Baby squirrels are adorable. We saved a couple of them recently who fell out of the gigantic palm tree in our yard:
"what digby sez..."
Month: March 2021
She didn’t think she could be caught:
Republicans are seriously pro right wing, military coup, by the way, no matter where it happens. This explains why they revere Augusto Pinochet so much:
A great bunch of liberty-loving patriots right there.
And Osama bin Laden was just engaging in shuttle diplomacy.
“So we are seeing a lot of ugliness uncovered, a lot of corruption exposed. But I believe that we are going to start seeing gifts and callings of righteous men and women exposed to counter all of this. Gifts that have remained dormant on the inside of people are going to start rising up. People are going to start filling these positions that they never saw themselves in, doing their part to serve their country.
Now, I want to tell you, I heard someone who is in very close contact with President Trump and the ins and outs of the White House under that administration. Talk to the owners of Epoch Times. They talk to the owners of Epoch Times and they said: “don’t change anything. You are right over the target.”
So anyone who tries to tell you that this is a fringe newspaper/media don’t listen to them. I have very good sources to say this is really good information. Is it a hundred percent? I don’t know. But it’s really good information. And we all know that there was information that was declassified just a few days before President Trump left office. And I know someone who is involved in declassifying that. And this person is getting very tired of waiting on the DOJ to do something about it. And we will be hearing about it very, very soon. And this is my opinion with that information that I have, I believe we will see resignations begin to take place. And I think we can take back the majority in the House and the Senate before 2022 when all of this is ended.”
By the way, that gun strapped to her thigh is just … ridiculous. The cosplaying these people need to do is just another example of the rampant immaturity of this culture. It’s pathetic.
As you watch the maskless revelers on crowded Florida beaches with only 12% of the population vaccinated against COVID-19, keep in mind that they are the gift Governor Ron DeSantis keeps on giving the rest of the country. He’s probably been only 2nd to Trump in convening super-spreader events that have killed thousands of people. He’s a mean, nasty piece of work in every way even going so far as to confidently admit that he’s making sure his rich donors are getting vaccines ahead of everyone else and threatening to deny them to anyone who complains about it.
But for reasons that aren’t hard to fathom, since he’s such a lovely guy, the mainstream press has discovered that this Trump 2.0 is quite the dreamboat. Eric Boehlert wrote about it in his great newsletter today:
Despite 32,000 Covid deaths in the state, as well as a mediocre at best vaccination rollout, journalists are lining up to do the Republican’s bidding.
“How Ron DeSantis Won The Pandemic,” was the Politico headline Thursday night, for a big write-up that read like it was written by the governor’s press office. The Republican deserves huge praise, readers were told, because his pandemic decisions, “have ended up being, on balance, short of or even the opposite of ruinous.” Can the press post the bar any lower?
“After a year of criticism by health experts, mockery from comedians and blistering critiques from political rivals, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is standing unabashedly tall among the nation’s governors on the front lines of the coronavirus fight,” CNN cheered this week. The report then quoted DeSantis boasting about his Covid record from a recent fundraising appeal, yet CNN raised no objections to the governor raising money off tens of thousands of pandemic deaths.
CNN suggested the “defiant and combative” DeSantis deserves a Covid star turn despite the fact, “Florida lands nearly in the middle of all states on a variety of coronavirus metrics.” (With tourism floundering, the state’s also drowning in a $2.7 billion budget shortfall.)
Indeed, Florida’s deaths per 100,000 population rate is nearly identical to California and New York, where Democratic governors are not currently being toasted by the Beltway press. DeSantis and his allies argue those two blue states have implemented much harsher lockdown and social distancing measures, while Floridians have been able to roam freely, therefore making DeSantis a success. But scientists note Florida’s humid climate may have helped keep the death rate low.
In a recent report about Florida’s supposed Covid success story, the New York Times quoted DeSantis bragging, “If you look at South Florida right now, this place is booming.” He added, “You can live like a human being. You aren’t locked down. People aren’t miserable.” (No Democratic officials were quoted in the Times piece to offer a counter perspective.)
Politico last month applauded the “wonky” Florida governor and his Covid-fueled rise in Republican politics: “Conservatives are relishing the contrast and holding up DeSantis as an example of effective governance.”
