House GOP conducts discredited Biden-Burisma probe that Zelenskyy wouldn’t do as ‘favor’ for Trump

Remember that “perfect” phone call in July 2019 that led to President Donald Trump’s first impeachment? That’s the call in which Trump asked Ukraine’s newly elected president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to do “a favor” for him—namely to speak with his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and announce an investigation of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, related to the Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma.

The call came just a week after the White House had ordered the State Department and Pentagon to withhold nearly $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine that had already been authorized. Despite the pressure, Zelenskyy didn’t announce any such investigation, which might have derailed Biden’s presidential campaign.

But now Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, is doing the very favor for Trump that Zelenskyy wouldn’t do. And it couldn’t have come at a more opportune time for the embattled former president, who is facing a federal indictment for mishandling classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort. 

RELATED STORY: Trump plays victim and savior

Comer had threatened to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress for failure to turn over an FBI document created in June 2020 that contained unsubstantiated allegations from a confidential source in Ukraine about Joe and Hunter Biden. Comer said a “whistleblower” had informed lawmakers about the FBI document.

The Washington Post wrote: “It is not hard to figure out why this is unfolding the way it is unfolding. There’s an enormous appetite on the right at the moment for evidence that the FBI and Justice Department are deploying a double standard or that Biden deserves to face criminal charges just as much as former president Donald Trump.”

The allegations that Comer wants to investigate relate to the Bidens and Burisma. And this latest political stunt by Comer could backfire like others.

It’s possible that the committee is simply regurgitating Russian disinformation. The U.S. intelligence community, in an unclassified report released in March 2021 said that “Ukraine-linked individuals with ties to Russian intelligence engaged in activities targeting the 2020 U.S. presidential election,” including “alleging corrupt ties between President Biden, his family, and other U.S. officials and Ukraine.”

“a bunch of malarkey”

Wray had cited the need to protect confidential sources in refusing to turn over the document. But the FBI director eventually relented and allowed all the members of the Oversight Committee to view the redacted document, known as an FD-1023 form, usually a report about information relating to alleged crimes provided to the FBI by an informant.   

Wray insisted that the committee members view the document in a secure room known as a SCIF, for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, on Capitol Hill. The viewing occurred on Thursday, just hours before Trump broke the news about his indictment.

It’s unknown why the FBI insisted that committee members view the document in a SCIF. But Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wasted no time in rushing out of the room to take notes and reveal the contents of the document to reporters.

RELATED STORY: You have to see Marjorie Taylor Greene's plan to 'take down the Deep State'

Greene and fellow Freedom Caucus member Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida both said Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky allegedly told an FBI source that he had paid $5 million apiece to Hunter Biden and then-Vice President Biden in an attempt to avoid a corruption investigation, the New York Post reported.

“It was all a bribe to get (former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor) Shokin fired,” Greene said in a video that she posted on Twitter. She concluded by saying: “We are going to continue following this investigation; we are going to continue to look into every single thing that we can uncover.”

President Biden dismissed the bribery allegations as a “bunch of malarkey.”

The claim that Biden pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin because he was investigating Burisma has been totally debunked. The evidence shows Biden was carrying out U.S. policy when he went to Kyiv and warned then-president Petro Poroshenko that the U.S. would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees until Shokin was removed as prosecutor general. The International Monetary Fund also threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine because Shokin wasn’t pursuing corruption cases.

Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, an independent agency, has said Burisma was not even under investigation when Biden was pushing for Shokin’s removal. But the facts haven’t stopped Republicans from claiming that the FBI form proves that the Bidens took millions in bribes. 

The day after Trump’s indictment, the Murdoch-owned New York Post had a front-page cover with photos of both Biden and Trump with the headline “Hail to the Thiefs” and subheadlines “Trump indicted for taking classified documents” and “Ukraine bizman: ‘I bribed Biden for $10M.”

Trump complained that his federal indictment came on the same day that House Republicans gained access to the FBI document, so the bribery allegations got less attention in the news media.

"It's no coincidence they indicted me the very same day it was revealed that the FBI had explosive evidence that Joe Biden took a $5 billion illegal bribe from Ukraine," Trump said Saturday from the North Carolina Republican Party Convention.

questioning credibility

But as independent journalist Ed Krassenstein pointed out in a tweet, there are many reasons to question the credibility of the information provided to the FBI in the FD-1023 form that has so excited the MAGAverse.

Breaking: The Bribery allegations that Comer, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Republicans have been touting are concerning Burisma. While Republicans are making the claim that the allegations “100%” prove that Biden committed bribery, let’s take a step back and evaluate where the… pic.twitter.com/pLuWAj5vSq

— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) June 8, 2023

Moreover, The Washington Post reported that the FBI and Justice Department under then-Attorney General William Barr had reviewed the allegations from the confidential informant and “determined there were no grounds for further investigative steps.”

The Post wrote:

The allegation contained in the document was reviewed by the FBI at the time and was found to not be supported by facts, and the investigation was subsequently dropped with the Trump Justice Department’s sign-off, according to the people familiar with the investigation.

Barr said the information in the June 2020 FBI form was passed along to U.S. Attorney David Weiss of Delaware, who began an investigation into Hunter Biden’s overseas business ties and consulting work in 2018. That would mean Weiss, a holdover from the Trump administration, has been in possession of the information for three years, but has not acted on it.

The Washington Post reported that Weiss is nearing a decision on whether to charge Hunter Biden for relatively minor tax- and gun-related violations. The newspaper reported last year that federal agents had concluded that they had enough evidence to charge Biden with failing to report all of his income on tax filings and lying on a form for a gun purchase by denying that he had substance abuse problems.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the Oversight Committee, wrote in a statement that “much of the information provided by the source (in the June 2020 form) was information Mr. Giuliani had already provided the FBI.” Raskin added:

“We now know what I had long suspected: that Chairman Comer’s subpoena is about recycling stale and debunked Burisma conspiracy theories long peddled by Rudy Giuliani and a Russian agent, sanctioned by former President Trump’s own Treasury Department, as part of the effort to smear President Biden and help Mr. Trump’s reelection campaign.”

That Russian agent Raskin is apparently referring to is Andriy Derkach, a former member of Ukraine’s parliament who represented various pro-Russian parties. Among them was the Party of Regions headed by ousted pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, which paid millions of dollars to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to work as a consultant.

Here’s how The Washington Post described Derkach’s background:

Derkach, a former member of Ukraine’s Russia-leaning Party of Regions, was educated at the Higher School of the KGB in Moscow before entering business and politics in independent Ukraine after the Soviet Union’s collapse. His father was a longtime KGB officer who later ran independent Ukraine’s intelligence service in the late 1990s and early 2000s before losing his position amid a scandal over Ukrainian authorities’ involvement in the kidnapping and murder of a prominent journalist.

