FOCUS: She Warned America That Russia Hacked Our Voting Rolls. Why Is She in Jail?
Monday, 30 July 2018 10:29
Bunch writes: "Last week's news that special counsel Robert Mueller had the goods on 12 high-level Russian spies whose job was to hack computers and muck up America's 2016 presidential election was a political bombshell - but also a resounding vindication for a 26-year-old Georgia woman with the wonderfully poetic name of Reality Winner."
Reality Winner. (photo: standwithreality.org)
She Warned America That Russia Hacked Our Voting Rolls. Why Is She in Jail?
In the spring of 2017, with public concern mounting about the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, federal officials still sought to assure people that there’d been no major success in penetrating electronic voting systems. But Winner, a commended Air Force veteran with a top-secret security clearance, then working for a government contractor, had seen evidence that federal officials weren’t telling the whole truth.
And so Winner did what Daniel Ellsberg, Mark Felt, and others whose difficult decisions made in real time have long since been vindicated by history had done: She blew the whistle. In sending her evidence to the news media, Winner took down a cover-up of information that the Russians had, in fact, been far more aggressive — and successful — in targeting voting systems. Indeed, one major electronic voting-records vendor, later identified as VR Systems, had been hacked into, and Russians then used that information to target voting officials in the critical swing state of Florida with “spear-phishing” emails aimed at compromising their computer networks.
But to say that the vindication of Reality Winner was bittersweet would be a gross understatement.
When the indictments came down, the young Air Force vet still sat in a Lincoln County, Ga., jail cell, awaiting formal sentencing after she decided in June to plead guilty to one count of felony transmission of national defense information, an inevitable outcome in a federal prosecution that was ridiculously stacked against Winner from Day One. Under her plea agreement, Winner will spend 5 years and three months in prison — until late 2022, if time served is included.
Winner, who won an Air Force Commendation Medal for her work in identifying “high-value targets” for American drone strikes, is clearly a woman with a strong notion of right and wrong, who wanted America to do better. For that, she was punished under a law aimed at traitors and forced to surrender 63 months of her freedom, the longest sentence, if it’s not commuted, that will ever be served by an American whistle-blower. Her unconscionable punishment shows how a national-security state can devolve into a police state when the issue becomes who owns the truth: the government or the governed.
“Far from a criminal, she should be considered a hero,” Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which supported Winner during her prosecution, told me. Timm is also a little dumbfounded (and so am I) that Winner’s case didn’t get more attention, in a time when the Trump-Russia story is often the lead item on cable TV news. Or why she didn’t get more support from mainstream news orgs in a time when the White House has all but declared war on journalism.
After all, Trump’s expressed passion for jailing journalists and his Justice Department’s zeal in prosecuting Winner to the fullest extent of the law may be appalling, but it’s also the culmination of a long-standing war on whistle-blowers that’s accelerated with the security-state obsessions of post-9/11 America, under presidencies and Congresses run by both parties.
America’s obsession with valuing its secrecy over doing the right thing led to utter absurdities. Not a single high-ranking government official spent one day behind bars for the unlawful torture of terrorism suspects, arguably the greatest moral stain on our nation during the George W. Bush years, but a CIA analyst who blew the whistle on torture named John Kiriakou was locked up for two years in a federal prison here in Pennsylvania.
So far, history is repeating itself. The nightmare of a foreign power like Russia trying to tip the scales of a weakened American democracy and install Donald Trump in the White House is the political scandal of the century, and yet two years into it, the only person convicted of a felony and sitting in a jail cell is the woman seeking to expose part of the cover-up.
Yet, as Timm noted, the perversions of the American justice system when it comes to government secrecy made it essentially impossible for Winner to defend herself. Under the Espionage Act, defendants aren’t able to present evidence about their motive, that a leak of documents was in the public interest and didn’t actually harm national security, as seemed true here. A motion by Winner’s lawyers to allow testimony from the state election officials who were grateful to learn about the security flaws exposed by the leak was shot down by the federal judge who also refused to grant bail to the Air Force veteran.
Timm noted, incredulously, that the day after the leaked NSA document was published in The Intercept, a federal agency — the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — sent out a bulletin to state officials warning about the security issues that had been revealed. “This is at the same time,” Timm noted, “that the government was saying that by releasing this information, Reality Winner was putting national security at risk.”
