Police Matter Too: What the Police Really Believe

Inside the distinctive, largely unknown ideology of American policing — and how it justifies racist violence.

By Zack Beaucham , VOX

Arthur Rizer is a former police officer and 21-year veteran of the US Army, where he served as a military policeman. Today, he heads the criminal justice program at the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank in DC. And he wants you to know that American policing is even more broken than you think.

“That whole thing about the bad apple? I hate when people say that,” Rizer tells me. “The bad apple rots the barrel. And until we do something about the rotten barrel, it doesn’t matter how many good fucking apples you put in.”

To illustrate the problem, Rizer tells a story about a time he observed a patrol by some officers in Montgomery, Alabama. They were called in to deal with a woman they knew had mental illness; she was flailing around and had cut someone with a broken plant pick. To subdue her, one of the officers body-slammed her against a door. Hard.

Rizer recalls that Montgomery officers were nervous about being watched during such a violent arrest — until they found out he had once been a cop. They didn’t actually have any problem with what one of them had just done to the woman; in fact, they started laughing about it.

“It’s one thing to use force and violence to affect an arrest. It’s another thing to find it funny,” he tells me. “It’s just pervasive throughout policing. When I was a police officer and doing these kind of ride-alongs [as a researcher], you see the underbelly of it. And it’s ... gross.”

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America’s epidemic of police violence is not limited to what’s on the news. For every high-profile story of a police officer killing an unarmed Black person or tear-gassing peaceful protesters, there are many, many allegations of police misconduct you don’t hear about — abuses ranging from excessive use of force to mistreatment of prisoners to planting evidence. African Americans are arrested and roughed up by cops at wildly disproportionate rates, relative to both their overall share of the population and the percentage of crimes they commit.

Something about the way police relate to the communities they’re tasked with protecting has gone wrong. Officers aren’t just regularly treating people badly; a deep dive into the motivations and beliefs of police reveals that too many believe they are justified in doing so.

To understand how the police think about themselves and their job, I interviewed more than a dozen former officers and experts on policing. These sources, ranging from conservatives to police abolitionists, painted a deeply disturbing picture of the internal culture of policing.

Police officers confront protesters in front of City Hall in New York City on July 1.

 Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Police officers across America have adopted a set of beliefs about their work and its role in our society. The tenets of police ideology are not codified or written down, but are nonetheless widely shared in departments around the country.

The ideology holds that the world is a profoundly dangerous place: Officers are conditioned to see themselves as constantly in danger and that the only way to guarantee survival is to dominate the citizens they’re supposed to protect. The police believe they’re alone in this fight; police ideology holds that officers are under siege by criminals and are not understood or respected by the broader citizenry. These beliefs, combined with widely held racial stereotypes, push officers toward violent and racist behavior during intense and stressful street interactions.

In that sense, police ideology can help us understand the persistence of officer-involved shootings and the recent brutal suppression of peaceful protests. In a culture where Black people are stereotyped as more threatening, Black communities are terrorized by aggressive policing, with officers acting less like community protectors and more like an occupying army.

The beliefs that define police ideology are neither universally shared among officers nor evenly distributed across departments. There are more than 600,000 local police officers across the country and more than 12,000 local police agencies. The officer corps has gotten more diverse over the years, with women, people of color, and LGBTQ officers making up a growing share of the profession. Speaking about such a group in blanket terms would do a disservice to the many officers who try to serve with care and kindness.

However, the officer corps remains overwhelmingly white, male, and straight. Federal Election Commission data from the 2020 cycle suggests that police heavily favor Republicans. And it is indisputable that there are commonly held beliefs among officers.

“The fact that not every department is the same doesn’t undermine the point that there are common factors that people can reasonably identify as a police culture,” says Tracey Meares, the founding director of Yale University’s Justice Collaboratory.

The danger imperative

In 1998, Georgia sheriff’s deputy Kyle Dinkheller pulled over a middle-aged white man named Andrew Howard Brannan for speeding. Brannan, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, refused to comply with Dinkheller’s instructions. He got out of the car and started dancing in the middle of the road, singing “Here I am, shoot me” over and over again.

In the encounter, recorded by the deputy’s dashcam, things then escalate: Brannan charges at Dinkheller; Dinkheller tells him to “get back.” Brannan heads back to the car — only to reemerge with a rifle pointed at Dinkheller. The officer fires first, and misses; Brannan shoots back. In the ensuing firefight, both men are wounded, but Dinkheller far more severely. It ends with Brannan standing over Dinkheller, pointing the rifle at the deputy’s eye. He yells — “Die, fucker!” — and pulls the trigger.

The dashcam footage of Dinkheller’s killing, widely known among cops as the “Dinkheller video,” is burned into the minds of many American police officers. It is screened in police academies around the country; one training turns it into a video game-style simulation in which officers can change the ending by killing Brannan. Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who killed Philando Castile during a 2016 traffic stop, was shown the Dinkheller video during his training.

“Every cop knows the name ‘Dinkheller’ — and no one else does,” says Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer who currently teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

The purpose of the Dinkheller video, and many others like it shown at police academies, is to teach officers that any situation could escalate to violence. Cop killers lurk around every corner.

It’s true that policing is a relatively dangerous job. But contrary to the impression the Dinkheller video might give trainees, murders of police are not the omnipresent threat they are made out to be. The number of police killings across the country has been falling for decades; there’s been a 90 percent drop in ambush killings of officers since 1970. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, about 13 per 100,000 police officers died on the job in 2017. Compare that to farmers (24 deaths per 100,000), truck drivers (26.9 per 100,000), and trash collectors (34.9 per 100,000). But police academies and field training officers hammer home the risk of violent death to officers again and again.

It’s not just training and socialization, though: The very nature of the job reinforces the sense of fear and threat. Law enforcement isn’t called to people’s homes and streets when things are going well. Officers constantly find themselves thrown into situations where a seemingly normal interaction has gone haywire — a marital argument devolving into domestic violence, for example.

“For them, any scene can turn into a potential danger,” says Eugene Paoline III, a criminologist at the University of Central Florida. “They’re taught, through their experiences, that very routine events can go bad.”

Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a professor at UT-Austin, calls the police obsession with violent death “the danger imperative.” After conducting 1,000 hours of fieldwork and interviews with 94 police officers, he found that the risk of violent death occupies an extraordinary amount of mental space for many officers — far more so than it should, given the objective risks.

Here’s what I mean: According to the past 20 years of FBI data on officer fatalities, 1,001 officers have been killed by firearms while 760 have died in car crashes. For this reason, police officers are, like the rest of us, required to wear seat belts at all times

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In reality, many choose not to wear them even when speeding through city streets. Sierra-Arévalo rode along with one police officer, whom he calls officer Doyle, during a car chase where Doyle was going around 100 miles per hour — and still not wearing a seat belt. Sierra-Arévalo asked him why he did things like this. Here’s what Doyle said:

There’s times where I’ll be driving and the next thing you know I’ll be like, ‘Oh shit, that dude’s got a fucking gun!’ I’ll stop [mimics tires screeching], try to get out — fuck. Stuck on the seat belt … I’d rather just be able to jump out on people, you know. If I have to, be able to jump out of this deathtrap of a car.

