A Kenosha Militia Facebook Event Asking Attendees To Bring Weapons Was Reported 455 Times. Moderators Said It Didn’t Violate Any Rules.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the reason the militia page and an associated event remained online after a shooting that killed two people was due to “an operational mistake.”

Ryan MacBuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on August 28, 2020


Facebook

In a companywide meeting on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that a militia page advocating for followers to bring weapons to an upcoming protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, remained on the platform because of “an operational mistake.” The page and an associated event inspired widespread criticism of the company after a 17-year-old suspect allegedly shot and killed two protesters Tuesday night.

The event associated with the Kenosha Guard page, however, was flagged to Facebook at least 455 times after its creation, according to an internal report viewed by BuzzFeed News, and had been cleared by four moderators, all of whom deemed it “non-violating.” The page and event were eventually removed from the platform on Wednesday — several hours after the shooting.

“To put that number into perspective, it made up 66% of all event reports that day,” one Facebook worker wrote in the internal “Violence and Incitement Working Group” to illustrate the number of complaints the company had received about the event.

BuzzFeed News could not verify the content on the militia page or its associated event because they had been removed from the platform. A previous story from the Verge noted that the page had issued a “call to arms” and hosted a number of commenters advocating for violence in Kenosha following the police shooting of 29-year-old Black man Jacob Blake.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.

The internal report seen by BuzzFeed News reveals the extent to which concerned Facebook users went to warn the company of a group calling for public violence, and how the company failed to act. “The event is highly unusual in retrospect,” reads the report, which notes that the next highest event for the day had been flagged 18 times by users compared to the 455 times of the Kenosha Guard event.

After militia gathered in Kenosha on Tuesday night, a 17-year-old with a rifle allegedly killed two protesters. Facebook has maintained that the suspect, whose Facebook and Instagram profiles were taken down after the incident, had no direct connection with the Kenosha Guard page or event.
Do you work at Facebook or another technology company? We'd love to hear from you. Reach out at ryan.mac@buzzfeed.com or via one of our tip line channels.

During Facebook’s Thursday all-hands meeting, Zuckerberg said that the images from Wisconsin were “painful and really discouraging,” before acknowledging that the company had made a mistake in not taking the Kenosha Guard page and event down sooner. The page had violated Facebook’s new rules introduced last week that labeled militia and QAnon groups as “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” for their celebrations of violence.

The company did not catch the page despite user reports, Zuckerberg said, because the complaints had been sent to content moderation contractors who were not versed in “how certain militias” operate. “On second review, doing it more sensitively, the team that was responsible for dangerous organizations recognized that this violated the policies and we took it down.”

During the talk, Facebook employees hammered Zuckerberg for continuing to allow the spread of hatred on the platform.


Provided to BuzzFeed News

One Facebook user received this response after trying to report the Kenosha Guard Facebook page noting that it did not "go against one of our specific Community Standards."

“At what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread across our services?” wrote one employee. “[A]nti semitism, conspiracy, and white supremacy reeks across our services.”

The internal report seen by BuzzFeed News sheds more light on Facebook’s failure.

“Organizers… advocated for attendees to bring weapons to an event in the event description,” the internal report reads. “There are multiple news articles about our delay in taking down the event.”

One Facebook user who flagged the Kenosha Guard page “for a credible threat of violence” was told “it doesn’t go against one of our specific Community Standards,” according to a screenshot they sent to BuzzFeed News.

In addition to the four manual reviews that determined the Kenosha Guard page to be non-violative, the Facebook report also noted a number of reviews that “were handled by automation” had reached the same conclusion. As part of a proposed change, the Facebook employee writing the report said that the company should monitor spikes in feedback reports for events and “trigger investigation immediately given this has proved to be a good signal for imminent harm.”

The report seems to acknowledge that Facebook was late to act.

“This post provides more details around what happened and changes we are making to detect and investigate similar events sooner,” the worker wrote. “This is a sobering reminder of the importance of the work we do, especially during this charged period.”


MORE ON FACEBOOK
Facebook Employees Are Outraged At Mark Zuckerberg's Explanations Of How It Handled The Kenosha ViolenceRyan Mac · Aug. 28, 2020
Facebook Fired An Employee Who Collected Evidence Of Right-Wing Pages Getting Preferential TreatmentCraig Silverman · Aug. 6, 2020
“Facebook Is Hurting People At Scale”: Mark Zuckerberg’s Employees Reckon With The Social Network They’ve BuiltRyan Mac · July 23, 2020



Ryan Mac is a senior tech reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.

