US Politics

The Republican leader in the House of Representatives and an extremist congresswoman who champions “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” have demanded action against the Democratic representative Maxine Waters, after she expressed support for protesters against police brutality.On Saturday, Waters spoke in Brooklyn Center, the Minneapolis suburb where Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, was shot and killed by police last week.The California congresswoman spoke before final arguments on Monday in the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis officer who knelt on the neck of George Floyd for more than nine minutes last May, resulting in the Black man’s death and global protests.“I’m going to fight with all of the people who stand for justice,” said Waters, who is Black. “We’ve got to get justice in this country and we cannot allow these killings to continue.”Tensions are high in Minneapolis.Waters said: “We’ve got to stay on the street and we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”Of Chauvin, Waters said: “I hope we’re going to get a verdict that will say guilty, guilty, guilty. And if we don’t, we cannot go away.”On Sunday night the Republican minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, said: “Maxine Waters is inciting violence in Minneapolis – just as she has incited it in the past. If Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi doesn’t act against this dangerous rhetoric, I will bring action this week.”Waters, 82, a confrontational figure sometimes known as “Kerosene Maxine”, made headlines last week by telling the Ohio congressman Jim Jordan to “respect the chair and shut your mouth” during a hearing with Anthony Fauci, the chief White House medical adviser.She regularly clashed with Donald Trump, angering some Democratic leaders. In 2018, Waters said people should harass Trump aides in public. Pelosi called the comments “unacceptable”. The Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, went for “not American”.Observers said McCarthy’s most likely course of action is to seek formal censure – a move unlikely to succeed unless enough Democrats support it.From the far right of McCarthy’s party, the Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene compared Waters’ words with those of Trump, when he told supporters to march on Congress and overturn his election defeat, resulting in the deadly Capitol riot of 6 January.“Speaker Pelosi,” she tweeted. “You impeached President Trump after you said he incited violence by saying ‘march peacefully’ to the Capitol. So I can expect a yes vote from you on my resolution to expel Maxine Waters for inciting violence, riots, and abusing power threatening a jury, right?”Trump did tell supporters to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”. He also said: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”In February, Greene lost committee assignments over conspiracy-laden remarks. At the weekend, she dropped plans to start an “America First Caucus” based on “Anglo-Saxon political traditions”.Some Democrats want to expel Greene from Congress. That too is unlikely to succeed. More

He’s back.George W Bush, the former US president, returns to the political stage this week with a promotional book tour comprising numerous “virtual conversations” and TV and radio interviews, including a late night talkshow.The media appearances, focused on immigration reform, look set to confirm Bush’s improbable journey from reviled architect of the devastating Iraq war to elder statesman venerated even by some liberals. The Republican’s approval rating has soared since he left office in 2009 and he has been praised by his Democratic successor, Barack Obama.Not everyone, however, is comfortable with the rehabilitation of a leader whose “war on terror” yielded waterboarding and other forms of torture. They argue that Americans with short memories have become overly eager to embrace Bush, 74, as a folksy and avuncular national treasure.“I’m hoping there’ll be some pushback against this because I think it’s an absolute scandal that man should be rehabilitated and tarted up as in any way progressive,” said Jackson Lears, a cultural historian.Lears added: “This is a man who, in company with [vice-president Dick] Cheney of course, created more permanent and long-lasting damage to the presidency and the American system of government than probably anyone before or since.”Bush’s new book, Out of Many, One, fits his new image. The 43rd president has painted 43 portraits of immigrants he has got to know and has written their stories. His purpose, says his office, is to put human faces on the important debate around immigration and the need for reform.Bush’s publicity blitz will be reminiscent of that undertaken by Obama last November for the publication of his presidential memoir. It includes a virtual conversation with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the immigrant Hollywood actor and former governor of California, hosted by the George W Bush Presidential Center on Sunday.There will be an event with his daughter, Barbara Bush, via Barnes & Noble and further virtual conversations hosted by other bookshops. Media appearances range from an opinion column in the Washington Post newspaper to a three-part CBS interview in which anchor Norah O’Donnell visits Bush and his wife, Laura, at their ranch in Texas.Bush tells O’Donnell that the immigration system was one of the biggest disappointments of his presidency. “I campaigned on immigration reform,” he says. “I made it abundantly clear to voters this is something I intended to do.”But Lears, a history professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey and editor of the journal Raritan Quarterly, finds the notion of Bush as a champion of immigrants as “self-parodic”.He said: “It’s almost beyond belief that he would be celebrated for that or any other kind of humane gestures of inclusion and tolerance.