Corruption

Tens of thousands of anti-corruption protesters in the Philippines are calling for President Ferdinand Marcos Jr to resign. Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Lo explains the allegations from the Manila protest.

In the Philippines, a massive corruption scandal is triggering street protests and putting pressure on the government of Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

The population’s increasing exposure to typhoons, floods and rising sea-levels has seen the government allocate $9.5bn of taxpayer funds to more than 9,800 flood-control projects in the last three years.

But recent audits reveal widespread cases of structures being grossly incomplete or non-existent.

Multiple government officials are accused of pocketing huge kickbacks, funding lavish lifestyles.

101 East investigates how the most vulnerable are being flooded by corruption in the Philippines.

Nov. 28 (UPI) — Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky‘s chief of staff, resigned Friday after a raid on his home in a sweeping corruption scandal.

Yermak had led Ukraine‘s negotiating team in peace talks with the President Donald Trump administration. He was the most powerful political figure in Ukraine behind Zelensky.

“This is the perfect storm. There is a lot of uncertainty right now,” a Ukrainian official told Axios.

He was scheduled to travel to Miami on Saturday for talks with Trump’s team, but that meeting has been canceled.

On Friday, Hungarian President Viktor Orban met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in defiance of the rest of the European Union members. Orban said his visit was an attempt to secure Russian energy supplies for the winter for Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia.

Zelensky announced Yermak’s resignation and said he will appoint a new chief of staff soon.

No charges have been filed as of this writing.

“Russia really wants Ukraine to make mistakes. There will be no mistakes on our side,” Zelensky said in a video on X. “We do not have the right to ease the pressure. We do not have the right to retreat or to quarrel among ourselves. If we lose our unity, we risk losing everything.”

Investigators from Ukraine’s National Anti-corruption Bureau and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office did the searches Thursday morning targeting Yermak, the Kyiv Post reported.

In a Telegram post, Yermak confirmed the searches.

“Today, NABU and SAPO are indeed conducting procedural actions at my home. There are no obstacles for the investigators,” he said.

Yermak said investigators were given full access to his apartment.

“My lawyers are on site, interacting with law enforcement officers. From my side, I am providing full assistance,” he added.

While officials have not confirmed why the searches were conducted, reporter Christopher Miller of the Financial Times said that his sources confirmed it was part of Operation Midas, an investigation into large-scale bribery in the energy sector in Ukraine.

NABU also confirmed the searches.

“NABU and SAPO are conducting investigative actions (searches) at the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine. The investigative actions are authorized and are being carried out within the framework of the investigation. Details to follow,” the agency said on Telegram.

Justice Minister Herman Halushchenko and Energy Minister Svitlana Hrynchuk resigned Nov. 12 after investigators uncovered that officials at the state nuclear energy company Energoatom had manipulated contracts to generate bribes and laundered about $100 million.

On Nov. 13, Zelensky sanctioned his former business partner Timur Mindich over his role in the scandal.

Ukrainian president’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak confirms search, saying he has offered ‘full cooperation’.

Anticorruption authorities in Ukraine have searched the home of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, as a major corruption investigation continues to roil the country and cause consternation among allies.

Andriy Yermak, who leads Kyiv’s negotiating team concurrently trying to hash out the terms of a United States-proposed plan to end the four-year war with Russia, confirmed his apartment was being searched on Friday and said he was fully cooperating.

“There are no obstacles for the investigators. They have been given full access to the apartment, and my lawyers are present on-site, cooperating with the law enforcement officers. From my side, there is full cooperation,” he said on social media.

In a joint statement, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office said the searches were “authorised” and linked to an unspecified investigation.

Earlier this month, the two anticorruption agencies unveiled a sweeping investigation into an alleged $100m kickback scheme at the state atomic energy company that ensnared former senior officials and an ex-business partner of Zelenskyy.

Friday’s searches come as the Ukrainian president faces growing pressure from the administration of United States President Donald Trump to agree to Washington’s proposal to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

Ukraine and its European allies had raised concerns that the Trump-backed plan comprised some elements that Russia has been actively pushing for, including that Ukraine cede additional territory and curtail the size of its military.

But a revised proposal has been put forward, and Kyiv has said it is open to negotiations.

The searches are also likely to worsen tensions between Zelenskyy and his political opponents amid the peace negotiations.

In a statement on Thursday, the European Solidarity opposition party criticised Yermak’s role as a negotiator and called on Zelenskyy for “an honest dialogue” with other parties.

‘Black Friday’

Viktor Shlinchak, a political analyst at the Kyiv-based Institute for World Politics, described the searches as a “Black Friday” for Yermak and suggested Zelenskyy may be forced to dismiss him.

“It looks like we may soon have a different head of the negotiating team,” he wrote on Facebook.

Yermak, 54, is Zelenskyy’s most important ally, but a divisive figure in Kyiv, where his opponents say he has accumulated power, gatekeeps access to the president and ruthlessly sidelines critical voices.

A former film producer and copyright lawyer, Yermak came into politics with Zelenskyy in 2019, previously working with him during the now-president’s time as a popular comedian.

He is widely considered the second-most influential man in the country and even sometimes nicknamed “vice president”.

The corruption investigation revolves around an alleged scheme involving Energoatom, the state-run nuclear power company that supplies more than half of the country’s electricity.

“That [case] has been swirling around Ukraine for several weeks now, rocking the government,” Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands reported from Kyiv on Friday. “The allegation is that some $100m … has gone through a kind of laundromat,” he explained.

Anticorruption investigators have said they suspect that Tymur Mindich, a one-time business partner of Zelenskyy, was the plot’s mastermind.

Mindich has fled the country, with any criminal proceedings against him likely to be carried out in absentia. Two top ministers have also resigned over the scandal.

Challands also noted that the inquiry comes after Zelenskyy’s government had tried in July to take away the Ukrainian anticorruption agencies’ independence and place them under the control of his prosecutor-general.

But the Ukrainian leader backtracked after mass public protests.

Islamabad, Pakistan – A new assessment by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has concluded that corruption in Pakistan is behind an economic crisis driven by “state capture” – where public policy is manipulated to benefit a narrow circle of political and business elites.

The Governance and Corruption Diagnostic Assessment (GCDA), finalised in November 2025, presents a grim picture of a system marked by dysfunctional institutions that are unable to enforce the rule of law or safeguard public resources.

According to the 186-page report, corruption in Pakistan is “persistent and corrosive”, distorting markets, eroding public trust and undermining fiscal stability.

The report, requested by the Pakistani government, warns that without dismantling the structures of “elite privilege”, the country’s economic stagnation will persist.

