Barring some almost unimaginable development, Brett Kavanaugh will be elevated to the Supreme Court tomorrow. In all likelihood he will serve there for decades into the future. I know many of you are disappointed, angry, resolved. I have nothing wise to add to those sentiments. But I do have an observation I would like to share, one which I think helps put in perspective what we’ve witnessed and experienced over the last two to three weeks.
When Dr. Blasey Ford was giving her testimony last week her words were credible and shattering to the hopes of Brett Kavanaugh and his supporters. This isn’t just my take. I was getting reports from Capitol Hill. Republicans were crestfallen and grim about their prospects. Kavanaugh gained an extreme edge by going second in his testimony – something I think was frankly logical and fair. (Someone accuses and then the accused responds.) Still going second was a huge advantage. And I think that to a great degree Kavanaugh saved his own nomination with that performance.
Sure it made lots of people question his judicial temperament, his ability to be any kind of fair arbiter on the Court, even in these hyper-politicized times. It made lots of people think he had at least lied repeatedly by the common sense definition if not technically crossed the line into perjury. But it secured Republican partisans and close to the entirety of Senate GOP behind him.
It’s worth asking why.
There were two salient parts of Kavanaugh’s response. First, while he obviously denied Blasey Ford’s allegation, for the most part he ignored it. He checked the box of denying the claim and then rapidly pivoted to a pure message of aggression, anger and promises to fight the recognized set of political enemies that bind him to his mass and elite supporters. The palpably false claims he made were meant to be and largely were subsumed in a morality play about grievance, aggression and common enemies. To put it more succinctly, Kavanaugh went full Trump. And it worked.
That latter point is the key. It worked.
It was telegraphed in advance of Kavanaugh’s testimony that he’d been urged to show more emotion than he’d shown in his original hearings and his Fox News interview, where many found him awkward and bloodless. As Will Saletan notes here, he seems to have spent the time during Blasey Ford’s testimony rewriting his remarks, adding small but critical additions which turned general broadsides against a media circus and an unfair process into what were more like declarations of partisan warfare.
I wondered then and now how much this was contrived and how much it was the real Brett Kavanaugh. It seems to me that it was a conscious decision to embody Trump. But having made that decision, it came very naturally. I don’t think he’s that good an actor. It came off as very authentic. He fully embodied the mentality of attack and the tone of aggression and calculated disrespect. I hesitate to read too much into that short span of hours. But we’ve learned in the last couple weeks that Kavanaugh has or at least had a temper, and a tendency toward physical aggression, especially when he was drunk. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think he tapped into that part of his personality for the performance.
It goes without saying that this leitmotif of aggression and attack fits neatly and naturally into the mood of challenged masculinity that Kavanaugh had to leverage to save himself. As I’ve argued previously, we tend to focus on the libretto of politics much more than the score, where the real story is often told. This is the heart of Trumpism. Trump may be bellicose, harsh and taunting by nature. But that mood and predatory behavior fits naturally into a political movement focused on reclamation and revenge. We see this in Trump’s often imbecilic fights with foreign leaders and his menacing, vilifying way he talks about his political opposition. Kavanaugh has his own spin on it. But it’s the same basic appeal.
WASHINGTON, DC – SEPTEMBER 27: Senate Judiciary Committee member Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) shouts while questioning Judge Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill September 27, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
What this all means is that conservatism and the GOP are now Trumpism. More significantly it means that it is transferable. Others can pick up the mantle and make it work. This is hardly surprising. Last year Rep. Greg Gianforte body slammed a reporter days before his election and is now a Representative in good standing who is often praised for his physical toughness. Equally significant, Trumpism didn’t begin with Trump. I take some pride in the fact that I think this site has done as good a job as any news publication in the US over the last 18 years chronicling the rise of the revanchist right in the Republican party and the party’s subsequent transformation. The politics of aggression, norm-breaking, the penchant for conspiracy theories, the increasingly explicit white nationalism – these were all present in 2014, 2010 and in a more attenuated form in 2004. What Trump did was, through some malign and impulsive intuition, fused these together into a workable politics. He took what was still the underbelly of Republican politics, which nevertheless provided it with the bulk of the GOP’s motive force, and made it the face, the brand.
