Month: August 2023

Entrepreneur, journalist, and First Amendment warrior James Larkin has died, just a little over a week before he was slated to stand trial for his role in running the web-classifieds platform Backpage. Larkin, 74, took his own life on Monday.

A native of Maricopa County, Arizona, he leaves behind a wife and six children, as well as a string of newspapers and a legacy of fighting for free speech.

With journalist Michael Lacey, Larkin built the Phoenix New Times from an anti-war student newspaper into a broad—and still-thriving—record of Maricopa County culture and politics. New Times didn’t shy away from honest reporting on local law enforcement and power figures—including Sen. John McCain and his wife Cindy—or on controversial issues like abortion, immigrant rights, or the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles.

“I had just come back from school in Mexico City and had been exposed to the Mexican student movement in the late 60’s and early 70’s and they were really serious radicals, serious revolutionaries, and a lot of them were killed in the ensuing years, murdered by the Mexican government. I realized that politics were serious,” Larkin told Reason in 2018. “I felt that the paper… really had an opportunity to be politically powerful.”

San Francisco Bay Guardian publisher Bruce B. Brugmann described Larkin and Lacey’s aesthetic as “desert libertarianism on the rocks.” They expanded their alt-weekly empire nationwide, eventually running 17 free papers, including the Miami New Times, Westword, the Dallas Observer, and The Village Voice.

The company stood out for being both highly profitable and a hard-hitting journalistic enterprise—a perfect blend of Larkin’s business acumen, Lacey’s brash, indie-press M.O, and the pair’s shared commitment to exposing and standing up to government malfeasance. Collectively, the papers and their staffers were nominated for more than 1,400 national writing awards, won one Pulitzer, and were finalists for the Pulitzer six other times.

“We weren’t trying to curry favor,” Larkin told Reason in 2018. And they took a “stubborn approach to bureaucrats telling us ‘you can’t do that’ or ‘we’re not going to allow you to do that.’ We knew what our rights were.”

“Law enforcement, politicians, bureaucrats, regulatory types. They don’t really understand the First Amendment,” he added.

Among the court battles they fought—and won—was one over infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio demanding data on New Times readers; Arpaio was eventually forced to pay Larkin and Lacey a $3.75 million settlement, which they used to establish the immigrant rights organization Frontera Fund.

Another legal battle was waged over a 1971 New Times ad for a group that helped women in Arizona (where abortion was illegal) travel to California for the procedure. The case eventually helped invalidate Arizona’s entire abortion ban.

In 2004, the pair launched Backpage.com as an online extension of the print classified ads that had supported their newspapers until Craigslist decimated print classified profits across the newspaper industry. Like Craigslist, Backpage became a popular digital platform for all sorts of user-generated ads, including a robust business in “adult” advertising.

By the time Larkin and Lacey bowed out of running Backpage in 2015, it had become a worldwide phenomenon. The business was highly profitable and also immensely popular among sex workers.

This earned Backpage—and its creators—the ire of activists, politicians, and prosecutors, who trafficked in myths and moral panic about sex work, sexual exploitation, and online platforms. Much as lawmakers and prosecutors have been doing with a wide swath of social media executives recently, they began demonizing Larkin, Lacey, and other Backpage executives as deliberate merchants of harmful content rather than people providing a platform for the speech of millions of individual users, most of whom were engaging in protected expression.

“We’re the canary in the coal mine for the internet,” Larkin told Reason in March.

Politicians and the press spread false narratives about Backpage—namely that it was an open forum for “child sex trafficking”—and about its founders’ complicity in these alleged crimes. In reality, Backpage was utilized (and loved) by countless independent sex workers. The platform banned ads for anything illegal, including consensual adult prostitution; it also worked hard to keep ads posted by or featuring minors off the site and cooperated extensively with law enforcement when bad deeds were facilitated through Backpage ads.

“Even without a subpoena, in exigent circumstances such as a child rescue situation, Backpage will provide the maximum information and assistance permitted under the law,” wrote federal prosecutors in a 2012 memo. This memo, and another from 2013, were the product of an extensive federal investigation into Backpage that included grand jury testimony, witness interviews, and reviewing more than 100,000 internal documents. “Backpage genuinely wanted to get child prostitution off of its site,” the federal prosecutors concluded. “Witnesses have consistently testified that Backpage was making substantial efforts to prevent criminal conduct on its site, that it was coordinating efforts with law enforcement agencies and NCMEC [the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children], and that it was conducting its businesses in accordance with legal advice.”

