#and just cannot stop evading questions during interviews

[sometimeswritingsometimesdying]

ok well maybe the band au could do with some original songs written by me..... it could be fun.... and extremely time consuming.... and arduous..... but it would be fun!

[quijotine]

come get ya miraculous juice

If your thirst for lukanette and slow burn adrinette cannot possibly wait for season 4, Chapter 10 of The Wall Between Us is up on AO3! 

Or read in Tumblr below the cut

Chapter 10

“Aw, come on Luka, don’t be like this,” Albin said, swinging an arm around his neck.

“I’m not being like anything,” Luka protested as he and his group of friends made their way out of the metro station and towards Place de la Concorde. “I’m just saying I don’t feel like coming to a demonstration.”

“So, what would you rather be doing today instead, hm? Stay locked up in your room like an emo kid? Besides, the weather is great today and you know Margot will hang us by our heads if we don’t show up.”

Luka sighed and remitted to walk along, which pleased Albin.

Luka’s friends had been very adamant on helping him out of the house as often as possible since his breakup with Marinette. They knew that, left to his own devices, Luka would close up and keep to himself. He wasn’t the kind of guy that readily shared when something bothered him, he was more the type that had to be squeezed like an orange for him to share his mind when he was feeling low. However, this was not the reason why Luka had put up more of a fight than it was usually his style. It had been almost a week since the breakup and he had managed to keep out of trouble with Hawkmoth, but he attributed his success to a lot of calm evenings and just processing everything his own way.

As much as he supported the cause and his friend Margot, he could see how participating in a demonstration could get him riled up, especially if some asshole showed up. And he’d attended enough demonstrations during his lifetime to know that there was always some asshole showing up.

The trio of boys made their way to the organizers’ tent, where Margo kept busy readying cardboard signs. Without as much as a quick glance upwards and a smile, she said, “Oh good, you’re here. Help me with these, please. Paint is on the table over there.” She handed a couple of cardboard pieces to each of the boys and left them to their own devices.

Luka wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with these. His creativity didn’t exactly lie in the visual department. That was always more a thing for...

He shook his head and proceeded to grab some random paint and brushes for Albin, Noe, and himself. As he turned around, he accidentally knocked a container of black paint on the person behind him waiting their turn.

“What the heck! Watch it!” the girl exclaimed.

“Shit,” he hissed. “Oh my god, I'm so sorry! Let me help you clean-- Kagami?”

It took him a couple seconds to recognize who she was. It had been almost a year since he had last seen her. There was an air to her that made it evident she had changed a lot during that time, but it was also obvious in her appearance. She had cut her hair shorter than before and she had now several piercings on her ears. She seemed to have also shed her preppy outfits in favor of high-waisted mom jeans and a black crop top. Besides her appearance, Luka could  just tell this was the type of girl who wouldn’t take crap from anyone, even more than before. It was a bit… daunting. He did always wonder how someone as intimidatingly sure of herself ended up with someone like Adrien.

“Luka,” she said deadpan.

“You... look very different.”

She gave him a dirty look. “Really? You come to a feminist demonstration and the first thing you do is comment on my appearance?”

Luka blushed with embarrassment. “No, no, no! Sorry! I didn’t mean it like that! You just-- in general. You look different in general.”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Thanks for ruining my pants, by the way. They weren't my favorite or anything,” she said sarcastically, then stopped, looked around the room and asked, “Where’s Marinette, anyway? Maybe she knows some way to take the stain off.”

Luka clutched his painting utensils and gulped. He had tried to steer away from the subject as much as possible to reduce his risk of getting akumatized, but he supposed there wasn’t much of a way to evade it right now.

“We, uh... we broke up a few days ago.”

“Oh.” Kagami perked up, suddenly aware how her question might have been a little insensitive. “Sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah.”

“Not that it’s my business, but how are you doing? After your akumatization and so on?”

“I didn’t get akumatized,” he said, suddenly defensive, as an urge to get back to his friends built up.

“Really?” Kagami said, a bit surprised.

“Yes, really.”

“I always had the impression you were super into her,” she commented, but mostly to herself.

“I am--I was,” he said, getting angry.

“I got akumatized into this nightmarish monster when Adrien and I broke up and it turned out it didn’t take me so much to get over him.”

“That has absolutely nothing to do with it,” he retorted, evidently irked.

“No, no. Of course not,” she hurried to say, realizing she had unintentionally pushed his buttons. “I just meant to say props to you. Lesser people get akumatized for the weather or something like that. Sorry for the stupid comparison.

“Sure. Whatever…”

“... Anyway,” Kagami said, sighing. “I guess we’ve made this sufficiently awkward, right? So, I’ll get going.”

Luka marched back to his friends and unceremoniously dumped the materials at the center of their little circle as tried to calm himself down.

He tried to focus on getting something into his sign but the fact he was stuck doing something Marinette usually loved to do was not helping in the slightest.

He breathed heavily, his eyes prickling him as hot, angry tears pooled and then fell onto the cardboard.

“I need some fresh air,” he announced to his friends, who had noticed his mood but had not said anything yet and watched as he stormed outside.

He paced around, taking deep breaths. The anxiety of not being able to calm down mixed with the fear of getting akumatized, was like kindling soaked in gasoline being thrown into a starting fire. And, as wildfires do, it burst out of control.

Luka gasped for air and then, with horror saw as the black butterfly approached him. He sprinted back to the tent where his friends were but by the time he got there, the butterfly had already lodged in the paintbrush he was holding.

The voice of his friends urging him not to give into the spell was faint and distant in his ears, but enough to keep him steady.

The first thing he noticed is that this akumatization felt different. He's was still aware of everything. He hadn’t been completely akumatized yet. Hawkmoth held him in his petrifying grasp but stalled, as if deciding what to turn him into.

Suddenly, his grave voice echoed inside his head.

“What is it that you want, Luka Couffaine?”

“Get out of my head,” Luka hissed, focusing as hard as he could on not thinking of anything that would reveal the secrets he knew.

