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David Scott Witwer, Pennsylvania State University

(THE CONVERSATION) On July 30, 1975, Jimmy Hoffa, the former president of the Teamsters Union, disappeared.

Hed gone to a restaurant in suburban Detroit apparently expecting to meet a couple of mafia figures whom he had known for decades. Hed hoped to win their support for his bid to return to the unions presidency. A few customers remembered seeing him in the restaurant parking lot before 3 p.m.

Sometime after that he vanished without a trace.

The FBI has long assumed that Hoffa was the victim of a mob hit. But despite a decades-long investigation, no one has ever been charged with his murder. His body has never been found.

Yet even though his physical remains are missing, Hoffa lives on in our collective cultural consciousness.

Martin Scorseses The Irishman is only the latest film to offer a fictionalized version of Hoffas story. Before that there was Sylvester Stallones F.I.S.T. (1978), Danny DeVitos Hoffa (1992) and the made-for-TV movie Blood Feud (1983).

Hes been the subject of countless true crime books, most famously Charles Brandts I Heard You Paint Houses. He inspired an episode of The Simpsons. And he crops up in tabloids such as the Weekly World News, which claimed to have found him living in Argentina, hiding from the vengeful Kennedys.

Ever since I started researching and writing on the history of the Teamsters, people have asked me where I think Hoffas body is located. His story, Ive learned, is the one aspect of labor history with which nearly every American is familiar.

Hoffas disappearance transformed him from a controversial union leader into a mythic figure. Over time, Ive come to realize that Hoffas resonance in our culture has important political implications for the labor movement today.

The rise and fall of the Teamsters Teamster

Hoffa became a household name in the late 1950s, when Robert F. Kennedy, then serving as chief counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee, publicly grilled him about his mob ties.

While other witnesses avoided answering questions by invoking their Fifth Amendment rights, Hoffa, the newly elected leader of the nations largest and most powerful union, adopted a defiant stance. He never denied having connections with organized crime figures; instead, he claimed these were the kinds of people he sometimes had to work with as he strengthened and grew his union in the face of employer opposition. He angrily dismissed any allegations of corruption and touted the gains his union had won for its membership.

The verbal sparring between Kennedy and Hoffa became the most memorable part of the hearings.

To the benefit of big business, it turned Hoffa into a menacing symbol of labor racketeering.

But to his union members, it only enhanced his standing. They were already thrilled by the contracts Hoffa had negotiated that included better pay and working conditions. Now his members hailed him as their embattled champion and wore buttons proclaiming, Hoffa, the Teamsters Teamster.

His membership stayed loyal even as Hoffa became the target of a series of prosecution efforts.

After becoming attorney general in 1961, Kennedy created a unit within the Department of Justice whose attorneys referred to themselves as the Get Hoffa Squad. Their directive was to target Hoffa and his closest associates. The squads efforts culminated in convictions against Hoffa in 1964 for jury tampering and defrauding the unions pension fund. Despite that setback, Hoffas hold on the Teamsters presidency remained firm even after he entered federal prison in 1967.

When he finally did leave office, Hoffa did so voluntarily. He resigned in 1971 as part of a deal to win executive clemency from the Nixon administration. There was one condition written into the presidents grant of clemency: He couldnt run for a position in the union until 1980.

Once free, Hoffa claimed that his ban from union office was illegitimate and began planning to run for the Teamsters presidency. However, he faced resistance not from the government but from organized crime figures, who had found it easier to work with Hoffas successor, Frank Fitzsimmons.

Hoffas meeting at the restaurant on July 30, 1975, was part of his efforts to allay that opposition.

Clearly, things didnt go as planned.

Some theorize that the mafia had him killed in order to ensure that he would not run against Fitzsimmons in the Teamsters upcoming 1976 union election.

But after no arrests and multiple fruitless excavations to try to locate his body, Hoffas case remains, to this day, unresolved.

From man to myth

In Andrew Lawlers history of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, he writes, To die is tragic, but to go missing is to become a legend, a mystery.

