Morning Memo comes to you today from the frigid shore of Lake Mendota, where one of the kids graduated from UW this weekend.
Must Read
The New York Times is out with an incredible exposé on an incoming GOP member of Congress from Long Island who does not at all appear to be who he says he is.
Rep.-elect George Santos (R-NY) first hit Morning Memo’s radar a week ago, when he was one of the attendees at the New York City gala where Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) bragged that if she and Steve Bannon had been in charge on Jan. 6, they would have coup’d more effectively.
Now the Times has a blistering examination of Santos’ biography. Let’s just say who he claimed to be on the campaign trail doesn’t match with the newspaper’s reporting.
Let’s start with his work history. NYT could find no record of him actually holding claimed jobs at Citigroup or Goldman Sachs.
Education? No record of him attending Baruch College in NYC as he has claimed, the NYT reported.
A tax-exempt charity he claimed to have started? No record of it having registered in New York or New Jersey, and the IRS had no record of it, the paper found. A supposed beneficiary of a 2017 fundraiser for the group, who declined to be named by the paper, said she never received any of the funds, only excuses from Santos.
The kicker is criminal charges for check fraud in Brazil!
There’s much more. It’s worth a read.
Big Day For The Jan. 6 Committee
The Jan. 6 committee will meet this afternoon to vote on releasing its final report to the public. The committee is also expected to recommend criminal referrals arising from the effort to overturn the 2020 election. The exact sequence of events this week remains a bit opaque as the committee winds up its work before the next Congress. Look for a TPM live blog today to cover the minute-to-minute developments.
The Meadows Texts Series Wraps Up
The concluding installments in TPM’s series on the Meadows Texts:
Hunter Walker was on with MSNBC’s Yasmin Vossoughian:
"A strategy for overturning the will of the people." @hunterw speaks about the 2,319 text messages Mark Meadows turned over to the January 6 committee pic.twitter.com/PhH7GksFW3
GOP Rep Downplays Role In Meadows Texts: ‘I Was The Messenger In This’
Rep. Greg Murphy (R-NC) denied to a local paper having any substantive communications with Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows about overturning the 2020 election.
Here’s a sample of what TPM reported on Murphy’s texts to Meadows:
The next day, Rep. Greg Murphy (R-NC) sent Meadows a couple of texts with another version of the state legislature strategy . … Murphy’s text was largely copied and pasted from a Revolver article that claimed “The Vote Has Been Hopelessly Contaminated. Republican State Legislatures Must Now Move to Appoint Pro-Trump Electors.”
“Why are we not pursuing this strategy?” Murphy asked before sharing text from the Revolver article, and adding, “Please pay close attention to the very last paragraph.”
Here’s how Murphy spun it to the local paper:
“It is literally a copy-and-paste from something someone sent me with a formal legal opinion to pass on to Mark Meadows because I had his contact information,” he said. “This is what was sent to me to pass on. I was the messenger in this.”
More Reaction And Fallout To The Meadows Texts
The impact of the Meadows Texts series continued to ripple outward:
Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA), who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, described Rep. Ralph Norman’s call for “Marshall Law” as “obscene” and “unprecedented.”
In an open letter, a bipartisan group of more than 30 former congresspersons called for ethics investigations of members of the House who played a role in the events leading up to and including the Jan. 6 attack.
Other Coverage Of The Meadows Texts
Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice: “Hunter Walker on Mark Meadows’s texts and what he expects from the final J6 report”
Alexandra Petri: “Help us, auto-correct. You are the last best hop for democracy.”
Todd Zwillich: “The texts show various levels of cheerleading, crackpottery, magical thinking, and authoritarian planning on the part of nearly three dozen GOP lawmakers in Meadows’ contacts. The vast majority of them—Norman, Greene, Rep. Scott Perry (who I’m betting you’ll be hearing a lot about on Monday—are all returning to Congress, ready to take power in January and wielding muscular influence over GOP leaders. Those leaders have already promised to do all they can to distort and erase the truth of Jan. 6 from the national memory.”
Francis Wilkinson: “The texts show a group effort, by people who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, to locate American democracy’s weak points and exploit them to overthrow a democratically elected government.”
The Meadville Tribune: “Text messages from three Republican congressmen from Pennsylvania are among a trove of texts exchanged with former President Donald Trump’s last White House chief of staff concerning attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to a report from online news outlet Talking Points Memo.”
Sid Schwab: “Reading the TPM series, there’s no denying the seditious depth of their intentions; their undisguised disregard for democratic processes; their willingness to turn to violence and totalitarianism. Perhaps surprising to people less intent on observation is the amount of paranoid, conspiratorial, uninformed insanity of those people. Elected people. Reelected; not, presumably, in spite of their derision of democracy, but because of it.”
Mar-a-Lago Case Has Quieted Down
I suspect this is the calm before the storm of indictments.
After a flurry of activity in the Mar-a-Lago documents case — including Special Counsel Jack Smith taking over the case, and a federal appeals court shutting down the special master sideshow — things have been quiet publicly, even though the end of the special master fiasco meant the Justice Department could resume its investigation.
In the meantime, some big picture coverage:
WaPo: How Trump jettisoned restraints at Mar-a-Lago and prompted legal peril
NYT: Inside Mar-a-Lago, Where Thousands Partied Near Secret Files
Proud Boys Seditious Conspiracy Trial Starts
Jury selection begins today in the trial of five Proud Boys, including its former chairman Enrique Tarrio.
A Special Kind Of Stupid
A Jan. 6 riot defendant from Tennessee is facing new charges after he allegedly schemed to kill the FBI agents investigating his case and to attack the FBI office in Knoxville. A cooperating witness apparently recorded a call with 33-year-old Edward Kelley, who has been charged along with an alleged co-conspirator:
On December 14, 2022, at approximately 3:45 PM, Witness 1 had a recorded call with KELLEY over Service 1. KELLEY started the call by saying: “I just sent Austin [CARTER] a message, here’s your course of action: if I’m extradited to DC or you don’t hear about my status within 24 or 48 hours of my, if they are coming to arrest me again, start it. You guys are taking them out at their office. What you and Austin [CARTER] need to do is recruit as many as you can, call [UI] who you need to, and you’re going to attack their office. If the same thing happens to any of you guys, I’m doing the same thing, okay?” Witness 1 replied, “just to make sure I’m understanding which office, we’re going after the Knox one, right?” KELLEY replied “yes.” KELLEY further told Witness 1 “once you guys have enough people … you don’t have time to train or coordinate, but every hit has to hurt, every hit has to hurt.”
