What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.
This video clearly demonstrates how racist America is as a country and how far we have to go to become a country that is civilized and actually values equal justice. We must not rest until this goal is achieved. I do not want my great grandchildren to live in a country like we have today. I wish for them to live in a country where differences of race and culture are not ignored but valued as a part of what makes America great.
(Arguably the worst President since his fellow murderer Andrew Johnson)
The Justice Department escalated an effort to seize and inspect old ballots in Fulton County, where President Trump was booked in his criminal election interference case.
Election workers during the Fulton County ballot recount in Atlanta in November 2020.Nicole Craine for The New York Times
The Trump administration sued Fulton County, Ga., on Thursday in an effort to seize and inspect old ballots from the 2020 election, as the administration continues to question President Trump’s loss in that race to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Trump has for years fixated on his defeat in that election and has continued to promote his lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Since returning to office in January, he has embarked on a wide-ranging campaign to settle scoresrelated to his effort to overturn the 2020 election — most prominently issuing a sweeping grant of clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Fulton County, which is largely nonwhite and voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Biden, was one of the main focuses of Mr. Trump’s effort to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election. After leaving office, Mr. Trump and some of his allies were criminally charged with election interference in Georgia, and the former president was booked at the Fulton County jail.
Some discrepancies in Fulton County’s recount process did emerge after the 2020 election, but the state’s Republican leadership ultimately affirmed Mr. Biden’s victory there with a manual recount. Mr. Trump then pressured Georgia’s top elections official to “find” him enough votes to overturn his loss in the state.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, a strident Trump supporter and conservative activist who runs the Justice Department’s civil rights division, subpoenaed Fulton County’s 2020 ballots in October, but the county resisted turning them over. In the lawsuit filed on Thursday, the Justice Department accused county officials of violating the Civil Rights Act by not handing over the ballots.
Democrats fear that a new inspection of 2020 ballots may be used to stoke suspicions of ballot fraud if the 2026 elections do not go Republicans’ way. The Trump administration has repeatedly argued, without reliable evidence, that the 2020 election was affected by mass voter fraud.
On the same day that the Justice Department delivered its broadside of election lawsuits, Mr. Trump announced that he was pardoning Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk who was convicted of tampering with voting machines in an effort to prove Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election. However, the president has no ability to pardon the state crime that Ms. Peters was convicted of, and therefore no legal power to free her from a state prison.
Ms. Peters’ supporters have sought to convince Mr. Trump that she is an important potential witness for the administration’s pursuit of evidence of mass voter fraud in the 2020 election. The pardon that Mr. Trump issued last week was broadly worded, including offenses “related to election integrity or security” from January 2020 to December 2021.
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.“
In Trump’s Justice Dept., Failing in Court Might Be Better Than Bucking the Boss
"Thursday demonstrated an emerging reality for President Trump: Commanding the Justice Department is not the same as controlling the justice system.
The White House was served a legal rebuke this week when federal grand jurors in Alexandria, Va., rejected the Justice Department’s push to indict Letitia James, the New York attorney general, on mortgage-related charges for the second time in a week.Vincent Alban/The New York Times
Revenge, it turns out, is a dish best served with evidence.
It was a moment worth marking. Federal grand juries almost never decline to bring an indictment once, much less twice. Such rejections, known as “no true bills,” have been exceedingly rare, a misfire that often stigmatizes the prosecutors involved.
They are becoming more common, and accepted, in a department where face-planting in court might be preferable to facing down the boss.
The rejection in the James case was not the only notable legal rebuke that day of actions demanded by the White House. A few hours earlier, a federal judge in Marylandfreed Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, dealing a blow to the department’s monthslong effort to prosecute and deport an immigrant in a test of Mr. Trump’s claim that he can expel whomever he wants, wherever and whenever he wants, with minimal or no due process.
“I think many of these cases are nationalized for the public and there is a pushback on Trump and his targeting of individuals,” said John P. Fishwick, who served as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia from 2015 to 2017.
“This is a major shift,” he added.
Thursday demonstrated an emerging reality for Mr. Trump and his aide Stephen Miller, a driving force behind the maximalist approach to presidential power: Commanding the Justice Department is not quite the same as controlling the justice system.
Increasingly, federal juries and judges have rejected cases presented by the department for lack of sufficient supporting evidence, or because prosecutors committed major procedural or legal errors in their scramble to appease the White House.
In recent months, grand jurors in Washington spurned efforts to indict or ultimately convict anti-Trump activists: a woman who posted a threat against Mr. Trump on Instagram and, most famously, a Justice Department employeewho tossed a sandwich at federal officers.
The prosecutors in the James case do not even hold the administration’s swing-and-miss record. Thatdistinction appears to belong to Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington,whose office failed three timesto obtain an indictment against a woman who pushed an F.B.I. agent against a wall during a protest over the summer.
Even when Ms. Pirro’s subordinates changed course and moved forward on misdemeanor charges that did not require an indictment, a trial jury shut them down again, acquitting the woman altogether.
