Quotes of the Day:
"Is any man afraid of change? What can take place without change? What then is more pleasing or more suitable to the universal nature? And can you take a hot bath unless the wood for the fire undergoes a change? And can you be nourished unless the food undergoes a change? And can anything else that is useful be accomplished without change? Do you not see then that for yourself also to change is just the same, and equally necessary for the universal nature?"
- Marcus Aurelius
“Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth.”
- Theodore Roosevelt, The Man In The Arena: Speeches and Essays by Theodore Roosevelt
Will Rogers suggested a plan to get rid of WW I German subs: "Boil the ocean." How you gonna do that? he was asked. "I dunno, I'm 'Plans,' that's 'Operations.'"
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 19 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Ukraine Intensifies Strikes Against Russian-Controlled Areas
3. What Hundreds of Photos of Weapons Reveal About Russia’s Brutal War Strategy
4. 'It's just hell there': Russia still pounds eastern Ukraine
5. Opinion | Are We Sure America Is Not at War in Ukraine?
6. America’s shame: About 14 percent of military families are food insecure
7. When the Lies Come Home (Ukraine) by Douglas Macgregor
8. Ukraine Live Updates: Finland and Sweden Push for NATO Membership
9. China May oil imports from Russia soar to a record, surpass top supplier Saudi
10. A dictator’s son promised unity. His election is pulling Filipinos apart.
11. Refineries are making a windfall. Why do they keep closing?
12. UKRAINE NEEDS MORE ARTILLERY SUPPORT: Congress Was Right to Defend Ukraine – Please Do More
13. How can Multilateral and Bilateral security partnerships coexist, while advancing U.S. strategic goals?
14. When 'Fake News' Was a Force for Good (book review)
15. Ukrainian troops are deserting battle and Russian troops have 'troubled' morale as the war is expected to last years, NATO chief says
16. New NATO Strategic Concept Will Broaden Vision of Deterrence
17. He Tried to Reform the Way a Top D.C. Think Tank Gets Money. Now the FBI Is Looking Into Him.
18. Authoritarian regimes are a health threat to the world - analysis
19. Meet the legendary ‘father of Special Forces’ who helped establish the Green Berets
20. Awakened to Putin’s Threat, Biden and the West Nod Off Again
21. The Frontline Interview: J. Michael Luttig (January 6th)
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 19 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 19
Karolina Hird, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Mason Clark
June 19, 5:30 pm ET
Click here to see ISW's interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
The UK Ministry of Defense assesses that the Kremlin’s continued framing of its invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation” rather than a war is actively hindering Russian force generation capabilities. The UK Ministry of Defense reported on June 19 that Russian authorities are struggling to find legal means to punish military dissenters and those who refuse to mobilize because the classification of the conflict in Ukraine as a “special military operation” precludes legal punitive measures that could be employed during a formal war.[1] ISW has previously assessed that the Kremlin’s framing of the war as a “special operation” is compounding consistent issues with poor perceptions of Russian military leadership among Russian nationalists, problems with paying troops, lack of available forces, and unclear objectives among Russian forces. The Kremlin is continuing to attempt to fight a major and grinding war in Ukraine with forces assembled for what the Kremlin incorrectly assumed would be a short invasion against token Ukrainian resistance. The Kremlin continues to struggle to correct this fundamental flaw in its “special military operation.”
Russian authorities likely seek to use war crimes trials against captured Ukrainian servicemen, particularly troops that defended Mariupol, to advance its narratives around the war. Russian sources reported that the authorities of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) plan to hold war crimes tribunals until the end of August 2022 and that at least one of these tribunals will be held in Mariupol.[2] These tribunals will reportedly be judged in accordance with DNR legislation (which notably allows capital punishment, unlike Russian law) and be modeled on the Nuremberg format for war crimes trials. The trials are a sham attempt to try lawful prisoners of war as war criminals and support the Kremlin’s false framing of its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine as a ”de-Nazification” operation. Despite the fact that DNR authorities plan to try Ukrainian servicemen in the DNR, a source in Russian law enforcement told state-owned media outlet TASS that the deputy commander of the Azov Regiment and the commander of the Ukrainian 36th Marine Brigade will both be transferred to Russia for investigation and trial.[3] Russian authorities will likely use these trials to strengthen legal controls of occupied areas and further demoralize Ukrainian defenders by setting a harsh legal precedent during preliminary tribunals, as well as advancing the Kremlin’s false narrative of invading Ukraine to “de-Nazify” it.
Key Takeaways
- Concentrated Russian artillery power paired with likely understrength infantry units remains insufficient to enable Russian advances within Severodonetsk.
- Russian forces continued to prepare to advance on Slovyansk from southeast of Izyum and west of Lyman.
- Russian forces are focusing on strengthening defensive positions along the Southern Axis due to recent successful Ukrainian counterattacks along the Kherson-Mykolaiv Oblast border.
- Successful Ukrainian counterattacks in the Zaporizhia area are forcing Russian forces to rush reinforcements to this weakened sector of the front line.
- Russian forces are likely conducting false-flag artillery attacks against Russian-held territory to dissuade Ukrainian sentiment and encourage the mobilization of proxy forces.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and three supporting efforts);
- Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian troops in the cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts
- Supporting Effort 1—Kharkiv City;
- Supporting Effort 2—Southern Axis;
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Concentrated Russian artillery power paired with likely understrength infantry units remains insufficient to enable Russian advances within Severodonetsk, as Russian troops continued to fight for control of the city but made few gains on June 19. Russian forces continued efforts to encircle the remaining Ukrainian troops in the Azot industrial plant.[4] Russian Telegram channels additionally claimed that Russian forces are advancing on Lysychansk from the south and fighting in Berestove, Spirne, Vovchoyarivka, and the Lysychansk Oil Refinery.[5] Russian troops conducted airstrikes around Severodonetsk and Lysychansk and strengthened their grouping to the south of the area around Orikhove and Toshkivka.[6] Russian forces likely seek to levy their attempts to interdict the T1302 Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway to support offensive operations in Lysychansk.
Russian forces continued to prepare for offensive operations toward Slovyansk from southeast of Izyum and west of Lyman but did not make any confirmed advances in either direction on June 19. Russian forces conducted reconnaissance and artillery strikes against Ukrainian positions southeast of Izyum around Dibrove, Virnopillya, Kurulka, Bohorodychne, and Dolyna, as well as to the west of Lyman.[7]
Russian forces continued offensive operations to the east of Bakhmut to interdict Ukrainian lines of communication along the T1302 Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway on June 19. Russian forces reportedly fought around Nyrkove, Mykolaivka, and Berestove and conducted air, artillery, and missile strikes against Ukrainian positions east of Bakhmut and near the T1302.[8] Russian forces will likely continue efforts to gain access to the T1302 in order to support operations in Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, especially as fighting in the area has largely stalled and Russian forces are increasingly unable to consolidate control of the city, even with artillery superiority.
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Withdraw forces to the north and defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum)
Russian forces focused on maintaining their occupied frontiers north of Kharkiv City and fired at Ukrainian positions in northern Kharkiv Oblast on June 19. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops unsuccessfully attempted reconnaissance-in-force operations in Rubizhne (in Kharkiv, not Luhansk Oblast), and Russian forces are likely fighting for more advantageous positions along the entire frontline north of Kharkiv City.[9] Russian forces additionally continued artillery strikes on Kharkiv City and surrounding settlements.[10]
Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Recent Ukrainian counterattacks have forced Russian troops to focus on maintaining their defensive positions along the Southern Axis on June 19.[11] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces in Kherson Oblast are strengthening their air-defense systems in the area, likely in response to continual, successful Ukrainian aviation attacks against Russian forces south of Davydiv Brid.[12] Mayor of Melitopol Ivan Fedorov claimed that Ukrainian troops are approaching the Kherson Oblast.[13] While ISW cannot independently confirm the current positions of Ukrainian troops, it is likely that localized Ukrainian counterattacks continue to push back Russian forces, especially along the Kherson-Mykolaiv Oblast border, and Ukrainian forces may be able to further threaten Kherson City in the coming weeks.
Russian forces are continuing to accumulate equipment and manpower in central Zaporizhia Oblast, specifically along the Dniprorudne-Vasylivka-Orikhiv line, likely in response to Ukrainian counterattacks.[14] Fedorov stated that Ukrainian forces pushed the Zaporizhia Oblast frontline 10 km south. Ukrainian officials have previously reported that the Zaporizhia frontline shifted five to seven kilometers south and it is unclear whether Ukrainian forces have advanced 10 km in total or in addition to these earlier advances. Ukraine’s Zaporizhia Regional Military Administration stated that Russian troops are moving equipment and vehicles from Crimea through Melitopol toward the Vasylivka and Polohy areas and that Russian sabotage groups clashed with Ukrainian troops near the Zaporizhia-Donetsk Oblast border on June 19.[15] Russian forces are likely accumulating troops in Zaporizhia Oblast to defend against ongoing Ukrainian counterattacks towards Melitopol that could threaten Russian control of the city.
Russian forces continued missile and artillery strikes against various locations in Kherson, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, and Odesa Oblasts.[16] Although Ukrainian air defense intercepted missiles before they struck Odesa directly, Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command noted that Russian forces likely targeted Odesa and other areas that are not experiencing direct hostilities to exert psychological pressure on the population and undermine local economies.[17] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command additionally reported that Russian forces are restructuring their naval grouping to include more submarines, which is a likely response to successful Ukrainian attacks on Russian naval assets in the Black Sea.[18]
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)
Russian forces are likely employing false-flag artillery strikes against infrastructure in Russian-held areas of Donetsk Oblast in order to dissuade pro-Ukrainian sentiment and encourage the mobilization of proxy forces. Open-source Twitter accounts confirmed ISW’s previous assessment that artillery attacks against Donetsk City were likely conducted from within Russian-held territory, refuting accusations made by Russian authorities that blamed Ukrainian troops for the attacks.[19] Such false-flag attacks are likely being propagated by Russian authorities to create hostility toward the Ukrainian military.