I know we’ve been a bit Elon-centric here of late, but the latest developments should prompt us to look to some of the core challenges behind what we now call social media. The Musk saga is comparatively simple: a middle-aged buffoon on one-half midlife crisis, one-half power trip running roughshod over everything. But outside such extreme cases there are more basic challenges. The essence of the social media business proposition is to be the venue for literally everyone talking about everything while managing the venue through automated processes which keep the staff capacity and costs low. Put a different way, success means scale: revenues growing exponentially while costs grow arithmetically.
It’s been quite a week. On Monday, we began publishing a series of stories based on the 2,319 text messages former President Trump’s last chief of staff, Mark Meadows, provided to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. “The Meadows Texts” showed the high-level coordination behind the frantic, feverish effort to challenge Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
Over the course of a dozen different stories, we showed you how members of Congress, Trump administration officials, campaign operatives, localpoliticians, an army of lawyers, and at least one CEO schemed behind the scenes to fight the will of the people. TPM obtained these texts from multiple sources and our subsequent reporting identified the people who played leading roles in this effort including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA), and Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA).
This was the political movement that fueled and coincided with the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol that took place on Jan. 6, 2021, as the election was being certified. Our work showed how the challenge to that certification began while the votes were still being counted and continued well after the attack in Washington. The political leaders of this undemocratic campaign may not have broken the windows or brawled with the Capitol Police. But they promoted the baseless conspiracy theories that radicalized and drove the crowds that day. They also conceived of and pursued the extra-legal strategy to stop Congress from certifying the election in the hope that friendly legislatures would overrule the voters and choose their own electors. Additionally, these stories showed the violent rhetoric of the political arm of the election challenge including at least one call for “MARSHALL LAW” from Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) that was an affront to both the English language and American ideals.
Despite all of these revelations, we also know these texts were just the tip of the iceberg. They are the messages Meadows and his legal team provided to the committee. Within that log, there are indications discussions were missing, including conversations that clearly begin without context as well as signs Meadows and his associates moved their communications to encrypted channels. It’s frightening to imagine what might have been contained in the calls and texts we could not see.
Much of the push to reverse the result of the free and fair 2020 election played out in the public eye. Trump spent weeks promoting lies about the vote and his team mounted a wild legal challenge that flailed its way through courts around the country. Over 100 Republican members of Congress objected to the election results at the Capitol on Jan. 6 even after the shocking violence.
Even though the attack on democracy played out live, there has been an ongoing attempt by many on the right to deny the reality of it. Our reporting on Meadows’ text messages showed how this effort to deflect blame began even as the Capitol was still under siege. When we reached out to the various players who conspired to reverse the vote, some attempted to minimize their roles. However, with this series, readers don’t have to take our word for it or theirs. The American public can see the participants in the push to overturn the election in their own words.
This project was a massive effort for TPM. A team of five reporters — myself, Josh Kovensky, Kate Riga, Emine Yücel, and Kaila Philo — all worked to write and report these stories. Over five weeks, we reviewed thousands of messages and burned up the phone lines. This evidence was initially compiled by investigators working with the Jan. 6 committee, but we hope you will agree that our context, analysis, and publication helped make them accessible and understandable.
For me personally, this project is the culmination of nearly two years of extensive reporting on Jan. 6 that included broadcasting from the steps of the Capitol that day and co-writing the book “The Breach” with Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman and staffer for the select committee. Witnessing what happened that day made it quite clear this was one of the most important stories of our time.
It all could have been so much more violent. The bombs placed on Capitol Hill did not go off. Police engaged in hours of hand-to-hand combat, and even though both sides of the fighting were armed, the day ended with only one person shot. Those officers aren’t the only ones who resisted the assault. Around the country and in Washington a handful of officials refused to give in to pressure from Trump and his allies to toss the election results aside. Despite the horrifying violence in the cradle of our democracy, we were relatively lucky on Jan. 6, but there is a real risk in counting on similar good fortune in the future. The violent and authoritarian possibilities created by MAGA conspiracy culture have been laid bare. And, as this series has noted, that movement is not going away.
Helping to lead the reporting team along with our editors David Kurtz, John Light, and Josh Marshall has been a true honor. The impact of TPM’s “The Meadows Texts” series has been clear. Our stories were covered on television and by majormagazines. Reporters expanded on our work with additional analysis. Local news outlets around the country also pressed the various members of Congress named in these stories about their parts in the plotting. And on Thursday, a bipartisan group of over 30 former House members sent a letter calling for an investigation from the Office of Congressional Ethics because, “We now know, for example, that sitting lawmakers corresponded and met with White House officials and allies to plot various prongs of the campaign, including to advocate that the president declare martial law.” The story even transcended the political world and penetrated pop culture.
Through all of this, the most important impact was the support we received from TPM readers. Our subscribers have enabled us to put together a team that is capable of a large, complex undertaking like this one. It won’t be the last one and we hope you will join TPM and help us continue this work.
“The Meadows Texts” did not just involve written stories. As we sought to inform the public about the contents of these messages and the coordination of the election challenge, our tech and design team — Derick Dirmaier, Christine Frapech, Jacob Harris, and Matt Wozniak — worked to create solutions that allowed us to publish Meadows’ messages as they might have appeared in your phone.
Experiencing these texts in their natural form — typos and all — is crucial to appreciating just how disturbing they were. The various conspiracies and anti-democratic schemes were thrown out with a carelessness and utter lack of intellectual rigor. This was a coup attempt that sought to evade checks, balances, and spellcheck.
The TPM spirit has always been able to draw humor from even the darkest moments. We aim to provide clear-eyed original reporting on extremist threats that also appreciates the absurdity inherent in the American fringe. But make no mistake, this was all deadly serious. Inside Meadows’ phone we saw a plot against our democracy. We can’t look away.
Asbestos is only one of many toxic substances that are linked to problems like cancers, genetic mutations and fetal harm and that other countries have banned, but the United States has not. That includes substances like hexabromocyclododecane, a flame retardant used in some building materials that can damage fetal development and disrupt thyroid hormones, and trichloroethylene, a toxic industrial degreaser that has contaminated communities, including a whole neighborhood that suffered a string of tragic pediatric cancer cases.