Hawkmoth laughed. “But you called me here. Your emotions... I can tell you’re a soul in pain. You lost something. I can relate to that pain.” Luka felt how Hawkmoth snaked through his thoughts, looking for something to convince him. A flash of a thought, and Hawkmoth knew he was hiding something.

“GET OUT!” he screamed in his head.

He laughed again. “Oh? And what secrets might you be keeping? Hm?”

Luka winced, straining to keep thinking of random things: music, the weather, that weird bench at school that wobbles when he sits and how he hates it. Anything.

“I can help you recover what you lost...” he whispered softly. “Your girlfriend… Don’t you want her back? What is her name? I can help you. I promise I won’t hurt her.”

He felt himself slipping, turning.

“No!” he said, reverting back into his human form. “Let me go!”

“Maybe what you want is revenge on him? The reason she abandoned you? You’re not worthy like him, are you? That’s why she left you… But I can make you worthy… Wouldn't you want to be in his place, hm? Wouldn’t everything be better with that pesky boy of the way?”

Again, Luka felt himself morph and forced himself to think of other things. He tried reciting stupid facts he knew about ship maintenance.

“Get out of my head!” he exclaimed, sounding much weaker.

“Your power of will is very commendable,” Hawkmoth said. “But if I’m overstaying my welcome all you need to do is tell me what you want.”

“N-no!” Luka said, straining and screaming. “GET OUT!”

“If you--”

Suddenly the contact broke, and he collapsed onto the ground. The world went dark.

When Luka regained consciousness, he did so with a jolt. He was surrounded by his friends, Ladybug and Chat Noir, and surprisingly enough, Kagami.

He had an ungodly headache and realized blood had dried on his upper lip. His nose must have bled.

“Give him some space,” Ladybug ordered the crowd, seeing as Luka was struggling to gather his bearings. He didn’t know what particular panic to tackle first.

“What happened?” he asked, noticing they were not under the tent anymore and the gathering crowd that was preparing for the demonstration had dissipated.

“You got akumatized,” Ladybug explained, a bit surprised she had to fill him in on that particular point.

“Or rather, were about to akumatized,” Chat Noir said, trying to help his confused expression.

“You kept changing into different things. Like, you were getting akumatized on and off again,” Albin explained. “It was pretty scary.”

He turned to Ladybug with horror realizing what that meant. “You need to take me out of here,” he urged.

“Please!”

“Just take it easy for a second, okay?” Ladybug said, trying her best not to share Luka’s worry. “We’ll take you home in a minute.”

Ladybug and Chat Noir had not been present for most of the incident, so they stayed to talk to the people that had seen the attack, mainly Luka’s friends and Kagami.

Chat Noir was the one to interview them while Ladybug found some water for Luka to drink. Once everyone had calmed down and gave Chat Noir their testimony, they took Luka away to a secluded place to talk. It was the abandoned industrial section where Chat usually led Akumas.

“He knows,” he said, with absolute terror in his voice, Luka said pacing around, trying his best to contain his tears. “He knows that I know something! He saw that I was hiding something. I’m so sorry, Ladybug. I tried but he--he was in my mind and saw--.” His voice broke down.

For a reason unknown to Chat, Ladybug suddenly assumed the same urgency as Luka.

“Did he see?” she asked as Luka cried. “Luka, did he see?”

“See what?” Chat Noir asked, with escalating worry. “What is going on?”

“He didn’t. That’s why I kept changing, he tried to convince me several times,” said Luka. “But he knows that I’m keeping a secret.”

Ladybug covered her mouth with her hands.

“Would somebody please just care to explain what is going on?” Chat demanded.

“You didn’t tell him?” Luka said with disbelief.

“Luka, I need you to tell me exactly everything you remember. What happened?” Ladybug said, ignoring the question.

“Nothing. He just… he figured that I… lost someone. And he was trying to get me to tell him who it was, and to convince me to try to get them back, or to get revenge. I managed to focus my thoughts, but what if he tries again,” Luka said fearfully. “You were right,” he sobbed. “I shouldn’t have—I should’ve just looked away that day! I wish I never knew about this.”

Despite Chat’s presence, Ladybug could only comfort Luka with a hug, not knowing what else to do. Chat, on the other hand, seemed to have put two and two together. Luka knew Marinette’s identity.

“Oh my god…” Chat muttered with disbelief as he leaned against the metal sliding door of one of the warehouse buildings and fell to the floor. He grabbed chunks of his hair just to process what all of this meant, what to feel first. His father was only an akumatization away from figuring out Marinette.

“Luka, I promise you I won’t let anything happen to you, okay? We will come up with a plan, Chat Noir and me. But for now, I need to you to lay as low as possible. We cannot be seen together anymore. At all. If Hawkmoth is the person Chat and I suspect he is, he could be very close to finding out who I am if he makes the connection that we were together. Erase everything. Everything we ever posted on our social media, messages, calls, anything that might be public evidence. Try to have Juleka do the same.”

Luka contemplated the prospect for a moment. Ladybug knew she was thinking exactly the same thing as him: how devastating it will be to have to pretend that nothing ever happened. To actively destroy their memories together.

“Okay,” he said after a while. “And what if I get akumatized again? I don’t think I’ll be able to hold him off for any longer than I did today.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Ladybug said. “That’s for us to figure out. Your only task is to pretend like you don’t know us, for your own sake.”

They sent Luka back home on a cab that Marinette called through her burner phone, leaving a heavy sense of danger looming between Chat and Ladybug. He was still on his spot on the ground, with his head on his hands as he supported his arms on his knees.

Ladybug sighed and slid down to sit next to him.

“You told him?”

“I’ve only ever told Alya. He found out by accident,” she said, already defensive and prepared for the argument that was bubbling up between them. “He also knows who you are.”

Chat’s stomach dropped. “Come again?”

“He was hiding in the same alley you transformed in one day.”

Chat let out a heavy sigh and swore loudly.

“You knew about this and you didn’t think to tell me?” he asked Ladybug.

Ladybug was in complete silence. She didn’t know what to say. “I—“

“You what?” Chat demanded.