It is hard to know how many no-true-bill decisions have been rendered because grand jury deliberations are shielded by secrecy laws. But incases brought in other citieswhere Mr. Trump has flooded the streets with federal officers, grand jurors have also declined to bring charges. In Los Angeles,a MAGA-aligned prosecutor failed to obtain charges against an activistwho had protested the administration’s immigration enforcement.
A federal judge in Maryland freed Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom the Justice Department has been trying for months to prosecute and deport.Stephanie Scarbrough/Associated Press
Mr. Trump’s political appointees at the department have publicly lashed out at “activist” judges and groused about anti-Trump bias among jurors in the Democratic-dominated capital.
But there is also a sense inside the department, less openly articulated than tacitly understood, that the system provides a pressure valve for marginal cases — allowing prosecutors to prove they made a good-faith effort to execute the president’s orders, regardless of the outcome.
Nor is it entirely clear that successful prosecutions are the only goal. One top official, Ed Martin, who leads the so-called weaponization working group responsible for investigating those who investigated Mr. Trump, has suggested that naming and shaming targets is a legitimate end in itself.
If the president’s opponents have celebrated recent setbacks as a sign of his diminishing power, Mr. Trump does not seem to have gotten the memo. If anything, he has accelerated his use — or abuse, in the view of critics — of clemency powers to negate the verdicts of juries and judges on behalf of political allies.
And the Justice Department continues to investigate several high-profile Trump targets, including Senator Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat. In recent weeks, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Floridahas expanded a nebulous and far-reaching investigationinto what the president’s most fervent loyalists have described as a “grand conspiracy” by officials in the Obama and Biden administrations to destroy Mr. Trump.
The Justice Department has a longstanding policy of not commenting on grand jury proceedings. But two people with knowledge of the situation said the White House was still pushing to indict Ms. James, and that Justice Department officials were considering other options to fulfill Mr. Trump’s demands. The people requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.
Some of those pressing for Ms. James’s prosecution blamed the failure to secure an indictment on resistance from career prosecutors, and a judge’s ruling that Lindsey Halligan, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had been illegally appointed.
“Two grand juries didn’t ‘reject the evidence,’”wrote Sam Antar, a felon-turned-activist who has been among Ms. James’s most vocal critics. “They heard a presentation from the same career prosecutor who never wanted to bring the case in the first place. If you want a non-indictment, you present a non-case.”
Nonetheless, career prosecutors and Trump-appointed department officials who reviewed the evidence thought the case was far too weak to present to a grand jury. Ms. Halligan’s predecessor, Erik S. Siebert, found insufficient evidence to bring charges against her, and had raised similar concerns about a potential case against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director.
Mr. Trump forced him out, and hastily replaced him with Ms. Halligan, a former insurance lawyer with no prosecutorial experience. She quickly obtained indictments against Ms. James and Mr. Comey, before they were tossed out by a judge who ruled she had been illegally appointed.
The release of Mr. Abrego Garcia, which came after the White House vowed that he would never walk free on U.S. soil, capped an extraordinary 10-month legal saga that embroiled the Justice Department in countless hours of writing briefs and attending court hearings.
And in the end, the order letting him out of custody was based, at least in part, on an embarrassing technicality. The initial immigration judge who handled the case had never issued a formal order to remove him from the country, and the Justice Department had not bothered to check.
But the decision, issued by Judge Paula Xinis in Federal District Court in Maryland, also took the Trump administration to task for something much more serious: holding Mr. Abrego Garcia in immigration detention for months but never following through on its repeated promises to re-deport him. Judge Xinis found the administration’s failures particularly troubling because Mr. Abrego Garcia had agreed to be sent to Costa Rica but officials refused to let him go there, proposing instead to expel him to a series of African countries to which he had no ties.
Andrew Rossman, one of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, hailed Judge Xinis’s ruling as an example of the court system doing what it was designed to do.
“Today’s decision granting Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release is a victory not just for one Maryland man but for everyone,” Mr. Rossman said on Thursday. “We’re gratified by the court’s ruling upholding due process and the rule of law.”
But the administration, taking the position it often has when rulings do not go its way, attacked Judge Xinis personally.
“The White House, the administration oppose this activism from a judge who is really acting as a judicial activist, which unfortunately we have seen in many cases across the country,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said.
The Trump administration has rarely been willing to live with adverse rulings, almost always pressing forward aggressively with appeals or other attempts to undo a negative decision.
In Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case, officials immediately fixed the lack of an order to remove him from the country by obtaining one overnight from an immigration judge.
Then the administration instructed Mr. Abrego Garcia to show up for an appointment with immigration officials on Friday morning — a move that so worried his lawyers that they convinced Judge Xinis to issue a new order forbidding the authorities from simply rearresting their client.
In the end, while their concerns were real, the consequences were less than dire. Mr. Abrego Garcia left his appointment without so much as a hitch.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump."
“A white Cinnabon worker in Wisconsin was fired after a video surfaced showing her using a racial slur against two Black customers. Despite the company’s condemnation, a GiveSendGo crowdfunding campaign for the worker raised over $130,000, with some donors expressing support for her and promoting white supremacy. This incident follows a similar pattern seen earlier this year, highlighting the ongoing debate surrounding race, social media, and public backlash.
