Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders about Medicare-for-all legislation on Capitol Hill. | AFP via Getty Images

What Elizabeth Warren would do on health care in her first 100 days as president.

In her new health care agenda for the first 100 days of her presidency, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) makes a tacit concession: The health care plan Democrats are most likely to pass in the near term is a robust public option.

Warren rolled out a laundry list of health care executive actions on Friday that she said she plans to take in her first few months as president, making her the first Democratic candidate to offer such a robust administrative playbook.

She also laid out her plan to get to Medicare-for-all, beginning with passing a bill at the start of her presidency that would create a new government health plan that would cover children and people with lower incomes for free, while allowing others to join the plan if they choose. It’s a particularly expansive version of a public option.

Only later, in her third year in the White House, does Warren say she would pursue Medicare-for-all legislation that would actually prohibit private health insurance, as would be required for the single-payer program that she says she, like Bernie Sanders, wants.

As Warren competes with not only Sanders on the left but Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg toward the center for the Democratic nomination, the plan seems like a bit of triangulation on her part. She isn’t backing off her commitment to Medicare-for-all single-payer. But she is putting out a plan that she will argue is more likely to actually pass 18 months from now.

Either bill in Warren’s two-step plan would face serious challenges: The first requires 50 or so Senate Democrats to agree on a health care plan in early 2021 and then the second even more audaciously needs a Senate supermajority to approve single-payer health care (or an end to the Senate filibuster).

This won’t win over many Sanders supporters, who see an unnecessary focus on tactics over strategy. The moderates will still assail her plan as unrealistic and politically toxic. Warren, meanwhile, will make the case she has a plan to both pay for and pass Medicare-for-all.

Health care didn’t seem like the senator’s top priority earlier in the campaign when she spent more time touting the anti-corruption bill she says would be her No. 1 legislative item. But she is now committing to passing a significant health care bill early in her presidency.

Elizabeth Warren’s plan for transitioning to Medicare-for-all, explained

Warren starts by saying she would push a Democratically controlled Congress to pass a Medicare public option in the first 100 days of her presidency.

The new government insurance plan would immediately cover all children under 18 and every American with an income below 200 percent of the federal poverty level (about $25,000 for an individual, $51,500 for a family of four) with no premiums or cost-sharing. The uninsured and people eligible for free coverage would be automatically enrolled. There would be an opportunity to opt out. At the same time, Americans over 50 would also be eligible to enroll in the existing Medicare program, with new limits on their cost-sharing.

Other Americans, including the 160 million people who get insurance through their work, could choose to join the public option if they wish. For people who did choose to enroll in the government plan, their employer would need to pay a contribution to help cover the cost. People with incomes above 200 percent of the poverty level would be asked to pay premiums (capped at 5 percent of income) and they would have to pay some money out of pocket for medical care; the government plan would cover 90 percent of costs.

In its structure, the Warren public option shares some features with Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg’s (automatic enrollment for the uninsured, buy-in option for workers, etc.), but its benefits are more generous.

Warren says that, over time, premiums and cost-sharing for the government plan would be reduced to zero, though she doesn’t provide a timeline for doing so. This is a key tenet of Medicare-for-all as written by Sanders and previously endorsed by Warren: no cost-sharing or means-tested premiums.

Her proposed legislation would also expand Obamacare’s existing tax subsidies for private insurance and would allow people who work at larger firms, who are currently ineligible for that assistance, to take advantage of it and buy subsidized private insurance on the law’s marketplaces if they decline workplace coverage.

So in the short term, Warren’s legislation as outlined here would create a government backstop plan for the uninsured and certain vulnerable populations (kids, the poor, the near-poor) that also competes alongside private insurance for working people with higher incomes. She leaves the institution of single-payer, without private insurance, for another bill that she says she’ll pursue before the end of her first term.

The two-step approach — instead of one bill with a transition period, as Sanders has written — is an attempt to navigate Senate rules and Senate politics.

First, if Democrats manage to win a majority in 2020, it will be a slim one. They could theoretically eliminate the filibuster, but a lot of senators sound reluctant to do that. So any major legislation would likely need to be passed through the budget reconciliation process, which allows a bill to move with just 51 votes but restricts what policies can be included to provisions that directly affect federal spending and revenue. Some provisions of Medicare-for-all, like the prohibition on private insurance, are not thought to be permissible under reconciliation.

And to pass a reconciliation bill with a slim majority, Democrats will need basically every single one of their members to support it. There would be a significant bloc of moderate Democratic senators — led by the likes of Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) — who would need to back whatever health care bill President Warren is trying to pass. Those lawmakers have already said they don’t support Medicare-for-all, but they might be more amenable to the public option that Warren is suggesting as a starting point.

Then, by year three, Warren says she’d take the final step toward single-payer and advocate for a bill to eliminate private health insurance. That would require 60 votes, so either a difficult-to-imagine Democratic supermajority where the entire caucus supports single-payer, or even more difficult-to-imagine Republican support for the plan.

But if there is one place that Democrats do all agree on health care, it’s that they think Americans, if given the chance to have government health care, will really come to like it. Sanders says that’s why people will ultimately be happy to give up their private plan and why Pete Buttigieg says he believes a buy-in can be the start of the path to single-payer.

That would defy the recent history of health care reform where parties that pass or even just pursue major changes to US health care pay dearly in the next election, as they did in 1994, 2010, and 2018. But the assumption is baked into each of their plans in a different way.

All the health care executive actions Warren wants to take

Warren’s plan also broadens her health care agenda beyond Medicare-for-all, the dominant primary debate so far but only a dream if Democrats don’t win the Senate and Mitch McConnell controls the Senate agenda.

In that case, the new Democratic president would be mostly dependent on their administrative power to change health care policy. Warren also detailed her roadmap for executive action, a mix of reversing Trump administration actions and taking her own steps to, in particular, reduce prescription drug and other health care costs.

She says she would:

• Reverse the Trump rule that allows states to loosen the ACA’s requirements for insurance benefits
• Reverse Trump’s expansion of short-term health insurance plans, which are not subject to Obamacare’s insurance regulations
• Block Medicaid work requirements
• Undo Trump administration’s plans to restrict abortion access and weaken health care protections for LGBTQ people
• Use existing government authorities — compulsory licensing and march-in rights, both of which could allow the government to revoke a drug’s patent if there is a compelling public interest — to allow the production of cheaper versions of insulin, Epipens, opioid overdose medication, and more.
• Appoint antitrust enforcers to combat hospital consolidation and anti-competitive mergers of hospital and physician practices

Warren’s plan here attempts to both finish answering the tough questions about Medicare-for-all (how do you pass it?) and broaden the health care conversation (she also proposes a $100 billion increase in NIH research funding). Health care had become a vulnerable spot in her wonky armor and, mindful of her “plans” reputation, she is moving to repair it.

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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey at an Entrepreneurial Refugee Network event in the UK. | Matt Crossick/PA Images via Getty Images

Twitter just released the first iteration of its policies banning political ads — and appears to have changed course on CEO Jack Dorsey’s declaration it would ban issue ads.

Twitter’s public honeymoon after its announcement of a ban on political ads is over. The social media company now faces the task of actually fleshing its new policy out — and dealing with the inevitable protests and unanswered questions moving forward.

On Friday, the San Francisco-based company unveiled the first iteration of its new policies surrounding political advertisements on its platform. Just over two weeks ago and amid controversy over Facebook’s policy that allows politicians to lie in ads, CEO Jack Dorsey announced on Twitter that his firm would ban political ads. The announcement was widely praised, but it also brought a lot of questions about what constitutes a political ad and how Twitter would go about carrying this out. Friday is the first time we’re getting a look at the details of how the policy will look.

Twitter’s new guidance is essentially a rough outline of a policy that still has a lot of details to work out and that will inevitably cause backlash — a fact it isn’t shying away from.

“This is entirely new terrain,” said Vijaya Gadde, legal, policy, and trust and safety lead at Twitter, in a call with reporters on Friday. She acknowledged that especially on the global level, Twitter has a lot of specifics to figure out, and that some areas will be subjective. “We’re also prepared that we’re going to make some mistakes, and we’re going to have to learn and improve this policy over time,” she said.

Twitter won’t enforce its new policies around political ads until November 22, and it says it plans to roll out more information before then. But it’s moving fast.

Twitter’s initial announcement of its political ads ban was in many ways a public relations win for the company — political advertising isn’t a big part of its overall revenue (just $3 million in the 2018 midterms on $3 billion in total revenue for the company that year). But given all of the public outcry over Facebook’s policy against fact-checking ads from politicians, it was a quick way to get a leg-up on a competitor.

Now comes the hard part of putting the ban in place. Twitter hasn’t proven itself to be hyper effective at addressing abusive behavior and offensive content on its platform in the past, and it’s bound to have missteps this time around, too. It’s already changed course on how it will approach issue ads, which it initially said it would ban but now will allow — with some qualifications.

What we know about how Twitter is going to approach political ads

Twitter’s view is that the reach of political messages should be earned, not bought, and advertising should not be used to drive political or regulatory outcomes.

To that end, it will ban political content as of next week, defining that as “content that references a candidate, political party, elected or appointed government official, election, referendum, ballot measure, legislation, regulation, directive, or judicial outcome.” Ads containing political content, such as voting or fundraising appeals and ads that advocate for and against political content, are barred. Candidates, political parties, and elected or appointed government officials will not be allowed to run ads of any kind, and in the United States, that will apply to PACs, super PACs, and 501(c)(4)s as well.

Once politicians are out of office, they can run an ad — assuming it isn’t political content.

The more complicated part of Twitter’s new policy relates to cause-based advertising, in other words, issue ads. Dorsey in October said the company would ban issue ads, but it appears to have changed course.

Twitter says it will allow ads with messages about issues such as civil engagement, the economy, the environment, and social equity, but they can’t advocate for or against a specific political, judicial, legislative, or regulatory outcome related to those matters. Basically, advertisers can talk about those topics, but they can’t push a specific result on them. So a group, for example, could put out an ad warning against the dangers of climate change, but it presumably can’t encourage the passage of the Green New Deal, or direct people to a candidate’s homepage.

In that category, there will be restrictions on micro-targeting, an important tool advertisers use to try to reach the exact people they believe will be most amenable to their messages. Any group or person trying to put out ads about a cause will only be able to target at the state, province, or regional level — no zip codes — and can’t use keywords and interest targeting around politics, such as conservative or liberal. Micro-targeting restrictions will presumably make it harder for ads to be served to heavily siloed corners of the platform.

For-profit organizations — ExxonMobil or Walmart, for example — can run cause-related ads, but they’re not supposed to be ones aimed at driving a political outcome but instead tied to the organization’s “publicly stated values, principles, and/or beliefs.” In other words, Exxon can run an ad showing the benefits of fracking, but they can’t run an ad that promotes a piece of legislation that would allow fracking somewhere.

Outlets Twitter defines as “news publishers” will be able to run ads, assuming they aren’t pushing political beliefs or advocating for or against an issue. In other words, an ad pushing a media outlet’s political endorsement or an opinion column would be barred.

There are a lot of holes to poke in this

This is just a first step in what is likely to be a long process for Twitter, and a new set of controversies about how it and other social media companies deal with content on their platforms.

For one thing, while Twitter won’t allow ads that advocate for or against a specific political cause, the policy’s a lot squishier about ads containing disinformation. Twitter won’t allow a hypothetical ad from Walmart, for example, telling people to call their representatives and advocate against a $15 minimum wage. But could Walmart take out an ad saying a $15 minimum wage bankrupted a town in Iowa, or just push some softer but inaccurate talking points on the matter? Maybe.

Del Harvey, vice president of trust and safety at Twitter, said in the Friday press call that she believes one of the defenses against disinformation in ads is the backlash they might produce on the platform. “One of the benefits of Twitter being a primarily public platform is that you can absolutely be called [out] and held accountable for what you say,” she said.

It would appear as though Planned Parenthood, which is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, would be able to run a Twitter ad talking about the benefits of birth control or sexually transmitted infection testing. And someone could presumably run an ad advocating for LGBTQ equality, as long as it’s not tied to a specific bill or court case. But the line between what is and isn’t allowed is going to be a thin one — advocates are often clearly trying to influence public opinion and the law, even if not a specific piece of legislation.

What exact terms will be prohibited in micro-targeting? How will Twitter enforce these policies? How will it identify those who inevitably try to game the system and set up a system for people to flag ads they believe break the rules? Will Twitter be transparent on how it makes subjective decisions? These are all things we still don’t completely know. Some of this plane is going to get built while it’s already in the air.

“We’re moving really quickly here, because we think that the timing is urgent,” Gadde said.

