Not even a week after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended its masks mandate for public travel—a move that reflected rising Covid trends from the BA.2 subvariant—a federal judge in Florida has struck down the order, sending airlines and other public transportation hubs into confusion.
It wasn’t immediately clear on Mondayhow soon masks would no longer be required or whether the Biden administration would seek to appeal. (My colleague Jeremy Schulman happened to be boarding a plane when he was alerted to the court ruling and has promised to keep us abreast of how the surprise change will affect compliance!) In her ruling, Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle wrote that the CDC’s order exceeded the statutory authority and violated administrative law.
The CDC had previously extended the federal mask mandate to stay in effect until May 3 in order to monitor how the omicron subvariant BA.2 would transpire across the country. (Coincidentally, the requirement had been set to expire today.) The Northeast in particular has seen cases tick up significantly, with New York and New Jersey seeing average daily cases climb by an alarming 64 percent over the past week.
For transportation workers concerned about the rising numbers Monday order is likely to come as a distressing development. But it could also be welcomed by some, particularly airline staff, who have been under immense pressure since the start of the pandemic to get anti-mask passengers to comply with CDC rules. Personally, I see this as potentially setting the stage for a whole new wave of conflicts, with those opposed to masks confronting those who still choose to wear them.
Either way, don’t say I didn’t warn you. More chaos ahead. Beep beep!
Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to vote on Nominee for Associate Justice to the Supreme Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.Graeme Sloan/Sipa/AP
Utah Senator Mike Lee, the son of legendary US solicitor general Rex E. Lee, has long referred to himself as a “constitutional conservative.” He’s authored no less than three books on the Founders, and received plaudits from conservatives for introducing bills that aim to limit executive power.
But newly released texts between Lee and Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows in the aftermath of the 2020 election reveal just how fair-weather Lee’s loyalty to the constitution really is.
The texts, published by CNN, come from the goldmine of correspondence that Meadows handed over to the select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot (before he suddenly decided to stop cooperating). They show an increasingly desperate Lee pressing Meadows for proof to back up Trump’s lies that massive voter fraud swung the 2020 election to Biden.
On November 22, 2020, Lee texted Meadows:
Please give me something to work with. I just need to know what I should be saying.
And two days later:
Please tell me what I should be saying.
Throughout the exchange, Lee seems less worried about the potential danger of, you know, overturning the will of the American electorate than the frenzied way in which the so-called “Kraken” team—composed of Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell—went about it. He’s down with subverting democracy, he just wants to do it legally.
Beyond illustrating Lee’s tenuous loyalty to democratic principles, the texts also underscore just how pathetic the effort to overturn the election actually was. Republican senators knew that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were based on flimsy evidence, even as they played footsie with his election lies to avoid becoming the targets of his ire.
In fact, Lee (presciently) urges Meadows to stop the Trump team from indulging in potentially libelous conspiracy theory. Instead, he repeatedly asserts, the team should focus on having state legislatures appoint alternate slates of electors to give the Senate pretext to throw out the legitimate electoral votes. “We simply have no authority to reject a state’s certified electoral votes in the absence of a (sic) dueling slates.”
CNN also leaked texts between Meadows and Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, who seemed similarly distressed by Powell and Giuliani’s antics.
“Frigging Rudy needs to hush…” the ellipsis-addled representative texted Meadows on November 22.
Instead of Powell and Giuliani, both Roy and Lee point Meadows toward more-respectable-but-no-less-crazy law professor John Eastman, who authored several memos detailing a far-fetched scheme to toss out legitimately cast electoral votes on the day of the count.
But all Lee’s efforts to ingratiate himself with Trump proved for nought on January 4, 2021, when Donald Trump repeatedly ad-libbed that he was “a little angry” at Lee for declining to endorse the whackiest claims about the election.
“I’ve been spending 14 hours a day for the last week trying to unravel this for him,” Lee whined to Meadows. “To have him take a shot at me like that in such a public setting without even asking me about it is pretty discouraging.”
On January 3, 2021, Lee texted Meadows, “I don’t think the president is grasping the distinction between what we can do and what he would like us to do.” He continued, three days before a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, in an attempt to disrupt the electoral vote count, “Nor do I think he’s grasping the distinction between what certain members are saying that sound like they could help him, but would really hurt him.”
Lee added: “I know only that this will end badly for the president unless we have the Constitution on our side.”
For years, concerns have been mounting in the press and among Senate staffers about California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s cognitive abilities. A report published in the San Francisco Chronicle today—featuring interviews with four US senators, three former Feinstein staffers, and a Democratic congressperson from California—reveals more about the 88-year-old’s potential inability to legislate.
The sources interviewed by the Chronicle said that Feinstein’s deteriorating memory made it impossible for her to do her job without heavily relying on staff. “It’s bad, and it’s getting worse,” one Democratic senator told the Chronicle. The sources recounted instances of Feinstein forgetting recent conversations or failing to recognize people she had known for years. At a memorial address for Port of San Francisco Commissioner Anne Halsted, Feinstein reportedly forgot to mention the woman who had died. When staffers told her that she needed to speak again, she referred to Halsted in the present tense.
Feinstein rose to prominence as mayor of San Francisco after George Moscone’s assassination in 1978. She was elected to the Senate in 1992, and in 2021 became the longest serving senator from California. At 88, she is the oldest member of the Senate. As a member of several committees, including the Judiciary, she also holds quite a bit of power. If Democrats hold onto control of the Senate after the midterms, she will replace the retiring Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) as president pro tempore, the third in line for the presidency. Her term is not set to end until 2024.
This is a tragic situation for the senator, who in February lost her husband of more than 40 years. Still, it raises serious questions about the practicality of a Senate with no term or age limits, where staffers may work to keep knowledge of a legislator’s deteriorating mental state hidden from constituents. As the Chronicle notes, the very doggedness that made Feinstein an effective legislator now factors into her refusal to resign. “My biggest concern,” one staffer said, “is that it’s a real disservice to the people of California.”
