theintercept--2020-09-02--Ed Markey Beats Back Senate Challenge From Joe Kennedy

In one of the most widely watched Democratic primaries of the 2020 cycle , on Tuesday night 74-year-old Sen. Ed Markey cruised to victory against 39-year-old Rep. Joe Kennedy .
The win represented the first time a Kennedy has ever lost an election in Massachusetts , and now with his House seat also on the ticket tonight , he ’ ll soon be out of elected office altogether .
With 32 percent of precincts reporting , Markey had a 10-point lead with 55 percent of the vote to Kennedy ’ s 45 percent , and Kennedy has conceded the race @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spent between the two candidates for the safe blue seat .
For the last 12 months , voters and reporters have pressed Kennedy to explain why he was running in the first place , since his policy positions largely mirror Markey ’ s and Democrats are under great pressure to focus energy — and cash — on reclaiming the White House and Senate .
His answer largely boiled to the idea that he felt he could “ leverage ” a Senate seat better than the incumbent , that there ’ s more to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you sponsor and the votes you cast .
While Kennedy acknowledged that he has not used his platform in the House of Representatives to bring national attention to policy issues like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ayanna Pressley , he has said he ’ s leveraged his time in the House by traveling across the country during the 2018 midterm cycle to help raise nearly $ 5 million for other Democratic candidates and flip the House .
He served then as a regional Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee vice chair and stumped for candidates in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ D.C .
But as The Intercept previously reported , this commitment to unseating Republicans represented a shift for the Massachusetts congressman , who , when he began his time in Washington , was not as keen to build Democratic power in the House .
He would make a point to defend his tea party colleagues , even in the midst of the 2013 government shutdown , and after the Democrats lost more seats in the 2014 midterms , he quickly rejected the idea that he could help lead the DCCC going into 2016 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ job , ” Kennedy told the Boston Globe at the time .
“ But it ’ s not something that interests me .
If I do the job right , I would be finding ways to beat those guys.
” Massachusetts voters didn ’ t seem to buy it , and many speculated that the bid was driven by Kennedy calculating his chances of entering the Senate .
Massachusetts has no shortage of strong Senate hopefuls waiting for Sen. Elizabeth Warren to find a place in a potential Biden administration .
Both Pressley @ @ @ @ @ @ @ widely assumed to be interested in running in an open seat , and Kennedy ’ s chances against those women are much slimmer than his shot at ousting Markey appeared to be as he geared up for the run .
As young as Kennedy is , it was now or never for him .
clear signs that Kennedy ’ s campaign was growing more desperate in the final month of the race .
While he had spent most of his political career trying to prove that he was more than just a guy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ surname , leading up to Election Day he regularly invoked his family ’ s political legacy and reminded Massachusetts voters of his beloved heritage .
Markey , on the other hand , took the unusual step of doubling down on attacks against Kennedy ’ s family , long a sacred cow in Massachusetts politics .
Throughout August , Markey contrasted the wealth and privilege of Kennedy ’ s upbringing with his own modest childhood .
In a viral campaign video released mid-month , Markey says , “ It ’ s time to start @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you ” — a jab at Kennedy ’ s famous great-uncle , John F. Kennedy .
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi , who came out with a late-stage endorsement of Kennedy , cited the digs against the Kennedy clan as motivating her endorsement .
“ I wasn ’ t too happy with some of the assault that I saw made on the Kennedy family , ” she told the Washington Post .
“ Joe didn ’ t ask me to endorse him , ” she added , “ but I felt an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ donated $ 5,000 to Kennedy ’ s campaign earlier in August , and $ 5,000 to Markey ’ s campaign in 2019 .
Following Pelosi ’ s endorsement — which was slammed by progressives who thought it was hypocritical that she backed a primary challenger in the Senate given her opposition to primary challengers in her chamber — Markey nabbed new House endorsements from House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler and House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney .
Ocasio-Cortez , who co-authored the Green New Deal resolution with Markey , has also been campaigning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s campaign said it raised $ 100,000 immediately after Pelosi ’ s endorsement , while Markey ’ s campaign said it raised more than $ 300,000 during that same period .
Another sign that Kennedy ’ s campaign seemed to be flailing was the amount of energy he spent in August decrying “ cyberbullying ” from some of Markey ’ s online supporters , an unmistakable reference to the kinds of attacks Sen. Bernie Sanders received from his opponents during the 2020 presidential primary .
Kennedy ’ s campaign accused the Markey camp @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Senator to condemn online trolls .
Kennedy also beefed up his security detail in light of what he described as increasing death threats .
Trying to tie Markey supporters to the image of hostile “ Bernie Bros ” may have been an attempt to try and win supporters of Warren who , while still brooding over the presidential primary and how they were treated , supported Markey this primary en masse .
Polls throughout the campaign showed Markey doing best with affluent , college-educated , suburban voters , the same sort of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , by contrast , polled better among lower-income voters , rural and Black voters , and those without a college education .
Sanders notably declined to endorse Markey in the primary .
With the help of an army of progressive activists , Markey transformed the narrative around his candidacy from where it stood a year ago .
Last July , before Kennedy jumped into the race , a Boston Globe/Suffolk University poll showed that 45 percent of likely voters in the state were undecided about supporting Markey for reelection and 14 percent said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Two months later , in September 2019 , another Boston Globe/Suffolk University poll found Kennedy ahead by 14 points in a Senate head-to-head , and more Massachusetts voters viewed Kennedy as the more liberal candidate and a better fighter for Democratic priorities than Markey .
to suggest the race was tightening by the spring , when a UMass-Lowell poll released in early May showed Kennedy up by just 2 points .
Although another poll released around the same time showed Markey trailing by 16 points , the UMass-Lowell one was enough to allow @ @ @ @ @ @ @ himself as a surging underdog .
By August , a flurry of new polls showed Markey in the lead , with margins of 2 points , 10 points , 8 points , and 12 points , respectively .
The decision by the millennial left , led by Sunrise Movement , to make Markey its top priority of the cycle did not come without costs , as it drained resources that could have gone into other competitive Senate primaries — including in Delaware , where Sen. Chris Coons , who is openly hostile to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is facing a spirited challenge from the left — or into House races like Alex Morse ’ s challenge to Ways and Means Chair Richie Neal or that of Robbie Goldstein , who launched a viable but largely overlooked challenge against a Democrat opposed to single-payer health care .
Even Ihssane Leckey , a would-be Squad member in Kennedy ’ s district , could have been more competitive with some national attention , but on Tuesday night she wasn ’ t in the top three candidates .
Choosing Markey , though , sent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new generation of activists does not consider age or length of service disqualifying credentials .
This ought to have been clear given the youth support for the presidential campaigns of Sanders , yet it still seemed to mystify pundits covering the race , who marveled that young people were somehow not supporting the young person .


theintercept--2020-09-03--Senate Report Shows What Mueller Missed About Trump and Russia

traveled to Moscow in November 1996 , looking for real estate development opportunities , he didn ’ t get a hotel deal in Moscow , but he may have found a new woman , and the Russian government probably knew about it , according to the Senate Intelligence Committee ’ s remarkable new report on the committee ’ s three and a half year investigation into Trump and Russia .
Trump met the Russian woman through his business connections at a party at a luxury hotel in Moscow , and the two apparently had a brief affair , at a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ second wife , Marla Maples .
