Editors’ Blog

Very, very, very weird story. A raid was conducted on two men in Washington, DC this evening. The two impersonated federal law enforcement officers and gave gifts and other enticements to ingratiate themselves with members of the Secret Service, one of whom was on the First Lady’s protective deal. But to what end? What’s especially weird about the first AP story here is that it doesn’t address what these two men were trying to accomplish. Here’s a thread with photos of the raid. Let’s keep an eye on this story.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) has addressed the crowds at white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ events the last two years in a row — most recently sparking uproar after both he and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) appeared at the America First Political Action Conference last month.

Despite receiving abnormally swift condemnation from GOP leadership after news of his appearance broke, Gosar had not yet addressed the bipartisan backlash to his speech until just a few days ago.

Out of the blue the government of Naftali Bennett appears to be on the brink of collapse as one of the members of his own party, Idit Silman, has moved to the opposition. The development is part of the on-going splintering of Bennett’s own party, Yamina. But a catalyst or trigger appears to have been opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu offering her a ministry in a new Netanyahu-led right-wing government.

For now, the coalition government has lost its majority. But the Knesset isn’t currently in session. So there’s no immediate way for the opposition to topple it. And it would be difficult for Netanyahu to form a majority himself. So this likely means new elections.

In the first weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine we saw what appeared to be almost universal global condemnation of Russia’s actions. There was that lopsided UN vote condemning the action in which only four other nations, all pariahs or under de facto Russian occupation, took Russia’s side. But over time, a somewhat different story has emerged. Russia has very, very few backers. But there’s a big chunk of the world, likely the majority of the world’s population, living in countries where the governments basically do not want to take sides.

Oklahoma has completely tossed the “weeks” component of the abortion debate.

A bill that would make it illegal to perform an abortion in Oklahoma quietly passed the state House today by a 70-14 vote. The same Republican-backed bill passed the Oklahoma Senate last year, according to the Washington Post, meaning the bill is now headed to Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt’s desk.

If passed, it will become the most restrictive abortion ban in the country.

We have mentioned to you a few times what you almost certainly remembered: that President Trump’s first impeachment was over Ukraine and that Trump’s disgraced 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort’s work was in Ukraine working for the Russia-aligned former President of Ukraine. But there’s more to it than that. If we step back we can see a thread stretching back at least a decade, weaving from one crisis to the next until this moment. We start in the uprising against Viktor Yanukovych, the so-called Maidan Revolution, an event which was triggered by Yanukovych’s decision to move away from integration with the European Union. Vladimir Putin has always blamed Yanukovych’s ouster from power on the US. And this was actually the context for an incident which people in the US foreign policy and national security world later saw as a harbinger of what was to come.

A gruesome, horrifying topic but also a stunning, remarkable piece of data, visual and explanatory journalism. The Russian defense ministry has released a statement claiming that the bodies of executed civilians left on the streets of Bucha in Ukraine are another Ukrainian “provocation,” a hoax engineered by Ukraine meant to discredit Russia. They claim that the killings happened after the Russian army evacuated the city. The Times has an article that graphically and dramatically refutes these claims. You’ve likely seen those videos of drive-throughs through the shattered city in which the bodies, most shot execution style and many with bound hands, are visible on the side of the road. Times journalists cross-referenced these harrowing videos with satellite imagery which shows very clearly that the bodies were there when the town was under Russian occupation. It feels unseemly to to be so praiseful of something that is about chilling war crimes. But the work is still remarkable. The dispositive nature of the refutation is hard to fully appreciate without seeing it. See it here.

Who could’ve seen this coming/Only the best people/You’re fired/etc.

I wrote earlier this year about the deliciously glitchy roll-out of former President Trump’s new social media app, which he created to spite Facebook and Twitter for daring to ban him after he used their platforms to incite his violent insurrection. Back in February, the Trump Media & Technology Group’s CEO (and former U.S. representative from California) Devin Nunes — who has also made a name for himself whining about Twitter and cows and left Congress to take on this Trump social task — predicted Trump’s new social site would need another month past its launch date to be fully functional.

