Today’s most significant news is the announcement from Russia that they intend to pull back from some areas near Kyiv, allegedly as a magnanimous gesture. We can say with near certainty that Putin’s generals aren’t doing it out of goodwill. Still, the move does seem to answer one of our most pressing questions of the past few days: With continued Ukrainian successes against Russian positions northeast and northwest of Kyiv, how close might Ukrainians be to achieving the complete encirclement of major parts of the Russian invasion force?
It would be such an enormous military victory as to be unthinkable, and few analysts appear to consider it plausible even as Ukrainian victories in the northeast led to new maps that looked perilously close to it. However, the Russian announcement hints that no matter how we outside observers were interpreting the scenario, Russian generals are now concerned enough to order troops in the most vulnerable positions around Kyiv to pull back to more protected ground.
Another recent action signals that Russia finds its position more precarious than it is willing to admit: the recent destruction of a major bridge south of Chernihiv. It was first hypothesized to be a cruel move intended to block civilian evacuations; a more plausible interpretation is that Russia has abandoned using the route to resupply its Kyiv attacks and is now (literally) burning the bridges behind it to stall Ukrainian counterattacks.
Russia may be attempting to sell its shifting of forces as a move to “focus on the Donbas” or “better enable negotiations.” The practical truth of the matter is that Putin’s generals have spent a great many lives in their attempts to push closer to Kyiv, only to now find those positions too dangerous to keep holding. Russia won’t be pulling back very far, but it’s impossible to hide its troop movements from satellites and needs an excuse for why it’s pulling troops from spots now too threatened by Ukrainian territory recaptures to keep. The preferred public answer: We meant to do that!
Again, this doesn’t mean Russian troops will be going very far, and it certainly doesn’t mean Russia doesn’t intend to regroup and attempt to push more artillery back toward Kyiv in the coming weeks. But it means Ukraine has bloodied the attackers enough that Russia’s no longer just “pausing to resupply” along the Kyiv front but doesn’t feel it can sustain its current positions in the face of Ukrainian counterattacks. That is significant, especially since we can imagine how Vladimir Putin will respond to the generals bringing him such news.
The war has been taking an increasingly partisan turn here at home. The biggest reason is that Donald Trump keeps opening his mouth, shattering whatever show of pro-Ukrainian unity his Republican Party manages to craft between his outbursts. But a new demand by House Republicans that his Ukrainian extortion scheme be officially papered over, added to a confusing move by a major television network to rehabilitate one of the Trumpites who most worked to cover up the scheme, aren’t helping. The first step to defending Ukraine would be to reject plans to extort the nation for political benefit … and they still can’t do it.
Republicans have been trying very hard to shift to a pro-Ukraine stance since Russian autocrat and far-right hero Vladimir Putin invaded the country and began a systemic program of war crimes, but it has been hard going. The Republican talking points of the Donald Trump era were that Ukraine was a hopelessly corrupt country and that we needed to support whatever crackpot schemes Rudy Giuliani and other party toadies came up with to put the screws to its corrupt-but-not-in-the-right-way government. Also oh-by-the-way maybe it was Ukraine, not Russia, who attacked our 2016 presidential elections, and maybe it was Donald Trump's political opponents who orchestrated it rather than a laundry list of Donald Trump's grifting underlings and kin.
No matter how hard walking lie dispenser Sen. Mitch McConnell or other Republicans bluster that actually the party has been pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia all along, it regularly goes to hell again when some pro-Trump House Republican pipes up with a new defense of how Donald Trump had every right to block military aid from reaching Ukraine until the Ukrainian president did him, personally, an election favor.
Sure enough, here comes Oklahoma's Rep. Markwayne Mullin, and with impeccable timing. Mullin is taking this moment to introduce a new House resolution that would "expunge" Donald Trump's first impeachment. It would officially, according to, uh, this document, never have happened. And Mullin is doing this because, he told Fox News, Democrats were "manipulating a perfect phone call with a vulnerable nation" for their "political gain."
It is possible this bearded gas station bollard was drunk when he was saying that, because nobody in full possession of their faculties would still use the phrase "perfect phone call" in the year Dickety Dickety Two unless Donald Trump was standing behind them with a gun to their back. It is a level of maudlin sycophancy that even Sen. Lindsey Graham shies away from these days.
Though we have never once said this and will never say it again: Markwayne Mullin is right. The House of Representatives should absolutely be taking time out of whatever the hell they are currently pretending to do to revisit the debate on whether Donald Trump's extortion of the Ukrainian government was, as they have insisted ever since, how the Republican Party believes their foreign policy should function. Whether it is reasonable for a president to make congressionally mandated military assistance contingent on an allied government announcing false accusations against Republican enemies. Whether the timing of Trump's delay, which took place as Russian cutouts and Russian forces were stepping up military attacks inside Ukraine as part of the overall plan to annex the eastern side of the nation outright was coincidental or conspiratorial.
We should again all be pondering whether the near-entirety of the Republican Party, its lawmakers, its allies, and its pundits sought to immunize Trump from consequences because they genuinely do not feel that a president corrupting foreign policy to gain personal, nongovernmental benefits is out of bounds—or if they believe only that Republican elected officials ought to be able to commit such crimes.
