclampsia, a type of high blood pressure that only occurs in pregnancy or the postpartum period, and can lead to seizures and strokes. Around the world, it kills an estimated five women an hour. But in developed countries, it is highly treatable. The key is to act quickly.
By standardizing its approach, Britain has reduced preeclampsia deaths to one in a million — a total of two deaths from 2012 to 2014. In the U.S., on the other hand, preeclampsia still accounts for about 8 percent of maternal deaths — 50 to 70 women a year. Including Lauren Bloomstein.
When Lauren McCarthy Bloomstein was a teenager in the 1990s, a neighbor who worked for a New York publishing firm approached her about modeling for a series of books based on Louisa May Alcott’s classic “Little Women.” Since her mother’s death, Lauren had become solitary and shy; she loved to read, but she decided she wasn’t interested. “Are you kidding? Go do it!” Frankie Hedges insisted. “That would be fabulous!” Lauren relented, and the publisher cast her as the eldest March sister, Meg. She appeared on the covers of four books, looking very much the proper 19th-century young lady with her long brown hair parted neatly down the middle and a string of pearls around her neck. The determined expression on her face, though, was pure Lauren. “She didn’t want sympathy, she didn’t want pity,” Jackie Ennis said. “She wasn’t one to talk much about her feelings [about] her mom. She looked at it as this is what she was dealt and she’s gonna do everything in her power to become a productive person.”
In high school, Lauren decided her path lay in nursing, and she chose a two-year program at Brookdale Community College. She worked at a doctor’s office to earn money for tuition and lived in the garage apartment that Hedges and her husband had converted especially for her, often helping out with their young twin sons. Lauren “wasn’t a real mushy person,” Hedges said. “She wasn’t the type to say things like ‘I love you. ’” But she clearly relished being part of a family again. “You can’t believe how happy she is,” Ennis once told Hedges. “We’ll be out and she’ll say, ‘Oh, I have to go home for dinner!’”
After graduating in 2002, Lauren landed at Monmouth Medical Center, a sprawling red-brick complex a few minutes from the ocean that is part of the RWJBarnabas Health system and a teaching affiliate of Philadelphia’s Drexel University College of Medicine. Her first job was in the medical surgical unit, where her clinical skills and work ethic soon won accolades. “I cannot remember too many healthcare employees that I respect as much as Lauren,” Diane Stanaway, then Monmouth’s clinical director of nursing, wrote in a 2005 commendation. “What a dynamite young lady and nurse!” When a top hospital executive needed surgery, Larry recalled, he paid Lauren the ultimate compliment, picking her as one of two private-duty nurses to help oversee his care.
Larry Bloomstein, who joined the unit as an orthopedic surgical resident in 2004, was dazzled, too. He liked her independent streak — “She didn’t feel the need to rely on anyone else for anything” — and her levelheadedness. Even performing CPR on a dying patient, Lauren “had a calmness about her,” Larry said. He thought her tough upbringing “gave her a sense of confidence. She didn’t seem to worry about small things.” Lauren, meanwhile, told Ennis, “I met this guy. He’s a doctor, and he’s very kind.” Their first date was a Bruce Springsteen concert; five years later they married on Long Beach Island, on the Jersey shore.
Larry and Lauren Bloomstein met at the hospital in 2004. He liked that she was feisty and independent yet had “a calmness about her.” She told her best friend he was “very kind.” They married five years later. (Courtesy of Larry Bloomstein)
One of Lauren’s favorite books was “The Catcher in the Rye” — “she related to the Holden Caulfield character rescuing kids,” Larry said. When a spot opened at Monmouth’s elite neonatal intensive care unit in 2006, she jumped at it.
The hospital has the fifth-busiest maternity department in the state, delivering 5,449 babies in 2016. Monmouth earned an “A” grade from Leapfrog, a nonprofit that promotes safety in health care, and met full safety standards in critical areas of maternity care, such as rates of C-sections, and early elective deliveries, a hospital spokeswoman said. Its NICU, a Level III facility for high-risk newborns, is the oldest in New Jersey.
“With NICU nursing, it’s one of those things either you get it or you don’t,” said Katy DiBernardo, a 20-year veteran of the unit. “The babies are little, and a lot of people aren’t used to seeing a teeny tiny baby.” The NICU staff included nurses, neonatologists, a respiratory therapist and residents. Lauren, DiBernardo said, “just clicked.”
One of the things Lauren liked best about her work was the bonds she formed with babies’ families. Nurses followed the same newborns throughout their stay, sometimes for weeks or months. She was a touchstone for parents — very good at “calming people down who have a lot of anxiety,” Larry said —and often stayed in contact long after the babies went home, meeting the moms for coffee and even babysitting on occasion.
She also cherished the deep friendships that a place like the NICU forged. The neonatal floor was like a world unto itself, Lauren Byron, another longtime nurse there, explained: “There’s a lot of stress and pressure, and you are in life-and-death situations. You develop a very close relationship with some people.” The environment tended to attract very strong personalities. Lauren’s nickname in the Bloomstein family football pool was “The Feisty One,” so she fit right in. But she could stand her ground without alienating anyone. “She was one of those people that everyone liked,” Byron said.
Another person everyone liked was OB-GYN John Vaclavik. He had come to Monmouth as a resident in 2004, around the same time as Larry, after earning his bachelor’s from Loyola College in Baltimore and his medical degree at St. George’s University on the island of Grenada. Medicine was the family profession: Two uncles and two brothers also became doctors and his wife was a perinatal social worker at the hospital. Lauren and her colleagues thought he was “very personable” and “a great guy,” Larry said.
“She was good friends with my wife and she felt comfortable with me,” Vaclavik would recall in a 2015 court deposition.
After his residency, Vaclavik joined Ocean Obstetric & Gynecologic Associates, a thriving practice that counted numerous medical professionals among its clients. Vaclavik was a “laborist” — part of a movement that aimed to reduce the number of C-sections, which tend to have more difficult recoveries and more complications than vaginal births. In a state with a C-section rate of 37 percent, Monmouth’s rate in 2016 was just 21 percent.
The neonatal nurses had plenty of opportunity to observe Vaclavik and other OB-GYNs in action — someone from NICU was called to attend every delivery that showed signs of being complicated or unusual as well as every C-section. “We always laughed, ‘They’ll call us for a hangnail,’” DiBernardo said. Lauren was so impressed by Vaclavik that she not only chose him as her own doctor, she recommended him to her best friend. “She kept saying, ‘You have to go to this guy. He’s a good doctor. Good doctor,’” Ennis said.
In other ways, though, the NICU staff and the labor and delivery staff were very separate. The neonatal nurses were focused on their own fragile patients — the satisfaction that came from helping them grow strong enough to go home, the grief when that didn’t happen. Once Ennis asked Lauren, “How do you deal with babies that don’t make it? That’s got to be so bad.” Lauren replied, “Yeah, but we save more than we lose.”
Loss was less common in labor and delivery, and when a new mother suffered life-threatening complications, the news did not always reach the NICU floor. Thus, when a 29-year-old special education teacher named Tara Hansen contracted a grisly infection a few days after giving birth to her first child in March 2011, the tragedy didn’t register with Lauren, who was then three months pregnant herself.
Hansen lived in nearby Freehold, New Jersey, with her husband, Ryan, her high school sweetheart. Her pregnancy, like Lauren’s, had been textbook perfect, and she delivered a healthy 9-pound son. But Hansen suffered tearing near her vagina during childbirth. She developed signs of infection but was discharged anyway, a lawsuit by her husband later alleged.
Hansen was soon readmitted to Monmouth with what the lawsuit called “excruciating, severe pain beyond the capacity of a human being to endure.” The diagnosis was necrotizing fasciitis, commonly known as flesh-eating bacteria; two days later Hansen was dead. One of Vaclavik’s colleagues delivered Hansen’s baby; Vaclavik himself authorized her discharge. According to court documents, he said nurses failed to inform him about Hansen’s symptoms and that if he’d known her vital signs weren’t stable, he wouldn’t have released her. The hospital and nurses eventually settled for $1.5 million. The suit against Vaclavik and his colleagues is pending.
Vaclavik did not respond to several interview requests from ProPublica and NPR, including an emailed list of questions. “Due to the fact this matter is in litigation,” his attorney responded, “Dr. Vaclavik respectfully declines to comment.”
Citing patient privacy, Monmouth spokeswoman Elizabeth Brennan also declined to discuss specific cases. “We are saddened by the grief these families have experienced from their loss,” she said in a statement.
Monmouth Medical Center delivered 5,449 babies in 2016. Lauren Bloomstein was a nurse in its neonatal intensive care unit.
(Bryan Anselm for ProPublica)
Larry Bloomstein’s first inkling that something was seriously wrong with Lauren came about 90 minutes after she gave birth. He had accompanied Hailey up to the nursery to be weighed and measured and given the usual barrage of tests for newborns. Lauren hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but he returned to find her dinner tray untouched. “I don’t feel good,” she told him. She pointed to a spot above her abdomen and just below her sternum, close to where she’d felt the stabbing sensation during labor. “I’ve got pain that’s coming back.”
Larry had been at Lauren’s side much of the previous 24 hours. Conscious that his role was husband rather than doctor, he had tried not to overstep. Now, though, he pressed Vaclavik: What was the matter with his wife? “He was like, ‘I see this a lot. We do a lot of belly surgery. This is definitely reflux,’” Larry recalled. According to Lauren’s records, the OB-GYN ordered an antacid called Bicitra and an opioid painkiller called Dilaudid. Lauren vomited them up.
Lauren’s pain was soon 10 on a scale of 10, she told Larry and the nurses; so excruciating, the nurses noted, “Patient [is] unable to stay still.” Just as ominously, her blood pressure was spiking. An hour after Hailey’s birth, the reading was 160/95; an hour after that, 169/108. At her final prenatal appointment, her reading had been just 118/69. Obstetrics wasn’t Larry’s specialty, but he knew enough to ask the nurse: Could this be preeclampsia?
Preeclampsia, or pregnancy-related hypertension, is a little-understood condition that affects 3 percent to 5 percent of expectant or new mothers in the U.S., up to 200,000 women a year. It can strike anyone out of the blue, though the risk is higher for African Americans, women with pre-existing conditions such as obesity, diabetes or kidney disease, and mothers over the age of 40. It is most common during the second half of pregnancy, but can develop in the days or weeks after childbirth, and can become very dangerous very quickly. Because a traditional treatment for preeclampsia is to deliver as soon as possible, the babies are often premature and end up in NICUs like the one where Lauren worked.
As Larry suspected, Lauren’s blood pressure readings were well past the danger point. What he didn’t know was that they’d been abnormally high since she entered the hospital— 147/99, according to her admissions paperwork. During labor, she had 21 systolic readings at or above 140 and 13 diastolic readings at or above 90, her records indicated; for a stretch of almost eight hours, her blood pressure wasn’t monitored at all, the New Jersey Department of Health later found. Over that same period, their baby’s vital signs were being constantly watched, Larry said.
In his deposition, Vaclavik described the 147/99 reading as “elevated” compared to her usual readings, but not abnormal. He “would use 180 over 110 as a cutoff” to suspect preeclampsia, he said. Still, he acknowledged, Lauren’s blood pressure “might have been recommended to be monitored more closely, in retrospect.”
Leading medical organizations in the U.S. and the U.K. take a different view. They advise that increases to 140/90 for pregnant women with no previous history of high blood pressure signify preeclampsia. When systolic readings hit 160, treatment with anti-hypertensive drugs and magnesium sulfate to prevent seizures “should be initiated ASAP,” according to guidelines from the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health. When other symptoms, such as upper abdominal (epigastric) pain, are present, the situation is considered even more urgent.
This basic approach isn’t new: “Core Curriculum for Maternal-Newborn Nursing,” a widely-used textbook, outlined it in 1997. Yet failure to diagnose preeclampsia, or to differentiate it from chronic high blood pressure, is all too common.
California researchers who studied preeclampsia deaths over several years found one striking theme: “Despite triggers that clearly indicated a serious deterioration in the patient’s condition, health care providers failed to recognize and respond to these signs in a timely manner, leading to delays in diagnosis and treatment.” Preeclampsia symptoms — swelling and rapid weight gain, gastric discomfort and vomiting, headache and anxiety — are often mistaken for the normal irritations that crop up during pregnancy or after giving birth. “We don’t have a yes-no test for it,” said Eleni Tsigas, executive director of the Preeclampsia Foundation. “A lot of physicians don’t necessarily see a lot of it.” Outdated notions — for example, that delivering the baby cures the condition — unfamiliarity with best practices and lack of crisis preparation can further hinder the response.
The fact that Lauren gave birth over the weekend may also have worked against her. Hospitals may be staffed differently on weekends, adding to the challenges of managing a crisis. A new Baylor College of Medicine analysis of 45 million pregnancies in the U.S. from 2004 to 2014 found mothers who deliver on Saturday or Sunday have nearly 50 percent higher mortality rates as well as more blood transfusions and more perineal tearing. The “weekend effect” has also been associated with higher fatality rates from heart attacks, strokes and head trauma.
According to Lauren’s records, Vaclavik did order a preeclampsia lab test around 8:40 p.m., but a nurse noted a half-hour later: “No abnormal labs present.” (According to Larry, the results were borderline.) Larry began pushing to call in a specialist. Vaclavik attributed Lauren’s pain to esophagitis, or inflammation of the esophagus, which had afflicted her before, he said in his deposition. Around 10 p.m., according to Lauren’s medical records, he phoned the on-call gastroenterologist, who ordered an X-ray and additional tests, more Dilaudid and different antacids — Maalox and Protonix. Nothing helped.
Meanwhile, Larry decided to reach out to his own colleagues in the trauma unit at Cooper University Hospital in Camden. In his training, perhaps the most important lesson he’d learned was to ask for help: “If there’s a problem, I will immediately get another physician involved.” By chance, the doctor on call happened to be a fairly new mother. As Larry described Lauren’s symptoms, she interrupted him. “You can stop talking. I know what this is.” She said Lauren had HELLP syndrome, an acronym for the most severe variation of preeclampsia, characterized by hemolysis, or the breakdown of red blood cells; elevated liver enzymes; and low platelet count, a clotting deficiency that can lead to excessive bleeding and hemorrhagic stroke.
Larry’s colleague urged him to stop wasting time, he recalled. Lauren’s very high blood pressure, the vomiting, and the terrible pain radiating from her kidneys and liver were symptoms of rapid deterioration. “Your wife’s in a lot of danger,” the trauma doctor said. (She didn’t respond to ProPublica’s and NPR’s requests for comment.)
Earlier this year, an analysis by the CDC Foundation of maternal mortality data from four states identified more than 20 “critical factors” that contributed to pregnancy-related deaths. Among the ones involving providers: lack of standardized policies, inadequate clinical skills, failure to consult specialists and poor coordination of care. The average maternal death had 3.7 critical factors.
“It’s never just one thing,” said Roberta Gold, a member of the Council on Patient Safety in Women’s Health Care, whose daughter and unborn grandson died from a pregnancy-related blood clot in 2010. “It’s always a cascading combination of things. It’s a slow-motion train wreck.”
The last 16 hours of Lauren’s life were consistent with that grim pattern. Distressed by what the trauma doctor had told him, Larry immediately went to Lauren’s caregivers. But they insisted the tests didn’t show preeclampsia, he said. Not long after, Larry’s colleague called back to check on Lauren’s condition. “I don’t believe those labs,” he recalls her telling him. “They can’t be right. I’m positive of my diagnosis. Do them again.’”
Meanwhile, Lauren’s agony had become almost unendurable. The blood pressure cuff on her arm was adding to her discomfort, so around 10:30 p.m. her nurse decided to remove it — on the theory, Larry said, “We know her blood pressure is high. There’s no point to retaking it.” According to Lauren’s records, her blood pressure went unmonitored for another hour and 44 minutes.
Larry had given up on getting a specialist to come to the hospital so late on a Saturday night, but he persuaded Vaclavik to call in a general surgical resident. Around 11:55 p.m., according to the nurses’ notes, Lauren begged, “Do anything to stop this pain.” Vaclavik prescribed morphine, to little effect.
