The Brief

When politicians and planners think about climate adaptation, they’re often considering the hard edges of infrastructure and economics. Will we divert flooding? Should we restore shorelines? Can we fireproof homes? Folklorist Maida Owens believes such questions don’t capture the full picture. When climate disaster comes for the diverse Cajun and Creole fishing communities of Louisiana’s islands and bayous, it has the potential to tear their cultural fabric apart.

“There’s more to community resilience than the physical protection of properties,” Owens, who works with Louisiana’s state folklife program, told Grist.

Radical change is already occurring. Louisiana’s coast is slowly being swallowed by the sea; the Southwest is drying out; Appalachia’s transition from coal has been no less disruptive than a recent battery of floods and storms. These crises, which are unfolding nationwide, interrupt not only infrastructure, but the rituals and remembrances that make up daily life.

The study of those rituals and remembrances may seem like an esoteric discipline, one relegated to exploring quaint superstitions of the past or documenting old men in overalls playing homemade instruments. It’s true that those who study and preserve folklore don’t concern themselves with high art — that is, the sort of thing supported by networks of patronage and philanthropy and gallery exhibitions. Their mission is to record the culture of ordinary people: us. Our jokes, our songs, our spiritual practices, our celebrations, our recipes. Such things are the glue that holds society together, and as the climate changes our ways of life, Owens and her peers say, it’s important to pay attention to how culture adjusts.

Doing that goes beyond the practical question of how people will carry their heritage into a world reshaped by climate change. It requires looking to tradition-bearers — the people within a community who are preserving its customs, songs, and stories and passing them on — for clues to how best to navigate this tumultuous time without losing generations of knowledge. In that way, folklorists across the country increasingly strive to help communities adapt to a new reality, understand how tradition shifts in times of crisis, and even inform climate policy. Folklore doesn’t seem like it would teach us how to adapt to a warming world, but even as it looks over our collective shoulder at the past, it can prepare us for a future that is in many ways already here.

In the coal towns of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, Emily Hilliard has written extensively on this idea, which she calls visionary folklore. She looks for ways to sustain culture as those who practice it experience incredible change so that they might “send traditions on to the future.” As climate disaster threatens to wipe away entire towns and ways of life — both literally, in the case of the communities lost to the floods that ravaged Kentucky in 2022, and figuratively through the loss of archives and museums to those inundations — she considers this continuity an essential part of retaining a sense of place and identity, two intangible feelings that help give life meaning.

A Perry County school bus, along with other debris, sits in a creek near Jackson, Kentucky, on July 31, 2022.

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Seth Herald

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“Folklorists can help communities pass on these traditions,” she said.

Hilliard is a former West Virginia state folklorist who has, among other things, collected oral histories, songs, artwork, and legends for the West Virginia Folklife Program. It’s impossible to talk about climate in Appalachia without talking about coal, and the communities she has documented have a gnarled and thorny relationship with that industry, which has both sustained them and helped create the climate impacts they’re left to grapple with.

People, Hilliard said, face a grave risk in “the way that climate disaster breaks up communities, so that communities may no longer be able to share food and music traditions.” Visionary folklore is, in part, about trying to restore, replace, and sustain these things, while finding ways to bulwark and adapt traditions for an uncertain future.

Climate change, like the coal industry that fostered it, threatens to rewrite some of the region’s cultural memory. Hilliard recalls members of the Scotts Run Museum in Osage, West Virginia, a place where town elders regularly play music, tell stories, and share meals, talking of rising floodwaters threatening their community gathering spaces. She sees collaboration with communities to preserve these important community resources as part of her life’s work.

As she strives to help communities sustain old traditions, Hilliard sees new ones emerging as coping strategies for a world in which foundations are shifting. As floods have repeatedly swept through Appalachia, she has seen communities come together to repair and replace family quilts, musical instruments, and other heirlooms and keepsakes, some of which were painstakingly crafted by hand and many of which have been handed down through generations. Community members in Scotts Run established “repair cafes” where people with various skills helped neighbors recover. Coal company towns’ often hardscrabble existence made such expertise necessary, and in an era of looming environmental destruction, those knowledge pathways allow people to simultaneously come together to grieve and to begin to rebuild their community. Such things are not limited to Appalachia, of course.

