segunda-feira, 31 de julho de 2023
Trump expects to be indicted ‘any day now’ on January 6 charges
2h ago
18.44 BST
Trump expects to be indicted ‘any day now’ on
January 6 charges
Donald
Trump said he expects he could be indicted “any day now” as part of special
counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection.
Smith has
been looking into Trump’s efforts to remain in office following his 2020
election defeat to Joe Biden. Federal prosecutors have assembled evidence to
charge Trump with three crimes, the Guardian has reported: obstruction of an
official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and a statute
that makes it unlawful to conspire to violate civil rights.
Trump, posting to Truth Social on Monday, wrote:
I assume that an Indictment from Deranged Jack
Smith and his highly partisan gang of Thugs, pertaining to my “PEACEFULLY &
PATRIOTICALLY Speech, will be coming out any day now, as yet another attempt to
cover up all of the bad news about bribes, payoffs, and extortion, coming from
the Biden ‘camp.’ This seems to be the way they do it. ELECTION INTERFERENCE! PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT!
.jpg)
30m ago
20.16 BST
Dharna Noor
A small group of progressive lawmakers led by Vermont
Senator Bernie Sanders on Monday urged the United States to bring lawsuits
against the fossil fuel industry for its alleged efforts to sow doubt about the
climate crisis.
“The
actions of ExxonMobil, Shell, and potentially other fossil fuel companies
represent a clear violation of federal racketeering laws, truth in advertising
laws, consumer protection laws, and potentially other laws, and the Department
must act swiftly to hold them accountable for their unlawful actions,” reads
the letter, which was also signed by Democratic senators Ed Markey and
Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Jeff Merkley of Oregon.
The letter,
addressed to attorney general Merrick Garland, references the well-documented
climate misinformation campaign waged over decades by oil and gas companies,
and the dozens of lawsuits filed by states, municipalities, and the District of
Columbia about that campaign.
The letter
was sent as swaths of the United States bake under sweltering temperatures.
This summer’s record-breaking heatwaves in America and southern Europe, which
have put tens of millions of people under heat advisories, would have been
“virtually impossible” without climate change, according to a recent study by
scientists at World Weather Attribution.
The
senators also implore the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission
and other law enforcement agencies to file their own lawsuits against parties
who participated in climate deception, and request a meeting with Garland.
“The
polluters must pay,” the senators wrote.
More than 50m Americans under alert as heatwave persists
More than 50m Americans under alert as heatwave
persists
Phoenix experiences 31st day where temperatures have
reached at least 110F (43.3C), while wildfires burn in California and Nevada
Erum Salam
Mon 31 Jul
2023 17.37 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/31/us-extereme-heat-alert-wildfires
Over 50
million Americans remain under a heat advisory in one of the hottest summers
ever recorded, and a heatwave continues to affect vast parts of the country.
Nasa
recently confirmed June was the hottest June ever.
The hot and
dry weather in the south-west of the US has set off a wave of wildfires.
California and Nevada are currently battling a major fire that is uncontrolled.
Another out-of-control fire that originated in Washington state has spread into
Canada, forcing residents in the town of Osoyoos, British Columbia, to
evacuate.
Sunday
marked the 31st consecutive day where temperatures reached at least 110F
(43.3C) in Phoenix, Arizona. The city’s previous record was 18 days in June
1974.
Doctors in
the region reported a rise in first-, second-, and third-degree contact-burn
cases, some fatal, amid extreme heat conditions.
The reports
of severe burn incidents came from hospitals in Arizona and Nevada, where
deaths from heat-related conditions have surged.
In Texas,
San Antonio hit an all-time high of 117F in June.
Bodies of
water around the world are experiencing a phenomenon known as “marine
heatwave”, when waters warm to unprecedented levels. A sharp rise in
temperatures has been seen in the Caribbean Basin, the Atlantic, and the Gulf
of Mexico, threatening the already fragile ecosystems of marine life,
particularly coral reefs. The conditions cause coral to bleach, and in many
cases, die.
Andrew
Baker, director of the Coral Reef Futures Lab at the University of Miami told
the Washington Post: “This is definitely the worst bleaching event Florida has
ever seen.”
Ocean
surface temperatures in places such as Florida have surpassed 90F, the
threshold for water to be safe to swim in. The hot-tub like temperatures left
its residents with limited options for cooling down.
Amid
record-breaking heat levels, Joe Biden last week announced new measures to
protect Americans against the “existential threat of climate change” and
extreme heat. Some of these measures include improving access to clean drinking
water, planting more trees, opening more cooling centers, and cracking down on
labor heat-safety violations.
Biden said:
“We want the American people to know help is here, and we’re gonna make it
available to anyone who needs it.”
Experts say
the measures are a step in the right direction, but not nearly enough. In his
address, Biden stopped short of declaring a climate emergency or directly
addressing the need to phase out planet-heating fossil fuels.
On Monday,
four Democratic senators – Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley and
Elizabeth Warren – sent a letter to the US attorney general, Merrick Garland,
urging him to bring lawsuits against the fossil-fuel industry for its
longstanding and carefully coordinated campaign to mislead consumers and
discredit climate science in pursuit of huge profits.
