Category: Washington Post

A year before Greenwater Services got a $1.7 million contract to clean the algae-infected Reflecting Pool, it had received another no-bid government contract to deploy at the trash-plagued Tijuana River.

Greenwater, which is owned by a Trump donor, was hired to treat sewage in the Tijuana River with its “nanobubble technology,” a system that injects ozone into water. But the monthlong water purification pilot to evaluate the technology was cut short last October when a storm flooded the river’s banks. The remnants of machinery were washed into the border river, with diesel leaking along the way, frustrating scientists and environmentalists at federal agencies who had questioned internally whether the company’s project would work in a flood-prone area.

Eight months later, the company brought its equipment to clean up a mess at the Reflecting Pool in Washington. In April, as part of his effort to remake the nation’s capital city ahead of America’s 250th birthday, President Donald Trump drained the pool at the base of the Lincoln Memorial to add a new coating to the bottom that would make the water shine “American flag blue.” But a week after the $14 million renovation was finished in June, an outbreak of algae floated along the water’s surface, hiding the new blue coating under a thick, mossy shade of green. Algae had long been a problem for the pool, but a Washington Post analysis of satellite data found that the post-renovation bloom was the worst outbreak dating back at least five years.

The Department of Interior gave Greenwater and its nanobubble technology an expedited, no-bid contract to clean up the muck, even though other companies had expressed interest in the work to the National Park Service. Administration officials cited an urgent need to solve the problem before the 250th celebrations, and said they didn’t have time to allow companies to compete for the bid, according to a federal contracting document.

Greenwater, founded in 2019 in Ohio, is owned by J.J. Cafaro Investment, according to the contracting documents it filed with the government. J.J. Cafaro is an heir to an Ohio-based mall development company and a Republican donor who has given about $350,000 to Trump-related political committees and owns a $16 million mansion down the road from Mar-a-Lago. He said he considers the president “a friend,” and Trump once described Cafaro as “a man who made a lot of money in Cleveland, does a good job and a fantastic man.” Cafaro has denied his relationship with Trump played a role in securing Greenwater’s contract for the Reflecting Pool.

Chas Antinone Jr., Greenwater’s president and chief operating officer, has said the company has been expanding on the use of its technology, mostly in small bodies of water under 100 acres — such as a free demo to Trump’s Bedminster resort in 2024, Antinone told the San Diego Union-Tribune. The manager of Trump National Golf Club Bedminster brought Greenwater into conversations with the Interior Department about cleaning the Reflecting Pool, the New York Times reported.

In total, the federal government has paid Greenwater $2.8 million between the Tijuana River and Reflecting Pool contracts.

Company spokesperson Erin Kramer said Cafaro is not involved in the company’s day-to-day operations, and she shared research showing the technology has cleaned algae in studies. (Cafaro did not respond to requests for comment.)

“Private demonstrations, self-funded projects, research partnerships, and public-agency work are ways new environmental technology moves from research to adoption,” Kramer said in response to questions about the Bedminster demo.

Asked about the Bedminster connections, the Interior Department press office emailed a statement saying the White House was not involved in the selection process for any contract.

Since the Times reported last month on his company’s no-bid contract, Cafaro has become a sort of bogeyman for liberals online. On Monday, the Democratic National Committee’s rapid response X account shared a photo of Cafaro along with news that the Interior Department planned to use the same contractor that installed the liner to repair the pool, even though Cafaro doesn’t own or operate that company.

That photo featured Cafaro posing with former Real Housewives of Orange County star Kelly Dodd. But Dodd later posted a video clarifying that she merely posed with him because “he looked a little peculiar, and I liked his whole [get up]” but she only met him once at an event in Palm Beach, where she also saw Trump.

“This has gone viral. I don’t know why I got lumped in with this guy,” she said. “I can safely tell you I don’t know this man.”

