On a muggy Thursday morning in June, I drove through the gates of the Federal Correctional Institute in Tallahassee to meet a convicted criminal who, as far as I can tell, is the only person connected to two huge environmental contamination cases in Mississippi to ever serve prison time.
Yet, strangely, the convicted felon I was on my way to meet wasn’t a polluter. On the contrary, Tennie White, who was prosecuted by a joint team made up of attorneys from the Environmental Protection Agency and the environmental crimes division of the Justice Department, had spent her professional life exposing contamination. She was an environmental lab owner who was particularly vocal about protecting poor African-American communities. Before she was charged and prosecuted, White had spent much of her time volunteering for an organization she had co-founded to help these Mississippians contend with pollution.
Although White, who is 57, had spent years closely involved with dramatic cases that stood out even in a state with more than its share of the country’s industrial pollution — two of which in particular resulted in severe harm to many people and millions of dollars in cleanup costs — White’s prosecution wasn’t obviously related to any of these incidents. Indeed, the crime White had been convicted of didn’t seem to have any environmental consequences at all.
White was convicted in 2013 of “faking laboratory testing results and lying to federal investigators.” Maureen O’Mara, the special agent in charge of the EPA’s criminal enforcement program in Mississippi, explained in a press release that White’s conviction was essential to safeguarding the public’s health and that her “case demonstrates that individuals who falsify environmental records and try to mislead the government will be prosecuted and held accountable.”
During White’s trial, the federal prosecutor, Richard Powers, put it more simply: “This case is about lying.” White hadn’t been able to produce the original results for three wastewater tests an auto parts manufacturer named BorgWarner had hired her to perform, Powers explained to the jury at the start of her weeklong trial. He promised to convince them that she had never done the tests and had lied about them to EPA investigators. He successfully did so. On May 23, 2013, a jury found Tennie White guilty, and three months later, she was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison.
So when I heard White was being released to a halfway house after serving 27 months of her sentence, I decided to go down to meet her at the Federal Correctional Institute in Tallahassee to see for myself whether Tennie White was a fraud and a cheat, as the government attorneys contended, or perhaps, someone more complicated.
In the mid-1980s, within a few years of founding the Maranatha Faith Center, Jamison was searching for a new building to accommodate his growing congregation. When he heard that a stone-faced A-frame church, complete with pews and stained-glass windows, was for sale on the north side of Columbus, Mississippi, he jumped at the chance.
Kerr-McGee Chemical Corporation was a giant energy and chemical company perhaps best known for operating the nuclear power plant where Karen Silkwood was poisoned by plutonium. But Jamison hadn’t seen the Meryl Streep movie about Silkwood when he bought the church. He knew the company simply as the owner of the factory just down the road. He didn’t even know what the plant made.
That changed in 1999, when Jamison decided to add a sanctuary onto his building to accommodate his growing congregation. His first step was to remove a culvert from the parking lot of the property so they could lay the foundation. Having worked many years in construction, Jamison didn’t hesitate to get down in the ditch with his crew. After only a few hours of digging, a strange, greasy jelly began to accumulate in the ditch. It looked like shiny beads, droplets that would ooze up from the soil. And as he and his crew dug deeper, more of it pooled in the dirt.
Jamison called the city, which sent a worker to investigate, who advised him that the goo was likely creosote, and that Jamison ought to call Kerr-McGee. Jamison did and soon one of the plant’s managers arrived at the site. “He said, ‘Well, that’s not our product,’” Jamison recently recalled. “And if it was, it wouldn’t hurt you.”
The plant had been using creosote, an oily mixture made with coal tar, as well as a toxic compound called pentachlorophenol, to preserve the wood of railroad ties since 1928, which also happens to be around the time that scientists were publishing the first studies linking creosote and cancer. Kerr-McGee acquired the plant from a company called Moss American in 1963. By the mid-1980s, Kerr-McGee was the country’s second largest supplier of railroad ties. By the time the manager was paying his visit to Jamison, it was clear that contact with creosote could cause kidney and liver problems, chemical burns, convulsions, and even death. That same year, in a groundwater monitoring report Kerr-McGee was required to file with the state and EPA as a result of earlier contamination, it measured several toxic components of creosote at dangerous levels on its property near Jamison’s church. One, napthalene, which is thought to cause anemia, cataracts, and cancer, was present at 25 times the drinking water level set by the EPA.
But Jamison knew little about railroad ties or chemicals, so he took the Kerr-McGee man at his word. He and his small crew returned to work, digging farther down and unearthing more and more of the weird, oily substance. Several weeks later, the plant manager called again, according to Jamison. “This time, he said, ‘We want to be a good neighbor. Would you mind if we came over and just removed that debris from the culverts so you can use them easily?’”
Jamison accepted the offer. But to his dismay the Kerr-McGee crew arrived wearing hazmat suits. He and his workers had just spent more than a month in direct contact with what he finally understood to be a dangerous substance — wearing no protection. Several members of the crew had already developed skin rashes and breathing problems. Jamison himself had begun to feel unwell while he was digging.
“Before I went into that ditch to work, I had perfect blood pressure, I had good kidneys,” said Jamison. “After six weeks of direct exposure, I came out, and my blood pressure was being controlled by four pills two times a day, and my kidneys were functioning at less than a third of their normal function.”
Jamison hired a local attorney, Wilbur Colom, and in 1999, the company offered him a $3 million settlement, according to Jamison. He refused the offer, and a subsequent one for $4.5 million, he said, because the money came with a catch: He wouldn’t be able to tell anyone what had happened. Keeping the toxic goo secret and leaving others in harm’s way “didn’t seem like the pastoral thing to do.”
Rev. Steve Jamison walks alongside a polluted ditch that flows through the property of Maranatha Faith Center in Columbus, Mississippi. The ditch is where Jamison first discovered creosote flushed out from the old Kerr-McGee site.
Photo: Nicole Craine for The Intercept
The deacon has since died, and the current pastor of the First Assembly of God, Jody Gurley, disputed Jamison’s account. “There was never any environmental testing done or required,” said Gurley, who has only led the church for the past five years but has spoken about the sale with members of his congregation who remember it. “It wasn’t like they were trying to dump the property off,” he said. But Gurley added that Jamison might have expected the contamination. “Because of the location, I’m not surprised. You could see runoff from Kerr-McGee. You could always see the runoff.”
Jamison also learned that Kerr-McGee had known for years about the dangers of its plant. In 1997, one of Kerr-McGee’s environmental project managers, Steven Ladner, contacted the EPA’s office of solid waste to report creosote contamination at seven of its plants, including the one in Columbus. Ladner told agency staffer C. Pan Lee that the sites had “quite extensive contaminated areas” that would make cleanup difficult, according to a transcript of the call.
Yet Kerr-McGee managers publicly downplayed or lied about the extensive contamination at the plant, according to more than a dozen former workers interviewed on tape by a local documentary filmmaker. Creosote spills occurred daily, they said. And many big spills that should have been reported to authorities were kept secret and covered up with soap powder, dirt, gravel, or sawdust. Plant workers also did extensive cleanups before visits and inspections.
Mark Finch, who worked at the Kerr-McGee plant for 10 years, was repeatedly warned that reporting leaks and spills to the EPA was “not a good career move.” After accurately filling out reports and sending them to the federal agency, Finch was fired in 2002.
After Jamison filed his lawsuit over the contamination at Maranatha, Kerr-McGee attorneys instructed some of the plant workers not to speak to lawyers or the press. “They told us it was best for us to keep our mouths shut or we’d be in trouble,” said Jerrie Lewis Brooks, who worked at the Columbus plant for 15 years.
Jamison even contacted Johnnie Cochran, the attorney famous for taking high-profile cases, including O.J. Simpson’s. At first it seemed that Cochran was going to take the case, and he went down to Mississippi in 2001 to talk about how the plight of the Maranatha congregation fit into the larger pattern of environmental injustice in America. “Black communities make easy victims for careless corporations,” he told the crowd that assembled to hear him. “If you continue looking the other way when the powerless are wronged, then nothing will ever change.”
Cochran told Jamison that his was “the perfect case of Goliath and David.” But about two months after Cochran agreed to represent the church, the pastor saw him on TV signing a contract with the NFL Players Association. “One of Kerr-McGee’s lawyers that I knew was there as the NFL lawyer,” said Jamison. And when he suggested to Cochran that getting a job through the lawyers representing his opponents might pose a conflict, Jamison said, Cochran dropped his case.
Just after he discovered the creosote, it seemed Jamison would get the help of the state environmental agency, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, to whom he reported the discovery. In late 1999, the MDEQ issued an order requiring Kerr-McGee to clean his property. But for the next eight years, the ditch remained just as it was — half-dug in the lot outside the church. In 2004, the plant shut down, and still no one came to clean up his property, leaving Jamison unable to complete his extension. It wasn’t until 2007 that the city of Columbus used money from a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to pave it over.
From that point on, Kerr-McGee’s lawyers contended that Jamison’s property had been remediated. Jamison’s attorney hired a consultant named Lois George to test the soil and she reported to him, and to the court, that there was no creosote on the land.
