It took 20 years and four presidents to "lose" Afghanistan -- on a mission that was doomed early -- but the GOP is ignoring reality by blaming Joe Biden

Republicans -- including U.S. Sens. Josh Hawley and Roy Blunt of Missouri -- already are trying to score political points by blaming President Joe Biden for America's chaotic exit from Afghanistan. That's a pretty ugly tactic, given that Biden is trying to guide us through a surge in the coronavirus pandemic and some of the earliest clear consequences of climate change -- both largely driven by flawed conservative "thinking." But like a lot of right-wing rhetoric in the postmodern age, this is disconnected from reality. The U.S. mission in Afghanistan was much too lengthy and complex to blame failure on any one administration. Consider this from The Washington Post, under the headline "Afghan security forces’ wholesale collapse was years in the making":

In the summer of 2011, Army Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV made a round of public appearances to boast that he had finally solved a problem that had kept U.S. troops bogged down in Afghanistan for a decade. Under his watch, he asserted, U.S. military advisers and trainers had transformed the ragtag Afghan army and police into a professional fighting force that could defend the country and keep the Taliban at bay.

“We’ve made tremendous strides, incredible progress,” Caldwell, the head of the U.S. and NATO training command in Afghanistan, told the Council on Foreign Relations in June 2011. “They’re probably the best-trained, the best-equipped and the best-led of any forces we’ve developed yet inside of Afghanistan. They only continue to get better with time.”

Three months later, in a news briefing at the Pentagon, Caldwell said the Afghan soldiers and police previously had been in terrible shape: poorly led, uninspired and more than 90 percent of them illiterate. But he said the Obama administration’s decision to spend $6 billion a year to train and equip the Afghan security forces had produced a remarkable turnaround. He predicted that the Taliban-led insurgency would subside and that the Afghans would take over responsibility for securing their country by the end of 2014, enabling U.S. combat troops to leave.

In fact, according to documents obtained for the forthcoming Washington Post book“The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” U.S. military officials privately harbored fundamental doubts for the duration of the war that the Afghan security forces could ever become competent or shed their dependency on U.S. money and firepower. “Thinking we could build the military that fast and that well was insane,” an unnamed former U.S. official told government interviewers in 2016.

Those fears, rarely expressed in public, were ultimately borne out by the sudden collapse this month of the Afghan security forces, whose wholesale and unconditional surrender to the Taliban will go down as perhaps the worst debacle in the history of proxy warfare.

Ultimately, the U.S. effort was undermined from within Afghanistan:

The capitulation was sped up by a series of secret deals that the Taliban brokered with many Afghan government officials. In recent days and weeks, Taliban leaders used a combination of cash, threats and promises of leniency to persuade government forces to lay down their arms.

Although U.S. intelligence officials had recently forecast the possible demise of the Afghan government over the next three to six months, the Biden administration was caught unprepared by the velocity of the Taliban takeover. Afghan forces “proved incapable of defending the country. And that did happen more rapidly than we anticipated,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday on the ABC News program “This Week.”

How bad does this look in retrospect?

Over two decades, the U.S. government invested more than $85 billion to train and equip the Afghans and pay their salaries. Today, all that’s left is arsenals of weapons, ammunition and supplies that have fallen into the hands of the enemy.

Senior U.S. officials said the Pentagon fell victim to the conceit that it could build from scratch an enormous Afghan army and police force with 350,000 personnel that was modeled on the centralized command structures and complex bureaucracy of the Defense Department. Though it was obvious from the beginning that the Afghans were struggling to make the U.S.-designed system work, the Pentagon kept throwing money at the problem and assigning new generals to find a solution.

“We kept changing guys who were in charge of training the Afghan forces, and every time a new guy came in, he changed the way that they were being trained,” Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary during the Bush and Obama administrations, said in an oral-history interview with scholars at the University of Virginia. “The one thing they all had in common was they were all trying to train a Western army instead of figuring out the strengths of the Afghans as a fighting people and then building on that.”

Biden was the president who pulled the plug, but the mission probably was doomed from its beginnings in 2001:

In government interviews, U.S. military trainers who worked directly with recruits said the Afghans suffered from other insoluble problems, including a lack of motivation and a corrupt chain of command that preyed upon its own soldiers and police.

Maj. Greg Escobar, a U.S. Army infantry officer, spent 2011 trying to straighten out a dysfunctional Afghan army unit in Paktika province near the border with Pakistan. The first Afghan battalion commander whom Escobar mentored lost his job after he was charged with raping one of his male soldiers. The commander’s replacement, in turn, was killed by his own men.

Escobar said he came to realize that the whole exercise was futile because the U.S. military was pushing too fast and the Afghans were not responding to what was, in the end, a foreign experiment. “Nothing we do is going to help,” he recalled in an Army oral-history interview. “Until the Afghan government can positively affect the people there, we’re wasting our time.”

A lack of basic education among Afghan troops, riddled with tribalism, was perhaps the biggest hurdle:

Jack Kem, a retired Army officer who served as Gen. Caldwell’s deputy from 2009 to 2011, said the training command struggled to overcome a host of challenges. Recruiting was hard enough, but was compounded by startling rates of desertion and attrition. And trying to maintain an ethnic balance in the force among Afghanistan’s fractious tribes was another “enormous problem,” he said.

But perhaps the biggest hardship was having to teach virtually every recruit how to read. Kem estimated that only 2 to 5 percent of Afghan recruits could read at a third-grade level despite efforts by the United States to enroll millions of Afghan children in school over the previous decade.

“The literacy was just insurmountable,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. Some Afghans also had to learn their colors, or had to be taught how to count. “I mean, you’d ask an Afghan soldier how many brothers and sisters they had and they couldn’t tell you it was four. They could tell you their names, but they couldn’t go ‘one, two, three, four.’ ”

Here is more perspective from Salon, under the headline "Lay off Joe Biden: He didn’t “lose” Afghanistan — we are finally leaving it alone; We spent 20 messed-up years in Afghanistan flexing our muscles and money, and now we are making a messy exit."Writes Lucian K. Truscott IV:

Do you really think our pull-out from Afghanistan would have looked any different under the man who handled the coronavirus pandemic so well that he cashiered 400,000 American lives? He claimed over and over that he was going to end the "forever wars" and get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan once and for all. He was the president who said he could "make a deal" with the Taliban that was supposed to lead to a peaceful reconciliation with the Afghan government upon the withdrawal of American troops.

Taliban insurgents cleverly allowed cameras from Al Jazeera to film them walking through the presidential palace in Kabul demonstrating how a neat and tidy transfer of power looks, compared with what was attempted by the violent Trump mob that tried to take over the U.S. Capitol. This has led to predictable hand-wringing and pearl-clutching by the usual gaggle of Trump puppets, who the likes of MSNBC and CNN have been only too happy to allow on air to spew their anti-Biden garbage.

I swear, if I see the grim visage of one more Republican congressman lamenting the "chaos" caused by Joe Biden and the promises we broke with our "Afghan partners," I'm going to puke. We didn't have Afghan partners; we had people in a foreign country we showered with money and ordered around and told what to think and who to believe, which was us. Republicans have been waiting to hang "losing" the Afghanistan war around the neck of Joe Biden since he announced back in April that we would withdraw the troops remaining in that country by the end of this month. Unmentioned by all the Trump-puppets is the fact that Biden is doing nothing more or less than carrying out to the letter the deal Trump made with the Taliban last year: that we would pull all our troops out, that we wouldn't engage Taliban fighters in hostilities and they wouldn't engage us, and that the Taliban would pledge not to turn the country back into a stronghold for terrorist groups like al-Qaida and the Islamic State group.