Derkach was mentioned by name by the National Intelligence Council, consisting of the CIA, NSA, and five other U.S. intelligence agencies, in its March 2021 assessment of “Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections.” The report read:

“We assess that President Putin and other senior Russian officials were aware of and probably directed Russia’s influence operations against the 2020 US Presidential election. For example, we assess that Putin had purview over the activities of Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator who played a prominent role in Russia’s election influence activities. Derkach has ties to Russian officials as well as Russia’s intelligence services.”

It added:

A network of Ukraine-linked individuals—including Russian influence agent Konstantin Kilimnik—who were also connected to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) took steps throughout the election cycle to damage US ties to Ukraine, denigrate President Biden and his candidacy, and benefit former President Trump’s prospects for reelection.  

[…]

Derkach, Kilimnik, and their associates sought to use prominent US persons and media conduits to launder their narratives to US officials and audiences. These Russian proxies met with and provided materials to Trump administration-linked US persons to advocate for formal investigations; hired a US firm to petition US officials; and attempted to make contact with several senior US officials. They also made contact with established US media figures and helped produce a documentary that aired on a US television network in late January 2020.  

That U.S. television network was One America News Network. Media Matters for America said the right-wing cable station has a “notable history of acting as a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda,” including spoon-feeding its viewers Kremlin-backed propaganda about the war in Ukraine.

giuliani and derkach

In early December 2019, as the House was moving to impeach Trump, Giuliani traveled to Kyiv with an OAN crew to work on the documentary aired in January 2020. That’s when he met Derkach for the first time, TIME magazine reported. Derkach’s press office released this photo of his meeting with Giuliani, which was posted on his Facebook page that was later banned.

"In this handout photo provided by Adriii Derkach's press office, Rudy Giuliani, an attorney for U.S President Donald Trump, left, meets in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Dec. 5, 2019 with Derkach, who was later named an "active Russian agent" by the U.S. government." https://t.co/4nQpDNkbsR

— Markus T (@dforthandbview) October 16, 2020

Derkach had caught Giuliani’s attention when he held a November 2019 press conference in Kyiv to push his conspiracy theory of “DemoCorruption,” which holds “that Biden sits atop a vast system of graft that permeates the Democratic Party and colludes with George Soros and other Western billionaires,” TIME said.

Derkach had also been pushing the Kremlin-backed theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that had interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign on behalf of Clinton. When Time reporter Simon Shuster visited Derkach in his Kyiv office in 2021, he said Derkach handed him a folder labeled “Reports About Record-Setting Bribe,” which included press clippings, printouts from Twitter, and a letter that Derkach sent to U.S. Senate members accusing Biden and his family of corruption.

“Giuliani is a very capable lawyer. I appreciated his meticulousness,” Derkach told Shuster. “When we spoke, it was very useful for me. He records everything. He writes everything down in his notebook. He never relaxes.”

(That’s the same capable, meticulous lawyer who, in July 2020, was duped by Borat—a character played by actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen—in a compromising scene filmed in a New York hotel room.)

After the OAN documentary aired, Giuliani invited Derkach to New York for further talks in February 2020. Derkach appeared on Giuliani’s podcast.

In the months leading up to the November presidential election, Derkach continued his efforts to spread disinformation about Biden to Giuliani as well as Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa

the search for something incriminating

Derkach also released a series of audio tapes of 2016 conversations between Biden and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in which the U.S. vice president linked financial assistance to firing prosecutor Shokin. Derkach claimed he got the tapes from “investigative journalists.” 

There was nothing really incriminating or embarrassing in the heavily edited tapes, TIME reported. But during the first presidential debate in September 2020, Trump repeatedly brought up the tapes, accusing Biden of threatening Ukraine with withholding a billion dollars if Shokin wasn’t removed.

In September 2020, Derkach held a news conference in Kyiv in which he claimed that Burisma’s owner Zlochevsky had laundered money through off-shore banks to pay millions of dollars to a company co-owned by Hunter Biden, Ukraine’s Unian news agency reported.

Hunter Biden did serve on Burisma’s board of directors from 2014 to 2019, and was paid about $600,000 a year, according to the New York Times. His business partner Devon Archer also served on Burisma’s board. Burisma paid them several million dollars for consulting services through their investment firm Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC, Reuters reported. 

In September 2020, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Derkach “for his efforts to influence the 2020 U.S. presidential election.”

Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a press release: ”Andrii Derkach and other Russian agents employ manipulation and deceit to attempt to influence elections in the United States and elsewhere around the world.”

Last December, the Department of Justice indicted Derkach for a scheme to violate the sanctions by allegedly engaging in bank fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, and money laundering. Prosecutors said Derkach allegedly concealed his involvement in the purchase and maintenance of two condominiums in Beverly Hills, California. “While participating in a scripted Russian disinformation campaign seeking to undermine U.S. institutions, Derkach simultaneously conspired to fraudulently benefit from a Western lifestyle for himself and his family in the United States,” said Michael J. Driscoll, head of the FBI’s New York office.

But Derkach stands accused of even worse offenses in Ukraine amounting to treason. In January, Zelenskyy announced that Derkach and three other pro-Russian lawmakers had been stripped of their Ukrainian citizenship for choosing “to serve not the people of Ukraine, but the murderers who came to Ukraine.”

In March, the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, a British think tank, issued a detailed report on Russia’s “unconventional operations” during the war in Ukraine in which Derkach figured prominently.

Ukraine’s State Security Service (SBU) made public information in June 2022 that Derkach had been under the control of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, since 2016, and had been receiving installments of U.S. $3 million to $4 million a month, according to the RUSI report.

“Derkach is alleged to have been tasked with establishing a network of private security firms which would assist in maintaining control in a number of towns by pathfinding and assisting Russian forces upon their arrival,” the report said.

More ominously, the report said Ukraine's intelligence agencies believe that "the main direction of Derkach's pro-Russian activities" in the years before 2022 was to influence Ukraine's nuclear energy industry "in the interests of Russia." Russia had plans to seize Ukraine’s nuclear power plants as part of the invasion, and to that end, “the Russian special services recruited employees of nuclear facilities, including from units responsible for the physical security of the facilities." 

Ukraine has issued a warrant for the arrest of Rudy’s one-time pal. 

Maybe Republicans on the House Oversight Committee should think twice before doing Trump a favor by accepting at face value unsubstantiated bribery allegations regarding Joe Biden and his family, especially if they might be recycling and spreading Russian disinformation. But they won’t.

RELATED STORY: How did Fox News cover Trump's indictment?

History 101: Parallels between Putin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, plus U.S. reaction then and now

Battlefield developments regarding the brutal, unprovoked, imperialistic Russian invasion of Ukraine appear multiple times on this site’s front page every day—with good reason. For starters, Moscow has the world’s second largest military, and more nuclear weapons than any other country. Truly understanding the conflict means looking beyond what’s happened since hostilities began and examining history.