Kerr-McGee no longer exists as a company, but at the time a spokesperson named Debbie Schramm said, “Our environmental performance has been nationally recognized for environmental responsibility, and our plants operate safely and have not harmed anyone.”
Jamison, though, remained convinced there was still creosote on the church property. He had seen how much of it had oozed from the ditch. And he had watched the workers from the city do their work. He knew that none of them had removed or processed the soil before paving it over, but he was unable to prove his suspicions. The city claimed he couldn’t remove the concrete to dig in his own churchyard because the culvert was now government property.
It was only when Jamison hired Tennie White, someone his friend recommended as both knowledgeable about contamination and beyond the reach of his powerful neighbor, that he was able to get to the truth of what lay in the soil under his church.
Photo: Nicole Craine for The Intercept
After more than 70 years of operation, Kerr-McGee’s toxic legacy took the form of agricultural chemicals, rocket fuel, decaying nuclear isotopes, and all manner of harmful substances spread over more than 2,700 contaminated sites in 47 states including Florida, New Jersey, Idaho, Illinois, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. The cost of cleaning these sites — and compensating all the people who had been harmed by them — was so great it threatened the giant energy company’s very future.
The extent of the unpleasant financial consequences of the toxic messes was made clear to the company in 1999, when the EPA told Kerr-McGee it would have to pay more than $178 million to clean up a creosote factory in Manville, New Jersey. Soon after, the company began seeking advice on how to free itself from its unwanted environmental baggage. In 2000 one of its investment bankers, Lehman Brothers, came up with a plan.
The idea of “Project Focus” was to separate the profitable part of Kerr-McGee from the liabilities that were weighing it down. By early 2000, the company’s board of directors had begun to put the plan into action by creating a new company into which they transferred their profitable assets, including oil and gas holdings worth billions of dollars.
What was left after the transfers was Kerr-McGee’s moderately profitable business making a white pigment called titanium dioxide — that and responsibility for what turned out to be billions of dollars worth of environmental liabilities, $442 million in pension costs, and $186 million in “other post-employment benefits.”
Kerr-McGee put this company — with only $40 million in cash and its titanium dioxide business to offset all those debts — up for sale in 2005. The liabilities were so great they threatened to drag the whole business under, as was made clear in a sketch Lehman Brothers Managing Director Chris Watson drew on a whiteboard to illustrate the structure of the deal. In the drawing, according to court documents, the titanium dioxide business was depicted as a flower sharing a pot with weeds that the banker labeled as “Kerr-McGee’s environmental legacies.”
Kerr-McGee tried to put a positive spin on the debt-laden enterprise when it announced its separation in 2005 with an upbeat press release: “Current market conditions for this industry now make it an ideal time to unlock this value for our stockholders.” The market saw through the scheme, however, and no buyers stepped forward. So later that year, Kerr-McGee spun off its liabilities and debts into a new company called Tronox Inc.
It was 2009 when Tennie White first stumbled across the name Tronox. She had gone to the EPA’s reading room in Washington, D.C., on behalf of Jamison to read the files relevant to the Columbus site. The name surprised her. Up to a certain point in time, all the documents listed Kerr-McGee as the party responsible for the contamination. Suddenly, in the most recent files, Tronox had appeared.
By the time White was puzzling over the significance of Tronox, the weeds had already won out. In 2009, overcome with debt less than three years after it was created, Tronox filed for bankruptcy, leaving Jamison and more than 7,000 others who lived on or near the contaminated sites with little hope of getting justice. They couldn’t get compensation from Tronox because it was bankrupt. Nor could they turn to what was left of Kerr-McGee. In 2006, just six months after the spinoff relieved the company of its unappealing debt burden, Anadarko, another giant energy company, had snapped up the profitable part of Kerr-McGee for $18 billion.
Kerr-McGee, the Goliath Jamison had been battling for a decade, had disappeared.
Photo: Nicole Craine for The Intercept
In 1995, after about 10 years with Environmental Protection Systems and several years working for a metal finishing company, White went out on her own, founding an environmental laboratory that did asbestos removal as well as tests for an ever-shifting cast of contaminants at different industrial sites. Over the years, even as the particulars of the work changed, White began to notice that certain things remained the same. A lot of the sites she was hired to test were in small towns that had been polluted by big companies. And the people who lived there were often poor and didn’t understand the dangers the contamination posed.
By the time Jamison reached out to White to see if she would help him prove there was creosote contamination on his property, White had worked as a lab analyst on many similar cases, in which various industries had left chemicals in the soil and water.
For years, White had a straightforward role in these cases — to run tests. She had enjoyed letting the test results speak for themselves. But now she found herself in a different position. She had recently been to Hattiesburg, in southern Mississippi, where Kerr-McGee had also insisted there was no creosote contamination. While she was attending a community meeting there, she began to fully appreciate, for the first time, how the numbers she had been calculating for years affected actual men, women, and children.
“The people became real,” was how she remembered it recently. Some of the Hattiesburg residents told her about the smells that used to waft down their streets from the plant and the rashes their children had suffered for years. In the late 1980s, she had done some testing on the site of a local Ford dealership and found creosote, and on that more recent visit, she saw children playing in what she was pretty certain was contaminated mud.
From reading through the state’s files, White knew that Mississippi had handled other cases of creosote contamination differently. For instance, in Wiggins, Mississippi, a town that was about two-thirds white, both the EPA and the state environmental agency had designated a similar situation an emergency and remediated the contamination in less than a year. The neighborhoods affected by creosote contamination in Hattiesburg and Columbus, by contrast, were mostly black, and the problems there had gone unaddressed for many years.
When she was growing up, White’s parents used to tell her about their own childhoods in rural Mississippi towns during the Jim Crow era. She used to think that the indignities they suffered — having to get off the sidewalk when white people were coming and knowing you weren’t supposed to look them in the eye — were relics of the past. But the disrespect she saw in the contamination of these poor black communities felt directly connected to the struggles of her parents’ generation.
Cleaning up only contamination that affected white people — and knowingly leaving that found in poor black neighborhoods — was just another form of racism. And, as she told the city council of Hattiesburg in June 2008, it was criminal.
White took a close look at the report prepared by Lois George, the environmental consultant Jamison’s lawyer had hired and realized that the detection levels for the contaminants had been set higher than the action levels the EPA had set for those chemicals. White says she repeatedly asked George to provide the original test results on which her report was based, but never received the data. Lois George declined a request to comment for this article, citing client confidentiality.
From her years analyzing samples, White knew that “if you want to cover up some environmental contamination, you just raise the detection limits and then there appears to be nothing there.” So White and Jamison came up with a plan they hoped would force the government to test the soil again. Although city officials had warned Jamison not to move the concrete, on June 4, 2009, they rented a backhoe and did just that. Then White placed a call to 911 to report an open hole — a situation she knew obligated authorities to respond immediately, under state law. The MDEQ sent someone to the site but didn’t test the substance they had unearthed.
White then called the EPA, which a week later sent investigators who hauled off boxes of soil — many of which proved to be contaminated. In July, White wrote to Lisa Jackson, then head of the EPA, “on behalf of 24,700 citizens of Columbus,” to get the EPA’s help with the cleanup. In October, White wrote to the EPA again, noting that 8,976 people living within one mile of the Kerr plant, including 1,030 children, were being exposed to “unacceptable levels of Creosote and Creosote Break Down products.”
The EPA issued its final analytical report on the Columbus site in March 2011, which noted that levels of six carcinogenic semi-volatile organic compounds exceeded the recommended action levels, sometimes by more than six times. The contaminated spots included the playing field of the local middle school. By September 2011, the agency had designated a 90-acre tract that included the plant a superfund site. The cleanup, which began more than two years ago, is expected to cost some $67 million and last at least another three years. Since remediation of the area nearest Jamison’s church began in mid-October, J5, the construction management at the firm in charge of the project, removed some 600 tons of creosote-contaminated soil, according to Robyn Eastman, a director at J5. Eastman says he expects to remove another 600 tons before the section is finished in December.
Along the way to what was arguably her biggest achievement, White managed to anger pretty much every authority figure she encountered. The woman who had once taken comfort in sticking to the numbers began firing off outraged letters.
When the MDEQ failed to respond to her requests to test for creosote in Columbus, she went above their heads, contacting the federal authorities directly. In October 2009, she made an official complaint charging that the MDEQ and the EPA were guilty of environmental injustice. After investigating her complaint, the EPA’s office of the inspector general responded that the agency hadn’t found any evidence it had done anything wrong. In a letter, White replied “that OIG couldn’t find mud after a raging flood.”
She also wrote to the attorney general of Mississippi and suggested that the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality had failed to test the samples in Columbus because the affected locals were mostly poor and black. She sent copies of the letter to the FBI, the EPA, and the Justice Department.
Two months later, she wrote to Lisa Jackson, then the head of the EPA, suggesting that “the residents of Columbus appear to be participating in a Tuskegee Controlled Experiment to determine the health effects of Dioxins, Phthalate Esters and PAHs on African-Americans.” She posted pieces online accusing both the EPA and the MDEQ of environmental racism.