And, of course, the House needs to come to terms with the most consequential question of all: whether the near-unanimous Republican decision to immunize Trump against charges of corruption against our democracy led directly, a short time later, to Trump attacking our democracy even more directly with a propaganda-premised coup attempt that turned violent inside the halls of the U.S. Capitol. By. All. Means.
Come to think of it, Mullin's request that Trump not just be immunized from consequences for extorting the Ukrainian government, but the records "expunged" of any mention that Congress even objected, is something that would fit well with the House select committee probing the Jan. 6 insurrection. Donald Trump clearly believed that in a showdown between this nation's written Constitution and his own personal ambitions, Republicans would choose him. Why did he think so? Why was he so certain that the Republican Party would, so long as a little bit of preemptive violence was added to the mix so that all parties would understand the consequences for opposing him, fall in line and demand that the election be erased rather than acknowledge his loss?
Which, in fact, happened: The majority of Republican lawmakers did vote to nullify the election. But Democrats, at that particular moment in time, happened to outnumber them anyway.
Why would Trump think that the Republican Party would back him even if he committed sedition itself? Why was he so certain?
Mullin, author of a new resolution calling on Congress to "expunge" the impeachment charges Trump faced after an international extortion scheme looking to boost his own power even if it directly conflicted with laws passed by Congress: Do you have any insight as to why Trump would believe House Republicans would allow him to commit any crime he wanted to?
Ukraine may have saved our democracy and its own back in 2019 by resisting Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure the country’s government into announcing an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden.
What many people don’t realize is that Rudy Giuliani had already begun pushing to get the Ukrainian government to announce such an investigation as early as January 2019, when he met in New York with Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko. That’s months before Volodymyr Zelenskyy, running on an anti-corruption platform, won the April 21, 2019, presidential run-off election against incumbent Petro Poroshenko. Biden officially announced his candidacy just four days later.
I would recommend that everyone read the Ukrainegate timeline prepared by Just Security, an online forum that analyzes U.S. national security policy. It outlines the complex chain of events in the campaign to pressure Ukraine that eventually resulted in Trump’s first impeachment. And there was a a quid pro quo offered to Poroshenko—although it did not involve withholding weapons, according to the Just Security timeline.
TheWall Street Journalreported that in late Feburary 2019, Giuliani’s associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman met with Poroshenko to press him to initiate an investigation of Hunter Biden and a debunked theory that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Hillary Clinton. They said if Poroshenko went along he would be rewarded with a state visit to the White House. That would have been a boon to Poroshenko, who was in a tough campaign for reelection against Zelenskyy.
Now imagine an alternate history in which Ukraine’s top prosecutor had announced an investigation of the Bidens in March 2019. Poroshenko was pushed to the brink, but did not yield to the pressure.
Poroshenko and Trump in 2017
It would have come completely out of the blue, since there was no “perfect” phone call or whistleblower at the time. Just think about howCNN or The New York Times would have reported on the investigation. How would Biden have reacted to a nasty smear campaign against his sole surviving son, who was in a fragile state as he struggled to recover from substance abuse problems?
A New York Times story dated Feb. 26, 2019 said Biden had held a family meeting earlier that month in which there was a “consensus” that he should run for president. But at the same time, Biden acknowledged in a speech at the University of Delaware that he had been uneasy about “taking the family through what would be a very, very, very difficult campaign” against Trump. “I don’t think he’s likely to stop at anything, whomever he runs against,” Biden said.
If Ukraine had done Giuliani’s bidding, Biden might very well have decided against entering the race. At best, Biden would have entered the campaign as a weakened frontrunner, with a dark cloud hanging over his head. Either way, Democrats would have faced an even more contentious primary contest, which might have yielded a weakened candidate whom Trump would have had a better chance of defeating.
A second Trump term would have posed an undeniable threat to our democracy. As for Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s puppet would have continued undermining NATO and done little to help Kyiv resist Russian aggression.
In Trump’s mind, Ukraine, not Russia, was his enemy.
In August 2018, polls showed that Biden was leading Trump in a head-to-head matchup, and also leading the potential Democratic primary field. Biden indicated that fall that he was strongly considering a 2020 presidential bid. Around the same time, Giuliani Partners was hired by the Boca Raton, Florida, company Fraud Guarantee, co-founded by Parnas, a Ukrainian-American businessman. Giuliani ultimately was paid $500,000 for undisclosed business and legal advice, according to Reuters.
Lev Parnas in 2020
Parnas and his associate Igor Fruman were later convicted in a campaign fraud finance case, for using funds from a foreign investor to try to influence political candidates through campaign donations. There was a $325,000 donation to the pro-Trump American First PAC from a shell company set up by Parnas and Fruman. That was enough for both men to get invited to an exclusive donors’ dinner in April 2018 with Trump at his Washington hotel, at which both men urged the president to fire U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, an anti-corruption crusader, claiming that she was unfriendly to Trump, TheWashington Postreported
Parnas and Fruman became Giuliani’s facilitators and translators as he revved up efforts to go after Biden, even though he had yet to declare his candidacy.
