The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been surveilling the work of American journalists reporting on the unrest in Portland, Oregon, circulating “intelligence reports” on them to other federal agencies in a move that has been decried as a clear violation of the constitutional right to a free press.
The Washington Post obtained the intelligence reports which were compiled by the unit within DHS known as the “office of intelligence and analysis”. The newspaper said the reports were distributed in the past week to law enforcement and other agencies.
They referred specifically to two prominent US journalists whose reporting had revealed the disarray within the Trump administration’s contentious deployment of federal agents to quell protests in Portland.
One of the journalists, Mike Baker of the New York Times, had disclosed a leaked DHS memo that discussed the confusion prevalent among the federal agents sent to Portland. The memo showed that the camouflaged officers had little understanding of the nature of the demonstrations they were being asked to police.
The second journalist was Benjamin Wittes, who edits the national security blog Lawfare. He had also published leaked DHS documents, one of which was a memo warning the department’s officials not to disclose information to reporters.
Only after the Post published its bombshell article did Chad Wolf, the acting DHS secretary, put out a statement saying he was immediately halting the practice of collecting information on members of the press and ordering an inquiry into what had happened.
The revelation that DHS officials had not only been surveilling the work of journalists covering Portland but had been disseminating their findings as “intelligence reports” normally reserved for terrorism suspects or foreign adversaries prompted an immediate outcry.
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Will Trump actually pull federal agents from Portland? – video explainer
In a Twitter thread, Wittes said he was considering his legal options. He called the contents of the information gathered on his reporting “innocuous enough” but said what troubled him was that DHS officials had shared his work “as intelligence reporting … If this activity is okay, is it okay to build a full dossier of public record information on a journalist?”
Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, posited that this was just the tip of an iceberg. “An agency that is so cavalier about compiling intel reports about establishment figures like these is almost certainly compiling more comprehensive reports about others.”
Ned Price, a former CIA intelligence officer who acted as Barack Obama’s special assistant in the White House, said he had never advised a colleague in the intelligence community to quit their job. “But if this is what you’re being asked to do, you should absolutely resign.”
The relationship between the Trump administration, the federal agents – dubbed “Trump’s troops” – sent to Portland, and the press has been troubled on several levels. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing the DHS for the rough treatment that has been meted out to reporters covering the events at the federal courthouse in downtown Portland.
The ACLU complaint says that federal agents, led by border patrol, have been assaulting reporters in violation of a court order. Several members of the press have been shot at close range despite clearly being identified as journalists and photographers.
The birth of a militia: how an armed group polices Black Lives Matter protests
In Utah, members of a militia claim their presence deters protesters from becoming violent and destroying the state
Armed counter protesters in Hawaiian shirts, suggestive of an affiliation with the boogaloo movement (a loosely organized far-right anti-government group), march in Provo, Utah.Photograph: Steven Waggoner
Nicolle Okoren in Provo
Published onMon 27 Jul 2020 10.00 BST
The Utah Citizens’ Alarm is only a month old, and yet it already boasts 15,000-plus members.
The citizen militia’s recruits wear military fatigues and carry assault rifles. Their short-term goal, they say, is to act as a physical presence of intimidation to deter protesters from becoming violent and destroying the state of Utah. Their long-term goal: to arm and prepare the state of Utah against underground movements they believewill incite civil war.
The group was conceived in reaction to a Black Lives Matter protest against police brutality organized by different groups in Provo, Utah, on 29 June. That day, a white protester pulled out a gun and shot another white man, who was not protesting butdriving his vehicle into the protest route. Two shots were fired, and one hit the driver in the arm. Protesters claim the shooting was in self-defence because the driver was hitting marchers; the police found this claim to be unsubstantiated.
When Casey Robertson, 47, watched a video of the incident, he felt outraged that this could happen in his “little town of Provo”. He posted on his Facebook page and a local yard sale page that “protesters descended on downtown Provo and terrorized citizens and SHOTS WERE FIRED.” He explained that Insurgence, one of the organizing group, was planning another protest for the next night and he rallied “concerned citizens” to come together, armed and ready to do their part in protecting downtown businesses.