And while the gap between black and white infant mortality is often described as a complex mystery caused by a mix of factors, including income, nutrition, and education, White seemed to feel it all could be explained by environmental racism. While a more measured person might have described the different treatment of black communities as contributing to the problem, White laid responsibility for Mississippi’s startlingly high African-American infant mortality rate directly at polluters’ feet.
“Her mantra was, ‘You’re killing my babies,’” said Jamison.
A local convenience store and pizza joint sits along 14th Avenue, across from the old Kerr McGee plant in Columbus, Mississippi.
Photo: Nicole Craine for The Intercept
With the creation of the Coalition of Communities for Environmental Justice, White completed her transition from lab analyst to activist. She traveled throughout the state, often with Jones and Jamison, talking about environmental issues in black communities. She went to Columbia, where the former Reichhold Chemical plant had illegally buried thousands of drums of chemical waste. She went to Palmers Crossing, the African-American community in Hattiesburg where creosote was found. And she went to Grenada and Pickens, other Mississippi towns that, like Columbus and Hattiesburg, had been contaminated with creosote from Kerr-McGee plants.
White also went back to Crystal Springs, a small town about half an hour south of Jackson, where her testing had turned up contamination almost a decade earlier.
In 2000, BorgWarner, an auto parts manufacturer, hired an environmental consultant who contracted White to test the soil around property that BorgWarner had recently bought from another company. After two days of testing, she found several toxic chemicals, including carcinogenic PCBs, at well above the legal limit. One chemical, Aroclor 1268, was present in soil samples at more than 2,000 times the safety level set by the EPA. The contaminated areas included backyards where children played as well as the local high school’s football field, where students and their families were being unwittingly exposed to carcinogens.
White reported her findings to the plant manager, who said he didn’t want to report the contamination to the state. Such a response was fairly typical, she said, as was her own: According to state law, the company had 24 hours to notify the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality of the results. “And if they didn’t, I would have to.”
In the intervening years, after the people of the town had sued over their exposure to the carcinogenic chemicals, that discovery had wound up costing BorgWarner, which owned a plant there, some $50 million in remediation costs, and lawsuits over contamination ran the company at least an additional $39 million.
BorgWarner declined to comment for this article.
In 2009, White and Jones attended a meeting of the Crystal Springs City Council and offered advice to the members about how to find clean water. White told them that BorgWarner, as the polluter, was responsible for coming up with a source of clean water — not the residents of Crystal Springs.
To Jones, White was a perfect addition to the coalition. She understood environmental law and the technical terms and reports that were beyond the grasp of most of the affected people. She was committed, working long hours without pay. Perhaps most importantly, over her more than 20 years as a lab analyst, she had done testing in several of the communities that were part of the coalition. “She knew where all the bones was buried,” said Jones.
Their plan — to support the communities and highlight environmental racism in the Deep South — seemed to be working. “They were beginning to get attention,” said Heather Sanchez, a graduate student who wrote her master’s thesis about the coalition’s work in Hattiesburg. People began to call them when they encountered environmental problems. And residents of the various towns began sharing contacts and information.
But people close to White became concerned that her outspokenness might get her into trouble. Jones, who lived in Jackson at the time, traveled with her whenever he could. When he couldn’t, he made sure to talk with her on phone while she drove.
“This is Mississippi,” said Jones. “We worried about her life.”
Jamison was worried, too. “We tried to get Tennie to calm down,” he said. “She’s very passionate. I said, ‘Tennie, you’re fighting some big, big boys here. Let’s take it one at a time.’”
So in 2012, when White was charged with fraud by the EPA, the organization she so often criticized, and the charges involved a company she had helped a community challenge, Jamison, Jones, and others who had been working closely with her felt they knew exactly what had happened.
“She was framed,” said Jamison. “It was that simple.”
Tennie White at her home in Jackson, Mississippi. White, currently on house arrest, uses her living room as a home office to continue fighting against environmental pollution.
Photo: Nicole Craine for The Intercept
But the man who came to her office in Jackson was actually from the EPA. Matthew Anderson was a special agent in the EPA’s criminal investigations division, part of an elite team of armed “green cops” who run down environmental criminals. They interview suspects, sort through evidence, and put together cases that they then hand off to prosecutors.
Anderson wanted to talk about tests that BorgWarner had hired White to do in Water Valley, a small town south of Oxford. The company, which makes parts for car transmissions, releases the water it uses to wash the parts into the nearby Otoucalofa Creek. To ensure that the levels of certain metals are within required limits, it has to test its wastewater each month. In October 2008, BorgWarner asked White to submit a discharge monitoring report that summarized the test results to the company. And she had. But Anderson said he wanted the original test results. White told him that Robert Wilson, the BorgWarner employee who had hired her to do the tests, had the originals. She also said that she would send the results to Anderson.
Six months later, in January 2010, Anderson returned with another EPA special agent, Ricky D. Knight, and this time, after asking White about the test results, the two men left with her computer hard drive. On it, they testified during the trial, were files in which White had copied a signature that had been on a report another environmental lab had produced about the Columbus site — and affixed the copied signature to the BorgWarner report.
The trial, which was held in the U.S. district courthouse in Jackson, hinged on the question of what happened to the original test results — and whether White had actually performed the three tests, each of which cost the company $150. The copied signature, they argued, was evidence that White had been in the process of falsifying the original test results.
White’s two court-appointed attorneys argued that there was no evidence BorgWarner’s output to the creek ever caused any harm — a contention that the government prosecutors never disputed. They pointed out that because the wastewater went into a creek that wasn’t a federal waterway, the whole matter was outside the EPA’s jurisdiction and that there was no contract between BorgWarner and Tennie. The defense attorneys also argued that, because Tennie was supposed to give the test results to a private company and not the EPA, their dispute wasn’t a federal matter. (The EPA itself had used this argument when responding to White’s complaint about their failure to look into the testing done in Columbus by Lois George; because George’s data hadn’t been submitted to the EPA, the agency claimed, it was outside its jurisdiction.)
Oddly, though the EPA was helping prosecute her case and many of the witnesses testifying against her were from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, White’s attorneys never mentioned her long history confronting these organizations. And though BorgWarner’s employees made up most of the witnesses for the prosecution, her attorneys never told the jury that she had been involved in a case that had cost the company so dearly. Her attorneys declined to be interviewed for this article.
Perhaps the strangest part was that White’s lawyers never called to the stand the person who seemed to hold the answer to whether she had performed the tests: Robert Wilson, the BorgWarner employee who hired White and was in the best position to evaluate whether she had performed the tests. Though prosecutors referred to him by name more than 100 times during the trial, they never asked Wilson to testify either.
Wilson, it turned out, had known White since the mid-1990s and had worked with her since 2003 doing lead removal, asbestos inspections and abatement, and other environmental work. When Wilson took a position as an environmental health and safety manager for BorgWarner in 2008, he noticed that the lab the company was using to test its wastewater had a turnaround time of more than three days. So he asked White, who he felt confident could produce the results within one day, if she would run the tests and she agreed.
Wilson went on to extol White’s professional virtues, noting the diligence she brought to the work. “I’ve seen her stay up till 1 and 2 in the morning because they’d bring up 100 samples that are timed. She’d sit at that microscope for hours at a time,” said Wilson. “She was meticulous for each sample. Normally people’d get jaded. They’d check 57 in a row and figure the last four would be good. Not her. She’d check every last one.”
Wilson and White were friendly during the time they worked together, playing chess at lunchtime and having good-natured competitions over their knowledge of environmental law. Wilson still has one of the statutes they had argued about pinned to his bulletin board, describing it as “the one time out of 100 that we discussed that she was wrong.”
When I asked whether he thought White was guilty of the fraud charges related to those tests, Wilson didn’t hesitate. “I don’t believe it, I’m sorry,” he said, adding, “You can stack those agents yay high and I still won’t believe you.” After reading the transcript of the trial, which I sent him, Wilson later admitted that it was possible and that the testimony had “put a doubt” in his mind. But, he added, “Whether it’s probable is a whole other matter.”
As Wilson sees it, his colleague and friend had no reason to lie. “What is her motivation for risking her whole career and reputation for a $150 test? That makes no sense to me whatsoever.” On the other hand, Wilson believed companies might want to punish her or banish her from the environmental field. “She stepped on the wrong toes,” is how explained her prosecution, which he described as “a charade.” “I even tried to warn her at that time that you need to watch yourself because these people don’t play. You have the possibility of causing them multimillion dollars in lawsuits and expenses and, Tennie, they’ll come after you with a sledgehammer.”
The EPA special agents who came to ask him about White in 2009 or 2010 did seem eager to dig up anything negative about White. Wilson was working at Siemens Energy in Ridgeland, Mississippi, at the time and Anderson, Knight, and a third man came to his office, according to Wilson. The agents told him that White had implicated him in the fraud case and he responded that he didn’t believe them. The agents, Wilson said, then “changed tactics and just questioned me about the time I had worked with her.”