In the
letter, the lawmakers wrote: “The fossil-fuel industry has had scientific
evidence about the dangers of climate change and the role that burning fossil
fuels play in increasing global temperatures for more than 50 years.”
They added:
“Despite these companies’ knowledge about climate change and the role their
industry was playing in driving carbon emissions, they chose to participate in
a decades-long, carefully coordinated campaign of misinformation to obfuscate
climate science and convince the public that fossil fuels are not the primary
driver of climate change.”
Trump Employee Released on Bond After Court Appearance in Documents Case
Trump Employee Released on Bond After Court
Appearance in Documents Case
Carlos De Oliveira, the property manager of
Mar-a-Lago, made his first court appearance after his indictment on charges of
conspiring with Donald J. Trump to obstruct the retrieval of classified
material.
By Patricia
Mazzei and Alan Feuer
Patricia
Mazzei reported from Miami and Alan Feuer from New York.
July 31,
2023, 12:10 p.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/us/politics/carlos-de-oliveira-trump-documents-case.html
Carlos De
Oliveira, the property manager of Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald J.
Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, appeared in court for the first
time on Monday to face charges of conspiring with Mr. Trump to obstruct the
government’s monthslong efforts to retrieve highly sensitive national security
documents from the former president after he left office.
Mr. De
Oliveira did not enter a plea at his brief hearing in Federal District Court in
Miami. The chief magistrate judge, Edwin G. Torres, released him on a $100,000
personal surety bond, and he was ordered to remain in the Southern District of
Florida and to not have contact with any of the witnesses in the case.
A slight
man with gray hair, Mr. De Oliveira was met outside the courthouse by a throng
of television cameras but made no public remarks. In court, he told the judge
he had an expired American passport and lived in a rental property in Palm
Beach Gardens, Fla.
A formal
arraignment where Mr. De Oliveira will enter a plea was scheduled for Aug. 10
in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., the home courthouse of Judge
Aileen M. Cannon, who is overseeing the case. The arraignment is expected to be
handled by a magistrate judge in Fort Pierce, Shaniek Mills Maynard.
Mr. De
Oliveira, 56, was named as a new defendant in the classified documents
prosecution on Thursday. Prosecutors from the office of the special counsel,
Jack Smith, presented evidence in an updated indictment that he had plotted
with Mr. Trump and one of Mr. Trump’s personal aides to delete security footage
from cameras positioned outside a storage room at Mar-a-Lago that was instrumental
to the government’s investigation.
The new
indictment offered a portrait of Mr. De Oliveira working with the aide, Walt
Nauta, to examine the security cameras at Mar-a-Lago and ultimately telling the
property’s information technology expert that “the boss” wanted him to erase
the computer server housing the footage.
The revised
indictment also charged Mr. De Oliveira with lying to federal investigators by
repeatedly denying that he knew anything about boxes of documents at
Mar-a-Lago, even though he had personally observed and helped move them when
they first arrived at the property.
The updated
indictment charged Mr. Trump with three new counts: trying to “alter, destroy,
mutilate or conceal evidence”; inducing someone else to do so; and a new allegation
under the Espionage Act related to a classified national security document he
showed to visitors at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.
At the
10-minute hearing in Miami, Magistrate Judge Torres asked the prosecutors if
Mr. Trump should be arraigned on these new charges in Miami this week or in
Fort Pierce at Mr. De Oliveira’s arraignment. The prosecutor, Jay I. Bratt,
said he would have an answer for Judge Torres soon.
Mr. Trump
was already facing 31 counts of violating the Espionage Act by illegally
holding on to classified documents after he left the White House as well an
obstruction conspiracy count with Mr. Nauta.
After the
proceeding, reporters surrounded Mr. De Oliveira and his lawyer, John Irving.
“The
Justice Department has unfortunately decided to bring these charges against Mr.
De Oliveira,” Mr. Irving said. “Now it’s time for them to put their money where
their mouth is.”
The new
indictment from Mr. Smith’s office underscored the extent to which low-level
workers at Mar-a-Lago have become embroiled in the case. Prosecutors claim that
Mr. De Oliveira and Mr. Nauta worked closely together to help Mr. Trump cover
his tracks as investigators homed in on how and where he was storing classified
material at Mar-a-Lago.
The
indictment describes how Mr. Nauta repeatedly moved boxes at Mr. Trump’s
request in and out of a storage room at the club during a critical period: the
weeks between the issuance of a subpoena in May 2022 demanding the return of
all classified documents in Mr. Trump’s possession and a visit to Mar-a-Lago
soon after by federal prosecutors seeking to enforce the subpoena and collect
any relevant materials.
In June
last year, shortly after the government demanded the surveillance footage from
a camera near the storage room, Mr. Trump called Mr. De Oliveira and they spoke
for 24 minutes, the indictment said.
