I’m even more overwhelmed than usual with the news today. It’s absolutely insane.
Yesterday we got to see Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday book, and it is simply disgusting, as JJ wrote yesterday. Trump can deny he wrote the note with his signature all he wants. No one is buying it. He was closse friends with this man for 10-15 years and had to know what Epstein was up to. Not only that, Trump makes other sickening appearances in the book, including one about buying a “fully depreciated” woman from Epstein.
That would be enough horrible news to deal with today, but there’s much more. Poland shot down Russian drones that entered their air space. Israel bombed a building in Qatar. The Supreme Court decision to legalize racial profiling continues to be a top story (Dakinikat covered that extensively on Monday.). ICE is continuing to terrify residents of numerous cities. Trump ventured out of the White House last night with some cabinet members and was called Hitler by citizens of Washington DC.
Looking back, I don’t know what exactly I was expecting when I opened “Request No. 1,” the PDF file containing the contents of Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th-birthday book. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend and co-conspirator, created the book in 2003 by soliciting tributes from the financier’s friends and associates. Given the crimes Epstein was convicted of, I steeled myself before scrolling. Somehow, my internet-addled imagination failed me. This book is a nightmare.
The book was released yesterday by Congress after Epstein’s estate, which was subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee, provided a copy. It is the same book that contains the now-infamous letter and “bawdy” sketch from Donald Trump that ends: “May every day be another wonderful secret.” When The Wall Street Journal reported on the letter’s existence in July, the newspaper described it but did not republish the letter itself, so Trump vehemently denied that it was real and sued for defamation. But the now-public letter certainly looks real, and so does Trump’s signature. Many of the people who encountered it for the first time yesterday made a similar observation: Its creepy prose is framed by a markered sketch of what looks like the caricature not of a woman’s body, but of a girl’s. (The White House can no longer plausibly deny that the letter exists, but it now insists that Trump did not write or sign it.)
The Trump letter makes the birthday book inherently newsworthy. But it is far from the most disturbing or lecherous of the book’s contents. A section titled “Brooklyn” includes recollections of Epstein’s horrible sexual escapades, apparently including making a maid watch people have sex and holding a knife up while telling women to take off their swimsuits on a boat—a story told in the book under the heading “Girls on My Boat.” Given what we know about Epstein’s sex crimes, including his sex crimes against minors, the birthday book is a sickening document. Over its 238 pages, Epstein’s friends, “girlfriends,” and business acquaintances offer lurid tributes to the pedophilic multimillionaire in the form of acrostic poems, drawings, and letters extolling him as “a liver, a lover,” and, affectionately, the “Degenerate One.” Individual contributions vary but it is the sheer volume of sexual references and jokes that ends up being most shocking. So much so that I suggest you read the document yourself.
The book’s contributors apparently include former President Bill Clinton, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, the billionaire retailer Leslie Wexner, and, of course, Maxwell herself, as well as a prominent fashion designer, financiers, and a media magnate. Clinton, Mitchell, and Wexner did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for Clinton referred The Wall Street Journal to a previous statement that said, “The former president had cut off ties more than a decade before Epstein’s 2019 arrest and didn’t know about Epstein’s alleged crimes.” Wexner declined to comment to the Journal but previously told reporters he cut ties with Epstein in 2007.
Not all of the entries in the book allude to sexual activity, and it’s plausible that not all of the contributors knew about Epstein’s crimes. Still, the document is conspiracy jet fuel—visual and textual confirmation of the long-held suspicions that Epstein’s sex pestery was an open secret, enabled by powerful people who may have participated in it themselves or laughed it all off as a friend’s roguish quirk….
Sanitizing this document would be wrong, so I’ll be blunt: The Epstein birthday book is full of contributions from wealthy and powerful people who appear fully aware of Epstein’s attraction to “girls.” In fact, they seem to celebrate it and, in some cases, allude winkingly to Epstein’s predatory lifestyle.
Use the gift link to read the rest. I haven’t looked through the entire book yet. I suppose I should do it, but I’m not looking forward to it after what I’ve already seen and heard.
The splashy focus of Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday book released by lawmakers on Monday was a lewd drawing apparently signed by Donald J. Trump. But Mr. Trump’s cameo in another part of the book also provided fodder for Democrats and other critics of the president.
An entry in Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday book, contributed by the Florida real estate developer Joel Pashcow.
The entry, included in a bound volume in 2003, was made by Joel Pashcow, the former chairman of a real estate company in New York and a member of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Fla. It shows a photograph of Mr. Pashcow at the resort with Mr. Epstein, another man and a woman whose face is redacted. Mr. Pashcow is holding an oversize check that appears to have been doctored, with a seemingly phony “DJ TRUMP” signature.
A handwritten note under the photo, which was taken in the 1990s, joked that Mr. Epstein showed “early talents with money + women,” and had sold a “fully depreciated” woman to Mr. Trump for $22,500.
The woman, whose name is also redacted in the files released by the House Oversight Committee, was a European socialite then in her 20s, according to two people familiar with the original photo. She had briefly dated both Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump around that time, according to court transcripts and a person close to Mr. Epstein. The birthday book entry appears to be a reference to the competition between the two men for the woman’s affections.
The nature of the woman’s relationship with Mr. Epstein is murky. The New York Times is not naming her because she may have been one of his victims.
A lawyer for the woman said she knew Mr. Epstein in “a professional capacity” when she was a student but severed ties with him in 1997. She did not know anything about the letter or its “derogatory content,” the lawyer added.
A bit more information:
Mr. Pashcow appears to have contributed several consecutive pages to the book. On the page before the mock check is a vulgar cartoon depicting Mr. Epstein’s grooming of young girls: On one side, marked 1983, Mr. Epstein is handing out balloons to a group of girls; on the other, labeled 2003, he is receiving a naked massage from four topless young women. “What a great country!” it reads at the bottom.
The photograph with the giant check offers fresh insight on the social circles shared by Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein. It is no secret that the two were friendly in the 1990s and early 2000s, before Mr. Epstein was convicted of sex crimes in 2008.
A visual analysis by The Times found that the photo was taken at Mar-a-Lago after the resort opened as a club in 1996 and was landscaped with palm trees and other features.
Use the gift link to read more details if you so desire.
NATO fighter jets shot down multiple Russian drones that violated Polish airspace during an attack on neighboring Ukraine early on Wednesday, as the military alliance denounced Moscow for “absolutely dangerous” behavior that ratcheted up tensions to a new level.
The operation marked the first time that shots were fired by NATO since the start of the war in Ukraine. Polish and Dutch jets intercepted the drones, with assistance from Italian, German and NATO’s multinational forces, officials said.
People watch as a house is damaged after a drone or similar object struck a residential building according to local authorities, following violations of Polish airspace during a Russian attack on Ukraine.
Addressing the Polish parliament, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that while there was no reason to say that Poland was in a state of war, it was closer to a conflict than any time since World War II. He said the country was facing an “enemy that does not hide its hostile intentions.”
Tusk also announced that Poland has invoked Article 4 of NATO, meaning the alliance’s main political decision-making body will now meet to discuss the situation and its next steps.
Russia’s defense ministry said in a statement that it had carried out a strike against Ukraine overnight. It said that “no targets on the territory of Poland were planned for destruction,” and that the drones it used in Ukraine have a flight range that of no more than 700 kilometers (435 miles).
The Russian foreign ministry then said that these “specific facts completely debunk the myths repeatedly spread by Poland in order to escalate the Ukrainian crisis further.”
NATO chief Mark Rutte said, however, that the violation of Poland’s airspace was not an “isolated incident.”
Poland invoked Article 4 of NATO’s treaty on Wednesday after the alliance’s fighter jets shot down Russian drones that entered its airspace in the early hours of the morning. Russian drones have crossed into Poland before, including twice last week, but this was the first time that Russian drones had been shot down over the territory of a NATO country.
“What is clear is that the violation last night is not an isolated incident,” said Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general. “We will closely monitor the situation along our eastern flank, our air defenses continually at the ready.”
Here’s what to know about NATO’s Article 4….
Article 4 allows a member state to start a formal discussion among the alliance about threats to its security. While invoking Article 4 does not commit NATO to any military action, it is a required step toward a NATO decision to invoke Article 5. (An invocation of Article 5 is often assumed to have military implications, but the NATO treaty says only that its members will “assist” the party that has been attacked. This can also mean economic or political action.)
