October, 09 2018, 12:00am EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Afrin Sopariwala,Phone: 408.598.7656,Email:,jay@climatedisobedience.org
Judge Throws Out Felony Charges Against Climate Defenders
Mn Valve Turners Acquitted On All Charges In Landmark Climate Necessity Defense Trial
BAGLEY, MN
District Court Judge Robert Tiffany acquitted defendants of all charges today in the Clearwater County case of two "Valve Turners," Annette Klapstein and Emily Johnston, and support person Ben Joldersma. Judge Tiffany ruled that the prosecution failed to demonstrate any evidence of damage to two Enbridge pipelines. Klapstein and Johnston faced state felony charges for their part in the "Shut It Down" climate direct action two years ago, in which climate activists successfully disrupted all five pipelines carrying Canadian tar sands crude oil into the United States.
The acquittal came a week after the climate activists were preparing to present a "climate necessity defense," with expert testimony in areas including pipeline safety, climate science, climate policy and the efficacy of civil disobedience. The expert witnesses would have corroborated the defendants' testimony that their actions were justified by the need to avert imminent climate catastrophe. However, in a stunning about-face last week, the court forbade all expert testimony related to climate change and civil disobedience, while still allowing safety testimony, and possibly testimony to direct, non-climate impacts of tar sands extraction and pipelines.
"The Judge found what I was about to tell the jury: that these defendants caused no damage to the two pipelines they closed. Indeed, they acted out of concern for communities that are harmed by fossil fuel pipelines, and the climate emergency," said Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, an expert who authored the American Pipeline Institute pipeline safety guidelines.
"While I'm very glad that the court acknowledged that we did not damage the pipelines, I'm heartbroken that the jury didn't get to hear our expert witnesses and their profoundly important warnings about the climate crisis," said defendant Emily Johnston, 52, a Seattle resident and poet. "We are fast losing our window of opportunity to save ourselves and much of the beauty of this world. We turned those valves to disrupt the business-as-usual that we know is leading to catastrophe, and to send a strong message that might focus attention to the problem. We will continue to do that in every peaceful way we can; the stakes are far too high for us not to," Johnston added.
With the acquittal, the case establishes two important legal precedents.
"First, the climate necessity defense was upheld by the highest court in the State, which affirmed that these climate activists had the right to assert the climate necessity defense to a jury," said Lauren Regan, Executive Director of the Eugene Oregon-based Civil Liberties Defense Center.
"Further, the defendants were acquitted of felony criminal damage to critical energy infrastructure and pipelines. In an attack on our democracy, this law, like others of its kind in 31 states, was pushed through the state legislature at the behest of the fossil fuel industry, which sought to increase the penalties against activists who dared to challenge the profiteering motives of some of the biggest corporations," Regan said.
Dr. James Hansen was another of the expert witnesses scheduled to give testimony. "It's great that the defendants were found not guilty, but we missed an opportunity to inform the public about the injustice of climate change. Now we need to go on offense against the real criminals, the government," said Former NASA Chief Scientist Dr. Hansen. "The government, especially the Trump Administration, is guilty of not protecting the constitutional rights of young people. They should have a plan to phase down fossil fuel emissions, but instead they aid and abet the expansion of fossil fuel mining, which, if not stopped, will guarantee devastating consequences for young people."
"As older white people, we acknowledge that our white privilege may have resulted in better treatment in the legal system than activists of color often receive. That is why it is important for people of privilege to take bolder risk on behalf of the planet" said defendant Annette Klapstein. "There are lives in the balance, thousands of people are already dying from the effects of climate change and if we don't put a stop to it, it will be millions within a few short years. It is morally unacceptable to me to stand idly by while even one life is sacrificed to the greedy oil company executives and their already rich shareholders and the banks who fund them can continue to make their even more obscene profits at the expense of all life on earth," Klapstein added.
