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Sep 24, 2022
Poor Relations
Instead of regarding them as part of the United States (which they are) we treat Puerto Ricans like they're the poor cousins in the family, and we barely acknowledge them. We don't even like to talk about them, much less invite them over for Christmas dinner.
BTW: Climate Change, dummy.
Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico as a Category 1 storm. Flooding still wrought havoc.
“It’s a double whammy. You have a hurricane
with strong gusts and then a tail of intense rain
that remained stationary over the south
dropping two to three feet of water.”
(pay wall)
FEMA allocated billions for disaster mitigation after Maria. Few projects have gotten underway.
When Leida Rodriguez started building a house in Villa Esperanza, neighbors suggested she lift it because the nearby Rio Nigua rose a few feet during Hurricane Maria — nothing these weathered coastal souls hadn’t seen before.
So she built the house four feet off the ground, hoping to mitigate coastal flooding in southern Puerto Rico, where she found an affordable spot in a beautiful community to live out her retirement. Never did she imagine that a Category-1 cyclone would bring so much rain that the beams of her white-and-blue trim home would buckle and slide into a deep mud hole.
“It was my refuge, my place of peace,” said Rodriguez, 50, who along with her husband used their life savings to build the home block by concrete block. “We thought it wasn’t going to happen. No one had ever seen flooding like what happened.”
Hurricane Fiona dumped at least half as much rain as the coastal town of Salinas — where most of its residents live in flood zones — sees in a year. Though the storm brought far less powerful winds than Category-4 Maria in 2017, some parts of the main island experienced just as much rain or more. Many were caught off guard. First responders rescued hundreds of people from inundated homes and some roads and bridges repaired after Maria were destroyed again.
The U.S. government made historic allocations, including more than $3 billion for hazard mitigation, to Puerto Rico after Maria — some of which was slated to go toward preventing severe flooding during storms. A separate pot of federal public assistance money is designated for rebuilding public infrastructure. In Salinas, which was walloped by Maria and battered again by Fiona, officials have submitted 74 projects to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for funding. To date, just seven — including road repairs and a basketball court — have been completed, data from Puerto Rico’s Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency, shows. About two dozen more entered the construction phase in the last six months.
Salinas officials have identified 44 potential mitigation projects. So far, they’ve submitted three, including a proposal to build a water treatment plant that was approved in December and is in the design phase. Two other projects under review propose installing generators at critical facilities and a new storm water system on public streets leading to a hospital. Neither one of those projects has been constructed.
“I’m pretty sure if these mitigation plans would have been carried out, it would’ve mitigated the issues that some of these municipalities experienced,” said researcher Jennifer Hinojosa, who works for Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York and been tracking the recovery from Maria.
Instead, residents and experts say unrestrained coastal construction, mangrove destruction, deforestation, coastal erosion and poor canal maintenance have heightened the risk for marginalized communities like Salinas, a town of 25,000.
Across the island archipelago, 5 percent of the available post-Maria FEMA funds for hazard mitigation have been obligated, according to the data from Puerto Rico’s recovery office, a first hurdle in getting a project started. The cumbersome management of those funds at both the federal and local level is slowing down Puerto Rico’s slow long-term resiliency reconstruction, experts said.
FEMA officials said they are continuing to work with municipalities to help stave off the most severe — and in some cases, preventable — damage when a storm rolls through.
“Hurricanes are a natural phenomenon,” said Victor Alvarado, a local environmental activist. “Disasters are man-made.”
![]()
A satellite image shows a bridge before Hurricane Fiona in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, on Jan.18. (Maxar Technologies/Via Reuters)
![]()
A satellite image shows a flooded bridge in the aftermath of Hurricane Fiona, in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, on Sept. 21. (Maxar Technologies/Via Reuters)
‘Maria didn’t do this’
Puerto Rico’s southern region is drier than its northern coast and its topography makes it prone to rapid flooding. Hurricane Fiona concentrated its heavy rainfall over the southern slopes of the central mountains where water rushes down steep highlands and spills into the coastal plain until it reaches the sea. The soil is often unable to absorb all the moisture and instead it runs off the surface, according to meteorologists and regional climatological reports.
While the eye of the storm swirled westward, it dragged a line of intense weather that brought with it sustained humidity. That system pounded the southern coast with relentless precipitation.
“It’s a double whammy. You have a hurricane with strong gusts and then a tail of intense rain that remained stationary over the south dropping two to three feet of water,” said University of Wisconsin meteorologist Ángel Adames-Corraliza, a native of Puerto Rico. “That’s a nightmare scenario.”
Weeks earlier, Salinas residents had been worried about persistent drought conditions threatening their aquifer and only source of drinking water in the municipality. Today, many neighbors are struggling to understand why the inundation was so fierce that it triggered midnight rescues for hundreds who said they had never seen so much water. Engorged streams and creeks burst in all directions. The Rio Nigua jumped its banks and discharged into channels never carved in recent memory.
