Accused Michigan high-school shooter Ethan Crumbley was given a court-appointed lawyer — while his parents hired their own pricey private legal team to battle the lesser charges against them, a new report says.
James and Jennifer Crumbley, who were charged with involuntary manslaughter as accessories in their 15-year-old son’s first-degree murder case, have hired a team that includes Shannon Smith, who represented disgraced USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, The Independent reported.
Their son, on the other hand, is being represented by court-appointed lawyer Paulette Michel Loftin, a little-known defense attorney from the Detroit suburb of Rochester.
Ethan Crumbley faces life in prison if convicted on four counts of first-degree murder, terrorism and seven counts of assault with intent to commit murder in the Nov. 30 shooting at Oxford High School that killed four.
His parents were arrested last weekend after fleeing their manslaughter charges.
James and Jennifer Crumbley are hiring an experienced legal team to fight off their involuntary manslaughter charges.Oakland County Sheriff’s OfficePhotos of Oxford High School shooting victims Hana St. Juliana, Tate Myre, Justin Shilling and Madisyn Baldwin are placed in a memorial outside of the school at Oxford, Michigan on Dec. 7, 2021.Getty ImagesA flood of flowers are placed at a large memorial outside of Oxford High School, Michigan on Dec. 7, 2021.Getty Images
While their move to hire pricey lawyers may seem a cold-hearted move that leaves their son fending for himself, one prominent lawyer said they may have a reason.
“In some ways, the parents have got a harder case than the kid,” veteran defense lawyer Bill Swor told the Detroit Free Press.
A written football is laid in tribute to Oxford High School shooting victim, Tate Myre, at a memorial outside the school in Oxford, Michigan on Dec. 7, 2021.Getty Images
“They’re adults, and he’s a child, and the father bought the gun,” Swor said. “The mother made the [social media] postings, and public officials … made public statements that are very prejudicial.”
The Crumbleys purchased the 9 mm semiautomatic handgun their son allegedly used in the shootings and refused to take him out of school after a meeting with administrators over a “disturbing” drawing the teen made.
Ethan Crumbley is accused of shooting and killing four students at Oxford High School.Getty Images
He returned to class and opened fire about three hours later, authorities said.
After another teacher caught the teen researching ammunition on his phone a day before the shootings, his mother texted him, “You have to learn not to get caught.”
Veteran defense lawyer Bill Swor argues Ethan Crumbley will have an easier time at court than his parents.Getty Images
Loftin, Ethan’s lawyer, told the Free Press she will not comment on the case until she has a chance to review all of the evidence against her client.
Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said school officials and a Detroit artist who may have helped the Crumbleys run from police could also face charges.
(CNN)The National Defense Authorization Act, the annual must-pass legislation that sets the policy agenda and authorizes almost $770 billion in funding for the Department of Defense, passed in the House of Representatives on Tuesday night.
Michigan school shooting suspect Ethan Crumbley has been appointed an attorney by the court after his parents hired their own high-profile legal team but not a lawyer to represent their son on his murder and terrorism charges.
Paulette Michel Loftin, a little known defence attorney based out of Rochester, Detroit, was appointed by court officials on Thursday to represent the 15-year-old alleged mass shooter.
Ms Loftin told the Detroit Free Press she had been appointed at the request of the teenager because he could not afford to hire his own attorney.
Defendants are entitled to a court-appointed attorney, funded by the taxpayer, when they can prove they do not have the funds to pay for their defence themselves.
But, while the suspect’s parents Jennifer and James Crumbley appeared to choose not to foot their son’s legal bill, they took the step to hire two high-powered attorneys to represent themselves before they purportedly went on the run last week.
The Crumbleys had retained Shannon Smith and Mariell Lehman even before prosecutors charged them each with four charges of involuntary manslaughter in connection to last week’s deadly shooting.
Ms Smith has represented a number of high-profile clients in recent years including disgraced former USA Gymnastics team doctor and convicted sex offender Larry Nassar, who was accused of using his position of power to sexually abuse more than 250 victims over two decades.
He was sentenced to 60 years in federal prison on child porn charges and an additional 40 to 175 years in Michigan State prison for child sexual assault.
Ms Smith has also represented Jumana Nagarwala, who was charged with performing female genital mutilation in a landmark trial that was thrown out by a judge in September.
The Crumbleys’ decision not to pay for their son’s defence comes suggests they may be trying to distance themselves from any culpability for his alleged actions.
Criminal defence attorney Bill Swor told Detroit Free Press that the Crumbleys most likely can’t afford to pay for their son’s expensive murder trial, particularly given that they too are facing up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
“In some ways, the parents have got a harder case than the kid,” he said.
“They’re adults and he’s a child, and the father bought the gun. The mother made the (social media) postings, and public officials… made public statements that are very prejudicial.”
Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald brought charges against the Crumbleys on Friday saying they had bought their son the firearm used in the shooting as a Christmas present and ignored multiple warning signs about the impending violence.
The couple then appeared to go on the run, failing to show for their arraignment that afternoon, sparking a huge manhunt.
Law enforcement officials tracked the couple down and arrested them early Saturday morning at an art studio in a warehouse in Detroit close to the Canadian border where they said the Crumbleys were “hiding”.
Their attorneys have repeatedly denied that the couple were trying to evade authorities, instead claiming it was a “matter of logistics” around when and how they would turn themselves in.
Jennifer and James Crumbley pictured in their booking photos following their arrests on Saturday morning
Authorities said charges may also be brought against artist Andrzej Sikora, who allegedly helped the couple hide inside his studio.
Mr Sikora has spoken out to claim he did not know the couple had been charged when he let them hide out in the commercial space.
Ethan has been charged as an adult with 24 charges including one count of terrorism and four counts of murder after he allegedly opened fire inside Oxford High School in Oxford, Michigan, on 30 November.
Four students – Tate Myre, 16, Hana St. Juliana, 14, Madisyn Baldwin, 17, and Justin Shilling, 17 – were all killed in the massacre while one teacher and six other students were wounded. Ethan was taken into custody at the scene.
Ms Loftin told the Free Press she had spoken with her client but would not be commenting on the charges until she receives information on the evidence in the case,
“There are thousands of pages of discovery that I will need to review so that we can make an informed decision about whether or not we wish to have the preliminary exam,” she said.