The Senate report has redacted the woman ’ s name and blacked out her face in photos taken of her with Trump at the time and provided to the committee .
But the report explains in detail how Russian intelligence operatives keep track of the sexual activities of visiting foreign business executives , and notes that the Moscow-based U.S. businessman who introduced Trump to the woman probably told Russian government officials about it .
The story of Trump ’ s alleged Moscow affair is in keeping with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Senate report , which is at turns both reassuring and alarming .
While it debunks the so-called Steele Dossier , which was highlighted by a wild accusation that Trump had two women urinate on his bed in his Moscow hotel room in 2013 , the Senate report examines in detail the less tawdry , but far more plausible , story that Trump had a brief affair on his earlier trip to Moscow and the Russians knew about it .
In fact , the Senate report dismisses many of the most outrageous accusations involving @ @ @ @ @ @ @ overwhelming and damning evidence of Russia ’ s efforts to intervene in the 2016 presidential election to help Trump win and the Trump campaign ’ s eagerness to embrace the Russian intervention .
But the Senate report goes much further than election interference and provides the first detailed examination of the broader and complex network of relationships between Trump , his ever-shifting circle of personal and business associates , and a series of Russian oligarchs and other Russian and Ukrainian figures with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin .
In the process , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the events of 2016 and beyond .
Above all , it reveals the true nature of the counterintelligence threat posed by a president willing and eager to accept the help of a foreign adversary to win American elections .
Since its August 18 release , the Senate report — actually the fifth and final volume of the committee ’ s massive opus on Trump and Russia — has been overshadowed by both the Democratic and Republican national conventions , and as a result , it has received far less attention from the press @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But the Senate report is particularly significant now , as the 2020 general election campaign intensifies and Trump and his supporters continue to deny that Russia tried to help him win in 2016 and that Moscow is trying to do so again this year .
In recent days , John Ratcliffe , the director of national intelligence , has said that the DNI will stop in-person briefings for Congress about election interference , angering congressional Democratic leaders who charge that Ratcliffe and the Trump administration are trying to keep the public in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ through the political noise with clear and unequivocal language to explain what happened in 2016 .
At nearly 1,000 pages , the Senate report is by far the best and most thorough examination of the Trump-Russia story to date , and puts the narrower and more legalistic Mueller Report to shame .
Robert Mueller , the former FBI director appointed in 2017 to be special counsel to investigate the Trump-Russia case , kept his focus on gathering evidence for specific criminal prosecutions ; the Senate report shows that he missed the forest for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is critical of Mueller ’ s narrow approach and chides him and his team for having failed to grasp the true nature of the national security threat posed by Russia ’ s intervention in 2016 .
The report complains that Mueller failed to continue the FBI ’ s original counterintelligence investigation once the FBI handed off the broader Trump-Russia case .
Instead , the special counsel abandoned the counterintelligence portions of the case and focused instead only on elements of the case that could result in criminal prosecutions .
“ Over the course @ @ @ @ @ @ @ counsel ] successfully secured numerous criminal indictments and convictions , ” the Senate report states .
“ While criminal prosecutions are a vital tool in upholding our nation ’ s laws , protecting our democratic system from foreign interference is a broader national security mission that must be appropriately balanced with the pursuit of criminal prosecutions .
It is the committee ’ s view that this balance was not achieved .
Russian interference with the U.S. electoral process was inherently a counterintelligence matter and one not well-suited to criminal prosecutions.
” The Senate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nature .
It was produced by a Republican-controlled committee , but the report almost never seems to pull its punches aimed at any of its targets .
It is unsparing in its description of Trump and his campaign aides as eager to reach out for Russian help in 2016 , but is equally tough in its criticism of the FBI for its missteps in its subsequent investigation of Trump and Russia ’ s intervention in the election .
Along the way , each episode is recounted in exhaustive detail , and the result @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a clear understanding of the relative significance of the different chapters of the Trump-Russia case .
That is a relief after years of partisanship and polarization have skewed the public ’ s understanding of the case .
In fact , the Senate Intelligence Committee ’ s report is a throwback to an earlier era of congressional investigations in which bipartisanship was the rule , not the exception .
The report is so thick with research and evidence that the letters from Republican and Democratic senators on the committee , attached at the end @ @ @ @ @ @ @ report ’ s meaning , seem trivial by contrast .
Perhaps the only significance of the attached letter from the Republican senators is the name of one senator who didn ’ t sign it : Richard Burr of North Carolina , who until recently was the committee ’ s chair .
Burr was forced to step aside in May , after the disclosure that he was under investigation for stock sales he made before the American public knew the extent of the likely economic threat posed by the Covid-19 pandemic .
But by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work on the Trump-Russia case was virtually complete .
In hindsight , Burr appears to have played a key role in protecting the committee ’ s investigation from excessive partisan influence .
The independence of the committee ’ s investigation is evident in its clear and concise conclusions .
“ The committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president , ” the report states .
“ Moscow @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Clinton campaign , tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration , help the Trump campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee , and undermine the U.S. democratic process.
” The GRU , a Russian intelligence service , conducted the hacks and then used a false cyber front to transfer data to WikiLeaks , which then published the Clinton-related documents at key moments in the 2016 campaign , according to the report .
The U.S. media obligingly wrote stories based on the documents , without aggressively pursuing evidence that the leaks were the product @ @ @ @ @ @ @ states that “ while the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents , the Trump campaign sought to maximize the impact of those materials to aid Trump ’ s electoral prospects .
To do so , the Trump Campaign took actions to obtain advance notice about WikiLeaks releases of Clinton emails ; took steps to obtain inside information about the content of releases once WikiLeaks began to publish stolen information ; created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release ; and encouraged further theft of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the most intriguing sections in the report deals with the relationship between Paul Manafort , the onetime Trump campaign chair , and a Russian intelligence officer .
Indeed , the Manafort section of the report is a prime example of how the Senate investigators brought fresh eyes to a well-known episode in the Trump-Russia case and , unlike Mueller , found new information by examining it as a counterintelligence matter .
In March 2016 , longtime international lobbyist Paul Manafort joined the Trump campaign and by May was named the campaign ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump for free .
But Manafort came to the Trump campaign with a lot of baggage and was facing a desperate financial squeeze .
He had spent years working for Oleg Deripaska , a Russian oligarch with close ties to Putin , who had tasked him to conduct influence operations in countries where Deripaska had major business interests .
Deripaska also introduced Manafort to Ukrainian oligarchs and eventually Manafort went to work for Ukraine ’ s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych until he was ousted from power in 2014 in the wake of Ukraine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Manafort was caught up in a fight with Deripaska over an investment that had gone sour , and he saw his new position with the Trump campaign as a lifeline to help him resolve the situation .
“ Once on the campaign , Manafort quickly sought to leverage his position to resolve his multi-million dollar foreign disputes and obtain new work in Ukraine and elsewhere , ” the Senate report concluded .
One of Manafort ’ s closest aides during his time in Ukraine was Konstantin Kilimnik , who the Senate report @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kilimnik also served as Manafort ’ s liaison with Deripaska .
While he was working for Trump during the 2016 campaign , Manafort stayed in contact with Kilimnik and gave him the Trump campaign ’ s internal polling data , which showed that the key to defeating Clinton was to drive up negative attitudes about her among voters .
