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By Thomas Scripps, WSWSAugust 4, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/assange-wins-award-appears-in-court-facing-new-charges/
Note: Julian Assange is being recogized for his work to promote unconditional press freedom. “Julian Assange Is Awarded the 2020 Stuttgart Peace Prize,” reports:
“Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks imprisoned in London for a year, received the Stuttgart Peace Prize 2020. It is awarded by Die Anstifter and aims to promote the right to unconditional freedom of information and of the press.
“Annette Ohme-Reinicke, president of Die Anstifter, said the crackdown on Assange was also against comprehensive political information for all.
“Heike Hänsel, Member of Parliament and Deputy Chair of the Die Linke parliamentary group, said:
‘I am very happy with this award given to Julian Assange, who has suffered political persecution from the United States for years due to his journalistic work and who is now in danger of extradition to the United States. This award recognizes investigative journalism and is a strong message in defense of press freedom. Recognizing the peaceful and political dimension of the work of the founder of WikiLeaks is for him a very important support. As British justice treats Julian Assange as a dangerous criminal and keeps him in the most secure prisons, Assange is awarded this tribute for the US war crimes revelations in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am waiting for the German government and the EU to stop being blind and finally offer political asylum to Julian Assange. ‘”
In our view, Assange is the most important journalist of this century. He exposed war crimes and wrongdoing by the United States, other countries, and transnational corporations. He democratized the media breaking the stranglehold of corporate control. These are the reasons he is being prosecuted by the United States and the UK is considering his extradition. We must do all we can to stop the extradition and get the charges dropped against him. – KZ
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s case management hearing yesterday continued the travesty of legal due process to which he has been subjected for more than a decade.
The journalist and publisher is fighting extradition to the United States, where he faces politically motivated frame-up charges of espionage with a combined potential sentence of 175 years. He has not attended hearings via videolink for the last three months on the advice of doctors, due to his fragile state of health and the threat of exposure to coronavirus.
At the previous hearing on June 29, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser had scolded Assange for not being present, demanding medical evidence to justify his non-appearance in future. But yesterday, Baraitser ruled the hearing could go ahead without Assange after Belmarsh prison disrupted his plans to attend. Prison authorities claimed to have forgotten to arrange videolink facilities for the world-famous political prisoner.
Edward Fitzgerald QC, the lead defence lawyer, said he would prefer his client to be present. The hearing was adjourned for ten minutes to allow him to contact Assange. When court resumed, Fitzgerald confirmed his wish to see his client attend. The hearing was then adjourned for another hour and a quarter.
When Assange was finally produced via videolink he appeared tired and downcast, according to reporters in the court room.
The brief exchanges between Fitzgerald, Baraitser and prosecuting lawyer Joel Smith, centred on the superseding indictment against Assange issued by the US Department of Justice on June 24.
The new indictment is based on the testimony of Sigurdur Thordarson, described by WikiLeaks as a “sociopath, convicted conman and sex criminal involved in an FBI entrapment operation against WikiLeaks.” It alleges that Assange recruited and incited hackers against a range of classified, official, and private computers between 2009 and 2015. It contains no new charges but significantly expands the scope of allegations against WikiLeaks, deepening the assault on freedom of the press being waged by the US government.
Assange’s support for whistleblower Edward Snowden and transparency of information are alleged in the superseding indictment to constitute solicitation and theft of classified information. Former WikiLeaks section editor Sarah Harrison and former WikiLeaks spokesperson Jacob Applebaum are targeted on the same basis.
But the new indictment had not been served in the UK courts at the time of the last hearing (June 29) and had still not been submitted as of yesterday. Baraitser noted, “As it stands no further superseding indictment is before this court.” Smith responded for the prosecution that “It has been disclosed to the defence” and Baraitser confirmed, “It has only been disclosed to the court via email from the defence but not formally.”
Smith said that he could not commit to a timeline for serving the new indictment, before absurdly claiming that the “usual procedures” would be followed. There is nothing “usual” about this case, including the procedures surrounding the new indictment. As Fitzgerald said during the hearing, “We’ve had it sprung on us.”
