Dutch intelligence officials shared information with the C.I.A. in June 2022 that they had learned the Ukrainian military had been planning an operation using divers to blow up one of the pipelines.
The Central Intelligence Agency told Ukrainian officials last summer that it had learned of what it thought was an aborted plot by the Ukrainians to attack the Nord Stream pipelines, and the agency reinforced its objection to any such operation.
In June 2022, Dutch intelligence officials shared information with the C.I.A. that they had learned the Ukrainian military had been planning an operation using divers to blow up one of the pipelines, according to U.S. and European officials. But the original tip by the Dutch, according to a U.S. official, was that Ukraine had already reconsidered and canceled the operation.
In reality, American officials now believe, the operation was not aborted but delayed, potentially with a different Ukraine-aligned group carrying out the attack.
Explosions destroyed parts of the pipelines, which carry natural gas from Russia to Europe, in September. The Ukrainian government denied responsibility for the attack.
But German investigators later learned that a group of Ukrainians had rented a boat, loaded it with explosives and attacked the pipeline. American intelligence agencies now believe the operation was carried out at least with the loose direction of the Ukrainian government, but they do not know who exactly planned the operation.
The information about the C.I.A. warning to Ukraine, and that it was Dutch intelligence officials who provided the original intelligence, was earlier reported by the German news outlet Die Zeit and NOS, the Dutch national broadcaster.
It is unclear which U.S. official delivered the message about the pipeline attack to Ukraine. It was not delivered by senior level officials, however, because the United States already believed that Kyiv had reconsidered the wisdom of the attack, according to the American official. It was also not clear how the Ukrainians responded to the Americans’ message.
The original warning collected by Dutch intelligence included details similar to the final operation, but it also differed in some key respects, according to the European official. The original intelligence said Ukraine intended to attack Nord Stream 1, whereas the actual attack was against both the older pipelines and the just-completed set, known as Nord Stream 2.
Dutch intelligence also reported that the plan would involve using fake Estonian passports, the European official said. At least some members of the group that European investigators believe carried out the attack used fake Bulgarian passports.
The C.I.A. was not able to corroborate the information the Dutch provided them last summer but nevertheless warned the German government that the pipelines could be attacked and then discussed the matter with Ukrainian officials.
“DONALD TRUMP UNDER ARREST, IN FEDERAL CUSTODY.”
It was quite a chyron from CNN, marking the first time in the history of the United States that a former president has been charged with federal crimes. And in this case, what crimes they are: the willful retention, sharing, and hiding of classified documents that compromise our national security. Trump’s own national security advisor John Bolton said, “This is material that in the hands of America’s adversaries would do incalculable damage to the United States. This is a very serious case and it’s not financial fraud, it’s not hush money to porn stars, this is the national security of the United States at stake. I think we’ve got to take the politics out of this business when national security is at stake.”
Cameras were barred in the courtroom as Trump pleaded not guilty to the 37 charges in Miami today. Presiding magistrate judge Jonathan Goodman ordered Trump not to communicate with witnesses about the case, including co-defendant Waltine Nauta, then released him on his own recognizance, that is, without needing to post bail. Special prosecutor Jack Smith was in the courtroom; ABC’s senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott reported that Trump did not look at Smith.
Then Trump went back to his residence in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he gave a speech that New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who is close to the Trump camp, described as low energy, focusing on his insistence that he had a right to keep the classified documents (which experts agree is nonsense and amounts to a confession) and that the indictment was “the most evil and heinous abuse of power.” Right-wing Newsmax and the Fox News Channel (FNC) carried the speech; CNN and MSNBC did not.
FNC has been hemorrhaging viewers since it fired Tucker Carlson, a threat to its bottom line that might have been behind its chyron tonight attacking Biden by claiming “WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED.”
In statements similar to the one from FNC, right-wing pundits spent the day flooding Twitter and other social media with furious insistence that Trump is being unfairly prosecuted, followed by attacks on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and with allegations that there are tapes of President Biden accepting bribes—allegations that Biden openly laughed at this evening.
But that performative outrage among leaders did not translate into support on the ground in Miami. Law enforcement had been prepared for as many as 50,000 protesters, but only a few hundred to a thousand turned out (one wearing a shirt made of an American flag and carrying the head of a pig on a pole).
The lack of supporters on the ground was significant. Since the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, much of Trump’s power has rested on his ability to call out his base to silence opponents by threatening violence. That power was in full force on January 6, 2021, when his loyalists set out to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president, believing they were operating under the orders of then-president Trump.