Stories are supposed to have a beginning, a middle and an end. But when people go missing and are never found, Lawler explains, theyll endure as subjects of endless fascination. It allows their legacies to be re-written, over and over.

These new interpretations, Lawler observes, can reveal something fresh about who we were, who we are, and who we want to be.

The myth of Hoffa lives on, even though almost five decades have passed since that afternoon in July 1975.

What shapes has it taken?

To some, he stands for an idealized image of the working class a man whod known hard, manual labor and worked tirelessly to achieve his success. But even after rising to his leadership post, Hoffa lived simply and eschewed pretense.

As a Washington Post article from 1992 put it, He wore white socks, and liked his beef cooked medium well He snored at the opera.

Meanwhile, his feud with the Kennedys pitted a populist tough guy off the loading docks against the professional class, the governing class, the educated experts. The Washington Post piece ties Hoffas story to that of another working-class icon. Watching Hoffa go up against Bobby Kennedy was like watching John Henry go up against a steam hammer it was only a matter of time before he lost.

But Hoffas myth can also serve as a morality tale. The New Republic, for instance, described how Danny DeVitos 1992 film reworks Hoffas life into the story of an embattled champion of the working class who makes a Faustian pact with the underworld.

In the movie, Hoffas Teamsters are caught in hopeless picket line battles with mob goons who the anti-union employers have hired. In order to get those goons to switch sides, Hoffa makes a bargain with mafia leaders. But the mafia ultimately has Hoffa killed when he tries to defy their control, becoming the victim of his own unbridled ambition.

Finally, the underworlds mysterious role in Hoffas death keeps his story compelling for Americans who have a fascination with conspiracy theories. It supports the idea of an invisible cabal that secretly runs everything, and which can make even a famous labor leader disappear without a trace.

Hoffas story is often intertwined with theories about the Kennedy assassination that attribute the presidents murder to an organized crime conspiracy. Both Hoffa and Kennedys murders, in these accounts, highlight the underworlds apparently unlimited power to protect its interests, with tentacles that extend into the government and law enforcement.

Did Hoffa taint the labor movement?

Over two decades after he went missing, a 1997 article in The Los Angeles Times noted that No union in America conjures up more negative images than the Teamsters.

This matters, because for most Americans who lack first-hand knowledge about organized labor, Hoffa is the only labor leaders name they recognize. And as communications scholar William Puette has noted, the Teamsters notoriety is such that for many people in this country the Teamsters Union is the labor movement.

A union widely perceived as mobbed up with a labor leader notorious for his Mafia ties has come, in the minds of some Americans, to represent the entire labor movement. That perception, in turn, bolsters arguments against legislative reforms that would facilitate union organizing efforts.

The other themes in Hoffas myth have similar negative implications for labor. He represents a nostalgic, white, male identity that once existed in a seemingly lost world of manual work. That myth also implies that the unions that emerged in those olden times are no longer necessary.

This depiction doesnt match reality. Todays working class is diverse and employed in a broad spectrum of hard manual labor. Whether youre working as a home health aide or in the gig economy, the need for union protection remains quite real.

But for those working-class Americans who see their society controlled by a hidden cabal of powerful, corrupt forces like the puppet masters who supposedly had JFK and Hoffa killed labor activism can appear quixotic.

For these reasons, the ghost of Jimmy Hoffa continues to haunt the labor movement today.

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: http://theconversation.com/jimmy-hoffa-disappeared-and-then-his-legacy-took-on-a-life-of-its-own-126393.

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Jimmy Hoffa disappeared and then his legacy took on a life of its own - Torrington Register Citizen

Lev Parnas, the recently indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani, wants to dish to congressional impeachment investigators about Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the combative top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Parnas lawyer told CNN.

The attorney, Joseph Bondy, says Parnas is willing to tell Congress about a meeting Nunes allegedly had last year in Vienna with a disgraced former Ukrainian prosecutor about digging up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden. Nunes has been one of Trumps staunchest defenders in the impeachment inquiry, which centers on whether Trump was involved in pressuring Ukraine to investigate his chief political rival in the 2020 presidential campaign.

