Thursday, May 25, 2017

Trump's loose lips drive allies to reassess U.S. access to intel

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By TIM JOHNSON



WASHINGTON 
President Donald Trump’s loose lips aren’t just causing him political trouble anymore. Now they’re putting at risk vital global intelligence sharing with allies whose spies have helped thwart terrorist attacks on the United States.
British Prime Minister Theresa May on Thursday issued a public rebuke of the Trump administration before meeting with the president, and a senior Democratic lawmaker said the British government may have “every right to be furious.”
The flare-up was over U.S. leaks to the media about the terror network behind the Manchester Arena bombing Monday night that killed 23 people, including the British suicide bomber. Angered by the leaks, British police stopped passing information to U.S. counterparts.
Trump, who had no apparent role in the disclosures, called the leaks “deeply troubling.” But the incident follows others in which Trump personally appeared to reveal secrets, such as an Islamic State plot to blow airliners out of the sky.
The incidents include Trump allegedly telling the leader of the Philippines about the presence of two nuclear submarines off the Korean Peninsula and the disclosure of classified information to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at a May 10 meeting in the Oval Office.
“Every government looks at it and says, ‘Whoa! We need to think twice about our sharing with the government when the guy at the top seems to be so careless with information,” said Paul R. Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the CIA who now is a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies.
In some instances, Trump’s sharing doesn’t appear to have been a calculated move, within his lawful right as president, but a spontaneous disclosure.
HE JUST SEEMS TO HAVE BLURTED THIS STUFF OUT.
Steven Aftergood, Federation of American Scientists
“He just seems to have blurted this stuff out,” said Steven Aftergood, a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists who follows national security issues.
Trump, traveling in Brussels for a NATO summit, called the leaks out of his administration “a grave threat to our national security.” He pledged a deep inquiry by the Justice Department, and reassured Britain over the importance of security ties.
“There is no relationship we cherish more than the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom,” Trump said.
Intelligence sharing with Britain is critical “to our security and to theirs,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who is ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee.
“Any break or deviation from that relationship or the profound trust we have in the British and they have in us, would be a grave loss for both countries. We must take any steps necessary to remedy this problem immediately,” Schiff said in a statement issued by his office.
Other Democratic congressmen joined the criticism, including Rep. Ted Lieu, a fellow California Democrat, who upbraided Trump for pledging to root out leakers when he himself had spilled secrets.
Another nation affected by Trump’s disclosures is Israel. On Wednesday, Israel said it had changed its intelligence-sharing protocols with the United States. The move followed Trump’s disclosure to Lavrov that a human source in the Islamic State had revealed a plan to use bombs hidden in laptop computers to take down airliners. Although Trump didn’t say so, the source apparently was recruited by Israel.
While in Jerusalem this week, Trump denied that he’d mentioned Israel to Lavrov.
I NEVER MENTIONED THE WORD OR THE NAME ‘ISRAEL’ DURING THAT CONVERSATION.
President Donald J. Trump
"Just so you understand, I never mentioned the word or the name ‘Israel’ during that conversation. They were all saying I did, so you had another story wrong,” Trump told the media.
Acknowledging a human mole in a terrorist group like the Islamic State imperils both the source and the relationship with the nation that recruited the source, said Bruce Hoffman, a global fellow at the Wilson Center and director of security studies at Georgetown University.
“The aspiration of any intelligence agency is to have some source imbedded in the terrorist decision-making and planning apparatus. I mean, that is solid gold,” Hoffman said.
Still, Hoffman said some disclosures out of the White House can be chalked up to lack of familiarity with procedures over classified information and how it’s handled.
“Those procedures have to be second nature and routine to you,” Hoffman said, noting that Trump and his aides are outsiders prone to inadvertent action. “I don’t think it’s deliberate.”
Pillar said it falls on a few shoulders, primarily National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, an active duty Army lieutenant general, to educate Trump and his staff on the implications of handling and revealing classified information.
“He’s the key person to be the tutor,” Pillar said.
But the learning must happen more quickly, other observers said, noting that an erosion of allied trust in the Trump administration has already occurred.
“I absolutely think allies are reassessing how best to have an intelligence and criminal sharing relationship with the United States while President Trump is in office,” said Mark S. Zaid, a Washington, D.C. attorney who handles national security cases.