Just after midnight, her blood pressure about to peak at 197/117, Lauren began complaining of a headache. As Larry studied his wife’s face, he realized something had changed. “She suddenly looks really calm and comfortable, like she’s trying to go to sleep.” She gave Larry a little smile, but only the right side of her mouth moved.
In an instant, Larry’s alarm turned to panic. He ordered Lauren, “Lift your hands for me.” Only her right arm fluttered. He peeled off her blankets and scraped the soles of her feet with his fingernail, testing her so-called Babinski reflex; in an adult whose brain is working normally, the big toe automatically jerks downward. Lauren’s right toe curled as it was supposed to. But her left toe stuck straight out, unmoving. As Larry was examining her, Lauren suddenly seemed to realize what was happening to her. “She looked at me and said, ‘I’m afraid,’ and, ‘I love you.’ And I’m pretty sure in that moment she put the pieces together. That she had a conscious awareness of … that she was not going to make it.”
A CT scan soon confirmed the worst: The escalating blood pressure had triggered bleeding in her brain. So-called hemorrhagic strokes tend to be deadlier than those caused by blood clots. Surgery can sometimes save the patient’s life, but only if it is performed quickly.
Larry was a realist; he knew that even the best-case scenario was devastating. Chances were that Lauren would be paralyzed or partially paralyzed. She’d never be the mother she had dreamed of being. She’d never be a nurse again. But at least there was a chance she would live. When the neurologist arrived, Larry asked, “Is there hope here?” As he recalls it, the neurologist responded, “That’s why I’m here. There’s hope.”
Larry began gathering Lauren’s loved ones — his parents, her brother, Frankie Hedges and her husband Billy, Jackie Ennis. On the phone, he tried to play down the gravity of the situation, but everyone understood. When Larry’s mother arrived, the hospital entrance was locked, and Larry and Vaclavik came to meet her. “The obstetrician just said, ‘She’s going to be all right,’” Linda Bloomstein said. “And Larry was standing behind him, and I saw the tears coming down, and he was shaking his head, ‘No.’”
Around 2 a.m., the neurosurgeon finally confirmed what the trauma doctor had said four hours before: Lauren had HELLP syndrome. Then he delivered more bad news: Her blood platelets — essential to stopping the hemorrhage — were dangerously low. But, according to Larry, the hospital didn’t have sufficient platelets on site, so her surgery would have to be delayed. Larry was dumbfounded. How could a regional medical center that delivered babies and performed all types of surgery not have platelets on hand for an emergency? Vaclavik called the Red Cross and other facilities, pleading with them to send any they had. “In my understanding, there was a complete shortage of platelets in the state of New Jersey,” he said in the deposition. Hours passed before the needed platelets arrived.
The neuro team did another CT scan around 6 a.m. Larry couldn’t bring himself to look at it, “but from what they’ve told me, it was horrifically worse.” While Lauren was in surgery, friends began dropping by, hoping to see her and the baby, not realizing what had happened since her cheerful texts the night before. Around 12:30 p.m., the neurosurgeon emerged and confirmed that brain activity had stopped. Lauren was on life support, with no chance of recovery.
All this time, Hailey had been in the newborn nursery, being tended by Lauren’s stunned colleagues. They brought her down to Lauren’s room and Larry placed her gently into her mother’s arms. After a few minutes, the nurses whisked the baby back up to the third floor to protect her from germs. A respiratory therapist carefully removed the breathing tube from Lauren’s mouth. At 3:08 p.m., surrounded by her loved ones, she died.
Larry Bloomstein leaves the hospital with Hailey after Lauren’s death. Too shattered to return home, he slept with the baby in his parents’ living room for the first month. (Courtesy of Larry Bloomstein)
In the U.S., unlike some other developed countries, maternal deaths are treated as a private tragedy rather than as a public health catastrophe. A death in childbirth may be mourned on Facebook or memorialized on GoFundMe, but it is rarely reported in the news. Most obituaries, Lauren’s included, don’t mention how a mother died.
Lauren’s passing was more public than most, eliciting an outpouring of grief. Hundreds of people attended her wake and funeral — doctors and nurses from the hospital, friends from around the country, families Lauren had taken care of. Vaclavik was there, utterly devastated, Larry’s family said. The head of Monmouth’s OB-GYN department paid his respects and, according to Larry, promised in a private conversation at the wake to conduct a full investigation.
In the days after Lauren’s death, Larry couldn’t dwell on the implications of what had happened. He had to find a burial plot, choose a casket, write a eulogy. He was too shattered to return to the Mooresville house, so he took Hailey to his parents’ place, a one-bedroom apartment they were renting while they renovated their home, and slept with the baby in the living room for the first month.
After the funeral, he turned all his attention to his daughter. He knew nothing about newborns, always imagining Lauren would teach him — “What could be better than having your own NICU nurse to take care of your baby?” he had thought. He relied on his mother and sister and Lauren’s friends to guide him. He took time off from his job at Cooper, figuring three months would be enough. But as his return date approached, he knew he wasn’t ready. “I don’t think I can see a patient that’s on a ventilator right now,” he realized. “Or even just a hospital bed.” He didn’t want to leave Hailey. So he quit.
He sold the house, though he couldn’t bring himself to attend the closing — “I couldn’t stand handing those keys over to someone else.” He took Hailey a couple of times to stay with his sister and her family in Texas, where he didn’t have to answer the constant questions. But traveling with his baby daughter was painful in its own way. People didn’t know what to make of him. “It’s strange for people to see a father alone.” Wherever he went, he felt disconnected from almost everything around him. “You’re walking around this world and all these people are around you, and they’re going on with their lives and I just felt very, very isolated and very alone with that.”
Back in New Jersey, Larry found a job closer to his parents’ place, performed one operation and tried to quit. His new employers, though, persuaded him to stay. To avoid reliving the funeral, he returned to Texas for the first anniversary of Hailey’s birth and Lauren’s death in late September 2012. In one of his suitcases, he packed a giant cupcake mold Lauren had bought when they first married — she thought it would make a perfect first-birthday cake for the kids she yearned for. He baked the cake himself — chocolate, Lauren’s favorite, covered with sprinkles.
Other people in Lauren’s and Larry’s circle had been asking questions about her care since the night she died. “That was the first thing I literally said when I walked [into the hospital] — I said, ‘How did this happen?’” Jackie Ennis recalled. In the next week or two, she probed Larry again: “‘Did they do everything they could for her?’ He said, ‘No, there were warning signs for hours before.’” Ennis was too upset to dig any deeper.
As Larry’s numbness wore off, his orthopedist friends began pushing him as well. Larry was hesitant; despite the missteps he had witnessed, part of him wanted to believe that Lauren’s death had been unavoidable. “And my friends were like, ‘We can’t accept that. … With our technology, every single time a woman dies [in childbirth], it’s a medical error.’”
Lauren’s death, Larry finally admitted to himself, could not be dismissed as either inevitable or a fluke. He had seen how Lauren’s OB-GYN and nurses had failed to recognize a textbook case of one of the most common complications of pregnancy — not once, but repeatedly over two days. To Larry, the fact that someone with Lauren’s advantages could die so needlessly was symptomatic of a bigger problem. By some measures, New Jersey had one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the U.S. He wanted authorities to get to the root of it — to push the people and institutions that were at fault to change.
That’s the approach in the United Kingdom, where maternal deaths are regarded as systems failures. A national committee of experts scrutinizes every death of a woman from pregnancy or childbirth complications, collecting medical records and assessments from caregivers, conducting rigorous analyses of the data and publishing reports that help set policy for hospitals throughout the country. Coroners also sometimes hold public inquests, forcing hospitals and their staffs to answer for their mistakes. The U.K. process is largely responsible for the stunning reduction in preeclampsia deaths in Britain, the committee noted its 2016 report — “a clear success story” that it hoped to repeat “across other medical and mental health causes of maternal death.”
The U.S. has no comparable federal effort. Instead, maternal mortality reviews are left up to states. As of this spring, 26 states (and one city, Philadelphia) had a well-established process in place; another five states had committees that were less than a year old. In almost every case, resources are tight, the reviews take years and the findings get little attention. A bipartisan bill in Congress, the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act of 2017, would authorize funding for states to establish review panels or improve their processes.
New Jersey’s review team, the second-oldest in the U.S., includes OB-GYNs, nurses, mental health specialists, medical examiners, even a nutritionist. Using vital records and other reports, they identify every woman in New Jersey who died within a year of pregnancy or childbirth, from any cause, then review medical and other records to determine whether the death was “pregnancy-related” or not. Every few years, the committee publishes a report, focusing on things like the race and age of the mothers who died, the causes of death, and other demographic and health data. In the past, the findings have been used to promote policies to reduce postpartum depression.
But the New Jersey committee doesn’t interview the relatives of the deceased, nor does it assess whether a death was preventable. Moreover, like every other state that conducts such reviews, New Jersey “de-identifies” the records — strips them of any information that might point to an individual hospital or a particular woman. Otherwise, the medical community and lawmakers would refuse to go along. The goal is to “improve care for patients in general,” said Joseph Apuzzio, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Rutgers-New Jersey Medical School who heads the committee. This requires a process that is “nonjudgmental” and “not punitive,” he said. “That’s the best way to get a free discussion of all of the health care providers who are in the room.”
Yet the result of de-identification, as Larry soon realized, is that the review is of little use in assigning responsibility for individual deaths, or evaluating whether some hospitals, doctors or nurses are more prone to error than others. To Larry, this seemed like a critical oversight — or perhaps, willful denial. In a preventable death or other medical error, he said, sometimes the who and the where are as important as the why. “Unless someone points the finger specifically,” he said, “I think the actual cause [of the problem] is lost.”
Someone eventually steered Larry toward the New Jersey Department of Health’s licensing and inspection division, which oversees hospital and nursing home safety. He filed a complaint against Monmouth Medical Center in 2012.
The DOH examined Lauren’s records, interviewed her caregivers and scrutinized Monmouth’s policies and practices. In December 2012 it issued a report that backed up everything Larry had seen firsthand. “There is no record in the medical record that the Registered Nurse notified [the ob/gyn] of the elevated blood pressures of patient prior to delivery,” investigators found. And: “There is no evidence in the medical record of further evaluation and surveillance of patient from [the ob/gyn] prior to delivery.” And: “There was no evidence in the medical record that the elevated blood pressures were addressed by [the ob/gyn] until after the Code Stroke was called.”
The report faulted the hospital. “The facility is not in compliance” with New Jersey hospital licensing standards, it concluded. “The facility failed to ensure that recommended obstetrics guidelines are adhered to by staff.”
To address these criticisms, Monmouth Medical Center had implemented a plan of correction, also contained in the report. The plan called for a mandatory educational program for all labor and delivery nurses about preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome; staff training in Advance Life Support Obstetrics and Critical Care Obstetrics; and more training on the use of evidence-based methods to assess patients and improve communications between caregivers.
Some of the changes were strikingly basic: “Staff nurses were educated regarding the necessity of reviewing, when available, or obtaining the patients [sic] prenatal records. Education identified that they must make a comparison of the prenatal blood pressure against the initial admission blood pressure.” And: “Repeat vital signs will be obtained every 4 hours at a minimum.”
An important part of the plan of correction involved Vaclavik, though neither he nor the nurses were identified by name. The head of Monmouth’s OB-GYN department provided “professional remediation for the identified physician,” the Department of Health report said. In addition, there was “monitoring of 100% of records for physician of record per month x 3 months.” The monitoring focused on “compliance of timely physician intervention for elevated blood pressures/pain assessment and management.”
The department chairman, Robert Graebe, found Vaclavik’s charts to be 100 percent compliant, Vaclavik said in the deposition. Graebe was asked in a March 2017 deposition if Vaclavik was in good standing at the hospital at the time of Lauren’s treatment. “Was and is,” Graebe replied.
In a separate note, the Department of Health told Larry that it forwarded his complaint to the Board of Medical Examiners and the New Jersey Board of Nursing. Neither agency has taken disciplinary action, according to their websites.
Larry’s copy of the DOH report arrived in the mail. He was gratified by the findings but dismayed that they weren’t publicly posted. That meant hardly anyone would see them.
A few months after the DOH weighed in, he sued Monmouth, Vaclavik and five nurses in Monmouth County Superior Court in Freehold, New Jersey. For a medical malpractice lawsuit to go forward in New Jersey, an expert must certify that it has merit. Larry’s passed muster with an OB-GYN. But beyond the taking of depositions, there’s been little action in the case.
As the maternal death rate has mounted around the U.S., a small cadre of reformers has mobilized. Some of the earliest and most important work has come in California, where more babies are born than in any other state — 500,000 a year, one-eighth of the U.S. total.
Modeled on the U.K. process, the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative is informed by the experiences of founder Elliott Main, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford and the University of California-San Francisco, who for many years ran the OB-GYN department at a San Francisco hospital. “One of my saddest moments as an obstetrician was a woman with severe preeclampsia that we thought we had done everything correct, who still had a major stroke and we could not save her,” he said recently. That loss has weighed on him for 20 years. “When you’ve had a maternal death, you remember it for the rest of your life. All the details.”
Launched a decade ago, CMQCC aims to reduce not only mortality, but also life-threatening complications and racial disparities in obstetric care. It began by analyzing maternal deaths in the state over several years; in almost every case, it discovered, there was “at least some chance to alter the outcome.” The most preventable deaths were from hemorrhage (70 percent) and preeclampsia (60 percent).
Seven Causes Account For Most Pregnancy-Related Deaths
Main and his colleagues then began creating a series of “toolkits” to help doctors and nurses improve their handling of emergencies. The first one, targeting obstetric bleeding, recommended things like “hemorrhage carts” for storing medications and supplies, crisis protocols for massive transfusions, and regular training and drills. Instead of the common practice of “eye-balling” blood loss, which often leads to underestimating the seriousness of a hemorrhage and delaying treatment, nurses learned to collect and weigh postpartum blood to get precise measurements. Hospitals that adopted the toolkit saw a 21 percent decrease in near deaths from maternal bleeding in the first year; hospitals that didn’t use the protocol had a 1.2 percent reduction. By 2013, according to Main, maternal deaths in California fell to around 7 per 100,000 births, similar to the numbers in Canada, France and the Netherlands — a dramatic counter to the trends in other parts of the U.S.
“Prevention isn’t a magic pill,” Main said. “It’s actually teamwork [and having] a structured, organized, standardized approach” to care.
CMQCC’s preeclampsia toolkit, launched in 2014, emphasized the kind of practices that might have saved Lauren Bloomstein: careful monitoring of blood pressure and early and aggressive treatment with magnesium sulfate and anti-hypertensive medications. Data on its effectiveness hasn’t been published.
The collaborative’s work has inspired ACOG and advocates in a few states to create their own initiatives. Much of the funding has come from a 10-year, $500 million maternal health initiative by Merck, the pharmaceutical giant. Originally intended to focus on less developed countries, Merck for Mothers decided it couldn’t ignore the growing problem in the U.S. The U.S. maternal mortality rate is “unacceptable,” said Executive Director Mary-Ann Etiebet. Making pregnancy and childbirth safer “will not only save women’s lives but will improve and strengthen our health systems … for all.”
But the really hard work is only beginning. According to the Institute of Medicine, it takes an average of 17 years for a new medical protocol to be widely adopted. Even in California, half of the 250 hospitals that deliver babies still aren’t using the toolkits, said Main, who largely blames inertia.
In New York state, some hospitals have questioned the need for what they call “cookbook medicine,” said Columbia’s Mary D’Alton. Her response: “Variability is the enemy of safety. Rather than have 10 different approaches to obstetric hemorrhage or treatment of hypertension, choose one or two and make it consistent. … When we do things in a standardized way, we have better outcomes.”
One big hurdle: training. Another: money. Smaller providers, in particular, may not see the point. “It’s very hard to get a hospital to provide resources to change something that they don’t see as a problem,” ACOG’s Barbara Levy said. “If they haven’t had a maternal death because they only deliver 500 babies a year, how many years is it going to be before they see a severe problem? It may be 10 years.”