The Mueller report found that Manafort had shared Trump polling data with Kilimnik , but didn ’ t examine why he had done so .
The Senate report says that the intelligence committee “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been connected to the GRU ’ s hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 election.
” The report adds that “ this information suggests that a channel for coordination on the GRU hack operation may have existed through Kilimnik.
” The report adds that in interviews with Mueller ’ s prosecution team , “ Manafort lied consistently about one issue in particular : his interactions with Kilimnik.
” Manafort decided to “ face more severe criminal penalties rather than provide complete answers about his interactions with Kilimnik.
” The Manafort-Kilimnik relationship , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ single most direct tie between senior Trump campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.
” The Senate report is filled with such rich details , shedding new light on the wide cast of characters surrounding both Trump and Putin , and the end result is an engrossing tale of modern intelligence — and of lust , avarice , squalid opportunism , and incompetence — worthy of John le Carré .
With its depth of research , layered with an understanding of a complex series of personal networks in both the United States and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what none of the previous investigations have achieved .
It has brought the Trump-Russia story to life .

When Donald Trump traveled to Moscow in November 1996, looking for real estate development opportunities, he didn’t get a hotel deal in Moscow, but he may have found a new woman, and the Russian government probably knew about it, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s remarkable new report on the committee’s three and a half year investigation into Trump and Russia.
Trump met the Russian woman through his business connections at a party at a luxury hotel in Moscow, and the two apparently had a brief affair, at a time when Trump was married to his second wife, Marla Maples. The Senate report has redacted the woman’s name and blacked out her face in photos taken of her with Trump at the time and provided to the committee. But the report explains in detail how Russian intelligence operatives keep track of the sexual activities of visiting foreign business executives, and notes that the Moscow-based U.S. businessman who introduced Trump to the woman probably told Russian government officials about it.
The report reveals the true nature of the counterintelligence threat posed by a president willing and eager to accept the help of a foreign adversary to win American elections.
The story of Trump’s alleged Moscow affair is in keeping with the bipartisan and comprehensive nature of the Senate report, which is at turns both reassuring and alarming. While it debunks the so-called Steele Dossier, which was highlighted by a wild accusation that Trump had two women urinate on his bed in his Moscow hotel room in 2013, the Senate report examines in detail the less tawdry, but far more plausible, story that Trump had a brief affair on his earlier trip to Moscow and the Russians knew about it.
In fact, the Senate report dismisses many of the most outrageous accusations involving Trump and Russia even as it provides overwhelming and damning evidence of Russia’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 presidential election to help Trump win and the Trump campaign’s eagerness to embrace the Russian intervention.
But the Senate report goes much further than election interference and provides the first detailed examination of the broader and complex network of relationships between Trump, his ever-shifting circle of personal and business associates, and a series of Russian oligarchs and other Russian and Ukrainian figures with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the process, the report provides badly needed context for the events of 2016 and beyond. Above all, it reveals the true nature of the counterintelligence threat posed by a president willing and eager to accept the help of a foreign adversary to win American elections.
Since its August 18 release, the Senate report — actually the fifth and final volume of the committee’s massive opus on Trump and Russia — has been overshadowed by both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and as a result, it has received far less attention from the press and the public than it deserves.
But the Senate report is particularly significant now, as the 2020 general election campaign intensifies and Trump and his supporters continue to deny that Russia tried to help him win in 2016 and that Moscow is trying to do so again this year. In recent days, John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, has said that the DNI will stop in-person briefings for Congress about election interference, angering congressional Democratic leaders who charge that Ratcliffe and the Trump administration are trying to keep the public in the dark.
But the Senate report cuts through the political noise with clear and unequivocal language to explain what happened in 2016.
At nearly 1,000 pages, the Senate report is by far the best and most thorough examination of the Trump-Russia story to date, and puts the narrower and more legalistic Mueller Report to shame. Robert Mueller, the former FBI director appointed in 2017 to be special counsel to investigate the Trump-Russia case, kept his focus on gathering evidence for specific criminal prosecutions; the Senate report shows that he missed the forest for the trees.
The Senate report itself is critical of Mueller’s narrow approach and chides him and his team for having failed to grasp the true nature of the national security threat posed by Russia’s intervention in 2016. The report complains that Mueller failed to continue the FBI’s original counterintelligence investigation once the FBI handed off the broader Trump-Russia case. Instead, the special counsel abandoned the counterintelligence portions of the case and focused instead only on elements of the case that could result in criminal prosecutions.
“Over the course of its investigation, the [special counsel] successfully secured numerous criminal indictments and convictions,” the Senate report states. “While criminal prosecutions are a vital tool in upholding our nation’s laws, protecting our democratic system from foreign interference is a broader national security mission that must be appropriately balanced with the pursuit of criminal prosecutions. It is the committee’s view that this balance was not achieved. Russian interference with the U.S. electoral process was inherently a counterintelligence matter and one not well-suited to criminal prosecutions.”
The Senate report is most remarkable for its bipartisan nature. It was produced by a Republican-controlled committee, but the report almost never seems to pull its punches aimed at any of its targets. It is unsparing in its description of Trump and his campaign aides as eager to reach out for Russian help in 2016, but is equally tough in its criticism of the FBI for its missteps in its subsequent investigation of Trump and Russia’s intervention in the election. Along the way, each episode is recounted in exhaustive detail, and the result is that the reader is left with a clear understanding of the relative significance of the different chapters of the Trump-Russia case. That is a relief after years of partisanship and polarization have skewed the public’s understanding of the case.
Lust, Avarice, Opportunism, Incompetence
In fact, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is a throwback to an earlier era of congressional investigations in which bipartisanship was the rule, not the exception. The report is so thick with research and evidence that the letters from Republican and Democratic senators on the committee, attached at the end of the report and arguing over the report’s meaning, seem trivial by contrast.
Perhaps the only significance of the attached letter from the Republican senators is the name of one senator who didn’t sign it: Richard Burr of North Carolina, who until recently was the committee’s chair. Burr was forced to step aside in May, after the disclosure that he was under investigation for stock sales he made before the American public knew the extent of the likely economic threat posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. But by that time, the committee’s work on the Trump-Russia case was virtually complete. In hindsight, Burr appears to have played a key role in protecting the committee’s investigation from excessive partisan influence.
The independence of the committee’s investigation is evident in its clear and concise conclusions.
“The committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president,” the report states. “Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.”
“The committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president.”
The GRU, a Russian intelligence service, conducted the hacks and then used a false cyber front to transfer data to WikiLeaks, which then published the Clinton-related documents at key moments in the 2016 campaign, according to the report. The U.S. media obligingly wrote stories based on the documents, without aggressively pursuing evidence that the leaks were the product of a Russian cyberattack.
The report states that “while the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump campaign sought to maximize the impact of those materials to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. To do so, the Trump Campaign took actions to obtain advance notice about WikiLeaks releases of Clinton emails; took steps to obtain inside information about the content of releases once WikiLeaks began to publish stolen information; created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release; and encouraged further theft of information and continued leaks.”
One of the most intriguing sections in the report deals with the relationship between Paul Manafort, the onetime Trump campaign chair, and a Russian intelligence officer. Indeed, the Manafort section of the report is a prime example of how the Senate investigators brought fresh eyes to a well-known episode in the Trump-Russia case and, unlike Mueller, found new information by examining it as a counterintelligence matter.