Some Of The Biggest QAnon Conspiracy Accounts On Instagram Are Claiming They've Been Suspended

Accounts like @little.miss.patriot, who gained hundreds of thousands of followers by posting right-wing conspiracy theories on Instagram, are saying they have been suspended.


Stephanie McNeal BuzzFeed News Reporter
Last updated on September 1, 2020










Instagram

Some of the most popular pro-QAnon accounts on Instagram, which have been spreading right-wing conspiracy theories with increasing frequency over the summer, claimed on Tuesday that they have been suspended from the platform.

The account holder behind @little.miss.patriot, who gained nearly 300,000 followers in just a few months by posting pastel-colored infographics of various debunked claims about President Donald Trump and Democrats, posted on their backup account that their main Instagram handle had been suspended without warning

"I have no idea how long my page is disabled for, it will not let me log in, I have no information," the anonymous account holder wrote on their backup page, little.miss.patriot.2.






The account holder behind @qthewakeup also announced that they can no longer access their main page, writing on their backup page: "Can't stop, won't stop."


Instagram

As did the person behind @greatawkening3, who claimed to have 117,000 followers when they were suspended.


Instagram

Several smaller conspiracy theory pages, while they remain active, have also had their posts flagged as "false information" by Instagram's fact-checkers.


Instagram

And right-wing journalist Liz Crokin posted that her Instagram was "under attack," though she didn't clarify what she meant.


Instagram

However, several accounts that promote QAnon — the collective delusion about Trump fighting a child sex trafficking ring led by liberal global elites — remain active on the platform, without any apparent censorship of their content. In addition, many lifestyle bloggers who have pivoted to conspiracy theory content, such as @roseuncharted and @luvbec, have thus far faced no apparent consequences for sharing the misinformation.



Instagram

It's unclear whether the accounts have been temporarily suspended, if there is a glitch, or if they have been permanently banned. Instagram did not immediately return a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.

Last month, Facebook announced it was cracking down on misinformation on its platforms, including Instagram, removing or restricting hundreds of groups, accounts, and hashtags related to right-wing conspiracy theories.

"We have seen growing movements that, while not directly organizing violence, have celebrated violent acts, shown that they have weapons and suggest they will use them, or have individual followers with patterns of violent behavior," Facebook said in a statement to the New York Times.

COVID-19 Might Mean Humanity Has Entered An Age Of Pandemics, Tony Fauci Warned

“A deadly barrage” of pandemics is coming, a new report warns.

Dan VerganoBuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on September 1, 2020,

Pool New / Reuters

Humanity has “entered a pandemic era,” with the worldwide coronavirus outbreak likely the first of accelerating epidemics to come, top US infectious disease scientist Anthony Fauci and other public health experts are warning.

In an August report in the journal Cell, Fauci and medical historian David Morens, his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) colleague, foresee an accelerating rate of pandemics in the years ahead driven largely by deforestation, urban crowding, and wet markets for wild game, which will make increasing environmental degradation worldwide in this century, “the key determinant of disease emergence.”

“I don’t have a crystal ball, but what we are seeing looks very much like an acceleration of pandemics,“ Morens told BuzzFeed News.

These diseases increasingly either reemerge from older menaces, such as West Nile virus or antibiotic-resistant bacteria, or jump from wild animals to people, most notably with the deadly coronaviruses, SARS, MERS, and now SARS-CoV-2. The long-standing patchwork approach of responding to each new outbreak with emergency declarations followed by spurts of funding has to transform into a broader change in how people live to forestall the illness, deaths, and havoc of these plagues, Morens and Fauci argue.

"Evidence suggests that SARS, MERS, and COVID-19 are only the latest examples of a deadly barrage of coming coronavirus and other emergences," they conclude in their report.

Cell / Via marlin-prod.literatumonline.com

Infectious diseases since 1981

The number of novel coronavirus cases is approaching 26 million worldwide, causing more than 850,000 deaths. In the last 17 years, Morens noted that three novel coronaviruses have emerged in people after more than a century without any new ones. There's also been an explosion of Ebola outbreaks almost continuously in the last six years, a pandemic of mosquito-borne Zika, and the global spread of fatal dengue hemorrhagic fever. It looks like more than a coincidence, he said.