On a video that went viral, the worker, who is white, can be seen calling two Black customers an epithet. The campaign to give her money echoes the reaction to a similar incident this year.
When video of an argument between a white worker at a Cinnabon store and two Black customers began to circulate online last week, it seemed to fall into a troubling but familiar genre.
The employee at the northern Wisconsin shop can be heard calling the customers a racial slur. She makes an obscene gesture. “I am racist,” the worker declares. Cinnabon soon fired the worker, saying her actions and statements were “completely unacceptable.”
But what happened next veered from the way many viral moments of outrage play out online: While many on social media condemned the worker’s words, others leaped to her defense. And for at least the second time in recent months, donors offered money to someone caught being racist. By Tuesday, a campaign for the fired employee, who was not named by Cinnabon, had raised more than $130,000.
That crowdfunding page is hosted on GiveSendGo, a website that says it aims to “share the Hope of Jesus through crowdfunding to everyone who comes to our platform.”
The person who created the page describes the former Cinnabon worker as a hard-working mother, adding that “No White person should lose their job for refusing to be harassed by Somalians.”
Some who donated offered notes of encouragement to the woman, whom they saw as being singled out unfairly. They also promoted white supremacy and condemned immigrants.
The woman believed to be the fired employee did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, Alex Shipley, communications director for GiveSendGo, said that the company did not celebrate harmful speech but was providing a space for expression. “Our role is not to be a place of judgment, but to allow people to turn to their communities for support.”
A rival page on GoFundMe, created by a woman who said on that site that she was the cousin of one of the Somali customers, is seeking contributions to help the Somalis pursue legal action. It has raised about $6,400 so far.The person hosting that campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
GiveSendGo is also the platform for a crowdfunding page to raise money for a woman in Rochester, Minn., who called a child of Somali descent a racial epithet on a playground earlier this year. That incident was also recorded on video, and it appears to show the woman, Shiloh Hendrix, who is white, acknowledging that she used the slur.
Ms. Hendrix was cited by the city in August for disorderly conduct in the incident; the prosecuting attorney said a court date was pending. The fund-raising campaign for her has totaled more than $800,000.
Ms. Hendrix’s attorney, Brian Karalus, said that incident was different than the one at Cinnabon. “My client, in my opinion, was the victim in that case, despite her language,” he said, adding that she was upset at the time because she thought the person filming was trying to instigate a fight. That’s not the same, he said, as someone working in the customer service industry.
“You should treat the client with kindness even if they’re rude,” said Mr. Karalus, who added that he thought the disorderly conduct complaint would be dismissed.
It’s unclear what started the confrontation at the Cinnabon in Ashwaubenon, Wis., a suburb of Green Bay. But the company said in a statement that the video was “deeply troubling” and that the employee “was immediately terminated by the franchise owner.”
Jennifer Chudy, an associate professor of political science at Wellesley College, said fund-raising efforts like these reflect the conservative backlash to the nationwide protests about race that followed the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
“The political winds have changed so undeniably that these kinds of things can happen, and not only happen but receive validation,” she said.
Steven Hahn, a history professor at New York University, said that the funding campaigns show that viral videos and social media can be harnessed by people of varying political beliefs.
“The amazing thing about this is some of the ways in which social media transformed the whole landscape,” Dr. Hahn said. “We wouldn’t know about so many of the brutal assaults on Black men and women by the police and other law enforcement were it not for phone recordings.”
But social media also allows people to organize and financially support the politics of racial resentment, Dr. Hahn added.Some white people, he said, feel that they’re the ones who’ve been discriminated against. “Now they have platforms.”
Video of the slur directed at the Somali pair comes at a time when Somali immigrants have experienced increasing anti-immigrant sentiment. Last week, President Trump went on a xenophobic tirade against Somali immigrants while launching a new ICE operation primarily targeting Somalis in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, saying he did not want them in the country.
Dr. Chudy said views expressed by officials about protecting one group of people and rejecting another can have a noticeable effect.
“There’s a lot of political science research that suggests when elites say things, people follow,” she said.
Kitty Bennett and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Clyde McGrady reports for The Times on how race and identity is shaping American culture. He is based in Washington.“
“Speaker Mike Johnson’s control over the House is weakening as rank-and-file Republicans increasingly use discharge petitions to bypass his leadership and force votes on legislation he opposes. This tactic, once rare, has been used three times this year, including a recent vote to overturn a Trump executive order. The maneuver has given Democrats significant influence over the legislative agenda, highlighting Johnson’s difficulties in maintaining party unity.
The speaker has repeatedly lost his grip on the House floor thanks to a once rare parliamentary maneuver that G.O.P. members are increasingly using to force action on legislation.
Speaker Mike Johnson’s hold on his razor-thin majority has become increasingly slippery, as rank-and-file Republicans flout his wishes.Eric Lee for The New York Times
In the House of Representatives, the speaker controls everything, from office space to what legislation can get a vote on the House floor. But lately, time and again, Speaker Mike Johnson appears to have lost his grip.