Afghanistan didn't have a functioning government, but rather a bunch of people with official titles who were paid to do what we told them. Afghanistan didn't have a functioning army, it had a uniformed gang of men we gave M-16s and taught how to march and shoot. At least some of them were Taliban sympathizers. Some of those expensively trained Afghan soldiers shot and killed their American "partners," proving just what side they were really on. That the Afghan army is said to have "melted" into the populace as the Taliban walked triumphantly into Kabul should hardly be a surprise. Raise your hand if you expected anything different to happen. I'll wait.

Hmmm. No takers? I didn't think so.

With Afghanistan, we didn't even have the excuse that we were supporting a "war of independence" like we claimed about Vietnam. It was a big-power police action from day one. Bin Laden and al-Qaida hit us, so we went in there to take them out. We began losing Afghanistan the day we "took" Kabul from the Taliban and said we had driven al-Qaida terrorists out of the country.

What are the grim lessons of the U.S. experience in Afghanistan?

Here's the deal with a big, muscular country like the United States that thinks it should have so much say about the way the world is run that we have military outposts in 140 countries: The minute we "take" a city, or a region, or a country, we've lost it, because everyone who lives there knows two things. 

One, that we were never really going to live there, like we would if we changed citizenship or got a visa to move to a country like France. That's living in a country. We did what we always do in countries we occupy but don't live in. We walled off limited areas and turned them into Little Americas and called them "base camps" complete with resident McDonald's and KFC outlets. That's where the Americans who "took" Afghanistan lived, and nobody knew that better than the Afghans themselves.

Sure, there were some American civilians who actually lived in Afghan homes or apartments they rented or bought. Most of them worked for NGOs or international aid organizations like Doctors Without Borders or the dozens of groups that set up programs to help establish schools to educate Afghan girls and women. But few were in that country on official business of the American government. Most of the Americans representing our government lived behind gigantic concrete walls or Hesco barriers topped with razor wire and traveled in armored SUVs and Humvees in heavily defended convoys.

When I was in Iraq and Afghanistan around American troops, I used to ask them how they would like it if some foreign country moved a bunch of soldiers into their hometowns and seized property owned by locals and walled off that property and topped it with razor wire and then began moving around their hometowns in armored vehicles carrying soldiers with machine guns and grenades and even heavier weapons. To a soldier, they replied that would never happen in their hometowns, because people wouldn't let it.

Everywhere we established an American presence in Afghanistan was a hometown that didn't like being occupied by heavily armed American soldiers. So what did we expect?

The other thing the locals know with certainty is that we would leave. Hell, they watched 20 years of American soldiers cycle through their service in one-year tours. If they worked with the American military, Afghans could get to know a lieutenant in 2002 and watch them return as a captain in 2006, as a major in 2010, as a colonel in 2016, even as a general in 2020. But nobody stayed. Few became familiar with Afghan customs. Even fewer learned the language. They knew we wouldn't stay the course because most Americans Afghans came into contact with didn't stay more than a year.

Birmingham lawyer Burt Newsome seeks U.S. Supreme Court review in case involving allegations of a plot to frame him for a crime and ruin his practice

Burt Newsome

Birmingham attorney Burt Newsome is seeking review with the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) in a case alleging individuals connected to the Balch & Bingham law firm conspired to frame him for a crime and then used that information in an effort to steal a chunk of his banking-related work and ruin his practice.

Newsome, the proprietor of Newsome Law LLC in North Shelby County, alleges that former Balch attorney Clark Cooper was a central figure in the conspiracy, and the conspirators used prepaid "burner phones" to communicate about their plans and hide those conversations from Newsome and authorities. The matter has become known as the Newsome Conspiracy Case.

Alexandra Siskopoulos, an attorney from New York City, filed a petition for a writ of certiorari (dated July 17, 2021) on Newsome's behalf. She asks the high court to review the Alabama Supreme Court's judgment in the case, or in the alternative,  summarily reverse the decision and judgment of the Supreme Court of Alabama pursuant to Supreme Court Rule 16.

Newsome faces an uphill battle to have the high court hear his case. According to uscourts.gov, SCOTUS hears 100 to 150 of the 7,000 cases it is asked to review each year. That means any individual case has about a 2.14-percent chance of being heard, at most.

That's not the only challenge appellants face. Consider this language from Rule 10 of the U.S. Supreme Court:

A petition for a writ of certiorari is rarely granted when the asserted error consists of erroneous factual findings or the misapplication of a properly stated rule of law.

In other words, SCOTUS is not in the business of correcting errors that lower courts -- state or federal -- make. In Newsome's case, there is substantial evidence that the Jefferson County Circuit Court and the Alabama Supreme Court made numerous errors of fact and law. But those likely will not help get SCOTUS to hear his case.

So, what might prompt the high court to hear Newsome's case? What factors does SCOTUS weigh in determining whether to hear a case. The answers to those questions also can be found at Rule 10:

Review on a writ of certiorari is not a matter of right, but of judicial discretion. A petition for a writ of certiorari will be granted only for compelling reasons. The following, although neither controlling nor fully measuring the Court's discretion, indicate the character of the reasons the Court considers:

• (a) a United States court of appeals has entered a decision in conflict with the decision of another United States court of appeals on the same important matter; has decided an important federal question in a way that conflicts with a decision by a state court of last resort; or has so far departed from the accepted and usual course of judicial proceedings, or sanctioned such a departure by a lower court, as to call for an exercise of this Court's supervisory power;
• (b) a state court of last resort has decided an important federal question in a way that conflicts with the decision of another state court of last resort or of a United States court of appeals;
• (c) a state court or a United States court of appeals has decided an important question of federal law that has not been, but should be, settled by this Court, or has decided an important federal question in a way that conflicts with relevant decisions of this Court.

What does that mean? SCOTUS is about consistent application of the law across state lines -- in both federal and state jurisdictions. It looks for issues where federal circuit courts have split, state supreme courts have split, or either of those courts has failed to follow binding precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Siskopoulos' petition takes those standards into account, largely ignoring  alleged errors Alabama courts made while focusing on issues that have been decided in varying ways across the country. In short, the Newsome petition seeks clarity on issues that have been inconsistently decided in Alabama -- and beyond. While that strategy might seem odd to the layperson, it clearly is the proper way to approach SCOTUS.

Before we examine the arguments Siskopoulos makes, let's take a look at the facts of the case -- as laid out in her petition. Note: It paints an ugly and disturbing picture of how law is, or at least can be, practiced in Alabama. (The full petition, with exhibits, is embedded at the end of this post; citations omitted for ease of reading.):

Petitioner Burt W. Newsome is an attorney in the State of Alabama who owns and operates Newsome Law, LLC. As part of his legal practice,  Petitioner Newsome represents banks in collection actions. In 2012, Petitioner Newsome on behalf of his banking client obtained a judgment against a Ms. Lawson and began collection efforts. After noticing Ms. Lawson’s post-judgment deposition and garnishing her wages, Ms. Lawson’s common-law husband, Alfred Seier threatened Petitioner Newsome. In January 2012, Alfred Seier parked his vehicle adjacent to Petitioner Newsome’s vehicle in the parking lot of Petitioner Newsome’s law practice. When Petitioner Newsome went to his vehicle, Alfred Seier pointed a gun at Petitioner Newsome and told him “never to f**k with his wife again.” Petitioner Newsome was unarmed and escaped by dodging behind his vehicle and running to the back door of his office. Petitioner Newsome immediately called the authorities and filed charges against Alfred Seier.