Ukrainian refugees wait near the US border in Tijuana, Mexico. Gregory Bull/AP
In the last two months, US border officials have processed about 10,000 undocumented Ukrainians at the US-Mexico border. This is pretty far from typical for asylum seekers taken in at the southern border in the last couple years—but the Biden administration made an exemption for asylum seekers fleeing war-torn Ukraine, allowing them to enter the country. The discussion around their entry has also been pretty far from typical—no screams of a “border crisis” or a “surge.” But, then again, the border narrative was never really about people like them. The border narrative is rather one that continues, again and again, to incite panic about an expected “flood” or “wave” of Black, indigenous, and brown asylum seekers.
CBS News first reported that US Customs and Border Protection “encountered” 9,926 Ukrainians in two months, with more than 750 migrants processed on April 6 alone. About 150 to 200 Ukrainian asylum seekers were allowed to enter each day earlier this month, according to reports. Most of them have presented themselves at ports of entry knowing that they will be admitted.
Now, consider the context: “Here’s what’s staggering,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior policy council at the American Immigration Council, in a tweet. “The overwhelming majority” have been processed through the San Ysidro Port of Entry in San Diego “in numbers larger than we’ve seen that port of entry process in nearly 6 years.”
“This proves that we *can* process asylum seekers in large numbers,” said Reichlin-Melnick.
Here's what's staggering: the overwhelming majority have been processed through the San Ysidro port of entry, in numbers larger than we've seen that port of entry process in nearly 6 years.
This proves that we *can* process asylum seekers in large numbers at ports of entry. https://t.co/KmWnbntagS
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) April 11, 2022
So it looks like we could. We just don’t.
Last month, the Biden administration announced it would accept 100,000 Ukrainian refugees. But, as CBS News reported, “the administration has yet to announce any concrete steps to achieve the ambitious plan and expedite a visa and refugee process that typically takes months and years to complete.” So Ukrainian refugees are fleeing by plane to Mexico because they don’t need visas to enter the country, and waiting in Ukraine is simply too dangerous. Once in Mexico, they make their way to the US border to present themselves and request asylum. Ukrainians are having to wait in border cities like Tijuana and add their names to unofficial waiting lists similar to the waitlists that were formed for Central Americans starting in 2018. They have arrived in such large groups that Tijuana’s local government has set up a shelter for the 1,200 Ukrainian asylum seekers estimated to be in the city—also reminiscent of other Mexican-government shelters for Central American migrants in 2019. But because US border officials are not turning them away, Ukrainians are not having to risk their lives crossing in remote or dangerous areas of the border, like so many others have felt forced to do.
While the circumstances are clearly different, over the years I have reported on horrific stories from families who have fled Central America, Haiti, Venezuela, and Mexico, and who also have had to leave their homes to stay alive. They landed in situations at the border where there was no real path for them to follow. There have often been no lines to get in, though they are told to “get in line,” and there are no exceptions once they got to the border. And while not all people seeking asylum at the border will end up being granted asylum in a US court, they too would like a fair shot at seeking refuge. After all, asking for asylum is legal under US and international law.
Instead, it seems like every time there is an increase in the number of Black, brown, and indigenous migrants and asylum seekers at the border, it’s painted as an invasion and turned into a “border crisis” for the sake of politics and point scoring, rather than a logistical challenge and humanitarian crisis. Back in 2018, when migrant caravans from Central America brought the total number of migrants seeking asylum at the border to more than 5,000, the Trump administration sent National Guard troops to stop the “invasion.” Fox News and anti-immigrant pundits and politicians sparked fear in Americans by using images of hundreds of Guatemalan or Honduran migrants waiting for their chance at petitioning for asylum to show an urgent “border crisis.”
And that didn’t stop then. Remember how the country responded to thousands of Haitian migrants at the border last year? And just two weeks ago, the screaming started all over again when the Biden administration announced it would put an end to a temporary Trump-era policy from 2020 that was supposedly meant to stop the spread of Covid at the border and turn migrants back without screening or processing them, leaving most asylum seekers without an opportunity (and their legal right) to seek protection. Now, again, anti-immigration politicians and commentators are sharing images of large groups of mostly Latin American migrants and warning of “complete anarchy” at the border ahead of the end of Title 42—a “crisis without precedent in the recorded history of the modern nation-state.” Border Patrol Union leaders have gone on national TV to say that by ending Title 42 the Biden administration wants open borders because “they’re trying to change the demographics of the electorate” by bringing in immigrants of color. And, crucially, that there aren’t enough resources to process people at the border.
Rio Grande City Border Patrol agents encountered four large groups of migrants over the weekend near La Grulla and Roma that totaled more than 750! The migrants were from Cuba, Central and South America and more than half were single adults.https://t.co/yUqB7XPNwtpic.twitter.com/edo2ikJjum
— Chief Patrol Agent Brian Hastings (@USBPChiefRGV) April 12, 2022
Of course, the number of Ukrainians at the border is still way smaller than what we’ll likely see when Title 42 is repealed; in comparison, US Customs and Border Protection data shows an average of about 80,000 Title 42 expulsions in a recent two-month period.
But the difference in numbers simply cannot justify the difference in treatment. How the Ukrainians have been received means that when the government says there is no way to safely process tens of thousands of asylum seekers in a short time period, it just doesn’t really hold. “The expressed fears about a ‘rush at the border’ are more about optics than numbers,” Michael Paarlberg, an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, tweeted. When governments devote personnel to process people in an orderly way, “it’s not an issue.”
“There are clearly double standards in public perception and press coverage of refugees, driven by race, nationality and religion,” Paarlberg added. A lot of the double standards, he explained, has to do with “the language being used by media and politicians painting them as an undifferentiated mass showing up at the border for no particular reason…But a lot has to do with how narrowly we imagine conflict and persecution. Violence from interstate war, however rare, is conflict. Somehow gang violence, cartel violence, domestic violence, is less real.” (Similarly, my colleague Isabela Dias has written about how this double standard has manifested in Europe since Russia invaded Ukraine.)
2 observations. 1) there are clearly double standards in public perception and press coverage of refugees, driven by race, nationality and religion. Press should be careful about language that dehumanizes certain people https://t.co/pnj8zw000t
Throughout the last two decades, no matter who is in the White House, there have been numerous “border crises,” and no matter the messaging from whichever administration is in power, migration will continue. In fact, it will likely increase as climate refugees, economic collapse, and political unrest explode across the globe.