All three Crumbleys are now being held in Oakland County Jail where they are denied any contact with each other.
South African scientists say the omicron Covid variant significantly reduces antibodies generated by Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine, although people who have recovered from the virus and received a booster shot will likely have more protection from severe disease, according to a small preliminary study released Tuesday.
Prof. Alex Sigal with the Africa Health Research Institute and a team of scientists tested blood samples of 12 people who had previously been vaccinated with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, looking specifically at how well antibodies generated by the vaccine can neutralize the new variant – meaning block its ability to infect cells.
They found a 41-fold in drop in the ability of their antibodies to neutralize the omicron variant compared to the original virus, a dramatic reduction from its performance against the original ancestral strain as well as other variants, according to a preprint of the study that hasn’t yet been peer reviewed. Vaccine-induced antibodies dropped threefold in their ability to neutralize the earlier beta variant that previously dominated South Africa, suggesting omicron is much better at evading protection.
“The results we present here with Omicron show much more extensive escape” than the beta variant, researchers wrote. “Previous infection, followed by vaccination or booster is likely to increase the neutralization level and likely confer protection from severe disease in Omicron infection.”
The preprint study has not yet been peer reviewed and it tested 14 plasma samples from 12 vaccinated people, 6 of whom were previously infected. Scientists have been making their Covid research available prior to going through the extensive peer review process because of the urgency of the pandemic.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said earlier Tuesday the company can develop a vaccine that specifically targets omicron by March 2022 if needed. Bourla said it will take a few weeks to get more definitive data on whether the current vaccines provide enough protection against the variant.
The Pfizer CEO had previously told CNBC that the protection provided by the company’s two-dose vaccine would likely decline some in the face of omicron.
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The South African scientists also found the omicron attaches to the same receptor, known as ACE2, to infect human lung cells that previous variants used.
Omicron, first identified in southern Africa, has dozens of mutations that generally make viruses more contagious. White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci told reporters during a White House Covid briefing Tuesday that data from South Africa on new omicron infections “clearly argues towards a high degree of transmissibility.”
Fauci said Tuesday it is too early to draw conclusions about whether omicron causes more severe disease, though he said over the weekend that early reports were encouraging.
The South African Medical Research Council, in a report published Saturday, found that most patients admitted to a hospital in Pretoria who had Covid did not need supplemental oxygen, as was common in previous infection waves. Many patients in the Covid wards were actually hospitalized for other reasons, according to the report.
Pfizer’s CEO said earlier Tuesday a variant that spreads fast but causes milder symptoms is not necessarily good news.
“I don’t think it’s good news to have something that spreads fast,” Bourla told The Wall Street Journal during an interview at the paper’s CEO Council Summit. “Spreads fast means it will be in billions of people and another mutation may come. You don’t want that.”
Mr. McConnell and 10 Republicans agreed in October to allow the Senate to take up a short-term increase to the debt limit, which ultimately passed with Democratic votes. But some of those senators warned they would not acquiesce again, and Mr. McConnell and Mr. Schumer began quietly discussing alternatives.
“I’m confident that this particular procedure, coupled with the avoidance of Medicare cuts, will achieve enough Republican support to clear the 60-vote threshold,” Mr. McConnell said, predicting a Thursday vote for the bill in the Senate.
That would require 10 Republicans to join Democrats in advancing the bill, a prospect that Mr. McConnell discussed at lunch with members of his party on Tuesday afternoon.
Some lawmakers said they would be open to supporting the legislative gymnastics in the interest of foisting political responsibility for raising the debt ceiling on Democrats.
Understand the U.S. Debt Ceiling
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What is the debt ceiling? The debt ceiling, also called the debt limit, is a cap on the total amount of money that the federal government is authorized to borrow via U.S. Treasury bills and savings bonds to fulfill its financial obligations. Because the U.S. runs budget deficits, it must borrow huge sums of money to pay its bills.
Why does the U.S. limit its borrowing? According to the Constitution, Congress must authorize borrowing. The debt limit was instituted in the early 20th century so the Treasury did not need to ask for permission each time it needed to issue bonds to pay bills.
Do other countries do it this way? Denmark also has a debt limit, but it is set so high that raising it is generally not an issue. Most other countries do not. In Poland, public debt cannot exceed 60 percent of gross domestic product.
What are the alternatives to the debt ceiling? The lack of a replacement is one of the main reasons the debt ceiling has persisted. Ms. Yellen said that she would support legislation to abolish the debt limit, which she described as “destructive.” It would take an act of Congress to do away with the debt limit.
“To have Democrats raise the debt ceiling and be held politically accountable for racking up more debt is my goal, and this helps us accomplish that,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, told reporters before the lunch.
“To me, that’s the most important part: that the voters in 2022 see that the people who recklessly spent money that our future generation is going to have to pay back didn’t care,” he added.
The legislation would also postpone until 2023 mandatory cuts to a range of federal spending programs, including farm aid, community block grants and a 4 percent reduction in Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals.
Those kind of benefits, they exist objectively as numbers but you have to work to turn them into political capital. And I’m not sure, either nationally or at the state level, there is any evidence the Democrats are prepared to do that.
James Henson, director, Texas Politics Project, University of Texas at Austin
Prosecutors in Ghislaine Maxwell’s child sex-trafficking trial in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday introduced a witness who was once the kind of minor teen on whom the Briton is alleged to have preyed.
At 14, “Carolyn” was vulnerable. She had an alcoholic mother and a 17-year-old boyfriend and had been raped and molested by her grandfather from the age of four. She needed money.
Prosecutors allege that Maxwell procured girls between 1994 and 2004 for the financier Jeffrey Epstein, who would sexually abuse them.
Epstein, a convicted sex offender who numbered Prince Andrew and former presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton among his associates, killed himself in a New York City jail in August 2019, while awaiting his own sex-trafficking trial.
Maxwell, 59 and the daughter of the late British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, was arrested in July 2020 in New Hampshire, for her purported role in procuring minor teens for Epstein, some as young as 14. Now on trial on six counts, Maxwell pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Carolyn, who used her first name, was the third accuser to testify in the New York trial. She alleged that Maxwell coordinated sexualized massages with Epstein, starting when she was 14. At one point, she said, Maxwell assessed the girl’s naked body and touched her breast.
