Russia’s threat to push troops into Ukraine highlights Biden’s approach to foreign policy. Rather than issuing military threats, he has worked with European allies to put economic pressure on Russia. So far, it appears to be heading off the crisis.
“What I am doing is putting together what I believe…will be the most comprehensive and meaningful set of initiatives to make it very, very difficult for Mr. Putin to go ahead and do what people are worried he may do,” Biden said on December 3.
On December 6, the U.S. issued a comprehensive strategy for combating global corruption, including money laundering and attacks on journalists. In a two-hour video call the next day, Biden warned Putin “that the U.S. and our Allies would respond with strong economic and other measures in the event of military escalation.” Biden immediately informed leaders in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy about the call (Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on December 6).
Russia depends on petroleum exports and is currently waiting on approval from German regulators to start pumping gas through the $11 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic Sea. The U.S. says Germany has agreed to shut the pipeline down if Russia invades Ukraine. This puts pressure on Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who took over today when Angela Merkel stepped down, but the European Union is talking about permitting the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive branch, to sanction foreign countries without getting each country to sign on individually. Sanctions would go into effect unless a majority of the E.U. countries voted to lift them, imposing unity that would create a powerful economic weapon against Russia.
Meanwhile, Foreign Policy magazine’s national security reporter Jack Detsch tweeted yesterday that, according to Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, the U.S. is considering sanctions that could “[isolate] Russia completely from the global financial system.” That’s a threat to cut Russia out of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a banking cooperative in Brussels that facilitates financial transactions around the world. European leaders considered cutting Russia off from SWIFT after Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014 but decided against it because the effect on Russia would be so extreme: Russia relies on SWIFT to move its payment for petroleum exports.
SWIFT also makes sanctions effective. Since more than 40% of global transactions through SWIFT—and almost all oil purchases—take place in dollars, they are cleared through American banks. This means the U.S. can claim jurisdiction over them, giving the U.S. government financial and legal power to add muscle to foreign policy.
Blinken explained: “[O]ne country trying to tell another what its choices should be, including with whom it associates, that’s not an acceptable proposition. Changing the borders of another country by force, that’s not an acceptable proposition, because what that does is it undermines the entire international system, the rules-based order that we have invested in, we’ve been living by, and we think has done much to promote peace and security. And so if those basic principles go challenged and are allowed to happen with impunity, that’s going to undermine the entire system. That’s why this is…bigger even than Ukraine.”
He added that if we’re not leading, then “either someone else is likely to be, and probably not in a way that actually [advances] the interests and the values of the American people; or, maybe just as bad, no one is, and then you have a vacuum that tends to be filled by chaos and law of the jungle before it’s filled by anything else.”
And yet, Tucker Carlson and other Fox News Channel personalities are echoing Russian talking points, saying that Putin is building up troops near Ukraine simply because he “wants to keep his western border secure.” Since 2014, when Ukraine threw out a pro-Russian leader, it has swung toward Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), becoming a key U.S. ally. Carlson calls Ukraine’s interest in allying with Europe the U.S. “plan[ning] to control Ukraine no matter what.”
Back at home, today Washington Post reporters Beth Reinhard, Jacqueline Alemany, and Josh Dawsey reported that a fan of right-wing media personality Alex Jones put $650,000 into the organizations promoting and staging the January “Stop the Steal” event in Washington, D.C. Julie Fancelli is the 72-year-old daughter of the founder of the Publix grocery store chain and a Publix stockholder, and while she has expressed horror over the violence on January 6, the company wants to distance itself from her actions. It told the Washington Post: “We are deeply troubled by Ms. Fancelli’s involvement in the events that led to the tragic attack on the Capitol on January 6.”
That impulse to isolate key participants in the January 6 insurrection shows in the rush of more than 275 witnesses so far to testify before the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, while former Department of Justice lawyer Jeffrey Clark, who pushed the idea of voter fraud, and Trump loyalist Roger Stone say they will take the Fifth.
Yesterday, Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, refused to appear for a scheduled deposition. Instead he said he was willing to answer questions in writing, an ask that often suggests a person is hoping to avoid committing perjury. His lawyer complained that the committee wasn’t taking Meadows’s “executive privilege” defense seriously, and objected to “wide ranging subpoenas” to Meadows’s cell phone provider.
Neither Biden nor Trump has asserted executive privilege over Meadows’s testimony. Meadows and Trump adviser Stephen Bannon, who has been indicted for contempt of Congress for his own refusal to respond to a subpoena, say they want to hear the outcome of Trump’s assertion of executive privilege over subpoenaed records from the National Archives and Records Administration because it might change their defense. (Bannon was not a government official but a podcaster in January, undercutting his claim to be covered by executive privilege.)