For example, although many of us have a vague sense that Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler share some similarities as aggressive warmongers, it’s important to provide substance to supplement that vague sense—and to connect the history to the present both in terms of events in Europe and the reaction of our own country to the two dictators’ bloodthirsty acts.

The First World War officially ended at the stroke of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918—an appalling six hours after the countries involved had signed the armistice agreement. How many soldiers died in combat during those final six hours? Almost three thousand, and the last one was an American.

The conflict decisively altered the map of Central and Eastern Europe.

Before:

After:

Four states that had ruled over large swathes of territory were defeated, and their dynasties overthrown: the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian, and German empires. The Ottoman Empire dissolved, and the Turkish Republic that emerged in its place was limited to the Turkish heartland of Anatolia and, in Europe, a tiny bit of land surrounding Istanbul (they had lost much of their territory in Europe in the Balkan Wars that immediately preceded WWI).

The war led to fundamental change in Russia. The country became a democracy for a few months in 1917, and then, thanks to the Bolsheviks, transformed into the Soviet Union near the end of that year. By losing the war, it lost control over Finland, as well as the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which all became independent, while the territory known now as Moldova went from being Russian to Romanian. However, during the Second World War, the USSR reacquired all of these, except Finland—of which it did get a small slice—and added a large block of eastern Poland as well.

Austria-Hungary, the patrimony of the Habsburg dynasty, split apart completely. Most importantly for our purposes, its dissolution left millions who identified as ethnic Germans as either minorities in newly created states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, or in the rump-Austrian Republic. The Treaty of Versailles barred the newly created Austria from joining their territory to that of Germany, a step—known in German as Anschluss—that its leaders and most citizens wanted to take, rather than remain an independent state.

As for Germany, the Hohenzollern family abdicated the throne and democracy became its form of government. Elected leaders drew up a new constitution in the city of Weimar, which gave its name to the era running from the end of the war until Hitler’s takeover in 1933. The Versailles Treaty mandated that Germany hand over Alsace-Lorraine to France, a small piece of land to Belgium, a province to Denmark, and, in the East, one city (Memel) to Lithuania, as well as a large chunk of territory to Poland—which was reconstituted 123 years after having been forcibly partitioned by neighboring states. Large numbers of people who identified as Germans were now citizens of the new Poland, living in what became known as the “Polish Corridor.”

Germany had been the predominant military power on the European continent since its unification in 1871—accomplished in the wake of its crushing defeat of France, which had held that title for over two centuries. The country had a long tradition of militarism, and most Germans held martial values in high regard. They were proud of the nation’s military strength and battlefield victories. On the whole, Germany felt humiliated and was left wanting revenge after their defeat in WWI. Some Germans, in particular on the right, wanted nothing more than to undo the war’s outcome.

These revisionist desires were a major factor fueling Hitler's ability to win support—he was going to make Germany great again—and, ultimately, provided the basis for his aggressive foreign policy in the 1930s. As noted on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website:

Revision of the Versailles Treaty represented one of the platforms that gave radical right wing parties in Germany, including Hitler's Nazi Party, such appeal to mainstream voters in the 1920s and early 1930s. Promises to rearm, to reclaim German territory, particularly in the East, and to regain prominence again among European and world powers after a humiliating defeat, stoked ultranationalist sentiment and helped average Germans to overlook the more radical tenets of Nazi ideology.

During the Weimar era, Germany’s relations with its neighbors were not exactly placid, but at least war was avoided. After 1923, when the conflict over reparations payments was resolved, Germany had a “productive working relationship” with the two large West European democracies, Britain and France, and officially accepted the territorial losses along its western borders. German relations with its eastern neighbors were less settled, to be sure. However, In 1928, Germany signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which officially outlawed war “as an instrument of national policy.”

Five years later, Adolf Hitler had become chancellor of Germany. Through the violence and deceit he employed in the initial weeks of his rule, he became absolute dictator—the Fuehrer. Hitler’s military and foreign policy contains strong parallels to what we are seeing from Putin’s Russia today.

not carbon copies

The two are not carbon copies, to be sure. Nazi Germany’s commitment to murderous antisemitism and genocide—its meticulously developed and executed plan to kill every Jew, along with Roma and other groups deemed racially or otherwise inferior—is not something we are seeing from present-day Russia, although their war crimes against Ukrainian civilians are certainly despicable. Nevertheless, virtually from the time Hitler took power, he began his quest to reverse the results of WWI and alter his country's borders, a quest that brought Europe into war.

One of Hitler’s guiding principles was that ethnic Germans—those with, in his terms, German blood—needed to be “regathered" into the German state after being left outside it. The most egregious injustice, in the eyes of the Nazis, were those people whose territories were part of non-German states, such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, where they were being supposedly "mistreated."

Among his earliest steps, in 1936 Hitler took full control of the Rhineland—the demilitarized zone west of the Rhine River, on the border with France. Then, in 1938 he sent German troops into Austria and achieved the long-sought Anschluss. Later that year, he used the threat of force to acquire the Sudetenland—a part of western Czechoslovakia that bordered Germany, where German-speakers lived—although he promised that he’d then leave the rest of the country alone. In March 1939, he broke that promise. German forces marched in and took the rest of the Czech part of the country, and set up a Nazi-puppet regime in the Slovak half.

Hitler then turned his focus to Poland. After enacting a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union—which included a “secret protocol” by which the two countries agreed to divide Poland between them—Nazi Germany invaded its eastern neighbor on Sept. 1, 1939, and plunged Europe into the Second World War.

the many similarities

Russia's story over the past three-plus decades contains many similarities. The end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet empire—which, in Putin's words from 2005, constitute "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century"—stand as the equivalent of Germany’s defeat in WWI.

Within Russia, one generation after the end of the USSR, the autocratic Putin had dismantled the Yeltsin-era democracy that followed Soviet communism. Although the post-Soviet democracy did look shaky right from the start—people were talking about "Weimar Russia" as early as 1995—Putin is the person who delivered the death blow. Timothy Snyder, the preeminent historian of totalitarianism, has characterized Putin’s Russia as a fascist government, and contended that it is currently waging “a fascist war of destruction” in Ukraine. In this insightful New York Times op-ed piece, Snyder explores significant commonalities in the nature of the Putin and Hitler regimes.

Since first taking power in 2000, Putin has also ushered in an abrupt close to a period of relatively good relations with Russia's neighbors, which culminated in the signing of the NATO-Russia Founding Act in 1997. The document states that “NATO and Russia do not consider one another adversaries and cites the sweeping transformations in NATO and Russia that make possible this new relationship.” After Putin became president, he cast aside those sentiments as easily as he takes off his shirt for photo-ops.