If America wants to emerge from the current quagmire, we need a system that will encourage responsible truth-tellers, not deprive them of their liberty. Let’s be honest: Those things aren’t going to happen with a president who’s at war with the First Amendment or a Congress brainwashed to do his bidding. But if citizens do succeed in flipping the government over the next couple of cycles, how can a new generation of leaders keep the promise that Barack Obama broke a decade ago, and make America safe for the next Reality Winner?
Timm said any solution would start with rewriting the Espionage Act, to make it clear that the law is targeting treasonous spies, not patriotic whistle-blowers. Likewise, he said federal law could also be reformed to allow whistle-blowers like Winner or Kiriakou to present evidence on whether their leak was motivated by the public interest or whether national security was, in fact, harmed.
What’s more, we need more big shots in Big Media with the biggest megaphones to help remind people that it was leaked information that let the public know about the depths of Watergate, the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib, and the Vietnam War lying that was laid bare in the Pentagon Papers. In fact, it’s a little crazy — and maybe revealing — that while the journalism world was going ga-ga over the Pentagon Papers-era defiance in the movie The Post, very little ink was spilled in defense of Reality Winner.
All of us, true political leaders, the media, everyday citizens, need to fight for courage and for truth-telling and to speak out in its defense, or else we will continue to stumble through our current nightmare, where reality is a loser.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48781"><span class="small">Elizabeth Warren, Medium</span></a>
Monday, 30 July 2018 08:34
Warren writes: "Poor people are under attack from those in power, and the Poor People's Campaign is on the forefront of this fight."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Forward Together With the Poor People's Campaign
By Elizabeth Warren, Medium
30 July 18
n June 12th, 2018, Reverend William J. Barber II hosted a discussion on poverty for members of Congress. People living in poverty across the United States?—?from California to Kentucky to Michigan to West Virginia?—?told us their stories. We heard from a victim of a predatory loan who lives in a trailer home infested with mold. We heard from an undocumented immigrant who struggles to afford rent in Los Angeles. We heard from a retired coal miner who is still fighting for fair benefits from greedy corporations.
As Americans struggle to pay their bills, the Trump Administration continues to spit in the face of poor people. Donald Trump has nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court?—?a judge who poses a real threat to historically disadvantaged communities, including people of color, LGBTQ Americans, workers and the poor. The president has also crammed his administration with officials who care more about making money for themselves than protecting our environment, keeping our workers safe, and advocating for the rights of unions and consumers. Poor people are under attack from those in power, and the Poor People’s Campaign is on the forefront of this fight.
“This is not a liberal or a conservative movement. It is a deeply moral movement. The people who are hurting the most have linked up to say, ‘We won’t be silent anymore.’” Reverend Barber launched the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival to pick up where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. left off 50 years ago.
“I think it’s really easy for us as human beings to punish people or dismiss people because we don’t love them. And we can’t love them, we say, if we don’t know them.” Amy Jo Hutchinson told us about people living in poverty in West Virginia?—?and the governor’s immoral proposal to add work requirements to SNAP benefits.
Pamela Rush is a mother of two from Alabama. Her family lives in a mobile home that’s falling apart. But as a victim of a predatory loan, she has no money for repairs. Her 10-year-old daughter has breathing problems because of the mold in the trailer. She joined the Poor People’s campaign because she wants to fight back.
“There seems to be a lack of compassion and humility?—?or at the very least a turning of a blind eye?—?to problem areas in our society.” Christopher Olive is a U.S. Air Force veteran. He suffered from opioid addiction and homelessness after his discharge. He’s now fighting for affordable housing, rental assistance, and treatment facilities in his community, Grays Harbor County in Washington state.
Vanessa Nosie represents the San Carlos Apache tribe, from the Apache stronghold. She told us about the Elem Indian Colony in Clearlake, California. Cancer rates are increasingly high in the area after miners stripped mercury from the land, leaking heavy metal into the water. She’s fighting to preserve the sacred land of indigenous people from corporate greed and environmental devastation.
“As long as we’re divided, they can conquer.” Nick Smith is the son of a coal miner’s daughter. He’s seen poverty grow worse and worse in Appalachia as coal mining jobs disappear and unions are weakened. Nick is fighting against corporate greed, anti-union legislation, and voter suppression.
“Unfortunately, today most immigrants are afraid. But we’re not just afraid of getting deported, we’re now afraid of having our children ripped from our arms while we’re crossing borders.” Kenia Alcocer is fighting for basic human rights for immigrants. She told us about her life in Los Angeles, and how she fears displacement because of high rents and stagnant wages. “This is not about a paper, this is not about citizenship, this is about human rights.”