“He was a man who wrapped his very narrow-gauge nationalism, his chauvinism and militarism in the rhetoric of righteousness. He was an evangelical Christian and that, to me, is more offensive in many ways than Trump’s style, which was overt, offensive and repellent.”Bush’s broadcast interviews will also include Fox News, National Public Radio, Telemundo and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! – a late-night show hosted by comedian Jimmy Kimmel. His counterpart on NBC, Jimmy Fallon, suffered a backlash for being too soft on Donald Trump and playfully stroking the candidate’s hair just weeks before the 2016 election.The promotional tour, and direct intervention on immigration, will put the seal on Bush’s comeback to the public stage. After Joe Biden’s inauguration, he made a joint TV appearance with Bill Clinton and Obama that presented the trio as guardians of democracy in the wake of Trump’s scorched earth assault on institutions.Yet for some it was hard to reconcile this conceit with the man who once faced demands to be prosecuted for war crimes over the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”, or torture, at CIA “black sites” in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.Bush’s legacy includes the illegal invasion of Iraq in search of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. He resisted LGBTQ+ rights, botched the government response to Hurricane Katrina and presided over the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.Lears also criticizes Bush for an unconstitutional expansion of executive power that holds today. “This man committed more impeachable offences than you can shake a stick at and he’s being celebrated now in this mindless way,” he said.“I think of it as a yet another unintended and catastrophic consequence of Trump derangement syndrome: the sense that, well, maybe he wasn’t so bad after all because, after all, he and Laura and Barack and Michelle like each other. This seems to be the mentality that we’re dealing with.“It’s an enormous blind spot now and it’s perfect that an airhead like Jimmy Kimmel would be participating in this rehabilitation. I can’t imagine anything that would better signify the depths to which our public discourse has fallen than George Bush being celebrated on Jimmy Kimmel.”But even many of Bush’s critics have acknowledged some successes from his administration such as the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, or Pepfar, a historic global health initiative that saved or improved millions of lives in Africa. But they object to the way in which his long list of failures is being whitewashed because at least he is not Trump.Dan Kovalik, an author who teaches international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, said: “America is the land of amnesia. It’s not a country where people remember what happened yesterday, much less what happened in the Bush years. Also, because Trump was so bad, at least in terms of his personality, everyone else looks good by comparison.” More

During last year’s presidential election campaign, one of Joe Biden’s strongest arguments to voters was that he wasn’t Donald Trump.After engaging in the favorite pastime of the “former guy” with the first trip to a golf course of his presidency on Saturday, he finds that he still isn’t.“The course record was still intact,” Biden quipped to reporters after an apparently underwhelming round with an adviser, Steve Ricchetti, and his late son Beau’s father-in-law Ron Olivere at the Wilmington country club in Delaware.In contrast to the golf-loving Trump, whose frequent trips to the fairways during his only term in office were matched only by his over-exaggerations and flat-out lies about his achievements, Biden has never professed to be an avid follower or prolific player of the game.He and his wife Jill have been members of the club in his hometown since 2014, according to the Wilmington New Journal, and was reported by 2016 to have achieved a 10 handicap.But in the same year, as Trump was running for office and Biden was mulling his own political future, he told the then Irish prime minister Enda Kenny: “If you want to keep your handicap in golf don’t run for president.”During an average round with Kenny at the taoiseach’s home course at Castlebar, County Mayo, Biden was asked how his golf game was going. “Fortunately politics is going better,” the then US vice-president replied.Since then, Biden has been more of an occasional player, and until Saturday had not visited a golf course since his inauguration on 20 January.By this stage of his own presidency, Trump had already recorded 19 separate visits to golf courses, mostly at resorts he owned, such as Trump International in West Palm Beach, Florida, and the Trump National course in Potomac, Virginia, according to the website trumpgolfcount.com.After promising voters he would be too busy to play, Trump racked up some 300 rounds of golf in 150 visits during the four years of his administration, costing taxpayers almost $146m, the website estimated.Trump, meanwhile, was a fierce critic of the golfing habits of Obama, another president with a fondness for the game, and who admitted in 2016 to “an honest 13” as a handicap. Trump, who claims a 2.8 handicap, attacked Obama about golf at least 27 times on Twitter, according to the sports blog SBNation.A CNN fact check last year, however, found Trump had played far more frequently than his predecessor, including on Memorial Day weekend as coronavirus deaths in the US approached 100,000. More

