In February, President Trump ordered federal agencies to form task forces charged with finding regulations to weaken or eliminate. While the names of appointees to executive-agency task forces are typically made public, some agencies are refusing to reveal who is on their panels
This story was co-published with The New York Times.
President Trump entered office pledging to cut red tape, and within weeks, he ordered his administration to assemble teams to aggressively scale back government regulations.
But the effort — a signature theme in Trump’s populist campaign for the White House — is being conducted in large part out of public view and often by political appointees with deep industry ties and potential conflicts.
Most government agencies have declined to disclose information about their deregulation teams. But ProPublica and The New York Times identified 71 appointees, including 28 with potential conflicts, through interviews, public records and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Some appointees are reviewing rules their previous employers sought to weaken or kill, and at least two may be positioned to profit if certain regulations are undone.
The appointees include lawyers who have represented businesses in cases against government regulators, staff members of political dark money groups, employees of industry-funded organizations opposed to environmental rules and at least three people who were registered to lobby the agencies they now work for.
At the Education Department alone, two members of the deregulation team were most recently employed by pro-charter advocacy groups or operators, and one appointee was an executive handling regulatory issues at a for-profit college operator.
So far, the process has been scattershot. Some agencies have been soliciting public feedback, while others refuse even to disclose who is in charge of the review. In many cases, responses to public records requests have been denied, delayed or severely redacted.
The Interior Department has not disclosed the correspondence and calendars for its team. But a review of more than 1,300 pages of handwritten sign-in sheets for guests visiting the agency’s headquarters in Washington found that appointees had met regularly with industry representatives.
Over a four-month period, from February through May, at least 58 representatives of the oil and gas industry signed their names on the agency’s visitor logs before meeting with appointees.
The EPA also rejected requests to release the appointment calendar of the official leading its team — a former top executive for an industry-funded political group — even as she met privately with industry representatives.
And the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security provided the titles for most appointees to their review teams, but not names.
In February, President Trump ordered federal agencies to form task forces charged with finding regulations to weaken or eliminate. While the names of appointees to executive-agency task forces are typically made public, some agencies are refusing to reveal who is on their panels. See who we know about and who we don’t.
When asked for comment about the activities of the deregulation teams, the White House referred reporters to the Office of Management and Budget.
Meghan Burris, a spokeswoman there, said: “As previous administrations have recognized, it’s good government to periodically reassess existing regulations. Past regulatory review efforts, however, have not taken a consistent enough look at regulations on the books.”
With billions of dollars at stake in the push to deregulate, corporations and other industry groups are hiring lawyers, lobbyists and economists to help navigate this new avenue for influence. Getting to the front of the line is crucial, as it can take years to effect regulatory changes.
“Competition will be fierce,” the law firm Clark Hill, which represents businesses pitching the Environmental Protection Agency, said in a marketing memo. “In all likelihood, interested parties will need to develop a multi-pronged strategy to expand support and win pre-eminence over competing regulatory rollback candidates.”
Jane Luxton, a lawyer at the firm, said she advised clients to pay for economic and legal analyses that government agencies, short on staff, could use to expedite changes. She declined to identify the clients.
“You may say this is an agency’s job, but the agencies are totally overloaded,” Luxton said.
On a cloudy, humid day in March, Laura Peterson, a top lobbyist for Syngenta, arrived at the headquarters for the Interior Department. She looped the letter “L” across the agency’s sign-in sheet.
Her company, a top pesticide maker based in Switzerland, had spent eight years and millions of dollars lobbying the Obama administration on environmental rules, with limited success.
But Peterson had an in with the new administration.
Scott Cameron, newly installed at the Interior Department and a member of its deregulation team, had just left a nonprofit he had founded. He had advocated getting pesticides approved and out to market faster. His group counted Syngenta as a financial partner.
The meeting with Peterson was one of the first Cameron took as a new government official.
Neither side would reveal what was discussed. “I’m not sure that’s reporting information I have to give you,” Peterson said.
But lobbying records offered clues.
Syngenta has been one of several pesticide manufacturers pushing for changes to the Endangered Species Act. When federal agencies take actions that may jeopardize endangered animals or plants, they are generally supposed to consult with the Interior Department, which could raise objections.
For decades, the EPA largely ignored this provision when approving new pesticides. But recently, a legal challenge from environmental groups forced its hand — a change that affected Syngenta.
Pesticide lobbyists have been working behind the scenes at agencies and on Capitol Hill to change the provision. Companies have argued that they should be exempt from consulting with the Interior Department because they already undergo EPA approval.
Along with spending millions of dollars on lobbying, they have funded advocacy groups aligned with their cause. Cameron’s nonprofit, the Reduce Risks From Invasive Species Coalition, was one such group for Syngenta.
The organization says on its website that its goals include reducing “the regulatory burden of the Endangered Species Act on American society by addressing invasive species.” One way to do that is to use pesticides. The nonprofit’s mission includes creating “business opportunities for commercial products and services used to control invasive species.”
Because donations are not publicly reported, it is unclear how much Syngenta has contributed to Cameron’s organization, but his group has called the pesticide company one of its “generous sponsors.”
Cameron also served on a committee of experts and stakeholders, including Syngenta, that advised the federal government on decisions related to invasive species. At a committee event last July, he said that one of his priorities was “getting biocontrol agents to market faster,” according to meeting minutes.
Paul Minehart, a Syngenta spokesman, said: “Employees regularly engage with those in government that relate to agriculture and our business. Our purpose is to balance serving the public health and environment with enabling farmers’ access to innovation.”
A spokeswoman for the Interior Department did not respond to questions about how Cameron’s relationship with Syngenta might influence his review of regulations.
Under the law, members of the Trump administration can seek ethics waivers to work on issues that overlap with their past business careers. They can also formally recuse themselves when potential conflicts arise.
In many cases, the administration has refused to say whether appointees to Trump’s deregulation teams have done either.
One such appointee is Samantha Dravis, the chairwoman of the deregulation team at the EPA, who was a top official at the Republican Attorneys General Association. Dravis was also president of the Rule of Law Defense Fund, which brought together energy companies and Republican attorneys general to file lawsuits against the federal government over Obama-era environmental regulations.
The Republican association’s work has been criticized as a vehicle for corporate donors to gain the credibility and expertise of state attorneys general in fighting federal regulations. Donors include the American Petroleum Institute, the energy company ConocoPhillips and the coal giant Alpha Natural Resources.
The Republican association also received funding from Freedom Partners, backed by the conservative billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch. Dravis worked for that group as well, which recently identified regulations it wants eliminated. Among them are EPA rules relating to clean-water protections and restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.
Liz Bowman, an EPA spokeswoman, declined to say whether Dravis had recused herself from issues dealing with previous employers or their backers, or had discussed regulations with any of them.
“As you will find when you receive Samantha’s calendar, she has met with a range of stakeholders, including nonprofits, industry groups and others, on a wide range of issues,” Bowman said.
Bowman said the calendar could be obtained through a public records request. ProPublica and The Times had already filed a request for records including calendars, but the agency’s response did not include those documents. (An appeal was filed, but the calendar has not yet been released.)
“We take our ethics responsibilities seriously,” Bowman said. “All political staff have had an ethics briefing and know their obligations.”
Addressing the agency’s regulatory efforts, she said, “We are here to enact a positive environmental agenda that provides real results to the American people, without unnecessarily hamstringing our economy.”
At the Agriculture Department, the only known appointee to the deregulation team is Rebeckah Adcock. She previously lobbied the department as a top executive both at CropLife America, a trade association for pesticide makers, and the American Farm Bureau Federation, a trade group for farmers.
The department deals with many issues involving farmers, including crop insurance and land conservation rules, but it would not disclose whether Adcock had recused herself from discussions affecting her past employers.
At the Energy Department, a member of the deregulation team is Brian McCormack, who formerly handled political and external affairs for Edison Electric Institute, a trade association representing investor-owned electrical utilities.
While there, McCormack worked with the American Legislative Exchange Council, an industry-funded group. Both organizations fought against rooftop solar policies in statehouses across the country. Utility companies lose money when customers generate their own power, even more so when they are required to pay consumers who send surplus energy back into the grid.
Though the Energy Department does not directly regulate electrical utilities, it does help oversee international electricity trade, the promotion of renewable energy and the security of domestic energy production. After joining the department, McCormack helped start a review of the nation’s electrical grid, according to an agency memo.
Clean-energy advocates fear the inquiry will cast solar energy, which can fluctuate, as a threat to grid reliability. Such a finding could scare off state public utility commissions considering solar policies and serve as a boon for electrical utilities, said Matt Kasper, research director at the Energy and Policy Institute, an environmental group.
Disclosure records show that while McCormack was at Edison, the trade group lobbied the federal government, including the Energy Department, on issues including grid reliability.
The department would not answer questions about McCormack’s involvement with those issues.
Across the government, at least two appointees to deregulation teams have been granted waivers from ethics rules related to prior jobs, and at least nine others have pledged to recuse themselves from issues related to former employers or clients.
Some of the recusals involve appointees at the Small Business Administration and the Education Department, including Bob Eitel, who leads the education team and was vice president for regulatory legal services at an operator of for-profit colleges.
Another recusal involves Byron Brown, an EPA appointee who is married to a senior government affairs manager for the Hess Corporation, the oil and gas company.
Hess was fined and ordered to spend more than $45 million on pollution controls by the EPA during the Obama administration because of alleged Clean Air Act violations at its refinery in Port Reading, N.J. Disclosure records show that Brown’s wife, Lesley Schaaff, lobbied the EPA last year on behalf of the company.
An EPA spokeswoman declined to say whether Brown or Schaaff owned Hess stock, though an agency ethics official said Brown had recused himself from evaluating regulations affecting the company.
The agency declined to say whether Brown would also recuse himself from issues affecting the American Petroleum Institute, where his wife’s company is a member. The association has lobbied to ease Obama-era natural gas rules, complaining in a recent letter to Brown’s team about an “unprecedented level of federal regulatory actions targeting our industry.”
Before being selected to lead the deregulation team at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Maren Kasper was a director at Roofstock, an online marketplace for investors in single-family rental properties. Financial disclosure records show Kasper owned a stake in the company worth up to $50,000.
Changes at HUD could increase investor interest in rental homes, affecting a company like Roofstock. The agency, for example, oversees the federal government’s Section 8 subsidies program for low-income renters.
Ethics officials allowed Kasper to keep her stake, but she pledged not to take actions that would affect it. (A spokesman for HUD said Kasper’s tenure on the deregulation task force has since ended.)
One by one, scientists, educators and environmental activists approached the microphone and urged government officials not to weaken regulations intended to protect children from lead.
The forum, run by the EPA in a drab basement meeting room in Washington, was part of the agency’s push to identify regulations that were excessive and burdensome to businesses.
Few businesspeople showed up. As public hearings on regulations have played out in recent weeks, many industry and corporate representatives have instead met with Trump administration officials behind closed doors.
Still, the EPA has asked for written comments and held about a dozen public meetings. The agency has received more than 467,000 comments, many of them critical of potential rollbacks, but also some from businesses large and small pleading for relief from regulatory costs or confusion.
After a quiet moment at the meeting to discuss lead regulations, the owner of a local painting company, Brian McCracken, moved to the microphone.
McCracken was frustrated by what he described as costly rules that forced him to test for lead-based paint in homes before he could begin painting. Each test kit costs about $2, and he may need six per room. If a family then declines to hire him, those costs come out of his pocket.
“I don’t think anyone is sitting here saying that lead-based dust does not hurt children,” he said. “That’s not what we are talking about. What the contractor needs is a better way to test.”
His voice quavered: “Why do I have to educate the general public about the hazards that generations before me created? It doesn’t make sense at all.”
Trump is not the first president to take on such frustrations.
President Bill Clinton declared the federal government was failing to regulate “without imposing unacceptable or unreasonable costs on society.” He assigned Vice President Al Gore to collect agencies’ suggestions for rules that should go. One rule dictated how to measure the consistency of grits.
President George W. Bush’s regulatory overhaul focused more on how new regulations were created. The administration installed a political appointee inside each agency who generally had to sign off before any significant new rule could be initiated. At the EPA for a time, that official came from an industry-funded think tank.
President Barack Obama ordered regular updates from each agency about the effectiveness of rules already on the books.
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“When you raise the profile, when it’s clearly an executive priority, it gets attention,” said Heather Krause, director of strategic issues at the Government Accountability Office, the main auditor of the federal government. According to the auditor’s analysis, the effect under Obama was mostly to clarify and streamline rules, not eliminate them.
Like Bush, Trump has empowered political appointees. Though some agencies have included career staff members on their review teams, an executive order from Trump creating the teams does not require it — nonpolitical employees are generally believed to be more wedded to existing rules. And like Obama, Trump has imposed regular reporting requirements.
But Trump, who spent his business career on the other side of government regulations, has put an emphasis on cutting old rules.
The same day he signed the executive order initiating the review, he addressed a large crowd of conservative activists at a Maryland convention center.
“We have begun a historic program to reduce the regulations that are crushing our economy — crushing,” Trump said. “We’re going to put the regulations industry out of work and out of business.”
Amit Narang, a regulatory expert at the liberal advocacy group Public Citizen, said Trump’s decision to create teams of political appointees — formally known as regulatory reform task forces — should make it easier for the White House to overcome bureaucratic resistance to his rollback plans.
“To the extent there’s a deep state effect in this administration,” Narang said, “the task force will be more effective in trying to get the agenda in place.”
The New York Times’ Kitty Bennett contributed reporting to this story.
If you know anything about these task forces, contact us at taskforce@propublica.org or via Signal at 213–271–7217. See who we know about and who we don’t.
The ongoing investigations into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia involve reams of classified material. Yet Marc Kasowitz, the New York lawyer whom President Donald Trump has hired to defend him in these inquiries, told ProPublica through a spokesman that he does not have a security clearance — the prerequisite for access to government secrets. Nor does he expect to seek one.
Several lawyers who have represented presidents and senior government officials said they could not imagine handling a case so suffused with sensitive material without a clearance.
“No question in my mind — in order to represent President Trump in this matter you would have to get a very high level of clearance because of the allegations involving Russia,” said Robert Bennett, who served as President Bill Clinton’s personal lawyer. Like many Washington lawyers, Bennett has held security clearances throughout his career.
As the spotlight on Russia intensifies with new email disclosures that his son, son-in-law, and then-campaign manager met in June 2016 with a Russian attorney who promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton, Kasowitz’s lack of a security clearance could hinder the president’s legal and political response to the scandal.
One possible explanation for Kasowitz’s decision not to pursue a clearance: He might have trouble getting one.
In recent weeks, ProPublica spoke with more than two dozen current and former employees of Kasowitz’s firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, as well as his friends and acquaintances. Past and present employees of the firm said in interviews that Kasowitz has struggled intermittently with alcohol abuse, leading to a stint in rehab in the winter of 2014-15.
Several people told ProPublica that Kasowitz has been drinking in recent months. (The vast majority of those who spoke to ProPublica for this article declined to be quoted by name, citing Kasowitz’s penchant for threatening lawsuits.)
Experts on federal security reviews told ProPublica that recent episodes of alcohol abuse are a major barrier to receiving clearance, a process that involves government agents poring over a person’s past and interviewing family, friends and colleagues. Investigators typically raise flags about behaviors that might make someone vulnerable to blackmail or suggest poor judgment.
Kasowitz’s spokesman said he doesn’t need a clearance. “No one has suggested he requires a security clearance, there has been no need for a security clearance, and we do not anticipate a need for a security clearance,” the spokesman said. “If and when a security clearance is needed, Mr. Kasowitz will apply for one with the other members of the legal team.”
Kasowitz’s spokesman did not directly respond to questions about whether he has struggled with alcohol abuse, but said the attorney is able to drink in moderation without a problem.
While not a government employee, Kasowitz has become a public face of the administration on the Russia case. Last month, he went before the cameras to deliver the president’s response to the landmark testimony of fired FBI Director James Comey. White House officials have regularly referred media inquiries about Russia-related matters, including queries about Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn, to Kasowitz.
In Washington, where every word and action of the president’s lawyer is scrutinized, Kasowitz is a neophyte. Instead of negotiating deals among the capital’s power brokers or fending off FBI investigations, Kasowitz, 65, built a lucrative practice in civil court suing banks and representing, among others, a leading tobacco company.
Kasowitz has been described by colleagues in the scrappy world of New York lawyers as the “toughest of the tough guys.” Bloomberg News called him a “Pit Bull Loyal to The Boss” while The New York Times described him as “the Donald Trump of lawyering.” His aggressive legal style has spurred rebukes from two judges.
For over 15 years, he represented Donald Trump, earning the president’s loyalty through his eager pugilism. Kasowitz has defended him in the Trump University fraud lawsuit. He fought to keep records from Trump’s 1990 divorce private, and threatened to sue The New York Times for publishing a story in which women accused Trump of unwanted touching and sexual assault. He also recently represented Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly after multiple women accused O’Reilly of sexual harassment.
Before representing Trump in the Russia inquiry, Kasowitz was informally advising the president. He has told friends he recommended firing Preet Bharara because the crusading prosecutor posed a danger to the administration. He has told people Trump wanted him to be attorney general.
Trump reportedly sought a classic Washington lawyer to represent him on Russia before choosing Kasowitz. Initially Kasowitz was reluctant to take it on. “He didn’t seek this,” said Joseph Lieberman, the former senator and Democratic vice presidential candidate who is now senior counsel at the firm. “In the end, the president said, ‘I need you. I know you and trust you.’”
Lieberman and Kasowitz grew up in the same neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut. The future senator used to see Kasowitz’s father, who ran a scrap-metal business, walking through the neighborhood, greeting everyone as he went. Kasowitz went to Yale to study American history and then to Cornell Law School. After graduating in 1977, he started his law career in New York. In 1993, Kasowitz broke off from the prominent firm Mayer Brown to found his own firm.
As the firm met with early success, Kasowitz became wealthy. He brags to friends he makes anywhere from $10 million to $30 million per year. He owns an apartment in a white-glove building on Park Avenue and a mansion in Westchester County. He travels by private jet and, when in New York, is driven around in a black Cadillac SUV. He owns at least two horses, according to a lawsuit Kasowitz once filed against his daughter’s equestrian stable.
From the start, Kasowitz Benson had a hard-drinking culture that its leaders epitomized.
“It’s like a time warp,” said one former employee, citing the firm’s “macho, scotch-drinking, fist-fighting” ethos. Multiple former attorneys said they saw Kasowitz under the influence at the office, an accusation Kasowitz denies.
Associates would vie to join powerful partners in Kasowitz’s inner circle during the day at the Palm West Side, the steakhouse just across the street from the firm’s offices, and more recently, at another midtown steakhouse a couple of blocks away called Gallaghers. A framed magazine profile of Kasowitz hangs on the wall across from the bar at the Palm. Three former employees at the firm recall attorneys having to go across the street to the restaurant during the workday to consult Kasowitz on work matters, as he held court, drinking and eating. In response to questions, a spokesman for Kasowitz disputed that, saying he never had a drink during the day at the Palm outside of lunch and dinner and never handled firm business while at the restaurant.
Former employees pointed to reckless behavior by Kasowitz while drinking. ProPublica spoke with 10 people who attended the firm’s holiday party on Dec. 10, 2013, at the Edison Ballroom in Manhattan. Spouses and significant others were not invited.
Kasowitz, according to an attendee, was visibly inebriated, appearing to have a hard time standing on his feet without support. During the festivities, Kasowitz and a much younger woman not employed by the firm hit the dance floor. According to multiple eyewitnesses, they danced intimately in a way many employees felt was inappropriate for a work event. One person described it as “dirty dancing.” Some employees had seen Kasowitz’s dancing partner before: the then-25-year-old woman had been a hostess at the Palm. “It made women feel uncomfortable,” said one former female attorney who attended the party.
Kasowitz’s spokesman, Michael Sitrick, initially said Kasowitz “does not recall whether he danced with her at a holiday party over 3.5 years ago.” Later, he said that the descriptions of Kasowitz dancing at the party were “untrue.” Kasowitz said in a statement he never had “a romantic relationship” with the woman, “who many of us came to know (as we have many others) because she worked at the Palm Restaurant across the street from our offices.”
Kasowitz has been married for 25 years to Lori Kasowitz, a former Mayer Brown administrator and regular on the Manhattan charity circuit. The couple has one daughter.
Sitrick supplied eight statements from Kasowitz employees attesting to his character and behavior at the party and denying the allegations about the young woman. He said ProPublica could not quote the employees’ statements by name without their permission. ProPublica reached out to all of them. Two declined to be named, and six did not respond to requests to use their names.
That was not the only dramatic incident involving Kasowitz and the Palm hostess. Late one Thursday night in March 2013, the same woman was arrested for felony assault at Beauty & Essex, a lower Manhattan restaurant and club, after allegedly throwing a bottle that hit another woman in the head, according to NYPD records. A former partner in the law firm said that Kasowitz was with her and sustained an injury. Afterwards, Kasowitz walked around the office with two black eyes looking “like a raccoon,” according to the former partner.