Wilson said that sometime in 2013, Special Agent Anderson flew from Florida to see him again and described their visit this way: “He asked a lot of questions that were more of a personal nature than professional and seemed to want personal information on Ms. White. When it got to the point that he asked if we ever had a sexual relationship, I invited him to leave my office and not to contact me again.”
“At that point they were grasping at straws. They were trying to decimate her personal life or character assassination,” said Wilson. “It became a quest to decimate this lady not only professionally but personally as well.” The agents also dug up White’s financial information, including the fact that she had defaulted on a bank loan she took out to pay for her lab, which the prosecution later presented in court.
I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the EPA for all communications relating to the investigation of Tennie White in April 2016. The agency is supposed to resolve such requests within 20 business days, but I did not receive all the documents I requested. After months of being sent from one division of the EPA to another, I reached Tom Seaton, a deputy director in the legal counsel division of the office of criminal enforcement, who admitted that my request had been “totally mishandled” and that I had “a right to be unhappy.” Seaton said he would try to send me the special agents’ emails that referred to the White case, but he never did.
Wilson reported to the small room at the bottom of the courthouse for most of the trial. But as it drew to a close, he was released and watched the closing statements from the courtroom. He described seeing rows of prosecutors. On one side, were “the DOJ lawyers from Washington. And then you had the EPA guys lined up next to them. They were an impressive sight. Then on the other side you have one court-appointed lawyer next to this poor little black woman,” Wilson said, adding. “She’d kill me if she heard me say that. To me, it looked like they just took a sledgehammer to a flea.”
“I’m amazed at the lawyers they sent from the Justice Department out of Washington, D.C., and all the trouble they went to to prosecute a small-time little black businesswoman in Jackson, Mississippi,” said Wilson. “You don’t bring that much firepower if you’re going to be stepping on ants. Somebody wanted Tennie put away.”
Photo: Nicole Craine for The Intercept
Yet White said she had a degree when she applied for a loan to start her business in 1995. When she applied to be a HUD inspector in 2005, according to prosecutors, she went as far as to doctor one of her own undergraduate transcripts so it looked as though she had taken graduate courses. (White denies changing her transcripts.) White also lied about having a college degree twice under oath when testifying as an expert witness in unrelated trials. To me, she admitted that “she had never marched” at graduation.
Though lying about such things can be prosecuted as perjury, it rarely is. (There has been little consequence for Melania Trump, for instance, who seems to have both falsely claimed to have a college degree and lied about it under oath.) And White wasn’t being tried for perjury. But at her sentencing hearing, the prosecutors presented the forgery and lies about her degree as evidence of further criminal conduct, which, they argued, meant that she deserved to spend more time in prison than the 15-21 months laid out in the guidelines for “abuse of trust.” The judge clearly agreed, giving White 40 months in prison as well as an additional three years of supervised release and a $1,000 fine.
There are surely some environmental crimes worthy of imprisonment. In 2015, according to a summary prepared by the EPA, the agency’s enforcement division helped to convict 185 “eco-convicts,” for crimes like biofuel fraud or illegal asbestos removal. These sentences averaged about eight months of prison time.
The EPA recently decided to focus on relatively high-impact cases, according to an agency spokesperson, who sent an email in response to my inquiries for this story. This strategy is due in part to budget constraints, which have “required EPA to make hard choice across the board,” according to the email, and left the agency on track to prosecute just 88 cases this year. The number of special agents in the division is also down, with 164 currently employed, significantly below the 200 it is supposed to have by law.
The email from the EPA explained that the agency has adopted a sort of triage policy, and now focuses on “the cases that have the highest impact on protecting public health and the environment.” The statement concluded that, “Our Criminal Investigation Division works to ensure its agents are pursuing the most egregious violations and highest-impact cases in order to prevent harm to public health and the environment across the country.”
Yet many of these high-impact cases don’t result in any prison time at all, let alone the more than three years White received. As an example of a serious environmental incident the EPA pursued, the email presented the case of Freedom Industries. The agency did hit Freedom with a $900,000 fine for releasing a chemical used in coal mining into West Virginia’s Elk River, contaminating the drinking water of more than 300,000 people. The company’s top executive only received a $20,000 fine and one month in jail.
In another recent case, a man who knowingly exposed workers, including a 16-year-old boy, to asbestos by having them work in dumpsters full of it without any protection was sentenced in June to two years of probation, 150 hours of community service, and a $15,000 fine. Yet another company, which was found guilty of multiple violations of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act for using a banned pesticide and causing a family of four to fall seriously ill, received only a fine. In another case, an oil company owner was convicted of dumping oily water into a tributary of the Ohio River and received a sentence of four days in prison.
The Department of Justice declined to answer questions about Tennie White’s case, writing in an email that “the defendant was convicted after a trial by a jury of her peers and served a federal prison sentence. From our standpoint, the matter is concluded.” Nor did the EPA respond to my repeated requests to address the specifics of White’s case — and why her sentence for a crime of no environmental consequence was more severe than penalties for many others who caused serious harm. But I did speak with Doug Parker, who was the director of EPA’s criminal investigation division when White’s case was being investigated.
Parker, who founded his own consulting company after leaving the agency in April, said that White’s wasn’t the only case to center around discharge monitoring reports. Though he said he wasn’t familiar with the specifics of her case, he did say that her sentence was surprisingly long and “not one I’d expect for that” crime. When asked whether grudges might inspire some of the reports of suspicious activity to the agency, he said that investigators generally try to determine whether tipsters have an ax to grind.
When I asked him which of his cases had made him proudest, Parker pointed to the investigation of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill. He reminisced about working on an interagency task force set up to deal with the disaster, which was one of the most devastating in U.S. history. Pictures of people who had died during the incident lined the walls of the task force headquarters, he recalled, speaking to the investigators’ shared sense of purpose.
Yet, even that crime, which resulted in 11 deaths and the release of more than 3 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, resulted in no prison sentences. How could such serious crimes result in little or no jail time, while a much less consequential violation sent White to federal prison for 27 months? Parker acknowledges that “it is hard when it’s laid out like that to reconcile that,” but said that punishments don’t always line up with outrage. “When you have an egregious environmental issue, it doesn’t always translate to an egregious set of felony standards.”
That is certainly true in the case of Kerr-McGee, the company on which White was so focused before she was sent to prison. It turns out that Kerr-McGee and Anadarko were also brought up on fraud charges, accused of scheming to avoid responsibility for 2,746 contaminated sites in 47 states. In 2014, a bankruptcy court found them guilty.
Negotiations ensued between the Department of Justice, the EPA, and Anadarko. The agreement they hammered out called for Anadarko to pay $5.15 billion, which the EPA would use to clean up a number of sites, including the nation’s largest underground plume of rocket fuel, in Nevada, and 50 former uranium mines the company had dug in and around land belonging to the Navajo Nation. The award included $67 million to clean up the site in Columbus, Mississippi.
Judge Katherine Forrest, who oversaw the settlement, was clearly pleased by the deal, which was, as she noted, “the largest such recovery in American history.” And it’s certainly true that, without the EPA’s dogged pursuit of the case, the agency would never have collected the money, which is now being used to remediate the environmental mess caused by Kerr-McGee.
But the $5.15 billion recovered was only a portion of the more than $20 billion that attorneys felt was necessary to clean the sites. Most plaintiffs, including the Maranatha Church, which ultimately won its case against Kerr-McGee and is just now in the process of receiving a settlement, are receiving a fraction of what they would have seen if the company not declared bankruptcy.
Although the contamination from Kerr-McGee’s plants clearly caused harm — and more than 15,000 people who lived or worked near them have made claims over deaths and illnesses, including cancer, which they believe were caused by exposure to asbestos, creosote and other environmental toxins — none of the executives involved were charged with a crime or served any prison time.
In fact, many of them did better than that, not only avoiding serious consequences for their fraud but actually profiting handsomely from it. Kerr-McGee general counsel Gregory F. Pilcher, for instance, made $9 million off the reorganization, which was clearly designed to avoid the costs of cleaning up the contamination caused by the company. Kerr-McGee senior vice president Robert Wohleber made more than $20 million on the deal. And former Kerr-McGee chairman Luke Corbett walked away with $200 million. In all, Kerr-McGee received $761.8 million in transferred stock in the spinoff process.
All seem to have weathered what turned out to be a brief storm rather well. Corbett is now the lead independent director of OGE Energy. Wohleber went on to become the director of the Summit Midstream energy company, after directing his secretary to destroy all of his documents related to the Tronox spinoff (and having that secretary dutifully carry out his instructions and wipe his computer clean of all emails and files), according to court documents. Chris Watson, the Lehman Brothers executive who helped come up with the whole scheme, went on to become a managing director for Barclays.
The stock price of Anadarko, which is now one of the most profitable publicly traded oil and gas companies, went up after the settlement decision (presumably because the financial world viewed the deal as a good one for the company). And the company actually got a tax benefit of about $550 million from the settlement, as its press release detailed at the time. The statement also noted that “Anadarko Petroleum Corporation’s mission is to deliver a competitive and sustainable rate of return to shareholders.”