Two days
later, it added, Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira “went to the security guard
booth where surveillance video is displayed on monitors, walked with a
flashlight through the tunnel where the storage room was located, and observed
and pointed out surveillance cameras.”
Within a
few more days, Mr. De Oliveira approached the I.T. expert, Yuscil Taveras, and
informed him about the request by “the boss” to delete the surveillance footage.
When Mr. Taveras objected, the indictment said, Mr. De Oliveira repeated the
request, asking, “What are we going to do?”
Patricia
Mazzei is the Miami bureau chief, covering Florida and Puerto Rico. She writes
about breaking news, politics, disasters and the quirks of life in South
Florida. She joined The Times in 2017 after a decade at The Miami Herald. More
about Patricia Mazzei
Alan Feuer
covers extremism and political violence. He joined The Times in 1999. More
about Alan Feuer
Russia-Ukraine war at a glance: what we know on day 523 of the invasion
.jpg)
Russia-Ukraine war at a glance: what we know on
day 523 of the invasion
At least four people have been killed in Kryvyi Rih,
and two people killed in occupied Donetsk, after multiple strikes across
Ukraine
Martin
Belam, Guardian staff and agencies
Mon 31 Jul
2023 10.56 BST
- At least four people, including a 10-year-old child, have been killed and more than 40 injured after Russia struck a high-rise apartment in Kryvyi Rih. Authorities said people were also trapped under rubble. Oleksiy Kuleba, the deputy head of Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office, called for revenge, saying: “Every day, Ukrainian cities are under fire from Russian terrorists. Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Kharkiv. This is only for the last few days.” He said targeting civilians was a sign of “the despair and defeat of the Russian Federation at the front”.
- Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, said: “This is how the week begins in a Ukrainian city that just wants a quiet, normal life. Russia wants to take peace and life away,” and offered condolences to the victims and their families. The city is the home town of Zelenska and her husband.
- Denis Pushilin, the Russian-imposed acting governor of occupied Donetsk, has claimed at least two people have been killed and at least six injured after a Ukrainian strike hit a bus in the city that has been capital of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic since 2014, and which Russia claimed to have annexed last year.
- Three Ukrainian drones that were shot down over Moscow damaged a high-rise building containing government offices and briefly shut an international airport, according to reports. The Moscow mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said nobody was hurt and there was only minor damage to the facade of two office buildings in the Moscow city business district early on Sunday. Russia’s state news agency Tass reported a security guard had been injured. One of the damaged buildings – several kilometres from the Kremlin – was home to three Russian government ministries as well as residential apartments, according to Russian media, in the third such attack on the capital region in a week.
- “War is returning to the territory of Russia,” Zelenskiy warned after the drones were downed over Moscow. The Ukrainian president said that was “an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process” and that Russia’s symbolic centres and military bases would be targeted.
- Suspilne reports that as a result of morning shelling in Kherson, a 60-year-old employee of a utility company was killed, and four more people were injured. The Russian army also shelled Kramatorsk with rockets at night, and an industrial zone was hit. There were no casualties or injuries reported.
- Alexey Kulemzin, the Russian-imposed mayor of the occupied city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, has reported that “facades, balconies, roofing and glazing” have been damaged in Kuibyshevskyi district in the city by overnight shelling.
- The Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin appears to have said in a voice message published on Monday that his Wagner group was not currently recruiting fighters but was likely to do so in future. Prigozhin said in the voice message that “unfortunately” some of his fighters had moved to other “power structures”, but he said they were looking to return. “As long as we don’t experience a shortage in personnel, we don’t plan to carry out a new recruitment,” Prigozhin said. “However, we will be extremely grateful to you if you keep in touch with us, and as soon as the Motherland needs to create a new group that will be able to protect the interests of our country, we will certainly start recruiting.”
- Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said Moscow would be “forced” to use a nuclear weapon if Kyiv’s counteroffensive was a success and its forces “tore off a part of our land”. Medvedev, the deputy chair of Russia’s security council, said that in that situation “there would simply be no other option”.
- Saudi Arabia will host a Ukrainian-organised peace summit in early August seeking a way to start negotiations over the war, the Associated Press has reported, citing Saudi officials. One, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Russia was not invited to the talks in Jeddah. The head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Andriy Yermak, later confirmed the talks would be held in Saudi Arabia. Riyadh has not acknowledged the summit nor responded to a request for comment. The Kremlin said on Monday it needed to find out the purpose of upcoming talks.
31 Jan 2023: What does the ‘Qatargate’ corruption scandal in the European Parliament tell us about corruption?
COMMENTARY
What does the ‘Qatargate’ corruption scandal in
the European Parliament tell us about corruption?
DATE
31 Jan 2023
AUTHORS
Riccardo
D'Emidio
Drawing
from anti-corruption research, Riccardo D’Emidio outlines how the ‘Qatargate’
scandal in the EU Parliament challenges traditional approaches of corruption
analysis pushing the boundaries of how corruption is understood, and the
measures needed to tackle it.
