Tag: Sheriff Arpaio

President Trump’s flagrant Friday night news dump

The following article by Amber Phillips was posted on the Washington Post website August 25, 2017:

It’s Friday night. A Category 4 hurricane is about to slam the Texas coastline, and President Trump just directed the Pentagon to ban transgender people from joining the military and pardoned a politically radioactive convicted former sheriff. News also broke that one of his more controversial advisers, Sebastian Gorka, is leaving the White House.

This isn’t your average sleepy Friday news dump — a trick newsmakers use to bury unpopular news by releasing it when most people aren’t reading news. This is a flagrant attempt to hide a series of politically fraught (but base-pleasing) moves under the cover of an August Friday night hurricane.

In other words, it’s transparent Trump is doing controversial things he knows are controversial, and he and the White House would prefer the public and the media not focus on it. Continue reading “President Trump’s flagrant Friday night news dump”

The Joe Arpaio I Knew

The following article by Ryan Gabrielson was posted on the ProPublica website August 15, 2017:

The former Maricopa County sheriff made his name in part by targeting immigrants — even after a judge ordered him to stop. As President Trump considers a pardon, it’s worth remembering precisely what Arpaio did in his decades in law enforcement.

Joe Arpaio, then sheriff of Maricopa County, spoke at the Republican National Convention in July, 2016. Credit: John Moore, Getty Images.

For most of Joe Arpaio’s two-plus decades as Maricopa County sheriff, he directed operations from the top floor of a downtown Phoenix tower, worlds away from the jails overseen by rank and-file deputies. The executive offices wrapped around an expansive conference room, where I spent weeks in early 2008 with banker boxes full of arrest records, and hanging out with Arpaio himself, a politician who built his career on bashing immigrants long before the rise of Donald Trump.

Back then, I was working for the East Valley Tribune, then a daily newspaper in the Phoenix area. I had filed a public records request for all documents from deputies’ immigration operations. Teamed with Paul Giblin, a fellow Tribune reporter, we were trying to figure out how the sheriff was enforcing immigration laws, and what effect their monomaniacal focus was having on regular police work — like solving crimes. Arpaio had long before achieved national notoriety for making prisoners wear pink underwear and housing them in an outdoor tent city so hot that the inmates’ shoes melted. Continue reading “The Joe Arpaio I Knew”