In terms of a Republican presidential primary, it’s likely a large percentage of voters still think the virus is a “hoax,” and bashing science could play well for candidates like DeSantis. But the way that Politico so casually presented DeSantis’ Covid track record of 30,000-plus deaths as being a remarkable accomplishment that he can use as a springboard for national office simply highlighted the absurd (nonexistent?) standard the Beltway press often uses for grading Republican politicians.
Note that some local Florida journalists often don’t display the same, fawning enthusiasm as the D.C. press. “From the pandemic’s infancy, DeSantis has conveniently, even diabolically, airbrushed Covid-19 out of public life here,” Florida’s Lizette Alvarez wrote late last year. “The result: 1.2 million total covid-19 cases, nearly 61,000 total hospitalizations and a new seven-day case-positivity rate of 9.7 percent — all rapidly rising toward crisis levels.”
And from Nate Monroe in the Florida Times-Union: “Florida has, by the most generous accounting, just barely lurched through to the (hopeful) end of the pandemic under the leadership of Ron DeSantis — neither a particular success story nor the epitome of failure. Just average devastation.”
For the Beltway press, average devastation now counts as a Republican win.
And, as I’ve written before, they are at the same time erroneously saying that California has done a much worse job (not true) and pushing the Governor Newsom recall effort. When push comes to shove they just like assholes. Always have.
BTW: Here’s DeSantis’ stellar COVID record compared to Washington Guess which line is his.
The right wing is openly rooting for the leader of a foreign country against the president of the United States. I guess that’s fine. At least we don’t have to pay any attention to these people when they start flag-waving and insulting the left over alleged lack of patriotism.
Fox News has been talking about Putin challenging Biden to a debate for a day — and they’re rooting for Putin
They’re rooting for Putin
Fox News has been parroting Russian propaganda for the better part of 2 days now
I mean …
they’re rooting for Putin
Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on March 19, 2021.
I cannot imagine what these people would be saying if anyone on the left were to say similar things about Xi Jin PIng or even Angela Merkel. It’s mind-boggling.
There is a long tradition of freshmen U.S. Senators delivering their maiden speech about a signature issue — but it is rare that they get a standing ovation at the end of it. That’s what happened on Wednesday when the newly elected Democratic Senator from Georgia, Reverend Raphael Warnock spoke on the floor for the first time, giving an impassioned plea to guarantee voting rights around the country.
We shouldn’t be surprised that Warnock would give such a memorable speech. After all, he was the pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Martin Luther King’s church. One of his most important mentors was the late civil rights hero John Lewis, also from Atlanta. So he is a product of a very important American tradition and he lives up to that legacy. The Senate is immeasurably richer having someone with his passion and eloquence making the case for this important issue.
“Just a few months after Congressman Lewis’ death,” Warnock said Wednesday as he implored his colleagues to pass S. 1, the For the People Act, “there are those in the Georgia legislature, some who even dare to praise his name, that are now trying to get rid of Souls to the Polls, making it a crime for people who pray together to get on a bus together in order to vote together.”
He didn’t mince words. He reminded that so-called august body of its history of racist vote suppression even as he spoke with pride about being the first Black man to hold his Georgia Senate seat, formerly held by a rank racist who said that the way to keep Black people from voting was “pistols.” Warnock instead declared “ours is a land where possibility is born of democracy”:
Some politicians did not approve of the choice made by the majority of voters in a hard-fought election in which each side got the chance to make its case to the voters. And, rather than adjusting their agenda and changing their message, they are busy trying to change the rules. We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights and voter access unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era.
This is Jim Crow in new clothes.
Warnock then went right at the filibuster, which former president Barack Obama also recently, correctly, called “a relic of Jim Crow.”
I stand before you saying that this issue — access to voting and preempting politicians’ efforts to restrict voting — is so fundamental to our democracy that it is too important to be held hostage by a Senate rule, especially one historically used to restrict the expansion of basic rights.
It is a contradiction to say we must protect minority rights in the Senate while refusing to protect minority rights in the society.
I urge you to watch the speech if you haven’t seen it. It makes the superficial arguments from men and women who want to turn back the clock to the pre-civil rights era sound as cramped and ignorant as the ideas that animate them:
I’m sure the Republicans will have no problem shrugging off this argument. They are shamelessly self-interested and they know that allowing everyone to vote will not accrue to their favor. But Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are going to have to answer to their constituents and their reputations will be forever associated with those ancient racists Warnock talked about who used the filibuster to deny civil rights back in the day if they fail to meet this moment.