“I— I meant to tell you next time we met,” she said. “I didn’t think—“

“You didn’t think to tell me that the boyfriend you just broke up with and was very much at risk of being akumatized knows who we are?” he exclaimed with frustration.

“I just—“ Ladybug tried to come up with an explanation, but the words kept getting stuck on her throat. Chat was right to be mad. She should have told him as soon as she found out. But everything had been so much, with him disappearing and Luka suddenly breaking up with her that, in a moment of weakness, him knowing her identity had been the least of her worries.

“What were you thinking?” Chat demanded. “Ladybug, I told you I’m close to the Agreste family!”

“I’m sorry!” she yelled. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t think—I was… I was so distracted by everything going on that I never thought… I meant to tell you! But then all this stupid teenage drama got in the way! He broke up with me literally the day after you and I talked. That’s when he told me. I meant to tell you Chat Noir, I swear. I just...” she sighed. “I’m so stupid!”

She knocked the back of her head on the metal wall that they were leaning against. “This was the kind of mistake I wanted to evade by telling someone! And it still happened… No matter what I do, nothing ever seems to be enough.”

She was angry at herself, at the situation, at the fact that no matter how hard she tried, she was still not a good enough Guardian.

“We still have time to fix this,” he said, a lot calmer and even with hints of reassurance in his voice. “We need to use our upper hand before Hawkmoth gets a chance to get his,” said Chat. “I can get a hold of his personal calendar. We can attack when he least expects it.”

“How are you going to do that, Chat? Let me go with you,” Ladybug said, worried.

Chat shook his head. “I’ll do it as a civilian.”

“The more reason!”

“No, Ladybug. If anything goes wrong and he sees you there, he’ll be able to figure everything out. Trust me. I promise I will be careful.”

“But--”

“Marinette, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if anything happened to you,” Chat Noir said, his voice cracking and evidencing the whirlwind of emotions he had been trying to hide from her. “Please, just let me do this. Please, my lady.”

“Okay,” she said quietly. “But promise me you’ll be careful. And you’ll tell me when you do it. Please, promise me you’ll tell me.”

“I will.”

The clicking of Natalie’s heels as she entered the office disturbed the soft classical music playing in the background.

“Here’s the schedule for tomorrow, sir,” she said, placing a thin stack of papers on Gabriel’s desk. “Your flight to Helsinki is expected to arrive at nine a.m. and your first meeting is at ten, as you requested.”

“Excellent. Thank you, Natalie,” Gabriel said, without taking his sight off his screen.

Natalie nodded, heading to her desk.

“One more thing while I am absent, Natalie.”

“Yes, sir?”

Gabriel zoomed into the picture of the article he had been reading. The photographer had managed to capture the teenager he had akumatized looking urgently at Ladybug, who seemed to reciprocate his concern.

“Make sure to find out everything you can about this... Luka Couffaine.”

[day0one]

The Billionaire Governor Who’s Been Sued Dozens of Times for Millions in Unpaid Bills.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Raymond Dye had a buildup of blood behind his left eye that prevented him from seeing. David Polk had an abnormal heartbeat, and his wife had high cholesterol. Roger Wriston’s wife had a bad back.

All the men had worked for a collection of coal companies owned by Gov. Jim Justice and his family, which had pledged to provide health insurance after the miners retired. Last year, though, the retirees learned that those firms had stopped paying their premiums. And as a result, their coverage had been terminated. Polk skipped doctor appointments.

“I know that waiting on medical treatment can do irreparable harm to my health,” he later said in a legal filing, “but I cannot afford to pay the bills.”

The expenses for the aging retirees, compounded by decades of work in southern West Virginia’s coal mines, were often costly. At one point, Wriston and his wife ended up with a bill for $12,367.76, another court filing said.

“I don’t think it’s fair what they’re doing to someone who worked their whole life,” Wriston’s wife, Tammy, said in an interview.

About 150 retired miners around West Virginia were making a similar discovery. So the United Mine Workers of America, the same miners’ union that had endorsed Justice’s election as governor in 2016, went to court last year and asked a federal judge to force the Justice companies to pay.

Lawyers for Justice’s companies initially opposed the union’s request for such an order, arguing the miners had not followed proper procedures for appealing a denial of health-benefit claims. Then, the companies settled, promising to clear up the matter and ensure benefits were provided.

“We’ve dealt with them a lot over the years, with people’s benefits being on and off,” said Josh West, a UMWA district representative. “That’s just the way the Justices have done business.”

Related video: Jim Justice Got Subsidy Meant To Help Farmers (provided by CBS Pittsburgh)

Click to expand As he runs for reelection, Jim Justice, a billionaire and the state’s richest man, frequently touts his experience as a businessman, saying that his long career in coal and other industries makes him uniquely suited for the role of the state’s chief executive. When he’s been asked about lawsuits over unpaid bills, the governor has emphasized that he and his companies always pay what they owe.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom based in New York. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive articles and investigations like this one as soon as they’re published.

But a ProPublica review found that, over the last three decades, Justice’s constellation of companies has been involved in more than 600 lawsuits spanning more than two dozen states — including many filed by workers, vendors, business partners and government agencies, all alleging they weren’t paid. Often, similar cases were filed in multiple jurisdictions, as lawyers for plaintiffs tried to chase down a Justice company’s assets to settle debts.

Among the plaintiffs: a mining equipment company in Virginia, a farm machinery dealer in South Carolina, a bank in Maryland, an insurance company in New York, state tax collectors in Kentucky, and even lawyers and accountants hired by the Justice companies to represent them. Coal miners working for Justice companies have filed at least a half-dozen suits to collect money they said was due to them when they were laid off without legally required warnings or when their paychecks bounced.

To date, parties have won judgments or forced settlements worth more than $128 million in cases against the Justice empire. That’s significantly higher than what has been previously reported.

Last year, Forbes documented $10 million in payments that courts had ordered Justice companies to make to suppliers, workers and government entities since 2016. The publication also noted a pending $60 million civil case. But ProPublica examined legal records dating back to the start of Justice’s tenure as CEO of his family’s companies, representing the most complete accounting yet of how the corporate empire overseen by the governor often forces those it does business with to sue to get what they are owed.