Michal Freedhoff, the head of chemical regulation at the Environmental Protection Agency, concedes to decades of regulatory inaction. She says a chronic lack of funding and staffing, plus roadblocks created by the Trump administration, have hamstrung the agency in recent years. Still, Freedhoff believes in the regulatory system’s ability to protect the public from dangerous substances and says the EPA is “moving as quickly as we can to put protections into place that have been desperately needed.”
But the flaws of the American chemical regulatory apparatus run deeper than funding or the decisions of the last presidential administration. ProPublica spoke with environmental experts around the world and delved into a half century of legislation, lawsuits, EPA documents, oral histories, chemical databases and global regulatory records to construct a blueprint of a failed system. This is how the U.S. became a global laggard in chemical regulation.
1. The Chemical Industry Helped Write the Toxic Substances Law
The Toxic Substances Control Act authorizes the EPA to ban or restrict the use of chemicals that pose serious health risks. But industry magnates were so intimately involved in the drafting of the original 1976 bill that the EPA’s first assistant administrator for its chemical division joked the law was “written by industry” and should have been named after the DuPont executive who went over the text line by line.
The resulting statute allowed more than 60,000 chemicals to stay on the market without a review of their health risks. It even required the EPA, a public health agency, to always choose regulations that were the “least burdensome” to companies. These two words would doom American chemical regulation for decades.
In 1989, the EPA announced after 10 years and millions of dollars of work that it was banning asbestos. Companies that used asbestos sued the EPA, and in 1991, a federal court ruled that despite all of the work it had done, the EPA did not sufficiently prove that a ban was the least burdensome option. The rule was overturned.
It wasn’t until 2016 that Congress amended the law to cut the “least burdensome” language. The bill was hailed as an extraordinary compromise between health-focused lawmakers and the chemical industry. It created a schedule where a small list of high-priority chemicals would be reviewed every few years; in 2016, the first 10 were selected, including asbestos. The EPA would then have about three years to assess the chemicals and another two years to finalize regulations on them.
Behind the scenes, though, the bill text began not as a reformative measure, but as a company-friendly statute that would help industry avoid some regulations. Many public health advocates and several progressive lawmakers did not support it. Then-Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., announced at one point that in the metadata of a draft of the bill she had received, the American Chemistry Council, an industry lobbying group, was listed as the document’s originator. “Maybe I am old fashioned,” Boxer said, “but I do not believe that a regulated industry should be so intimately involved in writing a bill that regulates them.” (The ACC and a congressional sponsor of the bill denied her claim.)
Freedhoff, who was previously a lead Senate negotiator for the new chemicals bill, said that when the bill was finally signed into law a year later, it went from being a piece of legislation that was mostly supported by Republicans to one with wide bipartisan support. Both the ACC and health advocacy organizations were at the final signing ceremony, she added.
Some experts point out though, that during the legislative process, the chemical industry prevented the inclusion of some stronger regulations and collected several key wins, including the federal preemption of state-level chemical regulations. In the years before the amendment passed, progressive states like California and Vermont had stopped waiting for the EPA to regulate chemicals and started imposing their own restrictions. Under the new law, federal restrictions would overrule those state-level statutes in certain cases, creating a simpler regulatory structure that was easier for companies to comply with.
2. Following Early Failures, the EPA Lost Its Resolve
When the EPA failed to ban asbestos in 1991, some experts say the agency could have tried again. In the court’s decision, the judge did provide a road map for future bans, which would require the agency to do an analysis of other regulatory options, like import limits or warning labels, to prove they wouldn’t be adequate. “That to me is so telling,” said Eve Gartner, an environmental attorney who worked on the 1991 case and is now a managing attorney at Earthjustice. The EPA “clearly could have taken the steps it needed to ban asbestos in the ’90s.”
But EPA officials froze, believing it would be nearly impossible to prove a chemical should be banned under the “least burdensome” constraints. Many of the most dangerous substances, which faced bans in other countries, remained on the market for decades.
Among them was trichloroethylene, or TCE, a clear, colorless liquid with a sweet odor that resembles chloroform. Its chemical properties make it suited for a number of tasks, and it was used as everything from an anesthetic used during childbirth to a solvent used in the production of decaf coffee to, most commonly, a degreaser for cleaning machinery in factories. But its properties also made it toxic and carcinogenic to humans. Because of the health effects, the Food and Drug Administration banned the use of TCE in medicines, anesthetics and food products in 1977. The European Union placed TCE under its highest level of restriction almost 10 years ago. But the EPA never banned its use in workplaces and industrial factories, including some plants that let TCE leak into the environment.
In 2014, Kari Rhinehart, a nurse from Franklin, Indiana, was at work when she got a call about her daughter, Emma Grace Findley. Doctors had found signs of swelling during the 13-year-old’s annual eye exam and said she needed further testing. She was taken to the same emergency room where Rhinehart worked and prepped for an MRI. When a tech returned to inject more dye, Rhinehart, who held her daughter’s hand as she lay inside the machine, started sobbing silently. She knew that Emma Grace had a brain tumor. It turned out to be glioblastoma multiforme, a rare cancer mostly seen in adults over 50. Only three months after the diagnosis, a week before Christmas, Emma Grace died at home in her mother’s arms.
After WTHR, a local news station, discovered that many children in the community were developing abnormal cancers, Rhinehart learned that sites near her home were polluted with TCE. Even though they had been investigated by EPA, government-ordered tests showed they were still contaminating the air and groundwater. Parents demanded government action. Authorities reopened an investigation and ordered new cleanup efforts, including the replacement of thousands of feet of sewer lines. (Because the causes of most pediatric cancers haven’t been scientifically proven, no direct link has been established between the childhood cancer cases and TCE.)
After the “least burdensome” language was removed from the law in 2016, the EPA named TCE as one of its 10 high-priority chemicals and tried to propose a ban on high-risk uses that year. But the agency under Trump shelved the proposal following industry complaints and decided to reassess the risk of the chemical. Then, in 2021, the Biden EPA restarted the effort after finding that the previous administration had ignored ways the public could be exposed to chemicals like TCE. “It would have been a disservice to the people that we are charged with protecting” to not take the time to fix those issues before moving forward, said Freedhoff.