This was a call to arms. Utah Citizens’ Alarm was born.
“I was like, ‘We need to stand together as citizens and go down there and show these people that we’re not going to allow violence, and that we are not going to allow these anarchist violent groups to tear down Provo,” Robertson told the Guardian. “It’s not going to happen without a fight.’”
Utah Citizens’ Alarm has since organized regular military-style trainings for its members. Robertson says he has been tipped off “by secret sources within the government and law enforcement” that underground organizations like antifa are being funded by Isis, and are using groups like BLM to wreak havoc in the community to destroy American cities and ideals. Even if none of these theories stand up to scrutiny, he is dead set on not letting it happen.
Robertson was born and raised in Provo. His dad was a Provo police officer and his mother a police dispatcher. He has voted both sides of the political aisle – he voted for Clinton and Obama, although he now considers himself a conservative. To him, this is not about politics, but good and evil, and he is ready to die for this cause.
“My biggest fear, probably, is my children being brought up and having to grow up in a country that has completely lost its freedom, and that is under attack, and that is turning into this cesspool of violence and chaos,” he said. “Our enemy is now within, and that’s really scary to me.”
This already has a chilling effect on protests: organizers have begun cancelling protests out of fear of Utah Citizens’ Alarm coming and escalating the already heated emotions. So far, militia members remain unchallenged, using their second amendment rights to openly bear arms in public throughout the state.
‘We are here to protect the community’
That same Black Lives Matter protest that inspired Robertson’s fear was originally planned as a pro-police event in downtown Provo. John Sullivan, 26, the founder of Insurgence USA, a group for racial justice and police reform, organized a counter-protest alongside several other organizers. Protesters were to meet at the Provo police station at 6.30pm that night.
Sullivan, one of the few black men organizingfor racial justice in Utah, is not from Provo but Sandy, a suburb of Salt Lake City. Provo is a hyper-religious Latter-day Saint college town located 45 miles south of Salt Lake City. The city is made up of about 110,000 people, 88% white, 16.6% Hispanic, and less than 1% black. Local quirks include a strong second amendment culture, strong self-reliant groups, end of world preppers, a booming music scene and a charming Center Street that has at least three ice cream parlors and only recently got its first coffee shop, as the predominant demography does not drink coffee for religious purposes.
The Black Lives Matter protesters started to march. They yelled “Whose streets? Our streets!” at drivers and lingered in front of cars, some of which started plowing through the crowd, claiming protesters had surrounded them and would not let them leave. (Videos show this was not the case.)
John Sullivan of Insurgence USA speaks to Black Lives Matter protesters and counter-protest groups. Photograph: Steven Waggoner
Brian DeLong, a philosophy student at Utah Valley University, was grabbing a coffee when he saw protesters pass by. He joined in the march. At the intersection of University Avenue and Center Street, he was hit by a silver Excursion going southbound and immediately heard two gunshots, one after the other. DeLong bounced off the car and realized about five other people had also been hit. The driver frantically drove off.
Nine minutes later, an ambulance appeared on the scene. The police did not come, and only appeared in full riot gear at 9.40pm when protesters made it back to the front of the police station.
Drivers driving into protesters resulting in people shooting guns is becoming more frequent. On July 25, an Austin motorist drove into a crowd and fatally shot a protester. On the same night, another driver drove into protesters in Aurora, Colorado – except it was a protester who took out his gun and ended up shooting two fellow protesters.
After the Provo protest, a policeman told Josianne Petit, 34, a criminal defense paralegal and founder of Mama & Papa Panthers, an organization dedicated to helping parents of all races in raising black children, that the police were inside watching the whole protest on Facebook Live. She said: “I felt fundamentally betrayed. I had worked with Provo PD extensively prior to that protest and I thought I had a good working relationship with them, but to hear the complete disregard they had for the lives of protesters was alarming to me, but also devastating.”
Sullivan, the organizer, was not prepared for what transpired, nor did he know that anyone had a gun on his side of the protest. He created another Facebook event to hold a protest two days later in response.