It happened on Thursday, when Mr. Johnson was forced to stand by, powerless to stop a group of breakaway Republicans from teaming up with Democrats to pass what amounted to a rebuke of President Trump, delivered by a legislative body run by his own party.
In a 231-to-195 vote, the House approved a bill by Representative Jared Golden of Maine, a conservative Democrat, that would overturn a Trump executive order that stripped union protections from scores of federal workers.
The measure faces long odds in the Senate. But its success in the House was the latest indication that Mr. Johnson’s hold on his razor-thin majority has become increasingly slippery, as rank-and-file Republicans flout his wishes.
They are doing so not just by refusing to vote for the party position on important bills, but also, increasingly, by using a once-rare parliamentary maneuver to steer around the speaker and commandeer the House floor to bring up legislation that he does not want considered at all. The tactic has undercut Mr. Johnson’s leadership and diminished his power over the chamber’s agenda at a time when some rank-and-file Republicans are questioning his approach and complaining that he is disregarding the will of his members.
That has led more and more Republicans to resort to what is known as a discharge petition, a procedural tool that allows lawmakers to bypass House leaders and force legislation to the floor if a majority of the chamber’s members — 218 of them — sign on.
Mr. Golden used one on Thursday to get his labor bill to the floor, where 20 Republicans joined Democrats in supporting it, and more are pending on other issues that Mr. Johnson has yet to address.
Discharge petitions were once rare and had little chance of success, especially since signing one is one of Congress’s more publicly visible acts. When members launch such an effort, they place physical copies of the petition on the House clerk’s desk at the front of the chamber. Even as Congress has become increasingly digitized, lawmakers must sign their names in person, and their signatures are reported online.
Historically, members of the majority hesitated to embarrass their party’s leaders, and lawmakers feared retaliation for publicly supporting efforts to subvert the speaker. The petitions were viewed more as public statements of discontent than viable legislative vehicles.
But Thursday was the third time this year that Republican leaders, who with a slim majority can afford only a few defections, have been forced to contend with runaway discharge petitions that they could not stop. When they succeed, they can be particularly painful for leaders of the majority, teeing up politically tricky votes on matters that divide the party.
“I am not a fan of discharge petitions,” Mr. Johnson told reporters this week. “It is typically used as a tool against the majority.”
The highest-profile example was the bipartisan push that forced a vote that Mr. Johnson had toiledfor months to avoid on legislation to compel the Justice Department to release its investigative files on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It sailed through the House and Senate and quickly became law.
“Luckily, it doesn’t happen often,” said Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican. “But the times it has happened, I have not been a fan of that process being used.”
Thursday’s vote came as Mr. Johnson has been grappling with other signs of discontent from within his conference. At least twice this month, Republicans have struggled to secure the votes necessary to bring bills to the floor, forcing leaders to negotiate as lawmakers threaten their agenda. Last week, a bill to address oversight of college sports was removed from consideration after it became clear that Republicans did not have the votes to pass it.
On Wednesday, a procedural vote to bring a defense policy bill to the floor stalled for nearly an hour short of the support it needed. Mr. Johnson was in the House chamber haggling separately with two holdout factions — hard-line conservatives like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and a small band of moderate lawmakers — before finally getting enough of them to relent.
The episode highlighted Mr. Johnson’s difficulties in corralling his restive rank and file even on a procedural vote on which party unity is generally considered mandatory. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat, said she would not tolerate defections on such a measure, known as a rule, when she was in charge.
“Every now and then, somebody would say, ‘I’m not for the bill, so I’m not for the rule,’” she said, before describing her response: “You know what? Go on the other side of the aisle, because that’s not the way it works. You don’t want the bill? Vote against the bill.”
But discharge petitions have been the most visible and public threats to Mr. Johnson’s control of the House. The maneuvers seem to be a kind of legislative hydra: Each time Republican leaders put one behind them, three more seem to spring up in its place.
Even now, with just one week left to go before they depart for the year, Republican lawmakers are affixing their names to three different discharge petitions that would force votes on bills that Mr. Johnson does not want to consider.
Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, who already found some success with a discharge petition earlier this year aimed at allowing members of Congress to vote by proxy after the birth of a child, is now trying to force a vote on a measure that would ban lawmakers and their family members from trading stocks. As of Thursday afternoon, 14 of her 58 signatures have come from Republicans.
And as G.O.P. lawmakers debate the best way to address rising health care costs, some Republicans have signed on to two separate discharge petitions — one by Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, and another by Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey — that would tee up votes on extending Affordable Care Act subsidies that are slated to expire at the end of the year.
Both petitions have enough support from Republicans that they would succeed if Democrats united to endorse either of them, something they are unlikely to do because they are holding out for a longer-term extension than either bill would provide. But the number of G.O.P. signatures — Mr. Fitzpatrick has 10 and Mr. Gottheimer has 11 — indicates how eager some Republicans are to go around Mr. Johnson and hold a vote, which has given Democrats remarkable power over the direction of a major legislative debate.