“Twitter is still going to be trying to define what is political. Can it be contested? They’ve already proven themselves, just like the other platform companies, to be really bad at making those decisions,” Shannon McGregor, a political communications researcher at the University of Utah, told Recode in an interview before this first round of policies was released.

Twitter also serves as a test case for potential bigger players that have come under scrutiny over their political advertising policies, including Facebook, which is surely watching.

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Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch arrives for the House Select Intelligence Committee hearing on the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on November 15, 2019. | Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images

Probably not, but here’s why it likely doesn’t matter anyway.

When Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, testified on Capitol Hill Friday morning during the second day of impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump, it didn’t take the president long to send a tweet attacking her.

“Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” Trump wrote. “She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. it is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.”

Yovanovitch was ousted from her ambassadorship back in April after she apparently got in the way of Trump’s efforts to persuade the government of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.

Her testimony on Friday was clear, calm, and mostly unflattering to the Trump administration. “As Foreign Service professionals are being denigrated and undermined,” she told members of Congress, “the institution is also being degraded. This will soon cause real harm, if it hasn’t already.”

Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images

Trump has a habit of blasting critics on Twitter. But some observers — including some loyal to the president — said this tweet was, at best, a very bad idea.

But did this tweet really cross a legal line into witness tampering?

I put this question to seven legal experts. Their responses, edited for clarity and length, are below.

There wasn’t a perfect consensus, but most experts agreed that Trump’s tweet falls pretty clearly within our understanding of an impeachable offense. As to whether or not it constitutes a crime, the question is almost irrelevant since prosecution is all but impossible.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, law professor, Stetson University

According to the Department of Justice, intimidation of witnesses testifying before Congress is a crime under 18 U.S.C. § 1515(a)(1). However, in this case it is the president who is allegedly doing the witness intimidation and an OLC opinion (see Indicting a President Is Not Foreclosed: The Complex History – Lawfare) states that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

Just as Trump cannot be indicted for campaign finance crimes while president such as those involving Michael Cohen, he similarly could not be indicted for witness intimidation including his tweets this morning either while he is still in office. But accountability can come in different forms. The House of Representatives could add witness intimidation as a separate article of impeachment. Also, once Trump is an ex-president, federal prosecutors could charge him with witness intimidation if they chose.

Joshua Dressler, law professor, Ohio State University

To be guilty, Trump would need to actually intimidate the witness from testifying, which he didn’t, and it would have to be proven that it was his intention to intimidate. He could easily argue that he is just informing us of how bad the witness was at her job or he even could say, “you know I bad mouth people, witness or no witness. That’s just my ugly habit.”

Paul Butler, law professor, Georgetown University

Trump’s tweet is a stone cold thug move. Let’s say I am federal prosecutor investigating a mob boss. A witness testifies that she felt intimidated by the mob boss. As she speaks, the mob boss denigrates the witness in a tweet.

I would halt the proceeding — for the safety of the witness — and ask the judge for a warrant for the arrest of the mob boss. The United States Criminal Code makes witness intimidation a felony. The fact that a mob boss lives in the White House should not excuse him from being brought to justice.

Diane Marie Amann, law professor, University of Georgia

Impeachment is a legal process, in that the US Constitution provides for charging of “high crimes or misdemeanors” by the House, followed by trial in the Senate. Impeachment is not a federal criminal proceeding, however.

For this reason, evaluation of the president’s statements — in tweets, in phone conversations, at press gaggles, and the like — should turn not on whether the precise elements of a federal crime like witness tampering have been met, but rather on whether the statements constitute, or contribute to, abuses of the public trust that justify the president’s impeachment and removal from office.

Peter Shane, law professor, Ohio State University

If Trump were a criminal defendant charged with witness tampering, I assume his defenses would be: (1) he couldn’t have been intimidating Ambassador Yovanovitch because she was already testifying, and (2) his tweets were not directed specifically at any other witness.

Because I am not a criminal law expert, I do not know if (2) would or would not be a legally cognizable defense. (If a mob boss tweets, “Bad things are gonna happen to anyone who testifies about my kid,” I don’t know if it’s a defense that he would not have explicitly targeted a specific witness.)

Putting that aside, however, it must be said for the gazillionth time that impeachment is not a criminal process. For the president of the United States to seek to interfere by intimidation with testimony before a congressional hearing plainly falls within Alexander Hamilton’s understanding of an impeachable offense: “an abuse or violation of some public trust” that amounts to an injury “done immediately to the society itself.”

Peter Margulies, law professor, Roger Williams University School of Law

Trump’s live-tweeting during Ambassador Yovanovitch’s testimony was inappropriate but did not constitute witness tampering. The federal crime of witness tampering requires proof of intent to influence the witness. Trump’s critique of Yovanovitch’s performance as a diplomat in Somalia and elsewhere doesn’t show that crucial intent to influence.

If Trump had threatened Yovanovitch’s position in the U.S. foreign service — for which she thankfully has statutory protections — the charge of witness tampering might stick. But mere criticism — no matter how partisan, ill-founded, and unfair — doesn’t equal witness tampering. That’s also true of witness tampering in the context of impeachment.

In Federalist No. 66, Alexander Hamilton envisioned impeachment as a political process run by Congress. That means Congress can impeach a president even if the executive actions at issue are not literally crimes but are abuses of power, as in the presidential phone call that triggered the Ukraine impeachment inquiry.

But Hamilton and the rest of the framers knew that politics is sometimes unfair; with the rise of political parties early in the Republic, all of the major players during the founding era were subject to scurrilous charges on a daily basis. For example, supporters of Jefferson attacked President Washington as a supposed lackey of Hamilton and Hamilton as an agent of Great Britain. Washington wisely didn’t see fit to respond to these allegations himself, but criticizing his accusers would not have been witness tampering, even if Washington’s opponents had sought to impeach him (as they came close to doing with Washington’s successor, John Adams).

The “abuse of power” theory of impeachable offenses allows the President and his supporters the right of reply in the political realm. Criticism of a witness’s past is part of that political process. It may show that the president doesn’t “get it” and will continue to abuse his power, making impeachment all the more imperative. But it’s not witness tampering.

Jed Shugerman, law professor, Fordham University

High crimes and misdemeanors are not limited to felonies. In its articles of impeachment, the House should add Trump’s repeated practice of witness intimidation over three years as an abuse of power and as high misdemeanors. In context, this behavior is clearly impeachable.

But many legal commentators argued explicitly that Trump’s tweets this morning were crimes of witness intimidation, tampering, and obstruction, and I think that’s a mistake. Such an interpretation runs the risk of creating a slippery slope to infringe on the free speech of potential defendants to criticize witnesses and make public their own defense. They run the risk of communicating an overly aggressive scorched-earth approach to criminal law by Trump’s critics, who have no shortage of stronger legal arguments.

The content of the tweets were not threats. One statement that commentators focus on is the following: “They call it ‘serving at the pleasure of the President.’” They suggest it’s a threat to fire a current employee. But in context, it was an explanation for his power to have removed her earlier. There is a valid question about whether a boss needs to be more careful than even a remote implication about firing in retaliation, but a fair reading of context suggests this didn’t cross that line.

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The consequences of climate change can be weird and apocalyptic.

You can find evidence of a changing climate everywhere on Earth. But nowhere are the changes more dramatic than in the Arctic.

Our world’s northern polar region is warming twice as fast as the global average. And the consequences are easy to spot. On average, Arctic sea ice extent is shrinking every summer. The Greenland ice sheet is becoming unstable, and melting into the ocean at an accelerating rate.

Many changes in the Arctic are ominous, and some of the most troubling are occurring beneath the surface, in the permafrost. Permafrost is a layer of frozen soil that covers 25 percent of the Northern Hemisphere. It acts like a giant freezer, keeping microbes, carbon, poisonous mercury, and soil locked in place.

Now it’s melting. And things are getting weird and creepy: The ground warps, folds, and caves. Roadways built on top of permafrost have becoming wavy roller coasters through the tundra. Long-dormant microbes — some trapped in the ice for tens of thousands of years — are beginning to wake up, releasing equally ancient C02, and could potentially come to infect humans with deadly diseases. And the retreating ice is exposing frozen plants that haven’t seen the sun in 45,000 years, as radiocarbon dating research suggests.

Thawing permafrost is also a time bomb: There’s more carbon stored in the permafrost than in the atmosphere. Melting it risks accelerating global warming even further.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Wednesday released a 1,000-plus page report amassing all the best evidence on how the icy regions of the world and the oceans are threatened by climate change.

Permafrost temperatures keep rising, and the report paints a grim future. Even if the world manages to hit the IPCC target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, around 25 percent of the permafrost near the surface could be lost, the report finds. Changes to the permafrost (among other changes in the ocean and cryosphere) “are expected to be irreversible,” the report states.

In a more severe scenario where the world continues to increase emissions and we hit 5 degrees of warming, around 69 percent could be lost. That would drastically change the landscape of the Arctic and potentially set off a further acceleration of global warming.

To better understand the strange changes in the permafrost, in 2017, I spoke with Robert Max Holmes, an earth systems scientist with the Woods Hole Research Center. When I reached him by phone, he was in Bethel, Alaska, a small outpost town 400 miles west of Anchorage, and had just come back from an eight-day research and teaching expedition in the wilderness.

A week earlier, Holmes and his students had set up temperature sensors in the soil near their encampment. Their first reading was 0.3°C. “It’s barely frozen. And we just sort of sat there stunned. You don’t know whether to cry or what. Because you’re just like: My God, this whole thing is just going to change in a big way.”

Here’s how.

1) Permafrost has been frozen for millennia. Thawing it is a huge disruption.

Johnny Harris / Vox

The simplest definition of permafrost is ground that has been frozen for at least two years.

But it’s so much more than that. In much of the Arctic, that ground has been frozen for tens of thousands of years. And a huge amount of it is frozen — permafrost rests in 25 percent of all the land area in the Northern Hemisphere.

National Snow and Ice Data Center

The top few inches (up to a few feet) of the permafrost is what’s known as the “active layer.” This topsoil does thaw with yearly seasonal changes, and is home to a thriving ecosystem. So how do scientists know there’s permafrost underneath it?

“We have these things called thaw depth probes, which is basically just a T-bar, a steel rod that’s a centimeter in diameter and 1.5 meters or so long,” Holmes says. They poke the ground with it. “It’s like pushing a knife through warm butter or something, and then you hit the bottom of the tray, and boom” — there’s your permafrost.

Eventually, if you dig deep enough, the permafrost again thaws due to heat from the Earth’s core.

Permafrost is like the bedrock of the Arctic (you literally need jackhammers to break it apart). But rising air temperatures in the region are chipping away at this bedrock.

“Half the volume of permafrost may be frozen water,” Holmes says. “When that thaws, the water just runs off. The water may head downhill or the water has a lower volume than is ice, so the ground just slumps and kind of falls apart.”

(The New York Times has a great new interactive showing how much permafrost in the Alaska may inevitably melt.)

Every year, more permafrost grows closer to thawing, and the depth of the “active layer” — the top layer of permafrost that thaws in the summertime — is growing deeper in the Arctic regions north of Europe, a sign of instability.

2) The biggest threat is carbon

Johnny Harris / Vox

You can think of the Arctic permafrost as a giant kitchen freezer.

If you put organic (carbon-based) matter in your freezer, the food will stay intact. But if the freezer compressor breaks, it will slowly heat up. As it heats up, bacteria begin to eat your food. The bacteria make the food go rotten. And as the bacteria consume the food, they produce carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases and chemicals that smell terrible.

For tens of thousands of years, permafrost has acted like a freezer, keeping 1,400- to 1,6000 gigatons (billion tons) of plant matter carbon trapped in the soil. (That’s more than double the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere.) Some of the plant matter is more recent, and some is from glacial ice ages that radically transformed a lush landscape into a tundra.

“Plants are growing in permafrost regions, and when those plants die, because of the cold temperature, they don’t fully decompose, so some of that organic carbon is left behind,” Holmes says. When the permafrost thaws, “it starts to rot, it starts to decompose, and that’s what’s releasing carbon dioxide and methane,” he says.

This is one reason scientists are so worried about a melting Arctic: When the bacteria turn the carbon in the Arctic into C02 and methane, it accelerates a feedback loop. The more methane and carbon released, the more warming. The more warming … you get it.

A 2014 study in Environmental Research Letters estimates that thawing permafrost could release around 120 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere by 2100, resulting in 0.29°C of additional warming (give or take 0.21°C). By 2300, another study in Nature Geoscience concludes, the melting permafrost and its resulting carbon feedback loops could contribute to 1.69°C of warming. (That’s on the high end. It could be as low as 0.13°C of warming.)

