The congressional committee investigating January 6 on Thursday revealed new evidence that Donald Trump had a preexisting plan to falsely declare victory on election night in 2020—part of a plot to use made-up voting fraud claims in an attempt to retain power.

For the second time, the committee played leaked audio first reported by Mother Jones in which Trump adviser Steve Bannon, during an October 31, 2020, meeting, said that Trump had a “strategy” to prematurely assert he had won on Election Day. Explaining the so-called “red mirage,” in which Trump would show early leads in key states before mail-in ballots favoring Joe Biden were counted, Bannon said: “Trump’s going to take advantage of it. That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.”

“He’s gonna declare victory,” Bannon said. “But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”

On November 1, 2020, before Election Day, Axios first reported Trump’s plan. But Trump denied it at the time. And he and his supporters have since claimed that he was not lying when he announced—just hours after the polls had closed—that he had won. He legitimately believed election fraud cost him victory, they claim.

The committee, however, presented new evidence Thursday that Trump actually knew he had lost—he admitted it to aides—and that his victory declaration was part of plan to rally his supporters to help him stay in office anyway.

New York Attorney General Letitia James asked a judge on Thursday to appoint an independent financial monitor to oversee Donald Trump’s finances until her $250 million civil fraud lawsuit against him is resolved. James cited what she said was ongoing evidence of continuing fraud on the part of Trump and his company, including the creation of an entirely new corporate entity named “Trump Organization II LLC” on September 21, the same day James originally filed her suit. The new company could be part of an attempt to hide assets, James said.

James’ lawsuit accuses Trump, his adult children, and his companies of fraudulently manipulating statements detailing the former president’s net worth to get better deals from banks and insurance companies. 

“Since we filed this sweeping lawsuit last month, Donald Trump and the Trump Organization have continued those same fraudulent practices and taken measures to evade responsibility,” James said in a statement Thursday. “Today, we are seeking an immediate stop to these actions because Mr. Trump should not get to play by different rules.”

Besides asking for $250 million to make up for the financial benefits James says the Trumps improperly received thanks to fraud, James is also asking that the Trumps and Trump’s companies lose their business licenses to operate in New York and be banned from commercial real estate transactions for five years. Obviously, the newly created company was not a target of James’ suit and, for now at least, is not included on the list of companies that could be punished if her suit is successful. James’ filing on Thursday asks a judge to order the Trumps not to transfer their assets in an effort to escape her jurisdiction. James also wants the judge to require that any efforts by the Trumps to move assets be approved in advance by the court. Finally, James is requesting the appointment of an independent overseer to monitor Trump’s finances to make sure he’s complying with all of the rules. 

Trump’s attorney in the case, Alina Habba, did not return a request for comment. However, in an email from Habba to James’ office that James included with her filing on Thursday, Habba wrote that her clients have no problem agreeing not to remove assets from James’ jurisdiction.

When Sen. Raphael Warnock addressed several dozen supporters at Atlanta’s East Point Avenue United Methodist Church on Wednesday night, what he didn’t say spoke more loudly than what he did.

Warnock’s speech at this outreach event for Latino voters was full of religious and pro-immigration sentiments. “I am a Senator for all Georgia—no matter what country you’re from, and no matter what language you speak,” the reverend said. “The Bible tells us to welcome the stranger.” But it was also surprisingly hospitable to Warnock’s scandal-plagued opponent. That’s because Warnock did not criticize or even mention Herschel Walker once. During his comments, simultaneously interpreted into Spanish, Warnock didn’t bring up that Walker has been accused of holding a gun to his ex-wife’s head. He didn’t mention that Walker has criticized absentee fathers, while also having been accused of being one. Nor did Warnock mention the most recent allegation: that Walker, who supports total abortion bans without exception, has been credibly accused of urging a woman to get an abortion, and paying for the procedure. 

Perhaps Warnock has decided that the allegations against the famed 1982 Heisman Trophy Winner are garnering plenty of attention on their own, or that the mud-slinging that has become customary among such high-profile elections is unbecoming of a man who first rose to political prominence as the senior pastor at Atlanta’s Ebeneezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King, Jr. once presided.