In July, the agency published a draft version of a new assessment, which found that 52 of 54 uses of TCE present an unreasonable risk to human health. The EPA still needs to finalize that assessment before it can start the yearslong process of writing a regulation.
Asked about the delays, Rhinehart said, “How does the EPA say with a straight face their job is to protect human health?”
3. Chemicals Are Considered Innocent Until Proven Guilty
For decades, the EU and the United States followed the same “risk-based” approach to regulation, which puts the burden on government officials to prove that a chemical poses unreasonable health risks before restricting it. The process can take years while evidence of public harm continues to mount.
In 2007, the EU switched to a more “hazard-based” approach, which puts the burden on chemical companies to prove that their products are safe when evidence shows a chemical can cause significant harm like cancer or reproductive damage. Named REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals), the new system started by requiring the registration of every chemical that is imported or manufactured at a volume of more than 1 metric ton annually. Under a “no data, no market” policy, companies would be required to submit toxicological studies on those chemicals. And if those studies or other scientific research showed that a chemical could significantly harm human health, it could be prioritized for regulation.
Some experts say REACH isn’t perfect and there are ways for companies to subvert science or mislead regulators. For example, because the EU receives large amounts of information on thousands of chemicals, companies have been able to submit improper data or conduct inadequate testing without their actions being noticed for some time.
Nonetheless, the new system has fundamentally changed regulation in Europe. Under this approach, the EU has successfully banned or restricted more than a thousand chemicals.
While the Europeans discussed a hazard-based approach, the United States Congress was doing the same. Then-Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, introduced the Kid Safe Chemicals Act in 2005, which would require companies to reassess the safety of their chemicals every three years. The bill also required the EPA to assess 300 chemicals by 2010, and thousands more by 2020. Lobbyists and industry-friendly lawmakers were quick to fight back. They argued that this approach would ruin innovation in the United States and only a risk-based one was acceptable.
“Over and over again, we’ve seen this fail,” said Anna Lennquist, a senior toxicologist at ChemSec, an international nonprofit that works on chemical safety. “For the most harmful substances, the only way to ensure there is no risk from them is to ban them. That’s one main difference between the U.S. and EU.”
Neither the 2005 bill nor similar efforts over the years gained traction. Lautenberg died in 2013 before any reform passed in Congress. The 2016 law, a bill that maintained the risk-based approach with some improvements, was named after him.
Experts say a risk-based reform was likely the only type that could have passed in the U.S. legislature. The chemical industry has spent millions of dollars lobbying lawmakers to support its fight against stronger restrictions. The ACC alone has been one of the top lobbying organizations in the country in recent years.
Asked if the EPA needed a new stronger law to better regulate chemicals, Freedhoff said no and argued that the 2016 law “hasn’t been given half of a chance to succeed” because of a lack of funding and resources.
4. The EPA Mostly Regulates Chemicals One by One
Six years after the reform led the EPA to create a priority system to keep chemical regulations moving, the agency is behind on all such rules. So far, it has only proposed one ban, on asbestos, and the agency told ProPublica it would still be almost a year before that is finalized. In June, Freedhoff testified to the Senate Environment and Public Works committee: “I think we can all recognize that the law is not yet working as everyone had hoped.” Speaking about the chemicals the agency selected in 2016 to be a priority, Freedhoff admitted that, without additional resources, the EPA would “not get more than a handful of those rules on the books before 2025 or beyond.”
Freedhoff told ProPublica the delays are not caused by a lack of commitment and the agency’s entire staff is working to “make sure that people are protected from these dangers.” But she pointed out that the chemical division’s workload increased exponentially in 2016, and funding has mostly remained flat since then. “The fundamental truth is [the Toxic Substances law] has existed in its current form for almost six and a half years now and we still have the budget of the old broken law,” she said. In the EPA’s 2023 budget request, it asked for an additional $63 million and 200 new employees to better handle the workload.
A key reason the system is moving so slowly is that the law requires that every chemical go through a yearslong process, and the underfunded EPA division must face industry resistance for each one. “The whole regulatory process is designed to be slow and to be slowed down by those opposed to regulation,” said Joel Tickner, a professor of environmental health at University of Massachusetts, Lowell and a leading expert on chemical policy. “Frankly, unless EPA doubled their size, they can’t do much with the resources they have.”
Chemical company representatives and industry groups like the ACC have challenged the risk evaluations for many of the first 10 chemicals labeled as high priority. The organizations have submitted lengthy public comments accusing the EPA of conducting unscientific assessments and asked for extended time frames that further delayed regulation. When the EPA updated some risk assessments from the Trump administration to include risks from air and water exposure for chemicals like TCE, the industry groups were quick to challenge the agency with a 34-page rebuttal, accusing it of not following the letter of the law.
The industry has also vehemently argued against a full asbestos ban. Trade groups like the ACC insisted that workers were protected from the dangers of asbestos. Industry-friendly scientists wrote papers accusing the EPA of overestimating the substance’s dangers. And 12 Republican attorneys general wrote to the head of the agency questioning the EPA’s legal authority to pursue the ban.
Even when the EPA used its new authority under the 2016 law to have companies conduct toxicology tests of 11 prioritized chemicals, some industry organizations sued the agency in an attempt to invalidate the orders. One trade group sued over testing of 1,1,2-trichloroethane, a possible human carcinogen that is released in huge quantities by plants all across Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.” In its complaint, the group argued the order was“arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and otherwise not in accordance with the law.” The lawsuit is still ongoing. The testing for all of these chemicals was originally due to be done in December 2021. So far, testing has been completed on only one of the 11 chemicals.
“The conveyor belt is sort of stopping,” said Robert Sussman, an attorney who served as a deputy administrator for the EPA during the Clinton administration. “The sobering reality is that [the Toxic Substances Control Act] was supposed to change that with the new law, but now when you take a step back, that was maybe unrealistic to expect.”
Meanwhile, the EU has authored a new plan to regulate chemicals even faster by targeting large groups of dangerous substances that can cause cancers, genetic mutations, endocrine damage, immune system damage and more. If it’s enacted, it would lead to bans of another 5,000 chemicals by 2030, according to the European Environmental Bureau, a nongovernmental organization.
5. The EPA Employs Industry-Friendly Scientists as Regulators
The EPA has a long history of hiring scientists and top officials from the companies they are supposed to regulate, allowing industry to sway the agency’s science from the inside.