The
European Parliament has been rocked by what has been defined by analysts and
journalists alike as the ‘the most egregious’ corruption scandal in its
history. Over the past month, media headlines have reported on the alleged
implication in the scandal of (now) former Vice President of the European
Parliament, Eva Kaili, her partner Francesco Giorgi, and former Italian Member
of the European Parliament (MEP) Antonio Panzeri.
The Belgian
police seized bags of cash worth more than a million euros in the house of the
MEP and former MEP as part of an investigation into suspicions of corruption to
the benefit of Qatar.
While the
contours of the investigations continue to broaden, the Belgian federal
prosecutor is investigating allegations of participation in a criminal
organisation, corruption and money laundering. The scandal also involves NGOs
and trade unions – used to ‘move money around’ – and it seems not circumscribed
to Qatar, but could also implicate Moroccan authorities.
The scandal
brings to the fore many of the unresolved issues and misconceptions
characterising the study of corruption and integrity, placing the spotlight on
the murky waters of corruption, conflict of interest, lobbying, foreign
interference and the role of the state.
Corruption
research has traditionally focused on the nation state as the main locus or
unit of analysis of corruption and anti-corruption measures. However, the
Qatargate scandal sheds light on the international dimensions of corruption,
involving a third country allegedly trying to pay their way to shape EU policy,
unduly interfering in the work of a unique supra-national parliament with 705
elected members belonging to different countries, parties and political
cultures.
This is not
an irrelevant detail since political cultures matter: if there is one thing
that 30 years of anti-corruption research and policy has taught us, it is that
context matters. Different measures work in different settings. On this
occasion, the European Parliament relied on the collaboration of five national
security agencies and the work of the Belgian police to uncover the criminal
organization.
This
suggests that as corruption evolves, crossing borders and besetting new
institutions, anti-corruption measures should follow suit. EU institutions will
need to find their own tailor made solutions, which will inevitably need to
take into account the blurring boundaries between the public and the private,
and between political and economic powers.
In this
regard, former MEP Antonio Panzeri together with some of the actors allegedly
involved, fit the description of Janine Wedel’s ‘flexians’ or ‘institutional
nomads’. These are elite players who leverage their influence and power by
moving in and out of multiple roles crossing political and economic playing
fields – often beyond public scrutiny.
The alleged
involvement of members and former members of the European Parliament shatters
the misguided assumption that corruption is only an issue in the Global South
or in contexts of limited state capacity.
Nonetheless,
a couple of days after the story broke on Belgian media, the European
Parliament President, Roberta Metsola, opened the plenary session with these
words: “The European Parliament is under attack. European democracy is under
attack. Our way of open, free, democratic societies are under attack. The
enemies of democracy for whom the very existence of this Parliament is a
threat, will stop at nothing…”.
This speech
was defined as a ‘political communication masterpiece’ yet it dangerously
depicts corruption as an external insidious attack from ‘autocratic third
countries’. This reinforces the notion that corruption creeps into Europe from
elsewhere.
Most
importantly, this framing precludes any reflection on the structural factors
that enabled corruption to take place in the first place. Chief among these
factors is the role of lobbying within EU institutions and EU policy making.
Last year
The Economist reported that 25,000 lobbyists with a combined annual budget
conservatively estimated at more than €3bn seek to influence EU policy,
dwarfing the sums seized by the Belgian police.
Approximately
7,500 lobbyists are accredited with the European Parliament, meaning that they
are regularly able to meet with MEPs who are – for now – under no obligation to
register the meetings in the EU Transparency Register.
From an
ethical standpoint, a provocative and unresolved question remains: what
difference is there between €600,000 stacked in suitcases and €600,000 spent in
expensive trips to exotic destinations, luxury hotels, fancy dinners and
events?
While the
answer to this question is not an easy one, the Resolution adopted by the
European Parliament outlines some important steps for transparency and
accountability in European institutions.
Among other
demands, the text proposes the introduction of cooling off periods for former
MEPs, the strengthening of the Transparency Register and the alignment of its
whistleblower measures to the EU Whistleblowing Directive. Most importantly it
calls on the EU Commission – which holds exclusive legislative initiative – to
set up an independent ethics body overseeing all EU institutions (for more
information on this see here).
While these
are important steppingstones towards curbing corruption, they might not be
enough to instill integrity within EU institutions. Way too often in both
research and practice integrity is dealt with implicitly, assuming that this
will emerge simply by tightening checks and balances and reducing discretion.
The debate
in academia on corruption control vis-à-vis integrity building is a lively one
(see here and here) and it could prompt the EU to go beyond renewed regulatory
frameworks and drive forward the promotion of pro-integrity values and
practices. This could potentially tackle what Transparency International called
‘the culture of impunity’ in the European Parliament
In the past
thirty years, the fight against corruption might not have registered
ground-breaking successes, nonetheless it has acquired a substantive amount of
knowledge and lessons learnt. It is of paramount importance, that in times of
crisis such as this one, EU institutions tap into existing knowledge without
falling back on outdated – yet intuitively sound – measures.
Conversely,
the Qatargate case pushes the boundaries of anti-corruption research both in
terms of grasping the multiple dimensions and nuances of corruption, as well as
the possible anti-corruption measures to be put in place.