Nonetheless, in 2018, federal prosecutors seized Backpage. They began what has turned into a years-long federal prosecution of Larkin, Lacey, and other former executives, who stand accused of violating the Travel Act by facilitating prostitution.

The aforementioned memos, which were accidentally shared with the defendants as part of the discovery process, were ruled off-limits for defense use and placed under seal.

It was just one of many absurdities in an astoundingly unjust prosecution that has dragged on for over half a decade and now has a body count.

In April 2018, the government raided Larkin’s and Lacey’s homes and put Larkin and Lacey in jail. Upon their release, they were banned from leaving Maricopa County and forced to wear ankle monitors to ensure they wouldn’t flee, even though both men had houses, families, and long-standing ties in the area.

Prosecutors seized all sorts of assets from Larkin and other defendants, including assets that had nothing to do with Backpage. For more than five years, they’ve been unable to get a hearing on whether this was justified. The civil asset forfeiture happened “without a hint of due process,” Larkin told Reason in March.”They don’t want us to be able to have the tools to fight them.”

The case finally went to trial in September 2021. But repeated references to sex trafficking—something the defendants are not charged with—by prosecutors and prosecution witnesses led to Judge Susan Brnovich declaring a mistrial.

A federal appeals court said the prosecution was open to trying again, however. For Larkin and the other defendants, this meant even more years of trying to scrape together money to pay defense lawyers (not to mention get by on) while being unable to access the life savings the government was holding. Some of the defendants eventually had to get public defenders.

Late last year, Larkin let his longtime lawyer go. The new judge on the case, Diane Humetewa, rejected requests to push back the trial while his new counsel caught up.

Meanwhile, prosecutors kept showing that they weren’t willing to fight fair. Motions filed in June sought to stop the defendants “from referencing the First Amendment and ‘free speech’ at any time in the presence of the jury,” from bringing up “the legality or illegality of any advertisement” that ran on Backpage.com, or from referencing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, among other things.

In late July, Humetewa partially rejected the First Amendment motion but granted most of the government’s other motions seeking to limit how Larkin and the others could defend themselves.

In conversations with Reason, Larkin and Lacey have always been adamant that they are innocent and that the First Amendment protected Backpage and the speech it platformed. “We’ve never, ever broken the law. Never have, never wanted to,” Larkin said back in 2018. “This isn’t really—I know this is probably heresy—this isn’t about sex work to me. This is about speech.” Though of course, “sex workers have an absolute First Amendment right to post ads.”

He reiterated that sentiment last March. “To me, the issue is, and always has been, the speech. We platformed legal speech. The government didn’t like the speech, but it was legal,” he said. “I know that we’re innocent and this has been a political prosecution from day one.”

He was still pledging to fight, but he seemed less confident than he did five years ago that having the truth and having the law on their side meant they would prevail.

“If the government decides to point its finger at you, there’s really no question that they’re going to try to ruin you,” he said. And “given the system and the way it’s set up,” principled resistance could only go so far.

It’s unclear what Larkin’s suicide will mean for the other defendants in the impending trial, which is still scheduled to get underway on August 8.

In an order today, Judge Hemetawa wrote, “the Court, having become aware of Defendant Larkin’s passing, will nonetheless expect the parties to prepare for trial to commence on the current scheduled date.”

What is clear—at least to me, and surely to the many others who knew him—is that we are worse off for a world without Jim Larkin in it.

“I lost one of my heroes,” says Stephen Lemons, who worked for the Phoenix New Times from 2003 through 2017 and now edits Front Page Confidential, a site published by Larkin and Lacey.

Larkin was a true journalist and a pioneering businessman, but “above all of his works, however, he was a family man,” wrote Lacey in a statement on the website today. “I never saw my friend do a dishonest or dishonorable thing in his entire life. I had a four-decade friendship with a wonderful man. Now I have only his memory.”

In the time I spent talking to Larkin over the years, I encountered a soft-spoken, sharp-witted, and highly principled man with a deep love for his family and pride in the Phoenix-area community he called home. He rescued abandoned succulents, opposed Arpaio’s anti-immigrant agenda, couldn’t stand hypocrisy, and revered the United States Constitution. He had the discipline and drive of a highly successful businessman and the spirit of a renegade journalist. It seems he never stopped being that anti-war kid who helped build a newspaper with his friends.

