THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS GIVING POLITICAL APPOINTEES POWER OVER APPORTIONING FEDERAL FUNDS

Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought transferred the authority to make apportionment decisions from career staff to political appointees.
Ryan Grim


August 20 2020, 3:00 a.m.

https://theintercept.com/2020/08/20/federal-funds-omb-apportionment-trump/





IN THE final months of its first term, the Trump administration is cutting career government employees out of the process of apportioning federal funds, according to a memo reviewed by The Intercept, sent to staff on August 12 by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.

OMB sits at the center of the government’s executive branch, serving as a financial clearinghouse for every agency and federal program. The 100-year-old office reviews legislation passed by Congress that authorizes and appropriates federal government spending, and then apportions money to agencies based on those laws. For decades, OMB’s career staff have been responsible for signing off on the legality of the apportionment of funds to agencies and for projects.

Under the new regime, however, program associate directors — political appointees known as PADs — will sign off on disbursements themselves. The rationale behind the shift is that apportionment decisions are fundamentally policy decisions and therefore, should be the responsibility of political aides who are ostensibly accountable to voters, rather than government bureaucrats immune from such democratic responsiveness.

The change is not meant to enable the improper politicization of spending decisions, senior Trump administration officials said to The Intercept, but rather is intended to align responsibility where it ought to be: with those officials who are accountable to the government. When the agency was originally created, sign-off authority rested with the highest official in each department. A reorganization in 1970 added a new layer of officials — the PADs — but left the authority a rung below with the top career staff. The new delegations, the officials said, aims to correct that.

Meg Reilly, a political appointee at OMB under the Obama administration, said that it was alarming to think of people without training or expertise — or the culture of legal fealty that exists among career staff in the OMB — having power over those numbers. “It’s a meaningful cultural shift,” she said, noting that the career staff and political appointees within OMB physically work in different buildings, a geographic representation of the gulf between their roles.


The Trump administration, through the OMB, has previously worked to circumvent or override decision-making by career appointees, most famously by impounding U.S. military aid to Ukraine in 2019, at the same time that President Donald Trump was pressuring Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden — a scandal that resulted in Trump’s impeachment and ultimate acquittal. Given the administration’s handling of the census and the U.S. Postal Service — both of which it has worked to deliberately undermine for political gain — there is reason to suspect that its appointees would not handle the newfound power responsibly. Restricting funds or delaying disbursement until later in the year could have dramatic consequences for struggling states or for agencies like the Census Bureau, which has already faced major delays as a result of the pandemic and ended the 2020 headcount early, or the Postal Service, which has seen a wave of new policies and delays under the newly appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who is a mega-donor to Trump’s campaign.


Vought’s memo also gives him the ability to exercise the decision-making authority himself. “The delegation supersedes any previous delegation of such authority and will remain in place until revised or revoked,” the memo reads. “The Program Associate Directors may re-delegate this authority as necessary in writing. The delegation does not limit the authority of the director to exercise the delegated authority.”

Vought is a longtime conservative operative and was a senior aide to the Republican Study Committee, a coalition of right-wing House Republicans that is a mirror of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He is also a veteran of Heritage Action, the explicitly political arm of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. He was confirmed as deputy director of OMB in 2018 thanks to a tie-breaking vote cast by Vice President Mike Pence. He took over as acting director in January 2019, when Trump hired then-OMB Director Mick Mulvaney as his chief of staff. He was finally confirmed as director last month — making the memo one of his first moves in his official capacity as director.

During his confirmation hearing, Democrats challenged Vought on his position on withholding federal funds from states that embrace absentee voting, along with other politicized spending decisions. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked what he would do if he was ordered by Trump to punish states that encouraged mail-in voting. “I would take a review of programs and what discretionary authority we had, but I would do it within the bounds of the law,” Vought said, giving little ground.

Vought is a controversial figure on Capitol Hill, having defied a subpoena from congressional Democrats, refusing to answer questions about the withholding of funds from Ukraine. The Government Accountability Office released a report saying that OMB, under Vought, broke the law in withholding the funds. Vought rejected the characterization, which the GAO just as swiftly dismissed. “OMB’s assertions have no basis in law,” the GAO reported.

Reilly said the change is about more than just the politicization of disbursement decisions. “OMB career staffers are experts in their highly specific fields, many with advanced degrees and decades of experience,” she said. “Political appointees are there to advance the ideological goals of a presidency; historically, they find ways to do that within the apolitical, pragmatic recommendations of the career experts. Political appointees almost never have the depth of knowledge or historical data needed to make an informed decision about a specific budget apportionment on their own. The idea that such decisions will shift from nonpartisan experts to the fair-weather grifters in the White House is alarming.”

Facebook’s Ban on Far-Left Pages Is an Extension of Trump Propaganda

Facebook announced a sweep to ban some user groups — and it equated violent white supremacist militias with antiracist organizing.




https://theintercept.com/2020/08/20/facebook-bans-antifascist-pages/


ON WEDNESDAY, Facebook announced an expansion of its “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy,” removing or restricting hundreds of pages associated with groups that it claims promote violence. Nearly 800 QAnon groups, committed to pernicious disinformation and potentially deadly conspiracy theories, have been removed. Facebook also shut down the pages of far-right militias, like the New Mexico Civil Guard, an armed vigilante organization, whose leaders sport swastika tattoos.