“There is no legitimate legal basis for Mr. Meadows to refuse to cooperate with the Select Committee and answer questions about the documents he produced, the personal devices and accounts he used, the events he wrote about in his newly released book, and, among other things, his other public statements,” committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) responded. “The Select Committee is left with no choice but to advance contempt proceedings and recommend that the body in which Mr. Meadows once served refer him for criminal prosecution.”
Thompson’s letter outlined some of what Meadows has already shared with the committee, including “a November 6, 2020, text exchange with a Member of Congress apparently about appointing alternate electors as part of a plan that the Member acknowledged would be ‘highly controversial’ and to which Mr. Meadows apparently said, ‘I love it’; [and] an early January 2021 text message exchange between Mr. Meadows and an organizer of the January 6th rally on the Ellipse.”
In the material was also an email from November 7, 2020, “discussing the appointment of alternate slates of electors as part of a ‘direct and collateral attack’ after the election,” and an “email regarding a 38-page PowerPoint briefing titled ‘Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN’ that was to be provided ‘on the hill’; and, among others, a January 5, 2021 email about having the National Guard on standby.”
Thompson’s letter noted that the information came from Meadows’s personal cell phone and email address instead of his government accounts, raising the question of whether this information went to the National Archives as the law requires. He also noted that Meadows had withheld “several hundred” emails and “over 1000” text messages, claiming they were covered by executive privilege.
Wednesday night, Meadows sued House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and all nine members of the House January 6 committee in D.C.’s U.S. District Court to block both his subpoena and the one to his cell phone company, saying they were “overly broad and unduly burdensome.”
Committee vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) told CNN: “We look forward to litigating that.”
Former White House adviser Steve Bannon and GOP Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida want some "4,000 shock troops" to get ready to take control of the federal government if Donald Trump decides to run for president again and wins in 2024.
Although Trump has not formally announced his intention to seek office, he has repeatedly hinted at the possibility. Several recent polls have suggested that Trump would be well positioned to defeat President Joe Biden, who has said he expects to run for reelection.
During a segment of Bannon's War Room podcast on Thursday, he and Gaetz discussed a pro-Trump strategy to take full control of the government should the former president win in 2024.
Gaetz said that "sometimes you've got to raise your voice to raise a ruckus and to raise an army of patriots who love this country and will fight for her." He said the pro-Trump movement is "going to operationalize the performance to go right after the people who are imposing the vaccine mandates, who are enriching themselves and who are selling out the country."
Bannon, who served in 2017 as Trump's chief strategist and senior counselor, said that thousands of Trump loyalists should be ready to help the former president take the reins of power again.
"This is Trumpism in power. That's when we went to the 4,000 shock troops we have to have that's going to man the government," Bannon predicted. "Get them ready now. Right? We're going to hit the beach with the landing teams and the beachhead teams and all that nomenclature they use when President Trump wins in 2024—or before."
Bannon previously touted the strategy, but with fewer details, in remarks to NBC News.
"We're going to have a sweeping victory in 2022, and that's just the preamble to a sweeping victory in 2024, and this time we're going to be ready—and have a MAGA perspective, MAGA policies, not the standard Republican policies," he said in early October.
"If you're going to take over the administrative state and deconstruct it, then you have to have shock troops prepared to take it over immediately," he added.
Trump formally pardoned Bannon right before he left office in January. The former White House official had been charged with fraud related to a crowdfunding campaign he had launched to raise money for Trump's long-promised border wall. Bannon has since been indicted by a federal grand jury after he defied a subpoena issued by the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He is slated to face trial in July.
Whether Trump launches another presidential campaign in 2024 is not certain yet. However, the former president has strongly hinted on multiple occasions that he plans to run. "I think my base is going to be very angry [if I don't run in 2024]," Trump said Wednesday on radio's Hugh Hewitt Show.
Earlier this month, Trump told Florida radio station WDBO that he suspects Biden won't run again in 2024. "So I would think that maybe he wouldn't be running, based on his performance. I would not imagine he would be running," he said.
"A lot of your listeners are people that will be very happy with what my decision will be [regarding 2024], I believe," he added.
Many of Trump's close allies have expressed their expectation and desire for him to seek another White House term.
"I think ultimately in 2024 President Trump does run again. At least that is my hope," former Trump adviser Jason Miller told Fox Business in October.