The 46th US president took office promising a more welcoming immigration policy. But Republicans are calling a new wave of migrants at the southern border a ‘crisis’ and demanding action. In this episode of Full Story, Washington bureau chief David Smith describes the pressure Biden is under to respond to the issue. Plus, the Guardian’s Nina Lakhani describes what she witnessed on the border in Texas, where migrants are still being detained, and many sent straight back across the border

How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

Read Nina Lakhani’s story about her visit to the US-Mexico border in Texas here. More

Republicans who refuse the Covid-19 vaccination are actively “working against” efforts to lift the very coronavirus restrictions they insist are an infringement of their civil liberties, Dr Anthony Fauci, the US government’s leading infectious disease expert, said on Sunday.Fauci’s comments came as the government announced that half of all adults in the US had received at least one Covid-19 shot, marking another milestone in the nation’s largest-ever vaccination campaign. Almost 130 million people 18 or older have received at least one dose of a vaccine, or 50.4% of the total adult population, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported. Almost 84 million adults, or about 32.5% of the population, have been fully vaccinated.But Fauci, who was involved in a fiery exchange over the issue with the Republican congressman Jim Jordan on Thursday, told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday he was frustrated by recent studies showing that up to 45% of Republicans would not take the vaccine.“The fact that one may not want to get vaccinated, in this case a disturbingly large proportion of Republicans, only actually works against where they want to be,” he said.“They want to be able to say these restrictions that are put on by public health recommendations are things that they’re very concerned about. But the way you get rid of those restrictions is to get as many people vaccinated as quickly and as efficiently as possible.“When that happens for absolutely certain you’re going to see the level of virus in the community go down and down and down to the point where you would not have to have those public health restrictions.”Fauci said the attitude displayed by the Republican vaccine deniers was “paradoxical”.“On the one hand they want to be relieved of the restrictions. On the other hand, they don’t want to get vaccinated, it just almost doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “This is a public health issue, it’s not a civil liberties issue.”Fauci clashed with Jordan, a congressman from Ohio, when the US’s top health officials testified before Congress on Thursday and Jordan asked Fauci when Americans “get their liberty and freedoms back”.“We’re not talking about liberties. We’re talking about a pandemic that has killed 560,000 Americans,” Fauci told the congressman.About one in four members of the House of Representatives had not been vaccinated by March, three months after shots were being made available. A list of those who are not vaccinated is not publicly available, but several Republican members of Congress have admitted they do not plan to get the jab.Fauci’s comments come amid a resurgence of Covid-19 across the US, with an 8% rise in new cases in the last two weeks even as the number of those vaccinated continues to grow.Fauci said the single shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the use of which was suspended in the US last week after reports of extremely rare and severe blood clots in six women, could be reinstated as early as Friday at a meeting of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP).“I doubt very seriously they’ll just cancel it,” he said in a later appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press. “I do think that there will likely be some sort of warning or restriction or risk assessment. I don’t think [the advisory committee] is going to say, ‘everything’s fine,’ I think it’ll likely say, ‘OK, we’re going to use it, but be careful under these certain circumstances’.”He said that although the incidences of blood clots were rare, “you have six cases in close to seven million people,” he said, the temporary suspension of the J&J vaccine was necessary.“There’s a twofold reason for doing it, to pause and take a look in more detail about it, and to make sure that the physicians treat people appropriately,” he said.Meanwhile, the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, acknowledged on Sunday her state was at “a very serious moment” as new infections continued to rise, but she continued to resist growing pressure to reinstate restrictions she lifted in March.Michigan has become a new Covid-19 hotspot, with hospitalizations setting a new pandemic record last week and the state recording more than 2,200 cases of the B117 coronavirus variant, more than one-tenth the total for the entire US.“In the waning months I have been sued by my legislature, I have lost in a Republican controlled Supreme Court, and I don’t have all of the exact same tools,” Whitmer told MTP host Chuck Todd, who asked if she was backing away from a firmer stance.