SATURDAY, OCTOBER 23 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
Politics & the Nation
J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke speaks about the plan to
combat lending discrimination in Washington, D.C., on Friday.NEW YORK
Durst charged with
1982 murder of wife
Millionaire real estate scion
Robert Durst has been charged
with murder in the death of his
first wife, Kathie Durst, nearly
four decades after she
di sappeared and just days after
he was sentenced to life in
prison in California for killing a
confidante who helped him
cover up the slaying.
Authorities in the New York
City suburbs confirmed Friday
that they have charged Durst,
78, whose lawyers say has been
hospitalized on a v entilator in
Los An geles after testing
positive for covid-19.
A state police investigator
filed a criminal complaint
Tuesday in a town court in
Lewisboro, N.Y., charging Durst
with second-degree murder in
the death of Kathie Durst, who
vanished in 1982. He had not
been previously charged in
Kathie Durst’s disappearance.
The case garnered renewed
public interest after HBO aired
a documentary in 2015 in which
the eccentric heir appeared to
admit killing people, stepping
off camera and muttering to
himself on a l ive microphone:
“Killed them all, of course.”
Kathie Durst was 29 and in
her final months of medical
school when she was last seen.
She and Robert Durst, wh o was
38 at the time, had been
married nearly nine years and
were living in South Salem, a
community in Lewisboro. Her
body was never found. She was
declared legally dead in 2017.
On Oct. 14, a California judge
sentenced Durst to life in prison
without the possibility of parole
for murdering his best friend,
Susan Berman, in 2000.
Durst has covid-19 and was
on a ventilator, the Los Angeles
Times reported la st week.
— Associated Press and ReutersMINNESOTAOfficer charged in July
chase and fatal crashA Minneapolis police officer
has been charged with
manslaughter and vehicular
homicide for a crash in July that
killed an innocent motorist
while the officer was pursuing a
stolen vehicle, a p rosecutor
announced Friday.
Officer Brian Cummings was
driving nearly 80 mph in
Minneapolis with his siren and
lights activated when his squad
car slammed into another
vehicle, killing 40-year-old
Leneal Frazier, Hennepin
County Attorney Mike Freeman
said. The crash ended a chase
that lasted more than 20 blocks,
including through residential
neighborhoods where the
posted speed limit is 25 mph.
During Cummings’s chase,
Frazier’s Jeep entered an
intersection on a green light.According to investigators, the
driver of the stolen vehicle
narrowly missed Frazier’s Jeep
before the squad car struck it on
the driver ’s side.
Mayor Jacob Frey (D) said
after Frazier’s death that the city
would review its pursuit policy,
and that review was still
ongoing Friday.
Frazier was the uncle of
Darnella Frazier, whose
cellphone video of Minneapolis
police Officer Derek Chauvin
kneeling on George Floyd’s neck
was viewed worldwide and
helped launch a global protest
movement against racial
injustice. Chauvin was convicted
of murder and sentenced this
year in Floyd’s 2020 death.
The Frazier family, who had
called for Cummings to be
prosecuted in Frazier ’s death,
welcomed the charges as a f irst
step toward justice, according to
their lawyers, Ben Crump and
Jeff Storms.
— Associated PressDIGESTOCTAVIO JONES/REUTERS
People participate in a demonstration Friday in Brunswick, Ga.,
organized by nonprofit organization Transformative Justice Coalition
calling for justice for Ahmaud Arbery, a B lack jogger chased and
fatally shot by three White men in February 2020. The trial of the
three men charged in Arbery’s death began Monday.potentially dampening the user
growth key to Facebook’s multi-
billion-dollar profits.
Friday’s filing is the latest in a
series since 2017 spearheaded by
former journalist Gretchen Peters
and a group she leads, the Alliance
to Counter Crime Online. Taken
together, the filings argue that
Facebook has failed to adequately
address dangerous and criminal
behavior on its platforms, includ-
ing Instagram, WhatsApp and
Messenger. The alleged failings
include permitting terrorist con-
tent, drug sales, hate speech and
misinformation to flourish, while
also failing to adequately warn
investors about the potential risks
when such problems surface, as
some have in news reports over
the years.
“Zuckerberg and other Face-
book executives repeatedly
claimed high rates of success in
restricting illicit and toxic content
— to lawmakers, regulators and
investors — when in fact they
knew the firm could not remove
this content and remain profit-
able,” Peters said in a s tatement.
Friday’s filing, which was ac-
companied by a second affidavit
from Peters based on interviews
she conducted with other former
company employees, argues that
top leaders at Facebook, including
chief executive Mark Zuckerberg
and Chief Operating Officer Sher-BY CRAIG TIMBERGA new whistleblower affidavit
submitted by a former Facebook
employee Friday alleges that the
company prizes growth and prof-
its over combating hate speech,
misinformation and other threats
to the public, according to a copy
of the document obtained by The
Washington Post.
The whistleblower’s allega-
tions, which were declared under
pen alty of perjury and shared
with The Post on the condition of
anonymity, echoed many of those
made by Frances Haugen, another
former Facebook employee whose
scathing testimony before Con-
gress this month intensified bi-
partisan calls for federal action
against the company. Haugen, like
the new whistleblower, also made
allegations to the Securities and
Exchange Commission, which
oversees publicly traded compa-
nies.