Even Tronox, which was resurrected from bankruptcy by the deal with the EPA, has since recovered and is now an international mining and chemical company in fine financial standing.
Nor did anyone from BorgWarner ever face criminal charges over the harm it caused the environment or residents in Crystal Springs, though the company was sued by more than 1,000 claimants there and wound up in a bitter dispute with the previous owner of the site, the Kuhlman Electric Corporation, over who was responsible for the contamination.
Gregory Pilcher, Robert Wohleber, Chris Watson, and Luke Corbett did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for Barclays declined to comment.
Photo: Nicole Craine for The Intercept
Noting that BorgWarner didn’t have a valid permit for its wastewater, Wilson said, “I still don’t understand to this day why they went after Ms. White. If the Justice Department is going to go after anyone, it should have gone after BorgWarner for not meeting the standards of their pre-treatment permit.”
According to Wilson, if authorities were concerned about the dangers posed by the wastewater, they would have done further testing. “If you say the person didn’t test right, then you have to retest. You have to look, you have to see if there’s an out of control condition,” said Wilson, who noted that such an investigation didn’t happen. “Why didn’t the EPA and the MDEQ immediately call for tests to make sure they were in compliance? They should have had a whole team up there retesting the water, redoing testing, redoing sampling. But there was no sense of urgency there.”
For their part, prosecutors argued that White had lied about having done the tests, and that lies themselves do damage by undermining trust in the government’s environmental oversight.
“The whole system would kind of break down if we could not trust the data that was submitted to us,” Harry Wilson, the chief of the environmental permits division of the MDEQ, told the jury when testifying for the prosecution. Parker, the former head of the EPA’s criminal enforcement office, offered the same rationale for prosecuting any case in which protocol wasn’t followed, even if no harm was done: “If you don’t have that level of honesty and accurate reporting, the whole environmental compliance structure can potentially crumble.”
But for the people close to her, White’s prosecution only cemented their mistrust in government. At her sentencing hearing, Powers, the prosecutor, repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to get Jamison to admit that White had committed a crime.
Powers: And if I was to prove to you that she had committed other crimes, if I showed you evidence —
Jamison: But you haven’t. So I don’t.
Powers: If I did show you evidence, if I convinced you beyond a —
Jamison: I would not believe the evidence because I think the ability is there to manipulate them. So I would not believe them.
Powers: And isn’t it also true that the ability is there for the defendant to manipulate information she’s providing you?
Jamison: But I know her.
Jamison is recovering from his ordeal, at least financially. He received an undisclosed amount from a settlement Kerr-McGee made with some Columbus residents living near its plant. The Maranatha Church declared bankruptcy in 2003, but is now in the process of receiving a settlement from a trust set up through the bankruptcy court. Jamison is now on dialysis, however, which he believes is related to kidney damage he sustained while digging in the ditch. But a suit over his and the other workers’ injuries was dismissed.
What has not survived the lengthy journey he and White took through the system meant to protect Mississippi’s environment is his faith in government. As Jamison firmly told Powers in the courtroom, he believes there was a conspiracy to convict Tennie White.
For his part, Jones sees White’s prosecution as a modern day lynching. “If Tennie was back in the ’30s, ’40s, or ’50s, they’d simply hang her or tar and feather her,” he told me. “To put an advocate in her place in 2016, you just destroy their ability to make a living. That is Mississippi in 2016.”
Jones won’t specify who exactly “they” are — and believes it doesn’t matter. “It’s no one person, no one agency, no one company,” he said. “BorgWarner, Kerr-McGee, Anadarko — the system is the same. At the end of the day, Tennie was a problem to anybody who didn’t hold the interests of the general public at heart.”
Tennie White outside of her home in Jackson, Mississippi.
Photo: Nicole Craine for The Intercept
The elder of her two sons, Troy, pulled up to the prison, bearing gifts he knew she’d like: fresh blueberries, strawberries, and the Holy Bible. Troy didn’t know much about his mother’s work or fully understand why she had been incarcerated, but said he knew his mother’s spirit. “She’s not a go-quietly person,” he said with an affectionate laugh.
That spirit was alive and well during White’s 27 months in prison, when she helped fellow inmates learn to read and wrote to various governmental agencies, including the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the EPA, to whom she complained about overflowing human waste and the prison’s dangerous use of untrained workers to demolish load-bearing walls.
After her release, White spent several weeks in a halfway house and several months under house arrest in Jackson. Her ankle monitor was removed on October 4 and she is now awaiting surgery for her cataracts. Afterward, she is hoping to return to her work in Crystal Springs and Hattiesburg. “The people there tell me still nothing’s being done.”
Ms. Lerner your article was excellent on Ms. Tennie White and Pastor Steve JAMISON concerning the Kerr Mc Gee contamination. Thank you. This is the type of reporting that brings readers right there in Columbus, MS as if they were a part of the story.
Tennie White’s “crime” was that she threw rocks at people in tanks, metaphorically speaking. This kind of thing could happen to just about anyone anywhere, though being Black in Mississippi creates an extra danger.
This is not the way government is supposed to work, but it’s the way that it does. If you rattle the wrong cages hard enough, you get bitten. This basically comes down to overpopulation: in a society with anywhere near this many people, it’s impossible to have anything that resembles an honest or representative government. Too many people, too much bureaucracy, too many layers of power, etc. I have no doubt that some countries do it a lot better, but if you want a truly honest and representative government, the government and the population it governs have to be a lot smaller.
I can only add that most of Kerr McGee’s holdings seem to have been leased through the Bureau of Land Mangement – ergo the company was complicit with the US government itself in placing itself in areas guaranteed to do maximum damage to communities of color. There’s something really ugly going on here, beyond the everyday, background ugly which we’re all so inured to.
We live in an era where corporate lobbyists in DC are actively helping draft the very laws that are supposed to govern how they behave. It began, as far as I can tell, when Dubya was in office and didn’t abate when Obama was elected. I can only imagine what’s about to happen with Trump in office. I fear for us all.
Far from this not being capitalism, it’s the logical conclusion of capitalism run amok. It’s a cult that cannot, must not, acknowledge it’s own impact on the environment and depends wholeheartedly on the belief that there is no such thing as a finite resource – it’s very survival depends on this denial; it can’t admit this to itself or the entire edifice falls. This is why climate denial groups funded by Exxon and the Koch’s were an inevitability. This is why the planet is hopelessly polluted and why it will carry on. The planet is already coated in a layer of plastic microbeads. Our oceans are acidifying and the atmosphere is asked to absorb billions of tons of CO2 and methane, year upon year, all without effect? It’s utter madness.
Corporations have locked themselves into the seat of power and are not about to let us in. People are just another resource, to be used and expended as the corporate state demands. Sadly, people of color will probably always be at the bottom of this awful paradigm. Yet, we believe in capitalism so wholeheartedly, we can’t imagine a better way of living, a way that is more equal to all its denizens and still treats the one livable planet we know of with the respect she deserves. Capitalism actually demands that we be unequal, that some must suffer so that others may prosper. White is a regarded by the corporate state as a revolutionary in the current landscape, a small one, but a revolutionary none-the-less. The NAPL Sioux protesters can be lumped in here as well. Obama can’t lift a finger there because the corporate masters won’t allow it. Throughout history, revolutionaries have been persecuted and it’s never been clearer that we need a revolution; our very survival depends on it.
As John McMurtry says in his incredibly insightful book The Cancer Stage of Capitalism – “to criticize or to challenge any constituent of the World’s social order is to challenge the laws and necessity of the invisible hand itself.” Ding!
Hello all, this is Rev Steve Jamison, I am mentioned in Ms Lerner’s artical. I and my church have assisting Ms White since her incarceration. We have set up a none profit (The Mississippi Foundation For a Better Life). Send all donations to P. O. Box 2784 Columbus MS 39704.
Outstanding journalism. Thanks. If there’s any way to help Tennie White, please let us know.
I know there’s no way to help the EPA, Dept of Justice, etc.
This is an excellent story, well-researched and important. Thank you for doing this, and helping to get the word out.
Before I even bother reading this article, could the editors here please do some editing? NPR-style stories have no place here, and there’s way too much wasted on the author’s attempt to be artistic instead of just writing the article and presenting us with the facts. “Steve Jamison is a big presence, tall with broad shoulders, a square jaw, and a thin, regal mustache that frowns over his mouth”? Really? One, who cares, and two, even more important, stuff like this is a huge waste of time. Authors like this one should write novels or non-fiction books if they want people to spend this much time reading their stories. Too bad that I have to skip a story that I’m really interested in because the author added a bunch of meaningless crap to it, the editors failed to remove it, and I don’t have the time now to read it.
Yes, I’m SURE that you’re “really interested in” the story.
I have to agree with Jeff D. I read most of the story, but it was WAY too long. I’m not daunted by technical details, in fact, most stories need more of them, but I do get impatient with irrelevancies, of which this story had too many.
Where I started cutting out was when they started talking about how seldom other lawbreakers got punished for what they were doing. It’s an important point, but took up too much space.
People who are going after the Big Boys need to be impeccable. That should be the take-away here. It should be highlighted.