‘Hope it doesn’t rain’

Flowing along the U.S.-Mexico border and discharging into the Pacific Ocean, the Tijuana River has been plagued by untreated wastewater, sewage, and debris dating back decades.

The U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission gave a no-bid contract for Greenwater last year, initially offering more than $2 million for a pilot that would encompass 120 days of work. Officials said there was an “urgent need to assess the effectiveness of this technology in addressing the public health threat” and that “the technology is proprietary and not in use by any other company.”

Until permanent infrastructure to address the pollution problems is in place, officials must “think creatively and evaluate every credible tool that can bring relief to affected Americans now,” Frank Fisher, an IBWC spokesperson, said in a statement to the Post.

After Greenwater secured the project but before work got underway, career scientists exchanged emails asking about the initial $2 million cost and the feasibility of the project. Environmental Protection Agency staff who were consulting IBWC questioned their plans.

“Wow. $2.4m for 90 days?” Thomas Konner, an environmental engineer for the EPA, wrote to IBWC and EPA officials on July 1.

“Hope it doesn’t rain on their parade!” he followed up on Aug. 25.

Months before, another scientist questioned the approach and called it a “Sisyphean task” — and forecast the storm. “I really don’t think the ozone will do any good unless you are able to ozonate the entire flow, but that’s based on my gut feeling and nothing else,” Douglas Liden, then an environmental engineer with the EPA, wrote to colleagues. “I also think the first storm will wash out any equipment you install, just as it did in Nogales, AZ.”

Phillip Musegaas, executive director of the nonprofit San Diego Coastkeeper, which obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request, said local groups have long hoped for a solution to one of the nation’s worst environmental disasters, which has sickened residents, closed beaches, and contaminated the air and water. Greenwater was supposed to take the nanobubble technology to the noxious hot spot — Saturn Boulevard — where the pungent water foams, an IBWC official wrote in the emails planning the project. But the company’s pilot was cut short by the storm and it never went to Saturn.

Debris from the equipment washed into a barrier set up to collect trash along the river, according to photos shared with Voice of San Diego.

“We were skeptical about it, but we wanted to see if it would work properly,” Musegaas said. “The fact that the whole project ended early because they let the equipment get washed away was pretty frustrating.” The company later acknowledged that the nanobubble machines could not operate continuously as intended because trash floating in the river clogged the machines.

The company also said, in a report to the government about that pilot, that its machines hadn’t been affected by a previous rainstorm. The night of the next big storm, Greenwater said, it moved the machines to “a higher elevation” because of rising water levels, but “an unexpected flooding event occurred” that “carried large quantities of trash and debris that inundated and damaged” the machines. The company then said it shut the project down because of “safety concerns and site conditions.” The IBWC said in a December news release, citing the Greenwater report, that the project was “successfully completed” and the “technology has the capability to kill bacteria and eliminate odors associated with sewage.”

Heather Raymond, the water quality director for Ohio State University’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, has tested Greenwater Service’s technology for years. Raymond, who does not work for the company nor on the Reflecting Pool and the Tijuana River projects, said the technology showed promise in trials when her team tested it in large tanks in controlled settings where algae levels were reduced, and small lakes where they saw some improvements in the local advisories for toxin levels.

“There’s still a lot to learn in scaling this up in the water quality conditions and amount of treatment needed to be successful,” Raymond said.

In the case of the Reflecting Pool, workers from the National Park Service used hydrogen peroxide and vacuuming to clear the algae in addition to the temporary units. Greenwater also said it had temporary units running by June 7, but the units were taken offline on June 12. Within 24 hours, an algae bloom developed, and the units returned. The company has since installed a permanent system in the Reflecting Pool’s pipes and said the water has cleared even though green sediment remains at the bottom.

This week, the Reflecting Pool has been fenced off following the Fourth of July fireworks display, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the workers will drain the pool and repair the peeling coating.

