The Washington Post National Weekly. October 20, 2019.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2019

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable ground

A mammoth thaw PAGE 812 PAGE

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THE FIX

What fundraising tells us so far BY

A ARON B LAKE

The New Jersey Democrat has $4.2 million cash on hand thanks to the late $2 million infusion he got. That’s way behind the top five candidates, and it’s also behind Yang ($6.4 million).

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uesday wasn’t just debate night for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. It was also the deadline for them to file their third-quarter fundraising reports, as The Washington Post’s Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Anu Narayanswamy report.

As usual, these reports provide a window into the health and sustainability of the campaigns. Money isn’t the be-all, end-all in campaigns, but it is a necessity to compete.

Lee’s and Narayanswamy’s big takeaway is that former vice president Joe Biden isn’t raising front-runner money but is spending heavily; he raised the fourth-most in the field from July through September and has the fifth-most cash on hand.

Here are a few other things we learned.

Feeling the burn (rate) You know the primaries are getting close when the candidates start spending big. And that was certainly the case in the third quarter.

All but four of the leading candidates spent more money than they raised, creating a “burn rate” of over 100 percent. The only exceptions were Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)

(75 percent) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) (84 percent), South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (95 percent) and Andrew Yang (43 percent).

The highest burn rate from a non-selffunder belonged to Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who raised $4.8 million and spent $7.8 million for a burn rate of 162 percent.

Speaking of trouble: Julián Castro Making the next debate requires getting to 3 percent in four qualifying national or earlystate polls, or getting to 5 percent in two

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JOHN MINCHILLO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) has $4.2 million on hand thanks to a late $2 million infusion he got from supporters in the third quarter.

early-state polls. Klobuchar at least has $3.6 million in the bank and one 3 percent poll.

The situation for Julián Castro, though, appears more dire.

He raised less than all but two of the 12 candidates on the debate stage Tuesday ($3.5 million), and he has by far the lowest cash on hand ($672,000). With no qualifying polls thus far, a middling performance Tuesday and with very little in the bank to try to improve his lot, it’s difficult to see how he makes that next debate.

Booker’s gambit pays off With 10 days left in the quarter, news leaked out that Sen. Cory Booker was telling supporters he needed to raise at least $1.7 million down the stretch to stay in the campaign. He got it, and it’s about the only thing separating him from his own pretty dire financial situation.

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2019 The Washington Post / Year 6, No. 2

Steyer’s $47 million self-funding explosion Klobuchar’s and Castro’s struggle to make the next debate has to be all the more difficult to swallow given the one newcomer in Tuesday’s debate — billionaire Tom Steyer — has already qualified for it. Steyer is one of just seven candidates who are set for the fifth debate at this point.

And how has he done it? By absolutely flooding early states with his own money and getting the polls he needs in them. Steyer spent an astounding $47 million in the third quarter.

Sanders was next in line at $21.3 million.

Sanders wins again, right when he needed to show staying power Sanders hasn’t exactly kept pace with Warren in national polls, and some of his earlystate poll numbers have waned, but he remains the fundraising champion. For the third time in three quarters, he beat everyone else.

For the second quarter in a row, Sanders pulled in a little over $25 million and narrowly outpaced the second-place candidate. In the second quarter, the runner-up was Buttigieg ($24.9 million), and in the third it was Warren ($24.7 million).

Sanders also has the most cash on hand, at $33.7 million — a number buoyed by $12.7 million in transfers from his old campaign committee. That suggests, despite the health problems he faced in the past few weeks and the lack of early traction, he can be in this thing for the long haul if he really wants to. n

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY TECHNOLOGY BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

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ON THE COVER Thawing permafrost swells Siberia’s Kolyma River, ravaging the land and unearthing prehistoric treasures.

Photo by MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ of The Washington Post

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POLITICS

The front-runners are challenged M ATT V ISER in Columbus, Ohio BY

T

he Democratic Party’s fourth debate this past week opened a more robust and unpredictable clash over the ideological direction of the party, with moderates attempting to ignite the kind of passion that the liberal candidates have harnessed with large crowds and grass-roots donor networks.

After months in which the race was largely static amid a crowded field, the nomination fight is showing signs of narrowing its focus to fewer candidates, divided into parallel feuds in the liberal and moderate wings of the party.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) is entering a crucial phase of her campaign, taking attacks from all sides for the first time since she ascended in popularity, and attempting to demonstrate she can withstand the kind of scrutiny that previously fell mostly on Joe Biden, who until recently held an unchallenged lead in the polls. Yet as she attempts to coalesce support on the party’s left flank, Warren faces a renewed challenge from liberal Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whose debate appearance helped alleviate questions about his health and whose new endorsements and deep bank account have made clear he has no intention of leaving the race.

The left’s feud is replicated in the center, where Biden faces challenges from South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and others.

“It’s the first time the candidates admitted that Warren is the front-runner. Nobody had onstage, next to her, pressure-tested her policies and statements before,” Ben LaBolt, the national press secretary for President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, said of the debate. “Biden has always been a fragile front-runner, and I don’t think you would call him the front-runner anymore. So if you are Buttigieg or Klobuchar, the most obvious play was to try to go after Biden supporters who seem more gettable now than they were six months ago.”

DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Warren is fighting off attacks from all sides, while moderates see an opportunity to overtake Biden Biden on Wednesday also faced a striking problem for a former vice president with decades of Democratic connections: a lack of money. He only had $9 million cash on hand at the end of the third quarter, figures released late Tuesday showed. That was less than a third of the stockpile enjoyed by Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg.

However, Biden sought to focus on the lively squabble over Warren’s liberal policies, particularly on health care, where she has largely yielded to Sanders.

Sanders, the author of the Medicare-for-all plan, has acknowledged it will require increased taxes. Warren supports his plan to extend coverage to everyone in the United States and abolish the private health insurance industry, but unlike Sanders she has yet to provide details about how she would pay for a bill estimated to cost $30 trillion over a decade.

Both assert that middle-class Americans would see lower costs

overall. But economists have said it is impossible to make that guarantee given the details the candidates have put forward.

“It’s fascinating that the person with a plan for everything has no plan for the single most consequential issue in this election in the minds of the American people, across the board,” Biden told reporters before heading into a union hall in Columbus. “And you know, credibility matters.”

Biden and his allies also ramped up their criticism of an answer Warren gave during the debate in which she said, “I think we ought to get out of the Middle East. I don’t think we should have troops in the Middle East.” She later clarified that she meant only combat troops.

“I was surprised last night in the debate one of my colleagues said we should remove all troops from the Middle East,” Biden said at a Wednesday afternoon event in Davenport, Iowa. “We can be strong and smart at the same time.”