By Riccardo
D’Emidio, PhD Candidate, Centre for the Study of Corruption, University of
Sussex.
The views
expressed in this piece are his own.
The EU’s reply to Qatargate: Nips, tucks and
paperwork
Calls for a more profound overhaul have been met with
finger-pointing, blame-shifting and bureaucratic slow-walking.
“Judge us on what we’ve done rather [than] on what we
didn’t,” Roberta Metsola told journalists earlier this month |
BY EDDY WAX
AND SARAH WHEATON
JULY 31,
2023 4:04 AM CET
STRASBOURG
— The European Parliament’s response to Qatargate: Fight corruption with
paperwork.
When
Belgian police made sweeping arrests and recovered €1.5 million from Parliament
members in a cash-for-influence probe last December, it sparked mass clamoring
for a deep clean of the institution, which has long languished with lax ethics
and transparency rules, and even weaker enforcement.
Seven
months later, the Parliament and its president, Roberta Metsola, can certainly
claim to have tightened some rules — but the results are not much to shout
about. With accused MEPs Eva Kaili and Marc Tarabella back in the Parliament
and even voting on ethics changes themselves, the reforms lack the political
punch to take the sting out of a scandal that Euroskeptic forces have leaped on
ahead of the EU election next year.
“Judge us
on what we’ve done rather [than] on what we didn’t,” Metsola told journalists
earlier this month, arguing that Parliament has acted swiftly where it could.
While the
Parliament can claim some limited improvements, calls for a more profound
overhaul in the EU’s only directly elected institution — including more serious
enforcement of existing rules — have been met with finger-pointing,
blame-shifting and bureaucratic slow-walking.
The
Parliament dodged some headline-worthy proposals in the process. It declined to
launch its own inquiry into what really happened, it decided not to force MEPs
to declare their assets and it won’t be stripping any convicted MEPs of their
gold-plated pensions.
Instead,
the institution favored more minimal nips and tucks. The rule changes amount to
much more bureaucracy and more potential alarm bells to spot malfeasance sooner
— but little in the way of stronger enforcement of ethics rules for MEPs.
EU
Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly, who investigates complaints about EU administration
lamented that the initial sense of urgency to adopt strict reforms had “dissipated.”
After handing the EU a reputational blow, she argued, the scandal’s aftermath
offered a pre-election chance, “to show that lessons have been learned and
safeguards have been put in place.”
Former MEP
Richard Corbett, who co-wrote the Socialists & Democrats group’s own
inquiry into Qatargate and favors more aggressive reforms, admitted he isn’t
sure whether Parliament will get there.
“The
Parliament is getting to grips with this gradually, muddling its way through
the complex field, but it’s too early to say whether it will do what it
should,” he said.
Bags of cash
The sense
of resignation that criminals will be criminals was only one of the starting
points that shaped the Parliament’s response.
“We will
never be able to prevent people taking bags of cash. This is human nature. What
we have to do is create a protection network,” said Raphaël Glucksmann, a
French MEP who sketched out some longer-term recommendations he hopes the
Parliament will take up.
Another is
that the Belgian authorities’ painstaking judicial investigation is still
ongoing, with three MEPs charged and a fourth facing imminent questioning. Much
is unknown about how the alleged bribery ring really operated, or what the
countries Qatar, Morocco and Mauritania really got for their bribes.
On top of
that, Parliament was occasionally looking outward rather than inward for people
to blame.
Metsola’s
message in the wake of the scandal was that EU democracy was “under attack” by
foreign forces. The emphasis on “malign actors, linked to autocratic third
countries” set the stage for the Parliament’s response to Qatargate: blame
foreign interference, not an integrity deficit.
Instead of
creating a new panel to investigate how corruption might have steered
Parliament’s work, Parliament repurposed an existing committee on foreign
interference and misinformation to probe the matter. The result was a set of
medium- and long-term recommendations that focus as much on blocking IT
contractors from Russia and China as they do on holding MEPs accountable — and
they remain merely recommendations.
Metsola did
also turn inward, presenting a 14-point plan in January she labeled as “first
steps” of a promised ethics overhaul. The measures are a finely tailored
lattice-work of technical measures that could make it harder for Qatargate to
happen again, primarily by making it harder to lobby the Parliament undetected.
The central
figure in Qatargate, an Italian ex-MEP called Pier Antonio Panzeri, enjoyed
unfettered access to the Parliament, using it to give prominence to his human
rights NGO Fight Impunity, which held events and even struck a collaboration
deal with the institution.
This
14-point package, which Metsola declared is now “done,” includes a new entry
register, a six-month cooling-off period banning ex-MEPs from lobbying their
colleagues, tighter rules for events, stricter scrutiny of human rights work —
all tailored to ensure a future Panzeri hits a tripwire and can be spotted
sooner.
Notably, however,
an initial idea to ban former MEPs from lobbying for two years after leaving
office — which would mirror the European Commission’s rules — instead turned
into just a six-month “cooling off” period.