Kristinn Hrafnsson, Editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, explained in a statement yesterday, “What the US is doing is truly unprecedented. A new indictment is being introduced halfway into extradition proceedings, which have been a year in the making. The Assange extradition case started in February and was scheduled to resume in May but was then forced to adjourn until September due to the COVID lockdown.
“The ‘new’ superseding indictment actually contains nothing new. All the alleged events have been known to the prosecution for years. It contains no new charges. What’s really happening here is that despite its decade-long head-start, the prosecution are still unable to build a coherent and credible case. So, they’ve scrapped their previous two indictments and gone for a third try. They are wasting the court’s time and flagrantly disregarding proper process.”
As it stands, the UK courts are continuing with Assange’s extradition process based on an outdated indictment. The new version has been significantly adjusted and can only raise new and substantial legal issues that must be responded to. The defence are due to serve their skeleton argument on August 25. At the last case management hearing, Summers noted that that the superseding indictment “has the obvious capacity to derail the September date [for the next phase of the hearing].”
Fitzgerald told the court yesterday that it would be “improper” if the US government’s actions led to a delay in the case, particularly beyond the November US presidential election, in which he expected Assange to serve as a political football. He continued, “We are concerned about a fresh request being made at this stage with the potential consequence of derailing proceedings and that the US attorney-general is doing this for political reasons.”
Baraitser told him to “reserve his comments” on the new request, as it had not yet been served.
Fitzgerald indicated the defence may need a fourth week to fully present their arguments during the second phase of the extradition hearing—currently scheduled to last three weeks. Smith said that chief lawyer for the prosecution, James Lewis QC, would not be available for a fourth week and Baraitser agreed that it would be a “real concern” for the court if the case stretched to an additional week. Both parties agreed the court could decide later if a fourth week would be needed.
Journalists and monitors from political, legal, and medical organisations attempting to access the court via conference call were again unable to hear proceedings. The audio quality is routinely terrible, but on this occasion not even snatches of conversation where audible since, for the second time, the call was somehow left on hold after the adjournment. Space in the court is still strictly limited by social distancing measures.
As Assange appeared in court yesterday from Belmarsh prison, his partner Stella Morris gave evidence in a Spanish court over the spying activities of UC Global. The Spanish security company was hired by the CIA to spy on Assange and his closest associates during his final years of political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. It recorded Assange’s privileged meetings with lawyers, and his private consultations with medical doctors and journalists. The activities of UC Global, including plans to kidnap or murder Assange, expose the criminal and all-encompassing character of the US vendetta against Assange and WikiLeaks.
Assange’s final case management hearing will take place at 10am at Westminster Magistrates Court on August 14, ahead of the resumption of the extradition hearing proper on September 7 at Central Criminal Court. It was agreed that Assange, the judge, the defence, and the prosecution will all attend in person, but it remains unclear what the arrangements will be for the public, press and international observers.
By Andrea Mazzarino, Tom Dispatch.August 4, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/us-empire-of-bases-is-spreader-of-us-covid-19-disaster/
The Military Is Sick.
A Navy Spouse’s Take on Why We’re Not Getting Better
American military personnel are getting sick in significant numbers in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. As The New York Times reported in a piece buried in the back pages of its July 21st edition, “The infection rate in the services has tripled over the past six weeks as the United States military has emerged as a potential source of transmission both domestically and abroad.”
Indeed, the military is sick and I think of it as both a personal and an imperial disaster.
As the wife of a naval officer, I bear witness to the unexpected ways that disasters of all sorts play out among military families and lately I’ve been bracing for the Covid-19 version of just such a disaster. Normally, for my husband and me, the stressors are relatively mild. After all, between us we have well-paid jobs, two healthy children, and supportive family and friends, all of which allow us to weather the difficulties of military life fairly smoothly. In our 10 years together, however, over two submarine assignments and five moves, we’ve dealt with unpredictable months-long deployments, uncertainty about when I will next be left to care for our children alone, and periods of 16-hour workdays for my spouse that strained us both, not to speak of his surviving a major submarine accident.