“We have an administration right now in place that’s doing everything they can to set us back as much as they can.” Stanley Sturgill told us about the devastation of “right-to-work” anti-union laws in Kentucky. After working 41 years in the coal mines, he continues to fight for the health care and pension rights of coal miners.
“Venus is supposed to be alive.” Callie Greer’s daughter, Venus Colley-Mims, died because she didn’t have access to health care. While fighting for her life, she battled insurance companies who refused to pay for the medical care she needed. While waiting for the insurance company to approve a CAT scan and breathing equipment, she lapsed into a coma and died. Callie is fighting for every single person’s right to health care.
Ariana spoke about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Her family and her community are still suffering without clean water and she demands to know why the government has still not adequately addressed this crisis.
“Everyone needs health care.” Margie from North Carolina, told the story of her late brother-in-law, who died from kidney cancer because he did not have access to health care. She is advocating for Medicare for All because health care is a basic human right.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47905"><span class="small">Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website</span></a>
Sunday, 29 July 2018 13:41
Keillor writes: "It is a lovely summer so long as you don't think too much about the news, so I don't. When I was younger, I felt a duty to be informed, and now it is the duty of younger people, not me. I am trying to deal with busted zippers on a suitcase."
Garrison Keillor. (photo: Wisconsin Public Radio)
Up at Cabin, Leave Paper on Porch
By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
29 July 18
t is a lovely summer so long as you don’t think too much about the news, so I don’t. When I was younger, I felt a duty to be informed, and now it is the duty of younger people, not me. I am trying to deal with busted zippers on a suitcase.
The suitcase itself is in fine shape, but the pull tabs are missing. To zip it shut, I must grasp the tiny slider between thumb and forefinger and ease it along the chain, which ain’t easy.
I called a drugstore and the clerk heard “pull tabs” and thought I wanted to buy lottery tickets. I called another and the lady said, “A good luggage shop can repair that for you.” I thought I’d try attaching a paper clip to each slider and the search for paper clips led me to the many miscellany dishes we have in this house and the rich assortment of tiny screws, brads, tacks, clips, nails, staples, pins, and fasteners.
My wife asked what I was looking for. I told her. She said, “I have a bunch of zipper tabs upstairs, why didn’t you ask me for one?”
“Where did you get those?”
“From Amazon,” she said.
The little bald guy who started out selling books out of the trunk of his car and now is the richest man in the world (at $112 billion) sells replacement parts for zippers. What a country. Mister Twitter, by the way, is No. 766.
That is why I’m not up on the latest in the Miller investigation of collision with the Russians. Too busy with other things.
So I packed the suitcase and we went away to a cabin in the pines to get away from everything and sit by the lake and of course you find a little bit of the everything you went there to get away from, leaks from the fridge, raccoon incursions, hot water heaters not heating hot enough, but my wife handles those things because she is half Swedish. You put me in charge of hot water and we will all be in hot water very quickly.
The cabin also serves as the family museum. Her grandpa’s helmet and bugle from World War I are hung on the wall, his vest inscribed with the battles he witnessed, the Marne, the Somme, and Verdun, which lasted almost a year and cost 700,000 casualties. A man who had seen so much death would appreciate a lake cabin even more than you and I.
His son, my late father-in-law Ray, is still the presiding spirit of this cabin. As a young man, he helped build it; and as an old man, he cut up fallen trees for firewood and climbed up on the roof to clean leaves out of the gutters. His dad sat on the front steps and smoked his White Owl cigar and his mother cooked supper. His wife sat at the piano and played songs from old songbooks.
I came here years ago as a stranger in love with their youngest daughter, and the four of us sat on the porch and peacefully conversed, feeling the breeze off the lake. My love sat next to me on the wicker sofa, touching hands, and her parents sat in a rocker and a kitchen chair. I was not out to impress them. The only really impressive thing I can do is to recite the 87 counties of Minnesota by heart in alphabetical order in less than 60 seconds. As it happens, the cabin is in Wisconsin.
I was there to show them that I can converse in a quiet civilized way, not lecture or harangue or belabor, avoiding long digressions, bald-faced lies and outright heresy. I did this. I fit in. It was a lovely evening. We covered a lot of ground, mainly history, personal and national, but also music and art and some botany, my weak subject — I only know birch trees and tulips and maybe spruce — but I nodded, smiled, and soon we were off that and onto Cars We Have Loved and then trains.
