What Happened Today: August 10, 2022
Iran assassination of John Bolton thwarted; Domino’s exits Italy; Trump pleads the Fifth
The Big Story
An agent of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force allegedly organized the attempted assassination of John Bolton, the former national security advisor under Donald Trump. The Department of Justice unsealed a criminal complaint on Wednesday that outlined the efforts by Shahram Poursafi, a 45-year-old Quds Force agent, to pay a confidential informant $300,000 in the fall of 2021 to “eliminate” Bolton at the street address of his Washington, D.C., office. U.S. authorities say that Poursafi has not been to the United States and remains abroad. The Justice Department believed the attempted assassination was likely in retaliation for the January 2020 airstrike killing of Qassem Soleimani, the famed Quds Force commander who U.S. officials say was responsible for the killing of thousands of U.S. soldiers.
Ordered by then president Donald Trump, the airstrike against Soleimani fit with Bolton’s hawkish views on Iran. Bolton advised Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran and supported the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. Earlier this month, federal agents arrested someone in New York who was allegedly working on behalf of Iranian intelligence to kidnap an Iranian American journalist, Masih Alinejad. The U.S. refusal to remove the current designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from a blacklist of terrorist organizations has been presented as a roadblock in the Biden administration’s attempts to revive the Iran deal.
Read More: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/10/john-bolton-murder-plot-iranian-man-charged
In the Back Pages: Revisiting Ilhan Omar’s America
The Rest
→ On the advice of his attorney, former president Donald Trump said he declined to answer questions during a deposition for an ongoing investigation by the New York State attorney general’s office into the Trump family’s business practices. Citing his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, Trump said in a statement shortly after leaving the closed-door deposition in Manhattan on Wednesday that he “declined to answer the questions under the rights and privileges afforded to every citizen under the United States Constitution.” New York’s attorney general’s office began its investigation in 2019 after amassing what it said was ample evidence that the Trump organization had fraudulently misrepresented the value of real estate and other assets to obtain tax breaks and lines of credit. Donald Trump and two of his children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., were told by a judge in December that they would have to testify under oath as part of the inquiry. Trump said on Wednesday that his declining to answer questions was driven in part by the FBI sweep of his private club in Palm Beach on Monday, which was an unrelated investigation of Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.
→ In the policy sausage (or potpourri, depending on your perspective) that is the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, one key provision added to win the support of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) was the requirement that the federal government auction off land to oil and gas producers—a big win, many said, for those industries. But some contend that Manchin’s victory was more symbolic than anything. “I wouldn’t say the provision requiring offshore lease sales is entirely insubstantial, but I also wouldn’t classify it as some kind of major victory for the oil and gas industry,” Gregory Brew, a historian of oil at Yale University, told Grist. While the United States’ oil and gas industry long benefited from leasing federal lands, the industry has mostly moved on to fracking private lands in Texas and North Dakota and to extracting oil from foreign countries like Guyana. And while Manchin hopes that new leases in the Gulf will ensure energy security in the future, analysts are doubtful, noting that new forms of energy production can’t be built in the Gulf because “there is already junk in there,” as one former official at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management described the subaquatic maze of obsolete oil infrastructure. “The old industry is imposing costs on the new industry.”
Read More: https://grist.org/energy/inflation-reduction-act-oil-gas-leases-federal-land/
→ New high-dose versions of Narcan, a drug that can reverse opioid overdoses, have received FDA approval, but critics are saying the new versions are an attempt by drug makers to generate new, profitable products that could do more harm than good.
Most often administered in a syringe or with a nose spray of the long-standard .4-mg dose, the new versions—a 5-mg injection and an 8-mg nose spray—are so many times stronger that they themselves can induce an acute withdrawal in those who receive them.
Critics of the new drugs say that while the more powerful doses could potentially help reverse overdoses by the stronger and more deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl, as their drug makers tout, the research so far doesn’t fully support the claim that the higher doses are any more effective than the standard version.
Acute withdrawal symptoms of vomiting and pain induced by high-dose Narcan could also discourage drug users or those who would otherwise carry Narcan from using it all together.
“We’ve been asking for the removal of the prescription status [of naloxone] for 15 to 20 years, we’ve been asking for cheaper product, we’ve been asking for easier access,” said Eliza Wheeler, who runs a drug-treatment nonprofit. Last year, a record-breaking 106,000 Americans died of a drug overdose, the majority of which were caused by opioids.