You would think that, as my husband enters his third year of “shore duty” as a Pentagon staffer, the immediate dangers of military service would finally be negligible. No such luck. Since around mid-June, as President Trump searched for scapegoats like the World Health Organization for his own Covid-19 ineptitude and his concern over what rising infection rates could mean for his approval ratings, he decided that it was time to push this country to “reopen.”
As it turned out, that wouldn’t just be a disaster for states from Florida to California, but also meant that the Pentagon resumed operations at about 80% capacity. So, after a brief reprieve, my spouse is now required to report to his office four days a week for eight-hour workdays in a poorly ventilated, crowded hive of cubicles where people neither consistently mask nor social distance.
All of this for what often adds up to an hour or two of substantive daily work. Restaurants, dry cleaners, and other services where Pentagon staffers circulate only add to the possibility of his being exposed to Covid-19.
My husband, in other words, is now unnecessarily risking his own and his family’s exposure to a virus that has to date claimed more than 150,000 American lives — already more than eight times higher than the number of Americans who died in both the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed.
In mid-August, he will transfer to an office job in Maryland, a state where cases and deaths are again on the rise. One evening, I asked him why it seemed to be business as usual at the Pentagon when numbers were spiking in a majority of states. His reply: “Don’t ask questions about facts and logic.”
After all, unless Secretary of Defense Mark Esper decides to speak out against the way President Trump has worked to reopen the country to further disaster, the movement of troops and personnel like my husband within and among duty stations will simply continue, even as Covid-19 numbers soar in the military.
America’s Archipelago Of Bases
Global freedom of movement has been a hallmark of America’s vast empire of bases, at least 800 of them scattered across much of the planet. Now, it may prove part of the downfall of that very imperial structure. After all, Donald Trump’s America is at the heart of the present pandemic. So it’s hardly surprising that, according to the Times, U.S. troops seem to be carrying Covid-19 infections with them from hard-hit states like Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas, a number of which have had lax and inconsistently enforced safety guidelines, to other countries where they are stationed.
For example, at just one U.S. base on the Japanese island of Okinawa, the Marine Corps reported nearly 100 cases in July, angering local officials because American soldiers had socialized off-base and gone to local bars in a place where the coronavirus had initially been suppressed. No longer. In Nigeria, where official case counts are low but healthcare workers in large cities are reporting a spike in deaths among residents with symptoms, the U.S. military arms, supplies, and trains the national security forces. So a spike in cases among U.S. troops now places local populations (as well as those soldiers) at additional risk in a country where testing and contact tracing are severely lacking. And this is a problem now for just about any U.S. ally from Europe to South Korea.
What this virus’s spread among troops means, of course, is that the U.S. empire of bases that spans some 80 countries — about 40% of the nations on this planet — is now part of the growing American Covid-19 disaster. There is increasing reason to believe that new outbreaks of what the president likes to call the “Chinese virus” in some of these countries may actually prove to be American imports. Like many American civilians, our military personnel are traveling, going to work, socializing, buying things, often unmasked and ungloved, and anything but social distanced.
Public health experts have been clear that the criteria for safely reopening the economy without sparking yet more outbreaks are numerous. They include weeks of lower case counts, positive test rates at or beneath four new cases per 100,000 people daily, adequate testing capacity, enforcing strict social-distancing guidelines, and the availability of at least 40% of hospital ICU beds to treat any possible future surge.
To date, only three states have met these criteria: Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. The White House’s Opening Up America plan, on the other hand, includes guidelines of just the weakest and vaguest sort like noting a downward trajectory in cases over 14-day periods and “robust testing capacity” for healthcare workers (without any definition of what this might actually mean).
Following White House guidance, the Department of Defense is deferring to local and state governments to determine what, if any, safety measures to take. As the White House then suggested, in March when a military-wide lockdown began, troops needed to quarantine for 14 days before moving to their next duty station. At the close of June, the Pentagon broadly removed travel restrictions, allowing both inter-state recreational and military travel by troops and their families. Now, in a country that lacks any disciplined and unified response to the global pandemic, our ever-mobile military has become a significant conduit of its spread, both domestically and abroad.