This is what lake cabins are for. You can swim or canoe or hike if you like, but quiet reflective porch conversation, the dialogue of gentle people, is what we’re here for. Oddly, the subject of No. 766, our Chief Expletive, never comes up. He is not a cabin sort of guy. The reflection he loves is his own. The man is not connected to the soul of this country.
Putin Wanted to Interrogate Me. Trump Called It 'an Incredible Offer.' Why?
Sunday, 29 July 2018 13:36
McFaul writes: "On the long plane ride home, my incredulity over Putin's chutzpah eventually morphed into anger with Trump. Why had my president - my commander in chief, my fellow American - called Putin's scheme to defame, scare and threaten me and other critics of Putin 'an incredible offer?'"
Michael McFaul. (photo: Getty Images)
Putin Wanted to Interrogate Me. Trump Called It 'an Incredible Offer.' Why?
By Michael McFaul, The Washington Post
29 July 18
thought I was done worrying about Vladimir Putin. I left Moscow in 2014 as the departing U.S. ambassador, after Putin spent my two-year stint deploying state-controlled media outlets and their surrogates to propagate disinformation about me. He’d been received tepidly in his campaign to retake the presidency from his ally, Dmitry Medvedev, and he needed an enemy. So his proxies falsely argued that I had been sent by President Barack Obama to fund the opposition and foment revolution; that I hoped Putin would end up like Serbian autocrat Slobodan Milosevic, dislodged and imprisoned; and that I was a pedophile. It was a demoralizing dimension of an otherwise great job, but the White House defended me zealously. (In meetings with both Putin and Medvedev, Obama criticized their treatment of me.) When I returned to my teaching position in 2014, I was relieved to leave it all behind.
But this month, at the Helsinki summit between the two nations, Putin was after me again, and at first I didn’t understand how sinister his attack was. During his two-hour one-on-one meeting with President Trump, Putin made his American counterpart an offer: He would permit U.S. law enforcement officials to witness the Russian interrogation of 12 Russian spies accused by the United States of interfering in the 2016 campaign, if his own agents could observe the interrogation of a similar number of American intelligence officers who, Russia alleges, committed crimes on Russian soil. In the fantasy Putin spun during the joint news conference, U.S. intelligence officers had helped American-born British citizen Bill Browder launder money out of Russia, which Browder then gave to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. It was a ludicrously false equivalency that linked the documented efforts of Russian hackers to tilt the election to Trump with a host of completely imagined offenses by U.S. government officials. Amazingly, Trump called Putin’s crazy proposal “an incredible offer.”
I was in Helsinki, too, as an analyst for NBC News. My initial reaction was incredulity. First, it was obvious that if Putin — a former KGB officer — could stand next to Trump and lie on world television about Russian noninterference in the election, his military intelligence officers would obviously do the same. Second, Putin’s fabricated story was insulting; of course American intelligence officers had not used their positions to aid someone’s alleged money laundering scheme. The blatant defamation of American officials, as Putin stood next to our president, really angered me. Third, this was classic “whataboutism,” a favorite Putin tactic in which he compares, for instance, the annexation of Crimea with something unrelated, like Kosovar independence. In Helsinki, however, Putin simply invented the comparable crime.
I didn’t think Trump was malicious to see merit in this cynical, deceitful offer. He has been naive about Putin and his autocratic regime for years; this was another expression of his misunderstanding of Putin’s methods, or so I believed in the moment. (Trump’s praise underscored why he should never have held a tete-a-tete with Putin. If he could get played on such an obvious no-no — handing over our intelligence officers to Russian interrogators — what else did he agree to in private?) It was just one more symptom of his gullibility, like his choice, during the presser, to side with Putin and against his own government on the question of 2016 meddling: “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”
Then, on the flight home, Russian journalists began pinging me, asking for my reaction to a statement from the spokesman for the top Russian prosecutor that implied I was under investigation for violating Russian law! “We’re ready to send another request to the US authorities to grant us permission to question these very employees of the US intelligence agencies, as well as a number of other US government officials and businessmen, in order to charge them for the crimes committed by Browder,” it said, citing my name as one of those government officials.