Asked why he hasn’t commented on the abortion allegations against Walker, outside of once calling them “disturbing,” Warnock told Mother Jones: “I’m focused on the job that the people of Georgia have hired me to do. And I think at the end of the day, the contrast—the deep differences between me and him—will be exceedingly clear.” 

But the stakes of his nice-guy gamble couldn’t be higher. National polls averaged by FiveThirtyEight show just a 4-point lead for Warnock in an election that very well may be a factor—or even the final determinant—in whether Democrats retain their narrow control of the Senate. Georgia’s elections decided Senate control in 2020, when Sen. Jon Ossoff and Warnock both won their races in run-offs. Out of 50 states, just Georgia and Louisiana require run-offs when no candidate receives a majority of ballots cast in general elections. Elsewhere, candidates win when they have a plurality of votes. (If Georgia’s election concludes with neither Warnock or Walker winning more than 50 percent of the vote tally because the Libertarian candidate claims even a small percentage of the votes, a second election will take place about a month later.)

Last Sunday, Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa was forced to exit the game in the second quarter of Miami’s game with the Buffalo Bills after what looked to anyone watching like a serious blow to the head. Tagovailoa appeared to slam his helmet on the turf after being knocked down by a defensive player, got up, and then wobbled and fell again to his knees.

But Tagovailoa did not stay out of the game for very long. According to the Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel, he was evaluated by “several layers of medical professionals” for any sign of a head injury, cleared to go, and eventually finished the game.

And then, on Thursday night, this happened:

Prayers for Tua. He was just carted off the field pic.twitter.com/HPv03iqWMU

— allfootball (@allfootball_IG) September 30, 2022

Have you been following what’s going on at Yale? I haven’t, because I’m 35 years old and didn’t go there. But James Ho, a Trump-appointed judge who sits on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, has, and he’s pissed. So pissed, in fact, that he has announced in a speech on Thursday that he will no longer hire any clerks from Yale Law School, and is encouraging other judges to do the same.

According to National Review, which broke the story, Ho was upset about a string of recent events at the university where students disrupted conservative speakers, and another incident last year in which the administration censured a member of the campus chapter of the Federalist Society for inviting classmates to a party at his “trap house.”

“Yale not only tolerates the cancellation of views, it actively practices it,” Ho said in his address. Per NR, his remarks continued:

“We’re not just citizens. We’re also customers. Customers can boycott entities that practice cancel culture. . . . I wonder how a law school would feel, if my fellow federal judges and I stopped being its customers. Instead of millions of customers, there are only 179 authorized federal circuit judgeships, and 677 authorized federal district judgeships.”

Ho is mad at the ways in which some students at a private college campus are using their speech to criticize other people’s speech, and so his response is to actually ban anyone from that law school from working in his specific fiefdom of the federal government. It’s a pretty nice illustration of the gulf between what “cancel culture” looks like on television and what it means in practice in 2022.

Earlier this week, two West Texas men—one of whom was a former warden of a migrant detention center—were arrested and charged with manslaughter in the death of a Mexican national who had recently crossed over the border. An affidavit filed by a Texas Ranger alleged that Michael Sheppard, the now-former warden, and his brother Mark, came across a group of 13 Mexican migrants drinking from a reservoir on Tuesday, while driving their truck through a sparsely inhabited area south of the town of Sierra Blanca. When the Sheppards saw the group, the affidavit alleged, “The driver leaned on the hood of the vehicle and fired two shots from a firearm at the group,” and then “re-entered the vehicle and fled the scene.” 

Two people were shot—one man died at the scene, and a woman was transported to a hospital in El Paso with a stomach wound. According to the affidavit, members of the group told federal agents who responded to the shooting that “they overheard one of the males shout something in Spanish to the effect of, ‘Come out you sons of bitches, little asses!’ then revved the engine of the truck.” That was when the shooting started.

The two brothers told investigators that they had been in the area, and they had fired shots, but maintained that they’d shot at animals—the story changed from grouse, to ducks, to javelinas—and that they didn’t believe it was at the same location as the shooting. Curiously, they neglected to check to see whether they had actually shot anything, and instead quit their hunting expedition to attend a county water board meeting.