It’s also worth noting that in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Russia made a guarantee to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine,” in return for Kyiv turning its share of the Soviet nuclear arsenal over to Moscow. Putin has made clear that agreement isn’t worth the paper on which it’s written.

The Russian president’s overarching goal has long been to reverse previous territorial losses born by his country. Much like Hitler, his revisionism focuses on recovering lands populated by his people’s ethnic kin (or those, like Ukrainians, he claims are kin, even if they reject such an identity). An estimated 25 million people who identified as ethnically Russian suddenly found themselves living outside the Russian Federation when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. Some moved back to Russia, while others went elsewhere, but approximately 20 million or more remain living in Russia’s near abroad.

but our people ...

Exactly as Hitler did regarding ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland and Poland in the 1930s, Putin has been employing rhetoric decrying how Russian-speakers in the former USSR were supposedly being mistreated. Putin used this to justify military action against Georgia in 2008—where South Ossetia and Abkhazia have large ethnic Russian populations—and Ukraine, both in 2014, when it outright annexed Crimea and put troops into eastern Ukraine, as well as now.

Thinking beyond places where Moscow currently has armed forces or otherwise exercises control today (i.e., Belarus)—which also includes Transnistria, a breakaway, Russian-speaking part of Moldova bordering on Ukraine that has de facto sovereignty—significant numbers of people identifying as Russian live in every post-Soviet state. The largest in raw numbers reside in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Most ominously for European security, Russian-speakers also constitute large percentages of the population in Lithuania (15%), Estonia (30%) and Latvia (34%). These last three are members of NATO, but Russia has attempted to sow “disruption and discontent” in those countries nonetheless.

To take the long view, one can characterize European history from German unification in 1871 through 1945 as being centered around that country’s push to expand its borders and dominate the continent, and the period from 1945 to the present as being dominated by a similar push from Russia. Many once thought the latter push ended in 1991, but, as with Germany, a second phase began fewer than twenty years after the first one met defeat. The apocryphal Mark Twain quote applies here: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."

the difference in U.S. responses

We can also explore parallels, as well as differences, between the U.S. response to the outbreak of the Second World War and to Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine. Concerning the former, Franklin Roosevelt faced significant isolationist sentiment in the U.S. These were embodied by the strong restrictions contained in the Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1936, which imposed a U.S. embargo on the sale of all arms and military supplies to any party involved in a war. However, after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, FDR overcame the opposition of isolationists and began aiding the enemies of Nazi Germany.

First, President Roosevelt convinced Congress to allow him to sell military equipment on a “cash and carry” basis—as long as Britain and France could pay up front and get what they had bought home on their own, such sales were allowed. France fell to Hitler in June 1940, and Britain needed much more help, so FDR and newly minted British Prime Minister Winston Churchill got creative.

Next, the U.S. sent 50 outdated but still useful destroyers to help the British protect against a naval invasion of their island in return for 99-year leases on British bases in the Caribbean and off the Canadian coast. By the end of 1940, it was clear that far more was needed, so FDR introduced legislation, the Lend-Lease Act, that would authorize the necessary assistance without requiring any payment from those receiving it. It passed in March 1941. Here’s more on the act’s impact:

Roosevelt soon took advantage of his authority under the new law, ordering large quantities of U.S. food and war materials to be shipped to Britain from U.S. ports through the new Office of Lend-Lease Administration. The supplies dispersed under the Lend-Lease Act ranged from tanks, aircraft, ships, weapons and road building supplies to clothing, chemicals and food.

By the end of 1941, the lend-lease policy was extended to include other U.S. allies, including China and the Soviet Union. By the end of World War II the United States would use it to provide a total of some $50 billion in aid to more than 30 nations around the globe, from the Free French movement led by Charles de Gaulle and the governments-in-exile of Poland, the Netherlands and Norway to Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Paraguay and Peru.

Let’s compare FDR to our two most recent presidents: Donald Trump and Joe Biden. First, we have The Man Who Lost An Election And Tried Steal It. Sticking just to what became public, we know that he not only sucked up to Putin, but he also engaged in a long-running extortion campaign aimed at getting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to smear Biden in hopes of weakening the Democrat for the 2020 campaign. You might remember that when Zelenskyy sought to buy Javelin missiles in 2019, to protect against the Russian invasion he rightly feared, Fuck a L’Orange replied “I would like you to do us a favor, though.” Trump wanted the Ukrainian president to announce that his government was going to investigate Biden for argle-bargle. That’s what brought about his first impeachment. It wasn’t exactly a Rooseveltian response to a request for help made by a country facing attack.

President Biden, on the other hand, responded to the Russian invasion by strongly supporting Ukraine, with a robust diplomatic effort and billions of dollars in military assistance. His echoing of FDR even includes a revival of the historic Lend-Lease Act in the form of the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022. Just one more way Biden is the polar opposite of Trump.

The response of the U.S. and its NATO allies to Putin’s attack on Ukraine demonstrates a key difference between now and the events of Hitler’s day. Despite unleashing the greatest evil humanity has yet seen—and hopefully ever will see—the Nazi leader actually found military allies. The Nazi-led Axis included Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Romania in Europe, as well as Japan, because other countries not only had fascist governments too, but also shared Hitler’s aggressive desire to remake the map in their favor (democratic Finland, which was attacked by the USSR in 1939 and again in 1941, fought with the Axis as well after the second attack before reaching an armistice and switching sides in 1944).

Thus far, Putin’s Russia fights alone (except for tiny Belarus) against a country whose military efforts—and even its overall government functions—are being funded to a significant degree by the rest of Europe plus the U.S. The European Union in late June even made Ukraine an official candidate to join. NATO is working together more successfully than it has done in decades, coordinating their efforts to help Kyiv and punish Moscow. Furthermore, with the forthcoming accession of Sweden and Finland—the latter of which shares an 830-mile border with Russia—NATO will have more resources and strength than ever with which to contain Putin’s aggression.

Hitler’s war divided Europe (please note that, in addition to the countries fighting with Germany, the USSR was his “de facto ally,” as seen in the simultaneous Nazi/Soviet 1939 invasion of Poland, an alliance that lasted until he invaded the Soviet Union in 1941) whereas Putin’s war has united Europe against him. This is the great success of the institutions—NATO and the EU—created in the post-WWII years to incentivize democracy and peace on the continent. Hitler succeeded to the degree that he did because pre-WWII Europe lacked such institutions.

However, having the institutions exist on paper isn’t enough. Joe Biden deserves much credit for the NATO response to Ukraine, in particular given how much his disgraced predecessor weakened the U.S. relationship with NATO. Of course, Trump is now trying to “rewrite history” on this. Why not, I guess? He’s lied about literally everything else.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of  The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)

The Trump-Putin axis will continue to haunt the GOP throughout the war in Ukraine

The longer the savagery of Russian President Vladimir Putin drags on in Ukraine, the more the conflict calls into question Donald Trump's relentless fealty to a man who is increasingly viewed as perpetrating genocide against the Ukrainian people.