Imagine it’s November 2020, and I offer you the following vision of Joe Biden’s first year in office:
Stocks will soar. Consumer-spending growth will set land-speed records, and the president will oversee the best labor market of this young century. Coming off a flash-freeze recession, the U.S. unemployment rate will dip under 5 percent, lower than it was in every month of 2016. Blessedly, pay is rising fastest for low-wage workers. The number of job openings will set an all-time record, making this year possibly the best for finding a new gig since the end of the Second World War.
Sounds pretty good, huh? Then I offer another vision:
Americans hate foreign-policy mess on TV, but the U.S. will withdraw from Afghanistan with (no matter where you stand on the ethics) an indisputably messy finale. Americans are sick of plague, but over the summer, a new coronavirus variant will take over the country, killing tens of thousands of people and keeping masks pinned to faces. Americans don’t like overall inflation, and they really, really don’t like higher gas prices, but both will increase faster than at any point since the early 1990s.
Biden’s first year has been an unpredictable, best-of-times, worst-of-times mishmash. For now, the public seems to be holding the president responsible mostly for the worst bits: Biden’s approval rating at the end of his first year in office is lower than that of any American president since 1945, besides Donald Trump. More than 60 percent of voters say Biden is responsible for rising inflation, and now they’re souring on his handling of the Delta surge as well. On Fox News, commentators are regularly blaming the president for prices “spiraling out of control … like the ’70s.”
Both the public and the media sometimes see the president as the commander of our ship of state—a kind of all-powerful steward of all affairs economic, geopolitical, and biological. But they should take the nautical metaphor more literally. Navy captains seem in control, but they inherit ships built by other people and steer vessels through wind and waves that don’t obey any sort of direction. That—not omnipotence—is the reality of the American presidency.
“Presidents get way more credit than they deserve when things go well and way more blame than they deserve when things go badly,” Jason Furman, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, told me.
Presidents aren’t powerless, and it’s unhelpful to pretend so. Biden’s decision to stick with Fed Chair Jerome Powell was wise and meaningful. Biden had extraordinary control over the Afghanistan pullout and could still do much more to accelerate the distribution of cheap rapid COVID-19 tests. Furman himself warned the White House in February that the Biden stimulus bill might contribute to inflationary pressures (and I believe that, at least in part, Furman was right).
But when it comes to the issues that are most likely driving the majority of public dissatisfaction right now—such as gasoline inflation, supply-chain snafus, and the rise of Delta and other coronavirus variants—the president’s circumscribed powers are best analogized to a small rudder turned by a captain amid an angry sea.
“It’s likely that things will be in better shape a year from now, but most of the economy’s problems can only be solved with time,” Furman said. “That’s a really hard thing to say as president.”
Biden inherited an economy he didn’t build, sundered by a pandemic he didn’t start. He oversaw the distribution of a vaccine he didn’t develop, and his inoculation campaign ran headfirst into vaccine resistance he couldn’t control. He was slammed with a viral mutation he didn’t ask for, then got punished by an international supply-chain mess, which slammed into domestic logistics problems overseen by private-sector transportation companies he can’t command, compounded by trucker shortages and port inefficiencies he couldn’t go back in time to fix.
And then there’s gas. Strong evidence shows that voters reserve special hatred for rising gasoline prices. But this is another phenomenon that is largely out of Biden’s control. The economy has snapped back to normal and so have gasoline prices, which—for all the panic inducement you’ll see on TV—are still lower than they were for much of the 2010s and only $0.50 per gallon more than they were in 2019. Biden is being blamed largely for rising prices in a quickly expanding economy—a predictable outcome of catch-up growth (over which, again, he has at best limited control).
So what should Biden do, recognizing the limits of his own power? Cheer and vow.
The president should speak up about what’s been accomplished—“This is the best labor market of the century!”—and cheer on private-sector companies, such as those in domestic transportation logistics, whose increased efficiency is necessary to resolving America’s painful shortages. He should also tell people that he feels their pain on COVID-19 and inflation and announce a small number of easily achievable goals, like the production of several hundred million rapid COVID-19 tests made free for—and even personally mailed to—every American.
If that doesn’t work, there is always the serenity prayer. The White House can’t control the variants, or supply chains, or global energy markets. If COVID-19 and the global supply chain of November 2022 resemble those of November 2021, Democrats are going to get clobbered, no matter what. Some of Biden’s problems, however, may resolve themselves: Oil and natural-gas prices have come down in the past week, analysts at Morgan Stanley have predicted that supply-chain bottlenecks will be normalized within the next year, freight rates for goods shipped from Asia to the U.S. are dropping, and, blessedly, chicken inflation is slowing too.