“There may exist beneficial practices and adaptations to crises within our historical and current practices,” said Kimi Eisele, a folklorist with the Southwest Folklife Alliance in Tucson, Arizona. Eisele, who is beginning a folklife project focused on climate change, manages Borderlore, a journal operated by the Southwest Folklife Alliance. It recently received a $150,000 grant to collect oral histories that amplify the environmental history and future of the Southwest through the eyes of Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and other historically excluded people.

In southern Arizona, where Eisele lives and works, triple-digit temperatures, aridity, and groundwater depletion present a dire threat to agriculture and even long-term human settlement. Many of the interviews Eisele and others have collected focus on the impacts of climate change on Indigenous traditions and how those traditions are changing. The Tohono O’odham, whose ancestral land is divided by the border with Mexico, have for example long relied on willow for basket-weaving, but as farms and groundwater diversion have lowered the water table, willows have dried up and died. Basket-weavers now use the hardier yucca plant. Climate change is also causing traditional adobe homes to crack and decay; Native architects are working to shore them up and explore how modern technology can preserve them, even as the structures provide a model for building cooler, more energy-efficient homes.

The interviews describe adaptations made over millennia that still work – mind-boggling, perhaps, to a society that has managed to nearly deplete its resources in just a few hundred years. The Hopi, Tohono O’odham, Diné, and other peoples have weathered climate fluctuations, droughts, floods, and famine in the tens of thousands of years they’ve lived in the Southwest. Hopi farmer Michael Kotutwa Johnson, who raises corn, believes that heritage provides essential tools for adapting to the climate crisis. He is working to ensure others learn to use them.

Hopi farmer Michael Kotutwa Johnson relies on the annual monsoon to water his cornfields, and on what he knows of the land to prepare for the season ahead. He believes traditional farming methods will become increasingly vital as the climate changes.

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Courtesy Michael Kotutwa Johnson via Borderlore

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“As Hopis, we adjust to these environmental fluctuations,” Johnson told Eisele in an interview for the Climate Lore oral history series. “It’s part of our faith.” Even if this period of climate crisis is unprecedented and unpredictable, Johnson says, he feels prepared to bear it out.

Johnson is a dryland farmer, meaning he uses traditional farming methods that don’t require irrigation. He relies on the annual monsoon to water his fields, and on what he knows of the land to prepare for the season ahead. In 2018, for example, he realized early on that a drought was intensifying because “biological indicators that usually appear in April weren’t there,” he told Eisele. “Plants weren’t greening up, so we knew the soil moisture wasn’t going to be there.” In response, he and other Hopi farmers planted only a quarter of their usual crop to avoid depleting the soil. What he describes as “bumper” years can take communities through leaner times — if everyone is careful and pays attention.

“We’ve had a system in place to handle a lot of it. We plant enough to last three to five years,” Johnson told Eisele. “When you have everybody doing that, then you have to have a good supply to get through climatic changes.”

He hopes other farmers, particularly Native farmers, collaborate in practicing regenerative agriculture rather than relying on destructive groundwater withdrawal to maintain crops the desert simply can’t support. Eisele finds stories like Johnson’s invaluable in helping people everywhere adapt. “We are really looking at folklife as a tool for liberation,” she said.

Dr. Michael White and Company lead a jazz funeral procession during a wreath-laying event to remember the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina at the New Orleans Katrina Memorial.

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Joe Raedle

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Along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Maida Owens, takes such work a step farther, trying to use folklore to shape public policy and make the world more welcoming toward those displaced by the climate crisis.

The Bayou State has been losing up to 35 square miles of coastland each year for the better part of a century. As erosion and rising seas have remade the state, entire communities have had to move. Climate migration, new to some parts of the world, is as much a fact of life for Louisianans as the changing of the tides.

Even as Louisiana has focused on reclaiming lost land and restoring coastal wetland, Owens has urged special attention to adaptation, teaching people in harms’ way how to adjust their ways of life without losing what’s most important to them. She works with the Bayou Culture Collaborative, which brings together tradition bearers from impacted communities to talk “about the human dimension of coastal land loss” so residents, and their elected leaders, can better plan for the migration already afoot. Research has shown that when people make the difficult decision to pack up and leave, most of them go only a few miles.