In March 2016, longtime international lobbyist Paul Manafort joined the Trump campaign and by May was named the campaign’s chair. Manafort offered to work for Trump for free.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (L) talks to Rusal President and Management Board Member Oleg Deripaska at the 2017 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit at Da Nang, Vietnam on Nov. 10, 2017. Photo: Mikhail Klimentyev/TASS via Getty Images
But Manafort came to the Trump campaign with a lot of baggage and was facing a desperate financial squeeze. He had spent years working for Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with close ties to Putin, who had tasked him to conduct influence operations in countries where Deripaska had major business interests. Deripaska also introduced Manafort to Ukrainian oligarchs and eventually Manafort went to work for Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych until he was ousted from power in 2014 in the wake of Ukraine’s Maidan revolution.
By 2016, Manafort was caught up in a fight with Deripaska over an investment that had gone sour, and he saw his new position with the Trump campaign as a lifeline to help him resolve the situation. “Once on the campaign, Manafort quickly sought to leverage his position to resolve his multi-million dollar foreign disputes and obtain new work in Ukraine and elsewhere,” the Senate report concluded.
One of Manafort’s closest aides during his time in Ukraine was Konstantin Kilimnik, who the Senate report identifies as a Russian intelligence officer. Kilimnik also served as Manafort’s liaison with Deripaska.
While he was working for Trump during the 2016 campaign, Manafort stayed in contact with Kilimnik and gave him the Trump campaign’s internal polling data, which showed that the key to defeating Clinton was to drive up negative attitudes about her among voters.
The Mueller report found that Manafort had shared Trump polling data with Kilimnik, but didn’t examine why he had done so. The Senate report says that the intelligence committee “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the GRU’s hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 election.” The report adds that “this information suggests that a channel for coordination on the GRU hack operation may have existed through Kilimnik.” The report adds that in interviews with Mueller’s prosecution team, “Manafort lied consistently about one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik.” Manafort decided to “face more severe criminal penalties rather than provide complete answers about his interactions with Kilimnik.” The Manafort-Kilimnik relationship, the Senate report concludes, represents “the single most direct tie between senior Trump campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.”
The Senate report is filled with such rich details, shedding new light on the wide cast of characters surrounding both Trump and Putin, and the end result is an engrossing tale of modern intelligence — and of lust, avarice, squalid opportunism, and incompetence — worthy of John le Carré. With its depth of research, layered with an understanding of a complex series of personal networks in both the United States and Russia, the Senate report has done what none of the previous investigations have achieved. It has brought the Trump-Russia story to life.


theintercept--2020-09-03--Amid Coronavirus, Trump Moved to Expel Immigrants — But Border Patrol Didn’t Test Any of Them

appeared to get the coronavirus pandemic under control early : As of May , the agency had only reported a single confirmed case of Covid-19 among those in its custody .
There ’ s a simple reason , however , that the agency ’ s numbers were so low : Between March and early May , as the pandemic began to rage , the Border Patrol did not test any of its detainees for the coronavirus .
Documents disclosed by the Department of Homeland Security , which oversees immigration enforcement , on Monday show that , between March 7 and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a nationwide public health emergency , Border Patrol had administered coronavirus tests to a total of zero of the people it apprehended .
“ USBP has NOT RECEIVED any COVID-19 Tests from any source .
USBP DOES NOT conduct COVID-19 Testing of any kind in its temporary holding / processing facilities to date , ” the agency wrote in the documents , which came in response to a Freedom of Information Act request .
In the documents , Border Patrol reported that , though it was not conducting any testing , the agency @ @ @ @ @ @ @ temporary custody being tested for COVID-19 by local medical/health system ” between March and May .
Of those , one test had come back positive .
DHS did not respond to questions from The Intercept , including whether Border Patrol began testing after May 8 .
The agency does not publish detainee Covid-19 numbers for any time frame .
According to its website , 1,973 federal employees of U.S. Customs and Border Protection , the Border Patrol ’ s parent agency within DHS , had tested positive for coronavirus as of September 1 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Eleven of the agency ’ s employees have died of causes related to the virus .
In March , the Trump administration granted federal immigration agents sweeping powers to rapidly expel anyone at the border , including unaccompanied children , citing the threat of the coronavirus .
Of the 378,065 people apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol and DHS ’ s Office of Field Operation between March and July , 110,107 were returned under this emergency public health measure .
Immigrant advocates have criticized the policy as a risk to public health .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild , said the universal failure to test people that Border Patrol holds in congregate facilities , transfers around the country , and expels across the globe could contribute to the international spread of Covid-19 .
“ When they say that they ’ re doing it under the guise of public health , ” Shebaya said , “ that ’ s actually belied by the fact that they ’ re not testing anyone or putting in place any measures that one ordinarily would , if one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ prevalence of the coronavirus among detainees exists across federal immigration enforcement operations .
Through a review of internal emails between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and officials at a private prison company that houses immigration detainees , court documents , and conversations with lawyers and people detained by federal immigration authorities , The Intercept found that Border Patrol and ICE have obscured the true scope of Covid-19 ’ s spread within immigration detention — often by design .
Resistance to testing staff and detained people , sudden releases of ill detainees , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ employee health statistics don ’ t appear among ICE ’ s aggregate Covid-19 numbers help ICE and Border Patrol officials report to the outside world that they have the virus contained , that immigration enforcement can operate reasonably during a pandemic .
Other than pointing The Intercept to its general information page on the coronavirus , ICE declined to comment , citing pending litigation .
Border Patrol and GEO Group , the private prison company , did not respond to requests for comment .
Lisa Knox , a managing attorney with legal services @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told The Intercept that ICE and its private prison contractors “ are deliberately trying to obscure the true scale of what ’ s happening in detention.
” “ ICE and these private detention operators know that there really is no safe way to detain people during a pandemic .
Obscuring the numbers kind of helps them obscure that fact , ” Knox said .
“ The way to reduce Covid infections is to not detain as many people , or to not detain people , period.
” For instance , between April 23 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ detained in California ’ s Adelanto ICE Processing Center filed written complaints of fever , coughing , chills , and other coronavirus symptoms , ICE tested only one of them for Covid-19 , according to information disclosed as part of a court case .
Adelanto officials had plenty of test kits .
They just didn ’ t want to use them .
On May 19 , the facility ’ s GEO administrator informed Gabriel Valdez , the ICE officer in charge , that an overnight shipment of 1,900 testing kits would arrive at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to test everyone in the facility twice over .
Testing of all detainees was set to begin the following day , according to email records obtained by The Intercept .
Valdez replied , “ It ’ s your call on testing your staff , but until I receive guidance from my chain of command I don ’ t want any detainees tested through this voluntary process.
” The tests sat in a facility storeroom , banned from use .
ICE and GEO followed the same pattern at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center @ @ @ @ @ @ @ show that , knowing they ’ d have to release people and halt new arrests and transfers to make room for those who tested positive to quarantine , ICE and GEO officials at Mesa Verde rejected plans for broad coronavirus testing .
The same motives lay behind Adelanto ’ s resistance to testing , said Ahilan Arulanantham , an American Civil Liberties Union attorney suing the federal government over conditions in the facility .