Daniel and Maria De Jesús have lived confidently inside their home in the Coquí community of Salinas for more than 40 years, never before experiencing a severe deluge. The house sits a few feet above the low-lying roadway. Yet several hours into Fiona’s downpours, brackish water invaded their bedroom.
“I’ve never felt so much fear,” said Daniel De Jesús, 76, whose family was rescued by National Guard troops Sunday. “I stayed here during Maria. If I had done the same for Fiona, I would not be here to talk about it.”
Pieces of newly-laid asphalt was shattered like shards of glass and strewn about the neighborhood. The smell of rot was inescapable as residents piled their waterlogged furniture on the curb next to mounds of riverbed soil and sheared vegetation. Families strung out their clothes hoping the blistering post-storm sun would dry them out and get rid of the unmistakable odor of mold.
The De Jesús family lost most of their possessions. But that is not what worries them. They said they have warily watched how new construction projects, such as a nearby solar farm and housing developments, have taken little care for the geography and risks of the flood plain.
“Nature is reclaiming and telling us this belongs to her,” Daniel De Jesús said. “As the saying goes, the river always finds its course.”
Developers build too close to creeks and canals. They compact the soil and fill in wetlands with sand and gravel. They change natural water flows, said environmental lawyer Ruth Santiago, who works closely with a coalition of community-based organizations.
“There are things that are being approved...that are making the flooding worse,” she said.
Salinas Mayor Karilyn Bonilla Colón did not respond to interview requests but has been vocal in the local press about using the federal dollars principally for flood mitigation and urban renewal.
Illegal coastal construction in protected estuaries and sensitive land reserves, such as nearby Jobos Bay, has become a flash point for locals and other Puerto Ricans living near the ocean. In recent years, communities have waged court battles and protested against the central government giving what they see as illegal permits to builders destroying mangrove forests and exacerbating flooding.
Mangroves act as natural barriers that protect communities from storm surge and can absorb water, among other ecological benefits. These same communities saw flood levels rise dangerously in the middle of the night, Santiago said.
“Puerto Rico is a group of islands that is very limited in geographic space. It can be described as a mountain range surrounded by a narrow coastal plain. And that coastal plain is very narrow in the south,” Santiago said. “So you can’t keep building, using up land space. Floodwaters need areas that are not impacted by construction in order to go out to the sea without causing damage.”
Victor Bonilla said he held out as long as he could but when the water reached nearly a foot in height at 12:30 a.m. on Monday, he put his two boys and wife inside a dump truck that was helping to evacuate residents of barrio Playita — walking distance from the popular Punta Arenas beach.
“I didn’t want to leave. I’m a fighter but when you have a family, you’ve got to surrender,” said Bonilla, 37, whose family has lived and fished here for generations. “You learn how to live with flooding and adjust but we didn’t think this storm would do this. Maria didn’t do this.”
Mitigating disaster
The type of construction work that should be happening, residents and experts say, has not transpired in decades. Levees, canal dredging, sea walls and other diversions are the kind of flood control measures the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has long studied in this region. They’ve made recommendations and drawn up detailed plans, but the work either was not funded or was not completed, local officials and residents said.
In 2018, Puerto Rico’s congressional representative, Jenniffer González Colón(R), announced the approval of $2.5 billion of federal funding for flood control projects, including the canalization and construction of levees along Rio Nigua in Salinas. Some work has begun and is in the design phase, but not in time to make a difference for hundreds of families like the ones community leader Ismenia Figueroa’s serves.
“You learn to fight for what’s yours here and depend on no one,” said Figueroa, 60, her eyes reddening with tears. “But the sense of powerlessness can be so suffocating.”
This is the kind of thing Puerto Ricans in these Salinas neighborhoods and leaders said they have come to expect: Many overtures and announcements but lagging progress.
The sluggish pace of FEMA dollars reaching those communities with the most urgent infrastructure needs is a frustrating fact of life for residents. Much of the completed public infrastructure work in Puerto Rico has gone to rehabbing roads or rebuilding recreational facilities, records show, after Hurricane Maria.
The work is necessary, community leaders say, but so many of the projects that require significant investment, engineering and design to create resiliency, stay suspended in the proposal phase. Some of these plans and requests for hazard mitigation date back to declared disasters from previous hurricanes, according to FEMA data obtained by The Washington Post.
![]()
A member of the Puerto Rico National Guard distributes water in an affected community in the aftermath of Hurricane Fiona in Ponce, Puerto Rico, on Sept. 21. (Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters)
The delays are the consequence of bureaucratic hurdles and management struggles at the state and federal level, said former FEMA hazard mitigation expert and historian, Rafael Torrech. The veteran grant writer was brought in after Hurricane Maria to help guide applicants through the process. Hazard mitigation projects normally take longer and can take a back seat to the rebuilding of public infrastructure because they are focused on planning for the future.