Carolyn said Virginia Giuffre – a longtime Epstein and Maxwell accuser – introduced her to them at his Palm Beach mansion in the early 2000s. Carolyn’s then boyfriend knew Giuffre, which was how they met.
“Virginia asked me if I wanted to come make money,” Carolyn said in court, later testifying that Giuffre was 18 at the time.
“Did Virginia tell you what you had to do to make that money?” prosecutor Maurene Comey asked.
“Not right away,” Carolyn said. Giuffre, she said, told her they were going to her friend’s house on Palm Beach Island to “give him a massage”. They arrived and entered through the kitchen, she said, adding: “We were greeted by Ms Maxwell.” Giuffre told Maxwell “that I was her friend”, she said.
“What did Maxwell say?” Comey asked.
“You can bring her upstairs and show her what to do.”
“We walked up the stairs that were in the kitchen and we passed a bunch of bedrooms and entered into Mr Epstein’s bedroom, into his bathroom area.”
Giuffre, Carolyn said, took a massage table out of the closet.
“Virginia had taken off her clothes and she asked me if I would be comfortable taking off mine,” she said, “and I told her I would like to keep my bra and underwear on”.
Epstein entered, she said, and got onto the massage table face-down. After 45 minutes, he turned over and “Virginia got on top of him” and had sex with him, Carolyn said.
Carolyn sat on the sofa in the bathroom, she said. She said $300 was left for her on the bathroom counter.
Giuffre has alleged that Maxwell and Epstein coerced her into having sex with Prince Andrew when she was 17. Maxwell denies it, as does Andrew.
Carolyn said she returned to Epstein’s house, but not with Giuffre. Maxwell took her phone number, she said, and would call to schedule massages.
Voice cracking, Carolyn wiped her eyes after revealing that she went to Epstein’s house “over 100” times between the ages of 14 and 18. Sometimes, she said, she would schedule appointments. She needed money for drugs.
“Marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, anything that could block out … the appointment.”
Carolyn said she and Maxwell talked about “random personal things”, including her past sexual abuse. Maxwell asked her about sex toys and touched her, she said.
“I was upstairs setting up the massage table and at that point I was kind of comfortable because I’d been there so many times,” she said. “I was getting fully nude, and she came in and felt my boobs and my hips and my buttocks and said … that I had a great body for Mr Epstein and his friends. She just said that I had a good body type.”
Maxwell left the room and Epstein entered, Carolyn said. She was still just 14.
As time went on, she said, Epstein’s abuse came to include vaginal penetration and group sex. An Epstein associate took naked photos of her, she said. During sexualized massages with Epstein, Carolyn said, she told him about her “screwed up home life” including past abuse.
Carolyn broke into tears when she said the money Epstein gave her was for “buying drugs”. When she was about 15 or 16, she said, she brought some friends to Epstein’s house. She stopped seeing him at 18, she said, when she was “too old”.
After a lengthy cross-examination, prosecutors asked more questions of Carolyn on their re-direct, to dispel the defense’s suggestion that she was motivated by financial gain. She became increasingly distraught and said she was 13 when she met Maxwell.
“No. Money would not ever fix what that woman has done to me,” she said, weeping. “What she did was wrong … I’m so petrified for my daughters.”
Earlier Tuesday, prosecutors used photos of Epstein and Maxwell together to bolster their argument that they were so close, it stood to reason the socialite participated in his abuse of teen girls. These photos, on CDs seized from Epstein’s Manhattan home during a July 2019 search, were presented to jurors during FBI analyst Kimberly Meder’s testimony.
In one image, Maxwell smiled as she held Jeffrey Epstein’s foot in her hands, apparently giving him a massage. In another, Maxwell kissed him as they posed.
The second accuser in Maxwell’s trial testified on Monday, under a pseudonym, Kate. She alleged that Maxwell asked her to find young women for Epstein, because his sexual demands were insatiable.
The trial continues. Prosecutors said that they might complete their case this week.
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 802 9999. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
At the time he was having private reservations about Kavanaugh, Trump was publicly fighting for his confirmation, mocking Blasey Ford’s testimony at a rally and brushing off concerns from GOP lawmakers about his viability as a Supreme Court nominee.
The new book by Meadows, “The Chief’s Chief,” contains several such insights into how the Trump presidency worked, largely while casting the 45th president in a glowing light. Meadows’ book, out on Tuesday, defends Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, offers intimate details about the state of Trump’s health, takes shots at Trump critics and echoes Trump’s paranoia about leaks to the press as he speculates by name about who exactly was talking to reporters.
At times, it reads like a hagiography. Meadows, for example, compares Trump’s speech upon returning to the White House after his Covid-related hospitalization at Walter Reed to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
“Although the prose wasn’t quite as polished as the Gettysburg Address, delivered by President Abraham Lincoln after the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, it had the same compressed, forceful quality that had made President Lincoln’s words so effective at the time they were delivered,” Meadows writes.
But Meadows’ book also provides revelations that have reportedly angered Trump. The main ones concern Trump’s health as he battled Covid-19 in the fall of 2020. He reveals that Trump tested positive for Covid ahead of his first presidential debate with Joe Biden, potentially exposing dozens of individuals to infection and that Trump’s blood oxygen levels dipped to “dangerously low” levels, all while the White House painted a different picture of the president’s health.
Meadows acknowledges that while Trump tried to project a picture of strength, privately, he was battling serious symptoms of the virus while at Walter Reed.
“It was clear that the staff at Walter Reed was prepared for a long stay — weeks, maybe longer,” Meadows writes. “I wasn’t happy to hear that, but I also knew it probably wasn’t going to happen. If the president had his way, we would be up and out the door in a day or so.”
Ahead of Meadows’ book release, Trump has attempted to muddy characterizations of an excerpt that said he tested positive for the coronavirus ahead of his debate with Biden and may have exposed dozens of individuals to the virus. A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
For all his praise of Trump, Meadows offers plenty of criticism of those in Trump’s orbit. He describes his chief of staff predecessor, Mick Mulvaney, as out to lunch as the White House scrambled to respond to the pandemic at the beginning of March as cases were on the rise. Mulvaney was in Las Vegas on a golf trip, Meadows writes, and suggests that made Trump apoplectic.
“Let’s just say displeased when he learned this news. I don’t know who was in the room with him when he found out, but I certainly don’t envy them,” Meadows writes.