In New Jersey, providers don’t need as much convincing, thanks to a recent project to reduce postpartum blood loss led by the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses. A number of hospitals saw improvements; at one, the average length of a hemorrhage-related ICU stay plunged from 8 days to 1.5 days. But only 31 of the state’s 52 birthing hospitals participated in the effort, in part — perhaps — because nurses led it, said Robyn D’Oria, executive director of the Central Jersey Family Health Consortium and a member of the state’s maternal mortality committee. “I remember having a conversation with [someone from] a hospital that I would describe as progressive and she said to me, ‘I cannot get past some of the physicians not wanting to buy into this.’”
So New Jersey hospitals are about to try again, this time adopting mini-toolkits created by the ACOG-led Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health for hemorrhage and preeclampsia. “We’re at the very beginning” of a rollout that is likely to take at least two years, D’Oria said. Among those helping to create momentum has been Ryan Hansen, the husband of the teacher who died at Monmouth Medical Center a few months before Lauren Bloomstein.
Still, as hospitals begin to revamp, mothers in the state continue to perish. One was Ashley Heaney Butler. A Rutgers University graduate, she lived in Bayville, where she decorated the walls of her house with anchors, reflecting her passion for the ocean. She worked for the state Division of Vocational Rehabilitation Services as a counselor, and served as president of the New Jersey Rehabilitation Association. Her husband Joseph was a firefighter. She gave birth at Monmouth last September to a healthy boy and died a couple of weeks later at the age of 31, never leaving the hospital. It turned out that she had developed an infection late in her pregnancy, possibly related to a prior gastric bypass surgery. She was under the care of several doctors, including Vaclavik.
Hailey Anne Bloomstein, now 5 years old, has her mother’s brown hair and green eyes. (Bryan Anselm for ProPublica)
The death of a new mother is not like any other sudden death. It blasts a hole in the universe. “When you take that one death and what that does, not only to the husband, but to the family and to the community, the impact that it has in the hospital, on the staff, on everybody that’s cared for her, on all the people who knew them, it has ripple effects for generations to come,” Robyn D’Oria said.
Jackie Ennis felt Lauren’s loss as an absence of phone calls. She and Lauren had been closer than many sisters, talking several times a day. Sometimes Lauren called just to say she was really tired and would talk later; she’d even called Ennis from Hawaii on her honeymoon. The night Lauren died, Ennis knew something was wrong because she hadn’t heard from her best friend. “It took me a really long time not to get the phone calls,” she said. “I still have trouble with that.”
During Lauren’s pregnancy, Frankie Hedges had thought of herself as Hailey’s other grandmother. She and Lauren had made a lot of plans. Lauren’s death meant the loss of their shared dreams for an entire extended family. “I just feel she didn’t get what she deserved,” Hedges said.
Vaclavik’s obstetric practice is “larger” than in 2011, and he continues to have admitting privileges at Monmouth and two other hospitals, he said in his deposition. “I will never forget” Lauren’s death, he said. “… I probably suffer some post-traumatic stress from this.”
Hailey is five years old, with Lauren’s brown hair and clear green eyes. She feels her mother’s presence everywhere, thanks to Larry and his new wife Carolyn, whom he married in 2014. They met when she was a surgical tech at one of the hospitals he worked at after Lauren died. Photos and drawings of Lauren occupy the mantle of their home in Holmdel, the bookcase in the dining room and the walls of the upstairs hallway. Larry and Carolyn and their other family members talk about Lauren freely, and even Larry’s younger daughter, 2-year-old Aria, calls her “Mommy Lauren.” On birthdays and holidays, Larry takes the girls to the cemetery. He designed the gravestone — his handprint and Lauren’s reaching away from each other, newborn Hailey’s linking them forever. Larry has done his best to keep Lauren’s extended family together — Ennis and Hedges and their families are included in every important celebration.
Larry still has the video of Lauren and Hailey on his phone. “By far the hardest thing for me to accept is [what happened] from Lauren’s perspective,” he said one recent evening, hitting the play button and seeing her alive once more. “I can’t, I literally can’t accept it. The amount of pain she must have experienced in that exact moment when she finally had this little girl. … I can accept the amount of pain I have been dealt,” he went on, watching Lauren stroke Hailey’s cheek. “But [her pain] is the one thing I just can’t accept. I can’t understand, I can’t fathom it.”
Nina Martin covers gender and sexuality for ProPublica. She has been a reporter and editor specializing in women’s, legal and health issues for more than 30 years.
Renee Montagne is an NPR special correspondent. She’s reported and hosted for NPR since the mid-1980s.
The USDA’s research section studies everything from climate change to nutrition. Under the 2008 Farm Bill, its leader is supposed to serve as the agency’s “chief scientist” and be chosen “from among distinguished scientists with specialized or significant experience in agricultural research, education, and economics.”
But Sam Clovis — who, according to sources with knowledge of the appointment and members of the agriculture trade press, is President Trump’s pick to oversee the section — appears to have no such credentials.
Clovis has never taken a graduate course in science and is openly skeptical of climate change. While he has a doctorate in public administration and was a tenured professor of business and public policy at Morningside College for 10 years, he has published almost no academic work.
Clovis is better known for hosting a conservative talk radio show in his native Iowa and, after mounting an unsuccessful run for Senate in 2014, becoming a fiery pro-Trump advocate on television.
Clovis advised Trump on agricultural issues during his presidential campaign and is currently the senior White House advisor within the USDA, a position described by The Washington Post as “Trump’s eyes and ears” at the agency.
Clovis was also responsible for recruiting Carter Page, whose ties to Russia have become the subject of intense speculation and scrutiny, as a Trump foreign policy advisor.
Neither Clovis, nor the USDA, nor the White House responded to questions about Clovis’ nomination to be the USDA’s undersecretary for research, education and economics.
Catherine Woteki, who served as undersecretary for research, education and economics in the Obama administration, compared the move to appointing someone without a medical background to lead the National Institutes of Health. The USDA post includes overseeing scientific integrity within the agency.
“This position is the chief scientist of the Department of Agriculture. It should be a person who evaluates the scientific body of evidence and moves appropriately from there,” she said in an interview.
Woteki holds a Ph.D. in human nutrition and served as the first undersecretary for food safety at the USDA during the Clinton administration. She was then the dean of the school of agriculture at Iowa State University before becoming the global director of scientific affairs for Mars, Inc.
Clovis has a B.S. in political science from the U.S. Air Force Academy, an MBA from Golden State University and a doctorate in public administration from the University of Alabama. The University of Alabama canceled the program the year after Clovis graduated, but an old course catalogue provided by the university does not indicate the program required any science courses.
Clovis’ published works do not appear to include any scientific papers. His 2006 dissertation concerned federalism and homeland security preparation, and a search for academic research published by Clovis turned up a handful of journal articles, all related to national security and terrorism.
As undersecretary for research, education and economics, Woteki directed additional resources to helping local farmers and agricultural workers address the impacts of severe drought, flooding and unpredictable weather patterns. She chaired the “Global Research Alliance to Reduce Agricultural Greenhouse Gasses” at the G20, which brought together chief agricultural scientists from across the globe. Under her leadership, the USDA also created “Climate Hubs” across the country to help localized solutions for adapting to climate change.
Clovis has repeatedly expressed skepticism over climate science and has called efforts to address climate change “simply a mechanism for transferring wealth from one group of people to another.” He has indicated the Trump administration will take a starkly different approach at the USDA. Representing the campaign at the Farm Foundation Forum in October, Clovis told E&E News that Trump’s agriculture policy would focus on boosting trade and lessening regulation and not the impact of climate change.
“I think our position is very clearly [that] Mr. Trump is a skeptic on climate change, and we need more science,” he said. “Once we get more science, we are going to make decisions.”
The USDA’s undersecretary for research, education and economics has historically consulted on a wide range of scientific issues. Woteki, for example, said she was asked for input on the Zika and Ebola outbreaks because of the USDA’s relevant research and was frequently called upon to offer guidance on homeland security issues related to food safety.
“Access to safe food and clean air and water is absolutely fundamental to personal security,” she said, adding that a scientific understanding of food safety is critical to success in the job. “Food systems are widely recognized by the national security community as being part of critical infrastructure.”
Clovis’ academic background includes years of study on homeland security, but focused almost exclusively on foreign policy. A biography he provided to the 2016 Fiscal Summit at which he was a speaker indicates he is “a federalism scholar” and “an expert on homeland security issues,” with “regional expertise in Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East.” Neither this biography nor any other publicly available biographies list any experience in food safety, agriculture or nutrition.
Here are four ideas we’ve used to guide our Trump administration coverage. Read the story.
Clovis first became well-known in Iowa through his radio show, “Impact with Sam Clovis.” He finished a distant second in the 2014 Republican Primary for an Iowa Senate seat ultimately won by Joni Ernst. During the race, his outlandish statements often made headlines. In one instance, he said the only reason President Obama hadn’t yet been impeached was because of his race.
While he initially signed on as former Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s top Iowa advisor, he left in August 2015 to become the Trump campaign’s national co-chair and chief policy advisor. Emails leaked by the Perry campaign to The Des Moines Register show Clovis slamming Trump in the months before, questioning his faith. “His comments reveal no foundation in Christ, which is a big deal,” Clovis wrote. He also praised Perry for calling Trump a “cancer on conservatism.”
Still, Clovis subsequently became one of Trump’s best-known advocates on cable television, where he relentlessly defended his new boss. On “Morning Joe,”, he said Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton had failed to “control the sexual predation that went on in her own home.” On SiriusXM, he said Republicans who were abandoning Trump were “weak-kneed” and “lily-livered.”
Trump’s call for a “total and complete shutdown” of entry of Muslims into the United States in December 2015 put Clovis’ job as a tenured professor at risk.
“If he played a role in drafting or advising the Trump campaign on this issue, we will be outraged and extremely disappointed in Dr. Clovis,” Morningside College spokesman Rick Wollman told Iowa Starting Line, before pledging to look “more closely” at the issue.
Clovis went on unpaid leave from the college in the summer of 2015 and resigned after Trump’s win in November.
Do you have information about this case or other Trump administration appointees? Contact Jessica Huseman at jessica.huseman@propublica.org or via Signal at 972-268-1882.
A few weeks ago, folks from both our newsrooms sat down to enjoy some pastries and to brainstorm. We have teamed up a few times, doing work we’re quiteproud of. But we felt like there was an opportunity to do more.
After all, ProPublica takes on big and almost inevitably complex subjects. And Vox is expert at clearly and compellingly conveying complex things.
We left the meeting having enjoyed our cronuts. And then emails started flying with an idea: Why not join forces to combine ProPublica’s deep-dive reporting with Vox’s first-rate and impressively popular video storytelling.
And that’s what we’re here to announce: the Vox-ProPublica Video Fellowship. It’s a yearlong position for a video producer, who will be embedded in Vox’s team, producing work fueled by ProPublica’s reporting.
We figure everyone wins: Vox will get to dig into ProPublica’s investigations. ProPublica will get to learn about social video from the best in the business. And most importantly, you — our readers — will get great visual stories treated with creativity, curiosity and care.
We couldn’t be happier to be working together. And if this sounds like the perfect job for you, here is the job description. And here is where you should apply.
Vox/ProPublica Video Fellow (NYC)
We are looking for a visual-minded producer to be part of Vox.com’s video team in an exciting collaboration with ProPublica to produce videos based on investigative reporting. This fellowship will focus on producing short explainer videos and potentially longer doc-style videos. Successful candidates will have skills in a variety of areas — writing, archive research, filming and editing, with an emphasis on visual ingenuity. They will also have a deep interest in investigative journalism. You will be tasked with pitching, researching, shooting, editing and animating a series of short videos to be published on Vox.com, ProPublica and associated platforms.
Specific responsibilities:
Work collaboratively with partner editorial teams
Generate story ideas and pitches
Film and/or animate based off of scripts and interviews
Gather assets from archival sources
Edit, animate and color correct videos
Assist in animating longform videos
Skills required:
Ability to tell complex stories in simple, understandable ways
Experience as a visual storyteller — using either a camera, motion graphics or animations, with some degree of experience in all three preferred
Ability to communicate well and work collaboratively with media partners
Interest in investigative journalism and working in an editorial setting
Comfortable working in new mediums and formats — with a willingness to experiment and to continue to improve production skills
An understanding of the online video landscape
Please include a cover letter with links to three relevant pieces of past work in visual journalism, ideally but not restricted to videos. We know that great candidates can bring skills that we haven’t thought of and who won’t fit everything we’ve described above. If this is you, don’t hesitate to apply, and tell us what unique contributions you can offer.
Vox Media and ProPublica are committed to building an inclusive environment for people of all backgrounds and everyone is encouraged to apply. Vox Media is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, disability, national origin, protected veteran status, age, or any other status protected by applicable national, federal, state, or local law.
This job will be full time for one year, based in New York, and includes benefits. Pay will be based on experience.
In the early 2000s, banks successfully sued to stop Iowa from limiting their ability to charge ATM fees to non-customers. They also fought off states’ attempts to stop them from charging non-customers to cash checks drawn on the banks’ accounts. In another case, they stopped California from forcing two banks to conduct audits of their own residential mortgages.
What do all these cases have in common? The winning argument in each was that states had no right to impose their laws on federally regulated national banks. And the man who helped make that powerful argument was Keith Noreika — President Trump’s pick to head the federal agency that oversees national banks.
Noreika, a prominent Washington attorney who specializes in financial regulatory law, has made a career out of representing banks as they sought to fight back consumer-friendly state regulations and class-action lawsuits accusing banks of deceptive practices.
He is now the acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a position he can serve for 130 days without Senate approval and during which he does not have to abide by stricter ethics rules governing permanent appointees.
As head of the OCC, Noreika will be well-positioned to lighten regulations on banks — without the need for Congress to pass legislation.
Among the targets may be the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street overhaul, which made it easier for states to hold national banks accountable. Noreika has criticized the law’s burdens, while Trump has called it “horrendous.”
Under Dodd-Frank, the head of the OCC has broad power to review and preempt states’ consumer finance laws.
“The first way to change the regulations is to put in regulators who will propose to stop enforcing them,” said Andy Green, a former Democratic Senate staffer who helped craft the 2010 law and now works at the liberal Center for American Progress.
Noreika’s ascension fits into a broader pattern of Trump administration appointees. Many of them have worked to influence the same agencies they’ve now been assigned to lead. And while Trump has been slow to name people to positions that require Senate confirmation, he has been quick to install officials out of public view.
Through an OCC spokesman, Noreika declined to be interviewed. But he said in a statement:
“I am proud to have had an effective law practice where I represented clients of all types — banks, institutions, individuals, and a large labor union.”
He added:
“I do think that ten years after the crisis and seven years after the passing of Dodd-Frank, now is a good time to take stock of the rules implemented and actions taken to ensure the nation has the right sense of balance and coherence in regulating financial institutions.”
Noreika’s appointment has raised the ire of Democratic lawmakers.
“You have chosen to replace the current head with an acting head who is unvetted, has obvious conflicts of interest, and lacks the experience to run an agency that employs almost 4,000 individuals,” seven Democratic Senators wrote in a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Thursday.
Noreika is following in the footsteps of his mentor, John Dugan, who worked with Noreika at the corporate law firm Covington & Burling — before himself leaving to head the OCC from 2005 to 2010.
Under Dugan, the OCC was criticized as being too friendly to banks in the face of widespread lending abuses that fueled the financial crisis. While Noreika now heads up the OCC, Dugan is back at Covington, where his bio says he “advises clients on a range of legal matters affected by significantly increased regulatory requirements resulting from the financial crisis.”
Some say it’s too early to draw any conclusions on how Dugan’s protégé will run the agency.
“I don’t think you should assume that what a lawyer argues for a client is indicative of how he or she would react when you’re administering the law,” said H. Rodgin Cohen, senior chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell, a prominent corporate law firm.
Consumer advocates are particularly concerned about Noreika’s frequent reliance on the argument that federal banking laws and OCC regulations trump state laws — a concept known as preemption.