“If rising food and gas prices and global supply chains don’t get better, Biden will be in trouble, and if they do get better, it may have almost nothing to do with what he’s done, and he’ll get credit anyway,” Furman said. After a pause, he added: “Well, that, or people will find another reason to complain about him.”
Seems like you're quoting an awful lot of stuff.
I won't read that wall of text tho.
Trump also wrote laws protecting religious freedom.
The picture of what was happening at the White House in the days before the January 6 insurrection is becoming clearer. (While we also have a decent idea of what was happening at the Department of Justice, what was happening at the Pentagon remains unclear.)
Shortly after Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows announced on Tuesday that he would no longer cooperate with the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) wrote a letter noting that Meadows had already shared material—thus indicating he did not consider it privileged—that he is now saying he won’t discuss. Thompson identified some of that material.
He said Meadows had provided the committee with an “email regarding a 38-page PowerPoint briefing titled ‘Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN’ that was to be provided ‘on the hill’; and, among others, a January 5, 2021 email about having the National Guard on standby.”
Journalists immediately began looking for that PowerPoint. Slides began to surface, and then a whole slide deck appeared on the internet. The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell verified it on Friday. The fact that members of the president’s inner circle actually prepared a presentation for an audience about how to overturn an election crystallized just how close the nation came to a successful coup on January 6.
The PowerPoint presented three ways for then–Vice President Mike Pence to overturn Biden’s election and hand the presidency back to Trump. Pence could simply seat the slates of electors Trump supporters had organized to replace the official slates certified by the states. Pence could insist on rejecting all electronic ballots. Or Pence could delay the counting of the ballots long enough to throw the election into the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote. Since there were more Republican-dominated states than Democratic-dominated states, Trump would be reelected.
Then, also on Friday, news dropped that Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis had produced two memos—one previously unknown—outlining far-fetched legal arguments to justify Pence throwing the election to Trump. One, dated December 31, said he could simply refuse to open the envelopes containing the electoral votes of states whose results Trump contested.
A second, dated January 5, made a more complicated argument claiming for Pence more authority to determine the outcome of the election than the vice president has exercised since the 1887 Electoral Count Act.
Today, Robert Costa, the Washington Post reporter who wrote the book Peril with veteran journalist Bob Woodward about the fraught weeks surrounding the January 6 insurrection, laid out the timeline for early January in the White House.
In December, right-wing lawyer John Eastman began drafting the Eastman Memo calling for Pence to refuse to count electors from states Biden won and laying out a number of ways Pence could throw the election to Trump. (Trump’s own loyal attorney general, William Barr, and his deputy Jeffrey Rosen, who replaced Barr when he resigned on December 23, 2020, had already concluded the election was not fraudulent.) The plan, as Costa and Woodward put it in Peril, was: “Either have Pence declare Trump the winner, or make sure it is thrown to the House where Trump is guaranteed to win.”
The White House had the memo by January 1. Meadows was working with the Trump team to push the ideas in it. Someone in the White House gave it to Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and others on January 2. Meadows met with both Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani in Meadows’s office on January 2 to brief Graham, who was then the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on what they claimed was voter fraud. Graham demanded proof.
On January 3, Pence conferred with the Senate parliamentarian, who told him he was simply there to count the votes. It was clear he was not on board with Trump’s plan.
On January 4, Trump called Pence to the Oval Office to pressure him. Eastman presented his case to Pence; Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short; and Pence’s legal counsel, Greg Jacob. On that day, someone presented the PowerPoint to a number of Republican senators and members of the House.
Apparently, none of the people briefed called the attention of the FBI to the coming attempt to overturn the election.
On the evening of January 5, Trump called Pence to a meeting as his supporters were gathering on Freedom Plaza near the White House. The people in the streets were cheering and waving “Make America Great Again” flags. Trump asked Pence to throw the election to the House of Representatives; Pence again said he did not have authority to do anything other than count the certified electoral votes.
And then, according to Costa and Woodward in Peril, Trump asked: “Well, what if these people say you do?” gesturing to the crowds outside. “If these people say you had the power, wouldn’t you want to?”
Pence, who would have been the face of the insurrection if he had done as he was asked, still said no.
That night, Trump called his people in the so-called “war room” at the Willard Hotel, where loyalists had been trying to figure out a way to delay certification if Pence didn’t cave. He called the lawyers and the non-lawyers separately, since Giuliani wanted to preserve attorney-client privilege. “He’s arrogant,” Trump told his lieutenant Stephen Bannon.
