Editors’ Blog

Before we delve deeper into the details I just want to point your attention to this article in the Times magazine. Through the Trump administration it was clear for all to see that Jared Kushner and Saudi de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman (aka MBS) had developed a corrupt relationship which was both defining U.S.-Saudi relations and laying the groundwork for saving and then expanding Kushner’s (and wife Ivanka Trump’s) personal fortune. Now we learn that six months after he left the White House, a sovereign wealth fund controlled by MBS made a $2 billion investment in Kushner’s brand new private equity firm, Affinity Partners — this despite the fact that the panel that screens these investments for the Saudi sovereign wealth funds advised against the investment for reasons ranging from it being a bad investment, excess risk, Kushner’s firm being poorly run and inexperienced, not to mention the obvious “public relations risks.”

Below I recommended two articles about the occupation of Bucha, one from the Journal, the second from Der Spiegel. They are really best read together because they tell different but complementary stories. The first is more about an indisciplined and corrupt army which resorted to escalating brutality and killings as they became both more convinced the population was the Ukrainian Army against them and also more angry about their military failure. The second article gives more focus to mass killings as matters of policy, particularly military aged men and various local notables on lists of politicians, local leaders, former or possible future soldiers, anyone defined as a ‘nationalist’. The power of reading them together is that you get a sense of how both things were happening, both were feeding on each other.

Here is a great companion piece to the Journal article on Bucha that I linked to earlier. It’s from Der Spiegel. But it’s in English. It’s a very different sort of article but largely lines up in the story it tells. There’s quite a lot here, a lot of it hard to read. But I wanted to draw your attention to one passage which drives home just how critical the very early battlefield successes of the Ukrainian Army were to galvanizing the resistance of the Ukrainian population (emphasis added) …

I hope you’ve had a chance to read Josh Kovensky’s exclusive about the DC feds impersonators. Normally we wouldn’t be terribly interested in whether someone’s rents were months or years in arrears. But in this case it makes this story even more baffling and mysterious. We’ve been wondering for a couple days, Who was behind this? Where’d the money come from? As Josh reports, it wasn’t coming from anywhere. Because these guys never paid rent at all. The landlord eventually sued them but when it came time to evict they were protected by COVID-era eviction moratoriums.

I want to strongly commend this article in The Wall Street Journal on Bucha to your attention. It’s very hard to read and also a near masterpiece of narrative reporting. We’ve all seen the pictures and the horrors of this town. And there’s been claims of organized mass killing and even a plan of organized genocide. This account provides a more complicated but no less horrifying account. As we’ve heard from other towns, Russian soldiers were initially reasonably behaved and even polite to Ukrainian civilians in the town. Some confided with locals that they weren’t sure why they were there or what the point of the war was. But over time discipline began to break down. And Russian soldiers became increasingly suspicious that Ukrainian civilians were communicating their positions to Ukrainian soldiers and irregulars. This became a bigger concern as the Russian offensive bogged down. “They saw a spotter in every person who lived on the fifth floor,” one Bucha resident told the Journal, “They saw a commando in each of us.”

We’re following various leads on the DC Secret Service/impersonation caper. Some of them are quite, quite weird. But the most interesting thing about this case so far is how little information we know. The raids in this story happened two days ago, Wednesday afternoon. Normally in a case like this — apparent espionage, probable corruption involving the Secret Service — we’d be seeing a steady stream of articles revealing new details of the plot. But there’s close to nothing. I get the sense that’s because the DOJ and the FBI don’t really know themselves. Or at least, they didn’t yesterday.

If Roe v. Wade is overturned as conservative justices have signaled it might be this summer, abortion will become near-illegal almost instantly in 17 states.

As my colleague Kate Riga reported back in December, a large chunk of those states, including Michigan, have old laws on the books that were put in place before Roe gave people who can become pregnant the national right to an abortion. A few of those states have what’s referred to as a “trigger law” in place meant to be enacted as soon as Roe falls that would ban most or all abortions in the state. Some of those 17 states have both measures in place.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the Republican party going full QAnon and the latest follies of Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC).

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

Two new nuggets from the latest AP report on the DC caper we’ve been discussing through the day. Prosecutors allege that one of the two men accused of impersonating federal agents told witnesses that he was associated with the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency. He apparently also had visas showing multiple recent visits to Pakistan and Iran. Prosecutors also told a judge at a hearing today that during the raids on the men’s apartments FBI agents found “body armor, gas masks, zip ties, handcuffs, equipment to break through doors, drones, radios and police training manuals.” Yikes.

As we wait to hear more about the arrest of two men trying to infiltrate the Secret Service there’s one part of the story I want to highlight. Multiple U.S. Secret Service officers accepted free apartments for roughly a year from one of the accused men, Arian Taherzadeh. The value of these gifts varied from just over forty thousand to just under fifty thousand dollars annually. This is in addition to various other gifts.