Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,778
February 2, 2022 (Wednesday)
Today, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman sued Donald Trump, Jr.; Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani; as well as Fox News Channel personalities, including Laura Ingraham, for obstructing an official proceeding “by intimidating and retaliating against a key witness.” The lawsuit describes an “intentional, concerted campaign of unlawful intimidation and retaliation against a sitting Director of the National Security Council and decorated military officer…to prevent him from and then punish him for testifying truthfully before Congress during impeachment proceedings against President Trump.”
Their goal, the lawsuit says, was to portray him as disloyal to the United States, a spy, and “a politically motivated ‘leftist’ within the military who was insubordinate and even broke the law.” In addition to the effect on Vindman himself, it said, the attacks “left a stain on our democracy.”
And so, on Groundhog Day, we have come full circle.
Vindman was a key witness in the first House of Representatives impeachment hearing in 2019. A Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, he had been on the July 25, 2019 call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. After hearing the call, Vindman had reported to John Eisenberg, the top lawyer for the National Security Council, that the call was troubling, with Trump pressing Zelensky to deliver an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of potential rival Joe Biden, in exchange for promised military aid to Ukraine so it could resist Russian incursions. Eisenberg told Vindman not to tell anyone else about the conversation.
Vindman’s opening statement before Congress recalled the American dream. He explained that his father, who had brought Vindman from Ukraine when three, was afraid to have his son testify against the president. Vindman assured him it would be okay. “Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth,” Vindman said he told his father, “because this is America, this is the country I have served and defended, that all of my brothers have served, and here, right matters.”
After Vindman’s testimony, he was ousted from the National Security Council, and his twin brother Eugene, a senior lawyer and ethics official for the NSC who had not been involved in the impeachment hearings, was also fired, escorted off White House grounds “suddenly and without explanation,” according to Alexander’s lawyer David Pressman. The two men were fired on the same day Trump told reporters that he was “not happy” with Vindman’s testimony.
On July 8, 2020, Vindman resigned from the military after more than 21 years, citing the “campaign of bullying, intimidation, and retaliation” led by the president for his decision to leave public service.
And now he is suing the allies of the former president, demanding they repair the damage they did, both to Vindman and to democracy. "The threat to our democracy came from a conspiracy among people within the highest reaches of our government and their close allies. President Trump and his aides and other close associates, including Defendants, waged a targeted campaign against Lt. Col. Vindman for upholding his oath of office and telling the truth."
“I filed this lawsuit,” he said, “because I believe in the active role all citizens must play in upholding our democracy.”
It’s an interesting moment.
The former president is still strong. His fundraising emails, full of fake promises of 700x matching and dinners with the president, might sound just like scams, but they work: he started the year with $122 million in cash. He seems to be stockpiling it for himself; the only significant expenditure he has made is $1 million to a nonprofit, the Conservative Partnership Institute.
But things are not all ducky for him, either.
That million-dollar payment to CPI is significantly higher than any other donation, and it went to CPI, where his former chief of staff Mark Meadows now works, weeks after the House created the January 6 committee, which has subpoenaed Meadows.
Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, is supposed to go live this month, but when Business Insider reached out to Trump’s people—including to former representative Devin Nunes, who left Congress to become the CEO of Trump Media and Technology Group—to ask about it, no one responded. The investor presentation for the company was “so bad, it is laughable—literally says nothing,” one person to whom it was circulated wrote. The special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) behind Trump’s company is under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Yesterday, Trump tried to take back his statement of Sunday indicating he wanted then–vice president Pence to overturn the election. He released a statement saying he only wanted Pence to send the electoral votes back to the states “for reassessment.” This, too, would have been illegal, but it is significant because it shows he recognizes that his earlier statement adds to the case against him.
At his rally in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday, Trump promised to pardon the insurrectionists if he is reelected, and today Tara Palmeri of Politico reported that Trump had considered blanket pardons of the rioters, asking advisors if he had the power and if it was a good idea. Belying the idea floated by right-wing media that the rioters were “antifa,” he asked, “Is it everybody that had a Trump sign or everybody who walked into the Capitol,” who could be pardoned. Trump also wanted to announce that he was running in 2024 even before Biden’s inauguration, hoping to frame any future prosecutions as being politically motivated.
Representative Pete Aguilar (D-CA), a member of the committee investigating the insurrection, said on CNN that Trump’s promise is “absolutely” witness tampering. He wondered what it would take for Republicans to say enough is enough. “I don’t know where the floor is on that side of the aisle,” he said.
That seems a reasonable question, as right-wing personalities are upping the ante in their political rhetoric, echoing authoritarians in their suggestion that they will use the power of the government to go after those they consider political opponents. Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, for example, has expressed interest in arresting President Biden's chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, saying, “[w]e are going to create criminal referrals…. There needs to be an example made of him.”
As right-wing fury seems to mount, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is quietly gathering evidence, and those testifying seem to be getting closer to the heart of the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Yesterday, yet another member of former vice president Mike Pence’s team, top aide Greg Jacob, met with the January 6 committee for more than eight and a half hours.
The leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, has appeared before the committee this week and has answered “many questions,” according to his lawyer, although he has exercised his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination with regard to other questions.
Today, former Department of Justice lawyer Jeffrey Clark met with the January 6 committee for close to two hours. Clark backed Trump’s attempt to cast doubt on the election, and Trump entertained the idea of making him attorney general until Department of Justice leadership threatened to resign as a group if he did. Initially, Clark refused to answer a subpoena, and in December the committee voted to hold him in criminal contempt. The committee remained willing to talk, though, and apparently it now has.
We learned today that the committee has also subpoenaed from T-Mobile the phone records of Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward and her husband, Michael Ward, both of whom signed a document falsely claiming that Trump had won Arizona’s electoral votes. The Wards filed suit in federal court today to block the subpoena, saying that because the Wards are osteopathic doctors who use their phones to talk to patients, the subpoenas violate patient-doctor privilege.
Meanwhile, the committee has put off Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s testimony while it discusses the scope of his subpoena with his lawyer.
Today, committee member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said that the committee expects to hear from Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter and White House advisor, whom the committee expects to call this week.
Raskin also said public hearings will likely be held in April. This will make them uncomfortably close to the midterm elections, but they have had to be pushed back because of obstruction by Trump’s people.
And so we are back to where we were in 2019, when Vindman first reminded us that in America, right matters. At long last, will most of us decide that it does?
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Today, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman sued Donald Trump, Jr.; Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani; as well as Fox News Channel personalities, including Laura Ingraham, for obstructing an official proceeding “by intimidating and retaliating against a key witness.” The lawsuit describes an “intentional, concerted campaign of unlawful intimidation and retaliation against a sitting Director of the National Security Council and decorated military officer…to prevent him from and then punish him for testifying truthfully before Congress during impeachment proceedings against President Trump.”
Their goal, the lawsuit says, was to portray him as disloyal to the United States, a spy, and “a politically motivated ‘leftist’ within the military who was insubordinate and even broke the law.” In addition to the effect on Vindman himself, it said, the attacks “left a stain on our democracy.”
And so, on Groundhog Day, we have come full circle.
Vindman was a key witness in the first House of Representatives impeachment hearing in 2019. A Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, he had been on the July 25, 2019 call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. After hearing the call, Vindman had reported to John Eisenberg, the top lawyer for the National Security Council, that the call was troubling, with Trump pressing Zelensky to deliver an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of potential rival Joe Biden, in exchange for promised military aid to Ukraine so it could resist Russian incursions. Eisenberg told Vindman not to tell anyone else about the conversation.
Vindman’s opening statement before Congress recalled the American dream. He explained that his father, who had brought Vindman from Ukraine when three, was afraid to have his son testify against the president. Vindman assured him it would be okay. “Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth,” Vindman said he told his father, “because this is America, this is the country I have served and defended, that all of my brothers have served, and here, right matters.”
After Vindman’s testimony, he was ousted from the National Security Council, and his twin brother Eugene, a senior lawyer and ethics official for the NSC who had not been involved in the impeachment hearings, was also fired, escorted off White House grounds “suddenly and without explanation,” according to Alexander’s lawyer David Pressman. The two men were fired on the same day Trump told reporters that he was “not happy” with Vindman’s testimony.
On July 8, 2020, Vindman resigned from the military after more than 21 years, citing the “campaign of bullying, intimidation, and retaliation” led by the president for his decision to leave public service.
And now he is suing the allies of the former president, demanding they repair the damage they did, both to Vindman and to democracy. "The threat to our democracy came from a conspiracy among people within the highest reaches of our government and their close allies. President Trump and his aides and other close associates, including Defendants, waged a targeted campaign against Lt. Col. Vindman for upholding his oath of office and telling the truth."
“I filed this lawsuit,” he said, “because I believe in the active role all citizens must play in upholding our democracy.”
It’s an interesting moment.
The former president is still strong. His fundraising emails, full of fake promises of 700x matching and dinners with the president, might sound just like scams, but they work: he started the year with $122 million in cash. He seems to be stockpiling it for himself; the only significant expenditure he has made is $1 million to a nonprofit, the Conservative Partnership Institute.
But things are not all ducky for him, either.
That million-dollar payment to CPI is significantly higher than any other donation, and it went to CPI, where his former chief of staff Mark Meadows now works, weeks after the House created the January 6 committee, which has subpoenaed Meadows.
Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, is supposed to go live this month, but when Business Insider reached out to Trump’s people—including to former representative Devin Nunes, who left Congress to become the CEO of Trump Media and Technology Group—to ask about it, no one responded. The investor presentation for the company was “so bad, it is laughable—literally says nothing,” one person to whom it was circulated wrote. The special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) behind Trump’s company is under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Yesterday, Trump tried to take back his statement of Sunday indicating he wanted then–vice president Pence to overturn the election. He released a statement saying he only wanted Pence to send the electoral votes back to the states “for reassessment.” This, too, would have been illegal, but it is significant because it shows he recognizes that his earlier statement adds to the case against him.
At his rally in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday, Trump promised to pardon the insurrectionists if he is reelected, and today Tara Palmeri of Politico reported that Trump had considered blanket pardons of the rioters, asking advisors if he had the power and if it was a good idea. Belying the idea floated by right-wing media that the rioters were “antifa,” he asked, “Is it everybody that had a Trump sign or everybody who walked into the Capitol,” who could be pardoned. Trump also wanted to announce that he was running in 2024 even before Biden’s inauguration, hoping to frame any future prosecutions as being politically motivated.
Representative Pete Aguilar (D-CA), a member of the committee investigating the insurrection, said on CNN that Trump’s promise is “absolutely” witness tampering. He wondered what it would take for Republicans to say enough is enough. “I don’t know where the floor is on that side of the aisle,” he said.
That seems a reasonable question, as right-wing personalities are upping the ante in their political rhetoric, echoing authoritarians in their suggestion that they will use the power of the government to go after those they consider political opponents. Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, for example, has expressed interest in arresting President Biden's chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, saying, “[w]e are going to create criminal referrals…. There needs to be an example made of him.”
As right-wing fury seems to mount, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is quietly gathering evidence, and those testifying seem to be getting closer to the heart of the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Yesterday, yet another member of former vice president Mike Pence’s team, top aide Greg Jacob, met with the January 6 committee for more than eight and a half hours.
The leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, has appeared before the committee this week and has answered “many questions,” according to his lawyer, although he has exercised his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination with regard to other questions.
Today, former Department of Justice lawyer Jeffrey Clark met with the January 6 committee for close to two hours. Clark backed Trump’s attempt to cast doubt on the election, and Trump entertained the idea of making him attorney general until Department of Justice leadership threatened to resign as a group if he did. Initially, Clark refused to answer a subpoena, and in December the committee voted to hold him in criminal contempt. The committee remained willing to talk, though, and apparently it now has.
We learned today that the committee has also subpoenaed from T-Mobile the phone records of Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward and her husband, Michael Ward, both of whom signed a document falsely claiming that Trump had won Arizona’s electoral votes. The Wards filed suit in federal court today to block the subpoena, saying that because the Wards are osteopathic doctors who use their phones to talk to patients, the subpoenas violate patient-doctor privilege.
Meanwhile, the committee has put off Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s testimony while it discusses the scope of his subpoena with his lawyer.
Today, committee member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said that the committee expects to hear from Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter and White House advisor, whom the committee expects to call this week.
Raskin also said public hearings will likely be held in April. This will make them uncomfortably close to the midterm elections, but they have had to be pushed back because of obstruction by Trump’s people.
And so we are back to where we were in 2019, when Vindman first reminded us that in America, right matters. At long last, will most of us decide that it does?
mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,778
February 3, 2022 (Thursday)
Today, President Joe Biden announced that U.S. special operations launched a counterterrorism mission against the leader of the Islamic State militant group, ISIS. Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi took control of ISIS after the death of previous leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who killed himself in October 2019 during a raid by U.S. troops. Qurayshi was located in a safe house in northwestern Syria, and as U.S. forces approached, he detonated a bomb killing himself and the 13 women and children in the quarters with him.
Critics had charged that Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, begun under former president Trump, would injure U.S. credibility in the fight against terrorism. Thanking U.S. armed forces for their skill and bravery, Biden indicated his critics’ assessment had been misguided. “Last night’s operation took a major terrorist leader off the battlefield, and it sent a strong message to terrorists around the world: We will come after you and find you,” Biden said.
Biden’s handling of tensions with Russia has also strengthened the nation’s international hand. Russian president Vladimir Putin has demanded extraordinary concessions, and rather than weakening the resolve of members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, his aggression has united them. And, according to Edward Luce of the Financial Times, they are united behind U.S. leadership. “It has been years since that sentence could be written with a straight face,” Luce wrote. “Russia has brought about what it fears—a west that is displaying something approaching resolve.”
Today, U.S. officials claimed to have evidence that Russian intelligence intends to create a “very graphic” video, involving actors and corpses, that claims to show a Ukrainian attack on Russian speakers in order to justify a new Russian invasion of the neighboring country. Britain came to a similar conclusion.
British diplomat James Roscoe tweeted: “Russia says it will never invade Ukraine. Unless it is provoked. So *just in case* it is provoked, it has massed over 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border. But how is it that they are able to anticipat[e] that provocation? Perhaps because they are planning to stage [it]?”
Representative Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), former CIA analyst and former acting assistant secretary of defense, tweeted that a classified briefing was “a powerful reminder of just how much warfare has changed.” The Russian plan to stage a false attack on Russian troops by Ukrainian soldiers is “insane behavior,” she said. “Disinformation & misinformation are real tools in the Russian toolkit, as are cyberattacks that could deliberately target American & NATO civilians.”
Disinformation remains a weapon at home, too.
Josh Dawsey, Rosalind S. Helderman, Emma Brown, Jon Swaine, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post this morning broke the story that on December 18, 2020, extremists proposed to former president Trump that he use the powers of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Department to try to prove that foreign countries had swung the 2020 election. It suggested he could direct the agencies to sift through the electronic data from phones, emails, social media, and so on, automatically collected by those agencies but against the law to use to target individuals without a court order.
After the election, on November 9, 2020, the White House pressured the Pentagon into naming a lightly qualified 36-year-old Trump loyalist, Michael Ellis, to become the top lawyer at the NSA. The appointment was problematic and thus Ellis did not take charge during Trump’s term, but the decision to appoint him over career civil servants perhaps bears more attention even than it got at the time.
While the proposal never went into effect, its backers did send it to Senators Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Ron Johnson (R-WI). Senator Cynthia M. Lummis (R-WY) also attended a meeting on January 4 in which attendees alleged (falsely) that foreign governments had affected the vote. “[W]hy the heck did these R[epublican]s not alert the FBI, totally failure of conscience and their oaths,” wrote Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post.
It’s a good point.
Meanwhile, reporters continue to dig into the history of the false electors who claimed Trump had won their states. Alan Feuer, Maggie Haberman, and Luke Broadwater of the New York Times today revealed two legal memos from a lawyer affiliated with the Trump campaign providing legal rationales for the fake electors. “[W]e are,” he wrote, “trying to have an alternate slate vote, in hopes that its legitimacy will be validated….” One memo, dated November 18, 2020, by Kenneth Chesebro, justified the casting of fake ballots; another, dated December 9, 2020, focused on overturning the certified ballots for Biden. It urged the fake electors to meet in secret, sign fake documents, and submit them as if they were real.
Chesebro worked to find loopholes in the mechanics of the process to enable the fake electors to seem legitimate. “Michigan is much more specific about the location in which the electors must meet,” he noted, “which could be a bit awkward.” “Nevada is an extremely problematic State, because it requires the meeting of the electors to be overseen by the Secretary of State, who is only supposed to permit electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote in Nevada,” he wrote. “In conclusion,” he wrote, “it appears that voting by an alternate slate of electors is unproblematic in Arizona and Wisconsin; slightly problematic in Michigan (requiring access to the senate chamber); somewhat dicey in Georgia and Pennsylvania…; and very problematic in Nevada.”
Chesebro’s cool analysis of how to overturn our democracy is chilling.
Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, notes that the committee members are paying attention to the churning news about the insurrection. Trump’s comments over the weekend about pardoning the January 6 rioters spoke of his intent: ““If this violence against the Capitol wasn’t part of the plan, or wasn’t something he condoned, then why would he consider pardoning them?”
And yet, the Republican National Committee is doubling down on its support for Trump, its resolution committee tonight voting unanimously to censure the two Republican representatives on the January 6 committee: Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).
Ahead of the party vote, Cheney said: “Leaders of the Republican Party have made themselves willing hostages to a man who admits he tried to overturn a presidential election and suggests he would pardon Jan. 6 defendants…some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy. I’m a constitutional conservative and I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump. History will be their judge.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,778
February 4, 2022 (Friday)
Today the January jobs report showed the U.S. added 467,000 jobs. With more than 6.6 million jobs since Biden took office, 2021 under Biden created more jobs than any other year in history. The jobs report also revised the numbers for November and December upward by more than 700,000. The first 12 months of Biden’s presidency mark the best job creation on record. The unemployment rate is at 4.0%.
The other big news today is that the Republican National Committee, meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, censured Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) for joining the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Defending the events surrounding January 6, the RNC said that the investigation is “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
That is, the Republican National Committee says that the January 6 attack on the Capitol—in which nine people died, more than 150 law enforcement officers were injured, offices were ransacked, and rioters spread feces on the walls—was “legitimate political discourse.”
These two wildly different headlines are the outcome of 40 years of U.S. politics.
For a long time, the idea that that economy thrives when the government supports ordinary Americans was not controversial. Democrats began to make it the centerpiece of our system in the 1930s when, after a decade in which the government worked only for the wealthy, they offered a “New Deal” for the American people. Over time, lawmakers from both major parties embraced it, believing they had finally figured out a truly American system that would serve everyone.
A member of Republican president Dwight Eisenhower's administration explained that “Our underlying philosophy…is this: if a job has to be done to meet the needs of people, and no one else can do it, then it is a proper function of the federal government.” This, he said, was the “authentic American center in politics…a common meeting-ground of the great majority of our people on our own issues, against a backdrop of our own history, our own current setting and our own responsibilities for the future.”
But in the 1980s, Republicans argued that this system stifled economic development by hampering the ability of producers to put their money where they thought it would do the most good. Instead of supporting workers, they argued, government should cut taxes to enable those at the top of the economic ladder to accumulate capital and invest in the economy. Tax cuts became their go-to solution for any sort of economic crisis. The government should support the “supply side” of the economy. Any attempt to use the government to help the “demand side” was, they said, “socialism.”
Shortly after Biden took office, the Democrats returned to the old system. To address the economic wreckage left behind by the pandemic, Democrats in March 2021 passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, without a single Republican vote. That measure is behind the extraordinary U.S. economic recovery, proving that, no matter what its supply-side opponents have alleged over the years, supporting the demand side of the economy works.
That the Republican Party has now retreated into the delusion that a deadly attack on our government was “legitimate political discourse” is also a product of 40 years of political rhetoric saying that those who oppose Republican policies are anti-American. The idea behind the insurrection, and behind the Big Lie that inspired it—the idea that Biden stole the presidential victory from former president Donald Trump—was that a Democratic victory could not be legitimate. Indeed, in the letter censuring Cheney and Kinzinger, the RNC charges that “[t]he Biden Administration and Democrats in Congress have embarked on a systematic effort to replace liberty with socialism.” In this framing, any attempt to overturn such an “illegitimate” election would be an act of patriotism.
It would be “legitimate political discourse.”
But overturning elections on the claim that the usurper must defend a nation’s legitimate government is so much a part of authoritarian coups that it is almost a cliché.
And so we stand, on this one day, seeing the reclaiming of an old bipartisan consensus, on the one hand, and the justification for an authoritarian coup on the other.
This extraordinary statement by the RNC has brought the fight for control of the party into the open. This morning, news broke that the January 6 committee has evidence that Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who has been evasive about his contact with Trump on January 6 and who has said he did not recall if he spoke with the president that morning, in fact did. The president called Jordan on the morning of January 6, and they spoke for ten minutes—hardly a call one would forget, it would seem.
Jordan rejected an invitation from the January 6 committee to testify, saying that its request “is far outside the bounds of any legitimate inquiry.”
But if most Republican leaders are lining up behind Trump and the insurrectionists to make up an authoritarian wing of the party, former vice president Mike Pence hinted today he was hoping to carve out some distance from them. Although Trump focused his fury on Pence on January 6 because he would not overturn the election, and although the rioters brought a gallows to hang Pence, the former vice president has largely kept quiet about the event until today.
Hours after the RNC’s statement, Pence told the Federalist Society that January 6 had been a “dark day.” Pence said, "President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone." He added that "there's nothing more un-American" than to have "any one person...choose the American president."
Pence’s team, including his chief of staff, Marc Short, have been cooperating with the January 6 committee, and the committee will get a pile of records from Pence on March 3 unless a court stops Archivist of the United States David Ferriero from delivering them. It is likely Pence knows there is plenty that will come into the open to make siding with the Trump folks politically problematic. But there is more to his statement than that. While Pence stopped short of saying Biden won the election fairly, his rejection of the plot to overturn Biden’s victory and destroy our democracy suggests he is courting the old business wing of the party.
Pence has been closely allied with the billionaire libertarian Koch family throughout his political career and likely hopes to be a 2024 presidential candidate with their backing. Short, too, is allied with Koch family interests, and according to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), foundations and trusts associated with the Kochs are among the deep-pocketed funders of the Federalist Society, where Pence made his statement. The oligarchical wing of the party is, perhaps, making a bid to regain control over the party in the hopes that the insurrectionists will crash and burn.
Certainly, Trump loyalist Stephen Bannon recognized Pence’s words as a defection. On his podcast, Bannon addressed Pence, saying: “You are a stone cold coward…. My head’s blowing up.... I can’t take Pence…and Marc Short and all these Koch guys up there ratting out Trump up on Capitol Hill right now.”
I’m not one to romanticize our history, but it does seem worth noting that it was on this day in 1789 that the Electoral College unanimously elected George Washington the first president of the new United States. It seems that we might be able to choose better leaders than ones who are leaving us at the end of this day in 2022 with the truly legitimate political question: “Ratting him out for what?”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,778
February 5, 2022 (Saturday)
Just for fun, because today feels like a good day to talk about Grover Cleveland….
The economy has boomed under President Joe Biden, putting the lie to the old trope that Democrats don’t manage the economy as well as Republicans.
This should not come as a surprise to anyone. The economy has performed better under Democrats than Republicans since at least World War II. CNN Business reports that since 1945, the Standard & Poor’s 500—a market index of 500 leading U.S. publicly traded companies—has averaged an annual gain of 11.2% during years when Democrats controlled the White House, and a 6.9% average gain under Republicans. In the same time period, gross domestic product grew by an average of 4.1% under Democrats, 2.5% under Republicans. Job growth, too, is significantly stronger under Democrats than Republicans.
“[T]here has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century,” wrote David Leonhardt of the New York Times last year, “The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.”
The persistence of the myth that Democrats are bad for the economy is an interesting example of the endurance of political rhetoric over reality.
It began in the postwar years: the post–Civil War years, that is. Before the Civil War, moneyed men tended to support the Democrats, for the big money in the country was in the cotton enterprises of the leading enslavers in the American South, and they expressed their political power through the Democratic Party, which promised to protect and nurture the institution of human enslavement. Indeed, when soldiers of the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1861, it was not clear at all whether bankers in New York City would back the United States or the southern rebels. After all, the South was the wealthiest region of the country, and the North had just undergone the devastating Panic of 1857. Southern leaders laughed that without the South, northerners would starve.
The economic policies of the war years, including our first national money, national taxation, state universities, and deficit spending, created a newly booming industrial North, but many moneyed men resented the Republican policies they felt offered too much to poor Americans (the Homestead Act was a special thorn in their sides because it meant that western lands taken from Indigenous Americans would no longer be sold to bring money into the Treasury but would be given away to poor farmers). When the government established national banks, establishing regulations over the lucrative banking industry, state bankers were unhappy.
Whether moneyed men would stay loyal to Lincoln in 1864 was an open question. In the end, they did, but their loyalty after the war was up for grabs.
Democrats’ postwar financial policies drove moneyed men to give their allegiance to the Republican Party. Eager to make inroads on the Republicans' popularity, northern Democrats pointed out that the economic gains of the war years had gone to those at the top of the economy, and they called for financial policies that would level the playing field. Notably, they wanted to pay the interest on the war debt with greenbacks rather than gold, which would make the bonds significantly less valuable. The alteration would also establish that political parties could take office and change government financial engagements after they were already in force.
Republicans recognized that if a change of this sort were legitimate, the government’s ability to borrow in the future—say, to put down another rebellion—would be hamstrung. They were so worried that in 1868, they protected the debt in the Fourteenth Amendment itself, saying: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
When it looked as if a coalition including the Democrats might win the presidency in 1872, leaders from Wall Street publicly threw their weight behind the Republicans, and in exchange, the Republicans backed away from supporting the workers who had made up their initial voting base.
Southern white supremacists had begun to charge that permitting poor men to vote would lead to a redistribution of wealth as they voted for roads and schools and hospitals that could only be paid for by tax levies on those with property. Such a system was, they charged, “socialism.”
While southern whites directed their animosity toward their formerly enslaved Black neighbors, northerners of means adopted their ideas and language but targeted immigrants and organized workers. If those people came to control government and thus the economy, wealthier Americans argued, they would bring socialism to America, and the nation would never recover.
Increasingly, power shifted to wealthy industrialists who, after 1872, were represented by the Republican Party. They demanded high tariffs that protected their industries by keeping out foreign competition and thus permitted them to collude to raise prices on consumers. By the 1880s, Republican senators were openly serving big business; even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune lamented in 1884 that “[b]ehind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation.”
As money moved to the top of the economy, Democrats pushed back, calling for government to restore a level playing field between workers and their employers. As they did so, Republicans howled that Democrats advocated socialism.
Finally, after the spectacularly corrupt administration of Republican Benjamin Harrison, which businessmen had called “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” the unthinkable happened. In the election of 1892, for the first time since the Civil War, Democrats took control of the White House and Congress. They promised to rein in the power of big business by lowering the tariffs and loosening the money supply. This, Republicans insisted, meant financial ruin.
Republicans warned that capital would flee the markets and urged foreign investors—on whom the economy depended—to take their money home. They predicted a financial crash as the Democrats embraced socialism, anarchism, and labor organization. Money flowed out of the country as the outgoing Harrison administration poured gasoline on the fires of media fears and refused to act to try to turn the tide. Harrison’s secretary of the Treasury, Charles Foster, said his job was only to “avert a catastrophe” until March 4, when Democratic president Grover Cleveland would take office.
He didn’t quite manage it. The bottom fell out of the economy on February 17, when the Reading Railroad Company could not make its payroll, sparking a nationwide panic. The stock market collapsed. And yet the Harrison administration refused to do anything until the day Cleveland took office, when Foster helpfully announced the Treasury “was down to bedrock.”
To Cleveland fell the Panic of 1893, with its strikes, marchers, and despair, all of which opponents insisted was the Democrats’ fault. In the midterm election of 1894, Republicans showed the statistics of Cleveland’s first two years and told voters that Democrats destroyed the economy. Voters could restore the health of the nation’s economy by electing Republicans again. In 1894, voters returned Republicans to control of the government in the biggest midterm landslide in American history, and the image of Democrats as bad for the economy was cemented.
From then on, Republicans portrayed Democrats as weak on the economy. When the next Democratic president to take office, Woodrow Wilson, undermined the tariff as soon as he took office, replacing it with an income tax, opponents insisted the Revenue Act of 1913 was inaugurating the country’s socialistic downfall. When Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt pioneered the New Deal, Republicans saw socialism. Over the past century, that rhetoric has only grown stronger.
And yet, of course, it has been Republican economic policies that opened up the possibility for Democrats to try new approaches to the economy, to make it serve all Americans, rather than a favored few. As FDR put it: “It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.”