Puzzling to some experts is what motivated Trump to tell Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte about the location of U.S. nuclear submarines, a key component of the nation’s land-air-sea triad of nuclear retaliatory capability.
“The question is, why is President Trump releasing information to individual leaders who probably from an intelligence or military standpoint have no reason to know?” Zaid asked. “Now, the North Koreans know about it, and the thing everyone worries about is any provocation to a North Korean leader who is trigger happy.”
Trump’s disclosures reflect less on legality than on judgment, Aftergood said.
“It’s not that he’s weighed the risks and decided that they are outweighed by the benefits. It’s that he’s not thought the matter through,” Aftergood said.
“All we can infer is that he enjoys the role of the person who possesses secrets and therefore can share them.”
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JOIN THE INTERCEPT IN DOCUMENTING THE CONFLICTS OF INTEREST OF HUNDREDS OF TRUMP APPOINTEES

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By  & 




THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION has faced a growing clamor over the glaring conflicts of interest of many of its high-level appointees.
Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, is currently under investigation for his failure to report $45,000 in fees for a speech given in Moscow to RT, the Russian state media outlet. The billionaire investor Carl Icahn has been criticized for serving as an informal and unpaid adviser to Trump, including on areas in which Icahn has a direct financial interest.
What’s more difficult to track, however, are the conflicts of interest of lower-level appointees — the personnel who execute Trump administration policy on a day to day basis.
To shed light on these appointees’ backgrounds, The Intercept and the Center for Media and Democracy have requested the Office of Government Ethics Form 278, the standard financial disclosure document, for hundreds of Trump officials. We have now received over 150 of them and compiled them in a public Google Documents table, and will be adding more as they arrive.
As seen below, we have begun examining these appointees’ previous lives in the D.C. swamp, including stints as lobbyists and trips through the industry-government revolving door.
We invite readers to join us in combing through the pasts of these appointees, as well as informing us of any officials whose disclosure forms we have not obtained. Many appointments are made without announcements and are not identified on the relevant agency websites.
We will credit you if we use any of your work in future stories. We can be contacted by email at lee.fang@theintercept.com (encryption key available here) and nick@prwatch.org, or via Twitter at @LHFang and @NickSurgey. Instructions for communicating with The Intercept anonymously and with additional security are available here.
The documents show numerous potential conflicts of interest:
Anthony DeMartino, appointed as deputy chief of staff to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, previously consulted for defense contractor Palantir, helping the firm cultivate “government relationships,” according to his ethics disclosure. DeMartino’s consulting work was conducted through “SBD Advisors,” a firm with ties to high-level military officials. Former Defense Secretary Ash Carter previously worked for SBD Advisors, and its current advisory board includes retired Adm. Michael Mullen, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Barack Obama. The Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Anthony DeMartinoOffice of the Secretary of Defense
Deputy Chief of Staff		Form 278
Travis Scott Fisher and Daniel Simmons, two appointees at the Department of Energy, previously worked for the Institute for Energy Research, a pro-fossil fuel think tank founded by oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch. The Department of Energy is deeply involved in the approval of liquified natural gas export projects, a field in which Koch’s business has deep involvement. The Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment.
Travis Scott FisherDepartment of Energy
Assistant to the Secretary		Form 278
Daniel SimmonsDepartment of Energy
Assistant to the Secretary		Form 278
In other cases, Trump officials appear to have failed to follow the instructions for Form 278, which state that filers must name any source that paid more than $5,000 for their services. This is designed to force attorneys and lobbyists to disclose their significant clients.
Nathan Miller, appointed as a senior adviser to the Small Business Administration, is a former corporate lobbyist at a company called Public Strategies Washington. According to the required lobbying disclosure forms, Miller and other PSW staff met with Senate officials on behalf of clients including Bain Capital, Lockheed Martin, and Liberty Mutual last year in return for payments to his firm far over $5,000. However, none of these clients are listed in Miller’s presidential appointee disclosure form. Carol Wilkerson, the spokesperson for the SBA, sent us the following statement: “Utilizing our normal review processes, we have determined that appropriate disclosures were made with respect to Mr. Miller’s New Entrant OGE 278e Report.”