They appear to have settled on a plan to get Republican lawmakers to raise enough objections that it would delay the counting long enough to throw the election into the House of Representatives. (This squares with the voicemail Giuliani left for newly elected Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) in the midst of the insurrection, saying: “The only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow—ideally until the end of tomorrow.”)
Since his memo became public, John Eastman has said it “was not being provided to Trump or Pence as my advice.... The memo was designed to outline every single possible scenario that had been floated, so that we could talk about it.” When subpoenaed by the January 6 committee, Eastman declined to appear, asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Since journalist Lowell broke the story of Trump’s calls to the Willard the night of January 5, Trump’s spokesperson has said that the account “is totally false” but provided no more information.
Since the story of the PowerPoint dropped, retired U.S. Army colonel Phil Waldron, who was working with the Trump team to challenge the election results, claimed authorship of it. Waldron told the Washington Post that he met with Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times” and was the one who briefed several members of Congress about the information in his presentation on January 5.
Since Politico dropped the story about her memos, Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis said: “At no time did I advocate for overturning the election or that Mike Pence had the authority to do so…. As part of my role as a campaign lawyer and counsel for President Trump, I explored legal options that might be available within the context of the U.S. Constitution and statutory law.”
Yesterday, the January 6 committee subpoenaed six more people who had been involved in planning the rallies in Washington on January 5 and January 6. Some of them communicated with Trump directly; one communicated with Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL). Subpoenas went to Bryan Lewis, Ed Martin, Kimberly Fletcher, Robert “Bobby” Peede Jr., Max Miller, and Brian Jack.
On Monday, December 6, we learned that Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, has been cooperating with the January 6 committee.
...while proposing a storm trooper action involving armed insurrectionists from a private military junta, should Trump "manage to" win re-election.
Former White House adviser Steve Bannon and GOP Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida want some "4,000 shock troops" to get ready to take control of the federal government if Donald Trump decides to run for president again and wins in 2024.
Although Trump has not formally announced his intention to seek office, he has repeatedly hinted at the possibility. Several recent polls have suggested that Trump would be well positioned to defeat President Joe Biden, who has said he expects to run for reelection.
During a segment of Bannon's War Room podcast on Thursday, he and Gaetz discussed a pro-Trump strategy to take full control of the government should the former president win in 2024.
Gaetz said that "sometimes you've got to raise your voice to raise a ruckus and to raise an army of patriots who love this country and will fight for her." He said the pro-Trump movement is "going to operationalize the performance to go right after the people who are imposing the vaccine mandates, who are enriching themselves and who are selling out the country."
Bannon, who served in 2017 as Trump's chief strategist and senior counselor, said that thousands of Trump loyalists should be ready to help the former president take the reins of power again.
"This is Trumpism in power. That's when we went to the 4,000 shock troops we have to have that's going to man the government," Bannon predicted. "Get them ready now. Right? We're going to hit the beach with the landing teams and the beachhead teams and all that nomenclature they use when President Trump wins in 2024—or before."
Bannon previously touted the strategy, but with fewer details, in remarks to NBC News.
"We're going to have a sweeping victory in 2022, and that's just the preamble to a sweeping victory in 2024, and this time we're going to be ready—and have a MAGA perspective, MAGA policies, not the standard Republican policies," he said in early October.
"If you're going to take over the administrative state and deconstruct it, then you have to have shock troops prepared to take it over immediately," he added.
Trump formally pardoned Bannon right before he left office in January. The former White House official had been charged with fraud related to a crowdfunding campaign he had launched to raise money for Trump's long-promised border wall. Bannon has since been indicted by a federal grand jury after he defied a subpoena issued by the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He is slated to face trial in July.
Whether Trump launches another presidential campaign in 2024 is not certain yet. However, the former president has strongly hinted on multiple occasions that he plans to run. "I think my base is going to be very angry [if I don't run in 2024]," Trump said Wednesday on radio's Hugh Hewitt Show.
Earlier this month, Trump told Florida radio station WDBO that he suspects Biden won't run again in 2024. "So I would think that maybe he wouldn't be running, based on his performance. I would not imagine he would be running," he said.
"A lot of your listeners are people that will be very happy with what my decision will be [regarding 2024], I believe," he added.
Many of Trump's close allies have expressed their expectation and desire for him to seek another White House term.
"I think ultimately in 2024 President Trump does run again. At least that is my hope," former Trump adviser Jason Miller told Fox Business in October.
speaks tomes about your psyche.