Thereafter, Alfred Seier’s brother Claiborne Seier, who is also an attorney, called Petitioner Newsome’s office insisting that Petitioner Newsome drop the criminal charges against his brother explaining that his brother was dying from cancer. Petitioner Newsome refused to drop the charges making Claiborne Seier angry. During this time, Petitioner Newsome’s banking client went on lockdown fearing that their employees could be killed by Alfred Seier. The bank, thereafter, sold the debt of Ms. Lawson to Claiborne Seier at a discounted rate. At the criminal trial of Alfred Seier, Claiborne Seier again urged Petitioner Newsome to drop the charges against his brother. When Petitioner Newsome refused, Claiborne Seier threatened Petitioner Newsome that “he was going to get him.” Alfred Seier was convicted of menacing and died a few months later. Later that year, in December 2012, Petitioner Newsome found himself in an eerily similar situation to the events that unfolded with Alfred Seier. Petitioner Newsome’s law office shares a parking lot with a dental office. Defendant John Bullock arrived at the parking lot at 6:30 a.m. Defendant Bullock purportedly arrived an hour and half early for a dental appointment. While initially not parked by Petitioner Newsome’s vehicle, by 7:30 a.m., John Bullock’s vehicle was parked adjacent to Newsome’s vehicle in a manner identical to the Alfred Seier gun threat incident. When Petitioner Newsome went to his car, Defendant Bullock quickly opened his car door blocking Newsome from getting into his car. The parking and the way Bullock exited his vehicle were identical to the events that unfolded with Alfred Seier. Feeling threatened, Petitioner Newsome pulled out a handgun, held it by his side and instructed Bullock to return to his vehicle until Newsome left the parking lot. Defendant Bullock moved out of the way and Newsome got in his car and left for court. 

John Bullock’s testimony as to the events thereafter is unclear. Bullock at one point testified that he called the police when he went into the dentist office, but later stated that he called the police after he came out of his dental appointment..According to the police report, Bullock stated he did not know Newsome and identified Newsome after being shown a driver’s license photograph. Immediately after the incident, however, Bullock told his dentist that Newsome was his assailant. Approximately, one month after the incident, on January 14, 2013, Bullock filed a criminal complaint against Newsome for menacing. A few months later, on May 2, 2013, Newsome was stopped for speeding, and was arrested on the menacing warrant. Newsome was taken into custody and released later that day.  Shortly after Newsome was released and returned to his office, Defendant Claiborne Seier called Newsome’s law office. There was no apparent reason for the call. 

At this point, Balch & Bingham enters the picture, and the plot thickens:

Two days after Newsome’s arrest, Defendant Clark A. Cooper, emailed a representative of a bank about Newsome’s arrest. Defendant Cooper is an attorney who was a partner at the law firm of Defendant Balch & Bingham, LLP. Defendant Cooper and his former firm represent some of the same banking clients as Petitioner Newsome. This email was sent to a client both Newsome and Cooper represented. Cooper insinuated that the arrest could affect Newsome’s legal license. In one email, Cooper emailed a copy of Newsome’s  mugshot and stated, “Have you seen this? Not sure how it’s going to affect his law license. Bizarre.” In a second email, Cooper quoted the menacing statute and stated, “It is a class B misdemeanor. Not sure how this will affect his law license.”This resulted in the bank representative questioning Petitioner Newsome’s ability to practice law and he stopped sending Newsome case files for a period of time. In the underlying proceedings, Defendant Cooper had differing stories as to how and when he learned of Newsome’s arrest. In an unsworn affidavit, he stated he learned of the arrest on the Saturday that he sent the emails to the bank representative. In a sworn deposition, he claimed he learned of the arrest on either Thursday or Friday which would have been the day of the arrest or the day after. In another unsworn affidavit, Cooper claimed he learned of the arrest by seeing Newsome’s mugshot on a publicly available website. In a sworn deposition, however, Cooper claimed he learned the information from a paralegal at Balch & Bingham who either sent him a copy or printed the information for him.

In November 2013, Petitioner Newsome appeared in the District Court of Shelby County for his criminal trial. The judge instructed the parties to discuss the case in a separate room. Petitioner Newsome set forth that during the discussions Defendant Bullock told everyone in the room he was simply going to a dentist’s appointment when the incident took place. Newsome  asserted that although Bullock wanted Newsome to plead guilty, Newsome refused.Thereafter, Bullock asserted he was dropping the charges. Relying on Bullock’s claim that he was simply going to a dentist’s appointment, Newsome signed a Dismissal & Release form provided. The form order states “STATE OF ALABAMA V. Burton Wheeler Newsome. CASE NO. DC 2013-1434. This matter comes before the Court by specific AGREEMENT of the parties.” John Bullock is not a named party in the criminal case. The form order contains four alternate dispositional paragraphs. The only paragraph checked in this criminal case provided that the case was continued until April 2014 and then to be dismissed with prejudice provided that the defendant had no further arrests. The paragraphs regarding pre-trial diversion and the paragraphs regarding restitution were not checked as they were not applicable to Newsome’s dismissal agreement.The form order also contained a release of all of Newsome’s civil and criminal claims against countless governmental entities as well as nongovernmental entities, complainants and potential witnesses. On April 4, 2014, the district court dismissed the criminal case against Newsome with prejudice.

On January 14, 2015, Petitioner Newsome filed a civil lawsuit from which this Petition arises. Petitioner Newsome and his law firm Newsome Law, LLC sued attorney Clark A. Cooper, Mr. Cooper’s former law firm Balch & Bingham, LLP, John W. Bullock, and Claiborne Seier in the Jefferson Circuit Court Court “alleging that the defendants combined to have Newsome arrested on a false charge with the intent of damaging his reputation and law practice.” During discovery, Petitioners through an amended complaint named Don Gottier as an additional defendant. Petitioners alleged, “as later amended, malicious prosecution, abuse of process, false imprisonment, the tort of outrage, defamation, invasion of privacy, and multiple counts of conspiracy and intentional interference with a business relationship.” App.9. Petitioners alleged that the Defendants conspired “to set Newsome up to be arrested so that Cooper could then take Newsome’s clients on behalf of Balch and Seier could get revenge upon Newsome for filing a menacing charge against Alfred.” On February 13, 2015, Defendant Seier filed a motion to dismiss arguing that Petitioner’s claims had no factual basis and “the claims were barred by the release clause in the D&R [Dismissal & Release] order because the claims were related to Newsome’s menacing case.”

The Dismissal & Release order (D & R) and a related expungement regarding Newsome's criminal case would become central to his state-court lawsuit -- and his petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. We will examine those issues next.

(To be continued)

 

How did 31-year-old Daniel Crowley, of Trussville, end up fatally shot after Nashville cops "checked on him" while he was sitting in his SUV at a shopping center?