To be clear, the argument is not that Ukrainians should not be allowed in. I believe they absolutely should—and the US government should increase and expedite refugee claims from Ukraine so refugees don’t have to travel halfway around the world to the US-Mexico border to escape a deadly, unprovoked invasion of their homeland. The issue here is that just like the Department of Homeland Security managed to process 10,000 asylum seekers from Ukraine in the last two months, it should also make more humane pathways to process asylum seekers from the rest of the world—some of whom have been waiting at the border for months or years.
As the moralpanic about trans youth spreads, a dozen states have passed laws, mostly driven by Republican legislators, which prevent trans students from participating on girls’ sports teams. But in some states, these bills are facing unexpected opponents: Republican governors.
Thus far, only one Republican governor has successfully thwarted his state’s efforts to bring state law into high school sports. But three Republicans have joined Democrats in Kentucky, Kansas, and Louisiana in taking a stand against laws that target nonexistent problems. Here are their reasons.
Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb
Last month, Holcomb took a pragmatic approach in vetoing a bill that would have banned trans girls from participating in girls’ sports, arguing that the vague language of the legislation would open schools up to lawsuits. He further added that at no point in the past 10 years had a trans girl sought to compete on a girls’ team in Indiana.
“The presumption of the policy laid out in HEA 1041 is that there is an existing problem in K-12 sports in Indiana that requires further state government intervention,” he wrote. “It implies that the goals of consistency and fairness in competitive female sports are not currently being met. After thorough review, I find no evidence to support either claim even if I support the overall goal.”
Because a veto override in Indiana requires only a simple majority in the state House and Senate, HEA 1041 might still become law.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox
The most compelling and compassionate rebuke of anti-trans athletics legislation came from Cox, who issued a five-page statement last month outlining the logistical and moral downsides of the state’s proposed anti-trans sports bill.
“I must admit, I am not an expert on transgenderism,” Cox wrote. “I struggle to understand so much of it and the science is conflicting. When in doubt however, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy, and compassion.”
He went on to state that among the 75,000 kids participating in high school sports in Utah, four are trans, and only one plays girls’ sports. He also noted the high rates of suicidality and attempted suicide among trans youth in general:
Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what all of this is about. Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day. Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live. And all the research shows that even a little acceptance and connection can reduce suicidality significantly. For that reason, as much as any other, I have taken this action in the hope that we can continue to work together and find a better way.
But the state legislature did not share Cox’s concern about those four kids. Three days after Cox vetoed the bill, the state legislature voted to override it.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum
In 2021, Burgum vetoed a bill that would ban trans participation in school sports, on the grounds that it was legislating a nonexistent problem.
“To date there has not been a single recorded incident of a transgender girl attempting to play on a North Dakota girls’ team,” Burgum wrote in a statement, adding that the state’s High School Activities Association already had regulations regarding when and how trans kids could compete in sex-separated sports. He concluded, “This bill would unnecessarily inject the state into a local issue by creating a ban with myriad unforeseen consequences.”
Earlier this month, in one of the biggest labor wins in recent memory, workers at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse voted to unionize. Organizers celebrated; Sen. Bernie Sanders congratulated; and President Joe Biden warned, “Amazon, here we come.”
But the retail behemoth is pushing back. The company is seeking an election do-over, according to a legal filing obtained by the Associated Press.
Amazon outlined 25 objections against the union. They say that organizers intimidated workers to vote for the union, inappropriately distributed cannabis to workers, and failed to control media presence at the polls, among other objections. An attorney for the Amazon Labor Union called the claims “patently absurd.”
The move is part of a general push by Amazon to delegitimize the union victory. The company also has said the National Labor Relations Board had “inappropriate and undue influence” on the result for bringing a lawsuit against the company in March for an illegal labor practice.
Amazon’s own behavior during the union drive wasn’t exactly beyond reproach. As my colleague Noah Lanard wrote earlier this month, the company required workers to attend anti-union propaganda sessions and shelled out $3,200 per day for professional union-busters. Early on in the pandemic, Amazon fired worker Christian Smalls for helping lead a walk-out over Covid safety precautions. Smalls went on the lead the union fight—and win.
The results of an Amazon union vote in Bessemer, Alabama, has also been disputed, but this time by the NLRB. The union drive in Alabama initially failed, but the NLRB argued last year that the location of a voting box inside an Amazon-branded tent tainted the election. Workers voted again earlier this year, but the results are still too close to call.
A second Staten Island warehouse is set to vote on unionization on April 25.
At his State of the Union address on March 1, as the coronavirus’ Omicron variant was cresting, President Joe Biden laid out his strategy for managing the pandemic. “Covid-19 need no longer control our lives,” he declared. “If you’re immunocompromised or have some other vulnerability, we have treatments and free high-quality masks,” he said. Overall, though, “it’s time for Americans to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again. People working from home can feel safe to begin to return to the office.”
Since then, a new Omicron subvariant, called BA.2, has emerged, and infection rates are showing signs of rebounding, especially in the Northeast. On cue, Washington, DC, has just endured one of its biggest superspreader events since then-President Donald Trump’s infamous mask-free party celebrating the ascension of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, back in September 2020, months before the emergence of vaccines. Here’s the New York Times:
At least 53 people have tested positive for the coronavirus since attending The Gridiron Club and Foundation’s annual dinner last Saturday in Washington, the group’s president confirmed on Friday.
The Gridiron Club dinner, an annual white-tie roast between journalists and presidential administrations, was held at the Renaissance Hotel. But a night of good-natured ribbing has devolved into an outbreak of cases among Washington’s elite, including members of Congress, members of the president’s cabinet and journalists.
Biden didn’t attend the event, but several people in his circle did, including some who have since tested positive: Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Valerie Biden Owens, the president’s sister. Another Cabinet member who was present, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, announced on Twitter on April 9 that come down with Covid, adding that “thankfully my symptoms are mild.”