In 2005, when Noreika became a partner at Covington, the firm noted that “many of Mr. Noreika’s cases have challenged the validity of state and local laws as preempted by the federal banking laws” and listed Wells Fargo and Bank of America as prominent clients.
ProPublica identified more than a dozen such cases filed in federal court from 2000 through 2005. Most were dismissed or settled in banks’ favor.
“That’s a real problem,” said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center in Washington, D.C. “States often have laws that protect consumers in areas where there are no national laws.”
Banking lawyers say it only makes sense to give precedence to federal banking laws. Otherwise, national banks would end up dealing with 50 different regulators rather than one — the OCC. That was the whole point behind Congress’ creation of the agency during the Civil War, when states’ conflicting regulations made banking and commerce more difficult.
The OCC, meanwhile, adopted sweeping regulations that prevented those laws from applying to national banks and extended that protection to the banks’ state-chartered subsidiaries. In 2008, then-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer accused the agency of embarking “on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents.”
At the time, Dugan brushed off the criticism. “Almost everyone who has paid attention to the subprime lending crisis has concluded that OCC-regulated national banks were not the problem,” he said in a statement responding to Spitzer.
Sam Clovis likely to be named undersecretary of the USDA department that manages research on everything from climate change to nutrition. Read the story.
But two separate inquiries — the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and a report by the U.S. Senate Banking Committee — disagreed. The commission concluded that the OCC’s preemption of state laws ended up “preventing adequate protection for borrowers and weakening constraints” on risky mortgages.
The banks used the OCC to engage in “regulatory arbitrage,” said Arthur Wilmarth, a professor at the George Washington University Law School.
Dugan did not return phone calls but said in an email, “I disagree categorically with Wilmarth.” He referred his testimony to the crisis investigators, in which he said the financial crisis was “not caused by federal preemption of state mortgage lending laws.” Instead, Dugan said, “the root cause of the mortgage crisis was exceptionally weak underwriting standards.”
In 2007, as Dugan presided over the OCC, Noreika and his Covington colleagues won the biggest preemption victory of all, Watters vs. Wachovia Bank. The case evolved from separate federal lawsuits involving banks that had sought to shield their subsidiaries from state laws and subsequently faced collapse or fell into legal trouble for their business practices — Wachovia, National City Bank of Cleveland and Wells Fargo. Wilmarth advised state banking regulators on the cases.
The cases were merged and went all the way up to the Supreme Court, where Noreika argued that state laws didn’t apply to subsidiaries of national banks like Wachovia. In a 5-3 vote, the high court agreed.
Preemption became an even bigger issue after the 2008 collapse of several big banks, including Wachovia. Local governments tried to sue banks for alleged misdeeds, but again were blocked by preemption.
By then, Congress was working on Dodd-Frank, and preemption was a hotly debated area of reform. One of the changes Congress enacted as part of the law was to negate the effect of the Supreme Court decision that Noreika had litigated. Dodd-Frank also gave local law enforcement authorities more power to bring lawsuits against national banks under state laws. And it created a revised set of rules under which the OCC can review state banking laws to determine if they should be preempted.
The responsibility for those reviews falls to the head of the OCC — now Noreika. He has the power to determine if a state consumer finance law is preempted by federal law.
“He will now have his hand on the preemption button,” said Wilmarth, the George Washington University law professor.
Grace Ashford and Masako Melissa Hirsch contributed research to this story.
One morning in February, lawyer Marty Rosenbluth set off from his Hillsborough, North Carolina, home to represent two anxious clients in court. He drove about eight hours southwest, spent the night in a hotel and then got up around 6 a.m. to make the final 40-minute push to his destination: a federal immigration court and detention center in the tiny rural Georgia town of Lumpkin.
During two brief hearings over two days, Rosenbluth said, he convinced an immigration judge to grant both of his new clients more time to assess their legal options to stay in the United States. Then he got in his car and drove the 513 miles back home.
“Without an attorney, it’s almost impossible to win your case in the immigration courts. You don’t even really know what to say or what the standards are,” said Rosenbluth, who works for a private law firm and took on the cases for a fee. “You may have a really, really good case. But you simply can’t package it in a way that the court can understand.”
His clients that day were lucky. Only 6 percent of the men held at the Lumpkin complex — a 2,001-bed detention center and immigration court — have legal representation, according to a 2015 study in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Nationwide, it’s not much better, the study of data from October 2006 to September 2012 found: Just 14 percent of detainees have lawyers.
That percentage is likely to get even smaller under the Trump administration, which has identified 21,000 potential new detention beds to add to the approximately 40,000 currently in use. In January, President Trump signed an executive order telling the secretary of homeland security, who oversees the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, to “immediately” start signing contracts for detention centers and building new ones.
If history is any guide, many of those facilities will end up in places like Lumpkin, population 2,741. The city’s small downtown has a courthouse, the police department, a couple of restaurants and a Dollar General. There’s no hotel and many of the nearest immigration lawyers are based 140 miles away in Atlanta.
“It’s been a strategic move by ICE to construct detention centers in rural areas,” said Amy Fischer, policy director for RAICES, a San Antonio-based nonprofit that supports on-site legal aid programs at two Texas facilities for detained families. “Even if the money is there, it’s very difficult to set up a pro bono network when you’re geographically three hours away from a big city.”
ICE currently oversees a network of about 200 facilities, jails, processing centers and former prisons where immigrants can be held, according to a government list from February.
Unlike criminal defendants, most immigrants in deportation proceedings are not entitled to government-appointed lawyers because their cases are deemed civil matters. Far from free legal help and with scant financial resources, the majority of detainees take their chances solo, facing off against federal lawyers before judges saddled with full dockets of cases. Frequently they must use interpreters.
An ICE spokesman denied that detention facilities are purposely opened in remote locations to limit attorney access. “Any kind of detention center, due to zoning and other factors, they are typically placed in the outskirts of a downtown area,” said spokesman Bryan Cox. “ICE is very supportive and very accommodating in terms of individuals who wish to have representation and ensuring that they have the adequate ability to do so.” At Lumpkin’s Stewart Detention Center, for instance, lawyers can schedule hourlong video teleconferences with detainees, Cox said.
But a ProPublica review found that access to free or low-cost legal counsel was limited at many centers. Government-funded orientation programs, which exist at a few dozen detention locations, typically include self-help workshops, group presentations on the immigration court process, brief one-on-one consultations and pro bono referrals, but they stop short of providing direct legal representation. And a list of pro bono legal service providers distributed by the courts includes many who don’t take the cases of detainees at all. Those that do can often only take a limited number — perhaps five to 10 cases at a time.
The legal help makes a difference. Across the country, 21 percent of detained immigrants who had lawyers won their deportation cases, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review study found, compared to just 2 percent of detainees without a lawyer. The study also found that 48 percent of detainees who had lawyers were released from detention while their cases were pending, compared to 7 percent of those who lacked lawyers.
Legal counsel can also speed up the process for those detainees with no viable claims to stay in the country, experts said. A discussion with a lawyer might prompt the detainee to cut his losses and opt for voluntary departure, avoiding a pointless legal fight and the taxpayer-funded costs of detention.
Lawmakers in some states, such as New York and California, have stepped in to help, pledging taxpayer money toward providing lawyers for immigrants who can’t afford their own. But such help only aids those detainees whose deportation cases are assigned to courts in those areas.
“What brings good results is access to family and access to counsel and access to evidence, and when you’re in a far off location without those things, the likelihood of ICE winning and the person being denied due process increase dramatically,” said Conor Gleason, an immigration attorney at The Bronx Defenders in New York.
Romniel, who asked that his last name not be used for privacy reasons, said he quickly could have lost everything without a lawyer.
A native of the Dominican Republic and a U.S. green card holder, Romniel, 53, was picked up by ICE agents during an early morning raid at his New York home in 2015. He was sent to the Hudson County Correctional Facility in Kearny, New Jersey.
“It was like a nightmare,” Romniel said in Spanish during an interview. “It’s very important to have a lawyer to defend yourself, because I didn’t know anything about immigration law. I didn’t know what was happening to me.”
Gleason, who was paid by a local government program to assist Romniel, tracked down 17 years of his tax records, compiled 21 letters of support from family and community members, coordinated a psychosocial evaluation by a social worker and submitted research on the harsh treatment of deportees sent back to the Dominican Republic. In court, Gleason argued that Romniel’s positive contributions to society –— his full-time employment as a maintenance and security person, his consistent payment of taxes, his family ties — outweighed the harm of a single drug conviction from several years earlier.
After more than four months in detention, an immigration judge ruled in Romniel’s favor, allowing him to return to his family in New York. In September, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Advocates and lawyers for immigrants worry such happy endings will become even more uncommon as detentions ramp up.
Saba Ahmed, a staff lawyer at the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition in Washington, D.C., said a detainee she recently advised, a middle-aged man with a green card, was scooped up and sent to a Maryland detention facility in March because ICE agents wrongly believed he was a convicted robber — making him eligible for deportation.
When Ahmed met the man during a visit to the detention center about two weeks later, she realized that the government had meant to pick up someone else with the same name, and she helped secure his release.
“He didn’t have access to do an online search to prove it wasn’t him,” Ahmed said. “All he could say was, ‘It’s not me.’ You can’t just go on Google. You don’t have smartphones. There’s really no access.”
Immigrants, even those with the proper papers, can get locked up by ICE for a variety of reasons. Some are detained soon after crossing the border; others come to ICE’s attention after an arrest (whether or not they’re convicted of a crime). Federal agents have also swept up undocumented people in the proximity of raids targeting a specific person. Others have shown up for a scheduled check-in with ICE and are taken into custody instead.
Once in detention, even those with strong cases are at a disadvantage. Phone calls from inside the facilities can be expensive, lawyers said, limiting detainees’ contact with people who can help with their cases, such as community members for letters of support or officials who can send them corroborating records.
Many detention centers have law libraries with outdated materials. Without updated resources, detainees can’t research the current conditions in their countries of origin, which can be a crucial component of their defense if they fear violence or persecution there, lawyers said.
And even if they don’t speak English, all detainees without lawyers must compile their own legal documents and get them translated into English, a requirement for all paperwork submitted to immigration courts. Individuals must find translators on their own, attorneys said, and they sometimes rely on fellow detainees who know more English to help fill out forms.
Emory University School of Law adjunct professor Shana Tabak, who works with law students to represent immigrants facing deportation, said she typically puts together asylum packages of at least 200 pages containing documentary evidence, affidavits, testimony and expert opinions. “There’s no way a client who is detained and who does not have an attorney could put together that sort of evidence in order to advocate for him or herself and successfully win an asylum claim,” she said.
Perhaps as a result, 32 percent of detained immigrants with lawyers apply for asylum or other legal protections from deportation, whereas only 3 percent of detainees without lawyers do the same, according to the University of Pennsylvania Law Review study.
Ahmed, who has been working with detainees for 2 1/2 years, said some immigrants don’t realize that their life circumstances may qualify them for legal relief.
One man from El Salvador, she said, initially told her that he’d fled to the United States after gang members threatened to kill him if he didn’t give them money. After a few meetings, the man revealed he’d been thrown out of his family’s home because he was gay and had been repeatedly sexually abused by gang members.
“This is someone who had been persecuted and feared for his life, and would not have been able to avail himself of asylum if someone had not explained, ‘This is how asylum works,’ and then represented him,” Ahmed said.
After about five months in detention, she said, the man won his asylum case last October.
But even when detainees are linked up with attorneys, the geography of the detention system can make representing them challenging.
Arcenio, who asked that his last name not be used, was picked up in February and sent to Boone County Jail in Burlington, Kentucky, said Ted Farrell, his Louisville-based lawyer. He had a prior deportation order on his record and said he was fleeing death threats from Guatemalan gang members who opposed his political views. Farrell wanted to make sure that the 41-year-old would get the right kind of interview with the asylum office and that he would have time to prepare him for it over the phone.
But after five days in detention, Farrell said, Arcenio was sent to a facility in Brazil, Indiana. Farrell made an appointment to talk with him there, but on the day it was scheduled, he was transferred to a facility in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Farrell made a new appointment, but Arcenio was then moved to a different building in the same town. After several days of tracking, Farrell said, he finally got in touch.
Even then, Arcenio’s request for an interview was denied. ICE scheduled him to be deported to Guatemala and sent him to yet another detention facility, this one in Kankakee, Illinois, Farrell said.
After multiple phone calls, Farrell learned that immigration agents had requested the wrong type of interview with the asylum office. ICE acknowledged its mistake and took Arcenio off the manifest for a flight back to Guatemala, Farrell said. Arcenio passed his initial screening in March and is now waiting in detention to make his full case before an immigration judge later this month.
Meanwhile, he is still being held in Kankakee, a four-hour drive from Farrell’s office. They can only speak by phone with 24 hours advance notice, Farrell said, and sometimes they are asked to limit calls to around 15 minutes when there are several people waiting for the phone.
Farrell took on Arcenio’s case for a fee. “If he doesn’t win, I’m not going to go chase him down in Guatemala and make him pay,” Farrell said. “I’m sure there are attorneys out there who just won’t take a detained case or a potential detained case, because of the risk that they won’t ever get paid.”
Most free or low-cost legal help currently goes to detained mothers and children through such programs as the CARA Family Detention Pro Bono Project in Texas, immigration lawyers said. The project brings in about a dozen volunteer lawyers, law students and interpreters from around the country to serve one-week stints at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, about 75 miles from San Antonio. The volunteers help mothers who have fled sexual abuse, violence or other conditions in their home countries prepare for initial asylum interviews. They also represent families in bond hearings. A small group of staff rotates through Dilley to provide administrative support.
The program is able to advise nearly all of the families who pass through the detention center, according to Crystal Massey, one of the project’s coordinators. Another legal aid program that provides similar services exists 95 miles away at a family detention facility in Karnes City, Texas. Once families are released from either place, they must find their own lawyers to handle the rest of their asylum cases.
Fees from so-called “premium processing” to expedite H-1B visas have paid for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ efforts to digitize. But the agency hasn’t been able to keep up with demand, forcing it to suspend its cash cow. Read the story.
Recent detentions and seizures of phones and other material from travelers to the United States have sparked alarm. We detail what powers Customs and Border Protection officials have over you and your devices. Read the story.
Since Trump’s vow to increasedeportations, newer efforts to provide legal help to detainees have accelerated, but they remain unevenly distributed across the country.
Since 2013, New York City has provided lawyers for detained immigrants unable to afford them. This year, the program expanded to cover detainees with cases in immigration courts throughout New York. The state was the first in the country to guarantee representation for its indigent detained immigrant population, but last month Mayor Bill de Blasio said that the city should not provide legal aid to immigrants with certain criminal records.
In December, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced a $10 million fund — half from taxpayer dollars, half from foundations — to support immigrants facing deportation. But a city council committee voted in March to exclude most individuals with violent criminal convictions. A statewide effort, which promises $12 million toward legal support, passed the California Senate last month with a similar exception.
In San Francisco, nonprofit groups have secured initial private funding to take on 180 cases per year on behalf of detained immigrants, said Valerie Zukin, a lawyer with the Bar Association of San Francisco who is helping coordinate the new efforts. Starting in June, the city’s public defender office will support another three lawyers who will work exclusively on detained deportation defense cases.
And there is help coming to Lumpkin, too. A $1 million project led by the Southern Poverty Law Center started hosting volunteer lawyers last month to spend a week at a time representing eligible detainees at their bond hearings. Eventually volunteers will represent detained immigrants throughout their deportation cases, but even that effort will initially focus on detainees with the strongest cases, said Dan Werner, the attorney who is overseeing the program.
As for Rosenbluth, the North Carolina lawyer now lives in Lumpkin full time, save for the occasional weekend visit to his spouse back home. His house in Lumpkin is five minutes from the detention center and the mortgage costs about $95 a month, he said — cheaper than if he stayed for a night at a hotel.
“It takes a certain personality type to be willing to move to the middle of nowhere,” said Rosenbluth, who is currently working on about 15 detained cases. “To be in the courtroom, and reading the judge’s face and reading the trial attorney’s face, it makes all the difference.”