But according to Marfa Public Radio, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has found his own culprit for the shooting of two migrants: President Joe Biden. Per MPR:

In a statement, a spokesperson for Gov. Greg Abbott’s office called the shooting a “terrible tragedy” and said “violence of any kind will not be tolerated in Texas,” but also tied the shooting to the president’s border policies.

About five years ago, Kat decided to stop taking her birth control pills. She wanted to give her menstrual cycle a chance to return to normal before trying to get pregnant in the future—and anyway, she was beginning to have some doubts about the Pill. Her friends had been talking about what they saw as the dangers of hormonal birth control—blood clots, for instance. “Maybe I shouldn’t be putting chemicals in my body,” she recalls thinking. So Kat, who lives in England, spent about $100 on Natural Cycles, an app and thermometer that promised she could avoid pregnancy simply by taking her temperature every day.

It seemed so straightforward. The thermometer would send her temperature to the app, which would predict when she would ovulate—the hormones produced during ovulation typically raise body temperature by a little less than half a degree. Based on that information, the app used a color-coded system to tell her when she could safely have sex without getting pregnant. “Red days you abstain, and green days it’s safe to go for it,” Kat explains. It seemed just as easy as taking a pill every day, with none of the uncertainty of how hormonal medication could be affecting her body. Best of all, Natural Cycles assured her that when used correctly it was 98 percent effective—almost the same as the Pill.

Various factors drive women to try birth control methods that rely on observations of physical changes throughout the menstrual cycle to predict fertility. (There are many names for the various types of these methods, but for the purposes of this piece, I’ll refer to them collectively as cycle-tracking methods.) Some women experience unpleasant side effects of hormonal birth control and are frustrated that their doctors don’t take their complaints seriously. For others, their religion forbids the use of contraception. But in the last few years, there has been an explosion of interest in cycle-tracking, thanks in part to Silicon Valley companies that have launched cycle-tracking apps promising birth control by algorithm.

Other powerful forces also have mobilized behind this trend. As I have reported, many wellness influencers leverage women’s legitimate complaints about the side effects of the Pill, selling supplements, herbal remedies, and diets that they say will alleviate symptoms like mood changes, acne, and headaches. Those messages have no basis in science—yet they have moved swiftly through social networks and made their way into the mainstream. Celebrities including Dr. Oz, Gwyneth Paltrow, and podcaster Joe Rogan have all promoted the idea that hormonal birth control is unwholesome and potentially dangerous.

But recently, this tidal wave of backlash against hormonal birth control has made its way into another sphere of influence. Anti-abortion activists—many of whom are morally opposed to the idea of contraception because they consider it a form of abortion or just morally wrong—have found that wellness influencers, many of them pro-choice, are a boon to their cause. While previous generations of activists saw picketing outside abortion clinics as their only option for engaging the public, today’s crusaders are also using social media to win followers, incorporating wellness messages into confessional videos and stylish memes to convince their audience that hormonal contraception is not only sinful but also unhealthy. In a strategy I’ve been reporting on in collaboration with UC Berkeley journalism and law students, they are also promoting the false idea that cycle-tracking methods of birth control are just as effective at preventing pregnancy as hormonal contraception. Some downplay their anti-abortion convictions and religious identity in order to undermine trust in the Pill and IUDs.

When the Soviet Union still existed, Anatolii Harahatii made his career as a photographer in the small village of Savintsi in northeastern Ukraine. Snapshots of him as a younger, sharply dressed man appear on many surfaces in the cozy, one-story house he shares with Natalya, a former nurse and his wife of over 40 years. In photos from just a few years ago, he appeared happy and healthy, posing with Natalya and their two adult children.

As was the case for most Ukrainians, Anatolii’s life was forever upended on February 24 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of their country, and by early March troops had occupied Savinsti. Russia’s goal, which its government justified with an often head-spinning mix of falsehoods, was nothing less than to topple Ukraine’s democratically elected government and install a puppet regime in its place. As Ukrainian resistance proved to be more formidable than Putin had anticipated, Russian troops escalated their attacks on private citizens. Anatolii was one of them. 