“These pandemics do seem to be an increasing trend that look like they are going to happen more often, that is a fact,” said emerging diseases expert Nikos Vasilakis of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. “I don’t think it is avoidable. But it is preventable.”

There is a broad range of diseases besides coronaviruses that have pandemic potential every bit as bad as the current one, experts such as Gregory Gray of the Duke Global Health Institute told BuzzFeed News. They include ones that cause “killer colds,” mosquito-borne illnesses, polio-related paralytics, and the flu, where a “bird” flu jumping from poultry in China had been the expected next pandemic among infectious disease experts for the last decade. The current pandemic is a chance to rethink treating each new disease as a one-off emergency, Gray and other experts said, and move to continuously lowering the risks for potential outbreak hot spots where people, domestic animals, and wild animals are crowded together.

Kai Kupferschmidt@kakape

@DrTedros “The best way to end this pandemic is through solidarity, through cooperation”, says @drtedros. "Whether we like it or not, we're living in a globalized world. We are intertwined. The only option we have is to move together. And to fight this enemy together."

06:10 PM - 31 Aug 2020

Reply Retweet Favorite

“There's a lot more viruses where COVID-19 came from," Princeton evolutionary biologist Andy Dobson told BuzzFeed News. In a July paper cited by the NIAID officials, Dobson and colleagues estimated the cost of ending the wild meat trade in China to be $19.4 billion and the limited human exposure to virus-laden wildlife at less than $12 billion, compared to the estimated minimum $5 trillion in damages from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We need massive reductions in rates of environmental degradation, both loss of tropical forests and the egregious wildlife trade, otherwise the cage of emergent pathogens is wide open,” Dobson said.

On Thursday, NIAID named 10 centers for research into emerging diseases, each one aimed at investigating pathogens that might spill over from wild animals into people, like the coronaviruses, SARS, MERS, and SARS-CoV-2, which originated in bats. The announcement followed the NIH suspension of a separate grant in April to one of the centers, the EcoHealth Alliance, that looked for emerging coronaviruses in China, after complaints about it from President Trump.

But a lot more is needed than that effort to protect us from future pandemics, Morens said. With a human population expected to reach more than 10 billion people in this century, the report by Fauci and Morens calls for “living in more thoughtful and creative harmony with nature,” or else expect to see more pandemics like COVID-19 every few years.

“We cannot predict the emergence of any one pandemic, and it's possible this trend will just go away,” Morens said. “But I wouldn’t bet on it.”

A handout photo provided by the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) shows samples of a vaccine against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). (REUTERS)

Results of large antibody study good news for efforts to develop covid vaccine

1 min read . Updated: 02 Sep 2020, 11:28 AM ISTMarilynn Marchione , AP

• The new study was done by Reykjavik-based deCODE Genetics, a subsidiary of the US biotech company Amgen
• Large antibody study offers hope for virus vaccine efforts

Topics

Coronavirus

Antibodies that people make to fight the new coronavirus last for at least four months after diagnosis and do not fade quickly, as some earlier reports suggested, scientists have found.

Tuesday's report, from tests on more than 30,000 people in Iceland, is the most extensive work yet on the immune system's response to the virus and is good news for efforts to develop vaccines.

If a vaccine can spur production of long-lasting antibodies like natural infection does, it gives hope that “immunity to this unpredictable and highly contagious virus may not be fleeting," independent experts from Harvard University and the US National Institutes of Health wrote in a commentary published with the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

One of the big mysteries of the pandemic is whether having had the coronavirus helps protect against future infection and for how long. Some smaller studies previously suggested that antibodies disappear quickly and that some people with few or no symptoms may not make many at all.

The new study was done by Reykjavik-based deCODE Genetics, a subsidiary of the US biotech company Amgen, with several hospitals, universities and health officials in Iceland.

USPS Review Finds Decrease In On-Time Election Mail Delivery Since 2018

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - AUGUST 29: People stand near a USPS mail box as the city continues Phase 4 of re-opening following restrictions imposed to slow the spread of coronavirus on August 29, 2020 in New York City. 