FURTHER QUOTES AND STATEMENTS
Ben Joldersma, defendant, software engineer and father of three:
"Standing up to the oil corporations is scary, and while my wife and I were aware of the risk we were taking, in the face of the things we will lose we knew being in support of Emily and Annette was the right decision. So, 20 or 30 years from now, as the world descends further into climate chaos and our kids ask us what were we doing in 2018, we can look them square in the eye and honestly tell them we did everything we could.
While I'm glad the court acquitted the three of us I am disappointed not to take the stand. In the two years since the action, more than one billion barrels of tar sands oil have passed through Lines 4 and 67 here in Minnesota. We are in a climate emergency that presents the gravest threat our civilization has ever faced and we have just a few short years to make some very hard changes. The good news is that if we as a people do that work it could be a powerful engine for our economy, creating 65 million good new jobs and eliminate the Fossil Fuels Tax: trillions of dollars in health care and disaster recovery costs from air pollution and climate change."
Annette Klapstein, retired attorney and grandmother
I want to acknowledge that we were treated more gently by the court than any people of color ever are and we know that is in part because of our white privilege. As older white people we are often in the best position to take the riskier actions because we will be treated more gently. We know from our young activist friends who are people of color that when they take any kind of direct action, they run the risk of having police showing up and shooting them. And this happens over and over for no reason whatsoever. And when they are arrested they are almost always treated more harshly by the criminal justice system.
We see this in the trials of the indigenous people who were arrested at Standing Rock many of them have been charged with felonies for doing much less than the Valve Turners did, and most of them are being convicted and given harsh sentences, such as a several years.
Because I was a lawyer and spent many years working within the legal system, I know how poorly the legal system sometimes works for ordinary people and how incapable it is of adequately addressing some issues. Ultimately, I decided to take this action because my conscience would not let me do otherwise. There are people all over the world who are already losing their homes and even their lives to the catastrophic effects of climate change - they have no choice but to deal with the climate emergency we are now in. So I feel that morally, I have no choice either.
There are lives in the balance, thousands of people are already dying from the effects of climate change and if we don't put a stop to it, it will be millions within a few short years. Every life is precious and it is absolutely morally unacceptable to me to stand idly by while even one life is sacrificed so that greedy oil company executives and their already rish shareholders and the banks who fund them can continue to make their even more obscene profits at the expense of all life on earth. I did this because I have tried every legal possibility many times - I would not have chosen to break the law if I had any other effective alternative - but we are almost completely out of time to turn this around and I believe it is absolutely my moral duty to step up and put my body on the line to stop these fossil fuel corporations from destroying the very basis of life on earth.
I have very mixed feelings about het verdict. On the one hand I am very happy to have been acquitted and quite frankly to be off of bail so that I that don't have to be so careful about committing other acts of civil disobedience. I've been very careful for the past two years while on bail because if I was arrested I might have been taken back to the Clearwater County jail to await my trial.
We are in a dire and desperate time, the widow of opportunity to turn around the climate catastrophe is now rapidly closing. We have at most maybe two years. According to the recent IPCC report, and as basically all the climate scientist have told us, this is the time, and if we don't do it now it will be past the tipping point, and state of climate catastrophe will be permanent, until the point that virtually all life on earth will be extinct.
Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, author of the American Pipeline Institute pipeline safety guidelines.
"I was to testify concerning two essential elements of the case. The first was whether Emily and Annette damaged the pipelines. They did not, as the judge ruled, damage the pipelines. The flipside of that is the question: Do pipelines and the petrochemical products they deliver damage, increase risk or harm anybody? The answer to those questions is an emphatic yes."
Kelsey Skaggs, Attorney and Executive Director, Climate Defense Project
"This case is about an act of civil disobedience. As part of the necessity defense, we were prepared to present evidence that civil disobedience is an effective way to influence social and policy change. Our expert witnesses would have testified about the rich tradition of civil disobedience in the United States--including the abolition of slavery, the women's suffrage movement, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s--and the important role of civil disobedience in fighting fossil fuels"
Alice Cherry, Attorney and Co-Founder, Climate Defense Project.
