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In June, Sam Brown, the GOP candidate for US Senate in Nevada and longtime abortion opponent, published an op-ed that said that if he were elected and a national abortion ban came up for the vote in the Senate, he would oppose the measure. This was obviously a move to defuse incumbent Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen’s effort to wield the abortion issue against him. Brown’s campaign released an accompanying press release that complained, “Jacky Rosen and Nevada Democrats have spent nearly a year lying about Sam Brown’s personal position on abortion.” With this editorial—in which Brown said, “It’s our duty, as a society, to let women know they have options”—Brown was trying to fuzzy up the picture and become less of a target on this front. That was nothing new. A review of his campaign website reveals that over the past year Brown, an Afghanistan war veteran, has steadily shifted how he presents his position.

In July 2023, Brown’s site offered a brief and clear message on abortion: “Every life is precious, and it is in our American interest that we protect the lives of unborn babies just as we would protect the life of any other American. As a Senator, I will oppose any federal funding of abortion and only support U.S. Supreme Court Justices who understand the importance of protecting Life.” This was routine, if somewhat vague, rhetoric for a politician who calls himself “pro-life.” No mention of exceptions. No talk of respecting those who support women’s freedom on this matter.

The following month, Brown’s website expanded its statement on abortion, adding that he opposed late-term abortions and abortions without parental notification. Brown noted, “Every life is precious, I learned that firsthand when I nearly lost my own life in Afghanistan.”

By the end of February, the “Life” section on Brown’s website had changed again. He still stated his opposition. But Brown added a twist: “Nevada voters have made it clear where they stand on this issue, by enshrining protections for abortion in our state law. As a U.S. Senator, I will not vote to overturn the decision of Nevadans—I will not support a national abortion ban.” He added, “We must come together, as a nation, to engage in honest dialogue to personalize—not politicize — this important issue and make sure all voices are heard.”

Brown had moved from stating his outright opposition to abortion to now saying that he would not challenge Nevada state law that protects reproductive freedom and that he would oppose an nationwide ban. (In Nevada, thanks to a 1990 referendum, abortion is legal through the the first 24 weeks of pregnancy and afterward to protect the health of the mother.) He also was calling for a productive national conversation about abortion—not merely advocating curtailing or outlawing it.

This was quite a step for Brown. The previous September, he had declined to say whether he backed a national abortion ban. He had also then refused to comment on his previous support for a 20-week abortion ban during his failed 2014 bid for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives. Touting that measure, Brown had declared at the time, “On issues of life, that is a nonnegotiable for me.” Texas law at that point included an exception for preserving the life of the mother but not for rape or incest. And during that losing campaign, Brown had even called for greater restrictions on abortion: “I think that it’s a shame that here in Texas, which is being lauded as such a conservative state with regard to the issue of life, half of Europe has stricter laws than we do here.”

Brown’s declaration of opposition to a national ban in February coincided with his wife Amy Brown revealing that she had an abortion in 2008 when she was 24 and single. She said it had caused years of anguish but had made her sympathetic to women who encounter unwanted pregnancies. Both Browns said during an emotional joint interview that they would follow the will of the people of Nevada with respect to abortion—again, a major departure from his days in Texas as a fiery anti-abortion advocate.

The current version of Brown’s website contains yet another alteration to the “Life” section. It now states, “I am pro life, with exceptions for the tragic cases of rape, incest, and the life of the mother.” Brown had added the standard exceptions (though he said for the “life” not the “health” of the mother) that he had once seemed to oppose.

Brown has been no model of consistency on abortion. In fact, he has been on something of an awkward journey regarding abortion that can be seen as driven by political calculation. In Texas, he was a full-throated anti-abortion crusader. Four years after his failed campaign there, he managed the campaign for a Texas congressional candidate who called for an abortion ban with no exceptions. Brown also served as the executive board chairman of the Nevada Freedom and Faith Coalition whose national chapter has been a champion for severely restrictive anti-abortion measures.

Now, with a referendum on the Nevada ballot this November to enshrine reproductive rights within the state constitution and Brown being barraged on the issue by Rosen, he has jettisoned his past, non-negotiable support for a highly restrictive ban, embraced exceptions, and claimed he would not vote for a national prohibition.

Still, Brown is having trouble navigating this bob-and-weave course. Ever since the Nevada initiative qualified for the ballot in late June, he has declined to say publicly how he would vote for it—a dodge that looks like another step designed to keep him from being pegged as a die-hard abortion foe in a state where abortion rights are popular during an election season in which the Republican war on reproductive rights is a top issue.

Yet this week, the Nevada Independent published audio from an August 28 campaign meet and greet in which Brown, not surprisingly, privately suggested he would not vote for the measure: “I’m not for changing our existing law. Our existing law has been in place for over 34 years. The ballot measure would change the law and essentially [create] no limit on access to abortion.”

There have long been politicians who have changed their minds on abortion. But Brown has not said he has altered his view. In this case, he seems not to be evolving but evading.

In June, Sam Brown, the GOP candidate for US Senate in Nevada and longtime abortion opponent, published an op-ed that said that if he were elected and a national abortion ban came up for the vote in the Senate, he would oppose the measure. This was obviously a move to defuse incumbent Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen’s effort to wield the abortion issue against him. Brown’s campaign released an accompanying press release that complained, “Jacky Rosen and Nevada Democrats have spent nearly a year lying about Sam Brown’s personal position on abortion.” With this editorial—in which Brown said, “It’s our duty, as a society, to let women know they have options”—Brown was trying to fuzzy up the picture and become less of a target on this front. That was nothing new. A review of his campaign website reveals that over the past year Brown, an Afghanistan war veteran, has steadily shifted how he presents his position.