While corruption vulnerabilities are present at all levels of government, according to the report, “the most economically damaging manifestations involve privileged entities that exert influence over key economic sectors, including those owned by or affiliated with the state.”

The report argues that Pakistan stands to gain substantial economic benefits if governance improves and accountability is strengthened. Such reforms, it notes, could significantly lift the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), which stood at $340bn in 2024.

“Based on cross-country analysis of the reform experience of emerging markets, IMF analysis projects that Pakistan could generate between a 5 to 6.5 percent increase in GDP by implementing a package of governance reforms over the course of five years,” the report said.

Stefan Dercon, a professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford who has advised the Pakistani government on economic reforms, said that he agreed that the absence of accountability in corruption cases was eating away at the country’s economic potential.

“Failure of implementation [of laws and principles of accountability] gives vested interests too often free rein and addressing this must be at the core of efforts for economic reform,” he told Al Jazeera.

Here is what we know about the IMF report, the areas of weakness it highlights, the policy recommendations it makes, and what the experts say.

What does the IMF report say?

Pakistan has turned to the IMF 25 times since 1958, making it one of the fund’s most frequent borrowers. Nearly every administration, whether military or civilian, has sought IMF assistance, reflecting chronic balance of payments crises.

The current programme was started under Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

The GCDA’s release comes ahead of the IMF executive board’s expected approval of a $1.2bn disbursement next month, part of the ongoing 37-month-long, $7bn programme.

Pakistan narrowly avoided default in 2023, surviving only after the IMF extended an earlier nine-month deal, which was followed by the ongoing 37-month programme.

According to the GCDA, Pakistan consistently ranks near the bottom of global governance indicators among nations. Between 2015 and 2024, the country’s score on control of corruption remained stagnant, placing it among the worst performers worldwide and within its neighbourhood.

At the heart of the IMF’s findings is the concept of “state capture”, where, according to the fund, corruption becomes the norm and, in fact, the primary means of governance. The report argues that the Pakistani state apparatus is frequently used to enrich specific groups at the expense of the broader public.

The report estimates that “elite privilege” – defined as access to subsidies, tax relief and lucrative state contracts for a select few – drains billions of dollars from the economy annually, while tax evasion and regulatory capture crowd out genuine private sector investment.

These findings echo a 2021 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report, which said economic privileges granted to Pakistan’s elite groups, including politicians and the powerful military, amount to roughly 6 percent of the country’s economy.

Ali Hasanain, an associate professor of economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, said the IMF’s description of elite capture is accurate but added that it was “hardly a revelation”.

He pointed to the 2021 UNDP report and other domestic studies that describe how Pakistan’s economic system has long served politically connected actors who secure “preferential access to land, credit, tariffs and regulatory exemptions.”

“The IMF diagnostic repeats what many domestic studies, including those by the World Bank and Pakistan’s own institutions, have already emphasised: Powerful interests shape rules to maintain their advantage,” he told Al Jazeera.

The new report notes that tax expenditures, including exemptions and concessions granted to influential sectors such as real estate, manufacturing and energy, cost the state 4.61 percent of GDP in the 2023 fiscal year alone.

It also calls for an end to special treatment for influential public sector entities in government contracts and urges greater transparency in the functioning of the Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC).

The SIFC, created in June 2023 during Sharif’s first term, is a high-powered body comprising civilian and military leaders and tasked with promoting investment by easing bureaucratic obstacles. Although positioned as a flagship initiative jointly owned by the government and the military, it has faced sustained criticism for a lack of transparency.

The report describes broad legal immunity granted to SIFC officials, many from the armed forces, as a major governance concern. It warns that this immunity, combined with the council’s authority to exempt projects from regulatory requirements, creates significant risks.

Highlighting the absence of transparency, the GCDA says the SIFC should publish annual reports with details of all investments it has facilitated, including concessions granted and the rationale behind them.

“The recently established Special Investment Facilitation Council, which has been vested with substantial authority to facilitate foreign investments, operates with untested transparency and accountability provisions,” the report said.

Judiciary and rule of law

The report identifies the judiciary as another critical bottleneck. Pakistan’s legal system is overwhelmed by more than two million pending cases. In 2023 alone, the number of unresolved cases before the Supreme Court increased by 7 percent.

Over the last 12 months, Pakistan has passed two constitutional amendments, both of which faced severe backlash from many in the legal community who said that they represent a “constitutional surrender”. In essence, the amendments create a parallel Federal Constitutional Court that critics say will reduce the powers of the Supreme Court, while also changing rules that guide how judges are appointed and transferred, in ways that opponents say could give the executive great control over whom to promote and whom to punish.

The government, however, has insisted that the changes were made to improve the efficiency and efficacy of the judicial system.

Similar credibility challenges affect the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) and the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), the two principal bodies responsible for investigating corruption.

The GCDA cites a 2024 government task force, which found that NAB has, at times, exceeded its mandate and launched politically motivated cases. This selective accountability, the report says, has damaged public trust and created a climate of fear within the bureaucracy, slowing decision-making.

While NAB says it recovered 5.3 trillion rupees ($17bn) between January 2023 and December 2024, the report notes that conviction rates remain low.

The diagnostic calls for fundamental reforms to NAB’s appointment processes to ensure independence and a shift from “political victimisation” to “rule-based enforcement”.

Was the report necessary?

The IMF outlines reforms which experts acknowledged would be comprehensive if pursued by authorities.

Yet analysts also note that international institutions and domestic researchers have repeatedly made similar observations in the past, with little follow-through by the government.

Sajid Amin Javed, a senior economist at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in Islamabad, says the fact that Pakistan is already under an IMF programme may compel the government to take the findings more seriously.

He said that the IMF report could have gone further than it has by acknowledging that many of its recommendations have been made by others in the past, “without bringing any change”.

“Perhaps the assessment could have been made to see why these failures happened,” he said.

Javed welcomed the report’s attempt to quantify economic losses from corruption, hoping it might push policymakers to act.

“Corruption and governance are intrinsically tied to each other. Corruption leads to weak governance, and weak governance promotes corruption, making them conjoined,” he said.

Hasanain, however, was more sceptical, questioning why the IMF waited for a formal request from the Pakistani government despite having its own internal assessment mechanisms.

What can the government do?

Analysts said Pakistan’s economic landscape has long been shaped by politically connected actors who enjoy preferential access to land, credit, tariffs and regulatory exemptions. The IMF’s observations, they noted, are not new.

Hasanain argues that corruption, including elite capture of markets, regulatory bodies and public policy, is political in nature and cannot be addressed without deeper reforms.

“Without a broader political awakening, governance reforms will remain technical fixes built on unstable foundations. Ultimately, elite capture is undone only when political incentives change,” he said.