Meadows also says Trump was “furious” when news leaked to the press that he retreated to a secure bunker beneath the White House as violent protests over the murder of George Floyd erupted in Washington. Meadows writes that Trump demanded to know who leaked the news and ordered him to find out who it could be.
“I could already tell, based on the way the story was reported, that the leaker was probably not someone with firsthand knowledge of Secret Service protocols,” Meadows wrote. “To this day, everyone has a theory about where the leak came from. If I had to bet, I would say that it was probably Stephanie Grisham, Emma Doyle, or someone from the VP’s team.” Grisham was chief of staff to the first lady, and Doyle was deputy chief of staff for policy to the first lady in the White House at the time.
Throughout his book, Meadows — like his boss — pays close attention to press coverage, taking note of positive and negative coverage, mentioning reporters by name, and discussing Trump’s famous media diet.
Meadows takes repeated swipes at Fox News and its Washington managing editor, Bill Sammon, who he said rebuffed his entreaties to cover Trump more favorably (Meadows portrays this as heretical).Sammon, he writes, told him he did “not answer to the president’s chief of staff, and your opinion on Fox’s programming is not important to me.”
Meadows, peeved that Dana Perino’s show had aired a Biden rally instead of one from Trump, responded by threatening to block White House officials from going on her show through the election.
Fox News did not return a request for comment.
Lately, Meadows says Trump has been pressed by supporters about whether or not he will run again in 2024. Meadows recounts a somber conversation with Trump after the Biden administration’s bungled Afghanistan withdrawal this summer and says following recent phone calls with Trump, he has walked away with a new mission from the former president — to start preparing for a second term.
“In short,” Meadows writes, “I was given the task of finding secretaries and undersecretaries who wouldn’t undercut the president. It is a challenge that I look forward to tackling.”
You know the date — Dec. 7 — and what happened then, and what happened thereafter, to the United States and to the world.
But what was life like on Dec. 6, 1941, and in the years before then, closer to home, for one group of people for whom that date would alter their lives — the Japanese and Japanese Americans in Los Angeles?
For the many thousands of them living on the West Coast — among them U.S. citizens — Pearl Harbor’s “thereafter” meant being detained, dispossessed of property, and sent to incarceration camps.
In 1941, about 36,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were living in and around Los Angeles, most of them within about five miles of Little Tokyo, the growing nucleus of the community for more than half a century.
They’d started arriving at the end of the 19th century, some of them brought to serve the railroads that the Chinese had helped to build. In 1882, the federal Chinese Exclusion Act had codified what California, by law and by violence, had been rolling toward for years.
The biggest railroad projects were finished, the gold mines played out (along with them, the state’s haul from the tax on foreign miners), and the Chinese appeared to the ever more populous white California like a menace, and the Chinese Exclusion Act capped years of intolerance and discrimination.
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Still, California needed cheap labor, and some businesses sent recruiters to Japan. This new labor wave from Asia arrived legally, but ran up against some of the same kinds of proscriptions that the Chinese had faced, which is why Little Tokyo — like other cities’ “Japantowns” — formed and thrived: because of, as well as in spite of, the discrimination.
Sidelined from much of L.A.’s public and commercial life, these new residents — they weren’t allowed to become naturalized citizens until 1952 — began creating their own: schools, temples and churches, markets and restaurants. “They brought Japanese food and cultural traditions,” said Kristen Hayashi. She directs collections management and access at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo.
“But they also adopted American traditions, so you see the emergence of Japanese American culture: baseball, even food traditions — you definitely see them incorporating some American foods.”
And vice versa. The traditional Japanese new year’s good–luck treat, mochi, has become a hugely popular fusion sweet in the U.S. It was the inspiration of civic leader Frances Hashimoto, born behind the barbed wire of a World War II-era camp. Working at her family’s Little Tokyo confectionary, she dreamed up a mochi ball with an ice cream heart, and if there’s a dessert hall of fame, this should be in it.
Little Tokyo is littler than it used to be. Part of it was sacrificed after the war to build the LAPD headquarters, Parker Center, which was itself razed a couple years ago.
Beyond the footprint of Little Tokyo itself, pre-war Japanese and Japanese Americans lived and worked across much of L.A.
In Los Angeles Harbor, back when enormous tuna and sardine canneries there were packing up and shipping off Southern California’s sea harvest, a Japanese fishing village called Fish Harbor flourished from about 1906 on part of Terminal Island. Its fleet went to sea regularly and profitably; a Times headline from 1913 commented, “White men inferior to Japanese as fishermen.”
A 1994 Times story described the community with the main street called “Tuna Street.” The Baptist church sponsored children’s sumo tournaments, and the Buddhist temple organized the Boy Scout troop. The elementary school’s white teachers observed Japanese holidays. The Times, in 1926, described it amiably if condescendingly as “a bit of Japan translated to the shores of California.”
It was a company town, as Naomi Hirahara and Geraldine Knatz wrote in “Terminal Island: Lost Communities of Los Angeles Harbor,” but also, to some residents’ way of thinking, an “enchanted island.”
How that idyll ended, I’ll get to presently.
Looking around L.A. now, it does defy belief, but in 1949, and for many years before then (but never after), Los Angeles was the single most productive agricultural county in the nation. Much of that bounty — from celery to snapdragons — came from the sweeping square miles of what is now the thoroughly suburbanized South Bay and southeast L.A. County.
The Japanese — so often thwarted from owning land — leased many of the acres they worked there. Families with names like Muto, Sasaki and Ishibashi made crops grow and flowers bloom. Japanese farmers on the Palos Verdes Peninsula formed a cooperative “to compete with larger growers,” according to Judith Gerber’s book “Farming in Torrance and the South Bay,” which also pointed out that most never returned from being incarcerated during World War II, and that was evidently “part of the reason farming lost its economic importance in the region.”
The floricultural talents of Japanese gardeners were a status symbol — sometimes, as The Times wrote, on the assumption that the immigrant was made for the job, “in this case, the Japanese gardener, a humble servant whose mystical Eastern philosophy grants him a flair for plants and agriculture.” At one time, historians calculated, one JapaneseAmerican man in four was a gardener, and, as The Times noted, gardeners “became the cornerstone of the Japanese American community, establishing schools and churches.”