But, it’s been more than a month since Truth Social weathered its disastrous debut. Things haven’t improved much.

We’re now well into the second half of our membership sign-up drive. Please consider joining today if you haven’t already. It can be a challenge convincing readers that their membership makes a big, big difference in the future of this site. About 80% of our budget comes from subscriptions. So TPM literally wouldn’t exist without your subscription fees. And we need more people to join. We wouldn’t ask if it weren’t really important. Can you join us? Just make today the day. Click right here. Super easy. And you’ll be glad you did.

The Times has this harrowing, disturbing report from Trostyanets. It’s a good, reported, observational piece on what happened. One key takeaway is that civilians describe the initial Russian occupying force as professional and agreeable enough. Eyewitnesses describe many of them as disoriented, not even quite sure why they were there. (Remember, the Russian soldiers apparently had very little advance warning they were actually going to war.) But as time went on they got antsy and started running low on supplies. That led to a cycle of looting and the tensions that follow from it. But things really went bad when this initial force was cycled out and replaced with Chechen separatist paramilitaries.

As I’ve mentioned to you before, I continue to find Michael Kofman, who works at CNA, the big Navy think tank, the most measured and informative analyst for information on the war in Ukraine. Today he posted a Twitter thread which has as many questions as answers. But there’s a key dynamic I want to highlight. We tend to make fun of the Russian insistence on calling the Ukraine war a “special military operation.” But this turns out to have important real world implications.

As I’ve shared with you, I’ve spent a lot of the last month closely reading on-the-ground reports from Ukraine as well as accounts from a spectrum of military analysts, reporters, soldiers of fortune, people on the ground in Ukraine and more. In recent days I had seen a number of claims that Russian troops had carried out mass executions before evacuating or being driven out of towns in Ukraine. Most of these were claims of mass killings of men of military age but others of men and women of all ages. I haven’t known what to make of these accounts because claims of civilian atrocities are the most established kind of wartime propaganda. There is the deceit of war and the fog of war that demands caution in evaluating all new information. Most of these were either anecdotal, second hand or from sources I wasn’t familiar with. But over the last two days reporters have followed in the wake of Ukrainian troops or evacuating Russian troops. Now some of these claims are being validated. They may be widespread, not limited to a few incidents.

I wanted to flag this article for your attention. It’s written by an Austrian military analyst named Gustav Gressel. He’s one of the military analysts I’ve been following on Twitter. The argument is that Russia isn’t retrenching or narrowing its goals to seek a diplomatic settlement. Rather, it’s in an operational pause in which Russia is restocking men and materiel for a second offensive which will be modified and optimized based on what the Russians learned in their mostly failed original war plan. Based on this analysis Gressel says NATO/U.S. should be pouring more and more big ticket arms into Ukraine in advance of that next onslaught. I’m unable to independently analyze this argument and increasing the scale of arms transfers is a policy question more than an analytic one. But I want to put the argument in front of you because it does seem to square with what a number of these analysts and observers are saying.

Also, Kazakhstan seems to be saying more clearly it’s not taking Russia’s side over Ukraine.

TPM Reader RC thinks TS “fundamentally misunderstands what’s at stake and what it takes to win today.”

At the national and statewide levels, persuading perceived “center and center-right voters” is a waste of time at this point. The goal here is to keep the coalition together. The last two cycles have demonstrated that there is a 50+1 majority that can give Democrats political power. We need to be making sure that coalition shows up, not chasing a handful of “gettable voters”, most of whom are closet partisans.

From TPM Reader TS on pandemic-era restrictions on asylum-seekers…

The pandemic is not over and the limits on entrants should be extended at least through 2022.  The President should say no to advocates and legalistic experts pushing him to open the border to asylum claimers.  CNN will be filming droves of people crossing the Rio Grande every day. They are already starting.