[3] https://tass dot ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/14965913?utm_source=meduza.io&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=meduza.io&utm_referrer=meduza.io
2. Ukraine Intensifies Strikes Against Russian-Controlled Areas
Photos at the link.
Ukraine Intensifies Strikes Against Russian-Controlled Areas
Donetsk comes under worst artillery barrages since fighting erupted there in 2014, as Russia hits cities across Ukraine with missiles
Updated June 19, 2022 1:13 pm ET
Latest
- Ukrainian artillery pounded Donetsk, the biggest Russian-controlled city in Donbas.
- A Ukrainian missile attack on an ammunition warehouse likely came as a setback for Russia’s assault on Severodonetsk.
- Russian missiles hit Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, as well as oil refineries in northeastern and central regions.
Ukraine intensified artillery and missile strikes against the Russian-controlled parts of the Donbas region, targeting weapons depots and military bases in an effort to stall
a Russian offensive, while Moscow unleashed new salvoes of long-range missiles—some of them shot down by air defenses—on cities across Ukraine.
The city of Donetsk, the biggest in Russian-controlled Donbas, this weekend came under the worst artillery barrages since the conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014. The strikes hit military facilities, according to video footage of burning ammunition depots posted on local social-media channels, but also damaged civilian infrastructure. The Russian-appointed mayor of Donetsk, Aleksey Kulemzin, whose office was also hit by the shelling, said five civilians had been killed.
According to Igor Girkin, a former Russian intelligence officer who sparked the violence in Donbas eight years ago by seizing the city of Slovyansk, Ukrainian shelling of Donetsk also destroyed the headquarters of the 1st Army Corps, the official name of the military force of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. The corps commander, Russian Maj. Gen. Roman Kutuzov, was killed by Ukrainian troops earlier this month.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine was launched by President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 24 with the ostensible goal of protecting Donbas, one-third of which has been controlled by Russian proxies since 2014. But Russian forces have been unable to dislodge Ukrainian troops from the immediate outskirts of Donetsk in nearly four months of fighting.
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Questioned about this failure at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Friday, Mr. Putin said that a frontal attack on Ukrainian positions near Donetsk would cause too many casualties and called for patience as Russian troops carry out a complex campaign to encircle Ukrainian forces in the region.
A building at a local market stands charred by shelling in Donetsk, a Russian-controlled city in eastern Ukraine.
PHOTO: ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO/REUTERS
The body of a man lay covered on Saturday after a rocket strike in Lysychansk.
PHOTO: ARIS MESSINIS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
For the past month and a half, the fighting in Donbas concentrated around the city of Severodonetsk, the administrative center of the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Luhansk region, which together with the Donetsk region makes up Donbas.
While Russian troops have made slow gains in the city, at tremendous cost to both sides, they have so far failed in their efforts to take it over completely or to cut off the main access road to the remaining Ukrainian-held parts of Luhansk, such as the town of Lysychansk that overlooks Severodonetsk. Ukraine’s military said Sunday it repelled a Russian probe near the town of Toshkivka, forcing Russian forces to retreat.
A well-known Ukrainian commander, Oleh Kutsyn, head of the volunteer Carpathian Sich battalion, was killed near the city of the Izyum in the Kharkiv region, Ukrainian officials said Sunday.
Watch: Macron, Scholz, Draghi Meet With Zelensky in Kyiv
Watch: Macron, Scholz, Draghi Meet With Zelensky in Kyiv
Play video: Watch: Macron, Scholz, Draghi Meet With Zelensky in Kyiv
The leaders of France, Germany and Italy met with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Thursday, at a pivotal moment in the war with Russia. They traveled to the country by train and also visited Irpin, where the French president said there were signs of war crimes. Photo: Ludovic Marin/Press Pool
The Russian offensive in Severodonetsk is likely to have been further stalled by a successful Ukrainian missile strike on an ammunition storage facility used by Russia and its proxy forces in the town of Krasny Luch, deep in the rear of Russian-controlled Luhansk. While the strike, using the Tochka-U ballistic missile, took place on Thursday, it was only over the weekend that the extent of the damage became clear, with footage showing a devastated wasteland littered with burned artillery shells. According to pro-Russian military correspondents, the Krasny Luch facility was the principal warehouse of Russian ammunition for the Severodonetsk offensive.
Russia’s main response to Ukrainian attacks in Donbas has been to intensify strikes against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure facilities. Russian missiles late Saturday hit oil refineries in the towns of Shebelyne near Kharkiv and Novomoskovsk near Dnipro, causing giant fires. A rescue worker died in Novomoskovsk when a burning fuel tank exploded Sunday morning, according to the regional government.
Ukrainian soldiers move a howitzer into position in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.
PHOTO: EFREM LUKATSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Children playing in the Kyiv-area suburb of Borodyanka, which came under attack early in the war.
PHOTO: SERHII KOROVAYNY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Russia also continued hitting the northeastern city of Kharkiv itself with Iskander missiles and long-range artillery. While Ukrainian forces pushed Russian troops from the immediate outskirts of Kharkiv last month, that counteroffensive stalled as Russia poured reinforcements into the area, seeking to prevent Ukrainian troops from reaching the nearby Russian border. Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said Sunday he has canceled a planned visit to Madrid to stay put for “more effective coordination with the military to defend Kharkiv.”
Not all Russian long-range missile strikes are successful, especially as Ukraine in recent weeks started using its jet fighters to intercept incoming missiles. That is what happened Sunday morning over the towns of Irpin and Bucha near Kyiv, where a cruise missile was shot down, according to regional officials. In the southern Odessa region, two SS-N-26 Onyx supersonic missiles launched from Crimea were successfully intercepted, according to the regional administration there.
Ukraine has repeatedly asked Western partners for more and better weapons, particularly air-defense systems that could protect the country’s cities from Russian missiles. While Slovakia has provided Ukraine with a Soviet-designed S-300 system, no Western wide-area air-defense platforms have been supplied so far. Germany last month promised to deliver the modern Iris-T air-defense system, which could protect an entire city such as Kyiv or Odessa, but it will take months before it is actually shipped.
A fuel facility in Novomoskovsk, central Ukraine, burned on Sunday after a Russian attack.
PHOTO: OBTAINED BY REUTERS/VIA REUTERS
Mourners on Saturday held a memorial ceremony in Kyiv for a young activist killed fighting in the Kharkiv region.
PHOTO: CAROL GUZY/ZUMA PRESS
3. What Hundreds of Photos of Weapons Reveal About Russia’s Brutal War Strategy
What Hundreds of Photos of Weapons Reveal About Russia’s Brutal War Strategy
Reflecting a shockingly barbaric and old-fashioned wartime strategy, Russian forces have pummeled Ukrainian cities and towns with a barrage of rockets and other munitions, most of which can be considered relatively crude relics of the Cold War, and many of which have been banned widely under international treaties, according to a New York Times analysis.
The attacks have made repeated and widespread use of weapons that kill, maim and destroy indiscriminately — a potential violation of international humanitarian law. These strikes have left civilians — including children — dead and injured, and they have left critical infrastructure, like schools and homes, a shambles.
dThe Times examined more than 1,000 pictures taken by its own photojournalists and wire-service photographers working on the ground in Ukraine, as well as visual evidence presented by Ukrainian government and military agencies. Times journalists identified and categorized more than 450 instances in which weapons or groups of weapons were found in Ukraine. All told, there were more than 2,000 identifiable munitions, a vast majority of which were unguided.
The magnitude of the evidence collected and cataloged by The Times shows that the use of these kinds of weapons by Russia has not been limited or anomalous. In fact, it has formed the backbone of the country’s strategy for war since the beginning of the invasion.
Of the weapons identified by The Times, more than 210 were types that have been widely banned under international treaties. All but a handful were cluster munitions, including their submunitions, which can pose a grave risk to civilians for decades after war has ended. More than 330 other weapons appeared to have been used on or near civilian structures.
Because of the difficulties in getting comprehensive information in wartime, these tallies are undercounts. Some of the weapons identified may have been fired by Ukrainian forces in an effort to defend themselves against the invasion, but evidence points to far greater use by Russian forces.
Customary international humanitarian laws and treaties — including the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their protocols — demand that the driving principle in war be military necessity, which mandates all combatants direct their actions toward legitimate military targets. The law requires a balance between a military mission and humanity. Combatants must not carry out attacks that are disproportionate, where the expected civilian harm is clearly excessive, according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, to the direct and concrete military advantage that would be anticipated. Combatants must consider distinction, that attacks are directed only toward lawful targets and people and are not applied indiscriminately. And they must not use weapons calculated to inflict unnecessary suffering.
“The Russians have violated every single one of those principles almost daily,” said Mike Newton, a Vanderbilt University law professor who frequently supports efforts to prosecute war crimes all over the world.
“The law of war is far more demanding than the rule of simple expediency and convenience,” Professor Newton said. “Just because I have a weapon doesn’t mean I can use it.”
What follows is an analysis of the visual evidence The Times examined in its investigation.
Unguided Munitions
A vast majority of the weapons identified by The Times were unguided munitions, which lack accuracy and, as a result, may be used in greater numbers to destroy a single target. Both of these factors increase the likelihood of shells and rockets falling in areas populated by civilians.
Russia has relied heavily in Ukraine on long-range attacks with unguided weapons, like howitzers and artillery rockets. By comparison, Western military forces have almost entirely converted their arsenals to use guided rockets, missiles and bombs, and they have even developed kits that can turn regular artillery shells into precision weapons. Russia may be limited by sanctions and export controls affecting its ability to restock modern weapons, and much of its precision-guided arsenal may now have been exhausted.
D-30 Howitzer
A Soviet design used since World War II.