Daniel Crowley's SUV (Trussville Tribune)

 

A 31-year-old man from Trussville, AL, is dead after police in Nashville, TN, shot him for . . . well, we really don't know why the cops shot Daniel Turney Crowley. According to press reports, police gave a reason for shooting Crowley, but it's hard to understand why they considered lethal force to be necessary. And we are left with this disturbing question: Why did police initiate an encounter with Crowley when there appears to be no evidence he was doing anything remotely unlawful?

The incident started around 5 a.m.last Wednesday when an officer with a K-9 unit conducted a business check at a shopping center and noticed a black SUV parked near a Cricket store. The officer apparently considered the vehicle suspicious -- possibly because of the time of day -- and approached it, finding Crowley inside, reportedly holding a pocket knife. Much of the incident apparently was caught on body-camera video, although one news report said it has been the practice of Nashville police to edit such footage before it is released to the public. (Video is embedded at the end of this post.) From a report at WPLN, Nashville Public Radio:

The three Metro police officers involved in a fatal shooting near the West Precinct Wednesday morning have been identified. And the man who was killed is tentatively ID’d as a 31-year-old from outside Birmingham. 

Police have released edited body camera footage, in what has now become standard practice for MNPD.

The video shows that K-9 Officer Richard Clemmons, who has spent eight years with the department, approached the man (whose face is blurred) as he sat in a Toyota 4Runner outside a Cricket store on Charlotte Avenue near White Bridge Road. Police had deemed the parked vehicle suspicious.

Questions: Why is a vehicle parked outside a store, even at 5 a.m., considered suspicious? Is that in line with Nashville PD policy? Did the "suspicious" designation color everything that happened next?

The video shows Clemmons told the driver to drop a knife, which is not visible from any of the camera angles. If he responded, he could not be heard on the footage. When he didn’t comply, the video shows Clemmons calling for backup. Officers Jonathan Phipps and Colin Blee arrived within minutes.

As soon as they pulled up, the video shows the man started to open the door to his SUV and run toward officers who are still shouting at him. Police say all three fired at the man who fell to the ground.  

Everyone involved appears to be white. Police have released photos of a black pocket knife they say the man was holding.

Question: Why did the initial officer call for backup? Why did the officer tell Crowley to drop the knife, when he was alone inside his own vehicle and apparently not threatening anyone? Did calling two additional officers to the scene -- with no apparent crime in progress -- escalate a minor situation into a fatal encounter?

This does seem to answer one of our questions above. The arrival of two additional officers -- with Crowley now facing three officers instead of one -- clearly seems to have escalated the situation. Also, there is this oddity: The account says Crowley was holding a knife while he was inside his vehicle, but it does not say he had the knife when he exited the vehicle and reportedly ran at police. That story changes with this account from newschannel5.com:

Metro Nashville police say three of its police officers shot and killed a man who charged at them with a knife early Wednesday morning.

The call came in shortly after 5 a.m. along Charlotte Pike in West Nashville.

Kristin Mumford with the Metro Nashville Police Department said K9 officer Richard Clemmons stopped at a Cricket Wireless store after seeing a Toyota 4Runner sitting in the parking lot at 5:05 a.m. Police said when K9 officers aren't on an active call, they conduct business checks.

When Officer Clemmons approached the SUV, he saw that the man was armed with a knife. He ordered the suspect to put down the weapon and radioed for backup.

Officer Clemmons can be heard on the bodycam video telling the man to "put the knife down." He continues saying, "C'mon man, I'm just here checking on you. Put the knife down. I'm just here to help you bro. Put the knife down... it's not worth it man."

Two additional officers arrive just before the man gets out of the SUV and charges at officers. That's when the three officers fire at the suspect and he falls to the ground.

The man was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he died.

Questions: Let's be charitable to the cops and assume a vehicle parked outside a Cricket store at 5 a.m. looks suspicious, at least a little odd. Shouldn't that suspicion fade when an officer approaches and sees one man, alone, in the SUV, clearly not bothering anyone or anything? The officer says he's there "just checking on you" and adds "I'm just here to help you, bro." If that was the case, why didn't Clemmons say, "Hey, just checking on you, man. You OK?" If that drew no response why not pull a card out of his pocket and say," This is my card, with my name and contact info on it. I'm going to slide it under your windshield wiper, and if you need help of any kind, please contact me. I'll be in the area." 

While it might seem strange to see an SUV parked outside a Cricket store at 5 a.m., I can think of several reasons a driver might wind up in such a spot. Perhaps he was driving, realized he was getting sleepy, and pulled into what appeared to be a safe spot for a nap. Perhaps he had been out with friends for a few beers, realized he was impaired, and pulled over to get off the road. Perhaps he just was not feeling well and decided to take a break from driving, in hopes he would start feeling better.

Maybe we will never know if any of these scenarios were in play, but it's hard not to wonder if the cops even considered any of this. They seemed obsessed with two things: (1) The knife, which doesn't appear to be visible at any point in the video; and (2) Shooting Crowley as quickly, and as often, as possible once he exited the vehicle -- even though Crowley never appears to get close enough to the officers to stab any of them -- even if he had a knife, which based on released images, looks more to me like a utility knife than a pocket knife.

Here are the most troubling questions of all: Why did a young man have to lose his life in a situation where, perhaps he was acting outside the norm, but there was no sign of unlawful activity on his part? Why can't cops, in an era of gross police misconduct, handle situations like this in a way that doesn't leave someone dead?

 

Joe Perkins, founder of Matrix LLC , claims in lawsuit that former employees helped create a competing entity while working for Matrix, siphoning fees and eventually launching Canopy Partners in Florida

Joe Perkins (Donald Watkins' Facebook page)

The founder of a Montgomery-based consulting group, known to some as a "dirty tricks" firm, is suing several former employees, claiming they set up entities to compete with Matrix LLC while still serving as Matrix employees. The suit also claims the former employees improperly retained Matrix trade secrets and proprietary information, including research techniques and confidential information related to the pricing of specialized communications services.

News of the lawsuit, filed in Jefferson County Circuit Court, surfaced last week in an Orlando Sentinel report about funds for "ghost candidates" in Florida state Senate races -- being traced to political operatives in Alabama. The funds wound up benefiting Republican candidates.

Prime defendant in the Perkins lawsuit is Jeff Pitts, who managed Matrix's Birmingham office and also served as the firm's chief executive officer. From the complaint, filed by Birmingham's Campbell Law Firm, which has represented Balch & Bingham in civil matters related to the North Birmingham Suprerfund bribery scandal (Complaint is embedded at the end of this post.):

Pitts created an entity called TMP Interactive in 2018 through which he operated a competing communications consulting business during his employment by Matrix. Pitts even provided services to Matrix clients but billed those clients through TMP Interactive, effectively embezzling money from and unlawfully competing with Matrix. 

Starting in 2017, Pitts . . . created various other entities -- some 501(c)(4) organizations --as vehicles to accept money from various Matrix clients.

In late 2020, Pitts informed Perkins that he wanted to resign from Matrix and form his own competing communications company. That led to the formation of Canopy Partners LLC in Plantation, FL, and Pitts took three other Matrix workers with him. From the complaint:

Upon the resignation of these employees, Matrix changed the locks on its Birmingham office and undertook an inventory of the equipment it owned and was used by . . . the former employees. . . . 