FEMA has dedicated staff but the mechanisms for releasing money are outdated and ill-suited to long term reconstruction, Torrech said. The added complications of Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy and lack of access to financing meant the government could not afford to put out bids for work through the federal agency’s reimbursement model. It took time for FEMA, Puerto Rico’s recovery office, and the fiscal oversight board managing the Commonwealth’s finances to develop cash flow solutions.
By then, there were labor and material shortages driven by the pandemic, transportation issues and an ongoing exodus from Puerto Rico. A limited supply of professional firms able to do design and engineering work from the island archipelago drove up costs.
“Puerto Rico is a perfect example of everything that went wrong,” Torrech said. “Practically, none of the mitigation projects has gotten to the construction phase. You cannot control nature but you can control your reaction to it. It’s a question of management.”
It’s a cycle that has been repeated disaster after disaster, experts said. Soon, the only options left for some of Puerto Rico’s most under-resourced communities such as those in Salinas, is to abandon their homes and relocate.
Wanda Lee considered it. The 44-year-old left her seaside home to start anew in Pennsylvania, overwhelmed by the weeks of powerlessness and joblessness in the aftermath of Maria. But, she said, the island called her back home.
Then came Fiona. Lee was asleep for most of it, relegating the storm to an afterthought. When she awoke and stood up from her bed, she stepped into a puddle of water. The flooding was worse than five years earlier and she and her neighbors had to be rescued from their homes. But this time, she won’t be packing up.
“I stick out the storms and I stick out these hurricanes because it’s part of me,” Lee said in front of her newly-waterlogged home. “I’m a playera [beach lover] and this is what we do.”
Rodriguez, the woman who lost her house to a mudslide near the river, spent hours on the phone Thursday with federal officials to see if she qualifies for help. She said she is not optimistic because the low-cost lot where her house once stood was in a flood zone where many of her neighbors did not get help after Maria.
“I will recover,” she said. “But I won’t rebuild here.”
So she built the house four feet off the ground, hoping to mitigate coastal flooding in southern Puerto Rico, where she found an affordable spot in a beautiful community to live out her retirement. Never did she imagine that a Category-1 cyclone would bring so much rain that the beams of her white-and-blue trim home would buckle and slide into a deep mud hole.
“It was my refuge, my place of peace,” said Rodriguez, 50, who along with her husband used their life savings to build the home block by concrete block. “We thought it wasn’t going to happen. No one had ever seen flooding like what happened.”
Hurricane Fiona dumped at least half as much rain as the coastal town of Salinas — where most of its residents live in flood zones — sees in a year. Though the storm brought far less powerful winds than Category-4 Maria in 2017, some parts of the main island experienced just as much rain or more. Many were caught off guard. First responders rescued hundreds of people from inundated homes and some roads and bridges repaired after Maria were destroyed again.
The U.S. government made historic allocations, including more than $3 billion for hazard mitigation, to Puerto Rico after Maria — some of which was slated to go toward preventing severe flooding during storms. A separate pot of federal public assistance money is designated for rebuilding public infrastructure. In Salinas, which was walloped by Maria and battered again by Fiona, officials have submitted 74 projects to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for funding. To date, just seven — including road repairs and a basketball court — have been completed, data from Puerto Rico’s Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency, shows. About two dozen more entered the construction phase in the last six months.
Salinas officials have identified 44 potential mitigation projects. So far, they’ve submitted three, including a proposal to build a water treatment plant that was approved in December and is in the design phase. Two other projects under review propose installing generators at critical facilities and a new storm water system on public streets leading to a hospital. Neither one of those projects has been constructed.
“I’m pretty sure if these mitigation plans would have been carried out, it would’ve mitigated the issues that some of these municipalities experienced,” said researcher Jennifer Hinojosa, who works for Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York and been tracking the recovery from Maria.
Instead, residents and experts say unrestrained coastal construction, mangrove destruction, deforestation, coastal erosion and poor canal maintenance have heightened the risk for marginalized communities like Salinas, a town of 25,000.
Across the island archipelago, 5 percent of the available post-Maria FEMA funds for hazard mitigation have been obligated, according to the data from Puerto Rico’s recovery office, a first hurdle in getting a project started. The cumbersome management of those funds at both the federal and local level is slowing down Puerto Rico’s slow long-term resiliency reconstruction, experts said.
FEMA officials said they are continuing to work with municipalities to help stave off the most severe — and in some cases, preventable — damage when a storm rolls through.
“Hurricanes are a natural phenomenon,” said Victor Alvarado, a local environmental activist. “Disasters are man-made.”
‘Maria didn’t do this’
Puerto Rico’s southern region is drier than its northern coast and its topography makes it prone to rapid flooding. Hurricane Fiona concentrated its heavy rainfall over the southern slopes of the central mountains where water rushes down steep highlands and spills into the coastal plain until it reaches the sea. The soil is often unable to absorb all the moisture and instead it runs off the surface, according to meteorologists and regional climatological reports.