Article 4 states that the alliance’s members “will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened.”
Since NATO’s founding in 1949, Article 4 has been invoked eight times. Before Wednesday, the last was on Feb. 24, 2022, the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Now what?
The joint NATO response early Wednesday showed how quickly the war in Ukraine could escalate into a military confrontation between Russia and NATO.
Mr. Rutte said that the alliance’s air defenses were activated to ensure Poland’s protection. The response included fighter jets and air-defense systems from the Netherlands, Germany and Italy, he said.
“The security situation of our airspace has been stabilized, and ground-based air defense and radar reconnaissance systems have returned to standard operational activities,” the Polish military said on social media.
• US President Donald Trump expressed displeasure about the attack. “I’m not thrilled about the whole situation. It’s not a good situation,” he said, adding he would issue a full statement on Wednesday. Qatar’s prime minister was visibly angry as he described the strike as “state terrorism.”
Qatar said it has the right to respond to Israel’s strike in Doha that targeted Hamas political leaders, which it decried as a “blatant attack”.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, the Qatari prime minister, described Tuesday’s attack as “state terrorism” that targeted the security and stability of the region.
Aftermath of Israeli strike inside Qatar.
“Qatar… reserves the right to respond to this blatant attack,” he told a late night press conference.
“We believe that today we have reached a pivotal moment. There must be a response from the entire region to such barbaric actions.”
US president Donald Trump said he was “very unhappy” about Israel’s airstrike that killed six people, saying it advances neither Israel nor America’s goals.
Trump called the strike on Hamas’s political wing “unfortunate” and said he had directed US envoy Steve Witkoff to warn Qatar but it was too late to stop the strike.
Hamas said five of its lower-ranking members and a Qatari security official were killed in the airstrike, but that all its leaders survived the attack.
A big change happened yesterday, when the Supreme Court said it was okay for ICE and the Border Patrol to racially profile individuals walking freely on America’s streets. If you’re brown, speak Spanish, and work in a blue-collar job, you officially belong to a different class of citizen and according to Chief Justice John Roberts, it’s okay to racially profile you.
We have never in US history seen a federal law enforcement agency operate the way ICE has operated this summer — it marks the arrival of a new style of domestic policing, more in line with the infamous “brown shirts” of authoritarian regimes the world over than any regular policing tradition in the nation’s interior. Yes, we’ve seen similar abuses of civil liberties and due process stem from corrupt and racist state police and country sheriffs in the Jim Crow south, and plenty of local police departments even today suffer from localized corruption scandals, but never we seen what is happening with ICE right now take place the whole country over.
All of the nation’s law enforcement are blending together into an “ICE auxiliary.” — Garrett Graff
The day-to-day behavior and aggression of ICE is corrupting the soul of America. I encourage you to watch this video of federal agents policing the start of an elementary school in DC — there not to secure the school and children, but specifically to intimidate and punish schoolgoers. Tell me that isn’t the picture of authoritarianism? You know how you’re going to be the bad guy in the eyes of history? If school children and mothers have to push their way through your armed, masked gang while you’re carrying assault weapons in order to attend school. I can’t help but think how the Trump administration has turned the proud tradition of the US Marshals at the University of Mississippi or the 82nd Airborne at Little Rock Central High on its head. Similarly, this video of a masked officer detaining a father outside immigration court in New York City — the masked officers are indistinguishable from Wild West bank robbers.
There are four things that have really struck me about ICE’s operations over the last month, all of them worrisome about the trajectory of that agency and the presence and role of federal law enforcement in American life. (Separately, I’m going to write about the warning signs already visible in ICE’s dramatic hiring surge.) Taken together, they paint a picture of an already rogue agency that feels it operates outside of the Constitution and owes nothing to the Americans it’s supposed to serve.
(NOTE from BB: You’ll need to go to the link to read the entire explication under the four headings)
1) Everything is now ICE.
The most worrisome aspect of the quick militarization and turbo-charging of ICE is how American law enforcement across the board — and much of the government beyond — is being subsumed by ICE’s mission and lowering themselves, from hiring to behavior to tactics, down to ICE’s standards.
We have different federal law enforcement agencies for a reason — and moreover, as citizens, we as a country need and want federal law enforcement. The FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service, and the US Marshals all have their own lanes, authorities, and responsibilities, but right now we’ve watching the Trump administration turn all of federal law enforcement across both the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security into an faceless quasi-ICE auxiliary, blending all these agencies and agent into some amorphous anonymous blob of masked, brown tactical-vest-wearing federal law enforcement. I wrote recently about how this precisely is what authoritarian regime looks like — armed, masked, anonymous agents of the state jumping from unmarked vehicles and whisking people away….
2) Collapse of Moral Legitimacy.
I wrote earlier in the summer about how in a democracy policing requires moral legitimacy and the permission of the policed. That’s been one of the hallmarks of policing ever since Sir Robert Peel built the first modern police force in London’s Metropolitan Police. One of his core principles of policing was: “To recognize always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behavior, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.”
The DC police department was literally created originally in Peel’s image, which is why it too is known awkwardly as the “Metropolitan Police.” Now, in a historical irony, it is ground zero for the erosion of the moral legitimacy of federal law enforcement writ large….
3) Operating without due regard for civil liberties and due process.
In my essay at the end of August about how America has tipped in fascism, I wrote, “America has become a country where armed officers of the state shout ‘papers please’ on the street at men and women heading home from work, where masked men wrestle to the ground and abduct people without due process into unmarked vehicles, disappearing them into an opaque system where their family members beg for information.”
Add up all of the above and you have a portrait of a rogue agency, which is what leads me to my final dangerous warning sign: This agency clearly knows that it can do no wrong in the eyes of the White House and administration — there is no level of violence, brutality, or abuse of civil liberties that would get any of these agents or officers in trouble with their bosses. Earlier this summer, I wrote about how ICE is acting as if it will never face accountability again. We’ve seen ICE flaunt federal law that requires congressional oversight — and, instead, it has tried to arrest and charge federal lawmakers, a bright line if there ever was one.
At every turn, though, the agency is going out of its way to make it harder to hold officers accountable. ICE officers don’t routinely wear name tags or easily visible badge numbers (in this video, check out how you have to zoom in on his badge on his belt to even begin to identify his badge number.) Moreover, though, despite the fact that we’re weeks and months into this national ICE takeover, the agency has made no effort to make its masked officers on the streets identifiable to either the public — or even to itself.
You there. Stop what you’re doing. Take off that tool belt and hard hat—let’s see some ID. Why? Because we don’t think you’re a citizen. Now show us your papers.
This kind of behavior by government officials is now legal in the United States.
Masked ICE agents in Los Angeles
Yesterday, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court allowed ICE officials to conduct roving patrols and use racial profiling to stop and detain people for no other reason than their skin color, the language they’re speaking, suspicions about their national origin—or, really, if immigration officials just feel like it.
But wait, you might object. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. Did the Court explain why that protection apparently no longer applies to you if you’re a day laborer or running a fruit stand? Good luck with that: This Court’s majority doesn’t explain itself to anyone. It merely lets stand or overturns the decisions of lower courts—lately, almost always in favor of expanding the power of, and corroding any checks on, President Donald Trump.
Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo is a case from Los Angeles about whether ICE can stop people because of a suspicion of their being in the United States illegally, based solely, as SCOTUSblog summarized it, on any combination of four factors: a person’s “‘apparent race or ethnicity,’ speaking in Spanish or accented English, being present at a location where undocumented immigrants ‘are known to gather’ (such as pickup spots for day laborers), and working at specific jobs, such as landscaping or construction.”
A California district-court judge had earlier enjoined ICE from making such stops, perhaps appalled by this example:
Plaintiff Jason Brian Gavidia is a U.S. citizen who was born and raised in East Los Angeles and identifies as Latino. On the afternoon of June 12, he stepped onto the sidewalk outside of a tow yard in Montebello, California, where he saw agents carrying handguns and military-style rifles. One agent ordered him to “Stop right there” while another “ran towards [him].” The agents repeatedly asked Gavidia whether he is American—and they repeatedly ignored his answer: “I am an American.” The agents asked Gavidia what hospital he was born in—and he explained that he did not know which hospital. “The agents forcefully pushed [Gavidia] up against the metal gated fence, put [his] hands behind [his] back, and twisted [his] arm.” An agent asked again, “What hospital were you born in?” Gavidia again explained that he did not know which hospital and said “East L.A.” He then told the agents he could show them his Real ID. The agents took Gavidia’s ID and his phone and kept his phone for 20 minutes. They never returned his ID.