Despite the fact that fatal car accidents are a risk for police, officers like Doyle prioritize their ability to respond to one specific shooting scenario over the clear and consistent benefits of wearing a seat belt.

“Knowing officers consistently claim safety is their primary concern, multiple drivers not wearing a seatbelt and speeding towards the same call should be interpreted as an unacceptable danger; it is not,” Sierra-Arévalo writes. “The danger imperative — the preoccupation with violence and the provision of officer safety — contributes to officer behaviors that, though perceived as keeping them safe, in fact put them in great physical danger.”

This outsized attention to violence doesn’t just make officers a threat to themselves. It’s also part of what makes them a threat to citizens.

Because officers are hyper-attuned to the risks of attacks, they tend to believe that they must always be prepared to use force against them — sometimes even disproportionate force. Many officers believe that, if they are humiliated or undermined by a civilian, that civilian might be more willing to physically threaten them.

Scholars of policing call this concept “maintaining the edge,” and it’s a vital reason why officers seem so willing to employ force that appears obviously excessive when captured by body cams and cellphones.

“To let down that edge is perceived as inviting chaos, and thus danger,” Moskos says.

This mindset helps explain why so many instances of police violence — like George Floyd’s killing by officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis — happen during struggles related to arrest.

In these situations, the officers aren’t always threatened with a deadly weapon: Floyd, for example, was unarmed. But when the officer decides the suspect is disrespecting them or resisting their commands, they feel the need to use force to reestablish the edge.

They need to make the suspect submit to their authority.

A siege mentality

Police officers today tend to see themselves as engaged in a lonely, armed struggle against the criminal element. They are judged by their effectiveness at that task, measured by internal data such as arrest numbers and crime rates in the areas they patrol. Officers believe these efforts are underappreciated by the general public; according to a 2017 Pew report, 86 percent of police believe the public doesn’t really understand the “risks and challenges” involved in their job.

Rizer, the former officer and R Street researcher, recently conducted a separate large-scale survey of American police officers. One of the questions he asked was whether they would want their children to become police officers. A majority, around 60 percent, said no — for reasons that, in Rizer’s words, “blew me away.”

“The vast majority of people that said ‘no, I don’t want them to become a police officer’ was because they felt like the public no longer supported them — and that they were ‘at war’ with the public,” he tells me. “There’s a ‘me versus them’ kind of worldview, that we’re not part of this community that we’re patrolling.”

You can see this mentality on display in the widespread police adoption of an emblem called the “thin blue line.” In one version of the symbol, two black rectangles are separated by a dark blue horizontal line. The rectangles represent the public and criminals, respectively; the blue line separating them is the police.

In another, the blue line replaces the central white stripe in a black-and-white American flag, separating the stars from the stripes below. During the recent anti-police violence protests in Cincinnati, Ohio, officers raised this modified banner outside their station.

A demonstrator holds a “thin blue line” flag and a sign in support of police during a protest outside the governor’s mansion in St. Paul, Minnesota, on June 27.

 Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

In the “thin blue line” mindset, loyalty to the badge is paramount; reporting excessive force or the use of racial slurs by a colleague is an act of treason. This emphasis on loyalty can create conditions for abuses, even systematic ones, to take place: Officers at one station in Chicago, Illinois, tortured at least 125 Black suspects between 1972 and 1991. These crimes were uncovered by the dogged work of an investigative journalist rather than a police whistleblower.

“Officers, when they get wind that something might be wrong, either participate in it themselves when they’re commanded to — or they actively ignore it, find ways to look the other way,” says Laurence Ralph, a Princeton professor and the author of The Torture Letters, a recent book on the abuses in Chicago.

This insularity and siege mentality is not universal among American police. Worldviews vary from person to person and department to department; many officers are decent people who work hard to get to know citizens and address their concerns.

But it is powerful enough, experts say, to distort departments across the country. It has seriously undermined some recent efforts to reorient the police toward working more closely with local communities, generally pushing departments away from deep engagement with citizens and toward a more militarized and aggressive model.

“The police have been in the midst of an epic ideological battle. It’s been taking place ever since the supposed community policing revolution started back in the 1980s,” says Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies. “In the last 10 to 15 years, the more toxic elements have been far more influential.”

Since the George Floyd protests began, police have tear-gassed protesters in 100 different US cities. This is not an accident or the result of behaviors by a few bad apples. Instead, it reflects the fact that officers see themselves as at war — and the protesters as the enemies.

A 2017 study by Heidi Reynolds-Stenson, a sociologist at Colorado State University-Pueblo, examined data on 7,000 protests from 1960 to 1995. She found that “police are much more likely to try to quell protests that criticize police conduct.”

“Recent scholarship argues that, over the last twenty years, protest policing [has gotten] more aggressive and less impartial,” Reynolds-Stenson concludes. “The pattern of disproportionate repression of police brutality protests found in this study may be even more pronounced today.”

There’s a reason that, after New York Police Department Lt. Robert Cattani kneeled alongside Black Lives Matter protesters on May 31, he sent an email to his precinct apologizing for the “horrible decision to give into a crowd of protesters’ demands.” In his mind, the decision to work with the crowd amounted to collaboration with the enemy.

“The cop in me,” Cattani wrote, “wants to kick my own ass.”

Anti-Blackness

Policing in the United States has always been bound up with the color line. In the South, police departments emerged out of 18th century slave patrols — bands of men working to discipline slaves, facilitate their transfer between plantations, and catch runaways. In the North, professional police departments came about as a response to a series of mid-19th century urban upheavals — many of which, like the 1834 New York anti-abolition riot, had their origins in racial strife.

While policing has changed dramatically since then, there’s clear evidence of continued structural racism in American policing. The Washington Post’s Radley Balko has compiled an extensive list of academic studies documenting this fact, covering everything from traffic stops to use of deadly force. Research has confirmed that this is a nationwide problem, involving a significant percentage of officers.

When talking about race in policing and the way it relates to police ideology, there are two related phenomena to think about.

The first is overt racism. In some police departments, the culture permits a minority of racists on the force to commit brutal acts of racial violence with impunity.