Whether or not anyone falls seriously ill from a Covid case picked up at the soiree, the incident is a reminder that the coronavirus is still very much with us. As Times opinion writer Sarah Wildman noted in a Saturday column, “estimates suggest about 3 percent to 4 percent of Americans are immunosuppressed,” and thus remain vulnerable to serious illness from an exposure to the virus. Their number includes Wildman’s teenage daughter, a cancer survivor.
Maybe Biden was right that Covid should no longer dominate our lives. But that shouldn’t mean reestablishing the pre-pandemic status quo. “Returning to what once was is not possible for all; we need, instead, a new normal, one that recognizes that everyone deserves the chance to participate in daily life,” Wildman wrote. “In practical terms that could mean, say, that the family of a child undergoing chemotherapy might ask her classmates and teachers to don masks to protect her against Covid (and other diseases like flu), without having to sue the school to comply.”
On Friday, police in South Texas’ Starr County charged a 26-year-old woman with murder and are holding her on a $500,000 bond, reports the McAllen-based Monitor. The crime, according to her accusers: She “knowingly cause[d] the death of an individual by self-induced abortion.”
It’s unclear whether the woman, identified as Lizelle Herrera, is being charged under Texas Senate Bill 8, which went into effect on September 1, 2021. The law banned abortion after cardiac activity can be detected, at around six weeks’ gestation, and added a new enforcement mechanism: It encouraged private citizens to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion, and allows them to collect cash judgments of $10,000 from those they sue if successful. Many observers, including University of Chicago Law School professor Aziz Huq, have compared this aspect of SB 8 to Fugitive Slave Acts passed by Congress in 1793 and 1850, which empowered plantation owners to use freelance bounty hunters to capture escapees and terrorize free Black people.
Since Gov. Greg Abbott signed SB 8 into law last May, it has repeatedly fended off legal challenge from pro-choice advocates. In December 2021, the US Supreme Court upheld the law, but allowed other federal lawsuits against it to proceed, providing a narrow path for rescinding it in the future. In March, a ruling by the Texas Supreme Court effectively shut down that route, meaning that it will likely remain in place.
The law immediately began “causing very real harm to pregnant Texans,” as my colleague Becca Andrews documented last November:
I have spent the past couple months reporting out of reproductive health clinics for a book project I’m working on, and I’ve seen Texans seeking care in Alabama, Kansas, and Tennessee. The one that sticks with me was a young woman who came to Huntsville, Alabama, after traveling to Jackson, Mississippi, where she was told she was barely over that clinic’s gestational limit. She had been traveling for almost a week and was exhausted. She told me it was only the second time in her life that she had ever left Texas.
Zaena Zamora, executive director of the Frontera Fund, a nonprofit that works to help pregnant people in deep southern Texas to get abortion care, was unsurprised by this anecdote. “The day after SB 8 went into effect, we had a caller who had to travel 15 hours overnight [by car] to Wichita, Kansas—she was seven weeks pregnant,” Zamora says. She is seeing unprecedented demand for help with travel and logistics. She told me that the group spent more on travel support just in the month of October than it did in the entire year of 2020.
Zamora said that the barriers facing Texans who live in the Rio Grande Valley, a region of the state that is close to the border, are especially great. “We’re the furthest away from any state border,” she says. “Typically, the people that we help have to travel the furthest than any other person would typically have to travel in Texas…we’re looking at 12-plus hours to get to your appointment.” Many of the people the fund seeks to help don’t have paid time off, and that’s just the beginning—there’s childcare to consider, along with money for food, lodging, transportation. Sometimes the support of the fund isn’t enough.
The Texas bill is novel because was purposely structured not to challenge Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established the right to an abortion without excessive government restriction. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is currently mulling a case involving a Mississippi abortion law that could lead to the overturning of Roe. Its ruling is expected in June. According to the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, if the conservative-dominated Supreme Court does move in that direction, “21 states have laws or constitutional amendments already in place that would make them certain to attempt to ban abortion as quickly as possible.”
Lizelle Herrera, confined on a murder charge for exercising control over her own body, is now making headlines and trending on social media. Her case may soon be the rule, not the exception.
The right-wing grift, long a staple of the US political scene, reached a kind of apotheosis under Donald Trump, the reality TV mogul who built an empire licensing his name to variousdodgyenterprises. Fittingly, the trope he rode to the presidency—that the United States needed to build a wall along our 2,000-mile southern border to keep out undesirables—also anchored a money-making scheme for some of Trump’s political allies, according to a 2020 federal indictment. Last week, one of the principles in the case, Brian Kolfage, agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and three tax charges after raising $25 million in a GoFundMe campaign called We Build the Wall.
The most high-profile figure associated with the scheme, one-time Trump Svengali and “stop the steal” stalwart Steve Bannon, won’t deal with legal consequences for the alleged crime. That’s because on his last day in office—two weeks after the January 6, 2020, Capital riot—Trump pardoned Bannon.
Even by the standards of right-wing griftery, We Build the Wall was bold stuff. According to the Justice Department’s 2020 press release, “to induce donors to donate to the campaign, Kolfage repeatedly and falsely assured the public that he would ‘not take a penny in salary or compensation’ and that ‘100% of the funds raised…will be used in the execution of our mission and purpose’ because, as Bannon publicly stated, ‘we’re a volunteer organization.'”
In reality, however, Kolfage “covertly took for his personal use more than $350,000,” while Bannon grabbed enough to “cover hundreds of thousands of dollars” in personal expenses. At a 2019 telethon to raise funds for the project, Bannon infamously joked that “we’re on the million-dollar yacht of Brian Kolfage. Brian Kolfage—who took all that money from Build the Wall.”
According to the indictment, the defendants actually did funnel We Build the Wall Funds into purchasing a yacht—a big 40-foot beauty they deemed “WarFighter.” It even appeared at one of those infamous “boat parades” to support Trump’s presidential campaign in 2020.
And in case you were wondering, yes, Donald Trump Jr. praised Kolfage and We Build the Wall as “private enterprise at its finest” in 2018.
Donald Trump Jr. praised We Build The Wall and Brian Kolfage at a 2018 event: "This is private enterprise at its finest. Doing it better, faster, cheaper than anything else. What you guys are doing is amazing.” pic.twitter.com/hOL25JoZPI
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson speaks after her confirmation as associate justice of the US Supreme Court on the South Lawn of the White House on April 8, 2022.Chris Kleponis/CNP/Zuma
On Friday, soon-to-be-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spoke to the historic moment of her ascension as the first Black woman to the United States Supreme Court on the White House lawn.
