Month: August 2022

Former President Donald Trump’s “worst day” came this week when his White House counsel Pat Cipollone was subpoenaed by federal investigators, one former Watergate prosecutor said.

Nick Ackerman, who served as an assistant special Watergate prosecutor, said that Tuesday’s subpoena marked “the worst day for Donald Trump.”

Cipollone has been ordered to testify in front of a grand jury as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into the activities leading up to the January 6, 2021, Capitol Riot. He has already been interviewed by the House committee investigating the attack, but Ackerman said the federal subpoena will be much more damning to Trump.

“I think that the Department of Justice is going to get a lot more information from Pat Cipollone,” the former prosecutor told MSNBC’s The Beat on Wednesday. “If he thought that he was his worst experience—going before the committee—he is in for a major surprise when he appears before that grand jury.”

So far, Cipollone has been the highest-ranking White House official to be subpoenaed by the Justice Department. Marc Short, former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, and Greg Jacobs, Pence’s former chief counsel, have also reportedly testified to a grand jury in recent weeks.

Ackerman said that unlike the House panel, federal investigators won’t let the former Trump lawyer cite executive privilege over conversations he had with Trump in his final days in office.

“They allowed him to claim attorney-client privilege. None of this is going to go anywhere with the feds,” Ackerman said. “He is going to claim privileges with individual questions. They will take him to a court judge, who is going to order him to testify and tell him there is no privilege.”

The former Watergate prosecutor said Cipollone could try to appeal those rulings, but he added that the investigation would move much swifter than the House committee’s hearings have this summer.

“Pat Cipollone is going to be talking more before the grand jury,” he said.

Even though the House panel allowed Cipollone to claim privilege over certain discussions to get him to testify, the former White House counsel’s testimony still provided the lawmakers with information for the panel to build its case against Trump.

Corroborating the accounts of other former Trump officials, Cipollone said that the Trump legal team’s plan to seize voting machines was “a terrible idea for the country.”

“There is a way to contest elections, you know, that happens all the time,” Cipollone said in the interview. “But the idea that the federal government could come in and seize election machines? I don’t understand why we even have to tell you that’s a bad idea for the country. It’s a terrible idea.”

Cipollone also told the committee that he believed that Trump should have granted the election in December 2020 and that he supported former Attorney General Bill Barr’s conclusion that there was no evidence of election fraud.

Hundreds of staff members and guests were stuck in a National Park after monsoonal weather caused major flooding that prevented them from escaping Friday morning, park service officials said.

Heavy rains pushed dirt and debris onto the roads around Death Valley National Park, making them impassable and forcing officials to close the park. The National Park Service (NPS) said the decision trapped 500 staff and 500 visitors inside.

“There are approximately 500 visitors and 500 staff currently unable to exit the park. No injuries to staff or visitors have been reported,” the National Park Service said in a statement Friday.

“On August 5, 2022, unprecedented amounts of rainfall caused substantial flooding within Death Valley National Park. All roads into and out of the park are currently closed and will remain closed until park staff can assess the extensiveness of the situation,” the statement added .

CALIFORNIA, ARIZONA RESIDENTS FORCED TO EVACUATE AS WILDFIRES BURN

Flooding closed all roads around the Death Valley National Park on August 5, 2022.
(National Park Service)

The California Department of Transportation said clearing the roads would take several hours, pending cooperative weather, the statement added.

“Approximately sixty cars, belonging to visitors and staff, are buried in several feet of debris at the Inn at Death Valley,” NPS said. “The flood waters pushed dumpster containers into parked cars, which caused cars to collide into one another. Additionally, many facilities are flooded including hotel rooms and business offices.”

“The Cow Creek Water system, which provides water to the Cow Creek area for park residents and offices, has failed. Park staff have identified a major break in the line due to the flooding which is being repaired. The remainder of the line is being inspected,” the statement added.

According to NPS, the amount of rain the park experienced Friday, 1.46 inches, was about 75% of the amount of rain the area typically receives in a year.

It also nearly matches the daily record of 1.47 inches set on April 15, 1988.

CALIFORNIA FIREFIGHTERS ARE HELPED BY FAVORABLE WEATHER IN FIGHT AGAINST FOREST FIRES

Friday’s park closure comes after flash floods on Monday disrupted travel on some roads along Highway 190, near the Death Valley National Park.

“Remember: turn around, don’t drown!” the Death Valley National Park warned visitors.

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All park roads remain closed as of Friday. Also, the Sunset, Texas Spring, and Stovepipe Wells Campgrounds were closed.

Emergency services and the California Department of Transportation are continuing to assess the situation.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

As eastern Kentuckians continue to search for missing loved ones, muck out their homes and prepare for more rain, they are beginning to ask who could be at fault for this past week’s deadly flooding and whether it was a natural disaster or one caused by the coal mines that have drastically reshaped and scarred the landscape.

Compacted dirt, destroyed mountaintops and deforestation in eastern Kentucky have often been left ignored by the coal companies that mined there, despite legal requirements that they attempt to return the land to its natural state when mining concludes. In recent decades, that spurned responsibility has, at times, turned heavy rains into floods and caused local residents who once counted on mining for jobs and prosperity to bring litigation against their former employers in Appalachian courtrooms.