Anatolii intensely followed the frightening and chaotic news of the early days of the war. Several months later, we sat in his kitchen, as he recalled seeing the news of grandmothers standing up to Russian armored columns, blocking their path as they tried to make their way through small villages across Ukraine.

“It was heroism,” Anatolii told me, referring to the Ukrainian civilians’ attempts to physically block Russian tanks with their bodies. When he awoke one morning, he decided to find the columns of tanks, which he filmed. He then posted the footage online.  At the end of May, Russian soldiers in masks, likely intelligence officers, arrested the 68-year-old pensioner. They considered his act of filming the tanks dangerous, likely due to the information it might provide to others in Ukraine, and believed he was in some way acting against the Russian authorities. 

Anatolii

Every other day, my WhatsApp bursts with messages from friends in Brazil and abroad expressing equal parts of excitement and apprehension as Sunday’s Brazilian presidential elections approach. On Wednesday, my best friend who lives in the country’s capital, Brasília, texted to say she was scared of wearing red clothes to go vote this weekend because red is the color associated with the Worker’s Party of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, the current front-runner, has a real, if slim, chance to beat far-right incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro in the first round by getting more than 50 percent of valid votes. “The mood is terrible,” she wrote, later adding that in the last 48 hours, four instances of political violence had been recorded across the country. “It’s very sinister this fear of expressing yourself.”

My friend’s worries are justified. The upcoming presidential elections in my home country are the most fraught and hate-filled in recent memory. In July, one of the president’s followers fatally shot a local Worker’s Party treasurer at his Lula-themed birthday party. Even before the official kick-off of the campaign in August, pro-Lula protesters were bombarded with feces and urine. On September 7, the day Brazil commemorated 200 years of independence, in the midst of a political discussion, a Bolsonaro supporter killed a Lula supporter, stabbing him 70 times and attacking him with an axe. This month, a researcher with Datafolha, one of the main polling institutes in Brazil, was assaulted. In a Rio de Janeiro bar, a 19-year-old woman was struck in the head after a Bolsonaro fan threatened to hit her sister when she criticized the president. Almost 70 percent of Brazilians surveyed in a September poll said they fear being victims of politically motivated violence. 

“Online and offline hate speech and harassment and serious political violence have made many Brazilians afraid to express political opinions and exercise their political rights,” Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “Electoral and judicial authorities, police forces, and other authorities should do their utmost to protect freedom of speech and assembly, and ensure that Brazilians can vote safely.” Experts with the United Nations have also called for peaceful elections and condemned “continuing attacks against democratic institutions, the judiciary and the electoral system in Brazil.” 

This is not the first time political violence has been part of a Brazilian election. In 2018, Marielle Franco, a Black, gay, feminist Rio de Janeiro councilmember and human rights advocate was killed along with her driver after leaving a Black women’s empowerment event. She has become an international icon as a symbol of resistance and activism, but her murder remains unsolved. That same year, while on the campaign trail, Bolsonaro was stabbed by a mentally ill man. Since then, the country’s Superior Electoral Court, which oversees elections, has recorded a spike in violence against candidates. When my American coworkers recently asked me what I thought the outcome of this election would be, I matter-of-factly stated I believed Lula would win, if only he didn’t get murdered first. (The leading candidate’s security apparatus has been reinforced, and he’s been wearing a bulletproof vest at public events.) 

Bolsonaro himself has often incited hostility if not outright violence. A former army captain and a member of congress for 27 years, he was famous for his misogynistic and homophobic views. As president, he is notable for his disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and disregard for the Amazon and climate change. He has called for the Worker’s Party to be swept into the “trash bin of history” and talked about shooting the “petralhada,” a pejorative way of referring to those who vote for the left-leaning party. This authoritarian president, who received a full endorsement from former President Donald Trump, has loosened firearms laws, which has resulted in a three-digit surge in gun ownership registration and told his supporters to “prepare” for what is likely to be a negative outcome for the president. Before Independence Day rallies in September, Bolsonaro urged his supporters to “go to the streets one last time.” 