“People from all over the coast are starting to leave and move inland,” Owens said. In the parlance of her field, the places they leave behind are “sending communities”; where they’re headed, “receiving communities” await them. Owens has begun to convene meetings online and in receiving communities to discuss cultural sensitivity to help people prepare for their new neighbors, knowing that migration can exacerbate class and racial tension.

In the Louisiana folklife program’s ongoing “Sense of Place – And Loss” workshop series, Owens hosts discussions about the future of bayou traditions to collectively imagine what the near future might look like as the Gulf Coast changes. Artists, other tradition bearers, and community leaders are invited to envision how they might make their towns and counties more welcoming for climate migrants, and Owens assists them in developing concrete action plans. Such an effort includes having receiving communities inventory their cultural and economic resources to see what they can offer newcomers, invest in trauma-informed care for disaster survivors, and consider what they might need to make themselves ready to integrate newcomers.

Louisiana’s combination of rising waters and sinking land give it one of the highest rates of relative sea level rise in the nation.

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The Louisiana state coastal protection and restoration authority has identified some towns that might have the capacity, and need, for more people; many of these places have the space but lack the social infrastructure to support the continuation of rural peoples’ foodways and artistic traditions. Though receiving communities may not be far away, those most vulnerable to displacement are often Indigenous, French-speaking, or otherwise culturally distinct, and moving even a short distance can expose them to unfamiliar circumstances. In her workshops, Owens is proposing ideas lifted in part from the adaptation strategies immigrants often rely upon, like cultural festivals and an emphasis on cultural exchange and language education. In a recent project, several coastal parishes (what Louisianans call counties) near Terrebonne created a collaborative quilt at a regional community festival as a way to draw attention to the beauty and ancestral importance of their wetlands and deepen their connections with one another.

That’s where Owens hopes folklorists can affect policy change, too. Owens is keeping a close eye on the state’s Coastal Master Plan, providing feedback with an eye towards supporting the culturally rich, and vanishing, coastal parishes. The Louisiana Folklore Society has urged the state to conduct its planning with respect to the desires and needs of the people who live on the coast, prioritizing engagement before any major mitigation project, and saving habitat not merely for its inherent value but also for its importance to the coastal tribes it sustains.

Though climate disasters have already thrown towns along the Louisiana coast and beyond into disarray and prompted seismic changes in how residents live, this is just the beginning. As floods and fires, droughts and erosion, and the myriad other impacts of a warming world wreak greater havoc, some of the answers to the crisis won’t be found in engineering or science, but in the cultural fabric that binds us together.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/culture/as-climate-change-fractures-communities-folklorists-help-stitch-them-back-together/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The legal tug-of-war centers on a two-panel work called “Adam” and “Eve.” The life-size paintings depicting the biblical characters were created around 1530 by German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder.

The Nazis stole the two paintings, and many others, from Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker in Holland in 1940. After the war, the Dutch government sold these two works to a Russian aristocrat, who sold them to the Norton Simon in Pasadena in 1971.

“By pursuing the recovery of the Cranachs, we are seeking to reverse a great injustice perpetrated by the Nazi theft of a Jewish family’s property,” Rabbi Noah Farkas, president and CEO of Jewish Federation Los Angeles, said in a written statement.

The Federation is plaintiff in a lawsuit filed on Monday in L.A. Superior Court that names the museum and two related foundations as defendants. Cranach the Elder’s work has sold for millions of dollars.

Goudstikker’s only living heir, Marei von Saher, gave the Federation the authority to file the lawsuit. If the lawsuit is successful, the Federation pledges to use the majority of the net proceeds to care for impoverished Holocaust survivors living in the L.A. area.

Adam and Eve, painted around 1530 by German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder.

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Von Saher has spent years trying, unsuccessfully, to get these paintings back. But this lawsuit is different. It’s filed under a 2024 California law that gives people the ability to petition to recover cultural property “that was taken or otherwise lost as a result of political persecution,” according to the law.