In overturning the lower court’s decision, five of the Court’s six right-wing justices—there is no other reasonable way to describe them at this point—took advantage of their right to remain silent, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh gamely tried to speak up in a concurrence. If his goal was to be reassuring, he did not help matters: Such stops are usually “brief,” he explained. Again, I am not a scholar of the Constitution, but I had no idea that I could be deprived of my rights under the Fourth (or any other) Amendment as long as my getting roughed up takes only a few moments out of my busy day.
President Donald Trump stepped out for dinner in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday only to find himself immediately confronted by protesters calling him “the Hitler of our time,” forcing him and his entourage of cabinet officials to stand awkwardly listening to their taunts before they could sit down to eat.
Activists took advantage of Trump’s rare public outing to to Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab, a short walk from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to heckle and berate the president with cries of “Free D.C.! Free Palestine! Trump is the Hitler of our time!”
“You are not welcome here!” one woman can be seen telling him in a video shared on social media. “Yes he is,” another diner countered.
Trump initially looked unfazed by the provocation but then gestured to his security team and said impatiently: “Come on. Let’s go. Get them out of here.”
The activist in question was escorted out of the dining area but continued to yell, despite some boos: “He’s terrorizing communities all over the world! From Puerto Rico… to Palestine to Venezuela! He’s not welcome to D.C.! He’s not welcome to Palestine! Palestine is not for sale!”
Only after she had been removed could Trump and his guests take their places at their table.
Joining the president for dinner were Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other senior White House officials.
Those are my offerings for today. What’s on your mind?
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Well, that was just about what most of us expected. Trump practically bowed down to Putin. Uniformed U.S. troops were seen on their hands and knees setting up a red carpet from Putin’s plane to where Trump stood to welcome him.
When he saw Putin coming, Trump clapped his hands. He was obviously thrilled to see his idol again, and he gave Putin a warm handshake while patting him on the shoulder. Then Putin was invited to ride in the Beast where the two men could talk privately. Or perhaps Putin handed Trump a written message–who knows?
The cats are not happy today.
After the meeting, Putin and Trump appeared at a supposed “press conference,” but no questions from the press were allowed. Traditionally the host speaks first, but Trump deferred to Putin, who gave a dissertation on the history of Russia in Alaska. Putin also agreed with Trump that there never would have been an invasion of Ukraine if Trump had been president. Trump spoke only briefly, and he complained about how the “Russia Russia Russia hoax” interfered with his “fantastic relationship” with “President Putin.”
We were interfered with by the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. It made it a little bit tougher to deal with, but he understood it. I think he’s probably seen things like that during the course of his career. He’s seen- he’s seen it all. But we had to put up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. He knew it was a hoax, and I knew it was a hoax, but what was done was very criminal, but it made it harder for us to deal as a country, in terms of the business, and all of the things that would like to have dealt with, but we’ll have a good chance when this is over.
Trump also noted that he was going to call NATO and Zelensky to let them know what happened in the meeting.
No questions from the press were allowed. You can read the full transcript at CBS News. It’s not very long.
MSNBC’s Peter Alexander reported that Trump’s entourage did not seem happy after the meeting:
Peter Alexander: "What struck me was the looks on the faces of a lot of the American, delegation here. Caroline Leavitt, Steve Witkoff, who came into the room, then left quickly. Leavitt appeared to be a bit stressed out, anxious. Their eyes were wide, almost ashen at times."
Papers with U.S. State Department markings, found Friday morning in the business center of an Alaskan hotel, revealed previously undisclosed and potentially sensitive details about the Aug. 15 meetings between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in Anchorage.
Eight pages, that appear to have been produced by U.S. staff and left behind accidentally, shared precise locations and meeting times of the summit and phone numbers of U.S. government employees.
At around 9 a.m. on Friday, three guests at Hotel Captain Cook, a four-star hotel located 20 minutes from the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage where leaders from the U.S. and Russia convened, found the documents left behind in one of the hotel’s public printers. NPR reviewed photos of the documents taken by one of the guests, who NPR agreed not to identify because the guest said they feared retaliation….
The first page in the printed packet disclosed the sequence of meetings for August 15, including the specific names of the rooms inside the base in Anchorage where they would take place. It also revealed that Trump intended to give Putin a ceremonial present.
“POTUS to President Putin,” the document states, “American Bald Eagle Desk Statue.”
Pages 2 through 5 listed the names and phone numbers of three U.S. staff members as well as the names of 13 U.S. and Russian state leaders. The list included phonetic pronouncers for all the Russian men expected at the summit, including “Mr. President POO-tihn.”
Pages 6 and 7 in the packet described how lunch at the summit would be served, and for whom. A menu included in the documents indicated that the luncheon was to be held “in honor of his excellency Vladimir Putin.”
A seating chart shows that Putin and Trump were supposed to sit across from each other during the luncheon. Trump would be flanked by six officials: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to his right, and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Special Envoy for Peace Missions Steve Witkoff to his left. Putin would be seated immediately next to his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, and his Aide to the President for Foreign Policy, Yuri Ushakov.
During the summit Friday, lunch was apparently cancelled. But it was intended to be a simple, three-course meal, the documents showed. After a green salad, the world leaders would dine on filet mignon and halibut olympia. Crème brûlée would be served for dessert.
The state-run Russian international news network Russia Today (RT) has released behind-the-scenes video from Alaska that appears to show President Donald Trump fawning over Vladimir Putin.
The video shared by the Kremlin shows Trump and Putin standing together backstage near where they delivered public remarks following their three-hour meeting.
Despite walking away without a deal and without sharing any details on progress toward ending the war in Ukraine, the president could be seen laughing as he spoke to Putin.
The only person standing with the two leaders as they spoke was Putin’s translator.
In the video, Trump can be seen offering his hand first to shake hands with Putin. The president then tapped their joined hands with his other hand, embracing Putin with a two-hand shake. He also shook the Russian translator’s hand at the end of the clip.
The Kremlin was quick to release the video. While the White House has been posting a series of clips from the historic visit in Alaska, it has not yet shared any candid video of Trump and Putin together. The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
According to RT, the video was taken right after their public remarks, during which neither man took any questions from reporters. It described their behind-the-scenes banter as “light chatter.”
President Donald Trump has ended his high-stakes Russia summit without announcing a deal to end the war in Ukraine, despite rolling out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin as the first U.S. president in years to invite him to America.
After a ride in the presidential limousine, a military flyover, and three hours of talks, a somewhat subdued Trump told reporters in Alaska: “We didn’t get there—but we have a very good chance of getting there.” [….]
During a press conference lasting only a few minutes, Trump and Putin spoke of an agreement of sorts, but gave no details, took no questions, and made no mention of a ceasefire.
“There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Trump said. “I will call up NATO in a little while. I will call up the various people that I think are appropriate, and I’ll, of course, call up President Zelensky and tell them about today’s meeting. It’s ultimately up to them.”
The lack of an announcement is likely to fuel claims that Putin was using the meeting as a stalling tactic to stave off further U.S. sanctions.
And, of course, Trump used it as an attempted distraction from the Epstein files.
The Russian authoritarian has been frozen out by the West for years, and his visit has been depicted in Moscow as a win for the Kremlin.
At the press conference, Putin addressed the room first, and then spoke for eight-and-a-half minutes about the history of the two nations, his desire for more business ties with America, and flattered the American president by agreeing that the war would not have happened if Trump had been in office.
He also told reporters that he greeted Trump on the tarmac in Alaska by saying, “Good afternoon, dear neighbor—very good to see you in good health and to see you alive.”
But Putin also made the point that in order to make a “lasting and long-term” end to the war, “we need to eliminate all the primary root causes” of the conflict in Ukraine.
This is viewed as shorthand for Putin’s hardline demands, which have repeatedly been rejected: that Ukraine disarms, gives up a large part of its land to Russia, and swears off joining NATO.