He was also someone beset by unnecessary and relentless persecution by the federal government. And now he is no longer around to enjoy the freedoms he championed for others.

“We’ve had people try to push us—politicians specifically—try to push us around all our lives, all our publishing lives,” Larkin told me in a 2018 conversation about why he and Lacey kept platforming adult ads on Backpage even after so much pressure from politicians to stop. “So when we come up to this battle it’s informed by that history. That’s not ivory tower; it’s real. All we’ve ever done is fight.”

Larkin’s personal fight may be over now. But his legacy should live on and serve as an inspiration for anyone who cares about civil liberties, free speech, and the freedom of the press.

The post Backpage Founder, Alt-Weekly Entrepreneur, and Free Speech Warrior James Larkin Has Died appeared first on Reason.com.

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The indictment that was unsealed yesterday in United States of America v. Donald J. Trump uses the phrase “knowingly false” 33 times, referring to the former president’s claims about the massive fraud that supposedly denied him his rightful victory in the 2020 election. There is a very good reason why that characterization is sprinkled throughout the indictment: All of the charges—which include conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiring to deprive Americans of their voting rights—depend on the assumption that Trump did not really think he had won reelection.

Nearly three years after Trump began complaining about “a major fraud” that supposedly had delivered a phony victory to Joe Biden, however, it remains unclear whether he honestly believed the nonsense he was spouting. The indictment itself includes evidence pointing in both directions.

The question is not whether a reasonable person would have believed that some combination of illegal ballots and deliberately corrupted voting machines had changed the election outcome, because the defendant is not reasonable. He is a man who cannot stand to admit defeat and who has a long history of listening to advisers who tell him what he wants to hear. Given these traits, it is plausible that he would latch onto any claim, no matter how absurd or unsubstantiated, that helped him deny the reality that voters had rejected him.

The indictment details the many times that people who supported Trump’s reelection, including campaign employees, top Justice Department officials, and state officials charged with overseeing the election or certifying its results, debunked specific fraud claims or candidly told him he had no choice but to acknowledge that he had lost. Yet Trump persisted in pushing the stolen-election narrative, seemingly impervious to any evidence contradicting it.

As Special Counsel Jack Smith sees it, Trump’s stubbornness shows that he was “determined to remain in power” and therefore pressed claims he knew to be false, ultimately resorting to extralegal tactics. He and his allies filed a slew of uniformly unsuccessful lawsuits challenging the election results—which they had a right to do, as the indictment acknowledges. They also hatched a scheme to enlist “fake electors” in seven battleground states, aiming to create the impression that there was a genuine question about whether Joe Biden had won those states.

Trump et al. repeatedly urged the Justice Department to reinforce that impression by falsely telling state officials that it had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States.” During a phone conversation, Trump reportedly told Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” Trump’s demands and his plan to appoint a more compliant replacement for Rosen nearly led to a mass resignation by senior department officials.

Trump repeatedly pressured Vice President Mike Pence, publicly and privately, to intervene in the purported controversy while overseeing the congressional tally of electoral votes on January 6, 2021. Trump urged Pence to accept the Republican slates, reject Biden’s, or send the competing slates back to the states, where legislators supposedly could choose between them. According to the indictment, he did that even though he knew Pence had no such authority and recognized that there was no factual basis for arguing that Biden did not win those states.

Frustrated by Pence’s refusal to go along with this scheme, Trump turned his ire on his vice president, publicly criticizing him for lacking the “courage” to cooperate. He did that after angry Trump supporters attacked the Capitol on January 6, disrupting the congressional certification of Biden’s victory and forcing Pence to flee along with the legislators. Trump had summoned those supporters to Washington for a “SAVE AMERICA RALLY,” at which he warned them that the republic’s fate was at stake and urged them to “peacefully” march on the Capitol in protest.

According to the indictment, Trump did all this as part of a criminal plot to remain in power. He knew his grievance was phony, and he knew the tactics he was using to overturn the election results were illegal.

That interpretation is plausible, but so is an alternative explanation that will be at the center of Trump’s defense. Trump, who to this day insists the election was stolen, maintains that he was pursuing legitimate remedies for a grave injustice. He says he relied on advice from lawyers like Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, both of whom the indictment describes as co-conspirators. Unlike the many skeptics in Trump’s circle, those advisers reinforced his conviction that he had won and assured him that he had legal options to change the outcome even after the electors were certified.