“Despite those things, we still have some of the strongest mitigation measures in the country, masked mandates, capacity limitations, working from home. We’re moving fast to get shots in arms, a million in two weeks, a million in just the last nine days. [But] I’m working with a smaller set of tools at my disposal.“We are at a very serious moment and that’s precisely why we’re going to keep following the science, imploring people to do the right things, keep our mitigations up and keep moving vaccines as quickly as we possibly can.”Globally, coronavirus deaths passed the grim milestone of three million on Saturday. Jeremy Farrar, director of the UK’s Wellcome Trust, warned that the true number of deaths was probably much higher.“Worryingly, this pandemic is still growing at an alarming rate. Hundreds of thousands are dying every month,” he said.The US leads the world in Covid-19 deaths with 566,937 deaths and almost 32m cases, more than twice as many as any other country according to the Johns Hopkins university of medicine on Sunday. More

This week, the Texas House of Representatives passed a bill dubbed “Constitutional Carry” that would allow citizens over the age of 21 to carry a gun without a license, drawing outrage from many state Democrats and gun-reform advocates.Texas law currently requires citizens to obtain a license to carry in order to carry a firearm openly or concealed. If passed into law, the new bill would remove that restriction, allowing Texans to carry guns without having to pass a background check or go through training. Texas would become the 14th state to implement such a law.The bill arrives on the heels of several recent mass shootings that have taken place around the country. On Thursday night, a gunman killed eight people including four members of the Sikh community in an Indianapolis FedEx warehouse. Earlier this month in Bryan, Texas, a man opened fire at a cabinet company where he was previously employed. One man died and five others were injured, including a state trooper.On Twitter, former congressman Beto O’Rourke expressed his support for those protesting the bill at the state capitol in Austin. He echoed their demands for common sense gun laws.“Grateful to @joecascinotx and those doing their best to stop HB 1927 and ensure that we have common sense gun laws in Texas,” O’Rourke tweeted. “Thank you for showing up and stepping up for Texas!”After a mass shooting in his native El Paso in August 2019 that left 23 people dead and another mass shooting that same month where 7 people were killed at a Cinergy movie theater complex in Odessa, O’Rourke had given an impassioned speech on gun reform and his proposal for a mandatory assault weapon buyback program.“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. We’re not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore,” he said then.Protesting the bill at the state capitol, Becca DeFelice, a volunteer for Moms Demand Action Texas chapter, said: “It’s not complicated, and it’s not controversial: gun owners like me know that responsible gun ownership means going through a background check and safety training before carrying loaded handguns in public.”State Democratic representatives Rafael Anchía and Diego Bernal offered an amendment to the bill that would prevent “insurrectionists … or violent white supremacist extremist[s]” from possessing firearms, but it failed to make it in the bill because it did not gain enough votes.In addition to 84 state Republicans, seven democrats voted in favor of the Constitutional Carry bill. Representative Morgan Meyer of Dallas was the only Republican to vote against the bill. The bill will now advance to a Republican-majority Senate, where the fate of the bill will be determined. More

I am one of more than 800,000 American military veterans who have served in Afghanistan since 2001. Tens of thousands more served in other capacities, from intelligence and diplomacy to aid and development. It’s fair to ask whether the end of the war affects how one views his or her own small role in the effort. If we didn’t “win”, whatever winning means in a war like this, did we matter? Were the sacrifices in vain?A cold accounting might tally the costs in blood, treasure and time against the benefits to Afghanistan’s development and security or the reduction of al-Qaida’s capabilities. A historian’s perspective, a strategist’s assessment of alternatives and time, above all else, will tell.Rather, consider a more familiar and human frame: sport. Two boxers stand in the ring. Ten athletes race for the gold medal. A thousand enter the marathon. Was it worth it only for the winner? Would you appear for the Olympics even if you knew in advance you would lose?The value of the individual veteran’s experience in Afghanistan is not dependent on the outcome of a battle, the shifts in a policy or the determinations of a historian. To quote President Theodore Roosevelt, “It’s not the critic that counts … the credit belongs to the man [sic] in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.” The game changes you, regardless of the result.Nowadays, I live in the suburbs of Washington DC. The eggbeater whirr of a helicopter is a routine accompaniment to the other sounds of our suburban neighborhood, close by a local hospital. Nearly 20 years ago, leading a platoon of 25 American mountain infantry in Afghanistan, I could have told you the distance, firepower and model of a helicopter from its signature melody in a matter of seconds.Reflecting on President Biden’s announcement about the end, for now, of American troops in Afghanistan, these hospital helicopters carry me back.There was