Masha Gesson’s amazing piece today in the NY Times about the prisoner swap is like something out of a John LeCarre novel. It’s absolutely riveting. If you read nothing else about this story, this is the one.
Weeks after that phone call, Navalny flew back to Moscow and was immediately arrested. A year after that, “Navalny” was winning major awards and heading for an Oscar, and Grozev and Pevchikh were discussing how to leverage that success to secure Navalny’s release.
On that stroll around the reservoir, they came up with a crazy scheme they decided to call Secret Project Silver Lake. They wanted to organize a swap of Russian spies held in Western prisons for Navalny and other Russian political prisoners. When Pevchikh got back to where the team was staying, she Googled “Glienicke Bridge,” a crossing between what used to be East and West Berlin, the site of several prior prisoner swaps, including one that involved four countries and almost 30 people.
It was around this time that Grozev learned that Russia had sent a squad, or squads, of assassins to kill him. Austrian and American authorities warned him not to return to Vienna, where his wife and two children were. I met Grozev around the same time, and played a minor role in helping him get situated. Soon we started meeting every couple of weeks, for what I thought would eventually be a profile of him.
James P. Rubin, who was leading a State Department project on Russian disinformation (and who had recently watched “Navalny”), heard about Grozev’s situation, and offered a room in his own house.
Grozev moved in and spent the next couple of months explaining Secret Project Silver Lake, which Rubin would eventually take to his boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
You just won’t believe it. That initiative led to international intrigue beyond anyone’s imagination culminating in what happened last night:
Another example of real statesmanship and "Trump would never": Sharing credit, giving thanks to others, and making clear that a lot of people went out on a limb to make this happen — instead of just taking 100% of the credit. https://t.co/ddVNIpShmw
📺 President Biden removed his American flag lapel pin and personally placed it on former Marine Paul Whelan during their meeting on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. ♥ pic.twitter.com/z7M2528Iek
At a rally in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, Donald Trump rolled out a new attack on Vice President Kamala Harris that showcased his well-known fondness for high-toned discourse: Her handling of immigration reveals her as not just weak, but also dumb.
The former president luridly claimed that Venezuelan gang members were “plotting to conduct ambush attacks” on American cops, then added: “All the while Harris and Biden sit in the White House and try to figure out who is dumber.” He proceeded to blame “Border Czar Harris” for a series of crimes by migrants, even though President Biden tasked her with addressing the root causes of Central American migration, while the Department of Homeland Security secures the border.
Unfortunately for Trump, unpublished DHS data shows that border encounters between ports of entry plummeted again to approximately 57,000 in July, according to an official familiar with the numbers. The data, which is preliminary until its official release in the coming days, was also leaked to CBS News and The New York Times. This is the fifth straight month of declining border crossings and the lowest monthly figure of the Biden administration. According to the Times, nine separate months during the Trump administration saw more border crossings than July under Biden did.
These numbers badly undermine Trump’s primary attack line on Harris—and not just in the most obvious way. It’s self-evident that declining migrant apprehensions counter Trump’s claim that the border is out of control due to alleged Biden-Harris weakness and stupidity. But it’s also important to dwell on why the numbers are falling, because this will demonstrate even more clearly that Trump’s ongoing attacks over this issue are nonsense—and that the truly “dumb” approach is Trump’s.
The dropping border numbers are often attributed to Biden’s new executive actions, announced in June, that effectively suspend asylum-seeking when border encounters rise above certain thresholds. The idea is that, if migrants can’t seek asylum here, it disincentivizes making the trek to the border to try to apply for it.
But there’s another reason for the dropping numbers: Mexico. As many immigration analysts havenoted, Mexico has intensified its crackdown on migrants journeying north, bussing them back to the southernmost part of the country. That has served as a major impediment to migrants trying to journey from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Little is known about the precise role that Biden played in getting Mexico to institute this crackdown. But Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, says most analysts agree that Biden’s private diplomacy with Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador played a crucial part. “Increased Mexican enforcement efforts have clearly played a big role in bringing the number of migrants reaching the U.S. border down in the past few months,” Selee told me.
This story is in TNR. But it should be on the front page of the NY Times. Just as people believe that the economy is terrible even though it has been roaring they also believe that the border is in crisis despite the fact that it is actually much improved — because they simply don’t hear about it.
Meanwhile, the US Government seems to be pretty good at stopping drugs from coming over the border:
Around 4 million fentanyl pills, weighing more than 1,000 pounds were seized in the largest fentanyl bust in U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s history on July 1. A second seizure on July 12 resulted in another 270 pounds of meth being taken off the streets.