→ Number of the Day: 0
The number of Domino’s pizzerias that will soon be left in Italy, where the company’s ambitious 2015 plans to open 880 stores turned into a paltry 29 stores. The Italians, it seems, were none too impressed by Domino’s “Philly Cheese Steak” pie, and now the last 13 places in the country where you can get chicken tacos on your pizza are slated to close. With Domino’s reporting more than $10 million in debt as of 2020, we assume Italy is safe—at least for now—from American upstarts messing with their margheritas. Meanwhile, “calls to all 13 remaining Domino’s locations,” Bloomberg notes, “went unanswered.”
→ Emails obtained by The Lever reveal that The Washington Post’s full-time fact checker Glenn Kessler “did not accurately recount public officials’ statement [sic] when he tried to discredit reporting about a 10-year-old rape victim” and then, when called out on it, offered a mealy mouthed correction, stating, “An email the county spokeswoman sent was inadvertently missed during the reporting.” This latest accusation follows similar criticisms of Kessler’s initial skepticism of the reporting, with the veteran fact checker casting doubt on the story because its sole source was a doctor who claimed to have provided the 10-year-old with the abortion. Kessler’s initial fact check also misrepresented what county officials had told him. “None of the officials we reached were aware of such a case in their areas,” he wrote in his column, while emails reveal that at least one county official had said they would not comment on a specific case. This incident emerges as yet another example of what Jacob Siegel, writing in Tablet, has described as the “privatized, quasi-governmental regulatory agency” of fact checkers—the final arbiters, these days, of what is true and what is false.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/invasion-fact-checkers
→ Rep. Ilhan Omar narrowly edged past her opponent in the Democratic primary for her Minneapolis house race on Tuesday, with a 2% edge in the vote total that was enough for her challenger, Don Samuels, to concede. Despite Omar’s backing by major party leaders Sen. Bernie Sanders and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Samuels, a Minneapolis City Council member, rallied supporters with his centrist critique of Omar’s more radical policy stances on expanding the Supreme Court bench and defunding the police, which remains a volatile issue since the murder of George Floyd in the city in 2020. For more on Omar, check out Armin Rosen’s profile of her political journey in today’s Back Pages.
→ Quote of the Day:
“A deal that doesn’t at least require one of the largest, richest corporations in the world to pay for community benefits, livable wages, and to mitigate clear environmental impacts, is no deal at all.”
A coalition of labor unions in upstate New York, responding to the news that Amazon is poised to receive a $124 million incentive package of subsidies to build a warehouse in Niagara, New York. This would be among the largest such incentive packages Amazon has ever received. The details of the deal were kept from the public—a move Amazon has increasingly deployed to avoid public backlash early in the process—and were only announced when the deal was all but completed. The executive director of the Niagara County Industrial Development Agency and one of the architects of the deal argued that “for every $1 in tax incentives provided to Amazon, the local community receives $11 in benefit. The approximately $124 million in incentives will generate approximately $1.3 billion in local benefit.” Critics counter, however, that the local school district would have been the beneficiary of the tens of millions of dollars in taxes that are being waived, and that other towns where Amazon opened warehouses saw net declines in employment, as the arrival of Amazon often put local stores out of business.
→ A young woman from Nebraska has been charged with several felonies and misdemeanors after Meta, the country that owns Facebook, gave police private documents and messages from her Facebook detailing her efforts to illegally dispose of a fetus after taking a pill to terminate her pregnancy at 23 weeks, past the state’s limit of 20 weeks. Celeste Burgess, 17, and her mother, Jessica Burgess, 41, bought a pregnancy-ending medication online, and then, after Celeste took the medication, buried the fetus—the initial crime the police were investigating. While the mother is being charged in connection with administering the pill without a medical license and past the 20 week cutoff, the daughter has not been charged with having the abortion—only with disposing of the body. In the course of their investigation, the police exhumed the stillborn fetus and delivered a warrant to Meta requesting Jessica’s messages and data; Meta complied.
→ Wednesday’s Labor Department report is mixed news: Core inflation, which excludes energy and food, rose 0.3%—happily, less than what economists were expecting. Inflation decreased 0.6% since June, meanwhile, and gasoline prices decreased 7.7%. Also down: the price of used cars, air travel, and apparel. Up, however, are grocery prices (1.3%) and housing costs. For the Biden administration, these mixed numbers are good numbers, with officials hoping that we’ve passed the peak of inflation, which still sits close to last month’s 40-year high. The numbers were also good enough for investors, with the market rallying yesterday afternoon on the news of the Labor Department’s report. It is unclear if yesterday’s report was strong enough to inspire the Fed to put a pause on its fiscal tightening, or to convince the American public that things are looking up.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
TODAY IN TABLET:
My Counterfeit Israeli Family Morton Landowne, the executive director of Tablet’s parent, Nextbook, writes about how a new book by the multimedia artist Andi Arnovitz is an astonishingly original work of Duchampian Zionism.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/counterfeit-israeli-family-andi-arnovitz
Queen of the Night Rokhl Kafrissen on the troubled family life of Régine, a French singer, disco mogul, and pioneering disc jockey
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/queen-of-the-night-regine
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something you want to tell us about that’s going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
With Ilhan Omar winning the Democratic primary in her bid to be reelected to Congress, today’s Back Pages sheds more light on her background and political rise with an excerpt from Tablet senior writer Armin Rosen’s recent profile “Ilhan’s Country.”