Internal divisions
Behind the
scenes, the house remains sharply divided over just how much change is needed.
Many MEPs resisted bigger changes to how they conduct their work, despite
Metsola’s promise in December that there would be “no business as usual,” which
she repeated in July.
The limited
ambition reflects an argument — pushed by a powerful subset of MEPs, primarily
in Metsola’s large, center-right European People’s Party group — that changing
that “business as usual” will only tie the hands of innocent politicians while
doing little to stop the few with criminal intent. They’re bolstered by the
fact that the Socialists & Democrats remain the only group touched by the
scandal.
“There were
voices in this house who said, ‘Do nothing, these things will always happen,
things are fine as they are,’” Metsola said. Some of the changes, she said, had
been “resisted for decades” before Qatargate momentum pushed them through.
The
Parliament already has some of the Continent’s highest standards for
legislative bodies, said Rainer Wieland, a long-serving EPP member from Germany
who sits on the several key rule-making committees: “I don’t think anyone can
hold a candle to us.”
MEP Rainer
Wieland holds lots of sway over the reforms | Patrick Seeger/EFE via EPA
Those who
are still complaining, he added in a debate last week, “are living in
wonderland.”
Wieland
holds lots of sway over the reforms. He chairs an internal working group on the
Parliament’s rules that feeds into the Parliament’s powerful Committee on
Constitutional Affairs, where Metsola’s 14-point plan will be translated into
cold, hard rules.
Those rule
changes are expected to be adopted by the full Parliament in September.
The
measures will boost existing transparency rules significantly. The lead MEP on
a legislative file will soon have to declare (and deal with) potential
conflicts of interest, including those coming from their “emotional life.” And
more MEPs will have to publish their meetings related to parliamentary
business, including those with representatives from outside the EU.
Members
will also have to disclose outside income over €5,000 — with additional details
about the sector if they work in something like law or consulting.
Negotiators
also agreed to double potential penalties for breaches: MEPs can lose their
daily allowance and be barred from most parliamentary work for up to 60 days.
Yet the
Parliament’s track record punishing MEPs who break the rules is virtually
nonexistent.
As it
stands, an internal advisory committee can recommend a punishment, but it’s up
to the president to impose it. Of 26 breaches of transparency rules identified
over the years, not one MEP has been punished. (Metsola has imposed penalties
for things like harassment and hate speech.)
And hopes
for an outside integrity cop to help with enforcement were dashed when a
long-delayed Commission proposal for an EU-wide independent ethics body was
scaled back.
Stymied by
legal constraints and left-right divides within the Parliament, the Commission
opted for suggesting a standards-setting panel that, at best, would pressure
institutions into better policing their own rules.
“I really
hate listening to some, especially members of the European Parliament, who say
that ‘Without having the ethics body, we cannot behave ethical[ly],’”
Commission Vice President for Values and Transparency Věra Jourová lamented in
June.
Metsola,
for her part, has pledged to adhere to the advisory committee’s recommendations
going forward. But MEPs from across the political spectrum flagged the
president’s complete discretion to mete out punishments as unsustainable.
“The
problem was not (and never really was) [so] much the details of the rules!!! But
the enforcement,” French Green MEP Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield — who sits in the
working group — wrote to POLITICO.
Wieland,
the German EPP member on the rule-making committees, presented the situation
more matter-of-factly: Parliament had done what it said it would do.
“We fully
delivered” on Metsola’s plan, Wieland told POLITICO in an interview. “Not
more than that.”
Who is Carlos De Oliveira, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort manager?
COURT
BATTLES
Who is Carlos De Oliveira, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago
resort manager?
BY NICK
ROBERTSON - 07/28/23 2:54 PM ET
Carlos De
Oliveira was indicted on three criminal charges alongside former President
Trump and his longtime aide Walt Nauda in a superseding indictment Thursday,
part of the classified document investigation at Trump’s Florida club.
De
Oliveira, the Mar-a-Lago Club’s property manager, allegedly assisted Trump and
Nauta in attempting to delete security footage that showed the men moving boxes
of classified documents around the property to hide them from federal
authorities.
He was
charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice, destroying evidence and lying to
the FBI.
De
Oliveira, 56, was hired as the Mar-a-Lago manager in January 2022, previously
working there as a valet, according to the indictment.
Federal
investigators claim De Oliveira helped Nauta move about 30 boxes of classified
documents around Mar-a-Lago and at one point told the club’s head of IT that
“the boss” wants security camera footage deleted.
In October,
after federal investigators searched the club and found additional classified
documents, De Oliveira allegedly drained one of the club’s pools, which caused
flooding in the server room that contained the security camera footage. This
happened not long after Trump told De Oliveira he would get him an attorney,
the indictment says.
According
to investigators, Nauta attempted to judge De Oliveira’s loyalty before that
promise came, with De Oliveira telling him nothing would get in the way of his
relationship with Trump.
Trump now
faces 40 charges related to the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, with
three of those added this week in the superseding indictment. Nauta faces eight
charges.