Stolen painting

Responding to the lawsuit, the Norton Simon Museum did not challenge that the painting was looted by the Nazis.

“After decades of litigation, court after court including the United States Supreme Court has confirmed that the Norton Simon Art Foundation has proper title to 'Adam' and 'Eve,'" the museum said in a written statement.

The museum is referring to a 2018 ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which said that since a foreign government sold the artwork, the court could not declare that sale illegal. The U.S. Supreme Court let that decision stand without reviewing it.

The Norton Simon has been pressured to negotiate with the heirs to return the work, even from the founder’s grandson.

“In my opinion, it's immoral and unethical because they don't have good title,” said Joel Greenberg, founder of the nonprofit Art Ashes, which helps families of Holocaust survivors recover art looted from their ancestors.

It’s not the only high-profile case of Nazi-looted art in the region. The late Los Angeles resident Maria Altman recovered a work by Gustav Klimt that was looted from her family by the Nazis in Austria.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A motorist was arrested on murder charges after authorities say she slammed her SUV into a city bus in Los Angeles, killing at least two people and injuring six others in a prelude to a second deadly tragedy: the fiery crash of a TV news helicopter that was covering the collision.

Bailee Lynn Rios, 36, of Simi Valley, was arrested Tuesday night and is being held at a Los Angeles jail with bail set at $4 million, police said Wednesday. The case is being forwarded to the district attorney’s office, which will decide whether to file the charges in court or pursue different ones. Information on a lawyer who could speak on her behalf was not immediately available.

The helicopter, which was used by NBC and Telemundo, crashed about two hours after police say Rios drove her 2004 Ford Expedition the wrong way down a busy avenue, ran a red light and struck a vehicle before hitting the bus. One passenger was fully ejected from the bus and another was partially ejected, police said.

Rios’ mother, Cindy Rios, said she was shocked and saddened by the string of events. She said she had not spoken to Bailee Lynn since her arrest and had not been contacted by law enforcement.

“It’s just horrible,” Cindy Rios told The Associated Press in a phone interview Wednesday. “The fact that my daughter was involved and was the cause of it is just extremely disturbing.”

“If anything, I’m sorry for the other families,” she added. “My daughter’s alive. People lost their lives.”

Chopper crash killed a reporter, a pilot and a man on the ground

NBC4 Los Angeles reported that two people aboard the helicopter — reporter Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw — were killed when the chopper went down Tuesday in the Chatsworth neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley north of downtown.

A person on the ground, identified as 29-year-old Edy Gutierrez Mejia, died in a parking lot, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office said. He was from Guatemala, the country’s consulate confirmed.

The crash happened as news crews were reporting on the collision involving the SUV that slammed into the bus.

There were no immediate details on what caused the helicopter crash, but an alarm could be heard sounding inside the helicopter’s cockpit as it lost altitude in the final seconds of video the crew broadcast before the crash.

Just after the beeping noise starts, a woman’s voice says “uh oh.” The helicopter moves quickly away from the bus crash site and starts losing altitude. The woman says “You can’t pull up?” before the video stops as the chopper nears the ground.

“That video is probably the most important evidence that we have discovered so far,” National Transportation Safety Board investigator Fabian Salazar said Wednesday at a news briefing.

Salazar said the sounds were consistent with the helicopter’s engine changing speed, as well as what he said were likely advisory tones for the pilot. The NTSB said it is also investigating the bus collision.

The helicopter, a Eurocopter AS350, went down near a large storage facility. At least four cars and two storage containers burned after the helicopter caught fire. NBC4 reporter Robert Kovacik was at the bus scene and saw black smoke and rushed to the helicopter crash site.

Anchor and reporters pay tearful tributes to deceased colleagues

Moreno was a familiar voice for NBC4 and Telemundo 52 during the station’s aerial coverage. She and Marciniw were both were employees of Angel City Air, which operated the chopper for the station.

Moreno, born in Orange County, joined Angel City Air in 2010, the same year she earned a broadcast journalism and political science degree from Chapman University. She reported for several news outlets and began flying with Marciniw in 2023, the NBC4 website said.

Marciniw grew up in Southern California and graduated from Burbank High School in 1974.