Just because other people get to skate, doesn’t mean activists can do so.
“People who are going after the Big Boys need to be impeccable. That should be the take-away here. It should be highlighted.”
This belief just shows how corrupted our justice system has become. The “big boys” will skate unless their accusers are “impeccable,” which no one is, and that’s just for this person. This woman didn’t “skate,” she was persecuted. She was made an example.
The real takeaway here is that the corporatocracy has our regulatory agencies doing their dirty work.
Excellent article, thank you!
Tennie White is a true heroine and everyone of us owe her a debt of gratitude for doing the work of what Our government should be doing, protecting the People and our environment.
Is there a fund or a way to support her and her work? A great human being!!!
Sharon,
Thank you for doing all the work to get this researched and published. We (the public) owe so much to people like you for being out there doing stories like Lennie White’s.
John
Oregon
Sorry for the ADD but do the world a favor and not write a damn book. Get to who what where when how why without the fat. Meanwhile the Kochs and their pigs on the payroll are telling a nation pollution is a hoax. Inhofe writes a book and Rubio enjoys big ag suffocating manatees . They all belong on death row
Thanks, Sharon. I know you are just reporting; but if you know of any legitimate crowd-funding aid for Tennie; please report a link!
For various reasons I can not start this myself.
https://funds.gofundme.com/dashboard/create
But I will gladly contribute. I life let than half a mile from the federal prison Ms. White was housed in. I only wish I had known her story sooner.
Great article. These are the stories at MUST be told if anything is going to change. The systemic racism in this country exists on levels that most of us “white” people can not begin to comprehend. Change is happening faster now. The racial bias found in housing, zoning, financing, criminal justice, voting access, toxic chemical exposure and clean up and much much more can now be found as the topic of discussion around many middle class white american tables.
An extraordinary article, so well written and researched.
Thank you Sharon Learner. I am wiped out just reading it. I can only imagine how draining it was to live , and write about it. I look at Tennie White’s modest house and feel we owe her something because this was very costly for her.
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This is a further indictment of capitalism: the monied corporations not only despoil the environment, causing illness, disability, and death, they evade real punishment and profit even when penalties are levied. Expand such behavior over the globe, and we must assume the whole world–aside from global climate change–is a toxic superfund site. In the end, we ALL will be killed by corporate greed and criminality.
This is NOT capitalism. This is corruption. This happens in EVERY form of government in almost EVERY country on the planet.
Please take your miss-informed commy BS elsewhere.
This shows corruption at high levels and all associated should be prosecuted.
Sad story, where the guilty go free and the innocent get imprisoned. The jury and judges need to be fired.
A lot of the problems with the legal system stem from the fact you can’t usually prosecute a judge, prosecutor, or other agents of the court or state, even in cases where they outright lied or knowingly tried an innocent person or found a person they knew to be innocent, guilty for whatever other reason.
Until judges and prosecutors are liable for their actions, they can do whatever they want with impunity. That power is going to have to be taken from them by force, they are not going to give it up willingly.
An Exceptional, Extensive and Compelling composition!!! Thank You !!!
Clearly “Stepping On The Wrong TOES…!!!” , whether in Corporations and/or Government, still can result in flagrant inequalities and focused intimidation and oppression.
INJUSTICES continue to exist in the context of ‘Big Money’ & ‘Big Power’ ; = Unacceptable !
Well done for shinning a light on the demonic nature of our shared societies, uk has done this with undercover police task forces. The digusting side of so called western freedoms & first world corporate hidden revenge policies pushing government .
This is indeed how things work in Mississippi, and shows how corrupt not only our state government is, but how they work in collusion with federal agencies to abuse the legal system to perpetrate injustice.
This isn’t even the tip of the iceberg though. There are thousands of people from Mississippi serving time in state and federal prisons for crimes they didn’t commit – but putting them in prison shuts them up. Tens of thousands more are abused by legal system in other ways to teach them a lesson they’ll never forget.
It’s too bad there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about it. Even the President has chosen to do nothing and look the other way. The powerful and their attorneys have mastered the methods of using the legal system to frighten and control people, to keep the status quo and ensure their financial success, no matter the cost, in lives or anything else.
Thank you for an extraordinary well written expose Sharon.
The legacy of the ‘new democrats’ is truly disgusting and now the whitewash has been fully hosed down after the election. I don’t cheer for Trump but this election has been clarifying and it may yet lead to better days. Obummer, appointed some truly nasty, useless people to ‘manage’ the mal-administration.
Q: Would you cut departments?
TRUMP: Environmental Protection, what they do is a disgrace.ÿEvery week they come out with new regulations.
Q: Who’s going to protect the environment?
TRUMP: We’ll be fine with the environment. We can leave a little bit, but you can’t destroy businesses.
Out of the frying pan and into the volcano. If you wanted better days, you should have voted for Sanders.
I’m not sure that keeping a corrupt institution like the EPA is good or bad. It’s kind of like assuming the Corleon or Gambino mob families will use the protection money they’ve acquired in a way that will be helpful to their neighborhood.
Why would you assume that a federal agency will look out for YOUR best interests, or the best interests of anyone except the people who bankrolled the current sitting Chief Executive?
Brilliant article.
We must ask ourselves, who are the environmental terrorists?
Kerr McGee is one of many.
This was SO well written and I would like to compliment The Intercept with fantastic reporting!
In all honesty, I have to finish this later. These stories upset me violently.
I strongly suggest reading Dan Fagin’s excellent book: Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. It’s not about our African American brothers and sisters, but the calculated greed, deception, and utter disregard for lives by the chemical companies.
“BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY”
A Monsanto sign in FUTURELAND in the original
DisneyLand in Anaheim, Ca.
Actually, chemicals will be the downfall of civilization here in earth; just TOO much contamination by all of these unknown concoctions invented daily, ultimately left for the environment and humans to try and assimilate…..
Toms River is one of my very favorite books – SL
I felt the same way, I did take the time to read this excellent Journalism because I long for a Media Medium as shockingly raw as this is.
I feel that if these many Decades of Environmental Crimes had been reported and dealt with promptly these Issues could have been mitigated. Without Accountability there is no Responsibility for these Corporate Offenders, which again goes to the need for good Journalism.
Great story and excellent followup on very difficult questions. Makes you wonder where Obama the community organizer was when the community activist was getting railroaded….
Excellent compelling story – thank you so much.
Yet, even that crime, which resulted in 11 deaths and the release of more than 3 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, resulted in no prison sentences. How could such serious crimes result in little or no jail time, while a much less consequential violation sent White to federal prison for 27 months?
Sounds like railway cowards that murder children and sexually harass me in order to try to silence me about the murders their pedophilic coward railway has committed. Hope to read about monetary settlements for the victims’ families and rehabilitative programs in prison for the offenders soon.
Well did they or didn’t they? I don’t have the time to sift through a book lenght article for your conclusion or whatever it is.
Are you being for real?!!!? This is the reason Trump is president and our planet is dying because people like you do not have patience enough to learn what is really happening to and in our world!
You’re missing a fantastic story about our corrupt government.
And he is lazy. But not lazy enough to not troll the comments and post something that clearly establishes his intelligence level.
Michigan 300,000 votes less than Obama in 2012 (75,00 Black voters accepted the boycott challenge); North Carolina 2 million votes decided to stay home; Wisconsin 230,000 fewer votes; and Pennsylvania 130,000 blacks said no this year to the Democratic Party. This is how black America (Todd Elliott Koger) helped make Donald Trump our 45th President.
The Democrats had always thrown shade in our direction. Black Lives Matter’s founders put in writing their “rejection” of us because their stated agenda “LGBTQ” issues. In June 2016, Donald Trump was the only one willing to listen to us. We explained to Mr. Trump that we had been voting almost 50 years “straight” Democrat and our situation remained the same or worst.
First, Mr. Trump issued an online video that addressed our plight. Next he went to Michigan and then took the message to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Thereafter, we packaged the visual optics and shared his fight against the “status quo” with black America. And, in late August 2016, we outlined the grassroots plan that defined demographics, targeted groups, and the available tools to grow an arsenal of black Trump supporters. We had to work night and day to control the message and Mr. Trump’s “Plan for Black America” as a campaign strategy to change the conversation when Mr. Trump slumped in the polls.
When “sh*t hit the fan” in October 2016 and everyone started to run from Mr. Trump we suggested a “writing,” a “NEW DEAL” proposal for black America to put things back on track. Donald Trump owes his victory to “predominately black Democratic strongholds of Pennsylvania” who were convinced to give Mr. Trump 31 percent more votes than the previous Republican Party presidential candidate. African Americans like Todd Elliott Koger convinced hundreds of thousands blacks in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and various other states to boycott the traditional “straight” Democratic Party vote in 2016.
Mr. Trump’s “margin of victory” is realized when you combine this with an increase of “Obama white voters” in Wisconsin and Michigan voting Trump in 2016. Trump won Pennsylvania by 1.1 percentage points (68,236 votes), Wisconsin by 0.9 points (27,257 votes), and Michigan by 0.2 points (11,837 votes). If Clinton had won all three states, she would have won the Electoral College 278 to 260. She fell short in all three.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dieNd5h_qpw
Bullshit!