Like many communities of color, the Japanese population here perforce had its own doctors, lawyers, teachers, dentists and other professionals; white institutions often wouldn’t serve nonwhite clients and patients. In 1929, Japanese and Japanese American doctors tried to build a hospital in Boyle Heights to serve their own. The 1918 flu pandemic, when Japanese were turned away from some hospitals, was still warm in their memory.
The state of California insisted they couldn’t do it, but both the state and U.S. supreme courts sided with the doctors, and the Japanese Hospital opened, and flourished. It’s now a convalescent care operation. It is also a city historic-cultural monument. As its sign states, “Immigrant Japanese doctors prevailed in 1928 U.S. Supreme Court Case.”
It wasn’t just a hospital that got built. A new foundation of law and principle for Japanese people in California — and by extension the nation — was laid down too. When the hospital was being planned, a USC-trained lawyer named Sei Fujii — barred by his Japanese citizenship from the actual practice of law — with his law partner, Marion Wright, persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court in 1928 to let the Japanese doctors incorporate and build the Boyle Heights hospital.
But it wasn’t until the 1950s, after the war and after Fujii had spent years in a detention camp, that the California and U.S. supreme courts threw out California’s discriminatory 1920 law banning “aliens” from owning land, which by 1949 mostly had come to mean the Japanese. As the California court wrote, the real intent of the land law was “the elimination of competition by alien Japanese in farming California land.” Fujii, the subject of the 2020 biography “A Rebel’s Outcry,” was awarded his California law license posthumously, in 2017.
The 1913 ban on land ownership “was intentional,” said Hayashi, “to prevent social mobilization.” One work-around was buying or putting land in the name of U.S.-born citizen children.
Fish Harbor went first. Even in the months beforehand, rumors were muttered that the quaint village of the 1920s and 1930s was a spy colony. As The Times described the suspicions, in 1994, the poles for drying fish were suddenly cast as “antennas.” Navigational charts became, in the public’s imagination, coastal maps. Japanese fisherman, fit and strong from their trade, were being trained by the Japanese military, and their boats were ready to do double duty as torpedoes. After the war, the U.S. government acknowledged no instances of spying or sabotage emerged from Fish Harbor.
Beginning within hours of the Pearl Harbor attack, the FBI arrived to start taking away the village’s leaders. Two months later, Japanese-born residents with a fishing license were also taken away. A few weeks later, the other residents of Fish Harbor, U.S. citizens among them, were given 48 hours to evacuate, and most were sent to incarceration camps. The village was bulldozed, possessions vanished. And, like the farmers of the South Bay, the fisherfolk of Fish Harbor did not return.
Unusually, some Japanese gardeners resumed their old trade after the war, perhaps in part because hostility kept them from getting hired to do anything else. In 1955, they created the large and thriving Southern California Gardeners’ Federation. Members could shop for supplies at a Little Tokyo co-op, which closed in 2012.
One remarkable survivor was Tokio Florist, another L.A. city historic-cultural landmark. Hayashi told me that it was founded and operated for two generations by women who grew on their property many of the flowers they sold. I used to stop there almost once a week to buy their unusual and remarkable blooms. The Sakai family was sent to Manzanar during the war. Someone evidently looked after the property for them, and in 1960, the family moved the business to Silver Lake. They closed the place in 2006.
Another piece of surviving Japanese landscape artistry is the Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden in Pasadena, open to the public on certain days of the week. It was designed and built between 1935 and 1941 — there’s that date again — by landscape designer Kinzuchi Fujii, and it has earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. Fujii was sent to a relocation camp, and there are accounts that in the single suitcase he was allowed to take with him, he carried plans and photos for the garden that he never saw again.
And before they too were evacuated to incarceration camps, the staffers of the Rafu Shimpo, L.A.’s Japanese-language newspaper, founded in 1903, managed not only to arrange to keep up the rent on the paper’s Little Tokyo offices, but to hide the Japanese-language lead type under the office floorboards, and so start publishing the paper once again, on New Year’s Day 1946.
“While Pearl Harbor upended Japanese American lives, it’s part of a long arc of discrimination,” Hayashi told me. “You had these FBI surveillance lists of Japanese immigrants long before Pearl Harbor. It could be for benign things like they were a Japanese language teacher, or sent money to a charity in Japan, or if the Japanese navy visited the U.S., they would socialize. They were seen as being suspicious. There was never any reported case of espionage … these were just false charges that were made by the FBI’s surveillance.”
In time, the restrictive covenants and laws that isolated Japanese and Japanese Americans were thrown out. The concentrated population once clustered around Little Tokyo — if it came back here from the camps — moved farther afield. Then, in 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, issuing reparations and an apology to the 100,000 or so whose lives were among the many thousands more that were broken, some beyond recovery, on Dec. 7, 1941.
With newly intense speculation that the Supreme Court will overturn or gut the Roe v. Wade decision, after conservative justices sounded set to do so in Wednesday’s arguments inDobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a blame game has ensued among supporters of abortion rights.
Some progressives look at the apparent success of the activists on the right and see a record of fecklessfailure on their own side: If only Democrats cared about abortion rights more and fought for them harder, as the anti-abortion movement fought to roll back abortion, this could have been averted.
But one of the main reasons conservatives got to the point where Roe’s defeat seems plausible is that they learned to be more like Democrats.
Republicans won most of the presidential elections in the first two decades after the Roe decision came down, and Republican presidents got to fill every Supreme Court vacancy that opened up in that span. But they did not reliably appoint anti-abortion justices. Several Republican appointees — John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter — ended up voting to uphold Roe, which is why it wasn’t overturned decades ago.
In contrast, though there have been fewer Democratic appointees since Roe, every one of them turned out to be reliably pro-abortion rights.
The political triumph of conservative activists, then, was in taking over their own party — pressuring George W. Bush and Donald Trump to rethink how Supreme Court appointments were made, and to only appoint nominees they’d vetted and deemed reliably anti-abortion. Groups like the Federalist Society reshaped the party’s politics and the conservative legal network so that recent GOP presidents not only could appoint justices believed to have anti-abortion views (due to better vetting) but felt they had to appoint such justices. Again, this was not necessary for Democrats, who had no trouble appointing justices who supported abortion rights.