“I think a lot of us are still trying to process what happened, this terrible loss,” NBC4 reporter Lauren Coronado told viewers early Wednesday as she stood near the crash site. A hazmat crew was cleaning up jet fuel, she said.

In a tribute to Moreno and Marciniw, the newscast referred to them as “the team in the sky,” saying Moreno would often post videos from her job and was in awe of the view. Anchor Lynette Romero held a colleague’s hand and wiped away tears after hearing Moreno’s voice when one of her posts was played.

In an interview with the station, Esteban Jimenez, a pilot, said he had known Marciniw since the 1990s. He said Marciniw had been his instructor.

“I just talked to him on Sunday. We were talking about the aviation business and retiring,” he said.

Expert talks about what may have caused the crash

Aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti said the alarm sounding in the helicopter’s final video sounds like the low rotor RPM warning horn that signals the main rotor is no longer spinning enough to keep the helicopter in the air.

“It just has all the earmarks of a potential loss of engine power and a dangerous decrease in the main rotor speed,” said Guzzetti who used to investigate crashes for both the NTSB and FAA.

Guzzetti said the pilot appeared to be trying to perform an emergency maneuver to use the wind to force the rotor to spin again much like a breeze turns a windmill. Doing that can create a bit of lift that could help cushion the impact, but Guzzetti said there would have been little opportunity to do that because the helicopter had been hovering at a low altitude beforehand.

There are risks to news helicopters particularly in a major city like Los Angeles where multiple helicopters respond to an incident, but the pilots all coordinate closely over the radio to ensure they maintain a safe distance from each other. The industry also shares best practices to help keep these news flights safe.

“It’s a very unique form of flying. And the community is very good about lessons learned,” Guzzetti said. “And so because of that, you don’t hear about too many of those accidents. So they’re rare, but they do occur, just because the mission is a risky one.”

Other crashes involving news helicopters

The station said this is the second aviation tragedy in its history.

In 1977, a KNBC news helicopter crashed when it ran out of fuel while returning to the station after covering a wildfire in Santa Barbara, killing the pilot and camera operator. The pilot, former U.S. Air Force officer Francis Gary Powers, had been in the news years earlier when he was shot down and captured while flying a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union for the CIA, an ordeal portrayed in the movie “Bridge of Spies.”

There have been at least eight fatal crashes involving news helicopters in the U.S. since 2000, killing 16 people, according to a review of federal accident records and news accounts.

They include a 2023 crash in a New Jersey forest that killed the pilot and a photographer aboard a helicopter used by Philadelphia station WPVI and a 2022 crash beside a Charlotte, North Carolina, interstate that killed a pilot and meteorologist during a training flight for WBTV.

A 2007 midair collision in Phoenix of two TV news helicopters that were covering a police chase led the NTSB to recommend that news helicopters have at least two people in the cockpit so the pilot can focus on flying while the reporter focuses on the story.

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Golden reported from Seattle, and Collins from Hartford, Connecticut. Associated Press writers Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska; Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco; Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire; and Allen Breed in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed.

Federal and county law enforcement announced charges Wednesday against three people in a widening investigation of homelessness services fraud in the L.A. area. Prosecutors previously charged three other people and said they plan to bring “many more” cases.

In Wednesday’s announcement at a news conference, authorities alleged a bribery scheme built on "ghost" clients illustrates a yearslong problem.

"Nobody was minding the shop," the region’s top federal prosecutor, Bill Essayli, told reporters in response to a question from LAist. "There's no vetting. There's no auditing. There's no accounting. It was just a rush to push as much money out the door."

What are the charges?

Authorities arrested Michael Young — founder of the Culver City nonprofit Home At Last — and accused him of using shell companies and fake bids to misappropriate $12 million in taxpayer funds. The allegations include siphoning $1 million into a high-end nightclub, a nearly $50,000 trip to Tahiti and a $140,000 restoration of a vintage Chevy Impala.

Michael Young, 46, of Baldwin Hills

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Courtesy Department of Justice

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A headshot of Alex Soofer shared by a federal prosecutor on X.

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First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli via X

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Scott Turner, the U.S. secretary for Housing and Urban Development, said Young's group received more than $118 million in public dollars for homeless housing since 2019 — over $75 million of it through the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA.