Former vice president Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event in Davenport, Iowa.

“I was surprised last night in the debate one of my colleagues said we should remove all troops from the Middle East,” Biden said, referring to fellow presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (DMass.).

On Wednesday, Warren’s chief campaign strategist, Joe Rospars, said the debate had illuminated Warren’s rise.

“Last night, in the face of more attacks from more candidates than anyone’s taken on any debate stage so far, Warren fought back by making her case for what really matters without descending into petty sniping,” Rospars tweeted.

While Biden was aiming directly at a candidate who has met and sometimes exceeded him in recent polls, the strategy for Butigieg and Klobuchar was somewhat more nuanced: to try to persuade voters who may be leaning toward Biden that they are better positioned to articulate a path forward.

Although Klobuchar is far behind many of the other candidates in the polls and fundraising, her hope lies in surveys that show most voters haven’t yet made up their minds and are willing to continue considering candidates.

The senator from Minnesota pitches herself as pragmatic and realistic; someone who, like Biden, can connect with white blue-collar voters, especially those in the Midwest. Buttigieg has grown more direct in his criticism of Warren over the past several weeks. Both contenders have focused on Iowa, a state that has catapulted past candidates to the nomination, most recently Obama.

Buttigieg and Klobuchar claim to represent a sensible Midwestern approach, but from a younger generation than Biden’s.

“Right now you have a group of candidates who are positioned to capitalize if one of the front-runners falters in the early states,” said Jefrey Pollock, a Democratic consultant and pollster who runs Global Strategy Group and previously served as an adviser to the presidential campaign of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

“An upset in Iowa or in New Hampshire or Nevada could reasonably open up a lane for someone new,” he added, pointing toward Buttigieg as well as Sens.

Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.). n

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GOP braces itself for impeachment

BY R ACHAEL B ADE AND E RICA W ERNER

M

ajority Leader Mitch McConnell told Republican senators Wednesday to be ready for an impeachment trial of President Trump as soon as Thanksgiving, as the Senate began to brace for a political maelstrom that would engulf the nation.

An air of inevitability has taken hold in Congress, with the expectation Trump will become the third president in history to be impeached — and Republicans believe they need to prepare to defend the president. While McConnell briefed senators on what would happen during a Senate trial, House GOP leaders convened what they expect will be regular impeachment strategy sessions.

In their closed-door weekly luncheon, McConnell gave a PowerPoint presentation about the impeachment process and fielded questions alongside his staff and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who was a manager for the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

Impeachment is the first step to remove a president, with the House voting on formal charges and the Senate holding a trial in which it either convicts or acquits him.

McConnell said the Senate would probably meet six days a week during the trial, lawmakers said.

“There’s sort of a planned expectation that it would be sometime around Thanksgiving, so you’d have basically Thanksgiving to Christmas — which would be wonderful because there’s no deadline in the world like the next break to motivate senators,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said.

During the meeting, Graham lobbied his colleagues to consider a public declaration in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), which would describe Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

CARLOS JASSO/REUTERS

McConnell told Senate Republicans that he expected Pelosi to hold the vote by Thanksgiving seeking an investigation into a domestic political rival as “unimpeachable.” Some senators, however, pushed back against that idea, arguing that Trump would assume that those who did not sign the document would be persuadable on a vote to oust him.

Meanwhile, Trump has continued to lash out at Democrats over their impeachment inquiry. During a Wednesday White House meeting on Syria and the Turkish attacks on the Kurds, Trump called Pelosi a “third-rate politician,” according to Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). Pelosi later clarified that Trump actually called her a “third-grade politician.”

It was the party leaders’ first face-to-face meeting since Pelosi launched the impeachment inquiry on Sept. 24, arguing that Trump betrayed his oath of office by pressuring Zelensky to dig up dirt on former vice president and 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The GOP’s internal reality check on Trump’s impeachment comes as House Democrats have had success securing damaging testimony from current and former State Department and National Security Council officials, many of whom are voicing longheld concerns about Trump’s actions on Ukraine.

On Wednesday, Michael McKinley, the former senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, testified that he resigned from his post of more than 25 years because State Department officials were being mistreated — and because he disapproved of using foreign policy to advance political prospects.

Republicans have been trying to coalesce around an impeachment strategy for weeks, lawmakers and aides say. In the House, they have decried the process as unfair and secretive — even as GOP members of the investigative committees have fully participated in deposing the witnesses.

On Wednesday, Trump allies

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) addresses reporters at the Capitol on Wednesday.

McConnell told members of his party that the Senate should try to have an impeachment trial taken care of by Christmas.

showed up to McKinley’s deposition and tried to enter the private meeting room. They were denied entry, as they are not members of the House panels — and then they went to the TV cameras to accuse Democrats of hiding investigative work from the public.

“If this case was so strong, why aren’t we doing it in front of the American people instead of behind closed doors?” asked Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), a House Intelligence Committee member who took part in the proceedings.

The House GOP criticism has unnerved some moderate Democrats, who began asking leaders about whether Republicans were being treated unfairly. In a letter to colleagues Wednesday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) sought to dispel those notions, saying that Republicans on the relevant committees have been included in the probe and questioned witnesses.

“The special counsels in the Nixon and Clinton impeachments conducted their investigations in private and we must initially do the same,” Schiff wrote. “It is of paramount importance to ensure that witnesses cannot coordinate their testimony with one another to match their description of events, or potentially conceal the truth.”

In the Senate, Republicans have been more blunt about their concerns over the impeachment process. During the Senate GOP lunch, for example, one lawmaker questioned how the party was going to stay on the same page throughout the process, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely describe the session.

Timing was a looming question in the Senate GOP meeting.

McConnell said that he expected Pelosi to hold an impeachment vote by Thanksgiving and that the Senate should try to dispose of the issue by Christmas. But he also noted that motions of dismissal of the charges in an impeachment trial are handled at the discretion of the chief justice, who presides over the trial. n

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Communist Party app is also a spy B Y A NNA F IFIELD in Beijing

but there was no legitimate reason a supposedly educational app would seek to run commands on users’ phones with high privilege levels, the fund wrote in a commentary about the Cure53 report.

T

he Chinese Communist Party appears to have “superuser” access to all the data on more than 100 million Android-based cellphones through a back door in a propaganda app that the government has been promoting aggressively this year.

An examination of the coding of the app used by phones running the Android operating system shows it enables authorities to retrieve messages and photos from users’ phones, browse their contacts and Internet history, and activate an audio recorder inside the devices.