Asked about that incident, Sitrick did not answer directly. He said Kasowitz attended a dinner at a restaurant where the woman was in attendance. As Kasowitz was leaving the restaurant, he was “assaulted by a total stranger,” Sitrick wrote in a statement. The Palm hostess was not involved in that assault and Kasowitz’s assailant was arrested, the spokesman said.
According to current and former attorneys at the firm, Kasowitz hit a low point in the winter of 2014-15. He abruptly left New York for Florida, where he owned a mansion at the Equestrian Club Estates in Wellington. Kasowitz sought alcohol treatment at the nearby Caron, a high-end rehab facility, according to two people who heard it from Kasowitz himself.
According to Sitrick, that winter had been difficult for Kasowitz because of the death of his father and that he had “sought out counseling” like “millions of Americans.” The spokesman did not answer directly whether Kasowitz was in rehab that winter but said he was not “at Caron in January 2015.”
Anyone whose job involves classified information, from White House officials to State Department diplomats to outside contractors, must get a security clearance. The applicant fills out paperwork disclosing where he or she has lived, worked and traveled abroad, as well as any contacts with foreign government officials. The form also asks about substance abuse, criminal history and mental health.
The government then undertakes an investigation that can take anywhere from weeks to over a year, depending on the position. In the case of White House positions, the FBI does the investigation. Agents comb through educational and financial records and speak to neighbors, former employers and associates. They then present a recommendation to the hiring agency, which makes the final call.
It’s not clear who currently makes decisions on clearances for White House hires. Spokeswoman Hope Hicks told ProPublica that the Trump administration does not comment on security clearance issues.
Alcohol abuse is one of many issues examined as part of the security clearance process. The standard form that those seeking clearance must fill out asks whether in the last seven years “your use of alcohol had a negative impact on your work performance, professional or personal relationships, your finances, or resulted in intervention by law enforcement.” According to the official security clearance guidelines, “Alcohol-related incidents at work, such as reporting for work in an intoxicated or impaired condition, [or] drinking on the job” can be a reason to withhold clearance.
While all clearance decisions are subjective, “You probably wouldn’t get your clearance if you had serious drinking problems in the last five years,” said Sheldon Cohen, a longtime Washington, D.C, security clearance lawyer.
The security clearance guidelines also flag personal conduct “that creates a vulnerability to exploitation, manipulation, or duress by a foreign intelligence entity.”
In 2016, over 1,100 people appealed their denial of security clearance. Alcohol and drug use were common reasons for such denials.
Attorneys representing clients in Washington frequently are required to seek security clearances in matters ranging from Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi hearings to employment disputes involving undercover CIA agents.
Already, there’s ample evidence that many aspects of the Russia case involve classified material. When former FBI Director James Comey testified about his interactions with President Trump, he said that he took notes after one classified briefing. “I wrote that on a classified device,” he said.
Adm. Michael Rogers, the head of the National Security Agency, testified last month of his interactions with Trump that could relate to the obstruction of justice issue: “Those conversations were classified.”
Meanwhile, congressional intelligence committees looking at the Russia issue have been scheduling hearings with key witnesses in classified sessions. A congressional meeting with special counsel Robert Mueller also took place in a classified setting.
In a statement, Kasowitz said that “we are unaware of and not involved in … any investigation involving ‘highly classified’ (or even classified) information.”
The firm has gone through multiple rounds of punishing layoffs. In the past six years, the number of lawyers has shrunk from around 370 to 260 today. Several major rainmakers have departed, including two of the most prominent women at the firm: Eleanor Alter, a well-known divorce lawyer, and Robin Cohen, who led Kasowitz’s insurance group.
Now its founder’s increasingly high-profile relationship with Trump has some partners worried that it could damage the firm’s brand and future business prospects.
Last year, with Election Day weeks away, Kasowitz fired off a letter threatening to sue The New York Times for a story in which women accused Trump of unwanted touching and sexual assault.
Kasowitz’s letter to the Times dismissed the women’s accounts as “false and malicious allegations” and demanded a retraction.
“People were embarrassed by the letter,” said one former attorney at Kasowitz’s firm.
The Times stood by its story. No lawsuit has been filed.
In February, several lawyers were upset when Michael Cohen, the former personal injury lawyer and real-estate investor who is best known as Trump’s former in-house attorney, arrived at the office.
“I came to see him because we were working on several matters together after the inauguration,” Cohen told ProPublica regarding his multiple visits to Kasowitz. Former employees say the firm briefly converted a conference room for Cohen to use as an office, with his nameplate on it.
Cohen said the “multitude of legal matters” he and Kasowitz were discussing included working as co-counsel for a client. Asked if anything came of those talks, Cohen said yes.
Sitrick, the Kasowitz spokesman, said, “Michael Cohen never worked for the firm or occupied any office at Kasowitz Benson.” He added: “They were working together on one civil matter for President Trump.” He didn’t specify what it was.
During roughly the same period that Cohen was visiting the firm, The New York Times reported that he was under FBI scrutiny in the Russia case. Cohen has denied wrongdoing.
One Kasowitz Benson partner, Zachary Mazin, departed in May for another firm, McKool Smith. In a private Facebook post, Mazin praised many of his former colleagues, but said that he and his wife concluded their family could not be associated with the firm. “As the extent of the Firm’s support for Trump’s presidency became clear, Amanda and I concluded that we would not be living our values if I stayed,” he wrote, adding: “Our most important consideration was the message that this choice sends to our daughters, both now and when they look back on this moment as adults.”
When Kasowitz traveled to Washington to respond to the Comey testimony, he brought at least two other lawyers from the firm with him.
In the rush to respond to the former FBI director’s testimony accusing President Trump of inappropriate meddling, a team of Kasowitz lawyers, along with another spokesman, Mark Corallo, drafted a statement that was riddled with errors. It started with the widely mocked misspelling, “Predisent Trump.”
Corallo said in an email that the statement went out to reporters with typos because of a technical glitch.
The day after the June 8 Comey hearing, sources linked to the Kasowitz team told reporters they would file a complaint against the former FBI director for giving what they described as “privileged information” to the press. Three weeks later, that plan fizzled entirely.
In recent weeks, employees say, Kasowitz has tried to calm fears within the firm, holding a series of town hall-style meetings.
“You can work toward steering this president toward the best possible decisions whether or not you agree with his politics,” Kasowitz said at one such event, according to a person familiar with his remarks.
President Trump selected Kasowitz Benson to represent him despite high-profile instances in which judges criticized the firm for ethically questionable tactics.
In one particularly heated case, the firm sued investors on behalf of a Canadian insurer, Fairfax Financial Holdings. The company accused the hedge funds and others of conspiring to release information that would send the stock lower. Michael Bowe, Kasowitz’s deputy on the Russia case, was the firm’s lead lawyer.
In 2006, employees of Kasowitz’s in-house investigative arm, KBTF Consulting, tried to ensnare employees of Morgan Keegan, a broker-dealer whose insurance analyst was publishing critical research on Fairfax, according to a court document. They wanted to find out if Morgan Keegan gave certain clients access to its analysis before making its reports public. Kasowitz employees, including two lawyers who worked for the investigative arm, created a fake hedge fund called Blackwood Group Capital Partners. Posing as investors, the Kasowitz private investigators met with the Morgan Keegan analyst who covered Fairfax, asking if they could have advance copies of his reports. He said no.
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Years later, Morgan Keegan hired a Rutgers law professor, John Leubsdorf, to assess whether the Kasowitz employees violated New Jersey ethical standards. The state bars attorneys from misrepresenting themselves. Leubsdorf called the firm’s conduct “inconsistent with the standards of professional responsibility.”
The Morgan Keegan attorneys tried to get Kasowitz’s firm thrown off the case, a request the judge rejected. But the judge said he was troubled by what the Kasowitz firm had done.
“I was brought up as a person and as an attorney to think you tell the truth, that that’s the only way you can deal with life. You tell the truth and, right, wrong, or indifferent, the truth will prevail. I don’t recall as an attorney ever participating in a deception such as [this] one,” Stephan Hansbury, a judge for the Superior Court of New Jersey, said at a 2011 hearing. “I don’t think that was an appropriate use of an investigator. I don’t think you’re supposed to go out and create evidence in order to justify a case. That’s not what the law allows.”
In 2007, Kasowitz had to defend his law firm from allegations of unethical conduct when another firm accused his team of violating a protective order in a legal proceeding. The order barred disclosure of bank records obtained during discovery in a federal shareholder lawsuit against Kasowitz’s client, a Canadian pharmaceutical company then known as Biovail.
But when Kasowitz’s law firm filed a separate complaint in New Jersey state court on behalf of Biovail, it used the bank records from the federal proceeding to bolster its case. Lawyers for the bank cried foul and in February 2007, Kasowitz had a testy conference call with Richard Owen, the U.S. district judge overseeing the federal case.
Owen was furious: “You get a whole bunch of the bank’s records and you’re sitting there drafting a complaint in New Jersey and you’re saying nobody ever said, ‘Where the hell did we get these records from, how come we have them?’” he asked Kasowitz, according to a court transcript of the call.
Kasowitz said his law firm did not know about the protective order and countered that the documents were not marked “confidential.” Owen did not see that as a good enough excuse and the two men went back-and-forth. Finally, Owen lost his temper.
“The record may show I hung up on Mr. Kasowitz,” said Owen, who has since died.
Kasowitz’s spokesman said the firm did nothing wrong in either case.
Eventually, Biovail fired Kasowitz’s legal team over the issue, only to rehire the firm a few months later. The firm was not sanctioned by Owen.
How Kasowitz’s aggressive style will play during the Russia inquiry is unclear — especially without a security clearance. On Monday, President Trump tweeted, “James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media. That is so illegal!”
If that allegation were true, Trump’s own lawyer wouldn’t be able to review the material.
Annie Waldman, Jessica Huseman and Cezary Podkul contributed reporting to this story.
Do you have information about Marc Kasowitz or his firm? Contact Justin at justin@propublica.org or via Signal at 774-826-6240. Contact Jesse at jesse.eisinger@propublica.org or via Signal at 718-496-5233.
Here’s more information on how to leak to ProPublica.
“Go home. We need Americans here!” white supremacist Jeremy Joseph Christian yelled at two black women — one wearing a hijab — on a train in Portland, Oregon, in May. According to news reports, when several commuters tried to intervene, he went on a rampage, stabbing three people. Two of them died.
If the fatal stabbing was the worst racist attack in Portland this year, it was by no means the only one. In March, Buzzfeed reported on hate incidents in Oregon and the state’s long history as a haven for white supremacists. Some of the incidents they found were gathered by Documenting Hate, a collaborative journalism project we launched earlier this year.
Documenting Hate is an attempt to overcome the inadequate data collection on hate crimes and bias incidents in America. We’ve been compiling incident reports from civil-rights groups, as well as news reports, social media and law enforcement records. We’ve also asked people to tell us their personal stories of witnessing or being the victim of hate.
It’s been about six months since the project launched. Since then, we’ve been joined by more than 100 newsrooms around the country. Together, we’re verifying the incidents that have been reported to us — and telling people’s stories.
We’ve received thousands of reports, with more coming every day. They come from cities big and small, and from states blue and red. People have reported hate incidents from every part of their communities: in schools, on the road, at private businesses, in the workplace. ProPublica and our partners have produced more than 50 stories using the tips from the database, from New York to Seattle, Minneapolis to Phoenix. Some examples:
Univision, HuffPost, and The New York Times opinion section identified a common thread in the reports we’ve received in which people of color are harassed “Go back to your country.” This type of harassment affects both immigrants and U.S. citizens alike, reporters found.
Several stories published by our partners focused on racial harassment on public transportation, using tips to illustrate something officials were also seeing. The New York City Commission on Human Rights observed a 480 percent increase in claims of discriminatory harassment between 2015 and 2016, according to The New York Times Opinion section. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority recorded 24 cases of offensive graffiti through April, compared to 35 in all of last year, the Boston Globe found. Univision covered multiple incidents involving Latinos targeted in incidents on the New York City subway.
Combing through our database, Buzzfeed discovered there were dozens of reported incidents in K-12 schools in which students cited President Donald Trump’s name or slogans to harass minority classmates. This echoed a pattern Univision had reported on: In November, the Teaching Tolerance project at the Southern Poverty Law Center received more than 10,000 responses to an educator survey indicating an uptick in anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant activity in schools.
Our local partners reported on how hate incidents affect communities across the country: anti-Semitic graffiti in Phoenix, Islamophobia in Minneapolis, racist vandalism and homophobic threats in Seattle, white supremacist activity at a California university, racist harassment and vandalism in Boston, racism in the workplace in New Orleans, and hate incidents throughout Florida.
There are a few questions for which answers continue to elude us: How many hate crimes happen each year, and why is the record keeping so inadequate?
The FBI, which is required to track hate crimes, counts between 5,000 and 6,000 of them annually. But the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates the total is closer to 250,000. One explanation for the gap is that many victims — more than half, according to a recent estimate — don’t report what happened to them to police.
Even if they do, law enforcement agencies aren’t all required to report to the FBI, meaning their reports might never make it into the national tally. The federal government is hardly a model of best practices; many federal agencies don’t report their data, either — even though they’re legally required to do so.
We’ll spend the next six months continuing to tackle these questions and more. And we and our partners will keep working our way through the tips in our database, telling people’s stories and doing our best to understand what’s happening.
There are ways that you can help us move the project forward:
This story was co-published with NPR’s Shots blog.
In Washington, D.C., a Medicare beneficiary filled prescriptions for 2,330 pills of oxycodone, hydromorphone and morphine in a single month last year — written by just one of the 42 health providers who prescribed the person such drugs.
In Illinois, a different Medicare enrollee received 73 prescriptions for opioid drugs from 11 prescribers and filled them at 20 different pharmacies. He sometimes filled prescriptions at multiple pharmacies on the same day.
These are among the examples cited in a sobering new report released today by the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The IG found that heavy painkiller use and abuse remains a serious problem in Medicare’s prescription drug program, known as Part D, which serves more than 43 million seniors and disabled people. Among the findings:
Of the one-third of Medicare beneficiaries in Part D (or roughly 14.4 million people) who filled at least one prescription for an opioid in 2016, some 3.6 million received the painkillers for at least six months.
Consistent with data released last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were wide geographic differences in prescribing patterns. Alabama and Mississippi had the highest proportions of patients taking prescription painkillers — more than 45 percent each — while Hawaii and New York had the lowest — 22 percent or less.
More than half a million beneficiaries received high doses of opioids for at least three months, meaning they took the equivalent of 12 tablets a day of 10-milligram Vicodin. The figure does not include patients who have cancer or those who are in hospice care, for whom such doses may be appropriate.
Almost 70,000 beneficiaries received what the inspector general labeled as extreme amounts of the drugs — an average daily consumption for the year that was more than 2 1/2 times the level the CDC recommends avoiding. Such doses put patients at an increased risk of overdose death. Extreme prescribing could also indicate that a patient’s identity has been stolen, or that the patient is diverting medications for resale.
Some 22,000 beneficiaries seem to be doctor shopping — obtaining large amounts of the drugs prescribed by four or more doctors and filled at four or more pharmacies. All states except for Missouri operate Prescription Drug Monitoring Program databases that allow doctors to check whether their patients have received drugs from other doctors before writing their own prescriptions.
More than 400 doctors, nurse practitioners and physician assistants had questionable prescribing patterns for the beneficiaries most at risk (meaning those that took extreme doses of the drugs or showed signs of doctor shopping). One Missouri prescriber wrote an average of 31 opioid prescriptions each for 112 patients on Medicare. And four doctors in the same Texas practice ordered opioids for more than 56 beneficiaries who seemed to be doctor shopping. “The patterns of these 401 prescribers are far outside the norm and warrant further scrutiny,” the inspector general said.
To be sure, many seniors suffer from an array of painful conditions, and some opioids are seen as more harmful and addictive than others. Tramadol, often used to treat chronic osteoarthritis pain, was the most frequently prescribed opioid and carries a lower risk of addiction than other opioids, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Moreover, last week’s report from CDC shows that painkiller use is ticking downward after years of explosive growth.
Still, officials in the inspector general’s office said more can and should be done to combat the problems they observed, even if the numbers are beginning to subside.
“I think what we’re saying here is this is still a lot of Medicare beneficiaries,” said Jodi Nudelman, regional inspector general for evaluation and inspections in the New York regional office, who supervised the report. “Regardless of if you are turning a corner, you’re still at these really high levels.”
The inspector general previously has called for Medicare to use its data to focus on doctors who are prescribing drugs in aberrant ways.
The inspector general’s numbers differ somewhat from an April report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs Medicare. The CMS report said that 29.6 percent of Part D enrollees used opioids in 2016, down from 31.9 percent in 2011. The inspector general pegged the 2016 figure at 33 percent but did not offer any historical comparisons. It was unclear why the two agencies came up with different figures.
In a statement, CMS said opioid abuse is a priority for the Trump administration. “We are working with patients, physicians, health insurance plans, and states to improve how opioids are prescribed by health care providers and used by patients, how opioid use disorder is diagnosed and managed, and how alternative approaches to pain management could be promoted,” it said.
Officials have known for years that opioid prescribing has been a problem in Medicare. ProPublica first highlighted the problem in 2013 when we published data on the drugs prescribed by every physician in the Part D program. Following that report, CMS put in place what it called an Overutilization Monitoring System, which tracked beneficiaries at the highest risk for overdoses or drug abuse. It asked the private insurance companies that run the drug program on its behalf, under contract, to review the cases and provide a response.
In a memo released in April, CMS said its monitoring system has been a success. From 2011 to 2016, it said, there was a 61 percent decrease in the number of beneficiaries who were labeled as “potential very high risk opioid overutilizers.” People were flagged that way if they were taking high doses of opioids for 90 consecutive days and received prescriptions from three or more doctors at three or more pharmacies. But the agency also said it would be implementing changes in January to better target those at highest risk of abuse.
Separately, in 2014, CMS told health providers they would have to register with the Medicare program in order to prescribe medications for beneficiaries. That way, the government could screen them and take action if their prescribing habits were deemed improper. Up to that point, doctors could prescribe drugs to Medicare patients even if they weren’t registered Medicare providers. Delay after delay has pushed back the requirement until 2019.
Dr. Cheryl Phillips, senior vice president for public policy and health services at LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit service providers for older adults, said managing pain in seniors is complex. Seniors are more likely to have conditions, such as orthopedic problems, cancer or degenerative joint disorders, which result in chronic pain. They sometimes don’t react well to non-prescription pain relievers, such as Tylenol, aspirin or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medicines. Health care providers like nursing homes are still evaluated, in part, on how well they manage pain, creating an incentive to turn to drugs.
“We have to challenge the notion that being pain free is a goal,” Phillips said. “It’s not that I want to see people suffering, but being pain free is perhaps a myth that not only society has been seduced with but physicians have as well.”
Phillips said she encourages physicians to explore nondrug alternatives, including meditation, mindfulness, moist heat and exercise.
Compare your doctor’s medication prescribing to his or her peers using our Prescriber Checkup tool. Read other stories in our series, The Prescribers.
This story has been updated with a response from a spokesman for Marc Kasowitz.
Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s personal attorney on the Russia case, threatened a stranger in a string of profanity-laden emails Wednesday night.
The man, a retired public relations professional in the western United States who asked not to be identified, read ProPublica’s story this week on Kasowitz and sent the lawyer an email with the subject line: “Resign Now.’’
Kasowitz replied with series of angry messages sent between 9:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern time. One read: “I’m on you now. You are fucking with me now Let’s see who you are Watch your back , bitch.”
In another email, Kasowitz wrote: “Call me. Don’t be afraid, you piece of shit. Stand up. If you don’t call, you’re just afraid.” And later: “I already know where you live, I’m on you. You might as well call me. You will see me. I promise. Bro.”
Kasowitz’s spokesman, Michael Sitrick, said Thursday he couldn’t immediately reach Kasowitz for comment.
ProPublica confirmed the man’s phone number matched his stated identity. Technical details in the emails, such as IP addresses and names of intermediate mail servers, also show the emails came from Kasowitz’s firm. In one email, Kasowitz gave the man a cell phone number that is not widely available. We confirmed Kasowitz uses that number.
The exchange began after the man saw our story featured last night on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC. We reported that Kasowitz is not seeking a security clearance even though the Russia case involves a significant amount of classified material.
Experts said Kasowitz could have trouble getting a security clearance because of what multiple sources described as a recent history of alcohol abuse. Former employees also said Kasowitz had engaged in behavior that made them uncomfortable.
Since the story was published, his spokesman issued a statement disputing several parts of the story: “Marc Kasowitz has not struggled with alcoholism,” Sitrick wrote. “He has not come into the office intoxicated, attorneys have not had to go across the street to the restaurant during the workday to consult Kasowitz on work matters.”
The rigorous background investigation that goes into getting security clearance also considers “any information relevant to strength of character, honesty, discretion, sound judgment, [and] reliability.”
The exchange of emails Wednesday began at 9:28 p.m. Eastern when the man sent the following message to Kasowitz’s firm account.