The new cases allege about $12 million in misappropriated funds — almost all of it by Young.

The bribery charges are against Lakiya Malone, an employee of the nonprofit Special Service for Groups, or SSG, who was responsible for referring homeless people to LAHSA-funded housing. Prosecutors say Malone took roughly $180,000 in bribes from Alexander Soofer, head of the now-defunct nonprofit Abundant Blessings, and in exchange steered him "ghost" participants — so he could bill for services never rendered.

Lakiya Malone, 48, of South Los Angeles

Donye Mitchell, 55, of Orange

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Courtesy Department of Justice

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“She was supposed to guard the money, and instead she took bribes,” Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said.

In a statement, SSG said it has been working with federal prosecutors “to ensure that any responsible individuals are held accountable” and has strengthened its “protocols and compliance.”

Charges against Soofer were announced in January. Authorities announced Wednesday that he has agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud and money laundering. Soofer admitted in his plea agreement to the alleged bribery scheme.

According to prosecutors, Soofer also admitted to "pocketing at least $2 million in taxpayer money for his own personal enrichment and for businesses unrelated to homeless housing," and that he has agreed to forfeit the money to the U.S. government. Prosecutors previously alleged he diverted a much larger amount: at least $10 million.

An LAist investigation found LAHSA kept awarding millions in contract renewals to Soofer’s group even after LAHSA’s own compliance team labeled it "high-risk" for, among other things, billing for services while reporting no enrolled participants.

The third defendant announced Wednesday is Donye Mitchell of the nonprofit Big Blue Umbrella. Mitchell is accused of lying about his experience to land a $1.2 million county-funded grant, receiving $315,000 and using those funds for personal expenses, including bail for a domestic violence arrest and video games. Officials said he's believed to be in Las Vegas and hadn’t been arrested as of Wednesday morning.

Mitchell is “a convicted fraudster, by the way,” Essayli said. He was convicted in 2011 of defrauding California unemployment benefits, according to the criminal complaint in the new case, and was ordered in 2012 to compensate the state $6 million.

The county funds he’s accused of stealing were awarded by a county vendor in 2024 — well after his fraud conviction.

LAist has left phone messages for Young's and Malone’s lawyers inviting their response to the charges and will update this article if they respond. It is unknown if Mitchell, who has not yet been arrested, has a lawyer.

Prosecutors' critique 

Essayli and L.A. County District Attorney Nathan Hochman criticized what they called a glaring lack of oversight of massive spending on homeless services. Hochman cited a court-ordered 2025 report that found L.A. city officials failed to properly track $2.3 billion in homeless funds, largely by outsourcing to LAHSA — which the review found failed to collect accurate data on its vendors and hold them accountable.

"We have not seen the results you would expect for billions of dollars being spent," Hochman said.

“This is the beginning of these prosecutions,” he added.  ”Many more” are expected in the coming months, he said.

Continuing trouble for LAHSA 

The new charges were announced the day after LAHSA's governing commission decided to give up its responsibility for federal dollars, including applying for roughly $240 million a year in federal homelessness funding and running the annual homeless count.

Also on Tuesday, Mayor Karen Bass skipped a congressional hearing on LAHSA's fraud problems, calling it a "politically motivated" attack.

LAHSA, now led by Interim CEO Gita O'Neill, said in a statement Wednesday that it has "zero tolerance for fraud, waste, or the exploitation of public resources" and commended prosecutors’ action.

The agency said it terminated its contracts with Young’s nonprofit in June after evidence of wrongdoing emerged, and is pursuing recovery of cash seized from Young. The statement added that LAHSA fully cooperated with the federal task force and that no LAHSA staff are implicated — only "external provider executives and outside contractors.”

Essayli was asked Wednesday whether LAHSA's past or current leadership has been culpable.

"That's actually a very difficult question to answer," he said.

"It is not against federal law to be incompetent, unfortunately. I wish it were,” Essayli said. “So just because the people at the helm did not do a good job, that does not give us the authority to arrest them."

“ I assure you, if anyone in power engaged in violation of federal law, we will not hesitate to charge them.”