"Although the defendants were disappointed that they were unable to present their case to a jury, the acquittal is a significant step forward for activists who have increasingly turned to the court system to press their demands for action on climate change. In three cases involving Valve Turners in other states who coordinated their actions with the Minnesota activists, defendants were convicted after being denied the opportunity to present a necessity defense. In Minnesota, today's courtroom victory follows a lengthy effort to defend the activists' right to argue climate necessity, a battle which went all the way to the state supreme court."
In October 2016 activists under the banner of 'Shut It Down - Climate Direct Action' took the climate future into their own hands by shutting down all the tar sands oil flowing into the US from Canada.
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'Serious Disregard for Human Life': Dem Senators Press Hegseth on Yemen Civilian Casualties
"President Trump has called himself a 'peacemaker,' but that claim rings hollow when U.S. military operations kill scores of civilians."
Apr 25, 2025
A trio of Democratic senators on Thursday demanded answers from embattled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth regarding U.S. airstrikes in Yemen, which have reportedly killed scores of civilians including numerous women and children since last month.
"We write to you concerning reports that U.S. strikes against the Houthis at the Ras Isa fuel terminal in Yemen last week killed dozens of civilians, potentially more than 70," Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Tim Kaine (D-Va.) wrote in a letter to Hegseth.
The lawmakers noted that "the United Nations Protection Cluster's Civilian Impact Monitoring Project has... assessed that March 2025 marked the highest monthly casualty count in Yemen in almost two years, tripling the previous month, with a total of 162 civilian casualties."
"If these reports of civilian casualties are accurate, they should come as no surprise," the senators said. "Using explosive weapons in populated areas—as these intense strikes appear to do—always carries a high risk of civilian harm."
"Further, reports suggest that the Trump administration plans to dismantle civilian harm mitigation policies and procedures at the Pentagon designed to reduce civilian casualties in U.S. operations," the letter notes. "And the Trump administration has already dismissed senior, nonpartisan judge advocates, or JAG officers, who provide critical legal counsel to U.S. warfighters, especially when it comes to the laws of war and adherence to U.S. civilian harm mitigation policies."
"The Defense Department also recently loosened the rules of engagement to allow [U.S. Central Command] and other combatant commands to conduct strikes without requiring White House sign-off, removing necessary checks and balances on crucial life-and-death decisions," the senators added. "Taken altogether, these moves suggest that the Trump administration is abandoning the measures necessary to meet its obligations to reducing civilian harm."
The senators asked Hegseth to answer the following questions:
- Has the Department of Defense (DOD) assessed the number of noncombatant and combatant casualties in each of its strikes inside Yemen?
- What has DOD's process been for assessing the acceptable civilian casualties for individual strikes inside Yemen, and assessing estimated levels of civilian harm and collateral damage?
- What role have legal advisers, including JAG officers, played in reviewing the legality of U.S. strikes in Yemen?
- What DOD instructions or orders currently govern department civilian harm mitigation and response actions?
- Were the civilian harm mitigation and response experts at CENTCOM and/or at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence consulted in planning for these strikes?
- How does the department plan to engage with the families or communities affected by these strikes, including acknowledging civilian harm and exploring avenues for potential redress?
Last month, Hegseth
announced that the Pentagon's Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Office and Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which was established during the Biden administration, would be closed. Hegseth—who has
supported pardons for convicted U.S. war criminals—lamented during his Senate confirmation hearing that "restrictive rules of engagement" have "made it more difficult to defeat our enemies," who "should get bullets, not attorneys," according to his 2024 book The War on Warriors.
Asked during his confirmation hearing whether troops under his leadership would adhere to the Geneva Conventions, Hegseth replied, "What we are not going to do is put international conventions above Americans."