Five minutes later, Kasowitz responded with two words:
Fifteen minutes after that, Kasowitz sent a second email:
The man responded politely:
But Kasowitz continued to harangue him:
And then, just 33 minutes after the man’s initial email, Kasowitz sent a fourth response, referring to his own Jewish heritage and the man’s name, which he presumed to be Jewish.
The man told us that the email exchange disturbed him so greatly he forwarded it to the FBI so there would be a written record in case Kasowitz followed through on the threat.
Experts in the laws on harassment and online threats differed on whether Kasowitz’s emails could put him in legal jeopardy.
When considering whether words constitute a true threat versus protected speech, “the threat has to be credible and the person has to intend to make the victim fear imminent physical harm,’’ said Danielle Citron, a University of Maryland law professor and author of a book on online harassment.
Citron pointed in particular to Kasowitz’s statements: “I already know where you live” and “you will see me. I promise.” She said: “That’s incredibly troubling language. If I’m a prosecutor I’m going to think hard about that.”
Ron Kuby, a New York lawyer who argued a case that overturned a portion of the state’s harassment law on free speech grounds, said he believed Kasowitz had not violated the law with his missives.
“When Kasowitz says things like ‘I already know where you live’ he is inching closer to the line. But in my view — as someone who despises the Trump administration, but who has litigated these issues — he is well on the legal side of the line.”
For over 15 years, Trump has periodically retained Kasowitz, who has cultivated a tough-guy image.
The New York Times reported this week that the relationship between Kasowitz and the Trump White House had soured and that Kasowitz could resign. Kasowitz’s spokesman told ProPublica Wednesday: “The NYT story is not accurate.” Kasowitz’s firm was also sued for malpractice this week by a former client in a billing dispute.
Update, July 13, 2017: A spokesman for Marc Kasowitz sent ProPublica this statement:
“Mr. Kasowitz, who is tied up with client matters, said he intends to apologize to the writer of the email referenced in today’s ProPublica story. While no excuse, the email came at the end of a very long day that at 10 p.m. was not yet over. ‘The person sending that email is entitled to his opinion and I should not have responded in that inappropriate manner,’ Mr. Kasowitz said. ‘I intend to send him an email stating just that. This is one of those times where one wishes he could reverse the clock, but of course I can’t.’”
Jeremy Merrill and Jesse Eisinger contributed reporting.
Have you heard from Marc Kasowitz, or do you have any information about his firm? Contact Justin at justin@propublica.org or via Signal at 774-826-6240.
Here’s more information on how to leak to ProPublica.
This story was co-published with The New York Times.
It seems safe to assume that nobody read Donald Trump Jr.’s damning emails with a Kremlin-connected lawyer more closely than Robert Mueller.
Mueller, the special counsel investigating possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, will surely be making calls to everyone involved in the now infamous meeting, including the president’s son; the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and his this campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort.
As he does, the question is whether Mueller will be able to build a case that goes all the way to the top.
That could depend on what lessons he learned from overseeing the task force that investigated one of the biggest fraud cases in American history: the collapse of the energy giant Enron.
In December 2001, Enron filed what was then the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history. Just weeks later, Mueller, then the FBI director; Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson; and the assistant attorney general for the criminal division, Michael Chertoff, formed the Enron Task Force, an elite team of FBI agents and federal prosecutors assigned to investigate and prosecute crimes related to the Houston-based energy trader. Andrew Weissmann, who recently joined Mueller’s Russia team, later led the task force.
The Enron team was patient and learned from its investigative and trial mistakes. After its yearslong run, it set a high-water mark for complex, high-profile financial inquiries, successfully indicting and imprisoning almost all of the company’s top executives.
Early on, the Enron team also won a jury conviction of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, Enron’s auditor, on an obstruction-of-justice charge. That experience could prove valuable as the Russia team investigates — among many possible routes — whether President Trump obstructed justice when he fired James Comey, the FBI director.
Prosecuting the Enron executives went slowly. Not until 2006 did a jury find the former chief executive, Jeffrey K. Skilling, and the former chairman and chief executive, Kenneth L. Lay, guilty. (Lay died before sentencing.)
The frauds Enron was accused of were audacious. The company had hidden debt in a complex web of off-the-books companies and had faked its profits. Yet prosecutorial success was not inevitable. Skilling and Lay pleaded ignorance, blaming lower-level employees and arguing they had relied on the advice of their attorneys and auditors. The government did not have damning emails or wiretap evidence from either man. Prosecutors may face a similar challenge with Trump, who tweets but reportedly does not use email.
The Enron team got off to an auspicious start, with the Department of Justice providing adequate prosecutorial resources. Mueller helped recruit talented prosecutors and investigators from around the county and then got out of their way.
He and other top Justice Department officials then gave their team political cover. Enron and its executives were particularly close to the Bush family and top Republican officials. Early on, the team interviewed White House officials about their recollections. Republican political operatives voiced displeasure, but the team persisted.
The task force conducted its investigations effectively, flipping lower-level employees to build cases against the top bad actors. The Enron team made aggressive and risky moves. For example, it shocked Houston high society by charging the wife of Andrew Fastow, the chief financial officer, with tax evasion to put pressure on him. It worked. Fastow began to cooperate with the government. (His wife pleaded guilty.) Every prosecutor knows this strategy works, but for various reasons today, few put in the painstaking work needed to penetrate the sophisticated legal defenses of highly paid executives.
As it proceeded, the task force weathered relentless attacks. First, critics charged it was moving too slowly. Later, white-collar defense lawyers accused the team of intimidating witnesses and overzealously charging executives. The legal establishment particularly criticized the prosecution of Arthur Andersen. The government won at trial in 2002, but the Supreme Court overturned the verdict three years later on a narrow issue involving jury instructions.
Despite its successes, the Enron Task Force emerged with a mixed legacy thanks to its trial losses and reversals from higher courts. Among them, the Supreme Court reversed part of the Skilling verdict.
Today, many Justice Department officials have learned the wrong lessons from the Enron experience, accepting the idea that the task force was overzealous. Even Democratic appointees like Mary Jo White, President Obama’s chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Lanny Breuer, his assistant attorney general for the criminal division, came to believe the prosecution of Andersen had been a mistake.
Drawing the wrong lessons has consequences. In subsequent years, the Justice Department did not assign prosecutors to work solely on financial crisis cases. While the Bush Justice Department had acted quickly to create the Enron Task Force, the Obama department allowed plans to create a similar task force, after the banking collapse of 2008, to die amid bureaucratic infighting.
It was no surprise, then, that the Justice Department never put any top bankers from the biggest banks in prison after the financial crisis. Forgetting what went right with the Enron prosecutions has contributed to a problem that still plagues the Justice Department: It has lost the will and ability to prosecute top corporate executives from the largest corporations.
Today Mueller’s team is operating in an even hotter kitchen than the Enron Task Force did. The president has repeatedly called the investigation “a witch hunt,” and rumors abound that he could fire Mueller any day. A Trump ally, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, has grumbled conspiratorially that the former FBI director was the “tip of the deep state spear” aimed at the president.
But the Enron Task Force may have given Mueller a hide thick enough to protect him from those attacks. More than that, Enron honed skills he’ll need now in the Russia investigation, which may well touch on money laundering, secrecy havens, complex accounting maneuvers, campaign finance violations — and multiple lies.
As I talked with Mueller’s former Enron Task Force colleagues in recent weeks, it became clear to me that he believes the Enron team was successful — and understands why. That means his special counsel team will probably move more slowly than people anticipate. But it might also shock people with its aggressive investigative and prosecutorial tactics. If Trump and his advisers committed crimes, Mueller will find them.
Jesse Eisinger is the author of “The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives.”
ICIJ reporter Sasha Chavkin had been investigating the World Bank for months when he visited a sweltering military post in Honduras and sat with the colonel. Sasha had heard the Honduran military was violently evicting local peasants to make way for a palm oil plantation — a project funded by the World Bank to boost the local economy. The reporter wanted the colonel to answer for these allegations.
But the man knew far more than Sasha expected. He knew who Sasha had been speaking to, and where he planned to travel next. He’d even sent his troops ahead of Sasha, to await his arrival. “If you go there,” the colonel said, “I can’t guarantee your safety.”
Sasha was scared, but he went anyway.
He was chasing a big story — that the World Bank was complicit in violently displacing people from their lands in order to make way for development projects all over the world. When Sasha got to the village in Honduras, called Panama, he heard about the brutal treatment of the peasants firsthand. Their land had been stolen from them, and a local priest had been murdered. His body — which showed signs of torture — was found under palm leaves on the land now taken over by the plantation.
This treatment wasn’t isolated to Honduras. Sasha found similar stories across the globe. In Ethiopia, he heard from villagers chased from their land by the Ethiopian military. Women reported being raped; others said they were beaten.
It was all part of what Sasha had been told was the World Bank’s biggest secret: Around 2009, the bank had stopped requiring governments to fill out detailed forms with a census of how many people were being displaced and what was being done to help them. Instead, it allowed governments to say that some people might be displaced, and that details on relocation would be worked out later. Often, the World Bank offered no clear plan to help displaced communities at all.
Using extensive data analysis and on-location reporting, Sasha and his team published a series that spans three continents and details how 3.4 million people were forced from their land by World Bank projects. Five days after Sasha and his team sent questions to the World Bank, World Bank President Kim Jong Kim held a press conference. He said the organization had taken a “hard look” at the resettlement policies and that it would be reforming supervision procedures.
The series is called “Evicted and Abandoned,” and today, Sasha talks with us about what he found and how he found it.
Have an idea for an episode? Email us your suggestions at podcasts@propublica.org.
Listen to this podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher.
The music for this podcast is from Podington Bear and Blue Dot Sessions.
The Houston Police Department has ended its longstanding practice of using $2 chemical kits to make drugs arrests, a policy that had contributed to hundreds of wrongful convictions in recent years.
In announcing the change, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said the department was abandoning the use of the kits, known formally as chemical field tests, because conducting the tests in the field had exposed officers to the dangers posed by potentially lethal drugs such as fentanyl. He did not address the recent scandal that had shown the unreliable tests to have often been the only evidence used to gain guilty pleas from innocent defendants.
The hundreds of wrongful convictions, reported on by ProPublica and the New York Times last July, had moved then-Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson to require that any positive field test be confirmed in the crime lab before a guilty plea could be won. ProPublica, in a subsequent article on the field tests used to identify fentanyl, had highlighted the threat to police officers.
Hear how ProPublica reporters discovered police departments nationwide use a $2 test for detecting drugs that can send innocent people to jail. Listen to the podcast.
The Drug Enforcement Administration last year warned local police that fentanyl, a synthetic opioid sold on the street, is toxic in tiny doses when breathed in or exposed to skin. In May, a police officer in Ohio collapsed and was hospitalized after merely brushing the drug off his uniform with his bare hand. Acevedo said Houston police recently recovered three kilos of fentanyl.
"That's quite a few doses, lethal doses, of this pretty bad substance," Acevedo said. The Houston Forensic Science Center also identified another potent synthetic opioid, carfentanil, in a drug evidence sample earlier this year.
The field tests have been used by police departments across the country for decades. Officers simply drop a suspicious substance into a pouch of chemicals and use supposedly telltale changes in color to make arrests for cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana and other illegal drugs. But virtually everyone in the criminal justice system – prosecutor, judges, lab scientists, defense lawyers – has had plenty of reason to know the tests are faulty. Courts in most states, in fact, bar the tests from being used in evidence in a criminal trial, saying the tests do not constitute forensic science.
But as increasing numbers of criminal drug cases are resolved through plea bargains, the tests have become enormously consequential. District attorneys in many jurisdictions allowed prosecutors to use the tests to gain guilty pleas even without confirmation by a lab.
ProPublica’s reporting on the long and troubled use of the tests prompted the district attorney’s office in Portland, Oregon, to alter its practice and require lab confirmation before guilty pleas were entered. A modest review of recent cases in Portland done by the prosecutor’s office resulted in the vacating of five criminal convictions.
In 2016, a panel created by lawmakers in Texas formally termed the field tests too unreliable to trust in criminal cases, and called on crime laboratories across the state to confirm drug evidence in every prosecution.
Without field tests, Acevedo said officers in Houston and across Harris County will instead use their own “expertise” in deciding when to make drug arrests. Officers have “a wealth of training and experience into what narcotics look like, what they feel like in terms of the packaging, the color, the appearance,” he said.
Joe Gamaldi, president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union, said that dropping field tests makes officers’ jobs both safer and easier. Gamaldi acknowledged that making arrests based only on officers’ beliefs about whether substances are illegal drugs does create a risk of wrongful arrests. “There is certainly that fear,” he said.
Former Houston Police Chief Charles A. McClelland had told ProPublica last year that he thought the field tests should be abandoned, saying officers were not chemists and shouldn’t be conducting experiments on the hoods of their patrol cars.
On Friday, McClelland told the Houston Chronicle that the policy change was “a very positive step for the criminal justice process.”
“I don't think any law enforcement agency in America should be doing this anymore," he told the Chronicle.
Alex Bunin, Harris County’s chief public defender, said he had no love for the field tests, calling them erratic and unreliable. But leaving decisions about arrests to an officer’s mere observations, he said, could wind up producing wrongful convictions too, maybe even greater numbers.
Related Stories: For more coverage, read ProPublica’s previous reporting about chemical field tests.
When Donald Trump Jr., his brother-in-law and his father’s campaign chairman sat down with a Russian lawyer last June expecting to receive incriminating information about Hillary Clinton, the lawyer brought along a chatty Russian-born Washington lobbyist named Rinat Akhmetshin.
Akhmetshin’s presence at the meeting, reported today by the Associated Press, only deepens the mystery surrounding that encounter.
Like Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-linked lawyer who showed up at the Trump Tower meeting, Akhmetshin is a colorful character, with a murky personal history and myriad ties to powerful Russian political and business leaders.
When I interviewed Akhmetshin last year, he told me he had served in military intelligence after being drafted as a young man growing up in the former Soviet Union. But he cut a figure unlike any Cold War thriller: a squat man in his late 40s with upright coils of graying hair, he arrived on a bright orange bicycle, wearing trendy glasses, a cardigan sweater and purple loafers. American officials quoted by NBC News said Akhmetshin was a military counterintelligence officer, and may still have links with Russian spy agencies, an assertion he adamantly denied to both NBC and the AP.
This much is clear: Since immigrating to the United States in the 1990s and becoming a dual citizen, Akhmetshin has worked as a lobbyist and public affairs consultant in Washington. Last year, he joined Veselnitskaya in a fight to overturn an American law that imposes financial and travel sanctions against Russians accused of violating human rights.
He is one of a growing number of figures with mysterious links to Russian government and business leaders whose names have surfaced in the sprawling investigations of Russia’s role in the 2016 election.
“In Russia, everything is much more informal, that’s what makes it so hard to pin down,” said Bill Browder, the investor who championed the U.S. law Akhmetshin and Veselnitskaya were attacking. “None of these people are carrying KGB business cards.”
Akhmetshin did not return a phone call or email from ProPublica. He told the AP he was surprised by how much attention his meeting with Trump Jr. has attracted. “I never thought this would be such a big deal,” he said.
As a lobbyist and public affairs consultant, Akhmetshin has worked for clients such as former Kazakh Prime Minister Akezhan Kazhegeldin, who fled his country on corruption charges that he said were politically motivated, and Andrey Vavilov, a powerful Russian politician and businessman who wanted to derail a rival’s bid for asylum in the United States.
A Dutch mining company owned by three Central Asian businessmen sued Akhmetshin in state court in Manhattan, accusing him of hacking into its computer system on behalf of a Russian firm with which it had a legal dispute. It quoted emails in which Akhmetshin purportedly told the Russian company that “the indexing is done” and that he would “get that thing in London tomorrow, can take it anywhere, pls advise where I should go.” Akhmetshin denied hacking or stealing any files. The dispute between the companies was settled with the Dutch firm which dropped its lawsuit against Akhmetshin.
In an affidavit filed as part of that case, Akhmetshin recounted a multi-faceted relationship with the American government. He said he had negotiated the lease of an U.S. air base in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet Republic that is now an independent nation. Separately, he said he had “helped save American lives” in Afghanistan by consulting with U.S. officials on “surveillance of undercover agents and suspected undercover agents.”
Akhmetshin has long cultivated relationships with journalists and government officials in Washington. I know of other reporters who have met with him for years and considered him a useful if mysterious source. He also introduced me to someone he claimed was a State Department official formerly posted in Moscow, but neither he nor the purported official would tell me his name.
When The New York Times first reported on Trump Jr.’s meeting with Veselnitskaya, Trump said it was to discuss resuming adoptions from Russia. In 2012, Russian President Vladimir Putin halted U.S. adoptions of Russian children in retaliation for passage of the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that froze the assets and restricted the travel of Russian officials accused of corruption and human rights abuses. The law was named after Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died mysteriously in a Moscow jail cell after investigating a $230 million tax fraud.
U.S. prosecutors in the Southern District of New York subsequently charged that almost $2 million from the tax scheme was invested in New York real estate. The holding company that bought the property, Prevezon, was owned by Denis Katsyv, the son of a man who was Moscow’s regional transport minister and is now vice president of state-owned Russian Railways. In May 2017, Prevezon settled the case by paying a $6 million fine in a deal in which it did not admit wrongdoing.
When the case was still pending, Katsyv hired both Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin to represent his interests. Veselnitskaya had previously been the family’s go-to lawyer, The New York Times reported. She identified herself as the younger Katsyv’s lawyer in an affidavit filed in the Prevezon case.
Dmitri “David” Zaikin made Russian energy deals with powerful officials, advised Eastern European parties drifting toward Russia, brokered condos at Toronto’s Trump Tower, and teamed up with the guy who hired Michael Flynn. Read the story.
Meanwhile, Akhmetshin registered as a lobbyist for a nonprofit organization called the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation. Federal disclosures filed by the foundation show the organization was controlled by Katsyv and two other Russians.
Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin both appeared at a planned screening in Brussels of a new documentary challenging the widely accepted narrative of the Magnitsky story. Akhmetshin also helped organize a screening in Washington on June 13 — a few days after he and Veselnitskaya met with Trump Jr. in New York. Campaign chief Paul Manafort and adviser Jared Kushner also attended.
Akhmetshin’s lobbying effort against the Magnitsky Act enlisted a former Democratic congressman from California named Ron Dellums, a former Treasury official, and several others, according to my reporting at Politico. I met Akhmetshin a few times last year in response to my questions on this subject. The lobbying succeeded in persuading Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., widely viewed as the member of Congress most sympathetic to Putin, into entering testimony from the director of the skeptical documentary into the congressional record, a propaganda coup for Moscow.
Akhmetshin has met Rohrabacher and one of his top aides repeatedly, people with direct knowledge of the meetings told me — they even had dinner at the Capitol Hill Club after a congressional hearing on U.S.-Russian relations.
The FBI warned Rohrabacher in 2012 that Russian spies were trying to recruit him, according to The New York Times. (That story did not mention Akhmetshin.)
Akhmetshin’s lobbying campaign has drawn the attention of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who chairs the powerful Judiciary Committee. Grassley has been pressuring the Justice Department for answers about whether some people working with Akhmetshin failed to properly report their activities to the Justice Department. Grassley has also asked the Department of Homeland Security for information about Akhmetshin’s immigration record.
While Veselnitskaya was Katsyv’s Russian lawyer, Katsyv was represented in New York by Mark Cymrot of the law firm BakerHostetler. Cymrot hired a research firm called Fusion GPS, led by a former Wall Street Journal reporter named Glenn Simpson. Simpson and Akhmetshin were in contact and have known each other for a long time, people with direct knowledge of the relationship told me.
Browder, the investor who employed Magnitsky at the time of his death, accused Simpson of failing to disclose his participation in the lobbying effort. Fusion GPS said in a statement it didn’t lobby and didn’t do anything that required disclosure. Grassley invited both Browder and Simpson to testify at a hearing on foreign lobbying next week, but Simpson reportedly won’t show.
Simpson’s role is intriguing because last summer he was also working with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who was assembling research on Trump’s ties to Russia, later published by BuzzFeed. Fusion GPS has refused to reveal its client for that investigation.
The role of Fusion GPS in the 2016 campaign appears complex, to say the least. In the same year, the company has acknowledged working on a project supported by the Kremlin (the repeal of the Magnitsky Act) and hostile to Russia’s interests (the Steele dossier). The company said through its lawyer that it would have no comment.
Grassley has said Simpson’s ties to Akhmetshin undermine the Steele dossier’s credibility. U.S. officials have verified some parts of Steele’s research and valued his work in the past, according to CNN and The Washington Post. A person close to Steele said he had no knowledge of Simpson’s relationship with Akhmetshin and that Akhmetshin was not among the Russians who provided information to Steele for the dossier.
Akhmetshin is not the only person with mysterious ties to Russian business and politics who have shown up in Trump’s orbit.
Konstantin Kilimnik: Manafort, who worked for the pro-Russian party in Ukraine before running Trump’s campaign, had an employee in Kiev named Konstantin Kilimnik who U.S. and Ukrainian authorities have suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence, according to Politico. Kilimnik served in the Russian army and learned English at a school that experts say often trains spies. Kilimnik denied being a spy to The Washington Post. Manafort had dinner with Kilimnik last August in New York, just before he was forced out of the Trump campaign amid growing questions about his work in the Ukraine, the Post reported.