The headline of one of Wednesday's lead stories on Politico read, "As Ukraine war intensifies, questions from first Trump impeachment linger."

The story notes that Trump withholding military assistance from Ukraine in exchange for a political favor from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy may seem distant, but it has "a direct tie-in to today’s war."

In the piece, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, whom Trump summarily ousted from the position, says she still harbors many unanswered questions about the entire episode.

But with so many books being written by key Trump administration figures, Yovanovitch expects the truth will out eventually.

“I expect ... that there will be more details forthcoming,” she says.

Indeed, keep 'em coming.

But the basic fact that Trump tried to kneecap Ukraine and Zelenskyy must remain top of mind as Republicans try to blame some fallout from Putin's war, such as higher gas prices, on President Joe Biden. In fact, by acquitting Trump during his first impeachment trial, Republicans blessed Trump's role in weakening Ukraine and emboldening Putin.

But Trump's first impeachment scandal is just one discrete part of an entire “litany of Trump-Russia intersections," as The New York Times put it in a remarkable piece featuring Russia expert and former Trump national security aide Fiona Hill. In a single paragraph, the Times connected these dots:

1. Trump's decades-long pursuit of business opportunities in Moscow.

2. Trump's persistent Putin worship.

3. Trump campaign aide J.D. Gordon weakening support for Ukraine in the GOP's 2016 platform.

4. Gordon dining with Russian ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak that same week.

5. Longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone asking WikiLeaks through a third party to send along forthcoming Clinton campaign emails stolen by Russian hackers.

6. Trump announcing: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

7. The Seychelles islands getaway in which military contractor and Betsy DeVos sibling Erik Prince huddled with the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund to establish a pre-inaugural backchannel to Russia.

8. Former Trump 2016 Campaign Chief Paul Manafort sharing internal polling with Russian intelligence operative Konstantin V. Kilimnik.

9. Trump’s mysteriously undocumented two-hour meeting with Putin in Helsinki in 2018, after which Trump publicly sided with Putin over the U.S. intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

10. Trump & Co. spreading Russian disinformation in 2019 asserting that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election to help Clinton.

11. Trump’s pardoning of both Manafort and Stone in December 2020.

12. Trump more recently calling Putin a "genius" and soliciting him to release dirt on President Biden's son, Hunter Biden.

That's a succinct dirty dozen, and it's still just the tip of the iceberg. But all of these threads teased out over the course of the last handful of years is exactly why the phrase "Trump-Putin axis" is so resonant, particularly in light of Russia's corrupt war and the unconscionable war crimes Putin is committing in Ukraine.

Fiona Hill: Trump said he wanted more than two terms in the White House—and he wasn’t joking

Fiona Hill is a longtime Russia expert who has repeatedly distinguished herself as someone willing to speak boldly, from the strong warning she offered about Russia’s efforts to undermine U.S. democracy during her testimony at Donald Trump’s first impeachment hearings to her statement soon after Russia invaded Ukraine that using nuclear weapons would be in character for Vladimir Putin.

Hill’s expertise on Putin—she co-authored a biography of him—inflects her read of Donald Trump, who she was able to observe in detail during her time as senior director for European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council in his administration. New York Times Magazine look back at Trump’s treatment of Ukraine highlights an important passage from her recent memoir, There Is Nothing For You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century: “In the course of his presidency, indeed, Trump would come more to resemble Putin in political practice and predilection than he resembled any of his recent American presidential predecessors.”

RELATED STORY: Fiona Hill: Putin tried to warn Trump he would go nuclear, but Trump didn't understand the warning

In the Times piece, Hill offers more thoughts on that basic assessment, describing how “He would constantly tell world leaders that he deserved a redo of his first two years,” because, “He’d say that his first two years had been taken away from him because of the ‘Russia hoax.’ And he’d say that he wanted more than two terms.”

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When interviewer Robert Draper suggests Trump was joking, Hill responded, “Except that he clearly meant it.”

Hill also heard David Cornstein, Trump’s ambassador to Hungary and a longtime friend, say similar things about Trump’s ambitions. “Ambassador Cornstein openly talked about the fact that Trump wanted the same arrangement as Viktor Orban”—the prime minister of Hungary, one of the autocratic leaders Trump so admires—Hill told Draper, “where he could push the margins and stay in power without any checks and balances.” 

But it was the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that fully clarified for Hill who Trump is and what his ambitions are. “I saw the thread,” she told Draper. “The thread connecting the Zelensky phone call to Jan. 6. And I remembered how, in 2020, Putin had changed Russia’s Constitution to allow him to stay in power longer. This was Trump pulling a Putin.”

Yeah. And U.S. institutions and democracy were strong enough to withstand it once, but we can’t afford a second attempt. Especially since, as Hill also told Draper, “Putin has been there for 22 years. He’s the same guy, with the same people around him. And he’s watching everything”—everything that happens through U.S. elections and changing administrations. 

As Hill warned during her impeachment testimony, “President Putin and the Russian security services operate like a super PAC. They deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives. When we are consumed by partisan rancor, we cannot combat these external forces as they seek to divide us against each other, degrade our institutions, and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy.” Donald Trump is at this point Putin’s eager ally in doing that.

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Not that we’re surprised, but isn’t failed President Trump even a little sick of himself constantly whining about losing the 2020 presidential election? Okay, I know: He didn’t lose it, it was stolen. He could have been a contender. Blah, blah, blah. 

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But his recent appearance on Real America’s Voice show, Just the News, with hosts John Solomon and Amanda Head was mindboggling even for the twice-impeached ex-president.

Trump didn’t waste time, talking about how the president of Russia, the man who has illegally invaded a free and Democratic-run country, leaving untold Ukrainians dead or refugees, should dig up dirt on his (Trump’s opponent) and now the sitting head of the U.S.

Last time I checked, Putin is not an ally to the U.S. Will the idiocy never end?

“As long as Putin is not exactly a fan of our country, let him explain… why did the [former] Mayor [Yuri Luzhkov] of Moscow’s wife [Elena Baturina] give the Bidens (both of them) $3.5 million,” Trump asks.

“I would think Putin would know that answer to that. I think he should release it. I think we should know that answer,” he continued. 

Extended clip is worth watching: "As long as Putin is not exactly a fan of our country... I would think Putin would know the answer to that. I think he should release it... you won't get the answer from Ukraine... I think Putin now would be willing to probably give that answer." pic.twitter.com/JFGcBk4Kxd

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 30, 2022

This is just more of the same rhetoric Trump has been ranting about since his loss in 2020. 