Two weeks ago, on a sparkling spring morning, we went trawling along Florida’s coastal waterway. But not for fish.
We parked a 17-foot motor boat in a lagoon about 800 feet from the back lawn of The Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach and pointed a 2-foot wireless antenna that resembled a potato gun toward the club. Within a minute, we spotted three weakly encrypted Wi-Fi networks. We could have hacked them in less than five minutes, but we refrained.
A few days later, we drove through the grounds of the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, with the same antenna and aimed it at the clubhouse. We identified two open Wi-Fi networks that anyone could join without a password. We resisted the temptation.
We have also visited two of President Donald Trump’s other family-run retreats, the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., and a golf club in Sterling, Virginia. Our inspections found weak and open Wi-Fi networks, wireless printers without passwords, servers with outdated and vulnerable software, and unencrypted login pages to back-end databases containing sensitive information.
The risks posed by the lax security, experts say, go well beyond simple digital snooping. Sophisticated attackers could take advantage of vulnerabilities in the Wi-Fi networks to take over devices like computers or smart phones and use them to record conversations involving anyone on the premises.
“Those networks all have to be crawling with foreign intruders, not just ProPublica,” said Dave Aitel, chief executive officer of Immunity, Inc., a digital security company, when we told him what we found.
Security lapses are not uncommon in the hospitality industry, which — like most industries and government agencies — is under increasing attack from hackers. But they are more worrisome in places where the president of the United States, heads of state and public officials regularly visit.
U.S. leaders can ill afford such vulnerabilities. As both the U.S. and French presidential campaigns showed, hackers increasingly exploit weaknesses in internet security systems in an effort to influence elections and policy. Last week, cyberattacks using software stolen from the National Security Agency paralyzed operations in at least a dozen countries, from Britain’s National Health Service to Russia’s Interior Ministry.
Since the election, Trump has hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and British politician Nigel Farage at his properties. The cybersecurity issues we discovered could have allowed those diplomatic discussions — and other sensitive conversations at the properties — to be monitored by hackers.
The Trump Organization follows “cybersecurity best practices,” said spokeswoman Amanda Miller. “Like virtually every other company these days, we are routinely targeted by cyberterrorists whose only focus is to inflict harm on great American businesses. While we will not comment on specific security measures, we are confident in the steps we have taken to protect our business and safeguard our information. Our teams work diligently to deploy best-in-class firewall and anti-vulnerability platforms with constant 24/7 monitoring.”
The antenna used to detect networks on Trump properties (Surya Mattu/ProPublica)
The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Trump properties have been hacked before. Last year, the Trump hotel chain paid $50,000 to settle charges brought by the New York attorney general that it had not properly disclosed the loss of more than 70,000 credit card numbers and 302 Social Security numbers. Prosecutors alleged that hotel credit card systems were “the target of a cyber-attack” due to poor security. The company agreed to beef up its security; it’s not clear if the vulnerabilities we found violate that agreement. A spokesman for the New York attorney general declined comment.
Our experience also indicates that it’s easy to gain physical access to Trump properties, at least when the president is not there. As Politico has previously reported, Trump hotels and clubs are poorly guarded. We drove a car past the front of Mar-a-Lago and parked a boat near its lawn. We drove through the grounds of the Bedminster golf course and into the parking lot of the golf course in Sterling, Virginia. No one questioned us.
Both President Obama and President Bush often vacationed at the more traditional presidential retreat, the military-run Camp David. The computers and networks there and at the White House are run by the Defense Information Systems Agency.
In 2016, the military spent $64 million on maintaining the networks at the White House and Camp David, and more than $2 million on “defense solutions, personnel, techniques, and best practices to defend, detect, and mitigate cyber-based threats” from hacking those networks.
Even after spending millions of dollars on security, the White House admitted in 2015 that it was hacked by Russians. After the hack, the White House replaced all its computer systems, according to a person familiar with the matter. All staffers who work at the White House are told that “there are people who are actively watching what you are doing,” said Mikey Dickerson, who ran the U.S. Digital Service in the Obama administration.
By comparison, Mar-a-Lago budgeted $442,931 for security in 2016 — slightly more than double the $200,000 initiation fee for one new member. The Trump Organization declined to say how much Mar-a-Lago spends specifically on digital security. The club, last reported to have almost 500 members paying annual dues of $14,000 apiece, allotted $1,703,163 for all administration last year, according to documents filed in a lawsuit Trump brought against Palm Beach County in an effort to halt commercial flights from flying over Mar-a-Lago. The lawsuit was dropped, but the FAA now restricts flights over the club when the president is there.
It is not clear whether Trump connects to the insecure networks while at his family’s properties. When he travels, the president is provided with portable secure communications equipment. Trump tracked the military strike on a Syrian air base last month from a closed-door situation room at Mar-a-Lago with secure video equipment.
However, Trump has held sensitive meetings in public spaces at his properties. Most famously, in February, he and the Japanese prime minister discussed a North Korean missile test on the Mar-a-Lago patio. Over the course of that weekend in February, the president’s Twitter account posted 21 tweets from an Android phone. An analysis by an Android-focused website showed that Trump had used the same make of phone since 2015. That phone is an older model that isn’t approved by the NSA for classified use.
Photos of Trump and Abe taken by diners on that occasion prompted four Democratic senators to ask the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether electronic communications were secure at Mar-a-Lago.
In March, the GAO agreed to open an investigation. Chuck Young, a spokesman for the office, said in an interview that the work was in “the early stages,” and did not offer an estimate for when the report would be completed.
So, we decided to test the cybersecurity of Trump’s favorite hangouts ourselves.
Our first stop was Mar-a-Lago, a Trump country club in Palm Beach, Florida, where the president has spent most weekends since taking office. Driving past the club, we picked up the signal for a Wi-Fi-enabled combination printer and scanner that has been accessible since at least February 2016, according to a public Wi-Fi database.
An open printer may sound innocuous, but it can be used by hackers for everything from capturing all the documents sent to the device to trying to infiltrate the entire network.
To prevent such attacks, the Defense Information Systems Agency, which secures the White House and other military networks, forbids installing printers that anyone can connect to from outside networks. It also warns against using printers that do more than printing, such as faxing. “If an attacker gains network access to one of these devices, a wide range of exploits may be possible,” the agency warns in its security guide.
We also were able to detect a misconfigured and unencrypted router, which could potentially provide a gateway for hackers.
To get a better line of sight, we rented a boat and piloted it to within sight of the club. There, we picked up signals from the club’s wireless networks, three of which were protected with a weak and outmoded form of encryption known as WEP. In 2005, an FBI agent publicly broke this type of encryption in minutes.
From our desks in New York, we were also able to determine that the club’s website hosts a database with an insecure login page that is not protected by standard internet encryption. Login forms like this are considered a severe security risk, according to the Defense Information Systems Agency.
Without encryption, spies could eavesdrop on the network until a club employee logs in, and then steal his or her username and password. They then could download a database that appears to include sensitive information on the club’s members and their families, according to videos posted by the club’s software provider.
This is “bad, very bad,” said Jeremiah Grossman, chief of Security Strategy for cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, when we described Mar-a-Lago’s systems. “I’d assume the data is already stolen and systems compromised.”
A few days later, we took our equipment to another Trump club in Bedminster, New Jersey. During the transition, Trump had interviewed candidates for top administration positions there, including James Mattis, now secretary of defense.
We drove on a dirt access road through the middle of the golf course and spotted two open Wi-Fi networks, TrumpMembers and WelcomeToTrumpNationalGolfClub, that did not require a password to join.
The dirt road through the Bedminster golf course (Surya Mattu/ProPublica)
Such open networks allow anyone within range to scoop up all unencrypted internet activity taking place there, which could, on insecure sites, include usernames, passwords and emails.
Robert Graham, an Atlanta, Georgia, cybersecurity expert, said that hackers could use the open Wi-Fi to remotely turn on the microphones and cameras of devices connected to the network. “What you’re describing is typical hotel security,” he said, but “it’s pretty concerning” that an attacker could listen to sensitive national security conversations.
Two days after we visited the Bedminster club, Trump arrived for a weekend stay.
Then we visited the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., where Trump often dines with his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, whose responsibilities range from Middle East diplomacy to revamping the federal bureaucracy. We surveyed the networks from a Starbucks in the hotel basement.
From there, we could tell there were two Wi-Fi networks at the hotel protected with what’s known as a captive portal. These login screens are often used at airports and hotels to ensure that only paying customers can access the network.
However, we gained access to both networks just by typing “457” into the room number field. Because we provided a room number, the system assumed we were guests. We looked up the hotel’s public IP address before logging off.
From our desks in New York, we could also tell that the hotel is using a server that is accessible from the public internet. This server is running software that was released almost 13 years ago.
Finally, we visited the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, where the president sometimes plays golf. From the parking lot, we recognized three encrypted wireless networks, an encrypted wireless phone and two printers with open Wi-Fi access.
The Trump club websites are hosted by an Ohio-based company called Clubessential. It offers everything from back-office management and member communications to tee time and room reservations.
In a 2014 presentation, a company sales director warned that the club industry as a whole is “too lax” in managing and protecting passwords. There has been a “rising number of attacks on club websites over the last two years,” according to the presentation. Clubessential “performed [an] audit of security in the club industry” and “found thousands of sensitive documents from clubs exposed on [the] Internet,” such as “lists of members and staff, and their contact info; board minutes, financial statements, etc.”
Still, the club software company has set up a backend server accessible on the internet, and configured its encryption incorrectly. Anyone who reaches the login page is greeted with a warning that the encryption is broken. In its documentation, the company advises club administrators to ignore these warnings and log in regardless. That means that anybody snooping on the unprotected connection could intercept the administrators’ passwords and gain access to the entire system.
The company also publishes online, without a password, many of the default settings and usernames for its software — essentially providing a roadmap for intruders.
Clubessential declined comment.
Aitel, the CEO of Immunity, said the problems at Trump properties would be difficult to fix: “Once you are at a low level of security it is hard to develop a secure network system. You basically have to start over.”
Do you have access to information that should be public? Here’s how to send tips and documents to ProPublica securely.
Last Thursday night, I tweeted: “The story we’re dropping tomorrow is the 1st time I wish I had a superpower to *force* people to read a thing.”
I still think that.
“The Last Person You’d Expect to Die in Childbirth” is the first part of our investigation with NPR into how the United States has become the most dangerous place to be pregnant among the world’s more affluent nations.
Every year 700 to 900 women die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes, and some 65,000 nearly die. Almost 60 percent of the deaths are preventable.
We told the story of Lauren Bloomstein — a nurse, married to a doctor — who died at her own hospital 20 hours after her son was born. Here’s a video her husband Larry took soon after the birth.
When we first asked readers months ago to share their stories, we said we would give regular updates on our reporting. Today, we’re giving you the backstory to the project, and where we’re going from here.
How We Started — and Learned That a Public Health Problem Is Too Often Treated as a Private Tragedy
It’s been seven months since our engagement team started to work with reporter Nina Martin on the investigation. Lack of data was among the main challenges. By almost every measure, basic tracking of maternal deaths and near-deaths is inadequate. Numbers are vague and ambiguous.
This left us looking to unconventional sources for names, causes of death and places where women are dying. We found particular success on the crowdfunding site GoFundMe.
Families and loved ones were sharing devastating details on pages set up to help cover the unexpected costs of losing a mother. This was particularly striking because people so rarely talk about maternal deaths elsewhere. Even the most popular mommy blogs don’t often delve into mortality and near-deaths. We realized that it’s part of a pattern: Treating the death of a mother due to pregnancy or childbirth as a private tragedy rather than as part of a public health crisis.
We heard from 2,500 people the first week, mostly women reporting that they had nearly died. Women told us they were rarely asked about what happened.
More than 3,100 people have now responded to our detailed questionnaire.
We’ve also heard from many, many others via email. And some, like New York Times reporter Catherine Saint Louis, publicly recounted their own near-death experiences:
We’re Looking Next at Racial Disparities, And Here’s How You Can Help
As successful as our callout has been, we want to reach more women of color. African Americans are three to four times more likely to die from childbirth complications than whites, yet we have only heard about 120 stories relating to black mothers.
We are now researching an upcoming article about racial disparities. Last week, we asked the black women we’ve heard from where they talk with other women about surviving childbirth complications.
We’re also working on several partnerships to reach wider audiences.
If you are interested in hosting our questionnaire, please let us know. In addition to our reporting teams at NPR and ProPublica, we worked with two university classes. Journalism students at NYU helped verify information about the women’s deaths we found via GoFundMe and Facebook research. And students from CUNY’s social journalism program worked on outreach strategies to get our callout in front of as many people as possible.
We are just getting started. As we move forward, we want your help too.
Do you know someone who should see the callout? Share it with them. Do you know about a group, organization or person who is thinking about this that we should talk to? Tell us. Do you have a story we need to hear about or information that will help not only us but the women and families impacted by this issue? Get in touch.
This story was co-published with Consumer Reports.
The California Department of Insurance has launched an investigation into whether eight auto insurers in the state discriminate against drivers in minority neighborhoods.
The investigation was prompted by an April 5 article, co-published by ProPublica and Consumer Reports, which found that the eight California insurers were charging more for auto premiums in minority neighborhoods, on average, than in non-minority areas with similar accident costs. California law prohibits insurers from charging rates that are excessive or unfairly discriminatory.
“We have taken these pricing allegations very seriously,” Deputy Commissioner Ken Allen wrote on April 28 to an attorney at Consumers Union, the policy and action arm of Consumer Reports. “… All necessary information to complete a thorough analysis on a file-by-file basis has already been or will be obtained from the eight insurers. The Department’s analysis will determine if there are inequities with respect to the pricing and treatment of any ZIP codes by these insurers.”
At the time our article was published, the California insurance department disputed ProPublica’s analysis. “The study’s flawed methodology results in a flawed conclusion,” the regulatory agency said in a statement.
But after hearing from groups including Consumers Union, Public Advocates and Consumer Watchdog, the department decided to initiate its own investigation. It will make the results of the review public, Allen told Consumers Union.
It’s not clear what data and methodology the department will use in its review, or whether it has the necessary data in-house. Allen wrote that the department will ask the eight insurers to submit “filings of their auto class plans and rating methodologies for review of discriminatory rating practices,” but the department regularly collects much of this information anyway.
The eight companies under scrutiny are subsidiaries of three major national insurers: Nationwide, USAA and Liberty Mutual.
Liberty Mutual and Nationwide both said that they don’t discriminate and that they cooperate with any review by the California insurance department.
“We support and embrace an inclusive environment that is free from discrimination in the workplace and in our businesses,” said Liberty Mutual spokesman John Cusolito. “… We are committed to offering drivers fair and competitive priced car insurance coverage options.”
“Nationwide develops its rates based on sound actuarial principles, relying on loss and expense experience and utilizing permissible and nondiscriminatory rating factors in compliance with each state’s ratemaking laws,” said Nationwide spokesman Eric Hardgrove.
USAA did not respond to a request for comment.
“We sincerely hope the California Department of Insurance will reaffirm what they had originally referred to as ‘flawed methodology’ that led to ‘a flawed conclusion,’” said James Lynch, chief actuary of the Insurance Information Institute, an industry trade group.
Lynch said the institute hired an actuarial firm that has reviewed ProPublica’s data. That study has not been made public.
In California, which is a highly regulated insurance market, eight of the 21 insurers we examined had pricing disparities of more than 10 percent, led by Liberty Mutual. Its premiums were on average 33 percent higher in zip codes where most residents are minorities than in whiter neighborhoods with similar accident costs. The disparities at USAA and Nationwide were 18 percent and 14 percent, respectively.
Disparate pricing was more prevalent in three other states, where insurance is less regulated.
In Illinois, 33 of the 34 companies we analyzed were charging at least 10 percent more, on average, for the same safe driver in zip codes where most residents are minorities than in other comparably risky zip codes. In Missouri and Texas, at least half of the insurers we studied charged higher premiums for a safe driver in high-risk minority communities than in comparably risky non-minority communities.
Minority neighborhoods pay higher car insurance premiums than white areas with the same risk. Read the story.