The new whistleblower is a f or-
mer member of Facebook’s Integ-
rity team whose identity is known
to The Post and who agreed to be
interviewed about the issues
raised in the legal filing. Perhaps
the most vivid moment in the
affidavit comes in a direct quote
the whistleblower reported hear-
ing from a top Facebook commu-
nications official during the con-
troversy following Russian inter-
ference in the 2016 presidential
election. The whistleblower’s
name is redacted in the af fidavit.
As the company sought to quell
the political controversy during a
critical period in 2017, Facebook
communications official Tucker
Bounds allegedly said, according
to the affidavit: “It will be a flash in
the pan. Some legislators will get
pissy. And then in a few weeks
they will move onto something
else. Meanwhile we are printing
money in the basement, and we
are fine.”
Bounds, now a vice president of
communications, said in a s tate-
ment to The Post, “Being asked
about a purported one-on-one
conversation four years ago with a
faceless person, with no other
sourcing than the empty accusa-
tion itself, is a first for me.”
Facebook spokeswoman Erin
McPike said in a statement, “This
is beneath the Washington Post,
which during the last five years
competed ferociously with the
New York Times over the number
of corroborating sources its re-
porters could find for single anec-
dotes in deeply reported, intricate
stories. It sets a dangerous prec-
edent to hang an en tire story on a
single source making a wide range
of claims without any apparent
corroboration.”
The quote from Bounds, ac-
cording to the affidavit from the
whistleblower, exemplified a
widespread attitude within the
company regarding problematic
content on the platform, report-
edly including illegal activity con-
ducted in Facebook Groups. The
whistleblower signed and dated
the claims in the five-page affida-
vit on Oct. 13, the week after Hau-
gen testified on Capitol Hill.
The SEC affidavit goes on to
allege that Facebook officials rou-
tinely undermined efforts to fight
misinformation, hate speech and
other problematic content out of
fear of angering then-President
Donald Trump and his political
allies, or out of concern about
yl Sandberg, are aware of the se-
verity of problems within the com-
pany but have failed to report
them in SEC filings available to
investors.
Though Facebook has been re-
markably successful since going
public in 2012, becoming one of
the most valuable companies in
the world, the new filings argue
that investors face serious down-
side risks they cannot understand
— a potentially serious allegation
for the SEC.
Section 230 of the Communica-
tions Decency Act, which some
lawmakers are pushing to reform,
gives broad immunity to Internet
companies for content that users
post on their platforms. That is a
barrier to some kinds of legal scru-
tiny but not necessarily to an in-
vestigation by the SEC, which has
wide-ranging enforcement pow-
ers.
“Facebook has created a busi-
ness model that accepted the
myth that it cannot be held liable,”
said Stephen M. Kohn, founding
director of the National Whistle-
blower Center and one of several
attorneys who worked on Friday’s
SEC filings.
The whistleblower told The
Post of an occasion in which Face-
book’s Public Policy team, led by
former Bush administration offi-
cial Joel Kaplan, defended a
“white list” that exempted Trump-
aligned Breitbart News, run then
by former White House strategist
Stephen K. Bannon, and other
select publishers from Facebook’s
ordinary rules against spreading
false news reports.
When a p erson in the video
conference questioned this policy,
Kaplan, the vice president of glob-
al policy, responded by saying, “Do
you want to start a fight with Steve
Bannon?” according to the whis-
tleblower in The Post interview.
Kaplan, who has been criticized
by former Facebook employees in
previous stories in The Post and
other news organizations for al-
legedly seeking to protect con-
servative interests, said in a state-
ment to The Post: “No matter how
many times these same stories are
repurposed and re-told, the facts
remain the same. I have consis-
tently pushed for fair treatment of
all publishers, irrespective of
ideological viewpoint, and ad-
vised that analytical and method-
ological rigor is especially impor-
tant when it comes to algorithmic
changes.”He added, “There has never
been a whitelist that exempts pub-
lishers, including Breitbart, from
Facebook’s rules against misinfor-
mation.”
The whistleblower complaint
also criticized Facebook for not
being aggressive enough in ad-
dressing evidence that the plat-
form was being used by military
officials in Myanmar to spread
hate speech during mass killings
of the minority Rohingya ethnic
group. Investigations have found
that hate speech flowed heavily on
Facebook, and the company has
acknowledged that it failed to act
swiftly enough to prevent the plat-
form from helping “incite offline
violence” in Myanmar.
In the most anguished line in
the affidavit, the whistleblower
wrote that many within the com-
pany had not done enough. “I,
working for Facebook, had been a
party to genocide.”
On the issue of Myanmar,
McPike said in her statement,
“Facebook’s approach in Myan-
mar today is fundamentally differ-
ent from what it was in 2017, and
allegations that we have not in-
vested in safety and security in the
country are wrong.”