Once it became the case that the anti-abortion party apparently only appoints anti-abortion justices, and the party in favor of abortion rights only appoints justices who support those rights, then Roe’s fate came down to which of those parties would win elections at key moments. The GOP did — taking the Senate in 2014 and the presidency in 2016, allowing them to fill three seats between then and 2020, in part because they aggressively used their Senate control to prevent President Obama from filling one of those seats. If Democrats can be said to have “blown it” on Roe v. Wade, that’s how they did so — by losing those hugely important elections.
Past Republican presidents appointed many justices who disappointed conservative activists
In the first two decades after Roe, spanning 1973 to 1992, six Supreme Court seats newly opened up — all while Republicans who said they opposed Roe v. Wade and would like it overturned were serving as president. (Technically there were seven openings, as William Rehnquist moved from associate justice to chief justice in this time, but he was already on the Court so I’m not counting his promotion as a new appointment.)
So by the time the Planned Parenthood v. Casey case reached the Supreme Court in 1992, the math did not look good for Roe. Eight of the Supreme Court’s nine justices had been appointed by Republican presidents (including Harry Blackmun, who authored Roe in the first place); the sole Democratic appointee was Byron “Whizzer” White, who had dissented from Roe.
But that year, four of those recent Republican appointees — Stevens, O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter — joined Blackmun, providing a five-vote majority that prevented Roe from being overturned. (The other two new Republican appointees, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, joined Rehnquist and White in dissent.)
This was a stunning failure from a party that had promised its supporters they’d get Roe overturned. And it happened for several reasons.
One is that most of these nominees (all but O’Connor and Scalia) had to make it through a Democrat-controlled Senate. President Reagan did try to appoint the conservative, Robert Bork, to one vacancy, but Democrats blocked him, so Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy instead — a fateful switch. Others, like Souter, may have been selected due to their lack of a “paper trail” of controversial conservative statements.
Another reason, though, is that the party just handled judicial appointments differently at that time. Republican presidents weren’t so laser-focused on appointing judges who they believed would pass an anti-abortion litmus test. Reagan, for instance, initially prioritized appointing the first woman to the Court, O’Connor, over a nominee who’d be more conservative. And activists who thought about the Court more politically didn’t yet have the juice to bend the president to their will every time.
How a balanced Court swung to the right
The final appointment before the Casey decision, George H.W. Bush’s appointment of Clarence Thomas, pointed the way to the future in every way except its outcome. Thomas was a staunch conservative (replacing the liberal legend Thurgood Marshall) who would turn out to be reliably anti-abortion, and his nomination was bitterly controversial. But the outcome, in the end, was that the Democrat-controlled Senate did confirm him, 52-48. (From a modern perspective, what’s most striking about that vote is that nobody filibustered.)
Then from 1993 to 2012, Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama each ended up getting to fill two Supreme Court seats while their own party controlled the Senate.
Clinton replaced the anti-abortion Justice White with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, providing Roe a sixth vote on the Court, as well as replacing Blackmun with Stephen Breyer.
Bush replaced the late conservative Chief Justice Rehnquist with another conservative, John Roberts. More importantly, he replaced O’Connor, who voted to uphold Roe, with Alito, a more solid conservative. (His initial choice for that seat, White House counsel Harriet Miers, lacked support due to conservative objections.)
Obama replaced two liberal justices (who had been appointed by Republicans), Souter and Stevens, with two other liberals, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
So for decades, there was a delicate balance of sorts, with five conservatives and four liberals on the courts, but with some of those conservatives (O’Connor and Kennedy) siding with liberals on certain key issues, and especially on Roe.
Then in 2016, Antonin Scalia died while Barack Obama was president. In theory, this was an enormous opportunity for Obama to replace a conservative with a liberal. The long-sought 5-4 liberal majority was in reach.
Except for one problem: Republicans had taken over the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections. This was the first Supreme Court vacancy to arise when the Senate and the presidency were controlled by opposite parties since the battle over Thomas’s seat in 1991. And partisan polarization had increased in the two and a half decades since.
Though previous Democrat-controlled Senates had rejected some nominees Republican presidents had put up for the Court, each debate was always about each specific nominee. GOP leader Mitch McConnell, though, set a new precedent: He said he wouldn’t consider any nominee Obama put up. (He claimed this was because it was an election year, but if Scalia had died in 2015, he would likely have found some other pretext — the appointment was simply too important for conservatives.)
This move paid off tremendously when Trump won the presidency and the GOP held the Senate in 2016. And Trump’s behavior once in office is where the increased success of conservative activists in dominating their party on this issue becomes evident — Trump made clear he’d only put up nominees who had the enthusiastic support of the Federalist Society.
Trump then ended up making three Supreme Court appointments in a single term. Replacing Scalia with Neil Gorsuch kept the conservative majority intact. He then also got to replace Anthony Kennedy and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg — two Roe defenders — with conservatives Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. (He could appoint Barrett because Republicans had managed to hold on to the Senate in the 2018 midterms.)
We don’t yet know for sure how the final decision on Dobbs will come down and what the margin would be. But the overall pattern is clear: Recent Democratic presidents have consistently appointed pro-Roe justices when they could. Republican presidents, though, may have started consistently appointing anti-Roe justices at just the right time.
Honolulu — From the empty shores of Oahu’s Waikiki Beach to the snowy summit of the Big Island’s highest peak, an unusually strong winter storm was clobbering the Hawaiian Islands on Tuesday and raising the threat of dangerous flash floods, landslides and crashing tree limbs. The strong storm over the nation’s only island state left eloping couples without weddings and tourists stuck indoors.
It also threatened the state’s infrastructure with a deluge of rain and wind.
Weather officials warned that slow-moving thunderstorms, high winds and heavy rains could persist through Wednesday and Governor David Ige issued a state of emergency for all of the state’s islands on Monday night.
A car turns onto a flooded Cooke Street, in Honolulu, Hawaii, December 6, 2021.
Marco Garcia/AP
CBS News affiliate HawaiiNewsNow reported that the island of Ohau, Haiwaii’s most populous, was under a flash flood warning until the early hours of Tuesday morning. By Monday evening, power provider Hawaiian Electric was reporting a significant electricity outage in downtown Honolulu. The company said one substation was reportedly flooded, and the power cut was likely to impact businesses and residents into Tuesday.