Felix Sater: Years ago, Trump partnered on a Manhattan real-estate project with a convicted Russian criminal named Felix Sater. This February, Sater worked with then-national security adviser Michael Flynn on a back-channel peace plan for Russia and Ukraine, The New York Times reported.
David Zaikin: Until Trump picked Flynn for national security adviser, Flynn was lobbying for Turkish interests, although he didn’t initially disclose that. Since at least 2015, pro-Turkish lobbying in Washington was secretly coordinated by a Ukrainian-born man named Dmitri “David” Zaikin, people with direct knowledge of the arrangements say. Zaikin has denied any role in Flynn’s Turkish lobbying. A Canadian citizen who now lives in London, Zaikin brokered the sale of condos in the Trump Tower in Toronto, helped a Putin ally attract U.S. and British investors in western Siberia, and worked as an executive at a mining company owned by a Russian oligarch. In recent years, he has also become involved in international politics, advising parties in Albania and Macedonia.
Do you have information about any of these operators, or about Russian influence efforts in the U.S.? Contact Isaac at isaac@propublica.org or via Signal at 203-464-1409.
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The U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the developed world. Yet these deaths of women from causes related to pregnancy or childbirth are almost invisible. When a new or expectant mother dies, her obituary rarely mentions the circumstances. Her identity is shrouded by medical institutions, regulators and state maternal mortality review committees. Her loved ones mourn her loss in private. The lessons to be learned from her death are often lost as well.
The inability, or unwillingness, of states and the federal government to track maternal deaths has been called “an international embarrassment.” To help fill this gap, ProPublica and NPR have spent the last few months searching social media and other sources for mothers who died, trying to understand what happened to them and why. So far, we’ve identified 120 pregnancy- and childbirth-related deaths for 2016 out of an estimated U.S. total of 700 to 900. Together these women form a picture of maternal mortality that is more racially, economically, geographically and medically diverse than many people might expect. Their ages ranged from 16 to 43; their causes of death, from hemorrhage to infection, complications of pre-existing medical conditions, and suicide. We were struck by how many perished in the postpartum period, by the number of heart-related deaths, by the contributing role sometimes played by severe depression and mood disorders — and by the many missed opportunities to save lives.
ProPublica and NPR plan to expand our 2016 photo gallery as we find more women and hear from more families. If you know of someone who died, please tell us here. Meanwhile, we highlight 16 women with portraits of their lives and deaths. Their stories are a reminder of just how much is lost when a mother dies. Examined together, these private tragedies point to a much bigger public health problem, and underscore the potential repercussions for women and families as Republicans in Congress push to revamp the health care system and roll back Medicaid.
Amanda Rose Kotrba never got over the frightening birth of her son, back in 2008. Late in her third trimester, she had developed a problem with her placenta — the organ that supplies nutrients to the developing fetus — and lost most of her amniotic fluid, resulting in an emergency Cesarean section. Seven years and a couple of miscarriages later, she was pregnant again. “She was scared,” her mother, Connie Holyfield, said. “She kept telling me that she was scared.”
Amanda was no shrinking violet — “feisty” and “headstrong” is how Connie described her 30-year-old daughter. She worked as a security guard and had a side business cleaning apartments in the Orange Park, Florida, complex where she and her longtime boyfriend lived with their son. She didn’t have private health insurance or a car, but Medicaid covered her maternity care and provided transportation to prenatal appointments; other times, Connie would drive her. Toward the end of her ninth month, Amanda’s visits to the doctor and the emergency room became more frequent. “She started having some bleeding, some back pain and some stomach pain,” Connie said. “She kept telling me she didn’t feel right.” Amanda worried that her placenta was failing again. But the doctors and nurses who examined her always sent her home.
On Sunday, Jan. 24, Amanda was overcome by searing pain; when Connie arrived at the hospital, her daughter was undergoing another emergency C-section. Amanda had suffered a placental abruption — the organ had become detached from the walls of the uterus — and major bleeding. Her newborn daughter had a collapsed lung, and Amanda was so ill she could barely glance at the baby. After a few hours, she seemed to rally. Then, when Connie went to take a photo of the baby to bring back to her room, Amanda texted her: “More blood.” As Connie was signing consent forms for more emergency surgeries, Amanda gasped, “Mom, I’m not gonna make it.” She died 36 hours later, her body so ravaged that, her mother said, “She didn’t even look like the same person.”
Thirty-nine-year-old Emily Cook Dyches of Salem, Utah, “was the mom who learned your kids’ names and asked about them when she saw you,” her husband Eric wrote last year. “She was the neighbor with the untidy house and smiling children. She was the mom who worried about not measuring up, but always put her best foot forward.” Emily and Eric met in third grade and married while attending Brigham Young University in 1998. She taught elementary school for a few years and worked as a piano instructor and photographer, but her most important job, she believed, was raising her kids — teaching them “not only practical life lessons, but more importantly eternal lessons, centered on how one can progressively become more like the Savior in word and deed,” as her obituary put it.
After she nearly died delivering her fifth baby, Trey, in March 2015, she recovered physically, but emotionally she was never the same. When breastfeeding proved difficult, “her anxiety about Trey’s health went through the roof,” Eric said. “She was worried about him developing and growing and surviving.” She began having panic attacks. “I’ve heard it described that it’s like you’re in a jetliner and you feel like the jetliner’s going down,” Eric said. The attacks were so bad he took her to the emergency room a couple of times, but the medical system “is just not equipped to handle that type of emergency.”
Antidepressants helped, and Emily’s condition seemed to stabilize for a time. But in retrospect, Eric said, “she wasn’t fully there, even though I thought we were functioning at a pretty good level.” When Trey was about nine months old, “she came to me and essentially just said, ‘It’s coming back.’” Emily agreed to check into a psychiatric hospital and stayed for 11 nights. (As she and Eric later learned, their insurance wouldn’t have covered visits to an outpatient facility anyway.) The experience was “very similar to incarceration,” Eric said. Emily couldn’t even wear an underwire bra, for fear she might use the wire to harm herself. Still, she got better, and the first couple of weeks after she was discharged felt to Eric like “a second honeymoon.” Then she regressed. On Feb. 24, after spending the day with her parents, she had a panic attack during a car ride. Her father pulled the car to the side of the freeway to console her, but before he could stop her, she opened the door and ran into oncoming traffic.
According to researchers in Georgia, Michigan and other states, mental health disorders have become a leading contributor to maternal deaths among white women in the months after childbirth. Eric doesn’t believe his wife was trying to harm herself. “She was disoriented. She wasn’t sure where she was going.” He does believe she needed more help than her family and community could provide. A few weeks after her death, he started a foundation in her honor, The Emily Effect, to help other women suffering from perinatal mood disorders, with a special focus on improving maternal care in Utah.
At 23, Brittany Haefke was a stay-at-home single mom with a 6-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son. She’d struggled with depression and drugs over the years, chronicling her ups and downs in her diaries, according to her mother, Deneen Haefke. But her kids helped keep her grounded. Nothing made her happier than playing ball with them or teaching them to ride their bikes. “You could just see the joy in her face,” Deneen said. “You couldn’t rip her away from them.”
Just hours after the birth of her third child, Cole, on Feb. 11, 2016, Brittany had so much trouble breathing that doctors put her on oxygen. She was so swollen, Deneen said, “she still kind of looked like she was pregnant.” The hospital staff ran some tests, but when Brittany heard the results she was so upset that she checked out and refused to tell her mother what the doctors had said. Back at the home the family shared in Floral City, Florida, Brittany withdrew into herself. “She did not even try to bond with [the baby],” Deneen said. Her swelling grew worse, and she started having chest pains. “I asked her every day, ‘Please let me take you to the doctor.’ She would refuse.” One morning, Brittany called her mother from a friend’s house: She was on her way to the hospital and didn’t think she’d be coming home. She died a few hours later from pregnancy-induced heart failure — the diagnosis, Deneen believes, that doctors had given her three weeks before. The condition is often treatable, but recovery can be long and uncertain, and Brittany’s Medicaid benefits were set to expire a couple of months after she delivered.
Her final journal entries reflected that she was tired of fighting. “I think she gave up on life,” Deneen said. Her mother buried the diaries with her.
Marqwetta Johnson of Tulsa, Oklahoma, had no idea when she collapsed that she was six weeks pregnant with twins. At 42, she had seven children, including a daughter with a learning disability, a son with autism, and twin 3-year-olds. The family was poor, but Marqwetta was patient and loving, said her eldest, 23-year-old Jamal. “She would tell me, ‘Whatever you decide to do, do the best you can at it.’” With his mother’s encouragement, he earned his undergraduate degree at Oral Roberts University in 2015, then headed to China to study international relations and Mandarin. He called her from there on April 7, 2016. “She was fine, laughing and telling me to make sure I did my Chinese homework.”
The next morning, Marqwetta complained of pain in her abdomen and began to bleed. Rushed to the hospital, she was diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy. One or more fertilized eggs had implanted in her fallopian tube instead of her uterus and burst, leading to hemorrhage and cardiac arrest. Marqwetta was older and overweight, traits associated with higher rates of pregnancy complications. Another risk factor was poverty. “She did not go to the doctor very often,” Jamal said. “I think people have a fear of going to see the doctor because of the cost associated with it. The uncertainty and the fear of, ‘Well if there is something wrong, it’s gonna be more expensive for me to try to fix what’s wrong.’” His mother’s sudden death left his younger siblings “like sheep without the shepherd,” he said. “That’s when it was my turn to stand up and say, ‘No, everything’s going to be okay.’” Jamal flew back to Tulsa and, fearing that the state would put his brothers and sister into foster care, launched a GoFundMe campaign to help him gain custody of them. He raised almost $20,000, enough to rent a house, hire a lawyer, and keep his family intact. He also got married and is expecting a child of his own. If he could see his mother one last time, he said, “I would tell her that all of her babies are okay. Including me.”
The YouTube video commemorating Kira Dixon Johnson’s life shows a vibrant woman who seemed to be in perpetual motion — racing cars and jet skis, piloting a plane, splashing in the ocean with her firstborn, Charles, in her arms. She spoke five languages and started a chain of English-language schools in China in the 2000s, then worked in the restaurant business in her native Atlanta. There she fell in love with Charles Johnson IV, from a prominent family of educators and civil rights lawyers. (His mother, the one-time TV judge Glenda Hatchett, represented the family of Philando Castile, gunned down by a police officer in Minnesota last July.) “She was literally the closest thing I’ve ever met to Wonder Woman,” her husband said. “She was superhuman to me.”
Kira was six months pregnant with her second son, Langston, when the couple moved to Los Angeles to pursue various business projects. She had delivered her first child by emergency C-section, and, hoping to avoid another trauma, she chose doctors affiliated with one of the city’s premier hospitals, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The delivery “was supposed to be a walk in the park,” Charles said. But soon after her scheduled C-section, Kira, 39, began to hemorrhage. Obstetric bleeding is one of the most common causes of maternal deaths in the U.S.; 70 percent of such deaths are preventable, researchers in California have found. In Kira’s case, her family contends, the medical team delayed treatment too long. Her abdominal cavity filled with blood and she died 12 hours after giving birth.
Charles sued the hospital and doctors this past spring in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The family hopes that the case will help spotlight the issue of maternal mortality among blacks, who die at a much higher rate than other women. “I owe it to my wife,” he said. “I owe it to my sons.” The hospital and doctors denied the allegations in court papers, contending that any negligence on their part was “not a substantial factor” in Kira’s death. In a statement, the hospital commended Kira’s family for “demonstrating important leadership in raising awareness of preventable maternal deaths,” adding: “[W]e thoroughly investigate any situation where there are concerns about a patient’s medical care. Based on our findings, we make any changes that are needed so that we can continue to provide the highest quality care to our patients.”
Amy Bartlett was the Yellowstone National Park spokeswoman who went on the news to explain why it was a stupid idea to take selfies with a giant bison or why scientists were sure the mega-volcano under the park was not about to blow. Yellowstone wasn’t just her job, it was her life: She met and married her husband, Jerry, there, made her home on the park’s Montana border, and named her kids Jackson (for the Wyoming resort town to the south of the park), Hayden (for the valley) and Ella Faith (for the geyser). Ella was born May 7, 2016.
At 41, Amy was thrilled to finally have a daughter. But a week after going home, while Jerry was putting the boys to bed, Amy suddenly began feeling strange — pain in her neck and jaw, a galloping heartbeat, extremely high blood-pressure readings on her home monitor. First she called her mother, then a friend who was coordinator of emergency medical services for the park. They told her the same thing: Her symptoms sounded like a heart attack. She needed to get to the hospital right away. Amy and Jerry both had EMS training, so they recognized the symptoms, too. But Amy was in excellent health, it was the middle of the night, and they lived more than an hour away from the medical center in Bozeman — a long way to go for a false alarm.
Amy opted to phone one more person, an on-call doctor at the hospital who suggested she rest a few minutes, then re-measure her blood pressure. As she lay down and began nursing, Jerry snuggled into bed beside her. At first, he thought she had fallen asleep; then he realized she had stopped breathing. An autopsy revealed a spontaneous coronary artery dissection, or SCAD, in which one of the main arteries to the heart suddenly splits. Once mistakenly thought to be quite rare, SCAD is now recognized as one of a series of heart conditions that may be triggered by pregnancy hormones, even in women who are otherwise healthy. The condition isn’t preventable, but if he and Amy had ever heard of it, Jerry said, they might have been able to save her life. “Neither of us wanted to believe this could be happening to her,” he said.
Krystine Toledo-Gonzalez loved to dance and hang out with friends — “things I would never, ever do if it wasn’t for her,” said her husband, Luis. “She was always pushing me to do more. We pushed each other.” They met in Miami in the mid-2000s and moved to Georgia a few years later to work and raise a family. He was a manager at Costco Wholesale; she was a part-time post-operative nurse in the Northside Hospital system and took care of their three kids, ages 2 to 16.
Krystine had given birth to her youngest child by emergency C-section, something she didn’t want to go through again. When she found out she was expecting another baby, she was determined to have a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean). Many ob/gyns and hospitals refuse to perform VBACs because of concerns that the uterus could rupture, so she had to go to Northside’s main hospital in Atlanta, which delivers 15,000 babies a year — more than any other medical center in the U.S.
Krystine had a slight fever but the delivery went fine. Then doctors discovered that she had developed a cold sore, so they decided to put her in isolation for a few days, Luis said. When she began complaining of pain in her abdomen, the first assumption was that she was having indigestion — gas trapped in her gut because she wasn’t able to walk around as much as she wanted. The pain worsened and her condition deteriorated. By the time she was diagnosed with a staph infection, Luis said, doctors couldn’t save her. She died at the age of 30, six days after her daughter was born.
“Northside Hospital shares in the loss of Krystine Toledo-Gonzalez,” the hospital said in a statement. “Privacy laws prevent us from providing any comments or additional information.”
Lynn Aguibitin Welker didn’t realize she was pregnant until her fifth month for a very good reason; she’d had her fallopian tubes tied after the birth of her second child. At 38, she worked in the preschool at Mission College in Santa Clara, Calif. “She was a great teacher, passionate about doing that,” said her husband, Eric, who met her in high school in the early 1990s when they were both in Junior ROTC. At school and at home, she was constantly making music and art. She wanted her daughter, 8-year-old Jordan, and son, Noah, 5, “to think crazy, whimsical ideas,” Eric said. “She was very much about raising kids who can see the potential in things.”
Finding out she was pregnant again “was a nice surprise,” he said. Then, two weeks later, an ultrasound revealed that the baby had hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a severe congenital defect that would require open-heart surgery soon after birth. Lynn “started to blame herself a little bit,” Eric said. She had chronic high blood pressure, and though doctors tried to reassure her, she worried that her anti-hypertensive medication might have hurt the baby.
For the next few months, she and her physicians did what they could to give the baby the best chance at a healthy life. On May 27, 2016, Lynn had a C-section at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center and neonatal specialists whisked away the fragile newborn, Savannah Angel. Lynn seemed fine. Then she crashed, and doctors couldn’t bring her back.
According to the autopsy, she had major blockages in her arteries that had gone unnoticed for years, leading to a massive coronary. The news was better for Savannah. After two surgeries, she’s strong and healthy, beginning to crawl and babbling her first words — “Da-da” and “Ma-ma-ma-ma.” “She’s doing great,” Eric said. “It’s been a good example of resilience for me to see.”
Laura Lenss, a 38-year-old architect in Seattle, “was like a Renaissance woman,” her younger sister Kristina Lenss said. “She was absolutely an expert at every single thing she did, whether it was architecture or building furniture or cooking or illustrating or making clothes or making movies. You name it.” Motherhood was Laura’s most absorbing project; she had one son, 3-year-old Henry, and was eagerly awaiting the arrival of his brother, whom she planned to name Wally. At her final prenatal appointment, her doctor suggested an induction that day. Laura texted Kristina that she was in the hospital eating a salad and then she would have the baby.
Labor went extremely quickly — less than an hour, Kristina said. Laura suffered a third-degree tear in her perineum, or vaginal area, but told her sister she wasn’t worried; the same thing had happened with Henry. Back home with the baby after one night in the hospital, “she was so excited,” Kristina said. “She said, ‘I’m just so in love. He’s perfect. He’s beautiful.’”
Soon, though, Laura was complaining about severe pain in her neck and shoulders. In a photo taken at Wally’s first pediatric appointment on June 14, she looked swollen and exhausted. That night, Laura was so self-conscious about her bloated appearance that she didn’t want to Facetime with her family. She made an appointment with her doctor for the next morning, but when her parents came to pick her up, they took one look and called 911. She died on the operating table a few hours later from complications of a strep A infection that began in her perineal wound.
“We’ve been crying ever since,” Kristina said. “We cry every day.”
At 25, Larissa Icemen was sweet but shy — the result, her mother-in-law Roberta Russette thought, of growing up in rough circumstances in Minneapolis’s Native American community. At big gatherings, she often kept to herself, and at home, she focused on her kids. She was pregnant with her fourth child.
On the morning of Feb. 6, 2016, in her 38th week, her husband Landen took her to University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital for what they expected would be another smooth delivery. Soon after they arrived, Larissa began vomiting and went into cardiac arrest. Doctors delivered her healthy son by emergency C-section, then rushed her to another hospital, where she underwent surgery for an amniotic fluid embolism, a rare complication believed to occur when amniotic fluid or other fetal material — sometimes as tiny as a fingernail or a hair — enters the mother’s bloodstream, triggering a massive allergic-like response.
The embolism caused Larissa’s heart to stop several times, depriving her brain of oxygen. When her condition stabilized, she was transferred to a nursing home. She couldn’t walk or talk, but she responded to her caregivers and family enough to give them hope. “She would have these really fighting moments… these bright spots,” Roberta said. “Then she would slip. All of a sudden she would get an infection out of nowhere.” She languished for almost five months. “We didn’t speak about it,” Roberta said. “We just knew she wasn’t going to fight anymore.”
Twenty-six-year-old Amanda Eva Garcia lived in Texas, where maternal deaths have increased sharply in recent years. One of 16 siblings, “she came from a really hard life,” said Zak Tiemann, her boyfriend since 2011. She was sweet-natured and excitable, with a raucous laugh that burst out of nowhere — “little things put a big smile on her face.” She especially doted on her 9-year-old daughter, June, and their 2-year-old, Zoey. “Her mom abilities were so good,” Zak said. “She was the best mom I’ve ever seen.”
Amanda didn’t earn enough in her assembly-line job making foam food containers to afford insurance, so like more than half of women who give birth in Texas, she got her care through Medicaid. After delivering her third daughter, Zayleeana, by C-section on July 5, 2016, she and the kids went to stay with Zak’s mom while he picked up work in San Antonio, 35 miles away.
A couple of days after leaving the hospital, Amanda’s stomach started to ache. She lost her appetite: “She wasn’t eating her food. She was just throwing it in the trash,” Zak said. She turned pale and complained of feeling hot even though, to Zak’s touch, “her body felt real, real cold.” Eight days after giving birth, she could no longer stand up. An ambulance took her to Guadalupe Regional Medical Center, where doctors told Zak that her organs were failing. She passed away a couple of hours later.
Sheriah Freitas met her husband Deitton, a soldier in the U.S. Army, at a Walgreens in Hawaii, where she was working in the cosmetics department. He loved her beautiful eyes — “they’re like blue and green and gray with brown in them” — and her big personality. “She was fierce. She was strong-minded and confident.” Pregnant with her first child at 25, she appeared to be doing exceptionally well. “We went to every appointment, every ultrasound, everything was perfect,” Deitton said. Still, he couldn’t help fretting, especially after they received transfer orders to Fort Benning, Georgia, thousands of miles from their families. “I just worried about my wife all the time.”
Sheriah went into labor three weeks early, on Aug. 13, 2016, but the couple was more excited than concerned. “We were making jokes all day,” Deitton said.