Special
counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the classified documents probe, is also
investigating Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and his
actions related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on the Capitol.
Smith met
with Trump’s defense on Thursday and sent him a target letter earlier this
month, raising speculation that he could be indicted again for that separate
investigation soon.
Minor Characters Emerge to Play Key Roles in Trump Documents Case
Minor Characters Emerge to Play Key Roles in
Trump Documents Case
Carlos De Oliveira and Walt Nauta, who were hired by
former President Donald J. Trump despite past troubles, rely on him for their
legal fees — and are now his co-defendants.
While former President Donald J. Trump plays the
leading role in the documents case, the narrative as laid out by prosecutors
relies heavily on supporting characters like Carlos De Oliveira, Walt Nauta and
others.
By Alan
Feuer, Maggie Haberman and Ben Protess
July 30,
2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/us/politics/trump-documents-de-oliveira-nauta.html
In the
early 2000s, Carlos De Oliveira was a valet and handyman at Mar-a-Lago, parking
cars and doing odd jobs at Donald J. Trump’s private club and residence in
Florida for not much more than $10,000 a year, court records show.
Then,
within two months in 2012, Mr. De Oliveira divorced and filed for bankruptcy.
He owned a 6-year-old BMW that needed brake work, paint and its belts replaced.
His checking account, the records said, held $700.
But over a
decade, Mr. De Oliveira, a Portuguese immigrant, started slowly climbing a
ladder of promotions at Mar-a-Lago. First, Mr. Trump brought him on to the
maintenance staff full-time, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Early last year, he was given the loftier post of Mar-a-Lago’s property
manager.
That was
the job he held when he was named with Mr. Trump in a new indictment last week,
one that accused him of conspiring with the former president and one of his
personal aides to obstruct the government’s efforts to retrieve dozens of
highly sensitive national security documents from Mr. Trump after he left
office.
Mr. De
Oliveira, a minor player in the case, was ensnared in it largely because
prosecutors contend he delivered a message to another Trump employee that the
former president wanted to delete a trove of potentially incriminating
surveillance footage at Mar-a-Lago. He was also charged with lying to
investigators.
The path he
followed is a familiar one in the world of Mr. Trump, who often views
relationships in terms of leverage and obsesses constantly about loyalty. In
his business career, as a candidate and as president, Mr. Trump has frequently
plucked subordinates from trouble or obscurity and given them a lifeline — and,
by extension, a sense of obligation to him.
Those
opportunities and obligations have sometimes come with a cost — including, as
in the case of Mr. De Oliveira, serious legal jeopardy.
The release
of new details on Thursday in an updated indictment by the special counsel,
Jack Smith, underscored the extent to which low-level workers like Mr. De
Oliveira — lacking Mr. Trump’s reserves of power, fame and money — have become
embroiled in the government’s attempts to hold the former president accountable
for threatening national security.
According
to the indictment, Mr. Nauta was central to the documents scheme, moving boxes
from a storage room at Mar-a-Lago at least five times at Mr. Trump’s direction.
Credit...Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The
situation is even more extraordinary because Mr. De Oliveira and Mr. Trump’s
other co-defendant in the case, Walt Nauta, his personal aide, are relying on
the former president not only for their paychecks but also their legal bills.
Those are being handled by Save America PAC, one of Mr. Trump’s fund-raising
entities.
In a
statement sent after this article was published online, Steven Cheung, a
spokesman for Mr. Trump, criticized the Justice Department.
“For the
weaponized Department of Justice and the deranged Jack Smith to target innocent
individuals and everyday Americans by leaking false and misleading information,
which is illegal and unethical, shows just how desperate and flailing they are
in order to salvage their collapsing case,” he said. Mr. Cheung appeared to be
referring to the details of the indictment.
“President
Trump’s employees are honorable, hard workers, and are the best of the best,”
he added. “They don’t violate the law because they are law-abiding citizens.”
The payment
of the legal bills has been the responsibility of Susie Wiles, one of Mr.
Trump’s top political advisers.
She started
by signing off on checks from the political action committee to lawyers for
some of the former White House and campaign officials who received subpoenas in
the past two years from the House select committee investigating Mr. Trump’s
efforts to overturn the 2020 election. As the criminal investigations have
unfolded, the number of lawyers whose payments Ms. Wiles is responsible for has
grown.
Ms. Wiles
also made an appearance in another portion of the indictment, where prosecutors
described Mr. Trump showing a classified document to a representative of a
political action committee — identified by people familiar with the matter as
Ms. Wiles.
With so
much of Mr. Trump’s past fund-raising spent on voluminous legal expenses, two
people familiar with the matter said his advisers were creating a legal-defense
fund to take on some of the costs, although the fund is not expected to cover
the former president’s legal fees. It is unclear how many other people the fund
is intended to support. Mr. Trump’s advisers have insisted there has been no
effort to influence witness testimony through Save America’s payment of legal
fees.
While Mr.
Trump plays the leading role in the indictment in the documents case, the
narrative as laid out by Mr. Smith’s team relies heavily on supporting
characters like Mr. De Oliveira, Mr. Nauta and others.