Alongside groups openly committed to genocidal white supremacy, which constitute a very real threat to Black and Indigenous communities, as well as other people of color, Facebook also shut down the pages of numerous antifascist, anti-capitalist news, organizing, and information sites. The move follows a pattern now well-established by the Trump administration — and unchallenged by most every mainstream media outlet — that draws indefensible false equivalences between organized, racist fascists, and the antifascists who vigorously oppose them.

Among the pages removed were those of antifascist news and research site, It’s Going Down, a media platform that publishes news, analysis, and reports on social struggles, as well as investigative work to expose white supremacist and neo-Nazi networks. Crimethinc, a bastion of left-wing, anarchist publishing and thought since the 1990s, saw its Facebook page removed too. The pages of groups organizing around the ongoing and potent antiracist uprisings were also shut down, including the PNW Youth Liberation Front, a network of youth collectives in the Northwest committed to direct action protest.

“Lumping anarchists and anti-fascists together with far-right militias who explicitly support the current administration is a strategic move to muddy the issue,” said a statement from Crimethinc in response to the bans. “This is the same operation that William Barr” — the attorney general — “performed in creating a Department of Justice task force focused on ‘anti-government extremists’ that targets self-proclaimed fascists and anti-fascists alike. In the case of the Department of Justice, this enables them to point to far-right and militia attacks in order to demand resources with which to crack down on those who are on the front lines of defending communities against such attacks.”


Both rhetorically and through specific policies, the government has obfuscated and downplayed the threat of white supremacist extremism, while sensationalizing the risks posed by the far left.

With its latest bans, Facebook is following this same playbook.




The demonization of antifascists has become a centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s reelection propaganda, which functions both to criminalize dissent and delegitimize Black liberation struggle. Following the intolerable events of the Charlottesville, Virginia, “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, Trump famously praised “very fine” members of the white supremacist coalition and blamed “both sides” for the murderous far-right violence that occurred — a stance that’s since been crystallized in his policies.

Facebook’s decision to treat leftist social justice platforms as equivalent to racist militia groups is merely an extension of the government’s position. “For months, Donald Trump has demanded this crackdown in a series of social media posts explicitly blaming anarchists and anti-fascists for the countrywide wave of protests precipitated by persistent police violence in the United States,” said the Crimethinc statement.

EARLIER THIS MONTH, as I wrote, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, chaired a farcical Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on “stopping anarchist violence.” The senator repeatedly chastised Democrats for failing to condemn “antifa” for a murder that was in fact carried out by the far right — and refused to be corrected. Both It’s Going Down and Crimethinc were mentioned during the hearing, within baseless overtures on the threat of the far left.

In the three decades since Crimethinc’s founding, the Facebook ban is “the first thing like this that has occurred,” said a participant in the collective, who asked for anonymity out of concern for far-right retaliation and state scrutiny. Of course, none of the antifascist groups removed by Facebook expected any better from the social media leviathan. “We ultimately aren’t surprised by this move and personally all hate Facebook,” the It’s Going Down Twitter account said, noting that it was nonetheless a “vehicle to connect with people.”

At stake is not the moral standing of Mark Zuckerburg’s turpitudinous monopoly, but rather the further entrenching of a false equivalence, which stifles antifascist dissent at a time of emboldened state and movement fascism.




It bears repeating, ad nauseam, that the far right has carried out 329 murders in the last three decades; none have been attributed to antifa. Between 2009 and 2018, white supremacist and far-right extremists were responsible for 73 percent of extremist murders in the U.S. And that’s not even to mention the state-sanctioned, racist killings carried out by the police.

There’s no doubt that a number of the leftist platforms removed in the Facebook sweep advocate for disruptive dissent and protest. Antifa practice certainly involves a willingness to physically confront organized white supremacists in the streets. But Facebook’s bans, echoing Trump’s myths, equate the “violence” of disruptive antiracist protest with the violence of neo-Nazis murdering immigrants and people of color.

“This line of thinking continues to equate protest disruption and property destruction with far-right movements who fundamentally want to harm and kill large segments of the public,” It’s Going Down tweeted.

For Facebook to treat even militant, antiracist, antifascist organizing as a violence comparable to that of white supremacist militias is a statement, in no uncertain terms, about which lives it deems to matter.