Matrix's in-house technology team realized that the computer server in the Birmingham office had been physically compromised. It appeared that someone had tried to physically destroy the server in an apparent attempt to prevent access to the electronic information it contained. This realization caused concern that Pitts and the other former employees were attempting to hide or destroy data stored on the server.

 

Ali Alexander, a right-winger with Alabama ties, is among extremists who have exploited Twitter's "libertarian" bent to gain attention and influence

Ali Alexander (center) and Alex Jones

 

Twitter has enabled the rise of right-wing extremists, including Alabama-connected Ali (Akbar) Alexander, according to an analysis by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Alexander, whose attorney is Baron Coleman of Montgomery, reportedly has been in hiding since organizing the "Stop the Steal" rally that morphed into a deadly ransacking of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Writes Michael Edison Hayden, under the headline "'We Make Mistakes': Twitter's Embrace of the Extreme Far Right":

Twitter gave far-right extremists the platform they needed to plan an attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, and the website, if it maintains its current approach, will likely enable politically motivated violence again in the future.

The following analysis lays out an introduction to observations the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has made about Twitter’s longstanding relationship with the far right. The analysis features samples of SPLC’s correspondence with Twitter about extreme far-right figures, as well as an insider’s revelations about the company’s struggles with moderation, and critical assessments of researchers from outside our organization. Tim Pool, a pro-Trump social media personality who has claimed to correspond with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in private, also told us when we reached out to him about the billionaire social media executive that he “seems very adamant that far-right figures be given unrestrained platforms.”

Twitter’s willingness to amplify extreme far-right voices has been a significant part of the company’s history. Now, those voices are one of the defining characteristics of the platform. The company created rules to prevent their users from spreading hateful content, employing automation or “bots” to boost tweets, and misleading the public about elections. Twitter does not enforce these rules with any discernible consistency. Dorsey and his staff have in fact enabled some repeat offenders, who post at a high volume on the site and have built up big followings to spread hate and disinformation. Many of these disinformation superspreaders have never faced any meaningful consequences for violating Twitter’s terms of service.

One of the loudest extreme voices belongs to Ali Alexander. Writes  Hayden:

Ali Alexander, the far-right operator who galvanized the “Stop the Steal” protests after Trump’s electoral defeat, has for years touted a personal relationship with Dorsey. Alexander told The Epoch Times, an outlet that some have criticized for proliferating reactionary propaganda, in December 2020 that he “used [his] relationships with Twitter” to promote Stop the Steal events after the company initially took steps to limit him from doing so.

“Twitter originally banned our [Stop the Steal] link,” Alexander told The Epoch Times, referring to a website used to organize those anti-democratic protests. “I used my relationships with Twitter to get that reversed.”

Dorsey praised Alexander in a 2019 HuffPost story, saying that the notorious disinformation peddler made “interesting points.” Dorsey also acknowledged that he consulted with Alexander about whether to suspend the account of Infowars’ Alex Jones. (Twitter was the last major company to suspend Jones. They did it in September 2018, a full month after a cluster of companies, including YouTube, Facebook, Spotify and Apple, had already publicly cut ties with him.) Two years after Dorsey complimented Alexander’s point of view, the Stop the Steal leader used Twitter to call for revolution.

“If they do this, everyone can guess what me and 500,000 others will do to that [Capitol] building. 1776 is always an option,” Alexander’s tweet read. He was responding to a comment hate group-linked congressperson and Twitter celebrity Marjorie Taylor Greene made about politicians taking steps to ensure that Electoral College votes would be certified on Jan. 6. (Insurrectionists yelled “1776” while storming the Capitol building that day.) On the day of the insurrection, Alexander proclaimed that he did not disavow the violence that erupted.

Twitter has done little to rein in Alexander's wildest and potentially most destructive tendencies:

Before Alexander led the political movement that eventually grew into the insurrection attempt on the U.S. Capitol, Dorsey and his team did not stop him from spreading disinformation. Ahead of the 2020 election, Alexander repeatedly promoted to his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers a campaign called #JoeBidenIsSick, which proclaimed that Joe Biden, then the Democratic nominee for president, suffered from a degenerative illness he did not actually have. Dorsey and Twitter also permitted Alexander to promote a website that sold merchandise celebrating the lies about Biden’s health.

In his last broadcast on Twitter’s livestreaming app, Periscope, Alexander threatened revenge against his perceived political opponents, saying he would “unleash a legion of angels to bring hell to our enemies.” Alexander made those comments on Jan. 10, at a time when government officials had boosted security across the country out of fears that extremists would hurt more people. Twitter finally removed him from the platform soon after.

Twitter's hands-off policy regarding extreme rhetoric is well established. Writes Hayden:

Hatewatch, the publishing arm of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, has been in dialogue with Twitter about far-right accounts for years, often as it relates to reaching out for comment on stories. During that time, Twitter has suspended individual accounts and Hatewatch has repeatedly watched the personalities who operate them return to the site under new handles. Twitter has also shown little indication that it seeks to limit the proliferation of hate or disinformation on its platform in any systemic way. On the contrary, the Twitter business model appears to hinge on instilling feelings of resentment in people and, to at least some degree, exacerbating mental illness and anxiety. Extremists who terrorize other users and exploit the site to sow chaos keep the billion-dollar corporation’s business model humming.

“People have learned [that Twitter] is not going to do anything,” James Alefantis, the owner of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C., told Hatewatch in a phone conversation in February. Far-right personalities targeted Alefantis and his employees with harassment for more than four years, after Twitter enabled them to spread disinformation in the form of the infamous #Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Twitter has allowed some of the most infamous promoters of #Pizzagate to continue to push lies and hate on its platform years later, rewarding them with growing audiences. “The message ‘There’s nothing you can do [about Twitter]’ has been fully integrated into the American brain.”

Lack of meaningful moderation is part of the problem at Twitter:

Twitter’s userbase has made CEO Jack Dorsey into one of the richest men on earth. He’s worth over $10 billion, thanks to his social media site, his financial services company Square and other projects. In addition to Twitter and Square, Dorsey also publicly supports the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which he did in a series of tweets published on Jan. 13. That thread drifted through different topics, including Twitter’s decision to suspend former President Trump’s handle, @realDonaldTrump, following the Capitol violence his company helped enable.

Dorsey tweeted in January: “Yes, we all need to look critically at inconsistencies of our policy and enforcement. Yes, we need to look at how our service might incentivize distraction and harm. Yes, we need more transparency in our moderation operations.” But, Dorsey concluded in the same tweet thread, “All this can’t erode a free and open global internet.”

Dorsey’s vision of “a free and open global internet” appears to leave room for disinformation specialists to use Twitter’s traffic to destabilize democracy in the U.S. and attempt to push the country in a more illiberal direction. A source who is familiar with the inner workings of Twitter’s moderation told Hatewatch that Dorsey and some of the upper-level employees in his organization approach their work with an “activist, libertarian” ideology that drives them to allow people to push lies and hatred on the website. (Hatewatch is not naming its source to protect them from potential retaliation.)