Javed, meanwhile, pointed to what he called policy design capture, arguing that those responsible for drafting governance and anticorruption reforms are often part of the same elite ecosystem.

“Elite policy capture on policy design is perhaps the most important component which allows the elite capture. The report’s recommendations show that we must go for participatory and inclusive methods to get out of our current conundrum,” he said.

For Hasanain, the most urgent reform is a unified economic turnaround plan that is fully owned by the prime minister and communicated clearly.

He said that Pakistan’s economic landscape was cluttered with “committees, councils, task forces and overlapping ministries”, each producing its own documents without accountability.

“The government should consolidate these scattered structures into one clear reform platform with defined priorities, timelines and measurable outcomes. Progress should be published monthly, debated publicly, and subjected to independent scrutiny,” he said.

Hasanain argued that such consolidation would improve coordination, build public trust and signal seriousness to investors.

For Javed, the most immediate priority is reforming the public procurement system, which governs how government bodies buy goods and services using public funds.

“Our procurement system is not working on value of money, but instead it focuses on quantity of money, where lowest bidder wins the bid,” he said, arguing that this approach meant that contracts often did not go to those best suited to deliver what was needed. “This system needs urgent modernisation.”

“An urgent realisation is the order of the day that if we need to have a flourishing, transparent economy, we have no choice but to overhaul our entire economic framework,” Javed said.

Jockey Dylan Kitts has been given a nine-year ban in a racing corruption case.

The rider and associate John Higgins conspired together to commit a corrupt practice by agreeing to stop a horse achieving its best possible position, it was found.

Kitts, 24, admitted to a disciplinary hearing he prevented his mount Hillsin from running on his merits when finishing third in a handicap hurdle at Worcester in July 2023.

Higgins, who has been banned from racing for 12 years, was deemed to be the mastemind behind the plan to stop Hillsin winning.

He is the father-in-law of Premier League footballer Ashley Barnes and is an associate of the horse’s owner Alan Clegg, who was not charged by the British Horseracing Authority (BHA).

Trainer Chris Honour was judged not to be part of the conspiracy but was found to have misled stewards and was fined £750.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy is racing to contain the fallout from a high-level corruption scandal that could undermine his authority, just as his country’s soldiers and civilians face potentially their toughest winter of the war with Russia.

A week after anti-corruption investigators said they had smashed an alleged $100 million (€86 million) kickback scheme centered on state nuclear power firm Energoatom, the furor is still swirling around Zelenskiy—even as Ukraine’s troops are under severe pressure on the battlefield with Russia, and its ailing energy grid suffers nightly attacks.

Justice Minister Herman Halushchenko and Energy Minister Svitlana Hrynchuk have resigned over the scandal, but more damaging for the Ukrainian president is what appears to be significant involvement of businessman Timur Mindich, a protégé of Zelenskiy and co-owner of the media company that Zelenskiy founded before entering politics in 2019. Apparently having been tipped off, Mindich reportedly fled Ukraine shortly before last Monday’s raids and arrests.

The Ukrainian parliament has also voted to dismiss Energy Minister Svetlana Grinchuk, marking the second high-level ouster in a single day as the government struggles to contain a growing corruption scandal linked to a close ally of Vladimir Zelenskyy.

It is reported by the Kiev Post that Zelenskiy could fire his influential chief of staff, Andrey Yermak, this week. A full-scale “riot” has unfolded within parliament over the vast corruption scandal that allegedly links Yermak with the multimillion-dollar kickback scheme in the country’s energy sector. The scandal has also reminded Ukrainians of how the president curbed the independence of the nation’s top EU-initiated anti-corruption agencies in July—before being forced to backtrack by street protests and international criticism—in what critics called a brazen attempt to shield associates from scrutiny.

It threatens to become the biggest political crisis of the war for Zelenskiy and comes at a time when Ukrainian troops are under severe pressure from Russia in parts of four regions—Donetsk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipropetrovsk.

Bags of cash and a golden toilet

The West’s “dis-ease” with Ukraine and its president is no longer speculation. It’s happening in plain sight, slowly but ineluctably. The Financial Times, hardly a Kremlin mouthpiece, has published a piece titled “Bags of cash and a gold toilet: the corruption crisis engulfing Zelenskiy’s government.” Its reporters now openly state that Ukrainian elites expect even more explosive revelations from NABU investigations. And once outlets like FT put something like this in print, it usually means the groundwork has been laid behind the scenes.

That Western Europe and the United States are still approving new aid says little about confidence in Kiev. But it speaks volumes about bureaucratic inertia and the reluctance of those who profit from this war to let the tap close suddenly. Even so, you can now hear cautious whispers in Brussels asking whether it makes sense to send billions to a government whose officials seem determined to conjure up a scheme to steal the money before it arrives. These are not new revelations; rather, the surprise is that anyone actually pretends to be surprised.

The truth is easy to discern: the West knew exactly who it was dealing with from the inception. Nobody in Brussels, London, or Washington was under any delusion that Ukraine was somehow to be confused with, say, Switzerland. They knowingly entered into a political partnership with what is, and has long been, one of the most corrupt and internally unstable political systems in Europe. To pretend otherwise is to feign ignorance—pure theater.

For more than thirty years, Ukrainian statehood has rested on the same shaky foundations: competing clans, oligarchic rule, privatized security services, and a political class willing to plunder their own population. Changing leadership never went so far as to alter the underlying structure; it never happened because each leader owed his position to the same network of cash, patronage, and power.

Consider Leonid Kravchuk: under his auspices, Ukraine began its slow “Banderization,” while state assets were siphoned away and local power brokers entrenched themselves. Leonid Kuchma then perfected this system. Under his presidency, Ukraine saw questionable arms deals, the murders of journalists and opposition figures, and audiotapes revealing orders to eliminate critics. Economic sectors with predictable profits were carved up among regional clans who ruled their fiefdoms in exchange for loyalty. And a steady stream of kickbacks to Kiev.

Viktor Yushchenko’s years brought more of the same: corruption schemes around energy, political assassinations, and the continued exploitation of ordinary Ukrainians. Viktor Yanukovych and Petro Poroshenko added their own layers to this hierarchy of detritus. Zelenskiy inherited it but then accelerated it, surrounding himself with loyalists whose main qualification was their willingness to feed at the same trough as previous leaders and look the other way.

Resistance to federalism

All of these leaders shared one common denominator: resisting federalization. Ukraine is a country with a large landmass; yet, it operates through a centralized, unitary form of governance in which a legislative body or a single individual is given supreme authority and thus ultimate power over regional and local needs of the country. There are distinct disadvantages inherent in such a structure:

·        It tends to subordinate local and regional needs to that of those in power.