Kavanaugh himself is a noteworthy bridge. A scion of the beltway political elite who received the country’s finest elite education, he made his name in the Bush White House. He is the epitome of the pre-Trump conservative establishment. Yet we can see here how seamless the transition was to full Trumpism, as it was for all the Republicans Senators who rushed to his side after his Thursday afternoon performance.
Early Thursday afternoon, Kavanaugh nomination was on life support. He went full Trump. And it worked.
Newly discovered handwritten documentation sheds new light on an ongoing scientific controversy regarding a famous collection of nearly 1,000 skulls amassed by a 19th-century Philadelphia physician. Dubbed the "American Golgotha," the collection is the work of Samuel Morton, who used them to compare the brain size of different racial groups in the 1830s and 1840s.
Paul Wolff Mitchell, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where the collection is stored, believes his analysis could help settle the often acrimonious debate over whether the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was correct in his assessment of the role of unconscious bias in science, particularly with regard to race. Mitchell concludes that Gould incorrectly accused Dr. Morton of inaccurately measuring the cranial capacity of his skulls but was nonetheless correct with regard to Morton's implicit racial bias. Mitchell's findings have just been published in PLOS Biology.
An American Golgotha
Morton is widely considered the father of scientific racism, and his controversial ideas about the intellectual superiority of the Caucasian people provided a handy defense of the continued enslavement of African-Americans in the US just prior to the Civil War. He bolstered those views with a broad analysis of 1,000 skulls he collected from all over, sometimes even scavenged from battlefields and the occasional catacomb. At the time, it was widely believed that skull size, or cranial capacity, was a marker of superior intelligence and advanced cognition.
Modern genetics has shown that there is no scientific basis for the traditional concept of race; it's a meaningless designation. But Morton ascribed to an archaic worldview that held that there were five distinct races, each representing separate acts of creation, and thus falling into a divinely determined hierarchy. In descending order, they were Caucasians, East Asians (Mongolian), Southeast Asians, Native Americans, and Blacks (or "Ethiopians") at the bottom. He naturally would have expected his measurements of cranial capacity to fall neatly within that hierarchy.
Morton made his first measurements of 256 skulls in 1839. To determine cranial capacity, he stuffed each skull with pepper seeds to determine the volume and meticulously jotted down the results. He published those results in Crania Americana the same year. For a second round of measurements of 672 skulls, published in 1840, he switched to lead shot, since he found it difficult to adequately replicate measurements with the pepper seeds, likely because they were so easily compressed. In both cases, he concluded that Caucasian skulls had the largest cranial capacity and that African skulls had the smallest. His third and final catalog appeared in 1849, two years before his death.
Morton's ideas fell out of favor over the ensuing century, but he became a lighting rod for renewed controversy in the 1970s, thanks to the late Stephen Jay Gould. Gould was convinced that the scientific method could be tainted by the personal biases of an individual scientist, particularly when it came to pre-existing racial biases about IQ, for example. He used Morton's measurements of his skull collection as a case study in a 1978 paper and in a chapter in his 1981 book, The Mismeasure of Man.
A “patchwork of fudging”
In the latter, Gould dismissed Morton's measurements as "a patchwork of fudging and finagling in the clear interest of controlling a priori convictions," although he did not think it was deliberate. Rather, Morton had an unconscious racial bias. He associated cranial capacity with intelligence, expected the Caucasian skulls to be larger, and so he systemically under-estimated the capacity of the African skulls. His preconceptions influenced his analysis.
Part of Gould's argument centered on a discrepancy between the 1839 skull measurements and Morton's 1840 data, showing a significant difference between the African skulls and the others. Granted, Morton had switched from pepper seed to lead shot for the later measurements, but the discrepancies should thus have occurred across the board for all the skulls. To Gould, this was a clear indicator that Morton had doctored the data unintentionally, perhaps by overfilling the Caucasian skulls with pepper seed or under-filling the African skulls.