“The [Chinese Communist Party] essentially has access to over 100 million users’ data,” said Sarah Aoun, director of technology at the Open Technology Fund, an initiative funded by the U.S. government under Radio Free Asia.

“That’s coming from the top of a government that is expanding its surveillance into citizens’ day-today lives.”

The party, led by President Xi Jinping, launched the app, called Study the Great Nation, in January. The name is a pun because the Chinese word for study — “xuexi” — contains the authoritarian leader’s family name.

The app contains news articles and videos, many of them about Xi’s activities or his ideology, “Xi Jinping Thought.” There is even a sense of competition, with users earning points for reading articles and commenting on them, and a leader board showing how users are faring in quizzes.

The app quickly became the most downloaded one in China, with state media reporting in April — the most recent figures available — that it had more than 100 million registered users.

Digital forensics The Open Technology Fund contracted Cure53, a German cybersecurity firm, to break apart the app and determine its exact capabilities.

The Cure53 researchers investi-

JUSTIN CHIN/BLOOMBERG NEWS

It has a back door to grant Chinese government access to all data on 100 million Android phones gated the Android version of the app, which is used in smartphones made by Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei, Oppo and Vivo, but did not look into the version available on Apple’s iOS. Android-based phones account for the vast majority of smartphones in China, with Apple making up only 6 percent of the market as of June, according to Counterpoint, a research consulting firm based in Hong Kong.

Apple said that this type of “superuser” surveillance could not be conducted on Apple’s system.

There have been suspicions about the app’s invasiveness — although many people in China are conscious that the authorities can read their messages. A cybersecurity law enacted two years ago required all tech companies to share user data with the government.

Although they were not able to fully assess the app’s functional-

ities because of code designed to thwart attempts to dissect the app, the Cure53 auditors found code that amounts to a back door into the phone that is able to run arbitrary commands with “superuser” privileges.

Granting such privileges is tantamount to giving administratorlevel access to a user’s phone, and this kind of code is generally considered to be malicious. Superuser privileges give developers the power to download any software, modify files and data, or install a program to log key strokes.

“It’s very, very uncommon for an application to require that level of access to the device, and there’s no reason to have these privileges unless you’re doing something you’re not supposed to be,” said Adam Lynn, the Open Technology Fund’s research director.

The investigation could not reveal how the code or the information it gathered was being used,

Chinese President Xi Jinping is seen planting a tree in an arranged photograph displayed on the “Study the Great Nation” app. The app, which has more than 100 million registered users, contains many articles and videos about Xi’s activities and ideology.

How it works The State Council Information Office, responding on behalf of the Propaganda Department, denied the app contained such functions.

“We learned from those who run the Study the Great Nation app that there is no such thing as you have mentioned,” the office said in a response to faxed questions outlining the report’s main findings.

Use of the app in China is not exactly voluntary. The Communist Party has issued directives to its members to download the app, as have many workplaces.

Starting this month, about 10,000 reporters and editors in Beijing will take part in a pilot test that is expected to extend nationwide, in which they will be tested on their knowledge of Xi Jinping Thought through the app.

The Propaganda Department’s media oversight office made it clear that only those who passed would get new press cards, which are required to work as a journalist in China.

Some say workplace-mandated usage sessions have become too stringent.

“Sometimes even when I’m very tired and have put my baby to sleep, I still have to complete my Study the Great Nation, otherwise my pay will be cut,” one disgruntled app user wrote on Weibo, the Chinese answer to Twitter. Another complained about having to write a 2,000-word self-criticism because that person didn’t earn enough points on the app.

The Open Technology Fund concluded that the app contained code that should be alarming to users and app store owners alike.

“What’s clear is that while the CCP advertises ‘Study the Great Nation’ as a way for citizens to prove their loyalty and study their country, the app’s maintainers are studying them right back,” it wrote in its commentary. n

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NATION

The battle over wild horse-roundups K ARIN B RULLIARD in Elko County, Nev. BY

W

ild horses may be symbols of the wide-open American West, but J.J. Goicoechea watched them warily. Under a bright desert sky, about 20 mustangs munched on the crested wheatgrass meant for the Angus cattle he grazes here on public land.

“You’ve got to look up to them.

They’re tough,” the fourth-generation rancher said, leaning against his dusty red truck. “But if we turn a blind eye, in five years there will be 100 horses here, and it won’t look as good.”

Goicoechea has long been on one side of the battle over wild horses and burros, an issue so contentious that Congress, animal advocates, conservationists, ranchers and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) have long been in a stalemate. Everyone agrees the situation is untenable: The government says three times more equines roam public land than the fragile terrain can handle. To address this, the BLM, which is charged with managing most of the animals, periodically rounds up horses and now has nearly 50,000 in holding. The agency says caring for the warehoused animals devours most of its wild horse budget, leaving little for other approaches.

Horse advocates call the roundups cruel, contend that millions of cattle do vastly more damage to public lands than thousands of horses, and insist mustangs must never be killed. Ranchers and some environmentalists view the horses as feral pests that damage ecosystems, compete for resources with cattle and wildlife, and should be culled or sold.

But against this conflict, at a time of deep political polarization, something almost unrecognizable is floating around Capitol Hill: a compromise. Over three years, major ranching and hunting organizations, represented by Goicoechea and others, quietly negotiated with animal welfare groups, including the Humane Society of the United States. These

PHOTOS BY CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Ranchers, animal welfare groups agree on plan; critics call it betrayal strange bedfellows recently unveiled a wild horse proposal that they say meets both sides’ goals: It keeps mustangs alive, and it gets a lot more off the land.

There are just a couple catches: It would cost $50 million a year, swelling the BLM’s horse budget by two-thirds. And most wild horse advocacy groups hate it.

The 10-year proposal calls for scaling up the roundups, or “gathers,” that animal activists have long despised — capturing up to 20,000 horses and burros each year. Those horses would live in private pastures or sanctuaries that provide cheaper and “more natural living situations” than the corrals the BLM now depends on. Wild horse adoptions, which last year numbered about 3,100, would have to increase, the plan says. Its final pillar is aggressive use of fertility control, such as PZP, an injection delivered annually by dart.

“This plan doesn’t benefit the

horses at all, or taxpayers. It benefits the livestock industry,” said Grace Kuhn, spokeswoman for the American Wild Horse Campaign.

The alliance behind the plan, which includes one prominent wild horse organization, dismisses that as a misrepresentation of their proposal — and of political reality. Although the 1971 federal law that protects wild horses and burros allows the interior secretary to euthanize older and unadopted animals or sell them for slaughter, Congress has for much of the past three decades blocked those powers in annual appropriations bills.