Mr. Fitzpatrick said the maneuver was a last resort to get action on a policy issue that his party was refusing to quickly address.
“You try to do things through the normal course, you try to do things through normal order, you know,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said. “When all of those remedies are exhausted, then you’ve got to go this route, unfortunately.”
Mr. Johnson said he understood his colleagues’ decisions, pointing to the “situation in their districts.” But others view the petitions as a needed check on the leadership’s grip on the House floor.
Ms. Greene, the Georgia Republican who is set to resign in January, said on Wednesday that she was weighing supporting every discharge petition that is introduced before she leaves, regardless of her views on the measure it supports.
Doing so would give her a lasting impact. Even if they resign or die in office, members’ signatures remain on discharge petitions until they are formally replaced, a process that can take months.
In a social media post, Ms. Greene said that she thought that every representative “deserves the right to represent their district and receive a recorded vote on their bills.”
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.“
The United States seized an oil tanker carrying Venezuelan oil, escalating President Trump’s campaign against Nicolás Maduro. The seizure, announced by Trump, was part of a broader effort to pressure Maduro’s government, which the U.S. accuses of drug trafficking and supporting terrorism. The tanker, previously linked to Iranian oil smuggling, was seized for violating sanctions, though the administration provided few details about the operation.
The seizure comes as the United States builds up its forces in the Caribbean as part of a campaign against President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
President Trump announced the seizure at the White House on Wednesday, without giving details on the operation.Doug Mills/The New York Times
The United States seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela on Wednesday, a dramatic escalation in President Trump’s pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela.
Speaking at the White House before an event on a new luxury visa program, Mr. Trump announced the operation and said it was “a large tanker, very large,” adding, without elaboration, that “other things are happening.”
When asked about the ship’s oil, Mr. Trump said, “Well, we keep it, I guess.” He declined to say who owned the tanker. “It was seized for a very good reason,” he added.
Three U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a law enforcement operation, said the ship was carrying Venezuelan oil. They said there was no resistance from the crew and no casualties.
In a statement, Venezuela’s government called the seizure a “barefaced robbery and an act of international piracy” aimed at stripping the country of its oil wealth.
The operation was the latest tactic in an expanding effort to squeeze Venezuela and pressure Mr. Maduro. The Trump administration has accused him of running a “narcoterrorist” cartel sending drugs to the United States, although many current and former officials in Washington say the campaign is ultimately aimed at regime change.
Since September, the United States has launched more than 22 known strikesagainst boats in the region, killing more than 80 people. The Trump administration insists, without publicly providing evidence, that the boats are smuggling drugs. Legal experts say the strikes may violate international law.
Attorney General Pam Bondi posted a video on Wednesday evening on social media showing armed U.S. forces rappelling from a helicopter onto the deck of the tanker. The video could not be independently verified.
Ms. Bondi said the operation included the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard, supported by the Pentagon. She said the tanker had been used to transport “sanctioned oil” from Venezuela and Iran.
The U.S. officials said they expected additional seizures in the coming weeks as part of the administration’s efforts to weaken Mr. Maduro’s government by undermining its oil market.
One of the officials identified the tanker as a vessel called the Skipper, and said it was carrying Venezuelan oil from Petróleos de Venezuela, the state-owned oil company known as PDVSA. The official said the ship had been previously linked to the smuggling of Iranian oil — a global black market that the Justice Department has been investigating for years. The vessel was sailing under the flag of another Latin American nation in which it was not registered, the official said, and its ultimate destination was Asia.
A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter flying over the former Roosevelt Roads naval base in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, last month. Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters
A federal judge issued a seizure warrant roughly two weeks ago because of the ship’s past activities smuggling Iranian oil, not because of links to the Maduro government, the official said. Prosecutors have said that Iran uses money generated from oil sales to finance its military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which the United States has designated a terrorist entity.
The administration did not address many details about the operation, including what happened to the crew and what ultimately will happen to the ship. It was not clear whether the seizure warrant — which is sealed — was for the ship or the oil or both. The White House did not immediately respond when asked whether the United States had the legal authority to keep the oil.
The ship, under a different name, had been put under sanctions by the Treasury Department in 2022. U.S. officials said it was part of “an international oil smuggling network that facilitated oil trades and generated revenue” to support Hezbollah and Iran’s revolutionary guard force.
The Navy, the Coast Guard, Southern Command and the Pentagon all declined to discuss the episode, referring questions to the White House.
Venezuela is exceptionally dependent on oil, which makes these kinds of seizures potentially damaging to the country’s fragile economy. Oil accounts for the bulk of the country’s export revenues. In turn, Venezuela’s government spends much of the proceeds from oil exports to import basic necessities like food and medicine.
Although Venezuela is believed to have colossal untapped oil reserves, the country produces far less oil than it did at the start of the century, after mismanagement, U.S. sanctions and corruption at PDVSA hobbled output.
The United States was long the largest buyer of Venezuela’s oil, but political tensions have eroded those ties. China now buys roughly 80 percent of Venezuela’s overall oil exports.