·        It can encourage an abuse of power, which is one reason why the United States and a dozen other nations created a federated state instead. Instead of having one form of centralized power, there is a system of checks and balances designed to provide more equality and give greater voice to those being governed.

· Greater opportunities for manipulation exist. Those in power can pursue more wealth or governing opportunities for themselves, because few ways exist to stop such activity.

·        The governing structure will protect the central body first.

·        Sub-national regions are not allowed to decide their own laws, rights, and freedoms; there is no sharing of power.

·        The few control the many. If there is a shift in policy that takes rights away from select groups or individuals, there is little, if anything, the general population can do to stop it.

·        The central authority can artificially shape the discussions of society; it can decide that their political opponents are a threat, then pass laws that allow them to be silenced or imprisoned for what they have allegedly done.

The current scandal in Ukraine is testament to the issues noted above relating to its form of governance.

A federal Ukraine would devolve power and financial control to the regions, and that is the nightmare scenario for Kiev’s elites. It would loosen their grip on revenue streams, limit their political leverage, and allow regional identities to express themselves without fear of punishment from the center. So instead of reform, those with power offered forced Ukrainization and nationalist slogans about one people, one language, and one state. It was a political survival strategy, not a nation-building project.

This is why changing presidents will solve nothing. Remove Zelenskyy, and you likely get another figure produced by the same system. Perhaps Zaluzhnyi, perhaps a recycled face from a previous era. The choreography will be identical; only the masks of the actors will change. The deeper problem is the structure of Ukrainian statehood itself. As long as Ukraine remains in its current unitary form of central authority, it will continue producing conflict, corruption, and internal instability. War is not an aberration in such a system. It is an outcome.

If the elites refuse to reform and the population has no means to compel them, then the discussion must move beyond personalities. The uncomfortable truth is that the only lasting solution may be to abandon the current model of Ukrainian statehood altogether. No cosmetic change will save a system, the very design of which fosters autocracy and corruption.

Ministers implicated in scandal involving misused and stolen funds earmarked for anti-flooding infrastructure.

Two ministers in Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s cabinet resigned on Tuesday after being implicated in an ongoing investigation into “ghost” infrastructure and billions of dollars of missing government funds, deepening a crisis facing the country’s government over the corruption scandal.

Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin and Department of Budget and Management Secretary Amenah Pangandaman have both stepped down from their posts, presidential palace press officer Claire Castro said on Tuesday.

Castro said the pair chose to resign “after their departments were mentioned in allegations related to the flood control anomaly” and “in recognition of the responsibility to allow the administration to address the matter appropriately,” according to The Philippines Inquirer newspaper.

Bersamin and Pangandaman are the highest-ranking members of the Marcos government to be hit directly by the corruption scandal since it broke in July, according to Aries Arugay, an expert in Philippines politics and a visiting senior fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.

Marcos himself has managed to stay above the fray – for now – although Arugay said that could change at any time.

“At the moment, the palace is trying to take the president out of this, and this is why you have the ‘resignations’ of the executive secretary, the budget secretary. They’re the ones accepting command responsibility over this,” he told Al Jazeera.

Arugay said Marcos Jr still has a “comfortable” majority in the legislature because many MPs still prefer him to leadership under Vice President Sara Duterte, but “all bets are off” should more evidence emerge.

Earlier this week, politician Zaldy Co – who is currently not in the Philippines – alleged that Marcos directed him to add $1.7bn to the budget for “dubious public works” while he headed an appropriations committee, according to The South China Morning Post, although the claims have not been verified.

Co was among the first group of officials to be charged this week for their role in the corruption scandal following a months-long investigation, according to The Philippines Inquirer.

The scandal has engulfed the Philippines since Marcos Jr revealed in a speech to Congress earlier this year that billions of dollars of public funds for anti-flooding infrastructure had been siphoned off by private contractors to build substandard infrastructure – and in some cases, none at all.

The Philippines is regularly hit by typhoons and other tropical storms, and flooding remains a perennial and often deadly problem.

The corruption scandal has set off mass protests across the Philippines, including a demonstration on Sunday that drew 500,000 people to Manila.

Protests come amid widespread anger over billions of pesos spent on substandard or non-existent flood control infrastructure.

Tens of thousands of people are gathering in the Philippines’ capital, Manila, demanding accountability over a corruption scandal linked to flood-control projects and top government officials, including allies of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

The three-day rally, which begins on Sunday, is the latest display of outrage over the discovery that thousands of flood defence projects across the typhoon-prone country were made from substandard materials or simply did not exist.

Police estimated that 27,000 members of the Iglesia Ni Cristo, or Church of Christ, gathered in Manila’s Rizal Park before noon, many wearing white and carrying anticorruption placards, for the afternoon demonstration.

Brother Edwin Zabala, spokesman for the church, said the three-day rally is aimed at expressing “our sentiment and lend the voice of the Iglesia ni Cristo to the calls of many of our countrymen condemning the enormous evil involving many government officials”.

Other groups were scheduled to hold a separate anticorruption protest later on Sunday at the People Power Monument in suburban Quezon city.

The country’s military reaffirmed support for the government before the planned demonstrations in Manila, where the Philippine National Police say they will deploy 15,000 police as security.

The protests follow allegations that numerous well-connected figures, including Marcos’s cousin and former House of Representatives Speaker Martin Romualdez, pocketed large sums for anti-flooding projects that were low in quality or never completed at all.

Public outrage has flared again after recent storms hammered large swaths of the country earlier this month and left at least 259 people dead, and Marcos has promised that those implicated in the scandal would be in jail before the Christmas holiday.

The Department of Finance has estimated that the country lost up to 118.5 billion pesos ($2bn) to corruption in flood-control projects between 2023 and 2025, some of them referred to as “ghost infrastructure projects”.

A fact-finding commission has filed criminal complaints for corruption against 37 people, including senators, members of Congress, and wealthy businesspeople. Criminal complaints have also been filed against 86 construction company executives and nine government officials for allegedly evading nearly 9 billion pesos ($153m) in taxes.

Among those accused are lawmakers opposed to and allied with Marcos. In addition to Romualdez, these include Senate President Chiz Escudero, as well as Senator Bong Go, a key ally of former President Rodrigo Duterte.

All three have denied wrongdoing.

Marcos has said his cousin will not face criminal charges “as yet” due to a lack of evidence, but added that “no one is exempt” from the investigation.

“We don’t file cases for optics,” he said. “We file cases to put people in jail.”

Duterte, a harsh Marcos critic, was detained by the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands in March for alleged crimes against humanity over his brutal anti-drug crackdowns.

His daughter, the current vice president, said Marcos should also be held accountable and jailed for approving the 2025 national budget, which appropriated billions for flood control projects.