The same source said many Twitter employees are “well-meaning,” and do not necessarily subscribe to the same libertarian ideology as the company’s leadership does. But the source also told Hatewatch that Twitter’s moderators “are powerless” and bound to decisions made by an ideologically driven leadership team. The moderators “feel pressure to follow [guidelines and instructions] to a T,” the source told Hatewatch. High-level decision-making about moderation policy comes from a different team, which tells moderators how to handle accounts. But the two teams are siloed, the source said, and rarely interact directly. Managers of Twitter’s moderators base the performance reviews of their staff on “how quickly they can clear their queues [of reported tweets and accounts] and how many [complaints] they can process in a day.”

 What drives Twitter's "activist libertarian" ideology?

More ideologically driven managers at Twitter who decide who gets to operate on the platform, the source told Hatewatch, “view themselves as being the last line of protection from America becoming China.” It’s the kind of absolutist worldview the fringe conspiracy theorists at Infowars sometimes voice.

Jack Dorsey himself “follows” or has followed on Twitter extreme far right and reactionary figures, as Hatewatch will detail later in this analysis. Though Dorsey follows nearly 5,000 accounts of varying political alignment, his connections to these far-right accounts show he cannot in good faith claim ignorance about the extremists who exploited their site in the runup up to the Jan. 6 attack. Not only did Twitter “verify” many of these personalities, but their CEO also publicly interacted with some of them. Beyond the people detailed here, Dorsey also once followed Stefan Molyneux, a social-media personality Twitter permanently suspended from the platform in 2020. Molyneux argued on Twitter that white men were genetically predisposed to be more intelligent than women and non-white people at the time Dorsey followed his account, Hatewatch found. (Molyneux has denied being a white supremacist, despite repeatedly remarking that non-white people are predisposed to be less intelligent than white people.)

Becca Lewis is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University who studies the way social media fosters and incentivizes far-right movements and enables them to spread propaganda. Lewis told Hatewatch that the source’s evaluation of Twitter’s apparent rightward ideological bent does not surprise her. Lewis noted to Hatewatch that major tech companies such as Twitter were founded on a libertarian ethos that today they disguise as being ideologically neutral.

“[Twitter] has an individualist view of speech,” Lewis said, referring to the belief that speech serves the will of the individual, rather than society. “It still deeply influences the way all of these social media companies do content moderation.”

Twitter aims to keep readers clicking, much the way casinos want to keep people gambling:

The analytics company Similar Web lists Twitter as the sixth most trafficked website in the U.S., just behind Facebook, Amazon and Yahoo. Twitter, like all other major social media companies, designs its product to keep people tethered to it, hoping the screen time will result in people clicking. The company gamifies discourse to achieve that effect, targeting human psychology in much the same way casinos make choices in design to keep people gambling. Critics of Twitter, including SPLC, underscore the degree to which the traffic-hungry design produces the side effect of driving right-leaning users toward increasingly inflammatory content. A person may come to the site seeking to follow a conservative politician, then eventually be directed by Twitter’s algorithm to follow an account pushing white nationalist talking points.

“Even if the algorithm were removed, Twitter is filled with horrible content,” Megan Squire, a professor of computer science at Elon University and a Senior Fellow with Southern Poverty Law Center, told Hatewatch for this analysis. “Even if they removed the algorithm, the problem is what Twitter allows on its site. Inventing algorithms to promote that content is adding fuel on the fire.”

Twitter's "who to follow" feature often leads to the accounts of extremists:

One example of how Twitter’s algorithm drags people to find what Squire calls “horrible content” is the degree to which the site regularly recommends users to follow white supremacists and other far-right extremists. Hatewatch found dozens of examples of Twitter recommending that people follow extremists, sometimes in a slate of three accounts at one time. In one example, Twitter recommended in a “Who to follow” section the white nationalist talk show Red Ice, as well as one of its hosts, Henrik Palmgren, and white nationalist Scott Greer. YouTube banned Red Ice TV in 2019, as did Facebook, and Palmgren and his cohost moved their talk show to a separate, independently operated video hosting site. By advertising this harder-to-find location on Twitter, Red Ice retained much of the mainstream visibility they should have lost at that time.

As for Greer, The Daily Caller fired him in 2018 in response to pressure over his ties to the white supremacist movement. According to archives, Twitter verified Greer’s account in 2015, when he still worked for The Daily Caller, and then did not remove his verification badge after the firing. In 2015, Greer had under 2,000 followers. He jammed the site with content, tweeting close to 45,000 times in under nine years, not including the possibility of deleted posts, and now boasts over 80,000 followers. Greer runs one of the many extant accounts on Twitter that promoted lies about the 2020 election, tweeting “fake news” after CNN projected Joe Biden as the winner.

Greer’s Twitter display name also “trended” on Jan. 13, a week after the insurrection, when he disparaged Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., along racial lines. The “Trending on Twitter” section displays the subjects or concepts that are being tweeted about in high volume on the site. People who provoke outrage on Twitter are commonly rewarded with increased visibility in the Trending section after site users react negatively to their comments.

In essence, Twitter is a game, and extremists have learned to exploit it:

Another way extremists exploit Twitter’s Trending section is to deliberately attach trending keywords to lies in order to gain unwarranted attention or to change people’s perceptions of an event as it is happening. Joan Donovan, the Research Director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, told Hatewatch that one recent example of far-right Twitter posters manipulating the Trending section during a breaking news event happened on Jan. 6. Far-right posters used the feature to falsely suggest that antifa demonstrators attacked the Capitol, a lie that was repeated on the House floor later that day.

“When a breaking news event happens, there is this run towards whatever hashtag people [are coalescing around] in that moment. And it’s ripe for planting misinformation,” Donovan said in a video chat. “Nowhere was that more consequential than the Jan. 6 insurrection, because they were able to get that narrative to circulate very quickly that antifa was behind the Capitol [violence]. And now we are still reckoning with the consequences. Many people believe that it wasn’t Trump supporters at those gates.”

Motion in gambling-related lawsuit claims Alabama AG Steve Marshall has $735,000 worth of conflicts and should step down from defending state senator

Steve Marshall

Three Greene County charities claim Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has conflicts of interest that should force him and his office to recuse themselves from a gambling-related lawsuit. 

In a motion filed by Montgomery attorney Tommy Gallion, the charities allege the Poarch Creek Indians (PCI) have given Marshall more than $735,000 in "dark money" campaign contributions to help further PCI's bid to establish a gaming monopoly in Alabama. Because of the conflict, Marshall and his office should step aside as counsel for State Sen. Bobby Singleton, a defendant in the case. Writes Gallion in the motion:

Most of this money is referred to as "dark money" because of how it is hidden from the public. This dark money was funneled from PCI to the Republican Attorney General's Association (RAGA). During this period, Marshall allegedly was the head of RAGA.

In May 2018, PCI Tribal Counsel leader Robert McGhee allegedly laundered PCI's dark money through the Business Council of Alabama, then headed by Republican operative Billy Canary.

Gallion goes on to state that Marshall "has a blatant conflict of interest in this matter and may be joined as a defendant if discovery reveals he was and/or is directly involved with the monopoly and restraint of trade as alleged in the complaint, with exhibits."

The motion claims defendants Singleton and Greenetrack, with assistance from Marshall, joined forces in the 2021 legislative session in an effort to forge a monopoly for PCI. The plaintiff charities say such an arrangement would put them out of business. From the Gallion motion (The full motion is embedded at the end of this post.):

In addition to Marshall's open support on behalf of PCI, he is assisting his uncle, Arthur Mothershed. Mothershed is the chief financial officer of Creek Indian Enterprises, a business owned and controlled by PCI. As CFO of PCI, Mothershed is responsible for the overall fiscal health and stability of PCI tribal enterprises. This responsibility includes contributions to various political candidates, which include his nephew, Marshall. 