In the end, that’s what the economists Leonhardt interviewed last year think is behind Democrats’ ability to manage the economy better than Republicans. Republicans tend to cling to abstract theories about how the economy works—theories about high tariffs or tax cuts, for example, which tend to concentrate wealth upward—while Democrats are more pragmatic, willing to pay attention to facts on the ground and to historical lessons about what works and what doesn’t.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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mickeyrat
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February 6, 2022 (Sunday)
There is, in fact, some news today, but nothing that can't wait until tomorrow. Seems like this might well be a busy week, so let's take the night off.
It's been quite cold here, and the sea smoke, which rises when the air is colder than the water, has been spectacular.
Photographer Peter Ralston caught this image earlier this week.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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mickeyrat
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February 7, 2022 (Monday)
It appears that the Republican National Committee’s censure of Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), along with its declaration that the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “legitimate political discourse,” has created a problem for Republican lawmakers as they try to position the party for the midterms and the 2024 election. Coming, as the statement did, just after former president Trump said that Pence had the power to “overturn the election” and that if reelected, Trump would pardon those who attacked the Capitol, it has put the Republican Party openly on the side of overturning our democracy.
Trump loyalists have been insisting that the rioters were “political prisoners,” and clearly the RNC was speaking for them. This wing of the party got a boost this evening when venture capitalist Peter Thiel, the libertarian whose wealth Forbes estimates to be about $2.6 billion, announced that he is stepping down from the board of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to focus on electing Trump-aligned candidates in 2022. Thiel famously wrote in 2009 that he “no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and deplored “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women” after 1920.
It also got a boost today when the Supreme Court halted a lower court’s order saying that a redistricting map in Alabama violated the Voting Rights Act by getting rid of a Black majority district. Alabama’s population is 27% Black, which should translate to 2 congressional seats, but by the practice of “packing and cracking”—that is, packing large numbers of Black voters into one district and spreading them thinly across all the others—only one district will likely have a shot at electing a Black representative. The vote for letting the new maps stand was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the liberals against the new right-wing majority, in control thanks to the three justices added by Trump.
But the backlash against the RNC’s statement suggests that most Americans see the deadly attack on our democracy for what it was, and Republican lawmakers are now trying to deflect from the RNC’s statement.
RNC chair Ronna McDaniel said that media quotes from the resolution are a “lie” and says the committee did not mean it to be taken as it has been. But other Republicans seemed to understand that the RNC has firmly dragged the Republican Party into Trump’s war on our democracy.
National Review called the statement “both morally repellent and politically self-destructive,” and worried that “it will be used against hundreds of elected Republicans who were not consulted in its drafting and do not endorse its sentiment.” If indeed the RNC simply misworded their statement, the editors said, “its wording is political malpractice of the highest order coming from people whose entire job is politics.”
Sunday, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who seems to entertain hopes for 2024, said on ABC’s This Week that “January 6 was a riot incited by Donald Trump in an effort to intimidate Mike Pence and Congress into doing exactly what he said in his own words—overturn the election.”
But others, like Senator Todd Young (R-IN), seem to be trying to split the baby. Young told Christiane Amanpour that those saying the attack was legitimate political discourse are “a fringe group,” although the RNC is quite literally the official machinery of the Republican Party. Young is up for reelection in 2022. He is also from Indiana, as is former vice president Mike Pence, who seems to be positioning himself to take over the party as Trump’s legal woes knock him out of the running for 2024.
On Friday, Pence told the Federalist Society that Trump was “wrong” to say that he, Pence, had the power to overturn the election. But he did not say that Biden won the election fairly. Then, on Sunday, Pence’s former chief of staff Marc Short seemed to try to let Trump off the hook for his pressure on Pence, telling Chuck Todd on Meet the Press that the former president “had many bad advisers who were basically snake oil salesmen giving him really random and novel ideas as to what the vice president could do.”
They seem to be trying to keep Trump’s voters while easing the former president himself offstage, hoping that voters will forget that the Republican leadership stood by Trump until he openly talked of overturning the election.
Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, seems unlikely to stand by as the country moves on, as the National Review editors indicated they were hoping. As he said in his closing at Trump’s first impeachment trial: “History will not be kind to Donald Trump. If you find that the House has proved its case, and still vote to acquit, your name will be tied to his with a cord of steel and for all of history.”
The other big news of the past day is that it turns out that Trump and his team mishandled presidential records, suggesting that we will never get the full story of what happened in that White House.
By law, presidential records and federal records belong to the U.S. government. An administration must preserve every piece of official business. Some of the documents that the Trump team delivered to the January 6 committee had been ripped up and taped back together, some were in pieces, and some, apparently, were shredded and destroyed. Legal commentator Asha Rangappa noted that Trump’s impeachments mean that such shredding could have amounted to an obstruction of justice.
Today we learned that the National Archives and Records Administration had to retrieve 15 boxes of material from Trump’s Florida residence Mar-a-Lago, including correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the letter that former president Barack Obama left for Trump (which would have brought a pretty penny if it were sold). Trump aides say they are trying to determine what other records need to be returned.
Former Republican Kurt Bardella noted, “If this had happened during a Democratic Administration while Republicans were in the majority, I guarantee you [the Oversight Committee] would be launching a massive investigation into this and writing subpoenas right now to any and every W[hite] H[ouse] official that was involved in this.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used the story to raise money for her progressive organization, Onward Together. She linked to the story as she urged people to “Take a sip from your new mug as you read the news.” With the tweet was the picture of a mug with her image and the caption “But Her Emails.”
House January 6 committee member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) says that the committee is planning to hold public hearings in April or May. They have been slowed down by the reluctance of the Trump team to cooperate.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
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mickeyrat
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February 8, 2022 (Tuesday)
The fallout over the Republican National Committee’s statement censuring Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) for “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” continues to rain down on the Republican Party.
Today, more than 140 former Republican officials and leaders issued a statement saying that the RNC has “betrayed the GOP’s founding principles and ceded control of a once-great movement to grifters and extremists.” They condemned the description of “the January 6th insurrection” as legitimate political discourse,” calling that description “an affront to the rule of law, peaceful self-government, and the constitutional order.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tried to distance himself from the party’s stance, saying the events of January 6 were “a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”
“First Pence, now McConnell,” NBC’s legal commenter Katie S. Phang noted. “A big hammer is about to drop and they don’t want to be in the path.”
Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) strode speedily away from ABC News congressional correspondent Rachel Scott when she asked about the resolution describing the rioting on January 6 as “legitimate political discourse,” telling her it was “not good” to answer questions in hallways. (Comedian Noel Casler tweeted that McCarthy “ran down that hall like he was being chased by a bunch of white dudes looking for some ‘legitimate political discourse.’”)
Other representatives seemed eager to shore up their arguments that the election was fraudulent and that investigators are illegitimate. New York representative Elise Stefanik, a Trump loyalist who replaced Cheney as the number three Republican in House leadership when House Republicans removed Cheney by a secret vote in May, defended the RNC, saying it had “every right to take any action.” She suggested that voters would ultimately decide whether to justify Cheney’s position or that of the RNC.
Last night, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) was on the Fox News Channel sounding more frantic than usual, accusing the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol of attacking him and insisting that “this is ridiculous and the American people are so fed up with this….” Jordan, such a key Trump loyalist that the former president awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a private ceremony at the White House on January 11, 2021, five days after the insurrection, has been eager to deflect attention from what we now know was a ten-minute call between him and Trump on the morning of January 6.
Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) tweeted today that 740,000 Maricopa County ballots cannot be verified. (These were the ballots taken over by the Cyber Ninjas and have been examined and verified several times over.)
More odd, though, was Representative Troy Nehls’s (R-TX) claim on Twitter that the Capitol Police Intelligence Division on November 20, 2021, “investigated my office illegally” and that Capitol Police leadership was “maliciously investigating me in an attempt to destroy me and my character.” He claimed such an attack was due to his criticism of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the January 6 Committee, the Capitol Police, and the shooting of Ashli Babbitt as she tried to break into the House chamber. The president of the right-wing organization Judicial Watch promptly accused Pelosi of targeting Nehls with “secret police.”
The Capitol Police responded that an officer found the office unlocked, entered it, and “saw a white board with text about body armor and an accompanying map of the Capitol campus.” In an article in the Federalist, Nehls said the map was intended to help an intern find an ice machine and the body armor part of a discussion of legislation to stop purchases of body armor from China. “If Capitol Police leadership had spent as much time preparing for January 6 as they spent investigating my white board, the January 6 riot never would have happened,” Nehls wrote.
It was a bizarre story that sounded like Nehls was trying to get out in front of something. Then Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) claimed that the Department of Justice is reading his mail. Taken with the spying on Nehls, Gohmert wrote, “the Democrat’s [sic] spying on political opponents appears to know no end.” And then he added a threat: “The people behind this should be hoping and praying that they will not be treated in the same manner in which they are running roughshod over Republicans when and if Republicans retake the majority.”
Jordan, Gosar, Nehls, and Gohmert all voted not to accept the certified ballots from certain states on January 6.
They might be reacting to the reality that the law is not as slapdash as they might have thought. Today, officers arrested the Mesa County, Colorado, clerk, Republican Tina Peters, after she resisted the seizure of an iPad on which she was illegally filming a court proceeding involving her deputy, Belinda Knisley, who is facing criminal charges of cybercrimes. Peters has been suspected of leaking data from county election machines to conspiracy theorists last year; it turned up in a presentation at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s symposium about the election last August. Trump loyalist Steve Bannon showed the arrest on his webcast.
Also today, prosecutors revealed their evidence for the trial of a January 6 defendant, Guy Wesley Reffitt, allegedly a member of the Texas Three Percenter militia group, mobilized against the U.S. government. The trial is set to begin on February 28. Their list of evidence is 11 pages long and extraordinarily thorough. It includes videos, phone records, texts, hotel receipts, pictures, and interviews, including ones with the defendant’s children, who will testify that Reffitt threatened them to keep them quiet. His daughter will testify that “she heard her father tell them that if they turned him in to law enforcement, they would be traitors, and that traitors get shot.” Also testifying will be one of the defendant’s colleagues in the Texas Three Percenter militia who traveled with him to D.C.
The government has done its homework.
Today, Reuters reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into a meeting between then-leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers alt-right extremist groups and other right-wing figures in a parking garage in Washington, D.C., on January 5, 2021. The attendees contacted by Reuters said “they did not discuss matters related to January 6.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
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mickeyrat
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February 9, 2022 (Wednesday)
This evening, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol issued a subpoena for documents and testimony to former White House trade advisor Peter Navarro, who has made a number of public statements about his role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In its letter to Navarro, the committee noted his statements that former president Trump was “on board with the strategy” of trying to steal the election, as were “more than 100” members of Congress, including Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).
This subpoena suggests that the committee is getting closer to lawmakers, and some of them are certainly acting as if they are uncomfortable these days.
Navarro responded to the subpoena with a fire-eating statement calling the members of the January 6 committee “domestic terrorists” engaged in a “partisan witch hunt,” and inaccurately claimed that former president Trump has invoked executive privilege that he cannot waive. (In fact, Trump invoked executive privilege only over documents in the possession of the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Supreme Court denied his claims.) He tried to blame House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the Capitol Police for the violence on January 6.
He added fuel to the ongoing fight within the Republican Party when he added: “Pence betrayed Trump. Marc Short is a Koch Network dog. Meadows is a fool and a coward. Cheney and Kinzinger are useful idiots for Nancy Pelosi and the woke Left.”
Navarro’s discomfort with the committee’s questions was not unlike that of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who picked up today on Representative Troy Nehls’s (R-TX) odd accusations of yesterday that Pelosi and the Capitol Police were spying on him. Greene accused Pelosi of having Gestapo-like secret police “spying on members of Congress, spying on the legislative work we do, spying on our staff and spying on American citizens,” she said, although she called them “gazpacho,” apparently confusing the cold tomato soup with the Nazis.
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) is also flailing. Sunday, on Face the Nation, he said: “This commission is a partisan scam. They're going after—they're—the purpose of that commission is to try to embarrass and smear and harass as many Republicans as they can get their hands on.”
Yesterday, he released a video saying “Biden is sending free meth & crack pipes to minority communities in the name of ‘racial equity’.... There is no end in sight for this lunacy.“
This is a wild lie made up and spread by right-wing publications, referring to a drug harm reduction program inviting applications for grants in a 75-page call for proposals. Part of that harm reduction includes infectious disease testing kits, medication lock boxes, safe sex kits, vaccinations, and so on, including safe smoking kits, which do not include free meth or crack pipes but do include rubber mouthpieces for pipes to prevent burns, and disinfectant wipes.
Drug harm reduction programs have been around in the U.S. since the 1980s, when the HIV epidemic made it clear that addressing drug addiction could stop that era’s epidemic.
Exaggeration and demonization of their opponents has been part of politics for years, as Republicans tried to fire up their base by describing their opponents as socialists, lazy “takers,” baby-killers, and so on. Now, though, these over-the-top attacks on the committee and on the Democratic administration seem to be part of a new political project.
The frantic edge to them suggests concern about what the January 6th committee might uncover.
But statements like those yesterday of Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who claimed the Department of Justice was reading his mail; Nehls, who claimed that Pelosi was using the Capitol Police to spy on him; and Greene, who claims Pelosi has a “Gestapo,” normalize the practices of authoritarian government. The proposed banning of books by Republican school officials and lawmakers also echoes authoritarian tactics. Texas State Representative Matt Krause’s October list of 850 books he said “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex” invited schools to self-censor. It also puts the idea of banning books–—banning one book normalizes the banning of 850—on the political table.
And, to enforce such bans, states like Virginia, West Virginia, and Florida are turning to laws that enlist ordinary people to turn each other in to authorities.
We learned yesterday more details of another undemocratic project thanks to Mark Mazzetti and Adam Goldman of the New York Times: in summer 2018, Republican operatives launched a spying operation in Wyoming to gather dirt on opponents of then-president Donald Trump, targeting progressives, Democrats, and Republicans who seemed insufficiently loyal. To help fund the project, they turned to Erik Prince, known as the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and brother of then–secretary of education Betsy DeVos.
The third piece of this new, frantic language ties into America’s long history of politicians deploying racism to break the coalitions that challenge their power.
When Rubio lies that Biden is sending crack pipes to minority communities, he is tying into other constructed panics around race. Fourteen state legislatures have passed laws restricting the teaching of anything that looks like Critical Race Theory, although the actual concept, an advanced legal theory that seeks to explain the persistence of racial inequality in the U.S., is almost never taught in public schools. Republican allegations of voter fraud focus on majority Black districts, and state laws are increasingly threatening minority voting. On Monday night, the Supreme Court okayed racial gerrymandering, making it harder for Black voters to elect representatives of their choice.
These new legal fences enclosing Black Americans echo times in our past when multiracial coalitions threatened an entrenched political party and those in power reacted by using the law to divide their opponents along racial lines. Last June, as Republican operatives whipped up fears of CRT, Republican political operative Stephen K. Bannon told Politico that enflaming racism was how Republicans would take back Congress. “I see 50 [House Republican] seats in 2022. Keep this up,” he said. “I think you’re going to see a lot more emphasis from Trump on [CRT] and DeSantis and others. People who are serious in 2024 and beyond are going to focus on it.”
Cracking the majority that elected a Democratic government in 2020 will enable the Republicans to take back Congress and, among other things, ease pressure over the January 6 insurrection.
But according to a Washington Post story today, some of the very “suburban moms” being pressed into this racial division are organizing to fight back. “[I]t’s time to get off defense,” organizer Katie Paris told reporter Annie Gowan. “Why should we be the ones explaining ourselves?” Paris’s organization, Red, Wine, and Blue, trains its more than 300,000 members to push back against book bans. Paris recognizes that the attacks on diversity in the schools are about political control of the nation. Attacks on the schools, she says, “certainly are part of what I would say is a pretty massive orchestrated effort to undermine public education and teachers in the country, impose a political agenda, and win back suburban voters.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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mickeyrat
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February 10, 2022 (Thursday)
This morning’s news that former president Trump apparently clogged a White House toilet repeatedly with discarded documents was overtaken this evening by the news that some of the records Trump took from the White House were clearly marked as classified, some of them “top secret.”
The news of the flushed documents came through Axios from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, whose book about Trump will be out in October. By law, the records of a presidential administration belong to the American people; there are strict laws about how they should be handled and preserved. That Trump ignored the Presidential Records Act was known because of stories of how he ripped up documents that others tried to tape back together, but the idea that he was flushing so many documents he periodically clogged the toilet seemed a commentary on his regard for the American people who owned those documents.
And yet, by the end of the day, the flushing was not the big story.
In the 15 boxes of material the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) recovered from the former president’s Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, archivists discovered top secret documents. Top secret clearance is applied to documents whose disclosure “could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security” of the United States. They are supposed to be kept secure, and to be seen only by authorized individuals. NARA officials had been trying to retrieve missing documents since last summer (never, never, mess with archivists—they keep meticulous records), and Trump refused to hand them over. When they found the mishandled documents, they called the Justice Department.
Reid J. Epstein and Michael S. Schmidt in the New York Times recalled that Trump’s handling of sensitive national security documents was so lackadaisical that when he was White House chief of staff, General John F. Kelly tried to stop Trump from taking classified documents out of the Oval Office out of concern that he would jeopardize national security. Epstein and Schmidt recounted how Trump used to rip pictures out of the President’s Daily Brief, the daily bulletin of national security threats. Now, it appears he took secret material and did not keep it secure.
Certainly, Trump knew he was breaking the law. White House counsel Donald McGahn warned him about the Presidential Records Act. So did two chiefs of staff, Reince Priebus and Kelly. In 2017, internal White House memos warned against destroying presidential records, noting that such destruction is a crime. The editorial board of the Washington Post called Trump’s mutilated records, “a wrenching testimony to his penchant for wanton destruction.”
This story is about the stealing of our records and the endangerment of our national security—and the heroism of archivists—but it is also a story about the media. The defining narrative of the 2016 election was about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails, allegedly mishandled. Again and again, the email story was front-page news. A 2017 study in the Columbia Journalism Review by Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild found that the New York Times in six days published as many cover stories about Clinton’s emails as they did about “all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.” The network news gave more time to Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.
Today, Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America noted that the Trump story should mean that finally “political journalists should stop pretending to believe Republicans when they pretend to be outraged about purportedly illegal or unethical behavior by Democrats.” He compiled a long list of all the Fox News Channel stories about Clinton’s emails and said, “Based on the 2015–16 baseline, Trump flagrantly violating the Presidential Records Act should be a massive story.” Aaron Rupar, author of the newsletter Public Notice, tweeted the obvious: “If two prominent reporters broke news that Joe Biden was flushing documents down White House toilets, [Fox News Channel personality Sean] Hannity would anchor special Fox News coverage that would last through 2024. Trump flushing documents down WH toilets has been mentioned twice on Fox News today, once in passing.”
The House Oversight Committee has announced it will investigate the “potential serious violations” of the Presidential Records Act. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo was more to the point, saying that Trump’s destruction of evidence amounted to “willful and deliberate destruction of government records for the purpose of concealment.”
That analysis agrees with the discovery by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol that the White House phone logs for the day of the insurrection have gaps in them: calls they know Trump made to lawmakers are missing. This may be in part because he used his own private cell phone or the phones of aides.
The destruction of documents in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s hamstrung the investigation, but it is not clear that, in this era, the concealment will be so effective. Yesterday, lawyers for the Department of Justice provided 19 pages of information to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, outlining how they are getting through the massive amounts of information they have, using cell phone records, internet records, geolocation, data aggregators, and so on. It doesn't seem like much is slipping by.
While the investigation by the January 6 committee and the angry split in the Republican Party after the Republican National Committee excused the insurrection as “legitimate political discourse” have gotten all the headlines, the Biden administration has been working to rebuild and redefine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for a new era.
Dr. Mike Martin, a war studies visiting fellow at King’s College London, notes that it is hardly a secret that Russian president Vladimir Putin wants a buffer around Russia of states that are not allied with his enemies. If they cannot be allied with Russia, at least they will be chaotic and neutral, rather than pro-democracy and anti-corruption.
Martin notes it is not a coincidence that Putin decided to test NATO right as German leadership shifts from former German chancellor Angela Merkel to Olaf Scholz, as the U.K. is reeling from scandals surrounding Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and, I would add, as Biden is trying to rebuild the U.S. in the face of open hostility from Republicans after we have suffered far higher Covid death rates than other large, wealthy nations—63% higher since December 1, according to the New York Times.
But the allies surprised Putin by pulling together, in large part because of a sustained and thorough effort by the U.S. State Department, an effort that European diplomats told journalist and political scientist David Rothkopf was “unprecedented.” In a piece for the Daily Beast, Rothkopf notes that the dissolution of the USSR left NATO, along with other international institutions, adrift. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, fed the U.S. sense that it could and should act on its own, getting us into the quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq, which then shaped President Barack Obama’s caution as he tried simply not to screw up on the international stage. Then Trump actively worked to weaken international alliances.
Now, Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan are trying to rebuild NATO and international alliances, focusing on diplomacy. Recognizing that we cannot combat the crises of climate change, pandemics, and emerging technologies without cooperation, they are emphasizing a rules-based international order, and working with others, whose voices matter: “nothing about us without us.”
One diplomat for the European Union told Rothkopf these qualities are “refreshing and, in a way, revolutionary.” A scholar of diplomacy put it like this: “When there are lots of moving pieces in play, when there appears to be the chance for seismic shifts in power, these can call forth a golden age of diplomacy. And the coalition builders, the conceivers of grand alliances, the ones who work well with others, these almost always prevail in the face of a bullying despot.”
Still, no one knows what Russia will do, although as the ground softens, an invasion becomes more difficult. Yesterday, Russia expert and former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul added another piece: “Putin knows…NATO won’t accept new members who have Russian soldiers occupying parts of their countries, because NATO members don’t want a war with Russia. That's why Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 & Ukraine 2014.” Russia currently has troops in Belarus that it says are only there temporarily.
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February 11, 2022 (Friday)
Yesterday, the Treasury noted that the U.S. budget had a surplus of $119 billion in January. That’s the first budget surplus in more than two years. Tax receipts are up significantly: they grew 21% in January to $465 billion, as higher employment and earnings meant a big jump in payroll taxes and withholdings. At the same time, outlays fell 37%.
Today, the administration warned any American in Ukraine to get out as quickly as possible, leaving no later than 48 hours from midday today. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan warned that, “[i]f you stay, you are assuming risk with no guarantee that there will be any other opportunity to leave and no prospect of a U.S. military evacuation in the event of a Russian invasion.” He said the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv stands ready to help financially and logistically.
Sullivan told reporters that the administration believes that the world has entered the window of time in which if Russian president Vladimir Putin is going to attack Ukraine, he will do so. The U.S., he said, is “ready either way.” It will continue its hefty diplomatic push, or it and key allies will respond to an invasion with severe economic sanctions, reinforce the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and continue to support Ukraine and its well-trained and equipped army.
The U.S. has deployed service members to Poland, Romania, and Germany to defend NATO territory under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty that established NATO. Article 5 says that an attack against any NATO ally is considered an attack on all of them and that, in such an event, they will come to each other’s aid. To date, Article 5 has been invoked only once: on September 12, 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States.
Those personnel, Sullivan emphasized, “are not soldiers who are being sent to go fight Russia in Ukraine. They are not going to war in Ukraine. They are not going to war with Russia. They’re going to defend NATO territory, consistent with our Article 5 obligation. They are defensive deployments. They are non-escalatory. They are meant to reinforce, reassure, and deter aggression against NATO territory.”
“Whatever happens next,” Sullivan said, “the West is more united than it’s been in years. NATO has been strengthened. The Alliance is more cohesive, more purposeful, more dynamic than at…any time in recent memory.”
President Joe Biden spoke today with leaders from the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Poland, Romania, the Secretary General of NATO, and the presidents of the European Union to coordinate a response to Russian aggression.
Biden will speak again with Putin tomorrow.
The Fox News Channel is cheering on the so-called “Freedom Convoys” of disgruntled Canadians driving commercial trucks who have shut down Ottawa, Canada’s capital, as well as key border crossings between Canada and the U.S. They have created traffic jams that have made it impossible for auto plants on both sides of the border to get the parts they need, and the resulting production cuts, as well as the idling of hundreds of millions of dollars in trade, are hurting the economies of both countries.
According to Justin Ling in The Guardian, the convoys appear to have been organized by James Bauder, a conspiracy theorist who believes Covid-19 is a political scam and has endorsed the QAnon movement. Canada’s recent vaccine requirement to cross the Canadian border provided a catalyst to pull together a number of different groups opposed to public health measures with anti-government protesters. The protests were neither popular nor representative of truckers: there were never more than about 8000 protesters, 90% of truckers crossing the border are vaccinated, and the Canadian Trucking Alliance strongly opposes the protest.
On Tuesday, a spokesperson for the Canadian Trucking Alliance told Rose White of MLive that many of the Freedom Convoy protesters “have no connection to the trucking industry and have a separate agenda beyond a disagreement over cross border vaccine requirements.” Ling noted that the convoy participants flew neo-Nazi and Confederate flags and had QAnon logos on their trucks, but Bauder urged his supporters stick to the message of “freedom.”
The “Freedom Convoy” has been pushed by fake accounts on social media and has picked up supporters from the U.S. right wing, including leading lawmakers. Facebook officials told NBC News today that fake accounts tied to content mills in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Romania, and several other countries have been pushing the convoy. Their disinformation is working; donations from the U.S. have flooded into accounts supporting the convoy protesters.
Former president Donald Trump, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), and others have endorsed the convoy, and the Fox News Channel has talked about the convoy two and a half times as often as CNN and five times as often as MSNBC in the last month, according to Philip Bump of the Washington Post. Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America tweeted that the network has spent more than ten hours on the story since January 18, with the network personalities—especially Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity—explicitly calling for an American version of the protest.
The idea of shutting down supply chains does not interest the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which yesterday denounced the convoy. “The livelihood of working Americans and Canadians in the automotive, agricultural, and manufacturing sectors is threatened by this blockade,” Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa said in a statement. “Our economy is growing under the Biden Administration, and this disruption in international trade threatens to derail the gains we have made. Our members are some of the hardest workers in the country and are being prevented from doing their jobs.”
But that is almost certainly the point. Disrupting a nation’s supply chains destabilizes its economy and thereby weakens the government in power. Indeed, U.S. lawmakers know this quite well: in 1972, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency funded a 26-day truckers’ strike in Chile that helped to destabilize the government of democratically elected Salvador Allende, who would be overthrown the following year by right-wing dictator General Augusto Pinochet.
The economy under Biden shows that his traditional vision of a government that supports ordinary people rather than cutting taxes and funneling money to “makers” works; the extraordinary unity of NATO in the face of Putin’s determination to advance authoritarian goals shows that multilateral cooperation rather than unilateral military action works, too. For those determined to regain power, disruption and destabilization are the order of the day.
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February 12, 2022 (Saturday)
On February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born.
Lincoln was the nation’s sixteenth president, leading the country from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865, a little over a month into his second term. He piloted the country through the Civil War, preserving the concept of American democracy. It was a system that had never been fully realized, but that he still saw as “the last, best hope of earth” to prove that people could govern themselves.
“Four score and seven years ago,” he told an audience at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in November 1863, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln dated the founding of the nation from the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution, the document enslavers preferred because of that document’s protection of property. In the Declaration, the Founders wrote that they held certain “truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”
But in Lincoln’s day, fabulously wealthy enslavers had gained control over the government and had begun to argue that the Founders had gotten their worldview terribly wrong. They insisted that their system of human enslavement, which had enabled them to amass fortunes previously unimaginable, was the right one. Most men were dull drudges who must be led by their betters for their own good, southern leaders said. As South Carolina senator and enslaver James Henry Hammond put it, “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’”
In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that arguments limiting American equality to white men were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.” Either people—men, in his day—were equal, or they were not. Lincoln went on, “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it…where will it stop?”
Lincoln had thought deeply about the logic of equality. In his 1860 campaign biography, he permitted the biographer to identify six books that had influenced him. One was a book published in 1817 and wildly popular in the Midwest in the 1830s: Capt. Riley’s Narrative. The book was written by James Riley, and the full title of the book was An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce, Wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa, in the Month of August, 1815, With the Sufferings of her Surviving Officers and Crew, Who Were Enslaved by the Wandering Arabs on the Great African Desart [sic], or Zahahrah.” The story was exactly what the title indicated: the tale of white men enslaved in Africa.
In the 1850s, on a fragment of paper, Lincoln figured out the logic of a world that permitted the law to sort people into different places in a hierarchy, applying the reasoning he heard around him. “If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.—why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?” Lincoln wrote. “You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly?—You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.”
Lincoln saw clearly that if we give up the principle of equality before the law, we have given up the whole game. We have admitted the principle that people are unequal and that some people are better than others. Once we have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, we have granted approval to the idea of rulers and ruled. At that point, all any of us can do is to hope that no one in power decides that we belong in one of the lesser groups.