While the eye of the storm swirled westward, it dragged a line of intense weather that brought with it sustained humidity. That system pounded the southern coast with relentless precipitation.
“It’s a double whammy. You have a hurricane with strong gusts and then a tail of intense rain that remained stationary over the south dropping two to three feet of water,” said University of Wisconsin meteorologist Ángel Adames-Corraliza, a native of Puerto Rico. “That’s a nightmare scenario.”
Weeks earlier, Salinas residents had been worried about persistent drought conditions threatening their aquifer and only source of drinking water in the municipality. Today, many neighbors are struggling to understand why the inundation was so fierce that it triggered midnight rescues for hundreds who said they had never seen so much water. Engorged streams and creeks burst in all directions. The Rio Nigua jumped its banks and discharged into channels never carved in recent memory.
Daniel and Maria De Jesús have lived confidently inside their home in the Coquí community of Salinas for more than 40 years, never before experiencing a severe deluge. The house sits a few feet above the low-lying roadway. Yet several hours into Fiona’s downpours, brackish water invaded their bedroom.
“I’ve never felt so much fear,” said Daniel De Jesús, 76, whose family was rescued by National Guard troops Sunday. “I stayed here during Maria. If I had done the same for Fiona, I would not be here to talk about it.”
Pieces of newly-laid asphalt was shattered like shards of glass and strewn about the neighborhood. The smell of rot was inescapable as residents piled their waterlogged furniture on the curb next to mounds of riverbed soil and sheared vegetation. Families strung out their clothes hoping the blistering post-storm sun would dry them out and get rid of the unmistakable odor of mold.
The De Jesús family lost most of their possessions. But that is not what worries them. They said they have warily watched how new construction projects, such as a nearby solar farm and housing developments, have taken little care for the geography and risks of the flood plain.
“Nature is reclaiming and telling us this belongs to her,” Daniel De Jesús said. “As the saying goes, the river always finds its course.”
Developers build too close to creeks and canals. They compact the soil and fill in wetlands with sand and gravel. They change natural water flows, said environmental lawyer Ruth Santiago, who works closely with a coalition of community-based organizations.
“There are things that are being approved...that are making the flooding worse,” she said.
Salinas Mayor Karilyn Bonilla Colón did not respond to interview requests but has been vocal in the local press about using the federal dollars principally for flood mitigation and urban renewal.
Illegal coastal construction in protected estuaries and sensitive land reserves, such as nearby Jobos Bay, has become a flash point for locals and other Puerto Ricans living near the ocean. In recent years, communities have waged court battles and protested against the central government giving what they see as illegal permits to builders destroying mangrove forests and exacerbating flooding.
Mangroves act as natural barriers that protect communities from storm surge and can absorb water, among other ecological benefits. These same communities saw flood levels rise dangerously in the middle of the night, Santiago said.
“Puerto Rico is a group of islands that is very limited in geographic space. It can be described as a mountain range surrounded by a narrow coastal plain. And that coastal plain is very narrow in the south,” Santiago said. “So you can’t keep building, using up land space. Floodwaters need areas that are not impacted by construction in order to go out to the sea without causing damage.”
Victor Bonilla said he held out as long as he could but when the water reached nearly a foot in height at 12:30 a.m. on Monday, he put his two boys and wife inside a dump truck that was helping to evacuate residents of barrio Playita — walking distance from the popular Punta Arenas beach.
“I didn’t want to leave. I’m a fighter but when you have a family, you’ve got to surrender,” said Bonilla, 37, whose family has lived and fished here for generations. “You learn how to live with flooding and adjust but we didn’t think this storm would do this. Maria didn’t do this.”
Mitigating disaster
The type of construction work that should be happening, residents and experts say, has not transpired in decades. Levees, canal dredging, sea walls and other diversions are the kind of flood control measures the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has long studied in this region. They’ve made recommendations and drawn up detailed plans, but the work either was not funded or was not completed, local officials and residents said.
In 2018, Puerto Rico’s congressional representative, Jenniffer González Colón(R), announced the approval of $2.5 billion of federal funding for flood control projects, including the canalization and construction of levees along Rio Nigua in Salinas. Some work has begun and is in the design phase, but not in time to make a difference for hundreds of families like the ones community leader Ismenia Figueroa’s serves.
“You learn to fight for what’s yours here and depend on no one,” said Figueroa, 60, her eyes reddening with tears. “But the sense of powerlessness can be so suffocating.”
This is the kind of thing Puerto Ricans in these Salinas neighborhoods and leaders said they have come to expect: Many overtures and announcements but lagging progress.
The sluggish pace of FEMA dollars reaching those communities with the most urgent infrastructure needs is a frustrating fact of life for residents. Much of the completed public infrastructure work in Puerto Rico has gone to rehabbing roads or rebuilding recreational facilities, records show, after Hurricane Maria.