Examples of explicit racism abound in police officer conduct. The following three incidents were reported in the past month alone:

• In leaked audio, Wilmington, North Carolina, officer Kevin Piner said, “we are just going to go out and start slaughtering [Blacks],” adding that he “can’t wait” for a new civil war so whites could “wipe them off the fucking map.” Piner was dismissed from the force, as were two other officers involved in the conversation.
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• Joey Lawn, a 10-year veteran of the Meridian, Mississippi, force, was fired for using an unspecified racial slur against a Black colleague during a 2018 exercise. Lawn’s boss, John Griffith, was demoted from captain to lieutenant for failing to punish Lawn at the time.
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• Four officers in San Jose, California, were put on administrative leave amid an investigation into their membership in a secret Facebook group. In a public post, officer Mark Pimentel wrote that “black lives don’t really matter”; in another private one, retired officer Michael Nagel wrote about female Muslim prisoners: “i say we repurpose the hijabs into nooses.”

In all of these cases, superiors punished officers for their offensive comments and actions — but only after they came to light. It’s safe to say a lot more go unreported. [We don't know how many unreported cases there are in which superiors did punish officers for offensive comments and actions. I think it's fair to assume a decent amount of such cases--Esco20]

Last April, a human resources manager in San Francisco’s city government quit after spending two years conducting anti-bias training for the city’s police force. In an exit email sent to his boss and the city’s police chief, he wrote that “the degree of anti-black sentiment throughout SFPD is extreme,” adding that “while there are some at SFPD who possess somewhat of a balanced view of racism and anti-blackness, there are an equal number (if not more) — who possess and exude deeply rooted anti-black sentiments.”

Psychological research suggests that white officers are disproportionately likely to demonstrate a personality trait called “social dominance orientation.” Individuals with high levels of this trait tend to believe that existing social hierarchies are not only necessary, but morally justified — that inequalities reflect the way that things actually should be. The concept was originally formulated in the 1990s as a way of explaining why some people are more likely to accept what a group of researchers termed “ideologies that promote or maintain group inequality,” including “the ideology of anti-Black racism.”

A demonstrator walks past a mural for George Floyd during a protest near the White House in Washington, DC, on June 4.

 Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images

This helps us understand why some officers are more likely to use force against Black suspects, even unarmed ones. Phillip Atiba Goff, a psychologist at John Jay and the CEO of the Center for Policing Equity think tank, has done forthcoming research on the distribution of social dominance orientation among officers in three different cities. Goff and his co-authors found that white officers who score very highly in this trait tend to use force more frequently than those who don’t.

“If you think the social hierarchy is good, then maybe you’re more willing to use violence from the state’s perspective to enforce that hierarchy — and you think that’s your job,” he tells me.

But while the problem of overt racism and explicit commitment to racial hierarchy is a serious one, it’s not necessarily the central problem in modern policing.

The second manifestation of anti-Blackness is more subtle. The very nature of policing, in which officers perform a dizzying array of stressful tasks for long hours, brings out the worst in people. The psychological stressors combine with police ideology and widespread cultural stereotypes to push officers, even ones who don’t hold overtly racist beliefs, to treat Black people as more suspect and more dangerous. It’s not just the officers who are the problem; it’s the society they come from, and the things that society asks them to do.

While overt racists may be overrepresented on police forces, the average white officer’s beliefs are not all that different from those of the average white person in their local community. According to Goff, tests of racial bias reveal somewhat higher rates of prejudice among officers than the general population, but the effect size tends to be swamped by demographic and regional effects.

“If you live in a racist city, that’s going to matter more for how racist your law enforcement is ... than looking at the difference between law enforcement and your neighbors,” he told me.

In this sense, the rising diversity of America’s officer corps should make a real difference. If you draw from a demographically different pool of recruits, one with overall lower levels of racial bias, then there should be less of a problem with racism on the force.

There’s some data to back this up. Pew’s 2017 survey of officers found that Black officers and female officers were considerably more sympathetic to anti-police brutality protesters than white ones. A 2016 paper on officer-involved killings of Black people, from Yale’s Joscha Legewie and Columbia’s Jeffrey Fagan, found that departments with a larger percentage of Black officers had lower rates of killings of Black people.

But scholars caution that diversity will not, on its own, solve policing’s problems. In Pew’s survey, 60 percent of Hispanic and white officers said their departments had “excellent” or “good” relations with the local Black community, while only 32 percent of Black officers said the same. The hierarchy of policing remains extremely white — across cities, departmental brass and police unions tend to be disproportionately white relative to the rank-and-file. And the existing culture in many departments pushes nonwhite officers to try and fit in with what’s been established by the white hierarchy.

“We have seen that officers of color actually face increased pressure to fit into the existing culture of policing and may go out of their way to align themselves with traditional police tactics,” says Shannon Portillo, a scholar of bureaucratic culture at the University of Kansas-Edwards.

There’s a deeper problem than mere representation. The very nature of policing, both police ideology and the nuts-and-bolts nature of the job, can bring out the worst in people — especially when it comes to deep-seated racial prejudices and stereotypes.

The intersection of commonly held stereotypes with police ideology can prime officers for abusive behavior, especially when they’re patrolling majority-Black neighborhoods where residents have long-standing grievances against the cops. Some kind of incident with a Black citizen is certain to set off a confrontation; officers will eventually feel the need to escalate well beyond what seems necessary or even acceptable from the outside to protect themselves

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“The drug dealer — if he says ‘fuck you’ one day, it’s like getting punked on the playground. You have to go through that every day,” says Moskos, the former Baltimore officer. “You’re not allowed to get punked as a cop, not just because of your ego but because of the danger of it.”

The problems with ideology and prejudice are dramatically intensified by the demanding nature of the policing profession. Officers work a difficult job for long hours, called upon to handle responsibilities ranging from mental health intervention to spousal dispute resolution. While on shift, they are constantly anxious, searching for the next threat or potential arrest.

Stress gets to them even off the job; PTSD and marital strife are common problems. It’s a kind of negative feedback loop: The job makes them stressed and nervous, which damages their mental health and personal relationships, which raises their overall level of stress and makes the job even more taxing.

According to Goff, it’s hard to overstate how much more likely people are to be racist under these circumstances. When you put people under stress, they tend to make snap judgments rooted in their basic instincts. For police officers, raised in a racist society and socialized in a violent work atmosphere, that makes racist behavior inevitable.

“The mission and practice of policing is not aligned with what we know about how to keep people from acting on the kinds of implicit biases and mental shortcuts,” he says. “You could design a job where that’s not how it works. We have not chosen to do that for policing.”

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Across the United States, we have created a system that makes disproportionate police targeting of Black citizens an inevitability. Officers don’t need to be especially racist as compared to the general population for discrimination to recur over and over; it’s the nature of the police profession, the beliefs that permeate it, and the situations in which officers find themselves that lead them to act in racist ways.

This reality helps us understand why the current protests have been so forceful: they are an expression of long-held rage against an institution that Black communities experience less as a protection force and more as a sort of military occupation.

Police officers often represent more of a military occupation than a protection force for Black communities.

 David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

In one landmark project, a team including Yale’s Meares and Hopkins’s Vesla Weaver facilitated more than 850 conversations about policing among residents of six different cities, finding a pervasive sense of police lawlessness among residents of highly policed Black communities.