In response to Trump’s latest blathering, Rep. Ted Lieu tweeted: “Vladimir Putin is a war criminal and a butcher. Here are two responses—President Biden: This man cannot remain in power. Trump: Please help me, Vladimir. I am damn proud of our current President. And nauseated by the former President.”

Vladimir Putin is a war criminal and a butcher. Here are two responses— President Biden: This man cannot remain in power. Trump: Please help me Vladimir. I am damn proud of our current President. And nauseated by the former President. https://t.co/lO3CEnJ54d

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) March 30, 2022

According to Newsweek, author, journalist, and attorney Seth Abramson wrote, "President Biden is America's commander-in-chief; we're at the brink of open war with Russia; Putin is unambiguously an enemy of America.

"So one would expect any info Putin releases about our commander-in-chief to be a lie—and yet Trump now begs for Putin's aid. Open treachery.”

DNC Chair, Jamie Harrison tweeted: “Trump, the leader of the GOP, loves Putin more than he loves America. It has been evident for a while that the man seriously needs some professional help.”

Trump, the leader of the GOP, loves Putin more than he loves America. It has been evident for awhile that the man seriously needs some professional help. #GOPSoftOnRussia https://t.co/EqcMVn1SwT

— Jaime Harrison, DNC Chair (@harrisonjaime) March 30, 2022

Solomon, a former Fox News contributor, and formerly the editor-in-chief at the conservative newspaper The Washington Times, is also a big proponent of pro-Trump content, with multiple citings of his columns used as evidence by the GOP against impeaching Trump on allegations of pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden. 

"Solomon’s reporting on Burisma, Hunter Biden, and Ukraine election meddling has become inconvenient for the Democratic narrative," House Intelligence Committee ranking GOP member Devin Nunes said in his statement during the Trump impeachment hearings

According to the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact, while writing for The Hill, Solomon pushed the false Uranium One conspiracy, alleging that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sold a share of America’s uranium to Russia in exchange for a huge donation to the Clinton Foundation.

And Solomon played a key role in helping Giuliani launch the investigation into Hunter and Joe Biden

"I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon," Giuliani told The New York Times.

Co-host, Amanda Head, a notorious anti-masker, began her career as a model, actress, and singer, and was the first freshman to win the Miss Auburn University beauty pageant. She is best known for her turn as a vlogger for The Hollywood Conservative, launched in 2016. 

What has yet to remain clear is why the Republican party refuses to call a traitor a traitor. Perhaps they’re afraid of a poison Russian pill, or of simply losing a midterm seat to a more qualified and ethical opponent, but either way, someday, (I hope) the GOP will realize that as the party once known for its “values,” lost them long ago. 

One of Trump’s closest White House advisers admits that ‘it’s hard to describe how little he knows’

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.

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Bolton also pointed out that Trump’s general dislike of NATO, and his work to undermine NATO, worked in favor of Putin’s position. Trump’s interest in Ukraine, according to Bolton’s book, only perked up in “the summer of 2019 when [Trump] realized that he could have the possibility of holding up the obligation and delivery of substantial security assistance [to Ukraine] in an effort to get access to the Hillary Clinton computer server that he felt was in Ukraine, finding out about Hunter Biden’s income in Ukraine, and all of these things in this spaghetti bowl of conspiracy theories. That was the first time he really focused.”

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.”

As a result, Vladimir Putin didn’t have to be aggressive about much of anything regarding U.S. policy in the region. “I think one of the reasons that Putin did not move during Trump’s term in office was he saw the president’s hostility of NATO. Putin saw Trump doing a lot of his work for him, and thought, maybe in a second term, Trump would make good on his desire to get out of NATO, and then it would just ease Putin’s path just that much more.” In another interview, Bolton said of Trump’s threats to pull out of NATO, “I think Putin was waiting for that.”

Bolton’s beef with Trump has also led him to rail against the right-wing narrative that Trump was tough on Putin, with the U.S. under Trump applying sanctions to Russia. “In almost every case, the sanctions were imposed with Trump complaining about it, saying we were being too hard,” told Newsmax when that ultra-right-wing outlet tried to get him to go along with the narrative that Biden was at fault for everything in the history of ever.

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.’”

Trump’s Ukraine extortion campaign didn’t begin or end with ‘I would like you to do us a favor’

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine didn’t come from nowhere: Russia had invaded and annexed part of Ukraine in 2014 and there has been an ongoing war ever since, with thousands of people killed on both sides. Donald Trump’s efforts to extort Ukraine came in the midst of that war, and have to be understood in that context. Trump had very real leverage over Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, because Zelenskyy was desperate for U.S. support during a war and Trump used that leverage to apply pressure over a period of months.

Trump’s pressure campaign wasn’t just that of a larger country against a smaller one. It was against a smaller country at war with a larger one, where the aggressor in that war—Russia—was watching and reading the tea leaves about the United States’ level of support for Ukraine. Again and again, Trump left Ukraine hanging and let Vladimir Putin know that U.S. support for Ukraine was conditional at best.

The House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment inquiry report from 2019 lays it out in detail, as Asha Rangappa noted. From the moment Zelenskyy won his election in April 2019, Trump was dangling the possibility of public shows of support and then yanking them back. In their initial phone call after Zelenskyy’s win, Trump invited him to the White House—an invitation Ukrainian officials then sought to pin down and make real, without success. Trump initially said he would send Mike Pence to Zelenskyy’s inauguration with the U.S. vice president’s presence standing as visible evidence of support, only to keep Pence home and send Energy Secretary Rick Perry instead. This was as Rudy Giuliani was ramping up his efforts to get Zelenskyy to announce investigations into supposed corruption involving the Biden family and supposed Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections.

Trump explicitly connected his reluctance for a White House visit for the Ukrainian president to Ukraine having supposedly “tried to take me down” in 2016. This was false. As Russia expert Dr. Fiona Hill said in her impeachment inquiry testimony about claims that Ukraine interfered in the U.S. elections, “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves. The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016.”

Next, Trump personally froze nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine—aid appropriated by Congress and supported by officials throughout the federal agencies responsible for sending it, except those who were first and foremost Trump loyalists. And a quid pro quo was repeatedly communicated to Ukraine: Make a public announcement of investigations into the Biden family and interference in the elections if you want the White House visit and the military aid. No actual investigations are needed. Just the public announcement of them.

“On July 2, in Toronto, Canada, Ambassador Volker conveyed the message directly to President Zelensky, specifically referencing the ‘Giuliani factor’ in President Zelensky’s engagement with the United States,” according to the impeachment inquiry report. “For his part, Mr. Giuliani made clear to Ambassadors Sondland and Volker, who were directly communicating with the Ukrainians, that a White House meeting would not occur until Ukraine announced its pursuit of the two political investigations. After observing Mr. Giuliani’s role in the ouster of a U.S. Ambassador and learning of his influence with the President, Ukrainian officials soon understood that ‘the key for many things is Rudi [sic].’”