In a tearful speech, Jackson paid tribute to her heritage as a Black woman descended from slaves, quoting Dr. Maya Angelou’s Still I Riseand noting that she rises to the nation’s highest court with the help of those who came before her. “The path was cleared for me so that I might rise to this occasion,” she said. “I do so now while bringing the gifts my ancestors gave. I am the dream and the hope of the slave.”
"In my family, it took just one generation to go from segregation to the Supreme Court of the United States" — that was an amazing speech from Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson pic.twitter.com/gElMUgzPqN
After a painful confirmation process in which Republicans sought to tarnish her image with unfounded accusations of being soft on pedophiles, the ceremony on Friday was a celebration of Jackson and the historic nature of her nomination and confirmation. Despite the ugliness of the past few weeks, Jackson spoke with optimism about the progress that her nomination represents.
“I strongly believe that this is a moment in which all Americans can take great pride,” she said. “We have come a long way toward perfecting our union. In my family it took just one generation to go from segregation to the Supreme Court of the United States.”
More than a year after his supporters attacked the US Capitol, Donald Trump is finally voicing regret. No, not for pushing to overturn the 2020 presidential election or inciting violence. Instead, the former president is sad that he did not join his throng of supporters as they marched to the Capitol.
He then deflected blame for the violence that eventually overtook the Capitol building, claiming that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and DC Mayor Muriel Bowser should have done more to stop his supporters. That assertion, of course, is wildly untrue; Republican leaders, along with his own daughter, had reportedly begged Trump to intervene—and he declined to do so for hours, instead “gleefully” watching his supporters unleash violence on his White House television.
Trump’s admission that he wished he had marched to the Capitol—which contradicts Mark Meadows’ book that Trump never intended to march and that the entire thing had been planned “metaphorically”—is the latest evidence that the former president doesn’t have much contrition for the events of January 6. In fact, as the Justice Department has remained mum on whether it’s investigating Trump over the attempted coup, he’s appeared increasingly defiant. That emboldened stance was once again on display in the Post interview, where he also bragged about how many people participated in the Stop the Steal rally.
If Trump’s account here is true, then we have the Secret Service to thank for keeping Trump inside the White House. One can only imagine the significant escalation his presence would have sparked if his supporters saw the big man.
For years, Republicans have cried voter fraud, with few substantive examples. But, of late, there have been a few—from Republican politicians themselves. This week brings yet another one: Matt Mowers, a Republican candidate for Congress in New Hampshire, who voted twice in the 2016 presidential primaries, according to an Associated Press report yesterday. Mowers reportedly first voted in New Hampshire for Chris Christie, when he was a staffer for the former New Jersey governor. After Christie dropped out, he voted in New Jersey for Donald Trump.
This has two issues to it.
The main one is that you can’t do that. Mowers, like everyone else, is allowed to vote only once in elections. That’s based on federal law and the logic of democracy. The other is that Mowers—as a former State Department official under President Trump and a candidate in the 2022 midterm elections—has himself made calls to crack down on voter fraud and to implement new voting rules that amount to what my colleague Ari Berman has called “the coming coup.”
In this way, Mowers joins, most notably, Mark Meadows in an odd hypocrisy: members of the party calling the 2020 election stolen who might have done some voter fraud themselves.
Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, reportedly registered to vote somewhere he does not live. North Carolina is now investigating. Of course, he wrote in his memoir about the dangers of voter fraud. And, to add a bit more dissonance, Meadows is still being looked into for potentially helping plan January 6; we know he was texting Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, about the riot. He also pushed the Department of Justice to challenge the 2020 election’s integrity. And, before he was chief of staff, Meadows was elected to Congress as a result of “extreme gerrymandering.”
As writer Alex Pareene recently pointed out, there’s a certain amount of self-actualization here. Quite a few Republicans are committing voter fraud and thus proving there is voter fraud. The Washington Post has reported plenty more examples—which means we probably are not “prepared for mass voter fraud basically being summoned into existence by the conservatives who think it is already widespread,” Pareene writes. Don’t forget: Trump literally asked his supporters to vote twice.
As we watch not-admitting-Trump-lost-in-2020 become a campaign necessity for Republicans, it is maddening to see anti-democracy shoehorned into law as a way of cracking down on…anti-democracy. The myth of a stolen election has become the impetus for the GOP to set up a mechanism to potentially steal elections. Each day, it seems more clear that the next time someone like Trump lies about winning, there’s much more of a chance they could pull it off.
January 6 was violent, visceral, and televised. However, even before that, I wondered if this, the stuff we’re seeing now, would be the stuff of a genuine overthrow: state-level changes to voting procedures, lawsuits, affidavits, legalese, bureaucratic changes to processes. Autocracy by paper cut.
Since the AP report came out, Mowers has faced his share of attacks. But, for now, he isn’t even dropping out of the race. He just told the local paper that Hillary Clinton, who tweeted that his actions were bad, is a menace. Meadows is still around.
What if many voters just don’t like democracy? Unfortunately, all the blog posts in the world calling out the hypocrisy won’t help.
Indigenous leaders and water protectors at a 2021 "Treaty People's Gathering" in Clearwater County, Minnesota, protesting the construction of Line 3Alex Kormann/AP
Earlier this year, I wrote about a unique lawsuit aiming to stop the further construction of Line 3, a tar-sands oil pipeline built in 2021 that stretches for 330 miles across northern Minnesota and has been fought fiercely for nearly a decade by an Indigenous-led movement. The suit had an unlikely plaintiff: Manoomin, a grain known in English as wild rice that grows throughout the wetlands of northern Minnesota and holds immeasurable significance for Anishinaabe people. A 2018 White Earth law gave rights to the plant, part of an international rights of nature movement that seeks to flip dominant legal frameworks on their head. According to the complaint filed in August, the construction of the pipeline threatened Manoomin’s “inherent rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation.”