Stop Cheating…
The Democratic Party is like a wife who for years has been cheating on you right in front of your face. Who, you have been been warning her for years, if she does not change her ways and be loyal to her commitment to the progressive vows she made in the beginning of the marriage, there would be consequences! But She continued her adulterous ways, bringing her Neoliberal Warmongering Conservative Coporate Pirate Wall Street lovers to fornicate in the home in front of the family!
So what happened is… what any sane or intelligent thinking spouse (voters) would do… Divorce that bitch (no pun intended) and send her on her unfaithful way! And just maybe she might stop taking the (political) relationship for granite when she finds herself out in the cold!
A Clinton/Sanders ticket would have “swept the nation!”
But DNC (Debbie n Clinton) Blew It Big Time!
Pride and Arrogance ALWAYS proceed a FALL!
Bottom Line… the Democratic Party needs to seek “Political Relationship Counseling” and STOP whinning and blaming the family (voters) and everyone else (non voters) because they refuse to accept the “bend over and take it in rear and like it” bullshit that the coniving DNC and Democratic Party put before us and thought that there would be no consequences and for the divorce which came via its own adulterous Infidelity to the Progressive Family and the Working Class!
BUT NOW THEY KNOW…BUT JUST LIKE A CRACKHEAD, THEY ARE IN COMPLETE DENIAL, BLAMING EVERYONE THEY CAN POINT A FINGER AT EXCEPT THEMSELVES!
Self calculating numbers, wishfully thinking the “Stupid What If”, but NEVER looking at the funky stanking huge elephant in the room (or in this case, the funky Donkey!)
So please put your calculator and the pipe down and take a “reality check!”
Because we will no longer let you piss on us and call it Yellow Rain!
Whether it be a first black president who pissed on us or first woman president who thought she was going to piss on or the first orange president who thinks he gonna piss on us!
Viva la Progressive Family!
Pride and Arrogance ALWAYS proceed a FALL!
Mr Troll,
This Article is not about Herr Drumph, it is about Corporate Offenders like Him but not about Him. Not all of Us are Acolytes so perhaps take some time off from the Drumph Campaign of “truth sayers” lest you lose your way.
This story is incredible and certainly brings out the personalities of the main characters but fails to provide the viewpoint of the prosecutor or the judge. If the computer was taken, then that means the court granted a warrant. To get a warrant, the EPA agents must have provided a sworn affidavit. Both the affidavit and the warrant would be in the court file. The prosecutor’s closing statement would give you some idea of why they believed it was so important to pursue this lady. The judge’s statements at sentencing would also provide some background on why the court imposed such an extreme sentence. Typically, in federal court, the judges are bound by the parameters set forth in the sentencing guidelines with little to no leeway. I have questions as to how it was that this poor lady was sentenced to 40 months when the original charge was 10 to 12 months.
Having written all of this — I absolutely agree that the manner that this lady was treated doesn’t pass the smell test. I also agree with general warrant’s list of recent passes that the federal government has given to some and chosen to make examples of those who don’t have the political contacts to make sure they aren’t targeted.
We must remember that the government works for us. We are the citizens of this country. We need to make sure that the government starts turning its wheels in our favor and not special interests.
We should not allow our presidential candidates to accept money in exchange for special treatment. Pay to play is alive and well in federal government and in state government. The New Mexico governor has given so much money/time to the oil industry and the Koch brothers that she may as well be working for them not us.
Yes, please! Someone needs to write the book on this. Sharon Lerner, can you please help Tennie White become a household name? She is a tenacious activist, and whatever human-scale faults she may (or may not) have, she is a victim of injustice, and an inspiration, and someone to remind us that we are really not safe at all. Please! The book. The whole story, and the injustice done to her.
This is the first article I’ve read posted on this site, and it seems very well researched and written. Thank you T.I. and Sharon Lerner for doing this story, I’ve not found as much info on those involved and their actions (or lack of) in any other single news item. Tennie White was definitely singled out to be punished for exposing some of the common mishandlings of our environment by large coperations and for showing the public how the EPA lets those with large amounts of money get away with putting profit above all else, especially the lives of “common” people and their health. Trump may be on the right path with his desire to shut down the EPA, they cannot be trusted to protect civilians or the environment anymore, they’ve been bought and paid for by multi-billion dollar companies, although I’m not sure Trump can be trusted to replace the EPA with a proper oversight group since it could also interfere with his personal businesses as well. People like Tennie White are our best hope at justice, but only if the courts also truly believe in justice as well, unfortunately this isn’t happening because the courts, like the government, can still be controlled if you have a large enough bank account.
“Trump may be on the right path with his desire to shut down the EPA, they cannot be trusted to protect civilians or the environment anymore, they’ve been bought and paid for by multi-billion dollar companies”
True I think. But it all goes back to the military, specifically the nsa.
“Trump can be trusted to replace the EPA with a proper oversight group since it could also interfere with his personal businesses as well. People like Tennie White are our best hope at justice, but only if the courts also truly believe in justice as well, unfortunately this isn’t happening because the courts, like the government, can still be controlled if you have a large enough bank account.”
Let’s hope the EPA stays; hopefully chicken boy will go psychotic and focus on gitmo. He is going to be the potus after all.
If you like this one you should read the 3 part article on Dupont. You can search it on this site.
DOJ prosecutes Aarron Schartz for downloading computer files paid for with taxpayers money, to such extent he commits suicide. CHECK
DOJ investigates CIA torture and determines not enough evidence…while hiding away their copy of Senate Torture report. CHECK
DOJ investigates Wall Street bankers for destroying the world economy, determines they were perfect citizens. To save face, slaps WS on wrist with fines and warnings. CHECK
DOJ determines the murder of American citizens is A-OK, as the right of due process doesn’t necessarily mean the right to access of judicial process. CHECK.
DOJ investigates various domestic law enforcement departments who murder with impunity, gives warning the DOJ might get mad and throw temper tantrum. CHECK
DOJ re-institutes policy of okeying domestic law enforcement hiway robbery known as property forfeiture seizure ..as long as they get their cut. CHECK
DOJ okey’s the distribution of weapons of war to domestic law enforcement departments across Murika.. says..have at it. CHECK
DOJ prosecutes whistleblowers with impunity while ignoring those government agents who lie to Congress while keeping a straight face. CHECK
DOJ covers EPA back to prosecute one women with impunity, who caused EPA officials stress. CHECK
Meanwhile, EPA causes largest leak of toxic mining debris into Colorado river in history. No one is held accountable. CHECK
And on and on and on…..
You couldn’t make this shit up if you tried. The only question left is how these insidious scumsucking maggots look in the mirror without vomiting.
insects arent human
It’s not surprising the EPA is jailing environmental activists. In the tradition of George Orwell, most agencies do the opposite of what their name implies. This confuses a lot of people and I wish they would stop. The US Department of Defense could more accurately be described as the Department of War – as it once was. Then in 1949, Mr. Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four and in the same year, the government rechristened it as the Department of Defense. In the old days, the Department of Education would have been called the Department of Ignorance, but it only came into being in 1980, well after Mr. Orwell’s rules had taken effect.
In a free market, people would be able to sue companies for destroying their health. The Environmental Degradation Agency helps to temper these unwanted effects of the unfettered free market, by jailing the activists who are uncovering evidence of those companies’ wrongdoing. In an unregulated jungle, many of those companies would be forced into bankruptcy. In a proper regulated environment, the companies agree to kill people more slowly, and therefore are allowed to continue poisoning people.
The “free market” is an ideal that can’t work in the real world. Any time a person or organized group is successful it gains economic power and it then can use that power to consolidate it’s position. That power is also used to distort the political system to the benefit of the powerful and to the detriment of society as a whole. The powerful always give lip service to free markets but only champion the idea when it serves them to their benefit. When a free market would serve anyone else they will oppose the free market.
In the case of the US the very powerful can convert economic power into political power pretty easily. That political power is then used to suppress any opposition to that power by a competitors or those affected negatively. The EPA was allowed to be established because it is a way when those in power get caught doing harm to the community they can use the EPA to transfer the cost of fixing the problem from the guilty party to the public. At the same time they can use that process to present an image of concern and care about the community instead of the true image of nothing more than a legal criminal protected by laws that they have paid a corrupt political class to institute in for their sole benefit.
The government itself is neither good nor bad. Just like a private business it’s character is shaped by those people who run it.
In Texas they passed a law capping awards in civil suits. Tort reform is an example of laws that benefit the powerful instead of the larger community. Now when someone is injured by malpractice those responsible only have to pay a small fraction of the cost to fix the harm they have done. If the injuries are extensive enough either those harmed get to suffer or the public ends up paying to costs.
In the real world – free markets, regulated markets – nothing works, because you are dealing with human beings who are capable of screwing up even a perfect system. Human beings got themselves kicked out of Eden after all.
The government is merely a tool in the struggle for power. Those who control it gain more power for themselves. I agree with your comments but that still leaves the question of how to wrestle back those controls i.e. how to shift the balance of power.