This pressure ratcheted up with Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelenskyy, the one in which he responded to Zelenskyy’s request to buy more Javelin anti-tank missiles with, “I would like you to do us a favor, though.” And it became still stronger as the hundreds of millions of dollars in aid continued to be frozen. 

On Aug. 28, 2019, Politico reported on the hold-up of the aid. The following day, Ambassador William Taylor sent Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a first-person cable in which “He explained the ‘folly’ of withholding security assistance to Ukraine as it fought a hot war against Russia on its borders. He wrote that he ‘could not and would not defend such a policy.’” But on the same day, with the aid freeze now public, Trump cancelled a trip to Warsaw for a World War II commemoration event, a trip on which he was scheduled to meet with Zelenskyy. Instead, he sent Pence.

At the meeting, President Zelensky expressed concern that even an appearance of wavering support from the United States for Ukraine could embolden Russia. Vice President Pence reiterated U.S. support for Ukraine, but could not promise that the hold would be lifted. Vice President Pence said he would relay his support for lifting the hold to President Trump so a decision could be made on security assistance as soon as possible. Vice President Pence spoke with President Trump that evening, but the hold was not lifted. 

Zelenskyy—the guy who has stayed in Kyiv at the risk of his own life during Russia’s invasion—buckled under the pressure. He booked an interview on CNN to announce the investigations Trump was demanding. Instead, as more of the story of the extortion campaign trickled out and the House announced investigations, Trump unfroze the aid. 

Trump’s pressure on Ukraine—on Zelenskyy—wasn’t just about one phone call. And the pressure wasn't just about the specific military equipment Ukraine wanted. It was about sending a message to Putin that U.S. support for Ukraine was wobbly. 

Cawthorn’s Ukraine take isn’t so shocking if you’ve been paying attention to Republicans since 2016

This week, Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s take on Ukraine makes him stand out. “Remember that Zelenskyy is a thug,” Cawthorn said in a video obtained by North Carolina news station WRAL. “Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.”

It’s a bold statement, coming at a time when 61% of Republicans have a positive view of Republican President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, according to one poll—and Cawthorn did try to walk it back a little. But Cawthorn isn’t so out of step with his party if you look at the last few years rather than the last few weeks. For that matter, some prominent Republican voices continue to boost Vladimir Putin and suggest that Ukraine had it coming. 

The loudest Republican with the biggest platform carrying Putin’s water at this point is Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, who most recently jumped on board with Russian disinformation claims that the U.S. and Ukraine have a joint bioweapons program. Also buying into the bioweapons lab propaganda was Rep. Thomas Massie—one of the three Republicans who voted against a House resolution supporting Ukraine—who attached his concern about the issue to a tweet by Glenn Greenwald. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been critical of Putin recently, but she appeared at a white nationalist event less than two weeks ago at which Putin and the invasion of Ukraine were cheered on, and as recently as January, Greene was one of a significant number of prominent Republicans—led by Donald Trump—who were arguing against U.S. support for Ukraine.

Going back a little further than that, during Trump’s first Ukraine-centered impeachment, a standard Republican talking point was that Ukraine was incredibly corrupt, “one of the three most corrupt countries on the planet,” according to Rep. Jim Jordan.

But the groundwork for the extortion attempt that led to Trump's first impeachment had been laid years before that, in large part by former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, whose work for pro-Russian candidates and the oligarchs who supported them contributed both to political turmoil in Ukraine in recent decades and to the Republican move toward support for Putin. In one key incident, supposed grassroots anti-NATO protesters who attacked U.S. Marines doing exercises with the Ukrainian military were not so grassroots after all—they were plants set up by politicians for whom Manafort consulted. That incident in turn was cited by Putin when he annexed Crimea, as evidence that people there would welcome the Russian move.

With Manafort as Trump’s campaign manager—consulting with Russian oligarchs and employing a Russian spy all the while—military support for Ukraine was removed from the platform at the Republican National Convention. And all of that is before Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine while pressuring Zelenskyy to help Trump destroy Biden’s 2020 chances.

So Madison Cawthorn’s anti-Ukraine comments may seem shocking this week. But it’s not that Cawthorn is out of step with his party’s last several years of Ukraine-Russia policy. It’s just that he’s apparently too slow on the uptake to change his message quite as quickly as his fellow Republicans did.

Fiona Hill: Putin tried to warn Trump he would go nuclear, but Trump didn’t understand the warning

If you remember the name Fiona Hill, it’s likely because of her testimony in Donald Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, at which she distinguished herself as a forceful, knowledgeable, and fearless public servant. Hill is a Russia expert who was speaking about her time as the senior director for European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council under Trump. She offered a strong warning about Russia’s efforts to undermine U.S. democracy in that testimony. So she’s an interesting and important person to hear from about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—even as we should keep in mind that Hill is known as a Russia hawk and speaks from that perspective—and Politico’s Maura Reynolds gives us that chance with an in-depth interview.

It’s scary stuff, even beyond Hill’s warning that Putin really might use nuclear weapons—and in fact that he had tried to warn Trump about his willingness to do so (only Trump didn’t understand the warning). “The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it. Why have it if you can’t?” Hill said. Running through Russia’s recent history of poisonings with radioactive polonium and the Novichok nerve agent, Hill concluded, “So if anybody thinks that Putin wouldn’t use something that he’s got that is unusual and cruel, think again. Every time you think, ‘No, he wouldn’t, would he?’ Well, yes, he would. And he wants us to know that, of course.”

She continued, “It’s not that we should be intimidated and scared. That’s exactly what he wants us to be. We have to prepare for those contingencies and figure out what is it that we’re going to do to head them off.”

Hill faults the United States and NATO on failure to be prepared for contingencies, going back years. “I think there’s been a logical, methodical plan that goes back a very long way, at least to 2007 when [Putin] put the world, and certainly Europe, on notice that Moscow would not accept the further expansion of NATO. And then, within a year in 2008, NATO gave an open door to Georgia and Ukraine. It absolutely goes back to that juncture,” she told Reynolds. “Back then, I was a national intelligence officer, and the National Intelligence Council was analyzing what Russia was likely to do in response to the NATO Open Door declaration. One of our assessments was that there was a real, genuine risk of some kind of preemptive Russian military action, not just confined to the annexation of Crimea, but some much larger action taken against Ukraine along with Georgia. And of course, four months after NATO’s Bucharest Summit, there was the invasion of Georgia. There wasn’t an invasion of Ukraine then because the Ukrainian government pulled back from seeking NATO membership. But we should have seriously addressed how we were going to deal with this potential outcome and our relations with Russia.”