the double-rotored Chinook that deposited our advance party in Gardez, a peaceful city at the time.A nearby mountain pass reminded us that hadn’t always been the case. Two decades earlier, a large Soviet force was pinned down and decimated by Afghan mujahideen. Their hasty fighting positions remained by the roadside. In Gardez, our platoon was the muscle to protect a reconstruction team of diplomats and development workers. There were textbooks and school supplies to liberate from former Taliban warehouses, endless councils with local elders, and mostly uneventful patrols along roads bounded by tall fields of marijuana and hashish drying in the relentless sun. On one mission we helped army veterinarians vaccinate what must have been a thousand livestock: goats, sheep and camels streaming towards our tent from all points of the compass.Even then it was clear a generation or more would pass before Afghanistan’s economic and political development would catch up with the lofty communiques of the US and our Nato allies. This was an order of magnitude more challenging than the reconstruction of Japan and Germany after the second world war.There was the dragonfly silhouette of an Apache attack helicopter, call sign “Widow maker”, as it banked against the midday sun near Khand Narai pass.Soon after arriving in Afghanistan, we had relocated closer to the jagged mountain border with Pakistan. The Apache released its missiles on my target, an enemy sniper who moments earlier fatally punctured Chris’s chest. Hours before, we had scrambled in response to another unit ambushed near the Pakistan border. Chris had driven in my Humvee. We’d never have reached the firefight without his navigation. With the sniper dead, we stumbled to safer ground, carrying Chris on a stretcher. Slippery with blood, I struggled to keep a grip. It was a lonely and cold drive home.Every week, it seemed, more and more “insurgents” – the catch-all label for Taliban, al-Qaida and other people shooting at us – were emboldened to leave their sanctuary inside Pakistan and walk across the largely unmonitored border into Afghanistan. We could plainly see what policymakers at the time wouldn’t acknowledge: the Taliban, and their allies, were gaining strength.What we hadn’t realized yet was how the game had changed. We were still measuring success by our head-to-head encounters. They knew it was a political contest. To discredit the Afghanistan government in the eyes of local villagers, our adversaries didn’t need to compete in the election or construct new roads and clinics. They only needed to show the government couldn’t keep those villagers safe. In one brazen move, they beheaded all the police at a local outpost. One act of terror silenced a hundred potential collaborators. Across a large province, half the size of Switzerland, an American force in the hundreds was insufficient for the task. It always would be.There was the Blackhawk medevac helicopter with its red cross markings, attempting a second landing on Losano Ridge.If I’d had the time, I could have counted each of the bullet holes in its fuselage from its first bold attempt to land in the midst of a 12-hour battle. In what had become a familiar drill, my fellow lieutenant’s platoon had drawn fire near the border that morning and we arrived soon after with reinforcements. As one of my men crested a hill to my flank, an ambush erupted from what sounded like every direction. Evan, age 19, was shot and killed in the opening act. Four of his buddies pulled him up a steep hillside, under withering machine gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades, to the landing zone we marked for the Blackhawk. I remember the skids lifting off the ground, evading incoming fire. The helicopter raced north with Evan. Maybe 40, maybe 60 insurgents were killed by the time we rumbled home that September night, shivering and shattered. When we said roll call, it was the one name without a response I would never forget.There were the helicopters that brought celebrities and public officials for their combat visits. They kept the engines on because the visits were short. There were resupply helicopters laden with ammo, food and mail. Even at the outer perimeter of American firepower we ate frozen king crab legs and steak. Once when the water resupply failed, we made do with diet iced tea. When our replacements began to arrive by helicopter in the spring, we even became a little nostalgic and put on the airs of grizzled old-timers.I left Afghanistan in 2004, but Afghanistan never left me. I remember the smile when we helped an elderly woman carried to our clinic on her husband’s back. I remember the solidarity of our platoon as we returned to patrol after Evan and Chris died. I remember the laughter of a bonfire skit and the stink of one sergeant’s boots. I can recall almost every moment of some battles, but hardly any of others. On some days it’s a worn photo that reminds; on others, the sounds of a helicopter.I do not regret trading early career opportunities for a uniform. I do not begrudge the policy mistakes echelons above my reality. I no longer mourn those who did not return. Instead, I celebrate how they lived with integrity and courage. I cherish our band of brothers. I try to pass on what I learned to my children, students and colleagues.Yes, it mattered. We played and it counted. For us. More