But these are just estimates, and they come with a good deal of uncertainty. (There’s debate over how much greenhouse gases can be released out of the Arctic, and how long it would take.) It all depends on how quickly the Arctic warms. Some of this freed carbon might be taken up by new plant growth, the IPCC report finds. But even so, the report states, carbon released from permafrost will become a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

But the logic here is simple: The more warming, the greater the risk of kick-starting this feedback loop. A study published in Nature Climate Change in 2017 predicted that 1.5 million square miles of permafrost would disappear with every additional 1°C of warming.

And carbon isn’t the only pollutant trapped in the ice. A new study in Geophysical Research Letters finds that the Arctic permafrost is the largest repository of mercury on Earth. Mercury is a potent neurotoxin. And scientists now think there is around 15 million gallons frozen in permafrost soils — nearly twice the amount of mercury found in all other soil, the ocean, and atmosphere combined.

“The release of heavy metals, particularly mercury, and other legacy contaminants currently stored in glaciers and permafrost, is projected to reduce water quality for freshwater biota, household use and irrigation,” the IPCC reports.

Scientists don’t know how much of this mercury could be released, or when, the Washington Post explains. But they do know this: Continued melting will make it more likely for the mercury to be released, pollute the ocean, and accumulate in the food chain.

3) Ancient microbes are waking up

Johnny Harris / Vox

In August 2016, an outbreak of anthrax in Siberia sickened 72 people and took the life of a 12-year-old boy. Health officials pinpointed the outbreak to an unusual source.

Abnormally high temperatures had thawed the corpses of long-dead reindeer and other animals. Some of these bodies may have been infected with anthrax, and as Wired explained, the soil in Siberia is normally much too cold to dig deep graves. “The disease from thawing human and animal remains can get into groundwater that people then drink,” Wired reported.

Scientists are worried that as more permafrost thaws, especially in Siberia, there may be more outbreaks of long-dormant anthrax as burial grounds thaw.

That’s because the deep freeze of the permafrost doesn’t just keep carbon from escaping — it keeps microbes intact as well.

Permafrost is the place to preserve bacteria and viruses for hundreds of thousands — if not a million — years, explains Jean-Michel Claverie, a genomics researcher who studies ancient viruses and bacteria. “It is dark, it is cold, and it is also without oxygen. … There is no [ultraviolet] light.” All the bacteria need is a thaw to wake back up. “If you take a yogurt and put it in permafrost [that remains frozen], I’m sure in 10,000 years from now it still will be good to eat,” he said in a 2017 interview.

Claverie is part of a scientific team that determined it’s possible to revive 30,000-year-old viruses trapped in the permafrost. His work is centered on viruses that infect amoebas, not humans. But there’s no reason why a flu virus, smallpox, or some long-lost human infection couldn’t be revived the same way. These microbes are like time travelers — and they could thrive waking up in an age when humans have lost an immune defense against them.

I asked Claverie if there’s an upper limit to how long viruses and (certain types of) bacteria could survive in the permafrost.

“The limit is the limit given by the permafrost,” he explained, meaning he sees no limit. Permafrost is 1,000 meters deep in places, “which make it about a million, 1.5 million year old,” he said.

The danger here, he emphasized, is not from the slow thawing of the permafrost itself. That is, if the permafrost melts, and we leave the land alone, we’re unlikely to come into contact with ancient deadly diseases. The fear is that the thawing will encourage greater excavation in the Arctic. Mining and other excavation projects will become more appealing as the region grows warmer. And these projects can put workers into contact with some very, very old bugs.

The threat is tiny. But it exists. The big lesson is that even viruses thought to be eradicated from Earth — like smallpox — may still lurk frozen, somewhere.

“We could actually catch a disease from a Neanderthal’s remains,” Claverie says. “Which is amazing.”

4) Roadways are warping, foundations are shifting

When the permafrost melts, it literally changes the landscape, causing the ground to slump, and ripple.

In Bethel, Alaska, roadways are literally warping as the ground beneath them becomes less solid. In other places, the melting permafrost is creating craters and sinkholes. “You see buildings that are kind of slumping into the ground; you see that a lot in the Russian Arctic,” Holmes says. Civil engineers are experimenting with new types of pilings and foundations to help keep Arctic buildings on strong footing.

There is one crater in Siberia so large it’s gotten the nickname “doorway to the underworld.” It’s a kilometer long and up to 100 meters deep. And it’s growing larger every year.

The IPCC report underscores this as well: Melting permafrost will transform the landscape. Lakes will increase by 50 percent by 2100 under a high-emissions scenario. Meanwhile, after the soils melt, they may start to dry out, and increase the likelihood of wildfire in polar regions.

5) When we lose the permafrost, we lose a record of natural history

Johnny Harris / Vox

There are dangers buried in the permafrost. But there are also natural treasures yet to be discovered. The ice preserves all: ancient animal remains and human history in the region. Think of Ötzi, the remarkably preserved 5,000-year-corpse found in the Alps. If he had thawed, what was left of his body would have decomposed, and a window into the world he lived in would have been lost forever.

There may be other Ötzis in the Arctic. Or preserved bits of mammoth DNA yet to be discovered. The melting may make some of these treasures briefly accessible — freed from the ice — but also threatens to quickly destroy them. According to Scientific American, once a specimen is uncovered and thawed, researchers have a year at most to recover it before it completely breaks down.

Are there any benefits to melting permafrost?

“One story I heard of in Bethel is that there are people who are happy that now they can dig a basement,” Holmes says.

There are some benefits of thawing permafrost. For one, farming is now possible in parts of Alaska, as NPR reports. And “So it’s not that it’s all a bad news story,” Holmes says, “but I’d say the silver lining is pretty thin and pretty small in relationship to the larger-scale negatives.”

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Most fare evaders are one-time offenders, according to research from the Public Transport Research Group in Australia. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

New York City has increased policing to curb fare dodging. It’s resulted in outrage and protests from some riders.

When Allure editor Rosemary Donahue witnessed New York City transit workers installing cameras in front of subway turnstiles, she posted a photo to Twitter on November 1 that quickly went viral.

Part of her tweet — “are you…fucking….kidding me?? — captured the unique frustration and anger New Yorkers reserved for the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) in the wake of the city’s renewed focus on fare evasion this year.

“My mom waited an hour at Lexington-63rd after leaving work yesterday for the F train… but okay, this is the problem,” responded one Twitter user. “The cost of those cameras, installing those cameras, and paying someone to monitor the cameras is definitely a better way for the MTA to spend money than fixing the trains,” said another.

The online outrage has largely stemmed from riders’ dissatisfaction with the transit system’s efficiency and accessibility that, in their opinion, has not improved much, combined with anger over the perceived treatment of marginalized riders.

Within the past two years, the system’s on-time performance has fluctuated from terrible (58 percent on-time in January 2018) to satisfactory (84 percent in August 2019), but breakdowns, unexpected delays, and service changes still frequently occur. (The MTA also has a history of overstating its performance, according to Jalopnik reporter Aaron Gordon.)

According to the MTA’s estimates, the system will lose about $300 million from fare evasion this year, from both train and bus fares. But officials’ fixation on reducing this offense are misaligned, activist groups say, especially when these policies are likely to affect low-income riders and communities of color. Those who are fined or arrested for fare evasion in New York are disproportionately black or Hispanic, according to MTA data of arrests. The MTA has not responded to a call for comment at the time of publication.

Some activists have called for fare evasion to be decriminalized, which means offenders will have to pay a fine instead of facing arrest or jail time. Currently, people who don’t pay the fare are expected to pay a $100 fine, and the MTA said police will not be focused on making arrests. But according to The Appeal, those with an open warrant or a history of similar offenses could still be arrested if caught fare evading.

Fare evasion doesn’t just occur in New York. It’s an endemic issue for transit systems around the world, and current tactics used by authorities to reduce fare beating are far from perfect.

According to transit experts, we — the transit board, public officials, and regular citizens — might be simplifying the motives behind fare dodging: Why do people hop a turnstile or sneak through a gate in the first place? And what is it, exactly, that we’re trying to fix here?

Fare evasion is more common than you might think. But most people are one-time offenders.

While fare evasion has been studied by data scientists and engineers, few have looked into the psychological aspects that drive this action — a form of “consumer misbehavior,” according to researchers from the Public Transport Research Group in Australia.

The group’s findings, explained to me by Graham Currie, a professor of public transportation at Monash University, examine how common fare evasion is among the general public and the intentions of re-offending evaders, who are a small but significant population in transit systems worldwide.

Currie’s research evaluated rider behavior in Melbourne, but his team also conducted follow-up research in ten cities around the world, including New York, to determine the public’s perception of transit systems with high fare evasion rates.

Currie told me that in New York City, about 40 percent of transit riders evade a fare once a year, intentional or not. “This is a big share of the population,” he said. This one-time fare evasion could be due to a variety of circumstances: The ticketing booth wasn’t working, a rider left their Metrocard at home, or the emergency exit door was left open, which provides for a quick entry.

“But according to the law, even if you do it once, you’re committing a crime,” Currie continued. “So riders’ immediate reaction to the authorities calling them criminals is to feel that the system is incompetent.” (The Public Transport Research Group favors policies that don’t punish riders caught in their first attempt of fare beating.)

Activists have pointed to other cities in the US, such as Washington D.C. and Philadelphia, as examples of places that have passed measures to decriminalize fare evasion in the past year. According to Philadelphia news outlet Billy Penn, only 13 people have been charged with the harshest penalty — a total ban from the transit system — since the city decriminalized the offense in January.

Riders’ resistance and disdain for the MTA in New York overflowed into a protest in early November against increased policing on the MTA. The outrage was prompted by multiple videos of viral arrests that appeared to involve unnecessary force by police toward passengers of color. Hundreds of people occupied a subway platform and took to the streets in downtown Brooklyn. They hopped turnstiles and posted stickers to encourage mass fare evasion, a tactic taken from demonstrations in Santiago, Chile.

The following week, more videos documenting police action on the subway surfaced. A viral video on November 9 showed officers arresting a churro vendor in a station to the outrage of bystanders. (The NYPD told Gothamist in a statement that the vendor, who had 10 summonses for unlicensed vending, “refused to cooperate and was briefly handcuffed; officers escorted her into the command where she was uncuffed.”)

When I asked Currie if he found any correlation between fare evasion and people’s perception of the transit system, he said his research group theorized that would be the case. Their theory was predicated on research done towards shoplifting — how shoplifting rates increase if a shop appears to be old or unkempt and workers are unhelpful.

“I suspect it’s still true, although we didn’t find any link,” Currie said. “If people aren’t happy, it will affect their compliance with what the rules are.”

According to surveys conducted in Melbourne, recidivist fare evaders are not typically poor or disadvantaged. “A high share of them work and a number of them are wealthy, actually,” he said. In surveying this group of people who consistently fade evade, Currie found that they’re driven by the thrill of risk-taking.

This behavior is also tied to how much people perceive to be in control of the situation, which means they weigh the risk or likelihood of being caught. Stricter policing does reduce fare evasion, Currie said, although public officials need to implement it “carefully and considerately.”

People are more motivated to pay up if they think they’re likely to be checked for a ticket, Currie said. In Melbourne, for example, the transit system deploys plainclothes officers to inspect tickets randomly at stops and stations.

There’s also the “proof of payment” system that’s popular in Europe where there are fewer gates or barriers to entry, but occasionally, an inspector on a bus or train will demand to see a rider’s ticket. These methods have helped lower rates of fare evasion in cities like Oslo. The idea is to make paying for fares easier and faster — in addition to increasing the possibility of a passenger being checked.

The cost of fare evasion and why cities care so much

Andy Byford, New York City’s transit president, has maintained that fares are crucial in improving rider experience. “Every dollar that doesn’t come to us, in terms of fares that should be paid, is a dollar that we can’t improve in service,” he said at a news conference in September, according to AM New York.

Fares aren’t the only source of revenue for the MTA; the system also earns money from tolls, taxes, government subsidies, and advertisements. But fares account for the largest chunk — about 38 percent (or $6.2 billion) — of the MTA’s annual earnings.

The MTA, despite approving a much-needed $54 billion plan in September, is expected to reach a $1 billion operating budget deficit by 2023. The authority board voted to raise fares in April, and the city deployed an additional 500 transit and NYPD police to 50 subway stations and 50 bus routes where evasion is most common.

Vince Talotta/Toronto Star/Getty Images

The deployment would cost the MTA $249 million over the next four years, according to chief financial officer Bob Foran during the 2020 budget proposal on November 14. The agency is also expected to raise fares and tolls in 2021 and 2023 and cut back on 2,700 jobs.

As Streetsblog NYC reported, the police deployment will be partially financed by the $200 million the MTA is expected to save through anti-fare evasion efforts. But the projected cost of these efforts raised eyebrows among activists, local politicians, and city residents.