Nunes traveled to Europe in November 2018 with three of his staffers to pursue investigative work, reportedly related to his efforts to look into a conspiracy theory about the origins of special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The Daily Beast reported this week that Parnas claims to have helped arrange meetings for Nunes while he was overseas.

Parnas, a Soviet-born American, was apprehended with associate Igor Frumin at New Yorks JFK Airport in October and charged with conspiring to funnel foreign money into American political campaigns and trying to influence US relations with Ukraine. The pair worked with Giuliani, Trumps personal lawyer, to allegedly advance the scheme against Biden. CNN reports:

Bondy tells CNN that his client and Nunes began communicating around the time of the Vienna trip. Parnas says he worked to put Nunes in touch with Ukrainians who could help Nunes dig up dirt on Biden and Democrats in Ukraine, according to Bondy.

That information would likely be of great interest to House Democrats given its overlap with the current impeachment inquiry into President Trump, and could put Nunes in a difficult spot.

Nunes has denied the allegations and yesterday said he planned to sue CNN over its reporting on his involvement with Parnas. Some political operative offered these fake stories to at least five different media outlets before finding someone irresponsible enough to publish them, Nunes told Breitbart News. I look forward to prosecuting these cases, including the media outlets, as well as the sources of their fake stories, to the fullest extent of the law.

Parnas motivation for speaking to Congress seems to stem from hopes that it may affect his criminal case. Bondy told CNN that Parnas is willing to comply with a congressional subpoena for documents and testimony as part of the impeachment inquiry in a manner that would allow him to protect his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Parnas has already been subpoenaed by Congress. He hasturned over a trove of documents and other evidence, including videos and photos, related to Trumps efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden. He was unable to appear for a closed-door deposition in October, however, because he was in jail awaiting arraignment for the campaign finance charges pending in New York.

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Indicted Giuliani Associate Wants to Dish on Devin Nunes - Mother Jones

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SCRANTON, Pa. -- Shawn Christy has rested his defense and his fate is now in the hands of the jury.

The man from McAdoo is accused of threatening to kill the president and then committing a string of federal crimes while on the run from authorities for three months.

The final day of testimony saw tense exchanges and harsh words from Christy.

While debating with the judge and the prosecution about whether his evidence was admissible in court, Christy said, "Start charging cops and stop playing games in this courtroom. You're wasting my time and starting to annoy me greatly."

He later called one of the Assistant U.S. Attorneys a "f***ing punk." At one point the judge told the jury to leave the courtroom so he could tell Christy to "think long and hard about the impact you're having on the jury's opinion of you."

For his final witness, Shawn Christy called himself to the stand, according to WNEP.

Most of the evidence he presented to the jury and the testimony he gave did not have to do with the federal crimes he is charged with in this case. Instead, he focused on his personal gripes with law enforcement and the government.

Christy is charged with threatening to kill President Trump and Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli. He's also charged with several federal crimes he allegedly committed while on the run last year, crimes including illegally having a gun.

Before the jury was even called in, the judge ruled most of the evidence Christy planned as irrelevant and inadmissible in court.

The decision led Christy to tell the judge, "You are really pushing my buttons today and I don't appreciate it."

He then called the court, a "joke" and a "kangaroo court with a bunch of punk*ss federal marshals who think they're tough."

During his argument with the judge, Christy kept referring to the 2017 assault case in which he was accused of attacking the then-mayor of McAdoo Stephen Holly. He claims video evidence of the fight between the two was altered by a McAdoo police officer. He called that Schuykill County case the backbone of this federal case.

Christy missed his first court date for that case in May of last year. That's when a warrant went out for his arrest and he eventually became a fugitive.

Christy says he was told by his former public defender not to show up to that court date.

The judge and prosecution continuously insisted that the McAdoo assault case was irrelevant.

Once Christy took the stand, he told the jury that he did not receive all of his mail while he was in prison waiting for this trial, mail that he needed to be able to represent himself in court.

He showed the jury a picture from when he was captured and arrested in Ohio last September after a three-month manhunt. He says the sneakers he was wearing and the wallet he was carrying that day were not returned to him.