The work is necessary, community leaders say, but so many of the projects that require significant investment, engineering and design to create resiliency, stay suspended in the proposal phase. Some of these plans and requests for hazard mitigation date back to declared disasters from previous hurricanes, according to FEMA data obtained by The Washington Post.
The delays are the consequence of bureaucratic hurdles and management struggles at the state and federal level, said former FEMA hazard mitigation expert and historian, Rafael Torrech. The veteran grant writer was brought in after Hurricane Maria to help guide applicants through the process. Hazard mitigation projects normally take longer and can take a back seat to the rebuilding of public infrastructure because they are focused on planning for the future.
FEMA has dedicated staff but the mechanisms for releasing money are outdated and ill-suited to long term reconstruction, Torrech said. The added complications of Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy and lack of access to financing meant the government could not afford to put out bids for work through the federal agency’s reimbursement model. It took time for FEMA, Puerto Rico’s recovery office, and the fiscal oversight board managing the Commonwealth’s finances to develop cash flow solutions.
By then, there were labor and material shortages driven by the pandemic, transportation issues and an ongoing exodus from Puerto Rico. A limited supply of professional firms able to do design and engineering work from the island archipelago drove up costs.
“Puerto Rico is a perfect example of everything that went wrong,” Torrech said. “Practically, none of the mitigation projects has gotten to the construction phase. You cannot control nature but you can control your reaction to it. It’s a question of management.”
It’s a cycle that has been repeated disaster after disaster, experts said. Soon, the only options left for some of Puerto Rico’s most under-resourced communities such as those in Salinas, is to abandon their homes and relocate.
Wanda Lee considered it. The 44-year-old left her seaside home to start anew in Pennsylvania, overwhelmed by the weeks of powerlessness and joblessness in the aftermath of Maria. But, she said, the island called her back home.
Then came Fiona. Lee was asleep for most of it, relegating the storm to an afterthought. When she awoke and stood up from her bed, she stepped into a puddle of water. The flooding was worse than five years earlier and she and her neighbors had to be rescued from their homes. But this time, she won’t be packing up.
“I stick out the storms and I stick out these hurricanes because it’s part of me,” Lee said in front of her newly-waterlogged home. “I’m a playera [beach lover] and this is what we do.”
Rodriguez, the woman who lost her house to a mudslide near the river, spent hours on the phone Thursday with federal officials to see if she qualifies for help. She said she is not optimistic because the low-cost lot where her house once stood was in a flood zone where many of her neighbors did not get help after Maria.
“I will recover,” she said. “But I won’t rebuild here.”
Sep 23, 2022
Today's Hmm
In 34 years, only one GOP candidate for POTUS
has won the popular vote.
one
I wonder why Republicans are so determined
to push down on voting rights.
It's Not Journalism
... it's rat-fucking.
Opinion - Verdict upends Project Veritas’s journalism defense in infiltration case
On Thursday evening, a jury in D.C.'s federal courthouse returned a verdict against Project Veritas in a case stemming from its 2016 efforts to infiltrate Democracy Partners, a progressive political consulting firm that assisted Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The verdict, which included a damages award of $120,000, followed roughly a week of testimony in the case and one day of jury deliberations.
The verdict upends claims by attorneys for Project Veritas, the video-sting operation founded by James O’Keefe, that its four-part video series on Democracy Partners amounted to old-fashioned journalism.
“We thank the Jury for its decision and are deeply appreciative of the time and effort the members of the Jury devoted to consider our case," Democracy Partners said in a statement. "Hopefully, the decision today will help to discourage Mr. O’Keefe and others from conducting these kind of political spy operations.”
In a statement Thursday night, O’Keefe announced that Project Veritas will appeal the verdict. “The jury effectively ruled investigative journalists owe a fiduciary duty to the subjects they are investigating,” O’Keefe said in a statement, noting also that “investigative journalists may not deceive the subjects they are investigating.” O’Keefe was a constant presence at the trial, as were several other Project Veritas staffers.
At issue in the proceedings were two civil charges leveled by Democracy Partners in its 2017 suit — that Project Veritas engaged in unlawful wiretapping and fraudulent misrepresentation when it used false identities, bios and pretenses to earn the trust of Democracy Partners co-founder Robert Creamer and others. Project Veritas planted an intern — Allison Maass, who presented herself under the pseudonym “Angela Brandt” — in the firm’s offices, where she taped the goings-on from a camera attached to a button on her shirt.
“Fake, fake, fake,” said Joseph Sandler, attorney for Democracy Partners, in his closing statement on Wednesday.
Arguments in the case involved dueling descriptors: Democracy Partners claimed that Project Veritas, under O’Keefe, was orchestrating a “political spying operation” to assist candidate Donald Trump; Project Veritas said it was following in the grand tradition of American journalists who gather their news by going undercover. In his closing statement, Paul Calli, an attorney for Project Veritas, referenced the glory days of late “60 Minutes” correspondent Mike Wallace, once a virtuoso of undercover journalism and ambush interviews.