Since then, though, more than 1,000 people who participated in the events of January 6 have been charged with crimes, and many have been sentenced to prison, while Trump, who many defendants say called them to arms, has skated. That discrepancy is likely dampening the enthusiasm of Trump’s supporters for protest.
Today Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out that the audacity of Nevada’s militia-related Bundy family simply grew as family members launched successive stands against the federal government without significant legal repercussions. Republican politicians cheered on their attacks on federal officials for political gain, while Democratic politicians didn’t push to go after them out of concern that a show of federal power would alienate Nevada voters.
Trump’s threats and determination to stir up his base seem to reflect a similar consideration: if he can just rally enough support, he might imagine, the federal government will back off.
Federal officials permitting politics to trump the rule of law in our past have brought us to this moment.
After the Civil War, officials charged Confederate president Jefferson Davis and 38 other leading secessionists with treason but decided not to prosecute when the cases finally came to trial in 1869. They wanted to avoid the anger a trial would provoke because they hoped to reconcile the North and South. They also worried they would not get convictions in the southern states where the trials were assigned.
In the end, between President Andrew Johnson’s pardons and Congress’s granting of amnesty to Confederates, no one was convicted for their participation in the attempt to destroy the country. This generosity did not create the good feeling men like General Ulysses S. Grant hoped it would. Instead, as Civil War scholar Elizabeth Varon established in her book on the surrender at Appomattox, it helped to create the myth that the southern cause had been so noble that even the conquering northern armies had been forced to recognize it. The ideology of the Confederacy never became odious, and it has lived on.
The same quest for reconciliation drove President Gerald R. Ford to grant a pardon to former president Richard M. Nixon for possible “offenses against the United States” in his quest to win the 1972 election by bugging the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Washington, D.C., Watergate Hotel.
Ford explained that the “tranquility” the nation had found after Nixon’s resignation “could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States.” The threat of a trial would “cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States.”
In an echo of 100 years before, Ford’s generosity did not bring Nixon or his supporters back into the fold. Instead, they doubled down on the idea that Nixon had done nothing wrong and had been hounded from office by his “liberal” enemies. Nixon himself never admitted wrongdoing, telling the American people he was resigning because he no longer had enough support in Congress to advance the national interest. Although his support had collapsed because even members of his own party believed he was guilty of obstructing justice, violated constitutional rights of citizens, and abused his power, Nixon blamed the press, whose members had destroyed him with “leaks and accusations and innuendo.”
The willingness of government officials to ignore the rule of law in order to buy peace gave us enduring reverence for the principles of the Confederacy, along with countless dead Unionists, mostly Black people, killed as former Confederates reclaimed supremacy in the South. It also gave us the idea that presidents cannot be held accountable for crimes, a belief that likely made some of the presidents who followed Nixon less careful about following the law than they might have been if they had seen Nixon indicted.
Holding a former president accountable for an alleged profound attack on the United States is indeed unprecedented, as his supporters insist. But far from being a bad thing to stand firm on the rule of law at the upper levels of government, it seems to fall into the category of “high time.”
PHOENIX — Arizona House Republicans tried, but failed, to expel a Democratic lawmaker who admitted to a Bible-hiding prank caught on hidden camera.
Instead, GOP representatives could only muster a 30-28 vote to censure Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton on Tuesday.
Stahl Hamilton, a Tucson Democrat and ordained Presbyterian minister, has never disputed the facts of the matter – on three separate occasions, swiping Bibles from end tables in the Arizona House members' lounge and hiding them under cushions, and in one instance, a nearby refrigerator. She has described her actions as a playful commentary on the separation of church and state and a protest against the weaponization of religion in politics.
But many Republicans were outraged by what they called the "desecration" of scripture – some commented that they may have unknowingly sat on the Bible when it was hidden under seat cushions.
An Arizona lawmaker (who is also a minister) is under investigation for a Bible prank
"To do so is flagrantly offensive, and something the House needs to take seriously," said Rep. Justin Heap, one of three Republicans who filed an ethics complaint against Stahl Hamilton over the incidents.
Heap, who voted for expulsion, said the matter "really comes down to a simple question: What do we as a body value more? The reputations of Arizona politicians or the reputation of God in the world?"
"I know which side of that debate that I come down on," Heap said.