Friday’s summit in Alaska’s Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson was the first time Putin has been on U.S. soil in 10 years.
It was also the first time a U.S. president has given the VIP treatment to a Russian leader who faces an arrest warrant for war crimes issued by the International Criminal Court as well as being sanctioned by the U.S. government.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin agrees with him that letting voters send in ballots by mail puts honest elections at risk.
Trump, who promoted the false narrative that he, not Democrat Joe Biden, won the 2020 election, cited his agreement with Putin over absentee voting as he pressed his fellow Republicans to try harder to advance overhauls to the U.S. voting system that he has long sought.
Trump has voted by mail in some previous elections and urged his supporters to do so in 2024.
Putin, who has been Russia’s president or prime minister since 1999, was elected to another term in office with 87% of the vote in a 2024 election that drew allegations of vote rigging from some independent polling observers, opposition voices and Western governments. The most formidable opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic penal colony in 2024.
Imagine taking advice on fair elections from Putin. LOL
Those were the words that came to mind when we watched the Alaska Summit unfold.
On our screens, a blood-soaked dictator and war criminal received a royal welcome in the land of the free — as his attack drones headed for our cities.
In the lead-up to the meeting in Alaska, U.S. President Donald Trump declared he wanted a “ceasefire today” and that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin would face “severe consequences” if he didn’t go for it.
Yet after a 2.5-hour closed-door meeting, Trump and Putin emerged to share… nothing. “Progress” was made and some “understanding” reached, but the two didn’t come to an agreement on “the most significant point” — clearly, Ukraine.
Trump didn’t get what he wanted. But Putin? He sure did.
From the moment he stepped off the plane on U.S. soil, the Russian dictator was beaming.
No longer an international pariah, he was finally getting accepted – and respected — by the leader of the free world. Trump’s predecessor once called Putin a murderer; Trump offered him a king’s welcome.
Trump greeted Putin with a red carpet, warm handshakes, a flyover of U.S. bombers, and a backseat limo ride.
The chummy display stood in stark contrast to Trump’s hostile reception of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office six months ago.
Ukraine’s president endured a public shaming. Russia’s was pampered. Both episodes were disgraceful.
Glasser begins by describing the buildup and aftermath of the meeting pretty much as I’ve already posted here. Her evaluation of the event:
Sometimes the news is what it seems to be, meaning, in this case: No deal. The day began with a hellish war in Ukraine, with air-raid sirens in Kyiv and fierce battles in the east, and that is how it ended. The only difference is that Putin got one hell of a photo op out of Trump, and still more time on the clock to prosecute his war against the “brotherly” Ukrainian people, as he had the chutzpah to call them during his remarks in Alaska. The most enduring images from Anchorage, it seems, will be its grotesque displays of bonhomie between the dictator and his longtime American admirer.
Right around the time that Trump was on the tarmac, clapping for the butcher of Bucha, his fund-raising team sent out the following e-mail:
Attention please, I’m meeting with Putin in Alaska! It’s a little chilly. THIS MEETING IS VERY HIGH STAKES for the world. The Democrats would love nothing more than for ME TO FAIL. No one in the world knows how to make deals like me!
The backdrop for this uniquely Trumpian combination of braggadocio and toxic partisanship was, of course, anything but a master class in successful deal-making; rather, the impetus for the summit was the President’s increasing urgency to produce a result after six months of failure to end the war in Ukraine—a task he once said was so easy that it would be done before he even returned to office in January. Leading up to the Alaska summit, nothing worked: Not berating Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Not begging Putin to “STOP” his bombing. Not even a U.S.-floated proposal to essentially give Putin much of what he had demanded. Trump gave Putin multiple deadlines—fifty days, two weeks, “ten or twelve days”—to agree to a ceasefire and come to the table, then did nothing when Putin balked. When his latest ultimatum expired, on August 8th, instead of imposing tough new sanctions, as he had threatened, Trump announced that he would meet Putin in Alaska a week later, minus Zelensky, in effect ending the Russian’s global isolation in exchange for no apparent concessions aimed at ending the war that Putin himself had unleashed.
In the run-up to the meeting, debates raged about the right historical parallel to draw between this summit and its twentieth-century antecedents: Was it to be a replay of Yalta, with two great powers instead of three settling the fate of absent small nations, and with the United States once again signing off on Russia’s dominance over its neighbors? Or perhaps Munich was the better analogy, with Trump in the role of Neville Chamberlain, ceding a beleaguered ally’s territory as the price of an illusory peace? For Ukraine and its supporters in the West, the prospect of a sellout by Trump loomed large.
But history doesn’t repeat so neatly, and certainly not when Trump is involved. He is a sui-generis American President, who, at the end of the day, seemed to have orchestrated a self-own of embarrassing proportions. As ever, Trump’s big mouth offered up the best reminder of what he wanted in Alaska and what he did not get. On Friday morning, as Trump flew out of Washington aboard Air Force One, he told reporters, “I want to see a ceasefire rapidly. I don’t know if it’s going to be today, but I’m not going to be happy if it’s not today.” But, after his long-sought meeting with Putin, as he again boarded Air Force One for the long flight home, this was the chyron on Fox News that greeted him: “No Ceasefire After Trump-Putin Summit.”
Read the rest at The New Yorker. I got past the paywall by using the link at Memeorandum.com.
President Donald Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. He allowed the Pentagon twice to halt prearranged military shipments to Ukraine. He promised that when the current tranche of armaments runs out, there will be no more. He has cut or threatened to cut the U.S. funds that previously supported independent Russian-language media and opposition. His administration is slowly, quietly easing sanctions on Russia, ending “basic sanctions and export control actions that had maintained and increased U.S. pressure,” according to a Senate-minority report. “Every month he’s spent in office without action has strengthened Putin’s hand, weakened ours and undermined Ukraine’s own efforts to bring an end to the war,” Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Elizabeth Warren wrote in a joint statement.
Many of these changes have gone almost unremarked on in the United States. But they are widely known in Russia. The administration’s attacks on Zelensky, Europeans, and Voice of America have been celebrated on Russian television. Of course Vladimir Putin knows about the slow lifting of sanctions. As a result, the Russian president has clearly made a calculation: Trump, to use the language he once hurled at Zelensky, has no cards.
Trump does say that he wants to end the war in Ukraine, and sometimes he also says that he is angry that Putin doesn’t. But if the U.S. is not willing to use any economic, military, or political tools to help Ukraine, if Trump will not put any diplomatic pressure on Putin or any new sanctions on Russian resources, then the U.S. president’s fond wish to be seen as a peacemaker can be safely ignored. No wonder all of Trump’s negotiating deadlines for Russia have passed, to no effect, and no wonder the invitation to Anchorage produced no result.
There is not much else to say about yesterday’s Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska, other than to observe the intertwining elements of tragedy and farce. It was embarrassing for Americans to welcome a notorious wanted war criminal on their territory. It was humiliating to watch an American president act like a happy puppy upon encountering the dictator of a much poorer, much less important state, treating him as a superior. It’s excruciating to imagine how badly Trump’s diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, an amateur out of his depth, misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful. It’s ominous that Trump now says he doesn’t want to push for a cease-fire but instead for peace negotiations, because the latter formula gives Putin time to keep killing Ukrainians. It’s strange that Russian reports of the meeting focused on business cooperation. “Russian-American business and investment partnership has huge potential,” Putin said today.
Applebaum notes that Trump had already destroyed any chance Americans had of influencing Putin.
The U.S. has no cards because we’ve been giving them away. If we ever want to play them again, we will have to win them back: Arm Ukraine, expand sanctions, stop the lethal drone swarms, break the Russian economy, and win the war. Then there will be peace.
President Donald Trump said he will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House on Monday afternoon to discuss an agreement “which would end the war” between Russia and Ukraine.
The Truth Social post came about half a day after Mr. Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Mr. Trump said the meeting with Putin “went very well.” He also said the meeting was followed by a “late night phone call” with Zelenskyy and other European leaders, including Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO. The call took place around 2:40 a.m. ET.
“It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump did not share any details of the agreement. He said Zelenskyy would join him in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon to discuss the proposal.
European leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, said in a statement that they had been debriefed on the meeting with Putin, and said Mr. Trump had supported security guarantees for Ukraine.