“ They don ’ t have enough room to quarantine people — the people who refuse the test and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more people , ” he said .
“ Because they ’ re not willing to release more people , I guess , they stopped universal testing.
” By the time a federal judge ordered broad testing in Mesa Verde in mid-August , it was too late .
An outbreak had already overwhelmed the facility , with more than half of detainees testing positive .
private detention facility operators eschew broad testing until they have no other choice , civil rights attorneys at detention facilities in Virginia , Massachusetts , and California told The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ litigation , there has to be a massive outbreak where everybody is sick , before ICE will take the step of actually testing , ” said Shebaya , who ’ s working on a suit over conditions in Farmville , Virginia , detention center , the site of the worst outbreak in any facility of its kind .
“ When it was something voluntary , they had tested a grand total of six people across two facilities in Virginia that hold upwards of 500 people.
” Left to its own devices , ICE @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Covid-19-related statistics , said Monika Langarica , a staff attorney at the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties , in California .
At the Otay Mesa Detention Center , ICE initially claimed there were just eight medically vulnerable detainees who might be eligible for Covid-19 release , according to Langarica .
The government later confirmed the true number was over 130 .
ICE also omits Covid-19 cases among privately contracted detention employees from its staff numbers , which immigration advocates say dramatically underestimate the coronavirus ’ s true presence at the facilities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by GEO Group show that , as of mid-August , nearly 25 percent of the 130 employees at Mesa Verde had tested positive for Covid-19 , ICE reports zero staff cases in the facility .
That ’ s because almost everyone who works at Mesa Verde is an employee of a third-party contractor .
Sudden transfers of detainees further help to obscure outbreaks , lawyers said .
ICE releases detainees to hospitals , where their potential positive tests — and deaths — will not show up in the agency ’ s numbers , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ publish data on people who contracted Covid-19 while in ICE custody but tested positive or died after being released .
The federal government ’ s aversion to releasing detainees may have political motives .
In April , then Acting ICE Director Matthew Albence testified to Congress that the agency did not plan to let any more detainees go to protect them from coronavirus .
Albence explained that such releases could give the impression that the administration was “ not enforcing our immigration laws.
” “ If it ’ s clear you have Covid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Shebaya explained , it becomes untenable to resist releases and continue aggressive enforcement .
“ Not testing is a way of keeping the issue from being in the public eye .
”

U.S. Border Patrol appeared to get the coronavirus pandemic under control early: As of May, the agency had only reported a single confirmed case of Covid-19 among those in its custody.
There’s a simple reason, however, that the agency’s numbers were so low: Between March and early May, as the pandemic began to rage, the Border Patrol did not test any of its detainees for the coronavirus.
Documents disclosed by the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration enforcement, on Monday show that, between March 7 and May 8, as the pandemic became a nationwide public health emergency, Border Patrol had administered coronavirus tests to a total of zero of the people it apprehended. “USBP has NOT RECEIVED any COVID-19 Tests from any source. USBP DOES NOT conduct COVID-19 Testing of any kind in its temporary holding / processing facilities to date,” the agency wrote in the documents, which came in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
In the documents, Border Patrol reported that, though it was not conducting any testing, the agency was “aware of 16 detainees in temporary custody being tested for COVID-19 by local medical/health system” between March and May. Of those, one test had come back positive.
DHS did not respond to questions from The Intercept, including whether Border Patrol began testing after May 8. The agency does not publish detainee Covid-19 numbers for any time frame.
According to its website, 1,973 federal employees of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency within DHS, had tested positive for coronavirus as of September 1, even without a comprehensive testing plan. Eleven of the agency’s employees have died of causes related to the virus.
In March, the Trump administration granted federal immigration agents sweeping powers to rapidly expel anyone at the border, including unaccompanied children, citing the threat of the coronavirus. Of the 378,065 people apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol and DHS’s Office of Field Operation between March and July, 110,107 were returned under this emergency public health measure.
Immigrant advocates have criticized the policy as a risk to public health. Sirine Shebaya, executive director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, said the universal failure to test people that Border Patrol holds in congregate facilities, transfers around the country, and expels across the globe could contribute to the international spread of Covid-19.
“When they say that they’re doing it under the guise of public health,” Shebaya said, “that’s actually belied by the fact that they’re not testing anyone or putting in place any measures that one ordinarily would, if one were actually concerned about public health.”
Opacity around the prevalence of the coronavirus among detainees exists across federal immigration enforcement operations.
Through a review of internal emails between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and officials at a private prison company that houses immigration detainees, court documents, and conversations with lawyers and people detained by federal immigration authorities, The Intercept found that Border Patrol and ICE have obscured the true scope of Covid-19’s spread within immigration detention — often by design.
Resistance to testing staff and detained people, sudden releases of ill detainees, and a shadow set of private contractors whose employee health statistics don’t appear among ICE’s aggregate Covid-19 numbers help ICE and Border Patrol officials report to the outside world that they have the virus contained, that immigration enforcement can operate reasonably during a pandemic.
Other than pointing The Intercept to its general information page on the coronavirus, ICE declined to comment, citing pending litigation. Border Patrol and GEO Group, the private prison company, did not respond to requests for comment.
Lisa Knox, a managing attorney with legal services organization Centro Legal de la Raza, told The Intercept that ICE and its private prison contractors “are deliberately trying to obscure the true scale of what’s happening in detention.”
“ICE and these private detention operators know that there really is no safe way to detain people during a pandemic. Obscuring the numbers kind of helps them obscure that fact,” Knox said. “The way to reduce Covid infections is to not detain as many people, or to not detain people, period.”
For instance, between April 23 and July 15, as 305 people detained in California’s Adelanto ICE Processing Center filed written complaints of fever, coughing, chills, and other coronavirus symptoms, ICE tested only one of them for Covid-19, according to information disclosed as part of a court case.
Adelanto officials had plenty of test kits. They just didn’t want to use them. On May 19, the facility’s GEO administrator informed Gabriel Valdez, the ICE officer in charge, that an overnight shipment of 1,900 testing kits would arrive at Adelanto in a few hours, enough to test everyone in the facility twice over. Testing of all detainees was set to begin the following day, according to email records obtained by The Intercept.
Valdez replied, “It’s your call on testing your staff, but until I receive guidance from my chain of command I don’t want any detainees tested through this voluntary process.”
The tests sat in a facility storeroom, banned from use.
ICE and GEO followed the same pattern at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield, California. Internal emails show that, knowing they’d have to release people and halt new arrests and transfers to make room for those who tested positive to quarantine, ICE and GEO officials at Mesa Verde rejected plans for broad coronavirus testing.
“Because they’re not willing to release more people, I guess, they stopped universal testing.”
The same motives lay behind Adelanto’s resistance to testing, said Ahilan Arulanantham, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney suing the federal government over conditions in the facility. “They don’t have enough room to quarantine people — the people who refuse the test and people who test positive — without releasing more people,” he said. “Because they’re not willing to release more people, I guess, they stopped universal testing.”
By the time a federal judge ordered broad testing in Mesa Verde in mid-August, it was too late. An outbreak had already overwhelmed the facility, with more than half of detainees testing positive.
ICE officials and private detention facility operators eschew broad testing until they have no other choice, civil rights attorneys at detention facilities in Virginia, Massachusetts, and California told The Intercept.