The nanobubble technology has been turned off ahead of the draining, a person familiar with the plan said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. By the middle of the week, the pool appeared green and murky, its bottom invisible under the mossy shade.

A federal judge on Friday night granted the Justice Department’s request to dismiss the seditious-conspiracy case against four top members of the Proud Boys who led a violent mob into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But in his ruling, U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly gave a stark warning about President Donald Trump’s efforts to lift penalties against those who instigated and carried out the storming of the Capitol. The attack — by the mob seeking to overturn Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election — left more than 140 police officers injured and caused an estimated $3 million in damage.

The judge indicated he was wiping out the Proud Boys’ charges — against Ethan Nordean; Joseph Biggs; Zachary Rehl, former leader of the Philadelphia Proud Boys; and Dominic Pezzola — under protest, saying legal precedents left him no choice but to accede to the request by the Trump administration’s prosecutors.

“As the Court has said many times, the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was a perilous event,” wrote Kelly, who is a Trump appointee.

“It was an attack on people, including police officers, many of whom were injured. It was an attack on a coordinate branch of government — Congress — that the Founders saw fit to give a place of primacy in Article I of the Constitution. And it was an attack on the Constitution’s mechanism to facilitate the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next.”

The Jan. 6 riot followed a rally where Trump repeated his false claims that he won the 2020 election. As rioters rampaged through the Capitol, lawmakers were forced to evacuate, delaying the certification of Biden’s victory for hours.

Friday’s ruling wipes out some of the most serious criminal charges from the riot, cementing Trump’s bid to unravel the largest Justice Department investigation in U.S. history.

Trump pardoned nearly all the rioters — more than 1,500 — who were charged by the Justice Department in the wake of Jan. 6. But that blanket pardon, issued on the president’s first day in office last year, did not extend to about a dozen leaders and prominent members of two extremist groups behind the violence, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

Those defendants were convicted of carrying out a seditious conspiracy against the United States or related offenses. Trump initially commuted their prison terms, stopping short of a full pardon. But this year, while those cases were being appealed, Justice Department officials filed legal papers to vacate the convictions altogether.

The D.C. Circuit federal appeals court granted that request in May. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a Trump ally who serves as the top federal prosecutor in D.C., then filed motions to dismiss the underlying charges in U.S. district court.

Kelly said in his opinion on the Proud Boys case that judges are constrained to dismiss charges once prosecutors ask to drop them.

Under Supreme Court precedent, prosecutors have “exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide whether to prosecute a case,” and they may drop charges “in the interests of justice” even after defendants have been convicted.

The moves by the Justice Department were unusual — prosecutors rarely ask to throw out guilty verdicts — and Pirro’s office initially did not give detailed reasons for scrapping the highest-profile cases related to the Jan. 6 attack.

In a brief court filing, a prosecutor in Pirro’s office wrote only that the government “has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice.”

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio separately had his conviction vacated and charges dismissed last year, also at the Justice Department’s request. Tarrio, who had been convicted of organizing members of his group, was not present at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Pezzola was acquitted at trial of the seditious conspiracy charge but convicted of assaulting a police officer and other offenses from the riot.

“We took the worst they threw at us the raids, the solitary, the lies and we stood tall,” Tarrio posted on X after the ruling was issued Friday night. “Trump dropped the pardons and now the rest is crumbling. Justice is SERVED!”

Before dismissing the set of charges against the Oath Keepers, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta, an appointee of President Barack Obama, asked Pirro’s office to supply detailed reasons for its request. Mehta has not yet issued a ruling on the Oath Keepers’ charges.

A prosecutor, G.A. Massucco-LaTaif, said Trump’s blanket pardon proclamation also directed the Justice Department to drop all pending charges stemming from the Jan. 6 attack. Prosecutors can no longer put any Jan. 6 defendants on trial and judges cannot effectively impose any prison time, he wrote in a court filing, because the presidential proclamation would immediately kick in to prevent those outcomes.

