I must say that I am looking forward to the raft of articles in the works from the Times, WaPo, Politico and above all Axios about the GOP’s reckoning with the fact that their party leader (and most of his party) has spent the last several years toadying and obsequiously embracing Vladimir Putin and Russia. I jest of course since I have little hope that any of these pieces will be written. But the leader of this party has spent the last seven years fawning over the increasingly dictatorial leader of the country who has now tipped the world into the biggest international crisis in a generation and I guess we’re somehow not going to talk about that. I mean, he actually got impeached over it and for participating in a scheme to make the country Russia just invaded easier to invade.

It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on this character.

Convicted Russian spy Maria Butina just did a bizarre and rather concerning interview with the BBC in which she argued that Ukraine is “bombing” its own civilians and pushed Kremlin talking points that President Vlodymyr Zelensky, a Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors, is a Nazi.

The interview honestly sounds like a confused hostage video. I’ll get into the details more below. But since serving 15 months in U.S. prisons after being convicted of working as an unregistered foreign agent — for attempting to infiltrate the National Rifle Association and after admitting to helping set up a Russian backchannel for conservative strategists ahead of the 2016 election — Butina returned to Russia in 2019. And she’s a politician now — apparently a fairly successful one. Butina became a member of the Russian parliament’s lower chamber in 2021 and has batted away accusations that President Putin helped hand her the position as a “reward” for her criminal endeavors in the U.S.

In the midst of so much news I wanted to give you a heads up about something very important we have coming up next week. We suspended our annual sign up drives for the last two years. But we’re bringing them back because … well, because they’re super important and we need regular readers to become members. So if you’re a regular reader and you haven’t become a member or your membership has lapsed please consider joining or joining again. And if you’re already a member please spread the word about how cool a TPM membership is or lean on your coworker who keeps leaning over your desk to read Prime content without a subscription. The overwhelming percentage of the funds that keep our operation going come from your membership fees. So we really need you. There’s no big corporation behind this outfit to keep it going. It’s entirely reliant on you.

So keep an eye out next week when we get the drive started. And thank you in advance.