In July 2023, Brown’s site offered a brief and clear message on abortion: “Every life is precious, and it is in our American interest that we protect the lives of unborn babies just as we would protect the life of any other American. As a Senator, I will oppose any federal funding of abortion and only support U.S. Supreme Court Justices who understand the importance of protecting Life.” This was routine, if somewhat vague, rhetoric for a politician who calls himself “pro-life.” No mention of exceptions. No talk of respecting those who support women’s freedom on this matter.

The following month, Brown’s website expanded its statement on abortion, adding that he opposed late-term abortions and abortions without parental notification. Brown noted, “Every life is precious, I learned that firsthand when I nearly lost my own life in Afghanistan.”

By the end of February, the “Life” section on Brown’s website had changed again. He still stated his opposition. But Brown added a twist: “Nevada voters have made it clear where they stand on this issue, by enshrining protections for abortion in our state law. As a U.S. Senator, I will not vote to overturn the decision of Nevadans—I will not support a national abortion ban.” He added, “We must come together, as a nation, to engage in honest dialogue to personalize—not politicize — this important issue and make sure all voices are heard.”

Brown had moved from stating his outright opposition to abortion to now saying that he would not challenge Nevada state law that protects reproductive freedom and that he would oppose an nationwide ban. (In Nevada, thanks to a 1990 referendum, abortion is legal through the the first 24 weeks of pregnancy and afterward to protect the health of the mother.) He also was calling for a productive national conversation about abortion—not merely advocating curtailing or outlawing it.

This was quite a step for Brown. The previous September, he had declined to say whether he backed a national abortion ban. He had also then refused to comment on his previous support for a 20-week abortion ban during his failed 2014 bid for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives. Touting that measure, Brown had declared at the time, “On issues of life, that is a nonnegotiable for me.” Texas law at that point included an exception for preserving the life of the mother but not for rape or incest. And during that losing campaign, Brown had even called for greater restrictions on abortion: “I think that it’s a shame that here in Texas, which is being lauded as such a conservative state with regard to the issue of life, half of Europe has stricter laws than we do here.”

Brown’s declaration of opposition to a national ban in February coincided with his wife Amy Brown revealing that she had an abortion in 2008 when she was 24 and single. She said it had caused years of anguish but had made her sympathetic to women who encounter unwanted pregnancies. Both Browns said during an emotional joint interview that they would follow the will of the people of Nevada with respect to abortion—again, a major departure from his days in Texas as a fiery anti-abortion advocate.

The current version of Brown’s website contains yet another alteration to the “Life” section. It now states, “I am pro life, with exceptions for the tragic cases of rape, incest, and the life of the mother.” Brown had added the standard exceptions (though he said for the “life” not the “health” of the mother) that he had once seemed to oppose.

Brown has been no model of consistency on abortion. In fact, he has been on something of an awkward journey regarding abortion that can be seen as driven by political calculation. In Texas, he was a full-throated anti-abortion crusader. Four years after his failed campaign there, he managed the campaign for a Texas congressional candidate who called for an abortion ban with no exceptions. Brown also served as the executive board chairman of the Nevada Freedom and Faith Coalition whose national chapter has been a champion for severely restrictive anti-abortion measures.

Now, with a referendum on the Nevada ballot this November to enshrine reproductive rights within the state constitution and Brown being barraged on the issue by Rosen, he has jettisoned his past, non-negotiable support for a highly restrictive ban, embraced exceptions, and claimed he would not vote for a national prohibition.

Still, Brown is having trouble navigating this bob-and-weave course. Ever since the Nevada initiative qualified for the ballot in late June, he has declined to say publicly how he would vote for it—a dodge that looks like another step designed to keep him from being pegged as a die-hard abortion foe in a state where abortion rights are popular during an election season in which the Republican war on reproductive rights is a top issue.

Yet this week, the Nevada Independent published audio from an August 28 campaign meet and greet in which Brown, not surprisingly, privately suggested he would not vote for the measure: “I’m not for changing our existing law. Our existing law has been in place for over 34 years. The ballot measure would change the law and essentially [create] no limit on access to abortion.”

There have long been politicians who have changed their minds on abortion. But Brown has not said he has altered his view. In this case, he seems not to be evolving but evading.

Bernie Moreno’s network of car dealerships is the building block of the Ohio Republican’s campaign for US Senate. Moreno, who is seeking to unseat three-term Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in one of the year’s tightest races, has acquired and eventually sold off more than two dozen dealerships between 2005 and 2022 and grew enormously rich in the process. He is worth as much as $105.7 million, according to financial disclosures—wealth that helped power him to victory in an ugly primary this spring. That private sector track record is also a part of his pitch on the campaign trail, where he describes himself as a self-made man who “mortgaged everything I own in life” to buy his first Mercedes-Benz dealership in Cleveland and who built a successful company “with no partners.”

The up-by-the-bootstraps campaign trail story belies a more complicated reality. While Moreno describes his immigrant family as “lower middle class” and said they “came here with absolutely nothing,” a New York Times report in May detailed the Morenos’ powerful political and financial connections in Colombia, where one brother runs a major construction firm and another served as president of the Inter-American Development Bank. As he has attempted to position himself as a candidate for the working man, Moreno has been dogged, too, by questions about how he made his money. Earlier this year, my colleague Abby Vesoulis reported that Moreno shelled out more than $400,000 to settle a wage-theft lawsuit in Massachusetts in which “he was forced to admit to shredding overtime-­payment records.” He eventually settled more than a dozen claims of wage theft at his dealerships in the commonwealth, along with a host of other complaints from former employees—outcomes he has blamed on disgruntled workers and “activist” judges.