Christy also admitted to breaking into the home of his uncle in Luzerne County and the home in Kentucky of Sarah Palin's former son-in-law, but only to note that it struck him as odd that guns were lying around both of those homes.

When the prosecution cross-examined Christy, he denied stealing guns from his uncle.

He also denied posting the threat to kill the president, claiming his Facebook page was hacked.

The prosecution pointed to several Facebook posts made on what appears to be Shawn Christy's Facebook page that referenced specific people and events Christy had mentioned in his testimony.

Christy said all of it was public information so anyone could have posted it.

When the government kept pressing, Christy eventually invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer any more questions. His direct testimony was then stricken from the record, and the jury was told to disregard it completely.

During closing arguments, Assistant U.S. Attorney Francis Sempa stated "I'm not going to spend any more time on Mr. Christy's and his parent's beliefs about corruption in Schuylkill County. There's no credible evidence for that." And that even if there were, that does not excuse Christy's unlawful conduct in this case. He went through each of Christy's charges one by one and reviewed the evidence that he says proves Christy committed each crime.

Sempa pleaded with the jury to hold Christy accountable for "shredding the rule of law."

During his closing argument, Christy attempted to discredit many of the prosecution's witnesses and their testimonies.

Addressing the jury, he said, "You get to decide whether you've seen all the evidence or whether it was destroyed or hidden. That's up to you."

The jury is scheduled to begin deliberating Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. and they could have a verdict by the afternoon.

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Man who threatened to kill President Trump calls himself to stand during trial in Scranton - WPMT FOX 43

Former White House counsel Don McGahn has to comply with subpoenas from the House of Representatives, a federal judge has ruled. The judge smacked down the Trump administrations argument that they had absolute immunity, and in the ruling proclaimed that Presidents are not kings. Ring of Fires Farron Cousins explains what this decision means and what will be the next move for the White House.

Transcript:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.When the second half of the Robert Mueller report came out, uh, there was a lot of information in there that said that at the time, the white house counselor Don McGahn had carried out a lot of orders that Donald Trump asked him to do, that McGann felt were either inappropriate or quite possibly illegal. And after finding that out from the Mueller report, Democrats in the house of representatives issued a subpoena for McGahn to come and testify to them and explain what exactly he meant by carrying out orders by the president that he felt were illegal. Donald Trump, of course, blocked McGann from going to testify. They said, Nope, we have immunity. Were not going to let Don McGahn or anyone else from the white house, current or former go and testify in front of you. That was seven months ago that this happened. Well, yesterday, finally, a federal judge issued a ruling on this case and said, guess what, Donald Trump, you are not a King. That was in the ruling, by the way. And yes, Don McGahn, you can in fact go and testify. You still have all your legal rights when you testify, you know, were, were not taking away your rights, you know, to claim the fifth amendment, your freedom of speech, none of that. You still have all the legal rights a normal person would have, but you cannot ignore a subpoena. There is no such thing as blanket immunity and youre going to go testify. I want to read this little snippet here from the actual ruling itself because its so damning against Donald Trump stated simply the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that presidents are not Kings. This means that they do not have subjects bound by loyalty or blood whose destiny theyre entitled to control rather in this land of Liberty. It is indisputable that current and former employees of the white house work for the people of the United States and that they take an oath to protect and defend the constitution of the United States. Moreover, as citizens of the United States current and former senior level, presidential aides have constitutional rights including the right to free speech and they retain these rights even after they have transitioned back into private life. Meaning youve got your constitutional rights buddy, even though youre no longer the white house counsel, but you cant be prohibited from going and testifying in front of Congress. And again, this is related to what was said in the Muller report. So this is kind of old news. The hearing is not, or the ruling, excuse me, is not because it just came down yesterday, but this could have very serious ramifications for the current hearings happening in the house of representatives because Donald Trump has made same claim about the people. He is prohibited from testifying before Congress that he did back in the Mueller days. And that is, weve got blanket immunity. You cant call my people to testify. Theyve been prohibiting people inside the white house from going in, speaking about the Ukraine scandal, just like they did about the Mueller report. And this judge says, Nope, not going to fly. That cant happen. So of course the Trump administration is absolutely going to appeal this, but with any luck judges further down the line, possibly even the Supreme court may end up agreeing with this federal judge. Because after all, as weve sta said, if you give the white house blanket immunity, you also run the risk of giving the next democratic president because eventually well have another one. They would also enjoy that same immunity, and thats when its going to come back to bite those Republicans. So theyre not willing to take the chance right now to say that the white house is in fact above the law because they know eventually theyre not going to control the white house anymore.