Gould's takedown cemented Morton as the poster child for 19th century scientific racism. But some scientists took issue with Gould's conclusions, arguing that he was misrepresenting Morton's data and had never bothered to do his own measurements of the skulls to verify his assertions. The first to raise doubts was an undergraduate at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, named John Michael. His 1988 paper asserting that Morton's measurements were reasonably accurate, however, was largely dismissed. Gould was just too prominent for an undergraduate's critique to hold much water. Gould made no mention of it in the revised 1996 version of Mismeasure of Man.
Controversy fully erupted with the publication of a 2011 paper by a team of anthropologists led by Jason Lewis. They had replicated Morton's measurements of skull cranial capacity using lead shot on half the skulls in the collection, and their results matched Morton's in all but two percent of the cases—a statistically insignificant degree. "Ironically, Gould's own analysis of Morton is likely the stronger example of a bias influencing results," Lewis and his colleagues wrote in their paper. Co-author Ralph Holloway went so far as to denounce Gould as a "charlatan" to The New York Times—a rather shocking breach of academic decorum.
But Lewis et al. did not really address the central question of the differences between the seed and lead shot measurements, according to Mitchell, although they rightly identified places where Gould was a bit sloppy in his analysis. A concurrent Nature editorial noted as much, advising caution with regard to the conclusions, since "the critique leaves the majority of Gould's work unscathed." The editorial also questioned the motivation of Lewis and his colleagues, several of whom were associated with the University of Pennsylvania and therefore had a vested interest in defending Morton's science as being free from bias. And neither Gould nor Lewis and his colleagues had access to the full set of Morton's original seed measurements.
A new discovery
That's where things stood when Mitchell stumbled across a few key pages of Morton's personal 1840 copy of the Catalog of Skulls. He noticed that many entries had accompanying handwritten measurements jotted down, and those measurements were different from the later 1849 version of the catalogue. He concluded the handwritten notes in the earlier edition were from Morton's initial seed measurements. And he found that any differences between the averages for the seed and lead-shot measurements could be attributed to different overall sample sizes.
So Lewis et al. were correct in that aspect of their 2011 analysis: the differences between Morton's 1839 and 1840 measurements were still very much within statistical norms. Gould was wrong on that particular detail. But Mitchell goes on to make a convincing case in the second part of his paper that Gould was nonetheless correct about unconscious bias. "Just because Morton's data were not biased doesn't mean his science wasn't," he says.
Mitchell compared Morton's analysis to a similar skull survey undertaken a few years earlier by German anatomist Friedrich Tiedemann using millet seed to fill the skulls. Tiedemann's work is not nearly as well known, but Mitchell found his measurements of cranial capacity produced an equivalent data set to Morton's. However, Tiedemann came to a very different conclusion: he insisted that his findings proved it was impossible to use that data to draw any conclusions about racial hierarchies or superiority.
The difference arises from the two approaches each man took when analyzing the data. Tiedemann presented his data as a range in each racial category. All those ranges overlapped with each other far too significantly to make any reasonable scientific pronouncement about race. Morton, on the other hand, took an average of the measurements of the groups. Intriguingly, when Mitchell applied Morton's method to Tiedemann's data, taking the averages, he wound up with the same conclusions as Morton.
In other words, "The data were mute on these questions," says Mitchell. "Had Morton had Tiedemann's data or Tiedemann had Morton's data, they could have produced the exact same conclusions that each respectively did. That fundamental fact needs to be brought to bear on how we think about what bias means in cranial race science in the 1830s and 1840s."
Morton's belief in the racial superiority of Caucasians influenced his interpretation of his data; Tiedemann's staunch anti-slavery views did the same for the analysis of his data. And that's where Lewis et al. erred in their 2011 paper: they declared that the Morton case, rather than showing the ubiquity of bias, instead showed how science can escape the "bounds and blunders of cultural contexts." This is clearly not the case, based on Mitchell's analysis. Both Morton and Tiedemann had amassed good data, but that was not sufficient to save them from their own biases when it came to interpreting that data.