By Matt Shuham
|
September 1, 2020 6:15 p.m.

The Postal Service’s internal watchdog found an decrease in on-time delivery of election and political mail in a review earlier this year, the results of which were published Tuesday, underlining fears that a sharp uptick in mail-in voting may end up disenfranchising some voters this November.

The review from the USPS inspector general took place in May and June this year. Importantly, that was before the new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, instituted a series of changes that resulted in mail slowdowns across the country. And many of the inspector general’s findings don’t concern Postal Service employees themselves, but rather their counterparts in state and local government.

Still, with a record number of Americans expected to use the mail to vote this year, the report identified key weaknesses that could impact the vote tally.

“Since our prior audits, the Postal Service has improved internal communication between headquarters and mail processing facilities, and developed online Election and Political Mail training,” the report found. “However, the amount of identifiable Election and Political Mail delivered on-time nationwide was 94.5 percent from April 2020 through June 2020, a decrease of 1.7 percentage points compared to the same time period in 2018.”

The inspector general also highlighted a point that the USPS general counsel flagged to 46 states and the District of Columbia earlier this summer: Local deadlines for requesting and casting ballots are often set close to Election Day, meaning that some voters who request or submit ballots at the “last minute” may actually be out of luck.

The inspector general’s report, citing numbers from USPS management, highlighted a few significant shortcomings from state election officials: In 11 states, for example, over 44,000 ballots were sent from election boards to voters “the day of or day before the state’s primary election.” In Pennsylvania, 500 ballots were sent to voters the day after the election.

The state-by-state patchwork of election laws, especially concerning something like postmarking requirements, makes national election mail policy a difficult balance:



New York voters realized this might be a problem in primary season, when postmarking errors imperiled thousands of ballots.

“Without a postmark on return ballots mailed by voters, a ballot could be rejected and a vote not counted,” the report read.

In recent congressional testimony, DeJoy was short on details about a plan to ensure the prompt delivery of election mail, but he did reiterate to lawmakers that it was USPS policy to postmark all ballots, and that the USPS would seek to expedite all election mail, not just first-class mail.

But, frustrated with DeJoy’s refusal to hand over certain documents related to changes in the USPS policy toward late mail delivery trips, decommissioned sorting machines and other issues, the House Oversight Committee on Monday announced its intent to subpoena him.

The IG report also identified several pitfalls that, experts have told TPM, could especially impact states where postal and election workers have less experience with high vote-by-mail volumes, such as instances of election and political mail getting left behind at USPS facilities.

Over the two-month review of processing and distribution centers (P&DC) in seven cities, the report found, “we identified approximately 200 ballots at the Oklahoma City P&DC and 68,000 Political Mail mailpieces at the Baltimore P&DC that had not been processed.” (The ballots in Oklahoma were successfully delivered after investigators noticed them, the report assured readers.)



And none of the seven facilities used the Postal Service’s “Operational Clean Sweep Search Checklist,” the review found, referring to the list of specific facility areas to check to ensure that election and political mail isn’t lost in the system.

In large part, USPS management acknowledged the shortcomings identified in the report. But it disagreed with the inspector general’s recommendation “to work toward creating a separate, simplified mail product exclusively for Election Mail that would support uniform mail processing, including mandatory mailpiece tracking and proper mailpiece design.” There simply is not enough time to do so before the 2020 elections, USPS management said in an included response to the report.

However, the agency’s management responded, the Postal Service will undertake “herculean efforts” to ensure that ballots meet state deadlines.

With Itchy Trigger Fingers, Some Right Wingers Predict The Next Civil War Has Finally Arrived

PORTLAND, OR - AUGUST 22: Right wing groups, left, and anti-police protesters face off in front of the Multnomah County Justice Center on August 22, 2020 in Portland, Oregon. For the second Saturday in a row

By Matt Shuham
September 1, 2020

The first shots in the second American civil war have been fired — at least, according to some right-wing groups that have sought to use recent shooting deaths during protests across the country as a call to arms.

After three people were killed during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Portland, Oregon in recent days, right-wing groups that have made a habit of showing up armed to protest are forecasting a larger, more violent struggle. Experts told TPM that was purposeful.