In September, Byford said that he would “like to see cameras on every train on every bus on every station on all the gate lines,” according to the New York Daily News. Yet subway fare evasion hasn’t curbed despite increased policing, officials said in October. It’s actually risen from 3.9 percent of riders in June to 4.7 percent in August. (Bus fare evasion has dropped from 24 percent to 22 percent during the same time period.)

Cracking down on evasion is one way to rake in more funds for the MTA, which is also struggling with a decline in ridership. Still, it’s not likely that the MTA, or any American transit system, for that matter, is going to turn a profit any time soon.

Few public transit agencies in the world are profitable, and most of them are based in Asia. Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway system operates on a “rail plus property” model that profits off real estate developments above its stations. It’s also partially owned by the Hong Kong government and privately run.

Most transit systems don’t follow this model and rely on government subsidies or taxes. That’s why — even in cities where public transit is financially sustainable — fares do matter, and public officials are willing to crack down on evaders despite outcry.

It’s not just in New York City, which has estimated a loss of $300 million in annual fares. London Travel Watch, a transport watchdog group, said the system will lose 100 million pounds this year to fare dodgers. And in cities like DC, where fare evasion is decriminalized, the Metro expects to lose $36 million in 2019.

The promise and the price of free public transit

As transport fares continue to rise in cities around the world, a number of activists and organizations are calling for them to be eliminated. In other words: make public transit free. This is a radical demand — one that’s been considered for decades — that aims to reduce inequality in our transportation system. Research has shown that poorer communities have shoddier access to public transit systems.

As Joe Pinsker writes in The Atlantic, “Maybe free public transit should be thought of not as a behavioral instrument, but as a right; poorer citizens have just as much of a privilege to get around conveniently as wealthier ones.”

Luxembourg will be the first nation to offer free transit starting in 2020. With a system as complex and old as New York’s, though, the idea could sound far-fetched. After all, if the MTA can’t turn a profit, how will it subsidize fares for millions of residents while ensuring that the trains run on time?

Cities have been grappling with how to reduce fare evasion for decades, but making the system free, according to Currie, isn’t a viable solution for many. “High-capacity mass transit costs a fortune,” he told me.

Academics and activists have made in-depth, research-backed arguments for decades as to why we should or should not make public transit free. Transit advocate Ted Kheel, who lobbied for free transit in New York City for over 40 years, proposed a plan that included congestion pricing, taxi surcharges, and higher parking fees to cover fares.

Meanwhile, a 2013 report in the International Journal of Transportation that analyzed free fare schemes in Europe discouraged entirely free systems. While subway use drastically increased, the study found free transit to be costly and required “broad political support and long term commitment.”

Ultimately, before New York even considers a new fare system, it needs to improve its “ancient and unreliable” infrastructure or the city’s growth will soon be stifled, Currie said.

For the time being, it seems like the only thing passengers can do is pay for it. And people, for the most part, are doing so. It’s just that frustration arises when riders feel that their conditions aren’t improving, when fares are rising, and when more and more of that money is directed towards enforcement.

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Norris Henderson, an activist for criminal justice reform including voting rights for former prisoners, in New Orleans, on November 7, 2019. | Akasha Rabut for Vox

Ex-prisoners are getting their voting rights back. But the backlash has already started.

Shauntelle Mitchell waited in her local polling station in Slidell, Louisiana, and contemplated leaving. The October primary election would be her first time voting in years — her criminal record had prevented her from casting a ballot since 2011. This year, re-registered and finally free to vote, she felt nervous.

“All eyes was on me,” Mitchell, 43, recalled. “I started to walk out, because I felt people was looking at me, and I was like, ‘Why go through the whole process to walk away? You came here to vote, to try to make a difference, even if the candidate you picked does not win.’” She stopped herself and turned around. “I stood my ground and voted.”

Mitchell’s vote came at a historic moment: the first state-wide election held after Louisiana restored voting rights to some 36,000 people convicted of felonies, as Mitchell had been. It was a significant win for criminal justice reform activists in a state that had the highest incarceration rate in the nation until last year.

Louisiana activist Norris Henderson has been in the fight for so long, he’s been dubbed “St. Norris” by other organizers. On a recent fall day, Henderson took the stage in a round room in Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary for the first presidential town hall hosted by formerly incarcerated people. Invitations had been extended to the entire field, and three Democratic candidates for president — Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker, and businessman Tom Steyer — showed up.

“This has been a journey for us to get here,” he said. The room’s rough stone walls and Gothic, arching doorways surrounded him, leading to America’s original cellblocks. “Some people question why would we do something inside a prison, particularly this prison. This was where America first experienced mass incarceration. This was the first prison built in America.”

Today, some 200 years since Eastern State opened, an estimated 2.3 million people are held across the nation’s criminal justice system in prisons, juvenile facilities, jails, and immigrant detention centers. Nearly 60 percent of this population are people of color.

The town hall’s setting spoke directly to an inherent contradiction in the democratic ideal of “one person, one vote” presented by the age of mass incarceration: For people drawn into the system, one conviction often equals no vote — sometimes for life. Even when voting rights gains are made, they can be precarious.

Laws banning former prisoners from voting in America date back to the colonial era and remain the norm in much of the nation. Only 16 states and DC automatically re-enfranchise people convicted of felonies when they’re released, and two states — Maine and Vermont — allow people to vote from prisons. During the 2016 presidential elections, more than 6 million people were prevented from casting ballots through the criminal justice system, according to the Sentencing Project.

In tandem with the growing movement to end mass incarceration, there is a building consensus that these laws disenfranchise huge swaths of the population from participating in representative politics. Between 1996 and 2008, seven states repealed lifetime disenfranchisement laws for at least some ex-offenders.

Nevada, California, New York, and Arizona have all expanded voting rights for ex-felons this year. In Wisconsin, activists and politicians pushed a bill in October to immediately return the vote to those leaving prison. When Democrat Andy Beshear won Kentucky’s gubernatorial race in early November, it was viewed in part as a win for ex-felon re-enfranchisement — Beshear had campaigned on restoring voting rights to an estimated 100,000 people.

Nowhere has this fight been more consequential than in Louisiana and Florida, where activists scored two enormous victories. Last year, voting rights were restored to an estimated 36,000 people convicted of felonies in Louisiana through bipartisan legislation and 1.5 million in Florida during state elections through the Amendment 4 ballot initiative. That such expansions took place in these Southern states has both practical and symbolic significance: Florida’s high incarceration rate meant that extending the vote to former felons is considered the largest voting rights advancement since the 1970s.

John Raoux/AP

But the gains have not gone uncontested. Across the nation, voting rights wins have been undercut by laws requiring fines and fees in order to vote, relinquishing voting restoration for felons of certain crimes, and otherwise placing former prisoners in webs of bureaucracy with little clarity over how to regain their rights. It’s a lesson in the fragility of even momentous political gains, and the likelihood of setbacks.

“The right to vote is a marker of our citizenship, a marker of who counts, of who matters, a marker of who is part of our community and who is excluded,” said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Florida. It is, he added, “essential to protecting all other rights and freedoms we care about.”

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Norris Henderson sports a thin mustache, a smooth bald head and dark-rimmed glasses that he keeps in the pouch of his collared shirt. He has a calm presence and a subtly scrutinizing gaze. Henderson began organizing for prisoner’s rights while incarcerated himself 40 years ago. He’s considered a national authority in the movement — in addition to leading Voters Organized to Educate, a network of the nation’s leading formerly incarcerated activists from 35 states, which hosted the town hall, he’s also the head of Voice of the Experienced (dubbed VOTE), a similar group tackling mass incarceration and helping imprisoned people and their families in Louisiana.

A few weeks before the town hall, Henderson, 65, sat in his beige office in a converted school attached to an African American Catholic church in New Orleans, the city where Henderson was born and raised. It’s the city he returned to in 2003 when he was released from Louisiana State Penitentiary after serving nearly 28 years for a second-degree murder that he maintains he didn’t commit. Decades later, his organizing was instrumental in expanding voting rights in the state. “You almost don’t exist in this country if you don’t have your right to vote,” he said in an interview with the nonpartisan law and policy institute the Brennan Center for Justice.

Laws banning felons from voting have colonial origins, but they became entrenched after the Civil War as a tool to protect white supremacy. As states expanded their criminal codes to make felonies of crimes associated with African Americans, they also stripped those convicted of felonies of the right to vote, creating what Voters Organized to Educate describes as a class of “political refugees” that spans generations.

Virginia lawmakers, for example, made petty theft a felony and Mississippi politicians singled out forgery, burglary, arson, and perjury — laws considered more likely for African Americans to commit or be convicted of. In her excoriation of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander began the book with the story of a man in 2010 who can’t vote because of a conviction, whose father couldn’t vote because of poll taxes, whose grandfather or great-grandfather couldn’t because of the Ku Klux Klan, nor his great-great-grandfather, who was enslaved.

For Henderson, voting rights are just one more path to undoing the racist origins of mass incarceration. That October morning, his office walls were, like his desk, covered with papers, and he’d been miserable. Louisiana’s Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, had failed to win reelection outright, sparking a run-off with a construction mogul named Eddie Rispone who ran a campaign big on Trump and short on policy specifics. If Rispone wins on November 16, Henderson will lose an ally and gain an unknown quantity a mere nine months after a law passed restoring the vote to tens of thousands of Louisiana’s formerly incarcerated population.

Henderson pointed to a printed spreadsheet outlining voter turnout in the heavily Democratic Crescent City, which hadn’t broken 40 percent (it was 46 percent statewide). “Our people didn’t show up,” he said. He scoffed at the idea that President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, or Donald Trump Jr. had made the difference — all three of whom descended up in the state in a glitzy trifecta to galvanize Republicans ahead of the election. Instead, political analysts concluded Democratic and black voter turnout was down, despite statewide get-out-the-vote efforts.

Of the potential 36,000 re-enfranchised felons, only 581 had registered to vote by early September. “Voter apathy is so real in our state,” Ashley Shelton, the executive director of a network of progressive groups called the Power Coalition, told me on election night. “We don’t have a lot of voter suppression laws because they don’t have to.”

Henderson had expected Edwards’s win to “send a message” to the nation, which was beginning to view the race as a bellwether for 2020, about the kinds of progressive policies even Deep South voters want. Instead, Louisiana’s runoff election and the legal battle in Florida underline the potential fragility of voting rights gains.

Akasha Rabut for Vox

They’re not the only examples. In Massachusetts, people in prisons could cast ballots until 2000, when voters made it illegal. Both Tennessee and South Dakota have expanded felon disenfranchisement over the last 10 years. And in Tennessee, the requirement to repay fines and fees before being allowed to vote has reportedly placed some in an unnavigable maze of bureaucracy with no clear way to regain their rights. Today, 32 states require various levels of completion of parole, probation, and/or repaying fines, fees and restitution, if voting rights are returned at all, according to an analysis by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

One year after Florida voters passed Amendment 4, the state’s legislature is fighting a lawsuit attempting to curtail the amendment’s historic expansion of voting rights. Amendment 4 stated that those convicted of felonies, with the exception those convicted of murder or felony sex offenses, can vote after they’ve completed “all terms of sentence.” The amendment’s proponents, including its creator Desmond Meade, had argued it could take immediate effect without the need of any new legislation. The state’s Republican politicians disagreed.

This summer, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law passed along party lines stating that former felons can only vote once they’ve paid back all fines and fees ordered by a court during sentencing or as a condition of probation, parole or community service, for any felony conviction in the country. In Florida, such fees begin the moment of an arrest and extend until freedom: There is a fee for requesting a public defender, and fees for ankle bracelets and other monitoring during probation or parole.

One analysis by Florida political scientist Dan Smith found an estimated 82 percent of the 1.5 million people re-enfranchised by Amendment 4 would be denied the right to vote under the new law because they owe the state money, including a rate twice as high for those who are black compared to those who are white.

Smith found even small fees within $500 could present an insurmountable barrier, and noted that anyone working with a newly freed voter to help them to determine whether they have paid back all fines or fees “will have great difficulty” figuring that out in Florida’s “highly decentralized” system, let alone making that determination for crimes sentenced by another state or federal court. The move has been slammed by some critics, including the ACLU of Florida, as a poll tax.

“I think what the legislature did and what Ron DeSantis did is require people to pay in order to vote,” said Kubic, the ACLU of Florida’s executive director, which sued the state over the law along with the Brennan Center for Justice and other groups.

In October, a federal judge partly blocked the law, rejecting the poll tax claim but concluding that the state could not “deny the right to vote to a felon who would be allowed to vote but for the failure to pay amounts the felon has been genuinely unable to pay.”