But as the free-roaming and fast-reproducing horse and burro population mushrooms — from 40,000 in 2013 to 88,000 last year, according to the BLM — support for the animals has wobbled. President Trump’s budget has called for sales and killing, as have

A herd of wild horses in the Triple B Complex, managed by the Bureau of Land Management, run near Ely, Nev., in July. The BLM has nearly 50,000 wild horses in holding.

House appropriators and the BLM’s wild horse advisory committee. The status quo, a bureau official told lawmakers in July, could result in half a million horses on the range by 2030.

“We heard from key members of Congress that … they were leaning more and more toward letting the agency have the authority to kill horses,” said Gillian Lyons, a senior legislative specialist for the Humane Society Legislative Fund.

The ranching groups say they had come to believe the opposite — that Congress, regularly besieged by impassioned pleas from horse lovers, would never permit the culling of a symbol of the American spirit.

“We don’t see the world the same way,” Ethan Lane, vice president of government affairs for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and executive director of the group’s Public Lands Council, said of animal welfare groups. “The

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NATION only way this has been successful is us recognizing their concerns over how these horses are managed and them recognizing our concerns over how the rangelands are managed.”

Fertility control could be a compromise. Neither ranchers nor the BLM have ever bought into contraception as a large-scale solution: Last year, the bureau treated just 702 wild horses.

But modeling by ecologists and economists — brought in by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, another member of the alliance — found that if fertility control were administered to about 90 percent of mares that remain on the range, then roundups could dramatically slow after four years. After 10 years, it says, about 38,000 horses would roam the West, much closer to the government’s target population of 27,000. By then, roundups would be rare, and the few gathered horses could be adopted out, the plan posits.

“I believe in this proposal,” said Goicoechea, who participated in negotiations on behalf of the beef association and Eureka County, Nev., where he is a commissioner.

He said he thinks it would require the development of long-term contraception such as horse IUDs, but he found the modeling convincing.

Goicoechea said he was “very skeptical” when approached in 2015 by the Humane Society, an organization best known among ranchers for campaigns against slaughterhouses and for Meatless Mondays. He agreed to attend a meeting in Reno, but he didn’t tell peers.

Initial meetings fell apart over horse advocates’ refusal to entertain euthanasia, participants said.

After ranching representatives agreed to take killing off the table, meetings resumed last year in Utah, with a push from Rep. Chris Stewart (R). Goicoechea now talks up the plan at county meetings, and he testified about it in July before a Senate subcommittee.

Goicoechea, who is also Nevada’s state veterinarian, insists he likes wild horses. But he said he’s seen them starve in dry years.

“I know that white mare, and I can tell you when she was born — two years ago,” he said, pointing to a horse whose tail whipped lightly in the midsummer wind. But, he said, “they have to be managed appropriately.”

‘Traumatic, senseless roundups’ The day after Goicoechea watched the mare, the BLM began a three-week roundup in the area.

The agency said the 1.6-million acre swath of eastern Nevada was home to more than 3,300 wild horses, or four times above its “appropriate management level.”

The animals were hazards to workers at a nearby gold mine, a BLM official said: There had been 14 horse-vehicle collisions since December.

Shortly after 9 a.m., a helicopter emerged over a faraway ridge.

Like a buzzing sheepdog, it herded a band of frightened mustangs

running below toward a “Judas horse” — a domestic animal that led its wild cousins down a burlaplined corridor that dead-ended in a pen. Among the horses was the white mare.

Over four hours, two helicopters pushed 117 horses into the trap. Foals, some weeks old, struggled to keep up. A lone black stallion stumbled under the chopper before relenting and heading into the pen, the gate clanging behind him.

Three horses were later euthanized due to injuries, the BLM said.

Watching from a distant hill were a few activists, including

Top: Laura Leigh, founder of Wild Horse Education, stands with other wild horse advocates, observing the BLM processing area.

Above: J.J. Goicoechea drives past his cows in Newark Valley, where he has grazing rights from the BLM.

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Laura Leigh, who has sued the agency over its treatment of wild horses during roundups and other policies and won. When asked about the proposal, she scoffed. It did not address overgrazing by livestock and ignored mining and gas projects that squeeze horses out of public land, she said.

“They don’t even know what’s going on out here. They’re drug salesmen,” she said of the Humane Society, which holds a federal registration for PZP but insists it does not profit from it. “They sold the wild horse down the river.”

Other critics, including the former CEO of the Humane Society, have been similarly scathing. The proposal is vague, they say, and could allow surgical sterilization of mares, a procedure viewed by horse advocates as invasive. Eventually, the cost of feeding all the horses would provide an opening for mass euthanasia, they say.

The criticism has hit Return to Freedom, a California-based horse advocacy group that signed onto the plan. It has lost donors and battled accusations that it supports roundups and sterilization. But Neda DeMayo, the group’s CEO, said the plan is an opportunity to prove fertility control can work, even in large areas where horses are difficult to reach.

“The fact that we have a chance at shifting management to move away from these traumatic, senseless roundups and move toward better solutions in the near future is critical,” DeMayo said. Ranchers, she added, “are not going to say, ‘Thanks guys, we’re just going to take our cows off now.’ A huge step forward is that there is conversation.”

The day after the roundup near the mine, three semis pulled up across the state outside Reno, at the largest BLM horse holding and adoption center in the country. Inside the trucks were the horses captured the day before.

Workers separated the animals into groups — stallions to one corral; nursing mares and foals to another; “dry” mares to another.

Among the dry mares was the white one Goicoechea had recognized.

Over the next few weeks, she would be branded and vaccinated.

She might be adopted. But more likely, she’d be shipped out to a federally funded corral or pasture — one more horse off the range and into government storage. n

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‘The earth is slowly sinking’ As rapid warming swamps Siberia, towns attempt to adapt to their new reality

Mammoth bones that could be tens of thousands of years old are strewn near the Kolyma River. They probably were discarded by poachers in favor of valuable tusks.

SUNDAY, October, 20, 2019

COVER STORY

BY A NTON T ROIANOVSKI AND C HRIS M OONEY

on the Zyryanka River, Russia

A

ndrey Danilov eased his motorboat onto the gravel riverbank, where the bones of a woolly mammoth lay scattered on the beach. A putrid odor filled the air — the stench of ancient plants and animals decomposing after millennia entombed in a frozen purgatory.

“It smells like dead bodies,” Danilov said.

The skeletal remains were left behind by mammoth hunters hoping to strike it rich by pulling prehistoric ivory tusks from a vast underground layer of ice and frozen dirt called permafrost. It has been rapidly thawing as Siberia has warmed up faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. Scientists say the planet’s warming must not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit — but Siberia’s temperatures have already spiked far beyond that.