Through a novel legal maneuver that used the rights of nature, treaty law, and the independent jurisdiction of tribal courts, it seemed possible that Line 3 could be halted, at least for a bit.
But the tactic didn’t pan out. On March 10, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Court of Appeals dismissed the August lawsuit against Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources filed by tribal leaders on behalf of Manoomin, citing a lack of legal precedent.
The lawsuit targeted a permit by the Department of Natural Resources that allowed pipeline owner, Canadian corporation Enbridge, to pump 5 billion gallons of water from the ground to clear the route for the pipeline construction. Not only was this permit given, “abruptly, unilaterally and without formal notice to tribal leaders (quasi-secretly), and without Chippewa consent,” but it would also negatively affect the level and quality of the surrounding waterways where Manoomin grows, the complaint alleged.
The crux of the case was whether White Earth would be allowed to raise a legal claim in tribal court about something that happened off-reservation. When the Anishinaabe ceded their land to the United States, they retained what are called “usufructurary rights” to hunt, fish, and gather foods including wild rice as part of a series of treaties. The argument put forth by the mastermind of the case, White Earth tribal attorney Frank Bibeau, was that these treaty-protected rights extend into the ceded territories and could be enforced there by the White Earth Tribal Court.
The court disagreed. “Such exercises of sovereignty must take into account the longstanding legal and judicial framework,” wrote Judges George W. Soule, Lenor Scheffler Blaeser, and David Harrington in their conclusion. “A tribal court lacks subject matter jurisdiction to hear claims based on a nonmember’s allegedly unlawful activities that occur off reservation,” and treaty law does not “confer tribal court jurisdiction” off-reservation.
The precedent they relied on is whats called the Montana doctrine, named for a 1981 ruling that allowed tribes to address “what is necessary to protect tribal self-government or to control international relations,” but the court maintained those powers do not extend to nonmembers off-reservation, such as the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
The judges weren’t outright dismissive of the historic lawsuit, though, commending the “efforts to expand jurisdiction by Band legislation and the use of Tribal Court to address matters such as raised in this case,” and encouraging similar efforts “as an exercise of inherent tribal sovereignty.”
In response to the dismissal, White Earth attorneys Bibeau and Joe Plummer filed a brief on April 7 requesting the court to reverse its order.
This lack of legal precedent presents a persistent problem for the rights-of-nature legal movement—a potentially transformative paradigm shift in environmental conservation that in the United States legal context remains almost entirely symbolic in its real world effects. It was thought that in the case of the Manoomin lawsuit, the addition of treaty rights and tribal court could combine to become one of the first successful rights-of-nature effort in the movement’s still-young history. With the release of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report on Climate Change this week that warned of the requirement for “immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors,” the need for legal systems to adapt becomes all the more pressing. It would be even better if combating climate change and recognizing Indigenous sovereignty didn’t require unique legal strategies. And could be found in political will.
This article has been updated to reflect a brief filed to oppose the order from the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Court of Appeals.
More than a year into his presidency, Joe Biden trotted out his former boss, Barack Obama, to announce an improvement on the Affordable Care Act—and gin up some much-needed enthusiasm ahead of the midterms.
The change is minor, but consequential. Today, the administration announced a proposed fix to the “family glitch”: a problem in which some family members of ACA enrollees are ineligible for the premium tax credit they need to keep their coverage affordable. When individuals purchase health insurance through their employer, the ACA subsidizes costs exceeding 9.83 percent of household income, which is the ACA’s barometer for affordability. But affordability is determined by how much it costs to insure an individual, not including the individual’s family members. Consequently, some low-income workers who spend more than 9.83 percent of their household income on employer-provided health insurance for themselves and their families do not receive the subsidy.
Biden’s proposed rule would change that. There will still be a comment period, and it will take time to implement. But it’s something that Biden can do through executive order—avoiding the Sisyphean task of trying to convince gridlock experts like Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—that will help 1.2 million people get cheaper health care.
Today’s event marked an executive accomplishment—albeit one affecting a slim minority of the population—but it was primarily a bit of political theater by which Biden could reap the benefits of Obama’s charm. It was Obama’s first return to the White House in five years. The former president jokingly addressed “Vice President Joe Biden.” He reminisced on the difficulties of passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010 despite strong Republican opposition. The two men laughed in front of cameras.
More than a year into his presidency, Joe Biden trotted out his former boss, Barack Obama, to announce an improvement on the Affordable Care Act—and had a little fun doing so. https://t.co/EOJLdNjkwWpic.twitter.com/J0sxb7Y0Vk
You can’t blame Biden’s attempt here: People like Obama. Sure, his approval rating dipped after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law—he joked today that the website crashing didn’t help—and Republicans regained the House in the 2010 midterms, stifling Obama’s ability to get much else done. But by the time Obama left office, 58 percent of Americans approved of his job performance, not far behind President Clinton’s approval rating (61 percent), according to the Pew Research Center.
And, after a decade of Republican promises to repeal and replace Obamacare—and three Supreme Court challenges that failed to undo the law—people are starting to get used to Obama’s signature legislative achievement. In 2017, more people viewed the ACA favorably than unfavorably, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and that trend has continued to the present day. In March 2022, 55 percent of Americans approved of the ACA, while 42 percent didn’t.
Why? Because, even if the law isn’t perfect, people like having health insurance. Protections for people with preexisting conditions are hugely popular, as is the rule that allows young adults to stay on their parents’ plans until they’re 26. Unlike the infrastructure bill, whose benefits it will take years to reap, Obamacare has immediately and measurably improved people’s lives.
But, whether because of flawed messaging, the material benefits of culture wars, or the insufficiency of technocratic fixes, it’s been hard for voters to feel that Democrats have actually helped them. The midterms might be a foregone conclusion. But if Democrats want to win the next presidential election, or any, they need to keep finding ways to make people’s lives better—and brag about it.
One of Twitter’s most irresponsible users is now its largest shareholder.
Yep, Elon Musk—the Tesla executive with a storied history of inciting harassment, spreading misinformation, and trolling lawmakers with extremely immature digs on the social media platform—recently snatched up 9.2 percent of the company.