“There has to be litigation, there has to be a massive outbreak where everybody is sick, before ICE will take the step of actually testing,” said Shebaya, who’s working on a suit over conditions in Farmville, Virginia, detention center, the site of the worst outbreak in any facility of its kind. “When it was something voluntary, they had tested a grand total of six people across two facilities in Virginia that hold upwards of 500 people.”
Left to its own devices, ICE cannot be trusted to accurately report Covid-19-related statistics, said Monika Langarica, a staff attorney at the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties, in California. At the Otay Mesa Detention Center, ICE initially claimed there were just eight medically vulnerable detainees who might be eligible for Covid-19 release, according to Langarica. The government later confirmed the true number was over 130.
ICE also omits Covid-19 cases among privately contracted detention employees from its staff numbers, which immigration advocates say dramatically underestimate the coronavirus’s true presence at the facilities. For example, while court filings by GEO Group show that, as of mid-August, nearly 25 percent of the 130 employees at Mesa Verde had tested positive for Covid-19, ICE reports zero staff cases in the facility. That’s because almost everyone who works at Mesa Verde is an employee of a third-party contractor.
Sudden transfers of detainees further help to obscure outbreaks, lawyers said. ICE releases detainees to hospitals, where their potential positive tests — and deaths — will not show up in the agency’s numbers, attorneys said. The agency does not publish data on people who contracted Covid-19 while in ICE custody but tested positive or died after being released.
The federal government’s aversion to releasing detainees may have political motives. In April, then Acting ICE Director Matthew Albence testified to Congress that the agency did not plan to let any more detainees go to protect them from coronavirus. Albence explained that such releases could give the impression that the administration was “not enforcing our immigration laws.”
“If it’s clear you have Covid outbreaks in every one of your facilities,” Shebaya explained, it becomes untenable to resist releases and continue aggressive enforcement. “Not testing is a way of keeping the issue from being in the public eye.”


theintercept--2020-09-03--Markey Won. Morse Lost. What Happens Next?

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This week, all eyes were on a pair of hard-fought Democratic primaries in Massachusetts. Sen. Ed Markey staved off a primary challenge from Joe Kennedy III, while the progressive mayor of Holyoke, Alex Morse, lost his bid to replace Rep. Richard Neal. Morse was dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct leveled at him by the Massachusetts College Democrats, which he was unable to shake off even after they were shown by The Intercept to be an unfounded smear campaign. Markey and Morse were both backed by the youth-led climate group Sunrise Movement. Sunrise leaders Evan Weber and Alex O’Keefe join Ryan Grim to discuss the lessons of this week.
Ed Markey: The time to be timid is past. The age of incrementalism is over. Now is our moment to think big, to build big. This is what this election is all about.
[Musical interlude.]
Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed, I’m Ryan Grim, filling in once again for Mehdi Hasan who — this time, we promise — will definitely be back soon, and he’ll tell you what he’s been up to.
But before he does, we’re going to take a look at this week’s much-discussed Democratic primaries in Massachusetts, starting with Ed Markey’s victory in the party’s Senate primary.
Evan Weber: He really had our back in a really big way over the course of the past year, you know, so when we heard that he was facing a tough reelection fight, we knew that we had to take a stand.
That’s one of my guests today, Evan Weber, Political Director of the Sunrise Movement, the youth-led climate action movement that threw its weight behind the Markey campaign and ultimately helped him to a surprisingly comfortable victory over his challenger, Joe Kennedy III. I’ll also speak to his colleague, Sunrise’s Creative Director Alex O’Keefe. We’ll discuss the Markey win, but also the primary loss of another Sunrise-backed candidate, Alex Morse, who tried to unseat Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal in Massachusetts’ 1st district.
Today on the show: What can we learn from the Massachusetts primaries?
[Musical interlude.]
A year ago, Joe Kennedy III looked like a real threat to Ed Markey, the incumbent in the 2020 Massachusetts senate election. No Kennedy had ever lost an election in Massachusetts. Kennedy was in his late 30s, compared to the 74-year-old Markey, and he had a big advantage in the polls, especially with Black, rural, and lower-income voters. And yet…
Newscaster: In the Massachusetts primary, Senator Ed Markey became the first person to ever defeat a member of the Kennedy family in that state.
Joe Kennedy III: I called Senator Markey to congratulate him and to pledge my support.
Newscaster: And when all the votes are found, this is gonna end up being something like a 10-point win for Ed Markey.
RG: So what went wrong? Kennedy, it turned out, was never able to give a convincing answer as to why he was running in the first place, given his platform’s apparent similarity to Markey’s. Oddly, that was the same unanswerable question that had bedeviled his great uncle’s presidential campaign in 1980.
Newscaster: Why do you want to be president?
Former Sen. Ted Kennedy: Well, I’m — were I to make the announcement to run, the reasons that I would run is because I have a great belief in this country that it is — has more natural resources than any nation of the world.
RG: That rambling answer came before Ted Kennedy had even announced his run, and it was over before it had begun.
In 2020, his great nephew’s race turned at the end on the meaning of the Kennedy legacy, and, as we’ll talk about later during our interview, it was Sunrise and Markey that baited Kennedy into a trap.
In the closing days, his campaign released an ad in which Markey inverted JFK’s most famous adage, telling voters:
Ed Markey: With all due respect, it’s time to start asking what your country can do for you.
RG: An offronted Kennedy went on the attack, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a longtime friend of the Kennedy family, jumped in the race to defend the clan’s honor.
It backfired. The public was not here to stand up for dynasties — not even the Kennedys in Massachusetts.
But the biggest part of the story is the support Markey got from the Sunrise Movement and allied youth organizations. Sunrise is a climate action group, made famous when it and Justice Democrats, joined by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, occupied Pelosi’s office in 2018. Markey and Sunrise were able to harness an energy reminiscent of the Bernie Sanders campaign, mobilizing young voters and transforming Markey from an old, staid incumbent into a familiar, hip progressive grandpa fighting off a challenge from the establishment.
Even the Bernie Bro trope showed up in the race. In recent weeks, Kennedy resorted to accusations of cyberbullying by Markey supporters. Even that didn’t seem to move many voters; Markey beat him by 11 points.
But there was another story going on in Western Massachusetts, in the 1st congressional district. There, Sunrise, and Justice Democrats, and others endorsed Alex Morse, the 31-year-old mayor of Holyoke, in his campaign to unseat congressman Richard Neal. That story played out very differently.
Polls showed Morse closing in on Neal just a few weeks before the election, but on August 7, as early voting was already underway, all hell broke loose.
Newscaster: The University of Massachusetts Democrats stating Morse had sexual relations with male students while he was teaching at UMass Amherst and he used his position for sexual gain.
RG: The allegations against Morse, who is gay, were vague, claiming that Morse had made students uncomfortable with sexual advances. But they didn’t contain any specific or verifiable claims, or even victims. They were enough, however, to persuade groups like Sunrise to back away from Morse’s campaign.
Newscaster: Morse, speaking to Western Mass News, saying he believes this is a political hit job and says the Neal campaign is to blame.
RG: Then starting on August 12, The Intercept published a series of exposés that turned the story on its head:
Newscaster: The online publication The Intercept reported yesterday that the allegations against Mayor Morse may have direct ties to congressman Richard Neal’s campaign.