State Sen. Jeff Brandes, a Republican from Pinellas County who helped shape the new legislation, says he believes “being a felon shouldn’t be a scarlet letter that you carry around the rest of your life,” but that the new law follows “spirit and the letter” of Amendment 4. He added that it keeps with the testimony of John Mills, a lawyer who represented the proponents of Amendment 4 and told Florida’s Supreme Court that some fees were implied in the phrase “all terms of sentence.”

Meanwhile, Meade and his organization, Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, haven’t waited on the legal battle. This summer, they began fundraising hundreds of thousands of dollars to repay people’s fines and fees and launched an initiative to help them register to vote.

The group’s get-out-the-vote and Amendment 4 education bus tour was scheduled to hit more than a dozen cities in November, and FRRC says it identified 100,000 former felons still eligible to vote under the new law in Miami-Dade County alone. Numerous deadlines loomed: There were multiple November local elections, including Orlando’s mayoral election, where Meade himself had hoped to vote for the first time since the 1980s, when he was convicted on drug and firearms charges.

Amendment 4’s final interpretation — and its ability to expand voting rights — will likely lie with the Florida Supreme Court, which is expected to issue a non-binding opinion on whether fines and fees are rightly implied by the amendment’s language. In the meantime, Florida lawmakers face the challenge of creating an avenue for those who can’t afford to pay their fees to still vote, as ordered by the judge.

“It’s an open question what that looks like,” Kubic said, but he expects such a process to be in place before the 2020 presidential elections. If he’s right, the nation will be scrutinizing Florida’s election with more than the usual intensity, looking for signs that a new voting block could change the political fate of the state, and the White House.

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Myrna Perez, who leads the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting rights and elections program, said this new phase of Florida’s Amendment 4 battle can’t undo what she’s called “the greatest civil rights advancement any of us will see in our lifetime.” But it is replete with lessons for activists. “We’re going to be doing calculations about how much you want to anticipate the backlash in the fight for these kinds of amendments,” she said.

The amendment proved that ballot initiatives can do in a single election what politicians can take decades to achieve. But she noted that ballot language itself is tricky. Floridian activists opted for the general phrase “all terms of sentence,” rather than using more specific, but perhaps also more complicated language, that could have avoided the entire debate on fines and fees.

“This is a data point about what can happen when you try for a policy that is easy for the average Floridian to understand,” Perez said. One needs to write a short statement that’s clear enough to be understood by average voters, but one that is also “detailed enough to forestall attempts to thwart it.”

Wilfredo Lee/AP

It is also, despite ongoing litigation, another example of the bipartisan appeal of criminal justice reform among voters — the same appeal that has made the need to tackle mass incarceration an unlikely unifying issue of the Trump era. In order for Amendment 4 to have passed in the first place, a significant chunk of Florida’s Republican voters had to approve it, even if many of the state’s Republican politicians were less enthusiastic.

In Louisiana, seven of the original 10 criminal justice reform bills passed as a package in 2017 were carried by Republicans. Donald Trump recently received a controversial award for signing the bipartisan First Step Act, which allows thousands of federal prisoners to earn an early release, and Democratic presidential hopefuls have each tried to own an animating issue for the left with detailed and sometimes ambitious criminal justice policy proposals.

Even so, most of the 2020 Democratic field candidates who were absent from Henderson’s criminal justice forum won’t easily be able to shake such a slight to a group with little historical reason to trust either party. Henderson had warned a few weeks earlier: “If you don’t show up for us in October 2019, don’t look for us in November 2020.” He nevertheless characterized the event as a success as he took the stage again to wrap the event. “We’re not begging nobody for anything,” he said. “Today is the beginning of us making demands.”

Among the Louisiana reforms, restoring voting rights has been one of Henderson and his fellow activists’ greatest achievements — the other being ending Louisiana’s Jim Crow-era practice of allowing convictions even when juries were split 10-2, created expressly to “establish the supremacy of the white race” in 1898.

The law, which re-enfranchised those who’ve been out of prisons or jails for five years beginning March of this year, passed the Republican-dominated house by just two votes last year. Now, its future depends upon the ongoing support of enough of the state’s politicians, some of whom have already moved to reduce its impact. In the last session, one lawmaker attempted to block those convicted of sex crimes against minors from voting, a bill that failed.

“It was little things like that, just the idea before these things even get implemented correctly,” Henderson said. “It was like, ‘It ain’t gonna work.’ Well, how do you know it ain’t gonna work? You gotta give it a chance to work.”

If Edwards loses, “it’s gonna be a whole bunch of ifa-woulda-shouldas,” Henderson said. “But that don’t get us nowhere, that just gets us into rolling back four years of progressive accomplishments. As opposed to fighting for new things, it’s kind of like trying to fight to hold onto things.”

What that means for elections in hotly contested states like Florida remains to be seen. Common speculation is that these newly enfranchised voters could have handed Hillary Clinton the Oval Office if they’d been able to vote in 2016, but that’s assuming a strong partisan lean among people convicted of crimes that some political scientists argue is likely false. One analysis of the impact of Florida’s Amendment 4 found that while black voters who’ve been imprisoned do tend to register as Democrats, their non-black counterparts —who are the majority — lean Republican. It could be that expanding voting rights to former felons won’t fit neatly into a partisan narrative — that it really will, simply put, expand democracy for democracy’s sake.

For millions of formerly incarcerated people, it’s a right that could matter immensely. Shauntelle Mitchell described it as a moment of power. “I’ve had a lot of people saying you know, you’ve been to jail before so your voting is not gonna count,” Mitchell said. “The thing I have to do is to not let no one put me down and tell me my voice doesn’t count. That’s what made me register and go vote. Even if the people I choose don’t win, I still made a difference.”

On November 16, when Louisianians decide whether they want four more years of John Bel Edwards — and criminal justice reforms — Mitchell will be one of them.

Rosemary Westwood is a writer in New Orleans and the publisher of the weekly newsletter on reproductive rights, the Roe Report. In past lives, she’s produced and reported radio news, created a podcast, and worked as a newspaper columnist.

Akasha Rabut is is a photographer and educator based in New Orleans. Her work explores multicultural phenomena and traditions rooted in the American South.

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The investigation is now complete.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team indicted or got guilty pleas from 34 people and three companies during their lengthy investigation.

That group is composed of six former Trump advisers, 26 Russian nationals, three Russian companies, one California man, and one London-based lawyer. Seven of these people (including five of the six former Trump advisers) have pleaded guilty.

If you also count investigations that Mueller originated but then referred elsewhere in the Justice Department, you can add a plea deal from one more person to the list.

It’s a sprawling set of allegations, encompassing both election interference charges against overseas Russians, and various other crimes by American Trump advisers.

However, Mueller did not allege any crimes directly connecting the two — that is, that Trump advisers criminally conspired with Russian officials to impact the election.

Other reported focuses of Mueller’s investigation — such as potential obstruction of justice by the Trump administration — also did not result in any charges.

Justice Department officials told reporters Friday that this is the final list, and that no more indictments are coming from the special counsel’s probe.

The full list of Mueller indictments and plea deals

1) George Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, was arrested in July 2017 and pleaded guilty in October 2017 to making false statements to the FBI. He got a 14-day sentence.

2) Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chair, was indicted on a total of 25 different counts by Mueller’s team, related mainly to his past work for Ukrainian politicians and his finances. He had two trials scheduled, and the first ended in a conviction on eight counts of financial crimes. To avert the second trial, Manafort struck a plea deal with Mueller in September 2018 (though Mueller’s team said in November that he breached that agreement by lying to them). He was sentenced to a combined seven and a half years in prison.

3) Rick Gates, a former Trump campaign aide and Manafort’s longtime junior business partner, was indicted on similar charges to Manafort. But in February 2018 he agreed to a plea deal with Mueller’s team, pleading guilty to just one false statements charge and one conspiracy charge.

4) Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, pleaded guilty in December 2017 to making false statements to the FBI.

5-20) 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies were indicted on conspiracy charges, with some also being accused of identity theft. The charges related to a Russian propaganda effort designed to interfere with the 2016 campaign. The companies involved are the Internet Research Agency, often described as a “Russian troll farm,” and two other companies that helped finance it. The Russian nationals indicted include 12 of the agency’s employees and its alleged financier, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

21) Richard Pinedo: This California man pleaded guilty to an identity theft charge in connection with the Russian indictments, and has agreed to cooperate with Mueller. He was sentenced to 6 months in prison and 6 months of home detention in October 2018.

22) Alex van der Zwaan: This London lawyer pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with Rick Gates and another unnamed person based in Ukraine. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail and has completed his sentence.

23) Konstantin Kilimnik: This longtime business associate of Manafort and Gates, who’s currently based in Russia, was charged alongside Manafort with attempting to obstruct justice by tampering with witnesses in Manafort’s pending case last year.

24-35) 12 Russian GRU officers: These officers of Russia’s military intelligence service were charged with crimes related to the hacking and leaking of leading Democrats’ emails in 2016.

36) Michael Cohen: In August 2018, Trump’s former lawyer pleaded guilty to 8 counts — tax and bank charges, related to his finances and taxi business, and campaign finance violations — related to hush money payments to women who alleged affairs with Donald Trump, as part of a separate investigation in New York (that Mueller had handed off). But in November, he made a plea deal with Mueller too, for lying to Congress about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

37) Roger Stone: In January 2019, Mueller indicted longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone on 7 counts. He accused Stone of lying to the House Intelligence Committee about his efforts to get in touch with WikiLeaks during the campaign, and tampering with a witness who could have debunked his story. He was convicted on all counts after a November 2019 trial.

Finally, there is one other person Mueller initially investigated, but handed over to others in the Justice Department to charge: Sam Patten. This Republican operative and lobbyist pleaded guilty to not registering as a foreign agent with his work for Ukrainian political bigwigs, and agreed to cooperate with the government.

That’s the full list, but we’ll delve into the charges in a bit more detail below.

The five ex-Trump aides who struck plea deals with Mueller

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

So far, no Trump associates have been specifically charged with any crimes relating to helping Russia interfere with the 2016 election.

Yet five have pleaded guilty to other crimes. Manafort and Gates were charged with a series of offenses related to their past work for Ukrainian politicians and their finances. Papadopoulos and Flynn both admitted making false statements to investigators to hide their contacts with Russians, and Cohen admitted making false statements to Congress.

Papadopoulos: Back in April 2016, Papadopoulos got a tip from a foreign professor he understood to have Russian government connections that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” He then proceeded to have extensive contacts with the professor and two Russian nationals, during which he tried to plan a Trump campaign trip to Russia.

But when the FBI interviewed Papadopoulos about all this in January 2017, he repeatedly lied about what happened, he now admits. So he was arrested in July 2017, and later agreed to plead guilty to a false statements charge, which was dramatically unsealed in October 2017.

Initially, it seemed as if Papadopoulos was cooperating with Mueller’s probe. But we later learned that the special counsel cut off contact with him in late 2017, after he talked to the press. In the end, he didn’t provide much information of note, Mueller’s team said in court filing. His involvement with the investigation now appears to be over, and in September 2018, he was sentenced to 14 days incarceration.

Flynn: In December 2016, during the transition, Flynn spoke to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions that President Barack Obama had just placed on Russia, and about a planned United Nations Security Council vote condemning Israeli settlements.

But when FBI agents interviewed him about all this in January 2017, Flynn lied to them about what his talks with Kislyak entailed, he now admits. In December 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to a false statements charge and began cooperating with Mueller’s investigation. We haven’t seen the fruits of his cooperation yet, and he has not yet been sentenced.

Manafort and Gates: This pair worked for Ukrainian politicians (and, eventually, the Ukrainian government) for several years prior to the Trump campaign, and made an enormous amount of money for it. Mueller charged them with hiding their lobbying work and the money they made from it from the government, as well as other financial crimes and attempts to interfere with the investigation.

Gates was the first to strike a plea deal. In February, Mueller dropped most of the charges he had brought against him. In exchange, Gates pleaded guilty to two counts — one conspiracy to defraud the United States charge encompassing the overall Ukrainian lobbying and money allegations, and a false statements charge. (With the latter, Gates admitted lying to Mueller’s team during a meeting this February. A Dutch lawyer, Alex van der Zwaan, also pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI related to his Ukrainian work with Gates.)

Manafort, meanwhile, fought the charges in two venues, Washington, DC, and Virginia. His first trial was in Virginia, and in August, it ended with his conviction on eight counts — five counts of subscribing to false income tax returns, one count of failing to report his foreign bank accounts, and two counts of bank fraud. The jury deadlocked on another 10 counts, so for those, the judge declared a mistrial.