Other Republicans referenced the April expulsion of former Rep. Liz Harris for inviting a witness to present false charges about lawmakers and other state officials — and then, according to an ethics committee report, lying about her involvement in the outrageous testimony.
Though the circumstances of their actions were vastly different, the House Ethics Committee found both Harris and Stahl Hamilton in violation of House Rule No. 1, which governs disorderly conduct.
Still, the vote fell well short of the two-thirds majority needed to kick a member out of the House. Democrats and four Republicans rejected the motion to expel.
The Arizona House expels a Republican lawmaker for her role in baseless testimony
One of those Republicans, Rep. David Cook, also voted against the censure and defended Stahl Hamilton's character while lamenting her poor judgment.
"Everyone in this room, everyone you know, every family member that I know, has made a poor decision at one time or another. And I think this is overkill for a bad, chosen prank," Cook said in explaining his vote against expulsion. "And an apology was good with me."
The Tuesday votes followed a full-blown investigation into the matter, even after Hamilton was caught, admitted to and apologized for her actions. The committee's unanimous seven-page report cast doubt on the sincerity of the apology, as well as Stahl Hamilton's characterization of her actions as a "joke."
"Many members of this committee do not view this as an act of jest," the report stated.
The report concluded that, by hiding Bibles, Stahl Hamilton "deprived members who choose to exercise their religious beliefs by referring to the biblical texts of an opportunity to do so."
The committee also wrote that the "offense and disrespect" Stahl Hamilton displayed for the Bible were not unique to the Bible.
"Her actions would have been equally offensive and disrespectful if it had been the Book of Mormon, Qur'an, or any other religious text," the report stated.
However, the Bible is the only religious text available in the members lounge.
Sam Stein @samstein
NEW -- Ron DeSantis is running to the right of Donald Trump on everything from entitlements to Covid policy. But No Labels says if he is the GOP nominee they will drop their third party bid.
Here's a clue to what the No Labels crowd ("we need to eschew extremism on eithe side") is really up to...
Quote:Sam Stein @samstein
NEW -- Ron DeSantis is running to the right of Donald Trump on everything from entitlements to Covid policy. But No Labels says if he is the GOP nominee they will drop their third party bid.
Politico
No Labels Is Helping a Firm that Raises Money for Right-Wing Extremists
The self-proclaimed centrist group is using a vendor that assists election deniers, MAGA Republicans, and the radical Trump right.
On Monday, the World Day Against Child Labor, Democrats led by Representatives Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) and Raul Ruiz (D-CA) introduced into Congress the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety, or CARE Act. It seeks to raise the minimum age for farm work from 12 to 14, repairing a carveout from the era of the Jim Crow 1930s that permitted children to work on farms at two years younger than in other sectors.
Democrats have introduced similar bills since 2005, but the measures have failed because opponents say such rules would hurt family farms. Kristi Boswell, a lobbyist for the agricultural industry and former member of the agricultural bureau under Trump, said at a hearing that her “niece and nephews would not have been able to detassel corn at ages 12 and 13, despite their parents knowing they were mature enough to handle the job.”
This bill, Ruiz notes, has exemptions for family farms. It is intended not to stop the passing of farming knowledge from parents to kids, but to protect Latinx children “who are working in the fields because they’re living in extreme poverty.”
Pressure for federal legislation to protect children is mounting, in part because of the recent effort of Republican-dominated state legislatures to weaken child labor laws. As recently as 2017 a historical review of the history of child labor from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said that “child labor like that…in the decades leading up to the passage of the [Fair Labor Standards Act] no longer exists.” But, now, thanks to a red-hot labor market that is driving up wages, immigration bans, and an influx of unaccompanied minor children who have been released to sponsors after arriving in the U.S., child labor is on the rise.
In February 2023 the Department of Labor reported that it had seen a 69% increase—note that these were only cases that were caught—in “children being employed illegally by companies.” In the same month it announced a $1.5 million settlement with Packers Sanitation Services, Inc., one of the nation’s largest food safety sanitation services providers, after officials found the company employed at least 102 children aged 13–17 during overnight shifts at thirteen meat-processing facilities in eight states, where they used hazardous chemicals and cleaned dangerous meat processing equipment. At least three got hurt.
The federal government has vowed to crack down on violations of child labor laws, but the Economic Policy Institute, which examines the economic impact of government policies, reports that in the last two years, at least fourteen states have either passed or introduced measures to weaken the laws protecting children from dangerous working conditions. They permit longer work hours and more dangerous work, lower the ages for work around alcohol, or introduce new subminimum wages for children.