Five boys between the ages of 9 and 10 were rescued from a raging creek by Honolulu Fire Department workers, a statement from the agency said.
Before it hit Ohau and the capital the storm had already knocked out power to residents in communities elsewhere across the state.
Veterans and survivors of the attack on Pearl Harbor 80 years ago planned to meet for the anniversary celebration Tuesday morning at Pearl Harbor. Navy spokesperson Brenda Way told The Associated Press in an email Monday that she has heard of no discussion of canceling the event because of the storms.
The National Weather Service said the storm brings the threat of “catastrophic flooding” in the coming days as a low pressure system slowly moves from east to west and lingered on the edge of the archipelago.
“Now is the time to make sure you have an emergency plan in place and supplies ready should you need to move away from rising water,” Ige said in a statement.
On Oahu, where four shelters had been opened, most of the beaches in Waikiki were empty Monday as only a few people walked with umbrellas during passing heavy showers. Roadways were flooding in the area and cars crept through downtown as water gushed out of manhole covers.
A small tractor pushes sand off a walkway on Waikiki Beach, December 6, 2021, in Honolulu, Hawaii, as a strong storm packing high winds and extremely heavy rain flooded roads and downed power lines and tree branches across the state.
Marco Garcia/AP
On Maui, power outages and flooding were reported with more than a foot of rain falling in some areas.
The relentless rain forced three couples from the U.S. mainland to postpone their Maui elopements, said Nicole Bonanno, owner of Bella Bloom Floral, a wedding florist and boutique in Wailea.
“The roads, everything are a mess,” she said. “There are lots of trees down.”
Maui resident Jimmy Gomes was waiting for the lights to come back at his home on Monday after losing power at 6 p.m. Sunday. His rain gauge measured 7 inches: “I haven’t seen this kind of rain in a long time,” he said.
All of Hawaii’s islands still faced the threat of flash flooding, lightning strikes, landslides and strong winds over the next two days, according to the National Weather Service.
In this webcam image provided by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, snow is seen atop the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii on December 6, 2021.
Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope via AP
The winter weather system known as a “Kona low” prompted emergency alerts throughout the weekend while delivering wind, rain and even blizzard conditions at some of Hawaii’s highest elevations.
A weekend blizzard warning was issued for the state’s highest peak, on the Big Island. Snow is not rare at the summit of Mauna Kea, which is nearly 14,000 feet high. The last time there was a blizzard warning for the summit was in 2018. No residents live at the summit, but there are telescope observatories and other offices where officials work.
The weather service said there were reports of 8 inches of snow on the road below the top of Mauna Kea, and officials were working to get to the summit to get more measurements. The forecast was for a foot of snow at the mountain’s peak.
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Dave Kindy is a journalist, freelance writer and book reviewer who lives in Plymouth, Mass. He writes about history, culture and other topics for Smithsonian, Air & Space, Military History, World War II, Aviation History and other publications.
Citing mounting evidence of ongoing harm, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy on Tuesday issued a public health advisory on the mental health challenges confronting youth, a rare warning and call to action to address what he called an emerging crisis exacerbated by pandemic hardships.
Symptoms of depression and anxiety have doubled during the pandemic, with 25% of youth experiencing depressive symptoms and 20% experiencing anxiety symptoms, according to Murthy’s 53-page advisory. There also appear to be increases in negative emotions or behaviors such as impulsivity and irritability — associated with conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD.
And, in early 2021, emergency department visits in the United States for suspected suicide attempts were 51% higher for adolescent girls and 4% higher for adolescent boys compared to the same time period in early 2019, according to research cited in the advisory.
“It would be a tragedy if we beat back one public health crisis only to allow another to grow in its place,” Murthy said in a preface to the advisory. “Mental health challenges in children, adolescents, and young adults are real, and they are widespread. But most importantly, they are treatable, and often preventable.”
Even before the pandemic, children from all backgrounds faced serious mental health challenges, Murthy said. But nearly two years of disruption took a toll and worsened their mental health — especially for such groups as immigrants, students with disabilities and students of color from low-income families.
At the same time, pandemic-related safety measures reduced in-person interactions among children, friends, social supports and professionals such as teachers, school counselors, pediatricians and child welfare workers. This isolation made it “harder to recognize signs of child abuse, mental health concerns, and other challenges,” the advisory states.
“This is unprecedented, the amount of trauma that our students are experiencing on a mass scale,” said Loretta Whitson, executive director of the California Assn. of School Counselors.
A surgeon general’s advisory is a public statement intended to focus national attention to an urgent public health issue and provide recommendations for how it should be addressed. “Advisories are reserved for significant public health challenges that need the nation’s immediate awareness and action,” the document said.
The advisory calls for a broad-based and rapid response from government, social media companies, community groups, schools, teachers, parents and even students —and listed resources available to them.
Murthy issued his advisory the day after a quick visit to King/Drew Magnet High School of Medicine and Science, a campus of high achievers that is, comparatively speaking, well-staffed for mental health support and is adjacent to a regional medical center and medical school in the Willowbrook area of South Los Angeles.
But even here, students have been struggling, said Jesus El, a 17-year-old senior. Despite concerted efforts from teachers, many students became disengaged after campuses shut down and learning moved online to the Zoom format.
“For most of my classes, it was just names in a box — no microphones being turned on, no cameras, no chat,” Jesus said. “Unless the teacher says: ‘Say yes, if you’re still here,’ it was just ghost town, kind of.”
And students also are having difficulties adjusting to the resumption of in-person schooling.
“A lot of people still feel like, everything is virtual, like, they act as if we can’t see or hear what they say,” Jesus said. “A lot of students have been less motivated to come to school, you know, miss school more. I’m noticing a lot more students start to leave class and take long bathroom breaks.”
This fall Jesus was part of an effort to launch a school mental health club, which works to help students understand when and where to seek help, and to destigmatize the experience. It’s the kind of youth-initiated model cited in the advisory.
Similarly, senior Sydnee Breda-Nixon, 17, looks out for friends.
“I tend to notice when something is wrong,” she said, “whether it be how they’re texting, or how they’re talking to me, or how they’re reacting to certain things that I’ve done or said. If I see it on like Tuesday, I’ll ask them on maybe Wednesday — because you don’t want to just let them go through it all by themselves, because then that becomes something that is hard to take on.”