Smaller amounts of Venezuelan oil are exported to the United States, often to refineries on the Gulf Coast, and to Cuba, where the island nation’s Communist leaders have long relied on such cargoes to provide a semblance of economic stability.
President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, during a pro-government march on Wednesday in Caracas, the capital.Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times
In recent months, Mr. Trump has ordered a huge buildup of U.S. forces in the region, with more than 15,000 troops and a dozen ships in the Caribbean, including the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford. Mr. Trump has authorized covert action against Venezuela and has warned that the United States could “very soon” expand its attacks from boats off the Venezuelan coast to targets inside the country. But Mr. Trump has also recently spoken by phone with Mr. Maduro about a possible meeting. The president said on Wednesday that he had not spoken to Mr. Maduro since their last conversation.
The administration has developed a range of options for military action in the country, including targeting Mr. Maduro and seizing control of the country’s oil fields. The president has repeatedly expressed reservations about an operation to remove Mr. Maduro from power, aides say, in part because of a fear that the operation could fail. Mr. Trump has been in no rush to make a decision, though he has shown a particular interest in extracting some of the value of Venezuela’s oil for the United States.
The oil tanker operation came on the same day the Nobel Peace Prize was formally bestowed on a Venezuelan dissident, MarÃa Corina Machado. She was not at the ceremony on Wednesday in Oslo, where her daughter received the prize on her behalf, but the Nobel Peace Prize committee said she had left Venezuela and was traveling to Oslo.
Reporting was contributed by Simon Romero and Genevieve Glatsky from Bogotá, Colombia; Charlie Savage from Washington; Anushka Patil, Christiaan Triebert, Riley Mellen and Rebecca F. Elliott from New York; and Carol Rosenbergfrom Miami.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
Nicholas Nehamas is a Washington correspondent for The Times, focusing on the Trump administration and its efforts to transform the federal government.”
“John Roberts, now Chief Justice, has long sought to weaken the Voting Rights Act (VRA). In 1982, as a young DOJ lawyer, he successfully advocated for maintaining the intent standard in Section 2, making it difficult to prove racial discrimination in voting laws. Now, the Supreme Court, with Roberts’s influence, may further undermine the VRA by eliminating the use of race data in redistricting, potentially eroding minority voting rights.
The chief justice has been working to neuter the Voting Rights Act since the beginning of his career.
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In 1982, when the Voting Rights Act was up for reauthorization, the Reagan Justice Department had a goal: preserve the VRA in name only, while rendering it unenforceable in practice. A young John Roberts was the architect of that campaign. He may soon get to finish what he started.
Last month, at the oral argument in Louisiana v. Callais, a majority of theconservative justices seemed to signal their willingness to forbid any use of race data in redistricting. That could lead to the end of the VRA’s Section 2 protections for minority voters, and allow states across the South to redraw congressional districts currently represented by Black Democrats into whiter, more rural, and more conservative seats, potentially before the 2026 midterms.
A central question of the case, hotly debated during oral arguments, is whether Section 2 should prohibit election laws and procedures that have a racially discriminatory effect, or just those passed with clear racially discriminatory intent. Roberts almost certainly had flashbacks. This is the same question that was at the center of the 1982 reauthorization fight. Back then, the future chief justice’s job was to design the Department of Justice’s VRA strategy.
When Roberts first arrived at DOJ in 1981, fresh off a clerkship for William Rehnquist at the Supreme Court, he was assigned two important portfolios: prepping Sandra Day O’Connor for her confirmation hearings and voting rights. O’Connor sailed through the Senate. The VRA would be more contentious: A 1980 Supreme Court decision in City of Mobile v. Bolden had required plaintiffs making a Section 2 claim to prove that lawmakers had racial-discrimination intent. That’s difficult to demonstrate, and it brought nearly all Section 2 litigation to a halt.
Civil-rights groups, Democrats, and moderate Republicans wanted to use the VRA reauthorization to override Mobile and clarify that Congress clearly meant to remedy all racially discriminatory effects.The Reagan administration was divided. Moderate Reaganites did not want to battle over the landmark law, which was popular. Ideological conservatives within DOJ spoiled for a fight. They were content to extend the act, just so long as it was impossible to use. Roberts led the way.
Roberts’s papers from this era, housed at the National Archives, show his determination and dedication. They include memos and talking points, draft op-eds, scripted answers for bosses to deliver in meetings and before Congress, and presentations he gave to senators and Hill staff. These files show how Roberts devised the messaging strategies that made it possible for the administration to claim it supported the VRA, while actually helping to neuter it—an approach he has since mastered as chief justice.
When Roberts started as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith at DOJ in August 1981, pragmatic White House aides who wanted to avoid the messiness of a voting-rights fight appeared to hold the winning hand. Earlier that summer, the conservative representative Henry Hyde had experienced something of a conversion after public hearings across the South, reversed his own position, and urged his old friend Ronald Reagan to come aboard. Reagan addressed a national NAACP convention that June and vowed he would never allow barriers to be placed between any citizen and the ballot box. By August, he told The Washington Star that he would back whatever 10-year reauthorization Congress sent him, punting the question of intent versus effects to lawmakers.