By 2016, opioids had torn a piece out of Appalachia and the rust belt. The deep drop in life expectancy among white Americans without four-year degrees would no longer be ignored. OxyContin, Purdue Pharma’s highly addictive painkiller, helped elect Donald Trump.In Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe methodically and meticulously chronicles this tale of woe and crisis, indifference and corruption. His Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty lays bare the price exacted by the family’s drive for wealth and social mountaineering.The Sackler name came to dot the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, Tate Modern and the Louvre. They rose – others paid dearly.Keefe is a veteran writer at the New Yorker. His 2019 bestseller, Say Nothing, chillingly examined the convergence of youth, zealotry and destruction in Northern Ireland. He even solved the mystery behind a disappearance.Like Say Nothing, Empire of Pain is drenched in misery, this time the byproduct of OxyContin, the go-to drug for Purdue. Since 1999, opioid-related deaths have risen more than fivefold. By the numbers, opioids have killed more than 450,000 in the US in two decades.Keefe’s book builds upon The Family that Built an Empire of Pain, a 2017 long read. Empire of Pain is filled with firsthand interviews and takeaways from confidential and original documents. It is a chilling and mesmerizing read, “substantially built on the family’s own words”. Which is what makes it so damning.The Sacklers did not cooperate. Indeed, they sought to derail publication. Keefe raises the possibility he was placed under surveillance, an attempt to intimidate him and his family. Nonetheless, the Sacklers’ indifference and smugness rise off the pages like steam from a sewer.In one 1996 email, Richard Sackler, Purdue’s chairman and president, demands the company become as feared as a “tiger with claws, teeth and balls”. Asked repeatedly at deposition years later if Purdue played any role in the opioid crisis, he steadfastly answers: “I don’t believe so.”A cousin, Kathe Sackler, actually boasts that OxyContin was a “very good medicine” and a “safe medicine”. She also claims credit for coming up with the “idea”. But she doesn’t end there.Confronted with the question, “Do you recognize that hundreds of thousands of Americans have become addicted to OxyContin?”, she can only muster: “I don’t know the answer to that.”The drumbeat surrounding the monster birthed by Purdue is as old as the century itself. Barry Meier, then of the New York Times, published Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic, in 2003.Yet faced with pushback from Purdue and the Sacklers, the powers that be swept the crisis under the rug. Even the Times came down with a case a temporary case of cold feet.In 2007, under George W Bush, the US justice department only delivered a relative slap on the wrist. The Sacklers, major Republican donors, had unleashed a full-scale counter-attack starring Rudy Giuliani, Mary Jo White, formerly in charge of the southern district of New York and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a bevy of high-priced legal talent.Strings were seemingly pulled, career prosecutors’ findings and recommendations discounted and binned. Purdue agreed to pay $600m to resolve a felony charge of misleading and defrauding physicians and consumers. Three executives entered guilty pleas and agreed to $34.5m in penalties. None of the individuals criminally charged were Sacklers.In the words of a former DoJ lawyer, this was “a political outcome that Purdue bought”. The company named its in-house law library after one of the designated-offenders and paid millions in post-employment compensation: a reward for taking a bullet for the team.Paul McNulty, then deputy attorney general, helped handcuff justice. John Brownlee, the federal prosecutor for the western district of Virginia, clashed with McNulty over the disposition of the case. Word spread that Brownlee’s job tenure was shaky. He resigned in April 2008. For the record, James Comey, McNulty’s predecessor as deputy AG, resisted Purdue’s entreaties.Among hundreds of interviews, Keefe spoke to Brownlee and Rick Mountcastle, the line prosecutor and career lawyer who handled the case. Still at DoJ, Mountcastle raises the possibility Purdue had an inside man at the Food and Drug Administration who enabled OxyContin in exchange for the prospect of future employment.Based on a 1995 email, Mountcastle began to suspect that Curtis Wright, then an FDA examiner, had turned a blind eye to the dangers posed by OxyContin. Purdue would later tap Wright to be an executive director. In 2003, Wright testified that he still believed addiction to OxyContin was “rare”.“I think there was a secret deal cut,” Mountcastle tells Keefe. “I can never prove it, so that’s just my personal opinion. But if you look at the whole circumstances, nothing else explains it.”Regardless, the FDA helped pave the way for an opioid epidemic. Dr David Kessler, FDA commissioner when OxyContin received the agency’s approval, acknowledged “certainly one of the worst medical mistakes”.Donald Trump spoke of the toll of the opioid crisis but in 2020, as election day loomed, his Department of Justice announced a “global resolution” of the government’s investigation into Purdue and the Sacklers. By then, the company was in bankruptcy and the target of a barrage of civil lawsuits.The Sacklers agreed to pay a $225m civil penalty, little more than the 2% they had taken from Purdue. But no one would be prosecuted. Asked why the government had not brought criminal charges against the Sacklers, Jeffrey Rosen, Bill Barr’s deputy attorney general, declined to say.The government, Keefe writes, was “so deferential toward the Sacklers that nobody even bothered to question them”. More