Moreno was, by all accounts, a highly effective car dealer whose energy and risk-taking helped him thrive in a cutthroat industry. But records from a nearly decade-old legal battle involving a dealership in South Florida tell a more nuanced story about Moreno’s rise, and the breaks he got along the way.

The 2014 complaint in the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings centered on attempts by the Infiniti division of Nissan to expand its footprint in the highly competitive South Florida luxury car market by opening a new Infiniti dealership in downtown Coral Gables. After the company announced that Moreno—who had opened nine dealerships for brands such as Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Kia, BMW, and Saab—would be their guy, two neighboring dealers lodged an official protest with the Florida Department of Highway Safety, claiming that Nissan was infringing on their home turf and granting special favors to Moreno.

The South Florida case offered a glimpse of the breaks that helped Moreno climb to the top of the profession. He drew the ire of rival dealers by collecting millions of dollars in financial assistance from manufacturers to open new storefronts, and he testified that Mercedes-Benz had pulled strings to get him a sweetheart deal on his very first Ohio dealership. Ultimately, he secured his Florida “dream” project only after a top competitor was laid low by a scandal involving a failed drug test.

At the hearing that fall, Moreno was a star witness. He described how he got his start as a deputy to the New England car mogul Herb Chambers, an avid yacht collector who commuted to his Massachusetts headquarters by helicopter. They had a “father/son relationship,” Moreno said, but not long after vacationing together in the Caribbean, Moreno and Chambers had a falling-out, and the understudy went into business by himself, spending about $2 million in 2005 to purchase and overhaul a Mercedes-Benz dealership in North Olmsted, Ohio.

“I took every dollar that I had ever seen in my life and managed to save and bought the dealership,” Moreno testified. He even drained his 401(k)—“which is not a good financial move,” he conceded, “but that was my only choice.”

But Moreno did not just mortgage his property in Key Largo. He also got a bit of help. “[W]hat happened was they wanted a minority operator there,” he explained, in comments that were first reported by Business Insider in March. Mercedes arranged for the owner—billionaire automotive tycoon Roger Penske—“to sell that dealership for a dramatically reduced price in exchange for Mercedes giving Penske an open point in Chandler, Arizona,” Moreno said.

Moreno explained that big car companies were “under a lot of pressure to have the dealer body be diverse, be representative of the community. And so I’m certain, at that time, when—they may have been getting pressure to have more diversity among their dealership ranks, have the dealer body be diverse, be representative of the community.” During his Senate campaign, Moreno has railed against “wokeness” and referred to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs as “a new form of racism.”

“Bernie was offered this opportunity because he is a talented businessman, and he was able to turn this location into a successful dealership,” a Moreno campaign spokesperson said in a statement. “As he has said time and time again, Bernie believes that merit should always be the singular factor in these decisions—period. His dealerships performed to the highest standard, and he believes that success should be the only factor for hiring practices, promotions, and business dealings.”

The spokesperson added: “As Bernie has said time and time again, his family did not give him a cent to start his own business. He took a huge financial risk on his own to build a wildly successful car business.”

By the time he got wind of Infiniti’s plans to open a Coral Gables location in 2011, Moreno had become a star in the industry, with operations in Ohio, Kentucky, and Massachusetts. Having grown up in the Miami area, he testified that his “heart started beating” when thought about opening a new dealership nearby. Moreno described driving through Coral Gables one day when he saw a vacancy on the ground floor of the Bacardi Building, which is home to the beverage company’s world headquarters. This time, he leveraged his family connections with a nephew, who worked for the “number three guy” at the private equity giant Fortress Investments, which had recently sold the property. “With a little bit of his assistance,” Moreno said, he secured “really favorable lease terms.”

But the bid for the Infiniti dealership was still a bit of a gamble for both parties. In a 124-page prospectus Moreno’s Collection Auto Group submitted as part of the company’s proposal for the dealership, the company included a “Capitalization Plan” with a detailed description of Moreno’s assets at the time. “Necessary Working Capital will be funded,” Collection Auto wrote, “from profits from existing operations in Northeast Ohio…Moreno Family cash reserves, and/or liquidation of select Northeast Ohio stores as necessary.” The document included a handwritten insertion that Collection Auto was prepared to invest “whatever necessary” in the dealership. A campaign spokesperson said that the “cash reserves” in question referred to Moreno’s own funds, and not the extended Moreno family. 

While Moreno testified that his dealership group brought in about $15 million in profit a year, he had poured most of his own income into real estate and new projects—a bank statement attached to the prospectus showed just $55,000 in a personal savings account at the time, while his corporate books listed about $2 million in available funds. Jeffrey Harris, then the regional vice president for Infiniti’s operations in the eastern United States, testified that his biggest concern with Moreno’s pitch was “capitalization,” comparing the highly leveraged businessman to a “Silicon Valley startup.”

To cover the costs, Moreno got a much-needed handout. A centerpiece of the case was a confidential agreement Moreno signed with Infiniti. The manufacturer offered $4.4 million in financial assistance, about $2.4 million of which came in the form of performance incentives but the rest came in guaranteed payouts to defray the cost of rent and—somewhat presciently—delays due to litigation. According to court records, Nissan also gave Moreno $1.25 million in assistance to open a dealership in Akron, $650,000 to open a location in Cleveland, and $3.75 million to open another dealership by that city’s airport.