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, though, is not mostly about NATO, in Hill’s assessment. It’s not even entirely about restoring the borders of the Soviet Union. Hill thinks Putin is looking back further in time.

“I’ve kind of quipped about this, but I also worry about it in all seriousness—Putin’s been down in the archives of the Kremlin during COVID looking through old maps and treaties and all the different borders that Russia has had over the centuries,” she said.

“He’s said, repeatedly, that Russian and European borders have changed many times. And in his speeches, he’s gone after various former Russian and Soviet leaders, he’s gone after Lenin and he’s gone after the communists, because in his view they ruptured the Russian empire, they lost Russian lands in the revolution, and yes, Stalin brought some of them back into the fold again, like the Baltic States and some of the lands of Ukraine that had been divided up during World War II, but they were lost again with the dissolution of the USSR. Putin’s view is that borders change, and so the borders of the old Russian imperium are still in play for Moscow to dominate now.”

Domination doesn’t necessarily mean occupying or annexing another country. “You can establish dominance by marginalizing regional countries, by making sure that their leaders are completely dependent on Moscow, either by Moscow practically appointing them through rigged elections or ensuring they are tethered to Russian economic and political and security networks,” Hill noted. “You can see this now across the former Soviet space,” including Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Belarus, with Ukraine being “the country that got away.”

Putin’s determination to break Ukraine could mean occupation, but, Hill said, “What Putin wants isn’t necessarily to occupy the whole country, but really to divide it up. He’s looked at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and other places where there’s a division of the country between the officially sanctioned forces on the one hand, and the rebel forces on the other. That’s something that Putin could definitely live with—a fractured, shattered Ukraine with different bits being in different statuses.”

Putin is also engaged in what Hill describes as “a full-spectrum information war.” In that information war, “You get the Tucker Carlsons and Donald Trumps doing your job for you. The fact that Putin managed to persuade Trump that Ukraine belongs to Russia and that Trump would be willing to give up Ukraine without any kind of fight, that’s a major success for Putin’s information war.”

Hill said that the response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine must go beyond NATO. “I’m not saying that that means an international military response that’s larger than NATO, but the push back has to be international,” she clarified. That means an economic response that goes beyond sanctions.

”Sanctions are not going to be enough. You need to have a major international response, where governments decide on their own accord that they can’t do business with Russia for a period of time until this is resolved. We need a temporary suspension of business activity with Russia,” Hill said. “Just as we wouldn’t be having a full-blown diplomatic negotiation for anything but a ceasefire and withdrawal while Ukraine is still being actively invaded, so it’s the same thing with business. Right now you’re fueling the invasion of Ukraine. So what we need is a suspension of business activity with Russia until Moscow ceases hostilities and withdraws its troops.”

And, Hill said in a conversation that repeatedly invoked World War II as a precedent, Putin will not stop at Ukraine unless the response is such that he has no choice. There’s a lot more there. Agree or disagree with her, Hill’s take as an expert not just on Russia but on Putin specifically is worth reading in full.

Rep. Elise Stefanik shifts her message on Russia-Ukraine, at least for nearly two minutes

Rep. Elise Stefanik, who was a key part of the Republican effort to fight Donald Trump’s first, Ukraine-related impeachment in the House, has a message for the people of Ukraine. It’s not an apology for her support of Trump’s extortion of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an attempt to gain an election advantage over now-President Joe Biden. But—and this is big coming from Stefanik—her message sticks to Ukraine and Russia without overtly attacking Biden.

Last week, as Russia invaded Ukraine, Stefanik was part of a statement from House Republican leaders that blamed Biden for “appeasement,” and she released her own statement railing as much against Biden as against Putin. So her new video message (see below) to the people of Ukraine and to Zelenskyy is a real departure for her. Is that because, in speaking in theory to Zelenskyy, she wanted to avoid echoes of Trump withholding military aid from Ukraine in an attempt to get Zelenskyy to manufacture a scandal about Biden? Is it in some minor way a recognition that Biden’s approach—assembling a major international response with devastating sanctions on Russia—is looking more successful than Republicans were hoping? 

Either way, what Stefanik also isn’t doing is putting distance between herself and Trump. While her descriptions of Putin as “a gutless, bloodthirsty, authoritarian dictator” and a “war criminal” are a far cry from Trump’s descriptions of Putin as “smart” and “savvy” and “genius,” Stefanik is part of a broader Republican pattern of criticizing Putin while refusing to answer questions about Trump’s praise.

But Stefanik’s role in defending Trump’s attempted extortion of Ukraine makes her approach here particularly nauseating. This is someone who rose to prominence in her party by participating in stunts intended to disrupt the impeachment inquiry, and relentlessly tried to use the inquiry into Trump’s extortion effort to promote the very thing he had been getting at to begin with, dragging Biden and his son Hunter into her questioning at every opportunity. For her to act like she has had the welfare of the people of Ukraine at heart all along is staggeringly dishonest. But then, the entire Republican approach to this issue is staggeringly dishonest.

My message to the people of @Ukraine and @ZelenskyyUa: The United States of America stands firmly with you against Russia’s unprovoked and heinous attack on your country. pic.twitter.com/s4d96sWxb2

— Rep. Elise Stefanik (@RepStefanik) March 1, 2022

To the people of Ukraine, the United States of America stands firmly with you against Russia’s unprovoked and heinous attacks on your country. Your bravery, sacrifice, and resistance against a gutless, bloodthirsty, authoritarian dictator is a beacon of hope for freedom and democracy around the world.

A beacon of hope, but I’m not going to say a word about my party’s leader calling those unprovoked and heinous attacks “savvy.”

As a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, I was honored to lead a bipartisan group of congressional members to Ukraine in 2018. I met with the wonderful Ukrainian people and experienced the beauty of your culture and country. Most importantly, I saw firsthand the importance of the security partnership between our two countries to counter Russian aggression, combat Vladimir Putin’s disinformation, and defend democracy and freedom. Today, I remain committed to strengthening that partnership by working with my colleagues to increase military support for the Ukrainian armed forces and establish strong and effective deterrents to counter Putin’s hostility.

It cannot be emphasized enough that these are the words of someone who defended Trump for withholding $400 million of military aid from Ukraine in an effort to gain political advantage at home. 

Additionally, we are working to sanction Putin and his corrupt oligarch cronies immediately and permanently terminate construction of the Nord Stream II pipeline, end Russian energy exports around the world, and provide additional military and financial support to Ukraine. I will not stop fighting until Ukraine receives the resources it deserves and Putin is cut off and isolated from the international community. As you continue your fight against the evil desires of the war criminal Vladimir Putin, all of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people are in our prayers and we will stand behind you in support of this fight for your country. Never stop fighting for a sovereign, self-governing, and free Ukraine.