In 1863, Lincoln reminded his audience at Gettysburg that the Founders had created a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” but it was no longer clear whether “any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” During the Civil War, the people of the United States were defending that principle against those who were trying to create a new nation based, as the Confederacy’s vice president Alexander Stephens said, “upon the great truth” that men were not, in fact, created equal, that the “great physical, philosophical, and moral truth” was that there was a “superior race.”
In the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln called for Americans to understand what was at stake, and to “highly resolve… that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
[Photo of Abraham Lincoln by Alexander Gardner, November 8, 1863]
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February 13, 2022 (Sunday)
Tonight, while those who observe watched the Los Angeles Rams win the Super Bowl, we are in a holding pattern waiting to see if Russian president Vladimir Putin launches a major European invasion, and supporters of the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, are insisting that Trump’s opponent in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, committed treason by spying on his campaign.
There’s a lot going on.
So I thought tonight I would take a little detour and share one of my favorite stories about Valentine’s Day, which is on the calendar tomorrow. It’s one of my favorite stories not because of the way it starts, but because of the way it ends....
On Valentine’s Day in 1884, Theodore Roosevelt lost both his wife and his mother.
Four years before, Roosevelt could not have imagined the tragedy that would stun him in 1884. February 14, 1880, marked one of the happiest days of his life. He and the woman he had courted for more than a year, Alice Hathaway Lee, had just announced their engagement. Roosevelt was over the moon: “I can scarcely realize that I can hold her in my arms and kiss her and caress her and love her as much as I choose,” he recorded in his diary. What followed were, according to Roosevelt, “three years of happiness greater and more unalloyed than I have ever known fall to the lot of others.”
After they married in fall 1880, the Roosevelts moved into the home of Theodore’s mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, in New York City. There, they lived the life of wealthy young socialites, going to fancy parties and the opera, and traveling to Europe. When Roosevelt was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1881, they moved to the bustling town of Albany, where the state’s political wire-pullers worked their magic. Roosevelt’s machine politician colleagues derided the rich, Harvard-educated young man as a “dude,” and they tried to ignore his irritating interest in reforming society.
In the summer of 1883, Alice discovered that she was pregnant, and that fall she moved back to New York City to live with her mother-in-law. There she awaited the birth of the child who Theodore was certain would arrive on February 14.
As headstrong as her father, Roosevelt’s daughter beat her father’s prediction by two days. On February 12, Alice gave birth to the couple’s first child, who would be named after her. Roosevelt was at work in Albany and learned the happy news by telegram. But Alice was only “fairly well,” Roosevelt noted. She soon began sliding downhill. She did not recover from the birth; she was suffering from something at the time called “Bright’s Disease,” an unspecified kidney illness.
Roosevelt rushed back to New York City, but by the time he got there at midnight on February 13, Alice was slipping into a coma. Distraught, he held her until he received word that his mother was dangerously ill downstairs. For more than a week, “Mittie” Roosevelt had been sick with typhoid. Roosevelt ran down to her room, where she died shortly after her son got to her bedside. With his mother gone, Roosevelt hurried back to Alice. Only hours later she, too, died.
On February 14, 1884, Roosevelt slashed a heavy black X in his diary and wrote “The light has gone out of my life.” He refused ever to mention Alice again.
Roosevelt’s profound personal tragedy turned out to have national significance. The diseases that killed his wife and mother were diseases of filth and crowding—the hallmarks of the growing Gilded Age American cities. Mittie contracted typhoid from either food or water that had been contaminated by sewage, since New York City did not yet treat or manage either sewage or drinking water. Alice’s disease was probably caused by a strep infection, which incubated in the teeming city’s tenements, where immigrants, whose wages barely kept food on the table, crowded together.
Roosevelt had been interested in urban reform because he worried that incessant work and unhealthy living conditions threatened the ability of young workers to become good citizens. Now, though, it was clear that he, and other rich New Yorkers, had a personal stake in cleaning up the cities and making sure employers paid workers a living wage.
The tragedy gave him a new political identity that enabled him to do just that. Ridiculed as a “dude” in his early career, Roosevelt changed his image in the wake of the events of February 1884. Desperate to bury his feelings for Alice along with her, Roosevelt escaped to Dakota Territory, to a ranch in which he had invested the previous year. There he rode horses, roped cattle, and toyed with the idea of spending the rest of his life as a western rancher. The brutal winter of 1886–1887 changed his mind. Months of blizzards and temperatures as low as –41 degrees killed off 80% of the Dakota cattle herds. More than half of Roosevelt’s cattle died.
Roosevelt decided to go back to eastern politics, but this time, no one would be able to make fun of him as a “dude.” In an era when the independent American cowboy dominated the popular imagination, Roosevelt now had credentials as a westerner. He ran for political office as a western cowboy taking on corruption in the East. And, with that cowboy image, he overtook his eastern rivals.
Eventually, Roosevelt’s successes made establishment politicians so nervous they tried to bury him in what was then seen as the graveyard of the vice presidency. Then, in 1901, an unemployed steelworker assassinated President William McKinley and put Roosevelt—“that damned cowboy,” as one of McKinley’s advisers called him—into the White House.
Once there, he worked to clean up the cities and stop the exploitation of workers, backing the urban reforms that were the hallmark of the Progressive Era.
[Photo of Theodore Roosevelt's diary, Library of Congress.]
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February 14, 2022 (Monday)
It appears there was a reason for the former president’s unhinged rant of yesterday suggesting that members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign had spied on him and that “in a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”
Trump is likely unhappy because of a letter his accountants, the firm Mazars, sent to the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer on February 9. That letter came to light today when New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is investigating the finances of the Trump Organization, filed new court documents to explain why she wanted to question Trump and his adult children under oath.
The Mazars letter told the Trump organization that Trump’s financial statements from years ending June 2011 through June 2020 could not be relied upon to be accurate, and that it should tell anyone relying on those documents—banks, for example—that they were not reliable. It went on to say there was now a “non-waivable conflict of interest” with the Trump Organization that meant that Mazars was “not able to provide new work product” for the organization.
Lawyer George Conway interpreted the letter for non-lawyers. He tweeted:
“‘decision regarding the financial…statements’=they are false because you lied
‘totality of the circumstances’=the D.A. is serious
‘non-waivable conflict of interest’=we are now on team D.A.
‘not able to provide new work product’=sorry we’re not going to jail for you”
That is, it appears that Mazars is now working with James’s office. Last month, James’s office alleged that there is “significant” evidence that the Trump Organization manipulated asset valuations to obtain loans and avoid taxes. Now Trump’s accountants appear to be working with her office and have said that Trump’s past ten years of financial statements “should not be relied upon.”
This will probably be a problem for the banks that have loaned money to Trump. Their officers have likely relied on the accuracy of the information Trump provided, and according to lawyer Tristan Snell, the lenders could now call in loans early or otherwise change the terms of their agreements.
The Trump Organization jumped on the statements in the Mazars letter that “we have not concluded that the various financial statements, as a whole, contain material discrepancies,” and that “Mazars performed its work in accordance with professional standards” to claim that it is exonerated from any wrongdoing. “This confirmation,” it wrote, “effectively renders the investigations by the DA and AG moot.”
NBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner tweeted: “Trump Org[anization] tries to spin it as a complete exoneration (& G[eorge] Orwell blushes).” Orwell was famous for identifying “doublespeak,” language that reverses the meaning of words.
But while the fear of what it means for him that his accountant has dropped him might have inspired Trump’s rants about executing Hillary, the same does not hold for Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who on Sunday’s Fox & Friends broadcast agreed with Trump that Clinton’s aides had spied on him, and implied the punishment for such alleged espionage should be death.
The normalization of violence as part of the mainstream Republican Party is cause for concern.
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February 15, 2022 (Tuesday)
In all the chaos surrounding the former president, the actions today of the current president, Democrat Joe Biden, seem to be getting short shrift. This is unfortunate because they say a lot about his reorientation of the U.S. government.
At 3:30 this afternoon, Biden addressed the nation to update us on the crisis in central Europe as Russia threatens to invade Ukraine again. He reiterated that the U.S. has engaged in “non-stop diplomacy” for weeks and is prepared to continue that approach, proposing new measures for arms control, transparency, and strategic stability.
If diplomacy fails, the U.S. and our allies and partners around the world will impose economic sanctions on Russia and exert “intense pressure on [Russia’s] largest and most significant financial institutions and key industries.” Nord Stream 2, the valuable natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, will halt. And while the U.S. will not send military personnel to fight Russia in Ukraine, it will support Ukraine with armaments and intelligence. The U.S. will also honor Article 5 of our “sacrosanct” North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) obligations, defending any NATO country Russia attacks.
The U.S., NATO, and Ukraine are not a threat to Russia, he said, and we have no beef with Russian citizens. But the U.S. insists on basic principles: “Nations have a right to sovereignty and territorial integrity. They have the freedom to set their own course and choose with whom they will associate.”
“This is about more than just Russia and Ukraine,” he said. “It’s about standing for what we believe in, for the future we want for our world, for liberty…the right of countless countries to choose their own destiny, and the right of people to determine their own futures, for the principle that a country can’t change its neighbor’s borders by force. That’s our vision. And toward that end, I’m confident that vision, that freedom will prevail.”
Biden ended his speech with a significant statement: “Thank you,” he said, “I’ll keep you informed.” With that, he echoed Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and reinforced democratic norms: the president answers to the American people.
Meanwhile, in Russia, opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who is serving two and a half years in prison for charges that the European Court of Human Rights called “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable, is again on trial, behind closed doors, for allegedly stealing $4.8 million from organizations he founded. If convicted, he could be sentenced to another ten years in prison.
There was another way in which Biden today reinforced the idea that the government answers to the people. It harked back to an executive order Biden signed on July 9 that sort of slipped under the radar. Designed “to promote the interests of American workers, businesses, and consumers,” the order addressed the consolidation of industries in the last several decades. It noted that mergers and the rise of megacorporations have stifled competition and increased racial, wealth, and income inequality as power is transferred to corporate employers, making it harder for workers to bargain for higher wages and better working conditions.
The order called for reversing these trends and established a White House Competition Council to figure out how best to restore competition, workers’ rights, and consumer protection. It charged the different government departments with reporting on the consolidation in their areas of concern.
Today the Department of Defense issued its report. It noted that since the 1990s, the defense sector has consolidated from 51 to 5 defense contractors. This is a national security issue, it said, since lack of competition means higher prices for the government, slows innovation, and risks supply chains. The report calls for encouraging new businesses, broadening the supply chain, and overseeing mergers more carefully. The Defense Department called for the government as a whole to increase domestic capacity, expand supply chains, and build the workforce to reduce the reliance of our national defense on a few contractors.
In another shift away from big business and toward the American people, today the gunmaker Remington settled a lawsuit with the nine of the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting of December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, when a gunman murdered 20 first graders and six educators and wounded 2 others. The killer used a Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle manufactured by Remington.
A 2005 federal law called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act shields gun manufacturers from lawsuits when someone misuses their weapons, but in 2014, the families sued Remington on the grounds its marketing strategy, aimed at young, at-risk males through product placement in violent video games, made it partially at fault for the Sandy Hook massacre. The ads represented the gun as a combat weapon; Connecticut law prohibits deceptive ads.
The settlement was for $73 million, and it permits the families to release documents showing how Remington marketed the gun. Since Remington went bankrupt and its assets were sold off to other companies in 2020, four insurers will pay the settlement. A lawyer for the families said he hoped this settlement would change the ways gun manufacturers market their products.
Meanwhile, the former president today produced a four-page, somewhat nonsensical statement pushing back against the letter from his accountants, released yesterday, saying that no one should rely on the last ten years of Trump’s financial statements and that they were cutting ties with him. Trump began by saying that “We have a great company with fantastic assets that are unique, extremely valuable and, in many cases, far more valuable than what was listed in our Financial Statements,” then went on to provide cartoonish numbers purporting to prove he has a net worth of more than $6 billion. He said Mazars had withdrawn from his employment because of “vicious intimidation tactics,” and that “[t]his crime against me is a continuation of a Witch Hunt the likes of which has never been seen in this Country before.” He called for investigations of Hillary Clinton instead.
The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol today subpoenaed six more people: two members of the 2020 Trump campaign and four Republican officials from the battleground states that sent fake electors to Washington, D.C.
Michael A. Roman, who has made his career accusing Democrats of voter fraud, was director of Election Day operations for Trump’s campaign; Gary Michael Brown was his deputy. The committee told Roman it has communications showing he was involved “in a coordinated strategy” to get Republican members of state legislatures in contested states to elect false Trump electors, and then helped to direct Trump campaign staffers who were helping to organize the fraud. This puts the effort to overturn the election into Trump’s campaign staff explicitly.
Douglas V. Mastriano of Pennsylvania, Mark Finchem and Kelli Ward of Arizona, and Laura Cox, former chair of the Michigan Republican Party, were all key participants in the scheme to attack the validity of Biden’s election and to create fake alternative electors to enable Pence to overturn that election.
Lawyer John Eastman, who produced the infamous memo with a blueprint for Pence to overturn the election, has claimed that he cannot produce the documents the January 6th committee has subpoenaed because of attorney-client privilege. The judge overseeing the case has ordered him to document those attorney-client relationships by February 22.
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February 16, 2022 (Wednesday)
Today, the Washington Post ran a story by Claire Parker explaining that most Canadian truckers oppose the so-called “Freedom Convoy” protests. Almost all Canadian truckers are vaccinated and resent the protesters, whose shutdown of international borders has “had a very significant negative impact upon our professional driving community,” according to Stephen Laskowski, the president of the Canadian Trucking Alliance.
Prominent leaders of the convoys, including conspiracy theorist James Bauder, are not truckers themselves. Instead, right-wing agitators appear to be the ones behind the Trump and Confederate flags at the protests. More than 55% of the donations to the Christian fundraising website GiveSendGo for the protesters came from the United States.
Truckers’ organizations say the protests undermine the real concerns of truck drivers—wage theft, bad roads, and a lack of bathrooms—and worry that the convoys will hurt the public image of truckers.
Parker’s Washington Post story showing the Freedom Convoys as the expression of a radical fringe was an important reality check to the breathless stories from the American right hailing the Freedom Convoys as a popular movement.
The story that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton allegedly spied on then-candidate Trump’s campaign in 2016 illustrates the importance of the sort of reality-based corrective the Washington Post published about the Canadian truckers.
The story at the root of the right’s accusations against Clinton is actually fascinating. After Russians hacked the servers of the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016, cybersecurity experts started to look to see what else hackers might have hit. In July 2016, four of them noticed that Russia’s Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank appeared to be pinging a server registered to Trump Tower. To a lesser extent, it communicated with Spectrum Health in Michigan, an organization associated with the DeVos family. The servers were configured in such a way that they appeared to be shutting out other communications.
One of the security specialists took the story to lawyer Michael Sussman, who took it to the general counsel at the Federal Bureau of Investigation in September 2016, alerting him that cybersecurity folks thought there might be secret communications between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank. Sussman worked for the same law firm that represented the Clinton presidential campaign.
In May 2019, Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, appointed John Durham, former U.S. attorney for Connecticut, as special counsel to investigate the origins of the FBI’s investigation into the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia.
In September 2021, Durham indicted Sussman for lying to the FBI by saying he was not working for a client when he alerted them to the issue. Sussman denies he said he did not have a client, and identified himself as working for the cybersecurity expert. While Durham’s witness has contradicted himself, emails support Sussman’s account. For his part, Sussman responded by denying the charges and saying that Durham’s 27-page indictment contained “prejudicial—and false—allegations that are irrelevant to his Motion and to the charged offense, and are plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool."
In his indictment, Durham said the cybersecurity experts did not believe their own suggestion of connections between Alfa Bank and Trump Tower and were trying to hurt candidate Trump. They responded by accusing Durham of editing their emails misleadingly and stood behind their earlier conclusions.
The current furor is over a related issue. On Friday, in a court filing in the case against Sussman, Durham alleged that one of the cybersecurity experts, who was working for the White House as part of a cybersecurity contract, “exploited” his access there to find “derogatory information” about Trump. This charge stems from the fact that the researchers found odd data suggesting that a Russian-made smartphone, a YotaPhone, had communicated with the same networks—this we already knew—and that one of them told that information to the CIA in February 2017, about 20 days into the Trump administration. Durham did not indicate when he thought the experts had uncovered the issue—the timing suggests it was in 2016, before Trump took office—and the researcher’s lawyer has pointed out that the person had been hired to identify security breaches and threats.
The story is confusing, but it seems to show security experts who found anomalies and took them to the appropriate authorities (none of them has been charged with anything). The FBI dismissed the server issue, and it is not clear whether the phone issue was ever investigated. The launch of the FBI’s investigation of the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia had nothing to do with any of this, anyway. The investigation, called Crossfire Hurricane, began in July 2016 after George Papadopoulos, a member of the Trump campaign, told an informant that the campaign had dirt on Hillary Clinton. An investigation by the inspector general of the Justice Department concluded that the FBI investigation was not politically motivated.
The current story appears to be a nothing burger, and yet, the former president, right-wing media, and Trump loyalists are flooding the news with accusations that the Clinton campaign paid operatives to “infiltrate” servers at Trump Tower and the White House to create the Russia scandal. They are calling for multiple indictments.
Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) told the Fox News Channel on Sunday: “They were spying on the sitting president of the United States…. And it goes right to the Clinton campaign.” The former president claimed that “Robert” Durham—a name switch that might reflect his intense focus on Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was in charge of the Russia investigation—had provided “indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia.… In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”
The right is complaining bitterly that the mainstream media has covered this story only briefly, insisting the lack of wall-to-wall coverage proves the media is biased against the right. But the exaggeration of this story seems a transparent attempt to revisit the 2016 attacks on Clinton in order to distract both from the revelations of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and from the eye-popping news that Trump’s accountants have said the last ten years of his financial statements cannot be relied upon.
Controlling the narrative has always been a key factor in the right’s ability to turn out voters. But that ability just might be slipping.
Today, former judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit J. Michael Luttig, a Republican, said: “For the past six years, I have watched and listened in disgust that not one single leader of ours with the moral authority, the courage, and the will to stand up and say: ‘No, this is not who we are, this is not what America is, and it’s not what we want to be,’ has done so.”
Also today, a report by the Interior Department’s Inspector General Mark Greenblatt, who was appointed by former president Donald Trump, offered a window into how one Trump loyalist looked at our government as a way to further his own interests. The report concluded that Trump’s secretary of the interior, Ryan Zinke, broke federal ethics rules, lying to officials that he had “purely social” contact with developers in Whitefish, Montana, when in fact he communicated with the developers 64 times to talk about the project, including a parking lot on his own land and his interest in having a brewery on the property.
Zinke is now running for Congress. His campaign called the investigation a “Biden Administration led report” (the investigation began in 2018, under Trump) that “published false information, and was shared with the press as a political hit job.”
Spreading false stories depends on making sure the truth is inaccessible. Today Biden rejected Trump’s attempt to hide the White House visitor logs for January 6, 2021, from the January 6th committee on the grounds of executive privilege. Biden said that keeping them hidden “is not in the best interest of the United States.” Unless a court steps in, the National Archives and Records Administration will deliver them to the committee on March 3.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,778
February 17, 2022 (Thursday)
Today, Judge Arthur F. Engoron of the Supreme Court of the State of New York ruled that former president Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., and his daughter Ivanka Trump must produce documents and testify under oath in a civil investigation into their valuations of their business assets, complying with a subpoena New York attorney general Letitia James issued for their testimony in December.
The Trumps can invoke their rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution not to incriminate themselves. This is what Eric Trump did more than 500 times in October 2020, when he testified before members of the attorney general’s office. In a civil trial, however, invoking the Fifth can be interpreted negatively.
After the decision, James tweeted: “No one is above the law.”
The Trumps intend to appeal.
The arguments in today’s hearing raised a troubling point. Trump sued Attorney General James last December, alleging that “[h]er mission is guided solely by political animus and a desire to harass, intimidate, and retaliate against a private citizen who she views as a political opponent.” In today’s hearing, Trump’s lawyers continually portrayed James’s investigation not as a valid exercise in protecting the rule of law, but as a political attack on Trump. His lawyers argued that James’s investigation is “selective prosecution” and is “unconstitutional,” and that she is pursuing the case only to hurt the former president before the 2024 election.
The judge rejected these claims, pointing out, among other things, that none of the 600 or more documents in the case refer to Trump’s politics; they focus on his financial practices. “In the final analysis,” the judge wrote, “a State Attorney General commences investigating a business entity, uncovers copious evidence of possible financial fraud, and wants to question, under oath, several of the entities’ principals, including its namesake. She has the clear right to do so.”
Trump’s attempt to portray as political any legal reckoning for him for either potential wrongdoing with regard to his finances dovetails with the attempt of Trump and his loyalists to paint the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol as partisan.
Repeatedly, they have called the committee “illegitimate” because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) did not put on it the members House minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) nominated. She had the right to review his nominations, and she rejected Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who has now been implicated in the events of the day, and Representative Jim Banks (R-IN), who had attacked the committee as a partisan exercise “solely to malign conservatives and to justify the left’s authoritarian agenda.” He announced that he would use his place on the committee to investigate the protests of summer 2020 instead of the events of January 6.
After rejecting Jordan and Banks, Pelosi asked McCarthy to nominate others in their place, but instead he withdrew all the Republicans from the committee. At that point, she invited Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) to join the committee. Although Trump Republicans are portraying Cheney as a turncoat, she voted with Trump’s agenda 92.9% of the time. Kinzinger voted with Trump 90.2% of the time.
Nonetheless, Trump loyalists dismiss the two Republicans on the committee and claim the committee is partisan. Some are talking about turning the committee against the Democrats as soon as the House is back in their hands. Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich told the Fox News Channel: “I think when you have a Republican Congress, this is all going to come crashing down, and the wolves are going to find out that they’re now sheep and they’re the ones who are in fact, I think, fac[ing] a real risk of jail for the kinds of laws they’re breaking.”
Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a constitutional law professor and member of the January 6th committee, noted: “That’s the language of authoritarianism.”
Meanwhile, in an unusual move against an incumbent of his own party, House Minority Leader McCarthy has endorsed the Trump-backed primary opponent of Representative Liz Cheney, who is the vice chair of the January 6th committee. Trump and his allies are working this same game, pressing Wyoming’s Republican governor, Mark Gordon, to back a bill that would change state law to prevent Democrats from voting in the Republican primary, thus likely giving a primary victory to Cheney’s opponent. Although Cheney has said she will not encourage Democrats to support her in the primary, the Trump loyalists are prepared to change the law to put a Trump ally in her place.
Tonight, Trump lashed out about the legal developments of the past few days. He insisted that the suggestion by Special Counsel John Durham that operatives for Hillary Clinton spied on Trump as president—a suggestion Durham backed away from today—and Judge Engoron’s decision today were entirely partisan.
Trump claimed that Clinton, “one of the most corrupt politicians ever to run for President, can break into the White House, my apartment, buildings I own, and my campaign—in other words, she can spy on a Presidential candidate and ultimately the President of the United States—and the now totally discredited Fake News Media does everything they can not to talk about it.” (These allegations are false, of course.) On the other hand, he said, Attorney General James is selectively prosecuting him and his family.
“[T]he Radical Left Democrats don’t want [him] to run again,” he wrote, and their targeting of him “represents an unconstitutional attack on our Country… a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt in history.” Finally, he said, “I can’t get a fair hearing in New York because of the hatred of me by Judges and the judiciary. It is not possible.”
There is a dangerous theme running through these stories, as well as Trump’s attack on Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, who is investigating Trump’s attempt to pressure Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia and award that state’s electoral votes to him, rather than to the actual winner, Joe Biden. Earlier this month, Trump told attendees at a rally in Texas that he hoped they would take to the streets with “the biggest protest we have ever had,” if “these radical, vicious racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal.”
Trump and his loyalists are setting up the idea that any attempt to hold Trump and his allies accountable for illegal activities—including the attempt to overturn the 2020 election and thereby destroy our democracy—is a partisan attack. While that argument will undermine the rule of law, there is a twist to it: if Republicans can convince their voters that Democrats have engaged in partisan prosecutions of Trump and his allies, the Republicans can justify partisan prosecutions of Democrats as soon as they get the opportunity, just as Gingrich suggested. If this rhetoric works, Trump can undercut legitimate prosecutions, while Democrats will become fair game for partisan prosecutors.
This is indeed, as Representative Raskin said, the language of authoritarianism.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,778
February 18, 2022 (Friday)
There are four big stories today.
The first is that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has confirmed that it found classified documents among those its staff recovered from former president Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago.
David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, wrote in a letter to Representative Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, that NARA is in the process of inventorying the 15 boxes of material Trump took out of the White House and that it has found “items marked as classified national security information within the boxes.” Because Trump removed classified information from its required security protection, NARA staff have alerted the Department of Justice to that national security breach.
There is more. Ferriero said that NARA has identified social media records that the Trump administration neglected to preserve. NARA “has also learned that some White House staff conducted official business using non-official messaging accounts that were not copied or forwarded into their official electronic messaging accounts,” as the law required. In addition, even after news reports of Trump tearing up records led NARA to remind the White House that records must be preserved, it nonetheless received records that were torn into pieces.
But her emails.
(Sorry. Willfully destroyed records make historians a bit salty.)
Meanwhile, the second story is that John Durham, whose court filing in a case drove the story about Trump’s mishandling of presidential records out of the news this week, has responded to the accusation that he deliberately politicized and exaggerated a story to inflame Trump loyalists. Durham’s filing presented information in such a misleading way that right-wing media and lawmakers have howled incorrectly that it proved Hillary Clinton was spying on Trump both before and after he took office. The defendant in the case asked the court to strike from that filing the inflammatory paragraphs.
Today, Durham responded that “if third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated, or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the Government’s Motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the Government’s inclusion of this information.” In other words, the right-wing media frenzy misrepresents what happened, but that misinterpretation is not Durham’s problem.
The third story is that U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta rejected Trump’s attempt to dismiss three lawsuits that blame him for inciting the January 6 riot. Eleven members of the House of Representatives (in their personal capacities) and two Capitol Police officers have accused former president Trump, Donald J. Trump Jr., Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL), and right-wing militia groups including the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Warboys, and so on, of conspiring to prevent them from performing their official duties. This is a federal crime thanks to a law first passed in 1871 to stop Ku Klux Klan members from preventing Black legislators and their Republican allies from doing their jobs.
After reviewing the events of January 6 and the days leading up to it, the judge concluded that those launching the lawsuits “establish a plausible conspiracy involving President Trump.” He noted that the president and others worked together to disrupt Congress and stop the counting of the certified Electoral College ballots on January 6. The president undermined faith in the election, falsely claiming it was stolen, and urged supporters to go to Washington, D.C., on January 6, telling them it would be “wild.” He planned the rally, and at it he gave a barn-burning speech that concluded: ““We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Trump’s role in a potential conspiracy was “to encourage the use of force, intimidation, or threats to thwart the Certification from proceeding, and organized groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers would carry out the required acts.” The judge also noted a pattern of “call-and-response” between the president and his militia followers. When he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” for example, one of their leaders tweeted: “Standing by sir.”
The court concluded that it was plausible that Trump was part of a conspiracy to stop the performance of official duties.
The fourth story is that this evening, President Joe Biden addressed the nation to update us on the threat of Russia’s launching another invasion of Ukraine. He emphasized that we and our allies stand behind Ukraine and pledge to continue diplomatic efforts to prevent a war, and yet will deliver “massive costs on Russia should it choose further conflict.” He urged Russia “to de-escalate and return to the negotiating table.”
Political scientist and journalist David Rothkopf tweeted that Biden is speaking as the leader of the free world. “It has been a long time since a U.S. president filled that role. His remarks were concise and pointed...and underscored Western resolve. But the headline: He is convinced [that] Putin has decided… to invade.”
Indeed, that was the big takeaway from the speech: Biden said that intelligence sources think Putin has made his decision. Biden said: “we have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning to and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week—in the coming days. We believe that they will target Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, a city of 2.8 million innocent people.”
Former director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Chris Krebs pointed out that the advances the United States intelligence community has made in the last few years in counteractive measures have enabled the U.S. to head off plans “before they’re set in motion.” U.S. officials are alerting Putin to the fact there are leaks in his team, putting his plans at risk. This can cause strife and perhaps make leaders rethink their policies. As Krebs tweeted, it “[p]uts some sand in their gears, creates mistrust, and can slow down planning and operations…. The deliberate approach by western gov[ernmen]ts to anticipate Russian disinfo[rmation] & get in front of it is a positive evolution.”
We do not know where the next several days will lead, of course, but it is notable that the solidarity of the countries allied against authoritarianism, strengthened by U.S. diplomacy, is holding strong.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
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brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 40,718
That was one of her most intense letters of late. I hope it gets read widely.
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
Definitely. In one of George Carlin's HBO shows, he talked about how society was starting to fall aprt. He said, "You can juuuust feel things starting to unravel." Seems like he was right on the money again and it's all starting to ramp up.
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
Variously credited to Mark Twain or Edward Abbey.