Illustration of a D-30 Howitzer
BM-21 multibarrel rocket system
A Soviet launch system in use since the 1960s, in which 40 launch tubes are mounted on a truck chassis.
Illustration of a multibarrel rocket system
Source: U.S. Department of Defense
These Cold War-era, unguided Russian weapons have the capacity to shoot well beyond the range of the human eye — many miles past the point where a soldier could see the eventual target. To use these weapons lawfully at long range, Russia would have to use drones or soldiers known as “forward observers” to watch where the weapons hit, and then radio back corrections. There was little evidence that they were doing so until recently.
“I think what we’re seeing here with the Russians is kind of like what you’d see back in World War II, where they just bomb the hell out of people,” a senior American defense official said in an interview.
“The most surprising thing is, I guess, their philosophy on trying to break the will or the spirit of the Ukrainian people by just leveling large sections or entire towns,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about assessments of Russian behavior in Ukraine. He added: “This is what war used to look like, and they just brought it back center stage. And people, I think, are horrified.”
Artillery rockets like the 122-millimeter Grad were fielded long before precision-guided weapons were invented. They were designed for something called “saturation fire” — in which a handful of mobile rocket launchers, each of which can fire as many as 40 rockets in about 20 seconds, can offer the same firepower as many dozens of larger towed howitzers. They can essentially flood an area with warheads exploding in rapid succession.
When fired in a barrage, the rockets make up for their comparative inaccuracy with sheer volume — blanketing their targets with explosions.
The warheads on these weapons can be devastating. When they explode, they produce a blast wave that can grow in intensity as it bounces off buildings, shattering concrete on neighboring structures and damaging internal organs of anyone nearby. The munition’s casing breaks into razor-sharp fragments that can penetrate bodies. Both the blast wave and the fragments can be lethal at various ranges. Here are three common types of weapons Russia has been using in Ukraine whose fragments can be dangerous to unprotected people at great distances.
Hazardous fragmentation distances
People inside of these distances risk death or serious injury.
Sources: Collective Awareness to Unexploded Ordnance (munitions explosive quantities); U.S. military publications (hazard ranges)
Widespread Use
Munitions and remnants of weapons have been found throughout Ukraine, and about one-fifth of those identified were located outside of the areas of Russian troop presence, according to a Times analysis. Though some of the munitions were almost certainly used in airstrikes, many were most likely launched at maximum range, meaning that estimates of troop presence during the span of the war may have underrepresented the extent of the threat to civilians and civilian structures.
Rockets, missiles and other weapons identified in photos
Approximate extent of Russian troop presence
Sources: Institute for the Study of War with American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project (Russian troop presence) | Notes: Only munitions with known city or town locations are included. Extent of Russian troop presence shows combined assessments from March to June.
In the early weeks of the invasion, Russia shifted many of its attacks to highly populated areas with civilian infrastructure, hitting churches, kindergartens, hospitals and sports facilities, often with imprecise long-range unguided munitions that could be heaved blindly from afar, causing wreckage well beyond the boundaries of occupied territory.
The top prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague has opened a formal inquiry into accusations of atrocities in Ukraine. Under international humanitarian law, combatants and commanders are supposed to take all feasible precautionary measures to minimize harm to civilians and “civilian objects,” like apartments, houses and other buildings and structures that are not being used for military purposes.
Targeting civilian structures or indiscriminately bombing densely populated areas, depending on the circumstances of an attack, could violate the laws of war, or even possibly be a war crime. And the burden of proof to show that an area was a justified military target and that the attack was proportionate, experts have said, generally falls on the aggressor.
A photo of a warhead spiking the center of a playground, though it may be upsetting, does not necessarily prove that a war crime has been committed. Details of each instance, including the intent behind an attack and the surrounding circumstances, must be thoroughly investigated. (For example, if a school was being used as a military command center, it could potentially be considered a justified target under international law, though that would need to be weighed against other factors, like determining whether an attack would be proportionate.)
Still, experts said documenting evidence of potential violations could be an important first step in that investigative process and could help tell the story of civilians struggling on the ground. And a pattern of widespread attacks involving civilians and protected structures, they said, particularly with imprecise weapons, should not be ignored.
“This is a window into the mindset of how Russia views Ukraine,” said Pierre-Richard Prosper, who served as U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues under President George W. Bush and who has also been a war crimes prosecutor. “And it’s a window into how Russia views the likelihood that it will be held accountable for its actions.”
“It’s emblematic,” he said, “of how the Russian government has been operating with impunity on so many fronts.”
Over and over, The Times found visual evidence that Russian forces fired on areas that were near easily recognizable civilian buildings. Hundreds of munitions were identified in or near houses and apartment buildings, and dozens were identified in or near schools. Weapons were also identified close to churches, cemeteries, farms, medical facilities and several playgrounds.
At least 360 weapons were found near civilian structures.
Cluster Munitions
The Times found the distinctive remains of cluster munition warheads scattered across Ukraine — they were photographed sometimes where they landed, and sometimes where they were gathered in piles. The munitions are a class of weapon comprising rockets, bombs, missiles, mortar and artillery shells that split open midair and dispense smaller submunitions over a wide area.
Although some of the Russian submunitions used in Ukraine have been mines designed to kill people or destroy tanks, they usually take the form of small anti-personnel weapons called “bomblets” that are cheaply made, mass-produced and contain less than a pound of high explosives each.
About 20 percent of these submunitions fail to detonate on impact and can explode if later handled. Many of the solid-fuel motors tallied by The Times that were left over from rocket attacks might have carried cluster munition warheads, but it was unclear — meaning that the cluster weapon tally is likely an undercount.
A number of nongovernmental organizations have reported injuries and deaths in Ukraine resulting from cluster munitions. In February, Human Rights Watch said a Russian ballistic missile carrying submunitions struck near a hospital in Vuhledar, killing four civilians and injuring 10, including health care workers, as well as damaging the hospital, an ambulance and other vehicles.
The same month, according to the human rights organization, Russian forces fired cluster munitions into residential areas in Kharkiv, killing at least three civilians. Amnesty International reported that a cargo rocket dropped bomblets on a nursery and kindergarten in Okhtyrka, in an attack that was said to have killed three people, including a child, and to have wounded another child.
In April, Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General, which has been investigating potential war crimes, said a man in the village of Mala Kostromka picked up an unexploded submunition, which then detonated, killing him. In May, the office said Russian forces had used cluster munitions in a village in the Dnipropetrovsk region, possibly killing one person. Neither Ukraine nor Russia (nor the United States) have joined the international treaty banning the use of cluster munitions.
Uragan 9M27 artillery rocket
This is one of the most common cluster munitions Russia is using in Ukraine, and it contains up to 30 high-explosive bomblets.
Sources: Fenix Insight Ltd.; Collective Awareness to Unexploded Ordnance; Armament Research Services (ARES) and Characterisation of Explosive Weapons Project Note: Illustration is not to scale.
The military forces of both Russia and Ukraine are known to have used cluster munitions in Donbas during fighting in 2014 and to have used weapons in civilian spaces. But since the Feb. 24 invasion, with the exception of a single known use attributed to Ukrainian troops, evidence has pointed to nearly exclusive use by Russian forces.
The Times identified these weapons through photos of the skeletal remnants of empty rocket warheads as well as images of unexploded bomblets they left behind — some of which were designed to demolish armored vehicles and others to kill people.
At least 60 cluster submunitions were found.
Cluster Munitions in Civilian Areas
The Times defined civilian areas narrowly, as locations in or near identifiable nonmilitary or government buildings or places, like houses, apartment buildings, shops, warehouses, parks, playgrounds, schools, churches, cemeteries and memorials, hospitals, health facilities, agricultural structures and farms. Because some of the visual evidence — in both city centers and small villages — did not include clear examples of civilian buildings or landmarks, this tally is an undercount as well. The Times did not include infrastructure like roads or bridges.
At least 30 cluster munitions, including submunitions, were found near civilian areas.
Other Weapons of Concern
In the photos below, The Times identified other weapons that are widely scorned by the international humanitarian community: a hand grenade used as a booby trap, an antipersonnel land mine, remnants of incendiary weapons and a group of flechettes.
Multiple types of other potentially problematic weapons were also found.
The hand grenade in the first photo, disguised in a crumpled coffee cup, was found by Ukrainians near their home in Zalissya Village, near Brovary. The weapon potentially violates the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which restricts the use of booby traps in the form of seemingly harmless portable objects that can explode if disturbed or approached.
The POM-3 land mine in the second photo is also banned under international humanitarian laws; it can kill and maim civilians long after wars have ended. Ukrainian military officials reported that they found such land mines in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions. They are a new type of weapon, equipped with sensors that can detect when people walk nearby — unlike older types of land mines, which typically explode when people step on them or disturb attached trip wires. Ukraine is one of 164 nations that have signed a 1997 treaty banning the use of antipersonnel land mines and have pledged to purge their stockpiles, while Russia has refused to join it (as has the United States).
The POM-3 generally is launched by a rocket and then parachutes back to the ground. There, it waits until it senses a person nearby and then launches a small explosive warhead that can detonate midair. The fragments can be lethal to someone as far as 50 feet away. In April, the HALO Trust, a British American nonprofit that removes explosive remnants of weapons after armed conflicts, told The Times that “these create a threat that we don’t have a response for.”
The third photo shows small, hexagonal cylinders of thermite — an incendiary compound used in some Russian rockets and bombs that have been seen bursting open mid-air, streaming burning sticks of thermite onto the ground below. International law specifically prohibits their use near civilian areas.
The fourth photo shows a handful of flechettes, essentially tiny steel arrows released from certain types of shells. Using them does not necessarily violate international humanitarian law, but the weapons could potentially run afoul of the laws of war if deemed to cause unnecessary suffering or if used in civilian areas because of their indiscriminate, lethal nature.