I find myself agreeing with a lot of what TPM Reader PT says here about “Ukraine on the Verge of Defeat” …

As I mentioned, I’ve seen a fair number of different variations on the theme of “Vladimir V. Putin, SUPER-GENIUS” over the last few days; I’m sure you have as well. A thing they all seem to have in common is a presumption that Putin’s real goal in all of this was to acquire more territory in Ukraine’s east, or get a more firm grip on territory there that they already hold. I get the sense that they’re all taking a not-really-applicable analogy — making an opening bid in a negotiation that’s much bigger than what you actually expect to achieve — and applying it in a comically-inappropriate manner (specifically: ignoring the distinction that when you open with an overlarge ask it doesn’t actually cost anything to anyone, while Putin’s war in Ukraine has in fact cost Russia vastly more than if they’d just pursued additional conquest of territory in eastern Ukraine). 

From TPM Reader SS …

I want to follow-up on reader JJ’s thoughts. I’m aware of people like the “older Catholic guy” he describes. I’ve met some. But anytime we decide to label entire people groups with a stereotype that might be true for a subset, we are in danger. Any analysis that lacks nuance and complexity is often misguided.

I grew up in right-leaning evangelical subculture in the 1980’s in a highly conservative part of the country. My parents stood out in our circles as the token liberals. But they really were just people who left this area for a period and had lived both overseas and in California, and knew the world and the issues of the world were more complex.

From TPM Reader AE …

This may horrify you, but I am a pro-life leftie who has been a TPM-prime member for quite a while.  (I don’t remember exactly how long – I am sure that you have records.)  I thought your post “Traditionalism and Aggression” was horribly unfair.

I recognize of course that TPM is 100% pro-choice, and I still support you.

The domino effect is playing out much quicker than I expected.

I wrote just yesterday about far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) bringing an on-its-face small potatoes issue to Congress, introducing a resolution — co-sponsored by 20 other Republicans — that would recognize the second place finisher of an NCAA women’s swimming tournament as the first place winner. Both of the impressive athletes are women. The first place winner is a trans women. Hence the discriminatory and socially backwards uproar.

On the same day, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) reportedly announced her plans to write a federal version of Florida’s homophobic “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

I’ve been fascinated by the evolving Madison Cawthorn “scandal.” As TPM Readers know as well as anyone, House Republicans say batsh*t insane stuff pretty much weekly. They not infrequently make statements in support of fringe racist and domestic terror groups. They endorse borderline sedition (light treason, if you will). These pass with as little trace as a brief summer shower. Yet here we have Cawthorn whipping out this weird Boogie Nights reverie about cocaine-filled orgies among his colleagues in Congress, a den of iniquity the brash young man-boy Cawthorn says he is striving to keep himself pure from. And yet this looks to be on the verge of making him a political dead man walking among congressional Republicans. Kevin McCarthy said yesterday that Cawthorn has “lost my trust” and that if he doesn’t shape up he could be stripped of his committee assignments or worse.

It’d be eye roll-inducing if it weren’t so darkly nauseating.

A woman named Lia Thomas won the NCAA Division 1 national championship for the 500-yard freestyle swimming race last week. Thomas is the first transgender athlete to earn this title, beating out Tokyo Olympics silver medalist Emma Weyant, who won second place at the NCAA tournament.

For years I’ve been corresponding with TPM Reader BF. He’s in the national security world, whereas I’m just an outside observer. He’s prone to intense responses to events whereas I’m characterologically more cautious. But this is his field not mine. So in recent days I was struck to see that he thinks I have the Ukraine situation totally wrong and that notwithstanding its battlefield embarrassments and mishaps Putin is on the verge of getting everything he wants and Ukraine is on the verge of what amounts to surrender.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate talk about new revelations into what major Republican players were doing during and around the insurrection.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

From TPM Reader JJ …

Years ago I worked for a building trades union. I once had a car ride with a fellow staffer, an older Catholic guy who I’d once heard express opposition to abortion.   I thought I’d ask him about it.