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,778
February 19, 2022 (Saturday)
Something a little different tonight. Buddy and I were on the road last week, and he snapped this in a light snow on Boston's Commonwealth Avenue.
It's been a very long couple of weeks, and I'm going to see if I can be in bed before 10.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,778
February 20, 2022 (Sunday)
This afternoon, after a rare four-hour-long meeting of the National Security Council, President Joe Biden canceled a planned trip home to Wilmington, Delaware, tonight. The U.S. intelligence community says with high confidence that Russian president Vladimir Putin has ordered military units to proceed with an attack on Ukraine. The U.S. and the United Kingdom say that they expect Russia to create a “false-flag” attack on Russia, allegedly by Ukraine, that they will use as an excuse to invade.
Tonight, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Bathsheba Nell Crocker, told High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, the former president of Chile, that the United States has “credible information that indicates Russian forces are creating lists of identified Ukrainians to be killed or sent to camps following a military occupation. We also have credible information that Russian forces will likely use lethal measures to disperse peaceful protests or otherwise counter peaceful exercises of perceived resistance from civilian populations.”
A hallmark of this crisis has been the degree to which the U.S. has anticipated events by announcing to the world it has intelligence information laying out Russia’s next moves. This both enables NATO to get out ahead of Russian propaganda and warns Putin that his communications might be compromised, an idea that might give him pause before committing to invasion.
CNN White House reporter D.J. Judd identified those at the NSC meeting as Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Vice President Kamala Harris joined the group from Air Force Two on her way back from Munich, where she was representing the U.S. at the 58th Munich Security Conference, an annual conference on international security.
Russia continues to insist it is not planning an attack on Ukraine, although it has placed 150,000 troops at the Ukraine border, the largest military buildup in Europe since World War II ended. But the warming weather in Ukraine with the mud that it will bring does not bode well for an invasion, and Putin agreed today “in principle” to a meeting with Biden, an offer available only if Russia does not launch a new war.
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky spoke yesterday in Munich, chastising Europe for being slow to recognize the danger of Russian expansionism, even as Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. He warned that such imperialist aims historically have led to world wars unless they are stopped.
Zelensky vowed that Ukraine will fight if Russia invades again—it is still in the country from the 2014 invasion— but hammered home that Ukraine should not be begging for help: Ukraine shields Europe from Russia. Helping Ukraine “is your contribution into the European and international security for which Ukraine has been serving as a reliable shield for eight years now, holding back one of the largest armies in the world,” he said. “This is not a war in Ukraine, but a war in Europe.”
Meanwhile, Russia is extending its military presence in Belarus, where 30,000 Russian troops, along with missiles and other military hardware, have been engaged in military exercises with troops from Belarus. The exercises were scheduled to end today, but the Belarusian Defense Ministry said the troops will stay because of the deteriorating situation in Ukraine.
As he has faced increasing protests from pro-democracy opponents, Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko has reacted with an increasingly heavy hand. In May 2021 he forced an airplane flying over Belarusian airspace to land in Minsk, where authorities took opposition journalist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend into custody (Protasevich has disappeared in custody). Lukashenko has also cultivated ties with Putin. When he invited Russian troops to Belarus in early February, European officials warned they were unlikely to leave. Their presence in Belarus means they are 30 miles from the Ukrainian border and hundreds of miles closer to Poland and Lithuania, both countries that are part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned that "if Russia invades its neighbour,...we will open up the Matryoshka dolls of Russian-owned companies, and Russian-owned entities to find the ultimate beneficiaries within [and sanction them].”
Europe and the United States have vowed severe economic repercussions if Russia attacks Ukraine. But pro-democracy observers have called for the U.S. and the U.K. to crack down on the flow of Russian money into their countries regardless of what the next weeks bring.
Putin’s consolidation of power in Russia in the 1990s coincided with the deregulation of financial sectors in the U.S. and the U.K. and the resulting flow of illicit money into western democracies. A recent study of the U.K. by Chatham House explained that that money enabled oligarchs to corrupt western democracies as they used their ill-gotten wealth to elect politicians who would advance their interests. The U.K. has a “kleptocracy problem,” the authors said. Earlier this month, kleptocracy scholar Casey Michel and Harvard postdoctoral fellow Benjamin L. Schmitt published an article advocating an end to the practice of former politicians “becoming paid shills for autocrats.”
Indeed, while Biden has made ending that corruption and strengthening democracy a priority for his administration, not all Americans think allying with Putin, an authoritarian who poisons his opponents, siphons his country’s money into his own pockets, and has argued that liberal democracy is obsolete, is a bad idea. Led by Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, the Trump wing of the Republican Party appears to be throwing its weight behind Putin.
But will the Republican Party as a whole buck Trump over this and stand with the Democrats behind Ukraine and its democratic aspirations? There are signs that, in fact, it will. Tonight, Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ), who was on his way back from the Munich Security Conference, tweeted: “I’ve honestly never seen more unity among our allies, or our two parties in Congress, on any global issue.”
After all, it was not until Trump delegates made changes to the 2016 Republican political platform that the party weakened its support for Ukraine. And yet, in 2019, when Trump tried to skew the 2020 election by withholding congressionally appropriated funding for Ukraine to support its defense against Russia, Republican senators declined to convict him of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. So, we shall see how the party responds to the Ukraine crisis.
And how will America as a whole respond?
On February 20, Ukraine celebrates the Memorial Day of the Heroes of the Heavenly Hundred, honoring the memory of 107 protesters who died in mass shootings during the 2013 Revolution of Dignity. From 2013 to 2014, Ukrainians rose up against the government of Viktor Yanukovych, an autocratic politician managed by Paul Manafort and backed by Russia, eventually ousting him.
On February 21, the U.S. celebrates Presidents Day, a somewhat vague holiday placed in 1968 near Washington’s birthday on February 22, but also traditionally including Abraham Lincoln, who was born on February 12, 1809. On November 19, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln reminded Americans what they were fighting for:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” There, where more than 3000 U.S. soldiers died and more than 14,000 were wounded over three days, Lincoln explained: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
[Image from the Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana, Library of Congress]
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,778
February 21, 2022 (Monday)
As I write tonight, the U.N. National Security Council is meeting to discuss Russian president Vladimir Putin’s recognition of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) as independent states within the country of Ukraine. Russian-backed rebels have been fighting the Ukraine government in those regions since 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Today the self-styled leaders of those regions asked Russia for recognition, and Putin granted it.
Upon his recognition of the states, Putin sent a limited number of troops into them, alleging that the invaders were a “peacekeeping” mission to support the Russian separatists, who do not control the regions. Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, formally requested the U.N. meeting, citing Russia’s “ongoing aggravation of the security situation around Ukraine” and threats to “international peace and security.”
The events of the day began with a dramatic televised meeting of Putin’s security council in the Kremlin, with Putin asking his ministers if they supported recognizing DPR and LPR. While the meeting was presented as a “live” event, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, one of the advisors, was wearing a watch showing that the event was recorded five hours before, thus placing it before the “governments” of the regions asked for recognition.
Then Putin gave a long, aggrieved speech presenting Russia as the victim of the West, which had turned Ukraine into a “puppet regime.” He claimed that Ukraine is not, and should not be, a separate country from Russia. Shortly after current Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky won election in 2019, Russia began to hand out Russian passports to people in the two regions at stake today, strengthening Putin’s argument that the region is actually Russian. And yet, a poll from earlier this month showed that less than 10% of Russians want to invade Ukraine, making it a risky move for Putin.
Putin’s method for control of other countries has been to work for the election of friendly leaders who will permit the expansion of his influence. It is this history that is behind today’s advance on Ukraine.
In 2010, a pro-Russian politician, Viktor Yanukovych, won the Ukraine presidential election with the help of American political consultant Paul Manafort. Pro-democracy protesters forced Yanukovych from his post on February 21 in 2014, a date whose significance Putin’s actions today reinforced. Since then, Ukraine has turned back toward Europe.
Today, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said, “we will give up nothing to no one” and that the borders of Ukraine “will stay that way, despite any statements or actions taken by the Russian Federation.”
Meanwhile, after the Belarus Defense Ministry said yesterday that Russian troops would stay in the country past yesterday, the originally scheduled date of their departure, it said today that Russian troops might stay in Belarus indefinitely.
It seems worth noting the similarities between the work Manafort did for Yanukovych’s campaign and his work for Donald Trump in 2016, right up to calls to imprison Yanukovych’s pro-NATO main opponent, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who was imprisoned from 2011 until 2014, when she was released following Yanukovych’s ouster from power. And, once in office, Trump did, in fact, let Putin act much as he wished, especially with regard to Ukraine. According to Russia analyst Julia Davis, Russian state television last night said of the former president: “Trump gave us a 4-year reprieve.”
It is not clear if today’s developments are a precursor to a larger invasion, and that smaller incursion was likely an attempt to start a fight among Putin’s opponents over whether it is a big enough invasion to trigger the devastating sanctions the United States and European countries have prepared.
John McLaughlin, former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President George W. Bush and now of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, tweeted: “Putin has choreographed this with the hope that we and the Europeans will debate whether this is an “invasion” or not. And hoping that throws us enough off balance that he will pay a minimal price for this first slice of salami.”
Russia specialist Tom Nichols saw the same thing, tweeting: “Stop parsing ‘invasion.’ Putin just partitioned Ukraine by edict and is backing it up with force. That alone is reason to impose sanctions. Argue about which sanctions to impose, maybe, and leave some daylight for future moves, but this isn't about ‘is it an invasion.’”
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield answered such concerns: “Tomorrow, the U.S. will impose sanctions on Russia for its violation of international law and Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. We can, will, and must stand united in our calls for Russia to withdraw its forces, return to the diplomatic table & work toward peace.” Tonight, Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba “to reaffirm unwavering U.S. support for Ukraine.”
In response to Putin’s machinations today, the U.S. and U.K. immediately imposed limited sanctions. Biden signed an executive order economically isolating the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, banning all U.S. investment and business there, along with any imports from there, although it makes an exception for humanitarian aid. The executive order also allows the government to sanction individuals participating in the seizure of the region, as well.
In an address tonight, Zelensky told the Ukrainian people: “[Ukraine] is within its internationally recognized borders, and will remain so. Despite any statements and actions of the Russian Federation. We remain calm and confident.”
The price of oil rose more than 3% on the news, and stock markets around the world dropped.
Putin and his fellow oligarchs have amassed power thanks to the financial laxness of western democracies, which their money has helped to destabilize. With Putin’s attack on the international rule of law today, challenging western nations to stop him, Edward Luce of the Financial Times identified the larger picture: “Cannot be stated strongly enough,” he wrote. “If the west—chiefly America, but also Britain—doesn't burn its financial ties to Russia's oligarchy then Putin will prevail. This means taking on Wall Street, the City, law firms[,] realtors, the prep schools and western laundering outfits.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,778
February 22, 2022 (Tuesday)
Today Russian president Vladimir Putin said he’s recognizing the full territories claimed by the upstart governments of Ukrainian eastern provinces Luhansk and Donetsk. Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo points out that since those governments only control about a third and a half of the territory, respectively, in those provinces, this recognition would mean that Ukraine is occupying land that belongs to those breakaway regions.
Today, the European Union led the way on announcing sanctions against members of Russia’s leadership, reinforcing the idea of international cooperation against Putin. The E.U.’s 27 member states unanimously agreed to freeze the assets and ban the visas of 351 members of the Duma, the Russian government’s lower house of parliament, who backed recognition of the rogue governments within Ukraine.
The U.K. followed suit, sanctioning three "high net worth individuals" in Russia and five major Russian banks.
Germany halted certification of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, a project worth up to $15 billion to Russia.
In a speech this afternoon, President Joe Biden announced that the U.S. has imposed sanctions on two Russian banks, one of which is associated with the Russian military, and five individuals, including one who is in charge of VK, Russia’s largest social media network, and one that is listed on the London Stock Exchange. It also sanctioned Russia’s debt, cutting off its access to western financing.
The U.S. has gone after Russia’s ability to fund military contracts and raise new money to attack Ukraine. It also is joining with other nations to put the squeeze on what the Treasury Department calls “influential Russians and their family members in Putin’s inner circle believed to be participating in the Russian regime’s kleptocracy.” The goal, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, is to “begin the process of dismantling the Kremlin’s financial network and its ability to fund destabilizing activity in Ukraine and around the world.”
This first group of sanctions seems carefully targeted to hit Putin’s inner circle without sweeping in the Russian people. By applying pressure gradually, it also maintains leverage to try to dissuade Putin from escalating, which would not be the case if the U.S. threw everything at Russia immediately, leaving Putin no reason to change course. And yet, those sanctions remain on the table. Yellen said, “We continue to monitor Russia’s actions and if it further invades Ukraine, the United States will swiftly impose expansive economic sanctions that will have a severe and lasting impact on Russia’s economy.”
As voting rights activist Rachel Vindman put it: “We’re officially in the ‘Finding Out’ phase and all I can say is FINALLY.”
But not all Americans are on board.
Biden’s strong defense of democracy and pulling together of such a strong international coalition has left Republicans unclear about how to respond. In an interview today with right-wing podcaster Buck Sexton, former president Trump expressed admiration for Putin, saying his move to take over parts of Ukraine was “genius.” “Putin declares a big portion of… Ukraine…as independent…. And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen…. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy.”
Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) responded: “Former President Trump’s adulation of Putin today—including calling him a ‘genius’—aids our enemies. Trump’s interests don’t seem to align with the interests of the United States.”
Trump is not the only one. There used to be a saying that politics stopped at the water’s edge, meaning that lawmakers presented a unified front to other countries, no matter their partisan differences. So far, Republicans appear to have thrown that idea overboard, trying to use the crisis to attack President Joe Biden, a Democrat. Those Republicans who believe in protecting an international order based on the rule of law are getting around Biden’s reinforcement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and sanctions by accusing him of being weak on Russia.
The House Republicans somewhat nonsensically tweeted a photograph of the president walking away from the podium after his speech with the caption: “This is what weakness on the world stage looks like” (prompting others to ask if he was supposed to turn cartwheels as he left). House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and the leadership of the House Republicans issued a statement claiming that “Biden consistently chose appeasement and his tough talk on Russia was never followed by strong action.”
Others allied with Trump are supporting Putin by suggesting that the U.S. has no business protecting its ally Ukraine from Russian aggression. This is pushing them into what sure looks like a stand against America.
The press secretary for Florida governor Ron DeSantis, for example, tweeted that “the sad fact is that the USA is in no position to ‘promote democracy’ abroad while our own country is falling apart.” She continued: “I can never trust the federal government in any way.” J.D. Vance, a Republican candidate for the Senate from Ohio, said, “[T]he Russia–Ukraine border dispute has nothing to do with our national security, no American interest is served by our intervention, and that the obsession with Ukraine from our idiot leaders serves no function except to distract us from our actual problems.” Representative Ronny Jackson (R-TX) called for sanctions, not against Russia but against “senior officials in the Canadian government,” apparently because authorities there have arrested members of the truck convoy shutting down border crossings and cities to protest vaccine mandates for truckers.
Some have gone further, either defending Putin or attacking America outright. Candidate for New York Representative to Congress Andrew McCarthy tweeted: “Putin protects the church, tradition, and Russian culture to an extent that globalists cannot accept…. We deal with far worse governments regularly.” Right-wing commentator Candace Owens went further, actually blaming the U.S. for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “WE are at fault,” she tweeted.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has strengthened the international coalition against authoritarianism, but it could enable the Republicans to succeed in undermining Biden at home, replacing him with a pro-Russian leader like Trump in 2024. In that case, Putin’s desperate gambit will have worked, strengthening authoritarians around the world.
Meanwhile, Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny continues to stand for democracy against the authoritarianism that threatens his life. Putin tried to murder Navalny with the nerve agent Novichok and, when that failed, imprisoned him on trumped-up charges for 2.5 years. Now, Navalny is on trial again for fraud and contempt of court; one prosecution witness has refused to testify, saying he was pressured to testify and the charges are “absurd.” If convicted, the 45-year-old Navalny will face another 10 years in prison.
And yet, today Navalny released a 16-tweet thread calling Putin’s security council a bunch of “dotards and thieves” who are trying “to divert the attention of the people of Russia from real problems—the development of the economy, rising prices, reigning lawlessness.” “How long has it been since you last watched the news on federal channels?” he asked. “It's the only thing I watch now, and I can assure you, there is NO news about Russia there AT ALL. Literally. From the first to the last piece, it's Ukraine—USA—Europe.” “We have everything for powerful development in the 21st century, from oil to educated citizens, but we will lose money again and squander the historical chance for a normal rich life for the sake of war, dirt, lies and [corruption]. “The Kremlin is making you poorer,” he wrote, “not Washington.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,778
February 23, 2022 (Wednesday)
Today, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky made a passionate plea to the people of Russia to avoid war. He gave the speech in Russian, his own primary language, and, reminding Russians of their shared border and history, told them to “listen to the voice of reason”: Ukrainians want peace.
“You've been told I'm going to bomb Donbass,” he said. “Bomb what? The Donetsk stadium where the locals and I cheered for our team at Euro 2012? The bar where we drank when they lost? Luhansk, where my best friend's mom lives?” Zelensky tried to make the human cost of this conflict clear. Observers lauded the speech and contrasted its statesmanship with Putin’s recent ramblings.
And yet, it will stand only as a marker. Tonight in America, but early Thursday in Ukraine, Russian president Vladimir Putin launched a “special military operation,” claiming, quite transparently falsely, that he needed to defend the people in the “new republics” within Ukraine that he recognized Monday from “persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime.” He called for “demilitarization” of Ukraine, demanding that soldiers lay down their weapons and saying that any bloodshed would be on their hands.
He also promised to provide for the ”denazification” of Ukraine, a harking back to the period after World War II when Nazis and those who had worked with them were purged from society. Putin has repeatedly referred to Ukrainian leaders as Nazis, a charge Zelensky, who is of Jewish heritage, has pleaded with Russians to reject, citing Ukraine’s losses in World War II and his own grandfather’s service in that war. Putin’s chilling word here suggests that he intends to purge from Ukraine all those who worked with the Zelensky government.
Putin warned: “Anyone who tries to interfere with us, or even more so, to create threats for our country and our people, must know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never before experienced in your history.” This sweeping and vague threat seems to encompass everything from massive cyber attacks through nuclear war, but at this point it seems mostly to be an effort to deter resistance. Russia’s economy is already taking hits from Putin’s decision to recognize the breakaway governments, and it likely cannot withstand a long war. Putin needs a quick win.
As he spoke in a video, wearing the same clothes he wore in the prerecorded meeting broadcast Monday, suggesting this message might have been recorded at the same time, the U.N. Security Council was holding an emergency meeting in New York City to implore him not to go forward with war. At the Security Council meeting, the Russian ambassador claimed his nation was not “being aggressive against the Ukrainian people, but against the junta in power in Kyiv.” Rather than a junta government that took power by force, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky was popularly elected in April 2019 in a landslide of more than 73%.
At 10:58 tonight, Eastern time, Ukraine foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted: “Putin has just launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Peaceful Ukrainian cities are under strikes. This is a war of aggression. Ukraine will defend itself and will win. The world can and must stop Putin. The time to act is now.”
By midnight tonight, Ukraine’s state emergency service said that ten regions were under attack.
Countries around the world condemned the attack. Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs Jeppe Sebastian Kofod said: “Denmark utterly condemns this horrific attack…. An abhorrent breach of international law. Russia bears full responsibility for this needless conflict[.] We will coordinate closely with allies, partners for strongest possible international reaction[.]”
In a statement, President Biden said, “The prayers of the entire world are with the people of Ukraine tonight as they suffer an unprovoked and unjustified attack by Russian military forces. President Putin has chosen a premeditated war that will bring a catastrophic loss of life and human suffering. Russia alone is responsible for the death and destruction this attack will bring, and the United States and its Allies and partners will respond in a united and decisive way. The world will hold Russia accountable.”
The administration increased sanctions today, adding the company building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and its corporate officers. Tomorrow, Biden will meet in the morning with the other leaders of the G7: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U.K.—the world’s wealthiest liberal democracies. He will speak to the American people afterward to announce further consequences for Russia’s aggression.
Tonight, Biden reported: “President Zelenskyy reached out to me tonight and we just finished speaking. I condemned this unprovoked and unjustified attack by Russian military forces. I briefed him on the steps we are taking to rally international condemnation, including tonight at the UN Security Council. He asked me to call on the leaders of the world to speak out clearly against President Putin’s flagrant aggression, and to stand with the people of Ukraine.”
Zelensky told his people: “A minute ago I spoke to President Biden. The USA has started to unite international support. Today we need each of you to stay calm. If you can, stay at home. We are working. The army is working. The whole security and defense sector of Ukraine is working.”
Richard Engel of NBC News reported on this speech by Zelensky and in the report he noted that much of the Russian news flying around Ukraine appears to be false, designed to get Ukrainians to panic and give up quickly.
I’m cutting the news in this letter off at midnight, Maine time, to keep the record clear. And, while we’re at it, a lot happened domestically today, but I am holding it for the future. Today’s invasion of democratic Ukraine by authoritarian Putin is important. It not only has broken a long period of peace in Europe, it has brought into the open that authoritarians are indeed trying to destroy democracy.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,778
February 24, 2022 (Thursday)
Illia Ponomarenko, a defense reporter with the Kyiv Independent, reported today that according to Ukraine’s top general, “Russia’s blitzkrieg on day one has failed.”
Washington Post reporter Dan Lamothe today listed information delivered in an early briefing by a senior U.S. defense official. While this information is very early, and likely to be revised in the future, the official told reporters that the U.S. believed Russia launched more than 100 missiles at Ukrainian targets last night, primarily at airports and military targets. There were an estimated 75 Russian planes, including bombers, targeting nearly 10 airports.
The official described this as an “initial phase” of a “large-scale invasion” from Belarus south, from Crimea north, and from Russia to around the city of Kharkiv, which saw the heaviest fighting. The next move, he predicted, would be on Kyiv. “We still believe—it is our assessment—that they have every intention of basically decapitating the government and installing their own method of governance, which would explain these early moves toward Kyiv.” Tonight, U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley told lawmakers that Russian troops were now about 20 miles from Kyiv.
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky told his people that Ukraine lost 137 defenders on the first day, with 316 more wounded. Russia has not acknowledged any losses, although images from photojournalists in Ukraine indicate there have been Russian casualties.
Before midnight, American Eastern time, Friday had begun in Ukraine with the news from Ukraine’s minister of foreign affairs Dmytro Kuleba that Kyiv was being hit by “horrific Russian rocket strikes…. The last time our capital experienced anything like this was in 1941 when it was attacked by Nazi Germany. Ukraine defeated that evil and will defeat this one. Stop Putin. Isolate Russia. Sever…all ties. Kick Russia out of everywhere.”
In fact, isolating Russia and turning it into an international pariah seems to be the plan of the U.S., the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, and other allies and partners.
This morning, President Biden spoke with the leaders of the G7, the world’s wealthiest liberal democracies, and tweeted: “[W]e are in full agreement: We will limit Russia’s ability to be part of the global economy. We will stunt their ability to finance and grow Russia’s military. We will impair their ability to compete in a high-tech, 21st century economy.” G7 countries, which control 50% of the world’s gross domestic product, will participate in isolating Russia.
Early this afternoon, President Biden announced more sanctions on Russia, squeezing its financial system, its economy, and its political leadership. The Treasury Department also announced sanctions against state-owned banks, defense and security industries, and individuals in Belarus, “due to Belarus’s support for, and facilitation of, the invasion.” The U.S. will also block Russian access to emerging technologies.
According to the White House, the European Union, Australia, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom all are planning their own sanctions. Tonight, the leaders of the European Union announced “massive and targeted” sanctions against Russia, hitting 70% of the Russian banking market, oil exports, and Russia’s access to technology.
A bright spot for Putin is that China has eased restrictions on the importation of Russian wheat, thus helping Russia’s economy and helping out its own food security. Analyst Rachel Ziemba told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” that China’s interest in its access to important commodities will likely make it a “meaningful financial lifeline” for Russia, but China will not align with Moscow completely.
But there are plenty of dark spots for Putin, too. After the invasion, Russian stocks plunged 45% before recovering to close down 33%, while the ruble hit a record low against the dollar. Putin summoned Russian oligarchs to a meeting today. According to Max Seddon, Financial Times Moscow bureau chief, Putin told Russia’s business elite that he was forced into invading Ukraine because “they could have created such risks for us that it wasn’t clear how the country [Russia, that is, not Ukraine] could have continued to exist.”
Protesters in Russia took to the streets to oppose the war; many were arrested. According to Nastassia Astrasheuskaya, a Financial Times reporter in Moscow, the Kremlin had expected the public would support the attack on Ukraine. Prominent celebrities, including those who rely on the state to make a living, also came out against the war.
On Facebook, the commander in chief of the armed forces of Ukraine, Lieutenant General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, posted that a Russian platoon surrendered about 85 miles north of Kyiv. He said the platoon leader believed they were a reconnaissance team. “No one thought that we were going to kill. We were not going to fight, we were collecting information.”
The Ukraine Defense Ministry has asked computer hackers to help Ukraine’s war effort, and a Twitter account claiming to represent the computer hacker group Anonymous claimed to have taken down the Russian RT media outlet, which was, indeed, down this afternoon.
The U.S. is sending 7,000 more U.S. troops to Europe to shore up the defenses of our NATO allies. And two former presidents—Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republican George W. Bush—today released statements condemning the invasion and standing behind Ukraine. Bush wrote, “The American government and people must stand in solidarity with Ukraine and the Ukrainian people as they seek freedom and the right to choose their own future. We cannot tolerate the authoritarian bullying and danger that Putin poses.”
And yet, while some leading Republicans are expressing support for Ukraine and simply ignoring President Joe Biden, the same Republicans who have been most closely associated with Trump and the January 6 insurrection are trying to use Russia’s attack on Ukraine to undermine the president. Following the lead of former president Trump, who says that Putin invaded because Biden is weak, Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who took over for Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) when the House Republicans stripped her of her position as the third most powerful House Republican, tweeted that “Joe Biden is unfit to serve as Commander-in-Chief. He has consistently given into [sic] Putin’s demands and shown nothing but weakness.”
This is simply an extraordinary statement for a lawmaker to issue at a time when a president is rallying the global community to stop an invasion of another democracy, but she is not alone. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) called Biden weak and corrupt; Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said that former president Trump’s “unpredictability” (!) kept Putin cautious; Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) complained that the administration “project[s] weakness.” Representatives Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Paul Gosar (R-AZ); Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Ron Johnson (R-WI); and others all are working to undermine Biden in this moment of global crisis.
Diplomat Aaron David Miller, who spent 24 years in the State Department, had his own assessment of the president. He said: “So far, Biden has done a masterful job of leading and maintaining both E.U. and NATO unity.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 40,718
^^^"Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) called Biden weak and
corrupt; Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said that former president
Trump’s “unpredictability” (!) kept Putin cautious; Representative Jim
Jordan (R-OH) complained that the administration “project[s] weakness.”
Representatives Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Paul Gosar
(R-AZ); Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Ron Johnson
(R-WI); and others all are working to undermine Biden in this moment of
global crisis."
Of course, we know what these people are full of and made of, but this alone is enough to illustrate the point. Talk about weak!
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
Variously credited to Mark Twain or Edward Abbey.
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,778
February 25, 2022 (Friday)
This was a historic day in a historic week.
This afternoon, President Joe Biden nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to the Supreme Court. “For too long, our government, our courts haven’t looked like America,” Biden said in a speech introducing Jackson. “I believe it’s time that we have a court that reflects the full talents and greatness of our nation with a nominee of extraordinary qualifications, and that we inspire all young people to believe that they can one day serve their country at the highest level.”
Educated at Harvard, Jackson clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer, who is retiring and whose seat she will take if she is confirmed. Jackson has shown the same focus on democracy that Breyer brought to the court. While so-called “originalists” defer to what they perceive to be the legal limitations written into the Constitution by its Framers, Breyer defers instead to the purpose of the Constitution, deciding cases in part by figuring out which outcome would best defend and expand democracy. His focus on democracy also means he prioritizes consensus and civility.
Republicans who will likely object to Jackson are using her nomination to hit at the Biden administration. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who sits on the Judiciary Committee, said it was “extremely inappropriate” for the president to nominate a Supreme Court justice just days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and she said that “Biden is putting the demands of the radical progressive left ahead of what is best for our nation.”
In contrast to Blackburn, one could see the act of nominating a justice in the midst of a crisis in the same way President Abraham Lincoln thought about holding the 1864 election in the midst of the Civil War. In November of that year, he told a group of visitors that no one had been sure that a democratic government could survive in times of emergency, but he believed that if an emergency could interrupt the normal process of democracy, “it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.” Holding the election was itself a victory for the rule of law.