A Washington Post analysis found that the region near the town of Zyryanka, in an enormous wedge of eastern Siberia called Yakutia, has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times — roughly triple the global average.

The permafrost that once sustained farming — and upon which villages and cities are built — is in the midst of a great thaw, blanketing the region with swamps, lakes and odd bubbles of earth that render the land virtually useless.

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

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COVER STORY

“The warming got in the way of our good life,” said Alexander Fedorov, deputy director of the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in the regional capital of Yakutsk. “With every year, things are getting worse and worse.”

For the 5.4 million people who live in Russia’s permafrost zone, the new climate has disrupted their homes and their livelihoods.

Rivers are rising and running faster, and entire neighborhoods are falling into them. Arable land for farming has plummeted by more than half, to just 120,000 acres in 2017.

In Yakutia, an area one-third the size of the United States, cattle and reindeer herding have plunged 20 percent as the animals increasingly battle to survive the warming climate’s destruction of pastureland.

Siberians who grew up learning to read nature’s subtlest signals are being driven to migrate by a climate they no longer understand.

This migration from the countryside to cities and towns — also driven by factors such as low investment and spotty Internet — represents one of the most significant and little-noticed movements to date of climate refugees.

The city of Yakutsk has seen its population surge 20 percent to more than 300,000 in the past decade.

And then there’s that rotting smell.

As the permafrost thaws, animals and plants frozen for thousands of years begin to decompose and send a steady flow of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere — accelerating climate change.

“The permafrost is thawing so fast,” said Anna Liljedahl, an associate professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “We scientists can’t keep up anymore.”

Against this backdrop, a booming cottage industry in mammoth hunting has taken hold.

The long-frozen mammoth tusks — combined with Chinese demand for ivory — have imbued teetering local economies with a strike-it-rich ethos. Some people bask in instant money. But others watch in dismay as Siberia’s way of life is washed away.

‘NATURE IS IN CONTROL’ The first sign of change was the birds.

Over the past several decades, never-beforeseen species started to show up in the Upper Kolyma District, an area on the Arctic Circle in northeastern Siberia 1,000 miles west of Nome, Alaska.

The new arrivals included the mallard duck and barn swallow, whose normal range was

Native Yakutian horses graze near the wreckage of a Soviet-era helicopter near Zyryanka.

Fermented mare’s milk called kumys is a delicacy among the Sakha, a Turkic people who make up roughly half the population of Yakutia.

previously well to the south. A study published last year by Yakutsk scientist Roman Desyatkin said ornithologists in the region have identified 48 new bird species in the past half-century, an increase of almost 20 percent in the known diversity of bird life.

Then the land started to change.

Winters, though still brutal, turned milder — and shorter. Fed by the more rapidly thawing permafrost, rivers started flooding more, leaving some communities inaccessible for months and washing others away, along with the ground beneath them.

The village of Nelemnoye was cut off for three months in late 2017 when the lakes and rivers didn’t fully freeze, stranding residents who use the frozen waters for transport. With the village in crisis, the government dispatched a helicopter to take residents grocery shopping.

Claudia Shalugina, 63, used to teach at the three-story school in Zyryanka, a 90-minute motorboat ride downriver. Around 10 years ago, the Kolyma River washed away a section of Zyryanka, taking Shalugina’s school with it.

Satellite images show the loss of about 50 acres of land along the riverside, according to the geographic information firm Esri.

Just downstream from where the Zyryanka

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COVER STORY River flows into the mighty Kolyma, three huge tractor-trailers stand abandoned on the forested riverbank. Weeds and wildflowers rise up around them. The frozen river, used as a winter ice road, suddenly became too risky to drive on.

Spring had come early this year — again.

“It used to be man was in control,” said Pyotr Kaurgin, head of the Chukchi indigenous community in the village of Kolymskoye, on the northern reaches of the Kolyma River. “Now nature is in control.”

In the summer, huge blazes tore through Siberian boreal forests, unleashing yet more carbon into the atmosphere. Some scientists fear worsening northern fires are amplifying the permafrost damage. Meanwhile, six time zones away (but still in Siberia) on the Yamal Peninsula, monstrous craters have opened up in the tundra. Scientists suspect they represent sudden explosions of methane gas freed by thawing permafrost.

Outside Zyryanka, a once-bustling farm has given way to a jumbled landscape of dips, bumps and puddles. The mud road, what’s left of it, banks and turns at head-spinning angles, until it runs into a widening pond.

“The earth is slowly sinking,” horse farmer Vladimir Arkhipov said. “There’s more and more water and less and less usable earth.”

The impact on farming has been catastrophic.

Arkhipov produces fermented mare’s milk called kumys, a delicacy among the Sakha, a Turkic people who make up roughly half the population of Yakutia. Arkhipov also raises foals for meat, which in Sakha culture is sometimes consumed sliced thin, raw and frozen.

In the past five years, Arkhipov said, he has lost close to four of his 70-odd acres of hay fields to permafrost-related flooding — meaning he can feed three fewer horses in the winter. And during a freak blizzard in late 2017 — an increasingly common occurrence in the region as the climate changes, scientists say — 10 of his horses died.

Due to thawing permafrost — along with the demise of Soviet-era state farms — the area of cultivated land in Yakutia has plummeted by more than half since 1990. The region’s cattle herds have shrunk by about 20 percent, to 188,100 head in 2017 from 233,300 in 2011. Reindeer herds have also declined sharply.

Fedorov and other scientists say the degradation of crop and pastureland caused by the thawing permafrost helped bring about the collapse of the region’s agriculture.

VISITORS FROM THE ICE AGE The idea that warming brings disaster is ingrained in the tradition of the Sakha people of Yakutia, the region laced by the Zyryanka and Kolyma rivers. An old Sakha prophecy says: “They will survive until the day when the Arctic Ocean melts.”

Village elders recalled the phrase after an episode of catastrophic flooding in 2005, according to Susan Crate, an anthropologist at

Top: Andrei Zimzyulin lounges at his fishing camp on the riverbank, where he spends about half of the year. Shorter winters mean that once reliably frozen-over lakes and rivers are less predictable.

Above: A decaying bust of Vladimir Lenin sits on the Kolyma River.

“The earth is slowly sinking.

There’s more and more water and less and less usable earth.”

Vladimir Arkhipov, horse farmer

KLMNO WEEKLY

George Mason University, who has long studied climate change in Siberia. The radical transformation underway here, she said, should serve as a warning to people in every corner of the globe.

“Changing our ways is imminent,” Crate said.

