Adam Weinstein

Engagement Editor

I'm Mother Jones' engagement editor and Tumblrizer, specializing in explanatory journalism and new-media reporting. As a Navy vet and ex-Iraq contractor, I'm also committed to articulating all things martial—good, bad, and weird—to new audiences.

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Adam Weinstein is Mother Jones' engagement editor, having previously served the magazine as its national security reporter and copy editor. Before that, he worked at the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, and the Tallahassee Democrat. He's written for the New York Times, New York magazine, GQ, and Newsweek. A Navy veteran, two-day Jeopardy champion and ex-political scientist, he also did a recession-fueled stint as a military contractor in Iraq. For more about Adam and his writing, click here.

GOP Votes for Contempt as "Fast and Furious" Blows Up in Its Face

—By Adam Weinstein

| Thu Jun. 28, 2012 11:08 AM PDT

How are tons of US guns getting to Mexico? Ask conservatives. Flickr/Brian.chThe "Fast and Furious" imbroglio may have just gone sideways on House Republicans. Just prior to them leading a House vote for contempt against Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday, a far-reaching investigation published by Fortune magazine poked major holes in the conservative storyline about the alleged gun operation. Claims that law enforcement engaged in a deadly plot to let Mexican outlaws smuggle US guns, the magazine reports, are based on allegations by a lone whistleblower who may in fact be the only person who did any illegal gun-smuggling. The real cause of violence and crime south of the border, it reports, is lax gun laws in Arizona and elsewhere pushed by Republicans and their friends at the National Rifle Association.

To review the allegations in brief: Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) supposedly recruited local sellers in Arizona to hawk guns to known smugglers, then monitored the flow of those guns to criminal gangs in Mexico in the hopes of catching "big fish," in a tactic known as "gun-walking" (as opposed to "gun-running"). Two of these ATF-monitored assault weapons ended up at the crime scene where Brian Terry, a US Border Patrol agent, was shot and killed in December 2010. An ATF agent with a crisis of conscience blew the whistle on the operation, dubbed Fast and Furious, and Republicans in Congress began asking questions.

Now, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House government oversight committee, suspects the White House of involvement in the affair, and has demanded the administration turn over scores of internal communications. The White House has acknowledged that mistakes were made and turned over more than 7,600 pages of documents related to the case. But Issa demanded another 100,000 pages of internal administration communications, and President Obama invoked executive privilege to keep the documents confidential. Issa responded by pursuing the contempt-of-Congress vote against Holder—the first ever against a sitting attorney general—on the notion that the DOJ screwed up on Holder's watch.

According to Fortune, though, almost everything about the story that Republicans have been flogging is wrong. And the magazine makes the case that the GOP's allegations against Holder and the Obama administration aren't just inaccurate—rather, they distract from the possibility that GOP's politics are actually to blame for the deluge of three-quarters of a million American guns per year into Mexico. "Republicans who support the National Rifle Association and its attempts to weaken gun laws are lambasting ATF agents for not seizing enough weapons—ones that, in this case, prosecutors deemed to be legal," the report states.

"Republican senators are whipping up the country into a psychotic frenzy with these reports that are patently false," Linda Wallace, an IRS agent who worked on the Fast and Furious team and calls herself a "gun-rights supporter," told Fortune. Could Fast and Furious be a new Climategate, the next fact-free conservative conspiracy that takes roost in America's collective unconscious?

The Fortune exposé, which reporter Katherine Eban says took her six months to assemble, is exhaustive and tough to summarize, but its highlights are these:

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

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Researchers Blow Some Holes in Stand Your Ground

—By Adam Weinstein

| Tue Jun. 12, 2012 3:35 PM PDT

After avoiding major national scrutiny for more than six years, "Stand Your Ground" laws are increasingly coming under fire for making America a more dangerous place. Late last month, two economists from Texas A&M University—that hotbed of socialist leftism!—published a report (PDF) concluding that the broad "self-defense" statutes didn't actually deter crime, as proponents suggest. Rather, murder and manslaughter with firearms rose as much as 9 percent in SYG states—as many as 700 more deaths per year nationwide.

The Texas A&M report, which looked at crime stats from 2000-2009, is perhaps the clearest evidence yet that the NRA's crowning legislative triumph has been a public-policy nightmare. On the heels of the Trayvon Martin killing—in which shooter George Zimmerman initially claimed immunity from prosecution under Florida's landmark SYG law—we here at MoJo crunched the numbers and found similarly disturbing trends. So did the Wall Street Journal. Just last weekend, the US Commission on Civil Rights announced it was investigating SYG, claiming there are "some indicators of racial bias" in the law's enforcement nationwide.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

WATCH: James O'Keefe III Crashes Netroots Nation With His Handicam

—By Adam Weinstein

| Sat Jun. 9, 2012 1:55 PM PDT

Conservative activist James O'Keefe III, shown here in a mugshot after his arrest on federal felony charges for allegedly trying to tamper with the phone lines in Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-La.) office. He later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.