On that day, the two sides stood facing each other. The protesters carried posters; the Utah Citizens’ Alarm carried assault rifles. The protesters wore black; the paramilitia wore American flags. Both groups wore masks. On the west side, it was to protect themselves from the coronavirus. On the east side, masks were a protection from unwanted media attention.
One young man carrying an assault rifle and two magazines of ammunition, with his face completely covered, pointed at the protesters and said: “What they have done is straight out of the communist manifesto … they say that your political beliefs are now your identity and, if somebody’s against your identity, they can justify whatever they do against you because they’re now repressing you for not agreeing with you.”
He added: “Not everybody over there but the more extremists will agree with that. Black Lives Matter, as an organization, receives money from people who want to see violence happen.”
Another young man walked over and said: “They hate America. They say they want to change America, that’s un-American.”
The BLM protesters were authorized to march in the street. Utah Citizens’ Alarm was permitted to march on the sidewalks, guarding the storefronts from the protesters. About 250 policemen were brought in, as well as at least four snipers who stood on the roof of the Nu Skin building, a ten-storey building next to the Mormon temple.
One police officer from Springville, a town just south of Provo, said he trusted 99.9% of the men and women with the guns, and said: “Those men and women would be the first people to take a bullet for any of the protesters there.”
At the end of the march, Utah Citizens’ Alarm members came to the megaphone and repeated the Springville police officer’s line: “We are here to protect the community. We would be the first to take a bullet for each and every one of you.”
Josey Gardner, 25, a protester and EMT studying English at BYU, asked: “Whose bullets are they protecting us from? They are the only ones with guns.”
A chilling effect on free speech
Utah Citizens’ Alarm is now organized into a pseudo-militia under the guidance of ex-military and ex-law enforcement on their newly formed board of advisers. They want Utah to be fully prepared for the “civil war” instigated by underground, militant forces.
The group trains tirelessly. When on site, members are advised to move in groups of three and no less, because they have been told by informants on the inside that antifa attacks single out the strongest members in vulnerable situations. They have escape plans at every site, and promote a firm obedience to the local police, including when asked by them not to come to a protest.
(Provo police chief Rich Ferguson made a statement that the Provo police have no relationship with the Utah Citizens’ Alarm, which Sergeant Nisha King, head of the Provo police department’s public information team, verified. )
Opposing protest groups march on opposite sides of the street in Provo. Photograph: Steven Waggoner
Meanwhile, militia members have now been to almost every protest on the Wasatch Front. They come to protests throughout the state with anywhere between 30 to 1,000 members in full uniform (sometimes homemade, sometimes military-grade), some in bulletproof vests, and openly carrying ARs. They silently stand in the background and observe, always on guard believing they may be called upon to act quickly if something goes wrong.
A protest in Taylorsville was cancelled because too many protesters felt the risk was not worth being there. Robertson took this as a win.
Jason Stevens, of Utah’s American Civil Liberties Union, stressed the importance of the historical context in what happened in the civil rights movement of the 1960s when armed groups, militias, local chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, white citizens councils, organizations both official and unofficial took it upon themselves to defend what they saw as their rights and property with violent and systemic intimidation and threats to African Americans and others in those areas.
“I am not saying that is what is happening here. But with context, if you are a protester and you see groups like this showing up at your protest, that’s got to be in the back of your mind, this history of intimidation and threats.”
Outside of Utah, these threats are present and real for protesters. In Omak, Washington, small civilian militias are forming to threaten protesters. In New Mexico, there is another civilian militia group that call themselves the New Mexico Civil Guard reacting to rioting and looting.
BLM-adjacent groups held a “Stop Kidnapping Protesters” event in Salt Lake City on 22 July, in reference to what took place in Portland. Robertson and his team came in full garb and made a live video. Robertson said: “That’s the name of the protest – ‘Stop kidnapping protesters’. My boy over here translated it as ‘stop arresting criminals’. The awesome thing is these people that are out creating chaos and committing crimes, they are being watched. Law enforcement finally started to go around and pick them up and arrest them. I am all for it.”