Here we go again, I thought. As the first U.S. envoy to Moscow to be banned from traveling to Russia since George Kennan, I thought my days of dealing directly with Putin’s regime were over. Yet, here it was spewing yet another crazy story about me, only now ratcheting up the intimidation by accusing me of a crime. Putin has silenced many domestic critics with disinformation and false legal charges. Now, amazingly, he was reaching out to muzzle an American professor, thousands of miles away in California.
On the long plane ride home, my incredulity over Putin’s chutzpah eventually morphed into anger with Trump. Why had my president — my commander in chief, my fellow American — called Putin’s scheme to defame, scare and threaten me and other critics of Putin “an incredible offer”? An American president cannot establish the dangerous precedent of allowing any foreign government, let alone a hostile power, to interrogate or threaten to indict American officials for work they did while serving in the U.S. government. If this could happen to a former senior White House official and ambassador who had immunity while working abroad, what could happen to ordinary diplomats? Or intelligence officers? Or soldiers? Or aid workers? Surely, I reasoned, Trump’s team would get this cleaned up, on the record, when he returned to American soil.
In their first attempt to correct the record, they failed miserably. A few days after the Helsinki summit, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the White House was still considering Putin’s proposal for reciprocal interrogation of alleged criminals.
What? Did she too not grasp the gravity of this error? A flurry of outraged public reaction ensued, punctuated by a very rare bipartisan 98-to-0 vote in the Senate in defense of me and my fellow Americans on Putin’s list. The State Department spokeswoman, Heather Nauert, flatly dismissed Putin’s suggestion as “absurd” — but also made clear that she was not speaking for the White House.
In the third attempt to explain U.S. policy regarding Putin’s offer, Sanders said Trump had rejected the offer but still applauded the “sincerity” of the Russian president’s proposal. I’m not sure what was sincere about accusing me and others of some crazy crime to help the Clinton campaign by conspiring with a British businessman, but I was upset that my president hadn’t made a better effort — full-throated and without qualifications — to defend us. We all served, and some are still serving, our great country with honor. We do not deserve to be threatened by a foreign autocrat. This is not a partisan issue; this is an American issue.
I’m relieved to know that my government will not ask me to be interrogated by Russian law enforcement officials, but I still need my president to defend me and the other Americans from the next possible escalatory step — a warrant for my arrest, followed by the issuance of a Red Notice by Interpol to detain me in a third country and, in the worst of all worlds, extradite me to Russia. The Russian government has a reputation for abusing Interpol procedures for political ends.
In the end, it’s a low-probability event that Putin will order his government to indict a former U.S. ambassador for an invented crime. But I want it to be a zero-probability event, as does my family. And I want my government to help.
That’s because low-probability events occur increasingly often where Russia is concerned: the illegitimate arrest and murder, in prison, of Sergei Magnitsky; the annexation of Crimea; the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a civilian jet flying over Ukraine, that killed nearly 300 people; the intervention in Syria to prop up a murderous dictator; the assassination of a former first deputy prime minister, Boris Nemtsov, just steps away from the Kremlin; the audacious Russian attack on American sovereignty during the 2016 presidential election; the poisoning of the Skripals with a Soviet chemical weapon on British territory; and the spinning of a conspiratorial tale at a major summit about how a British businessman colluded with U.S. intelligence officers, congressional staffers and former State Department officials (from both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations) to steal Russian cash and help the Clinton campaign.
Putin already has done real damage to my professional and personal life. I once was a scholar of Russian politics, but now I can’t travel to that country to conduct research, at least in the Putin era. Even if Russia removed me from its travel ban list, I would not risk going back now with the threat of arrest lingering. Since 1983, I have traveled and lived in the U.S.S.R. and Russia constantly, residing roughly half a dozen years there. I have hundreds of close Russian friends, thousands of acquaintances, and deep interests in Russian culture and history. That chapter of my life, spanning more than three decades, is now over.
I hope Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and national security adviser John Bolton don’t give Putin another victory in his personal vendetta against me by allowing him to throw around false charges, bogus indictments and improper Red Notices issued in third countries. I hope they stand up — clearly, emphatically and publicly — for all Americans serving their country abroad and tell their Russian counterparts that charging (let alone dispatching Interpol to seize) former U.S. officials with fantastical crimes would be met with outrage, new sanctions and reciprocal measures.