During the mid-1990s, trust and estate lawyer Jonathan Blattmachr had an innovative idea that would come to revolutionize the American trust industry. Blattmachr is a veteran of the wealth management field, cutting his teeth at the famous white shoe law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, wealth managers to the Rockefellers and other dynastically wealthy families.

Then based in New York, he knew about the success of offshore jurisdictions—places like the Cayman Islands and the Cook Islands allowed super-rich Americans to secretly stash their wealth overseas, hidden from creditors and the tax man. But many of his clients, he believed, would not “want to have their assets in a place they couldn’t find on a map.”

What if, Blattmachr thought, the offshore came onshore?

With traditional trusts, you have the grantor (a.k.a. the client) who creates the trust and puts it in the care of a third-party trustee for the benefit of his beneficiaries—usually the grantor’s spouse or children. When offshore banking centers were first emerging, a major attraction was that they allowed grantors to create what’s known as an “asset protection” or “self-settled spendthrift” trust and house it offshore. Such trusts can be established for a very specific beneficiary: the grantor himself. (Most grantors are male.) By claiming he no longer owns the assets—in a way, they belong to the trust—he is able to avoid wealth-transfer taxes such as the estate tax, and dodge creditors, too. The intention is to put the grantor’s assets in an “ownership limbo,” which obfuscates his legal responsibilities. 

That’s what was going down offshore in the 1980s and 1990s. Blattmachr was riveted by the question: What if the United States hosted these trusts, too? You could have domestic asset protection trusts. He brought his idea to the trusts and estates law section of the New York State Bar Association, and was “unanimously shot down,” as Blattmachr told the trade publication Tax Notes in 2016. “People thought I was absolutely out of my mind.” See, some lawyers deemed the purpose of an asset protection trust—allowing people to insulate their money from creditors—a form of fraud.

Thursday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on abortion bans was a predictable, three-hour medley of left- and right-wing talking points. Republicans accused Democrats of wanting abortion policies in line with those of North Korea and China; Democrats accused Republicans of promoting repressive policies that are comparable to how the Saudi and Iranian regimes treat women. The “fentanyl candy” hysteria made an appearance, as did an out-of-context Shakespeare quote about demanding a pound of flesh.

But one witness cut through the noise, rejecting the “binary yes or no” approach to discussing abortion and shedding light on the humanity of the people who choose to terminate their pregnancies. Kelsey Leigh, a Pittsburgh woman who now works at a reproductive health center, said that she was 20 weeks and six days into a desired pregnancy when she learned that her child had a severe fetal anomaly that she considered “not compatible with life.” At 22 weeks, she had an abortion. “I could not carry my son for four more months to give birth to him knowing that his life would only be filled with pain and suffering,” she said.

During the hearing, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) shared his own story of losing a child to justify his position that “I support life, from conception to natural death.” Higgins said that his daughter Daniela died after being born three months prematurely, but that her short life was still valuable. “Our daughter Daniela breathed life into us,” he said. “She touched every life that she gazed upon.”

Leigh responded that the two stories are not incompatible. “No one needs to be reminded of the sanctity of life,” she said. “We need to be reminded that this is a nuanced, complex decision that is never gonna be answered by a binary yes or no question or the amount of weeks that my ultrasound shows. We need to leave people alone to make these decisions for themselves and their families and the betterment of their communities.”

Asked by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) why abortion bans are dangerous for families like hers, Leigh had some harsh words for the representatives who used their time to describe the stages of fetal development. “It’s demeaning and it’s insulting to insinuate that that’s what I need to hear to know that my son, and that his life, mattered,” she said. “The rhetoric and the sensationalization create stigma and shame, and it’s wrong. And it’s really difficult to sit here and to hear that, and then not actually be looked in the eye and be asked about my experience.”

This past weekend, activists, economists, politicians, and members of the public packed a room at the California Science Center in Los Angeles to talk about reparations. Members of the California Reparations Task Force, a first-of-its-kind group, gathered for their tenth meeting to grapple with some of the difficult questions they have yet to answer about what California owes to descendants of slavery.