DESPITE HUGE NUMBER OF MISCONDUCT COMPLAINTS, COPS AT NYPD’S 75TH PRECINCT KEEP GETTING PROMOTIONS

There has been little to no accountability for the staggering number of lawsuits and substantiated civilian complaints against the troubled precinct.
Tana Ganeva


August 23 2020, 7:00 a.m.

https://theintercept.com/2020/08/23/nypd-75th-precinct-police-misconduct/





ON A CLOUDY night in mid-December 2015, Justin McClarin was asleep in his basement apartment when New York Police Department Officers David Grieco and Michael Ardolino broke into his room. Grieco and Ardolino put McClarin in painfully tight handcuffs. When McClarin complained, the officers ignored him. Instead, they took McClarin outside and slammed him down on the pavement so hard that his shoulder became dislocated. The officers had neither an arrest nor search warrant. In a pending lawsuit from which this account is gathered, McClarin claims that they refused to give him a reason for his arrest.

Instead of taking McClarin to the hospital to treat his dislocated shoulder, Grieco and Ardolino took him to the NYPD’s notorious 75th Precinct. While he was restrained, officers at the 75th allegedly shot McClarin with a BB gun five times. The lawsuit also claims that the two officers knowingly lied to the district attorney, accusing McClarin of committing an undisclosed felony, leading to charges that were ultimately dropped. McClarin was released, but not before he spent six days in police custody.

McClarin’s lawsuit is seeking to hold New York City responsible for the alleged constitutional violations in part because of a pattern of the failure to hold police officers — in particular, the cops involved in McClarin’s case — to account. According to a database that tracks lawsuits, between 2015 and 2018, Ardolino was sued seven times, with one case settled, three pending, and three with unknown outcomes. The same data set lists 32 lawsuits that name Grieco, with 15 settled with cash from the city, nine pending, six with unknown outcomes, one verdict in Grieco’s favor, and one case dismissed with prejudice. The officer with the second-highest number of cases in the precinct has been sued 15 times. The suits have been costly for the city: The resolved cases against Grieco alone have resulted in more than $400,000 in payouts from the city to plaintiffs. (The NYPD declined to comment about the McClarin case and the officers’ records of lawsuits.)

Officers like Grieco and Ardolino have brought notoriety to the 75th Precinct. Based in East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood stricken by poverty and a troubling history of racist neglect by the authorities, the 75th was the most sued precinct of New York City cops from 2015 to 2018, according to CAPstat, a website created by public defenders that tracks federal civil rights lawsuits against New York police. (CAPstat’s organizers emphasize that the website “is a demonstration project and does not represent the universe of data of police misconduct in New York City.”) The city has had to defend itself in 90 lawsuits brought against the 75th during that period, while the next most-sued precinct had 40 cases brought against it.


The lawsuits, though, are only part of the story. An Intercept analysis of newly available records from the files of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, known as the CCRB, shows that, in addition to the lawsuits, the 75th Precinct also leads the city in complaints of misconduct by the public. When it comes to serious allegations about police misconduct, the 75th Precinct has the worst record in New York. And the officers involved in the encounters rarely face consequences. Instead, in the years following substantiated complaints against them, officers in the 75th Precinct routinely got raises and promotions.
1,364 Complaints

There have been 1,364 allegations of misconduct against the 75th Precinct logged with the CCRB. In contrast, the neighboring 73rd Precinct has 688; the 69th, also adjacent, has 418. The 104th and 102th Precincts have 170 and 182 complaints, respectively. Many other precincts have under 50. The 78th Precinct, which covers the tony neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, has only 46.




The records give a granular picture of allegations about police misconduct at the 75th Precinct — The Intercept found multiple cases in which officers from the 75th were accused of knowingly fabricating evidence, making a false arrest, or brutalizing residents — and the nearly complete lack of any accountability. The most severe disciplinary measures taken against police named in the complaints were docked vacation days, even when the CCRB recommended termination or suspension without pay.

Defense attorneys are well-aware of the 75th Precinct’s reputation. “In my practice, the 75th Precinct, covering East New York in Brooklyn, was not only one of the most prolific in terms of quantity of arrests, but also in violence, misconduct in all its forms, and routine constitutional violations,” Scott Hechinger, senior staff attorney and director of policy at Brooklyn Defender Services, a public defense group, told The Intercept. He added that despite the 75th Precinct’s notorious history, prosecutors continue to work with officers and the city continues to defend them in expensive lawsuits: “The cloak of absolute protection for cops is reinforced by all system actors.”

Grieco, one of the officers at the center of the McClarin lawsuit, appears to be uniquely prolific in racking up CCRB complaints. In addition to all the lawsuits, Grieco has also had 49 allegations made against him through the CCRB. In only 11 of those cases did the board exonerate him of any wrongdoing. In comparison, 41 percent of current NYPD service members have never had any complaints lodged against them, according to the CCRB’s 2018 annual report. Twenty-one percent have had only one complaint, 3 percent have had five, and only 9 percent have had six or more.

Like other cops in the 75th Precinct, all the lawsuits and CCRB complaints appear to have had little impediment to Grieco’s career. In the fiscal year 2017, after 11 years on the job and two years after the incident with McClarin, Grieco was promoted to detective third grade. His salary increased $10,000. A year later, in the 2018 fiscal year, Grieco was again promoted, this time to sergeant, and got another raise for $20,000 more.