Nathan MillerSmall Business Administration
Senior Adviser		Form 278
Anthony Pugliese, a senior White House adviser to the Department of Transportation, previously worked as a state-based lobbyist in Pennsylvania. Pugliese’s state lobbying disclosure shows clients including John Deere and Luxottica Retail North America. But Pugliese’s federal ethics disclosure reveals no client information. The Department of Transportation press office did not respond to a request for comment.
Anthony PuglieseDepartment of Transportation
Senior White House Adviser		Form 278
Michael Egan, appointed as the special assistant to Department of Defense White House liaison, previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. Egan lists three consulting clients but does not disclose their identities, instead writing “Not specified” and the city where each client is headquartered. The Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Michael EganDepartment of Defense
Special Assistant to the White House Liaison, OSD		Form 278
Justin Schwab, a senior attorney appointed to the Environmental Protection Agency, initially only listed his former law firm Baker Hostetler and did not disclose any clients. After being contacted by reporters, Schwab refiled his disclosure, revealing that he previously worked for Southern Co., a major utility that is directly affected by the Clean Power Plan climate change regulation. “We decline to comment,” wrote Enesta Jones, EPA spokesperson, when reached for a response.
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ANTI-MUSLIM CONSPIRACY THEORIST TRAINED SENIOR U.S. MARSHAL, NATIONAL GUARD MEMBERS, DOCUMENTS SHOW

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A FORMER FBI AGENT with a penchant for spreading anti-Muslim conspiracy theories trained a senior U.S. marshal, five federal contractors, and five National Guard members at a three-day event in Louisiana, according to documents obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information request.
John Guandolo, a prominent figure in what has become a cottage industry of ex-national security professionals exploiting fear of terrorism for cash, ran the March training on behalf of his firm, Understanding the Threat. Guandolo was paid $12,500 for the seminar, sponsored by the Rapides Parish District Attorney’s Office in Alexandria, which promised to show how “jihadis” operate in the United States, why understanding sharia is important to law enforcement agents, and how to “find and research jihadi organizations and leaders” in local communities. At a previous event, Guandolo labeled a local Muslim community leader as a religious extremist with no proof.
The documents obtained by The Intercept underscore how federal law enforcement and members of the military continue to frequent anti-Muslim trainings, despite past attempts to stop Islamophobic instructors from teaching soldiers and federal officers. Advocates have long expressed concern that such events encourage racial profiling and further corrode trust between government agencies and Muslim communities already weary of surveillance and infiltration by informants. They say these trainings are particularly troublesome at a time of rising anti-Muslim sentiment — sentiment that has been blessed by members of the Trump administration.
“Under no circumstances should federal law enforcement agents gain credit for attending anti-Muslim trainings, or be under the impression that it could be a legitimate part of their duties,” said Lindsay Schubiner, senior program manager at the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based group that tracks anti-Muslim trainings, referring to the continuing education credits often required of law enforcement officers. “Federal law enforcement agencies have to clearly send the message to their agents that anti-Muslim bigotry is unacceptable and that anti-Muslim conspiracy theories that Guandolo promotes should not be driving the implementation of federal law.”
Guandolo, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, resigned from the bureau in 2008 while he was being investigated by the FBI for affairs with female agents. The following year, he confirmed to the FBI that he had a sexual relationship with a key witness in a corruption case against a Democratic lawmaker in Louisiana.
But instead of fading into obscurity, Guandolo has leveraged his status as a former FBI agent into a lucrative career. Guandolo has made tens of thousands of dollars in recent years giving dozens of law enforcement trainings, many of them taxpayer funded. Sheriffs’ departments or police associations that put on conferences for local law enforcement sponsor most of Guandolo’s events. But the trainings are usually open to federal agents as well.
Guandolo has said that all American Muslim groups share the “same ideology as ISIS” and that President Obama committed “treason” by working with Muslim groups to combat terrorism. He has also called for the majority of mosques in the U.S. to be shut down and for the arrest of leaders of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim American civil rights group.
“Guandolo’s training is basically terror porn for people who want to be scared into fearing segments of society,” said Imraan Siddiqi, the executive director of CAIR in Arizona, a state in which Guandolo has given multiple trainings.
Guandolo and the Rapides Parish District Attorney’s Office did not return The Intercept’s requests for comment.