In multiple cases, plaintiffs had to go back to court to try to collect after either winning a case against a Justice company or settling with the governor’s empire. More than a dozen suits have been filed against Justice companies since Justice took office in January 2017, and several name the governor as a defendant.

“He does not pay his bills. I know that very well,” said Will Brownlow, president of New London Tobacco Market Inc., which last September won a $35 million ruling in what appears to be the largest courtroom loss for Justice’s empire.

Brownlow has been fighting Justice companies in court for more than eight years in a dispute over unpaid royalties on coal that Justice was supposed to — but did not — mine in eastern Kentucky.

The governor’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and Justice, through his private attorney, declined to be interviewed. A representative for Justice’s companies also declined to respond to a detailed list of questions for this story. Justice’s reelection campaign did not respond to an inquiry but instead sent an email blast to supporters, preemptively attacking the story, its author and ProPublica. It dismissed a list of detailed questions as “issues that have been reported on for more than a decade.”

As recently as last month, though, a federal judge found Justice to be personally liable for $6.9 million in damages for unpaid fees for the use of a coal shipping terminal in Newport News, Virginia. Lawyers for Justice and one of his companies had argued that they didn’t owe the fees.

Justice did not respond to a letter sent to his home, but he has spoken publicly about the debt skirmishes, as his political opponents have branded him a billionaire scofflaw.

The governor often blames the recent major economic downturn in the coal industry. While many of the nation’s major producers have filed for bankruptcy protection, though, Justice notes his family hasn’t used that route to try to evade liabilities. Indeed, the vast majority of lawsuits against Justice companies over unpaid debts do involve the coal business. Those have resulted in millions of dollars in damages for missed coal shipments and delinquent royalty payments.

But ProPublica’s review shows that some lawsuits over coal debt date back to the 1990s, well before the downturn of the last decade. Moreover, the debts are hardly limited to coal; they span Justice’s business empire. Tens of thousands for an irrigation system at a farming operation in South Carolina. Hundreds of thousands for flood cleanup work at The Greenbrier resort’s golf courses. Millions for a new helicopter.

A core of Justice’s defense is to blame the Russian conglomerate Mechel, which purchased a large chunk of Justice’s coal holdings in 2009 and then, according to court filings, ran up big bills in disputes with miners, contractors and vendors. The Justice family reacquired those holdings in 2015.

“Along the way, you’d walk the streets and somebody would yell at you, ‘Why don’t you pay your taxes?’” Justice said during an August 2018 press conference. “It was tough, because I knew already that I had paid Russian taxes. Not my taxes, Russian taxes.”

Justice said at the time that there were $30 million in vendor bills owed by Mechel, “some that we had no idea if it was real or not real.” Mechel did not respond to a request for comment.

But few of the major, high-dollar cases in ProPublica’s review were, in fact, related to Mechel. More importantly, legal records show that Justice companies agreed to accept many liabilities in the buyback.

The legal entanglements echo those of Justice’s Republican ally, President Donald Trump, who himself has been sued thousands of times over his business career, often by aggrieved vendors. Like the president, the governor has said that at the start of his term he turned over day-to-day control of his businesses to his adult children. But he still retains an interest in 120 corporate entities and continues to guide his empire.

a man standing in a room© Provided by ProPublica President Donald Trump listens to Justice at a campaign-style rally in 2017. Justice’s legal entanglements echo those of Trump. (Susan Walsh/AP Photo) For some plaintiffs, chasing a state’s top elected official or his companies for payment has proved uncomfortable. Nine months after Justice took office, Citizens Asset Finance sued the governor and two of his companies for more than $2.5 million for defaulting on a helicopter loan.

“I do a lot of financial institution work, and banks want to get paid, certainly, but they do not want to raise public ire,” William Thorsness, a lawyer for the bank, told a federal judge in New York during a June 2018 hearing. “Suing a sitting governor is not something they take joy in.”

Justice Aviation filed a counterclaim, blaming the bank for a delay and lower price when it sold the aircraft. Justice also complained at a press conference about mechanical problems with the helicopter. The parties later settled the case with Justice Aviation agreeing to pay a little more than $2.5 million.

Republican and Democratic candidates for governor have blasted Justice for his business empire’s long roster of debt collection cases. “I know what it’s like to make payroll every week, without a string of lawsuits and unpaid bills,” Woody Thrasher, Justice’s former Commerce Secretary and now a Republican primary opponent, told a local television station in March.

With the June 9 primary election approaching, Justice’s companies have recently moved to settle some major cases.

In early April, his coal operations reached a deal with the U.S. Department of Justice to pay more than $5 million in delinquent mine safety penalties, some of them dating back more than five years. Typically, fines for mine safety violations don’t result in lawsuits, but when Justice’s companies refused to pay the penalties imposed by the Mine Safety and Health Administration, the federal government sued. Initially, the Justice companies had sought to have the case dismissed, saying the government wrongly filed it in federal court in Virginia, while the named defendants are incorporated in West Virginia.

“Their position has been and is that they pay what they owe,” said Christopher Pence, a lawyer who handled the mine safety case for Justice’s companies.

“A Bad Image for the Coal Industry” Jim Justice took over his family’s coal business in 1993, after his father died. Nonpayment suits dogged operations from the start.

That year, two dozen miners alleged they weren’t paid wages and benefits owed to them, and the West Virginia labor department sued Bluestone Coal, the Justice family’s main company, on their behalf. The miners worked for Bluestone contractors, but state officials argued that Bluestone was responsible for paying the workers under state law. Ten of the miners settled their claims, while another 10 went to court and won. Bluestone argued it wasn’t responsible for the payments, but a judge entered a judgment against Bluestone in that matter, for $21,000. The cases of the remaining four miners were tossed by the court.

Three years later, authorities went after Justice’s company with a much more systemic claim: Bluestone had effectively cheated the state’s workers compensation program out of more than $5 million in premiums, state officials alleged. The lawsuit, filed by the state Bureau of Employment Programs, was part of a larger effort to force coal operators to shore up the program, which was hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole.