Then the mood shifted. Doctors said labor wasn’t progressing properly and that Sheriah needed a C-section. After the surgery, she held baby Luther — they’d settled on his name while she was in labor — for a few minutes. Then she began to bleed uncontrollably.
Sheriah had developed an amniotic fluid embolism. Doctors don’t know how to predict or prevent them; up to 80 percent of mothers who develop amniotic fluid embolisms die. Soon Sheriah went into cardiac arrest; Deitton held her hand and prayed while doctors worked frantically to revive her. He was still clutching her hand when she died.
Audrey Lockett LaBranche was a dynamo with a huge smile, a constantly changing assortment of colorful hairstyles, and vast reserves of energy, ambition and faith. She was the founder and proprietor of LaBranche’s Childcare Center, in Chicago Heights, Illinois, which provided care for 60 kids at a time, from babies in diapers to latch-key tweens, as well as support for their harried parents.
Under the name Audrey Cher, she had a side career as a Christian neo-soul/funk singer and songwriter and released her debut solo album, “The Intro,” last year. Her busy household included her husband of 21 years, a teenage son and daughter and 7-year-old twins. “I’m overwhelmed with Love & thanks,” she posted on Facebook last summer, pregnant with her fifth child. “I’m thankful for my life’s journey and I would not trade anything for the path I walked to get to where I am today.”
Her final pregnancy felt especially improbable. In 2015, Audrey had developed multiple blood clots that traveled to her lungs and nearly killed her. After months of medication and rest, she’d made a complete recovery. Then, as she announced on Facebook in January 2016, “God decided to surprise us.” The pregnancy was anything but easy. Audrey was 39, overweight and had thyroid disease. She was on blood thinners to prevent clots, but she experienced frequent Braxton Hicks contractions (uterine contractions that mimic labor) that made her uncomfortable and worried that the clots might be coming back. Late in the pregnancy, after a falling out with her longtime ob/gyn, she switched to a new doctor. “It was stressful to have to go under the care of someone who did not know her history,” her mother, Kathleen Lockett, said. But after that, things seemed to proceed smoothly, and baby Mathias was born by C-section in late August 2016, weighing eight pounds.
A couple of days after returning home, Audrey started complaining of a headache and problems with her C-section incision. At the local hospital, she was told that her sinuses were probably acting up, Kathleen said. The headache grew worse, and on Friday, Sept. 2, Audrey’s husband Marcus reported on Facebook that she had been rushed to a trauma center in Chicago: “My wife has suffered severe hemorrhaging in her brain that has left her in a lifeless state.” He was determined to stay hopeful. “Satan is a confirmed fool if he thinks this will shake my faith!”
But on Sept. 4, he acknowledged that Audrey still hadn’t shown any signs of improvement. She died that afternoon.
Marlene Dominguez-Hicks, 33, was the pride of her Filipino-immigrant parents — valedictorian of her high school class, B.A. from Stanford, M.D. from Meharry Medical College in Nashville.
She and her family — husband Alex, daughters Alyssa and Alana — were living in Houston, where she was in a radiology program at the University of Texas Health Science Center and looking forward to the birth of Alex Jr. Two weeks before the baby was due, she could still run up the stairs of her town house, declaring to her husband, “I feel great.” In her maternity photos taken around the same time, she wore a long white dress, a crown of flowers, and a radiant glow.
She spent Labor Day at the park and the zoo with her husband and kids. Alex urged Marlene, “Slow down if you need to,” but she insisted she was fine. The next day, she made her rounds as usual — she figured she might as well work up to the end, since her job was conveniently located in the hospital where she planned to give birth. After dinner, the girls were in bed and Alex was downstairs when he heard what sounded like books falling off a shelf. He found Marlene lying on the bathroom floor, unconscious, blood trickling from her mouth.
Paramedics did their best to revive her, but by the time they reached the hospital, she was gone. Doctors couldn’t save the baby, either — he’d been without oxygen too long. The diagnosis was peripartum cardiomyopathy, a type of heart failure that is induced by pregnancy and can strike from the middle of the second trimester into the postpartum period. It is treatable, but the symptoms — fatigue, swelling, shortness of breath — mimic the normal discomforts of pregnancy and so are often ignored. Once considered quite uncommon, peripartum cardiomyopathy is now estimated to cause about 11 percent of maternal deaths and can have a genetic component. That weighs on Alex’s mind. “When I take the girls to the doctor, I’m always going to ask him or her to check their hearts.”
Joonyper Light was many things — a punk rocker, a college student, a jewelry crafter, a budding businesswoman. She was also a 21-year-old heroin addict with a history of bipolar disorder and depression who was trying hard to change her life.
When she found out she was pregnant, “she got even more adamant” about beating her addiction, and entered a drug treatment program, her fiancé Matt Stock said. But the emotional ups and downs of pregnancy “led to even more of a struggle.” Getting clean in Springfield, Missouri, meant starting over with a whole new group of friends. “She didn’t have too many support systems. She felt alone. Felt bad about me being really her only true support system and putting everything on me.” As difficult as the prenatal period was, Matt said, Joonyper was “terrified of postpartum. She would always tell me, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to deal with this. I’m scared of how I’m going to be during that phase.’”
Their son Monte, born in September 2016, “lit up her life,” Matt said. Still, with Matt working full-time installing solar panels, “there was just not a whole lot of time for her to get to her rehab,” he said. Meanwhile, she worried about taking medications like antidepressants that would get in her breast milk. “She would act fine on the outside but be hurting on the inside.”
The stress and depression became “just too much for her to handle,” he said. Matt came home one night in November to find Joonyper on the bathroom floor, dead of an overdose. She wasn’t unique; maternal mortality review committees in Texas, Colorado and Philadelphia have found that overdoses linked to mood disorders make up an increasing number of maternal deaths. “This was a relapse. This was not an ongoing thing,” Matt wrote on Facebook a couple of days later. Also: “I need help. I really don’t know how to deal with this.”
Christen Vogel, 21, and her mother, Pamela Gore, were as close as some sisters. They lived two hours apart in North Carolina, but they talked several times a day, and Pam regularly drove to Camp Lejeune, where Christen’s husband was a Marine, to attend her daughter’s prenatal appointments. “I was looking forward to being “not a ‘grandma’ but a ‘Pamma,’” Pam said.
The only shadow of a problem emerged in Christen’s 38th week. She texted her mom to say she didn’t want to come home for her maternity photo shoot because she was afraid she might go into premature labor. She told her husband she had a headache, and when he urged her to see a doctor, she said she would try taking some medicine first. On the night of Nov. 30, Christen got out of bed and decided to take a bath. “That was her soothing measure,” Pam said. “If she had a headache, she’d get in the bath. If she had a stomach ache, she’d get in the bath.” When her husband woke up around 5:00 the next morning, he found her unresponsive in the tub. Neither she nor the baby survived.
The question no one seemed able to answer was why. Her heart and other organs were normal, an autopsy showed. The only substances in her bloodstream were caffeine and acetaminophen. The final death certificate listed the cause of death as “undetermined.”
The lack of finality was devastating for Pam, who started a GoFundMe campaign this past April to pay for an independent pathologist to review the records. “I have two other daughters who have hopes of having families in their future,” she wrote. “If this was caused from something that we could have prevented, I need to know.” Donors eventually contributed more than $3,300, but she’s still looking for a pathologist willing to take the case.
This story was co-published with the Chicago Tribune.
With questions swirling around his record as Cook County assessor, Joseph Berrios will take the unprecedented step Tuesday of defending his office before the Cook County Board after a Chicago Tribune investigation exposed widespread inequities in the county’s property tax system.
This story is part of a collaboration between ProPublica Illinois and the Chicago Tribune, continuing the reporting ProPublica Illinois reporter Jason Grotto began on property tax inequity as a member of the Tribune staff.
Published in June, “The Tax Divide” showed the assessor’s office overvalued low-priced homes while undervaluing high-priced ones. These disparities in assessments — known as regressivity — led to inequities in property tax bills, giving the wealthy unsanctioned tax breaks while penalizing low-income residents.
In the weeks since, mounting pressure has put the assessor on the defensive. The county’s independent inspector general opened an investigation; lawmakers at the state and local levels proposed legislation to limit the assessor’s ability to raise campaign contributions from tax attorneys; and a bill has been introduced in the General Assembly that would require greater transparency.
Among the questions Berrios is likely to face at Tuesday’s hearing: Why did his office tout and then quietly abandon a new residential valuation model funded by the MacArthur Foundation designed to reduce regressivity?
After the Tribune reported that the assessor’s office hadn’t implemented the new model, despite issuing a July 2015 news release saying it had, Berrios and his staff criticized the model as well as the experts who led the effort to create it.
Both of those experts — Robert Weissbourd, president of the consulting firm RW Ventures, and University of Chicago public policy professor Christopher Berry — are scheduled to testify at the hearing.
Among other criticisms, the assessor’s office said it had told Weissbourd and Berry before issuing the news release that their model was flawed. Deputy Assessor Tom Shaer produced three emails after the series ran that he said proved the two had “the temerity” to mislead the Tribune into believing otherwise.
Since then, Weissbourd has produced dozens of additional emails showing that the issues raised in the messages Shaer cited were part of a multiyear effort to test and implement the new model and had been resolved before the office produced the news release.
County commissioners also may address the question at the heart of the controversy over the models: how exactly the assessor values the county’s 1.5 million residential properties. The office has refused to disclose crucial details about its methods.
One of Berrios’ recent attempts to defend his record has already evaporated. Late last month, the assessor’s office posted on its website a news release that cited a study by a prominent research organization as proof that the county’s assessments are fair and accurate. Berrios invoked the same study during a rare television interview, also in late June.
However, a close examination of the study shows that its focus was on tax rates, exemptions and other policy issues in all 50 states; it was not an evaluation of how accurately the assessor’s office values property.
Adam Langley, a lead author of the study by the Massachusetts-based Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, confirmed that county officials mischaracterized the report.
“Our study is not about assessment accuracy,” Langley said. “That’s a separate issue.”
The institute issued a statement to the assessor’s office as well as county commissioners last week in an effort to set the record straight.
Two days later, the assessor’s office removed the news release from its site “to do further work regarding it,” Shaer said.
Tuesday’s hearing will see Berrios, who also is chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party, facing off against many commissioners who rely on the party for political support.
Berrios received more than half of his campaign contributions from the property tax appeal industry, the Tribune has reported. Appeals increased dramatically under Berrios, but an analysis carried out in cooperation with the University of Chicago’s Berry found the process makes the assessment system even less fair.
Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, who has introduced an ordinance to block the assessor from receiving contributions from tax attorneys and other businesses that file appeals, was among the first commissioners to request that Berrios testify. Berrios will appear at a Finance Committee hearing with the full board in attendance.
“At the heart of all this are the working people who are already hurting from increases in property taxes,” Garcia said in an interview. “We can’t tolerate a system that may be penalizing them. It’s just not fair.”
In seeking to defend its assessment practices, Berrios’ office sent four pages of bullet points to county commissioners contending, among other assertions, that the assessment model funded by the MacArthur Foundation produced inaccurate results. (The MacArthur Foundation has been a significant funder of ProPublica since it began publishing in 2008.)
“Simply put, this so-called ‘improvement’ is unfit for exclusive, primary or even somewhat primary use,” the document stated.
And in television and radio interviews after “The Tax Divide” was published, Shaer said the office had been optimistic about the MacArthur-funded model at the time but later discovered it produced erroneous results.
Until the Tribune launched its investigation, however, Berrios had offered nothing but public praise for the new model.
A July 2015 news release headlined “Cook County Assessor Berrios Implements New State of the Art Residential Assessment Model” described it as a “breakthrough” that improved accuracy by 50 percent and lowered regressivity by 25 percent.
As recently as April 2016 the assessor’s office was encouraging reporters to look at the model as evidence its assessments were fair and accurate. Officials even gave Weissbourd and Berry permission to provide reporters with a slide presentation showing how the new model improved assessments.
Around the same time, Berrios’ office also provided reporters with studies that concluded the new model outperformed the old one on every measure used by assessment experts around the world to evaluate fairness and accuracy.
When the Tribune analyzed millions of property tax records from the 2015 tax year, however, the results suggested the assessor had not actually implemented the new model.
Presented with those results in August 2016, officials then stated they were using the new model in conjunction with the old one, though they would not disclose how they did so. That was news to Weissbourd, Berry and MacArthur Foundation President Julia Stasch, all of whom had been quoted in the news release.
By then, the Tribune had used open records laws to obtain the new model along with computer records showing the results the office obtained from it. An examination of the computer code showed the office had made numerous errors when it ran the new model.
When those errors were pointed out during a September 2016 interview, the assessor’s office changed its story again, saying the new model had not been implemented because it had “issues” and produced inaccurate results.
The office also said Weissbourd and Berry had been told about the problems, which the two said was untrue.
After publication of the Tribune series, Shaer produced three emails that he said proved the assessor’s office had informed Weissbourd and Berry that the new model was flawed before issuing the news release. One of the emails wasn’t about the model at all; the others, sent in 2012 and in 2013, related to ongoing discussions about how to implement the new model.
The set of emails provided by Weissbourd show that the issues raised in those messages were resolved. There is no evidence in the emails that the assessor’s office alerted Weissbourd or Berry about issues with the new model before issuing the news release.
Two weeks before the 2015 announcement, the office’s head of residential valuation, Al Sarro, wrote to Weissbourd seeking feedback and requesting quotes for the news release announcing the launch of the model.
“Please take a look and add your thoughts,” Sarrow wrote in an email, which was provided by Weissbourd. “And also can you reach out to Chris (Berry) and Julia (Stasch) for any quotes they would like to add?”
When asked to comment on this set of emails, Shaer said the assessor’s office stands by its earlier statements that the model’s developers had been informed it was flawed.
When Berrios held a June news conference to address the findings of “The Tax Divide,” he brought along a researcher from a for-profit government services company that holds $65 million in county contracts, including a $30 million contract to set up a new property tax computer system for the county.
Richard Borst, of Tyler Technologies, criticized the MacArthur-funded model as well the Tribune’s analysis.
At the news conference, Borst handed out two pages of talking points that said, among other arguments, that the Tribune did not disclose enough technical information to make its analysis credible. But when a Tribune reporter pointed out that a 100-plus-page study had been posted online, Borst acknowledged he hadn’t read it.
Borst also repeated assertions by the assessor’s office that the analysis had included invalid sales involving the liquidation of estates of the deceased.
In fact, the analysis screened out those sales and other transactions that are not considered valid; the study was vetted by three industry experts, including two who helped write standards for the International Association of Assessing Officers.
ProPublica Illinois is funded in part through donations from folks like you. Make a tax-deductible donation today and help power the stories of tomorrow.
Borst also took aim at the MacArthur-funded model, saying Berry and Weissbourd’s team had made “rookie mistakes” that caused the model to be “fundamentally flawed.” For example, he said the new model “disregards location” and makes no use of geographic information systems, or GIS, to value property.
However, the new model does include location information. As for GIS, Berry said he and his team of statisticians had wanted to use GIS programs to further improve the accuracy and fairness of assessments, but the assessor’s office told them it didn’t have the necessary technical ability.
“It’s shocking that Mr. Borst is defending the assessor’s regressive assessments, especially without even having looked at their models,” Berry said. “Rather than get distracted by this nonsense, the assessor should get on with the business of fixing their unfair system.”
Borst’s firm declined to make him available to be interviewed for this story.
Asked at the news conference if he had examined the model that the assessor’s office actually uses, Borst said he hadn’t.
“That’s not for me to say,” he said. “That’s not my job.”
Do you have access to information about property tax inequity in Cook County that should be public? Email Jason.grotto@propublica.org or here’s how to send tips and documents to ProPublica securely.
This story was co-published with NPR’s Shots blog.
The box of prescription drugs had been forgotten in a back closet of a retail pharmacy for so long that some of the pills predated the 1969 moon landing. Most were 30 to 40 years past their expiration dates — possibly toxic, probably worthless.
But to Lee Cantrell, who helps run the California Poison Control System, the cache was an opportunity to answer an enduring question about the actual shelf life of drugs: Could these drugs from the bell-bottom era still be potent?
Cantrell called Roy Gerona, a University of California, San Francisco, researcher who specializes in analyzing chemicals. Gerona had grown up in the Philippines and had seen people recover from sickness by taking expired drugs with no apparent ill effects.
“This was very cool,” Gerona says. “Who gets the chance of analyzing drugs that have been in storage for more than 30 years?”
The age of the drugs might have been bizarre, but the question the researchers wanted to answer wasn’t. Pharmacies across the country — in major medical centers and in neighborhood strip malls — routinely toss out tons of scarce and potentially valuable prescription drugs when they hit their expiration dates.
Gerona and Cantrell, a pharmacist and toxicologist, knew that the term “expiration date” was a misnomer. The dates on drug labels are simply the point up to which the Food and Drug Administration and pharmaceutical companies guarantee their effectiveness, typically at two or three years. But the dates don’t necessarily mean they’re ineffective immediately after they “expire” — just that there’s no incentive for drugmakers to study whether they could still be usable.
ProPublica has been researching why the U.S. health care system is the most expensive in the world. One answer, broadly, is waste — some of it buried in practices that the medical establishment and the rest of us take for granted. We’ve documented how hospitals often discard pricey new supplies, how nursing homes trash valuable medications after patients pass away or move out, and how drug companies create expensive combinations of cheap drugs. Experts estimate such squandering eats up about $765 billion a year — as much as a quarter of all the country’s health care spending.
Experts say the United States might be squandering a quarter of the money spent on health care. That’s an estimated $765 billion a year. Do you believe you’ve encountered this waste? Tell us.
What if the system is destroying drugs that are technically “expired” but could still be safely used?
In his lab, Gerona ran tests on the decades-old drugs, including some now defunct brands such as the diet pills Obocell (once pitched to doctors with a portly figurine called “Mr. Obocell”) and Bamadex. Overall, the bottles contained 14 different compounds, including antihistamines, pain relievers and stimulants. All the drugs tested were in their original sealed containers.
The findings surprised both researchers: A dozen of the 14 compounds were still as potent as they were when they were manufactured, some at almost 100 percent of their labeled concentrations.
“Lo and behold,” Cantrell says, “The active ingredients are pretty darn stable.”
Cantrell and Gerona knew their findings had big implications. Perhaps no area of health care has provoked as much anger in recent years as prescription drugs. The news media is rife with stories of medications priced out of reach or of shortages of crucial drugs, sometimes because producing them is no longer profitable.
Tossing such drugs when they expire is doubly hard. One pharmacist at Newton-Wellesley Hospital outside Boston says the 240-bed facility is able to return some expired drugs for credit, but had to destroy about $200,000 worth last year. A commentary in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings cited similar losses at the nearby Tufts Medical Center. Play that out at hospitals across the country and the tab is significant: about $800 million per year. And that doesn’t include the costs of expired drugs at long-term care pharmacies, retail pharmacies and in consumer medicine cabinets.
After Cantrell and Gerona published their findings in Archives of Internal Medicine in 2012, some readers accused them of being irresponsible and advising patients that it was OK to take expired drugs. Cantrell says they weren’t recommending the use of expired medication, just reviewing the arbitrary way the dates are set.
“Refining our prescription drug dating process could save billions,” he says.
But after a brief burst of attention, the response to their study faded. That raises an even bigger question: If some drugs remain effective well beyond the date on their labels, why hasn’t there been a push to extend their expiration dates?
It turns out that the FDA, the agency that helps set the dates, has long known the shelf life of some drugs can be extended, sometimes by years.
In fact, the federal government has saved a fortune by doing this.
For decades, the federal government has stockpiled massive stashes of medication, antidotes and vaccines in secure locations throughout the country. The drugs are worth tens of billions of dollars and would provide a first line of defense in case of a large-scale emergency.
Maintaining these stockpiles is expensive. The drugs have to be kept secure and at the proper humidity and temperature so they don’t degrade. Luckily, the country has rarely needed to tap into many of the drugs, but this means they often reach their expiration dates. Though the government requires pharmacies to throw away expired drugs, it doesn’t always follow these instructions itself. Instead, for more than 30 years, it has pulled some medicines and tested their quality.
The idea that drugs expire on specified dates goes back at least a half-century, when the FDA began requiring manufacturers to add this information to the label. The time limits allow the agency to ensure medications work safely and effectively for patients. To determine a new drug’s shelf life, its maker zaps it with intense heat and soaks it with moisture to see how it degrades under stress. It also checks how it breaks down over time. The drug company then proposes an expiration date to the FDA, which reviews the data to ensure it supports the date and approves it. Despite the difference in drugs’ makeup, most “expire” after two or three years.
Once a drug is launched, the makers run tests to ensure it continues to be effective up to its labeled expiration date. Since they are not required to check beyond it, most don’t, largely because regulations make it expensive and time-consuming for manufacturers to extend expiration dates, says Yan Wu, an analytical chemist who is part of a focus group at the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists that looks at the long-term stability of drugs. Most companies, she says, would rather sell new drugs and develop additional products.