Warnock wasn’t being dogmatic about how this is to be done. He even said he hoped it would be bipartisan. But we know that isn’t how it’s going to go. Republicans are unanimously opposed and there’s no chance they will change their minds. But there are many ideas floating around out there about what might work to get this over the finish line.
I wrote about the dynamics of reforming the filibuster the other day. We will have to see how that goes. But coming to any agreement about that will probably require some negotiations within the Democratic caucus. Election law expert Richard L. Hasen, is pessimistic, writing in the Washington Post that “The For the People Act” likely can’t pass the Senate as written and suggests that it should be streamlined. He believes that certain provisions such as the requirement to re-enfranchise felons will be found unconstitutional and “the creation of a public financing program for congressional candidates, new ethics rules for the Supreme Court, and a requirement that most candidates for president and vice president publicly disclose their tax returns” will be non-starters. He suggests focusing more narrowly on specific voting rights provisions like restoring certain aspects of the Voting Rights Act, requiring states to offer online registration and offer at least two weeks of early voting and no-excuse absentee balloting.
It’s possible that that’s where the bill may end up when all the horse-trading is done. Those are all fundamental issues that would set back the Republican onslaught in the states. But I can’t imagine why Democrats would negotiate with themselves in advance like this. Certainly, any thoughts that some Republicans might sign on to these provisions is as much a fantasy as the idea they would vote for Medicare for All or tax increases for millionaires.
Former Obama White House Counsel, and authority on election law, Bob Bauer, suggested in the New York Times that Democrats need to try to immediately pass a narrow bill that would preclude states from enacting any rules to restrict voting access in federal elections unless it is done on a bipartisan basis. The reasoning is obvious: to ensure the right to vote is not subject to partisan manipulation. Bauer believes the current wave of laws is so dangerous that they need to push something through to put a stop to it and clarify the issues at stake for the public, even as the Senate continues to work on passing S.1.
I don’t know if it would be any easier to pass a narrower bill of that kind, but this is a clever way to frame the issue and might just succeed. After all, there are Republicans out there who are getting nervous about all these restrictions as well because it’s likely they’re going to cause trouble for their own voters. No excuses absentee voting was pushed by the GOP for years and many of their voters, particularly the seniors, prefer it. Eliminating it is purely an impulsive result of Donald Trump’s Big Lie. There are plenty of Republican officials who would welcome a reason not to make some of these changes in their states so Democrats would be wise to give it to them. Their constituents aren’t eager for these changes either. Recent GOP polling done in Texas found that 86% of Texans thought the 2020 elections went well, 97% had a good experience voting, and 73% (58% of Republicans) support extending early voting by a week.
For Democrats the end goal is clear and it is imperative: They must stop this assault on voting rights. — Jim Crow in new clothes, as Warnock so starkly put it. It’s going to be a messy process as these various approaches illustrate. But if they don’t follow through minority rule could become a permanent condition — and there will be nothing left to argue about.
Not the unspeakable horror we witnessed this week. This one was back in the 19th century right here in Los Angeles.
Apparently, we really haven’t evolved very much at all:
The Los Angeles of 1871 was a violent, lawless place.
Historians have described it as one of the last cities to establish civil law enforcement institutions, relying instead on vigilante justice and mob rule.
It also was a place notorious for its mistreatment and exploitation of Black, Asian, Latino and Native Californians at the hands of white settlers. But the venom against Chinese Americans was particularly poisonous, fueled by editorials in the Los Angeles News that attacked them as “barbarians taking jobs away from whites.”
“Los Angeles in 1871 was a dirty, violent city of nearly 6,000 people. Though the city had a higher homicide rate than New York or Chicago, it employed only six police officers to maintain law and order. Lynchings and mob justice were commonplace,” the Los Angeles Public Library wrote.
It was this world 150 years ago that spawned the Chinese Massacre, a bloody siege that brought shame to Los Angeles and sparked widespread changes in the way the city operated. But it did little to alter the core racism that Asians and other groups would continue to endure.
October 24, 1871
The violence of this day was on a scale that even a city known for its brutality and racial attacks had never seen. Cecila Rasmussen of The Times provided this narrative of the chain of events:
Gunfire erupted at 4 p.m., just as former city assessor-turned-patrolman Jesus Bilderrain was polishing off a whiskey at Higby’s saloon. Most of the barroom patrons shrugged off the commotion, but Bilderrain — pistol in hand — dutifully went out the swinging doors into the street. A short distance away, he found a man named Ah Choy shot through the neck (it was later determined this shooting was related to a feud between two Chinese gangs). As Bilderrain blew his whistle to summon help, bullets struck him in the shoulder and wrist.