WAS RUDY A “USEFUL TOOL” FOR A DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN BY RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE?
Now there’s one big unanswered question: Was Giuliani wittingly or unwittingly acting as a “useful tool” to spread disinformation prepared by Russian intelligence aimed at derailing Biden’s presidential campaign? It’s not implausible, because U.S. Intelligence has already confirmed that Russia was spreading disinformation about Biden’s mental health.
Giuliani and Trump in 2016
The Washington Post reported in October 2020 that U.S. intelligence agencies had warned the White House in 2019 that Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence and being used to feed disinformation to Trump. Giuliani did ask Ukraine to probe accusations that Ukrainian officials plotted to rig the 2016 presidential election in Hillary Clinton’s favor, by leaking evidence against Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager. Giuliani wanted Ukraine to investigate a mysterious Democratic National Committee server that Trump believed was hidden in Ukraine.
During the November 2019, House Intelligence Committee hearings, Fiona Hill, the former Russia expert for the National Security Council, called out House Republicans for pushing the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in the 2016 presidential election.
“This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves,” Hill said.
Giuliani was pushing allegations that Biden, while vice president to Barack Obama, pushed to get Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin dismissed, in order to avoid a corruption investigation of Ukraine’s Burisma energy company, whose board members included Hunter Biden. But Giuliani could not have come up with this conspiracy theory on his own, because it was totally baseless. It’s logical to assume that this notion was spoon fed to Giuliani, who eagerly swallowed it.
One method used by Russian intelligence operatives is to put ideas into the head of someone who is receptive to the same goal—in this case derailing Biden’s candidacy. The notion that Biden stood a good chance of defeating Trump in 2020 must have really stuck in Giuliani’s craw. It was Biden who turned “America’s mayor” into a national laughingstock in an October 2007 Democratic presidential debate.
“Rudy Giuliani. There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There’s nothing else! There’s nothing else! And I mean this sincerely. He’s genuinely not qualified to be president,” Biden said.
At the time, Giuliani was the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. He ended up running one of the most humiliating campaigns in modern U.S. political history, raising more than $60 million and winning only one delegate before dropping out. Giuliani then vanished into the political wilderness for eight years, only to reemerge as Trump’s personal lawyer and hatchet man.
Giuliani had access to Trump, who had repeatedly expressed his willingness to get dirt on his political opponents from foreign sources. Giuliani’s international consulting practice had clients in Ukraine dating back to at least 2008, including Kyiv’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxing champion.
During Trump’s first impeachment trial, Giuliani put out this intriguing tweet:
...incriminating documents. It was already a fully-intact bribery/extortion case. The reason you don’t know about it is because of the cover up by the corrupt Democrats and their establishment media!
The dossier was allegedly handed to Giuliani sometime in the fall of 2018. That raises some obvious questions: Who prepared it? What were its contents? Who were the witnesses? And who gave the dossier to Giuliani?
There are many possible suspects. A month before Trump’s first impeachment trial, NBC News published a guide to the controversial figures helping Giuliani dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine. The story noted that “most of them have ties to pro-Russian political figures or oligarchs.” Three names stand out in this rogues’ gallery: Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russia member of Ukraine’s parliament; Kostiantyn Kulyk, a former prosecutor; and Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian energy tycoon with deep ties to Russia.
Derkach studied at the FSB intelligence service academy in Moscow in the 1990s. Washington Postcolumnist Josh Rogin wrote that a top-secret CIA assessment had concluded that Putin and his top aides are “probably directing” a Russian foreign influence operation which involves Derkach, identified by U.S. intelligence as a Russian agent, who has been providing anti-Biden information to Giuliani.
Kulyk did prepare a seven-page, English-language dossier in late 2018 that accused Hunter Biden of corruption related to his service on Burisma’s board, according toThe New York Times. The dossier also made the dubious claim that U.S. diplomats covered up for crimes committed by the Bidens. Ukrainian officials said Kulyk had ties to a warlord in eastern Ukraine, accused of working for the Russian intelligence services. It’s not clear whether this was the same dossier that Giuliani was referring to in his tweet.
Firtash has been fighting extradition from Austria to the U.S. on bribery and racketeering charges. Parnas has alleged that Giuliani offered help with Firtash’s U.S. legal problems, in exchange for helping with the hunt for compromising information on the Bidens. Federal prosecutors also alleged that Parnas received a $1 million loan from a lawyer for Firtash.
Firtash was also involved in investment projects with Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who previously was paid millions of dollars to work as a political consultant for Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.
HOW GIULIANI PUT THE SQUEEZE ON UKRAINE BEFORE ZELENSKYY’S ELECTION
At the annual White House Hannukah party on Dec. 6, 2018, Parnas and Fruman held a private meeting with Trump and Giuliani. CNN reported that Trump tasked them to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens, according to associates of Parnas.
Parnas and Giuliani in 2018
In December 2018, Parnas and Fruman arranged a Skype call between Giuliani and Shokin, the former Ukraine prosecutor general who was the source of the debunked reports that Joe Biden had him fired to stop him from investigating wrongdoing in Burisma.