Combined, the two massive drug busts took millions of dollars out of the hands of drug smuggling organizations, according to a release. “This is an enormous amount of dangerous drugs that officers at the Port of Lukeville prevented from reaching communities throughout the United States,” said Guadalupe Ramierez, the Director of Field Operations at the Tucson office.
In the first incident, a 20-year-old from Arizona arrived at the port of entry with a customized 2011 pick-up truck carrying a trailer with a sport utility vehicle being towed on it. Officers noticed alterations to the frame of the trailer, which tipped them off to perform an additional inspection. The additional inspection revealed 234 packages concealed in the trailer frame that contained 4 million pills of fentanyl.
In the second seizure, officers discovered 270 pounds of meth transported similarly, in a pick-up truck towing a utility trailer.
In neither case were undocumented migrants carrying the drugs over the border in their backpacks.
Trump’s close adviser, the literally insane Laura Loomer, posted the following and Trump retweeted it:
In case you need something to send to a brainwashed relative to prove Harris is Black, here’s a picture of her and her father:
He’s still alive:
Her father is Black. Clearly. He was born in Jamaica. And she has always identified as Black and Indian which is what she is. Like tens of millions of other bi-racial Americans, she identifies as both. And also like most Black Americans she has a slave owner forefather. Do these people have any idea what they are saying?
This is so dumb I can hardly wrap my mind around it. But get ready. It’s going to be a thing.
“Trump didn’t change the party, he revealed it,” Stuart Stevens (“It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump“) tells The Daily Blast. It’s a view the former Republican says he forced himself to admit. Lee Atwater’s1981 confession about the Southern Strategy was more than a political strategy. It was an admission that it would work on racist sentiments present among the GOP base.
“We were very aware of this ugly, dark side,” Stevens says of himself, Nicole Wallace, and other Bush administration colleagues. “But we thought it was a recessive gene, and that we were the dominant gene.” They thought their party would move their way, just out of political practicality. It did not. Stevens tells Greg Sargent he did not write another of those “if only they’d listened to me” books. Because the GOP did listen to him.
“American conservatism is a failed intellectual exercise,” Stevens concludes. It is no longer a political party but an extremist movement. “The Republican Party went to war with the modern world, and is losing.”
The fault, as Cassius declared, is not in the GOP’s stars (or in Trump), but in themselves.
TFG has had many bad weeks, but the last couple have been especially bad. Vice President Kamala Harris now leads in some national and swing state polls. President Joe Biden’s success in winning (hear that word, Donnie?) the release of prisoners held in Russia has TFG flummoxed. His “unmitigated caucasity” (as a friend put it) in explaining blackness to the National Association of Black Journalists has neither won him friends nor expanded his voting base.
Now the orange-hued, former wrestling promoter is trying to brand Harris as dumb and — xenophobia being his signature chokeslam — as failed “Border Czar Harris.” In TFG’s dim mind, the Biden approach is both weak and dumb.
Actual data undercut that argument, Greg Sargent observes. Not that facts mean anything on the right. Border crossings have dropped for the fifth straight month per unpublished data obtained by CBS News and The New York Times, Sargent explains:
These numbers badly undermine Trump’s primary attack line on Harris—and not just in the most obvious way. It’s self-evident that declining migrant apprehensions counter Trump’s claim that the border is out of control due to alleged Biden-Harris weakness and stupidity. But it’s also important to dwell on why the numbers are falling, because this will demonstrate even more clearly that Trump’s ongoing attacks over this issue are nonsense—and that the truly “dumb” approach is Trump’s.
The dropping border numbers are often attributed to Biden’s new executive actions, announced in June, that effectively suspend asylum-seeking when border encounters rise above certain thresholds. The idea is that, if migrants can’t seek asylum here, it disincentivizes making the trek to the border to try to apply for it.
The Biden-Harris approach involves thinking and diplomacy:
But there’s another reason for the dropping numbers: Mexico. As many immigration analysts havenoted, Mexico has intensified its crackdown on migrants journeying north, bussing them back to the southernmost part of the country. That has served as a major impediment to migrants trying to journey from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Little is known about the precise role that Biden played in getting Mexico to institute this crackdown. But Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, says most analysts agree that Biden’s private diplomacy with Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador played a crucial part.
[…]
In other words, the declining numbers don’t merely illustrate that Biden’s asylum restrictions are having an impact. They also show that viewing the problem as one to be solved in no small part through diplomacy in the Americas—as Harris deeply believes to be true—is also the smarter approach. (The entire Trump attack is also nonsense for other reasons: There’s no link between migration and crime, and crime is sharply down under Biden in any case.)