ProPublica could only examine insurance payouts in four states because they are the only ones that release the type of data needed to compare insurance payouts by geography.
As a result of ProPublica’s reporting, two Illinois lawmakers have proposed barring car insurers there from using a driver’s zip code to determine premiums. Six Democratic members of Congress have also urged the Treasury Department to appoint a director for the Federal Insurance Office, which monitors insurance pricing and availability in minority neighborhoods.
Richard Marcantonio, managing attorney for San Francisco-based Public Advocates, said the California regulator’s actions may not go far enough. “We don’t know exactly what information he has asked for,” he said. “The whole thing is happening in a black box.”
He said that the department’s investigation should be conducted publicly, and the data used for its analysis should also be made available to the public. “It’s just too important an issue to have the public see conclusions without having any basis for understanding what went into them,” Marcantonio said.
Allen assured Consumers Union that this investigation is only the beginning. “The Department will continue this focus on ZIP code treatment in all subsequent class plan filings made by any insurer,” he wrote.
Wearing a slightly baggy suit, a maroon turban wrapped around his head, Maan Singh Khalsa looked across the courtroom at Judge Patricia Scanlon and wiggled his right hand.
The damage was obvious: Most of Khalsa’s pinky finger was missing.
“My attackers hit me with their fists, knocked off my turban, and yelled, ‘Cut his fucking hair.’ They yanked my hair through the window and used a knife to saw parts of it off. In the course of the attack, as I tried to protect my hair and my head, my right finger was stabbed, and eventually required amputation.”
Khalsa, an Indian immigrant and adherent of the Sikh faith, spoke softly and calmly during the hearing on Thursday. But with those words he was trying to close the book on a hate crime case that gained national attention last fall.
Khalsa was attacked last September on a roadway in Richmond, California, a tough oil refinery town perched on the edge of the San Francisco Bay. Now, on the left side of the courtroom, confined to a cage made of glass and black steel, stood Khalsa’s assailants, Colton Tye Leblanc, 25, and Chase Little, 31.
The episode started on the night of Sept. 25, 2016, when LeBlanc, Little and three other men working for an oil services company pulled up to a stoplight in a Ford F-150 pickup truck. Khalsa was driving a car in the next lane over. Somebody in the truck hurled a beer can at him. Soon the situation turned violent, with LeBlanc and Little, both white men, punching Khalsa, an IT specialist for the Social Security Administration, through his car window.
Then the knife came out.
“Observant Sikhs like me keep our hair unshorn in order to live in harmony with the will of God. Cutting a Sikh’s hair is one of the most humiliating things anyone can do a Sikh,” Khalsa told the court.
Before the assault, he said, “I was so carefree. I considered myself an American like everyone else. I had never worried about being the victim of prejudice. I enjoyed my life fully.”
The violence has been transformative. “When the traffic light turned green I was able to drive away from the attackers, but my life is forever changed,” said Khalsa. Now, he said, “It is difficult for me to go out in public.”
Khalsa said he has suffered short-term memory lapses, depression, bouts of anxiety. He said he has trouble typing and using his right hand in general.
After Khalsa shared his story with the court, LeBlanc and Little pleaded no contest to aggravated assault and hate crimes charges. Neither man offered an apology.
Scanlon handed each of them a three-year state prison term, with any restitution payments to be discussed at a later court hearing. It was a negotiated outcome, a deal struck by defense attorneys and County Prosecutor Simon O’Connell.
Back in November, LeBlanc’s attorney, Joseph Tully, dismissed the notion that his client targeted Khalsa due to Khalsa’s ethnicity or religion. “This was simply a fight over a beer can at a stoplight which can’t be elevated to a hate crime under any circumstance,” he said at the time.
A brutal beating; a terrible murder. Seeking motives in a divided America. Read the story.
Now, even as LeBlanc and Little prepared for an extended stay in the state penal system, Tully remained defiant, claiming to have amassed evidence essentially clearing his client and portraying Khalsa not as a victim but an aggressor, who had used his car as a weapon at some point in the altercation.
“I’ve laughed every time I’ve heard that,” responded O’Connell, the prosecutor. “The defense kept saying they were going to present all this exonerating evidence, but then they turned around and quite readily agreed to plead to the charges.”
Though Khalsa “might have panicked” while behind the wheel, he didn’t do anything malicious, said O’Connell.
For O’Connell, the conviction of LeBlanc and Little represented a significant victory.
Hate crime cases are especially challenging for prosecutors, who must prove not just that a defendant has committed a crime, but that he or she was motivated by animus towards the victim’s race, religion, nationality or other identity characteristic. In 2015, California prosecutors secured convictions on hate crimes charges in less than 50 percent of the cases they filed, according to figures compiled by the California Department of Justice. O’Connell’s colleagues in the Contra Costa district attorney’s office dropped hate crimes charges in another high-profile case, the murder of Will Sims, an African-American musician who was beaten and shot to death in November 2016 after a dispute in a bar.
For Khalsa, the morning in court was an opportunity to live out the principles of his faith.
At one point he looked directly at his assailants:
“As a Sikh, I believe that all of us are one human family, and that we must treat everyone as equals regardless of our many differences. Mr. Little and Mr. LeBlanc, I hope that one day you will come to share this view. I still consider you my brothers, and I hope that you will learn about me and my community, and one day consider me your brother, too.”
How do Americans live the last third of their lives? What we hear, especially when it comes to working, is that this usually is a time of stability, increased flexibility and widening opportunity. The kinds of work that people 50 and older do are often gamely called “encores,” “re-careers” or “third acts.”
I was laid off at 63. It took me 15 months to find a new job. In the interim, my twins, then 18, headed for college. The money was (and still is) flying out the door.
Getting laid off may be the price of a dynamic economy. Getting stuck out wasn’t part of the deal, especially if, like me, you depend on wages to pay your daily expenses. And to add to the pot for when you no longer work.
Building that reserve isn’t getting any easier. American employers are ratcheting back on their contributions. Rules aimed at protecting retirement funds are under attack by the new administration.
I’ve already done stories on court battles over age discrimination and want to delve deeper into the issue. If you know of a company or organization that has made major cuts of older workers, I’d like to hear about it.
I want to do stories about people moving through their 50s and 60s who are hit with demotions, layoffs or business closings. I want to find out what was behind the blows and how everyone coped. If you or someone you know has had one of these experiences, I’d like to talk.
I want to hear from people who’ve received a buyout or other parting package they thought would set them up for life only to discover it wasn’t enough, and then had trouble getting new work.
In short, I want your views on these issues — and others that you’d like addressed. We can build a community around what we learn together.
Do you have a story about age discrimination in the workplace? Help us with our reporting by answering some questions here.
Of course, I’m not your person if you’re looking for help with your particular job hunt. Or what to wear after 50. But with your help I can provide a realistic report about the challenges, setbacks and victories that real people face living out the rest of their lives. Please contact me at: peter.gosselin@propublica.org, or by leaving a message at 917-512-0258.
I’m also dusting off my Facebook account, where I’ll post my stories and anything useful I find along the way. So please don’t be shy.
This story was co-published with The New York Times Magazine.
The Townhouse on High Seas Court in the Cove Village development, in the Baltimore suburb of Essex, was not exactly the Cape Cod retreat that its address implied: It was a small unit looking onto a parking lot, the windows of its two bedrooms so high and narrow that a child would have had to stand on a chair to see out of them. But to Kamiia Warren, who moved into the townhouse in 2004, it was a refuge, and a far cry from the East Baltimore neighborhood where she grew up. “I mean, there were bunny rabbits all hopping around,” she told me recently.
In the townhouse next door lived an older woman with whom Warren became friendly, even doing her grocery shopping once in a while. But over the course of a few months, the woman started acting strangely. She began accosting Warren’s visitors. She shouted through the walls during the day. And at night she banged on the wall, right where Warren kept the bassinet in which her third child slept, waking him up.
Warren sent a letter reporting the problem to the complex’s property manager, a company called Sawyer Realty Holdings. When there was no response, she decided to move out. In January 2010, she submitted the requisite form giving two months’ notice that she was transferring her Section 8 voucher — the federal low-income subsidy that helped her pay the rent — elsewhere. The complex’s on-site manager signed the form a week later, checking the line that read “The tenant gave notice in accordance with the lease.”
So Warren was startled in January 2013, three years later, when she received a summons from a private process server informing her that she was being sued for $3,014.08 by the owner of Cove Village. The lawsuit, filed in Maryland District Court, was doubly bewildering. It claimed she owed the money for having left in advance of her lease’s expiration, though she had received written permission to leave. And the company suing her was not Sawyer, but one whose name she didn’t recognize: JK2 Westminster LLC.
Warren was raising three children alone while taking classes for a bachelor’s degree in health care administration, and she disregarded the summons at first. But JK2 Westminster’s lawyers persisted; two more summonses followed. In April 2014, she appeared without a lawyer at a district court hearing. She told the judge about the approval for her move, but she did not have a copy of the form the manager had signed. The judge ruled against Warren, awarding JK2 Westminster the full sum it was seeking, plus court costs, attorney’s fees and interest that brought the judgment to nearly $5,000. There was no way Warren, who was working as a home health aide, was going to be able to pay such a sum. “I was so desperate,” she said.
If the case was confounding to Warren, it was not unique. Hundreds like it have been filed over the last five years by JK2 Westminster and affiliated businesses in the state of Maryland alone, where the company owns some 8,000 apartments and townhouses. Nor was JK2 Westminster quite as anonymous as its opaque name suggested. It was a subsidiary of a large New York real-estate firm called Kushner Companies, which was led by a young man whose initials happened to be J.K.: Jared Kushner.
When Americans were introduced last year to Ivanka Trump’s husband and the nation’s prospective son-in-law in chief, it was as the preternaturally poised, Harvard-educated scion of a real-estate empire whose glittering ambitions resembled Donald Trump’s own. In 2007, Kushner Companies, run at the time by Jared and his father, Charles, bought the aluminum-clad skyscraper at 666 Fifth Avenue for a record-breaking $1.8 billion; they are now seeking partners for a $12 billion plan to replace it with a glass tower that would be 40 stories taller. In 2013 they acquired 17 buildings in Manhattan’s East Village for about $130 million, and three years later they spent $715 million on a cluster of buildings owned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses on prime land in Brooklyn’s fast-developing Dumbo district.
But the Kushners’ empire, like Trump’s, was underwritten by years of dealing in much more modestly ambitioned properties. Jared’s grandfather Joseph Kushner, a Holocaust survivor from Belarus, over his lifetime built a small construction company in New Jersey into a real-estate venture that owned and managed some 4,000 low-rise units concentrated in the suburbs of Newark. After taking over the business, Charles expanded Kushner Companies’ holdings to commercial and industrial spaces, but the company’s bread and butter remained the North Jersey apartment complexes bequeathed to him by his father.
In the mid-2000s, the company began to sell off the more than 25,000 multifamily rental units it owned, culminating in a 2007 sale of nearly 17,000 units for $1.9 billion. The sale — near the peak of the housing boom, just months before the crash — was impeccably timed, but it also reflected a shift in the attentions of what would soon be a three-generation real-estate dynasty. Charles, a major Democratic Party donor, had returned late the previous year from a brief stint in federal prison after pleading guilty to 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign donations. Back at the helm of the company, he began to shift its focus from New Jersey to New York City — and prepared to pass the reins to his son Jared, who had just received a degree in law and business from New York University.
But amid the high-profile Manhattan and Brooklyn purchases, in 2011, Kushner Companies, with Jared now more firmly in command, pulled together a deal that looked much more like something from the firm’s humble past than from its high-rolling present. That June, the company and its equity partners bought 4,681 units of what are known in real-estate jargon as “distress-ridden, Class B” apartment complexes: units whose prices fell somewhere in the middle of the market, typically of a certain age and wear, whose owners were in financial difficulty. The properties were spread across 12 sites in Toledo, Ohio; Pittsburgh; and other Rust Belt cities still reeling from the Great Recession. Kushner had to settle more than 200 debts held against the complexes before the deal could go through; at one complex, in Pittsburgh, circumstances had become so dire that some residents had been left without heat and power because the previous owner couldn’t pay the bills. Prudential, which was foreclosing on the portfolio, sold it for only $72 million — half the value of the mortgages on the properties.
In the following months, Kushner Companies bought another 1,700 multifamily units in similar markets, according to the trade publication Multifamily Executive. Unlike the company’s big New York investments, the complexes were not acquired with an eye toward appreciation — these were not growing markets, after all — but toward producing a steady cash flow. “Our goal is to keep buying and incrementally growing — they’re good markets where you can get yield,” Jared Kushner told Multifamily Executive in October 2011, predicting that the net income for the year’s purchases would be $14 million within a year. The complexes buttressed the Kushner portfolio in another way, he said: They would serve as a hedge against an upswing in inflation he believed was looming on the horizon.
A year later, in August 2012, a Kushner-led investment group bought 5,500 multifamily units in the Baltimore area with $371 million in financing from Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage lender — another considerable bargain. Two years later, Kushner Companies picked up three more complexes in the Baltimore area for $37.9 million. Today, Westminster Management, Kushner Companies’ property-management arm, lists 34 complexes under its control in Maryland, Ohio and New Jersey, with a total of close to 20,000 units.
Kushner’s largest concentration of multifamily units is in the Baltimore area, where the company controls 15 complexes in all — which, if you assume three residents per unit, could be home to more than 20,000 people. All but two of the complexes are in suburban Baltimore County, but they are only “suburban” in the most literal sense. They sit along arterial shopping strips or highways, yet they are easy to miss — the Highland Village complex, for example, is beside the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, but the tall sound barriers dividing it from the six-lane highway render its more than 1,000 units invisible to the thousands traveling that route every day.
The complexes date mostly from the 1960s and ’70s, when white flight from the city was creating a huge demand for affordable housing in Baltimore County. They were meant to exude middle-class respectability — unglamorous but safe and pleasant enough, a renter’s Levittown. Since then, however, they have slipped socioeconomically, along with the middle class itself, into the vast gray area of the modern precariat — home to casino workers, distribution-warehouse pickers, Uber drivers, students at for-profit colleges. Although most of the tenants I met in a series of recent visits to the complexes pay their own rent, ranging from about $800 to $1,300, some of them receive Section 8 assistance, as Kamiia Warren did; Baltimore County has no public housing for a population of more than 825,000, so these and similar complexes have become the de facto substitute.
At the time of the 2012 Baltimore purchase, Kushner raved about the promise of the low-end multifamily market. “It’s proven over the last few years to be the most resilient asset class, and at the end of the day, it’s a very stable asset class,” he told Multifamily Executive. He said things were proceeding well in the Midwestern complexes he purchased a year earlier. “It was a lot of construction and a lot of evictions,” he said. “But the communities now look great, and the outcome has been phenomenal.”
Kamiia Warren still had not paid the $4,984.37 judgment against her by late 2014. Three days before Christmas that year, JK2 Westminster filed a request to garnish her wages from her in-home elder care job. Five days earlier, Warren had gone to court to fill out a handwritten motion saying she had proof that she was given permission to leave Cove Village in 2010 — she had finally managed to get a copy from the housing department. “Please give me the opportunity to plead my case,” she wrote. But she did not attach a copy of the form to her motion, not realizing it was necessary, so a judge denied it on Jan. 9, on the grounds that there was “no evidence submitted.”
Kamiia Warren at Cove Village, the Kushner Companies property in Essex, Maryland, where she once lived (Philip Montgomery for The New York Times)
The garnishing started that month. Warren was in the midst of leaving her job, but JK2 Westminster garnished her bank account too. After her account was zeroed out, a loss of about $900, she borrowed money from her mother to buy food for her children and pay her bills. That February — five years after she left Cove Village — Warren returned to court, this time with the housing form in hand, asking the judge to halt garnishment. “I am a single mom of three and my bank account was wiped clean by the plaintiff,” she pleaded in another handwritten request. “I cannot take care of my kids when they snatch all of my money out of my account. I do not feel I owe this money. Please have mercy on my family and I.” She told me that when she called the law office representing JK2 Westminster that same day from the courthouse to discuss the case, one of the lawyers told her: “This is not going to go away. You will pay us.”