Even guided munitions, which are not generally banned on their face, can potentially run afoul of international humanitarian laws if they are used to harm civilians or structures without a justified military target. The Times found evidence of more than a dozen guided weapons in civilian locations.
At least 50 guided weapons were found, more than a dozen of which were in civilian locations.
Unexploded Weapons
Russia’s weapons strategy will reverberate far into Ukraine’s future. The Times found visual evidence of more than 120 rockets, bombs, shells and other munitions in Ukraine that failed to detonate or were abandoned. That count is surely just the tip of the iceberg, according to experts, who have said that proper cleanup of these weapons will take years.
Leftover munitions not only pose a danger to civilians if they unexpectedly explode, but also can wreak havoc on the environment, contaminating drinking water, soil and air, sometimes sickening or killing people. They can hinder rebuilding after fighting has ended, experts said, because people sometimes cannot return to their homes or cannot reach essential services.
More than 120 dud or abandoned munitions were found.
In April, HALO, which stands for Hazardous Area Life-Support Organization, told The Times that future efforts to remove explosives in Ukraine would require roughly the same number of workers as its current operation in Afghanistan, which has suffered decades of conflict.
Unexploded ordnance poses a serious and ongoing threat, even decades after wars are fought. In Syria, land mines, explosive remnants and unexploded weapons were a leading cause of child casualties last year, making up about a third of recorded injuries and deaths and leaving many children permanently disabled.
In Laos, where the United States used cluster munitions extensively during the Vietnam War, nine million to 27 million unexploded submunitions remained after the conflict, causing more than 10,000 civilian casualties, according to the Congressional Research Service. More than a full century after World War I, unexploded shells still litter parts of Europe where battles were fought. Some zones are still uninhabited because they are considered unsafe.
In addition to launching weapons that have failed to explode in Ukraine, Russia has also attacked local arms depots, causing fires and explosions that typically can fling hundreds of damaged and unstable munitions into surrounding areas.
Leila Sadat, a professor of international law at Washington University in St. Louis and a special adviser to the International Criminal Court prosecutor since 2012, said there was a “huge degree of weapon contamination that then Ukrainians have to address, assuming they can come back to these areas.”
“Ukraine,” Prof. Sadat said, “could become a wasteland.”
4. 'It's just hell there': Russia still pounds eastern Ukraine
'It's just hell there': Russia still pounds eastern Ukraine
AP · by JOHN LEICESTER and DAVID KEYTON · June 20, 2022
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia’s military machine persevered in its ferocious effort to grind down Ukraine’s defenses Monday, as the war’s consequences for food and fuel supplies increasingly weighed on minds around the globe after warnings that the fighting could go on for years.
In Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region, which in recent weeks has become the focal point of Moscow’s attempt to impose its will on its neighbor, battles raged for the control of multiple villages, the local governor said.
The villages are around Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, two cities in the Luhansk region yet to be captured by the Russians, according to Luhansk governor Serhiy Haidai.
Russian shelling and airstrikes on the industrial outskirts of Sievierodonetsk have intensified, he said.
Haidai told The Associated Press on Monday that the situation in Sievierodonetsk was “very difficult,” with the Ukrainian forces maintaining control over just one area — the Azot chemical plant, where a number of Ukrainian fighters, along with about 500 civilians, are taking shelter.
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The Russians keep deploying additional troops and equipment in the area, he said.
“It’s just hell there. Everything is engulfed in fire, the shelling doesn’t stop even for an hour,” Haidai said in written comments.
Only a fraction of 100,000 people who used to live in Sievierodonetsk before the war remain in the city, with no electricity, communications, food or medicine.
Even so, Haidai said, the staunch Ukrainian resistance is preventing Moscow from deploying its resources to other parts of the country.
The British defense ministry noted that the war is not going all Russia’s way, despite its superior military assets.
Russian ground troops are “exhausted,” the defense ministry said in an intelligence report Monday. It blamed poor air support for Russia’s difficulty in making swifter progress on the ground.
Across the world, drivers are rethinking their habits and personal finances amid surging prices for gasoline and diesel, fueled by Russia’s war in Ukraine as well as the global rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic. Energy prices are a key driver of inflation that is rising worldwide and making the cost of living more expensive.
The European Union’s top diplomats gathered in Luxembourg on Monday for talks focused on Ukraine and food security.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called on Russia to lift its blockades of Ukrainian ports to help deliver the millions of tons of grain waiting to be exported.
“I hope — more than hope, I am sure — that the United Nations will at the end reach an agreement,” Borrell said. “It is unconceivable, one cannot imagine that millions of tons of wheat remain blocked in Ukraine while in the rest of the world, people are suffering (from) hunger. This is a real war crime ... You cannot use the hunger of people as a weapon of war.”
Financial help for children displaced by the war in Ukraine was due to come from an unlikely quarter later Monday, when Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov looked to auction off his Nobel Peace Prize medal in New York.
Muratov was awarded the gold medal in October 2021. He helped found the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and was the publication’s editor-in-chief when it shut down in March amid the Kremlin’s clampdown on journalists and public dissent in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Muratov had already announced he was donating to charity the $500,000 cash award that came with the prize. The proceeds will go directly to UNICEF in its efforts to help children displaced by the war in Ukraine.
In other developments Monday:
— A Russian governor said Ukrainian shelling of a Russian village near the border with Ukraine wounded one person. A power station was hit, leaving parts of the village without electricity, according to Alexander Bogomaz, governor of the Bryansk region.
— The Russian military said it hit an airfield in Ukraine’s southern Odesa region with a missile, destroying two Bayraktar drones and a drone control station. Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konahsenkov said a high-precision Oniks missile hit an Artsyz airfield on the Odesa region. Earlier on Monday, the Ukrainian military said its air defense system deterred two airstrikes on the Odesa region, destroying the incoming missiles. The contradicting reports couldn’t be immediately reconciled.
___
AP reporters around the world contributed to this story.
AP · by JOHN LEICESTER and DAVID KEYTON · June 20, 2022
5. Opinion | Are We Sure America Is Not at War in Ukraine?
But our positions are not reversed and we did not invade Ukraine. But this OpEd is in keeping with those who believe the US is always wrong and should be blamed for global instability.
Conclusion:
Are we at war in Ukraine? If we swapped places — if Russian apparatchiks admitted helping to kill American generals or sink a U.S. Navy vessel — I doubt we’d find much ambiguity there. At the very least, what the United States is doing in Ukraine is not not war. If we have so far avoided calling it war, and can continue to do so, maybe that’s only because we’ve become so uncertain of the meaning of the word.
Opinion | Are We Sure America Is Not at War in Ukraine?
Guest Essay
Are We Sure America Is Not at War in Ukraine?
June 20, 2022, 5:13 a.m. ET
Members of Ukraine’s Armed Forces with an American-made M777 howitzer. Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
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Ms. Kristian is a journalist and a fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank.
In the more than three months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the Biden administration has said a lot of things about the war. It had to walk a few of them back almost immediately, like when President Biden’s statement that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” turned out not to be a call for regime change. On other points, its rhetoric has sharpened over time: In March, America’s goal was to help Ukraine defend itself; by the end of April it was a “weakened” Russia.
But on one thing the administration has been very consistent: America won’t get into war with Russia for Ukraine.
“We do not seek a war between NATO and Russia,” President Biden wrote in The Times at the end of May. “As much as I disagree with Mr. Putin, and find his actions an outrage, the United States will not try to bring about his ouster in Moscow. So long as the United States or our allies are not attacked, we will not be directly engaged in this conflict, either by sending American troops to fight in Ukraine or by attacking Russian forces.”
Much of the praise and critique of Mr. Biden’s Ukraine policy has accepted his version of events. But are we sure Americans can reliably recognize when we’ve joined a war?
Presidents have a history of insisting they have no intention of going to war, until they do. “He kept us out of war,” President Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 re-election slogan declared, only for Wilson to take us into World War I a mere month into his second term, right after describing American intervention as inevitable.
During the presidential election of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson promised he was “not about to send American boys nine or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” But in February 1965, within a month of his inauguration, Johnson authorized the bombing campaign known as Operation Rolling Thunder. A month after that, “American boys” were in Vietnam.
That history is instructive on the shelf life of any president’s promise — perhaps particularly during an election — to keep us out of war: Even if it’s true at the moment it’s uttered, it is no guarantee for the future.
But at least in the cases of World War I and Vietnam there was a demonstrable shift from not at war to at war, and Americans could point to a moment when that shift occurred. That bright line meant presidents could make straightforward promises to stay out of a war, and the public could tell when those promises weren’t kept.
In recent decades, however, especially in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, we’ve moved into a model of perpetual warfare, with ambiguous boundaries of chronology, geography and purpose. The line between what is war and what is not war has perilously blurred, and determining the moment we move from one into the other has become a more difficult task.
That’s partly because of technological advances, like drone warfare and cyberattacks, that have made it possible to commit what might otherwise be seen as acts of war — killing adversaries, destroying buildings, degrading nuclear facilities — in other countries without U.S. troops ever leaving U.S. soil. It’s also a function of executive war-making: Congress hasn’t formally declared war since 1942, but successive presidents have relied on the broad war powers granted to George W. Bush in 2002 to authorize the use of military force.
Are we at war in Pakistan or Somalia, for example, where we have been conducting drone attacks against Qaeda, Islamic State and Taliban militants in Pakistan since 2004 and Al Shabab in Somalia since 2011? Or at war in Niger, where U.S. forces were deployed and where four American soldiers were killed in an ambush in October 2017?
The United States has never officially joined the civil war in Yemen, but a Saudi-led coalition has killed civilians with U.S.-made warheads and chosen targets with American guidance.