Running to his rescue, saloon-owner-turned-rancher Robert Thompson was killed, shot through the heart by the same unseen gunmen, who also wounded some of the bystanders.
The rioters, meanwhile, rampaged on. Some climbed to the rooftops and used pickaxes to chop holes, firing through them at the immigrants inside. Two men who ran out into the street were cut down by gunmen on the roofs.
One by one, more victims were hauled from their hiding places, kicked, beaten, stabbed, shot and tortured by their captors. Some were dragged through the streets with ropes around their necks and hanged from a wooden awning over a sidewalk, a covered wagon or the crossbeam of a corral gate. Finally, 15 corpses — including those of a 14-year-old boy and the Chinese community’s only physician, Chee Long Tong — dangled in the City of the Angels. Four others died from gunshot wounds, bringing the death toll at the hands of the mob to 19 — 10% of the city’s tiny Chinese population.
Then, every rickety shanty in Chinatown was looted. “Boys, help yourselves,” was the cry. One lynching victim’s finger was cut off for the diamond ring he wore.
The leaders of the massacre paraded through the streets, displaying their booty, to the laughter and praise of the mob. An estimated $40,000 in cash, gold and jewels was stolen.
The next day’s local newspapers called the riot a “victory of the patriots over the heathens.”
In the end, 19 people died in the attacks.
“Ten percent of the Chinese population had been killed. One of the Chinese caught up in the mob violence was the respected Dr. Gene Tong. In fact, of the killed, only one is thought to have participated in the original gunfight,” the library wrote in its history of the massacre.
Bringing justice for the massacre was going to be a tall order for a city with such weak government institutions and little inclination to hold those who killed accountable. As Rasmussen wrote:
During the subsequent coroner’s inquest and grand jury hearings, police and other city officials — fearful of being labeled “Chinese lovers” — shielded the guilty. “I didn’t recognize anyone” was the recurring statement.
There were no other witnesses, since discriminatory state legislation then prohibited Chinese from testifying in California courts. Still, 37 rioters were indicted, 15 tried and eight convicted of manslaughter. A little more than a year later, however, the California Supreme Court reversed the convictions on the grounds that the original indictment had failed to establish that the Chinese physician had been murdered.
An embarrassed U.S. government subsequently paid imperial China an indemnity to settle the whole affair.
The massacre was a black mark for Los Angeles, and city leaders responded by building up the police department and criminal justice system. Vigilante rule began to fade. But the racism endured by Chinese and other minority groups actually worsened.
“The massacre did not result in racial tolerance, in fact, anti-Chinese sentiment increased in the following years. The Anti-Coolie club was formed in 1876, counting many prominent citizens among its members, and the newspapers resumed their editorial attacks against the Chinese,” the library said in its account.
The massacre was largely forgotten for generations. But the history was revived in recent decades, in part by Chinese American activists. It was the subject of two history books: “Eternity Street” by John Mack Faragher and “The Chinatown War” by Scott Zesch.
Michael Woo, the first Chinese American councilman in Los Angeles, ended his review of “The Chinatown War” this way:
“Zesch asks whether the right lessons have been learned. He argues that the 1871 massacre may have marked the end of mob justice in Los Angeles. But Zesch attributes this milestone primarily to improved law enforcement, not to the better angels of our nature taming our impulse to scapegoat, pander and pick up a gun.”
Even back then they clearly knew it was wrong. But they did it anyway because they could.
Ed Kilgore alerts New York “Intelligencer” readers to the greatest threat facing Arkansas that isn’t candidate-for-governor and former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. It’s “wokeness“:
Here’s her “elevator pitch” to Arkansans:
With the radical left now in control of Washington, your governor is your last line of defense. As governor, I will defend your right to be free of socialism and tyranny. Your Second Amendment right to keep your family safe and your freedom of speech and religious liberty. Our state needs a leader with the courage to do what’s right, not what’s politically correct or convenient.
She also modestly claimed that in the White House she “took on he radical left, the media, and their cancel culture … and won!” As governor, she promised to “be your voice, and never let them silence you!”