Pharmacists and researchers say there is no economic “win” for drug companies to investigate further. They ring up more sales when medications are tossed as “expired” by hospitals, retail pharmacies and consumers despite retaining their safety and effectiveness.
Industry officials say patient safety is their highest priority. Olivia Shopshear, director of science and regulatory advocacy for the drug industry trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, says expiration dates are chosen “based on the period of time when any given lot will maintain its identity, potency and purity, which translates into safety for the patient.”
That being said, it’s an open secret among medical professionals that many drugs maintain their ability to combat ailments well after their labels say they don’t. One pharmacist says he sometimes takes home expired over-the-counter medicine from his pharmacy so he and his family can use it.
The federal agencies that stockpile drugs — including the military, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Veterans Affairs — have long realized the savings in revisiting expiration dates.
In 1986, the Air Force, hoping to save on replacement costs, asked the FDA if certain drugs’ expiration dates could be extended. In response, the FDA and Defense Department created the Shelf Life Extension Program.
Each year, drugs from the stockpiles are selected based on their value and pending expiration and analyzed in batches to determine whether their end dates could be safely extended. For several decades, the program has found that the actual shelf life of many drugs is well beyond the original expiration dates.
A 2006 study of 122 drugs tested by the program showed that two-thirds of the expired medications were stable every time a lot was tested. Each of them had their expiration dates extended, on average, by more than four years, according to research published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences.
Some that failed to hold their potency include the common asthma inhalant albuterol, the topical rash spray diphenhydramine, and a local anesthetic made from lidocaine and epinephrine, the study said. But neither Cantrell nor Dr. Cathleen Clancy, associate medical director of National Capital Poison Center, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the George Washington University Medical Center, had heard of anyone being harmed by any expired drugs. Cantrell says there has been no recorded instance of such harm in medical literature.
Marc Young, a pharmacist who helped run the extension program from 2006 to 2009, says it has had a “ridiculous” return on investment. Each year the federal government saved $600 million to $800 million because it did not have to replace expired medication, he says.
An official with the Department of Defense, which maintains about $13.6 billion worth of drugs in its stockpile, says that in 2016 it cost $3.1 million to run the extension program, but it saved the department from replacing $2.1 billion in expired drugs. To put the magnitude of that return on investment into everyday terms: It’s like spending a dollar to save $677.
“We didn’t have any idea that some of the products would be so damn stable — so robustly stable beyond the shelf life,” says Ajaz Hussain, one of the scientists who formerly helped oversee the extension program.
Hussain is now president of the National Institute for Pharmaceutical Technology and Education, an organization of 17 universities that’s working to reduce the cost of pharmaceutical development. He says the high price of drugs and shortages make it time to reexamine drug expiration dates in the commercial market.
“It’s a shame to throw away good drugs,” Hussain says.
Some medical providers have pushed for a changed approach to drug expiration dates — with no success. In 2000, the American Medical Association, foretelling the current prescription drug crisis, adopted a resolution urging action. The shelf life of many drugs, it wrote, seems to be “considerably longer” than their expiration dates, leading to “unnecessary waste, higher pharmaceutical costs, and possibly reduced access to necessary drugs for some patients.”
Citing the federal government’s extension program, the AMA sent letters to the FDA, the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention, which sets standards for drugs, and PhRMA asking for a re-examination of expiration dates.
No one remembers the details — just that the effort fell flat.
“Nothing happened, but we tried,” says rheumatologist Roy Altman, now 80, who helped write the AMA report. “I’m glad the subject is being brought up again. I think there’s considerable waste.”
At Newton-Wellesley Hospital, outside Boston, pharmacist David Berkowitz yearns for something to change.
On a recent weekday, Berkowitz sorted through bins and boxes of medication in a back hallway of the hospital’s pharmacy, peering at expiration dates. As the pharmacy’s assistant director, he carefully manages how the facility orders and dispenses drugs to patients. Running a pharmacy is like working in a restaurant because everything is perishable, he says, “but without the free food.”
Federal and state laws prohibit pharmacists from dispensing expired drugs and The Joint Commission, which accredits thousands of health care organizations, requires facilities to remove expired medication from their supply. So at Newton-Wellesley, outdated drugs are shunted to shelves in the back of the pharmacy and marked with a sign that says: “Do Not Dispense.” The piles grow for weeks until they are hauled away by a third-party company that has them destroyed. And then the bins fill again.
“I question the expiration dates on most of these drugs,” Berkowitz says.
One of the plastic boxes is piled with EpiPens — devices that automatically inject epinephrine to treat severe allergic reactions. They run almost $300 each. These are from emergency kits that are rarely used, which means they often expire. Berkowitz counts them, tossing each one with a clatter into a separate container, “… that’s 45, 46, 47 …” He finishes at 50. That’s almost $15,000 in wasted EpiPens alone.
In May, Cantrell and Gerona published a study that examined 40 EpiPens and EpiPen Jrs., a smaller version, that had been expired for between one and 50 months. The devices had been donated by consumers, which meant they could have been stored in conditions that would cause them to break down, like a car’s glove box or a steamy bathroom. The EpiPens also contain liquid medicine, which tends to be less stable than solid medications.
Testing showed 24 of the 40 expired devices contained at least 90 percent of their stated amount of epinephrine, enough to be considered as potent as when they were made. All of them contained at least 80 percent of their labeled concentration of medication. The takeaway? Even EpiPens stored in less than ideal conditions may last longer than their labels say they do, and if there’s no other option, an expired EpiPen may be better than nothing, Cantrell says.
At Newton-Wellesley, Berkowitz keeps a spreadsheet of every outdated drug he throws away. The pharmacy sends what it can back for credit, but it doesn’t come close to replacing what the hospital paid.
Then there’s the added angst of tossing drugs that are in short supply. Berkowitz picks up a box of sodium bicarbonate, which is crucial for heart surgery and to treat certain overdoses. It’s being rationed because there’s so little available. He holds up a purple box of atropine, which gives patients a boost when they have low heart rates. It’s also in short supply. In the federal government’s stockpile, the expiration dates of both drugs have been extended, but they have to be thrown away by Berkowitz and other hospital pharmacists.
The 2006 FDA study of the extension program also said it pushed back the expiration date on lots of mannitol, a diuretic, for an average of five years. Berkowitz has to toss his out. Expired naloxone? The drug reverses narcotic overdoses in an emergency and is currently in wide use in the opioid epidemic. The FDA extended its use-by date for the stockpiled drugs, but Berkowitz has to trash it.
On rare occasions, a pharmaceutical company will extend the expiration dates of its own products because of shortages. That’s what happened in June, when the FDA posted extended expiration dates from Pfizer for batches of its injectable atropine, dextrose, epinephrine and sodium bicarbonate. The agency notice included the lot numbers of the batches being extended and added six months to a year to their expiration dates.
The news sent Berkowitz running to his expired drugs to see if any could be put back into his supply. His team rescued four boxes of the syringes from destruction, including 75 atropine, 15 dextrose, 164 epinephrine and 22 sodium bicarbonate. Total value: $7,500. In a blink, “expired” drugs that were in the trash heap were put back into the pharmacy supply.
Berkowitz says he appreciated Pfizer’s action, but feels it should be standard to make sure drugs that are still effective aren’t thrown away.
“The question is: Should the FDA be doing more stability testing?” Berkowitz says. “Could they come up with a safe and systematic way to cut down on the drugs being wasted in hospitals?”
Four scientists who worked on the FDA extension program told ProPublica something like that could work for drugs stored in hospital pharmacies, where conditions are carefully controlled.
Greg Burel, director of the CDC’s stockpile, says he worries that if drugmakers were forced to extend their expiration dates it could backfire, making it unprofitable to produce certain drugs and thereby reducing access or increasing prices.
The 2015 commentary in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, called “Extending Shelf Life Just Makes Sense,” also suggested that drugmakers could be required to set a preliminary expiration date and then update it after long-term testing. An independent organization could also do testing similar to that done by the FDA extension program, or data from the extension program could be applied to properly stored medications.
ProPublica asked the FDA whether it could expand its extension program, or something like it, to hospital pharmacies, where drugs are stored in stable conditions similar to the national stockpile.
“The Agency does not have a position on the concept you have proposed,” an official wrote back in an email.
Whatever the solution, the drug industry will need to be spurred in order to change, says Hussain, the former FDA scientist. “The FDA will have to take the lead for a solution to emerge,” he says. “We are throwing away products that are certainly stable, and we need to do something about it.”
Help us investigate wasted health care dollars: Experts say the United States might be squandering a quarter of the money spent on health care. That’s an estimated $765 billion a year. Do you believe you’ve encountered this waste? Tell us.
We’re recruiting local reporters and civically engaged citizens. We have a few ideas on how you can find these deals, who to talk to about them, and what documents to look for.
This story was co-published with Forbes.
Last August, Mississippi’s governor introduced a local hotel developer to then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at a $1,000-per-plate private fundraiser in Jackson. The developer, Suresh Chawla, had long been a campaign donor to the governor, Phil Bryant.
At the fundraiser, Chawla told Donald Trump and his son, Donald Jr., about his latest project: a boutique hotel in Cleveland, Mississippi, the home of a new museum devoted to the Grammy Awards.
Donald Trump told Chawla to “think grand,” according to Chawla.
Two weeks later, Chawla donated $50,000, roughly half to Trump’s campaign and half to the Republican National Committee.
By March — two months into Trump’s presidency — Chawla and his brother were on the 26th floor of Trump Tower for contract negotiations. By June, the Trumps and Chawlas had a handshake deal for not one but four Trump-branded hotels in Mississippi, signing the deal 10 minutes before a public announcement.
President Trump, who still owns his businesses, stands to financially benefit from the hotel partnerships while in office. Trump has put management of his businesses in a trust controlled by his sons. But, as we have reported, he can take money from it at any time.
When Trump pledged in January to separate himself from his businesses, he promised that his business would “not reference or otherwise be tied” to the presidency.
The Mississippi deal includes a four-star hotel called Scion at West End and three other, more affordable hotels. Those hotels are the first of a new brand the Trump family has announced that’s targeted to Trump’s political base: the patriotically themed American IDEA.
Now we want your help to find the rest. See the project.
A promotional video for the new Trump American IDEA Hotel brand that aired at the announcement event describes it as a mid-scale chain — “flea market chic,” Trump Hotels CEO Eric Danziger says — and “rooted in local culture and history and powered by gracious hospitality.” The video was mostly snippets of stock footage, including an apple pie being placed on a table, fans rooting on a sports team at a bar, and an American flag wafting in the breeze, along with the new American IDEA brand logo: a light bulb.
As part of its Scion hotel project, the Chawlas have been approved to receive public financing in the form of a tax-abatement program from the Mississippi Development Authority, which provides money for new projects through sales tax revenue. They will pay no local property taxes for seven years. Dinesh Chawla said the tax break, which was approved by the local city and county governments in January, is available to any project that meets the necessary criteria, adding, “We got no special consideration.”
That tax break could be worth millions but won’t be finalized until the property is assessed later this year.
The deals are some of the first tangible examples of how the Trumps are turning their newfound political capital into business.
“What’s new here is that an elected official, in this case the president, stands to personally benefit from a business brokered by political connections while still serving in office,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in government ethics.
The Trump Organization has said it is moving ahead on 39 different deals for hotels around the country. But the company hasn’t said where the hotels will be or who the Trumps will be partnering with.
ProPublica and Forbes have found details of six deals — the four with the Chawlas, and one each in Dallas and St Louis.
We are asking local journalists and interested citizens to help find and ferret out the facts on the remaining 33 deals. It’s important to know who the president’s family is in business with since it’s possible that Trump’s business interests could conflict with his day job of representing the American people.
After the Trump Organization announced the Mississippi deal with the Chawlas in June, we sought to document it from available public records and on-the-ground reporting.
Last summer, Bryant, Mississippi’s Republican governor since 2012, read a letter in a local newspaper describing how, in 1988, a Mississippi businessman named V.K. Chawla had reached out to Trump for a $428,000 business loan, according to the Chawlas. Instead of the loan, Trump offered advice in a 30-minute phone call, suggesting Chawla apply for a Small Business Administration loan.
Chawla got the loan and built a chain of 17 hotels across the Mississippi Delta. He died in 2005 and his sons, Dinesh and Suresh, took over the family business. Suresh Chawla and Parveen Chawla, Dinesh’s wife, have been donors to Bryant since his first gubernatorial campaign in 2011.
Bryant immediately saw an opportunity.
“[Bryant] called and said, ‘Is that true? That’s wild. I’m going to meet with his campaign.’ So he arranged a meeting for us,” Dinesh Chawla said in an interview.
The backstory behind the Chawla and Trump connection appealed to Donald Trump Jr. personally. “It makes his dad look good. He likes the hominess of it,” Dinesh Chawla said. “It sheds a positive light on his dad even though he’s not supposed to be involved and he isn’t involved.” The American IDEA brand was already in the works; the Trumps filed an application to trademark the name “American Idea” in April 2016 and “Idea Hotels” a month later.
Bryant’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
The Trump Organization declined to make the two executives who worked on the deal with the Chawla brothers available for an interview. A spokeswoman for Trump Hotels declined to respond to a list of emailed questions, including the timing of conversations with the governor and the locations for other hotels that have yet to be announced.
“While we are pleased to share this inspiring story, which is one of hundreds throughout Mr. Trump’s career as a business leader and mentor, the process of assessing and finalizing a hotel opportunity is complex and incredibly thorough,” the spokeswoman said in a written statement. “Much like every other hospitality company, it comes down to the actual business.”
The Chawlas will partner with Trump Hotels on two properties in Cleveland and two in nearby Greenville and Clarksdale. The Chawlas own several hotels in the three cities; Dinesh Chawla declined to say which will be adapted for American IDEA properties, citing the contract he signed with the Trump Organization.
Work has all but stopped at the new Scion hotel as a result of the new Trump Organization partnership, as the two parties work out the details, said Cleveland Mayor Billy Nowell. (Dinesh Chawla said those details primarily concern the hotel’s design; Trump Organization officials have asked for information about the community to incorporate into the decor and the Chawlas have scoured local archives to find such images, including those of local churchgoers from the 1950s and ‘60s.)
For its part, the city of Cleveland has primarily acted as “cheerleaders” for the new development, Nowell said. The Cleveland hotel carrying the Trumps’ Scion brand name is slated to open in March 2018.
Cleveland officials say the city is in sore need of more hotel rooms and welcomes the Trump projects. In addition to deferring taxes as incentive for the Chawlas to open the hotel, the tax abatement also requires that the project generate at least 10 full-time jobs, according to county documents. (Dinesh Chawla estimates the hotel will bring between 30 and 40 jobs to the small town.)
“When we have events like [Delta State University] ball games and at the Grammy museum, our hotels are full and people have to go to other towns,” said Judson Thigpen, head of Cleveland-Bolivar County Chamber of Commerce. “With this we’ll be able to recruit small conferences.” The city currently has fewer than 300 hotel rooms, and the Scion will have three complexes, with 100 rooms, he said.
The $20 million project is being built with $5 million in financing from Mississippi-based Guaranty Bank & Trust and will be managed by Trump Hotels in a partnership with Chawla Pointe LLC. All of the other American IDEA properties are existing hotels that will be adapted to the brand.
As for the other Trump-branded hotels, the Chawlas and Trumps have signed a franchising agreement, with the Trumps taking a cut of revenue and leaving the management of the buildings to the Chawlas. The approach is similar in other cities, where hotel operators have signed letters of intent with the Trump Organization.
Dinesh Chawla said he didn’t support President Trump during the campaign, largely because he didn’t think he would win. “I admire Hillary Clinton quite a bit,” he said. He says he voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, in part, because he “stayed at our hotel.” (His brother, Suresh, said that he doesn’t understand President Trump’s travel ban. "The whole concept of what’s going on there … I kind of stay away from all that.”)
“We don’t do things based on politics,” Dinesh Chawla said. “It’s about business.”
As President Trump’s pick to lead the agency that approves immigration petitions heads towards likely confirmation, more than 300 advocacy organizations are urging the Senate to oppose it, citing ProPublica’s examination of the nominee’s record.
Lee Francis Cissna, a veteran policymaker, was nominated in February to lead the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the sprawling agency that handles applications for green cards, citizenship, visas, asylum and the controversial deportation protections known as DACA, which benefit 800,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.
In a letter sent Monday to all Senate members, the groups noted that Cissna had volunteered for the Trump campaign and later provided “technical assistance” for Trump’s executive orders on immigration. The letter also referenced a story by ProPublica that showed Cissna helped draft dozens of letters under the letterhead of Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, between 2015 and 2016. Cissna had worked for Grassley’s office while on loan from his longtime employer, the Department of Homeland Security.
“Mr. Cissna ... contributed to a slew of letters criticizing USCIS for implementing various humanitarian programs and initiatives,” the letter read, citing ProPublica. “These include initiatives that reunited families and protected children facing violence, provided young people with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals the opportunity to obtain travel documents, and assisted victims of crime, including those affected by domestic and sexual violence.”
In the letter, the organizations urged senators to oppose Cissna’s confirmation or “at the very least,” delay it until after Congress can come up with a permanent legislative solution for DACA. The program was created by President Obama in 2012 through executive action, but its future has recently been the subject of ambiguous statements by the Trump administration.
The letter was signed by some of the biggest immigration advocacy organizations in the country, including the National Immigration Law Center and UnidosUS (until recently known as the National Council of La Raza). A separate letter signed by 45 Latino advocacy organizations, including the Mexican American Latino Defense and Educational Fund was sent on Thursday and also cited ProPublica’s reporting.
In a statement emailed to ProPublica on Monday, Grassley defended Cissna’s nomination.
“Francis Cissna’s remarks at his nomination hearing and responses to written questions from senators demonstrate his deep expertise on immigration policy, which I witnessed first-hand when he was detailed to my office,” Grassley wrote.
Cissna’s nomination sailed through the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Grassley, in May with a bipartisan 17-2 vote, but has yet to be voted on by the full Senate. He currently serves as immigration policy director at DHS, where he started working in 2006.
David Lapan, a DHS spokesman, said in an email Monday that Cissna “is well-respected and highly qualified” and noted the support he received at the committee level. “Secretary [John] Kelly looks forward to a confirmation vote by the Senate as soon as possible,” he said.
Early last week, the White House said “unprecedented obstruction” by Senate Democrats had stalled Cissna’s nomination. But on Friday The Washington Times reported that a Republican, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, had personally intervened to block Cissna’s nomination from reaching the floor until DHS increased the number of temporary visas for unskilled workers this year. On Monday, DHS announced it was adding 15,000 of these visas, known as H-2B. Despite the increase, Daniel Keylin, a spokesman for Tillis, said in an email Monday that the senator was still reviewing the situation and had not decided whether to continue to block Cissna’s nomination.
A directive from the head of ICE’s enforcement unit appears to push for tougher action than the Trump administration has publicly promised. Read the story.
In written responses during his vetting process, Cissna said he began volunteering about once a week for Trump’s campaign two months before Election Day.
“I offered my expertise in immigration-related policy and operations on a wide variety of projects,” Cissna wrote, “principally relating to employment-based visa policy.”
Cissna has said he personally supports the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on the perceived abuses of employment visas, notably H-1Bs, which are meant for college-educated foreigners.
In his public comments he has been cautious on DACA, perhaps the most contentious of all immigration programs. At his confirmation hearing in May, he noted that both Kelly and Trump had said that DACA would remain in place, but he did not say he personally supported the program.
“And if confirmed,” Cissna said at the hearing, “I would see my role to be the — to administer that program — as it stands with its current parameters.”
Last Wednesday, however, Kelly met with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and told them he’d been advised that the future of DACA was actually in the hands of the Department of Justice, which would have to decide whether to defend the program in court. He added that several lawyers had advised him that DACA would most likely not survive a legal challenge.
“Kelly was basically telling us DACA is facing a death sentence,” Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat, said in a statement about the meeting. Ten Republican state attorneys general have said they will challenge the legality of DACA if the administration does not stop the program by September.
But a day after Kelly’s remarks, Trump appeared to pull rank.
“It’s a decision that I make,” Trump said on the future of DACA while aboard Air Force One, “and it’s a decision that’s very, very hard to make.”
There’s a way for President Trump to boost the economy by 4 percent, but he probably won’t like it.
Across the Country, Military Sites Burn Hazardous Waste Into Open Air
RADFORD, Virginia — Shortly after dawn most weekdays, a warning siren rips across the flat, swift water of the New River running alongside the Radford Army Ammunition Plant. Red lights warning away boaters and fishermen flash from the plant, the nation’s largest supplier of propellant for artillery and the source of explosives for almost every American bullet fired overseas.
Along the southern Virginia riverbank, piles of discarded contents from bullets, chemical makings from bombs, and raw explosives — all used or left over from the manufacture and testing of weapons ingredients at Radford — are doused with fuel and lit on fire, igniting infernos that can be seen more than a half a mile away. The burning waste is rich in lead, mercury, chromium and compounds like nitroglycerin and perchlorate, all known health hazards. The residue from the burning piles rises in a spindle of hazardous smoke, twists into the wind and, depending on the weather, sweeps toward the tens of thousands of residents in the surrounding towns.