The Louisiana seminar was one of nine trainings Guandolo has given in 2017 alone. He is scheduled to give two more in June, according to the Center for New Community. Sign-in sheets for the Alexandria training obtained by The Intercept indicate that officers from nearly two dozen state and local law enforcement agencies attended, in addition to the federal employees and contractors.
Bernard McLaughlin, a mediator and former U.S. Army colonel who attended the seminar, said the training could prove especially useful for local law enforcement officers. “They don’t get taught a course on Islam or domestic terror or how radicals may plan attacks,” McLaughlin told The Intercept. “So you have to look at an introductory training just to get people oriented so they have a better understanding of Islam, what it is and what its proponents are.”
However, as critics of Guandolo have pointed out, he does not speak Arabic — the original language of the Quran — and has no scholarly expertise in Islam.
The most senior federal officer who attended the Alexandria seminar was Drew Koschny, chief inspector of the U.S. Marshals Service and deputy assistant director of Interpol Washington, the U.S. branch of the global police force Interpol.
U.S. Marshals are required to get approval from the Marshals Service before attending external trainings. But for the Guandolo training, Koschny “accepted the invitation and attended the event without completing the required USMS request for external training; therefore, the training course was not vetted and approved by the USMS,” said Drew Wade, a U.S. Marshals spokesperson. “Mr. Koschny felt the training would support his work at Interpol. He was not aware of any views attributed to individuals conducting the training.”
Four employees of Centerra, a security contractor that guards government facilities across the country, also went to the training. Three of the Centerra employees were listed in the documents as working for the Department of Energy. Another federal contractor who works for Fluor Federal Petroleum, the sole company guarding the U.S. government’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, attended the training. The Department of Energy, Centerra, and Fluor did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.
In addition, five Louisiana National Guard members, including an anti-terrorism officer, went to Guandolo’s three-day training.
“It is very commonplace, and very typical for us as a statewide organization, to get invited to attend and participate in training that is being conducted by any number of our various partner agencies,” Col. Ed Bush, a spokesperson for the Louisiana National Guard, told The Intercept. “The fact that we attended this training is a best practice for us, and whenever possible we always try to have representation at these training events, just for our own situational awareness and to maintain those partnerships that are key to our ability to respond as a state.” He added: “Attendance isn’t an endorsement.”
This was not the first time members of the military attended a Guandolo class. In an email obtained by The Intercept through a separate public records request, Guandolo told a local detective planning an upcoming training that Department of Defense employees had signed up for his February 2014 event in Culpeper County, Virginia. And in July 2011, he gave a guest lecture at the Joint Forces Staff College to a class for captains, colonels, and commanders. In that class, Guandolo used material that justified the Crusades and claimed that Muslims were enemies of the West and commanded to hate Jews and Christians.
After Wired exposed that class and other anti-Muslim material given to FBI agents, the Obama administration ordered government agencies to review their counterterrorism trainings. The FBI purged hundreds of anti-Muslim documents from its training material.

But the problem of anti-Muslim counterterrorism training persists. The documents related to Guandolo’s seminar in Louisiana suggest that federal government workers have attended locally sponsored anti-Muslim events with little oversight.
And the problem isn’t limited to Guandolo. In March, CAIR asked the U.S. Air Force to cut its ties with Patrick Dunleavy, an instructor who lectures at the United States Air Force Special Operations School in Florida. Dunleavy has written that the values of religious freedom and free speech are “contrary to the moral code of Islam” and that “to many Muslim parents, visions of violence and death” are the future they aspire to.
“It doesn’t look like this is an area where the federal government is doing its job and ensuring that its employees don’t participate in bigoted trainings,” said Farhana Khera, the executive director of Muslim Advocates.
In 2011, Khera secured a commitment from John Brennan, then President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, to create an interagency task force to ensure that law enforcement training material was not biased. But in 2014, after The Intercept published a document showing anti-Muslim bias in National Security Agency training documents, Muslim Advocates and dozens of other organizations called on the Obama administration to go beyond that task force. They asked the administration to be more transparent about how pervasive anti-Muslim trainings were and to ensure that the officials responsible were disciplined and the participants in those trainings were retrained. It is unclear if the Obama administration took any of those steps.
While biased trainings for federal employees are not a new issue, civil rights groups say they are especially disturbing in light of the election of Donald Trump, who has brought anti-Muslim activists like White House strategist Steve Bannon — who hosted Guandolo on his Breitbart radio show — into the halls of power.