“Mike Wallace with his hidden camera,” said Calli, who said he could still hear the “tick-tick-tick” of the iconic “60 Minutes” clock. He didn’t mention that Wallace moved away from undercover tactics as his career matured. “I have no doubt that what we started has become a plague ... we got caught up in the drama more than we caught up in going after the facts,” said Wallace in a 2006 CNN interview.
The reference to Wallace drives at the larger dynamic looming over Democracy Partners v. Project Veritas. If nothing else, the litigation exposed the unethical lengths to which O’Keefe’s organization will go to secure footage that explodes on the internet, as well as the growing gap between Project Veritas and traditional news organizations when it comes to clandestine reporting methods. Long before O’Keefe established Project Veritas in 2011, American journalists were falling out of love with undercover tactics — a breakup aided by Food Lion’s 1995 suit against ABC News for its clandestine exposé on the grocery behemoth’s unsavory meat-handling practices.
Mainstream outlets, accordingly, have spent the past couple of decades either swearing off undercover work or narrowing the circumstances when it’s warranted. “Undercover reporting can be a powerful tool,” wrote Greg Marx in CJR in 2010, “but it’s one to be used cautiously: against only the most important targets, and even then only when accompanied by solid traditional reporting.”
(pay wall)
On Thursday evening, a jury in D.C.'s federal courthouse returned a verdict against Project Veritas in a case stemming from its 2016 efforts to infiltrate Democracy Partners, a progressive political consulting firm that assisted Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The verdict, which included a damages award of $120,000, followed roughly a week of testimony in the case and one day of jury deliberations.
The verdict upends claims by attorneys for Project Veritas, the video-sting operation founded by James O’Keefe, that its four-part video series on Democracy Partners amounted to old-fashioned journalism.
“We thank the Jury for its decision and are deeply appreciative of the time and effort the members of the Jury devoted to consider our case," Democracy Partners said in a statement. "Hopefully, the decision today will help to discourage Mr. O’Keefe and others from conducting these kind of political spy operations.”
In a statement Thursday night, O’Keefe announced that Project Veritas will appeal the verdict. “The jury effectively ruled investigative journalists owe a fiduciary duty to the subjects they are investigating,” O’Keefe said in a statement, noting also that “investigative journalists may not deceive the subjects they are investigating.” O’Keefe was a constant presence at the trial, as were several other Project Veritas staffers.
At issue in the proceedings were two civil charges leveled by Democracy Partners in its 2017 suit — that Project Veritas engaged in unlawful wiretapping and fraudulent misrepresentation when it used false identities, bios and pretenses to earn the trust of Democracy Partners co-founder Robert Creamer and others. Project Veritas planted an intern — Allison Maass, who presented herself under the pseudonym “Angela Brandt” — in the firm’s offices, where she taped the goings-on from a camera attached to a button on her shirt.
“Fake, fake, fake,” said Joseph Sandler, attorney for Democracy Partners, in his closing statement on Wednesday.
Arguments in the case involved dueling descriptors: Democracy Partners claimed that Project Veritas, under O’Keefe, was orchestrating a “political spying operation” to assist candidate Donald Trump; Project Veritas said it was following in the grand tradition of American journalists who gather their news by going undercover. In his closing statement, Paul Calli, an attorney for Project Veritas, referenced the glory days of late “60 Minutes” correspondent Mike Wallace, once a virtuoso of undercover journalism and ambush interviews.
“Mike Wallace with his hidden camera,” said Calli, who said he could still hear the “tick-tick-tick” of the iconic “60 Minutes” clock. He didn’t mention that Wallace moved away from undercover tactics as his career matured. “I have no doubt that what we started has become a plague ... we got caught up in the drama more than we caught up in going after the facts,” said Wallace in a 2006 CNN interview.
The reference to Wallace drives at the larger dynamic looming over Democracy Partners v. Project Veritas. If nothing else, the litigation exposed the unethical lengths to which O’Keefe’s organization will go to secure footage that explodes on the internet, as well as the growing gap between Project Veritas and traditional news organizations when it comes to clandestine reporting methods. Long before O’Keefe established Project Veritas in 2011, American journalists were falling out of love with undercover tactics — a breakup aided by Food Lion’s 1995 suit against ABC News for its clandestine exposé on the grocery behemoth’s unsavory meat-handling practices.
Mainstream outlets, accordingly, have spent the past couple of decades either swearing off undercover work or narrowing the circumstances when it’s warranted. “Undercover reporting can be a powerful tool,” wrote Greg Marx in CJR in 2010, “but it’s one to be used cautiously: against only the most important targets, and even then only when accompanied by solid traditional reporting.”