During his first administration, President Donald Trumprelaxed rules of military engagement meant to protect civilians as he followed through on his campaign pledge to "bomb the shit" out of Islamic State militants and "take out their families." Thousands of civilians were killed during the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria as then-Defense Secretary James "Mad Dog" Mattis announced a shift from a policy of attrition to one of "annihilation."
Meanwhile, noncombatant casualties soared by over 300% in Afghanistan between the final year of the Obama administration and 2019.
Overall, upward of 400,000 civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen have died as a direct result of the U.S.-led War on Terror, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
In Yemen, the U.K.-based monitor Airwars says U.S. forces have killed hundreds of civilians in 181 declared actions since 2002. Overall, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis have died during the civil war that began in 2014, with international experts attributing more than 150,000 Yemeni deaths to U.S.-backed, Saudi-led bombing and blockade.
The U.S. bombing of Yemen has not received nearly as much coverage in the corporate media as the scandal involving Hegseth's use of Signal chats to share plans for attacking the Middle Eastern country with colleagues, a journalist, and relatives. However, critics say the mounting backlash over the high civilian casualties there is belying Trump's claim of an anti-war presidency.
"President Trump has called himself a 'peacemaker,' but that claim rings hollow when U.S. military operations kill scores of civilians," the senators stressed in their letter. "The reported high civilian casualty numbers from U.S. strikes in Yemen demonstrate a serious disregard for civilian life, and call into question this administration's ability to conduct military operations in accordance with U.S. best practices for civilian harm mitigation and international law."
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Apr 25, 2025
As the Trump administration faces a metastasizing controversy over reports of U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's use of the commercial messaging app Signal, including to discuss U.S. strikes in Yemen, the legal group National Security Counselors on Friday sued on behalf of a journalist to secure three months worth of conversations that took place on the encrypted platform.
According to The Hill, which was first report the news of the lawsuit, the complaint requests Hegseth's Signal messages and the messages from other top Trump officials.
The plaintiff in the lawsuit is journalist Jeffrey Stein, the founding editor of the outlet SpyTalk. Stein sought the three months worth of chat records via Freedom of Information Act request and is now taking legal action to obtain them, according to the complaint, which was filed in federal court.
News about my Signalgate iceberg lawsuit for @spytalker.bsky.social: it's OUT!
[image or embed]
— National Security Counselors 🕵 (@nationalsecuritylaw.org) April 25, 2025 at 12:35 PM
"The heads of at least five of the most powerful agencies in the national security community were freely texting over an app that was not approved for sensitive communications and setting it to automatically delete everything they said," Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, told The Hill. "Since then we've learned that we were right to be worried, thanks to the news about Hegseth's Signal chat with his wife and personal lawyer about bombing plans."
In what's now become known as "Signalgate," The Atlanticrevealed last month that its editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg had been accidentally included in a Signal group chat with top administration officials where they discussed forthcoming U.S. strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. The Atlantic later published messages from the chat.
Members of the chat, dubbed "Houthi PC small group," included Hegseth; National Security Adviser Mike Waltz; Vice President JD Vance; CIA Director John Ratcliffe; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The defendants listed in the lawsuit from the National Security Counselors are the Department of Defense, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the CIA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The New York Timesreported last week that Hegseth had shared information about impending U.S. strikes in Yemen in another Signal group chat included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer on March 15. The outlet cited four unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter.
In response to the Times' reporting, a spokesperson for the Pentagon wrote on April 20: The the newspaper "relied only on the words of people who were fired this week and appear to have a motive to sabotage the secretary and the president's agenda. There was no classified information in any Signal chat, no matter how many ways they try to write the story."
The Times responded a day later saying that it stood by the reporting, that the Pentagon had not denied the existence of the chat, and that the story did not characterize the information in the chat as classified.
In yet another twist, The Associated Pressreported Thursday, citing two unnamed sources familiar with the situation, that Hegseth had an internet connection set up in his office at the Pentagon that bypassed government security protocols—also known as a "dirty" line—in order to use Signal on a personal computer.