There have been isolated calls, including by some pro-Duterte supporters, for the military to withdraw support from Marcos, but Armed Forces of the Philippines chief of staff, General Romeo Brawner Jr, has repeatedly rejected those calls.

“With full conviction, I assure the public that the armed forces will not engage in any action that violates the Constitution. Not today, not tomorrow and certainly not under my watch,” Brawner said.

The military “remains steadfast in preserving peace, supporting lawful civic expression and protecting the stability and democratic institutions of the republic”, he added.

The FBI was secretly listening last year when a high-ranking advisor to Gov. Gavin Newsom unleashed a stream of profanities as she vented about a public records request from an unnamed individual.

“Double f— her!” said Dana Williamson, Newsom’s chief of staff, repeating the f word throughout the conversation. She also called another person an “a—,” according to federal court documents made public this week.

Before Wednesday, few people outside of California’s political bubble likely knew Williamson’s name.

Now she’s engulfed in a scandal involving political consultants and illicit payments that threatens to haunt her former boss, Newsom, as he challenges President Trump and looks toward the 2028 presidential race.

A smart and savvy negotiator who bridged Sacramento’s overlapping worlds of government, business and labor, Williamson is also someone who picked unnecessary fights and launched cruel missives, political consultants and friends said this week.

Federal agents arrested Williamson Wednesday at her home in Carmichael, a Sacramento suburb. Her lawyer, former U.S. Atty. McGregor Scott, was furious about how the arrest was handled, saying she was seriously ill and in need of a liver transplant.

Federal prosecutors allege that she conspired to funnel money out of one of her one-time client’s state campaign accounts for bogus services, and falsified documents related to her COVID loan.

She also is accused of lying on her tax returns about luxury items and services, including a $150,000 birthday trip to Mexico, that she allegedly sought to pass off as business expenses, according to the government.

Williamson, who pleaded not guilty to the charges this week, appeared in a courtroom in Sacramento. She appeared solemn during the hearing, at one point reportedly lifting her cuffed hand to wipe away a tear, and left without talking to reporters.

Court documents filed this week paint an image of both a conniving player and a fragile individual. “I’m scared,” she wrote in a February 2022 text message to a colleague as they discussed the alleged money-laundering scheme, which was allegedly in the early planning stages.

Public affairs consultant Steven Maviglio has known her since the two worked in President Clinton’s administration — and then later the administration of Gov. Gray Davis. He is now trying to put together a legal defense fund for her.

He described Williamson as a “no nonsense, no BS, get it done” person who was “straight-talking, sometimes to the point of offensive to people.”

She regularly dropped f-bombs, he added.

In another recording captured by the FBI, Williamson joined two colleagues last year in a restaurant near the state Capitol in Sacramento. The government was asking questions about money she received through her COVID loan.

She complained about the “f—” drama and said her Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan got “popped” — before adding another swear word. According to federal officials, she created false contracts in an attempt to show the COVID money was appropriately used.

There is little sympathy from her detractors. Gil Duran, the former press secretary to Gov. Jerry Brown, who worked alongside Williamson, likened her to a “mafia boss” in an interview with CNN. She also has numerous defenders in Sacramento, many of them women, who view her as a tough and inspiring figure.

The details in the federal filings sent shock waves beyond Sacramento and the state Capitol this week.

“I’m stunned about the allegation and find it hard to believe,” said Alison Gaulden, who supervised Williamson when she worked as an associate vice president of public affairs for Planned Parenthood Mar Monte from 2002 to 2004.

Gaulden described her as “incredibly bright and well versed in policy. I’ve admired how she grew in her career.”

Williamson, who grew up in Santa Rosa, moved between the private and public sectors, and was employed by three governors, Davis, Jerry Brown and Newsom.

At Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E), she worked alongside two other women who would be remarkably influential in her life: Nancy McFadden, the late advisor to Brown and Alexis Podesta, a longtime California political insider who also appears in the federal court documents filed this week.

Podesta is the person identified as “Co-Conspirator 2,” but has not been charged and is cooperating with investigators, according to her attorney.

Williamson was hired as a senior advisor for Brown and was later promoted to Cabinet secretary.

While working for Brown, Williamson publicly advocated for children’s health, testifying in favor of legislation that would eliminate the state’s personal-belief exemption for childhood vaccines. She said the issue was meaningful to her because she was a mother of four.

“Usually, staff doesn’t speak on bills, the great thing about the governor is that he respects that we are people first,” Williamson told the San Francisco Chronicle. “This was important to me.”

Business advocates appreciated her direct approach when she worked for Brown.

“She was very straightforward, she was a good person to work with,” said Stuart Waldman, president of Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. He said he hadn’t dealt with her in years.

She flip-flopped between private and government work, drawing criticism from groups like Consumer Watchdog for her “revolving door” career.

In one episode, she was allegedly seen negotiating for her energy clients in Brown’s office as the state hammered out details over a grid deal, drawing outrage from the watchdog group.

She started her own government relations firm, Grace Public Affairs, which handled an array of campaigns, including the online sports betting initiative Proposition 27, which appeared on the 2022 ballot, but failed to pass.

Her clients included California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, and former Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra, whose campaign fund was allegedly raided by Williamson, and others.

By 2017, she had a close group of female friends, who had also risen to the top of their professions. But to those who weren’t in her inner circle, she was all elbows, one political insider said this week.

At the California Democratic Party headquarters in downtown Sacramento, a bronze statue of Williamson’s then-5-year-old daughter was installed as part of a campaign to promote female empowerment following Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss.

Those behind the statue included Williamson’s friends Robin Swanson, a Democratic communications consultant, and Angie Tate, then a chief fundraiser for the California Democratic Party.

The installation was intended to mimic the “Fearless Girl” statue at New York’s Wall Street, which shows a 4-foot young woman looking defiantly at the famous charging bull statue.

In 2022, Newsom’s office announced Williamson was joining his office as chief of staff. Though the two weren’t particularly close when she joined, she quickly became part of his inner circle, Politico reported at the time.

Anthony York, Newsom’s former communications director and a former L.A. Times reporter, told Politico at the time that Williamson was not intimidated by the governor’s celebrity status. “She gives zero f—s, which is part of what makes her so great,” York said.

During her time in Newsom’s office, she worked with former Senate leader Darrell Steinberg on the successful passage of Proposition 1, which borrows billions of dollars for mental health services, and was a personal issue for her family.

“I had a particularly tough experience with my husband that I learned a lot from… when the incident happened with him, I learned about all the holes in the system,” she told KQED.

She moved from Elk Grove last year to Carmichael, purchasing a home for $1.695 million, according to property records. The records show her linked to several homes in Elk Grove, including one that went into foreclosure in 2012.