Biden actually was among multiple Western officials who had urged Ukraine to dismiss Shokin from his post at the country’s top prosecutor because of his insufficient efforts to combat corruption.
Bloomberg News reported that Giuliani met for the first time with then-Ukraine Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko in New York on Jan. 25-26, 2019. Giuliani held another meeting with the Ukrainian prosecutor in Warsaw, Poland, in mid-February. Parnas and Fruman attended both meetings.
And then in late February we get to the quid pro quo, with Giuliani’s associates telling Poroshenko that if Ukraine announced an investigation of the Bidens, he would be rewarded with a state visit to the White House.
Yet why didn’t the Trump administration try to extort Poroshenko by withholding shipments of lethal weapons? Perhaps because there might have been a previous quid pro quo.
In March 2018, the Pentagon approved the sale of 210 Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. In early April, a Ukraine anti-corruption prosecutor froze four cases involving Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, The New York Timesreported. Ukraine also announced it was halting all cooperation with the Mueller investigation. One of the cases resulted from the mysterious black ledger. In August 2016, Ukraine officials revealed the existence of a secret ledger, which appeared to detail payouts totaling $12.5 million to Manafort for his work as a consultant to Yanukovych.
But there was a catch that rendered the Javelin sale mostly symbolic. The U.S. insisted that the missiles be stored in western Ukraine, hundreds of miles from the frontlines in the eastern Donbas region, where Ukrainian forces were battling pro-Russian separatists, The Atlantic reported.
During their early 2019 meetings, Lutsenko fed some information to Giuliani, including bank records that detailed Burisma’s payments to Hunter Biden. But the records did not indicate any wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, according to a New Yorker profile of the Ukrainian prosecutor. Lutsenko told The New Yorker that he suggested to Giuliani that, if U.S. authorities opened an investigation into the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine, the prosecutor-general’s office would share any relevant information.
But Lutsenko soon realized that what seemed most important to Giuliani was to get him to announce investigations into the Bidens and into claims of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to The New Yorker. Lutsenko said he didn’t have any grounds to open such investigations under Ukrainian law. Lutsenko said he sensed that Poroshenko was worried that publicly announcing such investigations would damage Ukraine’s relations with the Democratic Party.
Ukraine had enjoyed strong bipartisan support until Trump came along. Trump’s Republican loyalists were already spouting conspiracy theories put forth by Russian intelligence that Ukraine had meddled in the 2016 election to help Clinton.
“I was near the red line, but I didn’t cross it,” Lutsenko told The New Yorker. “I was wondering what kind of game he (Giuliani) was playing. I felt like we were getting scammed.”
WE NEED A COUNTERESPIONAGE INVESTIGATION OF TRUMP, GIULIANI, MANAFORT, ET AL.
Imagine the consequences today if Poroshenko and Lutsenko had crossed that red line back in early 2019.
Instead, Giuliani and his associates were back at square one with Zelenskyy’s election. That set in motion the series of events leading to Trump’s “perfect” phone call to Zelenskyy, the arms-for-dirt extortion plot, and the president’s eventual impeachment (the first one, anyway).
The Mueller probe barely uncovered the tip of the iceberg, because its scope was limited to looking only into collusion between Russia and Trump during the 2015-2016 presidential campaign.
The DOJ should make a deal with Parnas and/or Fruman to reduce their sentences in exchange for information about whether Russian intelligence used Giuliani to interfere in the 2020 election by undermining Biden’s campaign. It is also high time that a counterespionage investigation be opened against Manafort, if it is not already under way.
And above all else, we need a comprehensive investigation of Trump’s dealings with Vladimir Putin and Russian oligarchs over the decades. With the help of former Attorney General William Barr and others, Trump has been able to escape any consequences for his ties to Russia.
Our nation will never be secure until these criminals are exposed and held to account.
Oh, hey, Republicans don’t think anyone should be talking about how they had Donald Trump’s back when he withheld military aid from Ukraine to extort personal political favors, and Politico is ready to report on just how unimportant Republicans think that was, drawing on quotes from six Republicans and, to rebut, one single Democrat.
Republicans “don’t see a shred of comparison” between Trump’s extortion effort and President Joe Biden not giving exactly the aid Republicans now claim to want the U.S. to send Ukraine, Politico reports. Republicans “are brushing off any suggestion that their frustration with Biden’s pace of Ukraine aid is at odds with their earlier defense of Trump’s posture toward Kyiv.”
It took three Politico reporters to come up with this, an article that alternates between the reporters’ paraphrasing of Republican dismissals, Republican quotes (sample: “That was the biggest nothing-burger in the world that resulted in an impeachment by the House,” according to Sen. Kevin Cramer), and a few carefully chosen facts about what exactly it is that Republicans are dismissing.
But lots of facts didn’t make it into Politico or are mentioned only in passing. The Washington Post reports, for instance, on the dozens of Senate Republicans who are attacking Biden for not sending more aid to Ukraine after they voted against the government funding bill including $13.6 billion in Ukraine aid. That vote and the funding at issue do not make a single appearance in the Politico article about how Republicans don’t think their past defense of Trump withholding support from Ukraine has any relevance to the current situation.