Marshall has openly used the Attorney General's Office to assist Uncle Mothershed, who has used his nephew to illegally protect PCI and put the plaintiffs out of business. This illegal quid pro quo is unconstitutional and a blatant conflict of interest. All of Marshall's actions have caused the plintiffs financial harm, and if he and his office are not stopped from representing defendant Singleton at tax at taxpayer expense, the other defendants and PCI will continue their attempts to destroy plaintiffs.

As chief law enforcement officer of the state of Alabama, Marshall has a sworn duty to not only enforce the law, but certainly not to violate the law. . . . Based on information and belief, Marshall's client, defendant Singleton, and perhaps himself will need to be investigated and brought before a Montgomery County grand jury.

My wife and I know about excessive force from cops, and so does NBA guard Sterling Brown, who has settled a lawsuit for $750,000 in Milwaukee

 

 

A professional basketball player for the Houston Rockets has settled a police-brutality lawsuit for $750,000. How did Sterling Brown, a 6-5 fourth-year guard from Southern Methodist University, run afoul of the Milwaukee PD while a member of the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks? It started with some careless parking on Brown's part and turned into a physical confrontation. From a report at CNN:

On January 26, 2018, Brown was tased by police and wrestled to the ground by several officers after an officer said he had parked across two handicapped spots at a drugstore. Brown was never charged with a crime.

 

Body-cam footage (see video above) reviewed by CNN showed a Milwaukee police officer stepping on Brown's ankle during his arrest, while others mocked Brown and any potential civil rights complaint he might make. 

The Milwaukee Bucks issued a statement last November supporting Brown's commitment to use the "horrifying abuse and injustice" as a catalyst to make change in the community. Brown now plays for the Houston Rockets.

 

The Milwaukee Police Department referred CNN to the joint statement between the city and Brown.

The issue of excessive force by law enforcement hits close to home here at Legal Schnauzer. As long-time readers likely know, deputies in Greene County broke my wife Carol's arm during an unlawful eviction in September 9, 2015. We filed a civil-rights/personal injury lawsuit in the Western District of Missouri on Sept. 4, 2020, meeting the state's five-year statute of limitations for such claims. Several factors have delayed the complaint, but we hope the drawn-out process starts gaining momentum shortly. One of the main delays came from the Greene County Sheriff's Office (GCSO) bringing false charges against Carol for "assault on a law enforcement officer," which she had to fight for the better part of three years. The GCSO's own documents show there was no probable cause to bring the charge, much less to take it to trial, but Sheriff Jim Arnott caused the bogus charge to be brought, likely because he was on the scene and knew one of his officers had injured Carol -- a classic "cover charge" in the vernacular of those who know the ugly secrets of American cops.

Being a world-class athlete might have helped Sterling Brown escape more serious injury. From CNN:

NBA player Sterling Brown's $750,000 settlement was approved Tuesday by the City of Milwaukee Common Council following a lawsuit stemming from a 2018 altercation where he was tased, tackled, and stepped on by city police officers.

The former Milwaukee Bucks player brought a civil rights lawsuit in federal court claiming Milwaukee police used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment, according to a letter from Milwaukee's Office of the City Attorney to Milwaukee's Common Council.

 

The Common Council approved the resolution authorizing the settlement 14-0 on Tuesday, with one abstention, according to the council website.

 

The settlement did not admit that Brown's constitutional rights were violated but the city and police department issued an apology. 

 

"The City of Milwaukee and MPD apologize for the encounter and actions between Mr. Brown and MPD officers on January 26, 2018," Brown and the city said in a joint statement. "The City further recognizes that the incident escalated in an unnecessary manner despite Mr. Brown's calm behavior."

 

The statement said the officer who initiated the incident has been reassigned from patrol responsibilities. Additionally, body-camera footage of the encounter is being used to train officers. The department will also work with Brown on community "education and outreach projects." The city is to prepare a revised anti-racist policing policy within the MPD, according to the statement.

What issues were at the heart of Brown's lawsuit? CNN reports:

The lawsuit filed on behalf of Brown in 2018 states the altercation began as he left a drugstore on January 26 and found an officer -- identified in the lawsuit as Officer Joseph Grams -- outside his car, which was parked across two handicapped parking spots.

 

Grams allegedly asked Brown, who was 22 at the time, for his license before telling him to back up and shoving him. Brown responded by telling the officer not to touch him several times. 

Several officers responded after Grams called for backup, according to the lawsuit and body-cam video released in the case.

 

After three cars were seen arriving on scene, the officer walked up to them and said he only wanted one extra patrol. He also told one of his colleagues that Brown was getting in his face, the video showed. 

At least one car left and others stayed before multiple officers gathered around Brown to ask him questions. At one point, an officer yelled at Brown to take his hands out of his pockets, and Brown said he had "stuff" in his pocket.

 

Other officers grabbed the athlete and pulled him to the ground, before he was tased.

 

According to the lawsuit, in addition to discriminating against Brown because he's Black and violating his rights by treating a parking violation as a criminal offense, officers also failed to read Brown his Miranda rights.

 

Some officers turned off their body cams during parts of the confrontation, the suit said.

 

The lawsuit alleged, among other things, unlawful arrest, excessive use of force and violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. It also accused the officers of collaborating to conceal their actions.

 

The Milwaukee Police Association initially defended the officers who arrested Brown in 2018, calling use of force "a necessary component of policing" and slamming city leaders for failing to defend the officers.

 

After the body-cam footage was released to the public, the union softened its tone and said it welcomed "appropriate review and oversight" of the matter.

 

After the incident, two sergeants were suspended without pay -- for 10 and 15 days, respectively -- for "failing to be a role model for professional police service."

 

One other officer was also suspended for two days for "failing to treat a member of the public with courtesy and professionalism." Eight others were scheduled to receive remedial training in professional communications, officials said in 2018.

Dark money that boosted Florida GOP candidates traces to Alabama operatives, including ex employees of Matrix LLC, with its ties to Alabama Power

 

Dark money that benefited Republican candidates in Florida has been traced to former employees of a  Montgomery-based consulting firm with longstanding ties to Alabama Power and Southern Company, according to a report at the Orlando Sentinel. The case reportedly has the attention of criminal investigators in Florida, and it has a civil component -- in the form of a lawsuit that Matrix LLC founder Joe Perkins has brought against his former employees. Write Sentinel reporters Jason Garcia and Annie Martin:

The source of more than half a million dollars spent last year promoting “ghost” candidates in key state Senate races remained a mystery even as the scandal rocked Florida politics, but newly public records suggest the money is tied to political players in Alabama.

At issue is $550,000 donated last year by a dark-money nonprofit to a pair of political committees that promoted little-known independent candidates in three key Senate races: Senate District 9 in Central Florida and Senate Districts 37 and 39 in South Florida. The money paid for nearly identical mailers apparently tailored to persuade Democratic-leaning voters to support the independent candidates in each of the three races, all of which were ultimately won by Republicans.