Similarly, it seems to me a mistake to characterize Jackson as a part of a “radical progressive agenda” unless democracy itself has become such a thing. Jackson’s tightly reasoned briefs show a focus on democracy that is similar to that of her mentor, Breyer. She has become famous, for example, for a 2019 opinion rejecting the idea that a president’s advisors cannot be compelled to testify before Congress. “Presidents are not kings,” she wrote. “This means that they do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control. Rather, in this land of liberty, it is indisputable that current and former employees of the White House work for the People of the United States, and that they take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Like Breyer, as well, Jackson has a “reputation for pragmatism and consensus building,” according to former president Barack Obama, who nominated her as a district judge.
At today’s event, Jackson defined America as “the greatest beacon of hope and democracy the world has ever known.”
If she is confirmed, Jackson will be the 116th Justice in American history, University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck pointed out on Twitter. She will be the eighth who is not a white man; she will be the sixth woman.
Anticipating criticism suggesting that Jackson’s judicial experience has been brief, Vladeck also compiled a chart of the judicial experience of all Supreme Court justices since 1900. The information showed that Jackson’s 8.9 years of prior judicial experience is more than four of the justices currently on the court—Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, Elena Kagan, and Amy Coney Barrett—had combined. It's also more experience than 4 of the last 10 justices had at their confirmations, or 9 of the last 17, or 43 of the 58 appointed since 1900.
“Today, as we watch freedom and liberty under attack abroad, I'm here to fulfill my responsibilities under the Constitution, to preserve freedom and liberty here in the United States of America,” Biden said.
This week was historic precisely because it brought into the open the degree to which freedom and liberty are, in fact, under attack, as Russian president Vladimir Putin launched a war of aggression against neighboring Ukraine.
Fighting in Ukraine is approaching Kyiv, where the government has armed its civilians to defend the city. Washington Post military reporter Dan Lamothe tweeted information from a senior defense official, who said that Russia is getting more resistance than it expected and that it has not managed to establish air superiority over Ukraine. The U.S. believes that Russia has launched more than 200 missiles at Ukraine, aimed at military sites but hitting civilian areas as well. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said today that 150,000 Ukrainians have been displaced since Russia invaded.
Putin today called for Ukrainians to overthrow their own government and negotiate peace with him.
Putin needed a quick victory in Ukraine, and the heroic resistance of the Ukrainians has made that impossible, buying time for pressure against him to build. Last night, 1800 Russians were arrested for protesting the war at rallies around the country; prominent Russians, including the children of leading businessmen and lawmakers, are speaking up against the invasion.
When Facebook fact-checked Russian state media accounts and put warning labels on them, the Kremlin limited Russians’ access to the site, where they were sharing their anger at Putin’s war. Apparently, ill-trained Russian conscripts are shocked to be on the front lines in Ukraine—Russian law says only volunteer troops are supposed to be used there.
Tonight Meta, the parent company of Facebook, banned Russian state media from running ads or raising money on Meta platforms anywhere in the world. While the ban apparently does not eliminate third-party ads, it does show which way the wind is blowing.
Today, members of the European Union and Britain froze the European assets of Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The U.S. also sanctioned Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov, as well as Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, which is intended “to attract capital into the Russian economy in high-growth sectors,” according to White House press secretary Jen Psaki. The Russian Ministry of Defense was hacked and taken down, and the personal information of its employees was leaked; the hacker group Anonymous claimed credit.
For the first time in its history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) activated its rapid response troops that can deploy quickly in case Russian troops cross the borders of NATO countries.
Putin is rapidly becoming isolated. Russia vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the invasion and calling for an immediate end to hostilities and the withdrawal of Russia’s troops from Ukraine, but it was notable that China, India, and the United Arab Emirates abstained rather than vote. Also today, President Milos Zeman of Czechia and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, both of whom have been supporters of Putin, came out strongly against the invasion. So did Romania and Bulgaria. Kazakhstan has refused to send troops to Russia.
The Ukraine resistance has given rise to the Ghost of Kyiv, a fighter pilot who may or may not be real, and who may or may not be a woman, and who has shot down six Russian planes. Such a superhuman legend symbolizes Ukraine’s people this terrible week.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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There is nothing happening tonight that cannot wait until tomorrow. Let's take the night off and regroup on Groundhog Day....
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Today, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman sued Donald Trump, Jr.; Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani; as well as Fox News Channel personalities, including Laura Ingraham, for obstructing an official proceeding “by intimidating and retaliating against a key witness.” The lawsuit describes an “intentional, concerted campaign of unlawful intimidation and retaliation against a sitting Director of the National Security Council and decorated military officer…to prevent him from and then punish him for testifying truthfully before Congress during impeachment proceedings against President Trump.”
Their goal, the lawsuit says, was to portray him as disloyal to the United States, a spy, and “a politically motivated ‘leftist’ within the military who was insubordinate and even broke the law.” In addition to the effect on Vindman himself, it said, the attacks “left a stain on our democracy.”
And so, on Groundhog Day, we have come full circle.
Vindman was a key witness in the first House of Representatives impeachment hearing in 2019. A Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, he had been on the July 25, 2019 call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. After hearing the call, Vindman had reported to John Eisenberg, the top lawyer for the National Security Council, that the call was troubling, with Trump pressing Zelensky to deliver an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of potential rival Joe Biden, in exchange for promised military aid to Ukraine so it could resist Russian incursions. Eisenberg told Vindman not to tell anyone else about the conversation.
Vindman’s opening statement before Congress recalled the American dream. He explained that his father, who had brought Vindman from Ukraine when three, was afraid to have his son testify against the president. Vindman assured him it would be okay. “Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth,” Vindman said he told his father, “because this is America, this is the country I have served and defended, that all of my brothers have served, and here, right matters.”
After Vindman’s testimony, he was ousted from the National Security Council, and his twin brother Eugene, a senior lawyer and ethics official for the NSC who had not been involved in the impeachment hearings, was also fired, escorted off White House grounds “suddenly and without explanation,” according to Alexander’s lawyer David Pressman. The two men were fired on the same day Trump told reporters that he was “not happy” with Vindman’s testimony.
On July 8, 2020, Vindman resigned from the military after more than 21 years, citing the “campaign of bullying, intimidation, and retaliation” led by the president for his decision to leave public service.
And now he is suing the allies of the former president, demanding they repair the damage they did, both to Vindman and to democracy. "The threat to our democracy came from a conspiracy among people within the highest reaches of our government and their close allies. President Trump and his aides and other close associates, including Defendants, waged a targeted campaign against Lt. Col. Vindman for upholding his oath of office and telling the truth."
“I filed this lawsuit,” he said, “because I believe in the active role all citizens must play in upholding our democracy.”
It’s an interesting moment.
The former president is still strong. His fundraising emails, full of fake promises of 700x matching and dinners with the president, might sound just like scams, but they work: he started the year with $122 million in cash. He seems to be stockpiling it for himself; the only significant expenditure he has made is $1 million to a nonprofit, the Conservative Partnership Institute.
But things are not all ducky for him, either.
That million-dollar payment to CPI is significantly higher than any other donation, and it went to CPI, where his former chief of staff Mark Meadows now works, weeks after the House created the January 6 committee, which has subpoenaed Meadows.
Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, is supposed to go live this month, but when Business Insider reached out to Trump’s people—including to former representative Devin Nunes, who left Congress to become the CEO of Trump Media and Technology Group—to ask about it, no one responded. The investor presentation for the company was “so bad, it is laughable—literally says nothing,” one person to whom it was circulated wrote. The special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) behind Trump’s company is under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Yesterday, Trump tried to take back his statement of Sunday indicating he wanted then–vice president Pence to overturn the election. He released a statement saying he only wanted Pence to send the electoral votes back to the states “for reassessment.” This, too, would have been illegal, but it is significant because it shows he recognizes that his earlier statement adds to the case against him.
At his rally in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday, Trump promised to pardon the insurrectionists if he is reelected, and today Tara Palmeri of Politico reported that Trump had considered blanket pardons of the rioters, asking advisors if he had the power and if it was a good idea. Belying the idea floated by right-wing media that the rioters were “antifa,” he asked, “Is it everybody that had a Trump sign or everybody who walked into the Capitol,” who could be pardoned. Trump also wanted to announce that he was running in 2024 even before Biden’s inauguration, hoping to frame any future prosecutions as being politically motivated.
Representative Pete Aguilar (D-CA), a member of the committee investigating the insurrection, said on CNN that Trump’s promise is “absolutely” witness tampering. He wondered what it would take for Republicans to say enough is enough. “I don’t know where the floor is on that side of the aisle,” he said.
That seems a reasonable question, as right-wing personalities are upping the ante in their political rhetoric, echoing authoritarians in their suggestion that they will use the power of the government to go after those they consider political opponents. Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, for example, has expressed interest in arresting President Biden's chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, saying, “[w]e are going to create criminal referrals…. There needs to be an example made of him.”
As right-wing fury seems to mount, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is quietly gathering evidence, and those testifying seem to be getting closer to the heart of the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Yesterday, yet another member of former vice president Mike Pence’s team, top aide Greg Jacob, met with the January 6 committee for more than eight and a half hours.
The leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, has appeared before the committee this week and has answered “many questions,” according to his lawyer, although he has exercised his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination with regard to other questions.
Today, former Department of Justice lawyer Jeffrey Clark met with the January 6 committee for close to two hours. Clark backed Trump’s attempt to cast doubt on the election, and Trump entertained the idea of making him attorney general until Department of Justice leadership threatened to resign as a group if he did. Initially, Clark refused to answer a subpoena, and in December the committee voted to hold him in criminal contempt. The committee remained willing to talk, though, and apparently it now has.
We learned today that the committee has also subpoenaed from T-Mobile the phone records of Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward and her husband, Michael Ward, both of whom signed a document falsely claiming that Trump had won Arizona’s electoral votes. The Wards filed suit in federal court today to block the subpoena, saying that because the Wards are osteopathic doctors who use their phones to talk to patients, the subpoenas violate patient-doctor privilege.
Meanwhile, the committee has put off Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s testimony while it discusses the scope of his subpoena with his lawyer.
Today, committee member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said that the committee expects to hear from Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter and White House advisor, whom the committee expects to call this week.
Raskin also said public hearings will likely be held in April. This will make them uncomfortably close to the midterm elections, but they have had to be pushed back because of obstruction by Trump’s people.
And so we are back to where we were in 2019, when Vindman first reminded us that in America, right matters. At long last, will most of us decide that it does?
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Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Today, President Joe Biden announced that U.S. special operations launched a counterterrorism mission against the leader of the Islamic State militant group, ISIS. Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi took control of ISIS after the death of previous leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who killed himself in October 2019 during a raid by U.S. troops. Qurayshi was located in a safe house in northwestern Syria, and as U.S. forces approached, he detonated a bomb killing himself and the 13 women and children in the quarters with him.
Critics had charged that Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, begun under former president Trump, would injure U.S. credibility in the fight against terrorism. Thanking U.S. armed forces for their skill and bravery, Biden indicated his critics’ assessment had been misguided. “Last night’s operation took a major terrorist leader off the battlefield, and it sent a strong message to terrorists around the world: We will come after you and find you,” Biden said.
Biden’s handling of tensions with Russia has also strengthened the nation’s international hand. Russian president Vladimir Putin has demanded extraordinary concessions, and rather than weakening the resolve of members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, his aggression has united them. And, according to Edward Luce of the Financial Times, they are united behind U.S. leadership. “It has been years since that sentence could be written with a straight face,” Luce wrote. “Russia has brought about what it fears—a west that is displaying something approaching resolve.”
Today, U.S. officials claimed to have evidence that Russian intelligence intends to create a “very graphic” video, involving actors and corpses, that claims to show a Ukrainian attack on Russian speakers in order to justify a new Russian invasion of the neighboring country. Britain came to a similar conclusion.
British diplomat James Roscoe tweeted: “Russia says it will never invade Ukraine. Unless it is provoked. So *just in case* it is provoked, it has massed over 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border. But how is it that they are able to anticipat[e] that provocation? Perhaps because they are planning to stage [it]?”
Representative Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), former CIA analyst and former acting assistant secretary of defense, tweeted that a classified briefing was “a powerful reminder of just how much warfare has changed.” The Russian plan to stage a false attack on Russian troops by Ukrainian soldiers is “insane behavior,” she said. “Disinformation & misinformation are real tools in the Russian toolkit, as are cyberattacks that could deliberately target American & NATO civilians.”
Disinformation remains a weapon at home, too.
Josh Dawsey, Rosalind S. Helderman, Emma Brown, Jon Swaine, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post this morning broke the story that on December 18, 2020, extremists proposed to former president Trump that he use the powers of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Department to try to prove that foreign countries had swung the 2020 election. It suggested he could direct the agencies to sift through the electronic data from phones, emails, social media, and so on, automatically collected by those agencies but against the law to use to target individuals without a court order.
After the election, on November 9, 2020, the White House pressured the Pentagon into naming a lightly qualified 36-year-old Trump loyalist, Michael Ellis, to become the top lawyer at the NSA. The appointment was problematic and thus Ellis did not take charge during Trump’s term, but the decision to appoint him over career civil servants perhaps bears more attention even than it got at the time.
While the proposal never went into effect, its backers did send it to Senators Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Ron Johnson (R-WI). Senator Cynthia M. Lummis (R-WY) also attended a meeting on January 4 in which attendees alleged (falsely) that foreign governments had affected the vote. “[W]hy the heck did these R[epublican]s not alert the FBI, totally failure of conscience and their oaths,” wrote Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post.
It’s a good point.
Meanwhile, reporters continue to dig into the history of the false electors who claimed Trump had won their states. Alan Feuer, Maggie Haberman, and Luke Broadwater of the New York Times today revealed two legal memos from a lawyer affiliated with the Trump campaign providing legal rationales for the fake electors. “[W]e are,” he wrote, “trying to have an alternate slate vote, in hopes that its legitimacy will be validated….” One memo, dated November 18, 2020, by Kenneth Chesebro, justified the casting of fake ballots; another, dated December 9, 2020, focused on overturning the certified ballots for Biden. It urged the fake electors to meet in secret, sign fake documents, and submit them as if they were real.
Chesebro worked to find loopholes in the mechanics of the process to enable the fake electors to seem legitimate. “Michigan is much more specific about the location in which the electors must meet,” he noted, “which could be a bit awkward.” “Nevada is an extremely problematic State, because it requires the meeting of the electors to be overseen by the Secretary of State, who is only supposed to permit electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote in Nevada,” he wrote. “In conclusion,” he wrote, “it appears that voting by an alternate slate of electors is unproblematic in Arizona and Wisconsin; slightly problematic in Michigan (requiring access to the senate chamber); somewhat dicey in Georgia and Pennsylvania…; and very problematic in Nevada.”
Chesebro’s cool analysis of how to overturn our democracy is chilling.
Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, notes that the committee members are paying attention to the churning news about the insurrection. Trump’s comments over the weekend about pardoning the January 6 rioters spoke of his intent: ““If this violence against the Capitol wasn’t part of the plan, or wasn’t something he condoned, then why would he consider pardoning them?”
And yet, the Republican National Committee is doubling down on its support for Trump, its resolution committee tonight voting unanimously to censure the two Republican representatives on the January 6 committee: Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).
Ahead of the party vote, Cheney said: “Leaders of the Republican Party have made themselves willing hostages to a man who admits he tried to overturn a presidential election and suggests he would pardon Jan. 6 defendants…some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy. I’m a constitutional conservative and I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump. History will be their judge.”
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Today the January jobs report showed the U.S. added 467,000 jobs. With more than 6.6 million jobs since Biden took office, 2021 under Biden created more jobs than any other year in history. The jobs report also revised the numbers for November and December upward by more than 700,000. The first 12 months of Biden’s presidency mark the best job creation on record. The unemployment rate is at 4.0%.
The other big news today is that the Republican National Committee, meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, censured Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) for joining the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Defending the events surrounding January 6, the RNC said that the investigation is “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
That is, the Republican National Committee says that the January 6 attack on the Capitol—in which nine people died, more than 150 law enforcement officers were injured, offices were ransacked, and rioters spread feces on the walls—was “legitimate political discourse.”
These two wildly different headlines are the outcome of 40 years of U.S. politics.
For a long time, the idea that that economy thrives when the government supports ordinary Americans was not controversial. Democrats began to make it the centerpiece of our system in the 1930s when, after a decade in which the government worked only for the wealthy, they offered a “New Deal” for the American people. Over time, lawmakers from both major parties embraced it, believing they had finally figured out a truly American system that would serve everyone.
A member of Republican president Dwight Eisenhower's administration explained that “Our underlying philosophy…is this: if a job has to be done to meet the needs of people, and no one else can do it, then it is a proper function of the federal government.” This, he said, was the “authentic American center in politics…a common meeting-ground of the great majority of our people on our own issues, against a backdrop of our own history, our own current setting and our own responsibilities for the future.”
But in the 1980s, Republicans argued that this system stifled economic development by hampering the ability of producers to put their money where they thought it would do the most good. Instead of supporting workers, they argued, government should cut taxes to enable those at the top of the economic ladder to accumulate capital and invest in the economy. Tax cuts became their go-to solution for any sort of economic crisis. The government should support the “supply side” of the economy. Any attempt to use the government to help the “demand side” was, they said, “socialism.”
Shortly after Biden took office, the Democrats returned to the old system. To address the economic wreckage left behind by the pandemic, Democrats in March 2021 passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, without a single Republican vote. That measure is behind the extraordinary U.S. economic recovery, proving that, no matter what its supply-side opponents have alleged over the years, supporting the demand side of the economy works.
That the Republican Party has now retreated into the delusion that a deadly attack on our government was “legitimate political discourse” is also a product of 40 years of political rhetoric saying that those who oppose Republican policies are anti-American. The idea behind the insurrection, and behind the Big Lie that inspired it—the idea that Biden stole the presidential victory from former president Donald Trump—was that a Democratic victory could not be legitimate. Indeed, in the letter censuring Cheney and Kinzinger, the RNC charges that “[t]he Biden Administration and Democrats in Congress have embarked on a systematic effort to replace liberty with socialism.” In this framing, any attempt to overturn such an “illegitimate” election would be an act of patriotism.
It would be “legitimate political discourse.”
But overturning elections on the claim that the usurper must defend a nation’s legitimate government is so much a part of authoritarian coups that it is almost a cliché.
And so we stand, on this one day, seeing the reclaiming of an old bipartisan consensus, on the one hand, and the justification for an authoritarian coup on the other.
This extraordinary statement by the RNC has brought the fight for control of the party into the open. This morning, news broke that the January 6 committee has evidence that Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who has been evasive about his contact with Trump on January 6 and who has said he did not recall if he spoke with the president that morning, in fact did. The president called Jordan on the morning of January 6, and they spoke for ten minutes—hardly a call one would forget, it would seem.
Jordan rejected an invitation from the January 6 committee to testify, saying that its request “is far outside the bounds of any legitimate inquiry.”
But if most Republican leaders are lining up behind Trump and the insurrectionists to make up an authoritarian wing of the party, former vice president Mike Pence hinted today he was hoping to carve out some distance from them. Although Trump focused his fury on Pence on January 6 because he would not overturn the election, and although the rioters brought a gallows to hang Pence, the former vice president has largely kept quiet about the event until today.
Hours after the RNC’s statement, Pence told the Federalist Society that January 6 had been a “dark day.” Pence said, "President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone." He added that "there's nothing more un-American" than to have "any one person...choose the American president."
Pence’s team, including his chief of staff, Marc Short, have been cooperating with the January 6 committee, and the committee will get a pile of records from Pence on March 3 unless a court stops Archivist of the United States David Ferriero from delivering them. It is likely Pence knows there is plenty that will come into the open to make siding with the Trump folks politically problematic. But there is more to his statement than that. While Pence stopped short of saying Biden won the election fairly, his rejection of the plot to overturn Biden’s victory and destroy our democracy suggests he is courting the old business wing of the party.
Pence has been closely allied with the billionaire libertarian Koch family throughout his political career and likely hopes to be a 2024 presidential candidate with their backing. Short, too, is allied with Koch family interests, and according to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), foundations and trusts associated with the Kochs are among the deep-pocketed funders of the Federalist Society, where Pence made his statement. The oligarchical wing of the party is, perhaps, making a bid to regain control over the party in the hopes that the insurrectionists will crash and burn.
Certainly, Trump loyalist Stephen Bannon recognized Pence’s words as a defection. On his podcast, Bannon addressed Pence, saying: “You are a stone cold coward…. My head’s blowing up.... I can’t take Pence…and Marc Short and all these Koch guys up there ratting out Trump up on Capitol Hill right now.”
I’m not one to romanticize our history, but it does seem worth noting that it was on this day in 1789 that the Electoral College unanimously elected George Washington the first president of the new United States. It seems that we might be able to choose better leaders than ones who are leaving us at the end of this day in 2022 with the truly legitimate political question: “Ratting him out for what?”
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Just for fun, because today feels like a good day to talk about Grover Cleveland….
The economy has boomed under President Joe Biden, putting the lie to the old trope that Democrats don’t manage the economy as well as Republicans.
This should not come as a surprise to anyone. The economy has performed better under Democrats than Republicans since at least World War II. CNN Business reports that since 1945, the Standard & Poor’s 500—a market index of 500 leading U.S. publicly traded companies—has averaged an annual gain of 11.2% during years when Democrats controlled the White House, and a 6.9% average gain under Republicans. In the same time period, gross domestic product grew by an average of 4.1% under Democrats, 2.5% under Republicans. Job growth, too, is significantly stronger under Democrats than Republicans.
“[T]here has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century,” wrote David Leonhardt of the New York Times last year, “The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.”
The persistence of the myth that Democrats are bad for the economy is an interesting example of the endurance of political rhetoric over reality.
It began in the postwar years: the post–Civil War years, that is. Before the Civil War, moneyed men tended to support the Democrats, for the big money in the country was in the cotton enterprises of the leading enslavers in the American South, and they expressed their political power through the Democratic Party, which promised to protect and nurture the institution of human enslavement. Indeed, when soldiers of the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1861, it was not clear at all whether bankers in New York City would back the United States or the southern rebels. After all, the South was the wealthiest region of the country, and the North had just undergone the devastating Panic of 1857. Southern leaders laughed that without the South, northerners would starve.
The economic policies of the war years, including our first national money, national taxation, state universities, and deficit spending, created a newly booming industrial North, but many moneyed men resented the Republican policies they felt offered too much to poor Americans (the Homestead Act was a special thorn in their sides because it meant that western lands taken from Indigenous Americans would no longer be sold to bring money into the Treasury but would be given away to poor farmers). When the government established national banks, establishing regulations over the lucrative banking industry, state bankers were unhappy.
Whether moneyed men would stay loyal to Lincoln in 1864 was an open question. In the end, they did, but their loyalty after the war was up for grabs.
Democrats’ postwar financial policies drove moneyed men to give their allegiance to the Republican Party. Eager to make inroads on the Republicans' popularity, northern Democrats pointed out that the economic gains of the war years had gone to those at the top of the economy, and they called for financial policies that would level the playing field. Notably, they wanted to pay the interest on the war debt with greenbacks rather than gold, which would make the bonds significantly less valuable. The alteration would also establish that political parties could take office and change government financial engagements after they were already in force.
Republicans recognized that if a change of this sort were legitimate, the government’s ability to borrow in the future—say, to put down another rebellion—would be hamstrung. They were so worried that in 1868, they protected the debt in the Fourteenth Amendment itself, saying: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
When it looked as if a coalition including the Democrats might win the presidency in 1872, leaders from Wall Street publicly threw their weight behind the Republicans, and in exchange, the Republicans backed away from supporting the workers who had made up their initial voting base.
Southern white supremacists had begun to charge that permitting poor men to vote would lead to a redistribution of wealth as they voted for roads and schools and hospitals that could only be paid for by tax levies on those with property. Such a system was, they charged, “socialism.”
While southern whites directed their animosity toward their formerly enslaved Black neighbors, northerners of means adopted their ideas and language but targeted immigrants and organized workers. If those people came to control government and thus the economy, wealthier Americans argued, they would bring socialism to America, and the nation would never recover.
Increasingly, power shifted to wealthy industrialists who, after 1872, were represented by the Republican Party. They demanded high tariffs that protected their industries by keeping out foreign competition and thus permitted them to collude to raise prices on consumers. By the 1880s, Republican senators were openly serving big business; even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune lamented in 1884 that “[b]ehind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation.”
As money moved to the top of the economy, Democrats pushed back, calling for government to restore a level playing field between workers and their employers. As they did so, Republicans howled that Democrats advocated socialism.
Finally, after the spectacularly corrupt administration of Republican Benjamin Harrison, which businessmen had called “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” the unthinkable happened. In the election of 1892, for the first time since the Civil War, Democrats took control of the White House and Congress. They promised to rein in the power of big business by lowering the tariffs and loosening the money supply. This, Republicans insisted, meant financial ruin.
Republicans warned that capital would flee the markets and urged foreign investors—on whom the economy depended—to take their money home. They predicted a financial crash as the Democrats embraced socialism, anarchism, and labor organization. Money flowed out of the country as the outgoing Harrison administration poured gasoline on the fires of media fears and refused to act to try to turn the tide. Harrison’s secretary of the Treasury, Charles Foster, said his job was only to “avert a catastrophe” until March 4, when Democratic president Grover Cleveland would take office.
He didn’t quite manage it. The bottom fell out of the economy on February 17, when the Reading Railroad Company could not make its payroll, sparking a nationwide panic. The stock market collapsed. And yet the Harrison administration refused to do anything until the day Cleveland took office, when Foster helpfully announced the Treasury “was down to bedrock.”
To Cleveland fell the Panic of 1893, with its strikes, marchers, and despair, all of which opponents insisted was the Democrats’ fault. In the midterm election of 1894, Republicans showed the statistics of Cleveland’s first two years and told voters that Democrats destroyed the economy. Voters could restore the health of the nation’s economy by electing Republicans again. In 1894, voters returned Republicans to control of the government in the biggest midterm landslide in American history, and the image of Democrats as bad for the economy was cemented.
From then on, Republicans portrayed Democrats as weak on the economy. When the next Democratic president to take office, Woodrow Wilson, undermined the tariff as soon as he took office, replacing it with an income tax, opponents insisted the Revenue Act of 1913 was inaugurating the country’s socialistic downfall. When Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt pioneered the New Deal, Republicans saw socialism. Over the past century, that rhetoric has only grown stronger.
And yet, of course, it has been Republican economic policies that opened up the possibility for Democrats to try new approaches to the economy, to make it serve all Americans, rather than a favored few. As FDR put it: “It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.”
In the end, that’s what the economists Leonhardt interviewed last year think is behind Democrats’ ability to manage the economy better than Republicans. Republicans tend to cling to abstract theories about how the economy works—theories about high tariffs or tax cuts, for example, which tend to concentrate wealth upward—while Democrats are more pragmatic, willing to pay attention to facts on the ground and to historical lessons about what works and what doesn’t.
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There is, in fact, some news today, but nothing that can't wait until tomorrow. Seems like this might well be a busy week, so let's take the night off.
It's been quite cold here, and the sea smoke, which rises when the air is colder than the water, has been spectacular.
Photographer Peter Ralston caught this image earlier this week.
[Photo, "Only One," by Peter Ralston]
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It appears that the Republican National Committee’s censure of Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), along with its declaration that the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “legitimate political discourse,” has created a problem for Republican lawmakers as they try to position the party for the midterms and the 2024 election. Coming, as the statement did, just after former president Trump said that Pence had the power to “overturn the election” and that if reelected, Trump would pardon those who attacked the Capitol, it has put the Republican Party openly on the side of overturning our democracy.
Trump loyalists have been insisting that the rioters were “political prisoners,” and clearly the RNC was speaking for them. This wing of the party got a boost this evening when venture capitalist Peter Thiel, the libertarian whose wealth Forbes estimates to be about $2.6 billion, announced that he is stepping down from the board of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to focus on electing Trump-aligned candidates in 2022. Thiel famously wrote in 2009 that he “no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and deplored “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women” after 1920.
It also got a boost today when the Supreme Court halted a lower court’s order saying that a redistricting map in Alabama violated the Voting Rights Act by getting rid of a Black majority district. Alabama’s population is 27% Black, which should translate to 2 congressional seats, but by the practice of “packing and cracking”—that is, packing large numbers of Black voters into one district and spreading them thinly across all the others—only one district will likely have a shot at electing a Black representative. The vote for letting the new maps stand was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the liberals against the new right-wing majority, in control thanks to the three justices added by Trump.
But the backlash against the RNC’s statement suggests that most Americans see the deadly attack on our democracy for what it was, and Republican lawmakers are now trying to deflect from the RNC’s statement.
RNC chair Ronna McDaniel said that media quotes from the resolution are a “lie” and says the committee did not mean it to be taken as it has been. But other Republicans seemed to understand that the RNC has firmly dragged the Republican Party into Trump’s war on our democracy.
National Review called the statement “both morally repellent and politically self-destructive,” and worried that “it will be used against hundreds of elected Republicans who were not consulted in its drafting and do not endorse its sentiment.” If indeed the RNC simply misworded their statement, the editors said, “its wording is political malpractice of the highest order coming from people whose entire job is politics.”