According to Eric Michael Johnson, an evolutionary anthropologist and historian of science based in Vancouver, BC, Gould was also correct in his original 1978 critique that skull size is irrelevant to determining intelligence or any kind of racial characteristics. Morton knew nothing about the bodies those skulls originally belonged to. "He didn't even know the sex of the skulls in most cases, and so would often arbitrarily assign a sex based on the size of the skull," Johnson says. "He could have gathered an average of these racial groups and put them into basic categories of small, medium, or large and then adjusted the skull averages within that framework. He would have found that it didn't fit this clear hierarchy that he believed in."
Johnson thinks Mitchell makes a solid argument in his new paper but acknowledges that "it brings out a lot of really interesting details that I think will be interpreted in contradictory ways, depending on the reader." Perhaps it could provide ammunition for those wishing to reignite the controversy. That said, "There's no basis whatsoever to hold Morton up as a scientist we should look back on with reverence or respect," says Johnson. "He measured things accurately, but his conclusions were fundamentally wrong and incredibly biased even by the standards of that time."
Judge Brett Kavanaugh is almost certainly going to be appointed the next member of the Supreme Court of the United States. Whatever Christine Blasey Ford said in her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, and whatever Kavanaugh said in his, and however credible and convincing either one seemed, none of it was going to affect this virtual inevitability. The Republicans, if they stick together, have the necessary votes. A veneer of civility made it seem as if the senators were questioning Ford and Kavanaugh to get to the truth of whether Kavanaugh, as a drunk teen-ager, attended a party where he pinned Ford to a bed and sexually assaulted her, thirty-six years ago. But that’s not what the hearing was designed to explore. At the time of this writing, composed in the eighth hour of the grotesque historic activity happening in the Capitol Hill chamber, it should be as plain as day that what we witnessed was the patriarchy testing how far its politics of resentment can go. And there is no limit.
Dressed in a blue suit, taking the oath with nervous solemnity, Ford gave us a bristling sense of déjà vu. “Why suffer through the annihilation if it’s not going to matter?” Ford had told the Washington Post when she first went public with her allegations. With the word “annihilation” she conjured the spectre of Anita Hill, who, in her testimony against Clarence Thomas, in 1991, was basically berated over an exhausting two-day period, and diagnosed, by the senators interrogating her, with “erotomania” and a case of man-eating professionalism. Ford’s experience—shaped by the optics of the #MeToo moment, by her whiteness and country-club roots—was different. The Republicans on the committee, likely coached by some consultant, did not overtly smear Ford. Some pretended, condescendingly, to extend her empathy. Senator Orrin Hatch, who once claimed that Hill had lifted parts of her harassment allegations against Thomas from “The Exorcist,” called Ford “pleasing,” an “attractive” witness. Instead of questioning her directly, the Republicans hired Rachel Mitchell, a female prosecutor specializing in sex crimes, to serve as their proxy. Mitchell’s fitful, sometimes aimless questioning did the ugly work of softening the Republican assault on Ford’s testimony. Ford, in any case, was phenomenal, a “witness and expert” in one, and it seemed, for a moment following her testimony, that the nation might be unable to deny her credibility.
Then Kavanaugh came in, like an eclipse. He made a show of being unprepared. Echoing Clarence Thomas, he claimed that he did not watch his accuser’s hearing. (Earlier, it was reported that he did.) “I wrote this last night,” he said, of his opening statement. “No one has seen this draft.” Alternating between weeping and yelling, he exemplified the conservative’s embrace of bluster and petulance as rhetorical tools. Going on about his harmless love of beer, spinning unbelievably chaste interpretations of what was, by all other accounts, his youthful habit of blatant debauchery, he was as Trumpian as Trump himself, louder than the loudest on Fox News. He evaded questions; he said that the allegations brought against him were “revenge” on behalf of the Clintons; he said, menacingly, that “what goes around comes around.” When Senator Amy Klobuchar calmly asked if he had ever gotten blackout drunk, he retorted, “Have you?” (He later apologized to her.)