The conviction finally brought Manafort to the table, and on September 14, he and Mueller’s team struck a plea deal requiring his cooperation. Manafort pleaded guilty to just two more counts — conspiracy to defraud the United States, and an attempted obstruction of justice charge. But he admitted that the other allegations Mueller previously made against him were true as well. The cooperation element of his plea deal fell apart in November, though, as Mueller’s team accused Manafort of lying to them. Manafort ended up being sentenced to a combined seven and a half years in prison.

Cohen: Mueller’s team was investigating Trump’s former attorney in 2017, but at some point, they referred the Cohen probe to the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY). It was SDNY that authorized the FBI raid of Cohen’s residence and office in April.

In August, Cohen cut a deal with SDNY. He agreed to plead guilty to 8 counts. Six of them involved his own finances — 5 tax counts involving hiding various income related to his taxi medallion business and other financial transactions from the US government, and a bank fraud count. Cohen also admitted participating in a scheme to violate campaign finance laws in connection with hush money payments to women alleging affairs with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Then, in November, Cohen made his deal with Mueller. Here, he agreed to plead guilty to making false statements to Congress, to try and cover up his work on behalf of a Trump Tower Moscow project during the campaign.

Cohen had told Congress that the Trump Tower Moscow project ended early in the campaign, that he hadn’t discussed it much with others at Trump’s company, and that he hadn’t successfully gotten in touch with the Russian government about it.

In fact, he now admits, the project was still active months later, he’d talked about it with Trump more than he’d admitted (and with unnamed Trump family members), and he’d talked about it with an assistant for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary.

Roger Stone was the final Trump associate indicted in the investigation

Then, on January 25, another political operative with a decades-long history with Trump — Roger Stone — was indicted.

Various statements by Stone, including many public ones, raised questions about whether he had some sort of inside knowledge about WikiLeaks’s posting of Democrats’ hacked emails during the 2016 campaign.

Stone has long denied having any such knowledge — and claimed that anything he knew about WikiLeaks came through an intermediary, radio host Randy Credico. Mueller’s indictment alleges that this story was false — and that Stone’s telling it to the House Intelligence Committee was criminal.

Mueller’s indictment of Stone alleges that the GOP operative gave a false story to explain his knowledge about WikiLeaks.

Stone was accused of lying about this to the House Intelligence Committee in 2017, and trying to tamper with a witness — Credico — so that he would stick to that false story. And, after a November 2019 trial, Stone was found guilty on all counts.

About two dozen overseas Russians have been charged with election interference

Mueller has also filed two major indictments of Russian nationals and a few Russian companies for crimes related to alleged interference with the 2016 election: the troll farm indictment, and the email hacking indictment.

The troll farm indictment: In February, Mueller brought charges related to the propaganda efforts of one Russian group in particular: the Internet Research Agency. That group’s operations — which included social media posts, online ads, and organization of rallies in the US — were, the indictment alleges, often (but not exclusively) aimed at denigrating Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy and supporting Donald Trump’s.

Mueller indicted the Internet Research Agency, two other shell companies involved in financing the agency, its alleged financier (Yevgeny Prigozhin), and 12 other Russian nationals who allegedly worked for it.

The specific charges in the case include one broad “conspiracy to defraud the United States” count, but the rest are far narrower — one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and six counts of identity theft. It is highly unlikely that the indicted Russian individuals will ever come to the US to face trial, but one company involved, Concord Catering, is fighting back in court.

No Americans have been charged with being witting participants in this Russian election interference effort. However, one American, Richard Pinedo of California, pleaded guilty to an identity fraud charge, seemingly because he sold bank account numbers created with stolen identities to the Russians. Pinedo agreed to cooperate with the probe as part of his plea deal. He was sentenced to 6 months in prison and 6 months home detention in October.

The email hacking indictment: Brought in July, here Mueller charged 12 officers of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, with crimes committed to the high-profile hacking and leaking of leading Democrats’ emails during the 2016 campaign.

Specifically indicted were nine officers of the GRU’s “Unit 26165,” which Mueller alleges “had primary responsibility for hacking the DCCC and DNC, as well as the email accounts of individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign” like John Podesta. Three other GRU officers, Mueller alleges, “assisted in the release of stolen documents,” “the promotion of those releases,” “and the publication of anti-Clinton content on social media accounts operated by the GRU.”

A trial here is unlikely, since all of the people indicted live in Russia.

Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime Manafort associate, has been charged with obstruction of justice

Then, Konstantin Kilimnik — who worked with Manafort in Ukraine and is now based in Russia — was charged alongside Manafort with obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice, in June.

Mueller argued that, earlier in 2018, Manafort and Kilimnik worked together to contact potential witnesses against Manafort and encourage them to give false testimony. He argues that this is attempted witness tampering, and qualifies as obstruction of justice.

The alleged tampering relates to the “Hapsburg group”— a group of former senior European politicians Manafort paid to advocate for Ukraine’s interests.

Both Manafort and Kilimnik tried to contact witnesses to get them to claim the Hapsburg group only operated in Europe (where US foreign lobbying laws don’t apply). But Mueller says there’s ample evidence that the group did work in the US too, and the witnesses thought Manafort and Kilimnik were trying to get them to commit perjury.

In Manafort’s September plea deal, he admitted to this. Kilimnik, however, is in Russia, and will likely remain there rather than face charges.

Sam Patten struck a plea deal after Mueller referred his investigation elsewhere

There’re another instance in which where Mueller surfaced incriminating information about someone, but handed off the investigation to elsewhere in the Justice Department.

Sam Patten: A GOP lobbyist who had worked in some of the same Ukrainian circles as Manafort and alongside Konstantin Kilimnik, Mueller’s team began investigating Patten, but at some point handed him off to the DC US attorney’s office. However, the plea deal Patten eventually struck obligated him to cooperate with Mueller.

According to a criminal information document filed by the DC US attorney’s office, Patten and Kilimnik (who is not named but referred to as “Foreigner A”) founded a lobbying and consulting company together. They did campaign work in Ukraine and lobbying work in the US, and were paid over $1 million between 2015 and 2017.

Specifically, the document claims that Patten contacted members of Congress and their staffers, State Department officials, and members of the press on behalf of his Ukrainian clients — all without registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as required by law.

Patten also admits to helping his Ukrainian oligarch client get around the prohibition on foreign donations to Donald Trump’s inauguration committee. The oligarch sent $50,000 to Patten’s company, and then he gave that money to a US citizen, who bought the four tickets. The tickets were given to the oligarch, Kilimnik, another Ukrainian, and Patten himself.

Finally, Patten also admits to misleading the Senate Intelligence Committee and withholding documents from them during testimony this January. He pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

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For more on the Mueller probe, follow Andrew Prokop on Twitter and check out Vox’s guide to the Trump-Russia investigation.

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9 questions about biohacking you were too embarrassed to ask.

Even if you haven’t heard the term “biohacking” before, you’ve probably encountered some version of it. Maybe you’ve seen Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey extolling the benefits of fasting intermittently and drinking “salt juice” each morning. Maybe you’ve read about former NASA employee Josiah Zayner injecting himself with DNA using the gene-editing technology CRISPR. Maybe you’ve heard of Bay Area folks engaging in “dopamine fasting.”

Maybe you, like me, have a colleague who’s had a chip implanted in their hand.

These are all types of biohacking, a broad term for a lifestyle that’s growing increasingly popular, and not just in Silicon Valley, where it really took off.

Biohacking — also known as DIY biology — is an extremely broad and amorphous term that can cover a huge range of activities, from performing science experiments on yeast or other organisms to tracking your own sleep and diet to changing your own biology by pumping a younger person’s blood into your veins in the hope that it’ll fight aging. (Yes, that is a real thing, and it’s called a young blood transfusion. More on that later.)

The type of biohackers currently gaining the most notoriety are the ones who experiment — outside of traditional lab spaces and institutions — on their own bodies with the hope of boosting their physical and cognitive performance. They form one branch of transhumanism, a movement that holds that human beings can and should use technology to augment and evolve our species.

Some biohackers have science PhDs; others are complete amateurs. And their ways of trying to “hack” biology are as diverse as they are. It can be tricky to understand the different types of hacks, what differentiates them from traditional medicine, and how safe — or legal — they are.

As biohacking starts to appear more often in headlines — and, recently, in a fascinating Netflix series called Unnatural Selection — it’s worth getting clear on some of the fundamentals. Here are nine questions that can help you make sense of biohacking.

1) First of all, what exactly is biohacking? What are some common examples of it?

Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a different definition of biohacking. Since it can encompass a dizzying range of pursuits, I’m mostly going to look at biohacking defined as the attempt to manipulate your brain and body in order to optimize performance, outside the realm of traditional medicine. But later on, I’ll also give an overview of some other types of biohacking (including some that can lead to pretty unbelievable art).

Dave Asprey, a biohacker who created the supplement company Bulletproof, told me that for him, biohacking is “the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside you so that you have full control over your own biology.” He’s very game to experiment on his body: He has stem cells injected into his joints, takes dozens of supplements daily, bathes in infrared light, and much more. It’s all part of his quest to live until at least age 180.

One word Asprey likes to use a lot is “control,” and that kind of language is typical of many biohackers, who often talk about “optimizing” and “upgrading” their minds and bodies.

Some of their techniques for achieving that are things people have been doing for centuries, like Vipassana meditation and intermittent fasting. Both of those are part of Dorsey’s routine, which he detailed in a podcast interview. He tries to do two hours of meditation a day and eats only one meal (dinner) on weekdays; on weekends, he doesn’t eat at all. (Critics worry that his dietary habits sound a bit like an eating disorder, or that they might unintentionally influence others to develop a disorder.) He also kicks off each morning with an ice bath before walking the 5 miles to Twitter HQ.

Supplements are another popular tool in the biohacker’s arsenal. There’s a whole host of pills people take, from anti-aging supplements to nootropics or “smart drugs.”

Since biohackers are often interested in quantifying every aspect of themselves, they may buy wearable devices to, say, track their sleep patterns. (For that purpose, Dorsey swears by the Oura Ring.) The more data you have on your body’s mechanical functions, the more you can optimize the machine that is you — or so the thinking goes.

Then there are some of the more radical practices: cryotherapy (purposely making yourself cold), neurofeedback (training yourself to regulate your brain waves), near-infrared saunas (they supposedly help you escape stress from electromagnetic transmissions), and virtual float tanks (which are meant to induce a meditative state through sensory deprivation), among others. Some people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on these treatments.

A subset of biohackers called grinders go so far as to implant devices like computer chips in their bodies. The implants allow them to do everything from opening doors without a fob to monitoring their glucose levels subcutaneously.

For some grinders, like Zoltan Istvan, who ran for president as head of the Transhumanist Party, having an implant is fun and convenient: “I’ve grown to relish and rely on the technology,” he recently wrote in the New York Times. “The electric lock on the front door of my house has a chip scanner, and it’s nice to go surfing and jogging without having to carry keys around.”

Istvan also noted that “for some people without functioning arms, chips in their feet are the simplest way to open doors or operate some household items modified with chip readers.” Other grinders are deeply curious about blurring the line between human and machine, and they get a thrill out of seeing all the ways we can augment our flesh-and-blood bodies using tech. Implants, for them, are a starter experiment.

2) Why are people doing this? What drives someone to biohack themselves?

On a really basic level, biohacking comes down to something we can all relate to: the desire to feel better — and to see just how far we can push the human body. That desire comes in a range of flavors, though. Some people just want to not be sick anymore. Others want to become as smart and strong as they possibly can. An even more ambitious crowd wants to be as smart and strong as possible for as long as possible — in other words, they want to radically extend their life span.

These goals have a way of escalating. Once you’ve determined (or think you’ve determined) that there are concrete “hacks” you can use by yourself right now to go from sick to healthy, or healthy to enhanced, you start to think: Well, why stop there? Why not shoot for peak performance? Why not try to live forever? What starts as a simple wish to be free from pain can snowball into self-improvement on steroids.

That was the case for Asprey. Now in his 40s, he got into biohacking because he was unwell. Before hitting age 30, he was diagnosed with high risk of stroke and heart attack, suffered from cognitive dysfunction, and weighed 300 pounds. “I just wanted to control my own biology because I was tired of being in pain and having mood swings,” he told me.

Now that he feels healthier, he wants to slow the normal aging process and optimize every part of his biology. “I don’t want to be just healthy; that’s average. I want to perform; that’s daring to be above average. Instead of ‘How do I achieve health?’ it’s ‘How do I kick more ass?’”

Zayner, the biohacker who once injected himself with CRISPR DNA, has also had health problems for years, and some of his biohacking pursuits have been explicit attempts to cure himself. But he’s also motivated in large part by frustration. Like some other biohackers with an anti-establishment streak, he’s irritated by federal officials’ purported sluggishness in greenlighting all sorts of medical treatments. In the US, it can take 10 years for a new drug to be developed and approved; for people with serious health conditions, that wait time can feel cruelly long. Zayner claims that’s part of why he wants to democratize science and empower people to experiment on themselves.