Williamson would send off combative messages, including social media posts or texts, often at night. Among her targets: California Labor Federation President Lorena Gonzalez and U.S. Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin), whom she called an “entertaining idiot” on X.

She took aim at former Assemblymember Kevin McCarty during his campaign last year for Sacramento mayor. She called him a “devil” on X and urged others not to vote for him, before her comment was taken down a few days later.

Newsom placed Williamson on leave when she informed him last year she was under criminal investigation. Her last day in office was in November 2024. At the time, the governor said in a statement that “her insight, tenacity, and big heart will be missed.”

This week, a spokesperson for the governor struck a different tone: “Ms. Williamson no longer serves in this administration. While we are still learning details of the allegations, the Governor expects all public servants to uphold the highest standards of integrity.”

We are being ruled by the “Epstein class,” and voters deserve to know the details of that particular scandal, and to be able to expect better of their leaders in the larger sense.

That’s the message we’ll be hearing a lot in the coming weeks and months now that Democrats have successfully moved forward their effort to release the full investigation into former President Trump buddy Jeffrey Epstein.

“When you take a step back, you have a country where an elite governing class has gotten away with impunity, and shafted the working class in this country, shafted factory towns, shafted rural communities,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) told me Wednesday.

He represents parts of Silicon Valley and is one of the authors of the House push to release the full government investigation into Epstein. But in the Epstein case, he also sees an opportunity to reach voters with a larger promise of change.

“What Epstein is about is saying, ‘we reject the Epstein class governing America today,’” Khanna said.

How appropriately strange for these days would it be if Epstein, who faced sex trafficking charges at the time of his death, provided the uniting message Democrats have been searching for?

“Epstein and economics” sounds like a stretch on the surface, but it is increasingly clear that Americans of all political stripes are tired of the rich getting richer, and bolder. The Epstein files are the bipartisan embodiment of that discontent.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), left, and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) have led Democrats’ push for release of the Epstein files.

(Sue Ogrocki and J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

Our collective frustration with what can appear only as a cover-up to benefit the wealthy and powerful is an unexpected bit of glue that binds regular Americans, because the corruption and hubris of our oligarchy is increasingly undeniable and galling.

Whether it’s our president’s obviously wrong contention that grocery prices are down; our vice president being willing to take on the pope about true Catholic doctrine; or our FBI chief flying his girlfriend around on the taxpayer dime, the arrogance is stunning.

But where each of those examples becomes buried and dismissed in partisan politics, sex trafficking girls turns out to be frowned upon by people from all walks of life.

“It’s universal,” said Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, and another Californian. “This is clearly a White House and a president that is the most corrupt person we’ve ever had in office serving as a chief executive, and this is just another piece of that corruption.”

Khanna, along with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, built the unlikely but unstoppable effort that brought together once-loyal Trumpers including Reps. Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace and Marjorie Taylor Greene with Democrats.

Those staunch right-wingers are tied in to their voters, and probably understood just how unpopular sex trafficking is with a base that grew into maturity on QAnon-inspired fear mongering about kidnapped children.

“It’s the only thing since Trump walked down the escalator that’s been a truly bipartisan effort to expose corruption and where there’s been a break in his coalition,” Khanna said.

And by “exposing rich and powerful people who abuse the system and calling them out clearly, we start to rebuild trust with the American people,” Khanna argues, the trust required to make folks believe Democrats aren’t so terrible.

Long before he was a linchpin in the Epstein saga, Khanna built a name as a force on the progressive left for a positive and inclusive economic platform that resembles the New Deal, which Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to rebuild democracy in another era of hardship and discontent.

It’s all about real payoffs for average Americans — trade schools and affordable child care and jobs that actually pay the bills. That’s the message that he hopes will be the top line as Democrats push forward.

On Wednesday, the buildup of resentment that might make that possible came into full focus in Washington, as Congress opened up to anything but business as usual. Democrats, led by Garcia, released emails raising questions about Trump’s knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.

Trump “spent hours at my house” and “knew about the girls,” Epstein wrote, even as Trump’s press secretary argued this was all a “fake narrative to smear” her boss.

Republicans countered the emails with a massive information dump probably meant to obscure and confuse. But House Speaker Mike Johnson, out of excuses, finally swore in Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who promptly provided the final signature on the discharge petition to call a House vote on releasing the entire Epstein files.

That happened just hours after Boebert, one of the key Republican backers of that effort, was called to the White House in a last-minute, heavy-handed bid to pressure her into dropping her name from the demand. She did not.

Enough to make your head spin, honestly. About 10 more dastardly, intriguing and unexpected things happened, but you get the gist: President Trump really, really does not want us to read the Epstein files. House Democrats are ready to fight the long fight.

Garcia said House Democrats aren’t caving, because the cover-up keeps growing.

“There’s a lot of folks now that are obsessed with hiding the truth from the public, and the American public needs to know,” he said. “The Oversight Committee is committed to fighting our way to the truth.”

But it will be a long fight, and one with only a slim chance of winning the release of the files. Any effort would have to clear the Republican-held Senate (and after the shutdown collapse, who knows if Senate Democrats have the stomach for resistance), then be signed by Trump.

Judging from his near-desperate social media posting about the whole thing being a “hoax,” it’s hard to imagine him putting his scrawl on that law.

But unlike the shutdown, the longer this goes, the more Democrats have to gain. People aren’t going to suddenly start liking pedophiles. And the more Trump pushes to hide whatever the truth is, the more Democrats have the high ground, to message on corruption, oligarchs and even a vision for a better way.

“Epstein and economics” — linking the concrete with the esoteric, the problem with the solution.

The bipartisan message Democrats didn’t know they needed, from the strangest of sources.

US President Donald Trump called the corruption trial against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a ‘political, unjustified prosecution’ as he requested the country’s president pardon him. However, under Israeli law, such a request can only be made by the person accused of wrongdoing, a legal representative, or a family member.

Justice Minister German Galushchenko allegedly took part in the scheme involving state nuclear power firm Energoatom.

Ukraine has suspended Justice Minister German Galushchenko for his alleged involvement in a corruption scandal involving the state-run nuclear power company, Energoatom, during his tenure as the country’s energy minister.

Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko announced on Wednesday that Galushchenko had been suspended from his duties, which will be carried out by Deputy Justice Minister for European Integration Lyudmyla Sugak.

Galushchenko, who served as energy minister for four years before taking over the justice portfolio in July, is accused of profiting from a scheme that laundered money from Energoatom.

Ukraine’s Pravda news outlet reported that anticorruption authorities raided Galushchenko’s offices on Monday.

‘I will defend myself in court’

In a statement, Galushchenko said he had spoken with the prime minister and agreed his suspension is appropriate while he defends his case.