“It’s even more troubling today because we now have a president and senior members of his administration who traffic in anti-Muslim bigotry,” said Khera. “So our concern is that you have the senior most official in the U.S. government giving a wink-wink, nod-nod to exactly this kind of bigotry.”
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Trump's Plan to Kick People Off Food Stamps Is an "Attack on the Poor," Activists Say

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By Mike Ludwig




Last April, advocates for low-income people in West Virginia sent a letter to state officials who were preparing to drop more than 1,500 people from the state's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (also known as SNAP or food stamps), demanding that an exemption be made for the homeless.
The state had decided to reinstate a federal rule in several counties requiring people without registered disabilities or dependent children to work at least 20 hours a week in order to receive food stamps longer than three months. The advocates argued West Virginia should follow the lead of other states and exempt houseless people from the requirement, because they face structural barriers to employment and often do not have a place to store their belongings while at work. 
"While this may be workable for some homeless individuals, it is truly a Hobson's choice for the homeless SNAP recipient: Either risk losing their possessions by leaving those items unattended during 20-plus hours of work per week, or lose their source of food under the SNAP program by failing to satisfy the SNAP work requirements," the letter states.  
West Virginia officials initially agreed to make the exemption, but it was dropped three months later, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail. Homeless individuals must now have their eligibility for SNAP evaluated on a case-by-case basis, which can mean additional office visits and paperwork for people who may have lost personal documents to theft or misplacement while living without stable housing.
This problem could be replicated across the country if President Trump has his way. Mirroring policies extolled by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, the White House budget proposal released this week would phase work requirements back into the SNAP program nationally, while slashing funding for it and other safety-net programs like Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars. The news has outraged advocates for the struggling and hungry.
"So, SNAP is what keeps families afloat, it helps people put food on the table ... it is the cornerstone program that prevents hunger in this country and lifts people out of poverty," said Michelle Stuffmann, spokesperson for the Jewish anti-hunger group MAZON, in an interview with Truthout. "That anyone would want to prevent people from putting food on the table is horrifying."
In all, Trump's budget proposal would cut $1.7 trillion from virtually every program that helps reduce poverty and support the working class over the next decade, in order to "balance the budget" and pay for tax cuts that benefit the wealthy, according to White House documents and advocacy groups. Funding for SNAP would drop by at least $191 billion -- a 25 percent cut -- by shifting costs to states, cutting eligibility for millions of households and reducing benefits for many more.
"This is an attack on the poor," said Nune Phillips, a policy analyst with the Center for Law and Social Policy, which advocates for low-income people and families.
Although the proposed cuts would impact programs benefiting low-income children, the disabled and the elderly, the Trump administration has framed its budget proposal around so-called "welfare reforms" designed to incentivize able-bodied people to get off the government dole and find a paying job. In a press conference on Tuesday, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said some SNAP participants do want to find jobs, but others simply "don't want to work."
"If there's 44 million people on there, eight years from the end of the recession, maybe, maybe it's reasonable to ask if there are folks who are on there who shouldn't be," Mulvaney said.  
Federal law requires able-bodied people without dependent children to work or receive job training for at least 20 hours a week in order to participate in the SNAP program for more than three months in a 36-month period. States can apply to extend this time limit, and the Obama administration waived the employment requirement for dozens of states as unemployment rates skyrocketed during the Great Recession.
As parts of the country have enjoyed economic recovery, some states gradually stopped applying for the waivers, or are using them only in areas where unemployment rates remain high. West Virginia, for example, still receives a federal waiver on the time limits for unemployed individuals, but advocates raised concerns about homeless residents last year as state officials reinstated the federal time limit in nine counties where unemployment rates tend to be lower than in the rest of the state.
"The reality is, the economy has recovered only for some people in this country," Stuffmann said. "Some of the better-paying careers and jobs have been replaced by lower wage, part-time employment." 
In 2016, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimated that more than 500,000 low-income people could lose their food stamps as federal waivers expired in 22 states. Under Trump's plan, waivers would be limited to areas with at least 10 percent unemployment, reducing the number of counties with a time-limit waiver from 1,000 to about 54 and leaving 1 million unemployed and underemployed people without food assistance.
