Editors’ Blog

Speaker Pelosi has tested positive for COVID. She is currently asymptomatic, according to her Deputy Chief of Staff.

Below I mentioned this wild story of two men impersonating government law enforcement agents to infiltrate the Secret Service. As far as I can tell there’s still no information about who was behind the plot, who was funding it or what the two men were trying to accomplish. From the limited information available the plot seems to be elaborate and well-funded but less than entirely professional. There seem to be way more loose ends than I’d expect in a state-sponsored effort. But really who knows?

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 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 U.S. And this was actually the context for an incident which people in the U.S. 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.