The news, which sent stock prices surging over 27 percent on Monday, has already produced a string of absurd developments: Donald Trump supporters are now petitioning Musk to allow their fearless leader back on the platform. Musk, who has previously suggested that Twitter doesn’t adhere to free speech, appears to be teasing some big changes, in addition to crowdsourcing an “edit” button. As for the billionaire’s detractors, they’ve been flooding Twitter with reminders that Musk—again, one of the most powerful men in the world—falsely attacked a random dude as a pedophile after he dared to poke fun at Musk’s mini-submarine.
I’m not one to pay much attention to our tech billionaire overlords (though I am obsessed with Amanda Seyfried’s brilliant performance of Elizabeth Holmes and the disgraced Theranos CEO’s horrendous dance moves). But the Musk news happens to fit neatly into a Venn diagram of some of the worst parts of our current news cycle. That includes Trump’s flailing efforts at Truth Social—hence his supporters rallying for a Twitter return—and the complete mainstreaming of false and malicious accusations of pedophilia within the Republican Party.
Here’s to hoping that Twitter, which apparently didn’t care to read Mother Jones in 2019, can convince Musk to start behaving like a normal human being. Until then, refresh your memory with a greatest hits of Musk’s trouble-making tweets here.
Former former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally for Georgia GOP candidates at Banks County Dragway in Georgia.Hyosub Shin/Atlanta Constitution Journal/AP
Three days into his first term as a Republican congressman, Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer, then just 33, pulled on a smoke hood and fled the Capitol as rioters invaded the House chamber on January 6. He later voted to certify the election results and ended up being one of nine Republicans to vote to impeach President Donald Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection. Since then, Meijer has suffered death threats, a Trump-endorsed primary challenge, and now the indignity of having Trump make fun of his last name at a political rally in his home state.
Last night, Trump appeared at a sports hall outside Detroit to promote the candidacy of a couple of low-level Republican candidates for state attorney general and secretary of state. As is often the case when he shows up to help another candidate, Trump spent most of the time talking about himself and insulting one of his enemies, in this case fellow Republican Meijer.
“A guy who spells his name ‘M-E-I-J-E-R’ but they pronounce it ‘MY-er,’” Trump said. “The hell kind of a spelling is that? ‘MY-er.’ I said, ‘How the hell do you pronounce this guy’s name?’”
“Nobody knows him,” Trump said of Meijer. “He’s done nothing in Washington. I said, ‘How do you pronounce his name? Is it ‘MAY-jer’? ‘MY-jer’? They said it’s ‘MY-er.’ How the hell do you get ‘MY-er’ out of it?”
While Trump may have thought he was making a great joke, people in Michigan may not have been so amused. The congressman’s last name is Dutch, and there’s a decent-sized Dutch American community in Western Michigan that tends to vote conservative Republican—a constituency Trump’s advisors apparently didn’t bother to brief him on. Meijer is also a household name in Michigan that adorns a beloved local chain of supermarkets that have, among other things, given away millions of dollars worth of free prescription drugs to treat diabetes and heart disease, as well as antibiotics and prenatal vitamins, the sort of meaningful philanthropy the Trump family has never even contemplated.
As my colleague Stephanie Mencimer wrote in her curtain-raiser, Republicans were well aware going into the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson that they had very little to criticize in Jackson’s record, and were therefore likely to resort to hypocritical, dark-money attacks to oppose President Joe Biden’s nominee.
But dark-money attacks would end up taking a backseat to false, malicious smears that inevitably devolved the Jackson hearings into a Republican conspiracy circus. Notably, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and others tried, falsely and deceptively, to portray Jackson as soft on child pornography defendants, perhaps in an attempt to signal their allegiance to the party’s bizarre QAnon fringe. (Read more here on the right’s history of turning child abuse into a political weapon.)
A Quinnipiac poll released late last week shows that their bad faith strategy may have backfired. More than half (52 percent) of respondents disapproved of how Republican senators handled the process, and only 27 percent approved. Democratic senators got a much more favorable review: 42 percent approval vs 32 percent disapproval. (These ratings were the reverse, more or less, of how people viewed senators’ handling of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, notes the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake.)
But don’t expect Cruz and Hawley to care much about the broader public reception. The intended audience for their malicious performances absolutely ate it up—and that’s likely all that matters to these senators.
In his first term, North Carolina Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn has been an embarrassment. We’ve seen his awful political chattering, like calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “thug”, and then the more personally damning, like getting arrested for driving with a revoked license.
But none of that seems to have pissed off GOP leadership the way Cawthorn’s most recent controversy has after the 26-year-old Republican alleged in an interview to have received invitations from lawmakers to participate in orgies while also witnessing these lawmakers do cocaine. (Specifically, Cawthorn said he saw someone doing a “key bump.”) House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy swiftly summoned Cawthorn into his office for a talk. Local Republicans got even more unhappy. And some in the North Carolina GOP, including US Senator Thom Tillis, are beginning to put more public weight behind a primary challenge.
This could be, the GOP has indicated, the end for Cawthorn. “I just told him he’s lost my trust,” McCarthy said in a rare public rebuke Wednesday, adding that there wasn’t any evidence to back Cawthorn’s claims. “I mean, he’s got a lot of members very upset.”
“I told him you can’t make statements like that, as a member of Congress, that affect everybody else and the country as a whole.”
But do Americans really share McCarthy’s frustration? As someone who has never attended a drug-fueled sex party—though truly no judgment if you have—I can say with full confidence Cawthorn’s allegations do not affect my life. But the clear panic Cawthorn’s claims have triggered within a party that has otherwise extended gratuitous tolerance to members hobnobbing with white supremacists is noteworthy here. It’s all to wonder what’s behind the urgent concern rankling Washington after Cawthorn opened his mouth.
Well, it looks like the answer might be the anxiety of spouses wondering if their dearly beloveds could be one of those who may or may not have invited Cawthorn to an orgy. That’s according to CNN’s Melanie Zanona, who asked Republicans why this controversy has finally forced them to draw the line with Cawthorn:
I asked a bunch of Republicans why *this* was the thing that broke the camel’s back with Cawthorn.