Residents believe that police see them as subhuman or animal, that interactions with officers invariably end with arrests and/or physical assaults, and that the Constitution’s protections against police abuse don’t apply to Black people.

“[It’s often said that] if you don’t have anything on you, just agree to a search and everything will be okay. Let me tell you, that’s not what happens,” Weaver tells me, summarizing the beliefs of her research subjects. “What actually happens is that you’re bound to get beat up, you’re bound to get dragged to the station. The police can search you for whatever. We don’t get due process, we don’t get restitution — this is what we live by.”

Police don’t treat whole communities like this because they’re born worse or more evil than civilians. It’s better to understand the majority of officers as ordinary Americans who are thrown into a system that conditions them to be violent and to treat Black people, in particular, as the enemy. While some departments are better than others at ameliorating this problem, there’s not a city in the country that appears to have solved it entirely.

Rizer summarizes the problem by telling me about one new officer’s experience in Baltimore.

“This was a great young man,” Rizer says. “He joined the Baltimore Police Department because he wanted to make a difference.”

Six months after this man graduated from the academy, Rizer checked in on him to see how he was doing. It wasn’t good.

“They’re animals. All of them,” Rizer recalls the young officer telling him. “The cops, the people I patrol, everybody. They’re just fucking animals.”

This man was, in Rizer’s mind, “the embodiment of what a good police officer should have been.” Some time after their conversation, he quit the force — pushed out by a system that takes people in and breaks them, on both sides of the law.

Beginning to build a fairer city: Five steps for de Blasio or, more likely, the next mayor

DAILY NEWS, HARRY SIEGEL

I wrote a couple of long months ago about my hope that our city can emerge as a fairer and more resilient one, less dependent on global capital and more responsive to the needs of flesh-and-blood New Yorkers. The city’s main product needs to be its people — not the world’s wealth or its elites. We have tremendous native talent here, too much of it squandered.

One step toward a better tomorrow would be a decades overdue requirement that NYPD officers — very much including the brass — actually live here. That would make some economic difference but also a significant cultural difference over time, changing the nature of how police see the city and who signs up to be police.

Bill de Blasio, who rarely has the courage of his own supposed convictions and whose time in office is happily running out, says that the city’s too expensive for that to work. But here are a few things, many of them also decades overdue, that could help change that:

• A vacancy tax on commercial, office and residential real estate. No more letting global dollars seeking a safe haven squat inside of shelters in a city endlessly short on shelter, diverting development dollars in the process. New York’s markets should be responsive to the people who live here, not the people who speculate on our real estate. We need eyes on the street, not empty storefronts. If it turns out that there’s more office space than demand for it in the new normal, let prices fall or spaces get repurposed, but don’t let them just sit empty.
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• A pied a terre tax. If you can afford a multi-million dollar pied a terre in New York City, you can afford to pay this tax. Even before the coronavirus, the number of uninhabited units here had been shooting up.
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• A commuter tax. It’s not really a coincidence that the bosses who killed that tax two decades ago — Joe Bruno, Shelly Silver and sponsor Dean Skelos — while competing to win a suburban Senate race were all eventually convicted (though Bruno’s conviction was eventually overturned, and Silver has yet to actually get locked up five years after he was arrested and then twice-convicted) for other acts of corruption.
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• Use some of that new tax money to make CUNY free again for New York City residents. The city university system, which was already being starved for funding before the virus, is the road to the middle class for 275,000 students a year. They shouldn’t return to in-person classes straight from driving for Uber, and they should be on campuses with toilets that work, sufficient and supportive administrators, and professors who aren’t eking out a living one course and semester at a time, and liable to be cut off, as many just were, if the economy takes a hit. Free tuition was a victim of the city’s last great financial crisis; restoring it should be a priority in this one.
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• Whose streets? Our streets! Dedicated walking and biking streets, paths and bridges. Save a few big streets for cars and buses, and then give people and bikes and outdoor dining priority everywhere else, with a truly enforced 10-mile-per-hour speed limit.

Fla has over 15,000 positive cases – the highest single-day number for any state. NYC reported zero coronavirus deaths for the first time since March.

“Florida health officials on Sunday reported 15,300 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 — more than any other state in America has previously reported in a single day.

The number in the Florida Department of Health’s latest update blew past the previous high, 12,274 by New York on April 4, and past Florida’s previous high of 11,458 on July 4,” the Miami Herald reports. “While the figure reflects Florida’s ballooning case numbers in recent weeks, it may also be the result of a dramatic one-day rise in the number of reported test results. … But a Herald analysis this past week found disturbing two-week trends — of increasing positivity and rising numbers of confirmed cases, even as testing volume remained the same. Florida has now had 269,811 confirmed case … [Republican Gov. Ron] DeSantis has recommended the wearing of face masks, but he has resisted calls to mandate it … Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez told CNN on Sunday that the county’s hospitals will soon reach capacity, but he said more beds can be added, including for intensive care. …

“Health experts are concerned that people are gathering in crowds, and have expressed concern that the Republican National Convention’s nomination party for Trump is scheduled to be held in Jacksonville in August. A commissioner for a county near Jacksonville is seriously ill with the virus, according to a posting by his daughter on Facebook. … On Saturday, the Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom reopened at Walt Disney World in Orlando, concerning health experts who urge people not to gather in groups. Guests at the park said that people were wearing masks and social distancing, and videos showed near-empty parks.”

New York City reported zero coronavirus deaths for the first time since March. 

“According to initial data reported by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, no one died from the virus in New York City on July 11. Officials recorded no confirmed deaths the day before as well, but did have two probable death. The department's data shows there hasn't been a day without a coronavirus-related death since March 13, two days after the first reported death,” NBC New York reports. 

Trump commutes sentence of confidant Roger Stone who was convicted of lying to Congress and witness tampering

WASHINGTON POST

President Trump commuted the sentence of his longtime confidant Roger Stone on Friday, using the extensive powers of the presidency to protect a felon and political ally while also lashing out against a years-long probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

 

The move, which the White House announced in a lengthy and pugnacious statement, is the latest attempt by Trump to discredit special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation after it consumed much of his presidency.

While the commutation was celebrated by Trump’s most stalwart supporters, the muted response by Republican lawmakers and Stone’s own history as a self-described “dirty trickster” indicated that the president’s decision to interfere with the nation’s justice system could be fraught with political risk. The move to grant Stone clemency underscored his continued willingness to disrupt the nation’s legal and political norms just months before an election.

While the 643-word statement recited a litany of Trump supporters’ complaints about Stone’s “unfair prosecution, arrest, and trial” — including several complaints about the media — the commutation leaves Stone’s conviction standing. Unlike a pardon, which would have absolved the GOP operative of wrongdoing, the White House action only lifted Stone’s punishment, a 40-month prison sentence that was to begin Tuesday.