To support its interpretation, the government cites evidence suggesting that Trump understood he had lost. During a meeting with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and other national security advisers on January 3, 2021, the indictment says, Trump “calmly” accepted a recommendation that the issue they were discussing should be left for the next administration, since Biden’s inauguration was just 17 days away. “Yeah, you’re right,” Trump allegedly said. “It’s too late for us. We’re going to give that to the next guy.”

Three days before the Capitol riot, that conversation suggests, Trump acknowledged the reality that he would be leaving the White House on January 20. But that does not necessarily mean he accepted the legitimacy of that result. On the day of the riot, the indictment notes, Trump declined to intervene, “instead repeatedly remarking that the people at the Capitol were angry because the election had been stolen.” Late that afternoon, Trump “joined others in the outer Oval Office to watch the attack on the Capitol on television” and remarked, “See, this is what happens when they try to steal an election. These people are angry. These people are really angry about it. This is what happens.” That sounds more like a true believer than a con man.

In favor of the latter reading, the indictment notes that Trump had previously expressed skepticism about a baroque conspiracy theory promoted by Sidney Powell, a lawyer whom the indictment describes as “Co-Conspirator 3.” Two weeks after the election, Powell appeared at a press conference alongside Giuliani and Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis, who described Powell as a member of the campaign’s “elite strike force team.” In that capacity, Powell described an elaborate international plot involving Dominion Voting Systems, tricky software, fake ballots, election officials across the country, George Soros, the Clinton Foundation, deceased Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, and “communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China.”

At a meeting with advisers that same month, the indictment says, Trump conceded that Powell’s “claims regarding the voting machine company” were unsubstantiated and remarked that she sounded “crazy.” Trump nevertheless publicly embraced the essence of Powell’s story: that software supplied by Dominion had “switched” massive numbers of Trump votes to Biden votes. Did Trump cynically promote that claim, knowing it to be false, or did he decide, in his desperation to avoid conceding the election, that maybe it was not so crazy after all? With Trump, either motivation is possible.

The same goes for all the times Trump was told that there was no evidence to support specific claims involving illegal voting or fake ballots. In mid-November, for example, a senior campaign adviser “informed the Defendant that his claims of a large number of dead voters in Georgia were untrue.”

In an email the following month, the same adviser complained about the repeatedly debunked claim that election workers at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena had produced and counted thousands of fake ballots. “When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team,” he wrote, “you can see why we’re 0-32 on our cases. I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.”

Again and again, Trump ignored such objections and continued to promote claims that his advisers said had no merit. He re-upped several of those claims during the notorious January 2, 2021, telephone conversation in which he urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary to overturn Biden’s victory in that state. Trump floated a litany of discredited rumors and conspiracy theories that Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel, Ryan Germany, politely but firmly refuted. Trump was unswayed.

When you read the transcript of that conversation, it is hard to tell what Trump is thinking. Any rational person would have taken to heart what Raffensperger and Germany were saying and either changed his mind or at least taken a closer look at the fraud claims. But again, Trump is not a rational person.

Trump initially acknowledges that the rumors he describes “may not be true.” But within a few sentences, he seems to have convinced himself that allegations of ballot shredding and equipment swaps are reliable enough to establish “a very sad situation.”

Later Trump practically begs for confirmation of the claims. “Do you think it’s possible that they shredded ballots in Fulton County?” he says. “Because that’s what the rumor is. And also that Dominion [Voting Systems] took out machines. That Dominion is really moving fast to get rid of their, uh, machinery. Do you know anything about that? Because that’s illegal, right?”

The ambiguity of that conversation reflects a broader problem that prosecutors will face in trying to convict Trump. Proving a conspiracy to defraud the United States requires showing that Trump was deceitful rather than delusional. The alleged conspiracy to “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate” people in their exercise of voting rights (including the right to have their votes counted) likewise requires criminal intent. And the government has to prove that Trump “corruptly” sought to obstruct the electoral vote tally.

Even if independently illegal conduct is enough to establish that a defendant acted “corruptly,” the government must prove that Trump knew his tactics were unlawful. The lawyers he favored were telling him otherwise.