Nearby, Belview Elementary School has been ranked by researchers as facing some of the most dangerous air-quality hazards in the country. The rate of thyroid diseases in three of the surrounding counties is among the highest in the state, provoking town residents to worry that emissions from the Radford plant could be to blame. Government authorities have never studied whether Radford’s air pollution could be making people sick, but some of their hypothetical models estimate that the local population faces health risks exponentially greater than people in the rest of the region.
More than three decades ago, Congress banned American industries and localities from disposing of hazardous waste in these sorts of “open burns,” concluding that such uncontrolled processes created potentially unacceptable health and environmental hazards. Companies that had openly burned waste for generations were required to install incinerators with smokestacks and filters and to adhere to strict limits on what was released into the air. Lawmakers granted the Pentagon and its contractors a temporary reprieve from those rules to give engineers time to address the unique aspects of destroying explosive military waste.
That exemption has remained in place ever since, even as other Western countries have figured out how to destroy aging armaments without toxic emissions. While American officials are mired in a bitter debate about how much pollution from open burns is safe, those countries have pioneered new approaches. Germany, for example, destroyed hundreds of millions of pounds of aging weapons from the Cold War without relying on open burns to do it.
In the United States, outdoor burning and detonation is still the military’s leading method for dealing with munitions and the associated hazardous waste. It has remained so despite a U.S. Senate resolution a quarter of a century ago that ordered the Department of Defense to halt the practice “as soon as possible.” It has continued in the face of a growing consensus among Pentagon officials and scientists that similar burn pits at U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan sickened soldiers.
Federal records identify nearly 200 sites that have been or are still being used to open-burn hazardous explosives across the country. Some blow up aging stockpile bombs in open fields. Others burn bullets, weapons parts and — in the case of Radford — raw explosives in bonfire-like piles. The facilities operate under special government permits that are supposed to keep the process safe, limiting the release of toxins to levels well below what the government thinks can make people sick. Yet officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, which governs the process under federal law, acknowledge that the permits provide scant protection.
Consider Radford’s permit, which expired nearly two years ago. Even before then, government records show, the plant repeatedly violated the terms of its open burn allowance and its other environmental permits. In a typical year, the plant can spew many thousands of pounds of heavy metals and carcinogens — legally — into the atmosphere. But Radford has, at times, sent even more pollution into the air than it is allowed. It has failed to report some of its pollution to federal agencies, as required. And it has misled the public about the chemicals it burns. Yet every day the plant is allowed to ignite as much as 8,000 pounds of hazardous debris.
“It smells like plastic burning, but it’s so much more intense,” said Darlene Nester, describing the acrid odor from the burns when it reaches her at home, about a mile and a half away. Her granddaughter is in second grade at Belview. “You think about all the kids.”
Internal EPA records obtained by ProPublica show that the Radford plant is one of at least 51 active sites across the country where the Department of Defense or its contractors are today burning or detonating munitions or raw explosives in the open air, often in close proximity to schools, homes and water supplies. The documents — EPA PowerPoint presentations made to senior agency staff — describe something of a runaway national program, based on “a dirty technology” with “virtually no emissions controls.” According to officials at the agency, the military’s open burn program not only results in extensive contamination, but “staggering” cleanup costs that can reach more than half a billion dollars at a single site.
The sites of open burns — including those operated by private contractors and the Department of Energy — have led to 54 separate federal Superfund declarations and have exposed the people who live near them to dangers that will persist for generations.
In Grand Island, Nebraska, groundwater plumes of explosive residues spread more than 20 miles away from the Cornhusker Army Ammunition Plant into underground drinking water supplies, forcing the city to extend replacement water to rural residents. And at the Redstone Arsenal, an Army experimental weapons test and burn site in Huntsville, Alabama, perchlorate in the soil is 7,000 times safe limits, and local officials have had to begin monitoring drinking water for fear of contamination.
40,000,000: Total acres of land — an area larger than the state of Florida — the EPA estimates has been contaminated by the Pentagon or its contractors in the U.S.
Federal environmental regulators have warned for decades that the burns pose a threat to soldiers, contractors and the public stationed at, or living near, American bases. Local communities — from Merrimac, Wisconsin, to Romulus, New York — have protested them. Researchers are studying possible cancer clusters on Cape Cod that could be linked to munitions testing and open burns there, and where the groundwater aquifer that serves as the only natural source of drinking water for the half-million people who summer there has been contaminated with the military’s bomb-making ingredients.
The Pentagon defends its use of open burns, saying they are legal, safe and conducted at far fewer sites than they used to be. The EPA, the Pentagon says, has drawn up acceptable emissions levels, and has issued permits accordingly.
“State and federal regulators and DoD scrutinize these operations to ensure the installation is operating in compliance with permits in a safe and environmentally responsible manner,” wrote J.C. King, director of munitions in the office of the assistant secretary of the army for installations, energy and the environment, in a statement sent to ProPublica.
But the EPA’s system for determining how much chemical burning is safe amounts to little more than educated guesses, ProPublica’s investigation shows. The limits are established using layers of modeling that can be highly speculative and that often bear little resemblance to the day-to-day reality of a place like Radford.
“They say look, these emissions factors show this stuff is pretty much harmless,” said Charles Hendrickson, a senior EPA remediation project manager who deals with burn sites. “But if you have a tiny percentage of something that is bad to breathe, or bad to get as fallout on your plants and soil and kids and house, even a tiny percentage of millions of pounds adds up.”
Such efforts, in any case, can be hopelessly compromised if the underlying data being fed into the models doesn’t match what’s actually being burned and how.
ProPublica reviewed records for the 51 active burn sites and more than 145 others the Pentagon, its contractors, and other private companies operated in the past, and found they had violated their hazardous waste handling permits thousands of times over the past 37 years, often for improperly storing and disposing of toxic material, and sometimes for exceeding pollution thresholds. At the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant in Oklahoma, the Army has failed to establish groundwater monitoring wells required by the EPA in order to watch for contamination from its burn site. Operators at the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama were cited in 2012 for burning despite cloudy weather conditions, conduct explicitly prohibited in their permit because it could make the pollution more dangerous.
Of course, the Pentagon could determine with greater accuracy any possible health threat. It could, for instance, actually sample and test the emissions generated by the burns. Aside from a few research sites, neither the EPA nor the Pentagon was able to point to an example where this was done. Until last year, it was never done in Radford.
ProPublica reviewed the open burns and detonations program as part of an unprecedented examination of America’s handling of munitions at sites in the United States, from their manufacture and testing to their disposal. We collected tens of thousands of pages of documents, and interviewed more than 100 state and local officials, lawmakers, military historians, scientists, toxicologists and Pentagon staff. Much of the information gathered has never before been released to the public, leaving the full extent of military-related pollution a secret.
“They are not subject to the kind of scrutiny and transparency and disclosure to the public as private sites are,” said Mathy Stanislaus, who until January worked on Department of Defense site cleanup issues as the assistant administrator for land and emergency management at the EPA.
Our examination found that open burn sites are just one facet of a vast problem. From World War I until today, military technologies and armaments have been developed, tested, stored, decommissioned and disposed of on vast tracts of American soil. The array of scars and menaces produced across those decades is breathtaking: By the military’s own count, there are 39,400 known or suspected toxic sites on 5,500 current or former Pentagon properties. EPA staff estimate the sites cover 40 million acres — an area larger than the state of Florida — and the costs for cleaning them up will run to hundreds of billions of dollars.
The Department of Defense’s cleanups of the properties have sometimes been delegated to inept or corrupt private contractors, or delayed as the agency sought to blame the pollution at its bases on someone else. Even where the contamination and the responsibility for it are undisputed, the Pentagon has stubbornly fought the EPA over how much danger it presents to the public and what to do about it, letters and agency records show.
The Department of Defense says that it is attending to its environmental problems and that it has made great progress, having cleaned up more than 80 percent of its troubled sites and closed dozens of open burn grounds. “It’s amazing where we’ve come from,” said Karen Baker, chief of the environmental division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for the Army’s cleanups and provides additional environmental cleanup services to the Pentagon for other branches. “The challenge is still there, and still daunting.”
But for Gregory Nelson, who grew up in a rural area along the Radford plant’s fence line and later earned his doctorate in science and technology studies at Virginia Tech, the progress hasn’t come fast enough.
“Radford is the center for the Defense network. It’s crucial to the war effort,” Nelson said. “But it’s ruined any hope that my parents’ property is safe, that my water is safe. It’s ruined the long-term economic development of Montgomery County. The shadow side is that this is the price of war that we as U.S citizens have to pay.”
The Arsenal — as the Radford Army plant has long been called — sits on 4,100 acres that have been marked by warfare of one sort or another for thousands of years. The earliest tribes left pottery and broken skulls. The Shawnee massacred English settlers. A hundred years later, Confederate forces bloodied the rolling valleys surrounding a dramatic oxbow on the New River. Then in 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the construction of today’s plant, tucked into that same turn in the river. The Arsenal raced to produce nitroglycerin and TNT, and by 1945 had made nearly 600 million pounds of them, powering almost one of every two U.S. weapons.
Today the Radford plant is run by one of the world’s largest military contractors, BAE Systems. The M-789 medium-caliber round, shot from Apache helicopters, is produced there, as are the propellants for M-829s, fin-stabilized antitank shells made with a depleted uranium tip that can pierce a 21-inch-thick wall of solid steel from more than a mile away. At least 10 other private companies sublease parts of the base from BAE, making small arms bullets and fireworks, among other things.
Each of these munitions produces scraps and residue that are highly toxic, volatile and difficult to safely dispose of.
197: The total number of active and former sites of open burns and detonations, including military munitions and their waste, listed in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s database.
Until the 1970s, Radford, like most industrial sites, dumped its waste in the river, buried it or burned it. Then Congress passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (and later amendments strengthening it), aggressively regulating the worst of these wastes and giving the EPA control over virtually every stage of how dangerous materials are handled. The EPA set strict limits on how much pollution could be released into the environment — requiring special treatment for toxic wastewater and other technologies to capture and contain hazardous pollutants. But some substances — mainly explosives — defied an easy solution, and so a catch-all category was created for the leftovers, called “Subpart X.”
Subpart X permits became a virtual escape hatch from the rest of the law, creating the nation’s open burn allowances and allowing the Department of Defense and its contractors to revert to their 1970s-era practices. For many years, the sites continued to burn on an “interim status,” awaiting formal permits from the EPA. Radford started using open burns in the 1940s but didn’t get its first burn permit until 2005. It now is allowed to burn nearly three million pounds of refuse each year, including explosives powder, metals caked with propellants, and even loose cardboard or clothing or cloth soiled with volatile chemicals.
Today the toxic emissions from the Radford Arsenal dwarf any other source of pollution in Virginia, according to the federal government’s Toxic Release Inventory. In 2014 and 2015, the last two years reported, its open burn releases include 8,400 pounds of lead, which presents extreme risks to children, stunting their brain development and leading to low IQs; 3,000 pounds of dinitrotoluene, which can cause brain and sensory dysfunction; and 360,000 pounds of polycyclic aromatic compounds, known to cause skin, lung, bladder and stomach cancers. The total toxic releases from all of the plant’s operations in those years amount to more than 10 million pounds.
All of that pollution is legal under federal and state laws that promise to protect public health. The burns are supposed to be permitted only in certain types of weather, with the amount and types of toxins strictly controlled so that they are spread out over time and the concentration of any one chemical released into the atmosphere is unlikely to exceed what EPA toxicologists say people can handle without getting asthma or cancer or heart disease.
“We are not going to issue a permit if it is not protective of human health and the environment,” said Kyle Newman, the risk assessor for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.
But the permits are based on computer simulations of pollution, not actual tests, according to interviews and the Army’s technical documents. And regulators admit little work has ever been done to confirm whether those simulations actually predict emissions levels at Radford, or whether those emissions are indeed safe.
Here’s how the simulations work: The Army or its contractors estimate the amount and types of materials they plan to burn. They plug that information into software that uses a calculation to help them estimate how much chemical emissions would be dispersed into the community. That calculation is usually based on a handful of field experiments. Radford’s calculation was based on a tiny sampling of explosives burned in an enclosed box, state regulators say. The Army and the EPA generate what’s called an “emissions factor” for a type of explosive, and then use that to estimate emissions for burn grounds across the country, depending on the weight of materials they disclose burning.
The government then plugs those figures into a second model to estimate how far the pollutants will travel from the burn site. Once it has that information, it makes a final calculation to guess whether people will breathe more than federal toxicology studies suggest is safe. That last step attempts to translate the EPA’s abstract figures for average lifetime exposure to a certain chemical into real-life limits that are supposed to consider brief but intense exposures, often to multiple cancer-causing toxins at the same time.
Just how well such models comport with the reality of burns in a place like Radford is the subject of considerable scientific skepticism. In Radford, on any given day that burns take place, the winds, weather, and even the substances being burned can be entirely different from the models. If the burn lasts longer or burns cooler; if the wind blows or an inversion traps smoke close to the ground; if the lead disperses in the air to a greater degree than expected, the accuracy of the models is thrown into question.
Andrew Kassoff, president of the environmental services firm EEE Consulting, has expertise in burn permits and has written environmental impact statements for both BAE and its predecessor, Alliant Techsystems, for other operations at the Radford plant. He said the models used to declare safe limits on emissions from open burns are outdated and “squirmy,” and were never able to fully account for the variables involved.
“By definition, the migration of contaminants is uncontrolled,” he said.
287: The number of times between 2011 and 2013 that the operator of the Radford Army Ammunition Plant failed to self-report that its smokestack emissions exceeded what environmental permits allow, according to EPA investigators.
Ashby Scott writes the Radford open burn permit for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. Scott said that as faulty as the permit calculations may be, they were based on extremely conservative estimates of exposures meant to prioritize public safety. The Department of Defense argues that this system of approximation works, in part because the experimental field tests show that the vast majority of the toxins are consumed by the fires and the pollution is relatively light.
The one step that hasn’t been taken: air sampling in the vicinity of homes and schools surrounding the Radford plant. In the first 70-some years that operators burned waste at Radford, neither the Army, nor the EPA, nor the state of Virginia ever actually measured the air pollutants coming from the burn pads or took samples in the nearby community.
“Our regulatory agencies do not feel that that is warranted,” said Rob Davie, chief of operations for the Army at the Radford plant told ProPublica in a recent interview. “There just hasn’t been a real need.”
In late 2016, the Army took its first samples of the smoke coming off its burn pads at Radford, partnering with scientists from NASA and the EPA to fly drones through the plumes. Those measurements attempt to record the actual emissions from the burns, but they still do not measure how pollutants may reach the surrounding community. Still, they’ll use that new data, DEQ regulators say, to reach a more precise risk assessment the next time they submit an application to renew the plant’s permit. The Army has described some of the findings to the local press, but has yet to make all of the air sampling results public. And they still haven’t sampled the air at homes and schools, where EPA models — and even the Army’s own analysis — suggest people are most at risk.
Davie said ambient testing in the community wouldn’t be able to identify which pollutants came from open burns and which came from other sources. He said the Army burns far less than its permits allow, and has invested heavily in environmental improvements across the Radford plant to measure or reduce pollution, including the recent drone monitoring. It would spend more if the benefits were evident.
Still, Virginia officials said they thought the cost of air monitors, which can run about $30,000 each, was one reason the Army was hesitating.
“You see resistance on the part of the facility to extend that kind of money,” Newman said.
Most people in towns like Radford trust the U.S. military to keep them safe, and to do it with honor. They have watched decades of wars — or fought in them — and saluted the military’s triumphs and mourned its losses without ever much questioning what would happen to the bombs, mortars and other materials left over.
The truth is that those materials litter the American landscape like no other industry or source of pollution ever has. “The Pentagon is the most prolific and profound polluter on the planet,” said Jeff Ruch, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a national whistle-blower support organization that has chronicled insider reports of pollution and failed cleanups on military sites for decades.
Many of the nation’s most beautiful parks and wildlands are in fact contaminated military properties. On Martha’s Vineyard, the wildlife estuary of Tisbury Great Pond, which the New York Times Travel section once described as “the last remaining unspoiled part” of the island, is a former World War II training range still being scoured for bombs. Outside Denver, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge was once a chemical weapons development site described by the Denver Post as the “most polluted piece of ground in America.” More than 1,000 acres remain closed to the public and protected by the Army.
Other sites — similarly transferred out of military ownership — are smaller and more urban, and have been wrapped into the folds of local communities or donated for public use. In the Vista Park neighborhood of southeast Orlando, Florida, Army officials dug up 400 live bombs on the grounds of a middle school in 2008 after an explosion nearby. A month after the cleanup, a school maintenance worker was hospitalized after accidentally detonating a smoke cylinder he found buried under the school’s long jump pit.
Even as the Pentagon confronts its old, polluted sites, new ones are being added to the list. Of the roughly 1,300 federal Superfund sites designated as the nation’s highest cleanup priority, more than 900 are former military properties or sites that produced material for defense purposes, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. At some 6,000 sites, the Department of Defense has acknowledged contaminating drinking water aquifers; the EPA has classified several as so contaminated they can never be restored. At other sites, dangerous chemicals are being discovered that were previously not well understood — and posing new threats to public health that officials are only now coming to grasp.
The Department of Defense claims it has completed remediation at roughly 80 percent of the dangerous sites it has identified through its formal restoration program, certifying them as “response complete” and requiring “no further action.” But, with few exceptions, officials count only sites identified as polluted from past operations, excluding many ongoing problems at active military ranges unless the pollution has already spread into the surrounding civilian community. At other sites, there has been no cleaning, and the only action has been to fence off contaminated areas. Still others have had to be re-cleaned two or three times. The U.S. Government Accountability Office questioned the Pentagon’s success rate several years ago and found it couldn’t document its determination that no more action was needed at nearly four out of 10 of the projects it analyzed.
“This is a difficult business and we are doing the best that we can,” said the Army Corps’ Baker, adding that any program approaching the size of the Pentagon’s environmental cleanups will have problems. “So if we miss something and need to come back we certainly go out and do that.”
But others who have spent careers overseeing the Pentagon’s handling of its domestic properties say it is the drive to spend coveted Defense Department money on weapons and warfighting — not fighting pollution — that undermines cleanups.
2,920,000: The amount, in pounds, of explosives powder, metals caked with propellants, and loose cardboard or clothing or cloth soiled with volatile chemicals that is allowed to be burned at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant each year.
“They clean it up in the cheapest, quickest possible manner,” said William Frank, who was a senior attorney in the EPA’s Federal Facilities Enforcement Office for 25 years before he retired last year. “They’ll drive up in a Jeep, take a look out the window and say, ‘Eh, no further action.’ It all comes down to money.”
ProPublica’s examination suggests that since Congress directed the Department of Defense to fix its contaminated sites, the agency has used an array of bureaucratic tools to shorten the list by almost any means legally available. On Cape Cod, the agency argued that an old, unused portion of a bombing range should still be categorized as “active,” fending off EPA regulations that only apply to “closed” sites. Near Port Clinton, Ohio, the Pentagon stopped its cleanup of a range the Army used for practice bombing for more than 60 years while it made sure no other private group could have been responsible for the pollution, according to testimony provided by Ohio environment regulators to the U.S. Senate.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has for decades lobbied Congress for legislation that would make the military exempt from the nation’s most significant antipollution laws — the very laws that compel it to clean up old bases in the first place.
It has also fought to steer the science that determines how some of the most poisonous contaminants are regulated. For example, a central ingredient in most modern munitions is an explosive called RDX that is increasingly turning up at contaminated sites across the country. The Department of Defense is pressing the EPA to walk back its 1990 assessment that RDX is a possible human carcinogen, even though several studies and even some members of the EPA’s own science advisory board suggest the EPA should strengthen its classification, not weaken it.
Where the Department of Defense has committed to full-scale cleanups, it frequently delegates that responsibility to environmental engineering firms that receive lucrative contracts. But those processes, too, have sometimes been troubled.
For years, for instance, the Army relied on a recycling firm to safely dispose of material containing RDX and other explosives at Camp Minden in northwestern Louisiana. But in 2012, after an enormous blast there sent a cloud of debris 7,000 feet into the air, an EPA inspection found the company had been hoarding the explosives it was supposed to be treating, allowing 18 million pounds of them to pile up in hallways, spill out of leaky cardboard boxes, and slowly degrade in the Louisiana heat.
The Department of Defense says that the problems described by ProPublica are outliers in an extraordinarily large program, and that the Pentagon has spent more than $42 billion cleaning up sites across the country. Those cleanups, it says, are prioritized to protect the public’s health, and have kept Americans safe. If progress is slow, the department says that’s in part because it is perennially underfunded by Congress, which allocated about $3.8 billion of the Pentagon’s $597 billion budget to environmental programs in 2015.
While there has been measured progress in certain places, and certainly some success stories, the Pentagon’s annual environmental funding has been steadily dropping. It received $780 million less in 2015 than it did in 2011. Under the Trump administration Defense Department spending is slated to increase, but there’s no indication that means more money will be spent on the environment. In fact, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has signaled, when it comes to Superfund enforcement, that he may weaken the standards the Pentagon is held to. In the meantime, the Pentagon’s use of the money it has, has thoroughly frustrated regulators and others seeking to hold it accountable.