Those calling for rollbacks of child labor protections say they are protecting parents’ rights from an intrusive state. They portray child labor as family oriented and good work experience. But the measures are backed—and sometimes written—by the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), a right-wing Florida think tank founded in 2011 whose goal is to cut the social safety net and antipoverty programs. Far-right donors who want to dismantle the federal government provide the financial support for the FGA.
David Campbell, professor of American democracy at the University of Notre Dame, told Jacob Bogage and María Luisa Paúl of the Washington Post, “When you say that a bill will allow kids to work more or under dangerous conditions, it sounds wildly unpopular…. You have to make the case that, no, this is really about parental rights, a very carefully chosen term that’s really hard to disagree with.”
A January 2022 FGA white paper provides talking points for weakened child labor laws, including the ideas that “teenagers are a critical source of labor for businesses struggling to find help” and that “with a national labor crisis and teenagers opting to join the workforce at record-high rates, cutting bureaucratic red tape can help stabilize the economy.” “THE BOTTOM LINE: States should restore decision-making to parents by eliminating youth work permits.”
This language echoes that of the early 1900s, when factories and mines employed children because they earned lower wages than adults and their small bodies could fit more easily into tight spaces, and when parents pushed their children to work because, in an era when most men made below-subsistence wages and there was no social safety net, families needed the money children earned to survive. In 1900 a quarter of the workers in the South’s textile factories were children under 16; by 1904, that number had climbed to a half, with 20,000 of them under age 12.
Factory fires and mine collapses, as well as the frequent injuries that cost children fingers or legs, brought popular attention to the dangers of child labor, but children could not vote and had no power to change legislation. Mill and mine owners lobbied legislators against regulating child labor, insisting that child labor laws would ruin their businesses by strengthening the power of unions as adult workers no longer had to worry about being undercut by cheaper child workers. And laws put children firmly under the control of their parents, who had the right to their children’s wages and who needed that income to make ends meet.
What would eventually throw a monkey wrench into this economic system was the recognition by Republican progressive reformers that children growing up in factories without education would never have the opportunity to become good citizens, whose education was crucial to a democracy. They would never learn to read or write, leaving them at the mercy of employers, and immigrant children caught in this system would never fully integrate into society.
Reformers worried that the nation would develop a permanent underclass that threatened the continued survival of democracy. In 1904 they organized as the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) to work against child labor in factories. In 1906, progressive senator Albert Beveridge (R-IN) introduced a federal child labor law, using the Constitution’s Commerce Clause to ban the transport of any products mined or manufactured by children under 14.
“We cannot permit any man or corporation to stunt the bodies, minds, and souls of American children,” Beveridge said. “We cannot thus wreck the future of the American Republic.”
When Beveridge’s bill failed, the NCLC hired photographer Lewis Hine to take the now-iconic pictures of the nation’s children in the streets, mines, and factories. In 1908, Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, who shared Beveridge’s concerns that the stunted children from the factories and mines would not grow up to become the foundation for a strong democracy, told Congress: “Child labor should be prohibited throughout the Nation.”
By 1916, Congress was ready to pass the Keating-Owen Act, a law prohibiting the shipment of goods produced by children across state lines. The Supreme Court struck it down in 1918, saying such federal legislation was unconstitutional. Congress then tried to stop child labor by levying a ten percent tax on businesses that hired children; the Supreme Court struck that down, too.
Finally, in 1938, as part of the New Deal effort to level the playing field between workers and employers, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). It established a federal minimum wage, a 44-hour work week, and an end to work for those under 16. During his quest for the legislation, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Congress, “A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling worker's wages or stretching workers’ hours.”
By the time the FLSA passed, laws requiring children to attend school had joined with the high unemployment of the Depression years to shift the idea that children should work to the idea that they should stay in school, and worker protections and Social Security, passed in the same era, meant that parents no longer needed their children’s wages to survive.
In the years after World War II, when people in the United States were determined to stand strong against both fascism and communism, the nation embraced the idea that children should be in school rather than in factories. An education would permit them to be upwardly mobile economically, thus lessening the likelihood that they would be tempted by authoritarian leaders who promised to improve their standard of living, and it would guarantee that they would be informed citizens who would work to advance democracy.
Until recently, that idea seemed permanent.
A bit more on this, Frank. Worth reading.