Their response: the orgy & cocaine allegations implicated fellow Republicans. And some members were getting questions from concerned constituents — and spouses — about the claims. https://t.co/S2qPzk8fqD
We may never know if Cawthorn’s claims were ever real. (For the record, McCarthy said that Cawthorn either exaggerated or was not telling the truth.) But let this whole episode show you that for Republicans, hell hath no fury like a spouse suddenly wondering if you’ve attended a cocaine-fueled orgy.
Earlier this week, two twisted individuals in Philadelphia sicced their dogs on a black cat named Buddy. They encouraged the dogs, repeatedly shouting, “Good boy!” as the cat yowled. The incident was captured on surveillance footage which I won’t share here because I don’t recommend watching it. But, hey, you know how to use Google.
I am pleased to announce that Buddy is “hanging in there,” in the words of the Pennsylvania SPCA, which has been providing the little guy with round-the-clock care. I might be biased, since I’m the proud owner of a little black cat who bears a strong resemblance to Buddy, but tell me this photo of the kitty hooked up to all sorts of machines doesn’t bring a tear to your eye:
BUDDY UPDATE: Last night, Buddy was sent to an ER vet to be closely monitored. He made it through the night. He continues to be in extremely critical condition.
Today, the PSPCA shared a video of a heavily sedated Buddy contentedly kneading a blanket—and melting my heart.
No $5 Friday today. Just love for Buddy. ⁰ Donate if you can. Send good thoughts if you want. And take solace in how many people across the country and globe are pulling for this sweet boy. ⁰ He's making muffins this morning. https://t.co/4oNPWEXhYXpic.twitter.com/wlX68q2MSz
Buddy was a stray, HuffPost reports, but received food and water from a local family. PSPCA is accepting donations for Buddy’s medical care. Meanwhile, local authorities are on the lookout for the two men responsible for the attack. If found, they could face felony animal cruelty charges.
Buddy is not out of the woods yet, but PSPCA is “cautiously optimistic” he’ll pull through. Please send this beautiful boy some good vibes.
5:15 p.m. ET: Two juvenile suspects have surrendered to authorities, the PSCPCA said in a statement. They have been taken into custody pending a custodial determination hearing.
Russia's Vladimir Putin.Kremlin Pool/Russian Look via ZUMA Press
The New York Timesran a piece Wednesday about US right-wingers parroting Kremlin talking points and swapping pro-Russian conspiracy theories with Moscow—most notably the unproven claim that the US government has been funding bioweapons labs in Ukraine.
As the Times reported, war-related mentions of “bioweapons labs” in Russian- and English-language media and social media have more than doubled since early March, when Moscow gave the theory a fine boost. On March 6, its Defense Ministry released a televised statement in which Russian officials claimed to have uncovered “traces of a military biological program being implemented in Ukraine, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.”
Just a few days later, on March 9, Fox News host Tucker Carlson—whose clips, as my colleague David Corn first reported, are being incorporated into the state media’s official propaganda strategy—dutifully aired the Defense Ministry’s statement. “Nuland just confirmed that the Russian disinformation they’ve been telling us for days is a lie and a conspiracy theory and crazy and immoral to believe, is in fact, totally and completely true,” Carlson said. “Whoa!” (He was referring to Senate testimony by Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who responded to a question from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) by saying that Ukraine does have “biological research facilities,” which US officials are worried could fall into Russian hands.)
On the day after Carlson’s broadcast, as Corn reported, Putin’s minions issued a memo with “recommendation for coverage” that ordered state media outlets to use Carlson clips on their programs. The same memo also dealt with the biolab conspiracy, Corn writes:
[It] highlights this bioweapons allegation as a top talking point for Russian media, noting the message should be that the “activities of military biological laboratories with American participation on the territory of Ukraine carried global threats to Russia and Europe.” The document goes further, encouraging its recipients to allege that the “the United States is working on a ‘biogenocide of the Eastern Slavs.’”
That’s a nutty claim. Yet it’s not unreasonable to distrust US government officials, too, on the topic of military conflicts. You may recall the Pentagon Papers, or the military’s coverup of civilian casualties in Syria, or the Air Force’s lies about nuclear mishaps. And who can forget how the Bush administration used bogus claims that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction as a pretext to invade and occupy. The resulting lack of trust makes it easy for our adversaries, foreign and domestic, to cast doubt upon government claims.
So I reached out by email to a person who knows a thing or two about the subject: an American bioweapons expert with security clearances who has worked closely with government officials but is not connected to the administration. This expert agreed to be quoted anonymously, and the upshot wasthat America’s primary post-Cold War mission in Eastern Europe has been the safeguarding and containment of some very scary stuff.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unsuccessful 1991 coup against Gorbachev, the USSR dissolved and Ukraine gained independence and recognition by the West, my source noted, and “that left a big problem, because Ukraine still housed all manner of nuclear and chemical weapons from the Soviet era, left behind—thousands of warheads, in fact.”
The Nunn-Lugar Act of 1991 created a pool of money to pay the Ukrainians to get rid of their WMDs. And—”to their ever-lasting regret!” the source said—Ukraine agreed to denuclearize. For a number of years, “the US has quietly been helping Ukraine to dismantle its Soviet-era chem/bio stuff. It seems possible that some US expertise (and possibly a small number of US personnel?) remains in Ukraine, established to retire safely the Soviet-era WMD. I have no specific idea what chem/bio matériel was left behind. So, at the core of those right-wingnut conspiracy theories may be a small kernel of truth, but one that’s being distorted beyond any (responsible) recognition.”
“Prior to Putin’s war,” the expert summarized, “the US had certainly paid the Ukrainians to dismantle WMD, and also sent experts to help with it. But given the little of that story that is public knowledge, so much of that collaborative de-armament work was done secretly/covertly—for obvious and understandable reasons.”
I was curious whether my source agreed with former Pentagon official Andrew Weber—and Nuland, for that matter—about Moscow’s possible motivation for spreading false claims about bioweapons in Ukraine. Indeed, the person said, “Putin might try to use the existence of any existing Ukrainian labs that deal with chem/bio, and whatever US connections these may—or may not—have, as a pretext under some kind of false-flag operation. Putin often accuses his adversaries of precisely the same thing that he’s doing.”
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