At the top of everyone’s mind was how to begin to calculate the amount the state should owe for the harms it has committed. The Task Force has to decide how much California should owe eligible Black residents not just for its involvement in slavery, but also for all the lingering trauma that has followed and the impacts it has had on every facet of society.

Though California’s 1849 state constitution was meant to be anti-slavery, the state was complicit in upholding the institution. There are no exact counts, but one Gold-Rush-era source estimates that in 1852, there were 1,500 enslaved African Americans living in in the state. The same year, California passed a state fugitive slave law, which not only criminalized formerly enslaved people who had escaped to the state from across state lines, but also people who had escaped there before California had even officially become a state. 

To study these harms and try to understand how they could possibly be remedied, the Reparations Task Force was created in September 2020, with the passing of AB 3121. The Task Force has two main objectives: 1) To “study the institution of slavery and its lingering negative effects on living African Americans…and on society”; and 2) to make recommendations for “compensation, rehabilitation, and restitution for African Americans.” In other words, it’s time for the government to pay up.

The Task Force issued its first report in June, with a final report due by July 2023. The interim report includes preliminary recommendations, ranging from a proposal to repeal policies that contribute to housing segregation to calls for free healthcare programs and the elimination of discriminatory policing. The interim report also recommends that the state should implement a reparations program to address its racial wealth gap (which one 2016 estimate put at around $350,000 in Los Angeles), though the Task Force has yet to decide the size of that payment.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, having dominated the past several news cycles by flying Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard without notice—a move his critics depict as a particularly cruel attempt to “own the libs” for political gain—has announced that he’s doubling down.

“We’ve got an infrastructure in place now. There’s going to be a lot more that’s happening,” DeSantis said Friday, according to CNN.

He noted that he plans to use “every penny” of the $12 million that Florida legislators had allocated to relocate migrants. Further flights are “likely,” and he is considering sending migrant buses like those Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey have used to shuttle thousands of asylum seekers to DC, New York City, and other urban Democratic strongholds, leaving officials and nonprofit workers scrambling to accommodate the newcomers.

He might even try and collaborate with Abbott, DeSantis said.

He denied reports, however, that some migrants had been misled about where they were headed and/or what awaited them on the other end—reports that have sparked Twitter accusations of “human trafficking.”

On May 22, 1962, Victoria Bell and her 11 children, ranging in age from two to 14, arrived in Hyannis, Massachusetts, after a days-long bus ride to Cape Cod from Little Rock, Arkansas. Amis Guthridge, an attorney and the leader of the southern segregationist group, the Capital Citizens’ Council, gave Bell $60 and paid for the family’s one-way tickets north. Bell was forced to care for her children with little support after her husband left and the local government cut off her welfare. In a photo from that time, she and her sons and daughters can be seen waving in front of a sign for the Cape Cod Community College, which had been turned into temporary housing for her and other families. “I hope my children get a better chance here,” Bell told the Boston Globe. The following day, Lela Mae Williams, a mother of nine from Huttig, Arkansas, disembarked from a Greyhound bus at a stop near President John F. Kennedy’s summer home in Hyannis. She had heard about “free rides” on a Louisiana radio station and been lured by promises of housing, job prospects, and a presidential welcome at their final destination.

It was all a cruel hoax.

Bell and Williams were among almost 100 people to be shipped under false pretenses to the resort town over the spring and summer of 1962 as part of a white supremacist campaign to send Black people from the South to northern cities. Overall, some 200 people were bused to Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, and other cities in Indiana, Idaho, and New Hampshire. The political ploy was a retaliation for the Freedom Rides from the previous year, when a group of 13 Black and white civil rights activists with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) embarked on southbound buses from Washington, DC, to protest continued segregation in interstate transportation despite the Supreme Court having ruled that it was unconstitutional. What became known as the “Reverse Freedom Rides” was meant to embarrass liberal politicians fighting for civil rights and presumably expose their hypocrisy by confronting them with the demand to live up to their values and assist the Black southerners. “We want to see if Northern politicians really love the Negro or whether they love his vote,” Guthridge said. He framed the unapologetically racist campaign as being beneficent and humanitarian and then underscored its basic intent: “And we want to acquaint the North, which has been making the South a whipping boy with some Southern problems.”