But that fall, as the White House planned to release a statement confirming that Reagan would support whatever compromise Congress reached, DOJ pushed back hard. The attorney general demanded a meeting with Reagan. Following the meeting, Reagan embraced two of Smith’s proposals—maintaining the intent standard, and making it easier for localities to escape Section 5 preclearance, which required all bodies in covered states to get approval before making any changes to election law or procedures. (Roberts would effectively end that requirement with his decision in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, neutering the law by freezing the formula that determined which states were covered.)
Reagan now declared the effects standard “new and untested”—a position that hewed almost verbatim to Roberts’s talking points. In his end-of-year news conference, Reagan channeled Roberts again. The effect rule “could lead to the type of thing in which effect could be judged if there was some disproportion in the number of officials who were elected at any governmental level,” Reagan said. “You could come down to where all of society had to have an actual quota system.”
This is almost exactly what Roberts would write in his December 1981 memotitled “Why Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act Should Be Retained Unchanged”: “Incorporation of an effects test in §2 would establish essentially a quota system for electoral politics.” Then came the line that could be seen as defining decades of future jurisprudence: “Violations of §2 should not be made too easy to prove, since they provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.”
Roberts inspired Reagan’s shift. His words and ideas made up the core of the president's statements. He placed the administration into an intent-versus-effects fight that Reagan’s political counselors thought unnecessary.
The next battle would be before the U.S. Senate. Roberts would script that too.
The Senate debate had kicked off with a mid-November New York Times op-ed from Vernon Jordan, then head of the National Urban League, titled “Diluting Voting Rights.” Roberts must not have liked what he read. Reagan’s endorsement of the intent standard “was not only a political mistake,” Jordan wrote, but a “disservice” to conservatism. Then the civil-rights leader lowered the boom. Intent to discriminate, he wrote, is impossible to prove.
“Local officials don’t wallpaper their offices with memos about how to restrict minority-group members’ access to the polling booth,” Jordan wrote. “Discriminatory effects, however, are clear to all.” Proving intent, he argued, shifted and required the burden of proof and required evidence that “would be virtually impossible to assemble.”
“The President’s endorsement of the Voting Rights Act,” he concluded, “is a sham.”
Roberts quickly drafted a counterattack and circulated it to DOJ higher-ups. The pugnacious response insists that the intent test would make a “radical change” to the Voting Rights Act and slams the House version as a “radical experiment.” Roberts conceded that local officials might not wallpaper their offices with racist memos, but insisted that “circumstantial evidence” would still suffice, “as Mr. Jordan presumably knows.”
“The only ones who could be disappointed by the President’s actions,” Roberts held, “are not those truly concerned about the right to vote but rather those who, for whatever reason, were simply spoiling for a fight,” fiercely attacking the integrity of a man who had devoted his life to the struggle for civil rights.
Roberts’s audience wasn’t civil-rights leaders or New York Times readers. The DOJ team needed to keep the number of Senate proponents for the intent test below 60, the threshold for defeating a filibuster. Senator Strom Thurmond chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee. Opponents of the VRA’s effects provision felt confident that they could engineer a host of obstructionist feints and amendments to block its passage. So it shocked them when Senator Charles Mathias, a Republican, filed his bill, which included the effects test, with 60 co-sponsors. If the coalition of 40 Democrats and 21 Republicans held, the reauthorization would pass easily. Thurmond sputtered in disbelief when informed of the number: “They must not have read the bill!”
A stunned Roberts prepared to fight on. “Do not be fooled by the House vote or the 61 Senate sponsors of the House bill into believing that the President cannot win on this issue,” Roberts wrote in a January 1982 memo to the attorney general. Roberts’s allies were segregationists, his math was bad, and his political instincts worse, but he urged his troops onward, confident in his own assessment of Congress. “Many members of the House did not know they were doing more than simply extending the Act, and several of the 61 Senators have already indicated that they only intended to support simple extension,” he wrote. “Once the senators are educated on the differences between the President’s position and the House bill, and the serious dangers in the House bill,” Roberts insisted, “solid support will emerge for the President’s position.”
Roberts worked every angle. The Senate Judiciary Committee was a chance to educate senators. The day before the attorney general was scheduled to testify, the administration abruptly asked for a delay. Roberts remained focused. On January 25, 1982, he sent Smith a memo of likely questions and suggested answers to help guide his remarks. In his behind-the-scenes brief to his boss, it’s apparent that Roberts was not willing to countenance a single improvement to the VRA.
In the brief, in detailing his objections to the effects test, Roberts supplied a tendentious account of supposed open-minded inquiry that pointedly ignored the testimony of experts and misrepresented the words of civil-rights leaders. He counseled Smith to tell Congress that “in reviewing the Voting Rights Act last summer in the course of preparing recommendations to the President, I met personally with scores of civil rights leaders.” Roberts wrote, “The one theme from these discussions was clear: the Act has been the most successful civil rights legislation ever enacted and it should be extended unchanged. As the old saying goes, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”
Here Roberts was merely parroting an earlier talking point he’d circulated during the House debate; it had nothing to do with the actual views of civil-rights leaders who, in fact, were determined at all costs to repair the defective Mobiledecision.