“In any event, the public’s interest in a trial of these defendants has already fully vested,” Massucco-LaTaif wrote. “This Court presided over two public trials of the charges in this indictment. … Dismissal of these cases with prejudice will not erase this public record.”

The president and top officials in his administration have moved aggressively to recast and minimize the threat posed by the mob of Trump supporters on Jan. 6.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department acknowledged that it had deleted reams of news releases it had posted online, which detailed the prosecutions of those charged in the riot.

The Washington Post identified several webpages that led to error messages, including news releases about the arrest and conviction of Tarrio and other rioters whose convictions were undone by Pirro. The Justice Department said in a social media post that it was erasing what it considered “partisan propaganda.”

“We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration,” the department posted on its rapid-response account on X. “We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”

Copies of hundreds of those news releases, which had been hosted on the website of the U.S. attorney’s office for D.C., have been archived by an independent website, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

A spokesperson for Pirro did not say who ordered the deletions or how many releases were affected, referring questions to Justice Department headquarters. A searchable database of all charges and convictions stemming from the Jan. 6 investigation was taken offline by the Justice Department last year.

Pirro has denounced political violence in other cases, such as the incident this year in which a lone gunman allegedly tried to assassinate Trump during the White House correspondents’ dinner, but routinely declines to take questions about the Jan. 6 riot at her public appearances.

She has also pursued Trump’s perceived political foes with shaky allegations of misconduct, including then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell as well as six Democratic lawmakers who angered the president by posting a video on social media reminding U.S. service members that they could refuse illegal military commands. A grand jury refused to indict the six Democrats, and Pirro closed the investigation into Powell after failing to find evidence of a crime.

In addition to the pardons, commutations, and court filings seeking to dismiss cases, Trump appointees have fired many of the FBI officials and prosecutors who investigated the attack.

The Justice Department has also taken steps to vacate the conviction of Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump adviser who was convicted of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena related to Jan. 6. And the department has stopped defending a similar conviction for Peter Navarro, a top trade adviser to the president who is appealing his case.

The Trump administration had announced plans for a $1.776 billion fund to provide payments to people who claim they were unfairly targeted by law enforcement, and dozens of Jan. 6 rioters said they intended to apply for a cut of the money. The payments would have been funded by taxpayers, raising bipartisan concerns in Congress. A federal judge issued an injunction blocking the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” from being established, and Trump administration officials have said that effort is dead.

In dismissing the Proud Boys’ seditious conspiracy charges, Kelly invoked remarks from President Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address in 1981 describing the peaceful transfer of power as a miracle of self-governance.

“President Trump’s views about the prosecution of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6 — whether those views are based on fact or fiction — are well known, as is his intention to extend clemency to them through the Executive Order,” Kelly wrote in the opinion.

“Moving forward, if this Nation’s experiment in self-government is to last another 250 years, the American people — no matter their partisan preferences — will have to act together to preserve, protect and defend that miracle through our constitutional framework,” he wrote.

Hateful emails and phone calls targeted a Minnesota school serving Somali families after President Donald Trump shared a video of its kindergartners on Truth Social this week, an episode that many Somali Americans see as an escalation of a sustained campaign of political and rhetorical attacks during Trump’s second term, community leaders said.

On Wednesday, Trump reposted a video from a kindergarten graduation ceremony at Gateway STEM Academy, a K-8 charter school in St. Paul. In the clip, children wearing blue graduation gowns, including girls wearing hijabs beneath their mortarboards, sing in Somali as they celebrate the end of the school year.

Trump amplified another user’s caption: “Every girl is in a hijab … in kindergarten.”

The faces of the young children were clearly visible in the video shared with Trump’s 12.9 million followers. Members of the Somali community said that exposure could open the door to attacks on some of the community’s most vulnerable members. The replies to Trump’s post quickly filled with anti-Muslim invective, including one user who called the children “future terrorists.”