There is a colorable argument, based on the precedent established by the 1960 dispute over Hawaii’s electoral votes, that presenting “contingent” electors was a legitimate way to preserve the Trump campaign’s options should it prevail in pending legal challenges to the election results. As the indictment notes, that is the rationale that Trump’s lawyers offered when they persuaded Republican nominees for the Electoral College in the supposedly contested states to sign certificates identifying themselves as “duly elected and qualified.”

If the would-be electors accepted that theory, it is possible that Trump did too. By January 6, of course, it should have been clear there was no chance that Congress would accept the “contingent” electors, reject Biden’s slates, or ask state legislatures to resolve the supposed conflicts. In trying to achieve one of those outcomes through Pence’s intervention, Trump was asking him to do something that Pence rightly concluded was beyond his constitutional powers. But again, Eastman was advising Trump that the cockamamie plan was a viable option.

Pence himself, who is now competing with Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, says “history will hold him to account for his actions that day.” But Pence is skeptical of the attempt to hold Trump criminally liable. “I’m not convinced that the president acting on bad advice of a group of crank lawyers that came into the White House in the days before January 6 is actually criminal,” he says.

Did Trump drink the Kool-Aid mixed up by Eastman, Giuliani, and the other advisers that Smith describes as his co-conspirators? Did he really believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that Biden stole the election? After covering Trump’s election claims since November 2020, I’m still not sure. Fair-minded jurors are apt to have similar doubts.

The post Did Trump Really Believe the Election Was Stolen? Here Is Why It Matters. appeared first on Reason.com.

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An increasingly unstable fiscal outlook and an elected government that won’t do anything about it have triggered America’s second-ever credit rating downgrade.

Fitch Ratings downgraded the U.S. government’s credit rating from “AAA” to “AA+” on Tuesday afternoon, signaling to investors that America’s Treasury bonds are a qualitatively less ideal purchase. In its announcement, Fitch said the downgrade reflected the federal government’s growing mountain of debt and the country’s fraught political dynamics—most recently evidenced by the brinksmanship over the debt ceiling that nearly triggered a default on the national debt.

“The repeated debt-limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions have eroded confidence in fiscal management,” Fitch said in its announcement. The change also reflects an “expected fiscal deterioration” over the next few years, as the federal deficit is projected to grow wider, adding to America’s already staggering total of $32 trillion in national debt.

The rating service also pointed to the widening gap between the federal government’s tax revenue and its spending, as well as the “limited progress” being made toward solving looming issues like the projected insolvency of Social Security in the early 2030s.

While the AA+ rating reflects that U.S. debt remains a trustworthy investment, Fitch’s downgrade is a warning signal about the federal government’s fiscal trajectory.

The downgrade “should be a wake-up call,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit that advocates for smaller deficits, in a statement. “We need to get our country’s fiscal and political house in order. The United States economy remains strong, but we are on an unsustainable trajectory.”

The national debt is on course to double relative to the size of America’s economy in the next 30 years, and as the debt grows, so will the cost of interest payments. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that interest on the national debt will consume one-third of the federal budget by 2050. That means more than 30 cents of every dollar taxed out of the economy will be directed towards the ongoing costs of past deficit spending rather than being used to cover government services.

“High and rising debt would have significant economic and financial consequences,” the CBO warned in June, echoing similar recent concerns raised by the Government Accountability Office and non-governmental groups. The mountain of debt will “slow economic growth, drive up interest payments to foreign holders of U.S. debt, elevate the risk of a fiscal crisis, increase the likelihood of other adverse effects that could occur more gradually, and make the nation’s fiscal position more vulnerable to an increase in interest rates,” the CBO said.

Fitch is the second of the “big three” credit rating firms to downgrade the federal government from its highest to second-highest category. In 2011, Standard and Poor’s (S&P) knocked America’s debt rating from AAA to AA+, where it remains today.

That change also followed a tense political standoff over the debt ceiling, though the federal government had a now-quaint $14 trillion in debt at the time. The current total is over $32.6 trillion.

Doubling your debt in just over a decade is a good way to scare off those who might lend you more money in the future. Given current fiscal and political trends in Washington, it was a question of when, not if, the U.S. would see another credit rating downgrade.

Unless something dramatically changes, this is unlikely to be the last.

The post U.S. Credit Rating Downgrade Is a Sign of Government Dysfunction appeared first on Reason.com.

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