In an interview, Murthy underscored the importance of friends, parents and teachers being attentive to changes in mood, behavior and interests. He noted that mental health symptoms in youths frequently become evident 10 years before they begin to be addressed.
Sydnee wasn’t doing so well herself. For a time, she lost interest in activities and engaging with family and friends. The pandemic made everything feel so dull and hopeless, she said, but her bond with an older sister helped pull her out.
Murthy also emphasized the role institutions play in creating accessible and seamless mental health support and noted that pandemic-relief aid — billions of dollars went to L.A. Unified alone — is supposed to target mental health.
Like many other school systems, the Los Angeles Unified School District has struggled to find available mental health professionals, falling about 500 social workers short of this year’s hiring goals, said school board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin.
“One good thing is that people are asking for help and trying to offer it to one another, even informally and without professional expertise,” Franklin said. “But we are also recognizing the deep need for professional expertise.”
The national average of caseloads for school counselors remains high, with 424 students per counselor for the 2019-20 school year. Professional guidelines recommend a ratio of 250 students per counselor.
Historically, the problem has been the lack of money to hire counselors. For now, the money is there, but the professionals are not. The advisory recommends that government — at the local, tribal, state and federal level — invest in a pipeline for counselors, nurses, social workers and school psychologists.
Daniel Eisenberg, a professor of health policy of management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, said he agreed with the advisory’s holistic approach in taking on problems that had been worsening long before the pandemic.
“This is an issue that really requires a long-term investment from all the stakeholders mentioned in the advisory, our entire society … for years and decades to come,” Eisenberg said.
The surgeon general has limited direct power, but traditionally speaks with medical expertise as the voice of the executive branch — a role that can be magnified by the individual in the office and the issues that person takes on. The surgeon general’s warning on tobacco products is a well-known example.
Murtry is on his second tour of duty. He also served as surgeon general from 2014-17, appointed by President Obama. The latest advisory is his second during the Biden administration. His first flagged the “urgent threat” of medical misinformation, calling on tech and social media companies to operate more responsibly.
Murthy said there’s a connection between the two advisories because misinformation can amplify polarization, “and that actually creates a really stressful environment.”
“I’ve learned from my own small children — they’re very sensitive to disagreement around them, whether their parents are arguing or other people are arguing.”
Some of the recommendations seem aspirational, like asking technology companies to step up, said Robin H. Gurwitch, a psychologist and professor at Duke University Medical Center. But aiming high is better than settling for the status quo, she said.
“I really do believe that this advisory infuses hope and if nothing else, carries hope forward that things can be better. Oftentimes, right now with COVID, mental health has taken so many hits.” With the advisory, she said, there’s hope that, “we can begin to shed some light on the issues and truly move forward in a productive way.”
“It’s been very confusing,” said Ms. Thomas, 36, as she and Mr. Ridgers, 43, waited in a long line at St. Pancras train station in London on Monday to get tested before their flight on Tuesday.
“I’m confused right now, actually,” Mr. Ridgers said, because the couple did not have an appointment at the St. Pancras testing center and were unsure if they needed one. They found out soon after that they could not get tested as walk-ins, and made an appointment for three hours later.
The start to their trip was complicated, too. They arrived before Britain’s two-day quarantine requirement came into effect and ended up quarantining unnecessarily for a day because they were unsure whether the requirement applied to them. New rules also required a P.C.R. test, so they spent more than 80 British pounds ($106) each on tests for Day 2 of their trip.
“Every morning, it was waking up to tune in to the news to find out if it had changed or if we were going to need to quarantine for longer, or if we were even going to be able to come home,” Ms. Thomas said. “It was really touch-and-go there for a little while.”
More than a dozen countries around the world, including the United States, have gone a step beyond testing requirements and have barred travelers who have recently been in any of eight southern African countries. Health experts have criticized that policy and have urged caution, because so little is known yet about the Omicron variant, which was first detected and sequenced less than two weeks ago in South Africa.
The Biden administration raised some eyebrows Monday after it described the art and antiquities market as a hotbed of shady financial dealings — weeks after first son Hunter Biden’s work went on display in a Soho gallery.
The warning from the White House was part of its “Strategy on Countering Corruption,” which the administration described as “a comprehensive roadmap for how the United States will amplify its efforts domestically and internationally, with governmental and non-governmental partners, to prevent, limit, and respond to corruption and related crimes.”
“When government officials abuse public power for private gain, they do more than simply appropriate illicit wealth,” the introduction to the 38-page report reads, later adding: “As a fundamental threat to the rule of law, corruption hollows out institutions, corrodes public trust, and fuels popular cynicism toward effective, accountable governance.”
On page 24 of the report, the White House describes the art market as “especially vulnerable to a range of financial crimes.”
“Built-in opacity, lack of stable and predictable pricing, and inherent cross-border transportability of goods sold, make the market optimal for illicit value transfer, sanctions evasion, and corruption,” the report adds.
Hunter Biden’s art show was criticized for being a potential ethics violation.Instagram
“The White House just issued a report flagging that money laundering is a problem in the… wait for it… art sale industry,” Shaub tweeted sarcastically.
“These are legitimate questions,” Shaub tweeted at the time. “It’s disappointing to hear [Psaki] send a message that the WH thinks the public has no right to ask about ethics. After the last 4 years, these questions have never been more important. I know this isn’t a popular opinion, but this stuff matters.”
Shaub and other ethics experts have repeatedly warned that the sale of Hunter Biden’s art is likely to draw the interest of prospective buyers seeking to curry favor with his father’s administration.
“There is no ethics program in the world that can be built around the head of state’s staff working with a dealer to keep the public in the dark about the identities of individuals who pay vast sums to the leader’s family member for subjectively priced items of no intrinsic value,” Shaub tweeted in October. “If this were Trump, Xi [Jinping] or [Vladimir] Putin, you’d have no doubt whatsoever that this creates a vehicle for funneling cash to the first family in exchange for access or favors. Nor would you doubt that the appearance of monetizing the presidency was outrageous.”
Walter Shaub, the former head of the US Office of Government Ethics, criticized the White House’s new report on Twitter.Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Republicans have called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate any sales of the first son’s work.
When a Post reporter asked Biden in October if he was concerned about potential corruption resulting from the sale of his son’s artwork, the president looked the reporter in the eyes and said: “You gotta be kidding me.”
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