“We are clear that Ukraine must have ironclad security guarantees to effectively defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity. We welcome President Trump’s statement that the U.S. is prepared to give security guarantees,” the statement read.
Read more BS at the link.
That’s it for me today. What do you think?
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The corporate media continues to bash President Biden and ignore Donald Trump’s insane rally speeches and his frightening plans for our future.
Trump held a rally last night after at least 10 days of golfing instead of campaigning. The rally wasn’t in a swing state though–he held it at his Doral golf course in Florida. Why isn’t the media calling him lazy?
Here’s a summary of the looney word salad Trump spewed last night. From @ArtCandee on Twitter:
Oh boy. Trump’s Doral rally tonight was a doozy. Let’s recap it:
He started off by bragging about his golf course instead of apologizing for being an hour late and leaving people waiting all day under a heat advisory.
He said he didn’t know what NATO was.
He bragged that “being indicted is a lot of fun.”
He claimed “tens of thousands” of people showed up to this sad little rally.
He later said “45,000 people” when it barely looked like 2k people were there.
He froze like a deer in headlights for 10 straight seconds.
He praised Laura Loomer and repeatedly called her “amazing.”
He’s mad that Kamala Harris laughs and called her “L-a-f-f-i-n’ Kamala,” proving what we already knew that bro can’t spell.
He said he wants a “no holds barred” debate without moderators this week. Essentially the two of them screaming at each other. Super dumb idea. Especially when Biden is hosting the NATO summit.
He also challenged President Biden to a golf tournament this week when President Biden is busy meeting with NATO leaders and doing his job.
He said Biden “doesn’t know what a synagogue is.”
He thinks you have to stop electric cars every hour.
He complained about the heat only 16 minutes in, when those people waited all day and he still showed up an hour late.
He said someone told him that he looks “great in a bathing suit.” Barf.
He called the fictional Hannibal Lecter “a lovely man” and compared him to immigrants.
He said migrants are “preying on everybody.”
He forgot how to say “feared” and said “field.” He said he’d be the “greatest president that God has ever created.”
He claimed Hunter Biden is running the country.
He babbled about facelifts.
He said he was going to bring Tom Homan back into his administration, a guy who helped author Project 2025 which he claims to know nothing about.
He claimed Biden has more homes than him.
He said we’ll become “energy independent” when we already are right now.
He complained some more about the hot weather.
He asked why “sweaty” golf caddies “never touched me, never hugged me, never kissed me.”
He made fun of Chris Christie’s weight while claiming he was standing up for him. Mighty rich.
He said the U.S. is turning into “communist Cuba or socialist Venezuela.”
He struggled to pronounce some of his sycophants’ names.
He called Don Jr. “a great talent” and that he has a “great wife” even though he’s not married to Kimberly Guilfoyle.
He said how much he loves his family showing up when his wife Melania and favorite daughter Ivanka didn’t even bother going.
He said “October 7th would not have happened” if he was President.
He said Israel “had no money.”
He said “we have nuclear submarines and five warships in Cuba,” essentially calling himself a Russian.
He said Biden has abandoned Cuba when he was the one who nixed Obama’s plan to reopen trade and travel to Cuba.
He said people get “shot, mugged, raped” when visiting the Washington Monument in DC.
He said he will protect the second amendment and “innocent life” in the same breath.
He told people to “vote whenever you want.”
He played a song performed by J6 insurrectionists and people who beat up police officers.
He read his teleprompter cue to speak quickly out loud.
He said that getting rid of energy efficiency in appliances will “keep our enemies at bay.”
He called the United States of America “a third-world country” and said we’re “a joke.”
He said President Biden “isn’t legally allowed to stand trial.”
He’s claiming that the stock market is high because of MAGA winning the election in November, and that it will crash like during the Great Depression if he loses.
He said it’s “easier to get fentanyl than groceries.”
He forgot how to say the word “economy.”
He said he’d rather take money from small dollar donors instead of the wealthy.
He said they’re “going to take over our Capitol.”
He lied like he breathes.
And we all know the media won’t cover HALF of this absolute train wreck.
House Democrats met Tuesday to discuss President Joe Biden’s candidacy, but one lawmaker wanted to know why the press has spent a second week on that story instead of looking at recently released Florida court documents in the Jeffrey Epstein case.
“We hear a lot from our constituents on different issues,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) said at the news conference Tuesday. “But something I’ve heard that doesn’t seem to be being covered are the Epstein files.”
“And by the way, he was convicted in a civil court for sexual assault and convicted in a state court for 34 felonies. Donald Trump should drop out of the race,” said Lieu….
In a surprise move, Circuit Judge Luis Delgado ordered the documents be released last week, shortly before the Fourth of July holiday.
“The testimony taken by the Grand Jury concerns activity ranging from grossly unacceptable to rape — all of the conduct at issue is sexually deviant, disgusting, and criminal,” the judge wrote.
Palm Beach County Clerk of Courts Joseph Abruzzo worked for the past three years trying to get the records released to the public, The Washington Post reported.
“The public, and the victims specifically, want to know how he was able to get a slap on the wrist and go on for decades, continuing these heinous acts to hundreds, or more, underage girls or women,” he said.
Insider’s Jacob Shamsian explained that Trump is the likely individual referred to as “Doe 174.” It identified the individual as saying, “I wish her well,” when referring to Epstein’s girlfriend and accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now serving 20 years in prison for her involvement….
“It’s easy to see where Trump fits into them,” Insider said. “They are all transcripts of depositions from Ransome, Giuffre, and Epstein’s Palm Beach housekeeper Juan Alessi, all of whom were asked about Epstein’s relationships with celebrities and other powerful people.”
Alex Katz, Red Roses with Blue, 2001
Trump has been trying to dissociate himself from the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” even though most of the people working on it are former members of the first Trumpadministration.
With all the focus in recent weeks on President Joe Biden’s age-related limitations, it’s worth remembering that Donald Trump’s incessant falsehoods and self-proclaimed desire to be a dictator on Day 1 make him far more unfit for the presidency. The latest Trump lie that should be garnering more attention is his attempt to distance himself from Project 2025: “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he posted on Truth Social last week. “I have no idea who is behind it.” That statement is demonstrably false. It reflects an attempt to deceive American voters about the dictatorship a second Trump term would bring.
The reasons that Trump is unfit are manifest. He is a convicted felon and inveterate liar who coddles the nation’s adversaries and threatens its allies. His 30-plus falsehoods in the debate were no less disqualifying than Biden’s age. But most concerning of all are his plans for autocracy, which we document in our American Autocracy Threat Tracker. We detail Trump’s own promise to be a dictator “on Day 1” of his presidency, to “terminate” or reject the Constitution, and to stretch the law to carry out his extreme policies—such as mass deportations (by military force if necessary) and concentration camps for immigrants lacking permanent legal status.
Dictatorship cannot of course be accomplished by one person alone. That’s why, in our Threat Tracker, we also document the autocratic proposals made by Trump’s campaign, allies, and enablers. First among them—and until now embraced by Trump—are the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025, an 887-page document that outlines how Trump could arrogate unprecedented power in the presidency and eradicate checks on presidential control. In our tracker, we catalog how Project 2025 “proposes to dismantle or radically overhaul the Departments of Justice and State; eliminate the Departments of Homeland Security, Education, and Commerce; radically repurpose other agencies; and eviscerate the professional civil service.” One “immediate priority” discussed by leaders of Project 2025 are proposals for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to suppress domestic dissent and violence.
That plan exemplifies the danger lurking beneath this extreme project, as hinted at by last week’s discussion of bloodshed. The president of the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025’s parent organization, Kevin Roberts, said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” The Heritage Foundation subsequently quote-tweeted this clip with one word: “Yes.”
Contrary to Trump’s disavowal, Project 2025 has been conceived, staffed, and endorsed by a plethora of Trump insiders—including some of the former president’s most senior and influential advisers. Notably, John McEntee, a powerful figure in the Trump administration as the director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, is a senior adviser to the effort and has helped spearhead its lists of potential Trump administration staffers. And Stephen Miller, a top Trump aide, is “one of the most powerful architects” of Project 2025, Axios has reported.