Meanwhile: Court documents and testimony show that Project Veritas, in putting together its four-part “Rigging the Election” video series on Democracy Partners, did the following:
- Concocted fake identities and narratives to deceive Democratic operatives
- Offered cash bonuses to staffers to get certain content from the targets of the investigation
- Gave a $20,000 donation to a progressive organization in order to “keep mouths watering” at Democracy Partners, in the testimony of a Project Veritas staffer
- Crafted a voter-fraud scheme and proposed it to Creamer, co-founder of Democracy Partners.
Of course, it screamed voter fraud. Creamer never bit on the scheme and testified that he considered “Roth” “well-intentioned” but ignorant of voting laws. And here’s the kicker: Even though it was Project Veritas that advanced the idea, its lawyer hammered Democracy Partners at trial for not doing enough to distance themselves from “Roth” after fielding the “surrogate voter” idea.
Got that?
Project Veritas must not have been spending enough time reading Poynter.org for ethics guidance. “Especially since the Food Lion misrepresentation and hidden-camera stuff, news organizations don’t do the ‘full Ginsburg’ ” of clandestine tactics, “where they put them all together at the same time,” says Lee Levine, a longtime First Amendment attorney. Contemporary examples of undercover stories are harder and harder to come by these days, says Levine — and even in the years when the practice was tapering off, he continues, news organizations that did embrace it were "very careful not to lie.”
Correct. Several years ago, Mother Jones decided that the best way to expose conditions in private prisons was to send in a writer to work as a guard. “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard,” by Shane Bauer, highlighted the scandalous crevices of the industry and hauled in all kinds of awards. Just how did Mother Jones get Bauer into the Corrections Corporation of America facility? Here’s how: “Shane Bauer applied for a job with the Corrections Corporation of America. He used his own name and Social Security number, and he noted his employment with the Foundation for National Progress, the publisher of Mother Jones. He did not lie.” (Disclosure: The Erik Wemple Blog’s wife is a staff writer at Mother Jones.)
Maass, the Project Veritas plant in the Democracy Partners infiltration, presented a résumé for her assignment. Asked at trial whether it contained anything that was true, Maass responded, “No.” Like other Project Veritas staffers on the stand, Maass didn’t shrink from confirming the deceptive measures that fueled the infiltration — what Sandler termed a “web of lies conjured by Project Veritas.” In his closing statement, Calli embraced the ethos of undercover reporting, asserting that Project Veritas propagates “deceit, deception and dishonesty” so that the organization can “speak truth to power.”
The trial, however, wasn’t simply a week-long seminar on journalism ethics. It turned, in large part, on prosaic legal technicalities and the tense testimony of a former union official. Following the publication of the Project Veritas videos, AFSCME withdrew from financial arrangements with Creamer and associated organizations.
Since Democracy Partners sued for fraudulent misrepresentation and unlawful wiretapping — and not defamation resulting from the content of the videos themselves — it had to prove that the damages stemmed from Project Veritas’s pre-publication actions: the operations and tactics themselves, that is. Former AFSCME executive Scott Frey testified that the infiltration was indeed a factor in the decision to cut ties, though he also said, in questioning from Calli, that the video itself was a “major factor."
That left an important judgment call in the hands of the jurors. Judging from the verdict, they viewed the infiltration as an actionable transgression itself. Too much fake-fake-fake.
Got that?
Project Veritas must not have been spending enough time reading Poynter.org for ethics guidance. “Especially since the Food Lion misrepresentation and hidden-camera stuff, news organizations don’t do the ‘full Ginsburg’ ” of clandestine tactics, “where they put them all together at the same time,” says Lee Levine, a longtime First Amendment attorney. Contemporary examples of undercover stories are harder and harder to come by these days, says Levine — and even in the years when the practice was tapering off, he continues, news organizations that did embrace it were "very careful not to lie.”
Correct. Several years ago, Mother Jones decided that the best way to expose conditions in private prisons was to send in a writer to work as a guard. “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard,” by Shane Bauer, highlighted the scandalous crevices of the industry and hauled in all kinds of awards. Just how did Mother Jones get Bauer into the Corrections Corporation of America facility? Here’s how: “Shane Bauer applied for a job with the Corrections Corporation of America. He used his own name and Social Security number, and he noted his employment with the Foundation for National Progress, the publisher of Mother Jones. He did not lie.” (Disclosure: The Erik Wemple Blog’s wife is a staff writer at Mother Jones.)
Maass, the Project Veritas plant in the Democracy Partners infiltration, presented a résumé for her assignment. Asked at trial whether it contained anything that was true, Maass responded, “No.” Like other Project Veritas staffers on the stand, Maass didn’t shrink from confirming the deceptive measures that fueled the infiltration — what Sandler termed a “web of lies conjured by Project Veritas.” In his closing statement, Calli embraced the ethos of undercover reporting, asserting that Project Veritas propagates “deceit, deception and dishonesty” so that the organization can “speak truth to power.”