To be sure, none of us knew how to tackle the dangers posed by this virus. The last global pandemic of this sort, the “Spanish Flu” of 1918-1919 in which 50 million or more people died worldwide, suggested just how dire the consequences of such an outbreak could be when uncontained. But facts and lived experience are two different things. If you’re young, physically fit, have survived numerous viruses of a more known and treatable sort, and most of the people around you are out and about, you probably dismiss it as just another illness, even if you’re subject to some of the Covid-19 death risk factors that are indeed endemic among U.S. military personnel.
Perhaps what the spread of this pandemic among our troops shows is that the military-civilian divide isn’t as great as we often think.
Protecting Life In The Covid-19 Era
Full disclosure: I write this at a time when I’m frustrated and tired. For the past month, I’ve provided full-time child care for our two pre-school age kids, even while working up to 50 hours a week, largely on evenings and weekends, as a psychotherapist for local adults and children themselves acutely experiencing the fears, health dangers, and economic effects of the coronavirus. Like many other moms across the country, I cram work, chores, pre-K Zoom sessions, pediatrician and dentist appointments, and grocery shopping into endless days, while taking as many security precautions as I can. My husband reminds me of the need to abide by quarantines, as (despite his working conditions) he needs to be protected from exposing top Pentagon officials to the disease.
Yet the military has done little or nothing to deal with the ways the families of service members, asked to work and “rotate,” might be exposed to infection. In the dizziness of fatigue, I have little patience for any institution that carries on with business as usual under such circumstances.
What’s more, it’s hard to imagine how any efforts to quarantine will bear fruit in a country where even those Americans who do follow scientific news about Covid-19 have often dropped precautions against its spread. I’ve noted that, these days, some of my most progressive friends have started to socialize, eat indoors at restaurants, and even travel out of state to more deeply affected places by plane. They are engaging in what we therapists sometimes call “emotion-based reasoning,” or “I’m tired of safety precautions, so they must no longer be necessary.”
And that’s not even taking into account the no-maskers among us who flaunt the safety guidelines offered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to indicate their supposed love of individual liberties. A relative, an officer with the Department of Homeland Security, recently posted a picture on Facebook of his three young children and those of a workmate watching fireworks arm in arm at an unmasked July 4th gathering. The picture was clearly staged to provoke those like me who support social-distancing and masking guidelines. When I talk with him, he quickly changes the subject to how he could, at any moment, be deployed to “control the rioters in D.C. and other local cities.” In other words, in his mind like those of so many others the president relies on as his “base,” the real threat isn’t the pandemic, it’s the people in the streets protesting police violence.
I wonder how the optics of American families celebrating together could have superseded safety based on an understanding of how diseases spread, as well as a healthy respect for the unknowns that go with them.
Sometimes, our misplaced priorities take my breath away, quite literally so recently. Craving takeout from my favorite Peruvian chicken restaurant and wanting to support a struggling local business, I ordered such a meal and drove with my kids to pick it up. Stopping at the restaurant, I noted multiple unmasked people packed inside despite a sign on the door mandating masks and social distancing. Making a quick risk-benefit assessment, I opened the car windows, blasted the air conditioning, and ran into the restaurant without my kids, making faces at them through the window while I stood in line.
A voice suddenly cut through the hum of the rotisseries: “Shameful! Shameful!” A woman, unmasked, literally spat these words, pointing right at me. “Leaving your kids in the car! Someone could take them! Shameful!” I caught my breath. Riddled with guilt and fearful of what she might do, I returned to my car without my food. She followed me, yelling, “Shameful!”
Aside from the spittle flying from this woman’s mouth, notable was what she wasn’t ashamed of: entering such a place, unmasked and ready to spit, with other people’s children also in there running about. (Not to mention that in Maryland reported abductions of children by strangers are nil.)
What has this country come to when we are more likely to blame the usual culprits — negligent mothers, brown and Black people, illegal immigrants (you know the list) — than accept responsibility for what’s actually going on and make the necessary sacrifices to deal with it (perhaps including, I should admit, going without takeout food)?