You forgot to mention that the insurance premiums that doctors pay for malpractice insurance average $1000 more a year in states that have tort reform. The insurance companies are making it on both ends.
This is honestly a story that sums up the corporatocracy state that our country has become. And I am so glad this particular author wrote it.. absolutely riveting journalism. Really makes you want to be a better person and an arsonist at the same time.
Thanks, Wallstats
A great article. I am going to assign it to my students next semester. It really was well researched and written. I was moved by your compassion for the subjects and outrage for the layers of injustice then and ongoing.
Obama is handing out awards and medals as consolation prizes to entertainers who donated buckaroonies to Hellary’s losing candidacy and real heroes like Tennie White and other whistle blowers putting their lives and careers on the line get villified, ostracised, condemned, exiled and imprisoned.
3rd World USA
So White gets 40 month hard time for allegedly not performing some $150 tests, while million $ polluters rearrange their assets with profit?
Justice served, US of Hell style.
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Proof positive that there is a sucker born every minute.
F#$king idiot should’ve let Daddy burn the whole damn thing down.
Humanity is a blight on this planet.
A not a GOD DAMNED thing will be done about it.
Meet the human race, savants at pointing out what’s wrong, and retardedly useless at actually fixing what’s wrong.
Once again, a fantastic story about institutionalized racism, and a real American hero is convoluted with the mention of Melania Trump, but you never told us Who appointed the head of the EPA to her post, that ultimately destroyed this woman
GIVE YOU A HINT, HOPE AND CHANGE
Pathetic!
Obama wasn’t promising HOPE and change.
We all misheard him.
He was promising GROPE and change, and wouldn’t you know it, he delivered with 45.
Amazing story, yet you could not help throwing Melania Trump under the bus when it was a Hope and Change appointment at the EPA that destroyed this fantastic woman, a real American hero. Shame on you
You idiot, can’t you hide you political leaning just once. We are, as a country sick of the two card Monte system, where the regular folk always lose
This is a depressing story. Yet there is hope. The more people know about this, the more chance something can be done. I hope this will be rectified before those involved die. I would like to think there is justice on earth.
NOPE.
Sorry Orville, but there is no hope.
The lunatics and fanatics of yesteryear were severely restricted by the fact that they could only murder and pillage what was in their immediate vicinity, while today’s monsters occupy positions of power and reach which make them God-like in the havoc they can unleash.
It’s time to face the fact that humanity is NOT the valedictorian who is going to an Ivy league school and has a bright future ahead of them. Humanity is the shy kid who got picked on in grade school, fell in with the wrong crowd in middle school, and eventually becomes a smack head in high school and OD’s 2 years after graduation.
The Universe has billions of intelligent species in it, and we simply will not make the cut.
The only blessing in all of this is that life is short, and most of us will be dead by the time the whole rotten thing comes crashing down.
The human species , on an evolutionary time scale , will most probably be the shortest lived organism in the Solar System , if not the entire Galaxy .
GOOD RIDDANCE !!!
Thank you Sharon Lerner for bringing to light the story of Tenny White, whose only crime was going up against the unmitigated gall of government officials who convicted her for bringing them to task on environmental racism. It sickens me to know that corporations that are found guilty of perpetuating destruction to the planet are rarely fined; and if fined, given very little prison time; and if that isn’t enough, stand to gain tidy sums for manipulating a flawed system in the process. The glaring injustice in this story reminds me of what happened to Shirley Sherrod who worked for the USDA under President Obama. While she didn’t serve a prison term, she was fired after being raked over the coals when bogus reports from breitbart news surfaced that she had discriminated against white farmers in a speech, causing Vilsack to fire her and Obama to lambast her without knowing the “report” was taken out of context. I am sure these two women would have a lot to discuss. The bright spot in Ms. White’s story is that we learned in the end that they may have been able to put her way, but they couldn’t take away her willingness to fight the good fight. And I say kudos to her!
Thank you, Robin. I appreciate the feedback
That was an excellent, well researched and well written article. Wish there was more out there….
I’m also a bit hesitant to add, speaking from my perspective and what has been done to me, but this really is just one small example on the tip of a very large iceberg.
There are very powerful people out there working for companies and governments that do set out to totally destroy people in every way. For reasons like this one. Back in the 60s they had names like MKUltra and Contelpro….these days we’re largely known as ‘Targeted Individuals’, as this lady quite clearly is.
Insane, inane, useless bureaucrats …. I think I m going to throw up! Thank you Intercept, thank you Ms. White for bring part of what good still exist in America.
Excellent journalism. I try to remain emotionally detached while reading pieces like this, in order, to analyze them with a clear mind but it was just impossible here.
This story was heartbreaking on so many levels. I thank you for your stellar journalism.
thank you, Marcello!
Thanks!
Thank you.
What a read. Thank you. Please keep it up.
Ah, yes, another turd in OTomma’s legacy; screw someone who is actually helping poor black people, while he smokes White Wall Street’s fat cigars and gets them to fund his library.
They prosecuted her for lying about environmental dangers? Tell that to Exxon-Mobil. Bring on Trump; he’s more likely to throw crooks in jail than this PC Dummocrap.
Not the first time EPA has gone after whistleblowers, but the idea that Trump will be better is laughable. He’s more likely to abolish the EPA, not reform it.
Your so right,I fell it will get worse under Trump,he will side with the company’s,after all y’all bragged about how he was such a good business man.Who do you think a business man will be helping .The people ,or the other businesses.come on how do you think he will help regular,poor non rich people.
I seriously doubt that Trump will be throwing his friends in jail. Obama (note how I’m using his and Trump’s actual names since I don’t reside permanently in 5th grade) has been an absolute mess in office. But Trump is in this for himself. If you think a self-absorbed billionaire cares squat for poor communities and pollution that kills its children, be they black or white, you’ve been successfully manipulated.
Problem here is that you aren’t taking responsibility. What did you do to push Obama to do whatever was “right” in your mind? You ever write him a letter? Ever get out and protest? Or is it all just trolling on an online message board? Regardless of our political affiliation, we should all be vigilant and activist for every president. Trump isn’t a solution. He’s another problem. Tennie White is a great example of being a citizen. If we all acted like her instead of name-calling or being vulgar on message boards, this country would be in a much better place for the working class and their families. She’s a hero so far as I’m concerned.
Amazing story! Thanks for the great work Sharon and Intercept, keep it up. And make sure you collect royalties when Hollywood picks up that story ;)
collect royalties…and please consider donating them to Tennie White.
This is indeed one of the most moving and important pieces I’ve seen on the Intercept or elsewhere anytime recently.
People are going to wonder how we let Trump’s criminals get ahold of the EPA. Something like this helps answer that. And someday the Trumpites in turn, and all the rich folks in charge of the Kerr-McGees of the world, are going to wonder how the head of Los Zetas became the emperor of half of America, and this helps answer that too. We’ve been hollowed out, left with only a few people who do the right thing, and them treated like this. What should we do if we see some kid being stuffed in a trunk as kidnappers take him away? You think, well, if his parents have enough money to be worth bothering with, they probably did something like this to somebody else, and knew enough to keep their mouths shut when it counted, so why not do what this gal from the EPA should have done, and keep your mouth shut? Society has a morale, and that morale can be broken, and it is broken, and it will be broken further.
So get #Obomba to pardon & exonerate her
Great idea.
And thank you TI for a well researched / written article!
Thanks for this informative article and thank you Tennie White for your outspoken courage. May you be well.
she was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison – for the exaggeration of time in college
MEANWHILE the REAL CRIMINALS ON WALLSTREET,
Hey ,, it’s a fuckin DEMOCRACY !!!
… what in hell does that mean?
Sharon, thank you so much for this fine piece of work. You truly deserve an award for it.
I feel like I have just been taken on an amazing adventure that is not quite over yet, but due to your reporting and the heroine’s courage will end in justice eventually prevailing.
I believe many of us reading this just want to give both you and Tennie the biggest of hugs.
Ditto Fellow Citizen. As for the Corporate criminals and EPA/DOJ scumbags who prosecuted this woman, terminal contempt is an understatement. I wish them every conceivable form of suffering imaginable x10, preferably perineal abscess’ of the rectum. However, I’m positive they will face their maker knowing what is about to occur to their soul.
I also want to thank Sharon, Fellow Citizen. I often find it hard to keep going with long articles, but I couldn’t stop reading this one. I would also like to give hugs to Ms. Warner, Ms. White, Rev. Jamison, Mr. Wilson, and all who are fighting to cleanup and safeguard the environment.
It is heartbreaking indeed that it seems as though so many times communities of color and/or economically challenged folks are targeted for pollution. It is heartbreaking that corporations and the gov’t are doing so little to punish polluters, yet will go after this woman with a vengeance. Disgraceful.
We must keep up the fight. We have got to get folks to see that what we’re doing to the Earth will eventually come back to haunt them – and all of us. Look at the way the water protectors/protesters have been treated as they fight to stop the DAPL. I wonder these days if there is any hope. I just pray there is.
Well said.
thanks, Fellow Citizen!