"Stable employment may not be available to many due to multiple economic factors," Phillips said. "Imposing a time limit does not change those circumstances -- it just takes away a crucial lifeline for people and perpetuates hunger."
Right-wing media outlets perpetuate classist myths about SNAP recipients, and Mulvaney would have us believe that many people use food stamps to avoid getting a job. It's a tough sell considering that people who are considered "able to work" and are subject to the time limit receive an average of only $150 to $170 a month in food stamps, according to CBPP. SNAP benefits are phased out slowly as earnings rise, and the program includes deductions for work expenses, so there is little incentive to stay unemployed.
Stuffmann and Phillips agreed that people impacted by the time limit come from diverse backgrounds. Some have trouble finding work because they are homeless or have been incarcerated, and others are veterans of war. Some have kids they remain responsible for but cannot claim as child dependents because they are over the age of 18. Phillips said restricting the time-limit waivers would hit "the most vulnerable populations the hardest."
In general, advocates say, SNAP works the way it's supposed to: Participants receive the assistance for a limited period of time when they lose a job or earnings fall, and then leave the program when they start making more money again. Enforcing a time limit on unemployed people does not alleviate poverty, and any increases in employment in states that reinstated the time limit typically indicate that people have found temporary, low-paying jobs after losing their benefits.
"There is this myth that somehow safety-net programs are more like a hammock," said Stuffmann.
Trump's proposal would rob states of the flexibility to spend federal funding in targeted areas that have not enjoyed economic recovery and develop their own programs for helping SNAP participants find jobs. It would also shift up to 25 percent of the program's costs to states by 2023, incentivizing state governments to make their own cuts and find ways to kick people off the rolls in order to balance budgets.
Phillips said this would leave the SNAP program "unrecognizable" compared to what it is today. This has implications for both unemployed people and workers with low-paying jobs who rely on food stamps to feed their kids, a group that even includes members of the military. If anything, advocates say, SNAP needs more funding, not less, and government data shows that investing in food security via SNAP stimulates the economy.
Like any president's budget proposal, Trump's is about framing policies rather than enacting them. Lawmakers have indicated that his proposed cuts would not fly on either side of the aisle, but conservatives have had their eye on gutting programs like SNAP by adding work requirements and cutting funding for years now. Stuffmann said now is a good time to contact representatives and make it clear that any calls for austerity should be rejected in their entirety.
After all, programs such as SNAP are supporting the nation's workforce, not subsidizing it into complacency.
"If you are hungry, you can't focus, and if you can't focus, you can't do a good job," Stuffmann said.
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Indigenous Alliance Launches Divestment Campaign Against US and Canadian Pipelines

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By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours



Toronto, Canada -- It's imperative to create an alternative to harmful fossil fuel extraction, according to Grand Chief Derek Nepinak of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs.
Nepinak is a member of the Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion, a coalition of 121 First Nations and other Indigenous tribes from across North America that are united against major projects stemming from the Alberta tar sands.
In its push for energy transformation, the Treaty Alliance's latest targets are the financial institutions currently funding major oil pipelines across Canada and the United States.
"The Treaty Alliance is really about establishing an alternative discussion space and an alternative to the popular narrative," Nepinak recently told Truthout in a telephone interview from Manitoba, in central Canada.
"It's an alternative narrative looking at the need to transition to sustainable forms of alternative energy," he said.
Earlier this month, the Treaty Alliance, alongside a coalition of other Indigenous groups, launched a new campaign to divest from banks that are funding four tar sands pipeline projects coming out of Canada, as well as the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota.
Organizers hope to put pressure on Energy Transfer Partners (a US oil company), and on the three companies involved in the Canadian tar sands pipelines: TransCanada, which owns the Keystone XL and Energy East pipelines; Kinder Morgan, which recently got a green light to expand the Trans Mountain pipeline from Alberta to British Columbia; and Enbridge, which plans to replace the Line 3 pipeline, which runs between Alberta and Wisconsin.
There are 64 banking institutions that fund at least one of the projects on the full divestment list, but 17 banks that fund the Dakota Access pipeline and all four pipelines from Canada have been specifically targeted. These include Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, Bank of Montreal, Scotiabank and Wells Fargo.