“Your honor, they keep giving this guy money,” complained John Forehand, an attorney for one of the plaintiffs, South Motors. “They aren’t giving anybody else money.”

That turned out to be an overstatement—Infiniti actually had offered a similar amount to South Motors previously to encourage it to open a new shop, and Moreno, for his part, testified that the $4.4 million in assistance was less than he’d asked for. The arrangement with Moreno was not “typical,” but “I wouldn’t call it uncommon,” said Harris, who argued that the large stipend was necessary to secure competitive locations in areas with high rents and startup costs, and that the accompanying confidentiality agreements were a necessity to prevent dealers from bragging to each other about their financial assistance. A judge at the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings in Tallahassee ultimately ruled in Nissan’s favor, and Moreno’s dealership opened in 2017.

But the case exposed discontent among smaller salesmen. A 2016 report in the trade journal Automotive News, which cited Nissan’s close financial relationship with Moreno, found that the assistance “has put Nissan at odds with some dealers, especially those who have smaller lots and lack the means or stomach to invest millions of dollars. Some have surrendered their franchises; others have faced termination notices from the manufacturer, numerous dealers report.” 

Later that year, in response to the Automotive News story, four Ohio dealers sued Nissan alleging that the manufacturer had given Moreno an illegal competitive advantage by lavishing incentives on him. Nissan denied that it gave any dealer preferential treatment, and the case was eventually settled with no admission of wrongdoing.

The South Florida dispute also offered a glimpse of the attributes that have made Moreno successful in Republican politics, where he is hoping to ride the coattails of the ur-salesman, Donald Trump. Moreno was promising a flashy new facility, with an in-house nail bar to cater to women, and specially imported “high, high end Colombian coffee.” (His great-grandfather, he said, founded the Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia—known to American consumers by its fictional pitchman, Juan Valdez.)

In his own testimony, Harris, the Infiniti executive, stated that Moreno had sold more cars in a month at one Cleveland dealership than his predecessor had sold in six months. “Bernie is now being chased by every manufacturer out there,” he said. “Mercedes is chasing him. Infiniti is chasing him…Bernie is absolutely one of the best.”

Sometimes, he could be both relentless and lucky. During the proceedings, Harris testified that despite Moreno’s best efforts, the company had initially reached an agreement with a different suitor for the Coral Gables location—the Major League Baseball star Alex Rodriguez, a hometown hero whose personal fortune and $27 million-a-year contract with the New York Yankees meant the company wouldn’t have to worry about capital costs.

“When I chose Alex as the number one candidate, I did get a text from Bernie every time he went 0 for 4,” Harris testified. “He’d say, ‘Your dealer just went 0 for 4 last night.’”

Ultimately, A-Rod’s baseball career worked against him. The New York Yankee pulled out of the deal after he was suspended for the entire 2014 season for steroid use, jeopardizing his coveted cash flow. 

“[W]hen Alex fell through, I immediately called Bernie and said, ‘Bernie, can you still do what you proposed?’ And he said, ‘yes,’” Harris said.

Correction, August 20: An earlier version of this story misstated which brand of car Moreno sold at his first dealership.

Bernie Moreno’s network of car dealerships is the building block of the Ohio Republican’s campaign for US Senate. Moreno, who is seeking to unseat three-term Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in one of the year’s tightest races, has acquired and eventually sold off more than two dozen dealerships between 2005 and 2022 and grew enormously rich in the process. He is worth as much as $105.7 million, according to financial disclosures—wealth that helped power him to victory in an ugly primary this spring. That private sector track record is also a part of his pitch on the campaign trail, where he describes himself as a self-made man who “mortgaged everything I own in life” to buy his first Mercedes-Benz dealership in Cleveland and who built a successful company “with no partners.”

The up-by-the-bootstraps campaign trail story belies a more complicated reality. While Moreno describes his immigrant family as “lower middle class” and said they “came here with absolutely nothing,” a New York Times report in May detailed the Morenos’ powerful political and financial connections in Colombia, where one brother runs a major construction firm and another served as president of the Inter-American Development Bank. As he has attempted to position himself as a candidate for the working man, Moreno has been dogged, too, by questions about how he made his money. Earlier this year, my colleague Abby Vesoulis reported that Moreno shelled out more than $400,000 to settle a wage-theft lawsuit in Massachusetts in which “he was forced to admit to shredding overtime-­payment records.” He eventually settled more than a dozen claims of wage theft at his dealerships in the commonwealth, along with a host of other complaints from former employees—outcomes he has blamed on disgruntled workers and “activist” judges.

Moreno was, by all accounts, a highly effective car dealer whose energy and risk-taking helped him thrive in a cutthroat industry. But records from a nearly decade-old legal battle involving a dealership in South Florida tell a more nuanced story about Moreno’s rise, and the breaks he got along the way.

The 2014 complaint in the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings centered on attempts by the Infiniti division of Nissan to expand its footprint in the highly competitive South Florida luxury car market by opening a new Infiniti dealership in downtown Coral Gables. After the company announced that Moreno—who had opened nine dealerships for brands such as Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Kia, BMW, and Saab—would be their guy, two neighboring dealers lodged an official protest with the Florida Department of Highway Safety, claiming that Nissan was infringing on their home turf and granting special favors to Moreno.