The White House cited Stone’s age, 67, saying he would be at medical risk in prison while he continued his appeals.

Stone “maintains his innocence and has stated that he expects to be fully exonerated by the justice system. Mr. Stone, like every American, deserves a fair trial and every opportunity to vindicate himself before the courts. The President does not wish to interfere with his efforts to do so,” the White House said.

Democrats quickly slammed the decision as yet another instance of Trump’s undermining the nation’s justice system by protecting his friends and seeking to punish his enemies.

Bill Russo, a spokesman for former vice president Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, took issue with both the substance and the timing of the commutation.

 

“President Trump has once again abused his power, releasing this commutation on a Friday night, hoping to yet again avoid scrutiny as he lays waste to the norms and the values that make our country a shining beacon to the rest of the world,” he said in a statement. “He will not be shamed. He will only be stopped when Americans make their voice heard at the ballot box this fall. Enough.”

 

While most Republicans stayed quiet about Stone’s commutation, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), the lone Senate Republican to vote to convict Trump during his impeachment trial, blasted the move.

“Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president,” he wrote on Twitter Saturday.

 

Stone is the latest in a series of controversial pardons or commutations Trump has handed down since taking office. Rather than following the traditional process run by the Justice Department on clemency decisions, Trump has often relied on appeals made to him by friends or has focused on cases championed in conservative media

.

Among those who have received pardons or commutations from Trump are disgraced politician Rod R. Blagojevich, convicted junk bond king Michael Milken, former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, right-wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza and former Army officer Clint Lorance, who was convicted of second-degree murder in 2013 for ordering his soldiers to open fire on three men in Afghanistan.

 

Trump’s clemency move on Stone, which went against the recommendation of his own Justice Department, is the latest sign of dysfunction within an administration that has received poor marks for its failure to control the coronavirus pandemic and over its response to the racial justice movement sparked by the killing of a black man by Minneapolis police in May.

 The president signaled his intentions on Twitter last month, saying Stone “was a victim of a corrupt and illegal Witch Hunt” but “can sleep well at night!” President Trump then told reporters Friday that he is “looking at” pardoning Stone, as he continued to build suspense over whether he would intervene before Stone reported to prison next week.

“Well, I’ll be looking at it,” Trump said Friday, before traveling to South Florida for events including a fundraiser in Fort Lauderdale, where Stone lives. “I think Roger Stone was very unfairly untreated, as were many people.”

Stone was sentenced to three years and four months in prison after being convicted of seven felony counts including lying about his attempts to get details of Hillary Clinton’s private emails from the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, then threatening a witness who could contradict his story.

 

 He had been ordered to report to prison by July 14. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson had given Stone a two-week delay to quarantine himself before traveling from South Florida to the prison Jesup, Ga. But she denied the two-month reprieve that Stone had requested with prosecutors’ assent.

An appeals court Friday evening also rejected Stone’s attorneys’ renewed request for a delay in his prison reporting date, ruling that they had failed to show why the reporting date was inappropriate or that he was likely to win an appeal for a new trial or reduced sentence. Stone’s defense earlier Friday, echoing Trump’s attacks against Stone’s treatment by prosecutors, argued that 20 inmates at Jesup have tested positive for the virus in the past two weeks, up from zero, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

Stone has argued that the judge and jury in his case were biased against him. Jackson rejected that claim in April, saying Stone’s argument that the forewoman’s anti-Trump political views rendered the verdict against him invalid “is not supported by any facts or data and it is contrary to controlling legal precedent.” Stone appealed her ruling to a higher court. 

 

The Trump administration’s intervention in Stone’s case has roiled the Justice Department and the federal judiciary. Trump has repeatedly attacked the prosecutors, judge and jury. Trump also sent tweets suggesting that “everyone” involved in prosecuting the case could be sued.

All four of the prosecutors who handled the case withdrew after Barr publicly overruled their recommendation that Stone serve seven to nine years in prison. The suggestion of a more lenient sentence came after Trump complained about the initial recommendation, raising questions about White House interference with the independence of the Justice Department.

More than 2,000 former Justice Department employees subsequently signed a public letter urging Barr to resign, and the head of the Federal Judges Association called an emergency meeting to discuss the situation.

Barr went on to intervene in the case of another former administration staffer, moving in May to drop charges against Michael Flynn. Trump’s first national security adviser had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI but has sought to reverse his conviction after claiming that prosecutors mishandled his case.

 

Stone’s conviction was the last obtained in Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. At trial last September, prosecutors asserted that Stone lied to Congress to protect Trump from embarrassment, making the president and his campaign a key component in their case.

In arguments and testimony, prosecutors revealed phone calls at critical times in 2016 among Stone, Trump and some of the highest-ranking officials in the Trump campaign: Stephen K. Bannon, campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates

.

Gates and Bannon testified that the campaign viewed Stone as a sort of conduit to WikiLeaks who claimed — even before the Russian hacking was known — to have insider information. Gates testified that he overheard a phone call in which Trump seemed to discuss WikiLeaks with Stone, calling into question the president’s assertion to Mueller’s office that he did not remember talking about the organization with his longtime friend.

Prosecutors buttressed the witness testimony with call and message records, which they said helped show that Stone’s claims to the House Intelligence Committee were false.

Stone’s defense team urged jurors to treat his case as a referendum not on him but on Mueller’s entire Russia investigation.

Stone’s attorneys urged jurors to reframe the question from whether Stone lied to whether that mattered, asserting that his hectic efforts to get information from WikiLeaks never amounted to anything.

“So much of this case deals with that question that you need to ask … so what?” defense attorney Bruce Rogow said.

“There was nothing illegal about the campaign being interested in information that WikiLeaks was going to be sending out,” Rogow said.

“If that’s the state of affairs that we’re in, I’m pretty shocked,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Marando told jurors in closing arguments, saying, “Truth matters. Truth still matters.”

In Mueller’s report, the special counsel included Trump’s interactions with Stone among examples of potential obstruction by the president. The report noted the during the investigation, Trump commended Stone for having the “guts” to say that he would not testify against the president and called his friend “very brave.” Mueller said evidence supported the inference that Trump intended to signal that he would reward witnesses who could implicate him for their silence.

 

 

Mask FAQs: Health Experts Answer Questions About Life-Saving Face Coverings

GOTHAMIST

Would you like to help save 45,000 human lives by November? Then all you have to do is wear a mask.

A new model from the University of Washington has projected at least 200,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. by November, but if 95% of Americans wear a mask, that number could drop by 45,000. Unfortunately, over the past few months, America has been divided on the mask issue, as some people do not see it as a life-saving tool, but, maddeningly, as a political prop.

For those who have more willingly adapted to #masklife, you may want to get used to it. Eric Toner of Johns Hopkins recently told the NY Post we could be wearing them for years — "I think that mask wearing and some degree of social distancing, we will be living with — hopefully living with happily — for several years. It’s actually pretty straightforward. If we cover our faces, and both you and anyone you’re interacting with are wearing a mask, the risk of transmission goes way down.”