That much, at least, should be easy. If the Trump administration does not act, then Congress should adopt new sanctions and other coercive moves to deter Russia from threatening U.S. government officials with detention. If the United States fails to protect its own citizens, it will send a message of weakness and permissibility to Moscow (and everywhere else). That signal will not help Trump obtain his objectives in negotiations with Russia (or anyone else). Putin, and the world, will be watching.
How Decade Long Republican Gerrymanders Could Be Undone by Reckless GOP Emails.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48778"><span class="small">David Daley, Slate</span></a>
Sunday, 29 July 2018 13:32
Daley writes: "Time and again, Hofeller's political allies have failed to heed his advice. The most recent example: newly disclosed emails - part of a federal court challenge to the constitutionality of the Michigan map by the League of Women Voters - that reveal just how determined GOP operatives, mapmakers, and congressional staffers were to design maps that would provide Republicans with a full decade of dominance."
Rep. Dan Kildee of Michigan speaks outside of the Supreme Court during oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford to call for an end to partisan gerrymandering on Oct. 3. (photo: Olivier Douliery/Getty Images)
How Decade Long Republican Gerrymanders Could Be Undone by Reckless GOP Emails.
By David Daley, Slate
29 July 18
How decadelong Republican gerrymanders could be undone by reckless GOP emails.
he master Republican mapmaker Tom Hofeller is among the visionaries who understood how sophisticated new GIS software and powerful new data sets provided an opportunity for the GOP to gerrymander itself decadelong advantages in the U.S. House of Representatives and state legislatures nationwide. Hofeller trains state legislators and junior line-drawers, however, with a PowerPoint so old-school that it looks like it might have been designed on a Commodore 64. There are no special effects to clutter Hofeller’s most important laws of redistricting: Avoid recklessness. Always be discreet. Avoid email.
In case that message does not sink in, Hofeller repeats and underlines this advice. “Emails are the tools of the devil,” he cautions. “Remember—A journey to legal HELL starts with but a single misstatement OR a stupid email!” “Remember, the court record is already open.” “Remember recent email disasters!!!”
Time and again, Hofeller’s political allies have failed to heed his advice. The most recent example: newly disclosed emails—part of a federal court challenge to the constitutionality of the Michigan map by the League of Women Voters—that reveal just how determined GOP operatives, mapmakers, and congressional staffers were to design maps that would provide Republicans with a full decade of dominance. (Emails and correspondence between Hofeller and Michigan Republicans, who have worked together in the past, have also been requested as part of discovery.) Those who are dejected about the Supreme Court’s refusal to put an end to extreme partisan gerrymandering should take heart. The next verdict on partisan gerrymandering will come this fall from voters in Michigan and three other states where meaningful reform is on the ballot. Even if these damning emails don’t move the high court, they’re almost certain to anger American voters.
Michigan Republicans have long denied that partisanship had anything to do with the congressional districts they drew after the 2010 census, a map that has locked in nine of the state’s 14 congressional seats for the GOP in every election since, even in years when Democrats earn many more statewide votes. They have insisted that Voting Rights Act requirements and the state’s political geography—Democratic voters are clustered in Detroit and Ann Arbor, while Republicans are spread more efficiently throughout the state—baked in its red edge naturally and inevitably.
Behind the scenes, they were making very different claims. “In a glorious way that makes it easier to cram ALL of the Dem garbage in Wayne, Washtenaw, Oakland and Macomb counties into only four districts,” wrote Jack Daly, the chief of staff to then GOP congressman Thaddeus McCotter, in a note to mapmaker Jeff Timmer and longtime strategist Robert LaBrant. Daly asked Timmer to swap neighborhoods in predominantly black Wayne County for suburban voters in West Bloomfield to meet the “obvious objective” of “putting dems in a dem district and reps in a GOP district.”
Another email celebrated a vulgar contour on the map that looked like an extended middle finger, and the likely impact that feature would have on a Democratic incumbent. “Perfect,” a colleague wrote Timmer. “[I]t’s giving the finger to sandy levin. I love it.”
In another email, discovered in trial documents by both the Bridge and the Detroit News, LaBrant told Timmer that national Republicans had suggested a map with 10 Republican seats and just four for the Democrats. That seemed too reckless for LaBrant, who counseled that “we needed for legal and PR purposes a good looking map that did not look like an obvious gerrymander.” LaBrant later observed that “we’ve spent a lot of time providing options to ensure we have a solid 9-5 delegation in 2012 and beyond.”