The South Florida case offered a glimpse of the breaks that helped Moreno climb to the top of the profession. He drew the ire of rival dealers by collecting millions of dollars in financial assistance from manufacturers to open new storefronts, and he testified that Mercedes-Benz had pulled strings to get him a sweetheart deal on his very first Ohio dealership. Ultimately, he secured his Florida “dream” project only after a top competitor was laid low by a scandal involving a failed drug test.

At the hearing that fall, Moreno was a star witness. He described how he got his start as a deputy to the New England car mogul Herb Chambers, an avid yacht collector who commuted to his Massachusetts headquarters by helicopter. They had a “father/son relationship,” Moreno said, but not long after vacationing together in the Caribbean, Moreno and Chambers had a falling-out, and the understudy went into business by himself, spending about $2 million in 2005 to purchase and overhaul a Mercedes-Benz dealership in North Olmsted, Ohio.

“I took every dollar that I had ever seen in my life and managed to save and bought the dealership,” Moreno testified. He even drained his 401(k)—“which is not a good financial move,” he conceded, “but that was my only choice.”

But Moreno did not just mortgage his property in Key Largo. He also got a bit of help. “[W]hat happened was they wanted a minority operator there,” he explained, in comments that were first reported by Business Insider in March. Mercedes arranged for the owner—billionaire automotive tycoon Roger Penske—“to sell that dealership for a dramatically reduced price in exchange for Mercedes giving Penske an open point in Chandler, Arizona,” Moreno said.

Moreno explained that big car companies were “under a lot of pressure to have the dealer body be diverse, be representative of the community. And so I’m certain, at that time, when—they may have been getting pressure to have more diversity among their dealership ranks, have the dealer body be diverse, be representative of the community.” During his Senate campaign, Moreno has railed against “wokeness” and referred to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs as “a new form of racism.”

“Bernie was offered this opportunity because he is a talented businessman, and he was able to turn this location into a successful dealership,” a Moreno campaign spokesperson said in a statement. “As he has said time and time again, Bernie believes that merit should always be the singular factor in these decisions—period. His dealerships performed to the highest standard, and he believes that success should be the only factor for hiring practices, promotions, and business dealings.”

The spokesperson added: “As Bernie has said time and time again, his family did not give him a cent to start his own business. He took a huge financial risk on his own to build a wildly successful car business.”

By the time he got wind of Infiniti’s plans to open a Coral Gables location in 2011, Moreno had become a star in the industry, with operations in Ohio, Kentucky, and Massachusetts. Having grown up in the Miami area, he testified that his “heart started beating” when thought about opening a new dealership nearby. Moreno described driving through Coral Gables one day when he saw a vacancy on the ground floor of the Bacardi Building, which is home to the beverage company’s world headquarters. This time, he leveraged his family connections with a nephew, who worked for the “number three guy” at the private equity giant Fortress Investments, which had recently sold the property. “With a little bit of his assistance,” Moreno said, he secured “really favorable lease terms.”

But the bid for the Infiniti dealership was still a bit of a gamble for both parties. In a 124-page prospectus Moreno’s Collection Auto Group submitted as part of the company’s proposal for the dealership, the company included a “Capitalization Plan” with a detailed description of Moreno’s assets at the time. “Necessary Working Capital will be funded,” Collection Auto wrote, “from profits from existing operations in Northeast Ohio…Moreno Family cash reserves, and/or liquidation of select Northeast Ohio stores as necessary.” The document included a handwritten insertion that Collection Auto was prepared to invest “whatever necessary” in the dealership. A campaign spokesperson said that the “cash reserves” in question referred to Moreno’s own funds, and not the extended Moreno family. 

While Moreno testified that his dealership group brought in about $15 million in profit a year, he had poured most of his own income into real estate and new projects—a bank statement attached to the prospectus showed just $55,000 in a personal savings account at the time, while his corporate books listed about $2 million in available funds. Jeffrey Harris, then the regional vice president for Infiniti’s operations in the eastern United States, testified that his biggest concern with Moreno’s pitch was “capitalization,” comparing the highly leveraged businessman to a “Silicon Valley startup.”

To cover the costs, Moreno got a much-needed handout. A centerpiece of the case was a confidential agreement Moreno signed with Infiniti. The manufacturer offered $4.4 million in financial assistance, about $2.4 million of which came in the form of performance incentives but the rest came in guaranteed payouts to defray the cost of rent and—somewhat presciently—delays due to litigation. According to court records, Nissan also gave Moreno $1.25 million in assistance to open a dealership in Akron, $650,000 to open a location in Cleveland, and $3.75 million to open another dealership by that city’s airport.

“Your honor, they keep giving this guy money,” complained John Forehand, an attorney for one of the plaintiffs, South Motors. “They aren’t giving anybody else money.”

That turned out to be an overstatement—Infiniti actually had offered a similar amount to South Motors previously to encourage it to open a new shop, and Moreno, for his part, testified that the $4.4 million in assistance was less than he’d asked for. The arrangement with Moreno was not “typical,” but “I wouldn’t call it uncommon,” said Harris, who argued that the large stipend was necessary to secure competitive locations in areas with high rents and startup costs, and that the accompanying confidentiality agreements were a necessity to prevent dealers from bragging to each other about their financial assistance. A judge at the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings in Tallahassee ultimately ruled in Nissan’s favor, and Moreno’s dealership opened in 2017.

But the case exposed discontent among smaller salesmen. A 2016 report in the trade journal Automotive News, which cited Nissan’s close financial relationship with Moreno, found that the assistance “has put Nissan at odds with some dealers, especially those who have smaller lots and lack the means or stomach to invest millions of dollars. Some have surrendered their franchises; others have faced termination notices from the manufacturer, numerous dealers report.” 