I assumed I’d hear a version of the Catholic take on it. Instead, he was refreshingly honest–

“These c**ts have gotten out of control.”

I was offline for a few hours and I came back to the news that ex-President Trump is calling on Vladimir Putin to help him unearth dirt about Joe Biden. I had been thinking it was going to be important going forward to remind people that Trump has repeatedly worked with Vladimir Putin to intervene in U.S. domestic politics and subvert U.S. elections. After all, it seems like Putin is getting less popular in the United States of late. But I guess that won’t be as pressing a need as long as Trump continues to re-collude out in the open on an ongoing basis. So here we are.

QAnon Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) recently endorsed “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance’s bid for the Republican nomination in Ohio’s Senate race. And as he continues his descent into Trumpian madness, he’s welcoming the far-right lawmaker’s support — and all the white nationalist ties that come with it — with open, orange-tinted arms.

It’s quaint now, but I wrote a bit here about my impression of Vance from the perspective of a young person living in a small conservative town in the Midwest at the time. I was once cautiously stirred by “Hillbilly Elegy” for what it did to seemingly usher-in a new wave of nuance surrounding conservative intellectualism. But I was also deeply skeptical of his approach to Republican values; a style that seemed far too generous to the GOP during an era in which the conservative movement largely shrugged off the vile and racist rhetoric overpowering the party.

If you follow reports closely, you’ve heard that the Ukrainian military has incrementally been reclaiming territory from Russian forces in the north of the country and parts of the south in recent days. The situation is different in the east and southeast, in parts of which Russia has continued to consolidate its possession of territory. There have also been reports of Russian withdrawals. But it’s been hard to disentangle which of these withdrawals are more like retreats in the face of counter-offensives, or simply redeployments to find more defensible positions, or actual withdrawals. All that’s been clear is that in substantial parts of the country Ukraine has been retaking control of territory that had been occupied by the Russian Army.

Today though Russia’s deputy defense minister said that Moscow would “fundamentally cut back military activity in the direction of Kyiv and Chernigiv” in order to “increase mutual trust for future negotiations to agree and sign a peace deal with Ukraine.”

I’m trying to make sense of how big a deal this is, how new this is and frankly just what to make of it. I was even put slightly on my guard since the reporting is in part from Bob Woodward and it is so reminiscent of the notorious 18 minute gap in Watergate tape recordings. But what the Post and CBS News report this morning is that in the records turned over to the January 6th committee there is a roughly eight hour gap in the record of the President’s actions and calls that maps almost exactly to the period of violent insurrection on Capitol Hill.

I am of course just speculating, but that ^ might be Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) current internal debate after Sen. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) flailing around on Fox News this weekend.

As head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Scott put out an “11-Point Plan to Rescue America” last month to attempt to give Republicans some sort of safe-space to coalesce around heading into the 2022 Midterms — as the party seemingly does not have a broader legislative agenda, beyond letting the right-wing media rile the base into a frenzy over faux culture wars.

A new article (sub req) in the FT says that Russia and Ukraine are discussing a ceasefire agreement in which Ukraine would agree not to join NATO but also get NATO-like security guarantees from major European powers and the U.S. Ukraine would also be free to join the EU. This essentially amounts to armed neutrality and likely an agreement not to host foreign troops on its territory. A key element appears to be an agreement to leave the question of the territories Russia held as of February 24th as a matter to be discussed in subsequent negotiations. So an agreement to disagree for the time being essentially.

The unknown in these negotiations and the reported draft agreements they are working on is that no one on the Ukrainian side — and I suspect in the U.S. as well — is clear at all about whether Russia is actually seriously considering these potential agreements or simply using them to stall for time or keep the Western powers from imposing more sanctions.