On its face, the current Ukraine crisis is over the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO. Russia wants a binding commitment that that will never happen. The U.S. and NATO refuse to offer such a firm and binding commitment. What’s easy to miss if you haven’t been following this story over the last two decades is that Ukraine has never gotten an invitation to join NATO. Not even close. There’s really no reason to think such an offer is or would have been coming any time soon. Successive U.S. Presidents have not been willing to take that step, even as they’ve worked to support Western-leaning governments in Kyiv. It’s been seen — rightly, I think — as just a bridge too far for the reasons I noted yesterday. Indeed, the backdrop to the current high stakes brinksmanship over whether Ukraine will be allowed to join NATO is that it’s a discussion of such a highly notional possibility. That fact must come up again and again in high level discussions.

I usually let notes from TPM Readers speak for themselves. But TPM Reader JE’s note made me think JE both didn’t know the extent to which he and I agree or where I get my news. It also gave me an opportunity to address a few issues I’ve been wanting to discuss.

First, JE …

A federal judge is placing the burden on John Eastman to demonstrate that he had an attorney-client relationship and thus privilege in his efforts to help ex-President Trump launch a coup to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The current argument turns on more than 500 pages of emails from just the days between January 4th and January 7th, 2021.

What jumps out at me is the fact that in his responses Eastman quite openly plays to the fact that his strategy is to delay until the committee is disbanded by a new Republican majority in early 2023. “To the extent the congressional defendants’ claimed ‘urgent need for resolution of the privilege issues’ is motivated by the looming 2022 midterm election, this is not a valid reason to alter this Court’s January 26 order,” Eastman’s attorney wrote in reply to the arguments put forward by House lawyers.

A headline last night from the Times: “Tone of Ukraine Crisis Shifts as Russia Signals Openness to Talk More.”

There are also some limited signs that Russia is redeploying some number of military personnel from their forward positions up against the Ukraine border back to their regular bases.

This (below) is a tweet from over the weekend from the Russian Embassy in South Africa. It’s an example of the dynamic I was talking about yesterday. U.S. diplomats have apparently told NATO allies, based on U.S. intelligence, that Russia had set February 16th, Wednesday, as a possible or probable invasion date. This is at least consistent with various moves by the U.S. and NATO allies over recent days — pulling out dependents, canceling civilian flights and such. Here Russia is denying it has any plans to invade on Wednesday and claims that the warnings are part of a U.S. plot to create a provocation which justifies NATO military action inside Ukraine. This is the kind of wrong-footing I’m talking about.

There has been a growing chorus of articles arguing that the Biden administration is trying to confront Russia on its own ground of information warfare. The key example is moving rapidly to declassify military intelligence about Russian moves to eliminate their potential element of surprise. The administration is trying to upend Russian tactics by continually revealing what they’re about to do or what they are preparing to do in advance. But there is something else they are doing that is getting less direct attention, something I mentioned earlier this month.

I wanted to share with you this post about the situation in Ottawa, sent along TPM Reader JK. I recommend reading the whole thing. But this is the gist:

What’s happening in Ottawa, they were clear, is two separate events happening in tandem: there is a broadly non-violent (to date) group of Canadians with assorted COVID-related gripes, ranging from the somewhat justified to totally frickin’ insane. But that larger group, which has knocked Ottawa and too many of our leaders into what my colleague Jen Gerson so perfectly described as “stun-fucked stasis,” is now providing a kind of (mostly) unwitting cover to a cadre of seasoned street brawlers whose primary goal is to further erode the legitimacy of the state — not just the city of Ottawa, or Ontario or Canada, but of democracies generally.

This morning’s latest on Trump’s seemingly pervasive destruction and theft of government documents and classified material is that White House officials periodically found the toilets in the White House residence clogged with wads of flushed paper, which they believed — reasonably enough! — were government documents the President had tried to destroy. This revelation comes from Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming Trump book “Confidence Man.” Axios has the scoop. Because of course it does. Mike Allen described this as adding “a vivid new dimension to his lapses in preserving government documents,” which struck me as a generous way to describe it.

Just moments ago the Post reported that the National Archives has asked the Justice Department to investigate ex-President Trump’s handling of White House records and possible violations of the Presidential Records Act. For clarity, the PRA is the post-Watergate statute that makes clear the the work product of the presidency belongs to the American public and not the individual president. As is so often the case, adjudicating Trump’s infractions is paradoxically complicated by their sheer brazenness. I mean, what is there to investigate? The violations have been so open that he seems to be saying with his actions that his actions are okay. Trump for years openly destroyed records covered by the PRA. (His staff reportedly attempted to piece them back together with tape.) Then he absconded with 15 boxes of records that the National Archives had to recover from Mar-a-Lago.

The Times has a piece on the topic we’ve been talking about here in recent days: the escalating battle over “legitimate political discourse” and the January 6th insurrection. They see it primarily as a messaging gaffe. And that is certainly part of the story. The imperative for the RNC was the formal censure of the two dissident House Republicans: Cheney and Kinzinger. That didn’t require a blanket endorsement of the Jan. 6th insurrection, which the label “legitimate political discourse” certainly conferred. That has to go down to Ronna McDaniel’s general ineptitude. But you need to be a really good driver on a twisty road with a lot of black ice. And right now the GOP is on a twisty road with a lot of black ice.

It’s no accident this happened. It happened because Trump is demanding it happen. As we noted yesterday, this is a dance between Trump and the Jan. 6th committee with most elected Republicans caught in between.