An Intercept analysis cross-referencing CAPstat salary data with CCRB complaints shows that this was a widespread pattern at the 75th Precinct. Rather than being punished when civilian complaints of misconduct against them were substantiated, police at the 75th routinely got promotions and raises.
No Discipline


It took the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police — and the global protest movement the killing sparked — for even a limited accounting of the CCRB records to become public. In the wake of the protests, New York repealed a controversial law known as 50-a, which allowed police to keep misconduct records secret.

With the law off the books, public-interest advocates, including the press, sought to make the misconduct records public through public records requests and, subsequently, in court — where police unions sued to suppress the information and a judge blocked the release of police disciplinary records until August 18. Eventually, the investigative news organization ProPublica released an incomplete set of CCRB data, which The Intercept used for its investigation. The ProPublica data set omitted both ongoing prosecutions — some of the worst cases — as well as those in which the board was unable to reach the complainant or secure their cooperation. (On Thursday, the New York Civil Liberties Union released a slightly broader data set with higher search functionality.)




Repealing 50-a was one of the few meaningful reforms backed by New York politicians who have long been averse to reforming the police. The recent widespread calls for the police’s funding to be drastically reduced gained little traction.

The newly released misconduct complaint records, however, when cross-referenced with pay and promotion data from CAPstat, starkly illustrate the limits of police accountability within the existing institutions. “We’ve tried reforms in the past, but the NYPD won’t follow the Constitution and aren’t deterred by criminal laws, let alone their own patrol guide,” said Hechinger of the Brooklyn Defenders.

In its analysis of CCRB data and lawsuits, cross-checking the information with officers’ pay history, The Intercept limited the data to cases in which the CCRB found the allegation against the officer to be substantiated and the misconduct extreme enough to recommend disciplinary charges — cases in which the cop in question faced termination, suspension without pay, docked vacation days, or “admonishment.” (Substantiated complaints with no disciplinary charges can lead to docked vacation days or more training, but the penalty applied is at the discretion of the police commissioner.)

The CCRB data paints a damning picture of the 75th. Fifty-five active police officers at the precinct have at least one complaint that was “substantiated with charges” on their record. Not only were none of these officers terminated, but, since 2000, police commissioners have not even applied the CCRB’s less harsh recommendation of temporary suspension without pay. Not a single one of the officers clocked fewer hours after the CCRB’s conclusion, according to CAPstat.




The NYPD declined to comment on The Intercept’s analysis of lawsuits and CCRB data on the 75th Precinct. Instead, Sgt. Jessica McRorie, a police spokesperson, pointed to years of reforms and trainings instituted for officers. “For years, the New York City Police Department has worked to refine its internal disciplinary system. Last year, an independent outside panel of former prosecutors and judges reviewed the system and found it to be fair and effective,” McRorie wrote in an email, adding that the department had also implemented further reforms recommended by the panel. “All of this advances the NYPD’s priority to make its internal disciplinary system as fair, effective, and transparent as it can for an agency privileged to manage a vast number of interactions with the public.”

Andrew Case, a former CCRB spokesperson, said suspensions are exceedingly rare. He once oversaw a complaint by a man who was beaten from behind by an officer with a baton with so much force, it ruptured his spleen. The officer barely faced consequences. “He got 10 vacation days docked,” Case said. “That’s their idea of what discipline should be.”

Not only did officers in the 75th Precinct with substantiated charges go undisciplined, but they also continued to make more and more money — both from raises and by harnessing NYPD’s infamous use of overtime pay. (As an example of overtime bloat, cops collectively raked in some $115 million in overtime pay in the first two weeks of the George Floyd protests.)

Every officer from the 75th Precinct who had complaints that were “substantiated with charges” got multiple raises in the years following the conclusion of their CCRB investigations, according to The Intercept’s analysis. More than half got raises the same year the CCRB substantiated complaints against them. Almost all of the officers in question also racked up thousands of dollars more in overtime pay than they had earned the year before complaints against them.

Take Grieco, who is known by the nickname “Bullethead.” In 2014, the year after the most serious CCRB complaint against him was substantiated, Grieco made $50,279 in overtime, up from $24,706 the year before. In 2015, he made $74,125 in overtime, nearly doubling his income over his salary of $78,026. Then came the promotions.
The Long History of the 75th

Today’s troubled 75th Precinct is not a historical aberration; the precinct has a long and sordid history of abuse, misconduct, and even criminal activity. In the 1980s, a group of detectives collaborated with drug cartels, taking bribes, running crack and cocaine, and robbing cartel rivals. One former officer, who helped plot to murder the wife of a rival drug dealer, served 13 years in prison and another detective served eight. Other officers who were involved served no time. The case prompted the formation of the Mollen Commission to study police corruption and misconduct — with damning results about corruption and abuse, in particular everyday brutality against the people of East New York.

Yet police in the 75th have carried on the patten of abuse at alarming rates. And, unlike the cartel case, many officers faced no consequences for their criminal activity. In 1992, two men were arrested for the murder of a 16-year-old girl, despite the absence of any physical evidence that they were involved. The two men, Everton Wagstaffe and Reginald Connor didn’t face murder charges, but were convicted of kidnapping in the case and served 23 and 15 years in prison, respectively.