Wandering the halls of Netroots Nation 2012 in Providence, Rhode Island, this week, I began to wonder why more conservative moles hadn't tried to crash this shindig. The annual progressive political convention for bloggers and organizers doesn't turn away paying guests, so it seems ripe for infiltration. Saturday afternoon, on the last day, it finally happened: James O'Keefe III, "ratfucker" extraordinaire, showed up to tape the festivities. And we taped him—see the video below.

O'Keefe, standing about six-foot-two and looking taller in a skin-tight black tee, held a handicam at the ready, but he and his consort—conservative blogger Jim Hoft, a.k.a. Gateway Pundit—seemed a little intimidated when I whipped out my own videocam.

O'Keefe, who says he attended last year's Netroots in Minneapolis, was in town to give a speech on investigative journalism and help give out some Breitbart Awards. So we've got that in common! I asked him how he felt about Mother Jones.

"You guys have been pretty critical of me," he smiled.

Unfairly so?

"Sometimes."

When I asked him what his "investigative" outfit, Project Veritas, was working on in Providence, he demurred. "It's classified."

After I stopped rolling, two progressive gay bloggers sauntered over to chat O'Keefe up, but the right-leaning muckraker shuffled off surreptitiously.

"He's been working out," one blogger commented. Someone asked the other blogger if he'd ever consider bedding O'Keefe.

"Not in a million years," he said, making a prune face.

O'Keefe, of course, is on a court-ordered probation that runs to 2013, owing to an "investigative journalism" project involving alleged plans for phone tampering* in the offices of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.); there's no word yet on whether this trip was approved by a probation officer. O'Keefe left before I could ask him.

*UPDATE: Daniel Francisco, executive director of Project Veritas, asked us to clarify that "James O'Keefe has never tampered with a Senator's phones." O'Keefe pled guilty to unlawfully entering federal property, admitting that he and his three accused partners "misrepresented themselves and their purpose for gaining access to the central phone system to orchestrate a conversation about phone calls to the Senator's staff and capture the conversation on video." Which sounds a lot better than phone tampering, the felony charge for which O'Keefe was initially arrested.

Francisco did not, however, dispute our characterization of O'Keefe's shirt as "skin-tight."

How the NRA and Its Allies Helped Spread a Radical Gun Law Nationwide

Years before Trayvon Martin was killed, gun lobbyists conspired to give Stand Your Ground shooters immunity everywhere.

—By Adam Weinstein

| Thu Jun. 7, 2012 3:10 AM PDT

Stand Your Ground, Explained

The three legal concepts that turned a reasonable self-defense law into a recipe for vigilante justice.

The Florida law made infamous this spring by the killing of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin was conceived during the epic hurricane season of 2004. That November, 77-year-old James Workman moved his family into an RV outside Pensacola after Hurricane Ivan peeled back the roof of their house. One night a stranger tried to force his way into the trailer, and Workman killed him with two shots from a .38 revolver. The stranger turned out to be a disoriented temporary worker for the Federal Emergency Management Agency who was checking for looters and distressed homeowners. Workman was never arrested, but three months went by before authorities cleared him of wrongdoing.

That was three months too long for Dennis Baxley, a veteran Republican representative in Florida's state Legislature. Four hurricanes had hit the state that year, and there was fear about widespread looting (though little took place). In Baxley's view, Floridians who defended themselves or their property with lethal force shouldn't have had to worry about legal repercussions. Baxley, a National Rifle Association (NRA) member and owner of a prosperous funeral business, teamed up with then-GOP state Sen. Durell Peaden to propose what would become known as Stand Your Ground, the self-defense doctrine essentially permitting anyone feeling threatened in a confrontation to shoot their way out.

Or at least that's the popular version of how the law was born. In fact, its genesis traces back to powerful NRA lobbyists and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing policy group. And the law's rapid spread—it now exists in various forms in 25 states—reflects the success of a coordinated strategy, cultivated in Florida, to roll back gun control laws everywhere.

[Read the full article]

Mother of All Wars: The Battle to Breastfeed in Uniform

—By Adam Weinstein

| Fri Jun. 1, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Weapons of mass distraction: Air Force Sgt. Terran Echegoyen McCabe and Staff Sgt. Christina Luna feed their babies in uniform. Brynja SigurdardottirThere's the war on women, and there's the war on breastfeeding. Then there's the war on breastfeeding women warriors. That latter struggle broke out earlier this week, when the interwebs discovered a staged photo of two uniformed female Air Force service members offering up camouflage-clad mammaries for their hungry babes. Sgt. Terran Echegoyen McCabe and Staff Sgt. Christina Luna, pictured above, sat for the photo shoot in order to garner attention for Mom2Mom, a network for service-connected mothers at Fairchild Air Force Base outside Spokane, Washington.

It certainly got attention. "A lot of people are saying it's a disgrace to the uniform," Crystal Scott, the founder of Mom2Mom, told NBC this week. "They're comparing it to urinating and defecating [while in uniform]." Now, a viral debate's busted out over the propriety of Uncle Sam's finest nursing while dressed for battle.

The funny thing is, the military takes a relatively progressive attitude toward service members breastfeeding. Each branch of service allows lactating mothers to defer overseas deployments by 4 to 12 months. And the Air Force even mandated regular break periods and safe spaces for women to breastfeed or pump while on duty, two years before Obamacare required all employers to observe similar provisions.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]