We asked several health experts about the importance of masks during this pandemic; consider this your Mask 101, and pass it along to those you know who are anti-maskers.

Why do I need to wear this mask?

"There are individuals who are infected with the virus that may not necessarily know they are infected or have symptoms that they don’t attribute to the virus. These individuals can be contagious, and wearing a face covering can diminish their chances of spreading the virus." — Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease doctor working on pandemic policy and emerging infections at Johns Hopkins

How important is it to wear a mask?

"It’s a good idea to wear face coverings (masks) when you can, especially indoors.  Based on what we know to date, transmission of virus seems much easier indoors, because the air is fairly stagnant, making it easier for virus-laden particles (mostly droplets) to find their way to a nearby person and be inhaled (eyes are also a possible route of entry).  There’s still disagreement about whether masks or 6-ft distancing is more important.  If you can do both, it may seem like wearing a belt and suspenders, but it’s prudent.  Outdoors, distance may be the main factor.  There’s nothing magical about the 6-foot rule, it’s empirical but seems to work fairly well in practice. It’s usually just not practical for everyone to be 6 feet apart indoors, so under those conditions, wearing a mask or face covering will help." — Dr. Stephen Morse, epidemiologist at Columbia

"Wearing a mask is important for reducing transmission in the community. Cloth or paper masks do not provide protection to the wearer, but they do reduce risk to others by source control, or by reducing the number of respiratory droplets that the wearer is disseminating into the environment. If everyone wears a mask, then the overall concentration of respiratory droplets in the space they are in will be reduced, and so will the overall risk of transmission. — Dr. Angela Rasmussen, associate research scientist at Columbia's Center for Infection and Immunity

N.B. In a recent episode of The Daily, NY Times reporter Donald McNeil also noted it is important to social distance when outdoors as well. "Sitting right next to somebody else in front of a stage at Mount Rushmore, for example, where the chairs are zip-tied together, is not safe. Masks or no masks, you still really want to try to keep six feet distance."

What kind of face coverings/masks (N95, PM 2.5, cloth) are best to wear right now — particularly as we see reports that the virus may be airborne?

"It’s important to remember that the notion that this virus is 'airborne' is something that is very controversial and is not reflected in the epidemiology. We are seeing close contact transmission being the primary mode and the virus is behaving more like a droplet spread virus than it is measles, which is truly airborne. I don’t believe this changes the type of face covering individuals should wear. The general public should not be wearing N95 masks." — Dr. Amesh Adalja

What if someone claims they can't breathe while wearing a mask?

Dr. Adalja offers this solution: "It’s not just face masks, face shields [also] serve this purpose and are much more palatable for most people to wear."]

Additionally, a Myrtle Beach doctor recently posted an experiment regarding masks and oxygen levels, which went viral. Dr. Megan Hall wrote, "I've been seeing a lot of comments on Facebook, or hearing from patients or other people with concerns about detriments to their health regarding wearing a mask," so she took her own oxygen levels and heart rate in different scenarios: not wearing a mask, wearing a surgical mask for 5 minutes, wearing an N95 mask, and wearing both masks simultaneously. Her results? "There is no significant change in my oxygen saturation (or HR) in any scenario. Though maybe inconvenient for some, you can still breathe."

Please wear a mask when interacting with waitstaff. SCOTT LYNCH / GOTHAMIST

With the return of outdoor dining, we're seeing unmasked patrons ordering from waitstaff, as well as tables that are often too close together. How unsafe is the unmasked patron making this scenario for waitstaff, and others nearby?

"This is a really tough question, because how does this work in practice? Aside from logistical issues associated with eating or drinking, there are a lot of variables that can affect transmission risk in a given restaurant environment, even outdoors: how crowded is it? How far apart are the tables? How long are the servers spending within close physical proximity to customers? What kind of ventilation is there in the dining area? So the bottom line is we don’t know, and my recommendations are to avoid restaurants with crowded dining areas, wear a mask at minimum whenever you are not seated at the table (such as when going to the bathroom, placing an order at the counter, etc), and wash/sanitize your hands. For waitstaff, I recommend always wearing masks, minimizing the time spent interacting with customers, and practicing rigorous hand hygiene, especially when handling customer dishes. Ideally all restaurant staff should have access to routine testing. It goes without saying that neither customers nor staff should go to a restaurant if they have any symptoms, no matter how minor. Restaurant owners and managers need to ensure their policies support their employees with sick leave in case they can’t come to work." — Dr. Angela Rasmussen

A word from Governor Andrew Cuomo

We asked Governor Andrew Cuomo about masks. In a statement, Cuomo, the first governor is the U.S. to mandate face coverings in response to the pandemic, wrote, "Every person has a responsibility here, social a responsibility and that’s what wearing a mask is all about. Just wear a mask. It's the smart thing to do. It’s also the right thing to do. In all of this complexity, there's still the  right thing and the wrong thing to do. The right thing is to wear a mask because it's not about you. It's about my health. You wear a mask to protect me. I wear a mask to protect you and wearing a mask is not the greatest intrusion.​ The only way forward is if I protect you and you protect me. I wear a mask for you and you wear a mask for me. If you care for me and I care for you, we showed that in the end love does win."

And finally, here's how to wear a mask properly

You must wear the mask over your nose, as well as your mouth. Not only over your mouth. Not around your neck. Not in your hand. Here's how to mask like a pro:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Tv2BVN_WTk?feature=oembed]

 

 

The Most Dangerous Phase of Trump’s Rule

His threat to democracy is nothing to laugh at.

ROGER COHEN, NY TIMES

PARIS — Think of postwar European institutions as an elaborate shield against fascism. The European Union diluting nationalist identity; the welfare state cushioning the social divisions dictators may exploit; NATO transforming the United States into a European power and the ultimate protector of democracy against totalitarian ideologies.

This was Europe’s collective response to its double suicide in the first half of the 20th century. It was not just Germany that had to resurrect itself from the rubble of “zero hour” in 1945, but the whole continent. Europeans owed it to the myriad corpses beneath their every step to build societies and institutions that were fascism-proof.

No wonder President Trump, whose dictatorial inclinations are as hard to suppress as Dr. Strangelove’s Nazi salute, hates these European institutions so much. His itch is to undermine, or even destroy, them. “I’m a nationalist,” he once said. Yes, he is — flags, military flyovers, walls, monuments and all, in exaltation of “the greatest, most exceptional and most virtuous nation in the history of the world,” as he put it on July 4.

Since arriving in France, I’ve heard a couple of French people describe Trump as “funny.” For Europeans, the novelty of America’s showman has worn off. He’s a loudmouth. He’s a fool. These observations have emerged from societies that have settled their painful scores with history and found a middling security. The United States, however, has not. In fact, I think Trump has just entered the most dangerous phase of his presidency.