In 2015, Wagstaffe and Connor were fully exonerated after DNA evidence cleared them. The state Appellate Division found that cops had withheld critical evidence — and then lied about it. Wagstaffe and Connor sued the city on the basis that they had been framed for murder by the cops. Eventually, they settled for a $25 million payout at the public’s expense.

The city never admitted any wrongdoing. Of the four officers named in the suit, two remain on the police force, one has since passed, and the fourth retired and is celebrated among NYPD for being featured in the book “The Making of a Detective.” None of the police officers ever faced any consequences.

“What I think police officers did to Reggie is tragic,” Conners’s lawyer, Emma Freudenberger, told The Intercept. “And there are how many Reggie Connors who are sitting in prison because police aren’t held accountable for following the rules?”

Given this decadeslong history and the absence of consequences for the police involved, advocates have little faith in the reforms championed by powerful New York politicians like Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. While de Blasio doesn’t have the authority to discipline rogue cops, Case, the former CCRB spokesperson, said, he does have the ability to hold the police commissioner accountable — but that’s unlikely to happen. “The police commissioner serves at the pleasure of the mayor. If the mayor wanted to replace him, he could,” Case said. “I don’t think de Blasio wants to do that. He’s trying to please the cops, but they never liked him.”

Hechinger agrees that the incremental reforms being proposed by politicians are unlikely to work. “If we don’t take decisive action knowing what we know now,” he said, “we will send the loud and clear message of continued impunity to the 75th and all precincts through the city.”

Her Former Colleagues Called In a “Wellness Check.” Then Police Shot Her to Death.

The killing of Sandy Guardiola at the hands of a cop illustrates the limitations of brutal, armed police responding to community needs.




https://theintercept.com/2020/08/22/police-shooting-wellness-check-sandy-guardiola/





NEUROLOGIST EUGENE TOLOMEO documented an appointment with his patient Sandy Guardiola that took place on October 3, 2017. “She smiles often,” he wrote. She was in “good spirits.”

Guardiola, a parole officer in upstate New York, was scheduled to start work at a new office location following a four-week medical leave after a car accident. She asked the doctor to sign paperwork allowing her to return to her job. She was, he noted, “excited about going back to work.”

When Guardiola’s two adult children spoke to her that week, they said she seemed well. To this day, they do not understand why a police officer was sent to their mother’s apartment in Canandaigua, New York, to carry out a wellness check on October 4. Neither of them had been called, although they were listed as her emergency contacts at work. All they know is that Scott Kadien of the Canandaigua Police Department entered Guardiola’s home without her permission and shot her three times while she was in her bed. She died in the hospital that afternoon.




The police shooting of a Latina woman in a small upstate New York town, with a population that is 96 percent white, did not make national news. Even local coverage was scant. A grand jury declined to charge Kadien, who claimed that Guardiola shot at him first (she legally owned a gun, owing to her job).

Amid national antiracist uprisings, however, with renewed focus on the plague of racist police killings, Guardiola’s son and daughter are pushing for their mother’s story to become known. Hers is one of all too many deaths that illustrate the risk of entrusting police forces with overseeing community wellness. And, like most every police killing, the story of Guardiola’s death is one of cop impunity, unanswered questions, and ongoing injustice.

“Everything we’ve turned up about this case has been outrage after outrage,” said Luna Droubi, an attorney representing Guardiola’s children, Andrew and Alysa Ocasio. In 2018, the family filed a federal civil rights suit against the Canandaigua police, the city, Kadien, Guardiola’s apartment complex, and her employer. The case is ongoing, with Guardiola’s children striving to correct the public record about their mother’s death. Droubi told me that even the wellness-check request call, which catalyzed the deadly course of events, was “illogical.”

The call was made by parole officers in Rochester, New York, where Guardiola had stopped working prior to her accident, having already chosen to transfer to a different location. According to her children, Guardiola said she faced discrimination in the Rochester office; she was due to start work in Binghamton, New York, following her approved medical leave.

Yet it was her former office colleagues who called 911 to request a wellness check. Guardiola did not pick up her phone or respond to knocks on her apartment door. Her children believe that she had gone to bed in the afternoon, taken a sleeping aid, and put in ear plugs, knowing that she’d have to wake up extremely early the next day to embark on her new, three-hour commute to work.

The police officer, Kadien, entered Guardiola’s apartment with a master key fob. He claims that he announced himself many times and only fired his weapon after Guardiola shot first. A bullet from Guardiola’s gun was indeed found at the scene, but in the wall far to the side of where Kadien had stood to shoot her. The trajectory of that bullet, and the nature of the bullet wounds in Guardiola’s body, her children’s legal team says, suggest that she was defensively covering her face when her weapon went off. According to a statement from the attorneys’ firm, which hired a renowned forensic pathologist to review the case, “the evidence clearly suggests that Ms. Guardiola was shot while she was reaching for her weapon and that at no time did she pose a threat to Sergeant Kadien.” As Droubi told me, “the forensics speak for themselves.”