Like much of the industry, Bluestone used a web of small contracting firms to mine its coal, maintaining that those firms were responsible for paying into the workers compensation system.

But the state argued that Bluestone, like many coal companies, actually controlled its contractors, who had failed to pay millions in premiums. “Bluestone obtained the mining permits and had the right to sell coal that was mined,” the Charleston Gazette reported in September 2000. “In many cases, Bluestone also provided contractors with mining equipment, engineering plans and day-to-day management direction.”

Bluestone denied the claim and fought the lawsuit. And the election of a new business-friendly governor — a former coal executive backed by Justice and other coal operators — provided a temporary reprieve, as the new administration battled with labor unions in an attempt to get the cases dropped. But, in 2001, another candidate ousted the incumbent on a pledge to collect from Bluestone and the rest of the industry.

Mining companies quickly settled, but the deal with the new administration allowed them to avoid millions in accrued interest. Bluestone Coal ultimately paid $5.1 million, escaping $15.7 million in interest.

Justice’s wealth ballooned in 2009 when his family sold the company to Mechel, a Russian mining and metals firm, for $436 million in cash. The Justice family, however, still maintained unrelated mining properties in Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. And the debt problems continued there, with suits over unpaid bills, late coal shipments and missed royalty payments.

The biggest of these cases was filed in 2012, after Justice’s Kentucky Fuel Corp. failed to mine coal at two sites it had leased, costing the coal owners their royalties.

The plaintiff, New London Tobacco Market, sued the mining company in federal court.

But the Justice companies fought the case for eight years, arguing that their contract only required them to mine the coal if it was commercially viable.

According to court records, Kentucky Fuel repeatedly refused to provide court-ordered financial documents, and Jay Justice, the governor’s son, even skipped a scheduled deposition in the case. In September 2019, a federal judge in Kentucky ruled in favor of the plaintiff, ordering Kentucky Fuel to pay more than $35 million — including $17 million in punitive damages.

In an interview, Brownlow, the owner of New London Tobacco, said that, when you add interest, his judgment against the Justice companies is worth more than $50 million. He regrets getting involved in the deal in the first place. “I probably wouldn’t do this again if I had it to do over again and knew what I know now,” he said.

In April, Kentucky Fuel lost a motion to reconsider the judgment. Justice’s company was also ordered to pay more than $1 million in legal fees to the plaintiffs, and his lawyers were sanctioned for filing the motion to reconsider in the first place. Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove admonished Justice’s companies.

“Nothing is fair unless decided in their favor,” he said. “Defendants began this litigation with the same opportunities for discovery and presentation of evidence as any other litigant, but they have squandered these opportunities with poor strategic decisions and contumacious, combative conduct.”

Kentucky Fuel, however, indicated in a court filing that it plans to appeal to a federal circuit court, and one of the company’s lawyers told a local paper the latest court ruling was “a terrible opinion.”

Even in a much-maligned industry, the practices of Justice’s companies have drawn attention. Some operators initially distanced themselves from him as he entered the political arena. Bob Murray, the controversial CEO of Murray Energy Corp., opposed Justice’s bid for governor, in part citing his financial troubles.

“I was aware of about 20 lawsuits against him for not paying his bills,” Murray told a crowd of Ohio County Republicans in 2015, according to a copy of his speech, “a bad image for the coal industry.”

From Russia With Debt Justice, however, earned goodwill from miners in 2015, when he bought back Bluestone Coal from Mechel. The Russian firm had closed some mines and laid off employees, and now, as a political candidate and mine owner, Justice was pledging to put miners back to work.

The United Mine Workers of America endorsed him in the governor’s race in 2016, and its members appeared in a campaign ad supporting his bid. (Justice ran as a Democrat but switched his party affiliation to Republican during his first year in office.)

“Jim is one of the good coal operators,” union President Cecil Roberts said in the spot, warning voters not to believe negative campaign ads that mentioned unpaid bills. “Jim is keeping miners working while paying off debts run up by a bankrupt Russian company.”

The Russian deal has been an essential part of Justice’s public defense about his companies’ unpaid taxes or overdue bills. He has said repeatedly that Mechel operated his family’s coal holdings poorly, running up bills it didn’t pay and then threatening to walk away. As part of the buyback, Justice agreed to take on at least $140 million in liabilities, according to corporate filings from Mechel. “It takes time to fix everything and do it right,” Justice told Forbes last year, “and along the way you get people who are throwing rocks at you.”

Some of those people are Justice’s own coal miners.

a group of people walking down a dirt road© Provided by ProPublica A coal miner in West Virginia. (David Goldman/AP Photo)

After Justice’s election in 2016, dozens of miners sued coal companies Justice had bought back from Mechel. They alleged that these operations, while owned by the Russian firm, had laid off large numbers of miners — or closed mines altogether — without first issuing the 60-day notice required by federal law. The suits sought back pay and benefits for the workers who lost their jobs without warning.

“They knew the big layoff was coming, they just never warned anybody,” said Robert Boyd, a miner who worked at several of Bluestone’s surface mines for more than five years. Boyd said the abrupt layoffs left miners in a lurch. “We had food bills and house payments,” he said. “It was hard to survive.”

Lawyers for Justice’s companies initially tried to have such cases thrown out, arguing they were filed too late. A federal judge disagreed, and the companies ultimately settled, agreeing to pay the miners. The companies made initial payments, but they fell behind on an agreed-to schedule. The miners had to go back to court to force payment, sometimes more than once. By April 2019, the Justice companies had inked the last of its new deals to catch up on payments. The total for three cases came to more than $3 million, including hundreds of thousands in penalty payments to the miners.

“They waited and waited, and that’s why we got a bigger settlement,” Boyd said.

These cases are among a small number in ProPublica’s review where Justice companies have sought to buck debts incurred from the Mechel deal.

Take, for instance, the case of James River Equipment Virginia LLC. In 2013, the mining equipment company sued Justice Energy Company Inc. over a $150,000 unpaid invoice from when Mechel owned the company. A judge issued a default ruling, and debt collection efforts continued once Justice was again the owner.