Much of the
story involves what prosecutors have said was a plot to move boxes of documents
in and out of a storage room at Mar-a-Lago to avoid returning them to the
government. Prosecutors say there was also a subsequent attempt to disguise
those movements by seeking to delete footage from security cameras positioned
outside the storage room.
According
to the indictment, Mr. Nauta was central to the first part of the scheme,
moving boxes from the room at least five times at Mr. Trump’s direction. All of
that took place during a critical moment in the government’s investigation: the
weeks between the issuance of a subpoena last year demanding the return of all
classified documents in Mr. Trump’s possession and a visit to Mar-a-Lago
shortly after by prosecutors seeking to collect the materials.
Mr. Nauta’s
path to Mr. Trump and Mar-a-Lago was also characterized by a degree of
turbulence.
A member of
the Navy, Mr. Nauta had worked as a valet for Mr. Trump in the White House. But
toward the end of his military career, Navy officials removed him from what is
known as the Presidential Support Detail after learning he had fraternized with
colleagues and subordinates in the White House mess, according to people with
knowledge of the matter.
As naval
officials were deciding what to do — including the possibility of sending Mr.
Nauta back out to sea on a ship — an aide to Mr. Trump, who was already out of
office, reached out to Mr. Nauta, offering him a job at Mar-a-Lago as the
former president’s personal aide, according to a person familiar with the
matter.
Mr. Nauta
leaped at the opportunity, the person said, taking the job in July 2021 after
receiving an honorable discharge from the Navy. It remains unclear whether Mr.
Trump knew of Mr. Nauta’s troubles in the Navy at the end of his career.
Prosecutors
say that they have been in touch with more than 80 witnesses while
investigating Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents, many of them low-
to midlevel employees of Mar-a-Lago or the Trump Organization, the former
president’s family real estate business. Most of these people — aides,
assistants, housekeepers, security officials — have been interviewed by Mr.
Smith’s team or appeared before grand juries.
Among them
was Yuscil Taveras, who works for the Trump Organization in information
technology and oversaw the surveillance cameras at Mar-a-Lago, according to
people with knowledge of the matter. The indictment describes how in June 2022,
on the same day that prosecutors issued a subpoena for footage from the cameras,
Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira sent text messages to Mr. Taveras implying that
they needed to speak with him.
A few days
later, Mr. De Oliveira approached Mr. Taveras in Mar-a-Lago’s I.T. department
and brought him to a private room for a conversation meant to “remain between
the two of them.”
There, the
indictment said, Mr. De Oliveira told Mr. Taveras that the “‘boss’ wanted the
server deleted” — a reference to the computer server housing the footage. When
Mr. Taveras responded that he did not know how to delete the server and did not
think he had the rights to do so, Mr. De Oliveira repeated the orders from “the
boss,” according to the indictment. “What are we going to do?” Mr. De Oliveira
asked.
Mr.
Taveras, identified in the indictment as Trump Employee 4, provided the
outlines of that encounter to the grand jury in May, the people with knowledge
of the matter said. During Mr. Taveras’s grand jury testimony, prosecutors
questioned him about his dealings with Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira, the people
said, seemingly laying the groundwork for the indictment that was unsealed last
week.
The Trump
Organization ultimately turned over the surveillance tapes, and the indictment
does not accuse any Mar-a-Lago employees of destroying the footage. (Mr. Taveras
has not been accused of any wrongdoing. Although at one point Mr. Smith’s team
was scrutinizing other aspects of his grand jury testimony, there is no
indication he is facing legal jeopardy.)
At a trial,
Mr. Taveras’s testimony could be crucial for Mr. Smith’s prosecutors in
establishing a conspiracy to try to erase the tapes — and thus obstruct the
investigation. And yet Mr. Taveras remains a Mar-a-Lago employee, one person
with knowledge of the matter said. He has a new lawyer, and it is unclear who
is paying his legal bills.
In a
remarkable scene in the indictment, people in Mr. Trump’s orbit are described
as beginning to worry about Mr. De Oliveira’s loyalties after the F.B.I.
descended on Mar-a-Lago with a search warrant last summer and hauled away about
100 classified documents.
“Someone
just wants to make sure Carlos is good,” the indictment quoted Mr. Nauta as
saying to another Trump employee.
In
response, that employee wrote in a Signal message with Mr. Nauta and Ms. Wiles
that Mr. De Oliveira was “loyal,” according to prosecutors. It was unclear
what, if anything, was said by others in the group message.
That same
day, the indictment said, Mr. Trump called Mr. De Oliveira and said he would
get him a lawyer.
Jonathan
Swan, Adam Goldman and Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.
Alan Feuer
covers extremism and political violence. He joined The Times in 1999. More
about Alan Feuer
Maggie
Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man:
The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team
that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers
and their connections to Russia. More about Maggie Haberman
Ben Protess
is an investigative reporter covering the federal government, law enforcement
and various criminal investigations into former President Trump and his allies.
More about Ben Protess