Trump’s preference is the immigration equivalent of Tim The Tool Man’s always disastrous “more power.” More wall. More punishment. More shoot-them-in-the-legs.
Even Sen. JD Vance’s allies realize the relative political newcomer has taken a huge leap that was bound to run into some early stumbles.
The Ohio Republican is the most politically inexperienced GOP vice-presidential nominee in almost 90 years. He’s run in just one election for any political office.
“You know, he’s gotten shot out of a cannon. It’s like going from zero to 60 in terms of intensity, publicity, scrutiny, all that stuff,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), an early supporter of Vance in his 2022 Senate campaign.
No kidding. Anyone running as the understudy to a 78 year old president who is clearly losing his mind will receive a lot of scrutiny which is why you might pick someone with tons of experience who has been thoroughly vetted — which he clearly was not. They were completely unprepared for the very online Vance’s record.
And he has virtually no experience:
At 39, Vance is the second youngest of the 100 senators. His selection as Trump’s running mate has prompted deeper looks at his years spent as a best-selling author who served as provocateur on his many cable TV appearances.
[…]
Now that President Biden, 81, has withdrawn from the race, Republicans have bracedfor more scrutiny over the gravitas of their vice-presidential pick given that Trump, 78, faces similar questions about his age and capabilities to serve a four-year term.
Since World War II only one other major party nominee has chosen a running mate with such little experience.
By August 1972, Sargent Shriver had served as the first Peace Corps director and as ambassador to France, and had led a White House anti-poverty program, but had never run for political office when Democrats turned to him. His nomination only came out of dramatic necessity, however, when the original choice — then-Sen. Thomas Eagleton, with 12 years of statewide elective office under his belt in Missouri — withdrew following revelations about his mental health.
Otherwise both parties have tended to use the vice-presidential pick as a balancing act, either for regional or ideological balance or for reassurance of the No. 2 being ready step into the job, according to Donald A. Ritchie, the Senate’s historian emeritus.
He is so not ready. He hasn’t done one thing in his life that would lead any responsible person to think he is qualified to lead the United States. He and Trump make quite a pair.
Here’s just another little tid-bit from Project 2025 (P. 455) you might find interesting:
They want the states to track every miscarriage, pregnant cancer patient, stillborn and abortion. If you think this is just about late term abortions you aren’t paying attention. They are planning to track women’s reproductive lives in the most intimate detail.
Trump is trying to disavow Project 2025. But does anyone think he actually cares about women’s reproductive rights or really women at all? They’re sex trophies and mothers to him, nothing more. (Even his first daughter who he sees as the former.) If he doesn’t ever have to run for election again (which he won’t, one way or the other) he will let the white natalist weirdos who are crawling all over MAGA world do whatever they want.
In case you are tempted to believe Trump’s fatuous claim that he secured the release of prisoners without giving anything up in return, here’s a fact check:
Criticizing the Biden administration’s recent prisoner swap of Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout for WNBA star Brittney Griner as “a one-sided disaster,” former President Donald Trump wrongly boasted that his administration “got 58 hostages released from various hostile countries without paying any money, or giving up anything.”
In fact, several of the deals resulting in the release of Americans held hostage or being wrongfully detained abroad came as a result of prisoner swaps during Trump’s time in office.
In November 2019, the Trump administration secured the release of American Kevin King and Australian Timothy Weeks, who were being held by the Taliban, in exchange for the release of three senior Taliban leaders being held in jails in Afghanistan.
In December 2019, the U.S. did a prisoner exchange with Iran, freeing Xiyue Wang, a graduate student at Princeton University who was serving a 10-year sentence in Iran on espionage charges. To secure Wang’s release, the U.S. freed Masoud Soleimani, an Iranian scientist convicted of export violations.
In July 2020, the Trump administration secured the release of Michael White, a Marine veteran jailed in Iran on charges of insulting the country’s supreme leader, in exchange for the release of a dermatologist convicted on export violations.
In October 2020, a deputy assistant to Trump helped broker a deal to free two Americans being held hostage by Iranian-backed militants in Yemen in exchange for the release of about 250 Houthi rebels being held in Oman.
So he’s full of shit. But you know that.
In a Feb. 7, 2020, story for the New Yorker, Joel Simon, a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, wrote that Trump “repeatedly pushed the boundaries of the no-concessions policy upheld by Republican and Democratic Presidents since Nixon. Trump’s style of resolving cases is more personal and more flexible.” In contrast to former President Barack Obama, Simon wrote, Trump “has gone out of his way to highlight his personal engagement in hostage-recovery efforts, welcoming hostages home on national television or inviting them to Oval Office photo opportunities. Trump seeks to showcase his skill as a deal maker and gain the political benefit of bringing Americans home.”