“The first shot has been fired brother,” said Stewart Rhodes, founder of the armed anti-government group Oath Keepers, in a tweet Sunday. “Civil war is here, right now. We’ll give Trump one last chance to declare this a Marxist insurrection & suppress it as his duty demands. If he fails to do HIS duty, we will do OURS.”

Rhodes was referring to the killing of Aaron Danielson in Portland on Saturday. Danielson was affiliated with a right-wing group known for street brawling, Patriot Prayer, whose members had joined a caravan of trucks that made a route through Portland earlier in the day, many armed with pepper spray and paintball guns.

Just a few days earlier, two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin — Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum — were allegedly killed by the 17-year-old Trump supporter Kyle Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse has been charged with homicide. No one has been charged in the Portland killing yet, but The Oregonian reported that a self-identified anti-fascist protester was under investigation.

The Oath Keepers’ tweets went beyond their normal schtick, said Sam Jackson, an assistant professor at the University of Albany and author of a new book about the group.

For years, Oath Keepers leadership has speculated about potential armed conflict: In 2015, for example, members of the group claimed that the “Jade Helm” military training exercise was a front for martial law. And last year, Rhodes said Democrats’ impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump marked “the verge of a HOT civil war.” But these conflicts, of course, never materialized.

“They’ve identified the start of a civil war over and over again,” Jackson said. “The identification or anticipation of a civil war is consistent.”

“What’s different now is they’re pointing to a particular act of violence from the people that they’ve identified as the other side — the enemy combatants in the civil war,” he added. “What’s different now is they’re not just anticipating that it’s going to happen soon — they’re rhetorically positioning that it has begun.”

The Oath Keepers message was part of a wave of ominous forecasts from right-wing vigilantes in recent days.

“This is the inflection point. This is where the pendulum swings back in the other direction,” Chris Hill, leader of the armed group called Georgia Security Force III%, said in a video last week, referring to the Kenosha shooting. He added, “There’s going to be an escalation in this conflict that we have — that is now, it is here, it is spreading, it is going to get crazy. It’s already crazy, but now there’s a body count.”

Hill saved his pitch for the end. If viewers didn’t join a militia soon, he said, “your country is going to be shattered glass and fucking rubble… But if you are interested, hit me up!”

Georgia Security Force III% and others recently faced off against some anti-Confederate monument activists at Stone Mountain in Georgia. Fights broke out at the scene and, at one point, both sides had hands on their firearms, feet away from each other.

Hill’s attempt to recruit off of the unrest is a natural part of leading an armed vigilante group. Jackson recalled that in 2015, after a gunman killed five servicemembers in attacks at a recruiting center and a Naval Reserve center in Chattanooga, Oath Keepers launched an effort that the group called “Operation Protect the Protectors.” It was a form of networking: Armed citizens, some of whom hadn’t before been affiliated with the Oath Keepers, stood outside of recruiting centers in a show of force.

Nowadays, the right-wing presence at uprisings across the country serves to “radicalize” potential extremists, said Daryl Johnson, a former domestic terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland Security

“Now, with the boogaloo movement and with these militias going into these [instances of] civil unrest, it kind of reinforces to them this notion that society is on the brink of a civil war,” he said. “And it serves as a radicalization facilitator, much like a foreign fighter going over to a conflict zone reinforcing their version of the world.”

The armed groups aren’t acting alone. Mainstream conservative media and political figures have created a bogeyman out of antifa and Black Lives Matter — convenient domestic “others” that serve as scapegoats. The President himself on Monday referred to people “on the streets” and “in the dark shadows” that were controlling Joe Biden. Separately, he said vaguely that the departments of Justice and Homeland Security would be “announcing a joint operation center to investigate the violent, left-wing civil unrest.”

Once upon a time, when Barack Obama was president, the Oath Keepers might’ve been up in arms about that sort of assertion of executive power. But things have changed. Stewart Rhodes, asked Monday what he thought Trump should do about America’s supposed new civil war, told the journalist Casey Michel, “he should declare a nationwide insurrection to be in effect and call all of the National Guard units into federal service, under his command, and use them to suppress the insurrection in the streets.”

A member of Patriot Prayer who claimed to have been with Danielson when he was killed — and whose story Oath Keepers retweeted — was asked a similar question this weekend: What should Trump do?

“Send troops,” the man said. “Send troops.”

Much of the amped up rhetoric about cresting violence is just projection: The right blames the left for violence to justify its own.