Later that year, in response to the Automotive News story, four Ohio dealers sued Nissan alleging that the manufacturer had given Moreno an illegal competitive advantage by lavishing incentives on him. Nissan denied that it gave any dealer preferential treatment, and the case was eventually settled with no admission of wrongdoing.

The South Florida dispute also offered a glimpse of the attributes that have made Moreno successful in Republican politics, where he is hoping to ride the coattails of the ur-salesman, Donald Trump. Moreno was promising a flashy new facility, with an in-house nail bar to cater to women, and specially imported “high, high end Colombian coffee.” (His great-grandfather, he said, founded the Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia—known to American consumers by its fictional pitchman, Juan Valdez.)

In his own testimony, Harris, the Infiniti executive, stated that Moreno had sold more cars in a month at one Cleveland dealership than his predecessor had sold in six months. “Bernie is now being chased by every manufacturer out there,” he said. “Mercedes is chasing him. Infiniti is chasing him…Bernie is absolutely one of the best.”

Sometimes, he could be both relentless and lucky. During the proceedings, Harris testified that despite Moreno’s best efforts, the company had initially reached an agreement with a different suitor for the Coral Gables location—the Major League Baseball star Alex Rodriguez, a hometown hero whose personal fortune and $27 million-a-year contract with the New York Yankees meant the company wouldn’t have to worry about capital costs.

“When I chose Alex as the number one candidate, I did get a text from Bernie every time he went 0 for 4,” Harris testified. “He’d say, ‘Your dealer just went 0 for 4 last night.’”

Ultimately, A-Rod’s baseball career worked against him. The New York Yankee pulled out of the deal after he was suspended for the entire 2014 season for steroid use, jeopardizing his coveted cash flow. 

“[W]hen Alex fell through, I immediately called Bernie and said, ‘Bernie, can you still do what you proposed?’ And he said, ‘yes,’” Harris said.

Correction, August 20: An earlier version of this story misstated which brand of car Moreno sold at his first dealership.

This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

US politics is an outlier bastion of climate denial with nearly one in four members of Congress dismissing the reality of climate change, even as alarm has grown among the American public over dangerous global heating, an analysis has found.

A total of 123 elected federal representatives—100 in the House of Representatives and 23 US senators—deny the existence of human-caused climate change, all of them Republicans, according to a recent study of statements made by current members.

“It’s definitely concerning,” said Kat So, campaign manager for energy and environment campaigns at the Center for American Progress, which wrote the report.

The report defined climate deniers as those who say that the climate crisis is not real or not primarily caused by humans, or claim that climate science is not settled, that extreme weather is not caused by global warming, or that planet-warming pollution is beneficial.

It also highlights examples of denial from representatives. “Of course the climate is changing,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in 2018. “The climate has been changing from the dawn of time. The climate will change as long as we have a planet Earth.”

Just because politicians “say they believe in climate change doesn’t mean that they are not still obstructing climate action, or using rhetoric that is antithetical to climate action.”

Other instances are more recent. “We’ve had freezing periods in the 1970s. They said it was going to be a new cooling period,” Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise said in a 2021 interview, referencing long-debunked research that is often still cited by climate deniers. “And now it gets warmer and gets colder, and that’s called Mother Nature. But the idea that hurricanes or wildfires were caused just in the last few years is just fallacy.”

Climate-denying lawmakers have received a combined $52 million in lifetime campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, the report also found.

The research shows that the American public, perhaps uniquely among people in developed countries, is represented disproportionately by climate deniers. Although 23 percent of the entire US Congress is composed of those who dismiss the climate crisis, polls show the proportion of Americans who share this view is significantly smaller, by as much as half.

Even as a quarter of US lawmakers deny the climate crisis, the American public has been moving significantly in the other direction. Fewer than one in five people in the US reject the findings of climate science, according to various studies, with long-running polling by Yale University showing that those they class as “dismissive” stand at just 11 percent.

While this slice of the American public opinion has remained largely unchanged in recent years, a much larger, growing cohort is worried about the climate crisis following a string of record hot years and a parade of wildfires, storms and other climate-fueled events. More than half of Americans are now “alarmed” or “concerned” about climate change, the Yale surveys find.

“The amount of people at each end of the spectrum—alarmed and dismissive—were essentially tied back in 2013 but today there are three alarmed people for every one dismissive, so there’s been a fundamental shift in how people see climate change in the US,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert in climate public opinion at Yale.

Though the portion of lawmakers who deny the climate crisis is stunning, it has been steadily declining in recent years. Just five years ago, 150 lawmakers denied the crisis. But many elected officials who don’t deny the crisis still use anti-climate rhetoric and work to thwart greenhouse gas curbing policies.

“There’s a culture of silence—climate has joined sex, religion and politics as the topics not to bring up at the Thanksgiving table.”

The Florida representative Mario Diaz-Balart, for instance, previously used the language of climate denial, but more recently described climate change as being “more of a religion”—a different form of “climate obstruction,” the report says. He has also continued to oppose climate aid.

“There are lots of harmful ways to talk about climate and act on it,” said So. “Just because they accept the scientific findings or say they believe in climate change doesn’t mean that they are not still obstructing climate action, or using rhetoric that is antithetical to climate action.”

Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University who has long studied anti-climate rhetoric, said it was “unsurprising” that the report found old-school climate denial is on the decline.