Lawyers who have pursued these cases in the past said it is still too early to pursue a case in the most recent flooding, as studies need to be conducted and claimants contacted, but interest in holding someone to account for the lost homes and at least 37 dead is growing.

“It may be too early to tell, but I’ve received a couple phone calls already,” said Ned Pillersdorf, a Kentucky lawyer in Prestonburg who has successfully sued coal companies for flood damage in the past. “No one is denying the amount of rain we had — it truly was a 1,000 year event — but did the strip mines contribute? Absolutely.”

Kentucky, particularly the eastern mountains, are littered with abandoned coal mines. Many are a result of strip mining or mountaintop removal mining, the latter a method in which mining companies use explosives to blast off a mountain’s summit to get to the coal inside.

Pillersdorf, whose home was flooded, noted that the areas worst hit in his county are the ones closest to the strip mines.

“It is obviously just a clear slam dunk in terms of corporate irresponsibility,” said Alex Gibson, the executive director of Appalshop, the culture and education center in Whitesburg that was hit by more than 6 feet of water. “And of how we can predict an outcome and ignore all the signs along the way until the tragedy happens and then act like, ‘Yeah, but we didn’t see it coming. It was God’s work.'”

The Kentucky Coal Association, which represents the state’s mining operations, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The loss of the natural ridge lines, vegetation and trees, and the cracks in the mountains that are largely owned by companies often funnels rainwater into the thin valleys, or low-lying hollows, where most eastern Kentuckians make their homes.

Without these natural protections, regional flooding has grown as climate change brings new levels of precipitation up from the Gulf Coast to Appalachia.

“They’re saying it’s a natural disaster, but I’m sorry. This is a disaster that was made by a whole bunch of mining that’s been going on for the past 40 years,” said Jack Spadero, the former director of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy who has testified as an expert witness in numerous coal mine lawsuits in recent years.“It has changed the landscape of eastern Kentucky dramatically.”

‘Like pulling teeth’

The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, or SMCRA, was a federal regulation that was supposed to prevent coal companies from leaving abandoned mines behind. The law required mine owners to reclaim the land and return it to its natural form as much as possible. In the ensuing 45 years, many companies have avoided that work and many states in the region, like Kentucky, turned a blind eye to it.

Now, there are more than 2,800 entries for Kentucky in the national inventory of known-abandoned mine land, according to a Department of Interior database, and much of it is located in the state’s eastern hill country. Experts also said that the number in the inventory is likely a conservative figure and that recent coal company banks have made it more difficult to pursue accountability.

SMCRA required every state to enforce the financial responsibility and claim obligation of the coal mine operators in their state. While some states required mining companies to pay claim costs upfront, others — like Kentucky — allowed them to put up a bond for the potential costs. In the past, small companies in Kentucky were allowed to create a pooled fund, while larger ones were able to self-bond, but the majority were done through a third party.

“There are surety companies that are holding these bonds, which are woefully inadequate to do the real claim work, but many are even fighting to turn over those bonds, so it’s like pulling teeth,” said Joe Childers, who has litigated cases for vulnerable Kentuckians against major energy companies for more than 40 years. “In the meantime, nothing gets done. The hillsides are scarred, they’re not reclaimed and you get a rain event like last week and you have terrible flooding. And it was totally exacerbated by the lack of proper regulation.”

Since 2013, Kentucky requires companies to pay into a single bond pool through what essentially serves as a tax on a certain amount of acreage or coal tonnage. But the difference between the liabilities that were left behind and the trust fund the state created in 2013 has grown significantly.

John Mura, a spokesperson for The Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, said by email that the state agency was “engaged right now organizing cabinet aid” to the affected areas and declined to comment further.

About 408,000 Kentuckians live within one mile of abandoned mine land, the regional think tank Ohio River Valley institute estimated last year, and it will cost nearly $1.2 billion to remediate it. As of 2020, the Kentucky fund had about $52 million in it, according to a state report.

Kentucky spent a little more than $1.5 million from its claim fund, according to the 2022 executive budget. The state is expected to receive an additional $75 million this year as part of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure law, which dedicated $11.3 billion toward abandoned mine claim over the next 15 years. Last year, the state received $9 million from the federal government.

The new sum is huge, but “it’s just a drop in the bucket” to address the need for communities across Appalachia, said Sarah Surber, a public health professor at Wayne State University who has studied environmental justice issues in the region and practiced law there for more than a decade.

“How do you prioritize [the funding]?” she said. “You have so many that have been left abandoned or sitting in limbo, you have more coal mine company bankruptcies anticipated, so how do you decide what mines get reclaimed and what does that mean for communities and their protection in terms of pollution and flooding issues?

Lawsuit challenges

Kevin Thompson, an attorney whose work earned national attention for challenging powerful coal CEO Don Blankenship, said the images he saw out of Kentucky this past week gave him flashbacks to the 2009 King Coal case he worked on in West Virginia and the photographs he took of the days after the flooding that happened there.

That case brought 20 low-income families against four powerful companies that Thompson argued were responsible for two flooding incidents that washed away people’s homes.