In recent years, according to a recent report on tactics of the racist “alt-right” published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, “Some members of the radical right realized that, even while claiming to be victims of liberal overreach, they could capitalize on their own violent acts. Video of a dramatic punch could go viral, making heroes out of the movement’s street warriors and recruiting people to the cause.”

One of the report’s authors, Howard Graves, told TPM that “the far-right has demonstrated that it is willing and able to escalate at a quicker rate, and that’s really where we see the biggest potential for violence.”

“Their animus for going out into the streets is to directly and physically oppose antifa,” Graves added. “And they see opposing antifa as largely instigating these conflicts.”


Matt Shuham (@mattshuham) is a reporter in TPM’s New York office covering corruption, extremism and other beats. Prior to joining TPM, he was associate editor of The National Memo and an editorial intern at Rolling Stone.

New Engineering Report Claims Bannon’s Privately Built Border Wall Will Fail

The report, set to be filed in federal court this week, confirms reporting from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune that found portions of the wall were in danger of overturning if not fixed due to extensive erosion just months after it was built.

MISSION, TEXAS - DECEMBER 11: A loader grades land near a section of privately-built border wall under construction on December 11, 2019 near Mission, Texas. The hardline immigration group We Build The Wall is const... MORE
By Jeremy Schwartz and Perla Trevizo
|
September 2, 2020 9:17 a.m.

This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

It’s not a matter of if a privately built border fence along the shores of the Rio Grande will fail, it’s a matter of when, according to a new engineering report on the troubled project.

The report is one of two new studies set to be filed in federal court this week that found numerous deficiencies in the 3-mile border fence, built this year by North Dakota-based Fisher Sand and Gravel. The reports confirm earlier reporting from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, which found that segments of the structure were in danger of overturning due to extensive erosion if not fixed and properly maintained. Fisher dismissed the concerns as normal post-construction issues.

Donations that paid for part of the border fence are at the heart of an indictment against members of the We Build the Wall nonprofit, which raised more than $25 million to help President Donald Trump build a border wall.

Former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, We Build the Wall founder Brian Kolfage and two others connected to the organization are accused of siphoning donor money to pay off personal debt and fund lavish lifestyles. All four, who face up to 20 years in prison on each of the two counts they face, have pleaded not guilty, and Bannon has called the charges a plot to stop border wall construction.

We Build the Wall, whose executive board is made up of influential immigration hard-liners like Bannon, Kris Kobach and Tom Tancredo, contributed $1.5 million of the cost of the $42 million private border fence project south of Mission, Texas.

Last year, the nonprofit also hired Fisher to build a half-mile fence segment in Sunland Park, New Mexico, outside El Paso.

Company president Tommy Fisher, a frequent guest on Fox News, had called the Rio Grande fence the “Lamborghini” of border walls and bragged that his company’s methods could help Trump reach his Election Day goal of about 500 new miles of barriers along the southern border.

Instead, one engineer who reviewed the two reports on behalf of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune likened Fisher’s fence to a used Toyota Yaris.

“It seems like they are cutting corners everywhere,” said Alex Mayer, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso. “It’s not a Lamborghini, it’s a $500 used car.”

Since Fisher’s companies embarked on construction of the Rio Grande fence, the Trump administration has awarded about $2 billion in federal contracts to the firms to build segments of the border wall in other locations.

Fisher agreed to the inspection as part of ongoing lawsuits against Fisher Sand and Gravel filed last year by the National Butterfly Center and the International Boundary and Water Commission. They unsuccessfully sought to convince a federal judge to stop the construction of the project until the potential impacts of the wall on the Rio Grande could be determined.

Mark Tompkins, an environmental engineer hired by the wildlife refuge, noted in his report that widespread erosion and scouring occurred after heavy rain events such as Hurricane Hanna in July, but that the fence has yet to experience a flood of the Rio Grande.

“Fisher Industries’ private bollard fence will fail during extreme high flow events,” concluded Tompkins, who specializes in river management.

“When extreme flow events, laden with sediment and debris, completely undermine the foundation of the fence and create a flow path under the fence or cause a segment of the fence to topple into the river, unpredictable and damaging hydraulics will occur,” he added in an affidavit to be filed in court.