There was, in this performance, not even a hint of the sagacity one expects from a potential Supreme Court Justice. More than presenting a convincing rebuttal to Ford’s extremely credible account, Kavanaugh—and Hatch, and Lindsey Graham—seemed to be exterminating, live, for an American audience, the faint notion that a massively successful white man could have his birthright questioned or his character held to the most basic type of scrutiny. In the course of Kavanaugh’s hearing, Mitchell basically disappeared. Republican senators apologized to him, incessantly, for what he had suffered. There was talk of his reputation being torpedoed and his life being destroyed. This is the nature of the conspiracy against white male power—the forces threatening white men will always somehow be thwarted at the last minute.
The Hill-Thomas hearings persist in the American consciousness as a watershed moment for partisanship, for male entitlement, for testimony on sexual misconduct, for intra-racial tension and interracial affiliation. The Ford-Kavanaugh hearings will be remembered for their entrenchment of the worst impulses from that earlier hearing. Thursday’s ordeal confirms that male indignation will be coddled, and the gospel of male success elevated. It confirms that there is no fair arena for women’s speech. Mechanisms of accountability will be made irrelevant. Some people walked away from 1991 enraged. The next year was said to be the Year of the Woman. Our next year, like this one, will be the Year of the Man.
Here's the problem: the theory is wrong, or at least, wildly exaggerated in certainty and significance.
Here's why.
The issue at hand is the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which says the government can't "for the same offence . . . .be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb." Most commonly double jeopardy means that the government can't charge you again with the same thing after they lose at trial. There's a notorious exception to it called the "Separate Sovereigns" or "Dual Sovereignty" Doctrine. Under this doctrine, different "sovereigns" can try you for the same crime because they have separate interests in punishing the crime. This most commonly allows the federal government and a state to prosecute you for the same crime, on the theory that they have distinct interests and reasons to do so. This famously happened when the federal government prosecuted the police officers who beat Rodney King even after they were acquitted in state court.
The Dual Sovereignty Doctrine has always been controversial and somewhat unpopular. This term, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case in which it could overturn the Dual Sovereignty Doctrine. That case is Gamble v. United States — you can read all about it here, on the indispensable SCOTUSblog.
The theory/meme/warning goes like this: Trump wants Kavanaugh on the Court immediately, so Kavanaugh can hear Gamble and vote to wipe out the Dual Sovereignty Doctrine, and then, once Trump pardons his various relatives and underlings and lawyers for federal crimes, they will no longer be subject to state prosecution for the same crimes. He'll be able to spare his whole criminal enterprise! It's obstruction/RICO!
No.
There's a bunch of things wrong with this wild-eyed theory.
Let's start with the fact that the Dual Sovereignty Doctrine has never been a clean left/right conservative/liberal issue. This isn't a situation where it's clear there's a 4/4 split and the conservative Judge Kavanaugh is needed to break it. So, for instance, in Heath v. Alabama in 1985, when the question was whether to extend the doctrine to two separate states prosecuting the same crime, seven justices extended it; the two who dissented were Brennan and Marshall, the liberals. In 2016, the issue returned to the Supreme Court in Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Vale. There the issue was whether the Dual Sovereignty Doctrine applied to Puerto Rico — is Puerto Rico, as a territory of the United States, a "separate sovereign" from the United States, or not? The Court held that Puerto Rico was not separate for these purposes and thus Puerto Rico and the United States could not prosecute someone for the same crime. Justices Ginsburg and Thomas — hardly ideological allies – concurred, but questioned whether the Supreme Court should revisit the viability of the Separate Sovereignty Doctrine. "I write only to flag a larger question that bears fresh examination in an appropriate case. The double jeopardy proscription is intended to shield individuals from the harassment of multiple prosecutions for the same misconduct . . . . Current “separate sovereigns” doctrine hardly serves that objective." (Ginsburgh, joined by Thomas, concurring.) The other justices did not question the doctrine. Thus, if the Doctrine is in serious danger of being overturned (and two justices questioning it is not enough to say that it is), it's in danger not just from the right, but from the left. And because it's not a clean left/right issue, we can't assume we know where Kavanaugh would come down on it.
More importantly, though, the connection between the doctrine and Trump pardons is bunk.