Other troubling details haunt the scene. Why, for example, did the officer call for police backup after the shooting, before calling for the emergency medical technicians who were on standby across the street? There was a 10-minute gap, while Guardiola was still alive yet bleeding to death, between the shots firing and the medics being summoned. Why was Guardiola put in handcuffs? “They were supposed to be there for her wellness, not to apprehend a criminal,” her 24-year-old daughter, Alysa, told me.

And why, in the immediate aftermath, did law enforcement officials lead Guardiola’s family to believe that she had effectively committed suicide-by-cop? “I had just spoken to her,” Alysa said, echoing the words of the doctor that she had been in “good spirits” and was making future plans. “We knew something was very off,” Guardiola’s son, Andrew, said of the police narrative.

THE RECENT antiracist uprisings have given rise to crucial and long overdue challenges to the role of policing in the U.S. A vast array of roles performed by cops, to the detriment of so many lives, should be carried out by social, health care, and community workers, untangled from a system of criminal justice, surveillance, and violence. Resource redistribution is necessary for wellness; the brutal policing of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities is not.




“There needs to be a change in how wellness checks are done, and who does them,” Alysa said. “You see it all around the country — people having manic episodes being killed or detained.”

Within the white supremacist context of this country, where Black, Indigenous, and other people of color are framed as a threat, summoning the police for wellness checks risks sentencing to death the person whose wellness is purportedly at stake. In New York, Chicago, North Carolina, Alabama, Minneapolis, and elsewhere in recent years, people — predominantly Black people — have been shot by police called for wellness checks. The very notion that armed cops are best suited to deal with an unwell person is belied by the sheer fact that disabled individuals make up a third to a half of all people killed by law enforcement officers. Guardiola was not ill, as her doctor had attested. Had she been, it’s hard to imagine a universe in which sending an armed cop into her apartment would be a solution toward wellness.




Police killings like Guardiola’s clarify the American myth of a citizen’s protected private property. White property is inviolable. The discriminatory application of “Stand Your Ground” laws make this clear. So, too, do spectacles like that of wealthy, white supporters of President Donald Trump imperiously pointing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters from an ostentatious mansion.

Racism and property are intractably bound in a country built by people owned as property, on stolen land. Police raids, deadly so-called wellness checks, and no-knock searches, not to mention the patrolling of public housing — all examples of how the state continues to treat the property of Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color as violable. For months, Breonna Taylor’s name has been chanted at protests across the country. She was murdered in March by plainclothes officers in Louisville, Kentucky, who entered her home on a no-knock search warrant. Taylor and her partner believed there were intruders in their home, because there were.
Andrew has been attending numerous Black Lives Matter rallies and protests in recent months. While his mother was Latina, not Black, he rightly sees her death as part of an unbroken history of racist police killings. “If my mom was a white woman, I think the whole interaction in her apartment would have maybe gone differently,” he said. He told me that since his mother moved to Canandaigua just three months prior to her death, she had often told him about receiving stares from the town’s majority-white residents. Alysa said that her mother’s new office transfer was part of a longer-term plan to move downstate and away from that environment.


In certain ways, Guardiola’s children recognize that their mother’s story is unusual in a movement antagonistic to the police and the carceral system. She was, after all, a parole officer. She had previously worked as a corrections officer on Rikers Island, the infamous New York City jail, before obtaining a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University and retraining as a parole officer. She specialized in working with parolees with mental health issues, and both her kids spoke of her desire to bring her caring attitude to her work, which adds a dark irony to her death in the context of a wellness check orchestrated by that same system.

Neither of Guardiola’s children approach their advocacy for their mother from an abolitionist stance; they want to see reform and, at the very least, Alysa said, “recognition of wrongdoing” where there has been none.

“At first, I held onto the hope that since my mother was a law enforcement official, that the system that she served would serve her,” said Andrew.

Her death, and the lack of any accountability for it, make clear the response to the slogan chanted again and again by protesters at police: “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?” The answer is very few people indeed.

TRUMP COMES UP EMPTY WHEN PRESSED FOR EVIDENCE OF ELECTION FRAUD IN COURT

The Trump campaign’s 524-page response to a discovery demand turned up precisely zero instances of mail-in voter fraud.

https://theintercept.com/2020/08/20/trump-election-fraud-pennsylvania-court/










PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S campaign, ordered by a federal court judge in Pennsylvania to back up its claims of fraud in the state’s vote-by-mail system, has documented only a handful of cases of election fraud in recent years — none of which involved mail-in ballots. The revelation, which came in the form of a partially redacted 524-page document produced by the Trump campaign last week, undermines the claim by Trump team operatives that mail-in ballot fraud is a grave risk to Pennsylvania voters.