The list of Trump-affiliated figures who have played a role in Project 2025 does not stop there. It also includes Ben Carson, Trump’s ex–secretary of housing and urban development; Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser under Trump; and Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump. Vought is yet another central player in the former president’s orbit: He drafted a key chapter in Project 2025 and is now the policy director for the committee writing the Republican National Committee’s policy platform. And there are many other lower-profile Trump advisers involved in Project 2025, as we discuss in our Threat Tracker.
Meanwhile, Trump’s super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., has been running ads promoting a website called Trump Project 2025. And figures like Miller and Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt have previously appeared in online advertisements promoting Project 2025.
Retribution is at the center of Donald Trump’s third presidential election campaign.
“I am your warrior,” Trumpproclaimed earlier this year. “I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
Trump’s loyal surrogates have duly embraced the project — perhaps no one more zealously than Ivan Raiklin, a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and former U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency employee, who bills himself as the former and would-be president’s “future secretary of retribution.”
Raiklin is seeking to enlist so-called “constitutional” sheriffs in rural, conservative counties across the country to detain Trump’s political enemies. Or, as he says, carry out “live-streamed swatting raids” against individuals on his “Deep State target list.”
“This is a deadly serious report,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Raw Story. “A retired U.S. military officer has drawn up a ‘Deep State target list’ of public officials he considers traitors, along with our family members and staff. His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.” [….]
The list Raiklin has been circulating since January is extensive.
It includes numerous Democratic and Republican elected officials; FBI and intelligence officials; members of the House Select January 6 Committee; U.S. Capitol Police officers and civilian employees; witnesses in Trump’s two impeachment trials and the Jan. 6 committee hearings; and journalists from publications ranging from CNN and the Washington Post to Reuters and Raw Story — all considered political enemies of Trump.
Julie Farnam, a former U.S. Capitol Police employee named on the list who as assistant director of intelligence and interagency coordination warned about the potential for violence in advance of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, said she would not be intimidated by the list.
“Any hit list is designed to impart the silence and fear of those named on it,” Farnam told Raw Story. “But silence is victory for those who write such lists. Conversely, speaking the truth without fear will always be the undoing of those who seek to intimidate and spread hate in our world. I can never be silenced.”
In addition to Farnam, the list includes nine current or former U.S. Capitol Police employees. The agency declined to comment for this story.
Raw Story is not publishing the full list given the potential risk posed to people unaware that they’re on it.
Many of the people on the “retribution” list are journalists. This story is behind a paywall, but those are the basics. Here’s a bit more:
Who is Ivan Raiklin?
As the 2020 election approached, conspiracy minded Trump supporters with active Twitter accounts were in abundance. Most never broke through the incessant MAGA noise, or merely added another note to its election denialism dissonance.
Raiklin was different.
He was a seasoned veteran with a background in military intelligence who wound up playing a small but significant role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election in Trump’s name.
Bouquet of Flowers by Edouard Manet (1882)
Following a distinguished career in the U.S. Armed Forces in which he served as a military attaché to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and foreign affairs specialist assigned to the Ukraine Crisis Team, Raiklin left the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2017 to run for U.S. Senate in Virginia, according to the Washington Post.
At the time, Raiklin’s candidacy in 2018 provided little indication of the MAGA loyalist relishing the destruction of Trump’s enemies that he would become….
Following his disappointing foray into electoral politics, Raiklin began his turn toward Trump’s MAGA movement.
In 2019, he appeared at a QAnon-themed fundraiser for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, whom Raiklin met in 2010. (Flynn and Raiklin have become close in recent years, with Raiklin urging Trump to select Flynn as his vice presidential running mate and Flynn featuring Raiklin in his current speaking tour.)
Roughly a week after the 2020 election, when major media outlets had called the election for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, Raiklin went on Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory show InfoWars and confidently predicted that Trump would ultimately obtain the necessary number of electoral votes to secure reelection.
“I absolutely guarantee it,” he said. “One hundred percent. Unequivocally. Full stop. There is no possibility that he does not reach 270.”
It’s a classic example of how Trump’s followers often act on Trump’s wishes or anticipate his desires without receiving specific directives.
For months, Trump had been saying that the only way he’d lose the election is if Democrats stole it through fraud. Now, Trump had lost, and Raiklin was arguing that Trump was winning, against all evidence.
Raiklin, in essence, operates as an agent of Trumpism independent of Trump.
And as the 2024 election nears, the same dynamic is apparent: Trump articulates the broad themes, and his supporters scramble to put them into practice.
“Stand back and stand by” set the stage for the Jan. 6 insurrection in 2021, and now, “I am your retribution” serves as a solicitation to supporters such as Raiklin to put together specific plans for retribution against Trump’s political enemies.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the NYT and WaPo to cover this story. They are working overtime trying to normalize Trump, while attacking Biden.
The Justice Departmentannounced on Tuesday that the U.S. has disrupted a Russian disinformation campaign involving Artificial intelligence-powered bots that created fake profiles on the X social media platform.
It’s President Vladimir Putin’s answer to the terrifying Skynet artificial intelligence network from the Terminator movies.
Government officials seized two internet domains and searched through 968 X accounts that they accuse Russia of using to create an AI “bot farm,” which the department said “Used elements of AI to create fictitious social media profiles—often purporting to belong to individuals in the United States—which the operators then used to promote messages in support of Russian government objectives,” according to the statement.
The U.S. action was, “The first in disrupting a Russian-sponsored Generative AI-enhanced social media bot farm,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray.
The court document read that the operation was devised by the deputy editor-in-chief at RT, formerly known as Russia Today, a Kremlin-run Russian news organization based in Moscow, in 2022. The goal was to spread RT’s standard television news broadcast on social media. It was part of a Kremlin-approved and funded project run by a Russian intelligence officer.
Russia’s efforts to influence this year’s U.S. election through information warfare have the same aim as in previous elections — to undermine President Joe Biden’s campaign and the Democratic Party and weaken public confidence in the electoral process, intelligence officials said Tuesday.
Lilacs in a Window by Mary Cassatt (1880)
Russia’s election influence operations, which include covert social media accounts and encrypted direct messaging channels, are targeting key voter groups in swing states to exploit political divisions in the U.S. and erode support for Ukraine in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion, officials with the Office of the Director National Intelligence, or ODNI, told reporters.
Asked whether Russia’s information campaign is trying to boost or undermine one of the presidential candidates, an ODNI official said: “We have not observed a shift in Russia’s preferences for the presidential race from past elections, given the role the U.S. is playing with regard to Ukraine and broader policy toward Russia.”
In its assessments of previous elections dating to 2016, the intelligence community concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime sought to sway American public opinion in favor of Donald Trump’s candidacy and denigrate the Democratic Party and its presidential nominees.
Former U.S. intelligence officials and regional analysts say the Kremlin has long viewed Trump as more sympathetic to Russia, citing his frequently expressed skepticism toward the NATO alliance, his reluctance to criticize Putin and his critical portrayal of Ukraine’s government.
Yesterday, the Boston area was supposed to get up to a foot of snow. For several days, meteorologists predicted a huge winter storm was on the way. They were confident it would happen. But at the last minute, Mother Nature changed her mind. There was a big storm, but its path shifted to the South, and guess what we got where I live? Nada. Some sleet and rain.
I really love snowstorms, and I was looking forward to this one. In addition, the entire Boston school system was shut down and many businesses closed for the day. That has to be expensive, right?
We’ve had several of these failed predictions this winter. What is the problem? Are meteorologists predicting these storms too many days ahead? I don’t know. But I’m disgusted. I’m never believing their forecasts again. There is supposedly another snowstorm on the way. I’ll believe it when I see it.
On with today’s reads.
Yesterday’s Special Elections
Democrats got some good news last night as they won special elections in New York and Pennsylvania.
Democrat Tom Suozzi won a hotly contested special election for Congress on Tuesday, the Associated Press projected, retaking a seat in suburban New York and offering his party some reassurance amid high anxiety about President Biden’s political vulnerabilities.
Suozzi beat Republican nominee Mazi Pilip to replace Republican George Santos, who was indicted on a charge of fraud and then expelled from Congress late last year amid revelations that he fabricated much of his life story. The race for New York’s 3rd District — long viewed as a dead heat — played out in a suburban part of Long Island that favored President Biden by eight points in 2020 but then swung toward Republicans, backing Santos by the same margin.