Sunday, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who seems to entertain hopes for 2024, said on ABC’s This Week that “January 6 was a riot incited by Donald Trump in an effort to intimidate Mike Pence and Congress into doing exactly what he said in his own words—overturn the election.”
But others, like Senator Todd Young (R-IN), seem to be trying to split the baby. Young told Christiane Amanpour that those saying the attack was legitimate political discourse are “a fringe group,” although the RNC is quite literally the official machinery of the Republican Party. Young is up for reelection in 2022. He is also from Indiana, as is former vice president Mike Pence, who seems to be positioning himself to take over the party as Trump’s legal woes knock him out of the running for 2024.
On Friday, Pence told the Federalist Society that Trump was “wrong” to say that he, Pence, had the power to overturn the election. But he did not say that Biden won the election fairly. Then, on Sunday, Pence’s former chief of staff Marc Short seemed to try to let Trump off the hook for his pressure on Pence, telling Chuck Todd on Meet the Press that the former president “had many bad advisers who were basically snake oil salesmen giving him really random and novel ideas as to what the vice president could do.”
They seem to be trying to keep Trump’s voters while easing the former president himself offstage, hoping that voters will forget that the Republican leadership stood by Trump until he openly talked of overturning the election.
Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, seems unlikely to stand by as the country moves on, as the National Review editors indicated they were hoping. As he said in his closing at Trump’s first impeachment trial: “History will not be kind to Donald Trump. If you find that the House has proved its case, and still vote to acquit, your name will be tied to his with a cord of steel and for all of history.”
The other big news of the past day is that it turns out that Trump and his team mishandled presidential records, suggesting that we will never get the full story of what happened in that White House.
By law, presidential records and federal records belong to the U.S. government. An administration must preserve every piece of official business. Some of the documents that the Trump team delivered to the January 6 committee had been ripped up and taped back together, some were in pieces, and some, apparently, were shredded and destroyed. Legal commentator Asha Rangappa noted that Trump’s impeachments mean that such shredding could have amounted to an obstruction of justice.
Today we learned that the National Archives and Records Administration had to retrieve 15 boxes of material from Trump’s Florida residence Mar-a-Lago, including correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the letter that former president Barack Obama left for Trump (which would have brought a pretty penny if it were sold). Trump aides say they are trying to determine what other records need to be returned.
Former Republican Kurt Bardella noted, “If this had happened during a Democratic Administration while Republicans were in the majority, I guarantee you [the Oversight Committee] would be launching a massive investigation into this and writing subpoenas right now to any and every W[hite] H[ouse] official that was involved in this.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used the story to raise money for her progressive organization, Onward Together. She linked to the story as she urged people to “Take a sip from your new mug as you read the news.” With the tweet was the picture of a mug with her image and the caption “But Her Emails.”
House January 6 committee member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) says that the committee is planning to hold public hearings in April or May. They have been slowed down by the reluctance of the Trump team to cooperate.
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The fallout over the Republican National Committee’s statement censuring Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) for “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” continues to rain down on the Republican Party.
Today, more than 140 former Republican officials and leaders issued a statement saying that the RNC has “betrayed the GOP’s founding principles and ceded control of a once-great movement to grifters and extremists.” They condemned the description of “the January 6th insurrection” as legitimate political discourse,” calling that description “an affront to the rule of law, peaceful self-government, and the constitutional order.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tried to distance himself from the party’s stance, saying the events of January 6 were “a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”
“First Pence, now McConnell,” NBC’s legal commenter Katie S. Phang noted. “A big hammer is about to drop and they don’t want to be in the path.”
Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) strode speedily away from ABC News congressional correspondent Rachel Scott when she asked about the resolution describing the rioting on January 6 as “legitimate political discourse,” telling her it was “not good” to answer questions in hallways. (Comedian Noel Casler tweeted that McCarthy “ran down that hall like he was being chased by a bunch of white dudes looking for some ‘legitimate political discourse.’”)
Other representatives seemed eager to shore up their arguments that the election was fraudulent and that investigators are illegitimate. New York representative Elise Stefanik, a Trump loyalist who replaced Cheney as the number three Republican in House leadership when House Republicans removed Cheney by a secret vote in May, defended the RNC, saying it had “every right to take any action.” She suggested that voters would ultimately decide whether to justify Cheney’s position or that of the RNC.
Last night, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) was on the Fox News Channel sounding more frantic than usual, accusing the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol of attacking him and insisting that “this is ridiculous and the American people are so fed up with this….” Jordan, such a key Trump loyalist that the former president awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a private ceremony at the White House on January 11, 2021, five days after the insurrection, has been eager to deflect attention from what we now know was a ten-minute call between him and Trump on the morning of January 6.
Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) tweeted today that 740,000 Maricopa County ballots cannot be verified. (These were the ballots taken over by the Cyber Ninjas and have been examined and verified several times over.)
More odd, though, was Representative Troy Nehls’s (R-TX) claim on Twitter that the Capitol Police Intelligence Division on November 20, 2021, “investigated my office illegally” and that Capitol Police leadership was “maliciously investigating me in an attempt to destroy me and my character.” He claimed such an attack was due to his criticism of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the January 6 Committee, the Capitol Police, and the shooting of Ashli Babbitt as she tried to break into the House chamber. The president of the right-wing organization Judicial Watch promptly accused Pelosi of targeting Nehls with “secret police.”
The Capitol Police responded that an officer found the office unlocked, entered it, and “saw a white board with text about body armor and an accompanying map of the Capitol campus.” In an article in the Federalist, Nehls said the map was intended to help an intern find an ice machine and the body armor part of a discussion of legislation to stop purchases of body armor from China. “If Capitol Police leadership had spent as much time preparing for January 6 as they spent investigating my white board, the January 6 riot never would have happened,” Nehls wrote.
It was a bizarre story that sounded like Nehls was trying to get out in front of something. Then Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) claimed that the Department of Justice is reading his mail. Taken with the spying on Nehls, Gohmert wrote, “the Democrat’s [sic] spying on political opponents appears to know no end.” And then he added a threat: “The people behind this should be hoping and praying that they will not be treated in the same manner in which they are running roughshod over Republicans when and if Republicans retake the majority.”
Jordan, Gosar, Nehls, and Gohmert all voted not to accept the certified ballots from certain states on January 6.
They might be reacting to the reality that the law is not as slapdash as they might have thought. Today, officers arrested the Mesa County, Colorado, clerk, Republican Tina Peters, after she resisted the seizure of an iPad on which she was illegally filming a court proceeding involving her deputy, Belinda Knisley, who is facing criminal charges of cybercrimes. Peters has been suspected of leaking data from county election machines to conspiracy theorists last year; it turned up in a presentation at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s symposium about the election last August. Trump loyalist Steve Bannon showed the arrest on his webcast.
Also today, prosecutors revealed their evidence for the trial of a January 6 defendant, Guy Wesley Reffitt, allegedly a member of the Texas Three Percenter militia group, mobilized against the U.S. government. The trial is set to begin on February 28. Their list of evidence is 11 pages long and extraordinarily thorough. It includes videos, phone records, texts, hotel receipts, pictures, and interviews, including ones with the defendant’s children, who will testify that Reffitt threatened them to keep them quiet. His daughter will testify that “she heard her father tell them that if they turned him in to law enforcement, they would be traitors, and that traitors get shot.” Also testifying will be one of the defendant’s colleagues in the Texas Three Percenter militia who traveled with him to D.C.
The government has done its homework.
Today, Reuters reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into a meeting between then-leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers alt-right extremist groups and other right-wing figures in a parking garage in Washington, D.C., on January 5, 2021. The attendees contacted by Reuters said “they did not discuss matters related to January 6.”
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This evening, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol issued a subpoena for documents and testimony to former White House trade advisor Peter Navarro, who has made a number of public statements about his role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In its letter to Navarro, the committee noted his statements that former president Trump was “on board with the strategy” of trying to steal the election, as were “more than 100” members of Congress, including Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).
This subpoena suggests that the committee is getting closer to lawmakers, and some of them are certainly acting as if they are uncomfortable these days.
Navarro responded to the subpoena with a fire-eating statement calling the members of the January 6 committee “domestic terrorists” engaged in a “partisan witch hunt,” and inaccurately claimed that former president Trump has invoked executive privilege that he cannot waive. (In fact, Trump invoked executive privilege only over documents in the possession of the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Supreme Court denied his claims.) He tried to blame House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the Capitol Police for the violence on January 6.
He added fuel to the ongoing fight within the Republican Party when he added: “Pence betrayed Trump. Marc Short is a Koch Network dog. Meadows is a fool and a coward. Cheney and Kinzinger are useful idiots for Nancy Pelosi and the woke Left.”
Navarro’s discomfort with the committee’s questions was not unlike that of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who picked up today on Representative Troy Nehls’s (R-TX) odd accusations of yesterday that Pelosi and the Capitol Police were spying on him. Greene accused Pelosi of having Gestapo-like secret police “spying on members of Congress, spying on the legislative work we do, spying on our staff and spying on American citizens,” she said, although she called them “gazpacho,” apparently confusing the cold tomato soup with the Nazis.
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) is also flailing. Sunday, on Face the Nation, he said: “This commission is a partisan scam. They're going after—they're—the purpose of that commission is to try to embarrass and smear and harass as many Republicans as they can get their hands on.”
Yesterday, he released a video saying “Biden is sending free meth & crack pipes to minority communities in the name of ‘racial equity’.... There is no end in sight for this lunacy.“
This is a wild lie made up and spread by right-wing publications, referring to a drug harm reduction program inviting applications for grants in a 75-page call for proposals. Part of that harm reduction includes infectious disease testing kits, medication lock boxes, safe sex kits, vaccinations, and so on, including safe smoking kits, which do not include free meth or crack pipes but do include rubber mouthpieces for pipes to prevent burns, and disinfectant wipes.
Drug harm reduction programs have been around in the U.S. since the 1980s, when the HIV epidemic made it clear that addressing drug addiction could stop that era’s epidemic.
Exaggeration and demonization of their opponents has been part of politics for years, as Republicans tried to fire up their base by describing their opponents as socialists, lazy “takers,” baby-killers, and so on. Now, though, these over-the-top attacks on the committee and on the Democratic administration seem to be part of a new political project.
The frantic edge to them suggests concern about what the January 6th committee might uncover.
But statements like those yesterday of Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who claimed the Department of Justice was reading his mail; Nehls, who claimed that Pelosi was using the Capitol Police to spy on him; and Greene, who claims Pelosi has a “Gestapo,” normalize the practices of authoritarian government. The proposed banning of books by Republican school officials and lawmakers also echoes authoritarian tactics. Texas State Representative Matt Krause’s October list of 850 books he said “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex” invited schools to self-censor. It also puts the idea of banning books–—banning one book normalizes the banning of 850—on the political table.
And, to enforce such bans, states like Virginia, West Virginia, and Florida are turning to laws that enlist ordinary people to turn each other in to authorities.
We learned yesterday more details of another undemocratic project thanks to Mark Mazzetti and Adam Goldman of the New York Times: in summer 2018, Republican operatives launched a spying operation in Wyoming to gather dirt on opponents of then-president Donald Trump, targeting progressives, Democrats, and Republicans who seemed insufficiently loyal. To help fund the project, they turned to Erik Prince, known as the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and brother of then–secretary of education Betsy DeVos.
The third piece of this new, frantic language ties into America’s long history of politicians deploying racism to break the coalitions that challenge their power.
When Rubio lies that Biden is sending crack pipes to minority communities, he is tying into other constructed panics around race. Fourteen state legislatures have passed laws restricting the teaching of anything that looks like Critical Race Theory, although the actual concept, an advanced legal theory that seeks to explain the persistence of racial inequality in the U.S., is almost never taught in public schools. Republican allegations of voter fraud focus on majority Black districts, and state laws are increasingly threatening minority voting. On Monday night, the Supreme Court okayed racial gerrymandering, making it harder for Black voters to elect representatives of their choice.
These new legal fences enclosing Black Americans echo times in our past when multiracial coalitions threatened an entrenched political party and those in power reacted by using the law to divide their opponents along racial lines. Last June, as Republican operatives whipped up fears of CRT, Republican political operative Stephen K. Bannon told Politico that enflaming racism was how Republicans would take back Congress. “I see 50 [House Republican] seats in 2022. Keep this up,” he said. “I think you’re going to see a lot more emphasis from Trump on [CRT] and DeSantis and others. People who are serious in 2024 and beyond are going to focus on it.”
Cracking the majority that elected a Democratic government in 2020 will enable the Republicans to take back Congress and, among other things, ease pressure over the January 6 insurrection.
But according to a Washington Post story today, some of the very “suburban moms” being pressed into this racial division are organizing to fight back. “[I]t’s time to get off defense,” organizer Katie Paris told reporter Annie Gowan. “Why should we be the ones explaining ourselves?” Paris’s organization, Red, Wine, and Blue, trains its more than 300,000 members to push back against book bans. Paris recognizes that the attacks on diversity in the schools are about political control of the nation. Attacks on the schools, she says, “certainly are part of what I would say is a pretty massive orchestrated effort to undermine public education and teachers in the country, impose a political agenda, and win back suburban voters.”
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This morning’s news that former president Trump apparently clogged a White House toilet repeatedly with discarded documents was overtaken this evening by the news that some of the records Trump took from the White House were clearly marked as classified, some of them “top secret.”
The news of the flushed documents came through Axios from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, whose book about Trump will be out in October. By law, the records of a presidential administration belong to the American people; there are strict laws about how they should be handled and preserved. That Trump ignored the Presidential Records Act was known because of stories of how he ripped up documents that others tried to tape back together, but the idea that he was flushing so many documents he periodically clogged the toilet seemed a commentary on his regard for the American people who owned those documents.
And yet, by the end of the day, the flushing was not the big story.
In the 15 boxes of material the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) recovered from the former president’s Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, archivists discovered top secret documents. Top secret clearance is applied to documents whose disclosure “could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security” of the United States. They are supposed to be kept secure, and to be seen only by authorized individuals. NARA officials had been trying to retrieve missing documents since last summer (never, never, mess with archivists—they keep meticulous records), and Trump refused to hand them over. When they found the mishandled documents, they called the Justice Department.
Reid J. Epstein and Michael S. Schmidt in the New York Times recalled that Trump’s handling of sensitive national security documents was so lackadaisical that when he was White House chief of staff, General John F. Kelly tried to stop Trump from taking classified documents out of the Oval Office out of concern that he would jeopardize national security. Epstein and Schmidt recounted how Trump used to rip pictures out of the President’s Daily Brief, the daily bulletin of national security threats. Now, it appears he took secret material and did not keep it secure.
Certainly, Trump knew he was breaking the law. White House counsel Donald McGahn warned him about the Presidential Records Act. So did two chiefs of staff, Reince Priebus and Kelly. In 2017, internal White House memos warned against destroying presidential records, noting that such destruction is a crime. The editorial board of the Washington Post called Trump’s mutilated records, “a wrenching testimony to his penchant for wanton destruction.”
This story is about the stealing of our records and the endangerment of our national security—and the heroism of archivists—but it is also a story about the media. The defining narrative of the 2016 election was about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails, allegedly mishandled. Again and again, the email story was front-page news. A 2017 study in the Columbia Journalism Review by Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild found that the New York Times in six days published as many cover stories about Clinton’s emails as they did about “all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.” The network news gave more time to Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.
Today, Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America noted that the Trump story should mean that finally “political journalists should stop pretending to believe Republicans when they pretend to be outraged about purportedly illegal or unethical behavior by Democrats.” He compiled a long list of all the Fox News Channel stories about Clinton’s emails and said, “Based on the 2015–16 baseline, Trump flagrantly violating the Presidential Records Act should be a massive story.” Aaron Rupar, author of the newsletter Public Notice, tweeted the obvious: “If two prominent reporters broke news that Joe Biden was flushing documents down White House toilets, [Fox News Channel personality Sean] Hannity would anchor special Fox News coverage that would last through 2024. Trump flushing documents down WH toilets has been mentioned twice on Fox News today, once in passing.”
The House Oversight Committee has announced it will investigate the “potential serious violations” of the Presidential Records Act. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo was more to the point, saying that Trump’s destruction of evidence amounted to “willful and deliberate destruction of government records for the purpose of concealment.”
That analysis agrees with the discovery by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol that the White House phone logs for the day of the insurrection have gaps in them: calls they know Trump made to lawmakers are missing. This may be in part because he used his own private cell phone or the phones of aides.
The destruction of documents in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s hamstrung the investigation, but it is not clear that, in this era, the concealment will be so effective. Yesterday, lawyers for the Department of Justice provided 19 pages of information to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, outlining how they are getting through the massive amounts of information they have, using cell phone records, internet records, geolocation, data aggregators, and so on. It doesn't seem like much is slipping by.
While the investigation by the January 6 committee and the angry split in the Republican Party after the Republican National Committee excused the insurrection as “legitimate political discourse” have gotten all the headlines, the Biden administration has been working to rebuild and redefine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for a new era.
Dr. Mike Martin, a war studies visiting fellow at King’s College London, notes that it is hardly a secret that Russian president Vladimir Putin wants a buffer around Russia of states that are not allied with his enemies. If they cannot be allied with Russia, at least they will be chaotic and neutral, rather than pro-democracy and anti-corruption.
Martin notes it is not a coincidence that Putin decided to test NATO right as German leadership shifts from former German chancellor Angela Merkel to Olaf Scholz, as the U.K. is reeling from scandals surrounding Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and, I would add, as Biden is trying to rebuild the U.S. in the face of open hostility from Republicans after we have suffered far higher Covid death rates than other large, wealthy nations—63% higher since December 1, according to the New York Times.
But the allies surprised Putin by pulling together, in large part because of a sustained and thorough effort by the U.S. State Department, an effort that European diplomats told journalist and political scientist David Rothkopf was “unprecedented.” In a piece for the Daily Beast, Rothkopf notes that the dissolution of the USSR left NATO, along with other international institutions, adrift. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, fed the U.S. sense that it could and should act on its own, getting us into the quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq, which then shaped President Barack Obama’s caution as he tried simply not to screw up on the international stage. Then Trump actively worked to weaken international alliances.
Now, Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan are trying to rebuild NATO and international alliances, focusing on diplomacy. Recognizing that we cannot combat the crises of climate change, pandemics, and emerging technologies without cooperation, they are emphasizing a rules-based international order, and working with others, whose voices matter: “nothing about us without us.”
One diplomat for the European Union told Rothkopf these qualities are “refreshing and, in a way, revolutionary.” A scholar of diplomacy put it like this: “When there are lots of moving pieces in play, when there appears to be the chance for seismic shifts in power, these can call forth a golden age of diplomacy. And the coalition builders, the conceivers of grand alliances, the ones who work well with others, these almost always prevail in the face of a bullying despot.”
Still, no one knows what Russia will do, although as the ground softens, an invasion becomes more difficult. Yesterday, Russia expert and former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul added another piece: “Putin knows…NATO won’t accept new members who have Russian soldiers occupying parts of their countries, because NATO members don’t want a war with Russia. That's why Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 & Ukraine 2014.” Russia currently has troops in Belarus that it says are only there temporarily.
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Yesterday, the Treasury noted that the U.S. budget had a surplus of $119 billion in January. That’s the first budget surplus in more than two years. Tax receipts are up significantly: they grew 21% in January to $465 billion, as higher employment and earnings meant a big jump in payroll taxes and withholdings. At the same time, outlays fell 37%.
Today, the administration warned any American in Ukraine to get out as quickly as possible, leaving no later than 48 hours from midday today. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan warned that, “[i]f you stay, you are assuming risk with no guarantee that there will be any other opportunity to leave and no prospect of a U.S. military evacuation in the event of a Russian invasion.” He said the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv stands ready to help financially and logistically.
Sullivan told reporters that the administration believes that the world has entered the window of time in which if Russian president Vladimir Putin is going to attack Ukraine, he will do so. The U.S., he said, is “ready either way.” It will continue its hefty diplomatic push, or it and key allies will respond to an invasion with severe economic sanctions, reinforce the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and continue to support Ukraine and its well-trained and equipped army.
The U.S. has deployed service members to Poland, Romania, and Germany to defend NATO territory under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty that established NATO. Article 5 says that an attack against any NATO ally is considered an attack on all of them and that, in such an event, they will come to each other’s aid. To date, Article 5 has been invoked only once: on September 12, 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States.
Those personnel, Sullivan emphasized, “are not soldiers who are being sent to go fight Russia in Ukraine. They are not going to war in Ukraine. They are not going to war with Russia. They’re going to defend NATO territory, consistent with our Article 5 obligation. They are defensive deployments. They are non-escalatory. They are meant to reinforce, reassure, and deter aggression against NATO territory.”
“Whatever happens next,” Sullivan said, “the West is more united than it’s been in years. NATO has been strengthened. The Alliance is more cohesive, more purposeful, more dynamic than at…any time in recent memory.”
President Joe Biden spoke today with leaders from the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Poland, Romania, the Secretary General of NATO, and the presidents of the European Union to coordinate a response to Russian aggression.
Biden will speak again with Putin tomorrow.
The Fox News Channel is cheering on the so-called “Freedom Convoys” of disgruntled Canadians driving commercial trucks who have shut down Ottawa, Canada’s capital, as well as key border crossings between Canada and the U.S. They have created traffic jams that have made it impossible for auto plants on both sides of the border to get the parts they need, and the resulting production cuts, as well as the idling of hundreds of millions of dollars in trade, are hurting the economies of both countries.
According to Justin Ling in The Guardian, the convoys appear to have been organized by James Bauder, a conspiracy theorist who believes Covid-19 is a political scam and has endorsed the QAnon movement. Canada’s recent vaccine requirement to cross the Canadian border provided a catalyst to pull together a number of different groups opposed to public health measures with anti-government protesters. The protests were neither popular nor representative of truckers: there were never more than about 8000 protesters, 90% of truckers crossing the border are vaccinated, and the Canadian Trucking Alliance strongly opposes the protest.
On Tuesday, a spokesperson for the Canadian Trucking Alliance told Rose White of MLive that many of the Freedom Convoy protesters “have no connection to the trucking industry and have a separate agenda beyond a disagreement over cross border vaccine requirements.” Ling noted that the convoy participants flew neo-Nazi and Confederate flags and had QAnon logos on their trucks, but Bauder urged his supporters stick to the message of “freedom.”
The “Freedom Convoy” has been pushed by fake accounts on social media and has picked up supporters from the U.S. right wing, including leading lawmakers. Facebook officials told NBC News today that fake accounts tied to content mills in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Romania, and several other countries have been pushing the convoy. Their disinformation is working; donations from the U.S. have flooded into accounts supporting the convoy protesters.
Former president Donald Trump, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), and others have endorsed the convoy, and the Fox News Channel has talked about the convoy two and a half times as often as CNN and five times as often as MSNBC in the last month, according to Philip Bump of the Washington Post. Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America tweeted that the network has spent more than ten hours on the story since January 18, with the network personalities—especially Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity—explicitly calling for an American version of the protest.
The idea of shutting down supply chains does not interest the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which yesterday denounced the convoy. “The livelihood of working Americans and Canadians in the automotive, agricultural, and manufacturing sectors is threatened by this blockade,” Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa said in a statement. “Our economy is growing under the Biden Administration, and this disruption in international trade threatens to derail the gains we have made. Our members are some of the hardest workers in the country and are being prevented from doing their jobs.”
But that is almost certainly the point. Disrupting a nation’s supply chains destabilizes its economy and thereby weakens the government in power. Indeed, U.S. lawmakers know this quite well: in 1972, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency funded a 26-day truckers’ strike in Chile that helped to destabilize the government of democratically elected Salvador Allende, who would be overthrown the following year by right-wing dictator General Augusto Pinochet.
The economy under Biden shows that his traditional vision of a government that supports ordinary people rather than cutting taxes and funneling money to “makers” works; the extraordinary unity of NATO in the face of Putin’s determination to advance authoritarian goals shows that multilateral cooperation rather than unilateral military action works, too. For those determined to regain power, disruption and destabilization are the order of the day.
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On February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born.
Lincoln was the nation’s sixteenth president, leading the country from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865, a little over a month into his second term. He piloted the country through the Civil War, preserving the concept of American democracy. It was a system that had never been fully realized, but that he still saw as “the last, best hope of earth” to prove that people could govern themselves.
“Four score and seven years ago,” he told an audience at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in November 1863, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln dated the founding of the nation from the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution, the document enslavers preferred because of that document’s protection of property. In the Declaration, the Founders wrote that they held certain “truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”
But in Lincoln’s day, fabulously wealthy enslavers had gained control over the government and had begun to argue that the Founders had gotten their worldview terribly wrong. They insisted that their system of human enslavement, which had enabled them to amass fortunes previously unimaginable, was the right one. Most men were dull drudges who must be led by their betters for their own good, southern leaders said. As South Carolina senator and enslaver James Henry Hammond put it, “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’”
In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that arguments limiting American equality to white men were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.” Either people—men, in his day—were equal, or they were not. Lincoln went on, “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it…where will it stop?”
Lincoln had thought deeply about the logic of equality. In his 1860 campaign biography, he permitted the biographer to identify six books that had influenced him. One was a book published in 1817 and wildly popular in the Midwest in the 1830s: Capt. Riley’s Narrative. The book was written by James Riley, and the full title of the book was An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce, Wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa, in the Month of August, 1815, With the Sufferings of her Surviving Officers and Crew, Who Were Enslaved by the Wandering Arabs on the Great African Desart [sic], or Zahahrah.” The story was exactly what the title indicated: the tale of white men enslaved in Africa.
In the 1850s, on a fragment of paper, Lincoln figured out the logic of a world that permitted the law to sort people into different places in a hierarchy, applying the reasoning he heard around him. “If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.—why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?” Lincoln wrote. “You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly?—You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.”
Lincoln saw clearly that if we give up the principle of equality before the law, we have given up the whole game. We have admitted the principle that people are unequal and that some people are better than others. Once we have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, we have granted approval to the idea of rulers and ruled. At that point, all any of us can do is to hope that no one in power decides that we belong in one of the lesser groups.
In 1863, Lincoln reminded his audience at Gettysburg that the Founders had created a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” but it was no longer clear whether “any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” During the Civil War, the people of the United States were defending that principle against those who were trying to create a new nation based, as the Confederacy’s vice president Alexander Stephens said, “upon the great truth” that men were not, in fact, created equal, that the “great physical, philosophical, and moral truth” was that there was a “superior race.”
In the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln called for Americans to understand what was at stake, and to “highly resolve… that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
[Photo of Abraham Lincoln by Alexander Gardner, November 8, 1863]
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Tonight, while those who observe watched the Los Angeles Rams win the Super Bowl, we are in a holding pattern waiting to see if Russian president Vladimir Putin launches a major European invasion, and supporters of the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, are insisting that Trump’s opponent in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, committed treason by spying on his campaign.
There’s a lot going on.
So I thought tonight I would take a little detour and share one of my favorite stories about Valentine’s Day, which is on the calendar tomorrow. It’s one of my favorite stories not because of the way it starts, but because of the way it ends....
On Valentine’s Day in 1884, Theodore Roosevelt lost both his wife and his mother.
Four years before, Roosevelt could not have imagined the tragedy that would stun him in 1884. February 14, 1880, marked one of the happiest days of his life. He and the woman he had courted for more than a year, Alice Hathaway Lee, had just announced their engagement. Roosevelt was over the moon: “I can scarcely realize that I can hold her in my arms and kiss her and caress her and love her as much as I choose,” he recorded in his diary. What followed were, according to Roosevelt, “three years of happiness greater and more unalloyed than I have ever known fall to the lot of others.”
After they married in fall 1880, the Roosevelts moved into the home of Theodore’s mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, in New York City. There, they lived the life of wealthy young socialites, going to fancy parties and the opera, and traveling to Europe. When Roosevelt was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1881, they moved to the bustling town of Albany, where the state’s political wire-pullers worked their magic. Roosevelt’s machine politician colleagues derided the rich, Harvard-educated young man as a “dude,” and they tried to ignore his irritating interest in reforming society.
In the summer of 1883, Alice discovered that she was pregnant, and that fall she moved back to New York City to live with her mother-in-law. There she awaited the birth of the child who Theodore was certain would arrive on February 14.
As headstrong as her father, Roosevelt’s daughter beat her father’s prediction by two days. On February 12, Alice gave birth to the couple’s first child, who would be named after her. Roosevelt was at work in Albany and learned the happy news by telegram. But Alice was only “fairly well,” Roosevelt noted. She soon began sliding downhill. She did not recover from the birth; she was suffering from something at the time called “Bright’s Disease,” an unspecified kidney illness.
Roosevelt rushed back to New York City, but by the time he got there at midnight on February 13, Alice was slipping into a coma. Distraught, he held her until he received word that his mother was dangerously ill downstairs. For more than a week, “Mittie” Roosevelt had been sick with typhoid. Roosevelt ran down to her room, where she died shortly after her son got to her bedside. With his mother gone, Roosevelt hurried back to Alice. Only hours later she, too, died.