On that one, Republicans are deploying the “I voted against the thing I say I support because there were also things I opposed in the bill” argument, but as Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy said in response, “Inside every piece of legislation are elements that many of us disagree with. Inside that budget that you voted against are all sorts of things that I disagree with. But in the end, in order to govern the country, you have to be able to find a path to compromise.”
Or, as Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz put it, “It’s very simple: If you don’t vote for the thing, you’re not for the thing,” Schatz said. “That is literally our job, to decide whether we are for or against things as a binary question.”
Republicans decided they were against impeaching Donald Trump for withholding military aid to Ukraine to extort personal political favors from Zelenskyy. Quite a few of them decided they were against aid for Ukraine if it involved also funding the rest of the U.S. government. And they’re getting plenty of space in Politico to explain why the first was merited without being challenged on their reasoning or asked about the second.
Republicans continue to struggle mightily with the task of distancing themselves from Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin, now that Putin not only ordered the annexation of a European democracy but has committed to a campaign of war crimes to accomplish it. Putin has been a favorite of the American far-right for his nationalist policies, his contempt for human rights, and of course, his ability to govern as a "strong" autocrat who dispenses with his own political opposition using whichever tools of the state are most convenient. The admiration turned mainstream once Donald Trump started praising him, and sucking up to him, for the same reasons.
Putin is the autocrat of the exact sort that the Republican right have demanded this country also install. We have all seen Sen. Ted Cruz's mocking of the "woke" American military compared to the testosterone-heavy recruiting ads of the (now proven incompetent) Russian army. We have years of history of the most highly connected Republicans working directly with pro-Russian oligarchs to destabilize Ukrainian democracy in exchange for either cash or "favors"—in the form of fraudulent claims and documents that can be used against Republican enemies here at home. Fox News' Tucker Carlson went from cheering for Putin to vaguely condemning him to speedily shifting into a top international promoter of Kremlin "biolab" propaganda intended to retroactively justify the invasion.
The party is a wreck on this. And speaking of wrecks, here's Marjorie Taylor Greene, coming out with the straight-fascist conspiracy take. It no longer even matters whether she herself believes these things to be true; she is either a willing purveyor of hoaxes or an unwilling one, and either should be sufficient grounds to remove her from office outright.
Marge Greene issues a statement tonight against help for Ukraine. Says both sides are at fault, the Ukraine govt only exists because of Obama, and Biden, Pelosi and Romney have financial interests in the country. pic.twitter.com/9Ra8VWpKsT
Greene punctuated her speech, which was delivered soon after Ukrainian President Zelenskyy's virtual address to Congress, with repeated claims that Ukraine is certain to lose to Putin—a claim that, at this point, few outside the Kremlin are still claiming. On the contrary, the Russian advance has stalled out amid devastating supply shortages, the Putin government is urgently asking China for Chinese-made weapons to replace what they have expended, and as it currently stands Russia has devoted 75% of its total offensive forces to an effort which may end the nation's claims of superpower status.
There surely cannot be anyone left in America who believes that Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, has put even ten minutes of serious thought into what should or should not happen in Ukraine. But the more central point is that she is not an outlier on this.
Which Republican lawmakers have been eager to adopt Rudy Giuliani-pushed hoaxes claiming that their Democratic enemies-of-the-moment were responsible for all sorts of subterfuge in Ukraine and that the Ukrainian government was in cahoots with those efforts? Nearly all of them! And not just a little, but to the point that Republican lawmakers were willing to repeat those claims as part of their justifications for nullifying a U.S. constitutional election on behalf of the liars who invented the theories.
Which Republican lawmakers stubbornly insisted that there was no foul done when Donald Trump held up weapons shipments to an at-war Ukraine in a flagrantly crooked attempt to extort the Zelenskyy government into publicly endorsing a hoax aimed at Trump's election opponent? All of them, save one Republican senator.
Many of those same Republicans are now on television feigning great outrage over President Biden's unwillingness to directly engage Russian aircraft in combat. The very same Republicans were using Greene's arguments during Trump's first impeachment trial to argue that Trump's one-person blockade of military aid to Ukraine during a time of war was of no great consequence.
The Greene position is the basest form of the Republican position, in that she is not clever enough to couch her demands in the doublespeak most politicians use to pretend at nuance. The Republican position on Ukraine is that whatever is happening is the fault of Democrats, the answer is to do the opposite of whatever Democrats want to do, and the actual outcome—whether a European democracy lives or dies—is irrelevant. The war only exists as attack line. It is important only to the extent that it can be used to pin Bad Things on the movement's domestic enemies.
There is no unified Republican Party "position" on the Russia-Ukraine war. There are only attacks. A few senators are using the war to demand that the supposedly cowardly Biden administration do more. House Republicans who have long expressed at least subtle admirations for Putin (aka, the Trump wing of the party) is demanding their Democratic enemies do less. And all of it is a complete afterthought, as the dominant Republican theme of the war centers itself around rising gas prices, and why those rising gas prices are not Vladimir Putin's fault but the fault of Joe Biden because ... something.