Our role in the seven-year conflict in Yemen has been robust enough that many experts believe the Saudi-led coalition would sue for peace without it. It has been robust enough that American lawmakers — including a bipartisan majority of senators in 2019 and Representatives Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, and Peter DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon, this year — have characterized it as a violation of Article I of the Constitution, which grants Congress the power to declare war, and of the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which sharply limits, in nature and timeline, military action initiated by the president.
We crossed the line in Yemen, those lawmakers concluded, even if it’s not wholly clear where the line is.
Are we at war in Ukraine? If we swapped places — if Russian apparatchiks admitted helping to kill American generals or sink a U.S. Navy vessel — I doubt we’d find much ambiguity there. At the very least, what the United States is doing in Ukraine is not not war. If we have so far avoided calling it war, and can continue to do so, maybe that’s only because we’ve become so uncertain of the meaning of the word.
Bonnie Kristian (@bonniekristian) is the author of the forthcoming book “Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community.” She is a columnist at Christianity Today and a fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank.
6. America’s shame: About 14 percent of military families are food insecure
America’s shame: About 14 percent of military families are food insecure
BY JOHN FERRARI, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 06/19/22 7:00 AM ET
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
The Hill · by Max Greenwood · June 19, 2022
American service members and their families are going hungry and Congress needs to fix this. Almost 14 percent of our enlisted force today is food insecure. These families struggle to afford to feed nutritious meals to their loved ones. To compare, a $15-an-hour minimum wage works out to $31,200 annually, assuming one works a full-time schedule. A junior enlisted military member in the E3 pay grade — meaning a fairly new member in the first few years of service — has a base pay of $29,220, or $14 per hour.
Many people will point out that this compensation does not include medical care, housing allowances and food stipends. Given that most military service members work more than 40 hours weekly, at high-risk jobs, and often deploy for months on end, a base pay that provides less money than one can make in fast food service is probably not the right answer for those who keep our country safe.
This issue needs to be a top concern as Congress prepares to mark up the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Our service members should not have to apply for extra-governmental programs or go to food banks. They should be paid a wage that enables them to feed their families. The problem worsened during the pandemic; one study indicated a 150 percent increase in marginal food insecurity among the U.S. military in the past two-plus years.
American society continues to debate whether someone who works full time should be paid a living wage. The debate was further fueled by the October 2020 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report revealing that 70 percent of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants have full-time jobs. While the public debate has been focused on why large profitable corporations should pay their employees enough to avoid public assistance, we Americans should ask the same question on behalf of our troops: Should military members be paid a living wage so that they can avoid food banks and public assistance programs? The answer is an emphatic “Yes.”
Congress has taken some action to address this problem. The 2022 NDAA provided a new food allowance called the Military Family Basic Needs Allowance, or BNA. While this is helpful, all that Congress accomplished was to replace one source of public assistance with another. In the end, it does not pay our junior-ranking enlisted military members a living wage. Nor is it likely to solve the challenge of food insecurity; it has a technical flaw that counts off-post housing allowance as income, thereby disqualifying many of those who need the BNA. The same flaw exists with the SNAP program.
More importantly, this new allowance continues to mask the real problem: We are stuck in the 1970s by paying our junior enlisted service members as if they have been drafted as young people without families, rather than volunteers with families. Raising their pay grade will move the military further away from the 1970s era of low-cost, high-turnover labor. Additionally, the BNA continues to ask service members to “prove” they are eligible for the program, adding an extra burden and creating a costly bureaucracy to administer.
The coming weeks are important as Congress debates amendments to the annual NDAA. The combination of near-term high food inflation — with the longer-term reality of not paying our enlisted service members enough to get by — has created a major problem that must be solved.
Specifically, Congress needs to first fix the BNA and exclude the housing allowance from eligibility requirements. Next, with food inflation at 10.1 percent in May and rising, Congress must increase the military pay raise beyond the 4.6 percent proposed by the Defense Department (which passed in the June 8 mark-ups), and provide additional funding to cover the increased pay. As a last step — but perhaps the most important one — Congress should set up a commission to reform the military pay tables to bring them in line with the 21st century concept of fair pay and wages. Start the reform effort at the lowest end of the enlisted pay tables.
Waiting another year to solve this problem also will turn this into a military readiness problem; we already see personnel shortfalls because of insufficient recruiting. Congress must act now to send a strong and powerful message to military families, to America’s youth, and to our adversaries that our military members are our most important competitive warfighting advantage.
To recruit and retain service members, the American military should be a model employer. We should not subject the families of service members defending our country to the stigma of depending on government handouts. Slogans such as “Join the military and go on food stamps” are not what the American public expects — or what the military deserves.
Retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. John Ferrari, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a former director of program analysis and evaluation for the Army.
The Hill · by Max Greenwood · June 19, 2022
7. When the Lies Come Home (Ukraine) by Douglas Macgregor
I do not think I have ever read a positive OpEd or any positive analysis from MacGregor.
Excerpts:
However, the effects of repeated strategic failures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria are cumulative. In the 1980s, General Motors wanted to dictate the kind of automobiles Americans would buy, but American consumers had different ideas. That’s why G.M., which dominated the U.S. market for 77 years, lost its top spot to Toyota. Washington cannot dictate all outcomes, nor can Washington escape accountability for its profligate spending and having ruined American prosperity.
In November, Americans will go to the polls. The election itself will do more than test the integrity of the American electoral process. The election is also likely to ensure that Biden is remembered for his intransigence; his refusal to change course, like Herbert Hoover in 1932. Democrats will recall that their predecessors in the Democratic Party effectively ran against Hoover for more than a half century. Republicans may end up running against Joe Biden for the next 50 years.
When the Lies Come Home - The American Conservative
After lying for months, the media are preparing the public for Ukraine’s military collapse.
Diogenes, one of the ancient world’s illustrious philosophers, believed that lies were the currency of politics, and those lies were the ones he sought to expose and debase. To make his point, Diogenes occasionally carried a lit lantern through the streets of Athens in the daylight. If asked why, Diogenes would say he was searching for an honest man.
Finding an honest man today in Washington, D.C., is equally challenging. Diogenes would need a Xenon Searchlight in each hand.
Still, there are brief moments of clarity inside the Washington establishment. Having lied prolifically for months to the American public about the origins and conduct of the war in Ukraine, the media are now preparing the American, British, and other Western publics for Ukraine’s military collapse. It is long overdue.
The Western media did everything in its power to give the Ukrainian defense the appearance of far greater strength than it really possessed. Careful observers noted that the same video clips of Russian tanks under attack were shown repeatedly. Local counterattacks were reported as though they were operational maneuvers.
Russian errors were exaggerated out of all proportion to their significance. Russian losses and the true extent of Ukraine’s own losses were distorted, fabricated, or simply ignored. But conditions on the battlefield changed little over time. Once Ukrainian forces immobilized themselves in static defensive positions inside urban areas and the central Donbas, the Ukrainian position was hopeless. But this development was portrayed as failure by the Russians to gain “their objectives.”
Ground-combat forces that immobilize soldiers in prepared defenses will be identified, targeted, and destroyed from a distance. When persistent overhead intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets, whether manned or unmanned, are linked to precision guided-strike weapons or modern artillery systems informed by accurate targeting data, “holding ground” is fatal to any ground force. This is all the more true in Ukraine, because it was apparent from the first action that Moscow focused on the destruction of Ukrainian forces, not on the occupation of cities or the capture of Ukrainian territory west of the Dnieper River.
The result has been the piecemeal annihilation of Ukrainian forces. Only the episodic infusion of U.S. and allied weapons kept Kiev’s battered legions in the field; legions that are now dying in great numbers thanks to Washington’s proxy war.
Kiev’s war with Moscow is lost. Ukrainian forces are being bled white. Trained replacements do not exist in sufficient numbers to influence the battle, and the situation grows more desperate by the hour. No amount of U.S. and allied military aid or assistance short of direct military intervention by U.S. and NATO ground forces can change this harsh reality.
The problem today is not ceding territory and population to Moscow in Eastern Ukraine that Moscow already controls. The future of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions along with the Donbas is decided. Moscow is also likely to secure Kharkov and Odessa, two cities that are historically Russian and Russian-speaking, as well as the territory that adjoins them. These operations will extend the conflict through the summer. The problem now is how to stop the fighting.
Whether the fighting stops in the early fall will depend on two key factors. The first involves the leadership in Kiev. Will the Zelensky government consent to the Biden program for perpetual conflict with Russia?
If the Biden administration has its way, Kiev will continue to operate as a base for the buildup of new forces poised to threaten Moscow. In practice, this means Kiev must commit national suicide by exposing the Ukrainian heartland west of the Dnieper River to massive, devastating strikes by Russia’s long-range missile and rocket forces.
Of course, these developments are not inevitable. Berlin, Paris, Rome, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, Vilnius, Riga, Tallin, and, yes, even Warsaw, do not have to blindly follow Washington’s lead. Europeans, like most Americans, are already peering into the abyss of an all-encompassing economic downturn that Biden’s policies are creating at home. Unlike Americans who must cope with the consequences of Biden’s ill-conceived policies, European governments can opt out of Biden’s perpetual-war plan for Ukraine.
The second factor involves Washington itself. Having poured more than $60 billion or a little more than $18 billion a month in direct or indirect transfers into a Ukrainian state that is now crumbling, the important question is, what happens to millions of Ukrainians in the rest of the country that did not flee? And where will the funds come from to rebuild Ukraine’s shattered society in a developing global economic emergency?
When inflation costs the average American household an extra $460 per month to buy the same goods and services this year as they did last year, it is quite possible that Ukraine could sink quietly beneath the waves like the Titanic without evoking much concern in the American electorate. Experienced politicians know that the American span of attention to matters beyond America’s borders is so short that an admission of defeat in Ukraine would probably have little or no immediate consequences.