For example, in 2010, the agency worked with a panel of scientists to evaluate the risks of hexavalent chromium, the chemical featured in the movie “Erin Brockovich.” But the Center for Public Integrity found that several scientists on that panel had actually defended PG&E, the company that poisoned a community with the substance. Some of those scientists disagreed with this characterization and one said he had gone through the EPA’s conflict-of-interest vetting. In 2017, the EPA hired a new top official at its chemical division who had been an executive at the ACC for five years. The New York Times found that she helped direct much of the Trump administration’s decisions to deregulate chemicals.
And then there’s Todd Stedeford. A lawyer and toxicologist, Stedeford has been hired by the EPA on three separate occasions. During his two most recent periods of employment at the agency — from 2011 to 2017 and from 2019 to 2021 — he was hired from corporate employers who use or manufacture chemicals the EPA regulates.
Before 2011, Stedeford worked for Albemarle Corp., which was among the largest makers of flame retardants in the world. The chemicals, which are added to furniture, electronics and other products to help prevent fires, have been associated with neurological harm, hormone disruption, and cancers. A 2012 investigation by the Chicago Tribune revealed that Albemarle and two other large manufacturers founded, funded and controlled a front group that deceived the public about the safety and effectiveness of flame retardants used in furniture. Albemarle argued its products were safe, effective and extensively evaluated by government agencies. When Stedeford left the job defending flame retardants, he went on to head the EPA program that assessed the risks of chemicals including those same flame retardants, the Tribune reported. In response, Stedeford told ProPublica that he had recused himself from work on flame retardants when he joined the agency.
Then Stedeford left the EPA in 2017 and went to work for Japan Tobacco International, where he defended the company’s “novel tobacco products,” such as vape pens and e-cigarettes. When he returned to the EPA in 2019, Stedeford became involved in a scientific project with a former Japan Tobacco colleague that looked into how to evaluate the dangers of chemicals in e-cigarettes. Stedeford said that he was hired to advance “new approach methodologies” at the agency and that the project fell under that purview and there was nothing wrong with that.
Some close watchers of the agency say people like Stedeford epitomize the EPA’s revolving-door problem. “He represents the sense that industry science is the best science, which is very much in line with regulators deferring to industry-funded studies showing there isn’t cause for concern,” said Alissa Cordner, an academic who wrote the book “Toxic Safety: Flame Retardants, Chemical Controversies, and Environmental Health.”
In response, Freedhoff said she didn’t believe her current staff was “corrupt, or unduly responsive to industry” and that she has seen “the dedication and the commitment and the passion that the career staff here feel for the work that they’ve been charged with doing.” She declined to comment on Stedeford, who was last hired by the previous administration.
When he was hired again in 2019, Stedeford was in a pivotal position to influence how the new chemical regulation law would be implemented. Whistleblowers have accused Stedeford of changing the findings of health assessments of new chemicals that were being evaluated before being allowed on the market, minimizing and sometimes deleting hazards listed in the documents, according to The Intercept. The EPA’s Office of Inspector General is now investigating those claims. Stedeford declined to comment on the accusations.
During this stint at the EPA, Stedeford was also tasked with leading an effort to update the agency’s approach to assessing polymers, chemicals that make up the vast majority of plastics. Polymers can cause “lung overload,” a condition in which tiny particles accumulate in the lungs, potentially causing chronic lung diseases. The EPA had Stedeford work with companies that make these chemicals on a paper about lung toxicity and, in October 2020, Stedeford proposed a new policy based on their unpublished research.
The change was set to affect how dozens of new plastics were assessed, increasing the amount of the polymers that it was considered safe to inhale, according to a complaint submitted by EPA scientists who opposed the policy. (Stedeford told ProPublica that he disagreed with those scientists and that he had told agency staffers they didn’t need to use the new approach if they felt it was inappropriate in a particular case.) After the complaint was filed, the agency withdrew the policy.
Stedeford left the EPA again in 2021 to work for a law firm that represents chemical companies. Emails obtained by ProPublica show he continued to work with agency staff on the paper about lung overload. Stedeford said “there’s nothing untoward about that” because he had “contributed scholarship” to the paper while at the agency. The EPA said “employees that worked on this paper did so with the full knowledge and support of their management at the time the work was occurring. Other co-authors on the paper include scientific experts from industry and NGOs.”
When businessman Marty Davis made his way into the Oval Office in mid-December 2020, he brought a blanket for former First Lady Melania Trump. Davis, the CEO of a quartz countertop company, also brought a series of wild election conspiracy theories for Melania’s husband.
Davis’ meeting with former President Donald Trump, which has not previously been reported, was revealed in the tranche of 2,319 text messages that the former president’s last chief of staff, Mark Meadows, turned over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
TPM has obtained these messages and analyzed them for our in-depth series, “The Meadows Texts.” While our stories thus far have largely focused on the members of Congress who wrote Meadows about efforts to overturn the election, the text log also shows a wide array of people were corresponding with Trump’s chief of staff about efforts to challenge his loss.
Meadows received messages from every corner of the right-wing ecosystem. The election conspiracy paranoia and schemes to challenge the vote count came from a diverse cast of characters ranging from professional political players to rank-and-file party loyalists.
Davis is a prime example of one group that had a large presence in the text log: businesspeople with a direct line to Meadows. And Davis — quite literally — seems to have gone further than any of them.
Based on the texts, Davis’ trip to the Oval Office began as he repeatedly peppered Meadows with advice and encouragement to “expose the corrupt election and reverse this result by exposing illegal votes.” In a message to Meadows, Davis indicated he was pressing at least six Republican lawmakers to aggressively challenge Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
Davis is a prolific donor to Republican politicians. On Dec. 9, 2020, as a slew of Trump allies around the country were engaged in efforts to overturn the vote, Davis indicated he was pressing various contacts to get himself a White House meeting. As he sought to enlist Trump’s chief of staff in this effort, Davis dangled the possibility he would host Meadows on a “goose hunting trip.”
12/9/20 10:28 p.m.