The campaign is suing Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar and each of the state’s county election boards to prevent election administrators from providing secure drop boxes for mail-in ballot returns. These drop boxes allow voters to return their mail-in ballots by hand, without sending them through the postal system and risking delays. The Trump campaign alleges that the practice “provides fraudsters an easy opportunity to engage in ballot harvesting, manipulate or destroy ballots, manufacture duplicitous votes, and sow chaos.”

In a motion last week, Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future and the Sierra Club called on the Trump campaign to provide evidence of the existence of voter fraud, arguing that the campaign’s lawsuit was “replete with salacious allegations and dire warnings” about Pennsylvania’s elections and that they “must either be compelled to provide discovery concerning their fraud-based allegations or be precluded from pursuing these claims going forward.” Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan granted the motion, ordering the campaign to “produce such evidence in their possession, and if they have none, state as much.”

The response provided by the Trump campaign to the opposing counsel, which was shared with The Intercept and Type Investigations, contains a few scant examples of election fraud — but none of the instances in the 524-page discovery document involved mail-in ballots.


“Not only did the campaign fail to provide evidence that voter fraud was a widespread problem in Pennsylvania, they failed to provide any evidence that any misconduct occurred in the primary election or that so-called voter fraud is any sort of regular problem in Pennsylvania,” said Suzanne Almeida, interim director of Common Cause PA, one of the parties in the lawsuit. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

The non-redacted portion of the Trump campaign’s response consists in large part of news reports and copies of the campaign’s open records requests to counties. It contains no new evidence of fraud beyond what local news outlets have previously reported. The examples of fraud that it does provide include the case of four poll workers who admitted to harassment and intimidation of voters at one polling place during a special election in 2017. It also includes an election judge who altered vote totals in his polling place between 2014 and 2016 at the behest of a political consultant. And while the amended complaint brought by the campaign cites a few incidents of mail-in fraud, none were mentioned in the discovery document.




This is far from the first time that Republicans have failed to substantiate their frequent claims that voter fraud is a persistent problem in American elections. In 2018, one of U.S.’s most prominent crusaders against voter fraud, then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, was asked by a district court to produce evidence that noncitizens were voting in his home state of Kansas. Kobach brought forth witnesses, but their testimony fell apart on cross examination. Judge Julie Robinson wrote in her opinion that “evidence that the voter rolls include ineligible citizens is weak. At most, 39 [non]citizens have found their way onto the Kansas voter rolls in the last 19 years.” The rare known cases of voter fraud were not the tip of the iceberg, she concluded, “there is no iceberg; only an icicle, largely created by confusion and administrative error.”

After taking office, Trump established a controversial presidential commission to study voter fraud. The commission met only twice before disbanding without producing evidence of widespread voter fraud in U.S. elections.

With state Democrats simultaneously suing to affirm the legality of Pennsylvania’s drop boxes, Boockvar has asked the state Supreme Court to settle the relevant questions of election law before the federal trial is completed. Mail-in ballots will start going out to voters in mid-September.

2020: Make It Stop

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3ssaxjiuU4&feature

Huge Numbers of Primary Absentee Voters in Top Swing States Must Reapply for Fall Ballot

Steven Rosenfeld August 24, 2020

https://citizentruth.org/huge-numbers-of-primary-absentee-voters-in-top-swing-states-must-reapply-for-fall-ballot/

In the rush to vote absentee as the pandemic broke, they didn’t fill out forms to get a mailed-out ballot for the presidential election too.

On August 20, the Wisconsin Elections Commission announced that they would send letters to 2.6 million voters who have not yet signed up to receive an absentee ballot for the fall election, reminding them about their voting options and urging them to apply for a mailed-out ballot online or use an enclosed form.

What the announcement did not say was that a half-million of the voters getting the mailing had applied, received, and voted with an absentee ballot in April 2020’s presidential primary. But unlike 800,000 other voters who this spring checked a box on an application to receive an absentee ballot for the rest of 2020’s elections, these half-million voters had only applied for a mailed-out ballot in the primary.

“If a registered voter requested an absentee ballot for April but not for the rest of the year, he or she will receive a letter from the Wisconsin Elections Commission in early September explaining the options for voting this fall,” Reid Magney, WEC public information officer, said in an email. “For April, there were 1.3 million absentee ballots requested. For November, we have about 800,000 requests. So approximately half a million… [voters] only requested a ballot for April.”

The WEC’s effort to contact millions of voters who never or rarely voted by mail before COVID-19 raises a big question for absentee voters in battleground states. Are individuals who voted by mail earlier this year unaware that they may be required to reapply for an absentee ballot in the presidential election?

“It’s an example of little things that can matter a lot,” said Phil Keisling, Oregon’s former secretary of state and board chair of the National Vote at Home Institute, referring to how voters filled out unfamiliar application forms months ago.


East of the Rockies, most states require voters to reapply for each election. But that is not the case in some presidential swing states where voters can choose to receive an absentee ballot for the next election or for the rest of the year. That choice can hinge on checking a box or signing a section on the state’s application, which many voters did in haste this spring as the pandemic postponed presidential primaries.