The judge denied Warren’s request without explanation. And JK2 Westminster kept pressing for the rest of the money, sending out one process server after another to present Warren with legal papers. Finally, in January 2016, the court sent notice of a $4,615 lien against Warren — a legal claim against her for the remaining judgment. Warren began to cry as she recounted the episode to me. She said the lien has greatly complicated her hopes of taking out a loan to start her own small assisted living center. She had gone a couple of years without a bank account, for fear of further garnishing. “It was just pure greed,” she said. “It was unnecessary.” I asked why she hadn’t pushed harder against the judgment once she had the necessary evidence in hand. “They know how to work this stuff,” she replied. “They know what to do, and here I am, I don’t know anything about the law. I would have to hire a lawyer or something, and I really can’t afford that. I really don’t know my rights. I don’t know all the court lingo. I knew that up against them I would lose.”
A search for “JK2 Westminster” in the database of Maryland’s District Court system brings back 548 cases in which it is the plaintiff — and that does not include hundreds of other cases that have been filed in the name of the company’s individual complexes.
The vast majority of these cases have been filed by a single small law firm in the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills. The law office of Jeffrey Tapper specializes in “collections” work, with an emphasis on landlord-tenant cases. It has represented several other real-estate management companies, including Sawyer, which retains a stake in many of the Kushner complexes.
In April, I drove to Owings Mills in hopes of speaking to Tapper. As I waited for him by reception, I overheard an assistant making a call about a new case, saying that the firm would continue to pursue one tenant even if the other person on the lease had filed for bankruptcy. Tapper emerged, a man in his mid-60s with white hair, a paunch and a large smartphone clipped to his belt. Our interview was brief. “I’m not having any conversation with you that has to do with one of my clients,” he said. “I’m not helping you with any of whatever you’re trying to do.”
In the cases that Tapper has brought to court on behalf of JK2 Westminster and individual Kushner-controlled companies, there is a clear pattern of Kushner Companies’ pursuing tenants over virtually any unpaid rent or broken lease — even in the numerous cases where the facts appear to be on the tenants’ side. Not only does the company file cases against them, it pursues the cases for as long as it takes to collect from the overmatched defendants — often several years. The court docket of JK2 Westminster’s case against Warren, for instance, spans more than three years and 112 actions — for a sum that amounts to maybe two days’ worth of billings for the average corporate law firm associate, from a woman who never even rented from JK2 Westminster. The pursuit is all the more remarkable given how transient the company’s prey tends to be. Hounding former tenants for money means paying to send out process servers who often report back that they were unable to locate the target. This does not deter Kushner Companies’ lawyers. They send the servers back out again a few months later.
In March 2009, Joan Beverly, a probation agent, signed the lease for her daughter, Lennettea, for a unit at Dutch Village, a complex on the northern edge of Baltimore. Lennettea moved out a year later, several months before her lease was up. Kushner Companies bought Dutch Village more than two years later. In December 2012, JK2 Westminster filed suit in Baltimore County District Court against Beverly, seeking $3,810.16 — several months of rent it said it was owed, plus about $1,000 in repair costs, including $10 for “failure to return laundry room card.”
That February, Lennettea filed a written court notice explaining that her mother, who was dying of pancreatic cancer, was “in terminal hospice care and is not eligible to work.” She added by way of supporting evidence a letter from the hospice provider to Joan Beverly’s bank, explaining her and her husband’s late mortgage payments on their home: “There has been added financial stress because Mrs. Beverly is very ill at this time.” But JK2 Westminster persisted in seeking a hearing on the suit. In March, a district court judge found in favor of the company — a total judgment against Joan of more than $5,500.
Joan died two weeks later. Her husband, Tyrone Beverly, a retired longshoreman, requested that the judgment against his deceased wife be removed but was denied. The case remains open in the court database. Tyrone, who was married to Joan for 32 years, told me that he had assumed the judgment had been dismissed and was unaware that it was still listed as awaiting payment. “They just didn’t treat us fair,” he said.
Dutch Village, a Kushner Companies-owned complex in Baltimore (Philip Montgomery for The New York Times)
The sweeping nature of the company’s pursuit of tenants was most evident when those tenants were, in fact, prepared to defend themselves. Shawanda Hough moved out of her unit in the Carriage Hill complex in the northwestern Baltimore suburb of Randallstown in early 2012 after black mold worsened her son’s asthma, landing him in the hospital twice. After the maintenance crew tried and failed to fix the problem, she got the rental office’s written permission to move out in advance of her lease. But then Kushner Companies bought Carriage Hill, and a year and a half later, in August 2013, JK2 Westminster filed a lawsuit against Hough, seeking $4,068.53.
Hough fought back. In a court filing, she said that she had kept all of her documentation, and that the company had assured her that it had not lost a dime in rent; she had gone so far as to coordinate the time of her departure with the arrival of a new tenant. JK2 Westminster went ahead with a hearing before a judge a month later, but the judge ultimately found for Hough.
Cases like Hough’s, however, were the exception rather than the rule. Overall, about nine out of every 10 cases brought by JK2 Westminster that I surveyed resulted in judgments against the defendants, who often did not appear in person for the hearings — and if they did, almost never had legal representation. How could it possibly be worth Kushner Companies’ while to pursue hundreds of people so aggressively over a few thousand dollars here and there? After all, the pursuit itself cost money. And it wasn’t happening just in Baltimore — Doug Wilkins, a lawyer in Toledo who has represented some of the complexes bought there by Kushner, told me the company is seeking far more monetary judgments than did previous owners.
When I presented JK2 Westminster’s record of litigation to Matthew Cypher, a Georgetown University business professor who used to work for the real-estate giant Invesco, he said it was highly unusual to put so much effort into pursuing former tenants in court. “These people fade into the shadows of the night,” he said. “It’s amazing to me that there’s that much to go after.” Brian Pendergraft, an attorney in Greenbelt, Maryland, who works on both sides of landlord-tenant litigation, told me he had heard of large property-management companies pursuing former tenants for unpaid rent but not going so far as to pursue tenants who predated the company’s ownership of a complex. “I guess you can do it,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s cool.”
But Matthew Hertz, whose Bethesda, Maryland, firm represents landlords and tenants in similar cases, explained to me that there is a logic behind such aggressive tactics. The costs of the pursuit are not as high as you might imagine, he said — people are not that hard to find in the age of cellphones and easily accessible databases. “If I give my process server a name and phone number, it’s generally enough to trace you,” he said. “If I have a date of birth and Social Security number, it’s even easier.” The legal costs can be billed to the defendant as attorney’s fees, if the terms of the lease allow. And garnishing wages is relatively easy to do by court order, assuming the defendant has wages to garnish.
As for pursuing former tenants from years before the new company’s ownership of a complex, Hertz said it was hardly different from an investor’s buying a portfolio of mortgages: It’s debt to be collected on. “If you buy someone’s properties, you’re buying their debts, not just their assets. You take the good with the bad, and try to collect on the bad. Even if you only get back 5 percent, you’re making something,” he said. “It’s, ‘I’m buying up this property and if I can collect anything, it’s gravy on top.’”
There was, Hertz added, an ancillary benefit to such relentless pursuit: sending a message to current tenants. One way to make sure that tenants are paying their rent and to keep them from breaking leases early — which brings with it the costs and hassles of having to clean apartments and find new tenants — is to instill a sense of fear about violating a lease. “Any landlord takes that into account,” Hertz said. “They know tenants are going to talk to each other. If they say, ‘He’s going to come after you,’ it’s deterrence.”
When Kushner Companies finally responded to my questions about the cases, they essentially affirmed Hertz’s reasoning. As manager for the Baltimore complexes, the company had a “fiduciary obligation” to its ownership partners to collect as much revenue as it could, said Kushner Companies’ chief financial officer, Jennifer McLean, in a written response. She said the company’s legal costs have been “minimal” compared with what it seeks to recover.
McLean declined to comment on several cases, including Kamiia Warren’s. But she said the pursuit of Joan Beverly, the woman dying of cancer, was justified. “This tenant owned the landlord $3,819.16,” she said in the written statement. “As property manager, it’s our job to collect rent payments.”
In general, “Westminster Management only takes legal action against a tenant when absolutely necessary,” McLean said. “If legal action is pursued, however, the company follows guidelines consistent with industry standards.” She added: “While taking a tenant to court is far from an ideal outcome, that option — and clear rules governing it — must exist as a last resort.”
The Highland Village complex, along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, is one of Kushner Companies’ largest, a vast maze of lanes and courts lined with rows of short brick-and-siding-fronted homes. Like the other Kushner complexes I visited in Baltimore’s southern and eastern suburbs, it is situated in what was once a predominantly white working-class community, within reasonable commuting distance of the harbor and industrial plants, now defunct, like Bethlehem Steel. In recent decades, many black transplants from the city and Hispanic immigrants have arrived as well, and Highland Village is an unusually integrated place.
Highland Village, where many residents complained about the owners’ aggressive rent-collection practices (Philip Montgomery for The New York Times)
The complex, like the others I saw, seemed designed to preclude neighborliness — most of the townhouses lack even the barest stoop to sit out on, and at least one complex has signs forbidding ball-playing (“violators will be prosecuted”). At another complex, kids had drawn a rectangle on the side of a storage shed in lieu of a hoop for their basketball game. The only meeting points at many of the complexes are the metal mailbox stands, the dumpsters and the laundry room. And the only thing that united many of the residents I spoke to, it seemed, was resentment of their landlord.
They complained about Westminster Management’s aggressive rent-collection practices, which many told me exceeded what they had experienced under the previous owners. Rent is marked officially late, they said, if it arrives after 4:30 p.m. on the fifth day of the month. But Westminster recently made paying the rent much more of a challenge. Last fall, it sent notice to residents saying that they could no longer pay by money order (on which many residents, who lack checking accounts, had relied) at the complex’s rental office and would instead need to go to a Walmart or Ace Cash Express and use an assigned “WIPS card” — a plastic card linked to the resident’s account — to pay their rent there. That method carries a $3.50 fee for every payment, and getting to the Walmart or Ace is difficult for the many residents without cars.
Tenants who pay after the fifth are hit with late fees that start around $40 to $50 and escalate from there, with court fees usually added on as well. What upsets residents most, though, are not the fees themselves but that the property managers, instead of putting pink or yellow late notices and court summonses discreetly in mailboxes or under doors, post them in public — on the front doors of townhouse units or on lobby walls or lobby doors of apartment buildings. This bothered even tenants who said they always paid their rent on time. “The whole neighborhood knows,” said Marquita Parmely, a truck driver who pays $1,010 a month to rent a townhouse at Essex Park, near Cove Village. Dareck Cromwell, a retiree living at Carriage Hill, told me: “They put them in the windows for everybody to see, to see your business. That’s not right. You don’t put people’s business out like that.”
Compounding these grievances was Westminster’s maintenance of the properties — or lack thereof. Their complexes comprise hundreds of units, but typically have only four or so workers looking after them. Alishia Jamesson, a 30-year-old Highland Village resident, invited me into the small living room of the $842-a-month townhouse she and her fiancé share with her two children. The room was cluttered with bags from Walmart and Dollar Tree, ketchup packets and supplies for the work Jamesson took up after she lost her cashier’s job at Walmart for missing too many shifts for parenting duties: making personalized tote bags and gift baskets for weddings.
Jamesson showed me three large holes in the walls of the townhouse, which Westminster charged her and her fiancé, Keith Riggs, $150 to fix in October but had not yet repaired. “Every time I ask about drywall they say, ‘Oh, well, we only have one drywall person,’” Riggs told me. There was also black mold spreading around the bathtub, a large brown stain and crack on the wall adjacent to the stove and a gap in the bathroom skylight that allowed in rain and snow. Jamesson told me that the refrigerator hadn’t worked for more than a month before being replaced; her family had lived on canned food and boxed milk.
Complaints about poor upkeep abounded at the other complexes too. At Highland Village, there was the matter of the vacant unit that burned down one night a couple of months ago: Its shell was still standing, attended by nothing but plywood and a tarp. At Essex Park, east of the city, Marquita Parmely, the truck driver, told me she had a mouse infestation that was severe enough that her 12-year-old daughter recently found one in her bed. Parmely also has a 2-year-old with asthma, which is aggravated by allergens in mice droppings. She moved her own bed and other furniture away from the walls to dissuade mice, kept the family’s laundry in tote bags after mice started appearing in the hamper and vacuumed twice a day. Her neighbor told me it took weeks for staff members to replace a rear window that had been shot out by kids with a BB gun.
A late-rent notice left on the front door of a Kushner Companies complex in a suburb of Baltimore (Philip Montgomery for The New York Times)
At the Carroll Park complex in Middle River, Maryland, Jen Jackson showed me a ceiling leak that was causing a mold problem. At the Whispering Woods townhouses nearby, a resident named Nicole, who asked that I not use her last name, told me she had filed unheeded complaints about loose plastic shutters, one of which finally fell off and hit her in the head. (When I visited Nicole again a few weeks later, she told me that Westminster staff had scolded her for speaking with me and told her not to do so again. A large black pickup followed me and a photographer as we walked through the complex until we left.) In the same complex, Renee Cook showed me the large swath of her downstairs ceiling that had collapsed and the mold and mildew beneath the carpet, each resulting from a leak from her neighbor’s (illicit) washer-dryer.
Asked about such conditions, Kushner Companies said it follows industry standards for maintenance staffing and exterminator visits, and that it and its partners had spent $10 million on upgrades across the complexes. “Despite those improvements, issues still arise, given the age of the properties,” said McLean, the chief financial officer. Shortly after I put questions to the company about specific tenants’ complaints, Cook’s ceiling was repaired.
The worst troubles may have been those described in a 2013 court case involving Jasmine Cox’s unit at Cove Village. They began with the bedroom ceiling, which started leaking one day. Then maggots started coming out of the living room carpet. Then raw sewage started flowing out of the kitchen sink. “It sounded like someone turned a pool upside down,” Cox told me. “I heard the water hitting the floor and I panicked. I got out of bed and the sink is black and gray, it’s pooling out of the sink and the house smells terrible.”
Cox stopped cooking for herself and her son, not wanting food near the sink. A judge allowed her reduced rent for one month. When she moved out soon afterward, Westminster Management sent her a $600 invoice for a new carpet and other repairs. Cox, who is now working as a battery-test engineer and about to buy her first home, was unaware who was behind the company that had put her through such an ordeal. When I told her of Kushner’s involvement, there was a silence as she took it in.
“Get that [expletive] out of here,” she said.
Very few of the complex residents I met, even ones who had been pursued at length in court by JK2 Westminster, had any idea that their rent and late fees were going to the family company of the president’s son-in-law. “That Jared Kushner?” Danny Jackson, a plumber in his 15th year living at Harbor Point Estates, exclaimed. “Oh, my God. And I thought he was the good one.”
Mike McHargue, whose girlfriend Patricia Howell is a Trump supporter, did not know that Jared Kushner owns the housing complex in Middle River, Maryland, where he lives.
(Philip Montgomery for The New York Times)
Jackson said he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Many of the others I spoke with had not voted — in that or any other election. “I’m not a big political person, so I feel like I don’t think I should vote on something I know nothing about,” Alishia Jamesson told me. But eastern Baltimore County was a Trump stronghold, a formerly staunch Democratic territory with many downwardly mobile white voters — and Kushner’s complexes were no exception.
East of the city, I met Chris Freimiller, a 38-year-old resident of the company’s Morningside Park complex, who was smoking Newports in his car before heading to work at a Rite Aid distribution center. Freimiller complained to me about the persistent leaks from the toilet and the ceiling damage it had caused, and about being hit repeatedly with late fees. He told me he voted for president for the first time ever last year — for Donald Trump. His vote, he said, was motivated by “the racial and police issues. How bad it got with Obama and how he seemed to promote the cop-bashing and the racial divide.” Did knowing that he was sending his late fees to Trump’s son-in-law change anything? “Yeah, actually,” he said. “As if they need any more money.”