Hi Mark How are you? Lewandowski, Ronna and a Caroline have all been trying to pin down a oval for me with POTUS They have Molly in the loop Can you help push it over Id like to come in next couple days I want to thank him and tell him what Im doing to fight now for him! Also, heavily support 2024 if he gets screwed on this thing. Also talked with Jim Jordan on various matters and on POTUS visit too and then will connect with Jim as well… Thx Marty Davis Following all this More importantly We go goose hunting in Saskatchewan or pheasants in South Dakota.. Ill arrange at our camps You told me at my home u love to hunt
Marty Davis
Davis’ pitch was evidently successful. Seven days later he wrote another message to Meadows describing his sitdown with Trump. Based on that message, Trump had told Davis he wanted to seize voting machines “for evidence.” Davis also seemed to feel Trump was fixated on the thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories involving Dominion, a voting systems company that loomed large in the imaginations of many 2020 election deniers. Countless experts — including multiple Trump administration officials — have testified the claims about Dominion had no merit and even Meadows, in some of his texts, indicated he was dubious of the claims about the company. Ultimately, Dominion filed a series of defamation suits against Trump allies who pushed the theory. While some of those cases are ongoing, Dominion has had some success in initial court decisions. Davis wrote Meadows indicating he was concerned about Trump’s focus on Dominion. He was eager for Trump to get behind other, more run-of-the-mill right-wing conspiracy theories about fraud.
12/16/20 6:46 p.m.
Mark I told Potus there was extensive cheating in Minnesota And there was He asked me to get voting Machines for evidence Machines were not the issue in Minny We had very few Dominium machines in Minnesota! Point was not machines in Minnesota! Cheating was by multiple and egregious ballot creation …. And so in the mail-in voting and ballot harvesting ..!! Not by the machines ! FYI JUST DONT WANT POTUS TO MISUNDERSTAND THAT THE CHEATING WAS FROM ILLEGAL VOTEs from harvest and mail in BEST Marty
Marty Davis
“Thanks,” Meadows replied.
Reached by phone on Friday, Davis initially did not want to discuss his meeting with Trump.
“I don’t want to talk about it. It was a courtesy call,” he told TPM.
When reminded of his text messages, Davis admitted he visited the Oval Office to thank Trump and give “a blanket” to Melania. He also said that he and Trump discussed the election. Davis indicated he was focused on concerns raised by the controversial right-wing group Project Veritas about alleged “ballot harvesting” which the group claimed to connect to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). The group’s supposed exposé contained no evidence and was later labeled a “coordinated disinformation campaign” by experts. Thanks to Davis, that alleged disinformation made it straight to the president’s desk.
“I gave information or input to what I thought they needed to do to investigate it,” Davis said. “I thought they should have had hearings on that.”
Meadows and Trump did not respond to requests for comment. For more information about the story behind the text log and our procedures for publishing the messages, read the introduction to this series.
Along with people from the business world and from Congress, Meadows received messages from current and former members of the Trump administration offering advice on the efforts to challenge the election and boost claims of voter fraud. Meadows’ immediate predecessor, former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, is one of the Trump White House alums who weighed in.
Twenty days after the 2020 presidential election, Mulvaney reached out to Meadows with a plan modeled after the official response to the Kennedy assassination.
11/23/20 12:17 p.m.
Random thought to add to your quiver:��an executive order creating a bipartisan commission on election fraud. Won’t solve the problems now, but may 1) prevent them in 2024 and 2) who knows? vindicate what he has been saying all along?
Mick Mulvaney
11/23/20 12:17 p.m.
The Warren Commission was created by executive order.��Trump could do it.��Biden would never have the balls to reverse it.
Mick Mulvaney
There was no response from Meadows in the text message logs. TPM independently verified Mulvaney’s phone number. He did not respond to a request for comment.
While Mulvaney’s “Warren Commission” proposal was certainly tinged with conspiratorial logic, it also seemed to acknowledge Trump’s loss. The plan seemed to be something of an off ramp, a way for Trump to save face and air his baseless claims about voter fraud while still stepping aside. Mulvaney’s planning for Joe Biden to take office stands in stark contrast to his successor’s extended efforts to challenge the vote. Mulvaney was one of the individuals in the text log who messaged Meadows on Jan. 6 to express dismay and urge Trump to calm the crowds.
Russell Vought, who is the former director of the powerful Office of Management and Budget, also texted Meadows. Vought seemingly pressed Meadows to pursue a variation of the alternate electors strategy through which Republican-controlled legislatures could subvert the vote in key swing states.
11/9/20 5:01 p.m.
I have not heard whether we are seriously considering the state legislature strategy. If we are, we should get that out there bc it would change the narrative from being a no win court strategy. Similar to our vacate strategy on boehner, those GOP legislatures would have no choice to back and the media would be unhinged
Russell Vought
Meadows seemed to be on board with Vought’s plan.
“Agreed,” Meadows replied.
Vought, whose phone number could not be independently verified by TPM, did not respond to requests for comment.
John Calvin Fleming straddles two of the worlds represented in Meadows’ text log. He was a Trump administration official and, prior to joining the White House, Fleming served in Congress where he represented Louisiana’s Fourth Congressional District. Along with Meadows, Mulvaney, and six other members, he founded the far-right House Freedom Caucus in 2015.
While there were other former members of Congress in the text log, Fleming’s contribution stands out. He exchanged over 20 messages with Meadows where he aired fevered fears about “fraudulent voting activities,” “corrupt commissioners,” and “PHANTOM VOTES.” Fleming also described coordinating with Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX) on efforts to dispute the election. On Nov. 21, 2020, Fleming sent Meadows a pair of links. One was a transcript of the late right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh railing against Dominion; the other was a clip from Rumble, a video platform popular among the far right, that Fleming said showed “how the Dominion algorithm worked.” Fleming followed that up with his own narration of the wild theory.
11/21/20 2:07 p.m.
Basically, the system was set up so that Biden would make up the difference in votes beginning the early morning of Nov 4. There were preset ratios of Trump to Biden votes to be flipped for groups of precincts. But the system repeatedly rolled the ratios from one precinct to another within the group to avoid detection and suspicion. Usually there was less than 5 mins between precincts suddenly changing to the ratio from the previous precinct.
John Fleming
11/21/20 2:08 p.m.
Various odd ratios were used to avoid detection, but they all favored Biden of course.
John Fleming
Eight months after sending these texts Fleming joined a lobbying firm, The McKeon Group.