His memo encouraged Smith to double down on loose talk of racial quotas before Thurmond’s committee, contending without any empirical backing that the effects test “would establish a quota system for electoral politics”—here he underlinedquota system—which “we believe is fundamentally inconsistent with democratic principles.”
The next day, January 26, Roberts again urged Smith to stiffen his resolve on the effects question as the attorney general prepared to begin his testimony. Roberts also attended a crucial meeting at the White House where DOJ officials sought to shore up Reagan’s opposition to the effects test—“once and for all,” a seemingly frustrated Roberts wrote.
In this final prehearing memo, the young aide exhorted his boss: “I recommend taking a very positive and aggressive stance.” Roberts certainly followed that advice; he had grown weary of all the bureaucratic skirmishing with Reagan’s political team, and demanded that the White House “actively work” to enact DOJ’s preferred policy. He insisted his position could be sold politically. “The President’s position is a very positive one,” Roberts wrote, repeating his pet mantra. “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”
In his memos, Roberts maintained that the effects test would “throw into litigation existing electoral systems at every level of government nationwide when there is no evidence of voting abuses nationwide supporting the need for such a change.” Roberts also again sought to tie opposition to the effects test to the administration’s overall stance on race and affirmative action. “Just as we oppose quotas in employment and education, so too we oppose them in elections.” Roberts concluded, imperiously, “It is very important that the fight be won, and the President is fully committed to this effort. His staff should be as well.”
No one could question Roberts’s commitment. That day he sent Smith yet another memo, a two-page response to an editorial in The Washington Post that endorsed the effects test. Then, in an early February 1982 memo to his direct boss, Brad Reynolds, Roberts offered handwritten edits on a draft op-ed. “I do not agree with the Attorney General that it is necessary to ‘talk down’ to the audience,” Roberts proclaimed. “The frequent writings in this area by our adversaries have gone unanswered for too long.”
Roberts remained hopeful that his position would prevail in the Senate, either by putting the filibuster back in play, enabling a presidential veto, or slowing things down sufficiently in order to gain a negotiating cudgel as the VRA neared expiration. Whatever obstructionist vision beguiled him most, Roberts worked the Senate hard. He assembled clips of op-eds aligned with his side along with his “Why Section Two of the Voting Rights Should Be Retained Unchanged” essay to be sent to friendly offices. He ran all this past Ken Starr—then a counselor to Smith, 16 years before the Monica Lewinsky investigation—with a handwritten note penned daringly on the attorney general’s letterhead: “Ken—possibilities to distribute to senators.” He signed it simply “John.”
Orrin Hatch’s Judiciary subcommittee—after five weeks of hearings focused almost entirely on intent versus effects—began to fall into line. It preserved the intent standard in the Senate bill, which then moved to Thurmond’s kingdom, the full committee. By then, Senator Bob Dole had seen enough. The Kansas Republican was determined that the GOP be the party of Lincoln, not Thurmond. He quietly settled the matter: Section 2 would carry the effects standard. The language of the accompanying Senate report could not have been clearer. Racial effects would be enough. Dole informed Reagan that DOJ could continue to fight—but they’d lose. He had at least 80 votes.
Back at Justice, Roberts’s band of brothers didn’t seethe so much as they threw up their hands in resignation. “The Reagan administration took the principled view over the politically advantageous,” Michael Carvin, the famed conservative litigator who served at DOJ with Roberts, told me, “and then they eventually caved.”
A different strategy would be needed. That April, as Roberts and others at DOJ battled, young conservative law students, joined by mentors such as Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, would have the first national gathering of what would become known as the Federalist Society at Yale Law. Conservatives came to a new conclusion: If you want to change the law, change the judges.
More than two decades later, about to ascend to the high court, Roberts would brush aside concerns about his views on voting rights by suggesting that the 1982 fight was a youthful folly, and that he had just been doing his job. “Senator,” Roberts told Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, “you keep referring to what I supported and what I wanted to do. I was a 26-year-old staff lawyer. It was my first job as a lawyer after my clerkships. I was not shaping administration policy. The administration policy was shaped by the attorney general on whose staff I served. It was the policy of President Reagan. It was to extend the Voting Rights Act without change for the longest period in history at that point, and it was my job to promote the attorney general’s view and the president’s view on that issue. And that’s what I was doing.”
This was not entirely accurate. Once again, Roberts was masterfully playacting support for a law he worked to thwart. The effects standard came from DOJ. It was not originally the policy of President Reagan. It was not the president’s view. Roberts had done far more than what he claimed under oath. And when he and fellow young Reaganite Samuel Alito arrived at the Supreme Court, the arguments that had once lost in Congress would now carry the day—not because things had actually changed in the South, but because the arena moved to the judiciary.
Now John Roberts doesn’t need the president, 60 senators, or 218 representatives. Four like-minded conservatives on the Court would be enough. It appears there are five—plus Roberts himself.“