The campaign is pushing the banks to stop funding the pipeline projects altogether, and develop ethically sound banking policies. It is also calling on "neighbors, elected officials, and pension managers to close all accounts with these banks unless they immediately stop financing tar sands pipelines." A petition with those demands has garnered more than 95,000 signatures to date.
Nepinak explained that the campaign is working to educate people about how their money is used.
"When you put your money in the bank, it's not just going to sleep; that money is actually being used to invest in projects that you may not agree with," Nepinak said. "People need to be aware of that. People need to be aware of where their banks are sending their money."
The tar sands in western Canada are one of the most resource-intensive oil extraction systems, and one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters in the world. The extraction process releases between 18 percent and 21 percent more carbon into the atmosphere than the extraction of conventional crude oil in the United States, according to a recent study.
Matt Remle, an Indigenous organizer based in Seattle, told Truthout that activists were not going to win a moral or environmental argument with the heads of corporations and banks that are backing major oil pipelines, so it is crucial to target what they do care about: dollars.
"They're not moved by those sort of arguments, but they are capitalist and they understand money, and if you go after their bottom line, either they respond, or maybe we can stop some of these pipelines in their tracks," he said.
Without concerted action from the opposition, pipeline construction is set to accelerate. US President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum in January to approve construction on the Dakota Access pipeline, the 1,100-mile pipeline that will carry about 500,000 barrels of crude oil every day from North Dakota to US oil markets.
Trump also approved construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that was blocked by former President Barack Obama, and which would pump tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska.
Earlier this month, TransCanada Corp., the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, said it was reassessing whether US oil producers were still interested in the pipeline. TransCanada spokesman Matthew John said the company plans to re-engage with prospective shippers "because of a lot of changes in the oil market," according to The Associated Press.
Last November, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau approved a plan to replace the Line 3 continental pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to Wisconsin, and to expand the Trans Mountain pipeline, which would run from Alberta to an export terminal on the coast of British Columbia.
As opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline was mounting, Remle was one of the key organizers who succeeded in getting the City of Seattle to cut financial ties with Wells Fargo -- over $3 billion -- over the bank's lending in support of the Dakota Access pipeline. The divestment campaign was part of a much broader effort: the #NoDAPL movement was one of the largest Indigenous-led uprisings in recent years, garnering support from dozens of Indigenous communities across the US and Canada. Last year, Indigenous-led resistance was organized to block construction on the pipeline, which the Standing Rock Sioux and other Indigenous water defenders said would endanger freshwater resources and disrupt their sacred sites.
The #NoDAPL mobilization set up a large encampment at the proposed pipeline site, and water defenders organized marches and other nonviolent actions in an attempt to have the project shut down. 
Police used water cannons and violently arrested and injured many of the people in Standing Rock as they attempted to remove them from their camp.
"I'm from Standing Rock. I'm Dakota. Every single person just witnessed colonialism in 2017," Remle said of the state repression that occurred at Standing Rock. "Colonialism in the 1800s was about coming in, removing us from our lands to get access to resources to benefit the settler-colonial populations.... That's exactly what happened with Standing Rock."
After people nationwide witnessed those scenes of violence, interest in the #NoDAPL movement spread to areas across the US and internationally and, Remle said, Seattle's divestment campaign "had a ripple effect" of its own.
Divestment efforts spread to other US cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, and to activists as far away as Berlin, he said.
More than $4.3 billion in city investments and nearly $90 million in personal funds have been withdrawn from the banks involved in the Dakota Access pipeline alone, according to the website DefundDAPL.
While ending the relationships between cities and big banks may have the biggest financial impact, Remle said anyone concerned about the pipelines can get involved by taking their own money out of the banks.
"We have to utilize everything that we can to fight these billion-dollar corporations," he said, stressing that divestment is just one tool among many that activists are using to apply pressure on these projects.
"On the personal level, [divestment is] probably the easiest thing you can do," Remle said. "It's going to add up. These people are ... out for the bottom line, and if they get a mass wave of people closing their accounts, things are going to hopefully change."
Meanwhile, Nepinak said, while large Canadian banks targeted for divestment had not responded to the demands so far, the successful US efforts show that the campaign is gaining ground.
"As long as we continue to carry a message that talks about hope and a future where we're actually sustaining the environment, instead of destroying it, I think we can actually create a culture shift," Nepinak said. "Every time we hear something happening, from the west to the east coast, to the north, it's positive."
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