With more than 93 percent of the vote counted early Wednesday, Suozzi led Pilip by nearly eight percentage points.
National issues dominated the campaign, making Tuesday’s vote this year’s first high-profile test of the parties’ messages on abortion, the economy and, above all, immigration. Suozzi represented the area for six years previously and campaigned as a moderate who wanted to work across the aisle. But with New York City struggling to absorb more than 100,000 migrants arriving from the southern border, much of the campaign centered on what polling suggests is Democrats’ toughest issue….
In New York, Suozzi’s victory capped a long list of Democratic wins in recent special elections, which have showcased the party’s ability to turn out its base and tap into anger at GOP-backed abortion restrictions since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Democrats spent millions of dollars attacking Pilip’s “pro-life” stance even though she said she would not support a national ban on abortion.
Road in the Village of Baldersbronde, Winter Day 1912, by Laurits Anderson Ring
I’m not sure immigration will be the Democrats’ “toughest issue” anymore, since Republicans in Congress refused to pass an immigration bill that was supported by the Border Patrol Union and the U.S. Chamber of Congress simply because Donald Trump order them to vote no.
Democrat Tom Suozzi is heading back to Congress after defeating Republican Mazi Pilip in the special election to replace serial fabulist and expelled former GOP Rep. George Santos. The result will further narrow the GOP’s already thin House majority and hand President Joe Biden’s party a boost as the general election campaign comes into focus….
Both parties poured cash into the race for New York’s 3rd congressional district, but Democrats’ fundraising and registration advantage combined with Suozzi’s brand – he’s spent most of the last 30 years at or around the center of Long Island politics – and a fired-up base, angry over the Santos fiasco, delivered a victory that means the House GOP will now become even harder to corral.
For Pilip, who has vowed to run again in the fall, defeat meant an almost immediate rebuke from Trump, who called her a “very foolish woman” in a social media post Tuesday night. Pilip refused until the final days of the campaign to say whether she voted for Trump in 2020, though she did follow his lead in dissing a highly touted bipartisan Senate border bill – a decision that helped Suozzi tie her more tightly to the former president over the last week….
The campaign was staked on a series of issues from the beginning: immigration, inflation, Israel and abortion. Suozzi talked about reproductive rights but didn’t make it a centerpiece of his campaign. Inflation has mostly leveled out. And there was no political or policy space to speak of between the candidates who both fully backed Israel.
On the immigration issue:
Understanding this, Pilip and Republicans set about hammering Suozzi over the migrant crisis in New York City, claiming he caused it along with Biden – a line that ultimately didn’t quite wash with voters who have long recognized Suozzi as a moderate or centrist. When Pilip suggested he was in league with the progressive “squad,” Suozzi at their debate was prepared.
“For you to suggest I’m a member of the squad,” he said, “is about as believable as you being a member of George Santos’s volleyball team.” (And that was before a knowing reference to Rick Lazio, which only seasoned New York voters would appreciate.)
Most notably, though, Suozzi and state Democratic leaders didn’t repeat their mistakes from 2022. They aggressively countered Pilip’s migrant message and it never felt like the issue, typically a winner for the GOP, put Suozzi on the backfoot.
The weather was a factor in this election. Many Democrats vote early or by mail, while Republicans mostly vote on election day. The snowstorm may have kept Republicans from getting to the polls.
Democrats won a state House special election in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night, preserving the party’s narrow majority in the closely watched battleground state, The Associated Press projected.
In the race for the open seat in the 140th state House District, Democrat Jim Prokopiak, a school board member in Bucks County, defeated Republican Candace Cabanas.
Prokopiak’s victory gives Democrats a narrow 102-100 majority in the state House, preventing another tie in the chamber.
The party had a one-seat majority, 102-101, before Democratic Rep. John Galloway resigned after he won a judgeship in November.
His departure created a tie. But another resignation Friday, by Republican Joe Adams, gave Democrats a fresh 101-100 advantage.
Republicans control the state Senate, while Democrats hold the governorship.
The win in Bucks County — a purple slice of the northern suburbs of Philadelphia — was hailed as positive news by national Democrats, some of whom had viewed the contest as an early bellwether of the party’s fortunes among suburban voters ahead of the 2024 election.
Even the Biden campaign weighed in on the victory, touting it as evidence that Bucks County voters would reject Donald Trump in the fall.
“With control of the state House on the line, Pennsylvanians again defeated Republicans’ anti-abortion agenda and voted for Jim Prokopiak, a Democrat who has stood up for women and working people,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement.
More News:
House Republicans spent yesterday impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas based on zero evidence.
The GOP-led House finally got its act together enough to stage an impeachment performance last evening, claiming the scalp of Biden Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
The same three Republican members who stymied the effort last week voted against impeachment again, but Rep. Steve Scalise’s return from cancer treatment gave the Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) the critical vote he needed to complete the flimsiest impeachment in history:
It’s totally appropriate to categorize these kinds of maneuvers by Republicans as performative or as playing politics or as engaging in political stunts. All true. But it’s also fundamentally an abuse of power. House Republicans are hikacking the levers of power that come with the offices they hold to advance their own partisan political aims and hold on to that power.
Not every example of an alignment between official acts and partisan political advantage is an abuse of power. But when you strip away any ostensibly objective motive for the official act, when you offer no pretense for the official act, when you’re only using the powers of the office to further your own political aims, when you stretch the law and the rules and bend them to your own grubby ends, you’re engaged in abuse of power. When, at the same time, you’re engaging in the wholesale breaking of government and institutions for the sake of it, all you’re left with is politics of the grimy, self-serving, and self-perpetuating variety.
There will have to be a trial in the Senate, but the “impeachment” is dead there. This is disgusting.
Sven Kroner, Hocuspocus
President Biden condemned Trump’s attack on NATO and his encouragement to Russia to attack our European allies.
Last May, Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) visited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, warmly embracing the embattled leader and later urging President Biden to “do more” to help the nation as it fights off Russia’s invasion.
But this week, Graham voted repeatedly against sending $60 billion in aid to that nation as well as against other military funds for Israel and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific. The longtime hawk dramatically announced on the Senate floor that he also would no longer be attending the Munich Security Conference — an annual pilgrimage made by world leaders to discuss global security concerns that’s been a mainstay of his schedule.
“I talked to President Trump today and he’s dead set against this package,” Graham said on the Senate floor on Sunday, a day after the former president said at a rally that he would let the Russians do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies that did not spend enough on defense. “He thinks that we should make packages like this a loan, not a gift,” Graham said.
Claude Monet, A Cart on the Snowy_Road at Honfleur, 1865 or 1867
Graham’s about-face on Ukraine aid sends a stark warning signal to U.S. allies that even one of the most aggressive advocates for U.S. interventionism abroad appears to be influenced by the more isolationist posture pervading the Republican Party.
It marked a departure for the senator who was harshly critical of Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy when he ran against him for president in 2015, in part on a message of launching a U.S. invasion of Syria. And even as he cozied up to Trump once he became president on numerous other issues, the Air Force veteran continued to criticize Trump on foreign policy, including for wanting to withdraw from Afghanistan and Syria….
The episode has also eroded Graham’s credibility among colleagues who worked closely with him to shape a bipartisan package of border policy reforms that Republicans demanded be attached to the foreign aid in exchange for their votes — only to backtrack and help kill it in the end.
Merrick Garland is highly unlikely to serve a second term as attorney general amid mounting criticism of the Biden classified documents report, a law professor has said.
Professor Anthony V. Alfieri, a law professor at the University of Miami in Florida, was reacting to Garland’s appointment of Robert Hur as special counsel to investigate President Biden’s handling of the documents.
Garland has been under pressure for the perceived unfairness of the report and his silence in its aftermath.
The report said that Biden claimed he couldn’t remember details of classified documents he held after leaving the White House as vice president, and would likely claim forgetfulness if put on trial.
“Garland’s lack of fairness in this case, and the ensuing political fallout, renders a second term of service highly unlikely,” Alfieri told Newsweek.
“Attorney General Garland’s appointment of Robert Hur as Special Counsel, despite a notably conservative pedigree and record, is less controversial than Garland’s conclusion that Hur’s report was neither ‘inappropriate’ nor ‘unwarranted’,” Alfieri said.