Reached by phone on Friday, Fleming described himself as “curious like everybody else” and said he simply “passed any suggestions on that may have been brought up.”
“I didn’t then and I don’t now have any information that would say one way or another on any type of anomalies or abnormalities that may have happened during the election,” Fleming said.
Trump campaign aides were another major source of the election conspiracy theories and strategies to overturn the vote that made their way to Meadows’ phone. John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster with a reputation for producing questionable numbers who worked for the Trump campaign during the 2020 race, sent Meadows multiple paranoid messages with concerns about voter fraud in ballot drop boxes. He also encouraged the legal challenges and urged Trump not to admit defeat in a text on Dec. 2, 2020, just shy of one month after Election Day.
“Any questions just call. Keep fighting. President can’t concede to keep legal standing to get to fraud,” McLaughlin wrote.
McLaughlin, whose phone number could not be independently verified by TPM, did not respond to requests for comment.
Along with Trump’s allies in Washington, local politicians messaged Meadows to provide advice, encouragement, and offers of support. One of them was Lance Dillenschneider, who recently mounted an unsuccessful bid for a spot in the Jackson County, Missouri, legislature.
Lance Dillenschneider and Storm Dillenschneider attend “Country Comes To Mar-a-Lago” at Mar-a-Lago on February 23, 2019 in Palm Beach, FL. (Photo by Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
According to Dillenschneider, he met Meadows while on vacation at the Breakers, a luxe hotel near Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida. Dillenschneider told TPM that he struck up a conversation with Meadows after recognizing him from the television. He said they had plans to meet again in the nation’s capital.
“He was going to give me the — at some point we were going to get the insider tour of Washington and COVID hit so that never happened,” Dillenschneider explained to TPM. “Then, of course, the election. So, consequently, I never got my insider tour.”
In the weeks after the election, Dillenschneider wrote Meadows to offer support, prayers, and baseless allegations about the vote.
11/17/20 10:09 a.m.
Mark If Dems cheating can Steal election we have no America.. it’s over. Tell the President we love him and we are with him 100 percent. He gave up so much for us !!! GOD Strengthen Him! Lance Dillenschneider
Lance Dillenschneider
12/21/20 11:31 a.m.
Mark We are still praying and stand behind the President. We know he won by a landslide! I am very Vocal on his behalf And pray for his strength, protection and victory!!! What can we do to help??? Hope you are well! Thanks Lance Dillenschneider
Lance Dillenschneider
The story of Dillenschneider’s meeting with Meadows suggests how easily the former White House chief of staff gave out his phone number. As a result, the net with which Meadows drew in conspiracy theories and counsel was quite wide. Dillenschneider wasn’t actually a politician when he first began corresponding with the White House chief of staff. He told TPM that he and his wife — a self-described “Trumpette” — both decided to run for local office after their son passed away in mid-2021.
“I never wanted to be a politician, never wanted to get into politics. However, the issues in my county were massive — crippling property taxes and massive fentanyl deaths,” Dillenschneider explained, adding, “We lost our 32-year-old son to fentanyl intoxication a year and a half ago. And those types of things are what prompted me to step in.”
Along with showing the ease with which a diverse array of Republicans connected with Meadows, Dillenschneider’s story provides hints of the factors that fuel Trump’s enduring appeal and the persistence of the election denial movement. Like many Trump supporters, Dillenschneider felt the former president focused on issues that were long ignored by others in Washington.
“He was the first one that ever even brought it up, and that was, of course, before our son’s death,” Dillenschneider said. “I never ever really had heard of fentanyl before President Trump brought it to my attention.”
Hearing his texts had been turned over to congressional investigators clearly disturbed Dillenscheider.
“Am I gonna expect the FBI at my door, kicking my door down and taking all my files or whatever?” he asked.
And while Dillenschneider’s support for Trump and doubts about voter fraud remain unwavering, his opinion of Meadows went down a notch after he learned the former chief of staff handed over their correspondence.
“If I ever see him again I’ll say, ‘Hey, thanks a lot, buddy,’” Dillenschneider said of Meadows, adding, “All I wanted to do was take you up on your offer of getting the insider Washington tour.”
This article first appeared at ProPublica and The Lever. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Flush with money after receiving the largest-known political advocacy donation in U.S. history, conservative activist Leonard Leo and his associates are spending millions of dollars to influence some of the Supreme Court’s most consequential recent cases, newly released tax documentsobtained by ProPublica and The Lever show.
The documents detail how Leo, who helped build the Supreme Court’s conservative majority as an adviser to President Donald Trump, has used a sprawling network of opaque nonprofits to fund groups advocating for ending affirmative action, rolling back anti-discrimination protections and allowing state legislatures unreviewable oversight of federal elections.
The records also show that the Leo-aligned nonprofits paid millions of dollars to for-profit entities connected to Leo.
Leo and one of his top associates did not respond to requests for comment.
The money flowed mostly through so-called dark money groups, which don’t have to disclose their donors. They are required to reveal the recipients of their spending in their annual tax returns, which are released to the public, but often those are also dark money groups or other entities that have minimal disclosure rules.
As ProPublica and The Lever detailed in August, Leo was gifted a $1.6 billion fortune last year by a reclusive manufacturing magnate, Barre Seid. The newly revealed tax documents cover last year, just as Leo was in the process of receiving that enormous donation.
The Supreme Court case involving a Colorado-based website designer who refuses to work for same-sex couples provides a window into Leo’s strategy.
At least six groups funded by Leo’s network have filed briefs supporting the suit, which seeks to overturn Colorado’s anti-discrimination law. The Ethics and Public Policy Center, which records show received $1.9 million from Leo’s network, submitted a brief supporting the web designer. So did Concerned Women for America, which has received at least $565,000 over the past two years from the Leo network, as well as an organization called the Becket Fund, which got $550,000 from a Leo group.
Leo’s network has also been the top funder of the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, which spends money to elect GOP attorneys general and serves as a policy hub for the state officials. Twenty Republican attorneys general have also filed a brief in support of the case. One Leo group donated $6.5 million to RAGA during the 2022 election cycle, according to the association’s federal filings.
The largest donation by Leo’s network was $71 million given to DonorsTrust, a so-called donor-advised fund that pools money from numerous funders and gives it out to largely conservative and libertarian groups. Past reports havedescribed DonorsTrust as a “dark-money ATM” of the conservative movement.