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Judge Smacks Down Trump Administration's Claim That They're Above The Law - The Ring of Fire Network - The Ring of Fire Network

Ambassador Gordon Sondland's belated admission during the impeachment hearings this week of a "quid pro quo" offered by President Donald Trump to Ukraine has been hailed as a "John Dean moment," recalling the whistleblowing testimony of White House Counsel Dean during the Senate Watergate hearings.

Like Dean during Watergate, as new witness accounts have highlighted contradictions and evasions in his testimony, Sondland has shifted from protecting the president to protecting himself by implicating key players around him. But as in Watergate, the door to Sondland's bombshell testimony was opened by a series of whistleblowers whose cumulative testimony forced his hand.

The current hearings were triggered by a whistleblower complaint three months ago by an anonymous CIA analyst, whose "hearsay" claims have been substantiated by direct witnesses to the events described, like Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and Fiona Hill at the National Security Council (NSC). The concerns Vindman and Hill reported to the NSC lead counsel in July were finally aired in public testimony this week.

Wrapping up a tumultuous week of hearings, House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., argued Trump's withholding of military aid "to an ally at war" to force a Ukrainian investigation of his political rival Joe Biden "is far more serious than a third-rate burglary of the Democratic headquarters," and goes "beyond anything Nixon did."

But as Republicans clamor for the anonymous whistleblower to testify and continue to intimidate witnesses, the partisan atmosphere and daily drip of revelations also recall Watergate - specifically how the Nixon campaign tried, and ultimately failed, to keep potential witnesses quiet during Watergate and insulate President Richard Nixon from the crisis.

The first whistleblower during Watergate was driven into the hands of prosecutors and attorneys for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) thanks to a tactical blunder by the Nixon campaign, whose attorneys washed their hands of him as investigators closed in.

While Dean would later reveal the coverup, former FBI agent Alfred Baldwin was the first member of the burglary team to talk. Three weeks after the Watergate arrests, Baldwin agreed to cooperate with prosecutors to avoid indictment and disclosed an earlier break-in at DNC headquarters, during which two phones were bugged.

The bugs had been planted by ex-CIA officer James McCord, who was head of security for the Committee to Reelect the President (CRP). The bug targeting DNC chairman Larry O'Brien was placed on the wrong phone and didn't work. But from late May to mid-June, McCord directed Baldwin to monitor over 200 intercepted conversations on DNC official Spencer Oliver's phone. Baldwin was the only witness to those calls and his typed logs of the conversations were passed to campaign chief (and former Attorney General) John Mitchell.

Baldwin eavesdropped on the calls from a seventh-floor room at the Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge, overlooking the sixth-floor offices of the DNC across the street. He monitored DNC headquarters from his balcony and observed the early-morning arrests of McCord and the burglary team. Two days after the arrests, Mitchell instructed his campaign deputy Jeb Magruder to burn Baldwin's logs of the DNC intercepts.

McCord warned Baldwin and his attorneys to "keep their mouths shut." The head of campaign security instructed Baldwin to "say that he worked for McCord Associates (the consulting firm through which he had been hired), rather than CRP ... use a CRP lawyer ...(and) plead the Fifth Amendment to questions."

O'Brien filed a $1 million suit against CRP and the burglars. As luck would have it, one of Baldwin's attorneys was a close friend of O'Brien's predecessor, John Bailey, and knew his client could be a star witness in the lawsuit. The attorney briefed Bailey on Baldwin's involvement, prompting the DNC's lawyer to tell a judge that he believed DNC headquarters had been under electronic surveillance "over a period of days and weeks" before June 17.

