Just between you and me: We’re launching a really critical fundraising drive tomorrow. So please keep an eye out.

Just a quick update on the situation in Ukraine. We appear to be seeing the first probing actions of Ukraine’s long awaited counteroffensive. But two other big things have happened over the last 18 hours which I wanted to note. One is either the collapse or sabotage of a dam in the eastern part of occupied Ukraine, which has caused a vast flood surge through the region. There are competing explanations and accusations over what and how it happened. The other is a news story. The Washington Post is reporting new circumstantial but pretty strong evidence that Ukraine was behind the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines last year.

As evidence mounts that Gov. Ron DeSantis was behind the latest migrant trafficking stunt in Sacramento, Bexar County (San Antonio) Sheriff Javier Salazar is recommending criminal charges in last year’s trafficking of migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard.

From Morning Memo:

Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has told a judge he’d rather be taken into custody pre-trial than reveal the donors who co-signed on his $500,000 bond.

It probably goes without saying if you think about it. But it’s worth saying it out loud in any case. Aside from Trump, all of the people running for President in the GOP primary, with the semi-exception of Ron DeSantis, aren’t actually running for President. Normally, long shot entrants at least think they have some chance or they have some plan for career advancement by making a solid showing. But in this race, every candidate is in that category. And not just random mayors or people who’ve been out of politics for years. But senators, big-state governors and more. The thinking seems to be: “I’ll have some name recognition for 2028. And who knows? He might die and then I’ll have a campaign already in place! Why not?”

There’s not one piece on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ political stunt of an election-police task force that we’ve published in the past year or so that didn’t spell out in greater detail what we’ve seen to be true since the beginning: that this sham election crimes force was created for the purposes of boosting DeSantis’ 2024 bid and scaring certain voters away from the polls.

This new reporting from the Orlando Sentinel only adds to that rather solid hypothesis.

I mentioned over the weekend that we have another example of migrants being hoodwinked into getting on a plane and then sent somewhere they didn’t know they were going to. Just like when Ron DeSantis did it last year with those folks he sent to Martha’s Vineyard, the aim is to “own the libs” and use vulnerable people for a partisan political stunt. I didn’t want to get ahead of the facts yesterday. But as one might have expected we now have the first indications it was DeSantis behind it again.

You’ve probably heard about The Atlantic article which has painted a devastating picture of network CEO Chris Licht and the state of the network on his watch. (CNN has had some time slots where Newsmax has managed to beat it of late.) There are several moving parts to this story. After what turned out to be a woefully mismanaged acquisition by AT&T, CNN and its parent Time Warner were picked up cheap by Discovery, a cable news heavyweight known for producing cheap shows with solid viewership. That was a bad sign for CNN and HBO — both in their in own spheres premium properties. The results for CNN, judged in viewership, have been abysmal. But for all the grief Licht is getting, this is fundamentally a failure not of execution but of strategy.

Put simply, the theory behind the current revamp of CNN is the network got “too liberal” and gave on-air hosts too much leeway for personal commentary and advocacy. But did CNN get “too liberal”? Or did the national political environment become so polarized and so knocked off the kilter of democratic norms that news coverage forced some level of confrontational stance? We’re back to the old problem of whether to prioritize “balance” or “accuracy.” Which of those two is more important shapes everything about how you approach journalism.

We have another mystery on our hands. Someone bused more than a dozen migrants from El Paso into New Mexico and then put them on a private jet which flew them to Sacramento. They were then dropped off in front of a Catholic church with no pre-arrangement or warning. Like the the DeSantis/Martha’s Vineyard stunt last year the migrants were apparently lured or tricked into getting on the plane. California authorities are now trying to get to the bottom of who was behind it.

Back in another lifetime, now-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy upset a bunch of his Republican colleagues when he just straight-up announced on Fox News that the Select Committee on Benghazi was making then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton look bad, and suggested that, hey, that was probably just the goal all along??? 🙃🙃