But, for three months, no one from Justice Energy or the Justice family showed up for hearings scheduled before a federal magistrate and a district judge. In 2016, a federal judge finally held Justice Energy in contempt and fined the company $1.2 million, payable to the U.S. government.

Justice Energy appealed the fine, arguing that it shouldn’t be penalized for missing hearings and not responding to legal matters that it inherited from Mechel. A federal appeals court, however, disagreed, twice upholding the fine.

Stiffing the Lawyers While past media reports — including those by NPR and Forbes — have noted two cases where Justice companies have failed to pay even their own lawyers, ProPublica found at least seven additional instances in which Justice companies were sued by law firms that had represented them. Taken together, the string of cases shows a pattern: A Justice company fails to pay a bill and is sued over the debt. Lawyers are hired to fight the collection suit. They often lose or settle, and then have to sue their Justice-related clients to get their fees.

Phelps Dunbar, a regional law firm in the Gulf Coast, represented one of Justice’s companies in a three-year case involving a coal shipping dispute. The firm “engaged in extensive discovery, protracted motion practice,” and briefed multiple federal appeals and “expended considerable time and effort,” it alleged in a debt collection suit. But Justice’s company didn’t pay. A lawsuit in federal court in Louisiana listed unpaid invoices totaling nearly $410,000.

The two sides settled days before a scheduled trial in 2016. Exact terms were not disclosed.

Another law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, also sued for nonpayment, after it helped settle a dispute that followed the buyback of Bluestone coal holdings from Mechel. The firm said that it was owed a percentage of the holdings in the settlement, but that Justice’s companies had “refused to pay anything.” Under its representation agreement, the law firm first took the case to arbitration, where a panel determined that the Justice companies owed $3.3 million. When the companies still didn’t pay, the firm sought approval of the arbitration ruling from a New York court in May 2016.

A week after the court filing, the Justice companies “promptly paid the full amount” without filing any sort of response with the court, according to a notice of voluntary dismissal filed by the law firm.

Sometimes, it appears that the Justice companies stop paying their lawyers in the middle of a case, a move that leads to delays for everyone involved.

That’s what happened in the case of New London Tobacco, the mining contract dispute that resulted in the $35 million judgment. After a year on the case, Justice company attorney, Billy Shelton, filed a motion to withdraw. He said that he “has been unable to obtain documents and information from his client necessary to properly and adequately prepare and provide a defense.” He also noted that Kentucky Fuel had “failed to pay counsel for recent legal services in this matter.”

Three months later, Shelton’s law firm sued seven Justice companies over $85,000 in unpaid legal fees. When the companies didn’t answer the suit, a local judge approved a default judgment against them. Three years later, Shelton told NPR that the lawsuit was “the result of a misunderstanding” that occurred when the right Justice executive wasn’t aware of the fee dispute.

In all, the Justice companies employed seven different law firms over the course of the New London Tobacco case.

The Money Chase In court filings and interviews, parties in several nonpayment cases against Justice companies say that they have had to go to extraordinary lengths to collect debts on payments as obligatory as local taxes.

By the summer of 2017, one Justice company owed unpaid property and mining-related taxes to Knott County in Kentucky, records show. The county filed suit against Kentucky Fuel to collect what was owed, plus interest and late fees. Over the course of two years, an $870,000 tax bill had ballooned to nearly $2 million. The levies, officials argued, were desperately needed for, among other things, school funding.

But even after a judge ordered Kentucky Fuel to pay, attorneys for the county resorted to seeking garnishments in order to intercept money being paid to Kentucky Fuel from local mining contractors. After the county collected nearly $150,000 through the garnishments, Kentucky Fuel settled for about $1.6 million, according to county attorney Timothy C. Bates.

“We’re an impoverished area, and it most certainly made it difficult with the several years that they didn’t pay,” said former Judge Executive Zach Weinberg, who was the county’s top elected official at the time. “It was definitely a hurt for the county.”

Even winning a lawsuit against Justice companies or forcing a legal settlement doesn’t always result in prompt payment. Plaintiffs often have to go back to court to enforce settlements. When that fails, they sometimes file their judgments in other jurisdictions where the Justice companies have property or other assets, then put liens on that property or prepare to force a sale.

The case of Monsanto Co. is instructive.

a group of people standing in front of a fence© Provided by ProPublica A Lewisburg, West Virginia, farm owned by the Justices. (Steve Helber/AP Photo)

In October 2018, the agrochemical giant said Justice Family Farms hadn’t paid a bill for more than $800,000 of seed.

Court records for the case, filed in U.S. District Court in St. Louis, where Monsanto is based, show that the parties quickly worked out a settlement. Justice Family Farms would make six installment payments.

A year went by, and the company made just one payment, for $25,000, records show. Even that was made two months late. Monsanto lawyers went back to court. U.S. District Judge John A. Ross ruled that Justice Family Farms was in breach of the deal. Not only had the company just paid a fraction of what it owed, he noted, but it had failed to respond to the legal proceedings entirely.

Five months later, when Justice Family Farms still hadn’t paid, lawyers for Monsanto asked Ross to provide them with a certified copy of his judgment, so that they could try to collect the money in Virginia, where the Justice farming company has its primary business office.

Monsanto’s attorney declined to comment, and it’s unclear from court records whether the Justice company ever paid.

A Maryland bank used the same tactic to compel payment in another case, after winning a nearly $1.5 million judgment against a different Justice firm, Justice Farms of North Carolina LLC. The company had defaulted on payments on a year-old series of business loans. The bank sued in late 2017 but payment wasn’t resolved until last year, after the financial institution began filing the judgment in other jurisdictions, chasing down the Justice family for its money.

The approach is not always successful, though, and it can be costly and time consuming for plaintiffs.

In December 2017, an insurance company won a nearly $850,000 judgment in New York against Justice’s Southern Coal Corp., which had failed to pay workers’ compensation and general liability premiums. The insurance company transferred the judgment to West Virginia, where the coal company’s bank accounts and other assets were located.