Double Jeopardy prevents successive prosecutions for the same crime, not related crimes. So — even if Kavanaugh swung the Supreme Court to overturn the Separate Sovereigns Doctrine, and even if Trump then went on a pardoning rampage to spare Ostrich Jacket and Idiot Lawyer and Junior and Dummy and so forth — Tump's pardon would only prevent state prosecution for the same crime that Trump pardoned them for federally. What's the "same crime?" Under the so-called Blockburger rule, two crimes are not the "same" if each one requires proof of an element that the other does not — that is, if each has at least one unique element. So: Trump's pardon can only prevent state prosecutions to the extent the state crimes have the same elements as the federal crimes he's pardoning. They usually don't. Gamble, the litigant in the case before the Court, points this out himself:
Because this Court deems two crimes to be different offenses any time “each offense contains an element not contained in the
other,” Dixon, at 696 (discussing Blockburger, 284 U.S. at 304), it will still be the unusual case in which the federal and state governments may not both bring some charge based on the same criminal occurrence.
Similarly, the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center filed a friend of the Court brief in support of neither party laying out historical issues for the Court. That Center has a historical interest in civil rights laws, which have often involved Dual Sovereignty Doctrine prosecutions (as it did in the Rodney King case). The center concurs that overturning the doctrine would not prevent dual prosecutions:
Under Blockburger v. United States, federal civil rights statutes concerning law enforcement misconduct are not the “same offense” as State
statutes that may cover the same or similar underlying conduct. Thus, overruling dual sovereignty should not eliminate the federal government’s ability to prosecute these types of civil rights cases after the State has previously prosecuted a case that was tried to verdict.
So: even if Kavanaugh helps overturn the Dual Sovereignty Doctrine, Trump cannot insulate his underlings with pardons — particularly because many of them face uniquely state-law issues, like state tax violations or violations of other state laws. Could Trump pardons preclude state prosecution for some state crimes that are identical to federal crimes? Yes. But the notion that such state prosecutions are even in the works is purely speculative.
There are plenty of reasons you might oppose Judge Kavanaugh. This one is an over-complicated bag of hot air, approaching a Twitter conspiracy theory.
Read The Insider Russian report on this same topic here.
An ongoing Bellingcat investigation conducted jointly with The Insider Russia has confirmed through uncovered passport data that the two Russian nationals identified by UK authorities as prime suspects in the Novichok poisonings on British soil are linked to Russian security services. This finding directly contradicts claims by the Russian president on 12 September 2018, and by the two men in an interview broadcast on RT one day later, that they are civilians who traveled to Salisbury for a tourist getaway.
Original Russian documents reviewed by Bellingcat and The Insider confirm definitively that the two men were registered in the central Russian resident database under the names Alexander Yevgenievich Petrov and Ruslan Timurovich Boshirov, respectively, and were issued internal passports under these names in 2009. However, no records exist for these two personas prior to 2009. This suggests the two names were likely cover identities for operatives of one of the Russian security services. Crucially, at least one man’s passport files contain various “top-secret” markings, which, according to at least two sources consulted by Bellingcat, are typically reserved for members of secret services or top state operatives.
These findings, along with peculiarities in the two men’s bookings of their flight to London, make Russia’s official statements that Petrov and Boshirov are civilian tourists implausible, and corroborate UK authorities’ claims that they are in fact officers of a Russian security service.
Last-minute travel plans
Aeroflot’s passenger manifest, reviewed by Bellingcat and The Insider, discredits Petrov and Boshirov’s claims, made in the RT interview, that they had been planning their visit to Salisbury for a long time. The manifest records the times of booking, check-in, and boarding of each passenger. In the case of the two suspects, they made their initial booking – and checked in online – at 20:00 GMT (22:00 Moscow time) on 1 March 2018, the night before their short trip to London and Salisbury.
(Click the manifest below to view it in full resolution)
The two suspects flew back to Moscow on 4 March 2018, having taken two trips to Salisbury both on March 3rd and March 4th, the day on which the Skripals were poisoned.