The trial, however, wasn’t simply a week-long seminar on journalism ethics. It turned, in large part, on prosaic legal technicalities and the tense testimony of a former union official. Following the publication of the Project Veritas videos, AFSCME withdrew from financial arrangements with Creamer and associated organizations.
Since Democracy Partners sued for fraudulent misrepresentation and unlawful wiretapping — and not defamation resulting from the content of the videos themselves — it had to prove that the damages stemmed from Project Veritas’s pre-publication actions: the operations and tactics themselves, that is. Former AFSCME executive Scott Frey testified that the infiltration was indeed a factor in the decision to cut ties, though he also said, in questioning from Calli, that the video itself was a “major factor."
That left an important judgment call in the hands of the jurors. Judging from the verdict, they viewed the infiltration as an actionable transgression itself. Too much fake-fake-fake.
Ukraine
Another "goodwill gesture" no doubt - so thoughtful.
Draft-dodging son of top Putin aide caught exempting himself from fighting in Ukraine war
When Vladimir Putin sends soldiers to fight and die in Ukraine, it’s Dmitry Peskov’s job to explain why Russian children must be sacrificed for a war his boss started.
The Kremlin spokesman and top Putin spin doctor could now have another tough story to sell to his countrymen: namely why his very own son may have refused the call to duty despite being a prime candidate.
Popular Politics, a Russian-language YouTube channel associated with imprisoned opposition leader Alexey Navalny, released the recording of a conversation in which someone who appears to be the 32-year-old Nikolay Peskov is ordered to appear the next morning for conscription.
“Obviously I won’t be there at 10 a.m. You need to understand that I’m Mr. Peskov,” he tells the supposed military official, impersonated by the channel’s presenter, Dmitry Nizovtsev.
The exchange highlights the privileged life of those in the inner circle of the Kremlin and their offspring at a time when recruits in poor, far-flung towns are being forced to bid goodbye to their families as they are called to the front.
According to the Daily Mail, Peskov junior is a former conscript in Russia’s nuclear rocket forces and would therefore be a leading candidate for conscription.They allegedly called the son of Putin's press-secretary Dmitry Peskov, Nikolay, and asked him why he did not respond to the military commissariat summons 😂
— Dmitri (@wartranslated) September 21, 2022
Can't prove it's him but the tone of voice is really similar. pic.twitter.com/kQv2WcdcCu
Neverthesless, he saw no need to join and pulled rank in the conversation: “Believe me, neither you nor I need this.”
This kind of deception has practice with Navalny. In 2020, he himself notably tricked one of Putin’s FSB intelligence service agents into explaining why a team of assassins both botched an attempt on his life and failed to cover their tracks before evidence of poisoning could be found.
The prank call and subsequent confession comes at a sensitive moment in the war in which Kyiv has appeared to break months of stalemate thanks in part to continued military aid from the West.
Putin’s nepotism
Ukrainian forces earlier this month gained a strategic advantage when they seized the rail junction at Kupyansk near the Russian border, cutting off a key supply route for Putin’s troops in the Donbas.
Following the rout, on Wednesday the Russian president felt it necessary to announce the mobilization of 300,000 reservists. His speech triggered a frantic search for flights out of the country before the borders were closed to military-age men.
Fledgling protests also broke out in the wealthy metropolises of Moscow and St. Petersburg, following months of social calm and outward demonstrations of popular support for the war. Dozens were arrested by Putin’s security officers in the process, and some were even allegedly served with a summons to appear at the local war office for subsequent conscription—an unusual punishment if true.
Peskov junior’s apparent exemption from military duty comes only hours after another example of Putin’s nepotism emerged.First clips coming out of Russia this morning of draftees saying bye to their families. This from a small town in Yakutsk. Credits @taygainfo pic.twitter.com/tlaVRoDgLT
— Pjotr Sauer (@PjotrSauer) September 22, 2022
On Wednesday, the Kremlin agreed to a deal swapping prisoners from Ukraine’s Azov battalion that surrendered in Mariupol in exchange for one of the Russian president’s staunchest local allies and the father to his goddaughter—Viktor Medvedchuk.
The former leader of Ukraine’s main pro-Russian political party had been arrested trying to cross the border in April and was due to stand trial for treason.
Ironically, it was Dmitry Peskov himself that sought to distance the Kremlin’s involvement at the time, calling him a “foreign politician” rather than a Russian citizen: “Medvedchuck should have left Ukrainian territory before the beginning of the [war].”
On Thursday, Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh blasted the Putin spin doctor.
“Literally everything that Peskov says must be understood exactly the opposite,” she wrote.
Earning that kind of reputation is not going to make the job of explaining his son’s apparent lack of patriotism any easier.
RICH MAN'S WAR
POOR MAN'S FIGHT
Overheard:
The top Google search
in Russia yesterday was
"how to break my arm at home"
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