Another case that Leo groups have sought to influence is Moore v. Harper, which could have sweeping implications for American democracy. The question posed in the case is whether the Constitution affords state legislatures the power to create rules for federal elections without state court oversight or intervention.
The Honest Elections Project, an initiative within another key Leo organization, the 85 Fund, has backed the plaintiff’s case with an amicus brief. The tax documents show that the 85 Fund also donated $400,000 in 2020 to the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an Indianapolis-based conservative legal group that filed a supportive brief in the case.
Thirteen Republican attorneys general filed a brief backing the suit as well.
The Supreme Court is also hearing two cases this term brought by the conservative group Students for Fair Admissions that are challenging universities’ affirmative action policies. The group received $250,000 from the 85 Fund in 2020, the tax records show, more than a third of the total it raised that year.
Speech First, which the records show received $700,000 in 2020-21 from the 85 Fund, filedbriefs backing Students for Fair Admissions in both cases. Republican attorneys general, backed by Leo’s network, submittedbriefs, too.
The other theme to emerge from the new tax records is the large amount of expenditures going to for-profit entities run by or connected to Leo. The 85 Fund’s largest outside vendor for 2021 was CRC Advisors, a for-profit consulting firm chaired by Leo. The 85 Fund paid CRC Advisors $22 million last year, tax records show.
The largest outside vendor to the Concord Fund, another hub in Leo’s network, was also CRC Advisors, which received nearly $8 million over the course of a year. Concord also paid $500,000 to BH Group, another for-profit firm led by Leo.
There is no prohibition on nonprofits sending business to companies they have connections to, but any deals must be made at a fair market value.
The companies did not immediately respond to questions about the payments.
A minor point. But TPM Reader BR points out that that the private jet at the center of the latest Twitter fracas is not precisely Elon Musk’s. It appears to be a corporate jet owned by SpaceX, the space launch company which along with Tesla is one of two companies on which Musk’s fortune is based. (Unlike Tesla, SpaceX remains a private company.)
BR flagged this Business Insider article that notes that Musk’s fleet of three Gulfstream jets is owned and registered to a company called Falcon Landing LLC, which BI says is “a shell company with ties to SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California headquarters.” The corporate listing for the shell corporation says it’s located at the same address as SpaceX and it’s agent and manager are also SpaceX. Among the corporation’s inactive directors and officers are SpaceX, Elon Musk and Gwynne Shotwell (president and COO of SpaceX), along with the corporate service company.
Anyways, it’s still Golden Dukes season and we are relentless in our devotion to celebrating our favorite filth. So far you’ve voted on the the best scandals of the year, on a local and national scale. Now it’s time to move onto one of the most competitive categories of the 2022 Golden Dukes: Meritorious Achievement In The Crazy.
The log of 2,319 text messages that Mark Meadows turned over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack serves to document an expansive plot to reverse former President Trump’s loss in the 2020 election that dozens of members of Congress eagerly participated in. However, they also provide a glimpse into the day-to-day rivalries and cutthroat culture of the Trump White House, where Meadows served as the last chief of staff. One set of text messages from former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke is a particularly vivid example of Trump-era backstabbing and maneuvering.
Trump’s administration had a record amount of turnover as the president regularly fired Cabinet secretaries and top aides when they crossed him or were consumed by scandal. The end result was an infamous snakepit where rival camps regularly took shots at each other as they sought to rise through the ranks and maintain the mercurial president’s favor.
Zinke has been described as “one of the most ethically dubious members” of the Trump Cabinet due to the more than a dozen federal investigations that were sparked by his conduct. He resigned in 2019 amid the barrage of negative headlines. Texts Zinke exchanged with Meadows seem to capture him in the midst of attempting to get back into the fold.
The former secretary began his power-play pitch to Meadows on Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020. The message includes an apparent misspelling of the word “portrait” and Zinke’s last initial as a signature.
11/3/20 4:53 p.m.
On the eve of victory. Keep the faith. In Vegas for the celebration. Portato unveiling on 10 December at Interior. Potus is going to need some warriors around him in his second term. The fight for freedom never ends. Z
Ryan Zinke
“Thanks friend. Let’s make it great again,” replied Meadows.
Zinke, who did not respond to a request for comment, unveiled his official portrait at the Department of the Interior on Dec. 10, 2020. It featured a dramatic image of Zinke on horseback in front of a national monument with which he had a decidedly fraught history. The ceremony also included an “unofficial” portrait where Zinke’s head was superimposed on “Death Dealer VI,” a painting by renowned sci-fi/fantasy artist Frank Frazetta. The resulting image featured Zinke waving an ax and riding into battle against a massive serpent. Epic stuff.
Based on the text log, six minutes after his message to Meadows, Zinke followed it up with an even more explicit push to get back in the Cabinet.
11/3/20 4:59 p.m.
Keep America Great! Post election, sec def and a few others need to go. Let me know if you need an acting to fill in as required. The fight for freedom never ends. Z
Ryan Zinke
The text message log provided to the Jan. 6 committee doesn’t contain any response from Meadows to Zinke’s offer.
For this series on Meadows’ text log, we are relying on the identifications of those texting with Meadows that were made by the committee’s investigators. TPM independently identified Zinke’s number through public records searches. Meadows and the committee did not respond to requests for comment. To read more about the story behind that text log and our procedures for publishing the messages, check out the introduction to this series.
Zinke’s second text to Meadows made an apparent reference to former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who had clashed with Trump over, among other things, the president’s eagerness to send troops into the streets during nationwide civil rights protests in 2020.
Trump did indeed announce that Esper had been “terminated” on Nov. 9, 2020, six days after Zinke’s message. The former president appointed another DOD official, Christopher Miller, to serve as acting secretary of defense. Zinke did not get the job.
While his effort to lead the Pentagon may have failed, Zinke has since punched a return ticket to Washington. Last month, Zinke won an election to represent Montana’s western district in the U.S. House of Representatives. Trump’s eager warrior is set to take office on Jan. 3.
Federal prosecutors obtained more than 130,000 email messages in a Jan. 6-related investigation that appears to be focusing on Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), newly released court filings show. In particular, prosecutors were focused on Perry’s communications with three lawyers — two of them officials at the Justice Department — who took part in efforts to try to use DOJ to help reverse the outcome of the 2020 election, according to the filing.