Additionally, lines between the second and first amendment are complicated, especially as open-carry laws in Utah make it legal for groups of heavily armed individuals to gather in places where the first amendment is being honored, such as protests.
“If the right to bear arms is overriding the right to free speech, that may be cause for concern,” said Dr RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah. “Our constitutional doctrine hasn’t yet had the chance to really tussle with the question of what the presence of guns does to a free speech event. Short of more overt threats of violence, we usually protect protesters with guns in the same ways we protect protesters without them. But if the express goal of the armed individuals is to intimidate people who might otherwise share their views, that’s especially troubling.”
In response to Utah Citizens’ Alarm, Utah protesters are now arming themselves. John Sullivan of Insurgence USA held his first armed protest on 22 July at the Utah state capitol, carrying an AR-15 and a magazine of ammo. He is encouraging Insurgence USA protesters to purchase guns so they can protect themselves if there is violence.
“Basically, nobody in our group owns a gun except for me; nobody was planning on ever shooting anyone. So the fact that I bought a bulletproof vest and more magazines and our people are buying guns should say a lot. It shouldn’t be that way.”
Petit, who also organizes alongside BLM and Insurgence USA, has recruited ex-military to train and arm her protesters, because she feels the threat is real as long as Utah Citizens’ Alarm is showing up.
“The only way forward is to make sure we are prepared, because at this point the options the only options available to us are when things go crazy we lie down and die, or we fight back.
It was a balmy June day in 2017 whenDonald Trumptook to the lectern in the White House Rose Garden to announce the US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, the only comprehensive global pact to tackle the spiraling crisis.
Todd Stern, who was the US’s chief negotiator when the deal was sealed in Paris in 2015, forced himself to watch the speech.
“I found it sickening, it was mendacious from start to finish,” said Stern. “I was furious … because here we have this really important thing and here’s this joker who doesn’t understand anything he’s talking about. It was a fraud.”
The terms of the accord mean no country can leave before November this year, so due to a quirk of timing, the US will officially exit the Paris deal on 4 November – 100 days from now and just one day after the 2020 presidential election.
The completion of Stern’s misery, and possibly any realistic hopes of averting disastrous climate change, rests heavily upon the outcome of the election, which will pit Trump against former vice-president Joe Biden, who has vowed to rejoin the climate agreement.
Todd Stern was the US chief negotiator during the Paris climate agreement process in 2015. Photograph: Brooks Kraft/Getty Images
The lifetime of the Paris agreement, signed in a wave of optimism in 2015, has seen the five hottest years ever recorded on Earth, unprecedented wildfires torching towns from California to Australia, record heatwaves baking Europe and India and temperatures briefly bursting beyond 100F (38C) in the Arctic.
These sort of impacts could be a mere appetizer, scientists warn, given they have been fueled by levels of global heating that are on track to triple, or worse, by the end of the century without drastic remedial action. The faltering global effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and head off further calamity hinges, in significant part, on whether the US decides to re-enter the fray.
“The choice of Biden or Trump in the White House is huge, not just for the US but for the world generally to deal with climate change,” said Stern. “If Biden wins, November 4 is a blip, like a bad dream is over. If Trump wins, he seals the deal. The US becomes a non-player and the goals of Paris become very, very difficult. Without the US in the long term, they certainly aren’t realistic.”
Nearly 200 countries put their name to the Paris accords, pledging to face down the climate emergency and limit the average global temperature rise to “well below” 2C above the era before mass industrialization started pumping huge volumes of planet-warming gases into the atmosphere from cars, trucks, power plants and farms. A more aspirational goal of halting temperatures at a 1.5C rise was also included although, just five years on, the planet is already creeping perilously close to this mark.
The Paris deal brought major, growing emitters like China and India on board with the quest to shift towards cleaner sources of energy, in part due to the urgings of Barack Obama, who claimed the agreement showed the US was now a “global leader in the fight against climate change”.