“That conclusion and his release of the report to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees without addition, redaction, or modification, both explicitly and implicitly approves formally descriptive but substantively gratuitous, ad hominem and politically charged language prejudicial to Mr. Biden.”
Read more at the link.
That’s all I have for you today. What are your thoughts on all this? What stories have you been following?
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John Constable, Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (c.1824-1828)
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Wow, is it hard to keep up with the headlines this week! Just this morning, we learned that the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is from NBC News. “International Criminal Court issues arrest warrant for Putin over alleged Ukraine war crimes. The court said Friday that the Russian leader is responsible for overseeing the forced deportation of children. The Kremlin has previously denied the accusation.” It’s reported by Henry Austin.
Putin committed the “war crime” of overseeing the unlawful abduction and deportation of childrenfrom Ukraine to Russia, the court said in a news release.
“There are reasonable grounds to believe that Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes,” the court, based in The Hague, Netherlands, said its pre-trial judges had assessed.
It added that Putin had failed to “exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts, or allowed for their commission, and who were under his effective authority and control.”
Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Putin’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights, is also alleged to have committed similar crimes, the ICC said.
While warrants are often issued in secret “to protect victims and witnesses and also to safeguard the investigation,” the release said that the court was “mindful that the conduct addressed in the present situation is allegedly ongoing, and that the public awareness of the warrants may contribute to the prevention of the further commission of crimes.”
From the early days of the invasion last February, Kyiv has accused Russia of forcibly transferring children and adults.
Franz Marc-In the Rain(Im Regen) (1912)
Turkey is backing Finland’s entrance into NATO. The NATO expansion may also give the Russian people some reason to feel less safe with Putin in charge. Hungary has also agreed to the deal. This is from Bloomberg News.
Turkey and Hungary both signaled they plan to ratify Finland’s entry into NATO, bringing the military alliance a step closer to welcoming its 31st member as the ripples from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine spread across the European security landscape.
“We’ve decided to start the process for the approval of Finland’s membership in our parliament,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a news conference Friday together with his Finnish counterpart Sauli Niinisto in Ankara. He added he hoped to complete the approval process for Finland by May 14 elections due in Turkey.
Meanwhile, Hungary plans to approve the Finnish entry March 27, Fidesz parliamentary leader Mate Kocsis said in a Facebook post. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has continually delayed a parliamentary vote in contrast with his statements of support for NATO’s enlargement.
The stance taken by Turkey and Hungary decouples the Nordic countries’ bids to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, filed in May to deter any Russian aggression following its invasion of Ukraine. The comments cast further doubt on the timeline for Sweden’s accession.
“Progress on Sweden’s bid depends on steps it will take,” Erdogan said. Hungary also said it will decide on Sweden’s membership at a later date.
In The Rain, 1882, Vincent van Gogh
I vividly remember someone trying to leave with the Abraham Lincoln bust during Trump’s removal from the White House. It seems more stuff went missing. This is from the Washington Post. “Two gifts to Trump family from foreign nations are missing, report says. More than 100 gifts worth nearly $300,000 were not properly reported to the government, a new report finds.”
Federal officials cannot find two gifts received by President Donald Trump and his family from foreign nations, including a life-size painting of Trump from the president of El Salvador and golf clubs from the Japanese prime minister, according to a new report from House Democrats.
The gifts are among more than 100 foreign gifts — with a total value of nearly $300,000 — that Trump and his family failed to report to the State Department in violation of federal law, according to the report, which cites government records and emails.
The 15-page report, a result of ayear-long investigation by the House Oversight Committeeinto Trump’s failure to disclose gifts from foreign government officials while in office, revealed that the Trump family did not disclose dozens of gifts from countries that are not U.S. allies or have a complicated relationship with Washington. That includes 16 gifts from Saudi Arabia worth more than $48,000, 17 gifts from India worth over $17,000, and at least 5 gifts from China. Trump reported zero gifts entirely the final year of his presidency, according to the report, while he reported some of the gifts received in previous years.
Trump repeatedly told advisers that gifts given to him during the presidency were hisand did not belong to the federal government, former chief of staff John F. Kelly and other aides have previously told The Washington Post.
Investigators are continuing to search for the large portrait of Trump gifted to him ahead of the 2020 election by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and the golf clubs worth more than $7,000 thatTrump received from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during visits to the Trump International Golf Club and Kasumigaeski Country Club in 2017 and 2018, the report says.
Vasily Kandinsky Landscape with rain Guggenheim, c 1944
Count the silverware before and after anywhere this family travels. They’ll take anything! Meanwhile, court watch continues, and bets on Trump’s indictment are that both Manhattan and Georgia will come for him next week. Lock him up!
Because on Earth 2.0, this would be the stuff of endless news cycles and nightmares.
Here is Donald Trump channeling Kremlin propaganda, siding with Russia, even as he declares that our real enemy is . . . other Americans.
Despite the wishcasting punditry, the magical thinking of his rivals, and the fervent hopes of the Hollow Men of the GOP, this man is the presumptive nominee of the Republican party, and therefore possibly the next president of the United States. (The DeSantis bubble hasn’t burst. But it’s leaking.)
I don’t mean to alarm you. You should be alarmed.
Trump says Russia is not a threat, our greatest threat is our American representatives, we need to reevaluate the purpose of NATO, and most of the people in the State Dept, DOD and Intel Services need to be fired so he can put the right people in. pic.twitter.com/9PC6PrONM9
TRUMP: The State Department, the defense bureaucracy, the intelligence services, and all of the rest need to be completely overhauled and reconstituted to fire the Deep Staters and put America first.
We have to put America first.
At a time of growing international tension, the former president is threatening a massive purge of the nation’s defense infrastructure. He proposes dismantling — and completely overhauling — the Defense Department, the nation’s intelligence agencies (our eyes and ears), and the country’s foreign policy capabilities.
Mass firings, the loss of centuries of experience. A purge of independent, adult voices, and anyone else who might tell the new president “no.”
More important though, after the purge of the “Deep Staters,” he would “reconstitute” the country’s destroyed defenses, presumably by stacking the agencies with his own loyalists.
All while Russia advances, China rattles sabers, and the Middle East boils.
You can read the rundown that includes dumping NATO. We just found out Hungary and Turkey aren’t even up for that.
Nixen (Silberfische). Nymphs, Gustav Klimt, cc 1899,
When Donald Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, in a now-infamous bid to overturn the 2020 election, he alleged that thousands of dead people had voted in the state.
“So dead people voted, and I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number, and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters,” he said, without citing his study.
But a report commissioned by his own campaign dated one day prior told a different story: Researchers paid by Trump’s team had “high confidence” of only nine dead voters in Fulton County, defined as ballots that may have been cast by someone else in the name of a deceased person. They believed there was a “potential statewide exposure” of 23 such votes across the Peach State — or 4,977 fewer than the “minimum” Trump claimed.
In a separate failed bid to overturn the results in Nevada, Trump’s lawyers said in a court filing that 1,506 ballots were cast in the names of dead people and 42,284 voted twice. Trump lost the Silver State by about 33,000 votes.
The researchers paid by Trump’s team had “high confidence” that 12 ballots were cast in the names of deceased people in Clark County, Nev., and believed the “high end potential exposure” was 20 voters statewide — some 1,486 fewer than Trump’s lawyers said.
According to their research, the “low end potential exposure” of double voters was 45, while the “high end potential exposure” was 9,063. The judge tossed the Nevada case even as Trump continued to claim he won the state.
The “Project 2020” report conducted by the Berkeley Research Group has now been obtained by prosecutors investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. A copy was reviewed by The Washington Post, and it shows that Trump’s own campaign paid more than $600,000 for research that undercut many of his most explosive claims. The research was never made public.
The Justice Department has sought and obtained multiple reports, emails and interviews from witnesses that show campaign officials analyzing, and often discrediting, claims that Trump was making publicly, according to several people involved in the investigation, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal details. The Berkeley report was provided to the Justice Department earlier this month, one of the people said, after some people involved in its crafting received a subpoena.
Why do people believe this idiot? Nothing he says is true.
Anyway, I’m cold and achy. It’s raining like crazy and has gone into the 40s. It’s the second coming of Winter. I have to dig out clothes I just boxed up, and I’m ready to sleep for some time. Between this and the time change, I feel like a slug.
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
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