Editors’ Blog

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.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the RNC’s latest missive and some glimmers of hope for the Biden administration in the economy and pandemic.

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

There’s a comprehensive new report out from religious scholars and prominent Christian faith groups in the U.S. that dissects the role Christian nationalism played in inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and also previews ways in which Christian nationalism could be harnessed to embolden future acts of political violence.

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.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) stepped in it/spilled it/has soup on her face/etc.

The QAnon congresswoman is known for her various unhinged diatribes, usually packed with some layer of confusing racism or anti-Semitism or Nazism.

Today during an interview with the far-right Real America News outlet, Greene was attempting to comment on Rep. Troy Nehls’ (R-TX) recent bizarre claims that Capitol Hill police took unauthorized photos of his office last fall and that Capitol law enforcement is engaged in some deep state plot to “destroy” him. The Capitol Police pushed back on the allegations saying an officer merely locked the congressman’s office door when it was left wide open during Thanksgiving break. TPM’s Josh Kovensky got a copy of a Capitol Police report and he explains the whole faux-outrage incident in depth here, but essentially Nehls and other far-right lawmakers are seizing on Nehls’ accusations as fodder for their campaign to blame the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Police as they flail to divert blame for the attack away from Trump and his supporters.

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.

Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers (R) has made quite the name for herself in the far-right, Big Lie corners of the Republican Party in the last year. As a key figure in the state’s phony election “audit,” Rogers knows how to aggressively captivate her audience.

She’s injected herself into several election-overturning causes in recent months. In the waning days of the sketch audit of 2020 election results in Arizona’s Maricopa County, Rogers suggested imprisoning members of the Republican-majority board of supervisors when the county rejected the state Senate’s subpoena for additional election-related materials. The Trumpian state lawmaker has since proposed legislation that would make it easier for the governor’s office to investigate so-called instances of election “fraud,” setting state Republicans up to try to Big Lie their way out of any 2022 disappointments for the party.

Now, she’s getting involved in the Canadian anti-vax trucker protests in Ottawa that have devolved into a reckless display of Big Rig power over the course of the last 12 days with thousands of protesters flooding the area surrounding Ottawa’s Parliament building.