 

It is important to see Trump in historical context. The country he took over had been through a seesawing quarter-century of trauma. First the giddy all-powerful interlude after the disappearance of the Soviet Union, with its temptations of hubris. Then the disorienting shock of Sept. 11 that shattered the idea of America-the-inviolable and propelled the nation into its wars without victory. Then the Great Recession with its indelible lesson that, as Leonard Cohen put it, “the poor stay poor, the rich get rich.” Then the fact, irrefutable with the rise of China, of America’s relative decline, a development Barack Obama, the first Black president, opted to manage with cool realism.

All this provided the perfect context for “a clumsy, lurching and undiscriminating American nationalism that would boomerang upon itself,” as Jacob Heilbrunn described it in his tribute to Owen Harries, the Australian foreign policy intellectual, who predicted such a fate after Sept. 11.

Trump, masterful media manipulator, is the vehicle of that nationalism. He exploited a pervasive sense of American humiliation. It was out there, in search of a voice. Trump is not funny. He is fiendish.

Nationalism is not fascism but is a necessary component of it. Both seek to change the present in the name of an illusory past in order to create a future vague in all respects except its glory.

One of the core characteristics of fascism is nostalgia, a pining for a culture of masculinity and monumentalism, evident in Hitler’s Nazi Party and the architecture it embraced for the 1,000-year Reich. Trump’s nostalgia is for some unidentified moment of American greatness, when white male property owners ruled alone, the nation’s global dominance was unchallenged, women stayed home, and gender was not 360. By choosing to speak at Mount Rushmore on the eve of Independence Day, Trump attempted to inscribe his nationalism in a monumental narrative of American heroism. It was straight from the autocratic playbook.

Another central characteristic of nationalism and fascism is their need to define themselves against an enemy. Trump has chosen his: China, designated as the culprit for the coronavirus debacle (and the scapegoat behind which the president can hide his own equal responsibility); and the “angry mobs” he alluded to at Mount Rushmore who constitute, Trump said, a new “far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance.”

It is Trump who demands “absolute allegiance” — look at his trembling cabinet — and whose nationalism is fascist-tinged. He has turned an uprising against racial injustice after the killing of George Floyd into a pretext to lash out against “criminal” mobs.

There have been excesses among the protests. It is always better to try to contextualize history than excise it. Cancel culture is inimical to free speech. But the overarching threat the United States faces in the run-up to the Nov. 3 election is from Trump. The fascism in the air is on the far right of the political spectrum. If Trump could identify national humiliation as his ace in the hole in 2016, he can also seize the potential of the coronavirus pandemic to muddy the waters and stir pervasive fear.

Last month, Trump tweeted: “RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!” Of course, that foreign country would be China.

Trump is preparing the ground to contest any loss to Joe Biden and remain president, aided, no doubt, by Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department.

I know, it’s unthinkable. So was the Reichstag fire. Europeans, like Americans, should focus on just how unfunny Trump is.

One day, more than 63,000 Covid-19 cases

• 

• On Thursday, the US reported more than 63,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day, breaking the daily record set earlier this week. The seven-day rolling average of new cases stands at about 53,700 per day. [CNBC / Will Feuer]

•  
• The US death toll is also beginning to climb after initially lagging relative to surging case numbers. On Wednesday, California reported a single-day high of 149 Covid-19 deaths. [LA Times / Hannah Fry, Rong-Gong Lin II, and Luke Money]
• As the pandemic worsens in the US, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, cautioned earlier this week that the hardest-hit states “should seriously look at shutting down.” [Axios / Fadel Allassan]
• And some states have already begun to scale back efforts to reopen. In Texas, for example, bars are again closed and Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statewide mask order last week, warning that it was a necessary step “to avoid having our economy shut down again.” [Dallas Morning News / Robert T. Garrett]
• Rising cases have also highlighted enduring issues with US coronavirus testing. According to Ashish Jha, who directs Harvard’s Global Health Institute, while the US can conduct more tests now than it could earlier this year, [But still, not as much as it needs.--Esco20] basic supply chain issues still have not been addressed. [Vox / German Lopez]
• 
  
• With no respite from the coronavirus in sight, Congress is on the clock to negotiate another relief package before its August recess. On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters that the Trump administration’s proposed $1 trillion package “doesn’t come anywhere near” what’s needed. [Politico / Sarah Ferris]
• The expanded unemployment benefits included in the last major relief package are also set to expire at the end of the month, and their future is unclear. Democrats hope to extend the program, reports CBS News, but congressional Republicans are less sure. [CBS News / Grace Segers]
• 
  
• Another round of direct stimulus payments is also under consideration for the next relief package, though Republicans have floated a new eligibility threshold that would see only those making less than $40,000 receive a check. [Washington Post / Jeff Stein and Erica Werner]
• 
• As Vox’s Jen Kirby reports, the expiration of expanded unemployment could prove disastrous for renters in particular. Evictions are resuming in many parts of the US, and if unemployment benefits vanish as well, the result will likely be “an eviction crisis of biblical proportions.” [Vox / Jen Kirby]

Data Contradicts NYPD's Claim That Bail Reform And COVID-Releases Drove Shooting Spike

Claims from the NYPD's top cops that an uptick in gun violence has been caused by bail reform efforts and emergency releases from Rikers Island due to COVID-19 continue to prove baseless, without any data surfacing to back them up.

Shootings have increased 130 percent in June compared to last year. Over Fourth of July weekend alone, police said there were 46 shootings involving 64 victims. Eleven people were murdered—ten of which were shooting victims.

Shea claimed the rise in shootings was "predictable" in a NY1 interview this week. "You heard me say a storm was coming. We're in the middle of it right now. We're in a perfect storm of sorts, with COVID, with the Rikers population."

At a press briefing with Mayor Bill de Blasio shortly after, Chief of Department Terence Monahan echoed his boss: "It's a combination of things. Bail reform. Covid releases from prison. Court shutdown." Plus, "animosity towards police," he said.

 

But data from the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice as well as the NYPD contradict those claims.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, 1,477 people were released from Rikers Island due to the public health emergency.

Among those, one person was re-arrested for alleged murder—someone released after defense lawyers filed for their release, according to the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice. Seven people were re-arrested for gun-related charges, including one released early on a city sentence, four whose warrants were lifted, and two who had district attorney consent.

The total number of re-arrests was 193 out of 1,477, or 13 percent, for detainees released related to COVID-19. Most re-arrests were on charges for theft or burglary.
But among all 4,500 people let out of jail between March 16th and July 5th—including those who paid bail, finished their sentences, or for health reason due to coronavirus—the re-arrest rate was 12.8 percent, or about 576 individuals.

Six people out of that 4,500 have subsequently been arrested on murder charges. Another 35 were arrested for weapons charges, or 6 percent.