Typically in these years, top Pentagon officials and the high command are prioritizing the maintenance of empire at the expense of protecting the very bodies that make up the armed services (not to speak of those inhabitants of other countries living near our hundreds of global garrisons). After all, what’s the problem, when nothing could be more important than keeping this country in the (increasingly embattled) position of global overseer? More bodies can always be produced. (Thank you, military spouses!)
The spread of this virus around the globe, now aided in part by the U.S. military, reminds me of one of those paint-with-water children’s books where the shading appears gradually as the brush moves over the page, including in places you didn’t expect. Everywhere that infected Americans socialize, shop, arm, and fight, this virus is popping up, eroding both our literal ability to be present and the institutions (however corrupt) we’re still trying to prop up. If we are truly in a “war” against Covid-19 — President Trump has, of course, referred to himself as a “wartime president” — then it’s time for all of us to make the sacrifices of a wartime nation by prioritizing public health over pleasure. Otherwise, I fear that what’s good about life in this country will also be at risk, as will the futures of my own children.
By Amberin Zaman, and Joe Snell, Al-Monitor.August 4, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/united-states-stealing-syrian-oil/
US Oil Company Signs Deal With Syrian Kurds
Sources told Al-Monitor the agreement to market oil in territory controlled by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces was signed “with the knowledge and encouragement of the White House.”
The Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of Northeast Syria has signed an agreement with an American oil company, well-placed sources with close knowledge of the deal told Al-Monitor. One of the sources said the agreement to market oil in territory controlled by the US-backed entity and to develop and modernize existing fields was inked last week “with the knowledge and encouragement of the White House.” The sources named the company as Delta Crescent Energy LLC, a corporation organized under the laws of the state of Delaware. The sources gave no further details about the company but would only say they had been in talks for “a long time” and that it had received an OFAC license to operate in Syria.
Sinam Mohamad, the Syrian Democratic Council representative to the United States, confirmed via Whatsapp that Delta Crescent had signed an agreement with the autonomous administration but said she had no further details.
Oil is the autonomous administration’s principal source of income.
The sources briefing Al-Monitor confirmed that Lindsay Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina who is close to President Donald Trump, had spoken to Mazloum Kobani, the commander in chief of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) yesterday and that Kobani had informed Graham of the deal and asked him to relay details of it to the US president.
Graham confirmed that he had heard about the oil agreement from Kobane to CBS reporter Christina Ruffini, who then relayed this in a tweet.
During his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Graham he was “OK” with the deal. “The deal took a little longer senator than we had hoped, and now we’re in implementation,” he said.
The sources told Al-Monitor that the US government had also agreed to provide two modular refineries to the autonomous administration but that these would only meet 20% of its refining needs. Delivery of the refineries has been held up by logistical hitches related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the sources said.
The Kurdish-led entity controls most of Syria’s oil wealth, which is concentrated in and around the Rmelain fields close to the Turkish and Iraqi borders and in the Al-Omar fields further south. Before Syria’s civil conflict erupted in 2011, the country used to produce around 380,000 barrels of crude per day. Production is down to around 60,000 barrels per day, much of it refined in makeshift refineries and transported by leaky pipelines causing massive environmental pollution.
Oil is a politically radioactive topic, with the central government in Damascus accusing the United States of stealing its oil after Trump declared last year in the wake of Turkey’s October incursion against the SDF that he was keeping some 500 US Special Forces in the Kurdish governed space “for the oil.” Despite steadily tightening sanctions on the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, the United States has turned a blind eye to ongoing oil trade between the Kurds and Damascus. A fair amount of the oil is also sold at cut-rate prices to the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
Ankara is every bit as sensitive about the oil as it’s seen as the vehicle for cementing the Syrian Kurds’ self-rule project. Turkey has since 2016 been launching military operations against the SDF to disrupt its perceived attempts to establish a contiguous zone of control from the Iraqi border all the way to Afrin to the west of the Euphrates river and beyond. Turkey claims the SDF and its affiliates are “terrorists” because of their links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the rebel group that has been fighting for Kurdish self rule inside Turkey since 1984 and is on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations.