“It’s harder to deny the science when it’s so much more apparent that the climate is warming, that extreme weather is getting worse and happening constantly,” she said. “Nobody can deny the science with a straight face, given everything.”

She noted, however, that the fossil fuel industry and its allies have long used a variety of messaging to rebuff concerns about the climate. She said she was unsure those other forms of rhetoric were any less harmful.

“As far back as the 1990s, they were saying renewable energy isn’t reliable enough, or they were saying that wind power…kills whales,” she said. “Is it really so different from climate denial if you don’t deny the science but you deny the possibility of solutions?”

Among ordinary people, Leiserowitz said the views of the relatively small group of people who deny that temperatures are warming, or tie climate science to conspiracy theories involving Al Gore or the United Nations, are often exaggerated both politically and throughout US society.

“This small minority of Americans are really vocal, they are more likely to vote and clearly they are more than adequately represented in the halls of Congress,” he said. “They are punching above their weight and having an undue influence on the public square, to the extent that most people don’t want to talk about climate change because they think half of the country doesn’t believe in it. There’s a culture of silence—climate has joined sex, religion and politics as the topics not to bring up at the Thanksgiving table.”

Political polarization and the prevalence of “safe” congressional seats, which encourage candidates to hew to more extreme views in order to secure key party primary contests, have helped entrench this imbalance, Leiserowitz said, along with a flood of donations from the fossil fuel industry.

Kamala Harris has joked about experimenting with marijuana and—unlike another famous Democrat—admitted to a truly shocking act: inhaling. With Joe Biden out of the race, her track record on drug policy as a prosecutor, senator, and vice president is worth revisiting. A Harris administration would be responsible for shaping federal drug policy that would impact the tens of millions of Americans suffering from addiction and the effects of the failed war on drugs. As a prosecutor in San Francisco, she had a slightly higher conviction rate for marijuana-related crimes than her predecessor but later sponsored a bill in the Senate to lift the federal prohibition on marijuana by removing it from the list of substances under the Controlled Substances Act—also known as descheduling. Vice President Harris played a major role in the Biden administration’s messaging around drug policy, even announcing their intention to reschedule marijuana during a March roundtable featuring rapper Fat Joe. Rescheduling marijuana would place it in a category of illegal drugs that are considered less dangerous, making research more viable, but drug policy advocates have criticized the administration for not moving to deschedule the drug.

My hope is that Kamala Harris works to end the drug war.

One advocate calling for the descheduling of marijuana is Kassandra Frederique of Drug Policy Action, a nonpartisan organization working to end the drug war through campaigns and ballot initiatives. Frederique says Harris is “further along in terms of cannabis reform policy” than Biden and that her evolution on drug policy shows promise. I spoke with her about Harris’ track record and what she hopes to see from a possible future Kamala Harris administration.  

Can we start by talking about your journey towards advocating for drug policy change? What made you want to get involved in this type of activism?

The more I learned about drug policy and its implications [for] everyday life, I recognized how so much of my own life and the lives of my loved ones were shaped by these policies, and I found a real purpose in working to dismantle the tools that have been really harming so many people for so long. 

What do you hope to see from Kamala Harris’ approach to drug policy if she becomes the next president? 

My hope is that Kamala Harris works to end the drug war. I think we’ve seen her evolution on certain issues like cannabis. We’ve seen her engagement through the Biden-Harris administration around the overdose crisis and recognizing that people need more access to medication treatment. She’s called out the entities that are exploiting people’s pain. We are in a moment where over 100,000 Americans are dying yearly from overdoses. My hope is that whoever leads the country in the next four years is actively invested in that and is working to actually get the resources to our communities and to end criminalization. 

When it comes to marijuana policy specifically, what do you hope to see from the Harris administration if she wins? 

What we’re looking for is the descheduling of cannabis. I think we need to remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act. When the vice president was a senator, she was a sponsor of the MORE Act, which descheduled cannabis [and] worked on expungement.

My hope is that she would follow the majority of Americans who believe that cannabis should be regulated. Even in the public comment period that just passed, nearly 70 percent of the comments supported descheduling, decriminalizing, or legalizing cannabis at the federal level. That’s a large mandate, and I think it aligns with Senator Harris’ perspective before she became vice president, and we’d like to see her move in that direction. 

Your organization has criticized the Biden administration for pursuing rescheduling instead of seeking to legalize marijuana federally. What are the issues that rescheduling doesn’t address? 

Rescheduling doesn’t deal with any of the criminal justice issues. People can still be incarcerated. Rescheduling doesn’t address the issues that have made cannabis such a large criminal justice issue, that has gotten people deported or [made] people lose custody of their kids or lose housing. Descheduling would actually trigger policy reforms that will impact the vast majority of people who’ve been harmed by cannabis prohibition. 

How was Harris’ record as a prosecutor, senator, and VP? Where have you seen her evolve on these issues? 

We’ve seen the most evolution from Kamala through her position on cannabis—slower than we would have liked, but her evolution shows promise. There were things that we struggled with her on when she was a prosecutor in California. But I think if you are a drug policy reformer, you’re always struggling with prosecutors. We worked with her on many pieces of legislation when she was a senator, and we’ve appreciated some of her rhetoric as vice president. There are no politicians currently who are 100 percent on ending the war on drugs.

How do you think the Harris administration could differ from the Biden administration in terms of marijuana policy and drug policy overall? 

President Biden has also evolved on cannabis. Has he gone as far as advocates would have liked? No. But he has evolved from where he started. I think Vice President Harris is further along in terms of cannabis reform policy. Our hope is that we can build momentum from what the Biden-Harris administration has done and that a potential Harris administration would be willing to go further. 