“A political decision must be made, and only then can all the details be sorted out,” said Galushchenko. “I believe that suspension for the duration of the investigation is a civilised and correct scenario. I will defend myself in court and prove my position.”

According to Ukraine’s Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), the alleged $100m scheme was orchestrated by businessman Timur Mindich, a close ally of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

SAPO’s investigators say Galushchenko helped Mindich manage illicit financial flows in the energy sector, while contractors working with Energoatom were forced to pay bribes of 10 to 15 percent to avoid losing contracts or facing payment delays.

Accusations of kickbacks in the energy sector are particularly sensitive in Ukraine, much of which is facing lengthy daily blackouts as it fends off massive Russian attacks on its infrastructure.

The scandal also highlights a potential challenge to Ukraine’s European Union membership bid, for which eradicating corruption remains a key condition.

Addressing the country on Monday, Zelenskyy urged full cooperation with the anticorruption inquiry and said anyone implicated should be held to account.

Zelenskyy’s comments come just months after he was forced to reverse plans to curb the independence of the country’s key anticorruption watchdogs – SAPO and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine – following widespread protests.

Ukranian president promises accountability after anticorruption bureau announces probe into alleged Energoatom scheme.

Ukraine’s anticorruption agency has launched an investigation into an alleged $100m kickback scheme involving Energoatom, the state-run nuclear power company that supplies more than half of the country’s electricity.

The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), which operates independently of the government, announced the probe on Monday as the country faces another harsh winter under daily Russian bombardment.

In a statement posted on social media, NABU said that a “high-level criminal organisation” orchestrated the alleged scheme, led by a businessman and involving a former adviser to the energy minister, Energoatom’s head of security, and four other employees.

“In total, approximately 100 million USD passed through this so-called laundromat,” NABU said, without naming the suspects.

“The minister’s adviser and the director of security at Energoatom took control of all the company’s purchases and created conditions under which all contractors had to pay illegal benefits,” according to NABU chief detective Oleksandr Abakumov.

He said the group discussed increasing the kickback rate during work on protective structures at the Khmelnytskyi nuclear plant last October.

Investigators said Energoatom’s contractors were forced to pay bribes of 10 to 15 percent to avoid losing contracts or facing payment delays.

“A strategic enterprise with annual income exceeding 200 billion hryvnias [$4.7bn] was managed not by authorised officials but by individuals with no formal authority,” NABU said.

Zelenskyy calls for ‘criminal verdicts’

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, addressing the nation on Monday evening, urged full cooperation with the investigation. “Everyone who has been involved in corruption schemes must receive a clear legal response. There must be criminal verdicts,” he said.

Zelenskyy’s comments come just months after he was forced to reverse plans to curb the agency’s independence following widespread protests. Eradicating corruption remains a crucial condition for Ukraine’s European Union membership bid, a goal Kyiv views as central to its post-war future.

Energoatom confirmed on social media that its offices were being searched and said it was cooperating with investigators.

Deputy Minister of Energy of Ukraine Svitlana Grynchuk told reporters she was not yet familiar with the case details, but promised a “transparent process” and accountability for anyone found guilty. “I hope that the transparency of the investigation will reassure our international partners,” she said.

Ukraine’s power infrastructure has suffered extensive damage from Russia’s air strikes this autumn, leaving large parts of the country without electricity. Although Moscow has not targeted nuclear reactors directly, Ukrainian authorities say substations linked to them have been repeatedly hit.

NABU released photographs showing stacks of cash, Ukrainian hryvnias, US dollars and euros, stuffed into bags and piled on tables. The agency did not disclose the owners of the seized money.

The agency conducted 70 searches, reviewed more than 1,000 hours of audio recordings, and deployed its entire detective staff over 15 months.

Opposition lawmaker Yaroslav Zheleznyak, a strong supporter of anticorruption reform, said he would introduce a parliamentary motion to dismiss Grynchuk and her predecessor, German Galushchenko, now serving as justice minister. Hrynchuk declined to comment on the proposal, while Galushchenko did not respond to requests for comment.

As Ukraine continues to battle both corruption and Russia’s war, Kyiv’s ability to convince its international partners of reform may prove as critical to its future as the fighting on the front lines.

This article contains some spoilers for the Netflix miniseries “Death by Lightning.”

If politics today make your head spin, wait until you see Netflix’s “Death by Lightning.” The four-part miniseries, premiering Thursday, chronicles one of the more jaw-dropping stretches of post-Civil War American history, when corruption ran rampant, a presidential nominee was drafted at the 11th hour, only to be assassinated early in his term by one of his biggest fans — becoming perhaps the greatest head of state we never really got to have.

And the show answers the burning expletive-laced question posed by its first line: Who is Charles Guiteau?

“I’ve been in a James Garfield rabbit hole for seven years of my life at this point,” says showrunner Mike Makowsky, who adapted Candice Millard’s 2011 chronicle of Garfield and Guiteau, “Destiny of the Republic.” Those who paid attention in history class probably remember that Garfield served briefly as our 20th president in 1881 before being shot and killed. Those who remember more than that are few and far between.

“My own agent half the time refers to him as Andrew Garfield,” says Makowsky. “And I have to confess, I knew very little about Garfield, like most Americans, until I picked up Candice Millard’s remarkable book.”

Realizing he knew little about one of the four American presidents to be assassinated, Makowsky thought, “Since I would desperately like to be on ‘Jeopardy!’ someday, I was like, ‘Let me educate myself.’ I wound up reading the entire book in one sitting.”

“Death by Lightning,” directed by “Captain Fantastic” auteur Matt Ross, boasts a remarkable cast: Betty Gilpin as First Lady Lucretia Garfield; Nick Offerman as Garfield’s successor, a hard-drinking, hard-partying Chester A. Arthur; Michael Shannon as James Garfield, the polymath president, crusader against corruption and noble to a fault; and Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Guiteau, the frustrated office-seeker who shot him.

“I wanted to cast people who were somewhat counterintuitive,” says Ross. “If you read the cast list for this, you might assume Michael Shannon was playing Guiteau because he has played a lot of complicated, for lack of a better word, villains — tough guys, bad guys. And Matthew Macfadyen has played more heroic characters.”

Guiteau is definitely no Darcy from “Pride and Prejudice,” or Tom Wambsgans from “Succession,” for that matter. In the series’ conception of him, he shares more DNA with Martin Scorsese’s unhinged protagonists than he does with Darcy — or, certainly, with Garfield.

The proto-incel with a gun

As portrayed in “Death by Lightning,” Guiteau is a rotten-toothed, scheming, big-dreaming, delusional charlatan and possible sociopath. He’s the proto-incel, and the diametrical opposite to Garfield, whom Makowsky defines as “lawful good,” to borrow the Dungeons & Dragons classification.