Over the past 50 years, temperatures in most of Yakutia have risen at double or even triple the global average rate, according to work by Yakutsk-based scientists Fedorov and Alexey Gorokhov. The town of Zyryanka has warmed by just over 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) from 1966 to 2016, according to their analysis.

The Post’s analysis, which uses a data set from Berkeley Earth, looks further back. It shows that Zyryanka and the roughly 2,000square-mile area surrounding it has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) when the past five years are compared with the mid- to late 1800s.

Some regions of Siberia bordering on the Arctic Ocean are warming even faster, The Post’s analysis shows.

Desyatkin, at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk, found that the changes are even more dramatic underground. From 2005 to 2014, his team found, the number of days with below-freezing temperatures three feet below the surface fell from around 230 days a year to 190.

That is significant because enormous wedges of ice lie under Yakutia.

In some parts of the world, permafrost lies in a relatively thin layer just below the ground’s surface. But in much of Yakutia, the permafrost is of a special, icy and far thicker variety.

Scientists call it Yedoma.

Formed during the late Pleistocene, the Earth’s last glacial period, which ended about 11,700 years ago, Yedoma consists of thick layers of soil packed around gigantic lodes of embedded ice. Because Yedoma contains so much ice, it can melt quickly — reshaping the landscape as sudden lakes form and hillsides collapse.

Around Zyryanka, exposed ice wedges glisten along the riverbanks. Their slick, muddy surfaces form ghostly, moonlike grooves. Plant roots dangle like Christmas ornaments from the top layer of soil, left behind as the ice below it melts.

In the 1970s, Desyatkin said, the ground in the Middle Kolyma District, just north of Zyryanka, thawed to a depth of about two feet every summer. Now it thaws to more than three feet.

That extra foot of thawing means that, on average, every square mile of territory has been releasing an additional 700,000 gallons of water into the environment every year, according to Desyatkin’s calculations.

Meanwhile, ancient plant and animal remains trapped inside the Yedoma are exposed to nonfreezing temperatures — or even the open air. That, in turn, activates microbes, which break down the remains and unleash carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, especially from the thawing plant material.

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COVER STORY

PROSPECTING FOR MAMMOTH Although the thawing of these ancient remains raises the threat of terrifying consequences, it is, for some, the bright side of climate change.

“The thawing of the permafrost has a very good effect. The mammoth bone comes out and brings us money,” said Yevgeny Konstantinov, a newspaper editor in the Arctic town of Saskylakh. “Everyone rides Jeeps now.”

In recent years, demand from China has created a booming market for mammoth ivory.

People in Yakutia collected almost 80 tons in 2017, according to official figures — a likely undercount, experts say. A Yakutia official recently estimated annual sales to be as high as $63 million.

As the permafrost thaws and riverbanks erode, more tusks will emerge. Though mammoths disappeared from the Siberian mainland some 10,000 years ago, the government estimates that 500,000 tons of their tusks are still buried in the frozen ground.

Supply and demand are so great that some people are collecting mammoth tusks at nearindustrial scale. They use high-pressure hoses to blast away riverbanks and hire teams of young men to comb the wilderness for months at a time. People involved in the business, which isn’t entirely legal, said some tusk prospectors have deployed underwater cameras and scuba gear.

“You get bit once, you catch the bug. It’s like a gold rush,” said Alexey Sivtsev, a prospector in Zyryanka who said he is licensed to collect tusks. In the glutted market, Sivtsev said, the price for top-quality tusks has fallen from about $500 a pound five years ago to around $180.

According to Sakha tradition, tusk hunting violates the sacred ground and brings bad tidings. Some Siberians worry that it also draws young people into an underworld linked to organized crime.

“Since all this is connected to criminality, I’m worried that this mafia, as we call it, is getting a basis for existing in our villages,” said Vyacheslav Shadrin, who studies northern indigenous peoples at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk.

Konstantin Gusev, a hunter in Nelemnoye, is still waiting for his mammoth payday.

Once, he found the tusk of an ancient woolly rhinoceros but threw it away. He later learned that such a find sells for $7,000 a pound, making it among the most valuable animal remains buried underground.

Gusev now has his eye on a strip of riverbank where he found a mammoth tooth. He invested in a water pump and hose to try to uncover what’s underneath.

TRYING TO SURVIVE’ The mammoths aren’t enough to keep Gusev in the countryside, however. The hunter said he is moving to Yakutsk to look for other kinds of work.

The ducks and geese are just about gone, he said, possibly moving to new habitats in Si-

Andrey Danilov, a part-time hunter of mammoth tusks, treks through an area of the Zyryanka River in Russia’s Siberia that has been made rich in ivory by thawing permafrost. The price for top-quality tusks has fallen from about $500 a pound five years ago to around $180.

The region around Zyryanka has seen warming nearly three times the global average 3.2ºC

3ºC above 1880-1899 average

2 Five-year rolling average

1.2ºC

1

0

-1 Annual average for Zyryanka 1880

1900

Source: Berkeley Earth

1950

1980

2018

JOHN MUYSKENS/THE WASHINGTON POST

“This isn’t a man-made catastrophe yet, but it’ll be unavoidable if things continue at this pace.”

Yakutsk Mayor Sardana Avksentyeva

beria as the climate shifts. The sable pelts aren’t as thick as they used to be. The shorter winters mean that once reliably frozen-over lakes and rivers are now less predictable, making hunting grounds harder to reach and restricting his ability to get goods to market.

“Something is changing,” Gusev said. “People are sitting around, trying to survive.”

In Nelemnoye, the population has declined to 180 from 210 in the past decade, according to village head Andrei Solntsev. Just 82 of the residents have work. Many factors are pushing people to move to the city — lack of Internet access, poor flight connections, limited job opportunities — but the uncertainty born of a changing climate looms over everything.

“We’re already seeing the phenomenon of climate refugees,” Shadrin said.

But “it’s not like anyone is waiting for them here” in the city, he said. “No one is ready to help them immediately. . . . They’re breaking away, becoming marginals.”

And Yakutsk offers no escape from the warming climate.

As the permafrost thaws and recedes, a handful of apartment buildings there are showing signs of structural problems. Sections of many older, wooden buildings already sag toward the ground — rendered uninhabitable by the unevenly thawing earth. New apartment blocks are being built on massive pylons extending ever deeper — more than 40 feet — below ground.

“The cold is our protection,” Yakutsk Mayor Sardana Avksentyeva said. “This isn’t a manmade catastrophe yet, but it’ll be unavoidable if things continue at this pace.”