Trump, who once famously called climate science a “hoax”, has never looked kindly on the deal, which he framed as an international effort to damage the US while letting China off too lightly. In his Rose Garden speech, Trump remarked that he was elected to “represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” In reality, each country is free to choose its own emissions cuts without any sort of enforcement. “Paris is like a vessel, such as a glass – you can pour water or wine into it,” said Sue Biniaz, a former US state department lawyer who drafted parts of the Paris deal. “It’s not the design of Paris that’s the problem, it’s that there’s not the political will to do enough.”
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Why Trump abandoning the climate fight puts the planet in even more danger – video explainer
Abandoned climate efforts
The US government in practice abandoned any concern over the climate crisis some time ago, with the Trump administration so far rolling back more than 100 environmental protections, including an Obama-era plan to curb emissions from coal-fired power plants, limits on pollution emitted from cars and trucks and even energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs. In an often chaotic presidency, Trump’s position on climate change has been unusually consistent – American fossil fuel production must be bolstered, restrictive climate regulations must be scrapped.
Unswayed by growing alarm among Americans over the climate crisis, Trump is taking this same message to the election. “Biden wants to massively re-regulate the energy economy, rejoin the Paris climate accord, which would kill our energy totally, you would have to close 25% of your businesses and kill oil and gas development,” the president said this month, without citing evidence, as he announced another rollback, this time of environmental assessments of pipelines, highways and other infrastructure.
The Longview power plant, a coal-fired plant, on 21 August 2018 in Maidsville, West Virginia. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Despite all this, US emissions have continued to fall, due in large part to the downfall of a coal industry that Trump has attempted to prop up. The international ramifications have been telling, however – in the absence of any sort of positive cajoling from the US, global emissions have remained stubbornly high and most countries are lagging behind their own promised actions.
According to the Climate Action Tracker, only Morocco is acting consistently with the Paris agreement’s goals, with the global temperature rise set to exceed 3C by the end of the century even if the current pledges are met. Paris was meant to be only the beginning – countries are supposed to continually ratchet up their ambition levels until the more extreme ravages of climate change, such as dire flooding, heatwaves, crop failures and the loss of coral reefs, are avoided.
“There’s been less political will from other countries to take action to a certain extent because the US isn’t pushing for it,” said Biniaz. “During the first four years of Trump it’s easier to say it’s likely to be an aberration, a short-term deviation, but if it’s eight years it’s harder to keep together the coalition of countries that care about this.”
‘Another meteorite is coming’
Another four years of a Trump administration uninterested in the climate crisis could set back global emissions cuts by a decade, according to one published analysis, making the chances of meeting the goals of Paris near to impossible.
Hakon Saelen, an environmental economist at the University of Oslo who led the study, said the US withdrawal is a “significant major blow” to the mitigation of the climate crisis. “The world cannot afford any delay if the 2C target is to be reached,” he said. “Our model indicates that the chance of reaching it is very low already, but near zero with another Trump term.”
Trump after announcing the US would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement at the White House in Washington in June 2017. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
But even with an engaged Biden administration that is somehow able to get Congress to agree to a $2tn plan to shift the US on to renewable energy, the challenge is immense. The world has dithered on cutting emissions for so long that only an unprecedented, rapid overhaul of the way we travel, generate energy and eat will keep humanity within the bounds of safety outlined in Paris.
The world will have to slash emissions by more than 7% a year this decade to have any hope of meeting the 1.5C target, according to the United Nations. This annual cut will be achievable this year only through the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic, which shuttered much of the global economy. A more sustainable path to decarbonization will need to be immediately identified and implemented.
“The warmer it gets the worse it gets and the [Paris] targets are broadly at a level where we things will get really bad,” said Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute. “We don’t want people to give up hope, the human race won’t become extinct at 2C but that’s an unnecessarily high bar. There are still large threats and a lot of good reasons to keep warming below that.
Stern said American voters will naturally be “supersonic focused” on coronavirus and the economic fallout. “But climate change can’t be forgotten this election,” he said. “The Covid crisis has shown us countries can do remarkable things in short order when they believe they have to. It shows us we need leaders who also understand what we need to do on climate change, because that is another meteorite heading our way.”
A photographer walks behind federal agents as demonstrators protest in Portland, Oregon, on 26 July. Photograph: Caitlin Ochs/Reuters