This is Arkansas we are talking about, where it’s hard to imagine socialism is in the works, or lying liberal media dominating news and views, or woke cancel-culture commissars stalking the earth searching for good decent Christians to “silence.” But without question, Sanders is a savvy pol. So the strange gospel she is preaching could well be the coming thing in Republican politics everywhere.
Kilgore has more about how anti-wokeness allows Republicans “and their supporters to pose as innocent victims of persecution rather than as aggressive culture warriors seeking to defend their privileges and reverse social change.” Anti-wokeness is a “parody of the very over-sensitivity it attributes to the ‘woke.’”
Perry Bacon Jr. of FiveThirtyEight believes anti-wokeness is “just a repackaging” of the party’s backlash politics. Kilgore calls it “white backlash to Black political advancement, and conservative backlash to cultural changes sweeping away the patriarchal society many remember and others fantasize to bring back in the guise of ‘American greatness.’”
I once almost got stuck in the airport in Fayetteville, Ark. on Christmas Eve.
The American greatness was the “almost.”
Ron Brownstein makes a pitch at The Atlantic for Joe Biden’s White House to place more emphasis on working directly with city rather than state governments for advancing his priorities. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, for example, remains hostile to climate change efforts and, basically, to any initiative coming from a Democratic president. Brownstein cites the eagerness of Lina Hidalgo, chief elected officer of Harris County, Texas (Houston), to partner with Biden on a range of issues from pandemic recovery to transportation to affordable housing in addition to addressing the effects of climate change:
Hidalgo’s enthusiasm about working with Biden illustrates the president’s opportunity to fundamentally rethink the way the federal government pursues its domestic goals. Biden could advance both his agenda and his political interests by channeling his policies through major metropolitan areas, without relying on states as his principal partners, as previous White Houses have traditionally done.
Cities and their inner suburbs need an immediate lifeline from Washington to stabilize their finances after the devastation of the pandemic. But once those communities regain their balance, they could become crucial allies for Biden. By working with big metros, the president would be aligning federal policy with powerful economic, social, and electoral trends—and empowering local officials overwhelmingly sympathetic to his core objectives. If Biden can forge such partnerships, he could both ignite a new wave of local innovation and solidify the Democratic Party’s advantage in the fast-growing, diverse, and well-educated metro areas that have become the bedrock of its electoral coalition.
Brownstein’s premise is attractive. As far as it goes. But as he says, with this approach Biden could advance his agenda and his political interests by improving Democratic prospects in metro areas.
Where Brownstein goes wrong
Biden faces better odds working with metro areas because many are already under Democratic control while Republicans tend to dominate the countryside. The reason state governments are unreliable partners for a Democratic president is that Republicans control 30 state legislatures and 27 governors’ mansions. And that because even as Democrats dominate vote totals in the few large cities Republicans eat their lunch in smaller, more-numerous rural counties.
If all Democrats care about winning is statewide races and the presidency, fine. As growing metro areas become larger percentages of state populations, building Democratic capacity there could help win more statewide contests. Maybe even elect a senator or two in states such as Texas. But emphasis on metropolitan concerns without Democrats expanding their influence in the redder hinterlands could simply exacerbate the urban-rural divide that leaves the GOP controlling a majority of states legislatures and thus state and federal redistricting. The U.S. Constitution’s allocation of senators already gives rural states over-representation in the U.S. Senate. Gerrymandering tilts the balance even more in the GOP’s favor.
Candidates in statewide races care primarily about finding voters in bulk, about getting the most bang for the campaign buck on a short calendar. They concentrate their efforts in big metro areas and rural areas get lip service. State legislators have to win votes in districts whether they trend urban or rural. Out there, Democrats struggle. Presidential coattails are not enough to overcome that. Lavishing even more attention on urban areas will not improve the situation and solidify the view that Democrats couldn’t care less about rural Americans whatever their party.
How well did an American strategy built on holding the cities work in Vietnam?
Brownstein acknowledges the problem but dismisses it where it comes to presidential contests:
More and more, cities and their inner suburbs find their interests converging—while those interests simultaneously diverge from the conservative priorities of the mostly white people living in small-town and rural places away from urban centers. As November’s presidential results demonstrated, if you draw an imaginary beltway around almost any major metropolitan area, Democrats are growing stronger inside that circle, while Republicans are consolidating their position outside of it. Tabulations by The Daily Yonder, a website focusing on rural issues, found that Biden not only won the counties anchored by the nation’s biggest urban centers by a crushing 13 million votes, but also carried their inner suburbs by more than 4 million, and even won midsize urban centers by 1.5 million or so. (Those three categories of communities provided almost four-fifths of all Biden’s votes.) Trump dominated the smaller places beyond those centers, but that wasn’t nearly enough for him to overcome Biden’s advantage in the metro areas.