In August, Michigan also sent a letter to millions of voters who have not yet applied to receive an absentee ballot for the fall, or only applied for an absentee ballot for an election earlier this year. Its mailing, too, reiterated the options to vote this fall, encouraged recipients to vote absentee and told them how to apply. (Both Michigan and Wisconsin have new online portals and downloadable forms.)

Michigan’s Department of State did not provide figures when asked how many voters might be in the same situation as the half-million Wisconsin voters: those who voted by mail in its April primary, but have to reapply to vote by mail this fall.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, mailed absentee ballot applications to 7.7 million voters this May. More than 1.6 million voters used the ballots in Michigan’s August’s primary, setting a state record, the Detroit Free Press noted. But millions of Michigan voters have yet to apply for a fall absentee ballot.

“Benson’s office will mail the postcards to the 4.4 million active registered voters who have not already applied for an absentee ballot and are not already signed up to automatically receive an absentee ballot for every election,” the paper said, noting that some of this year’s earlier absentee voters are not set up to do so for the fall.

Voting by mailed-out ballots is not the only way to vote in the presidential election. In most states, voters can cast absentee ballots or vote in person at a polling place, either early or on Election Day. But many states, including 2020 swing states, are making historic shifts to voting from home in response to the pandemic.


As Michigan’s and Wisconsin’s latest public education efforts attest, many voters apparently do not know that they need to reapply for an absentee ballot for the fall, especially if they filled out an application months ago and then voted by mail in the spring or summer.

“The voter turnout groups cannot count on people who might get a ballot automatically,” said Kevin Kennedy, the former executive director of Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board, the state election agency that preceded the Wisconsin Elections Commission. “They need to follow up.”

An Overlooked Requirement?

Most people who have never voted by mail may not realize that they must apply for an absentee ballot in their state, just as they have to register to vote. The rules and specifics vary state by state.

“If you applied for an absentee ballot in the spring, can you expect to get one in the fall? The answer is no, apply again,” said Wendy Underhill, director of the National Conference of State Legislatures’ elections and redistricting team, which tracks the latest state-by-state trends and changes in voting procedures.

“It’s [the burden] on the voter to ask for that absentee ballot for each election in most states,” she said. “There’s about 14 states that have online portals where you can ask for an absentee ballot. And that makes your life easier. And it really makes the life of the election official easier.”

Before the pandemic, most states east of the Rockies saw less than 10 percent of their voters cast mailed-out ballots. Previously, these states envisioned mailing ballots to registered voters if they were in the military, overseas, disabled, ill or elderly, traveling for work, or on vacation. Their laws and rules were based on the expectation that relatively small numbers of voters would apply for an absentee ballot when they needed it. Some states created permanent lists for elderly and disabled voters. One exception was Florida, which allows voters to apply for an absentee ballot for every election in a two-year period.


The pandemic led many states to suspend or update these rules. This fall, the District of Columbia and nine states will directly send registered voters an absentee ballot, skipping the application process altogether. (The nine states are California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Hawaii, New Jersey and Vermont.) That development has been sharply attacked by President Trump.

But most states still require voters to apply to vote absentee. In two-thirds of the states, voters can do so without citing an excuse. A half-dozen states additionally require voters to declare an excuse (illness, overseas, etc.). Some battleground states will send their voters an application for the fall, while others, such as Ohio and Georgia, will not.

“I would encourage people to just renew their ballot application,” said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor who specializes in voter turnout and is writing a book about absentee voting in 2020, when asked what general advice he would suggest when surveying the evolving fall landscape.

The best state and local government portals allow voters to check and update their registration information, to see if they signed up for an absentee ballot, and see the address where that ballot will be sent, said Hillary Hall, National Vote at Home Institute senior adviser for state and local elections.

What Should Voters Do?

What states are doing to help people vote from home varies. In Pennsylvania, another swing state, its Department of State recently emailed voters who signed up to receive an absentee ballot for all of 2020, or just for the presidential election, to inform them about a new online ballot-tracking tool.

That email said, “You do not need to re-apply for a mail-in ballot. You will receive a ballot on the mail in September or October.” While the state has a new portal for other voters to apply online for an absentee ballot for the fall, the department did not respond to an inquiry asking how many voters applied to vote by mail in its June primary but not for the presidential election.

Campaign insiders creating voting apps said this ambiguity should be addressed.


“There should be a campaign to say, ‘Hey, voters in this state, we know there’s a chance that you could have signed up, [and] you may think you have signed up, but you haven’t yet. Go do it,’” said Alex Niemczewski, CEO of BallotReady, a startup whose voter information apps are being used by the Democratic Party.

“There should be a campaign, but it is not in our wheelhouse to do this,” she said, explaining that BallotReady cannot reliably check whether a voter has signed up to vote by mail because the relevant state and local government databases are in constant flux as data is being processed, sometimes delayed and transferred.

That leaves it up to voters to figure out what to do, or political parties or advocacy groups to help them. As the mailings in Wisconsin and Michigan show, there may be hundreds of thousands of voters who voted with mailed-out ballots earlier this year. But that doesn’t mean they are set to receive an absentee ballot this fall.