In a February 2019 review of a book on hostage negotiation by Simon, Jason Rezaian of the Washington Post, who was held hostage by Iran for 544 days, discussed the messy and morally fraught business of negotiating the release of overseas hostages and noted Trump’s successes on this front.
“No government has found a way to prevent hostage-taking, and the practice is getting more widespread,” Rezaian wrote. “But this is one area where the Trump administration has had some success. Andrew Brunson, a pastor detained in Turkey, was released in October 2018 after the United States imposed sanctions and tariffs. Joshua Holt, a Mormon missionary, was freed in May 2018 after nearly two years in a Venezuelan prison following separate meetings by two U.S. senators with President Nicolás Maduro.
“But a question still nags: Those releases came at what cost? For no hostage is ever freed for nothing,” Rezaian wrote.
That is correct. The alleged “deal maker” made prisoner swaps just like every president. He did it for his own personal aggrandizement but that’s just par for the course. The results were the same.
It’s a terrible business. But you cannot leave innocent people in prison if you have the means to get them out. Trump knows this. He just lies.
The political movement that materialized organically, protested policy decisions, and eventually helped end Donald Trump’s presidency may now be taking on a second political life with the goal of not just beating Trump, but electing the first woman president.
None of this was a sure thing. Just a few months ago it looked a lot like the anti-Trump #Resistance was dead.
Progressive organizers and activists were exhausted; Trump fatigue had settled in. And voters of all kinds were tuned out and unenthusiastic about the candidate choices they had.
That dynamic has flipped — for now. But what remains uncertain is whether this energy can mobilize record numbers of voters like it did in 2020, or if it exists in a bit of an echo chamber, like the energy that fired up Hillary Clinton’s hardcore supporters but failed to produce a winning coalition…
they are primarily being organized by the same kinds of activist groups and organizations that were important during the rise of the original #Resistance — groups like Run for Something, Indivisible, Moms Demand Action, and Swing Left. Many function independently of any official Democratic campaign or the party itself. Others are newer, like Voters of Tomorrow or Gen Z for Change, which focus on reaching younger voters, or are issuing their first political endorsements, like March for our Lives.
The author questions whether this is just happening in the Progressive bubble. I don’t know, but I kind if doubt it. It does feel like “The Resistance” emerging but it’s combined with more than a touch of Obamamania. That seems potent to me.
A prisoner swap at a Turkish airport on Thursday involving seven countries freed the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and two other Americans held in Russia, along with several jailed Russian opposition figures, the White House said, in the most far-reaching exchange between Russia and the West in decades.
The scope of the deal has little precedent in the post-Soviet era. For the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, Moscow freed prominent dissidents as part of a swap; 16 people in total were released from Russian custody. In exchange, eight people were freed by the West, after a complex web of negotiations that took place behind the scenes for months among nations that are otherwise bitterly at odds over Russian aggression in Ukraine.
The exchange took place at the international airport in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, and involved seven different planes ferrying 24 prisoners from the United States, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway, and Russia, a Turkish intelligence official said.
The deal seemed sure to prompt jubilation among Western nations that had condemned the charges against the imprisoned Americans and opposition figures as baseless and politically motivated. It also delivered a diplomatic victory for President Biden, who has long pledged to bring home imprisoned Americans and to support Russia’s embattled pro-democracy movement.
It was also a triumph of a different sort for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who can use the deal to highlight his loyalty to Russian agents who get arrested abroad. But the deal also carried risks at home for him, by releasing imprisoned politicians who could energize Russia’s moribund, exiled opposition.
Biden: Good afternoon. This is a very good afternoon. A very good afternoon. Today, we are bringing home Paul, Evan, Alsu, and Vladimir… pic.twitter.com/OSraChpmbF
Notable detail: Just an hour before Pres. Biden announced he was exiting the 2024 race last month, he was on the phone with his Slovenian counterpart, "urging them to make the final arrangements" for this massive prisoner swap, according to a senior administration official.
The Biden administration leaned on @VP Kamala Harris at key moments to help secure the prisoner deal, including two high-level meetings in Germany with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golab, said a senior administration official pic.twitter.com/afUj4srVw3
Vance tells @scontorno of the prisoner swap: “We certainly want these Americans to come back home…But we have to ask ourselves, why are they coming home?…it's because bad guys all over the world recognize Donald Trump's about to be back in office, so they’re cleaning house"