According to NYPD data obtained by the Post, just one person released under bail reform laws implemented January 1st was re-arrested for a shooting, out of 528 incidents this year. About 91 out of 11,000 people released from Rikers under bail reform—.8 percent—were in the vicinity of a shooting after they were released.

But of those 91, the NYPD described 25 as "victims," 24 as "witnesses," 31 as "suspects," and 10 as "perps," the tabloid reported.

Earlier this week, the NYPD said 136 people released due to bail reform were "involved in a shooting or murder," but didn't provide a breakdown.

The NYPD counts nine people out of 2,500 Rikers inmates released due to coronavirus as being linked to shootings; one person arrested, two are people of interest, three are victims, and three are witnesses, the Post reported. (The NYPD's count includes a broader scope of COVID-related releases, counting people discharged for any reason, not just coronavirus.)

The NYPD did not comment on why the department's claims contradict the department's data, as well as the data from the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, which based their analysis in part on NYPD information.

The mayor said he disagreed with his police officials during a virtual news conference Thursday, where he was asked about the NYPD's messaging on the uptick in violence.

Trump’s taxes may be released to Manhattan grand jury, supreme court rules. But The Supreme Court Lets Trump Run Out the Clock

Two rulings clear the way for prosecutors in New York to seek President Trump’s financial records, but the justices stopped Congress for now. 

You Won't See Trump's Taxes Before Election Day, But He Could Face Bigger Problems

NPR

A few things are clear from what the court decided Thursday about the President Trump's financial records. Presidents do not have absolute immunity from having to release financial records, and more specifically to Trump, we likely won't see his taxes until after the presidential election.
That, though, may be beside the point, because allowing a New York grand jury — and a motivated district attorney — to mine his records could jeopardize his brand, the fortune he built and even possibly his children, who work for the Trump Organization.

Will I see Trump's taxes?

Maybe eventually, but not before the November presidential election. That's for a couple of reasons. Take the congressional case — the Supreme Court said that the case has to go back to the lower courts and that Congress has to better define what it is looking for from the president.

That could mean more hearings and appeals and the case eventually finding its way back to the Supreme Court. That would certainly not happen before November.

The other case involves a New York grand jury that is seeking Trump's financial records, including his taxes, from third parties, like banks and accountants, and not from the president directly.
Little is known about that New York investigation, led by New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance. The only way Trump's taxes or other financial records would be made known to the public is if people were indicted, the case went to trial and the financial records were used as evidence. That would take months, if not longer.

Is this a win or loss for the president?

Overall, it's a big loss. Details of his financial dealings are likely to eventually be made public — something Trump has long tried to avoid.

Now, he and his allies could argue that it's not all bad, given that none of the information is likely to come out before November and, therefore, won't have an impact on his potential reelection.
But given the country's polarization, unless something provably criminal came out, it's probably unlikely that it would have had much impact on the presidential election anyway. But that may not be the point. When it comes to taxes, Trump has said before that it made him "smart" to figure out how not to pay them. His base has never abandoned him.

All that said, look at how Trump is reacting to what were big decisions from the court — and in a 7-to-2 manner — that, bottom line, said a president does not have categorical immunity to block a subpoena just because he's president.

Trump tweeted that it's "not fair" that he has "to keep fighting in a politically corrupt New York" and that, in the past, the court has given "broad deference" to presidents.

Setting the record straight, though: The high court has never said a president has immunity from all forms of subpoenas. While the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel has advised that a president should not be indicted while in office, the Supreme Court in U.S. v. Nixon forced the release of secret White House tape recordings that eventually led to Richard Nixon's resignation.

Do we know what the New York grand jury is investigating?

We don't know exactly what the grand jury is investigating — it's a secret. But it could be anything and everything related to Trump, the Trump Organization and people around him. That was made pretty clear by the reaction from Vance after the ruling.

 Vance said in a statement. "Our investigation, which was delayed for almost a year by this lawsuit, will resume, guided as always by the grand jury's solemn obligation to follow the law and the facts, wherever they may lead."

"Wherever they may lead" is pretty expansive and shows why Trump is so irritated by all of this.
Here are some clues from last year's congressional testimony from Trump's former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen. "It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed among the wealthiest people in Forbes, and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes," Cohen said.

That's just one example. A mysterious $50 million loan for a project in Chicago is also under scrutiny.
With all that, whether this matters to the presidential election might be beside the point. His financial records being fully investigated has the potential to imperil the organization he built and the people who work for it, including himself — and his children.

Remember, Trump was already ordered last year to pay $2 million in damages for misuse of funds from his foundation, and it was in the process of dissolving because of that.

• Trump got better news in the second case, Trump v. Mazars: As Vox’s Ian Millhiser writes, “Mazars is a victory for Trump because it holds that the president enjoys special immunity from congressional investigation enjoyed by no other citizen.” [Vox / Ian Millhiser]

In 7-to-2 rulings in both cases, Trump nominees Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh joined the majorities.

•  

No Easy Answers on School Reopening

VOX

• New York City public schools will not fully reopen this fall, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced , and children will only attend in-person classes between one and three days a week. Social distancing measures will also be in effect, and both students and teachers will be required to wear masks. [NYT / Eliza Shapiro]
• 
  
• The NYC announcement stands in sharp contrast to some other states' plans. As Axios’s Ursula Perano points out, Florida is on course to reopen its schools fully, and Massachusetts intends to resume school in the fall with social distancing in place. [Axios / Ursula Perano]
• 
  
• It’s also not quite the approach that President Donald Trump has pushed for. On Tuesday, he tweeted that “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” and falsely accused presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden of wanting to keep schools closed for political reasons. [Twitter / Donald J. Trump]
• 
  
• New York City’s plan, according to de Blasio, is intended to “make more space in every classroom” by keeping students home for a portion of each week. “What we WON'T do,” he said on Twitter, “is ignore the science and recklessly charge ahead like our president.” [Twitter / Bill de Blasio]
• 
  
• As things stand, there’s really no easy answer on schools reopening. Teachers in Florida have warned that the state's reopening plan is “completely unacceptable” and dangerous ... [CNN / Christina Maxouris]
• 
  
• ... but research has found distance learning is unsustainable. Students miss out on learning gains in reading and math relative to in-class instruction, and the negative impact is even greater on students from lower-income households. [Vox / Matthew Yglesias]
• 
  
• School reopening plans will affect parents too. If students aren’t back in the classroom full time, it will be difficult for many adults to return to work even if their employers proceed with reopening. [Washington Post / Laura Meckler]
• 
  
• As Vox’s German Lopez points out, the school reopening debate is ultimately a question of priorities. “If you want to reopen schools this fall, then you need to get the spread of Covid-19 down,” he writes. “And that means opting not to reopen — possibly at all and definitely not at full capacity — restaurants, bars, nightclubs, or other places.” [Vox / German Lopez]