However, the effects of repeated strategic failures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria are cumulative. In the 1980s, General Motors wanted to dictate the kind of automobiles Americans would buy, but American consumers had different ideas. That’s why G.M., which dominated the U.S. market for 77 years, lost its top spot to Toyota. Washington cannot dictate all outcomes, nor can Washington escape accountability for its profligate spending and having ruined American prosperity.
In November, Americans will go to the polls. The election itself will do more than test the integrity of the American electoral process. The election is also likely to ensure that Biden is remembered for his intransigence; his refusal to change course, like Herbert Hoover in 1932. Democrats will recall that their predecessors in the Democratic Party effectively ran against Hoover for more than a half century. Republicans may end up running against Joe Biden for the next 50 years.
Douglas Macgregor, Col. (ret.) is a senior fellow with The American Conservative, the former advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, a decorated combat veteran, and the author of five books.
8. Ukraine Live Updates: Finland and Sweden Push for NATO Membership
Ukraine Live Updates: Finland and Sweden Push for NATO Membership
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at an official welcome ceremony, in Ankara, Turkey, earlier this month.Credit...Burhan Ozbilici/Associated Press
Envoys from Finland and Sweden were meeting on Monday with Turkish officials to discuss Ankara’s continued objections over their bids to join NATO, which have slowed a process that other members of the alliance have been keen to fast-track.
Sweden and Finland announced last month that the Nordic nations would jointly submit applications to join NATO. The decision was mostly welcomed by other members of the alliance, who have sought to demonstrate unity and boost their strength as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drags on.
But President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has threatened to block the two nations from joining the alliance, saying Sweden and Finland sympathize with Kurdish militants whom he regards as terrorists. His stance has complicated the applicants’ prospects because NATO operates by consensus.
Officials in Finland and Sweden have spoken with Turkish officials in attempts to address the government’s concerns. NATO defense ministers, too, have been discussing how to satisfy Turkey.
On Sunday, NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said that the alliance took seriously the concerns of the Turkish government, but he did not offer details on a possible resolution.
Turkey’s public broadcaster, TRT, confirmed that a delegation from Ankara had arrived in Brussels on Sunday for the talks. Ibrahim Kalin, a spokesman for Mr. Erdogan, told reporters that negotiations could not proceed unless concrete steps are taken.
Finland’s foreign minister, Pekka Haavisto, urged patience ahead of the talks. Speaking to Swedish media in Brussels on Monday, he said that the negotiations were important but would take time.
The discussions on Monday come as Russia continues to pummel eastern Ukraine with strikes, resulting in mounting losses of life on both sides in a war that Western leaders warned could last years.
At the White House Rose Garden in May, President Biden met with President Sauli Niinisto of Finland and Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson of Sweden and vowed to speed up their membership. He characterized their inclusion into the alliance as almost a formality, noting that both countries had contributed forces to conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Safak Timur and Johanna Lemola contributed reporting.
9. China May oil imports from Russia soar to a record, surpass top supplier Saudi
China May oil imports from Russia soar to a record, surpass top supplier Saudi
- Summary
- Russia overtakes Saudi as top supplier after 19-month gap
- Russian imports nearly 2 mln bpd in May
- Imports from Malaysia more than doubled in May yr/yr
- Customs reports 3rd Iranian shipment since last Dec
SINGAPORE, June 20 (Reuters) - China's crude oil imports from Russia soared 55% from a year earlier to a record level in May, displacing Saudi Arabia as the top supplier, as refiners cashed in on discounted supplies amid sanctions on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine.
Imports of Russian oil, including supplies pumped via the East Siberia Pacific Ocean pipeline and seaborne shipments from Russia's European and Far Eastern ports, totalled nearly 8.42 million tonnes, according to data from the Chinese General Administration of Customs.
That's equivalent to roughly 1.98 million barrels per day (bpd) and up a quarter from 1.59 million bpd in April.
The data, which shows that Russia took back the top ranking of suppliers to the world's biggest crude oil importer after a gap of 19 months, indicates that Moscow is able to find buyers for its oil despite western sanctions, though it has had to slash prices.
And while China's overall crude oil demand has been dampened by COVID-19 curbs and a slowing economy, leading importers, including refining giant Sinopec and trader Zhenhua Oil, have stepped up buying cheaper Russian oil on top of sanctioned supplies from Iran and Venezuela that allows them to scale back competing supplies from West Africa and Brazil. read more
Saudi Arabia trailed as the second-largest supplier, with May volumes up 9% on year at 7.82 million tonnes, or 1.84 million bpd. This was down from April's 2.17 million bpd.
Customs data released on Monday also showed China imported 260,000 tonnes of Iranian crude oil last month, its third shipment of Iran oil since last December, confirming an earlier Reuters report.
Despite U.S. sanctions on Iran, China has kept taking Iranian oil, usually passed off as supplies from other countries. The import levels are roughly equivalent to 7% of China's total crude oil imports. read more
China's overall crude oil imports rose nearly 12% in May from a low base a year earlier to 10.8 million bpd, versus the 2021 average of 10.3 million bpd. read more
Customs reported zero imports from Venezuela. State oil firms have shunned purchases since late 2019 for fear of falling foul of secondary U.S. sanctions.
Imports from Malaysia, often used as a transfer point in the last two years for oil originating from Iran and Venezuela, amounted to 2.2 million tonnes, steady versus April but more than double the year-earlier level.
Imports from Brazil fell 19% from a year earlier to 2.2 million tonnes, as supplies from the Latin American exporter faced cheaper competition from Iranian and Russian barrels.
Separately, data also showed China's imports of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) amounted to nearly 400,000 tonnes last month, 56% more than May of 2021.
For the first five months, imports of Russian LNG - from mostly Sakhalin-2 project in the Far East and Yamal LNG in Russian Arctic - rose 22% on the year to 1.84 million tonnes, according to customs data.
Below is the detailed breakdown of oil imports, with volumes in million tonnes:
(tonne = 7.3 barrels for crude oil conversion)
Reporting by Chen Aizhu and Beijing newsroom; Editing by Tom Hogue and Muralikumar Anantharaman
10. A dictator’s son promised unity. His election is pulling Filipinos apart.
Excerpts:
One recent night, the trio renewed their argument over a dinner of noodles and cheese doughnuts.
“Marcos is not our president,” Jaynus said, prompting her father to accuse her and her brother of trying to “destroy” Bongbong rather than give him a chance.
“Forgive and forget,” Olaivar said, making a sweeping motion with his hand. “Move on!”
“Say that to the victims of martial law,” answered James.
They sat at the same dinner table but lived in alternate realities. The children read Rappler, an independent news organization whose founder faces criminal charges (and won a Nobel Peace Prize) after exposing human rights abuses under Duterte.
Their father felt the outlet deserved its legal troubles and that mainstream media organizations were biased against the Marcoses. He preferred to read pro-Bongbong blogs. As dusk fell outside, he dismissed the idea that Marcos Jr. would repeat his father’s abuses as “BS.”
“You cannot predict the future,” he told his children.
“But you can look at history,” said his son.
A dictator’s son promised unity. His election is pulling Filipinos apart.
June 16, 2022 at 2:12 a.m. EDT
MANILA — Louie Crismo remembers the day almost half a century ago when his brother was grabbed off the street by Philippine security forces and never seen again — one of more than 3,000 people killed during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. So he was appalled when the strongman’s son emerged as the front-runner for president earlier this year. His horror grew when he realized Marcos’s supporters included members of his own family.
On the eve of the election last month, Crismo pleaded with his cousins to reconsider.
“Let’s remember his good heart and the pain that martial law brought,” the 64-year-old wrote of his brother, with a link to details about the disappearance. “Hopefully you will join us in helping stop the dictator’s family from returning to power.”
But his message went unanswered. Ferdinand Marcos Jr., known as “Bongbong,” won in a landslide. And Crismo hasn’t spoken to his cousins since.
When Marcos Jr. is inaugurated on June 30, it will cap a decades-long project to rehabilitate the image of the Philippines’ most infamous family with a mixture of online mythmaking, real-world alliances and messages of unity. But the family’s return to power nonetheless has come as a shock to the millions who once celebrated its expulsion.
The pain and confusion has been most intense for the relatives of those killed and for the roughly 70,000 victims who survived detention, half of whom were tortured, according to journalists and human rights groups. Many feel the darkest and most formative chapter of their lives is being erased — not only by Marcos Jr., who refuses to acknowledge or apologize for his father’s abuses, but also by their own families.
The issue has erupted at dinner tables and in family chat groups, splitting relatives and souring friendships. A group of psychologists who have been providing counseling for those who volunteered for Marcos Jr.’s opponent in the election campaign estimated that up to a third of them talk of politically divided households.
“A classmate from medical school told me she voted for Bongbong and said, ‘it’s time to move on,’ ” recalled Imelda Cabatuando, who was detained for three months, electrocuted in her genitals and threatened with rape during the dictatorship. “I said, ‘Don’t you dare tell me to move on. I was tortured under Marcos.’ Then I unfollowed her on Facebook.”
The election has exposed old wounds. But it has also revealed fresh frustrations with liberal democracy in the Philippines, a close U.S. military ally that has drifted toward China under outgoing president and strongman Rodrigo Duterte.
Marcos Sr. declared martial law in 1972 after a series of attacks he blamed on communist guerrillas, some of which were actually the work of his government. For the next 14 years, his forces arbitrarily arrested critics and suspected leftists, often dumping their bodies in public to suppress dissent. Marcos Sr. and his family also siphoned billions from government coffers, some of which went toward the more than 1,000 pairs of designer shoes his wife, Imelda, accumulated.
When the dictator was ousted in a popular uprising in 1986, however, the country never fully reckoned with what it had gone through.
“We didn’t take stock of what happened in 1986 in any significant way,” said Carlos Conde, from Human Rights Watch. Unlike some other countries that endured dictatorships, the Philippines didn’t establish a truth and reconciliation committee to analyze and memorialize the abuses, he noted. It did create one of Asia’s first human rights commissions and enabled victims to receive some compensation from wealth reclaimed from the Marcoses. But political elites held on to power, and little effort was made to educate younger generations about the martial law era.