On February 14, 1884, Roosevelt slashed a heavy black X in his diary and wrote “The light has gone out of my life.” He refused ever to mention Alice again.
Roosevelt’s profound personal tragedy turned out to have national significance. The diseases that killed his wife and mother were diseases of filth and crowding—the hallmarks of the growing Gilded Age American cities. Mittie contracted typhoid from either food or water that had been contaminated by sewage, since New York City did not yet treat or manage either sewage or drinking water. Alice’s disease was probably caused by a strep infection, which incubated in the teeming city’s tenements, where immigrants, whose wages barely kept food on the table, crowded together.
Roosevelt had been interested in urban reform because he worried that incessant work and unhealthy living conditions threatened the ability of young workers to become good citizens. Now, though, it was clear that he, and other rich New Yorkers, had a personal stake in cleaning up the cities and making sure employers paid workers a living wage.
The tragedy gave him a new political identity that enabled him to do just that. Ridiculed as a “dude” in his early career, Roosevelt changed his image in the wake of the events of February 1884. Desperate to bury his feelings for Alice along with her, Roosevelt escaped to Dakota Territory, to a ranch in which he had invested the previous year. There he rode horses, roped cattle, and toyed with the idea of spending the rest of his life as a western rancher. The brutal winter of 1886–1887 changed his mind. Months of blizzards and temperatures as low as –41 degrees killed off 80% of the Dakota cattle herds. More than half of Roosevelt’s cattle died.
Roosevelt decided to go back to eastern politics, but this time, no one would be able to make fun of him as a “dude.” In an era when the independent American cowboy dominated the popular imagination, Roosevelt now had credentials as a westerner. He ran for political office as a western cowboy taking on corruption in the East. And, with that cowboy image, he overtook his eastern rivals.
Eventually, Roosevelt’s successes made establishment politicians so nervous they tried to bury him in what was then seen as the graveyard of the vice presidency. Then, in 1901, an unemployed steelworker assassinated President William McKinley and put Roosevelt—“that damned cowboy,” as one of McKinley’s advisers called him—into the White House.
Once there, he worked to clean up the cities and stop the exploitation of workers, backing the urban reforms that were the hallmark of the Progressive Era.
[Photo of Theodore Roosevelt's diary, Library of Congress.]
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It appears there was a reason for the former president’s unhinged rant of yesterday suggesting that members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign had spied on him and that “in a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”
Trump is likely unhappy because of a letter his accountants, the firm Mazars, sent to the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer on February 9. That letter came to light today when New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is investigating the finances of the Trump Organization, filed new court documents to explain why she wanted to question Trump and his adult children under oath.
The Mazars letter told the Trump organization that Trump’s financial statements from years ending June 2011 through June 2020 could not be relied upon to be accurate, and that it should tell anyone relying on those documents—banks, for example—that they were not reliable. It went on to say there was now a “non-waivable conflict of interest” with the Trump Organization that meant that Mazars was “not able to provide new work product” for the organization.
Lawyer George Conway interpreted the letter for non-lawyers. He tweeted:
“‘decision regarding the financial…statements’=they are false because you lied
‘totality of the circumstances’=the D.A. is serious
‘non-waivable conflict of interest’=we are now on team D.A.
‘not able to provide new work product’=sorry we’re not going to jail for you”
That is, it appears that Mazars is now working with James’s office. Last month, James’s office alleged that there is “significant” evidence that the Trump Organization manipulated asset valuations to obtain loans and avoid taxes. Now Trump’s accountants appear to be working with her office and have said that Trump’s past ten years of financial statements “should not be relied upon.”
This will probably be a problem for the banks that have loaned money to Trump. Their officers have likely relied on the accuracy of the information Trump provided, and according to lawyer Tristan Snell, the lenders could now call in loans early or otherwise change the terms of their agreements.
The Trump Organization jumped on the statements in the Mazars letter that “we have not concluded that the various financial statements, as a whole, contain material discrepancies,” and that “Mazars performed its work in accordance with professional standards” to claim that it is exonerated from any wrongdoing. “This confirmation,” it wrote, “effectively renders the investigations by the DA and AG moot.”
NBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner tweeted: “Trump Org[anization] tries to spin it as a complete exoneration (& G[eorge] Orwell blushes).” Orwell was famous for identifying “doublespeak,” language that reverses the meaning of words.
But while the fear of what it means for him that his accountant has dropped him might have inspired Trump’s rants about executing Hillary, the same does not hold for Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who on Sunday’s Fox & Friends broadcast agreed with Trump that Clinton’s aides had spied on him, and implied the punishment for such alleged espionage should be death.
The normalization of violence as part of the mainstream Republican Party is cause for concern.
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In all the chaos surrounding the former president, the actions today of the current president, Democrat Joe Biden, seem to be getting short shrift. This is unfortunate because they say a lot about his reorientation of the U.S. government.
At 3:30 this afternoon, Biden addressed the nation to update us on the crisis in central Europe as Russia threatens to invade Ukraine again. He reiterated that the U.S. has engaged in “non-stop diplomacy” for weeks and is prepared to continue that approach, proposing new measures for arms control, transparency, and strategic stability.
If diplomacy fails, the U.S. and our allies and partners around the world will impose economic sanctions on Russia and exert “intense pressure on [Russia’s] largest and most significant financial institutions and key industries.” Nord Stream 2, the valuable natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, will halt. And while the U.S. will not send military personnel to fight Russia in Ukraine, it will support Ukraine with armaments and intelligence. The U.S. will also honor Article 5 of our “sacrosanct” North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) obligations, defending any NATO country Russia attacks.
The U.S., NATO, and Ukraine are not a threat to Russia, he said, and we have no beef with Russian citizens. But the U.S. insists on basic principles: “Nations have a right to sovereignty and territorial integrity. They have the freedom to set their own course and choose with whom they will associate.”
“This is about more than just Russia and Ukraine,” he said. “It’s about standing for what we believe in, for the future we want for our world, for liberty…the right of countless countries to choose their own destiny, and the right of people to determine their own futures, for the principle that a country can’t change its neighbor’s borders by force. That’s our vision. And toward that end, I’m confident that vision, that freedom will prevail.”
Biden ended his speech with a significant statement: “Thank you,” he said, “I’ll keep you informed.” With that, he echoed Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and reinforced democratic norms: the president answers to the American people.
Meanwhile, in Russia, opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who is serving two and a half years in prison for charges that the European Court of Human Rights called “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable, is again on trial, behind closed doors, for allegedly stealing $4.8 million from organizations he founded. If convicted, he could be sentenced to another ten years in prison.
There was another way in which Biden today reinforced the idea that the government answers to the people. It harked back to an executive order Biden signed on July 9 that sort of slipped under the radar. Designed “to promote the interests of American workers, businesses, and consumers,” the order addressed the consolidation of industries in the last several decades. It noted that mergers and the rise of megacorporations have stifled competition and increased racial, wealth, and income inequality as power is transferred to corporate employers, making it harder for workers to bargain for higher wages and better working conditions.
The order called for reversing these trends and established a White House Competition Council to figure out how best to restore competition, workers’ rights, and consumer protection. It charged the different government departments with reporting on the consolidation in their areas of concern.
Today the Department of Defense issued its report. It noted that since the 1990s, the defense sector has consolidated from 51 to 5 defense contractors. This is a national security issue, it said, since lack of competition means higher prices for the government, slows innovation, and risks supply chains. The report calls for encouraging new businesses, broadening the supply chain, and overseeing mergers more carefully. The Defense Department called for the government as a whole to increase domestic capacity, expand supply chains, and build the workforce to reduce the reliance of our national defense on a few contractors.
In another shift away from big business and toward the American people, today the gunmaker Remington settled a lawsuit with the nine of the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting of December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, when a gunman murdered 20 first graders and six educators and wounded 2 others. The killer used a Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle manufactured by Remington.
A 2005 federal law called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act shields gun manufacturers from lawsuits when someone misuses their weapons, but in 2014, the families sued Remington on the grounds its marketing strategy, aimed at young, at-risk males through product placement in violent video games, made it partially at fault for the Sandy Hook massacre. The ads represented the gun as a combat weapon; Connecticut law prohibits deceptive ads.
The settlement was for $73 million, and it permits the families to release documents showing how Remington marketed the gun. Since Remington went bankrupt and its assets were sold off to other companies in 2020, four insurers will pay the settlement. A lawyer for the families said he hoped this settlement would change the ways gun manufacturers market their products.
Meanwhile, the former president today produced a four-page, somewhat nonsensical statement pushing back against the letter from his accountants, released yesterday, saying that no one should rely on the last ten years of Trump’s financial statements and that they were cutting ties with him. Trump began by saying that “We have a great company with fantastic assets that are unique, extremely valuable and, in many cases, far more valuable than what was listed in our Financial Statements,” then went on to provide cartoonish numbers purporting to prove he has a net worth of more than $6 billion. He said Mazars had withdrawn from his employment because of “vicious intimidation tactics,” and that “[t]his crime against me is a continuation of a Witch Hunt the likes of which has never been seen in this Country before.” He called for investigations of Hillary Clinton instead.
The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol today subpoenaed six more people: two members of the 2020 Trump campaign and four Republican officials from the battleground states that sent fake electors to Washington, D.C.
Michael A. Roman, who has made his career accusing Democrats of voter fraud, was director of Election Day operations for Trump’s campaign; Gary Michael Brown was his deputy. The committee told Roman it has communications showing he was involved “in a coordinated strategy” to get Republican members of state legislatures in contested states to elect false Trump electors, and then helped to direct Trump campaign staffers who were helping to organize the fraud. This puts the effort to overturn the election into Trump’s campaign staff explicitly.
Douglas V. Mastriano of Pennsylvania, Mark Finchem and Kelli Ward of Arizona, and Laura Cox, former chair of the Michigan Republican Party, were all key participants in the scheme to attack the validity of Biden’s election and to create fake alternative electors to enable Pence to overturn that election.
Lawyer John Eastman, who produced the infamous memo with a blueprint for Pence to overturn the election, has claimed that he cannot produce the documents the January 6th committee has subpoenaed because of attorney-client privilege. The judge overseeing the case has ordered him to document those attorney-client relationships by February 22.
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Today, the Washington Post ran a story by Claire Parker explaining that most Canadian truckers oppose the so-called “Freedom Convoy” protests. Almost all Canadian truckers are vaccinated and resent the protesters, whose shutdown of international borders has “had a very significant negative impact upon our professional driving community,” according to Stephen Laskowski, the president of the Canadian Trucking Alliance.
Prominent leaders of the convoys, including conspiracy theorist James Bauder, are not truckers themselves. Instead, right-wing agitators appear to be the ones behind the Trump and Confederate flags at the protests. More than 55% of the donations to the Christian fundraising website GiveSendGo for the protesters came from the United States.
Truckers’ organizations say the protests undermine the real concerns of truck drivers—wage theft, bad roads, and a lack of bathrooms—and worry that the convoys will hurt the public image of truckers.
Parker’s Washington Post story showing the Freedom Convoys as the expression of a radical fringe was an important reality check to the breathless stories from the American right hailing the Freedom Convoys as a popular movement.
The story that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton allegedly spied on then-candidate Trump’s campaign in 2016 illustrates the importance of the sort of reality-based corrective the Washington Post published about the Canadian truckers.
The story at the root of the right’s accusations against Clinton is actually fascinating. After Russians hacked the servers of the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016, cybersecurity experts started to look to see what else hackers might have hit. In July 2016, four of them noticed that Russia’s Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank appeared to be pinging a server registered to Trump Tower. To a lesser extent, it communicated with Spectrum Health in Michigan, an organization associated with the DeVos family. The servers were configured in such a way that they appeared to be shutting out other communications.
One of the security specialists took the story to lawyer Michael Sussman, who took it to the general counsel at the Federal Bureau of Investigation in September 2016, alerting him that cybersecurity folks thought there might be secret communications between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank. Sussman worked for the same law firm that represented the Clinton presidential campaign.
In May 2019, Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, appointed John Durham, former U.S. attorney for Connecticut, as special counsel to investigate the origins of the FBI’s investigation into the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia.
In September 2021, Durham indicted Sussman for lying to the FBI by saying he was not working for a client when he alerted them to the issue. Sussman denies he said he did not have a client, and identified himself as working for the cybersecurity expert. While Durham’s witness has contradicted himself, emails support Sussman’s account. For his part, Sussman responded by denying the charges and saying that Durham’s 27-page indictment contained “prejudicial—and false—allegations that are irrelevant to his Motion and to the charged offense, and are plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool."
In his indictment, Durham said the cybersecurity experts did not believe their own suggestion of connections between Alfa Bank and Trump Tower and were trying to hurt candidate Trump. They responded by accusing Durham of editing their emails misleadingly and stood behind their earlier conclusions.
The current furor is over a related issue. On Friday, in a court filing in the case against Sussman, Durham alleged that one of the cybersecurity experts, who was working for the White House as part of a cybersecurity contract, “exploited” his access there to find “derogatory information” about Trump. This charge stems from the fact that the researchers found odd data suggesting that a Russian-made smartphone, a YotaPhone, had communicated with the same networks—this we already knew—and that one of them told that information to the CIA in February 2017, about 20 days into the Trump administration. Durham did not indicate when he thought the experts had uncovered the issue—the timing suggests it was in 2016, before Trump took office—and the researcher’s lawyer has pointed out that the person had been hired to identify security breaches and threats.
The story is confusing, but it seems to show security experts who found anomalies and took them to the appropriate authorities (none of them has been charged with anything). The FBI dismissed the server issue, and it is not clear whether the phone issue was ever investigated. The launch of the FBI’s investigation of the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia had nothing to do with any of this, anyway. The investigation, called Crossfire Hurricane, began in July 2016 after George Papadopoulos, a member of the Trump campaign, told an informant that the campaign had dirt on Hillary Clinton. An investigation by the inspector general of the Justice Department concluded that the FBI investigation was not politically motivated.
The current story appears to be a nothing burger, and yet, the former president, right-wing media, and Trump loyalists are flooding the news with accusations that the Clinton campaign paid operatives to “infiltrate” servers at Trump Tower and the White House to create the Russia scandal. They are calling for multiple indictments.
Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) told the Fox News Channel on Sunday: “They were spying on the sitting president of the United States…. And it goes right to the Clinton campaign.” The former president claimed that “Robert” Durham—a name switch that might reflect his intense focus on Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was in charge of the Russia investigation—had provided “indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia.… In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”
The right is complaining bitterly that the mainstream media has covered this story only briefly, insisting the lack of wall-to-wall coverage proves the media is biased against the right. But the exaggeration of this story seems a transparent attempt to revisit the 2016 attacks on Clinton in order to distract both from the revelations of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and from the eye-popping news that Trump’s accountants have said the last ten years of his financial statements cannot be relied upon.
Controlling the narrative has always been a key factor in the right’s ability to turn out voters. But that ability just might be slipping.
Today, former judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit J. Michael Luttig, a Republican, said: “For the past six years, I have watched and listened in disgust that not one single leader of ours with the moral authority, the courage, and the will to stand up and say: ‘No, this is not who we are, this is not what America is, and it’s not what we want to be,’ has done so.”
Also today, a report by the Interior Department’s Inspector General Mark Greenblatt, who was appointed by former president Donald Trump, offered a window into how one Trump loyalist looked at our government as a way to further his own interests. The report concluded that Trump’s secretary of the interior, Ryan Zinke, broke federal ethics rules, lying to officials that he had “purely social” contact with developers in Whitefish, Montana, when in fact he communicated with the developers 64 times to talk about the project, including a parking lot on his own land and his interest in having a brewery on the property.
Zinke is now running for Congress. His campaign called the investigation a “Biden Administration led report” (the investigation began in 2018, under Trump) that “published false information, and was shared with the press as a political hit job.”
Spreading false stories depends on making sure the truth is inaccessible. Today Biden rejected Trump’s attempt to hide the White House visitor logs for January 6, 2021, from the January 6th committee on the grounds of executive privilege. Biden said that keeping them hidden “is not in the best interest of the United States.” Unless a court steps in, the National Archives and Records Administration will deliver them to the committee on March 3.
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Today, Judge Arthur F. Engoron of the Supreme Court of the State of New York ruled that former president Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., and his daughter Ivanka Trump must produce documents and testify under oath in a civil investigation into their valuations of their business assets, complying with a subpoena New York attorney general Letitia James issued for their testimony in December.
The Trumps can invoke their rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution not to incriminate themselves. This is what Eric Trump did more than 500 times in October 2020, when he testified before members of the attorney general’s office. In a civil trial, however, invoking the Fifth can be interpreted negatively.
After the decision, James tweeted: “No one is above the law.”
The Trumps intend to appeal.
The arguments in today’s hearing raised a troubling point. Trump sued Attorney General James last December, alleging that “[h]er mission is guided solely by political animus and a desire to harass, intimidate, and retaliate against a private citizen who she views as a political opponent.” In today’s hearing, Trump’s lawyers continually portrayed James’s investigation not as a valid exercise in protecting the rule of law, but as a political attack on Trump. His lawyers argued that James’s investigation is “selective prosecution” and is “unconstitutional,” and that she is pursuing the case only to hurt the former president before the 2024 election.
The judge rejected these claims, pointing out, among other things, that none of the 600 or more documents in the case refer to Trump’s politics; they focus on his financial practices. “In the final analysis,” the judge wrote, “a State Attorney General commences investigating a business entity, uncovers copious evidence of possible financial fraud, and wants to question, under oath, several of the entities’ principals, including its namesake. She has the clear right to do so.”
Trump’s attempt to portray as political any legal reckoning for him for either potential wrongdoing with regard to his finances dovetails with the attempt of Trump and his loyalists to paint the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol as partisan.
Repeatedly, they have called the committee “illegitimate” because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) did not put on it the members House minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) nominated. She had the right to review his nominations, and she rejected Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who has now been implicated in the events of the day, and Representative Jim Banks (R-IN), who had attacked the committee as a partisan exercise “solely to malign conservatives and to justify the left’s authoritarian agenda.” He announced that he would use his place on the committee to investigate the protests of summer 2020 instead of the events of January 6.
After rejecting Jordan and Banks, Pelosi asked McCarthy to nominate others in their place, but instead he withdrew all the Republicans from the committee. At that point, she invited Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) to join the committee. Although Trump Republicans are portraying Cheney as a turncoat, she voted with Trump’s agenda 92.9% of the time. Kinzinger voted with Trump 90.2% of the time.
Nonetheless, Trump loyalists dismiss the two Republicans on the committee and claim the committee is partisan. Some are talking about turning the committee against the Democrats as soon as the House is back in their hands. Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich told the Fox News Channel: “I think when you have a Republican Congress, this is all going to come crashing down, and the wolves are going to find out that they’re now sheep and they’re the ones who are in fact, I think, fac[ing] a real risk of jail for the kinds of laws they’re breaking.”
Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a constitutional law professor and member of the January 6th committee, noted: “That’s the language of authoritarianism.”
Meanwhile, in an unusual move against an incumbent of his own party, House Minority Leader McCarthy has endorsed the Trump-backed primary opponent of Representative Liz Cheney, who is the vice chair of the January 6th committee. Trump and his allies are working this same game, pressing Wyoming’s Republican governor, Mark Gordon, to back a bill that would change state law to prevent Democrats from voting in the Republican primary, thus likely giving a primary victory to Cheney’s opponent. Although Cheney has said she will not encourage Democrats to support her in the primary, the Trump loyalists are prepared to change the law to put a Trump ally in her place.
Tonight, Trump lashed out about the legal developments of the past few days. He insisted that the suggestion by Special Counsel John Durham that operatives for Hillary Clinton spied on Trump as president—a suggestion Durham backed away from today—and Judge Engoron’s decision today were entirely partisan.
Trump claimed that Clinton, “one of the most corrupt politicians ever to run for President, can break into the White House, my apartment, buildings I own, and my campaign—in other words, she can spy on a Presidential candidate and ultimately the President of the United States—and the now totally discredited Fake News Media does everything they can not to talk about it.” (These allegations are false, of course.) On the other hand, he said, Attorney General James is selectively prosecuting him and his family.
“[T]he Radical Left Democrats don’t want [him] to run again,” he wrote, and their targeting of him “represents an unconstitutional attack on our Country… a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt in history.” Finally, he said, “I can’t get a fair hearing in New York because of the hatred of me by Judges and the judiciary. It is not possible.”
There is a dangerous theme running through these stories, as well as Trump’s attack on Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, who is investigating Trump’s attempt to pressure Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia and award that state’s electoral votes to him, rather than to the actual winner, Joe Biden. Earlier this month, Trump told attendees at a rally in Texas that he hoped they would take to the streets with “the biggest protest we have ever had,” if “these radical, vicious racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal.”
Trump and his loyalists are setting up the idea that any attempt to hold Trump and his allies accountable for illegal activities—including the attempt to overturn the 2020 election and thereby destroy our democracy—is a partisan attack. While that argument will undermine the rule of law, there is a twist to it: if Republicans can convince their voters that Democrats have engaged in partisan prosecutions of Trump and his allies, the Republicans can justify partisan prosecutions of Democrats as soon as they get the opportunity, just as Gingrich suggested. If this rhetoric works, Trump can undercut legitimate prosecutions, while Democrats will become fair game for partisan prosecutors.
This is indeed, as Representative Raskin said, the language of authoritarianism.
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There are four big stories today.
The first is that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has confirmed that it found classified documents among those its staff recovered from former president Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago.
David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, wrote in a letter to Representative Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, that NARA is in the process of inventorying the 15 boxes of material Trump took out of the White House and that it has found “items marked as classified national security information within the boxes.” Because Trump removed classified information from its required security protection, NARA staff have alerted the Department of Justice to that national security breach.
There is more. Ferriero said that NARA has identified social media records that the Trump administration neglected to preserve. NARA “has also learned that some White House staff conducted official business using non-official messaging accounts that were not copied or forwarded into their official electronic messaging accounts,” as the law required. In addition, even after news reports of Trump tearing up records led NARA to remind the White House that records must be preserved, it nonetheless received records that were torn into pieces.
But her emails.
(Sorry. Willfully destroyed records make historians a bit salty.)
Meanwhile, the second story is that John Durham, whose court filing in a case drove the story about Trump’s mishandling of presidential records out of the news this week, has responded to the accusation that he deliberately politicized and exaggerated a story to inflame Trump loyalists. Durham’s filing presented information in such a misleading way that right-wing media and lawmakers have howled incorrectly that it proved Hillary Clinton was spying on Trump both before and after he took office. The defendant in the case asked the court to strike from that filing the inflammatory paragraphs.
Today, Durham responded that “if third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated, or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the Government’s Motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the Government’s inclusion of this information.” In other words, the right-wing media frenzy misrepresents what happened, but that misinterpretation is not Durham’s problem.
The third story is that U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta rejected Trump’s attempt to dismiss three lawsuits that blame him for inciting the January 6 riot. Eleven members of the House of Representatives (in their personal capacities) and two Capitol Police officers have accused former president Trump, Donald J. Trump Jr., Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL), and right-wing militia groups including the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Warboys, and so on, of conspiring to prevent them from performing their official duties. This is a federal crime thanks to a law first passed in 1871 to stop Ku Klux Klan members from preventing Black legislators and their Republican allies from doing their jobs.
After reviewing the events of January 6 and the days leading up to it, the judge concluded that those launching the lawsuits “establish a plausible conspiracy involving President Trump.” He noted that the president and others worked together to disrupt Congress and stop the counting of the certified Electoral College ballots on January 6. The president undermined faith in the election, falsely claiming it was stolen, and urged supporters to go to Washington, D.C., on January 6, telling them it would be “wild.” He planned the rally, and at it he gave a barn-burning speech that concluded: ““We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Trump’s role in a potential conspiracy was “to encourage the use of force, intimidation, or threats to thwart the Certification from proceeding, and organized groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers would carry out the required acts.” The judge also noted a pattern of “call-and-response” between the president and his militia followers. When he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” for example, one of their leaders tweeted: “Standing by sir.”
The court concluded that it was plausible that Trump was part of a conspiracy to stop the performance of official duties.
The fourth story is that this evening, President Joe Biden addressed the nation to update us on the threat of Russia’s launching another invasion of Ukraine. He emphasized that we and our allies stand behind Ukraine and pledge to continue diplomatic efforts to prevent a war, and yet will deliver “massive costs on Russia should it choose further conflict.” He urged Russia “to de-escalate and return to the negotiating table.”
Political scientist and journalist David Rothkopf tweeted that Biden is speaking as the leader of the free world. “It has been a long time since a U.S. president filled that role. His remarks were concise and pointed...and underscored Western resolve. But the headline: He is convinced [that] Putin has decided… to invade.”
Indeed, that was the big takeaway from the speech: Biden said that intelligence sources think Putin has made his decision. Biden said: “we have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning to and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week—in the coming days. We believe that they will target Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, a city of 2.8 million innocent people.”
Former director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Chris Krebs pointed out that the advances the United States intelligence community has made in the last few years in counteractive measures have enabled the U.S. to head off plans “before they’re set in motion.” U.S. officials are alerting Putin to the fact there are leaks in his team, putting his plans at risk. This can cause strife and perhaps make leaders rethink their policies. As Krebs tweeted, it “[p]uts some sand in their gears, creates mistrust, and can slow down planning and operations…. The deliberate approach by western gov[ernmen]ts to anticipate Russian disinfo[rmation] & get in front of it is a positive evolution.”
We do not know where the next several days will lead, of course, but it is notable that the solidarity of the countries allied against authoritarianism, strengthened by U.S. diplomacy, is holding strong.
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www.headstonesband.com
Definitely.
In one of George Carlin's HBO shows, he talked about how society was starting to fall aprt. He said, "You can juuuust feel things starting to unravel." Seems like he was right on the money again and it's all starting to ramp up.
Something a little different tonight. Buddy and I were on the road last week, and he snapped this in a light snow on Boston's Commonwealth Avenue.
It's been a very long couple of weeks, and I'm going to see if I can be in bed before 10.
Will see you tomorrow.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
This afternoon, after a rare four-hour-long meeting of the National Security Council, President Joe Biden canceled a planned trip home to Wilmington, Delaware, tonight. The U.S. intelligence community says with high confidence that Russian president Vladimir Putin has ordered military units to proceed with an attack on Ukraine. The U.S. and the United Kingdom say that they expect Russia to create a “false-flag” attack on Russia, allegedly by Ukraine, that they will use as an excuse to invade.
Tonight, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Bathsheba Nell Crocker, told High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, the former president of Chile, that the United States has “credible information that indicates Russian forces are creating lists of identified Ukrainians to be killed or sent to camps following a military occupation. We also have credible information that Russian forces will likely use lethal measures to disperse peaceful protests or otherwise counter peaceful exercises of perceived resistance from civilian populations.”
A hallmark of this crisis has been the degree to which the U.S. has anticipated events by announcing to the world it has intelligence information laying out Russia’s next moves. This both enables NATO to get out ahead of Russian propaganda and warns Putin that his communications might be compromised, an idea that might give him pause before committing to invasion.
CNN White House reporter D.J. Judd identified those at the NSC meeting as Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Vice President Kamala Harris joined the group from Air Force Two on her way back from Munich, where she was representing the U.S. at the 58th Munich Security Conference, an annual conference on international security.
Russia continues to insist it is not planning an attack on Ukraine, although it has placed 150,000 troops at the Ukraine border, the largest military buildup in Europe since World War II ended. But the warming weather in Ukraine with the mud that it will bring does not bode well for an invasion, and Putin agreed today “in principle” to a meeting with Biden, an offer available only if Russia does not launch a new war.
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky spoke yesterday in Munich, chastising Europe for being slow to recognize the danger of Russian expansionism, even as Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. He warned that such imperialist aims historically have led to world wars unless they are stopped.
Zelensky vowed that Ukraine will fight if Russia invades again—it is still in the country from the 2014 invasion— but hammered home that Ukraine should not be begging for help: Ukraine shields Europe from Russia. Helping Ukraine “is your contribution into the European and international security for which Ukraine has been serving as a reliable shield for eight years now, holding back one of the largest armies in the world,” he said. “This is not a war in Ukraine, but a war in Europe.”
Meanwhile, Russia is extending its military presence in Belarus, where 30,000 Russian troops, along with missiles and other military hardware, have been engaged in military exercises with troops from Belarus. The exercises were scheduled to end today, but the Belarusian Defense Ministry said the troops will stay because of the deteriorating situation in Ukraine.
As he has faced increasing protests from pro-democracy opponents, Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko has reacted with an increasingly heavy hand. In May 2021 he forced an airplane flying over Belarusian airspace to land in Minsk, where authorities took opposition journalist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend into custody (Protasevich has disappeared in custody). Lukashenko has also cultivated ties with Putin. When he invited Russian troops to Belarus in early February, European officials warned they were unlikely to leave. Their presence in Belarus means they are 30 miles from the Ukrainian border and hundreds of miles closer to Poland and Lithuania, both countries that are part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned that "if Russia invades its neighbour,...we will open up the Matryoshka dolls of Russian-owned companies, and Russian-owned entities to find the ultimate beneficiaries within [and sanction them].”