The West Virginia court ordered federal marshals to investigate, but they found bank accounts empty or closed. The district judge, in turn, appointed a special commissioner in January 2019 to probe Southern Coal’s finances further. The inquiry went on for nearly a year, until the commissioner ordered Jill Justice, the governor’s daughter and a Southern Coal board member, to appear for a deposition. Southern Coal settled the matter this past February, but court records did not make clear how much was paid.

Corporate Shell Game In recent years, several plaintiffs have argued that Justice, his companies and his family operate what amounts to a complicated corporate shell game, moving money from one part of the business empire to another, all to avoid big debts, costly liabilities, even fines.

Last year, after the appeals court upheld her contempt ruling, U.S. District Judge Irene Berger pressed Justice Energy to pay the $1.2 million fine in the case of James River, the mining equipment company that sued over unpaid invoices.

U.S. Attorney Mike Stuart investigated Justice Energy’s finances, examining records and interviewing corporate officials. He found what he called the shell of a company: Justice Energy doesn’t own a mine or any coal reserves, or even any mining equipment. Miners and supervisors aren’t employed by Justice Energy.

“While Justice Energy Company Inc. may be a corporation, it is, in reality, an alter ego and shell controlled by the Justices through their other entities and has no real separate existence under the law,” Stuart wrote. “I believe that those who control Justice Energy Company Inc. have a legal obligation and the ultimate legal responsibility to make sure that the contempt sanction is paid.”

The federal prosecutor later filed a motion for formal permission to “pierce the corporate veil,” a legal maneuver that would force Justice and his family themselves to pay the fine. Justice’s lawyers never filed a response. Instead, the next day, Justice Energy agreed to a payment plan. (Bluestone Resources, another of Justice’s companies, would pay the fine.)

Now, others are echoing Stuart’s findings as they seek to pull back the curtain on Justice’s business operations.

New London Tobacco, concerned that it wouldn’t be able to collect any eventual judgment in its case against Justice’s Kentucky Fuel, filed a second lawsuit while its first suit played out in court.

Specifically, New London Tobacco alleged that the Justices transferred property and other assets in anticipation of losing the debt collection case. In one instance, the suit says, about $1.8 million from the sale of coal leases was “diverted” by wire transfer to Jay Justice’s personal brokerage account at Goldman Sachs. Citing federal racketeering laws, New London Tobacco alleges that the Justices are “members of an association-in-fact enterprise” — a term originally intended to allow the targeting of organized crime.

“The business strategy,” New London Tobacco said in its lawsuit, “includes incurring debts that they do not intend to pay and using delay and forcing creditors to bring unnecessary litigation, so that the members of the Enterprise can avoid full payment of their debts.”

Lawyers for Justice companies have sought to have the case dismissed, but the matter has been stayed, pending resolution of New London Tobacco’s original case against Justice entities.

Another plaintiff, a Canadian steel mill, sued Justice’s Southern Coal Sales Corp. — along with a dozen Justice family companies — as it sought damages over missed coal shipments. The company, Essar Steel Algoma, alleged that Southern Coal was effectively drained by other Justice entities to protect it from litigation. The subsequent financial weakness “rendered it purposefully judgment proof,” Algoma’s lawyers said.

Justice’s attorneys denied the claim, saying that Algoma has “a gross misunderstanding of how affiliate entities operate in the coal industry.”

“Indisputably, it is an owner’s prerogative to infuse capital into his own company or companies to ‘keep them afloat’ and the coal industry, in particular, experiences ups and downs that require such support.”

This month, a federal judge in New York denied a motion by the Justice companies to dismiss the case, rejecting what she called an “everyone is doing it” defense.

Meanwhile, the Justice companies are filing lawsuits of their own.

In March, they sued an equipment supplier they said reneged on an oral settlement to resolve a $9.4 million judgment against one of the family’s firms.

That case was reminiscent of a suit the Justice empire filed last year against the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement over $4.2 million in unpaid strip-mining penalties and fees. Justice’s companies claim that they had a verbal deal to resolve the matter for $250,000. But, they say, OSMRE backed out. And fearing a government collection action, the Justices sued to try to enforce that verbal deal. “We don’t want to have to go to court to get the government to do the right thing and live up to its end of the bargain,” Jay Justice, the governor’s son and CEO of the mining operations, said in a press release, “but we can’t sit back and let the government take advantage of our good faith efforts to resolve this matter.”

Last week, a federal judge in Virginia tossed the Justice companies’ case.

Disclaimer: Ken Ward’s wife is an unpaid board member of Mountain State Justice, a nonprofit legal organization in West Virginia. The group represented miners in their cases regarding layoffs and the Justice companies, but she had no role in the litigation.

[theconservativebrief]

US President Donald Trump will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Finland next week in one of the most anticipated summits in years.

The two leaders will likely discuss Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election; how to wind down the war in Syria; Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and broader incursion into Ukraine; and how to reduce the number of nuclear weapons around the world.

That’s a lot to pack in to a four-hour meeting on July 16 in Helsinki, and it’s unclear what they will — or won’t — agree to. But the question on everyone’s mind is, which one is going to have the most success advancing their agenda?

Experts say the Russian will likely outperform the American.

“For Putin, Trump is a kind of a useful idiot,” says Andrei Kolesnikov, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank. An unnamed State Department official echoed that sentiment in a Friday interview with the New Yorker: “Our guy here is like an amateur boxer going up against Muhammad Ali.” Of course, it’s possible Trump and Putin both get positive results from their meeting.

Here’s a guide to the topics that are likely to come up during Trump and Putin’s face to face meeting, and what to expect as a result.

Last Friday — just three days before Trump is supposed to meet face-to-face with Russian President Vladimir Putin — Mueller announced indictments against 12 Russian spies, accusing them of interfering in the 2016 US presidential election.

Mueller says the 12 men, who are all officers in the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, hacked the computer networks of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

They allegedly coordinated to release damaging information to sway the election, though Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told reporters it’s unclear if their efforts changed the outcome of the election.

The hacking issue — and Russia’s election interference more broadly — is bound to be the biggest issue of Trump and Putin discuss.

The president says he’ll “of course” mention it, but expects Putin to push back. “What am I going to do? He may deny it,” Trump told reporters at the NATO summit on Thursday. “All I can do is say, ‘Did you?’ And, ‘Don’t do it again.’ But he may deny it.”