This happened 10 days before prosecutors or the FBI heard Baldwin's story. Both they and the public thought the burglars' mission to bug the DNC had failed.

When Baldwin visited Washington with his lawyers on July 5, CRP attorneys "disavowed" him, insisting that "the Committee had nothing to do with the break-in" and as Baldwin was never officially working for the Committee, there would be no money or help forthcoming from the Nixon campaign.

Abandoned by CRP, Baldwin cut a deal with prosecutors later that day, offering his full cooperation in exchange for avoiding prosecution. In subsequent interviews, Baldwin revealed details of the earlier break-in; the intercepted calls monitored on Oliver's phone; and how he had posed as John Bailey's nephew to get a tour of the DNC from Oliver's secretary before the second break-in. He also implicated White House security consultant Howard Hunt and CRP counsel Gordon Liddy in the burglary, deepening the involvement of the Nixon campaign.

Senate Watergate Committee investigators later found it "incredible" that CRP's lawyers had made no serious attempt to stop Baldwin from telling prosecutors what he knew, seemingly unconcerned that Baldwin would tie Hunt and Liddy to the break-in, so long as nobody higher up the chain was implicated.

On Aug. 26, a DNC attorney met secretly with Baldwin and his attorneys, leading to a 26-page memo that gave the full story to the DNC. Two weeks later, O'Brien announced that his phone and Oliver's had been tapped in an earlier break-in and monitored for three weeks. The secret memo was also leaked to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who reported Baldwin's story without identifying him. In early October, Baldwin exited the shadows, giving an exclusive interview to the Los Angeles Times.

While the contents of the calls Baldwin monitored were excluded from the Watergate trial due to wiretapping statutes, his testimony implicated McCord, Hunt, Liddy and CRP in the break-in. After refusing to testify during the trial, McCord then famously wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica which broke the coverup wide open and led John Dean to talk.

One month later, Dean revealed to prosecutors that Hunt and Liddy had also been involved in a White House sanctioned break-in targeting Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg before Watergate. When Hunt admitted his role in the Ellsberg break-in, using CIA equipment, another whistleblower realized he had potentially explosive information and stepped forward.

Rob Roy Ratliff, the CIA liaison to the National Security Council, revealed that his White House office had been used by Hunt to pass sealed envelopes to the Agency in the year before the break-in. One of the envelopes was addressed to the CIA's chief psychiatrist and contained sexual gossip on Ellsberg, and a colleague was "shocked and bewildered by the things that Hunt told him he was doing" at the White House.

Like Vindman and Hill today, Ratliff reported his concerns about Hunt's irregular activity through proper channels. He alerted the CIA director, worried that fresh revelations of Hunt's links to the Agency could prove damaging, as the CIA had insisted it had cut off all support for Hunt before the Ellsberg break-in. But little came of it. The CIA Inspector General's investigation into the incident remains classified and the contents of the other sealed packages Hunt sent to the Agency before Watergate remain a mystery. Like the whistleblowers at the NSC today, Ratliff tried to do the right thing but his revelations were buried, a reminder of why getting the whistleblower complaint to Congress was critical to the current investigation.

Together, the stories of Baldwin and Ratliff show that Watergate whistleblowing went much deeper than White House Counsel John Dean, and that his pivotal testimony came about in part because of other witnesses before him. Baldwin's decision to talk was a tale of two attorneys on opposite sides of the political spectrum - the CRP attorney who cut him adrift; and his own attorney, a Democrat who found a willing ear at the DNC.

Ostracized as scapegoats by the Nixon campaign, McCord and Baldwin responded with the most damaging and compelling testimony against the government in the opening week of Senate Watergate hearings.

The experiences of the Watergate whistleblowers reflect what we're seeing in the impeachment inquiry to date - a battle to keep key witnesses silent, with each new layer of testimony smoking out new witnesses, whose cumulative accounts have now revealed a clear picture.

O'Sullivan is a documentary filmmaker, senior lecturer in filmmaking at Kingston University, London and author of the new book, "Dirty Tricks: Nixon, Watergate and the CIA."

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The real threat to Donald Trump from the impeachment hearings - Bryan-College Station Eagle