The whistleblower also sharply
criticized Facebook’s alleged fail-
ure to adequately police its online
Groups. Organized around a
theme, many are public and avail-
able for anyone to join, while oth-
ers require invitations from exist-
ing members and, in some cases,
cannot be found through ordinary
searches. These so-called secret
Groups, in particular, enable “ter-
rifying and aberrant behaviors”
and are poorly monitored, if at all,
according to Friday’s af fidavit.
The whistleblower affidavit
and other documents filed with
the SEC said such Groups have
become havens for criminality, fa-
cilitating illegal trade in drugs
and antiquities. When the whis-
tleblower raised concerns about
this within the company, a F ace-
book official replied, “We need to
focus on the good,” the affidavit
says.
When asked about toxic con-
tent on the platform, McPike re-
sponded by saying in her state-
ment, “As a company, we have
every commercial and moral in-
centive — to try to give the maxi-
mum number of people as much
of a positive experience as possi-
ble on Facebook.”
[email protected]Facebook slammed in new a∞davit
BIZ HERMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Facebook employees work at the company’s campus in Menlo Park, Calif., in 2017. A n ew affidavit
about the tech firm from a whistleblower follows testimony on Capitol Hill from a former employee.Ex-employee’s filing
alleges firm let illegal
activity go uncheckedexecutives
repeatedly claimed
high rates of
success in
restricting illicit
and toxic content
... when in fact
they knew the firm
could not remove
this content and
remain profitable.”
Gretchen Peters,
with the Alliance to
Counter Crime OnlineBY DAVID NAKAMURAAttorney General Merrick Gar-
land on Friday launched a new
Justice Department initiative
aimed at combating discrimina-
tory lending policies among
banks, saying the practice harms
minority communities and con-
tributes to the racial wealth gap.
In a n address to staff, Garland
cited the history of banks deny-
ing loans to Black borrowers
during the Great Depression — a
tactic known as redlining — and
warned that such practices re-
main widespread more than
90 years later. He said the depart-
ment would, in conjunction with
other federal agencies, mount
the federal government’s “most
aggressive and coordinated ef-
fort” to root out and punish those
who violate federal laws that
prohibit such practices.
“Our initiative alone will not
erase the full legacy of discrimi-
nation,” Garland said. “But we
will spare no resource to ensure
that federal fair lending laws are
rigorously enforced.”
Under the initiative, officials
said, Justice’s civil rights division
will work with U.S. Attorneys’
offices across the country, as well
as with regulators at the Con-
sumer Financial Protection Bu-
reau and the Treasury Depart-
ment, to investigate and pros-
ecute banks for biased lending.
To punctuate the message, Jus-
tice officials also announced a
settlement in a federal redlining
case against Trustmark National
Bank in Memphis, saying the
institution has agreed to invest
$3.85 million in a loan subsidy
fund and dedicate loan officers as
well as open a l oan office in a
majority Black or Hispanic
neighborhood. The bank also will
pay a $5 million civil penalty,
federal officials said.
Federal authorities said that
from 2014 to 2018, Trustmark
avoided areas where minorities
lived, locating its loan offices in
majority White neighborhoods.
The settlement with Trust-
mark comes after the Justice
Department reached agreement
in August with Cadence Bank to
invest more than $5.5 million to
increase credit opportunities for
Black and Hispanic borrowers in
Houston.
“Redlining is alive and well
and has had a lasting negative
impact,” said Assistant Attorney
General Kristen Clarke, whooversees the Justice Depart-
ment’s civil rights division. “End-
ing redlining is a critical step
toward closing the widening
gaps of wealth between commu-
nities of colors and others. We
have a duty to act now.”
In a s tatement, Duane A. Dew-
ey, Trustmark’s president and
chief executive, said the bank
entered into the settlements with
the federal government “to avoid
the distraction of protracted liti-
gation and because we share the
common goal s of breaking down
barriers to home financing and
exploring innovative ways to
help residents of underserved
areas achieve the dream of home-
ownership.”
Dewey emphasized that the
bank already has implemented
new programs to increase ser-
vices to minority neighborhoods.Experts have said redlining
has contributed to generational
inequities as Black families have
had more obstacles than White
ones to buying a home and being
able to pass along that asset to
their children. In the first quarter
of 2020, for example, 44 percent
of Black families owned their
home, compared with 73.7 per-
cent of White families, according
to the Census Bureau.
“Today, a White family is
30 percent more likely to own a
home than a Black family,” Gar-
land said, emphasizing that the
gap is “larger than it was in
1960.”
Federal officials said their ef-
forts would not be limited to
traditional forms of redlining,
but would also address digital
forms of unfair lending based on
computer algorithms that offer
on loan advertisements or under-
writing guarantees to certain po-
tential customers, while leaving
out other groups.
Those tactics are “often more
subtle and difficult to detect, and
more resource-intensive to find,”
said Michael J. Hsu, the acting
comptroller of the currency at
the Treasury Department.
[email protected]Justice Dept. t o target
redlining among banks
A Memphis bank already
has agreed to pay out a
$5 million civil penalty“Ending redlining is a
critical step toward
closing the widening
gaps of wealth between
communities of colors
and others.”
Assistant Attorney General
Kristen Clarke, head of the Justice
Department’s civil rights division