An Extraordinary Passport File
Bellingcat and The Insider have reviewed original records from the central Russian passport and residential registration database and have identified the passport files belonging to the two suspects.
The person using the name Alexander Petrov does in fact have a passport file, under the name Alexander Yevgenievich Petrov, born on 13 July 1979 in Kotlas, a small town in northern Russia. The birth date coincides with that of the Alexander Petrov who flew on Aeroflot flight SU2588 on 2 March 2018, as seen in the passenger manifest reviewed by Bellingcat.
This person’s domestic passport photo matches the photos released by the UK authorities and the face of the person calling himself Alexander Petrov in the RT interview.
Mr. Petrov’s passport file contains peculiarities that are not found in any other passport file reviewed by Bellingcat and The Insider in this and prior investigations.
Born in 2009?
First, this person’s file lacks any history of address registrations or previous identification documents issued prior to 2009. A standard passport file – such as the files of the other 3 Russian citizens bearing the name Alexander Petrov and born on 13 July 1979, all of which were reviewed by Bellingcat and the Insider before identifying the person of interest – contain a history of previous, expired ID documents (called domestic passports), international passports issued to the person (both expired and current), as well as previous address registrations. The first – and only – Russian ID document listed for Mr. Petrov under his file is an internal passport (mandatory for Russian citizens over the age of 14) issued on 26 November 2009, and valid until today. The passport file contains a field called “reason for issue of document”, which typically lists the previous (expired) ID document that the current one substitutes. In Mr. Petrov’s case, the reason for issuance of the new passport is listed simply as “Unsuitable for usage”, a marking typically used when a previous passport has been damaged or found to contain invalid data. A hand-written note in Petrov’s file makes a reference to a pre-existing national passport issued in St. Petersburg in 1999. However, no record of such a passport number exists in the central passport database.
“Do not provide any information”
Alexander Petrov’s passport dossier is marked with a stamp containing the instruction “Do not provide any information”. This stamp does not exist in standard civilian passport files. A source working in the Russian police force who regularly works with the central database confirmed to Bellingcat and The Insider that they have never seen such a stamp on any passport form in their career. That source surmised that this marking reserved for operatives of the state under deep cover.
Adding additional credence to the hypothesis that Alexander Petrov’s persona is a cover identity comes from another page in his passport file, which is reserved for input of biographical data. In Mr. Petrov’s case, this page is left blank, and in addition to the same stamp “Do not provide information”, a hand-written note is added with the text “There is a letter. S.S.”. Per the same source interviewed for this story, S.S. is a common abbreviation for “sovershenno sekretno”, Russian for “top secret”.
Another clue pointing to the non-civilian status of Mr. Petrov is the absence from his passport file of any information about his international passport, which he used to travel to the United Kingdom. The passport number is listed in the Aeroflot passenger manifest reviewed by Bellingcat. However, the passport file shows no international passport belonging to Alexander Petrov, in contrast with regular practice – under which the file contains a list of all government-issued ID documents, both national and international passports, expired and currently valid.
(Click the passport data below to view it in full resolution)
The Russian media outlet Fontanka has previously published information on Boshirov and Petrov’s passport files, indicating that they were separated by only 3 digits (-1294 and -1297), meaning that they were issued at nearly the same time. Bellingcat and The Insider also reviewed passport data for the other two individuals to whom those two passports were issued, with the the passport numbers ending in -1295 and -1296. These two individuals also had peculiar passport dossiers, with incomplete or time-capped data, similar to Alexander Petrov’s passport file. Additionally, Fontanka noted that Petrov and Boshirov bought two separate return flights back to Moscow on March 4. Additional information on these findings, along with other discoveries related to Boshirov and Petrov, will be published on Bellingcat’s site next week.
After an investigation that probably did not need to last three months, an Oregon woman was arrested last week on charges of murdering her husband. Daniel Brophy was shot at work on June 2, and according to The Oregonian, police initially had no suspects. Except that the spouse will almost always be on the list of possible suspects, and in this case, police probably thought it was at least worth reading the spouse’s 2011 essay, “How to Murder Your Husband.”