For many Minnesotans of Somali descent, the post was the latest salvo in a monthslong campaign in which Trump has repeatedly singled them out while his administration has mounted an aggressive immigration and law enforcement operation in the Twin Cities.

“The first term of Donald Trump was a cakewalk compared to this,” said Suleiman Adan, deputy executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Minnesota chapter. “In the first term, you saw attacks on equality, belonging, and justice. In the second term, it’s an attack on basic human dignity. Right now, the crosshairs are on the Somali community.”

Adan said he and other advocates had been in contact with officials at the school, who told them they have been contending with hateful emails, phone calls, and social media posts.

Reached Friday, the White House did not directly address questions about the president’s decision to share the video, the harassment the school says followed, or concerns about posting identifiable children to millions of followers.

“President Trump is right,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said. “Aliens who come to our country, complain about how much they hate America, fail to contribute to our economy, rip off Americans, and refuse to assimilate into our society should not be here.”

The ceremony featured in Trump’s post took place on the last day of school for the rising first-graders, who have not been back to the building since, Adan said.

The school is mulling safety measures for when classes restart. The incident has also increased concern around Saturday schools that teach Somali language and culture.

Gateway STEM Academy’s parent handbook describes the school as a STEM-focused charter that seeks to “embrace” students’ cultural backgrounds and encourages family participation in cultural celebrations, while emphasizing academic rigor, attendance, and discipline. It also offers Arabic among its electives alongside science, technology, and math programming.

The video featured in the social media post began as a recording of an ordinary school celebration before ricocheting through the online right. The song, in Somali, is benign: it speaks of the pride of being a student, the joy of reaching a milestone, and hopes for continued success, said Malika Dahir, the executive director of Reviving the Islamic Sisterhood for Empowerment.

Members of the Somali community routinely stream milestone moments for friends and relatives who live in other countries or states, Dahir added.

“There isn’t a graduation or a wedding that isn’t livestreamed,” she said. “We share these online, because family members are all over the world. It’s a way to share momentous occasions. To feel like now these moments might be weaponized, there’s just a sense of loss, like our joy has been stolen.”

The video was circulated by End Wokeness, an influential conservative social media account, with a caption drawing attention to the girls’ hijabs. Trump reposted the clip, first without explanation and later with the account’s caption attached.

The post was consistent with Trump’s frequent use of Truth Social to share racially charged, often inflammatory, imagery. Earlier this year, his account posted a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, which was deleted after bipartisan condemnation. He later shared a doctored image of the Obamas beside a graffiti-covered Air Force One bearing “BLM” and Arabic writing.

Minnesota is home to roughly 80,000 people of Somali descent, the largest Somali community in the United States. Trump has repeatedly singled out Somali immigrants during his second term, seizing on a series of sprawling fraud investigations involving state and federal social-service programs. Many of those charged are Somali or Somali American.

The largest fraud allegation centered on a nonprofit whose operators and affiliates were accused of diverting about $250 million from a federally funded child-nutrition program. Federal prosecutors have also brought separate cases involving programs intended to provide housing assistance to vulnerable adults and therapy for children with autism. Prosecutors say defendants used some of the money to buy cars, real estate, and other personal luxuries.

Trump has used the scandals to justify large-scale federal intervention in Minnesota, dispatching thousands of immigration officers to the Twin Cities in an operation that extended well beyond the people accused of fraud. The deployment prompted weeks of protests and confrontations between agents and residents.

During the operation, federal officers fatally shot Renée Good and Alex Pretti, both 37-year-old U.S. citizens, in separate encounters that were captured on video and became flash points in the national debate over Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The administration subsequently changed leadership of the operation and began drawing down the federal presence. In February, border czar Tom Homan announced that 700 officers would leave Minnesota, although he attributed the withdrawal to increased cooperation from state and local authorities rather than directly to the shootings.