There's no unified Republican Party position on what ought to happen in Europe because Republicanism no longer has any measurable, identifiable ideology that would guide such a thing. It's chaos. Tucker is promoting top Kremlin conspiracies, Greene is demanding the United States cut off supplies and let Putin win, Sen. Lindsey Graham is daring the administration to get into a shooting war, Donald Trump is still praising Putin's supposed genius even as his military gets bogged down, literally, in soggy Ukrainian fields.
The only unified party position is that of the typical fascist movement; no matter what crisis hits, it is their domestic enemies who are responsible, claims that are supported by newly constructed hoaxes supposing all of it to have been manufactured so as to benefit the secret corruption of their enemies, and whether the crisis ends well or in abject disaster is of no consequence except as a tool for further demonizing those domestic enemies.
We saw this at the beginning of the pandemic when even the most basic of emergency precautions were opposed en masse by a Republican Party devoted instead to claims that every one of those medical precautions—from masks to public closures to vaccines—was a supposed assault on nationalist freedoms. We are seeing it now, as Republicans take to the airwaves to claim that Putin only invaded Ukraine because Joe Biden tricked him into it, or looked "weak" compared to President Hamburglar, or that Biden is doing too little to protect Ukrainians but is also doing too much, which means temporarily high gas prices are his fault, which means we should be easing sanctions on Putin, but we should also be taking Russian yachts, and in the background, Tucker continues to yell about "biolabs" with all the conviction of a dog barking at passing cars.
Republicanism has long passed the point at which it can respond to a real crisis with urgency—or even competence. It cannot distinguish between true crises and its own crafted delusions, and does not care to, and instead insists that incompetence in times of crisis is itself bold. When Donald Trump botched each and every aspect of the early pandemic response, due largely to his fixation on assigning such tasks to incompetent, suck-up underlings, those failures became a newly invented ideology to rally around. No masks! No public safety measures! Testing is for cowards!
Republicanism is now obsessively a movement devoted to attacking the movement's own domestic enemies, and there is no ideology or policy that takes precedent over that. Greene is acting on reflex, but it is the reflex that the party base now demands of every one of its politicians. Anyone who can't handle the job, like Rep. Liz Cheney, is declared an enemy.
Putin is targeting and slaughtering civilians in a brutal unprovoked war against Ukraine, a sovereign democratic nation. Only the Kremlin and their useful idiots would call that “a conflict in which peace agreements have been violated by both sides.” pic.twitter.com/Ld9WomOStd
This was once a completely unremarkable centrist position. But now Cheney is the one being purged, and the Dear Leader-humping conspiracy goons of the party are those doing the purging.
Russian state TV also jumped on comments by Republican congressman Madison Cawthorn, who called Zelenskyy “a thug”. That got played over and over. pic.twitter.com/VdC2AG48NQ
Putin is doing the world a small favor in demonstrating that an autocratic government consisting of a single Dear Leader who surrounds himself with toadying yes-men and who cares not a damn about corruption—so long as it is corruption that benefits himself and his allies—will eventually hollow out their state to the point it becomes nonfunctional. This is not a lesson any of these Republicans will learn, as they demand the United States be recrafted into a similar one-party state that frees their own Dear Leader to violate laws at will and without consequence.
They won't learn from it because the party exclusively picks incompetent would-be autocrats to rise up their ranks while scrubbing out anyone with even the slightest bit of expertise. The rest of us, though, need to be watching closely.
Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, an ally of former President Donald Trump, is reportedly planning to primary Mitt Romney for his Utah Senate seat in 2024.
Politico revealed that Reyes is discussing a potential run with political players in state politics and supporters and allies associated with Trump.
A source for the outlet who is close to Reyes said he is “very seriously considering running” regardless of what Romney decides to do in 2024.
“He’s confident that regardless of what Senator Romney wants to do, he’s going to pursue this,” they told Politico.
Utah AG Sean Reyes is preparing for a 2024 Senate run that could pit him against Mitt Romney in a GOP primary.
Reyes backed Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 results and has been elected statewide three times.
Romney has a couple of options in the 2024 election cycle.
A national poll last month shows that Senator Romney runs even with fellow Republican Senator Ted Cruz at 4% of those voters making a choice for the Republican presidential primary.
That number ranks well below the 53% Trump received in the same poll, but would land him some votes.
Another poll one month earlier shows 64% of Republicans in Utah disapprove of Romney’s job performance, including half who strongly disapprove.
Last spring, the Senator had boos and catcalls cascaded down upon him from well over 2,000 Republican delegates at the Utah Republican State Convention.
Politico describes Sean Reyes as “a Trump loyalist” and reports that he’s met with the former President on two occasions “and each time Trump encouraged him to run against Romney.”
“When he meets with Trump, the only thing that comes up is ‘Will you run against Romney? I need you to run against Romney. Get that guy out,’” their source is quoted as saying.
Reyes backed Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election results.
Asked about the prospect of running against Reyes, a confident Romney welcomed the challenge.
“Were I to decide to run again, the best news I could get would be that Sean Reyes was my opponent,” he said laughing and walking away.