“A lot of people said we needed to ‘move on’ in 1986,” Conde said. “Now we are again suffering from the effects of this ‘move on’ tendency.”
“It’s collective amnesia,” said Raissa Robles, a journalist who wrote a book on the martial law era. “After the Marcoses left, Filipinos were traumatized. And when you’re a traumatized person, you’d rather forget what happened.”
The rehabilitation of the Marcos name began in 1991, two years after Marcos Sr. died, when his family was allowed to return to face charges of tax fraud and graft. But the family not only avoided prison; they rapidly returned to politics. Marcos Jr. was elected to Congress in 1992. His mother — who is still appealing one set of corruption convictions — and older sister soon followed suit.
But it wasn’t until 2016 that the family fully re-emerged as a political force. That year, Bongbong nearly became vice president thanks to a sophisticated and well-funded social media strategy that falsely painted his father’s dictatorship as a “golden age” of law, order and economic prosperity.
That online effort didn’t end with his candidacy but rather continues today, said Jonathan Ong, a disinformation researcher at the University of Massachusetts and Harvard who studied the 2016 and 2022 elections.
“The Marcoses are saying they are victims of a miswritten history,” he said, adding that Bongbong uses that sense of grievance to connect with ordinary Filipinos frustrated with the status quo. Much of the analysis has focused on Marcos’s alleged use of troll farms and bots to attack critics, Ong said. But what the campaign did effectively was to flood social media with a “creative archive” of Marcos “folklore” that appealed to many demographics.
Mary watched the disinformation ensnare her family. The 52-year-old, who asked that her last name not be used to avoid worsening family tensions, is a “martial law baby,” as they are called here, who grew up during the dictatorship. Her middle-class family was largely insulated from the violence. Like millions of Filipinos, however, she and her siblings took part in the protests that pushed Marcos Sr. out.
In the past year, however, Mary began to see her siblings post pro-Bongbong statements on social media. When she asked, one sister replied that she had “come to a different appreciation of history.”
Mary campaigned for Leni Robredo, Marcos Jr.’s main opponent. When Marcos won more than twice as many votes, Mary vowed on Facebook to continue opposing him. Some of her siblings mocked her, and Mary abandoned a family group chat.
“My sisters trolled me,” she said, her voice breaking. “I was so disappointed in my family. Okay, you are pro-Marcos, even if I don’t understand you, that’s your belief, you’re my family, so be it. But trolling me?”
The election pitted Cleta Monsanto against her eldest child. Now 65, she was a mother of three young children in 1985 when her husband, Ireneo, was pulled off a bus and executed by soldiers who suspected the teacher of being a communist rebel. When she recently learned that her son supports Marcos Jr., Monsanto berated him over video chat.
“I feel so angry toward my son,” she said.
Cabatuando, who was detained and tortured by the Marcos regime in 1973, now lives in Australia, where few people know what she endured. But her family in the Philippines is well aware. And on a visit there before the election, she was dismayed to hear younger relatives say they planned to vote for Marcos Jr. because they felt his father’s reign had been prosperous.
“It’s a golden lie,” Cabatuando said. “Not a golden age.”
Marcos Jr., who declined through a spokesperson to be interviewed, has both distanced himself from his father’s dictatorship and downplayed its abuses. But he served as a governor and vice-governor for the last six years of his father’s reign.
“I hold him 100 percent accountable,” Cabatuando said. “He knew what was being done, and he benefited from it.”
“He is in no way innocent,” echoed Bonifacio Ilagan, a playwright and prominent martial law victim. “He has been the chief propagandist.”
Ilagan was detained for two years, tortured and then released just days before his sister was arrested and never seen again. For him, Bongbong’s victory seems like a nightmare from which he can’t wake.
“It’s as if all of the stories we’ve been telling people, all the things that happened during martial law, never happened at all,” he said.
Marcos Jr.’s victory wasn’t only down to social media mythmaking, however. It was also due to a very real alliance with Duterte. The strongman praised the martial law era and in some ways emulated it with his bloody six-year war on drugs. Though Duterte was initially skeptical of Bongbong, his party endorsed him after Marcos Jr. struck a deal for the president’s daughter, Sara Duterte-Carpio, to be his running mate.
That earned the support of Jaime Barbee Olaivar. Half a century ago, he was a young Marcos Sr. supporter who initially welcomed martial law. Then his father was detained for two years after blowing the whistle on a military scam. By the time of the 1986 revolution, Olaivar had joined the protests.
Yet he and his father blamed the military, not Marcos Sr. And when another strongman came along in 2016 promising to remove drug addicts from neighborhoods like Olaivar’s, he backed him. Olaivar keeps a “Duterte: Man of Action” bumper sticker on his refrigerator, much to the disgust of his two activist children.
Now the family is divided over his support for Marcos Jr., who has embraced not only the Dutertes, but also the drug war. Olaivar’s son, James, 24, works for a government agency devoted to victims of human rights violations and spends much of his time helping martial law survivors. Olaivar’s daughter, Jaynus, 26, directed a film about a family impacted by a drug war killing.
One recent night, the trio renewed their argument over a dinner of noodles and cheese doughnuts.
“Marcos is not our president,” Jaynus said, prompting her father to accuse her and her brother of trying to “destroy” Bongbong rather than give him a chance.
“Forgive and forget,” Olaivar said, making a sweeping motion with his hand. “Move on!”
“Say that to the victims of martial law,” answered James.
They sat at the same dinner table but lived in alternate realities. The children read Rappler, an independent news organization whose founder faces criminal charges (and won a Nobel Peace Prize) after exposing human rights abuses under Duterte.
Their father felt the outlet deserved its legal troubles and that mainstream media organizations were biased against the Marcoses. He preferred to read pro-Bongbong blogs. As dusk fell outside, he dismissed the idea that Marcos Jr. would repeat his father’s abuses as “BS.”
“You cannot predict the future,” he told his children.
“But you can look at history,” said his son.
11. Refineries are making a windfall. Why do they keep closing?
Excerpts:
Oil refineries across the country are being retired and converted to other uses as owners balk at making costly upgrades and America’s pivot away from fossil fuels leaves their future uncertain. The downsizing comes despite painfully high gasoline prices and as demand globally ramps up amid sanctions on gasoline and diesel produced in Russia, the third-biggest petroleum refiner in the world, behind the United States and China.
Five refineries have shutdown in the United States in just the past two years, reducing the nation’s refining capacity by about 5 percent and eliminating more than 1 million barrels of fuel per day from the market, leaving the remaining facilities straining to meet demand. Yet even at this lucrative moment for what’s left of the refining industry, a White House desperate to bring down gas prices is having little success persuading owners to expand operations, and more closures are imminent.
The futility of the White House effort came through in the response to letters President Biden sent this week to the nation’s major oil companies, chastising them for squeezing “historically high profit margins” out of their refineries. “At a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable,” Biden wrote. Biden threatened to invoke emergency powers if the companies don’t bring prices down.
The companies are unmoved. The profits follow years of heavy losses at many facilities after demand plunged during the pandemic. Unpredictable shifts in oil markets had created a challenging business climate before that. Even at this moment of windfall refinery earnings, where the profit margin on each barrel of oil processed has jumped from a dollar or two a year ago to as much as $18 today, investors are hardly jumping at the opportunity to enter the sector. They fear the profits are short lived. The administration’s environmental priorities — as well as rising public and corporate concern about climate change — would make many refineries obsolete in the not-too-distant future.
Refineries are making a windfall. Why do they keep closing?
Companies see only headaches on the horizon for refineries, undercutting the White House push to boost production
June 20, 2022 at 6:38 a.m. EDT
PHILADELPHIA — As the energy crunch drives record profits at American oil refineries, the owners of what had been the largest such facility in the Northeast have no regrets about tearing the place down.
Hilco Redevelopment Partners has been hauling out 950 miles of pipe from the former Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery, abandoning the property’s 150-year history of processing crude oil into fuel in this city. The firm is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convert the 1,300-acre site along the Schuylkill River into a green, high-tech campus for e-commerce and life sciences companies.
“I don’t even know how to operate a refinery,” said Roberto Perez, chief executive of Hilco, which bought the property in a bankruptcy auction in 2020, a year after a massive explosion at the refinery rattled the city. “It’s not what we do.”
Oil refineries across the country are being retired and converted to other uses as owners balk at making costly upgrades and America’s pivot away from fossil fuels leaves their future uncertain. The downsizing comes despite painfully high gasoline prices and as demand globally ramps up amid sanctions on gasoline and diesel produced in Russia, the third-biggest petroleum refiner in the world, behind the United States and China.
Five refineries have shutdown in the United States in just the past two years, reducing the nation’s refining capacity by about 5 percent and eliminating more than 1 million barrels of fuel per day from the market, leaving the remaining facilities straining to meet demand. Yet even at this lucrative moment for what’s left of the refining industry, a White House desperate to bring down gas prices is having little success persuading owners to expand operations, and more closures are imminent.
The futility of the White House effort came through in the response to letters President Biden sent this week to the nation’s major oil companies, chastising them for squeezing “historically high profit margins” out of their refineries. “At a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable,” Biden wrote. Biden threatened to invoke emergency powers if the companies don’t bring prices down.
The companies are unmoved. The profits follow years of heavy losses at many facilities after demand plunged during the pandemic. Unpredictable shifts in oil markets had created a challenging business climate before that. Even at this moment of windfall refinery earnings, where the profit margin on each barrel of oil processed has jumped from a dollar or two a year ago to as much as $18 today, investors are hardly jumping at the opportunity to enter the sector. They fear the profits are short lived. The administration’s environmental priorities — as well as rising public and corporate concern about climate change — would make many refineries obsolete in the not-too-distant future.