The U.S. agreement this week to allow Ukraine to produce Patriot missiles and President Donald Trump’s praise for President Volodymyr Zelensky are leading the Kremlin to recalibrate its message on the war.

The Kremlin has downplayed the developments but says they will make a peaceful resolution more difficult.

Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for Russian President Vladimir Putin, accused Ukraine on Friday of being “unwilling” to engage in a peace process, while Moscow remains open to ending the war through diplomacy. He reiterated that Putin was open to scheduling another phone call with Trump.

The Kremlin has, in fact, repeatedly rejected Zelensky’s offers to meet with Putin and rejected his calls for a full ceasefire.

“One must give credit to Zelensky’s diplomacy,” the Russian political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov wrote Friday on Telegram. “Ukraine managed to reconfigure the anti-Russian alliance into a new alignment — one far more advantageous for itself and increasingly threatening to Russia.”

Zelensky, Trump told reporters Wednesday at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, has “done an amazing job.” It was a dramatic departure from Trump’s comments during his first year back in office, when he accused the Ukrainian leader of ingratitude for U.S. help and “gambling with World War III.”

“We’re going to give a license to you to make Patriot missiles,” Trump said Wednesday. “That’s pretty cool. This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving them enough. I said, ‘Make them yourself.’ We haven’t informed the company of that yet, but that’ll work out all right.”

The Patriot missiles, long sought by Kyiv, are among the few Western weapons capable of shooting down the ballistic missiles Russia is increasingly firing at Ukrainian cities.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking alongside Trump, said Russia was finding it harder to defend its own skies. He expressed hope the deal would “create the space now to negotiate the end of this war.”

“It’s an escalation,” Trump added, “but it’s also an escalation that can help lead to an end.”

Peskov, in response, said the Kremlin does not “see an escalation” but said there were “certain misconceptions within the White House administration … regarding the idea that escalation and military pressure can help pave the way for a peaceful settlement.”

He called this “a flawed judgment” and warned it might cause what Russia calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine to go on longer.

“It will result in our having to establish a larger security zone — a larger buffer zone,” he said. “Consequently, stoking tensions and taking actions that drive escalation will in no way contribute to the peace process.”

Peskov downplayed the Patriot deal.

“Yes, it is an obvious fact that the U.S. is continuing full-scale deliveries of weaponry and military technology to Ukraine — we are aware of this,” he said. “At the same time, however, there is a certain duality in the United States’ position: Unlike the Europeans, the U.S. maintains a desire to facilitate a move toward a peace process.”

Russia, which invaded Ukraine, has pressed maximalist demands on Kyiv, including the surrender of territory its forces have not captured. The Kremlin has invited Zelensky to come to Moscow, while the Ukrainian leader has dismissed the offer as a stalling tactic.

“The Kremlin appears to be struggling to adjust its narrative line in response to the Trump administration’s recent denial of Russian negotiating tactics and acknowledgment of Ukrainian battlefield successes,” the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said in a recent analysis.

Pastukhov, who is based in London, said Zelensky had “succeeded in altering — not so much the ‘reality on the ground’ that Putin is so fond of citing, but rather the West’s perception of that reality.”

“Now,” he said, “it is Putin who must rack his brains over how to present the ‘realities on the ground’ in a more favorable light.”

While the U.S. deal is a diplomatic win for Zelensky, military analysts warn it won’t address Ukraine’s immediate needs. Russia is firing ballistic missiles at Ukrainian cities almost daily. Given strict U.S. technology controls and the complexity of the missile systems, full-scale production is likely years away.

Zelensky thanked the United States for the “positive decision.”

“President Trump has repeatedly emphasized that only two or three countries in the world are currently capable of producing Patriots because the others are not technologically ready,” he told reporters Friday. “The United States has recognized Ukraine as a country that is ready to do this.”

Now, he said, his teams need to work out a timeline to set up production. “The sooner we reach an agreement, the sooner we’ll be able to produce Patriots.”