On the news of Utah AG preparing to possibly primary him in 2024, Romney tells @burgessev:
“Were I to run again, the best news I could get would be that Sean Reyes was my opponent.” He laughed and walked off. w/ @dlippmanhttps://t.co/kxrmI9DI46
Romney, often touted as center-right, moderate, or simply the voice of reason in the Republican Party, has been engaged in some extreme commentary and behavior of late.
He blamed the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the Trump-touted concept of ‘America First.’
“Putin’s impunity predictably follows our tepid response to his previous horrors in Georgia and Crimea, our naive efforts at a one-sided ‘reset,’ and the shortsightedness of ‘America First,’” said Romney.
He also engaged in truly extreme rhetoric, the likes of which you’d expect to hear “The View” or CNN, rather than a supposedly level-headed member of Congress, when he accused decorated Iraq War veteran and former Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard of being a Russian asset and spreading “treasonous lies.”
Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian propaganda. Her treasonous lies may well cost lives.
Romney was filmed marching with protesters while explaining that he was walking “to make sure that people understand that Black Lives Matter.”
“We need a voice against racism … we need many voices against racism and against brutality,” he said. “And we need to stand up and say black lives matter.”
The New York Times usually wins the awards for the worst, shallowest political coverage most driven by the imperative of normalizing Republican extremism and attacking Democrats. But Washington Post White House Bureau Chief Ashley Parker has dropped in with a doozy of an entry. She’s taken the serious problem of a brutal war and how the United States can respond without risking a broader and even more devastating war, and making it all about the optics.
It’s appalling that she would write that war-news-as-fashion-analysis sentence,* and it’s worse that this is the sentence she was proud to use to represent her story in the tweet. “Look how clever I am,” that tweet screams. “Aren’t I just at the pinnacle of my profession?” Which, sure, given that her specific profession is the kind of media that caused every other reporter in the White House press briefing room on Wednesday to ask Press Secretary Jen Psaki the exact same question—not because they expected her answer would change, but so their networks would have their own reporters on video asking the same not very interesting question.
President Joe Biden’s comments, Parker wrote, “at times took on an almost defensive tone,” a total flipping mystery of an observation in a story blatantly aimed at putting Biden on the defensive. Parker then goes on to offer three-plus paragraphs of concrete actions Biden has taken to support Ukraine and attempt to get Russia to back away from war before writing, “But since the actual war between Russia and Ukraine began three weeks ago, Biden and his European counterparts have articulated no clear end game, and Wednesday’s Biden-Zelensky juxtaposition offered something of a split screen, with the U.S. president and his team trying to explain why the administration was falling short on meeting Zelensky’s stirring request.”
They’re not trying to explain why they’re falling short. They’re explaining why a U.S.-imposed no-fly zone would be a very bad idea—and even many Republicans committed to attacking Biden agree on that point, though many are urging him to send fighter jets, a move Psaki explained would cross the line from providing defensive weapons to sending offensive ones. As Psaki also said, “If we were President Zelenskyy, we would be asking for everything possible as well, and continuing to ask for it.” Zelenskyy is doing what he should be doing as the leader of his country. Biden’s job is to lead this country, and as long as there is any other possible option, that means avoiding war with Russia.
About Republicans, by the way: Parker quotes two of them—Sens. Ben Sasse and Susan Collins—urging the administration to send fighter jets. What she doesn’t do is what should be mandatory every time a Republican who was in office in 2020 is quoted on Ukraine: Describe how they voted on the impeachment of Donald Trump for withholding nearly $400 million of military aid and public shows of support from Ukraine and Zelenskyy while Trump engaged in a pressure campaign aimed at getting Zelenskyy help him harm Biden’s political prospects.
In a reasonable media environment, one does not get to go from defending the withholding of aid to demanding the immediate, not fully considered, provision of an entirely new category of powerful military equipment without facing some serious questions about one’s partisan motives. But as Ashley Parker went all in on showing us with this story, this is not a reasonable media environment.
* To be clear, fashion analysis is an important thing when done well. In this case, it was embarrassingly misplaced. Because it was shallow, unserious fashion analysis, it added to the overall offense of this article.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave a virtual address to the United States Congress today, a key portion of which was video footage of the devastation caused by Russian attacks—and the many, many civilians now injured or dead. Zelenskyy again asked the United States to intervene directly in the war with the imposition of a military "no-fly" zone. President Joe Biden responded in public with a partial list of new weapons to be delivered to Ukrainian defense forces—and by calling Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin a "war criminal."
That will be the least of Putin's worries. The strongman today vowed a purge of disloyal Russian officials as he looks to pin blame for Russia's still-astonishing battlefield incompetence on anyone other than himself and the other oligarchs that turned Russia from a would-be superpower to a hollowed-out kleptocracy. Ukrainian artillery appears to be increasing now that Russian forces are bogged down into relatively stationary positions, but of even more consequence may be a newly announced U.S. shipment of an unknown number of the sort of small, cheap drones that Ukraine's defenders have been using to such devastating effect already.