(However, he admits that some of his stunts have been purposely provocative and that “I do ridiculous stuff also. I’m sure my motives are not 100 percent pure all the time.”)

Getty Images/iStockphoto

The biohacking community also offers just that: community. It gives people a chance to explore unconventional ideas in a non-hierarchical setting, and to refashion the feeling of being outside the norm into a cool identity. Biohackers congregate in dedicated online networks, in Slack and WhatsApp groups — WeFast, for example, is for intermittent fasters. In person, they run experiments and take classes at “hacklabs,” improvised laboratories that are open to the public, and attend any one of the dozens of biohacking conferences put on each year.

3) How different is biohacking from traditional medicine? What makes something “count” as a biohacking pursuit?

Certain kinds of biohacking go far beyond traditional medicine, while other kinds bleed into it.

Plenty of age-old techniques — meditation, fasting — can be considered a basic type of biohacking. So can going to a spin class or taking antidepressants.

What differentiates biohacking is arguably not that it’s a different genre of activity but that the activities are undertaken with a particular mindset. The underlying philosophy is that we don’t need to accept our bodies’ shortcomings — we can engineer our way past them using a range of high- and low-tech solutions. And we don’t necessarily need to wait for a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial, traditional medicine’s gold standard. We can start to transform our lives right now.

As millionaire Serge Faguet, who plans to live forever, put it: “People here [in Silicon Valley] have a technical mindset, so they think of everything as an engineering problem. A lot of people who are not of a technical mindset assume that, ‘Hey, people have always been dying,’ but I think there’s going to be a greater level of awareness [of biohacking] once results start to happen.”

Rob Carlson, an expert on synthetic biology who’s been advocating for biohacking since the early 2000s, told me that to his mind, “all of modern medicine is hacking,” but that people often call certain folks “hackers” as a way of delegitimizing them. “It’s a way of categorizing the other — like, ‘Those biohackers over there do that weird thing.’ This is actually a bigger societal question: Who’s qualified to do anything? And why do you not permit some people to explore new things and talk about that in public spheres?”

If it’s taken to extremes, the “Who’s qualified to do anything?” mindset can delegitimize scientific expertise in a way that can endanger public health. Luckily, biohackers don’t generally seem interested in dethroning expertise to that dangerous degree; many just don’t think they should be locked out of scientific discovery because they lack conventional credentials like a PhD.

4) So how much of this is backed by scientific research?

Some biohacks are backed by strong scientific evidence and are likely to be beneficial. Often, these are the ones that are tried and true, debugged over centuries of experimentation. For example, clinical trials have shown that mindfulness meditation can help reduce anxiety and chronic pain.

But other hacks, based on weak or incomplete evidence, could be either ineffective or actually harmful.

After Dorsey endorsed a particular near-infrared sauna sold by SaunaSpace, which claims its product boosts cellular regeneration and fights aging by detoxing your body, the company experienced a surge in demand. But according to the New York Times, “though a study of middle-aged and older Finnish men indicates that their health benefited from saunas, there have been no major studies conducted of” this type of sauna, which directs incandescent light at your body. So is buying this expensive product likely to improve your health? We can’t say that yet.

Similarly, the intermittent fasting that Dorsey endorses may yield health benefits for some, but scientists still have plenty of questions about it. Although there’s a lot of research on the long-term health outcomes of fasting in animals — and much of it is promising — the research literature on humans is much thinner. Fasting has gone mainstream, but because it’s done so ahead of the science, it falls into the “proceed with caution” category. Critics have noted that for those who’ve struggled with eating disorders, it could be dangerous.

And while we’re on the topic of biohacking nutrition: My colleague Julia Belluz has previously reported on the Bulletproof Diet promoted by Asprey, who she says “vilifies healthy foods and suggests part of the way to achieve a ‘pound a day’ weight loss is to buy his expensive, ‘science-based’ Bulletproof products.” She was not convinced by the citations for his claims:

What I found was a patchwork of cherry-picked research and bad studies or articles that aren’t relevant to humans. He selectively reported on studies that backed up his arguments, and ignored the science that contradicted them.

Many of the studies weren’t done in humans but in rats and mice. Early studies on animals, especially on something as complex as nutrition, should never be extrapolated to humans. Asprey glorifies coconut oil and demonizes olive oil, ignoring the wealth of randomized trials (the highest quality of evidence) that have demonstrated olive oil is beneficial for health. Some of the research he cites was done on very specific sub-populations, such as diabetics, or on very small groups of people. These findings wouldn’t be generalizable to the rest of us.

5) This all sounds like it can be taken to extremes. What are the most dangerous types of biohacking being tried?

Some of the highest-risk hacks are being undertaken by people who feel desperate. On some level, that’s very understandable. If you’re sick and in constant pain, or if you’re old and scared to die, and traditional medicine has nothing that works to quell your suffering, who can fault you for seeking a solution elsewhere?

Yet some of the solutions being tried these days are so dangerous, they’re just not worth the risk.

If you’ve watched HBO’s Silicon Valley, then you’re already familiar with young blood transfusions. As a refresher, that’s when an older person pays for a young person’s blood and has it pumped into their veins in the hope that it’ll fight aging.

This putative treatment sounds vampiric, yet it’s gained popularity in the Silicon Valley area, where people have actually paid $8,000 a pop to participate in trials. The billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has expressed keen interest.

As Chavie Lieber noted for Vox, although some limited studies suggest that these transfusions might fend off diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis, these claims haven’t been proven.

In February, the Food and Drug Administration released a statement warning consumers away from the transfusions: “Simply put, we’re concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies. Such treatments have no proven clinical benefits for the uses for which these clinics are advertising them and are potentially harmful.”

Another biohack that definitely falls in the “don’t try this at home” category: fecal transplants, or transferring stool from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of an unhealthy recipient. In 2016, sick of suffering from severe stomach pain, Zayner decided to give himself a fecal transplant in a hotel room. He had procured a friend’s poop and planned to inoculate himself using the microbes in it. Ever the public stuntman, he invited a journalist to document the procedure. Afterward, he claimed the experiment left him feeling better.

But fecal transplants are still experimental and not approved by the FDA. The FDA recently reported that two people had contracted serious infections from fecal transplants that contained drug-resistant bacteria. One of the people died. And this was in the context of a clinical trial — presumably, a DIY attempt could be even riskier. The FDA is putting a stop to clinical trials on the transplants for now.

Zayner also popularized the notion that you can edit your own DNA with CRISPR. In 2017, he injected himself with CRISPR DNA at a biotech conference, live-streaming the experiment. He later said he regretted that stunt because it could lead others to copy him and “people are going to get hurt.” Yet when asked whether his company, the Odin, which he runs out of his garage in Oakland, California, was going to stop selling CRISPR kits to the general public, he said no.

Ellen Jorgensen, a molecular biologist who co-founded Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, two Brooklyn-based biology labs open to the public, finds antics like Zayner’s worrisome. A self-identified biohacker, she told me people shouldn’t buy Zayner’s kits, not just because they don’t work half the time (she’s a professional and even she couldn’t get it to work), but because CRISPR is such a new technology that scientists aren’t yet sure of all the risks involved in using it. By tinkering with your genome, you could unintentionally cause a mutation that increases your risk of developing cancer, she said. It’s a dangerous practice that should not be marketed as a DIY activity.

“At Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, we always get the most heartbreaking emails from parents of children afflicted with genetic diseases,” Jorgensen says. “They have watched these Josiah Zayner videos and they want to come into our class and cure their kids. We have to tell them, ‘This is a fantasy.’ … That is incredibly painful.”

She thinks such biohacking stunts give biohackers like her a bad name. “It’s bad for the DIY bio community,” she said, “because it makes people feel that as a general rule we’re irresponsible.”

6) Are all these biohacking pursuits legal?

Existing regulations weren’t built to make sense of something like biohacking, which in some cases stretches the very limits of what it means to be a human being. That means that a lot of biohacking pursuits exist in a legal gray zone: frowned upon by bodies like the FDA, but not yet outright illegal, or not enforced as such. As biohackers traverse uncharted territory, regulators are scrambling to catch up with them.

After the FDA released its statement in February urging people to stay away from young blood transfusions, the San Francisco-based startup Ambrosia, which was well known for offering the transfusions, said on its website that it had “ceased patient treatments.” The site now says, “We are currently in discussion with the FDA on the topic of young plasma.”

This wasn’t the FDA’s first foray into biohacking. In 2016, the agency objected to Zayner selling kits to brew glow-in-the-dark beer. And after he injected himself with CRISPR, the FDA released a notice saying the sale of DIY gene-editing kits for use on humans is illegal. Zayner disregarded the warning and continued to sell his wares.

In 2019, he was, for a time, under investigation by California’s Department of Consumer Affairs, accused of practicing medicine without a license.

The biohackers I spoke to said restrictive regulation would be a counterproductive response to biohacking because it’ll just drive the practice underground. They say it’s better to encourage a culture of transparency so that people can ask questions about how to do something safely, without fear of reprisal.

According to Jorgensen, most biohackers are safety-conscious, not the sorts of people interested in engineering a pandemic. They’ve even generated and adopted their own codes of ethics. She herself has had a working relationship with law enforcement since the early 2000s.

“At the beginning of the DIY bio movement, we did an awful lot of work with Homeland Security,” she said. “And as far back as 2009, the FBI was reaching out to the DIY community to try to build bridges.”

Carlson told me he’s noticed two general shifts over the past 20 years. “One was after 2001, after the anthrax attacks, when Washington, DC, lost their damn minds and just went into a reactive mode and tried to shut everything down,” he said. “As of 2004 or 2005, the FBI was arresting people for doing biology in their homes.”

Then in 2009, the National Security Council dramatically changed perspectives. It published the National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats, which embraced “innovation and open access to the insights and materials needed to advance individual initiatives,” including in “private laboratories in basements and garages.”

Now, though, some agencies seem to think they ought to take action. But even if there were clear regulations governing all biohacking activities, there would be no straightforward way to stop people from pursuing them behind closed doors. “This technology is available and implementable anywhere, there’s no physical means to control access to it, so what would regulating that mean?” Carlson said.

7) One of the more ambitious types of biohacking is life extension, the attempt to live longer or even cheat death entirely. What are the physical limits of life extension?

Some biohackers believe that by leveraging technology, they’ll be able to live longer but stay younger. Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey claims people will be able to live to age 1,000. In fact, he says the first person who will live to 1,000 has already been born.

De Grey focuses on developing strategies for repairing seven types of cellular and molecular damage associated with aging — or, as he calls them, “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence.” His nonprofit, the Methuselah Foundation, has attracted huge investments, including more than $6 million from Thiel. Its aim is to “make 90 the new 50 by 2030.”

Wondering whether de Grey’s goals are realistic, I reached out to Genspace co-founder Oliver Medvedik, who earned his PhD at Harvard Medical School and now directs the Kanbar Center for Biomedical Engineering at Cooper Union. “Living to 1,000? It’s definitely within our realm of possibility if we as a society that doles out money [to fund research we deem worthy] decide we want to do it,” he told me.

He’s optimistic, he said, because the scientific community is finally converging on a consensus about what the root causes of aging are (damage to mitochondria and epigenetic changes are a couple of examples). And in the past five years, he’s seen an explosion of promising papers on possible ways to address those causes.

Researchers who want to fight aging generally adopt two different approaches. The first is the “small molecule” approach, which often focuses on dietary supplements. Medvedik calls that the “low-hanging fruit.” He spoke excitedly about the possibility of creating a supplement from a plant compound called fisetin, noting that a recent (small) Mayo Clinic trial suggests high concentrations of fisetin can clear out senescent cells in humans — cells that have stopped dividing and that contribute to aging.

The other approach is more dramatic: genetic engineering. Scientists taking this tack in mouse studies usually tinker with a genome in embryo, meaning that new mice are born with the fix already in place. Medvedik pointed out that’s not very useful for treating humans — we want to be able to treat people who have already been born and have begun to age.

But he sees promise here too. He cited a new study that used CRISPR to target Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a genetic disorder that manifests as accelerated aging, in a mouse model. “It wasn’t a total cure — they extended the life span of these mice by maybe 30 percent — but what I was very interested in is the fact that it was delivered into mice that had already been born.”

He’s also intrigued by potential non-pharmaceutical treatments for aging-related diseases like Alzheimer’s — for example, the use of light stimulation to influence brain waves — but those probably won’t help us out anytime soon, for a simple reason: “It’s not a drug. You can’t package and sell it,” he said. “Pharma can’t monetize it.”