Again, if your electoral calculus centers on Biden’s agenda and Biden’s political interests, a metro focus makes sense. But if Democrats in the states want to control more of their legislatures and to grow their benches for winning Senate seats and governorships, they must work to narrow the urban-rural divide. They must start winning more outside urban centers.
As much as grassroots Democrats now want to be like Stacey Abrams, her approach is radically different from that of campaigns and parties. Her New Georgia Project Action Fund organizes on a 365-day basis rather than on election cycles. They build relationships for the long haul in exurban areas.
“We do what they don’t,” Kendra Davenport Cotton, New Georgia COO, said in a recent Zoom call. On “Building a Grassroots Strategy to Elect Democrats in NC: How Georgia Did It,” she made clear New Georgia encourages black and brown citizens to be lifelong voters. They focus on voter registration and activation more than election-year mobilization. Thus, New Georgia organizes where campaign-focused candidates and the Democratic Party do not and finanacially most likely cannot. New Georgia organizes where they find concentrations of black and brown voters campaigns may not see as having sufficient return on short-term investment. The approach is effective if not as replicable by state and local party committees whose mission is winning elections, bang for the buck.
Referring to how Republicans gerrymandered Georgia, Cotton says [timestamp 26:05], “They carve that metro up and they say, we will give all the black folks metro Atlanta and we’ll take the rest of the state. And so [by focusing] all this intensive work in the larger, more metropolitan counties … that’s when you wake up always crying on the day after the election when all of these rural votes come in and you lose by 10,000.”
Where the radicals are
Matt Cohen of Mother Jones acknowledges the most radical Republicans are in state houses where they dominate. “And if extremism is what helps Republicans win elections at the state level, that’s what the party will ultimately embrace,” he writes, citing Carolyn Fiddler, the communications director for Daily Kos. One might surmise the majority of those represent rural districts. Higher turnout in the cities won’t end their tenure, nor will widening the urban-rural divide.
It is not that Brownstein’s strategy has no merit. It does. It just will not address the longer-term radicalism that inspired it and elects Republican governors such as Abbott and Ron DeSantis (Fla.) while leaving Democrats Roy Cooper (N.C.) and Tony Evers (Wis.) facing radicalized, GOP-dominated legislatures.
William Saletan takes a look at the latest IC report on foreign interference in US elections — and who helped them and benefitted them.
Donald Trump was a tool in a long-running Russian campaign to weaken the United States. That’s been documented in Republican-led investigative reports, and now it has been updated with new evidence, thanks to the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of the 2020 election. The report, drafted by the CIA, the FBI, and several other agencies, was released in unclassified form on Tuesday, but it was presented in classified form on Jan. 7. In other words, it was compiled, written, and edited during Trump’s administration. It destroys his lies about the election, and it exposes him as a Russian asset.
The report debunks conspiracy theories, promoted by Trump and his lawyers, that hackers in other countries robbed him of victory. “We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to interfere in the 2020 US elections by altering any technical aspect of the voting process,” including “ballot casting, vote tabulation, or reporting results,” says the document.
[…]
As to Russia, the report leaves no doubt: In 2020, as in 2016, “President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations” to help Trump and hurt his Democratic opponent. For example, “Shortly after the 2018 midterm elections, Russian intelligence cyber actors attempted to hack organizations primarily affiliated with the Democratic Party.” Then, in late 2019, Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, “conducted a phishing campaign against subsidiaries of Burisma holdings, likely in an attempt to gather information related to President Biden’s family.” Throughout the 2020 election, agents “connected to the Russian Federal Security Service,” FSB, planted negative stories about Biden. Internet operatives working for the Kremlin, including the troll farm that had boosted Trump in 2016, continued to promote “Trump and his commentary, including repeating his political messaging.”
Attacks on Biden and his son, Hunter, were part of this operation. Through “US officials and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration,” the report says Russia’s intelligence services “repeatedly spread unsubstantiated or misleading claims about President Biden and his family’s alleged wrongdoing related to Ukraine.” In this way, Trump’s circle “laundered” the Russian-planted stories, which were then recirculated—and promoted by Russia’s online proxies—as American news.