RG: We actually never proved a direct link to Neal’s campaign, but we did reveal a scheme by College Democrats, going back a year, to entrap Morse in order to generate sexual misconduct charges that could be used against him in the hopes of currying favor with Neal. Even the state party’s leadership was involved.
Nationally, Morse was vindicated by what The New York Times called “a cascade of head-spinning revelations.” And those revelations were enough to get Sunrise and other groups back into the race behind Morse for the final stretch, but by then the damage was done.
Locally, that reference to The Intercept’s reporting was fleeting and anomalous, as new outlets continued to treat the story as if it was real, with Neal saying the non-existent student victims should be heard, and Morse denying he did anything wrong.
An ad from Neal’s super PAC tarring Morse with the accusations continued to run locally through Election Day, even after they had apologized for it and said that it had aired accidentally.
Ad Host: Now, Alex Morse admits to sexual relationships with college students, even while he was a university lecturer.
RG: Neal, after benefitting from well over $5 million in spending, survived the challenge, 59 to 41.
[Musical interlude.]
RG: To talk more about Markey’s win, Morse’s loss, and what’s next, I’m joined by Evan Weber and Alex O’Keefe, two leaders of the Sunrise Movement.
Evan, thanks for being here.
EW: Great to be here. Thanks for having us, Ryan.
Alex, thanks for being here.
AOK: Yeah, thank you for inviting me.
So, how did you all settle on both the Ed Markey race and the Alex Morse race? Which one came first?
EW: Yeah. So in both cases, [laughs] it was a pretty, pretty easy decision. Ed Markey came first. We endorsed Ed Markey back in August of 2019, a month before Joe Kennedy even entered the race.
You know, we had worked closely with Ed Markey throughout the prior year, right after Sunrise Movement famously sat in Pelosi’s office and was joined by AOC. And Markey quickly reached out to AOC and Sunrise Movement to figure out how he could work with us to build a movement for a Green New Deal. And —
RG: So it was that occupation that kind of got his attention?
EW: It was. Yeah. And, you know, AOC kind of took Congress by storm by joining our protest of Pelosi’s office and, you know, Ed Markey is a guy who had been working on climate change for several decades, you know, since the 80s, working on clean energy and climate change. And when he saw sort of the energy that AOC and our movement brought along to the issue, he knew that he needed to be a part of really standing alongside and channeling that, and helping to bring it along to the halls of Congress.
And so he came up with the idea to turn our sort of proposal for a committee into a bill, into the Green New Deal resolution, that could set forward this vision for transformation that we were talking about. We started working really closely together with him from there.
You know, so when we heard that he was facing a tough reelection fight, he had had our back in a really big way over the course of last year and we wanted to have his. He stuck his neck out for us and, you know, really went out on a limb with the Green New Deal. And then there were these rumors that Kennedy was getting in the race and we knew that we had to take a stand.
RG: And so, it’s one thing to kind of have somebody’s back, but you guys ended up doing even more than that. Alex, you know, when did you realize that the Sunrise Movement support, and the kind of millennial-left support of Markey was going to be kind of the entire rationale for his reelection? And how did that translate into how you shape the campaign message?
AOK: Well, I tend to like underdogs. And I remember when we worked on the Charles Booker campaign, and I was in the campaign office as we were awaiting the results. And I was talking to some people on the left and people gave Markey no shot — I mean, even some people within our movement just did not believe that Ed Markey could defeat Joe Kennedy.
And I really tend to like these underdogs and I tend to think: Okay, well then, if they really need our help, if they’re desperate, then they’re going to allow us to be very creative, and really have control.
[Laughs.]
AOK: Markey’s star really began to rise on a meme level when he posted this iconic photo of him wearing Air Revolution sneakers outside his home in Malden. And this just kind of created a new persona for him that is almost inexplicable, similar to Bernie Sanders as this progressive grandpa that has been around the block for so long and is tough as nails and is not really going to allow anyone to tell them where to stand, his iconic political ad says that as well.
And they were working on building what he was calling a Markey-verse, with a lot of Sunrise Movement volunteers online. Because Markey made a decision that he was not going to canvass door to door, we thought we need to have a whole new style of digital organizing. So there became many meme accounts and offshoot, spin-off accounts of Shrek for Ed Markey, doggos for Ed Markey — and all this stuff does not necessarily persuade voters by 20 percentage points and swing elections, but what they do is they give people hope that there’s other people out there that believe Ed Markey can win. And that’s really important for mobilizing our base to do phone calls, to donate money to Markey, and to eventually vote for him. So this larger Markey-verse grew out and created a character of Ed Markey that many people opted into, many people could see and recognize.
RG: What’s the reaction been from elected officials in the Democratic Party, you know, since last night? Are you sensing any change in their posture toward the Sunrise Movement? Because one of the arguments for getting behind Markey was this will show veteran politicians that if they come the right way, it doesn’t matter, necessarily, what they’ve done in the past — that, you know, the millennial organizations are going to have their back. Have you seen anybody kind of putting out feelers?
EW: You know, I would say it started even before last night, and in the last couple of weeks, it was clear that Markey was gaining a lot of momentum, he was racking up tons of endorsements from progressive leaders and organizations and icons, and poll after poll showing him with strong, single-digit, even double-digit leads, which is what he ended up securing the win with.
You know, right after, right after Pelosi’s endorsement, which just, you know, totally backfired, the Markey campaign raised $400,000, immediately after that endorsement in comparison to Kennedy’s campaign raising just $100,000 off of it. We saw more and more progressives endorsing Markey as a result of that, sort of upset at Pelosi’s hypocrisy around the primary rules. And we even saw some establishment folks like Carolyn Maloney and Jerry Nadler, you know, chairs of committees, people in democratic leadership, that work with and have to work with Pelosi regularly, throw their weight behind Markey, bucking Pelosi —
RG: Right and both of those survived primary challenges of their own in New York recently.
EW: They did. Carolyn Maloney, in particular, had a very unexpectedly close primary challenge and Jerry Nadler as well. And since AOC’s election, there’s been this sort of sea change in the way that New York politicians have been relating to the left, including [laughs] the leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer. He did have Markey’s back in this election, which is perhaps unsurprising. He’s an incumbent Democrat, but Schumer also reached out to Markey’s team, I am told, very early this morning to congratulate him, to see what he can do to work more closely together.
I also heard that Markey got a call from Joe Biden very, very early on last night to congratulate him.
RG: Right, Schumer is kind of the most interesting of those, and also could be the most consequential. You know, if Democrats take the Senate in 2021, he’ll be Senate Majority Leader. And he won’t be a kind of rank and file guy who, you know, can rack up a decent voting record, but say: I wish I could have done more. No, he’ll be in charge of the entire floor agenda; it’ll be significantly up to him the strength of the legislation that gets to a potential Joe Biden administration.
Do you have a sense that the call he made last night to Ed Markey has something to do with the fact that he’s up in 2022, and is wondering if some of this energy could get behind him if he goes the right direction? And is it possible? Or is Wall Street Chuck too far gone for people like the Sunrise Movement?
AOK: I think it’s possible. I’m optimistic in general. I mean, if you look at Ed Markey’s record, there’s a lot of blemishes on it, things that I never supported — the Iraq War he voted for, the Biden crime bill. He has a record that looks a lot like Joe Biden’s on paper, even though he’s led on progressive issues like climate his entire career.