Europe and the United States have vowed severe economic repercussions if Russia attacks Ukraine. But pro-democracy observers have called for the U.S. and the U.K. to crack down on the flow of Russian money into their countries regardless of what the next weeks bring.
Putin’s consolidation of power in Russia in the 1990s coincided with the deregulation of financial sectors in the U.S. and the U.K. and the resulting flow of illicit money into western democracies. A recent study of the U.K. by Chatham House explained that that money enabled oligarchs to corrupt western democracies as they used their ill-gotten wealth to elect politicians who would advance their interests. The U.K. has a “kleptocracy problem,” the authors said. Earlier this month, kleptocracy scholar Casey Michel and Harvard postdoctoral fellow Benjamin L. Schmitt published an article advocating an end to the practice of former politicians “becoming paid shills for autocrats.”
Indeed, while Biden has made ending that corruption and strengthening democracy a priority for his administration, not all Americans think allying with Putin, an authoritarian who poisons his opponents, siphons his country’s money into his own pockets, and has argued that liberal democracy is obsolete, is a bad idea. Led by Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, the Trump wing of the Republican Party appears to be throwing its weight behind Putin.
But will the Republican Party as a whole buck Trump over this and stand with the Democrats behind Ukraine and its democratic aspirations? There are signs that, in fact, it will. Tonight, Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ), who was on his way back from the Munich Security Conference, tweeted: “I’ve honestly never seen more unity among our allies, or our two parties in Congress, on any global issue.”
After all, it was not until Trump delegates made changes to the 2016 Republican political platform that the party weakened its support for Ukraine. And yet, in 2019, when Trump tried to skew the 2020 election by withholding congressionally appropriated funding for Ukraine to support its defense against Russia, Republican senators declined to convict him of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. So, we shall see how the party responds to the Ukraine crisis.
And how will America as a whole respond?
On February 20, Ukraine celebrates the Memorial Day of the Heroes of the Heavenly Hundred, honoring the memory of 107 protesters who died in mass shootings during the 2013 Revolution of Dignity. From 2013 to 2014, Ukrainians rose up against the government of Viktor Yanukovych, an autocratic politician managed by Paul Manafort and backed by Russia, eventually ousting him.
On February 21, the U.S. celebrates Presidents Day, a somewhat vague holiday placed in 1968 near Washington’s birthday on February 22, but also traditionally including Abraham Lincoln, who was born on February 12, 1809. On November 19, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln reminded Americans what they were fighting for:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” There, where more than 3000 U.S. soldiers died and more than 14,000 were wounded over three days, Lincoln explained: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
[Image from the Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana, Library of Congress]
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As I write tonight, the U.N. National Security Council is meeting to discuss Russian president Vladimir Putin’s recognition of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) as independent states within the country of Ukraine. Russian-backed rebels have been fighting the Ukraine government in those regions since 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Today the self-styled leaders of those regions asked Russia for recognition, and Putin granted it.
Upon his recognition of the states, Putin sent a limited number of troops into them, alleging that the invaders were a “peacekeeping” mission to support the Russian separatists, who do not control the regions. Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, formally requested the U.N. meeting, citing Russia’s “ongoing aggravation of the security situation around Ukraine” and threats to “international peace and security.”
The events of the day began with a dramatic televised meeting of Putin’s security council in the Kremlin, with Putin asking his ministers if they supported recognizing DPR and LPR. While the meeting was presented as a “live” event, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, one of the advisors, was wearing a watch showing that the event was recorded five hours before, thus placing it before the “governments” of the regions asked for recognition.
Then Putin gave a long, aggrieved speech presenting Russia as the victim of the West, which had turned Ukraine into a “puppet regime.” He claimed that Ukraine is not, and should not be, a separate country from Russia. Shortly after current Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky won election in 2019, Russia began to hand out Russian passports to people in the two regions at stake today, strengthening Putin’s argument that the region is actually Russian. And yet, a poll from earlier this month showed that less than 10% of Russians want to invade Ukraine, making it a risky move for Putin.
Putin’s method for control of other countries has been to work for the election of friendly leaders who will permit the expansion of his influence. It is this history that is behind today’s advance on Ukraine.
In 2010, a pro-Russian politician, Viktor Yanukovych, won the Ukraine presidential election with the help of American political consultant Paul Manafort. Pro-democracy protesters forced Yanukovych from his post on February 21 in 2014, a date whose significance Putin’s actions today reinforced. Since then, Ukraine has turned back toward Europe.
Today, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said, “we will give up nothing to no one” and that the borders of Ukraine “will stay that way, despite any statements or actions taken by the Russian Federation.”
Meanwhile, after the Belarus Defense Ministry said yesterday that Russian troops would stay in the country past yesterday, the originally scheduled date of their departure, it said today that Russian troops might stay in Belarus indefinitely.
It seems worth noting the similarities between the work Manafort did for Yanukovych’s campaign and his work for Donald Trump in 2016, right up to calls to imprison Yanukovych’s pro-NATO main opponent, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who was imprisoned from 2011 until 2014, when she was released following Yanukovych’s ouster from power. And, once in office, Trump did, in fact, let Putin act much as he wished, especially with regard to Ukraine. According to Russia analyst Julia Davis, Russian state television last night said of the former president: “Trump gave us a 4-year reprieve.”
It is not clear if today’s developments are a precursor to a larger invasion, and that smaller incursion was likely an attempt to start a fight among Putin’s opponents over whether it is a big enough invasion to trigger the devastating sanctions the United States and European countries have prepared.
John McLaughlin, former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President George W. Bush and now of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, tweeted: “Putin has choreographed this with the hope that we and the Europeans will debate whether this is an “invasion” or not. And hoping that throws us enough off balance that he will pay a minimal price for this first slice of salami.”
Russia specialist Tom Nichols saw the same thing, tweeting: “Stop parsing ‘invasion.’ Putin just partitioned Ukraine by edict and is backing it up with force. That alone is reason to impose sanctions. Argue about which sanctions to impose, maybe, and leave some daylight for future moves, but this isn't about ‘is it an invasion.’”
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield answered such concerns: “Tomorrow, the U.S. will impose sanctions on Russia for its violation of international law and Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. We can, will, and must stand united in our calls for Russia to withdraw its forces, return to the diplomatic table & work toward peace.” Tonight, Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba “to reaffirm unwavering U.S. support for Ukraine.”
In response to Putin’s machinations today, the U.S. and U.K. immediately imposed limited sanctions. Biden signed an executive order economically isolating the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, banning all U.S. investment and business there, along with any imports from there, although it makes an exception for humanitarian aid. The executive order also allows the government to sanction individuals participating in the seizure of the region, as well.
In an address tonight, Zelensky told the Ukrainian people: “[Ukraine] is within its internationally recognized borders, and will remain so. Despite any statements and actions of the Russian Federation. We remain calm and confident.”
The price of oil rose more than 3% on the news, and stock markets around the world dropped.
Putin and his fellow oligarchs have amassed power thanks to the financial laxness of western democracies, which their money has helped to destabilize. With Putin’s attack on the international rule of law today, challenging western nations to stop him, Edward Luce of the Financial Times identified the larger picture: “Cannot be stated strongly enough,” he wrote. “If the west—chiefly America, but also Britain—doesn't burn its financial ties to Russia's oligarchy then Putin will prevail. This means taking on Wall Street, the City, law firms[,] realtors, the prep schools and western laundering outfits.”
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Today Russian president Vladimir Putin said he’s recognizing the full territories claimed by the upstart governments of Ukrainian eastern provinces Luhansk and Donetsk. Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo points out that since those governments only control about a third and a half of the territory, respectively, in those provinces, this recognition would mean that Ukraine is occupying land that belongs to those breakaway regions.
Today, the European Union led the way on announcing sanctions against members of Russia’s leadership, reinforcing the idea of international cooperation against Putin. The E.U.’s 27 member states unanimously agreed to freeze the assets and ban the visas of 351 members of the Duma, the Russian government’s lower house of parliament, who backed recognition of the rogue governments within Ukraine.
The U.K. followed suit, sanctioning three "high net worth individuals" in Russia and five major Russian banks.
Germany halted certification of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, a project worth up to $15 billion to Russia.
In a speech this afternoon, President Joe Biden announced that the U.S. has imposed sanctions on two Russian banks, one of which is associated with the Russian military, and five individuals, including one who is in charge of VK, Russia’s largest social media network, and one that is listed on the London Stock Exchange. It also sanctioned Russia’s debt, cutting off its access to western financing.
The U.S. has gone after Russia’s ability to fund military contracts and raise new money to attack Ukraine. It also is joining with other nations to put the squeeze on what the Treasury Department calls “influential Russians and their family members in Putin’s inner circle believed to be participating in the Russian regime’s kleptocracy.” The goal, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, is to “begin the process of dismantling the Kremlin’s financial network and its ability to fund destabilizing activity in Ukraine and around the world.”
This first group of sanctions seems carefully targeted to hit Putin’s inner circle without sweeping in the Russian people. By applying pressure gradually, it also maintains leverage to try to dissuade Putin from escalating, which would not be the case if the U.S. threw everything at Russia immediately, leaving Putin no reason to change course. And yet, those sanctions remain on the table. Yellen said, “We continue to monitor Russia’s actions and if it further invades Ukraine, the United States will swiftly impose expansive economic sanctions that will have a severe and lasting impact on Russia’s economy.”
As voting rights activist Rachel Vindman put it: “We’re officially in the ‘Finding Out’ phase and all I can say is FINALLY.”
But not all Americans are on board.
Biden’s strong defense of democracy and pulling together of such a strong international coalition has left Republicans unclear about how to respond. In an interview today with right-wing podcaster Buck Sexton, former president Trump expressed admiration for Putin, saying his move to take over parts of Ukraine was “genius.” “Putin declares a big portion of… Ukraine…as independent…. And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen…. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy.”
Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) responded: “Former President Trump’s adulation of Putin today—including calling him a ‘genius’—aids our enemies. Trump’s interests don’t seem to align with the interests of the United States.”
Trump is not the only one. There used to be a saying that politics stopped at the water’s edge, meaning that lawmakers presented a unified front to other countries, no matter their partisan differences. So far, Republicans appear to have thrown that idea overboard, trying to use the crisis to attack President Joe Biden, a Democrat. Those Republicans who believe in protecting an international order based on the rule of law are getting around Biden’s reinforcement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and sanctions by accusing him of being weak on Russia.
The House Republicans somewhat nonsensically tweeted a photograph of the president walking away from the podium after his speech with the caption: “This is what weakness on the world stage looks like” (prompting others to ask if he was supposed to turn cartwheels as he left). House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and the leadership of the House Republicans issued a statement claiming that “Biden consistently chose appeasement and his tough talk on Russia was never followed by strong action.”
Others allied with Trump are supporting Putin by suggesting that the U.S. has no business protecting its ally Ukraine from Russian aggression. This is pushing them into what sure looks like a stand against America.
The press secretary for Florida governor Ron DeSantis, for example, tweeted that “the sad fact is that the USA is in no position to ‘promote democracy’ abroad while our own country is falling apart.” She continued: “I can never trust the federal government in any way.” J.D. Vance, a Republican candidate for the Senate from Ohio, said, “[T]he Russia–Ukraine border dispute has nothing to do with our national security, no American interest is served by our intervention, and that the obsession with Ukraine from our idiot leaders serves no function except to distract us from our actual problems.” Representative Ronny Jackson (R-TX) called for sanctions, not against Russia but against “senior officials in the Canadian government,” apparently because authorities there have arrested members of the truck convoy shutting down border crossings and cities to protest vaccine mandates for truckers.
Some have gone further, either defending Putin or attacking America outright. Candidate for New York Representative to Congress Andrew McCarthy tweeted: “Putin protects the church, tradition, and Russian culture to an extent that globalists cannot accept…. We deal with far worse governments regularly.” Right-wing commentator Candace Owens went further, actually blaming the U.S. for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “WE are at fault,” she tweeted.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has strengthened the international coalition against authoritarianism, but it could enable the Republicans to succeed in undermining Biden at home, replacing him with a pro-Russian leader like Trump in 2024. In that case, Putin’s desperate gambit will have worked, strengthening authoritarians around the world.
Meanwhile, Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny continues to stand for democracy against the authoritarianism that threatens his life. Putin tried to murder Navalny with the nerve agent Novichok and, when that failed, imprisoned him on trumped-up charges for 2.5 years. Now, Navalny is on trial again for fraud and contempt of court; one prosecution witness has refused to testify, saying he was pressured to testify and the charges are “absurd.” If convicted, the 45-year-old Navalny will face another 10 years in prison.
And yet, today Navalny released a 16-tweet thread calling Putin’s security council a bunch of “dotards and thieves” who are trying “to divert the attention of the people of Russia from real problems—the development of the economy, rising prices, reigning lawlessness.” “How long has it been since you last watched the news on federal channels?” he asked. “It's the only thing I watch now, and I can assure you, there is NO news about Russia there AT ALL. Literally. From the first to the last piece, it's Ukraine—USA—Europe.” “We have everything for powerful development in the 21st century, from oil to educated citizens, but we will lose money again and squander the historical chance for a normal rich life for the sake of war, dirt, lies and [corruption]. “The Kremlin is making you poorer,” he wrote, “not Washington.”
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Today, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky made a passionate plea to the people of Russia to avoid war. He gave the speech in Russian, his own primary language, and, reminding Russians of their shared border and history, told them to “listen to the voice of reason”: Ukrainians want peace.
“You've been told I'm going to bomb Donbass,” he said. “Bomb what? The Donetsk stadium where the locals and I cheered for our team at Euro 2012? The bar where we drank when they lost? Luhansk, where my best friend's mom lives?” Zelensky tried to make the human cost of this conflict clear. Observers lauded the speech and contrasted its statesmanship with Putin’s recent ramblings.
And yet, it will stand only as a marker. Tonight in America, but early Thursday in Ukraine, Russian president Vladimir Putin launched a “special military operation,” claiming, quite transparently falsely, that he needed to defend the people in the “new republics” within Ukraine that he recognized Monday from “persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime.” He called for “demilitarization” of Ukraine, demanding that soldiers lay down their weapons and saying that any bloodshed would be on their hands.
He also promised to provide for the ”denazification” of Ukraine, a harking back to the period after World War II when Nazis and those who had worked with them were purged from society. Putin has repeatedly referred to Ukrainian leaders as Nazis, a charge Zelensky, who is of Jewish heritage, has pleaded with Russians to reject, citing Ukraine’s losses in World War II and his own grandfather’s service in that war. Putin’s chilling word here suggests that he intends to purge from Ukraine all those who worked with the Zelensky government.
Putin warned: “Anyone who tries to interfere with us, or even more so, to create threats for our country and our people, must know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never before experienced in your history.” This sweeping and vague threat seems to encompass everything from massive cyber attacks through nuclear war, but at this point it seems mostly to be an effort to deter resistance. Russia’s economy is already taking hits from Putin’s decision to recognize the breakaway governments, and it likely cannot withstand a long war. Putin needs a quick win.
As he spoke in a video, wearing the same clothes he wore in the prerecorded meeting broadcast Monday, suggesting this message might have been recorded at the same time, the U.N. Security Council was holding an emergency meeting in New York City to implore him not to go forward with war. At the Security Council meeting, the Russian ambassador claimed his nation was not “being aggressive against the Ukrainian people, but against the junta in power in Kyiv.” Rather than a junta government that took power by force, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky was popularly elected in April 2019 in a landslide of more than 73%.
At 10:58 tonight, Eastern time, Ukraine foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted: “Putin has just launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Peaceful Ukrainian cities are under strikes. This is a war of aggression. Ukraine will defend itself and will win. The world can and must stop Putin. The time to act is now.”
By midnight tonight, Ukraine’s state emergency service said that ten regions were under attack.
Countries around the world condemned the attack. Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs Jeppe Sebastian Kofod said: “Denmark utterly condemns this horrific attack…. An abhorrent breach of international law. Russia bears full responsibility for this needless conflict[.] We will coordinate closely with allies, partners for strongest possible international reaction[.]”
In a statement, President Biden said, “The prayers of the entire world are with the people of Ukraine tonight as they suffer an unprovoked and unjustified attack by Russian military forces. President Putin has chosen a premeditated war that will bring a catastrophic loss of life and human suffering. Russia alone is responsible for the death and destruction this attack will bring, and the United States and its Allies and partners will respond in a united and decisive way. The world will hold Russia accountable.”
The administration increased sanctions today, adding the company building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and its corporate officers. Tomorrow, Biden will meet in the morning with the other leaders of the G7: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U.K.—the world’s wealthiest liberal democracies. He will speak to the American people afterward to announce further consequences for Russia’s aggression.
Tonight, Biden reported: “President Zelenskyy reached out to me tonight and we just finished speaking. I condemned this unprovoked and unjustified attack by Russian military forces. I briefed him on the steps we are taking to rally international condemnation, including tonight at the UN Security Council. He asked me to call on the leaders of the world to speak out clearly against President Putin’s flagrant aggression, and to stand with the people of Ukraine.”
Zelensky told his people: “A minute ago I spoke to President Biden. The USA has started to unite international support. Today we need each of you to stay calm. If you can, stay at home. We are working. The army is working. The whole security and defense sector of Ukraine is working.”
Richard Engel of NBC News reported on this speech by Zelensky and in the report he noted that much of the Russian news flying around Ukraine appears to be false, designed to get Ukrainians to panic and give up quickly.
I’m cutting the news in this letter off at midnight, Maine time, to keep the record clear. And, while we’re at it, a lot happened domestically today, but I am holding it for the future. Today’s invasion of democratic Ukraine by authoritarian Putin is important. It not only has broken a long period of peace in Europe, it has brought into the open that authoritarians are indeed trying to destroy democracy.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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Illia Ponomarenko, a defense reporter with the Kyiv Independent, reported today that according to Ukraine’s top general, “Russia’s blitzkrieg on day one has failed.”
Washington Post reporter Dan Lamothe today listed information delivered in an early briefing by a senior U.S. defense official. While this information is very early, and likely to be revised in the future, the official told reporters that the U.S. believed Russia launched more than 100 missiles at Ukrainian targets last night, primarily at airports and military targets. There were an estimated 75 Russian planes, including bombers, targeting nearly 10 airports.
The official described this as an “initial phase” of a “large-scale invasion” from Belarus south, from Crimea north, and from Russia to around the city of Kharkiv, which saw the heaviest fighting. The next move, he predicted, would be on Kyiv. “We still believe—it is our assessment—that they have every intention of basically decapitating the government and installing their own method of governance, which would explain these early moves toward Kyiv.” Tonight, U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley told lawmakers that Russian troops were now about 20 miles from Kyiv.
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky told his people that Ukraine lost 137 defenders on the first day, with 316 more wounded. Russia has not acknowledged any losses, although images from photojournalists in Ukraine indicate there have been Russian casualties.
Before midnight, American Eastern time, Friday had begun in Ukraine with the news from Ukraine’s minister of foreign affairs Dmytro Kuleba that Kyiv was being hit by “horrific Russian rocket strikes…. The last time our capital experienced anything like this was in 1941 when it was attacked by Nazi Germany. Ukraine defeated that evil and will defeat this one. Stop Putin. Isolate Russia. Sever…all ties. Kick Russia out of everywhere.”
In fact, isolating Russia and turning it into an international pariah seems to be the plan of the U.S., the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, and other allies and partners.
This morning, President Biden spoke with the leaders of the G7, the world’s wealthiest liberal democracies, and tweeted: “[W]e are in full agreement: We will limit Russia’s ability to be part of the global economy. We will stunt their ability to finance and grow Russia’s military. We will impair their ability to compete in a high-tech, 21st century economy.” G7 countries, which control 50% of the world’s gross domestic product, will participate in isolating Russia.
Early this afternoon, President Biden announced more sanctions on Russia, squeezing its financial system, its economy, and its political leadership. The Treasury Department also announced sanctions against state-owned banks, defense and security industries, and individuals in Belarus, “due to Belarus’s support for, and facilitation of, the invasion.” The U.S. will also block Russian access to emerging technologies.
According to the White House, the European Union, Australia, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom all are planning their own sanctions. Tonight, the leaders of the European Union announced “massive and targeted” sanctions against Russia, hitting 70% of the Russian banking market, oil exports, and Russia’s access to technology.
A bright spot for Putin is that China has eased restrictions on the importation of Russian wheat, thus helping Russia’s economy and helping out its own food security. Analyst Rachel Ziemba told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” that China’s interest in its access to important commodities will likely make it a “meaningful financial lifeline” for Russia, but China will not align with Moscow completely.
But there are plenty of dark spots for Putin, too. After the invasion, Russian stocks plunged 45% before recovering to close down 33%, while the ruble hit a record low against the dollar. Putin summoned Russian oligarchs to a meeting today. According to Max Seddon, Financial Times Moscow bureau chief, Putin told Russia’s business elite that he was forced into invading Ukraine because “they could have created such risks for us that it wasn’t clear how the country [Russia, that is, not Ukraine] could have continued to exist.”
Protesters in Russia took to the streets to oppose the war; many were arrested. According to Nastassia Astrasheuskaya, a Financial Times reporter in Moscow, the Kremlin had expected the public would support the attack on Ukraine. Prominent celebrities, including those who rely on the state to make a living, also came out against the war.
On Facebook, the commander in chief of the armed forces of Ukraine, Lieutenant General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, posted that a Russian platoon surrendered about 85 miles north of Kyiv. He said the platoon leader believed they were a reconnaissance team. “No one thought that we were going to kill. We were not going to fight, we were collecting information.”
The Ukraine Defense Ministry has asked computer hackers to help Ukraine’s war effort, and a Twitter account claiming to represent the computer hacker group Anonymous claimed to have taken down the Russian RT media outlet, which was, indeed, down this afternoon.
The U.S. is sending 7,000 more U.S. troops to Europe to shore up the defenses of our NATO allies. And two former presidents—Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republican George W. Bush—today released statements condemning the invasion and standing behind Ukraine. Bush wrote, “The American government and people must stand in solidarity with Ukraine and the Ukrainian people as they seek freedom and the right to choose their own future. We cannot tolerate the authoritarian bullying and danger that Putin poses.”
And yet, while some leading Republicans are expressing support for Ukraine and simply ignoring President Joe Biden, the same Republicans who have been most closely associated with Trump and the January 6 insurrection are trying to use Russia’s attack on Ukraine to undermine the president. Following the lead of former president Trump, who says that Putin invaded because Biden is weak, Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who took over for Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) when the House Republicans stripped her of her position as the third most powerful House Republican, tweeted that “Joe Biden is unfit to serve as Commander-in-Chief. He has consistently given into [sic] Putin’s demands and shown nothing but weakness.”
This is simply an extraordinary statement for a lawmaker to issue at a time when a president is rallying the global community to stop an invasion of another democracy, but she is not alone. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) called Biden weak and corrupt; Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said that former president Trump’s “unpredictability” (!) kept Putin cautious; Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) complained that the administration “project[s] weakness.” Representatives Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Paul Gosar (R-AZ); Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Ron Johnson (R-WI); and others all are working to undermine Biden in this moment of global crisis.
Diplomat Aaron David Miller, who spent 24 years in the State Department, had his own assessment of the president. He said: “So far, Biden has done a masterful job of leading and maintaining both E.U. and NATO unity.”
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This was a historic day in a historic week.
This afternoon, President Joe Biden nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to the Supreme Court. “For too long, our government, our courts haven’t looked like America,” Biden said in a speech introducing Jackson. “I believe it’s time that we have a court that reflects the full talents and greatness of our nation with a nominee of extraordinary qualifications, and that we inspire all young people to believe that they can one day serve their country at the highest level.”
Educated at Harvard, Jackson clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer, who is retiring and whose seat she will take if she is confirmed. Jackson has shown the same focus on democracy that Breyer brought to the court. While so-called “originalists” defer to what they perceive to be the legal limitations written into the Constitution by its Framers, Breyer defers instead to the purpose of the Constitution, deciding cases in part by figuring out which outcome would best defend and expand democracy. His focus on democracy also means he prioritizes consensus and civility.
Republicans who will likely object to Jackson are using her nomination to hit at the Biden administration. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who sits on the Judiciary Committee, said it was “extremely inappropriate” for the president to nominate a Supreme Court justice just days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and she said that “Biden is putting the demands of the radical progressive left ahead of what is best for our nation.”
In contrast to Blackburn, one could see the act of nominating a justice in the midst of a crisis in the same way President Abraham Lincoln thought about holding the 1864 election in the midst of the Civil War. In November of that year, he told a group of visitors that no one had been sure that a democratic government could survive in times of emergency, but he believed that if an emergency could interrupt the normal process of democracy, “it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.” Holding the election was itself a victory for the rule of law.
Similarly, it seems to me a mistake to characterize Jackson as a part of a “radical progressive agenda” unless democracy itself has become such a thing. Jackson’s tightly reasoned briefs show a focus on democracy that is similar to that of her mentor, Breyer. She has become famous, for example, for a 2019 opinion rejecting the idea that a president’s advisors cannot be compelled to testify before Congress. “Presidents are not kings,” she wrote. “This means that they do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control. Rather, in this land of liberty, it is indisputable that current and former employees of the White House work for the People of the United States, and that they take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Like Breyer, as well, Jackson has a “reputation for pragmatism and consensus building,” according to former president Barack Obama, who nominated her as a district judge.
At today’s event, Jackson defined America as “the greatest beacon of hope and democracy the world has ever known.”
If she is confirmed, Jackson will be the 116th Justice in American history, University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck pointed out on Twitter. She will be the eighth who is not a white man; she will be the sixth woman.
Anticipating criticism suggesting that Jackson’s judicial experience has been brief, Vladeck also compiled a chart of the judicial experience of all Supreme Court justices since 1900. The information showed that Jackson’s 8.9 years of prior judicial experience is more than four of the justices currently on the court—Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, Elena Kagan, and Amy Coney Barrett—had combined. It's also more experience than 4 of the last 10 justices had at their confirmations, or 9 of the last 17, or 43 of the 58 appointed since 1900.
“Today, as we watch freedom and liberty under attack abroad, I'm here to fulfill my responsibilities under the Constitution, to preserve freedom and liberty here in the United States of America,” Biden said.
This week was historic precisely because it brought into the open the degree to which freedom and liberty are, in fact, under attack, as Russian president Vladimir Putin launched a war of aggression against neighboring Ukraine.
Fighting in Ukraine is approaching Kyiv, where the government has armed its civilians to defend the city. Washington Post military reporter Dan Lamothe tweeted information from a senior defense official, who said that Russia is getting more resistance than it expected and that it has not managed to establish air superiority over Ukraine. The U.S. believes that Russia has launched more than 200 missiles at Ukraine, aimed at military sites but hitting civilian areas as well. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said today that 150,000 Ukrainians have been displaced since Russia invaded.
Putin today called for Ukrainians to overthrow their own government and negotiate peace with him.
Putin needed a quick victory in Ukraine, and the heroic resistance of the Ukrainians has made that impossible, buying time for pressure against him to build. Last night, 1800 Russians were arrested for protesting the war at rallies around the country; prominent Russians, including the children of leading businessmen and lawmakers, are speaking up against the invasion.
When Facebook fact-checked Russian state media accounts and put warning labels on them, the Kremlin limited Russians’ access to the site, where they were sharing their anger at Putin’s war. Apparently, ill-trained Russian conscripts are shocked to be on the front lines in Ukraine—Russian law says only volunteer troops are supposed to be used there.
Tonight Meta, the parent company of Facebook, banned Russian state media from running ads or raising money on Meta platforms anywhere in the world. While the ban apparently does not eliminate third-party ads, it does show which way the wind is blowing.
Today, members of the European Union and Britain froze the European assets of Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The U.S. also sanctioned Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov, as well as Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, which is intended “to attract capital into the Russian economy in high-growth sectors,” according to White House press secretary Jen Psaki. The Russian Ministry of Defense was hacked and taken down, and the personal information of its employees was leaked; the hacker group Anonymous claimed credit.
For the first time in its history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) activated its rapid response troops that can deploy quickly in case Russian troops cross the borders of NATO countries.
Putin is rapidly becoming isolated. Russia vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the invasion and calling for an immediate end to hostilities and the withdrawal of Russia’s troops from Ukraine, but it was notable that China, India, and the United Arab Emirates abstained rather than vote. Also today, President Milos Zeman of Czechia and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, both of whom have been supporters of Putin, came out strongly against the invasion. So did Romania and Bulgaria. Kazakhstan has refused to send troops to Russia.
The Ukraine resistance has given rise to the Ghost of Kyiv, a fighter pilot who may or may not be real, and who may or may not be a woman, and who has shot down six Russian planes. Such a superhuman legend symbolizes Ukraine’s people this terrible week.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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