“It’s just not a priority,” said Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat whose district includes several Pentagon cleanup sites. “I don’t think it’s been given the weight that the potential danger to the public warrants.”
That potential danger isn’t going away anytime soon, both because of the pace and quality of the Pentagon’s remediation work and because the amount of aging munitions still to be dealt with is colossal — more than a billion pounds, by the Pentagon’s accounting.
Much of that is and will be disposed of through open burns and detonations.
Last year, the Crane Army Ammunition center in Indiana, 21 miles west of the town of Bedford, burned or detonated more than 10 million pounds of stockpile munitions; McAlester Army Depot in Oklahoma processed another 14 million pounds. The previous year, a private company burned more than 700,000 pounds of Pentagon-related explosives in Colfax, Louisiana.
Laura Olah founded the national Cease Fire Campaign after battling the Army over open burns at a plant near her home in Wisconsin. She said there is a lack of trustworthy and historical data on the burn sites — their operations and their health implications — that has left residents of places like Radford uneasy and angry. Without this information, she says, there is little to compel the Pentagon to switch to alternative disposal processes.
“The debate about risk takes us away from the fundamental issue: There is open burning of hazardous waste,” Olah said. “We can spend years and billions of dollars trying to quantify what that risk is, but it’s an avoidable risk.”
In late March, a dozen or so residents of the Radford area filed into a small room in a business park to hear the Army’s update on a variety of potential contamination issues. One of them involved trichloroethylene, an industrial solvent and potent human carcinogen common at Defense Department cleanup sites, which had been found in groundwater beneath the Radford plant.
James McKenna, the Army environmental engineer charged with handling cleanups at the Radford plant, told those gathered that the public liaison for environmental concerns — a civilian volunteer — would not be present. It marked the fourth straight meeting the liaison had failed to attend.
“It’s been two years,” complained Devawn Bledsoe, a local activist who has a thyroid condition she believes was caused by smoke plumes or water polluted by the plant.
Her attempts to wrest answers from the Army have been so fruitless that she says she has come to think officials are intentionally misleading her.
On this night, she fired questions at McKenna and would not let up. Were contaminants flowing through the region’s porous bedrock? Had the recent detection of perchlorate, a type of rocket fuel, on a nearby farm led to further investigation?
McKenna warned her to stop. Though he has run the plant’s cleanup program for more than 18 years, he told her that he didn’t have the information she sought and that her questions were beyond the scope of the meeting’s agenda.
Bledsoe cursed. McKenna, summoning two armed police officers, kicked her out.
Advocates like Bledsoe have found organizing against the Radford plant’s burns slow going. Outside the fence line of the Arsenal, the bucolic landscape is checkered with the stamps of a blue-collar community: farm fields and century-old hilltop estates are surrounded by defunct car washes and strip malls with laundromats and tire shops. Trump-Pence signs are still staked in front yards. The plant remains an essential driver of southwestern Virginia’s economy. A thousand people still work there. And those people are loyal, to the military and to the jobs it offers.
0: The number of times Pentagon officials endeavored to measure contaminants in the air outside of its hazardous waste burn facility in Radford, VA between 1940 and 2016.
Yet the five schools in the immediate vicinity of the Radford burn site, including Belview Elementary, are among the most at-risk in the nation, according to a 2009 analysis of pollution risk at schools completed by researchers at the University of Massachusetts and reporters at USA Today. The study used data from EPA pollution models combined with the annual toxic releases inventoried from the Radford plant and focused its findings on school locations. Of more than 127,000 schools nationwide, Belview — which sits at the top of a gully that funnels the smoke directly downwind from the burn site — ranked among the highest for cancer risk. The study pointed to troubling levels of lead and nitroglycerin, among other potentially harmful materials that were being released into the air.
But school officials remain sanguine about the potential danger. Phyllis Albritton, a former board member for Montgomery County Public Schools, said she had tried to raise concerns about the plant with other board members.
“They said, ‘I appreciate that, but most of our parents work there,’” Albritton recalled.
ProPublica asked the district superintendent and Belview’s principal what precautions they take when the Army’s burn alarms sound nearby. They deferred to a spokeswoman, Brenda Drake, who said, “We have not been advised by any regulatory agency that the students at Belview are in danger.”
Like so many in the surrounding towns, the school district’s leaders trust that the Army and regulatory agencies are at least following the rules.
But a review of the plant’s record suggests that is not always the case.
In 2014, the EPA’s office of criminal enforcement, forensics and training conducted a plant-wide investigation of the Radford Arsenal and found serious problems with almost every aspect governed by federal environmental laws, including the data the plant reported to the EPA about the amount of toxins it had to dispose of. Such inspections are done when the EPA or state regulators request them. The resulting report, marked confidential but obtained by ProPublica, found that in 2012 the Army and its contractors misreported the amount of lead, dibutyl phthalate and nitric acid that it shipped off the site as waste. It did not report its copper waste — which can cause respiratory, liver and kidney damage when breathed in high doses — at all. The report meant the EPA’s public records of toxic releases for the Radford plant — the community’s primary tool to measure how polluting it is — may be understated.
It wasn’t just the burning ground that violated its permits, but other facilities that are part of the plant as well. The 2014 inspection found that between 2011 and 2013, Radford’s incinerators and boilers were out of compliance, on average, as often as one out of every two days; they didn’t burn hot enough, or handled material too fast, resulting in more chloride, particulate matter, dioxins and furans, byproducts of chemical manufacturing that distort hormonal development and cause infertility, released into the air than permits say is safe. Hazardous waste reports were either missing or had gaps, one as long as four months. On 287 occasions, the Army and the plant’s operators failed to report excess emissions from its smokestacks, as required. In 2012, the plant released 15,000 gallons of sulfuric acid into a containment dike. Then, a few months later, it released 500 gallons of diethyl ether into the New River, failing to report the emergency to authorities in the time frame required. Four times, plant operators disposed of the ash from hazardous waste burns — illegally — in the trash.
What consequences, if any, resulted from that inspection remain a mystery. Virginia officials say they never saw a copy of the EPA’s 2014 investigation report and were not aware of its findings. They haven’t issued any violations and declined to comment when ProPublica shared a copy of the report. An EPA spokesman, Roy Seneca, wrote to ProPublica that “we are not going to be able to respond to your questions” on the matter, and the agency has yet to respond to a formal request for enforcement records. The plant’s operator, BAE, says that it did report its emissions under state law, and that the EPA was applying a different standard. The company said that it has also resolved the vast majority of the other problems, but the Army says it is still — three years after the report was issued — in talks with the EPA over next steps. “Mistakes are going to be made in large programs,” said Davie, the plant manager. “Our day-to-day compliance with all of our wastewater discharges, treatment plants, etcetera are really excellent when you look at the totality of what we are doing.”
In the past, the plant has been slow to correct errors, according to the EPA’s criminal investigators. The agency’s 2014 report states that after a similar inspection in 2010, the Radford plant did not take immediate action and failed to document how it corrected violations. Of 22 corrective actions ordered at that time, 16 lacked confirmation that they had been completed or an explanation for why they might have been ignored.
The situation at Radford — its expired permit status and its history of violations — isn’t unique. ProPublica’s review shows that more than a dozen other burn sites nationwide operate with “interim permits,” effectively suspended in regulation limbo ever since Congress passed the hazardous waste laws in 1984. And Virginia Department of Environmental Quality officials say it often takes years to renew permits like Radford’s that have expired. Meanwhile, military sites with active federal permits continue to rack up violations for the way they handle, treat and dispose of hazardous waste — 76 since 2015 alone.
Virginia regulators, who have primary authority to monitor Radford’s open burn operations, haven’t always held the Army to the previous permit conditions.
In August 2011, plant operators piled the burn pads with nearly twice as much waste as allowed, emitting 30 percent more chromium, a metal that causes lung and sinus cancers, into the air than is permitted, according to state documents. State regulators warned the plant but never issued a formal violation.
A few months later, the plant’s operator sought to change its permit to make the excess chromium legal despite the fact that the previous threshold was supposed to be, as a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Quality, William Hayden, put it, “the maximum amount that can be out there and not cause harm.” The company ultimately withdrew its request in the face of public concern.
In November 2014, the plant violated its emissions limits again — this time for lead — and the state similarly avoided issuing a formal violation, telling ProPublica it wasn’t warranted, in part because the excess discharge occurred for a short period of time.
The state doesn’t keep track of what Radford burns each day — and it isn’t regularly notified of the burn schedule, Hayden told ProPublica. Instead the Army keeps a daily diary, and every two years or so, state regulators audit it. BAE and its tenants are entrusted to self-report violations to state regulators — for all operations, not just the burn grounds — who then follow up. But the 2014 EPA investigation found instances where the plant’s operators appeared not to have self-reported.
The EPA estimates that health risks to people who live near the Arsenal are more than 158,000 times greater than for those who live in other towns in Virginia.
Darlene Nester’s family has a long connection to the plant. Her father worked there in the 1940s, and her husband worked there in the 1990s. She did a stint there as well, preparing explosive powders.
“We need the work,” said Nester, who worried that if residents criticize the plant or call for emissions controls, “it might put the Arsenal out of business.”
Still, her granddaughter attends Belview Elementary and she fears emissions from the burn site are endangering the little girl’s health.
A few local residents have pressed for more research, and in 2012 a branch of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted a health study to find out if pollution from the plant was connected to the high rates of illness in the area. Federal health authorities analyzed water pollution at the plant and whether people in the area were being exposed to it, then declared that residents were not at risk. But the study didn’t examine the causes of illnesses or take air samples in the broader community.
“It didn’t look at the main concern,” said Heather Govenor, an ecologist and member of the Army’s Restoration Advisory Board at Radford, which guides the plant on environmental cleanups. “Instead of butting heads about not doing it, why don’t we just get some data? If you’re sure it’s not a problem, then, cool.”
The lack of good information has left the community guessing.
Sarah Garst is a marathon runner who for 15 years ran in the area surrounding the plant, including along the New River less than five miles from the Radford burn site. At the age of 33, she was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer — a cancer for which her family has no history. Garst knows well that it’s nearly impossible to tie a cancer to a specific environmental culprit. But she can’t stop thinking about the plant’s pollution and litany of environmental infractions. Two years ago, a friend was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, too, then a few months later Garst’s running partner, a 50-year-old man with whom she has little in common except their use of the same trails, received a similar diagnosis.
“It leaves me uneasy,” Garst said. “He’s older than I am, he’s male, we have different situations, and that’s our common thing, that we do that.”
Proving these cancers are linked to the Arsenal, or even to pollution, is exceedingly difficult. Doctors point out that thyroid disease, often linked to chemicals in rocket fuel, is also genetically common in that part of Virginia, further muddying the issue. But without air pollution data, it’s difficult to even try to answer the question, let alone measure any other effects the pollution may be having on public health.
State environmental regulators say they don’t consider the plant’s implications on health aside from ensuring the open burn permit meets federal standards. Virginia’s Department of Health hasn’t gotten involved, deferring responsibility to federal agencies. “They are the ones that do the toxicology,” said Dwight Flammia, the chief toxicologist with the Health Department. “They do the investigation because the data is all federal.”
The government’s 2016 sampling effort, in which a drone was used to collect material from the burn plume, has been the most advanced thus far, and what little information has been released on its results has only served to contradict the Army’s past assurances.
24: The number of years since a U.S. Senate resolution called for the military to end its open burn practice “as soon as possible.”
Last fall, the Radford base’s commander was quoted in The Roanoke Times acknowledging that the air samples measured perchlorate — a rocket fuel linked by the CDC to thyroid disease. This, a few months after the same commander defiantly told the newspaper, “We do not burn perchlorates. We do not have perchlorates.”
In early 2016, low levels of perchlorate were detected in public water supplies, and in the water of a nearby farm that grows food for Virginia Tech. The plant’s operations manager said the final results would not show perchlorate, and the plant’s commander, Alicia Masson, who was recently reassigned, declined to comment.
Newman, the risk assessor for Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality, said of the Arsenal: “They suffer a trust deficit that sticks with them.”
The Army command at Radford maintains that it is improving both its environmental conduct and its relationship with the public. It points out that it has run two incinerators for explosives since the 1970s, but they can’t handle all explosives, leaving open burns the last resort. Davie, the plant’s manager, says Radford has focused on reusing and recycling excess materials, recently investing in a large acid recycling plant, and also just replaced its coal-fired boiler plant with a cleaner, gas-fired facility.
But the Army did not address its specific apparent violations in response to ProPublica’s questions, and it could not say when the long-awaited results from last year’s air sampling would be released.
That’s left Garst and others to try to connect the dots on their own.
“If they are skirting the edges of the rules and not doing what they are supposed to do, they are exposing people,” said Christopher Sonnier, an endocrinologist who has treated Devawn Bledsoe and several other Radford-area residents for thyroid disorders.
The Department of Defense should understand that burning its hazardous waste can hurt people. It learned the hard way under the pressure of war.
At dozens of Army and Air Force bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pentagon contractors dug gaping holes just steps from the flapping doorways of tents where soldiers slept and ate. In those holes, they dumped their munitions and their garbage, from medical waste to cafeteria trays to used tires, lighting it all on fire. The billowing smoke could block out the sun and engulf soldiers in hazardous plumes, heavy with metals and dioxins and an ugly soup of other carcinogens.
The burn pits are now believed to have sickened soldiers and other personnel. In personal statements filed in a class-action lawsuit against KBR, a military contractor that operated the burn pits, soldiers described throat tumors and nodules in the throat, chronic respiratory problems, asthma, hearing loss and cancers.
The military burns in Iraq and Afghanistan took place virtually alongside soldiers and included items not being burned in the U.S., but there are plenty of similarities. While the Department of Defense won’t say exactly how much of the material burned overseas was munitions, it does state that 80 percent of the material was “combustibles,” not counting cafeteria materials, clothing and medical waste. Also, more than 40 percent of the plaintiffs who joined the class-action suit — 160 people — described seeing live munitions, munitions boxes, ammunition and unexploded ordnance dumped into the burn pits at the bases where they were stationed.
The domestic burns also contain explosives and material from bullets and other munitions. In addition, Army and EPA records show that Radford, for instance, sometimes also burns miscellaneous nonexplosive material with its own dangerous chemical profiles: metals, flash tubes and filter bags, diesel fuel, cleaning pads and even cardboard and wood.
In the end, many of the chemical fingerprints — fine particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, dioxins and furans — are the same.
Health complaints from Iraq and Afghanistan vets have been treated very differently, however. As in Radford, the Pentagon long resisted recognizing risks or addressing residents’ health concerns. But in the end, Congress held hearings. The Department of Veterans Affairs created a health registry where more than 110,000 soldiers have stated their complaints. Former President Barack Obama signed legislation outlawing the war-zone burn pits.
All the while, here in the U.S., open burns have remained standard operating procedure, even though there are demonstrably safer options.
When East Germany reunified with the West it brought with it a stockpile of 440 million pounds of antiquated munitions that needed to be disposed of almost overnight.
Understanding the risks of burning the material, the Germans sought an industrial technique that could process large volumes of waste quickly and cheaply. They used a high-pressure water jet to clean out the munitions, separating the materials and allowing the parts to be reused.
Soon enough, the stockpile was gone. The Netherlands, Sweden and Canada also have banned all or most open burns and detonations, developing new technologies to get rid of military waste instead.
Why the U.S. Department of Defense hasn’t replaced open burning as its go-to method of disposal is an increasingly urgent question.
The permits the military has used for decades to conduct burns, after all, are essentially an exemption that federal law explicitly frames as a last resort.
Internal EPA documents outline eight technologies — from the high-pressure water jets used in Germany to chemical baths that dissolve explosives and break down their molecular bonds — for safely disposing of the explosives that the Army maintains are too dangerous to handle any way but burning.
Some of the most straightforward alternatives — clean-burning incinerators — are already used in scattered military locations in the U.S. At Camp Minden, the former ammunition plant in northwestern Louisiana where EPA officials uncovered the 18 million pounds of untreated explosives, Army officials planned to burn all of it. Then they relented, commissioning an enclosed burn chamber in which millions of pounds of the material could be burned and every ounce of smoke and fumes scrubbed and filtered until there were almost zero emissions. The chamber, according to Bob Hayes, the CEO of El Dorado Engineering, which built it, was designed in nine months, burned 15 million pounds of explosives in one year, and cost about $10 million.
“It’s opened a lot of eyes to what is possible,” said Hayes.
The stumbling block appears mainly financial. One 2012 Army report investigating alternatives to open burning in Tennessee called several of the EPA-identified technologies “viable options” that were “commercially available with acceptable engineering controls for safety,” but then said they would not be cost effective until more stringent — and more expensive — environmental regulations forced the Army’s hand. Another study of alternatives at the Dahlgren Naval Weapons Station in Virginia listed the capital costs of open burn as “$0,” compared to $2 million to $3 million for a contained detonation chamber.
“The Army and other DOD officials don’t have any motivation to push for a change to the way they’ve done it for 70 years,” said Hendrickson, the EPA remediation manager. “Open burn and detonation is the cheapest for them.”
It’s certainly true that some disposal options cost a lot: The Pentagon built two highly specialized contained burn chambers for rocket motors at China Lake, in California, for $100 million.
42: The number, in billions of dollars, the Pentagon has so far spent cleaning up its 39,400 polluted sites in the U.S.
But environmental regulators say many military analyses ignore the costs of remediating and cleaning the burn sites, figures that often run into the hundreds of millions of dollars and dwarf even the highest cost of alternative technologies. EPA documents show cleanups of burn grounds at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, a Department of Energy site that contributes military technology, will cost $626 million. Fort Wingate, in New Mexico, will cost $192 million. Castle Air Force Base in central California will cost more than $150 million. These figures aren’t tangential environmental costs — completing a cleanup is baked into the Subpart X permits that the Pentagon sites received in order to burn.
Still, alternatives only seem to be deployed after communities have mobilized to fight the burning with a vigor that has proven elusive in many military towns. “Sometimes it’s easier for everybody to just lie low and keep doing what they are doing,” Hayes added. “Short term thinking is the problem. In the immediate, it costs them nothing to keep burning.”
The success in Louisiana could be the start of a shift in momentum. In the 2017 Defense Department funding bill, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, supported an amendment ordering the National Academy of Sciences to evaluate alternatives to open burning.
Radford has been operating under an expired burn permit since late 2015, while trying to reach an agreement with the state of Virginia over a new permit. Virginia officials say the state has put off a decision because it wants to make the conditions more stringent, and the renewal might just give the state the leverage it needs to force the Pentagon’s hand.
“It certainly is an effort to encourage them to find a better way to deal with those materials,” said Hayden, the state spokesman.
At first, the Army was predictably resistant. In 2014, it ran a technical evaluation of open burn alternatives and concluded that the “status quo should be maintained.” According to Army documents, they found the alternatives, of all things, to be too dangerous.
The Pentagon, when writing reports like this, usually gets the benefit of the doubt.
“There was and continues to be a fair amount of deference to DOD when it comes to explosives safety,” said Scott, the Virginia environment manager who will write Radford’s permit. “You hope the guys who are dropping the bombs know how to handle the bombs.”
For Scott and others, it’s hard to understand why the Army resists the possibility of a modern incinerator to manage Radford’s explosives waste, especially given the results in Louisiana.
The Army insists the Minden technology isn’t a silver bullet, but says it hasn’t put off new solutions. “There’s never been a reluctance,” said King, the Army director of munitions, who has been involved in Pentagon remediation efforts for more than 40 years. “The Department of Defense has always been searching for alternatives and we continue to do so. The technology has to prove itself out, which the technologies do not.”
Still, when Virginia officials confronted the Army about this recently, Scott said, the Army privately acknowledged that incinerators were a viable option in Radford, but declined to formally agree to a plan to install them.
“Their response was, if we write it down on paper, it makes it real, and then we have to commit to it.”
Each day, the Army inches closer to that commitment. It now says — informally — that it will build an incinerator in Radford, but even if it does, it would take years before it’s in place. The Army isn’t even expected to submit a proposal to the state until mid-2018.
Every week, smoke swirls above the trees near the plant, and the acidic odor settles on Darlene Nester’s house, on the local schools and farming fields and trailer parks and shops.
For Devawn Bledsoe, the foot dragging and decades of delay have led to profound disillusionment. For a long time, she thought her responsibility was to bring light to the issue. Now she thinks it takes more than that. “There’s something so immoral about this,” she said. “I really thought that when enough people in power — the Army, my Army — understood what was going on, they would step in and stop it.”
“It’s hard to see people who ought to know better look away.”
Correction: A prior version of this article stated that lawmakers had granted exemptions to the Pentagon and its contractors to temporarily continue open burns. The exemptions were granted by regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency.
This story was co-published with the Huffington Post.
Abrahm Lustgarten is a senior environmental reporter, with a focus at the intersection of business, climate and energy.
Explore every shipment of hazardous waste sent to Colfax in 2015 and was burned or detonated into open air.
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