Quote:HERENo Labels Is Helping a Firm that Raises Money for Right-Wing Extremists
The self-proclaimed centrist group is using a vendor that assists election deniers, MAGA Republicans, and the radical Trump right.
The Brotherhood of the Philandering Oligarchs
I covered Donald Trump’s political ascent more than a decade before most other journalists did, which is another way of saying that I covered Silvio Berlusconi.
That was from 2002 to 2004, during the second of his four stints as prime minister of Italy. He was arguably at the peak of his power. And he was Trump before Trump, a harbinger of Trump, a dress rehearsal of Trump, nearly as hubristic, similarly nationalistic, contemptuous of norms, disdainful of the law, a creature of show business awash in creature comforts, loud, lewd — all of it.
I was then The Times’s Rome bureau chief, and I twice met at length with Berlusconi. He crowed about his accomplishments and squawked about his critics. Those of us who chronicled him back then often wondered, in our journalism and among ourselves, if his rise from cruise ship crooner to obscenely wealthy media magnate to leader of one of the world’s 10 largest economies was a peculiarly Italian phenomenon. How well would his shtick play in another country, one with greater weight in the world and more at stake?
Trump provided — and continues to provide — the answer. He is Berlusconi after Berlusconi, part pupil and part echo, though he’d surely loathe that characterization: He doesn’t believe that anyone really compares to him, a facet of his self-love that only proves his kinship with his Italian forebear.
Berlusconi died on Monday, at the age of 86, and I’m hardly the only journalist prodded by that milestone to think about the Berlusconi-Trump connection — the brotherhood of the philandering oligarchs. In The Times on Tuesday, Mattia Ferraresi sketched the many parallels between the two tycoons, noting, for example, that Berlusconi and his businesses were constantly drawing the attention of prosecutors, that he claimed to be the victim of rigged elections, that he bellowed about his persecution and that he cozied up to Vladimir Putin. Berlusconi and Trump are a Venn diagram that’s all overlap.
And it’s worth dwelling a bit longer on those shared traits, because they point to verities bigger than the both of them — to dynamics that will play out in Western politics for some time.
One of those is that ultimate power and ultimate persuasion depend on an intuitive, visceral understanding of the age’s media — of its timbre, its metabolism. Berlusconi owned and ran a television and publishing empire in Italy and grasped in particular how well spectacle and sex sell. He put them on the air; he wove them into his public persona. He seemed unbothered by the reports of “bunga bunga” sex parties at one of his opulent villas. Debauchery was his brand.
Trump, too, has benefited from a congenital affinity for television. But he also took to more recent inventions, to changes in the information ecosystem that suited him as well as “The Apprentice” did. He spotted the internet’s fertility for lies. He saw that the greatest currency on social media is spite. That’s what all those uppercase letters and exclamation points tap into. They’re not typographical. They’re psychosocial (and sometimes just plain psycho).
Here's a Canadian story for you folks.
Last weekend, the Canadian Open golf tournament was actually won by a Canadian golfer (rare or unprecedented). This fellow, Nick Taylor, is from a town midway between Vancouver and my own home town. He won in a playoff after sinking an 80' putt. Audience goes crazy. One of his best friends (also from that same town, Abbotsford) went rushing towards Taylor and a security guard, not knowing this relationship, tackled the friend.
And after this was sorted out, the friend apologized to the guard who tackled him.
“When you say that a bill will allow kids to work more or under dangerous conditions, it sounds wildly unpopular…. You have to make the case that, no, this is really about parental rights, a very carefully chosen term that’s really hard to disagree with.”
the recognition by Republican progressive reformers that children growing up in factories without education would never have the opportunity to become good citizens, whose education was crucial to a democracy. They would never learn to read or write, leaving them at the mercy of employers, and immigrant children caught in this system would never fully integrate into society.
In 1906, progressive senator Albert Beveridge (R-IN) introduced a federal child labor law, using the Constitution’s Commerce Clause to ban the transport of any products mined or manufactured by children under 14.
“We cannot permit any man or corporation to stunt the bodies, minds, and souls of American children,” Beveridge said. “We cannot thus wreck the future of the American Republic.”
When Beveridge’s bill failed, the NCLC hired photographer Lewis Hine to take the now-iconic pictures of the nation’s children in the streets, mines, and factories. In 1908, Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, who shared Beveridge’s concerns that the stunted children from the factories and mines would not grow up to become the foundation for a strong democracy, told Congress: “Child labor should be prohibited throughout the Nation.”