On July 2, 2022, Ilhan Omar briefly appeared onstage with Suldaan Seeraar, a Somali pop star making his U.S. debut. It was the first time the sizable Minneapolis Somali American community had held an event at the Target Center, the arena that’s home to the Twin Cities’ NBA team. Like Omar’s political career, the concert marked the power and permanence of a relatively new community of Americans, one that barely existed just 30 years earlier. Presented before thousands of young Somalis, many of whom had come from Columbus, San Diego, and other centers of Somali American life, Omar, the world’s best-known person of Somali ethnicity and one of the only members of the U.S. House of Representatives who is a bona fide national figure, faced a torrent of booing. The jeering accelerated as she began to address the crowd. “We don’t have all night,” she chided with a wide and unembarrassed smile across her face, as if the congresswoman was reveling in the open scorn.
That Omar is unpopular among some Somalis should not be surprising by now. Her primary campaign for the Minnesota state legislature in 2016 pitted her against a former Somali American political ally, Mohamud Noor, as well as against Phyllis Khan, an incumbent supported by Minneapolis City Councilman Hassan Warsame, then the Somali community’s leading elected politician. Omar defeated them both. Her supposedly heroic opposition to the religious and social conservatives of her own community was a major theme of This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman, Omar’s May 2020 memoir. From the beginning of her political career, her views on abortion, homosexuality, and a range of other topics were not those of a staunch Muslim traditionalist, and were even to the left of what a standard-issue Minnesotan typically believed. At the Target Center, she brought onstage her husband Tim Mynett, a political consultant who is not Somali and only converted to Islam around the time he ended his previous marriage and married Omar. Ahmed Hirsi, Omar’s previous spouse, was a well-known and once relatively popular figure in Twin Cities Somali affairs.
Perhaps, one source in the Minneapolis Somali community suggested to me, the booing expressed the growing edginess of a younger generation that was more open to taking a hard line on matters of religion and morality than even their parents had been. The Somali American community has produced plenty of young people vocally committed to progressive politics—the booers didn’t seem to represent a majority of the Target Center crowd, after all—but also many others who have gone sharply in the other direction, toward a religious fundamentalism that was itself a reaction to distinctly American realities. It could all be very bewildering, including to Somali Americans themselves. “Our children, they look like us,” said the man, a political strategist and activist in south Minneapolis, “but they are not Somali. They are American.”
Omar didn’t get to where she is by reconciling any of these contradictions but by making them work to her advantage. For most politicians, it would be a humiliating rebuke to have thousands of members of their ethnic and religious community rain boos upon them at a major public event held on their home turf. The smiles and laughter with which she greeted the opprobrium of young Somalis didn’t come from nervousness or surprise. This was the kind of confrontation that had helped turn her into a political star.
Omar’s instincts are rarely wrong, however polarizing a figure they’ve made her. In 2020, she ran 16 points behind Joe Biden, underperforming the president-elect by more than every one of the other 200-plus Democratic members of the House of Representatives up for reelection. But she still won 64% of the vote on the strength of a firm base of support that included far-left activists, college students, left-wing children of culturally conservative Somali immigrants, and the social-justice-minded bourgeois, newly activated by the protests and riots that broke out after the killing of George Floyd, which occurred in Omar’s congressional district. The Target Center incident might have looked like an ugly scene to people who knew little about her life and career, or like an opportunity for political opponents wrongly convinced that she’s beatable this year. Omar is up against former city council member Don Samuels in August’s Democratic primary, an unexciting alternative from an earlier political era who is likely headed for the same double-digit defeat that an earlier and even more promising challenger suffered in 2020. It’s unclear that any attack on Omar has ever landed particularly hard.
Being a lightning rod would have harmed Omar if she hadn’t proven to be such a skillful manager of her own story and her own image. That’s especially true when it comes to the more sensitive aspects of her dizzyingly complex life, which she has either ruthlessly neutralized, cleverly spun, or kept scrupulously out of view.
Read the rest here.