To embarrass Northern liberals and humiliate Black people, southern White Citizens Councils started their so-called "Reverse Freedom Rides," giving Black people one-way tickets to northern cities with false promises of jobs, housing, and better lives.https://t.co/xLpTjxG0PD pic.twitter.com/voiPBbwRuN

— JFK Library (@JFKLibrary) September 15, 2022

Back in 2018, Mother Jones reported that payments made by a shell company to an American lobbyist for an Albanian political party might have originated in Russia. Over the next four-and-a-half years, we didn’t learn much more. But in a newly declassified assessment publicized on Tuesday, US intelligence weighed in. An administration official suggested the intelligence community believes the payments we reported on were part of a vast international effort in which the Kremlin dispensed at least $300 million to politicians and parties in two dozen countries.

In 2017 Lulzim Basha, then the head of Albania’s center-right opposition party, was running for prime minister. In a pro-Western country seeking European Union membership, Basha was a relative skeptic, criticizing the anti-corruption measures the crime-plagued country would have to adopt in order to join the EU. He was also ardently pro-Trump, calling to “Make Albania Great Again” and seeking access to the new US administration.

Basha’s party, the Democratic Party of Albania, or DPA, hired a lobbyist—a former Ted Cruz aide named Nick Muzin—to help him court Trump and Republicans in Washington. Muzin got Basha meetings with a few GOP lawmakers, a Breitbart interview, and entry to a June 2017 GOP fundraiser where Basha took a picture with Trump that he quickly disseminated in Albania as evidence of his access to the US president.

Around the same time, Muzin received a $500,000 payment connected to his Albanian lobbying. The origins of that money were opaque and disputed. Muzin and Basha gave differing explanations. But evidence suggested the money came via Biniatta Trade LP, a shell company registered in Scotland by two other shell companies, which were based in Belize. Biniatta, despite efforts to obscure its origins, appeared to have Russian roots, with ties to a series of other shell companies controlled by Russian citizens, we reported. Biniatta made payments supporting Basha’s party at the same time he had a controversial meeting with Russia’s ambassador to Albania and signaled he was more amendable to Russia’s anti-western aims than was the incumbent prime minister he was challenging.

Mother Jones’ report drew attention in Albania. Critics accused Basha of working for the Russians. In 2019, Albanian prosecutors charged him with money laundering and falsifying documents in connection with the matter. The case was later suspended under murky circumstances. Basha denied accepting Russian money. And his party has insisted it paid Muzin only $25,000, offering no explanation of why someone else would pay a US lobbyist hundreds of thousands of dollars to help the DPA. (Through a spokesman, Muzin said at the time he believed Biniatta Trade was a private company owned by supporters of the DPA.)

On Thursday morning, rail companies and union leaders reached a tentative deal that will avert a strike or lockout that could have begun as soon as Friday. The question now is whether union members will accept the deal when it is put to a vote.

As I reported yesterday, the sticking point in negotiations has not been pay. Instead, workers have been fighting for sick days and increased freedom from punitive attendance policies adopted by rail companies. Engineer Ross Grooters described it to me as a fight “for the basic right to be able to be people outside of the railroad.”

In a joint statement, the leaders of the SMART Transportation Division and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, which together represent about half the workforce, said the tentative agreement would provide workers with “voluntary assigned days off,” as well the ability to take unpaid time off for medical care. In another win for workers, union leaders said healthcare costs would remain unchanged under the plan. Workers would still receive $5,000 of bonus payments and a 24 percent pay increase over five years under the most recent deal.

The tentative deal will now be voted on by union members. There are no guarantees it will be approved. Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers rejected an earlier agreement on Wednesday, and authorized a strike later this month. On social media, the reaction from workers to the most recent deal has been mixed with some expressing cautious optimism and others a sense that union leaders failed them. 

It’s baffling how many pundits and politicos want to weight in on this railroad deal before the rank-and-file have been able to see the details and decide if it’s acceptable.

Just hours after federal agents entered Mar-a-Lago on August 8 to seize highly classified national security documents, Rep. Paul Gosar urged a fight to the finish. “The FBI raid on Trump’s home tells us one thing,” the far-right Arizona congressman tweeted. “Failure is not an option. We must destroy the FBI.”