An international team of scientists, led by Dmitry A. Streletskiy at George Washington University, estimated in a study published this year that the value of buildings and infrastructure on Russian permafrost amounts to $300 billion — about 7.5 percent of the nation’s total annual economic output. They estimate the cost of mitigating the damage wrought by thawing permafrost will probably total more than $100 billion by 2050.

But people here are used to adapting. They survived the forced collectivization of the early Soviet Union. Gulag prisoners taught them to grow potatoes. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the state farms closed, they shifted to a greater reliance on hunting and fishing.

Now, Anatoly Sleptsov, 61, is once again embracing change.

The pastures of the village where he used to live have turned into swamps and lakes. So he moved to firmer ground outside Zyryanka, where he’s leveraging climate change to his advantage.

Though Sleptsov’s attempt to create an Israeli-style kibbutz failed, he figures the region can profit by marketing Omega 3 fatty acids extracted from its fish.

Meanwhile, his potatoes are flowering earlier. And this year, he started growing strawberries.

“Next thing,” he said, “we’ll have watermelon.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Exposing the rot in politics, media N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

E LIZABETH B RUENIG

W

CATCH AND KILL Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

By Ronan Farrow Little, Brown and Company.

464 pp. $30

hile political unrest roils the nation, left and right unite over a shared sense that nefarious elites plot to abuse and exploit us, their lessers. It is easy to dismiss these sorts of anxieties as delusional. But the trouble — and the great revelation of Ronan Farrow’s book “Catch and Kill” — is that the conspiracy theorists are essentially correct.

Farrow’s dark memoir of the era in which he helped unearth the abuses of Harvey Weinstein unfolds like a classic noir. He opens on a suspicious conversation between a pair of criminals, and then whisks the reader into his own world as it was then — surprisingly bleak, and mottled with disappointment. Farrow depicts himself as an outsider, demoralized by the failure of his short-lived MSNBC program, “Ronan Farrow Daily,” and convinced that he lacks the cool and gravitas of the longtime TV journalists who surrounded him at NBC. A tone of cold dread sets in before Farrow realizes he’s in the presence of some truly despicable characters. Matt Lauer’s first appearance in the book, for instance, is subtly sinister — Farrow innocently observes as Lauer pushes a button on his desk, and his office door swings shut. (The infamous button would eventually become a key feature in the sexual misconduct allegations against the former NBC “Today” show host.) As Farrow begins digging into the Weinstein case, other dark threads unspool around him, including those involving Lauer. The network superiors seem indifferent to their anchor’s alleged abuse, and Farrow is soon navigating a web of deceit and intrigue.

At the heart of every great noir is a conspiracy of evil that imbues the initial crime uncovered by the hero with a weightier resonance than was immediately obvious. So it goes with “Catch and Kill.” Weinstein turns out not only to be a

MARY INHEA KANG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Author Ronan Farrow helped unearth the abuses of Harvey Weinstein.

sexually exploitative megalomaniac, but also a thoroughly connected one, whose Rolodex of debtors, leeches and sycophants included the Clinton family, the Trump family and seemingly all of Hollywood.

When the army of connections enlisted to pressure Farrow fails to get him to drop the story, Weinstein turns to less figurative militants — Black Cube, a private investigative agency staffed by former Israeli spooks, who give Farrow cause to fear for his life.

Observers of the weirder aspects of the news cycle might note similarities to Pizzagate, an invented scandal in which Clintonlinked operatives were alleged to have been involved in a child prostitution ring run out of the basement of a Washington pizza par-

lor. That was nonsense. But the scandal surrounding Jeffrey Epstein — the late financier of mysterious means who trafficked teenage girls for sex with him and his wealthy friends — was decidedly real, and involved a similar roster of rich and powerful characters.

By the time Farrow gets around to the allegations against Lauer — which the former NBC anchor has denied — one begins to wonder if all these conspiracies of exploitation are really parallel, or whether they somehow intersect. Is it possible that Bill Cosby, Brian Singer, Les Moonves, Epstein and Weinstein could have all simultaneously carried on years-long campaigns of sexual abuse in the claustrophobic, insular world of media without drawing upon the same

resources? Or is the media — and by extension politics, its symbiotic partner — corrupt by its nature, structured by its own power brokers to permit victimization on a grand scale?

“Catch and Kill” has already resulted in precisely the sorts of legal threats and intimidation campaigns it details in its pages, suggesting that, at the very least, media moguls in the business of villainy share a playbook. Dylan Howard, an executive at American Media Inc. — the parent company of the National Enquirer, whose service of obtaining and burying incriminating stories for rich clients such as Weinstein and Trump gives the book its title — has sued Farrow and his publisher, Little, Brown and Co., in hopes of halting publication. Neither Farrow nor his publisher have shown signs of backing down.

And that’s a good thing. Exposing the rot inside the media has had the simultaneous effect of discrediting journalism as a profession, which is perhaps the greatest unspoken reality of the #MeToo era. Journalists played an enormous role in uncovering these endless scandals, but the abuse by journalists themselves also helped keep them submerged for as long as they were. It isn’t difficult to understand why ordinary people, reviewing a full accounting of the facts, might conclude that they can’t necessarily trust what they see — or don’t see — in the news.

Journalism like Farrow’s — fearless, exhaustive, even reckless in its disregard for personal or professional consequences — is the only way to begin to correct this problem. Still, even the noblest journalism can’t reverse the fact of what happened: namely, that some of the most influential people in our country have long perpetrated organized sex crimes against women and children. n Bruenig is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

Cummings was my foil and friend TREY GOWDY is a Republican who served in the U.S. House of Representatives for South Carolina’s 4th District from 2011 to 2019.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) sadly passed away Thursday morning, but I can still clearly remember his hand moving toward mine one day during a House Oversight Committee hearing — slowly, but with purpose. He wasn’t going to interrupt my opening statement or my questioning of a witness. But he had something he wanted to say right after I was done: The witness had been highly critical of the thenBudget Committee chairman, former speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). I didn’t like what she had said, and I spent my allotted five minutes letting her know it. Then Elijah’s hand came toward mine, like a father getting ready to tell his adult son he could have done better.

“You were too tough on that witness, son,” he said. “The fact that you can do something does not mean you should do it. I understand you like Paul — he’ll be fine. Make sure she is, too, when this is all over.”

There are more than a few YouTube videos of Elijah and me disagreeing with each other over the years. Unfortunately, there are no videos capturing his calls of encouragement to me. Or of me pushing him in his wheelchair — he would have done the same for me — because I wanted to talk with him while we walked. Or of Elijah going out of his way to encourage a member of my staff because he knew what it was like to be a young professional of color; because his desire to see her succeed

exceeded any and every political difference they may have had.

