Mtro. Federico La Mont, august 23rd, 2022
he National Archives found more than 150 sensitive documents when it got a first batch of material from the former president in January, helping to explain the Justice Department’s urgent response.
The initial batch of documents retrieved by the National Archives from former President Donald J. Trump in January included more than 150 marked as classified, a number that ignited intense concern at the Justice Department and helped trigger the criminal investigation that led F.B.I. agents to swoop into Mar-a-Lago this month seeking to recover more, multiple people briefed on the matter said.
In total, the government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump since he left office, the people said: that first batch of documents returned in January, another set provided by Mr. Trump’s aides to the Justice Department in June and the material seized by the F.B.I. in the search this month.
The previously unreported volume of the sensitive material found in the former president’s possession in January helps explain why the Justice Department moved so urgently to hunt down any further classified materials he might have.
And the extent to which such a large number of highly sensitive documents remained at Mar-a-Lago for months, even as the department sought the return of all material that should have been left in government custody when Mr. Trump left office, suggested to officials that the former president or his aides had been cavalier in handling it, not fully forthcoming with investigators, or both.
For Chernobyl Survivors, New Ukraine Nuclear Risk Stirs Dread*
They lived through what is considered the worst nuclear disaster in history. As fighting rages around the Zaporizhzhia plant, they fear another one.
For Valentyna Tkachenko, mere mention of the Zaporizhzhia power plant triggers tears of anguish. Like many around the world, she has been anxiously following the news about the fighting around the nuclear plant in southern Ukraine — but unlike most, she has seen a nuclear disaster unfold around her firsthand.
Ms. Tkachenko was 12 in 1986 when she spotted a glow from the direction of the Chernobyl power plant from her home in the village of Lubyanka, about 20 miles away. The plant in northern Ukraine had exploded, and was on fire.
She and her family were evacuated, and never returned to their home. Her aunt later died of cancer, an illness that Ms. Tkachenko said had affected many from her village. Ms. Tkachenko’s thick blond hair — “such a braid that no hairpin could cope with it,” she recalls — grew thinner, and then started falling out.
And now fear is growing about another nuclear plant in Ukraine, as Russian and Ukrainian forces exchange fire near it.
Pakistan’s Imran Khan Is Now the Target of Forces He Once Wielded*
Old allies like the military have turned against him, but the former prime minister’s appeal on the street has only grown stronger, setting up a dangerous showdown.
Former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s allies have been arrested. Media outlets and public figures considered sympathetic to him have been intimidated or silenced. He has been hit with charges under Pakistan’s antiterrorism act and faces the prospect of arrest.
For weeks, Pakistan has been gripped by a political showdown between the ruling establishment and Mr. Khan, the former cricket star turned populist politician who was ousted from the prime minister post this year. The drama has laid bare the perilous state of Pakistani politics — a winner-take-all game in which the security forces and the justice system are wielded as weapons to sideline those who have fallen out of favor with the country’s powerful military establishment or political elite.
That playbook has been decades in the making, and it has turned the country’s political sphere into a brutal playground in which only a few elite leaders dare play. It has also rendered the Pakistani public deeply disillusioned with the political system and the handful of family dynasties that have been at the top of it for decades.
I Don’t Feel Safe.’ Children Fear Going Back to School in Uvalde*
Three months after 19 students and two teachers died in a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, some students are opting for online classes or private schools.
With a little more than two weeks left before the beginning of the school year, Tina Quintanilla-Taylor drove her 9-year-old daughter, Mehle, past the new school where she was supposed to start fourth grade.
The school is just a mile or so away from the one she attended last year, Robb Elementary School, now permanently closed after a gunman’s shooting rampage left 19 students and two teachers dead. The new school looked clean and welcoming, but Mehle and her mother said they felt uneasy. There were no police officers visible, Mehle said. The newly installed fencing, she said, looked “skinny” and easy to climb.
“I don’t feel safe,” she told her mother.
Ms. Quintanilla-Taylor has decided to enroll her daughter in online classes approved by the state, as have many other parents in Uvalde, where the trauma of the May 24 shooting still lingers after a summer of mourning. Some parents said they are also considering private schools, including one operated by Sacred Heart Catholic Church, which began the new school year on Aug. 15 with double its enrollment from last year for students in prekindergarten through sixth grade.
The Idea That Letting Trump Walk Will Heal America Is Ridiculous*
The main argument against prosecuting Donald Trump — or investigating him with an eye toward criminal prosecution — is that it will worsen an already volatile fracture in American society between Republicans and Democrats. If, before an indictment, we could contain the forces of political chaos and social dissolution, the argument goes, then in the aftermath of such a move, we would be at their mercy. American democracy might not survive the stress.
All of this might sound persuasive to a certain, risk-averse cast of mind. But it rests on two assumptions that can’t support the weight that’s been put on them.
The first is the idea that American politics has, with Trump’s departure from the White House, returned to a kind of normalcy. Under this view, a prosecution would be an extreme and irrevocable blow to social peace. But the absence of open conflict is not the same as peace. Voters may have put a relic of the 1990s into the Oval Office, but the status quo of American politics is far from where it was before Trump.
The most important of our new realities is the fact that much of the Republican Party has turned itself against electoral democracy. The Republican nominee for governor in Arizona — Kari Lake — is a 2020 presidential election denier. So, too, are the Republican nominees in Arizona for secretary of state, state attorney general and U.S. Senate. In Pennsylvania, Republican voters overwhelmingly chose the pro-insurrection Doug Mastriano to lead their party’s ticket in November. Overall, Republican voters have nominated election deniers in dozens of races across six swing states, including candidates for top offices in Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin.
The Question Menacing Brazil’s Elections: Coup or No Coup?*
A simple but alarming question is dominating political discourse in Brazil with just six weeks left until national elections: Will President Jair Bolsonaro accept the results?
For months, Mr. Bolsonaro has attacked Brazil’s electronic voting machines as rife with fraud — despite virtually no evidence — and Brazil’s election officials as aligned against him. He has suggested that he would dispute any loss unless changes are made in election procedures. He has enlisted Brazil’s military in his battle. And he has told his tens of millions of supporters to prepare for a fight.
“If need be,” he said in a recent speech, “we will go to war.”
With its vote on Oct. 2, Brazil is now at the forefront of the growing global threats to democracy, fueled by populist leaders, extremism, highly polarized electorates and internet disinformation. The world’s fourth-largest democracy is bracing for the possibility of its president refusing to step down because of fraud allegations that could be difficult to disprove.
Yet, according to interviews with more than 35 Bolsonaro administration officials, military generals, federal judges, election authorities, members of Congress and foreign diplomats, the people in power in Brazil feel confident that while Mr. Bolsonaro could dispute the election’s results, he lacks the institutional support to stage a successful coup.
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