The sources said US Special Envoy for Syria engagement reportedly had informed Turkey about the oil deal and that Ankara had not reacted negatively. Russia was also informed and had not expressed a view, though certain fields were kept outside the deal, so as to ensure that the Syrian people outside the Kurdish zone were “not deprived of their share of the oil,” one of the sources said.
Turkey Joins Syria In Slamming Oil Agreement Between US Firm, Syrian Kurds
Ankara has spoken out against a new oil agreement between an American-based company and the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.
Turkey condemned a new oil agreement between an American-based company and the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, according to a release Monday by the country’s Foreign Ministry. Turkey now joins Syria in criticizing the deal after a Syrian state media announcement on Sunday by the country’s Foreign Ministry called the deal illegal and accused the agreement of stealing Syria’s crude.
The oil deal — as first reported by Al-Monitor — was signed with Delta Crescent Energy LLC, a corporation in the state of Delaware. Sources with close knowledge of the deal told Al-Monitor’s Amberin Zaman that the agreement was made “with the knowledge and encouragement of the White House.” The region is not officially recognized as autonomous by any international state.
Turkey’s condemnation of the deal arrives only days after US Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., spoke to Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) Commander in Chief Mazlum Kobane to confirm the deal had taken place. The US-backed SDF is the largely Kurdish military force in the region.
Graham and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo referred to the oil deal during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on July 30.
Turkey said they deeply regretted the US support that disregards international law and violates territorial integrity. The efforts are considered within the scope of financing terrorism, the ministry claimed.
“By this step, the PKK/YPG terrorist organization has clearly demonstrated its ambition to advance its separatist agenda by seizing the natural resources of the Syrian people,” read the statement. “The natural resources of Syria belong to the Syrian people.”
The deal comes amid increasing US sanctions against Syria. A new wave of sanctions were imposed in July under the Caesar Act, legislation that sanctions the Syrian government, including Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and some members of his family, for alleged war crimes against the Syrian population.
The agreement is to market oil in the territory controlled by the SDF and develop and modernize existing fields. The US government has also agreed to provide two modular refineries to the autonomous region’s administration. Delivery of the refineries, however, may be impeded due to the coronavirus pandemic, sources told Al-Monitor.
Cori Bush’s triumph over 19-year incumbent Rep. Lacy Clay in St. Louis, Missouri, is Justice Democrats’ latest upset.
Ryan Grim
August 4 2020, 11:46 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/05/cori-bush-lacy-clay-primary/
IN AN UPSET that will rock the House Democratic Caucus, Ferguson activist Cori Bush on Tuesday unseated Rep. Lacy Clay, whose family has represented the St. Louis-area congressional district for more than 50 years.
Clay dominated Bush among mail-in and absentee ballots, leading some outlets to prematurely call the race, but Bush surged back with a commanding Election Day lead, narrowly topping Clay by 3 points when all were counted.
Bush was among the original Justice Democrat recruits in 2018, but lost her first challenge by 20 points. A registered nurse and pastor, she made a second run this cycle, again with the backing of Justice Democrats, the progressive group best known for recruiting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “It is historic that this year, of all the years, we are sending a Black, working-class single mother who’s been fighting for Black lives since Ferguson all the way to the halls of Congress,” Bush said in a victory speech.
Bush’s win follows the upset of veteran Rep. Eliot Engel at the hands of Jamaal Bowman in New York, and longtime Rep. Daniel Lipinski in Illinois, who fell to Marie Newman. Justice Democrats also supported a challenge against Rep. Henry Cuellar, who narrowly fended off Jessica Cisneros in Texas.