“I think the most reductive view of Guiteau is ‘chaotic evil,’ right? But that’s the least interesting rendering of this person,” he says. “What are the societal factors that alienate a man like Guiteau from his fellow human beings? The show is meant to probe into his psyche.”

He was a member of the Oneida community, a religious sect based in New York that practiced communalism, free love and mutual criticism, which is depicted in the series (and yes, they founded the flatware company). But Guiteau couldn’t partake in what Makowsky delicately called the “benefits” of such a society, largely because his delusions of grandeur alienated him from others there. The women reportedly nicknamed him “Charles Gitout.”

“Everyone who encountered him described him as being disagreeable, odd, rude, selfish,” Ross says, explaining the need for an actor who had the opposite qualities. “He’s an extreme example of someone who had no work to be seen for, but was so desperately looking for affirmation and love.”

Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen) was part of the Oneida community, which practiced communalism and free love, but he wasn’t accepted by its members.

(Larry Horricks/Netflix)

Ross describes Macfadyen as someone who’s empathetic, warm and funny. “I wanted that humanity because the real Guiteau was a deeply disturbed man who was psychologically brutalized by his father to the point he was a non-functioning person.”

Makowsky says as he was reading Millard’s book, he thought of Rupert Pupkin, Robert De Niro’s deranged-fan protagonist in Scorsese’s “King of Comedy.” “This guy showing up, day in and day out, hoping for an audience with his hero [Garfield], being continually rebuffed to the point where something in his brain breaks,” he says of Guiteau. “He felt like a direct historical antecedent to the Rupert Pupkins and Travis Bickles of the world. He fell through the cracks and we lost potentially one of our greatest presidents because of it.”

Makowsky recalls shooting the only dialogue scene between Garfield and Guiteau, when the “greatest fan” finally gets to meet his idol. To Makowsky’s surprise, Macfadyen’s Guiteau “just burst into tears. That wasn’t scripted. It was so overwhelming to him. I think in that moment, more than any other in the series, you feel something for this man.”

Party (hearty) over country

Garfield was succeeded in office by Chester A. Arthur, whom Makowsky calls one of the least likely persons to ever become president. “The man had never held elected office,” he says. “His one political appointment prior to his nomination for vice president was as chief crony of the spoils system of [New York Sen.] Roscoe Conkling’s political machine. The level of corruption was so audacious and insane.”

He’s played with oft-drunken brio by Nick Offerman, whose voice Makowsky says he heard in his head as soon as he started writing the role: “I was like, it has to be Nick Offerman.” He took some liberties with the character and events, including a memorable sequence where Arthur and Guiteau go on a bender. Makowsky says they “probably never had a wild night out in New York, but it was an indelible proposition and I couldn’t resist.”

Nick Offerman plays eventual President Chester A. Arthur, who was closely aligned with New York Sen. Roscoe Conkling (Shea Whigham).

Betty Gilpin portrays First Lady Lucretia Garfield as her husband’s intellectual equal. (Larry Horricks / Netflix)

As to the first lady, “Lucretia Garfield was every bit her husband’s intellectual equal. But she couldn’t vote. There was a ceiling to what a woman in her day could accomplish,” Makowsky says, wistfully musing on what she might have achieved, given the chance. “And Betty [Gilpin] radiates that strength and that acute intelligence.”

Having recently given birth, Gilpin took her family along to Budapest for filming, voraciously researching Lucretia and reading her entire correspondence with her husband. The role gets meatier as the series progresses until she initiates an unforgettable, blistering encounter with Guiteau to button the story.

“Betty jokingly said to me, ‘If you cut that scene, I will kill you.’ I was like, ‘There’s no way that scene is being cut. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the entire show,’” Ross recalls. “Everyone who read it was like, ‘Oh my God, this scene.’ And Betty just knocked it out of the park, take after take after take.”

The forgotten president

Ross says when he first read Makowsky’s scripts, he thought they were “fantastically relevant” and offered a fresh look at American history. “As an American, I’m always trying to figure out what it means to be American,” he says. “The story of Garfield, you couldn’t make it up. He was a hero of working people and the promise of American democracy — having a representational democracy where those in power and the wealthy are not controlling the laws of the land, which could not be more relevant today.”

Makowsky calls Garfield “a poster boy for the American dream,” rising from poverty to the nation’s top office.

“He was a war hero and a Renaissance man that did math theorems while he was in Congress and who could recite Homer from memory,” he says. “This remarkable individual, fiercely intelligent and a brilliant, powerful orator, was far ahead of his time on certain political questions of the day. He was an outspoken proponent for civil rights and universal education and civil service reform.”

In real life, and as depicted in the series, Garfield worked with notable Black leaders like Frederick Douglass and Blanche Bruce, the first Black register of the Treasury, whom he appointed.

“The great tragedy is we were robbed of a potentially generational leader in Garfield,” Makowsky says.

“Death by Lightning” showrunner Mike Makowsky says Americans were robbed of a “potentially generational leader” in James Garfield.

(Larry Horricks / Netflix)

Garfield wasn’t even seeking the nomination when he spoke on behalf of another candidate at the Republican National Convention of 1880, but his speech so moved the delegates that they eventually persuaded him to accept the nomination after more than 30 votes failed to produce another winner. It reminded Makowsky of then-Sen. Barack Obama’s 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention, where he presented “a strong and confident, optimistic vision for the future of our country.”

Nowadays, such a rise seems less likely. “I don’t know if that would happen today, obviously because of money in politics; no one can run if they don’t have phenomenal backing,” Ross says.

Ross emphasizes the show is “not a history lesson,” drawing a distinction between drama and documentary. At times, “Death by Lightning” plays like a black comedy. Makowsky’s dialogue, while usually honoring what we think of as the formality and vocabulary of the 1880s’ idiom, occasionally veers into hilariously cathartic invective that bracingly reminds us these were living, breathing people with fire in their bellies.

“Ken Burns could make a 10-hour documentary to encapsulate all the nuances of this incredible story,” says Ross. What Makowsky did, Ross says, was contextualize the history through the prism of two very different people, Garfield and Guiteau.

“One is this incredibly admirable American figure I think everyone should know about, the greatest president we never really had. And then the other is a charlatan, a deeply broken, deeply mentally ill man who just kind of wanted to be Instagram-famous, just wanted to be known. You see this moment in history through their eyes, and I thought that was delicious.”

Tanzanian activists say graphic videos offer proof government forces killed dozens of people protesting over alleged election rigging. Incumbent President Samia Suluhu was named the winner of the October 29 vote in controversial circumstances.