One section of the report zeroes in on two Russian agents, Andriy Derkach and Konstantin Kilimnik, along with their associates. It says they met with and passed materials to people linked to the Trump administration to advocate for government investigations. Derkach peddled audio recordings that were edited to make Biden look corrupt, and he “worked to initiate legal proceedings in Ukraine and the US related to these allegations.” The report doesn’t name the Americans who collaborated with the Russian agents, but it’s easy to identify them from news reports. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, met with Derkach twice. Donald Trump Jr. promoted Derkach’s tapes. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, gave Kilimnik inside information on the campaign. Trump, in a 2019 phone call, pressed Ukraine’s president to open an investigation of Biden, as Derkach proposed. And congressional Republicans, led by Reps. Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes, parroted a Russian-planted narrative “to falsely blame Ukraine for interfering in the 2016 US presidential election.”
Trump also helped Putin discredit American democracy. That was a major goal of Russia’s 2016 and 2020 operations, the report explains: “Throughout the election, Russia’s online influence actors sought to amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of voter fraud.” Trump peddled the same fears. After the election, as “Russian online influence actors continued to promote narratives questioning the election results,” Trump duplicated that message. Russia’s agents also hyped “allegations of social media censorship,” as Trump did.
The IC assessment doesn’t address what Trump knew about the Russian influence campaign. But according to former officials who spoke last fall to the Washington Post and the New York Times, he was directly warned. In a December 2019 conversation, then–national security adviser Robert O’Brien told Trump that Giuliani had been “worked by Russian assets in Ukraine.” Trump shrugged and went on promoting the allegations Giuliani was feeding him. That makes Trump more than a Russian asset. It makes him, in technical terms, an agent of a foreign power.
And Trump wasn’t the only one:
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) this week released a declassified intelligence community assessment on foreign threats to our 2020 elections, and the top-line takeaway was important: Russia once again targeted our political system for the express purposes of giving Donald Trump power.
Indeed, as we discussed yesterday, Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin relied on the same cast of characters as their 2016 effort: the U.S. intelligence community specifically focused attention on Russian influence agent Konstantin Kilimnik who was responsible for trying to “denigrate” then-candidate Joe Biden in order to “benefit” Donald Trump’s re-election prospects.
But as important as these revelations are, they’re not the only lessons to be learned from the intelligence community’s findings. This week’s ODNI report also made clear that many leading Trump administration officials deliberately misled the public about foreign threats, especially related to alleged Chinese election interference.
I was also struck by multiple references in the intelligence community’s findings to a pro-Russian official by the name of Andriy Derkach. The Washington Post reported:
The intelligence community, for instance, assessed that Putin “had purview over” the activities of Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach, who played a prominent role in advancing the misleading narrative alleging corruption between Biden and Ukraine. [Rudy Giuliani] met with Derkach, whom the United States has sanctioned as an “active” Russian agent, in Ukraine and in the United States in 2019 and 2020 as Giuliani sought to release material that he thought would damage Biden. Last year, Derkach disclosed edited audio snippets of conversations Biden had as vice president with Ukrainian officials in an attempt to cast aspersions on him.
It’s obviously not great that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer partnered with a Russian agent, directed by Putin, on an anti-Biden scheme while the Kremlin was working on helping keep the then-Republican president in power.
But Rudy Giuliani wasn’t necessarily Andriy Derkach’s only point of contact. In fact, his name may be familiar to regular readers.
It was last year, for example, when we learned that Derkach claimed he fed information to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who was searching for anti-Biden dirt ahead of last fall’s elections.
Asked last summer whether he’d possibly relied on information from pro-Kremlin Ukrainians, the Wisconsin Republican appeared reluctant to answer, saying only that he and the Senate committee he led “are getting information from a variety of sources.”
A month earlier, at a House Intelligence Committee meeting, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) pressed Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) — the panel’s top GOP member — on whether the Republican had received anti-Biden information from Derkach.
According to a transcript from the closed-door discussion, Nunes didn’t want to answer.
It was against this backdrop that Maloney spoke yesterday to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace and said, “[T]he fact is that [Russian operatives] were so comfortable using people like Devin Nunes that Andriy Derkach — a known Russian asset — sent information to Devin Nunes at the Intelligence Committee. We literally had the package receipt.”
Someone should ask them about this. It seems there’s a little loyalty problem throughout the Republican party.