Like many in the biohacking community, Medvedik sounded a note of frustration about how the medical system holds back anti-aging progress. “If you were to come up with a compound right now that literally cures aging, you couldn’t get it approved,” he said. “By the definition we’ve set up, aging isn’t a disease, and if you want to get it approved by the FDA you have to target a certain disease. That just seems very strange and antiquated and broken.”

8) Biohackers also include people who engage in DIY science without experimenting on themselves. What’s that form of biohacking like?

Not everyone who’s interested in biohacking is interested in self-experimentation. Some come to it because they care about bringing science to the masses, alleviating the climate crisis, or making art that shakes us out of our comfort zones.

“My version of biohacking is unexpected people in unexpected places doing biotechnology,” Jorgensen told me. For her, the emphasis is on democratizing cutting-edge science while keeping it safe. The community labs she’s helped to build, Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, offer classes on using CRISPR technology to edit a genome — but participants work on the genome of yeast, never on their own bodies.

Some people in the community are altruistically motivated. They want to use biohacking to save the environment by figuring out a way to make a recyclable plastic or a biofuel. They might experiment on organisms in makeshift labs in their garages. Or they might take a Genspace class on how to make furniture out of fungi or paper out of kombucha.

Experimental artists have also taken an interest in biohacking. For them, biology is just another palette. The artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr from the University of Western Australia were actually the first people to create and serve up lab-grown meat. They took some starter cells from a frog and used them to grow small “steaks” of frog meat, which they fed to gallery-goers in France at a 2003 art installation called “Disembodied Cuisine.”

Boris Roessler/Picture Alliance via Getty Images

More recently, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has used old floral DNA to recreate the smell of flowers driven to extinction by humans, enabling us to catch a whiff of them once more.

And this summer, a London museum is displaying something rather less fragrant: cheese made from celebrities. Yes, you read that right: The cheese was created with bacteria harvested from the armpits, toes, bellybuttons, and nostrils of famous people. If you’re thoroughly grossed out by this, don’t worry: The food won’t actually be eaten — this “bioart” project is meant more as a thought experiment than as dinner.

9) At its most extreme, biohacking can fundamentally alter human nature. Should we be worried?

When you hear about people genetically engineering themselves or trying young blood transfusions in an effort to ward off death, it’s easy to feel a sense of vertigo about what we’re coming to as a species.

But the fact is we’ve been altering human nature since the very beginning. Inventing agriculture, for example, helped us transform ourselves from nomadic hunter-gatherers into sedentary civilizations. And whether we think of it this way or not, we’re all already doing some kind of biohacking every day.

The deeper I delve into biohacking, the more I think a lot of the discomfort with it boils down to simple neophobia — a fear of what’s new. (Not all of the discomfort, mind you: The more extreme hacks really are dangerous.)

As one of my colleagues put it to me, 40 years ago, “test tube babies” seemed unnatural, a freak-show curiosity; now in vitro fertilization has achieved mainstream acceptance. Will biohacking undergo the same progression? Or is it really altering human nature in a more fundamental way, a way that should concern us?

When I asked Carlson, he refused to buy the premise of the question.

“If you assert that hackers are changing what it means to be human, then we need to first have an agreement about what it means to be human,” he said. “And I’m not going to buy into the idea that there is one thing that is being human. Across the sweep of history, it’s odd to say humans are static — it’s not the case that humans in 1500 were the same as they are today.”

That’s true. Nowadays, we live longer. We’re taller. We’re more mobile. And we marry and have kids with people who come from different continents, different cultures — a profound departure from old customs that has nothing to do with genetic engineering but that’s nonetheless resulting in genetic change.

Still, biohackers are talking about making such significant changes that the risks they carry are significant too. What if biohackers’ “upgrades” don’t get distributed evenly across the human population? What if, for example, the cure for aging becomes available, but only to the rich? Will that lead to an even wider life expectancy gap, where rich people live longer and poor people die younger?

Medvedik dismissed that concern, arguing that a lot of interventions that could lengthen our lives, like supplements, wouldn’t be expensive to produce. “There’s no reason why that stuff can’t be dirt-cheap. But that depends on what we do as a society,” he said. Insulin doesn’t cost much to produce, but as a society we’ve allowed companies to jack up the price so high that many people with diabetes are now skipping lifesaving doses. That’s horrifying, but it’s not a function of the technology itself.

Here’s another risk associated with biohacking, one I think is even more serious: By making ourselves smarter and stronger and potentially even immortal (a difference of kind, not just of degree), we may create a society in which everyone feels pressure to alter their biology — even if they don’t want to. To refuse a hack would mean to be at a huge professional disadvantage, or to face moral condemnation for remaining suboptimal when optimization is possible. In a world of superhumans, it may become increasingly hard to stay “merely” human.

“The flip side of all this is the ‘perfect race’ or eugenics specter,” Jorgensen acknowledged. “This is a powerful set of technologies that can be used in different ways. We’d better think about it and use it wisely.”

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Listen to Reset

Josiah Zayner is a biohacker who’s famous for injecting himself with the gene-editing tool CRISPR. At a time when the technology exists for us to change (or hack) our own DNA, what are the ethics of experimenting on ourselves, and others, at home? On the launch episode of this new podcast, host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks to Zayner about how he’s thinking about human experimentation today. Plus: new efforts to come up with a code of conduct for biohackers, from legislation to self-regulation.

Subscribe to Reset now on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Roger Stone, former advisor to President Trump, and his wife Nydia Stone arrive at the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse, on November 15, 2019. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Stone’s trial was the highest-profile loose end remaining from the Mueller investigation.

The verdict is in for Roger Stone’s trial — and a Washington, DC, jury found President Donald Trump’s longtime political adviser guilty on all counts Friday.

Stone was convicted of one count of obstructing an official proceeding, five counts of making false statements to Congress, and one count of witness tampering.

The verdict makes Stone the sixth former Trump adviser to be convicted of or plead guilty to charges stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The special counsel indicted Stone in January, before completing his work, and Stone’s trial was the highest-profile loose end remaining from the probe.

Prosecutors alleged that Stone tried to obstruct the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election by lying to the committee about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks, and by encouraging another witness to lie for him.

The trial featured testimony from two other former top Trump campaign aides — Steve Bannon and Rick Gates. Both said that Stone repeatedly suggested he had inside information on WikiLeaks’s plans to release material that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Gates gave testimony suggesting that Stone shared this information with Donald Trump himself. And Trump’s name came up frequently in the trial — prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky argued that Stone’s motivation for his lies and obstruction was that “the truth looked bad for Donald Trump.”

But what wasn’t really cleared up in the trial was whether Stone in fact had legitimate inside information about WikiLeaks and its posting of Democratic emails that had been hacked by Russian intelligence officers. To an extent, that makes sense — the charges against Stone weren’t about anything he did in 2016, but rather the alleged cover-up he perpetrated the following year.

The government presented voluminous documentary evidence that the story Stone told Congress — that all his WikiLeaks information came from a single “intermediary,” radio host Randy Credico — was false. And they suggested Stone concocted this false story to hide his true WikiLeaks connection — conservative author Jerome Corsi. But what, exactly, Corsi learned, and how he learned it, remain murky.

Stone, however, has now been convicted, and will be sentenced at some point in the coming months by Judge Amy Berman Jackson. He will likely try to appeal his case — and hope President Trump pardons him — but, as of right now, it looks like the legendary dirty trickster may well serve prison time.

Who is Roger Stone?

Stone has had a reputation for political shenanigans since he was a 19-year-old volunteer carrying out dirty tricks to embarrass Richard Nixon’s 1972 Republican primary opponent — something that earned Stone a minor role in the Watergate hearings.

As a Republican campaign operative, he worked for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bob Dole; as a highly paid lobbyist, he worked alongside his friend Paul Manafort for a host of seedy clients. And he’s long been known as a colorful character who rejoices in the dark side of politics: scandals, smears, division, and negativity. Journalists have called him “the state of the art Washington sleazeball” and the “boastful black prince of Republican sleaze.”

Stone also, incredibly enough, spent nearly three decades trying to get Donald Trump for president before Trump actually went through with it. The two met in the mid-1980s, as Trump hired Stone and Manafort’s firm to do lobbying and PR for him. After Trump released his book The Art of the Deal in 1987, Stone urged him to consider running for president the following year, but Trump demurred. In 1999, Stone ran a presidential exploratory committee for Trump — but Trump again ended up not officially running.

The two had their ups and downs over the years (“Roger is a stone-cold loser,” Trump told the New Yorker in 2008, arguing he “always tries taking credit for things he never did”). But by 2011, as Trump mused about challenging President Barack Obama, Stone was egging him on again, urging him to spread conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace.

So when Trump finally did launch his presidential campaign in June 2015, Stone was on board as an official campaign adviser. But he didn’t last long. After clashing with then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, he left his official role in August 2015.

Yet Stone remained in contact with Trump himself to some extent and continued to try to support Trump’s candidacy from the outside. And some of those outside efforts landed him at the center of the Mueller investigation, leading to his arrest and indictment this January.

The timeline of Stone and WikiLeaks

It was all the way back in spring 2016 that Stone began saying he knew that WikiLeaks had information coming that would damage Clinton, according to both Bannon (testifying under subpoena) and Gates (testifying as part of a plea deal he struck with the government).

Back then, Gates was the deputy Trump campaign chair, serving under his longtime boss Paul Manafort. Gates testified that he and Manafort were initially skeptical that Stone really knew what he was talking about.

But then, on June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced that he had pending releases related to Clinton. Two days later, on June 14, the Democratic National Committee announced it had been hacked by the Russian government.

At the trial, the government revealed that Stone had called and spoken with Trump that same day (though it’s unclear what they discussed). Gates also testified that, the following day, Stone told him that more information was coming soon.

A little over a month later, on July 22, WikiLeaks posted the hacked DNC emails online. Gates testified that Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort then instructed him to keep in touch with Stone and find out what else he knew about WikiLeaks’s plans — so Trump could be briefed on them. On July 25, Stone emailed his associate Jerome Corsi, telling him to “get to Assange” and “get the pending WL [WikiLeaks] emails.”

Gates also testified that he witnessed a phone call between Trump and Stone in late July, while Gates was in a car with Trump driving to LaGuardia Airport. Gates said that he could not hear exactly what was said on the call but that after the call ended, Trump told him that “more information would be coming.” About an hour after the call, Stone emailed Corsi again, to say a friend of theirs in London should see Assange.

A few days later, on August 2, Corsi emailed Stone about what he said were Assange’s plans, and vaguely mentioned “Podesta” — a reference to John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair. (Podesta’s emails had been hacked, but that was not public knowledge at this point.) The next day, Stone emailed Manafort saying he had an idea “to save Trump’s ass.”

Manafort was ousted from the Trump campaign in mid-August, and replaced by Bannon. Stone then emailed Bannon on August 18, saying he knew a way to win the 2016 election, but that “it ain’t pretty.” Bannon testified that afterward, Stone continued to suggest privately that he had a “relationship with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.” Bannon added that the Trump campaign didn’t really have an official access point to WikiLeaks — but that the closest thing to that would have been Roger Stone.

Still, despite all of Stone’s ominous predictions, no one at the trial testified that Stone ever offered specific knowledge of WikiLeaks’s plans on timing or that he specified what information, exactly, they had in advance.

In any case, none of that was actually the focus of the charges against Stone.

The charges were about Stone’s alleged cover up

The government alleged that when the House Intelligence Committee asked him to testify in their Russia investigation in 2017, Stone concocted a false cover story to hide whatever actually happened.

Specifically, Stone omitted Jerome Corsi from the story, and claimed all of his information about WikiLeaks came from comedian and radio host Randy Credico. But, as prosecutors argued and Credico himself testified, that didn’t make sense with the timeline.

Credico did get in touch with WikiLeaks to do a radio interview with Assange, but that wasn’t until late August 2016 — months after Stone started claiming to know about WikiLeaks, and weeks after his emails with Corsi.

Stone was also charged with falsely telling Congress he had no emails or texts discussing WikiLeaks (he had a ton); with falsely saying he never asked for any requests to be communicated to Assange (he did); and with falsely saying he never discussed his conversations with his WikiLeaks intermediary with anyone in Trump’s campaign (Bannon and Gates said he did talk WikiLeaks with them).

The fuller story of what happened with Stone and WikiLeaks remains unclear — but Mueller’s own conclusions are already in his 448-page final report on the Russia investigation, hidden under black bars.

That’s because all material about Stone in the Mueller report was redacted, to avoid prejudicing this trial’s outcome. Now that it’s over, we’re finally getting closer to learning what the special counsel found — and whether he thought any Trump associates were involved in the dissemination of hacked emails.

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