It wouldn’t be the first time: Putin denied his country tried to sway the election when he and Trump met at the G20 summit in July 2017 — and Trump believed him.

Trump continues to buy Putin’s line today.

Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election! Where is the DNC Server, and why didn’t Shady James Comey and the now disgraced FBI agents take and closely examine it? Why isn’t Hillary/Russia being looked at? So many questions, so much corruption!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 28, 2018

That’s astounding, considering all the evidence that proves Putin lied to the president’s face. Three US intelligence agencies concluded last year that Russia interfered in the election, and the GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee backed that assessment this month.

There’s also special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into whether or not Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russia to win the White House. Mueller has indicted at least 32 people, 13 Russian nationals on conspiracy charges for using the internet to divide the American public among political, racial, and class lines.

None of that will stop Putin from denying meddling allegations — or stop Trump from trusting him.

Trump wants US troops out of Syria. Putin wants his ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, to stay in power after seven years of civil war. The two leaders may strike a deal, but it will likely be a bad one for the US.

Here’s the background: America’s roughly 2,000 troops in Syria are there to defeat ISIS. They do so mainly by supporting Kurdish forces who have taken the lead in the anti-terror fight, and also working with other countries as part of an anti-ISIS coalition.

However, the US is also on the side of fighters that want to remove Assad. That pits the US against Russia, which serves as Assad’s main military and political backer during the seven-year-long civil war.

So it’s not surprising Trump would want to speak with Putin about Syria. What is surprising is the kind of deal they might make involving their involvements in the conflict.

Here’s what the agreement may look like: Russia promises not to attack the small contingent of US-backed fighters in southwest Syria near the border with Jordan, an area known as the Daraa province, that pro-Assad forces recaptured this week. If that actually happens, it would give Trump space to withdraw US troops that ostensibly support anti-government forces.

But that’s not all: Trump also wants Russia to ensure that no more fighting between anti-Assad rebels and pro-regime forces happens in southwest Syria and that Iranian proxies, like Hezbollah, cannot enter the region.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who just met with Putin, said on Thursday the Russian leader had agreed to keep Iran at bay during their talk.

What would Trump offer in return? Well, he wouldn’t impede Moscow’s efforts to help Assad consolidate control of the country, even though US troops are mostly focused on defeating ISIS in Syria anyway.

Here’s why all of that is troublesome.

First, Russia has backed out of several Syria peace deals with the United States. It’s very hard to trust Moscow’s word that it will help de-escalate violence in Syria, since the Kremlin continues to support Assad — even as he kills his civilians with chemical weapons. Russia also wreaks havoc of its own by dropping bombs near US troop positions.

And second, Russia and Iran are allies in Syria because of their support for Assad. It’s hard to believe the Kremlin would suddenly work against Iran solely to make a deal with the United States, unless Putin extracts a big concession from Trump.

That concession wouldn’t come from Syria at all, but actually from Ukraine.

In February, the US Embassy in Ukraine tweeted, “We will never recognize Russia’s attempted annexation of Crimea, and remain steadfast in our support of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Never say never.

In June, Trump reportedly told leaders at the G7 summit in Quebec that Crimea might as well belong to Russia because the majority of people there speak Russian — a talking point straight out of the Kremlin. And at the NATO summit on Thursday, Trump said whether or not the US should recognize Crimea as part of Russia was “an interesting question,” citing how Russia built bridges to the southern Ukrainian peninsula and a submarine port.

Russia spends a lot of time spreading propaganda to convince Crimeans, Russians, and the world that the peninsula forms part of Russia. In one extreme instance, Putin drove a bright orange truck across a new 11-mile bridge that connects mainland Russia to Crimea and broadcast it to the world.

His message was simple: I own this place now.

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That’s why it would be a stunning decision for Trump to side with Putin on Crimea. Russia’s 2014 annexation of the peninsula was the first time since World War II that a country annexed the territory of a European state. Should Trump basically say “Sure, Putin, it’s yours,” it would turn the entire post-war period on its head, because the US would effectively approve the hostile takeover of territory.

That could even embolden Russia to consider taking other territory in Europe, including parts of Eastern Ukraine. It’s unclear if Trump can unilaterally agree that Crimea forms part of Russia: In July 2017, Congress legislated that the US can “never recognize the illegal annexation of Crimea by the Government of the Russian Federation.”

But regardless, if Trump says that Crimea is part of Russia — or at a minimum refuses to push back on that point — it would be a huge propaganda win for Putin.

There’s a chance for a positive outcome of the summit: the extension of the New Start nuclear treaty between the US and Russia.

New Start, which stands for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, is an arms control deal that came into effect on February 5, 2011, during the Obama administration. The treaty’s goal, essentially, is to limit the size of the American and Russian nuclear arsenals, the two largest in the world.

It allows Washington and Moscow to keep tabs on one another’s nuclear programs through stringent inspections and data sharing — thereby curbing mistrust about each other’s nuclear and military plans.

The treaty is currently in effect until 2021, but there’s an option for the leaders of both countries to extend the accord up to five years. If the treaty expires in three years, though, both sides lose crucial information about each other’s nuclear programs.

The Helsinki summit would be a good time to strike a nuclear deal between the two countries, because they’re effectively in an arms race, experts tell me.

Trump plans to develop newer and smaller nuclear bombs, in part to make them more usable. Putin, meanwhile, has announced plans to create an “invincible” nuclear-tipped missile that can evade any of America’s defense systems.

New Start doesn’t limit the creation of those kinds of weapons, but it would still place some caps on the most powerful ones both countries have.

That’s why most nuclear experts would prefer Trump strike this deal. “It ought to be a no-brainer,” says Kingston Reif, a nuclear proliferation expert at the Arms Control Association.

So the Trump-Putin summit will likely be a substantive one. But the hope is that the meeting is remembered for the right reasons, and not for Putin giving Trump a masterclass in diplomacy.

Original Source -> The 4 key things to watch for at the Trump-Putin summit

via The Conservative Brief