Nancy Brophy, 68, is a romance novelist whose “Wrong Never Felt So Right” series includes such works as The Wrong Cop,The Wrong Brother, and another work of probable interest to police, The Wrong Husband. The 2011 essay, posted on a writing-workshop site, was much shorter, and also free of hunky images.
“As a romantic suspense writer,” Brophy wrote in the essay, “I spend a lot of time thinking about murder, and, consequently, about police procedure. After all, if the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don’t want to spend any time in jail.” She continued: “And let me say clearly for the record, I don’t like jumpsuits and orange isn’t my color.”
Turns out the jumpsuits in Portland are blue.
The essay, which was tagged as “humor,” and was recently set as “private” though it has been on the internet for seven years and so is easily found, first discusses possible motives for a romance-novel heroine. (Or maybe “protagonist” is a better word.) They include: “Financial,” “Lying, cheating bastard,” “Fell in love with someone else,” “Abuser,” or “It’s your profession,” the last option being best for one who already happens to be a hitwoman. It is not clear yet whether any of these are suspected motives (or professions) in Brophy’s case. The essay does not really favor any of the options, and notes repeatedly that, of course, the wife will certainly be a suspect in any such case. “So,” she noted in the context of financial motive, “you have to be organized, ruthless, and very clever.”
“Husbands have disappeared from cruise ships before,” she pointed out. “Why not yours?”
The essay then discusses how the character should do it. Those options: guns (“loud, messy, require some skill”), knives, a garrote (but “how much upper body strength does it require to strangle a person?”), “random heavy piece of equipment” (e.g. baseball bat or pipe wrench), poison (takes too long), hiring a hit man (if necessary), or “hiring a lover” (“never a good idea”).
Brophy was careful to note that “I find it is easier to wish people dead than to actually kill them”—which at least made it sound like she’d already tried both—but suggested the latter was certainly possible, in the abstract. “[T]he thing I know about murder,” she wrote, “is that every one of us have it in him/her when pushed far enough.”
While this is certainly ironic, it would also certainly not be admissible evidence, because it isn’t specific enough to prove anything about whether or how the crime was committed in this particular case. Under Federal Rule of Evidence 404, for example, evidence that the defendant has committed another “crime, wrong, or other [bad] act” usually isn’t admissible “to prove a person’s character in order to show that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character.” It might be admissible to prove, for example, that the defendant followed a particular plan (i.e., the acts are similar enough to establish a modus operandi), or that the second one wasn’t an accident. But the acts have to be very similar, or else the evidence should be excluded because of the risk a jury might convict for the earlier crime or “bad act” instead of the one charged.
And, of course, in a situation like this one the First Amendment would also be implicated. With very rare exceptions, people have the right to say or write even horrific things without having to worry about those things being used against them. See King, Stephen; see also “Author Arrested for Writing About Murder in the 30th Century,” Lowering the Bar (Sept. 2, 2014).
One of those very rare exceptions wasa 1997 case in which a court held the First Amendment did not protect the publisher of an “instruction manual” called Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors from a wrongful-death lawsuit. Rice v. Paladin Enterp., Inc., 128 F.3d 233 (4th Cir. 1997). The evidence there showed that the killer had not only ordered and received the book, but had followed at least 20 specific recommendations it made—or, he just did 20 very specific things that also happen to be mentioned in the book, depending who you asked. Under those circumstances, the court found there was a jury issue as to whether the publisher had “aided and abetted” the murder. (The U.S. Supreme Court denied review, and the case settled.) That decision is questionable, even on those facts, and as noted above, “How to Murder Your Husband” is not at all comparable.
Coincidentally, the Hit Man case was the subject of a recent episode (Case 94) of the Casefile true-crime podcast (which I recommend—though I sometimes wish I could unhear Case 12, so beware of that one). As Casefile mentioned, it turned out that Hit Man had not in fact been written by “Rex Feral,” experienced killer-for-hire, but by a mother of two in Florida who had no criminal record and did not even own a gun. But then, while her work seems to have been pretty convincing as fiction, the killer didn’t get away with it. Yet another reason to be skeptical of things you read online.
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