At the Carroll Park complex, I met Mike McHargue, a private investigator, and his girlfriend, Patricia Howell. “They’re nothing but slumlords,” Howell told me of Westminster Management. “They take everyone’s money.” When I asked if they knew who was behind the company, they said they did not. “Oh, really?” Howell said when I mentioned Kushner’s name. “Oh, really. And I’m a Trump supporter.”
Jared Kushner stepped down as chief executive of Kushner Companies in January. But he remains a stakeholder in the company — his share of company-related trusts is estimated to be worth at least $600 million — and the company says it has no intention of selling off its multifamily holdings. (JK2 Westminster was formally dissolved in December, but Kushner Companies still owns the complexes through other entities; lawsuits against tenants are now typically filed in the names of the complexes themselves.) Because Kushner retains his interest in the complexes, the White House told The Baltimore Sun in February that he would recuse himself from any policy decisions about Section 8 funding, as many of his tenants rely on it for their rent. But even as Kushner now busies himself with his ever-expanding White House portfolio, his company is carrying on its vigorous efforts in court.
On April 17, three cases were being held consecutively in Baltimore’s District Court involving tenants of the Dutch Village complex. One was against Catherine Silver, a Morgan State University student who had given notice that she was moving at the end of March — she was fed up with lousy maintenance (among other things, a perpetually clogged toilet and a ceiling leak in her closet). But when Silver went to Walmart to pay her March rent with her WIPS card, the money mistakenly ended up not in the account for Dutch Village but the one for Kushner Companies’ adjacent complex, Pleasantview.
Westminster Management started eviction proceedings. On March 23, a sheriff’s deputy changed the locks on the unit. Silver was traveling at the time — it was spring break — and it was not until March 31 that she was able to explain to a judge what happened and get her keys back. By that point, it was too late to get her possessions into the moving truck she’d rented, and classes had resumed. She stayed in the unit, in which Westminster had turned off the heat and hot water, trying again to plan her departure. But Westminster was now after her for April’s rent, despite the fact that the company had literally barred her from being able to move before April, as she had intended. On April 25, a judge ruled that she needed to pay half of April’s rent, plus court costs: $471.
Given Kushner’s vast portfolio as an adviser to the president, it’s not clear how he’s going to avoid issues that could affect his bank account. The Trump administration has declined to give details. Read the story.
Westminster had a lawyer from Tapper’s firm, Andrew Rabinowitz, at the April 25 hearing, which lasted more than three hours — all over less than $500. The next day Rabinowitz was back to defend Westminster against Silver’s criminal complaint over the unfounded eviction. This time, he was more accommodating, perhaps because he realized a reporter was present. After conferring with Dutch Village’s property manager, who was also in attendance, Rabinowitz agreed to let Silver have until the end of May to move out, rent-free, as long as she paid for April. Silver asked if she could have her hot water turned back on. He said he would look into it. But when I visited Silver two weeks later, the hot water was still off. The stove was covered with the pots she was using to boil water for bathing.
On May 10 at the Highland Village complex, a woman was distributing the yellow “failure to pay rent” notices filed with the District Court to tenants who were behind on their May rent. One went up on the door of a man who introduced himself to me as Tommy, a recently divorced house painter with two children, who was at that moment sitting in his pickup truck reading Psalm 91 to gird himself for a visit to traffic court. He said he didn’t know why he kept being hit with late fees and court fees at Highland Village because he was up to date on the rent itself.
Over at Carroll Park, Mike McHargue, the private investigator, had also received a yellow notice and was trying to find out when he needed to come up with money to avoid eviction. So was Chris Freimiller, the Rite Aid worker. He had missed a couple weeks of work with back pain related to a metal bar in his leg from an earlier car accident, and Westminster Management had moved quickly to file for eviction over $722.09 in missing rent, plus $66 in fees. When I arrived, Freimiller was sleeping on the couch after a night shift, and his wife, Jaclyn Meador, was trying to get an eviction date from the constable while their 11-year-old son, Ethan, looked on.
One more yellow notice was affixed at the Highland Park home of Alishia Jamesson, the wedding-basket maker. Her fiancé had left his job as a casino housekeeper to take a job handling Amazon packages near the airport, but his first check hadn’t come through yet. Jamesson was working at Walmart again. The couple’s car tags had expired, so both were enduring long public transit commutes. No one had come from maintenance. There were still three holes in the wall.
Lee Francis Cissna, President Trump’s nominee to head the federal agency that handles applications for visas, refugee status and citizenship, has put little on the public record in his 20 years as a lawyer, government employee, diplomat and Capitol Hill aide.
But it turns out he has left many clues about how he could reverse Obama-era policies if he becomes director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a non-enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security.
On Wednesday, May 24, Cissna, 50, who has worked on immigration policy at Homeland Security for much of his career, is scheduled to appear at a confirmation hearing chaired by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley. From 2015 until earlier this year, Cissna worked for Grassley on immigration issues, having been detailed to his staff by Homeland Security. During that time, he remained on the agency’s payroll.
While there, he drafted dozens of letters under the senator’s name to Homeland Security officials, helping Grassley, an Iowa Republican, to intensify his oversight of immigration and creating a blueprint for dismantling President Obama’s initiatives, according to a dozen current and former agency and congressional staff members.
ProPublica reviewed more than 60 of the letters sent by Grassley during the time Cissna worked in his office. Among the policies they criticized were:
An emergency program for Central American children to reunite with parents in the U.S. The system “unquestionably circumvents the refugee program established by Congress,” according to a November 2015 letter.
The system for granting asylum to people claiming persecution in their home countries. A November 2016 letter claimed thousands of immigrants were “amassing” in Mexican border cities with the intention of “asserting dubious claims of asylum, which will practically guarantee their entry.”
Giving so-called “Dreamers” — undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children — the chance to obtain travel documents on top of work permits. This program would “open the door to undocumented immigrants to gain U.S. citizenship,” a March 2016 letter said.
A program allowing undocumented immigrants who are victims of crime to stay in the U.S. even if there are no visa slots available. A December 2016 letter said the policy is “being exploited by those wishing to defraud the system and avoid deportation.”
Many of the Obama-era humanitarian immigration programs were created through executive action and thus can be easily overturned. Trump has already issued several executive orders on immigration intended to restrict the leeway of immigration officers to admit people into the U.S. Many of the details of these policy changes, as well as how they will be carried out by the 19,000 USCIS employees, will fall to Cissna if he’s confirmed.
Kathy Nuebel Kovarik, former aide to Sen. Chuck Grassley and now-chief of the USCIS Office of Policy and Strategy, stands behind Grassley at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill on Dec. 2, 2015, in Washington, D.C. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
And Cissna would help cement Grassley’s influence at the agency. Another of the senator’s former aides was recently named to a senior position: Kathy Nuebel Kovarik, now chief of the USCIS Office of Policy and Strategy.
The Grassley letters written during Cissna’s tenure “exhibit an overall anti-immigrant view,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law at Cornell who reviewed them at ProPublica’s request. “They seem to think that immigrants are only causing harm to the United States as opposed to giving it a more nuanced view of both benefits and the potential dangers of immigration.”
Cissna did not respond to requests for comment. Taylor Foy, a spokesman for the Judiciary Committee, said Cissna had produced “initial drafts” of some oversight letters, adding that “all of this work was subject to a review and approval process by permanent committee staff and it may not reflect Cissna’s own policy preferences.”
Foy added it was “absurd” to suggest that it’s being unfair to immigrants to perform congressional oversight aimed at preventing fraud. “How is working to ensure that sponsors of unaccompanied minors are appropriately vetted, addressing policies that allow for exploitation of foreign labor, or improving the integrity of our lawful immigration system anti-immigrant?” he asked.
‘Almost Derogatory’
Cissna, who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgetown Law School, is well-versed in the details of immigration. He served as an attorney at USCIS, as well as in private practice, and as immigration policy director at Homeland Security. He also worked for the State Department in Sweden and Haiti, according to the White House.
The job of USCIS director requires “a minimum of 5 years of management experience” under the law that created the Department of Homeland Security and its sub-agencies in 2002. Several former agency officials questioned whether Cissna had any managerial experience, saying he has focused mostly on the policy minutiae of employment visa programs. In announcing Cissna’s nomination, the White House stated that at Homeland Security he “develops and coordinates policy with particular emphasis on temporary worker, immigrant, and other immigration benefits programs.”
It’s not unusual for agency employees with expertise to be detailed temporarily to congressional staffs and, in that capacity, it would be routine to help draft oversight letters. But Cissna was unusually prolific. While he was on staff, Grassley sent the agency at least 93 letters on immigration matters, which records reviewed by ProPublica show was six times as many as Grassley sent during the previous two years.
The volume elicited a complaint from then-Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who in late 2015 wrote to Grassley, saying the inquiries were preventing his staff members from getting their work done. One November 2015 letter requested information “in precise detail” on 250,000 immigrants — and gave the agency two weeks to respond.
Some people at the agency found the letters to be especially hostile.
“They became these very detailed, almost derogatory letters with knowledge about agencies that an ordinary Hill staffer wouldn’t know about,” said a former Homeland Security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Despite being a career bureaucrat, at a public forum in Washington, D.C., in 2014, Cissna hinted that he had disagreements with the Obama administration’s policies. “If I say something that's not exactly party line, then it’s me [speaking], not DHS,” said Cissna, whose remarks were videotaped. “Though if I don't come to tomorrow's panel, then you know that I was eliminated or something for having spoken wrongly."
But then, he gave no policy specifics. And he kept his job.
On Grassley’s staff, Cissna also worked on legislation aimed at changing the controversial visa program for college-educated foreign workers known as H-1B, which Grassley has criticized as displacing American workers with people willing to work more cheaply.
At a 2015 conference organized by the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit that favors restrictions on immigration, Cissna said his boss’ bill “addresses this whole nightmare.” He said there were “elements of monkey business and shenanigans in this program that we think ought to stop. The primary reform of the bill is it requires the employers to hire an American first if there is an American who’s available and eligible to do the job.” A video of the event shows the audience cheering when he says he worked for Grassley.
Dealing with ‘Parole’
The new USCIS director will help decide how to manage Obama programs expanded under an authority in immigration law known as “parole.” It allows the executive branch, on a case-by-case basis, to admit foreigners who don’t fall under visa categories created by Congress if there’s a humanitarian or public interest reason.
“Parole was always meant as an exception that was to be used sparingly,” said Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, which has been critical of the Obama administration’s policies.
A November 2015 letter from Grassley said, “with each parole program implemented by this Administration, further damage is caused to the Constitutional authority of the United States Congress.”
One parole program Grassley criticized admits children from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador who have parents in the U.S., aiming to discourage them from going through Mexico to cross the border illegally. According to USCIS, 1,500 children have been granted travel documents through the program, but advocates say the program has been on hiatus since shortly after Trump took office, with no official explanation.
Nina Zelic, director for refugee services at the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, said that because so few children from the region have been granted the more stringent status of refugee in recent years, “parole offers a life-saving alternative. It’s a recognition of the humanitarian crisis in Latin America.”
Earlier this month, the Lutheran group and some 30 other organizations pleaded with Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary, John Kelly, to continue granting travel documents. “Eliminating or reducing parole or other aspects of the program will leave children no choice but to embark on the treacherous migration journey northward in order to save their lives,” the organizations wrote, according to a copy of the letter provided to ProPublica.
Another parole program, launched in 2014 for the purpose of “family reunification,” granted discretionary admission into the U.S. to Haitians who had been approved for family-based green cards — the document that allows permanent residency — but couldn’t travel yet because of a visa backlog that can last for as long as a decade. Citing the need for “reconstruction and development” in Haiti, USCIS argued it was important to allow “Haitians to safely and legally immigrate sooner to the United States.” As of last month, more than 5,000 Haitians have been able to do so, according to USCIS.
A November 2015 Grassley letter to Homeland Security objected to that program as setting a bad precedent. “On what rational basis,” said the letter, “would USCIS deny a request from Syria, Liberia, Bangladesh, or any other country on earth with severe reconstruction and/or economic development needs to implement a parole-based ‘family reunification’ program for such a country?”
Two parole programs announced by the Obama administration but not implemented are likely to fade away under the new leadership.
One program would allow foreigners to create startups in the U.S., but according to a November 2015 Grassley letter it “circumvents the visa programs that Congress has established as the exclusive means to bring foreign workers into the country.” Another Obama proposal would have permitted foreigners who were victims of crimes in the U.S. and are willing to assist in the investigation of those crimes to travel even if the 10,000-a-year quota for that particular type of visa had been met. But Grassley’s December 2016 letter said that “fraud and abuse of the program can lead to unjustified approvals leaving legitimate victims in the shadows.”
Overall, the letters argue that creating immigration programs is the business of Congress, not of the executive branch.
“The parole authority isn’t a magic wand that the Department can use whenever it wants to create a visa program that Congress has … chosen not to pass or even consider,” an October 2016 letter from Grassley read.
Yale-Loehr, the Cornell law professor, said the Grassley letters on parole are so thorough they “look like a legal brief that probably went into the administration’s thinking in drafting its executive orders.”
Indeed, Trump’s Jan. 25 executive order on border immigration made clear that the administration wants immigration rules to be interpreted very narrowly, particularly parole.
However, Homeland Security and USCIS haven’t yet settled on how to implement those provisions. A Jan. 25 draft memo from Homeland Security said it was the “consistent and clear intent” of the law that parole should be used “rarely, and only in exigent circumstances.” But a second draft, issued Feb. 17, softened that language somewhat, saying that the law on parole only “appears to strongly counsel in favor of using the parole authority sparingly.” The final version, issued three days later, simplified things further: “In my judgment, such authority should be exercised sparingly,” wrote Kelly, the agency’s head.
A narrow interpretation is likely to be embraced by Cissna. One of the Grassley’s letters from November 2015 derided as “nonsense” an opinion by the Obama administration that argued the agency had substantial discretion in deciding when parole programs were justified.
David Martin, who was deputy general counsel at Homeland Security under Obama, said that the guidelines for using parole are more flexible than what the Trump administration is willing to acknowledge.
“But it’s perfectly within the administration’s prerogative to argue that the previous uses were unlawful,” Martin said in an interview. “It just means that we have a new leader in town and they want to use parole in a narrow set of categories.”
Another Grassley Choice
Nuebel Kovarik, the other Grassley aide in a top job at USCIS, was appointed after Grassley sent public tweets about her to Trump’s Twitter account.
Grassley watched a segment about the H-1B visa program on CBS’s 60 Minutes one Sunday in February. First the senator called the visa program a “ripoff.” Then, he addressed President Trump himself:
@POTUS If u want a real expert on fixing H1B a former staffer of mine just moved to HomelandSecurity Call my office I will tell WHO SHE IS
It’s unclear if they ever spoke, but two Sundays later, Nuebel Kovarik got the job.
Nuebel-Kovarik had spent 19 years with Grassley as a legislative aide — having taken that job immediately after graduating college — before taking a temporary political appointment on the seventh day of the Trump administration. According to her USCIS biography, she worked on “all immigration legislation” on Grassley’s behalf.
Top: Screenshot taken from the Wayback Machine on March 29, days before Kathy Nuebel Kovarik was appointed chief of USCIS’s policy office; bottom: Screenshot taken from the Wayback Machine on April 9, days after Nuebel Kovarik was appointed chief of USCIS’s policy office. The image erroneously referenced FY 2017.
One change showed up almost immediately after her appointment. On the Sunday Nuebel-Kovarik was formally appointed, a banner on the agency’s website was still promoting the H-1B program in starkly positive terms as “Strengthening the U.S. workforce.”
By that Monday, the phrase was gone.
At noon the same day, the agency issued a press release titled, “Putting American Workers First,” and promising an end to “H-1B Visa Fraud and Abuse.” The agency also announced a tip line to report H-1B abuses and said it would be conducting more workplace inspections at companies that hire foreign workers.
The unit that Nuebel Kovarik is heading up is “an extremely important office,” said Stephen Legomsky, former chief counsel at USCIS.
For example, she will be in charge of completing the official USCIS policy manual, an initiative begun under the Obama administration. According to the agency’s website, the sections that have yet to be written include those on parole, asylum and refugee programs.