But what we’re trying to show is that we will not just attack you if you don’t endorse the Green New Deal. But if you convert, if you join us, we’re not going to hold a grudge. We say at Sunrise: “No permanent friends and no permanent enemies.” So if you join us, not only are we going to like, not primary you, but we’re also going to support you in a way that only young people can.
The reason why people are afraid of the Green New Deal more than anything, because it’s all based on political economy, they’re afraid of attack ads about the Green New Deal. And so if you show them that we can produce better political ads than the other side can, like the Green New Deal-maker ad that we produced, we can reinvent your character and sell you to a whole new audience, then that’s going to make you a lot more willing to support the Green New Deal.
And I think Ed Markey’s transformation is best seen in that Road to a Green New Deal Tour that Evan was talking about. Before our first stop in Boston, Ed Markey had a line, “They’re giving these tax breaks to these oil companies, then they have the nerve to call what we’re doing socialism.” And at that time, the dirty word around the Green New Deal is that it was a socialist wish list, right? It was a Trojan horse for socialism.
And so he would go on to say, even though the crowd was cheering at the word socialism, he would go on to say: Well, no, that’s not what it is, though, folks!
[Laughs.]
AOK: And then by the end of the tour, having seen the transformation that we were sparking and the fervor we were sparking around the country, by the last DC stop with AOC and Bernie Sanders by his side, he said: “They call it socialism. Well, you know what I say? Give us some of that socialism!”
Yeah.
AOK: And Ed Markey, to his core, is a politician — a politician I respect — who will move with the movement, who will make very smart political calculations. That’s why we trust him as a dealmaker for the Green New Deal. And he saw that the momentum was with the young people, and he’s one of the few, few, few — if any other — incumbents that don’t just say, “I love these young climate kids. It inspires me!” But Ed Markey would bring a Black kid from the South, like me on the phone and ask for my advice and then follow it. He bet his career on the advice we gave to that last line in that dealmaker video, “It’s time to start asking what your country can do for you.”
You know, he bet his political career luring the Kennedys into a fight — a fight about the soul of neoliberalism — and what it ended up being was a disastrous miscalculation for Joe Kennedy, because it showed the ruling class was so offended that you would even ask them for more. But you have to have so much trust in the next generation, and that trust is weaved into the Green New Deal.
RG: Now the only member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation that hasn’t signed on to the Green New Deal was up for reelection too, Richie Neal.
Let’s talk a little bit about the bad news from last night. You guys got behind Alex Morse, the Holyoke mayor, supporter of the Green New Deal. Why do you think he fell as short as he did? The returns are still coming in it; looks like he’ll lose by about 18 points.
EW: Yeah. So obviously I think we’re gonna have to take our time to analyze what exactly led to the unfortunate loss there last night. You know, we backed Alex Morse early this spring, after many, many efforts to pressure and push, Richie Neal to close the gap [laughs] on Massachusetts delegation supporters of the Green New Deal and you know, he’s a guy who’s taking money from fossil fuel companies and utilities and he didn’t seem too interested.
So, here was this young guy, Alex Morse, who moved his city to 100 percent clean energy, reduced their emissions by a huge amount while mayor, and shut down the last remaining coal plant in Holyoke. You know, it was kind of a no-brainer there for us to get involved in this race.
Obviously, there was this sort of late-breaking scandal-non-scandal in the race that —
RG: Yeah.
EW: — pulled groups like ours out of the race for a critical week near the end where we were trying to evaluate what was going on and your reporting helped us understand and see clearly that there were some pretty bad intentions and corruption at the heart of these allegations and scandals that I think did bring a lot of national attention to his race in a way that was helpful and allowed us to do one of the things that we do well, which is, you know, put national progressive firepower on a race like this. But it also created this opening for Richie Neal and his allies to continue to spread misinformation and homophobic smears behind the scenes, through mailers, and digital ads, and TV ads that his disgusting super PAC aired, which obviously did seem to have some impact in the race, because polls showed that there were a lot of people still undecided, that Richie Neal was under 50 percent, which is historically bad as an incumbent, there was a real opportunity to close that gap. But it seemed like when those undecided folks were making their decisions, they went with Richie Neal, for some reason.
And so I do think that that had an impact. And, unfortunately, the local media did not do a good job of picking up on the great reporting that you did as the rest of the national progressive movement, and did cover the scandal [laughs], and the original breaking thing, but did not do as good of a job of covering the corruption of the Massachusetts Democratic Party.
The way that this smear unfolded, do you think it’ll change the way that kind of progressive organizations respond to the next attack that is leveled personally against an insurgent or progressive candidate?
EW: I think it absolutely will. You know, I’ll speak for the Sunrise Movement specifically: The way that those attacks played out was a big learning moment for us as a young organization. And we’ve been doing a lot of reflection, and are going to be doing more debriefing about how we can be better responsive to those kinds of attacks and smears going forward.
As our movement continues to grow power, like Alex talked about, more and more of those character attacks and smears are going to come our way. And we have to be ready to discern what’s real and what’s not, and, you know, have a default position of standing by our folks and doing our best to take claim seriously, but also make sure that we’re getting properly vetted evidence.
So what’s next for Sunrise Movement on the electoral front?
I know that at The Intercept we’re watching the New Hampshire Governor’s primary, Andru Volinsky, kind of insurgent candidate there.
We’re watching Jess Scarane, a candidate in Delaware who’s challenging Chris Coons.
But what are you guys looking at? And where do you think you’ll put your energy between now and November? Or are you just going all general election?
AOK: I mean, as far as I know, we are going all general election. We’ve done our part. We won in landslides across the country in a lot of these primaries. We reelected the Squad. We have someone, Mike Siegel, in Texas running to flip a Texas red seat for the Green New Deal, supported by labor unions, could really transform the entire political game in Texas, if that happens.
So we’re pivoting to the general election and using these really powerful champions that we’ve elected as our major protagonist in the story. Obviously, Joe Biden is not the protagonist that is going to mobilize young people to vote, and, unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have that much intent to mobilize our generation to vote. We believe it’s very important to defeat Donald Trump, and we want to use the Squad as really powerful motivators for our generation to see what comes after November.
We have to build that vision, the first hundred days of Joe Biden’s presidency, and build a vision of how we can shut down society and actually force him to take certain concessions from the left. We also have really powerful leaders like Ed Markey, who are now going to be on the inside negotiating with other senators who are now afraid of us, who also now want our support.
So we are going into 2021, if Joe Biden is President, with a real position of power to make the political agenda for the Democratic Party.
RG: Well, congratulations on your win last night, and good luck going forward.
Evan Weber is political director for Sunrise Movement. Alex O’Keefe is the creative director of the Sunrise Movement. Evan and Alex, thanks so much for joining us on Deconstructed.
EW: Thanks so much for having us, Ryan.
AOK: Yeah, Thanks for the invite. It’s good to win!
Beats losing.
AOK: [Laughs.] That’s for sure.
[Laughs.]
[Musical interlude.]
That’s our show! Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.
And I’m Ryan Grim, DC bureau chief for The Intercept. I’m also the author of the recent book, “We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to AOC, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement.” Evan Weber actually makes a cameo in it.
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