Three days later, an Ohio man named Ricky Shiffer donned tactical gear, armed himself with an AR-15, and went to the FBI field office in Cincinnati. After failing to breach the facility, he fled and later died in a shootout with law enforcement. Shiffer was a frequent user of Trump’s Truth Social site, where the ex-president has kept up steady attacks on political opponents and the Justice Department and FBI. Shiffer had posted about imminent violence, telling fellow Trump supporters to be ready “to jump into civil war.”

“People, this is it,” Shiffer wrote shortly after the Mar-a-Lago news broke. A Navy veteran who claimed he was also at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, he called for stocking up at gun stores with “whatever you need to be ready for combat.” He also said “patriots are heading to Palm Beach” and should kill any federal agents who try to stop them.

Was Shiffer spurred to attack the FBI by the statements from Trump and Gosar? It’s hard to know, and that’s no accident. Shiffer’s actions point to a rhetorical method experts call “stochastic terrorism,” whereby a leader vilifies a person or group in ways likely to instigate random supporters to attack those targets, while the instigator maintains a veneer of plausible deniability. Trump made this form of incitement a hallmark of his presidency, galvanizing extremists by railing against and dehumanizing his “enemies.” The country saw the devastating consequences when his supporters stormed Congress to obstruct certification of the presidential election. And now a growing number of Republicans are emulating Trump’s technique.

“While these attacks may defy specific predictability,” threat assessment experts Molly Amman and Reid Meloy wrote in a 2021 study in the journal Perspectives on Terrorism, “their likelihood is greatly increased by the public demon­ization process.” Repetition and saturation through social media and news coverage further amplifies the effect, they observed.

In a letter sent to the president on Wednesday, nearly half of American governors—all Republican—voiced their opposition to Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, announced last month.

“We fundamentally oppose your plan to force American taxpayers to pay off the student loan debt of an elite few,” they write in the letter.

The main argument is that Biden’s student debt forgiveness will harm lower-income families by forcing their hard-earned dollars to go to repaying the debts of America’s wealthiest, including high-salary lawyers and doctors who hold debt from graduate degrees.

“The top 20 percent of earning households hold $3 in student debt for every $1 held by the bottom quintile, generating a lopsided reality where the wealthy benefit at the expense of the working,” the governors write in their letter. “Simply put, your plan rewards the rich and punishes the poor.”

But this argument misses the fact that Biden’s debt forgiveness project includes two different elements aimed specifically at preventing America’s wealthiest from obtaining debt forgiveness, instead restricting the program to middle- and lower-income families.

Rail workers across the country may be on the verge of going on strike for the first time in three decades—a decision that would immediately cripple supply chains and cause billions in economic losses per day. Workers could walk off the job, or companies could lock them out, as soon as Friday if a deal isn’t reached. 

The dispute is not about pay, but the day-to-day indignities of working in the industry. Rail workers often don’t have weekends, get no sick days, and say that taking the time to care for themselves and their families can lead to being fired. As engineer Ross Grooters puts it, workers are “just fighting for the basic right to be able to be people outside of the railroad.”

The White House has been scrambling to try to avoid a strike that would upend the country’s economy in the lead-up to the midterm elections, and President Joe Biden has been in touch with unions and railroad companies, Politico reports. A shutdown could disrupt shipments of everything from coal and lumber to food and the chlorine used to treat wastewater. Amtrak trains that rely on freight carriers’ tracks are already being canceled.  

Failing to reach a deal by Friday does not guarantee a strike, since both sides could agree to extend negotiations. But administration officials are developing contingency plans to try to keep essential goods moving in the event of a shutdown, an outcome that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has said is “not acceptable.”

Unionized workers and rail companies have been in contract negotiations for more than two years. In July, Biden established a Presidential Emergency Board tasked with providing recommendations on how to end the dispute. Last month, the board proposed pay increases of 24 percent over five years, additional bonuses, and one extra personal day a year. It also called for lifting a cap on workers’ health care premiums, and did not back workers’ calls for sick days and less-punitive attendance policies.