Authorities in Miami-Dade County have since charged two people in connection with one of those races, including former Republican state Sen. Frank Artiles, who is accused of bribing one of the independent candidates to run. Prosecutors say it was part of a plot to siphon support away from the Democratic candidate in District 37 and tilt the election to the Republican, Sen. Ileana Garcia of Miami.

During the election, the two political committees filed campaign finance reports showing they got all of their money from the same donor. They initially identified that donor as Proclivity Inc., a nonprofit set up in Delaware and based out of a UPS store in Atlanta. But they later changed their reports to say the donor was Grow United Inc., a nonprofit set up in Delaware but based out of a UPS store in Denver.

But investigators in the Artiles case have obtained records that suggest the nonprofits had ties to consultants working at the time for Matrix LLC, an Alabama-based communication and political consulting firm.

That's where Joe Perkins enters the picture:

According to records from a separate civil lawsuit, those consultants all left Matrix at the end of last year amid a falling out with the firm’s founder, Joe Perkins, a Democratic strategist and behind-the-scenes power broker. Matrix recently sued its ex-employees — who now work together at a new consulting shop in Florida — accusing them of diverting fees from clients to businesses and nonprofits they set up for themselves.

Based in Montgomery, Alabama’s state capital, Matrix says it specializes in “assisting clients with highly sensitive and crisis situations.” There’s no indication the firm or Perkins are targets of investigators.

Perkins said he didn’t know anything about Proclivity or Grow United. He also said he had “no direct knowledge” of whether his former employees were involved in the campaigns. He declined to elaborate further, citing his lawsuit against them, to which they have not yet responded.

“The extent of any involvement that these other folks may or may not have had starts to get into the substance of my lawsuit,” Perkins said.

How did Sentinel reporters trace the dark money? It wasn't easy, with the funds following a winding trail that led to Alabama:

The Florida Center for Government Accountability, a government watchdog group, helped the Orlando Sentinel obtain and review documents to trace the dark money’s path to Florida.

“It was extremely difficult to unmask this trail of records, which does not appear to be unintentional,” said Michael Barfield, the center’s director of public access.

State authorities raided former state lawmaker Frank Artiles home in Palmetto Bay on Wednesday, March 17, 2021. Prosecutors say Artiles bribed a friend to run as a spoiler candidate in a South Florida state Senate race.

How exactly do the funds tie to Alabama? That's complicated:

At the time of last year’s elections, little was publicly known about Proclivity or Grow United except they were both set up in 2019 by Richard Alexander, according to Delaware corporate records, and they were 501c4 “social welfare” organizations, according to campaign finance records.

But investigators in the Artiles case obtained a copy of an $80,000 check from Grow United to one of the political committees used to promote the independent Senate candidates in Florida. The check, which Alexander signed, was issued by a bank in Alabama.

And separate tax and campaign finance records show that there is a Richard Alexander in Alabama associated with other nonprofits that have made significant campaign contributions in Florida.

For instance, a nonprofit called “Mothers for Moderation” donated $230,000 in August 2018 to the Florida Democratic Party. On its campaign finance reports, the party listed Mothers for Moderation’s address as Richard Alexander’s home address in Cullman, Ala.

In addition, Mothers for Moderation’s principal officer is Stephane Egan, according to a tax return. She is Richard Alexander’s sister.

Alexander and Egan have another sister: April Odom,the former chief spokesperson for Birmingham’s mayor who was working last year for Matrix LLC. According to litigation records, one of Odom’s colleagues at Matrix at the time was a Tallahassee-based consultant named Abigail MacIver.

And investigators in the Artiles case also obtained messages that appear to show that Alex Alvarado, the Republican political operative in Tallahassee who ran the two political committees that promoted the independent candidates, was working with both Alexander and someone identified in his phone as “Abbie M.”

"Abbie M" appears to be a key figure in all of this:

The person communicating with Abbie M isn’t identified in the records. But the messages were released as part of a larger batch of records that also include dozens of text messages from Alvarado to two other women involved in his political committees.

The texts with Abbie M began Oct. 6, a few days after Alvarado’s political committees received the $550,000 and a few days before they had to file campaign finance reports with the state.

“Get me C4 info when possible please,” an outgoing message said.

“Jeff was supposed to send to you. Let me follow up,” Abbie M responded.

A short time later, Abbie M sent the name, address and tax forms for Proclivity Inc., the organization Alvarado’s political committees initially claimed as their donor. Those details were included in the public campaign finance reports Alvarado’s political committees filed later that week.

In December, the records show Alexander emailed Alvarado to ask for a “correction,” writing that the source of the committees’ funding should have been listed in elections records as Grow United, not Proclivity. Alvarado responded he would make the switch “immediately.”

The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office refused to confirm whether Abbie M is Abigail MacIver or answer questions about the evidence made public so far. But Abigail MacIver’s boss at the time was then-Matrix CEO Jeff Pitts.

Alabama operatives tied to the scheme were not anxious to answer questions from the Sentinel: 

Pitts declined to answer questions about his involvement in last year’s Florida Senate races. MacIver, Odom and Alexander could not be reached for comment. Pitts, MacIver and Odom are now working for Canopy Partners, a Florida-based consulting firm that Pitts co-owns, according to litigation records — and all three are among the ex-Matrix employees named in Matrix’s civil lawsuit.

“The firm has always followed the letter and spirit of the law and any insinuation to the contrary is absolutely false,” Al Vreeland, a lawyer representing Canopy Partners, said in a statement provided by a spokesperson.

Matrix has a deep history with some of the biggest names in the Alabama business world:

One of Matrix’s biggest clients has been Alabama Power, a subsidiary of Atlanta-based utility company Southern Co. Records show it also represented the Alabama teachers union and oil-drilling giant BP America.

In its lawsuit, Matrix accuses Pitts and the other former employees of conspiring with one particular client to cheat Matrix out of fees. The lawsuit doesn’t identify that client by name but says it is a publicly traded company based in Juno Beach.

Based on Securities and Exchange Commission records, there is only one publicly traded company headquartered in Juno Beach: NextEra Energy, the parent company of Florida’s largest utility, Florida Power & Light, which turned a $2.9 billion profit last year.

Under Simpson’s leadership, the Senate Republican campaign committee paid more than $7 million during the 2020 election cycle to Data Targeting Inc., a political consulting firm tapped to oversee state Senate campaigns for Republicans. And Data Targeting gave a $15,000-a-month consulting contract to Artiles to work on Senate elections in Miami-Dade County. It also reimbursed Artiles for expenses that line up with steps authorities say he took to orchestrate the campaign of the independent candidate in Senate District 37.

Meanwhile, the head of Associated Industries’ political council is Ryan Tyson, who is also the executive director of another nonprofit called Let’s Preserve the American Dream that operates out of AIF’s headquarters in Tallahassee. Records show Alvarado works with Tyson and Let’s Preserve the American Dream, which paid Artiles $5,000 a month since 2017. Tyson said his nonprofit recently ended its contract with Artiles.

A spokesperson for NextEra declined to answer questions about whether the company had any role in promoting spoiler candidates in last year’s Senate races.

“All of Florida Power & Light Company’s corporate political and charitable contributions, which are funded by shareholders or employees, not customers, comply with all applicable laws and are properly disclosed,” spokesperson Bill Orlove said. “The company does not discuss its individual political contributions.