Experts have said the fence will face a never-ending battle with erosion given its proximity to the water and the sandy, silty material of the banks. In the Rio Grande Valley, the federal government usually builds sections of the wall miles inland on top of existing levees, partly due to erosion concerns.

A second report, based on a geotechnical and structural inspection by the Millennium Engineers Group of Pharr, Texas, also hired by the National Butterfly Center, found that the fence was stable for now, but that it faces a host of issues. They include soil erosion on the river side — in some areas gaps up to three feet wide and waist deep, concrete cracking, construction flaws and what the firm concluded was likely substandard construction material below the fence’s foundation.

The Millennium engineers called for a clay covering to protect the embankment from erosion, as well as closely monitoring the project.

Its conclusion: “The geography at the wall’s construction location in comparison to the river bend is not at a favorable location for long-term performance.”

According to a copy of an operation and maintenance plan, Fisher Sand and Gravel plans quarterly inspections of the fence as well as extra checkups after large storms. The company had also said it would plant grasses that better hold in place the sandy riverbank and add a layer of rocks to lessen erosion. New soil will also be “treated and seeded” to help fill ground cover.

Tompkins called the maintenance plan “completely inadequate” and a “haphazard and unprofessional approach to long-term maintenance.”

Tommy Fisher said Tuesday that he couldn’t comment on the reports because he hadn’t reviewed them. But he added that his company has fixed all of the erosion, in part by adding a 10-foot-wide road made out of rocks for the Border Patrol to drive over that his crew considered big enough so it wouldn’t be as easily displaced. He estimates it will cost up to $150,000.

“Bottom line, if you want border security on the border you have to think outside the box,” he said. “I feel very comfortable with what we’ve done.”

In July, Fisher appeared on a podcast hosted by Bannon, who called Fisher “kind of a mentor” who “taught me really about how you actually have to build a wall.”

Asked about the engineering concerns, which Bannon said were part of a “hit piece,” Fisher called them “absolutely nonsense.”

“I would invite any of these engineers that so-called said this was gonna fall over, I’ll meet ‘em there next week. … If you don’t know what you’re talking about, you probably shouldn’t start talking,” he said. “It’s working unbelievably well. There’s a little erosion maintenance we have to maintain.”

But to experts, Fisher’s planned fixes are inadequate.

“To me, it’s almost like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound,” said Adriana E. Martinez, a Southern Illinois University Edwardsville professor and geomorphologist who reviewed the reports on behalf of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

Officials with the International Boundary Commission have said that they too have found “significant erosion,” but spokeswoman Sally Spener said she couldn’t elaborate on that or on mitigation plans due to pending litigation. The binational body regulates building in the floodplain between the U.S. and Mexico because structures can worsen flooding and alter the course of the river, potentially violating international water treaties.

The Mexican section of the commission has said it worries the wall could obstruct the river’s flow or be knocked down by the force of the water, according to Spener.

Trump tried to distance himself from the private fence after the ProPublica/Tribune stories, saying that he had never agreed with it and that it had been done to make him look bad. He again distanced himself from the project and We Build the Wall after the charges against Bannon and the others.

“When I read about it, I didn’t like it,” he said. “It was showboating and maybe looking for funds. But you’ll have to see what happens.”

Last November, We Build the Wall representatives met with Customs and Border Protection officials about donating the group’s first border wall project — a half-mile fence in Sunland Park, New Mexico, just outside El Paso. According to a memo obtained by The Nation, CBP called it an “overall positive meet and greet.”

But the federal agency identified several areas of concern with the Sunland Park project, including the possibility that it would require an environmental assessment, but also the fact that Fisher Industries had inflated the speed with which it could complete the project.

“Their performance on this small project shows that some claims may have been inflated due to lack of experience with this type of work,” the memo states.

Fisher has said he wants to donate the Rio Grande fence to the federal government as well, although it’s unclear whether the government will take it. The fence likely will come with a hefty tax bill if not donated, after Hidalgo County recently appraised the land’s value at more than $20 million, which Fisher said his company will fight.

The next court hearing regarding the pending federal lawsuits is scheduled for Sept. 10.

Biden campaign wants pro-Trump ad on FRACKING removed in battleground PA, telling TV stations it "makes up a policy, ascribes it to Vice President Biden, and then says the nonexistent policy will result in job losses of 30 times more people than actually work in the industry.”

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