Bush’s win is monumental in a number of ways. Unlike Bowman, she did not have the luxury of an opponent who fled his district and told a hot mic that he only wanted to speak at a Black Lives Matter rally because he had a primary to worry about. When Engel lost to Bowman, an anonymous Democrat argued to the New York Post that his loss was a fluke and tied to his race and his lack of energy in office. “It doesn’t show AOC’s power — it shows that New York voters want demographic changes in the House,” the Democrat was quoted saying. “They don’t want old white guys who don’t do anything. Not only old white guys; but old white guys who only work when they’re up for reelection. … People are punishing these kinds of lawmakers. If you’re old, white, and lazy, you’re going to get kicked out.”
Clay, however, is not old (he just turned 64, a decade younger than Engel), white, or lazy. Clay did not remotely take Bush for granted, launching a full-scale negative campaign to try to take her down, and has been focused on her as a threat since her loss to him in 2018. He is a fixture of the community, and he and his father, Bill Clay Sr., a civil rights activist and co-founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, have continuously held the seat since the 1960s. His father lamented the loss on Wednesday.
Clay’s defeat is also ominous for incumbent Democrats, as he was hammered at home by an outside anti-monopoly group for his work with the financial industry to undo an Obama-era piece of Wall Street reform. The group, Fight Corporate Monopolies, spent $90,000 airing the attack ad, causing pain for Clay on the type of issue that rarely leaves the Beltway. It was doubly ominous given that it came from nowhere, and the new group, which had only previously spent against Massachusetts Rep. Richie Neal, does not disclose its donors.
Bush rose to prominence as a leader of the Ferguson protests in August 2014 and, with the help of Justice Democrats, challenged Clay in 2018. That year, Bush told The Intercept that she was optimistic about the growing momentum progressives were having in Congress. “I don’t think it was just lightning striking in that moment, like I heard some people say, I think this is a movement and I think it’s only going to grow,” Bush said. “From 2018 to 2020, I think this is going to continue to push forward because people are beginning to see now that this can happen.”
Justice Democrats was born out of the group Brand New Congress, which had initially launched with the plan to oust all 435 members of Congress, but that ambitious objective looked to be going zero for 435 heading into the spring. So Justice Democrats, after it split from BNC, chose one race to go all-in on — Ocasio-Cortez’s — and followed that with a win by Ayanna Pressley in Boston. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib later also won open seats, creating what is known today as “the Squad.” In 2018, Bush was featured alongside Ocasio-Cortez and two other candidates in “Knock Down the House,” a Netflix documentary about working-class challengers running for Congress.
Ocasio-Cortez traveled to St. Louis to rally for Bush two years ago, but her cash-strapped campaign wasn’t able to get the word out to voters, managing just about two weeks of paid radio ads. In 2020, significantly thanks to the endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders and his help with fundraising, but also the result of her higher name recognition from her role in the documentary, she was able to mount a more serious campaign and even outspent Clay down the stretch. Through his email list, Sanders raised Bush $107,000 throughout the campaign, a Sanders source said. The local Our Revolution chapter, which was built out of the 2016 Sanders campaign for president, backed Bush in 2018 and again this cycle, making some 30,000 voter contacts for her in 2020.
Justice Democrats spent roughly $200,000 in support of Bush through both a coordinated effort and an independent expenditure. “Cori is the fifth challenger backed by Justice Democrats to unseat an incumbent,” said Alexandra Rojas, JD’s executive director. “She organized a movement through pepper spray and rioting police in the streets of Ferguson. Her tenacity and unbreakable pursuit of justice is desperately needed in Congress today.”
Sunrise Movement, the youth climate group, was active on her behalf as well, as was Matriarch, a new organization that backs working-class women running for office. “She ran on defund the police, the Green New Deal, and Medicare for All and defeated a multigenerational political dynasty who got too close to corporate donors and too far from the needs of his district,” said Evan Weber, political director of Sunrise.
Yet Ocasio-Cortez declined to endorse Bush in her second run, as did many of the progressive groups that make up the institutional left. Clay has played a leading role in casting Justice Democrats as flatly racist in its willingness to challenge members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Ocasio-Cortez, as an incumbent, has been under intense pressure not to get behind primary challengers to her colleagues, and only backed Bowman after Engel’s hot-mic moment. No sitting member of the House backed Bush.
Bowman, however, rallied for her.