The disgraced former president’s top national security adviser has been doing a slew of interviews the past few weeks. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, John Bolton, like most former national security advisers, has found himself being asked for his opinion on rapidly changing events. John Bolton’s bona fides as a truly terrifying warmonger span decades, and he has been critical of Trump—for a price. Bolton says what most of us already know: Trump’s extortion attempts, in the form of holding back military aid from Ukraine in order to dig up dirt on then-candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter, is a big part of the reason Vladimir Putin did not invade Ukraine until now.
“He obviously saw that Trump had contempt for the Ukrainians. I think that had an impact,” Bolton told VICE earlier this month. Bolton goes on to detail a phone conversation Trump had with Vladimir Putin, shortly after Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected, during which Trump asked Putin how he felt about him. According to Bolton, Trump’s lack of knowledge and backbone in that conversation likely reinforced Putin’s belief that Trump didn’t have strong feelings in support of Ukraine’s leadership.
Trump’s choice to bring Bolton on to replace H.R. McMaster was considered ominous at the time, since Bolton’s No. 1 foreign policy idea has always seemed to be “invade everybody.” But Bolton was in the rooms where Donald Trump conducted foreign policy discussions and played little brother to Putin. “Trump had no idea what the stakes were in Ukraine,” Bolton said.
In fact, Bolton explained to VICE, Trump’s lack of curiosity for anything is profound. “It's hard for me to describe how little he knows,” Bolton tried to explain. This true mediocrity is why Trump’s reasoning for things is so whimsical and useless. He has no context or knowledge for much of anything. “He once asked [then-White House Chief of Staff] John Kelly if Finland was part of Russia. What he cared about was the DNC server, and Hunter Biden, and the 2016 election, and the 2020 election. That's what it was all about. And I think he had next to no idea what the larger issues were.”
Bolton, in an interview with the Washington Post earlier in March, Bolton said that he believed Vladimir Putin’s lack of open invasion of Ukraine during the Trump administration was possibly predicated on the Russian dictator’s belief that Trump would pull the United States out of NATO during a second term in office.
Arguably the saddest exchange between Bolton and VICE’s interviewer is the one when Bolton says he is unsure what Trump would have done if Russia had invaded Ukraine when Trump was in office. He joked, “He never got that server! Those Ukrainians wouldn’t give him the server!” The interviewer remarked that Ukraine probably wished that this mythical server with Hillary’s secret plans existed so they could have ingratiated themselves to Trump. Bolton’s reply, also clearly joking (or half-joking, at least) sounds like something Trump and the MAGA world would have held up as proof, not the absurdist joke it would have been:
“They should have given him a server and said, ‘Hey, we found that—may have been erased, but here's the server.’”
Following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s emotional appeal to Congress and President Joe Biden to help his country defend itself against Russia, top Republican leaders did the only thing they could think to do: use their cheering of Zelenskyy as cover to attack Biden.
Despite dressing their attacks on Biden in the language of support for Zelenskyy and Ukraine, Republicans didn’t exactly hide the real point. “The longer President Biden waits, trying to figure out excuses to not offend Putin, it's costing lives in Ukraine,” said House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, the day after Russia announced sanctions on Biden and a slate of other Democrats, but no Republicans, and just over two years after he and every other Republican, with the exception of Sen. Mitt Romney, voted against impeaching Donald Trump for withholding military aid from Ukraine to extort political favors.
When you're going straight to “excuses not to offend Putin,” you’re making it clear where your interests lie, and it’s not sincerely with the Ukrainian people.
Scalise’s fellow House Republican leader Elise Stefanik led her statement on Zelenskyy’s address with an attack on Biden’s “weakness and delay.” This is a return to form for Stefanik, who started the month with a message to Ukraine that managed not to blame Biden for Putin’s invasion, after her initial response had been aimed at Biden. Stefanik didn’t just vote against impeaching Trump: She was a key part of his impeachment defense, rising in the ranks of Republicans on the basis of that performance. For Stefanik, the inquiry into Trump having withheld military aid as part of an effort to get Ukraine to tarnish his domestic political opponent was a prime opportunity to try to tarnish Trump’s domestic political opponent—Joe Biden, the same person she is now holding responsible for Vladimir Putin’s actions.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also went straight to Biden. McConnell had on Tuesday said Biden was guilty of “hesitancy and weakness,” and on Wednesday said, “the message to President Biden is that he needs to step up his game.” McConnell voted to acquit Trump of withholding military aid to extort Ukraine.
Republican attacks on Biden implied that the distance between their preferred policies and his were bigger than they really are. Most Republicans agree that a U.S.-imposed no-fly zone would be a bad idea. “It remains my view that putting — if that means putting U.S. troops or pilots in Ukraine, I think the answer is no,” McConnell said. He, like many other Republicans, is drawing the line for attacking Biden between the drones and other equipment Biden is sending and the airplanes McConnell claims to support. (McConnell would still find a way to attack Biden if Biden sent dozens of planes tomorrow.)
Biden is out here trying to walk the line between aiding Ukraine and avoiding World War III, and Republicans are simply looking for any excuse they can manufacture to attack him.
(@catturd2) 