This push to turn Michigan red was part of a national movement. Savvy GOP strategists at the Republican State Leadership Committee, led by Chris Jankowski and Ed Gillespie, carefully orchestrated the GOP’s 2010 redistricting play, an audacious comeback move after being wiped out in 2008 by Barack Obama and losing control of both chambers of Congress. They named it REDMAP, short for the Redistricting Majority Project. By the time Democrats woke up and realized what the GOP was up to, Republicans had redrawn 193 of the 435 U.S. House districts. The lines, drawn by Hofeller, Timmer, and other GIS geniuses, held back the Democratic surge in 2012. The GOP held the House of Representatives 234–201 that year despite winning 1.4 million fewer votes nationwide.
Trouble is, some mapmakers forgot email was the tool of the devil. While the gerrymanders they crafted have yet to be undone at the ballot box, their partisan braggadocio has offended judges of all ideologies and provided the proof that something more than politics as usual was afoot during the 2010 redistricting cycle.
In Florida, despite the overwhelming passage of two 2010 state constitutional amendments demanding nonpartisan redistricting, GOP legislators ran sham public hearings while operatives drew the real maps in the shadows and funneled them into the public process. They left such a voluminous paper trail of draft maps and talking points that an outraged federal judge demanded that several Republican congressional districts be redrawn. “[T]his group of Republican political consultants did in fact conspire to manipulate and influence the redistricting process,” Judge Terry Lewis ruled in 2014.
Emails from Ohio revealed how GOP operatives charged with redistricting moved the entire process away from the Capitol and into a suite at the Doubletree Hotel that they dubbed “The Bunker.” On their personal Gmail accounts, strategists and politicians shared increasingly partisan indexes and algorithms, made last-minute fixes to aid campaign contributors, pledged fealty to national GOP goals, and shared virtual high-fives when they finished.
These map-makers didn’t run afoul of any laws—partisan gerrymandering is not illegal. Also, the impact of their work hasn’t been a secret. Multiple studies have demonstrated the historic, durable nature of the Republican gerrymanders in Wisconsin and North Carolina. And just last month, the Citizens Research Council of Michigan used several statistical tests to show the tilt embedded into the state’s maps, conclusively dismissing natural clustering or the state’s geography as the cause, and finding that “the Michigan legislature has gone beyond justifiable factors in drawing districts to advantage one political party.”
These sorts of emails, and the very clear intent behind them, also failed to convince the Supreme Court in the Wisconsin or Maryland cases this spring—though, to be clear, they punted those cases back to the lower courts on standing, specifically declined to rule on the merits and clearly expressed outrage and distaste over the obvious partisanship. In Benisek v. Lamone, which challenged Maryland’s Democratic gerrymander, Justice Stephen Breyer beseeched his colleagues to act in part because of the email record, arguing that “we’ll never have such a record again. I mean, the people who do the gerrymandering are not stupid.”
The public isn’t stupid either. These emails strip aside wonkish debates and make it extremely clear that politicians are doing all they can to choose their voters, and to make elections less meaningful and competitive. It shows that redistricting is not a geographic inevitability but rather a series of specific choices, made by committed partisans armed with precise data, wedded to a goal of decadelong domination.
When the Supreme Court dodged the Maryland and Wisconsin cases, the fight for fair maps shifted from the courts to the ballot box. Earlier this year, a petition drive forced Ohio legislators to agree to a new bipartisan process for drawing congressional lines in 2021. This November, redistricting reform will be on the ballot in Colorado, Utah, Missouri, and, yes, Michigan. These emails may not shift the U.S. Supreme Court, but they reveal the kind of political hypocrisy that infuriates Americans of all ideological stripes. We’ll see in November whether voters punish mapmakers who failed to avoid recklessness, weren’t discreet, and didn’t avoid email.
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ast week’s news that 
n June 12th, 2018, Reverend William J. Barber II hosted a discussion on poverty for members of Congress. People living in poverty across the United States?—?from California to Kentucky to Michigan to West Virginia?—?told us their stories. We heard from a victim of a predatory loan who lives in a trailer home infested with mold. We heard from an undocumented immigrant who struggles to afford rent in Los Angeles. We heard from a retired coal miner who is still fighting for fair benefits from greedy corporations.
t is a lovely summer so long as you don’t think too much about the news, so I don’t. When I was younger, I felt a duty to be informed, and now it is the duty of younger people, not me. I am trying to deal with busted zippers on a suitcase.
he master Republican mapmaker Tom Hofeller is among the 