What do you think is the significance of having someone from the community that is most affected by the war on drugs in the White House leading the nation’s drug policy agenda? 

Representation is important, [but] I don’t think representation always equals a difference in policy. For advocates, the mission is still the same. We have to push, we have to educate, we have to agitate to get the things that we know our communities need. And while one can assume that Harris has a closer relationship [with] those things, Vice President Harris was also a prosecutor, so we’ve not always been on the same side. As a senator, we’ve been on the same side more. Our hope is that we’d be able to maintain that.

Is there anything else you think is important to add? 

One of the things that Vice President Harris has focused on and really talked about is health equity and maternal health. And there’s an intersection here between the drug war and maternal health, and working to end the drug war is a tool [for] increasing maternal health. Overdose is the fourth leading cause of death for Black women. And I would assume that some of those women are pregnant. So, there’s been a large conversation about the Black maternal health crisis in the US. As we build a health equity agenda, that is a place that would align with where Harris is. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

A jury found New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez guilty on all counts on Tuesday afternoon, marking the end of the powerful lawmaker’s two-month corruption trial.

Federal prosecutors had accused Menendez of accepting bribes in exchange for using his clout as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to benefit Qatar, Egypt, and several personal associates. In June 2022, the FBI found evidence of the bribery scheme at his New Jersey home—gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz convertible, and home furnishings, as well as more than $480,000 in cash hidden in envelopes, clothing, closets, and a safe. The senator pleaded not guilty and claimed that he wasn’t aware of the money in the bedroom closet because his wife, Nadine, kept the door locked. Nadine was also charged but her trial has been postponed indefinitely as she recovers from breast cancer surgery. One of the couple’s co-defendants, Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty in March and testified against Menendez at trial.

According to Politico and the Bergen Record, in a five-hour closing argument starting last Monday, prosecutor Paul Monteleoni went through each charge in the 18-count indictment, connecting the lawmaker and his wife to gifts from three New Jersey businessmen—the co-defendants in the case—via emails, phone records, texts, and witness testimony. The prosecution team also asserted that Menendez made direct efforts to protect his co-defendants from criminal investigations, including attempting to secure the appointment of a particular candidate to lead the New Jersey US Attorney’s Office in the hope of shutting down a probe.

“Friends do not give friends envelopes stuffed with $10,000 in cash, just out of friendship,” Monteleoni stated last Tuesday. “Friends do not give those same friends kilogram bars of gold worth $60,000 each out of the goodness of their hearts.” 

Defense attorney Adam Fee addressed jurors last Tuesday, calling the prosecution’s evidence a “towering Jenga stack of stuff.” He asserted that Menendez kept money in his home because “everyone in his family was basically hoarding cash” due to their experiences of receiving visits from the Cuban police before they fled in 1951. 

In her testimony, Menendez’s sister, Caridad Gonzalez, recalled that their father didn’t trust banks, saying, “It’s a Cuban thing. They were afraid of losing what they worked so hard for.”

According to the New York Times, after Menendez’s guilty verdicts were announced, Judge Stein said, “I think everybody was very well tried. From the standpoint of the court, it was a well-tried case all around. Thank you.”

There is now pressure on the senator to resign before his term ends, but there is nothing in the Constitution that requires him to give up his seat. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called on Menendez to step down, releasing a statement saying, “In light of this guilty verdict, Senator Menendez must now do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, and our country, and resign.” Schumer has so far refrained from attempting to expel Menendez; it’s unclear if he will now do so if Menendez refuses to leave willingly.

Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), the Democratic nominee to take over Menendez’s seat in the Senate, described the verdict as “a sad and somber day for New Jersey and our country.” He went on to write, “I called on Senator Menendez to step down when these charges were first made public, and now that he has been found guilty, I believe the only course of action for him is to resign his seat immediately. The people of New Jersey deserve better.”

“I’m deeply disappointed by the jury’s decision,” Menendez said outside the courthouse, according to the Times. “I have never violated my public oath. I’ve never been anything but a patriot of my country and for my country.” He ignored reporters’ questions about whether he planned to resign.

Menendez technically remains on the November ballot as an independent candidate. 

This wasn’t Menendez’s first legal rodeo. Prior to winning reelection to the Senate in 2018, he faced a separate corruption prosecution that ended in a mistrial. The congressman was accused of helping a wealthy Florida ophthalmologist in a Medicare fraud scheme. In return, Menendez allegedly received various gifts from the doctor, including trips on his private jet, admission into a resort in the Dominican Republic, and campaign contributions. That case was made more challenging for prosecutors in part because of a unanimous 2016 Supreme Court ruling that overturned former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s (R) conviction on fraud, extortion, and conspiracy charges. At the time, Chief Justice John Roberts said the prosecution’s definition of an “official act” under federal bribery laws was overly broad. 

Tuesday’s verdict follows another landmark Roberts opinion that could make some public corruption cases more difficult for the Department of Justice to pursue. Earlier this month, the court’s conservative majority ruled that former presidents—in that case, Donald Trump—enjoy absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for at least some official acts they performed in office and that prosecutors cannot introduce broad categories of evidence related to those acts. Menendez’s attorneys had some success at trial making a similar argument: Judge Stein ruled that the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause barred prosecutors from using some evidence related to Menendez’s work as a member of Congress. 

But those favorable rulings weren’t enough for Menendez to avoid Tuesday’s guilty verdicts. Stein has set the sentencing date for October 29.