In reality, less than 1 percent of our lives, even as members of Congress, are captured on social media, C-SPAN or in print. After that, there’s still the other 99 percent of life. The part where you call each other when one of you is having a bad day. Where you hire an idealistic young person in your offices because a colleague asks you to give someone a chance. Where you let your colleague across the aisle know something is coming, so he can prepare for it and not be surprised. The part of life where you share painful details of real life because you know that your colleague will never violate your trust. That’s the full picture of my friendship with Elijah

BY SHENEMAN

Cummings: the meager 99 percent of life that’s not captured when you’re in politics.

He was a fighter. He was a more than formidable political opponent. He could punch hard.

And then the hearing would end, and life would begin. He was my friend, and it is that part of life working with Elijah that I will remember and cherish the best and the longest.

I met him while riding on a bus in Mexico. It was my first congressional trip. It wasn’t a particularly glamorous one and, consequently, there were few members who had signed up to go. He told me of our mutual connection to South Carolina.

His family had roots there. He still had relatives there and visited periodically. I asked, “Why did your family leave South Carolina, Mr. Cummings?”

We were separated by quite a few years, age-wise, but at that moment, his reply reflected a separation that was more like many generations: “To get an education, son . . . to get an education.” And I immediately knew what he meant. He turned to look out the window into the darkness of a foreign land, leaving me to dwell on the starkly different paths that we’d taken to find ourselves side by side on a bus, in another country, both

serving in Congress.

Our life experiences were different. Our political beliefs could not have been more different. We disagreed on most issues. Our committee assignments and respective leadership teams seemed to thrust us into almost every contentious issue facing Congress. Yet we never had a cross word outside of a committee room during the years we served together.

To the contrary, I had genuine affection for Elijah, and I admired the path he took, over the course of his life, rising to become a leader in Congress.

It’s not the hearings or political squabbles I’ll remember.

I’ll remember his laugh. I’ll remember the commanding voice that made him the most compelling orator in Congress.

I’ll remember his hand coming toward mine to let me know that a piece of advice was headed my way, once I stopped talking.

We served in a Congress that was often bitter and divided.

None of that exists where he is now. If I make it to the other side, we will serve together again in a place of only peace and forgiveness. I’ll listen for his voice and look for his hand, reaching out to try to teach someone how to be better. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Mike Pence BY

T OM L O B IANCO

In the very unlikely event that the impeachment inquiry underway in the House leads to President Trump’s removal from office by the Senate, Vice President Pence would ascend to the Oval Office. Pence remains one of the least­understood figures of the Trump administration — even as he quietly lays the groundwork for his own future presidential bid. Pence has long been a master at stealth campaigning. Here are five myths that have helped enshroud him.

MYTH NO. 1 He’s a theocratic ideologue.

But his most reliable political dogma isn’t about God; it’s about winning — and the latter trumps the former. In 2011, when he returned to Indiana for his successful race for governor, he dropped his image as a Washington culture warrior and tea party ally and pitched himself as the continuation of then-Gov. Mitch Daniels, a technocratic Republican who eschewed hot-button social battles, at least in public. Four years later, when critics painted Pence as the national face of anti-gay bigotry after he signed a law allowing businesses to cite religious objections to discriminate against LGBTQ customers, he faced a decision. Moderates and business leaders wanted him to veto the bill for fear it would crush Indiana’s nascent tech economy. Pence stood firmly with his Christian-right supporters — until Republican billionaire and megadonor Paul Singer phoned Pence and threatened to withhold financial support unless he backed down.

Pence’s team had been courting Singer for five years. Faced with the prospect of losing a huge cash boost in the future, the governor reversed himself and supported a “fix” that explained that the state would not allow discrimination.

MYTH NO. 2 He’s the shadow president (or a glorified coat rack).

Both depictions are exaggerations. If Pence were the secret steward, Trump would be

pushing free-trade measures, limiting spending and taking a hard line on traditional U.S. adversaries like Russia. Instead, the president has sent Pence to sell a reworked version of NAFTA, left him to defend trillion-dollar budget deficits and forced him to carry messages to Ukraine’s president, apparently threatening to withhold aid meant to protect against Russia’s incursions. But Pence is not always a bystander, either: In one attempt to change Trump’s mind without angering him, Pence invited former senators Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) and Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) to his office to discuss nuclear disarmament before Trump’s 2018 trip to negotiate with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore, Lugar told me.

MYTH NO. 3 He’s ready to push Trump off the cliff.

In the heat of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, some Trump advisers believed that Pence was trying to get the president ousted.

But Pence has already faced the perfect opportunity to ditch Trump and grab the crown, and he didn’t do it. After The Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” video in October 2016, Pence’s chief political aide, Marty Obst, was flooded with calls: The Republican National Committee was prepared to replace Trump as the nominee with Pence. Obst didn’t even need to think about it; Pence was

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Is Vice President Pence the Trump administration’s secret mastermind, or merely a bystander? Probably neither.

supporting Trump no matter what.

Pence and his team knew that Trump had an iron grip on the GOP base, and killing the king would not have been a good setup for 2020, when Pence planned to run against President Hillary Clinton after a Trump loss in 2016.

MYTH NO. 4 He believes he’s predestined to be president.

The authors of one biography argued that Pence believes God has lit a path for him that ends in the Oval Office, citing Pence’s favorite verse, Jeremiah 29:11, as evidence of his surety. “For I know the plans I have for you,” God tells the prophet.

“Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

But the key to understanding the line in Pence’s life story came in 1999, when Karen Pence had it framed for him. They were about to uproot their family to relocate to a different House district and start living on debt so he could make a third run for Congress after two previous losses. The verse isn’t a guarantee that Pence will make it to the White House; it’s a promise that if he and his family remain faithful, keep their heads down and do the work, God will provide for them.

MYTH NO. 5 He hates gay people.

Pence may indeed overlook the way his policies affect gay people — as indicated by his righteousness on the issue of religious freedom, where he decries discrimination not against LGBTQ folks but against Christian-right activists.

But does all that mean he is personally anti-gay? His friends and advisers say no. To prove the point, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, Ric Grenell, a gay conservative Republican, said he and his partner have been warmly accepted by the Pences in person: “Mike and Karen are great people, they’re godly people, they’re followers of Christ. They don’t have hate in their heart for anyone. They know my partner. They have accepted us.” A White House spokesman argued that Pence was not “anti-gay” because of a cordial meeting he had with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and his gay partner. n LoBianco is a political reporter in Washington and the author of “Piety & Power: Mike Pence and the Taking of the White House.”

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