The AP reported that the advantage of this kind of a line is that a user would be essentially "masked" and not show up as an IP address assigned to the Defense Department, but it would also leave that user vulnerable to hacking.
Speaking of the lawsuit filed by National Security Counselors, McClanahan toldThe Hill that "this administration has proven again and again that it is allergic to accountability and transparency."
"And we are bringing this case to make sure that they can't just put national security at risk for their own convenience and then destroy all the evidence afterwards," he added.
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Few if any corporations in the United States better exemplify the rigged nature of the nation's tax code than the e-commerce behemoth Amazon, which throughout its history has made use of cavernous loopholes to avoid taxation and build massive wealth for its top executives—including founder Jeff Bezos.
In a new report titled "Amazon and Our Rigged Tax System," a coalition of advocacy organizations details how "corporate tax advantages have been essential to the company's rapid growth and increasing market dominance"—and examines how Republican plans for another round of tax cuts could further benefit the corporation and Bezos.
The report from the Institute for Policy Studies, Athena Coalition, and PowerSwitch Action notes that Amazon—described as a "perfect case study in what is wrong with our tax code"—has "used credits and loopholes to avoid paying even the sharply reduced" 21% statutory corporate tax rate established in 2017 by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which President Donald Trump signed into law early in his first term.
If Amazon had paid the 21% statutory corporate tax rate between 2018 and 2021, the company's federal tax bill during that period would have been $12.5 billion higher, the groups estimated.
But in 2018, the first year the TCJA was in effect, Amazon received more in federal tax credits than it paid in taxes, giving the company a negative federal tax rate.
Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon's CEO in 2021 but still serves as executive chairman, has also benefited substantially from the skewed U.S. tax code. The report estimates that Bezos, one of the wealthiest people in the world, "pocketed $6.2 billion as a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act's failure to address the disparity in tax rates on income from wealth versus income from work."
"On his $36.7 billion in Amazon stock sales since that tax reform, Bezos owed only a 20% capital gains tax, far less than the 37% top marginal rate on ordinary income," the new report notes.
Andy Jassy, the company's current CEO, has "pocketed at least $6.6 million in savings over the past seven years thanks to the TCJA's reduction in the top marginal income tax rate," according to the new report.
"To stop autocracy, we need to challenge the corporations and billionaires behind and benefiting from oligarchy, not give them more tax breaks."
The report was published as Republicans in the U.S. Congress, with full support from President Donald Trump, work on tax legislation that's expected to renew individual provisions of the TCJA that would otherwise expire at the end of the year.
If the Republican-controlled Congress extends the soon-to-expire estate tax provisions of the TCJA—which doubled the federal estate tax exemption—"Bezos and Jassy's heirs would enjoy savings of $5.6 million," the new report estimates.
The advocacy groups said they produced the report out of "shared concern that a rising oligarchy is building an economy that bankrolls billionaires while leaving workers and small businesses behind."
"Right now, working families are bracing for drastic cuts to life-saving programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare and harmful slashing of pro-consumer regulations," the groups said. "Meanwhile, big corporations like Amazon and their executives stand to get even richer and more powerful through the huge tax breaks proposed by the administration and Congress. This fight has profound implications not only for Amazon and its executives, but for the balance of power in our economy."
Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch Action, said in a statement that "Amazon and Jeff Bezos have made billions squeezing every drop of profit they can out of our communities by breaking workers' bodies, poisoning our air, and sucking up public subsidies, and now they're selling out our fundamental freedoms."
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The report proposes a number of potential legislative solutions that it describes collectively as a "pro-worker and small business fair tax agenda."
Among the proposals are raising rather than cutting the statutory corporate tax rate and closing loopholes, imposing tax penalties on companies with massive CEO-to-worker-pay gaps, raising taxes on stock buybacks, and lifting the Social Security payroll tax cap to ensure the wealthy "pay their fair share into the system."
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