Building and upgrading the mammoth structures is a messy, expensive undertaking that can drag on longer than a decade, strain the finances of even the biggest fossil fuel giants and run the risk of getting abandoned before that investment is returned.
“I don’t think you are ever going to see a refinery built again in this country,” Chevron CEO Michael Wirth said in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this month.
“It’s been 50 years since we built a new one,” Wirth said. “In a country where the policy environment is trying to reduce demand for these products, you are not going to find companies to put billions and billions of dollars into this.”
Some of the nation’s 129 refineries are owned by large oil companies such as Chevron, while others are operated independently. At the facilities, the components of crude oil are separated and processed into fuel for vehicles and planes, as well as industrial petroleum products such as lubricants.
The last major refinery to come online in the United States, in 1977, is the one owned by Marathon Oil in Garyville, La. It is capable of pumping out 578,000 barrels per day. Since it opened, more than half the refineries in the U.S. have closed.
While the Biden administration says market manipulation by Big Oil is behind the shortage of refined fuel right now, the major fossil fuel companies don’t have a monopoly on production. There is a large refining facility in Houston up for sale right now.
“If there was someone out there who believed this would be a strong business in the future, this is an asset they could buy,” said Jacques Rousseau, a managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, an independent research firm.
The problem: Nobody wants to buy it. There has not been a single viable bid.
In the absence of any offers, LyondellBasell plans to shut its 700-acre operation on the Gulf Coast no later than the end of next year. Quitting the refining business, the company said in a statement, “is the best strategic and financial path forward.” The company did not comment on industry speculation that a fire that knocked part of its century-old Houston facility offline last week may push the closure date even sooner, as LyondellBasell faces the prospect of costly repairs.
The facility refines about 264,000 barrels of crude oil per day.
“These are aging physical plants where steel needs to be replaced, equipment needs to be overhauled, new pumps maybe needed,” said Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston.
“Just getting the equipment you need could take three years. Electric vehicles might already make up 20 percent of the car market by then. You could find yourself investing a bunch of cash to rebuild a refinery that may not be needed for long.”
The White House would have to take extreme steps to compel companies to refine more right now. That could involve Biden invoking emergency powers to curb exports of refined gasoline and diesel or to force companies to restart operations at idled American refineries, according to a memo ClearView sent clients.
The president wrote in his letter that he is “prepared to use all tools at my disposal” to bring prices down, scolding oil executives for making record profits off a refining shortage that is “blunting the impact of the historic actions” by the White House to confront soaring gas prices. Those actions included releasing 1 million barrels per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the suspension of an environmental rule limiting high blends of ethanol into gasoline in the summer.
Analysts caution that any actions the White House tries to take to spur more production could backfire. Curbing exports, for example, would intensify fuel shortages in Europe and could lead to further political destabilization there. It could also motivate companies to move more operations overseas, worsening shortages in the United States.
“The problem is we are running the existing refineries at full power,” said Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “There is not a lot of ability to require industry to refine more than it already is.”
The case of the shuttered Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery illustrates how little influence the White House has over such operations.
The Trump administration had worked aggressively to keep the plant that was churning out 335,000 barrels of fuel per day from closing, warning it played an important role in U.S. energy security and independence. The White House had dispatched Peter Navarro, a top Trump economic adviser, to try to help advance the bid of a group of energy executives who planned to rehabilitate the bankrupt facility.
The bid, which had the backing of organized labor, fizzled.
The city was emerging from the trauma of a refinery explosion that sent an enormous fireball over the area and catapulted large pieces of machinery throughout the property. A 38,000 pound fragment of the plant was hurled across the river by the explosion. Nobody was killed, but 3,271 pounds of highly toxic hydrofluoric acid leaked into the community. It can cause lung damage and severe skin burns, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The explosion was triggered by a pipe that had not been inspected since 1973. It was so corroded that the pipe’s metal had become thinner than a credit card, according to investigators from the U.S. Chemical Safety Board. The board noted that such corrosion had been the culprit in earlier refinery explosions in California and Utah, and “it’s just a matter of time” before another such explosion at a refinery leads to fatalities or contamination of a local community.
The Philadelphia refinery had already fallen into bankruptcy the year before it was engulfed by fire. New pipelines from the North Dakota Bakken region and the Permian Basin in Texas had begun pumping crude directly to Gulf Coast and Midwest refineries. Those refineries could then afford to sell their products much more cheaply than the Philadelphia facility, which could only access the North Dakota and Texas crude through rail car shipments.
Like many of the nation’s refineries, the one in Philadelphia was not equipped to process all types of crude. It could not, for example, handle the heavy crudes from Canadian tar sands that became available on the market for cheap, pushing the Philadelphia facility into further financial despair.
The refinery was also not equipped to blend ethanol into its fuels, forcing it to purchase expensive credits on the open market to meet its obligations under the federal Renewable Fuels Standard. The price of those credits had soared by 2017, creating a crushing financial burden.
Facing a city unnerved by the refinery’s public safety risks and immense greenhouse gas emissions, a shaky financial outlook, and tepid interest from investors, proponents of keeping the refinery going found themselves overshadowed by a large coalition of groups looking to turn the page.
“This is a phenomenon we are seeing around the country,” said Cary Coglianese, director of the program on regulation at Penn Law. “Neighborhoods are growing up around these facilities. There are lots of people who are not benefiting from the jobs they bring, but are suffering the risks associated with them. It changes the political playing field dramatically.”
Perez, who is based in Chicago, vividly recalls the day one of his colleagues approached him with the idea of buying the refinery. It struck him as absurd, knowing the cleanup would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the environmental liabilities are immense and it would take years to tear down the thicket of pipes and heavy equipment.
“I said, ‘We are not buying a refinery,’” Perez said. “I don’t even need to see it.”
But Perez was lured out, and on his visit he was struck to find the property just down the road from the airport, close to downtown Philadelphia and right by the port. It struck him that the highest and best use for such a strategically located piece of land in a city serious about going green was no longer petroleum processing.
“The community was very excited by our commitment to taking the refinery offline,” said Perez, whose company bought the property for $252 million. “Within day one of closing, we started the endeavor of unwinding 150 years worth of refining operations here.”
12. UKRAINE NEEDS MORE ARTILLERY SUPPORT: Congress Was Right to Defend Ukraine – Please Do More
UKRAINE NEEDS MORE ARTILLERY SUPPORT
Congress Was Right to Defend Ukraine
Please Do More
By Dan Rice
Ever since Russia invaded and occupied the Crimea and Donbas regions in 2014, Ukraine has been on a wartime footing. Three US administrations and bipartisan Congressional support have enabled Ukraine to withstand the onslaught they now face by air, land, and sea.
Over the past 8 years, US Army Green Berets and National Guard soldiers have trained over 26,000 of our Ukrainian allies. This support accounts for just $2 billion of our $778 billion defense budget for 2022 and provides the best return on any allied support we have ever given. There are no US troops at risk and our support has immediate impact. In comparison, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the US over $2 trillion EACH, with 6,000 killed in action, and tens of thousands wounded.
Vladimir Putin has invaded neighbors before without repercussions and said the collapse of the Soviet Union was the tragedy of our times. In 1999, he attacked Chechnya. In 2008, he invaded Georgia. In 2014, he invaded the sovereign nation of Ukraine and took the Crimea and Donbas regions, about 10% of the land of Ukraine. The world’s response was minimal. So, Putin continued his dream of reestablishing the power Russia enjoyed in his KGB youth. In 2021 he installed a puppet government in Belarus and now uses the country as training ground for Russian troops and a jump-off point for his invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian invasion in February 2022 triggered the largest land war since WWII as 150,000 Russian soldiers attacked from 4 directions, destroying cities, and terrorizing the civilian population with torture, rape, murder, and mass graves of innocent civilians. Fear rippled through all of Europe – the Russian army was back. This is a new version of total war, with precision weapons, cyber and electronic warfare, information and special operations, drones, psychological operations and social media pursuing military, economic, political, and cultural objectives.
The time for US leadership is now.
In the defense, smaller Ukrainian units hit attacking Russian armored forces with anti-tank rounds, followed by artillery strikes, while using anti-aircraft weapons to keep the superior Russian air force grounded. They would hit and fall back, trading ground for time. That worked, but Kyiv nearly fell.
Now the war is in very dangerous phase. The terrain in the east and south is flat and open. Battle has devolved into an artillery duel in which the Ukrainians are out-gunned by 10:1. 100 or more brave Ukrainians die every day while desperately defending their land.
The Russians have new generals and will likely attempt new strategies in the coming months. The fighting is in the east and south, where Russia is attempting to create a bridge from the Donbas, to Crimea, to Odessa, on to the entire Black Sea coast and all of its strategic ports. There is concern the Russians will attempt a massive missile attack on Kyiv, potentially chemical or nuclear.
Taking back land requires the Ukrainian military to go on the offensive. Offense requires different weapons than defense. Ukraine still needs Javelins to defeat tanks and Stinger anti-aircraft weapons, but more importantly Ukraine needs heavy artillery with GPS guided shells, and Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS) to stop the slaughter. The Russians count on imprecise mass artillery to destroy entire cities. The West needs to send immediate heavy artillery and MLRS to Ukraine.
Ukraine desperately needs artillery tubes of the old 122 and 152mm Russian caliber. These are prolific in Eastern Europe and stored in weapons depots across the region. The US has provided both towed (M777) and self-propelled (M109) 155 mm Howitzers. Ukraine needs more of both. They also need vast quantities of artillery rounds to feed all of these guns. In particular Ukraine needs 155 mm Excalibur GPS guided rounds. Ukraine will never beat Russia in quantity, but precision guided munitions can far more effective than area weapons.
Copyright 2022 Lockheed Martin
Most importantly, Ukraine needs Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS). The US recently approved shipment of four MLRS to Ukraine, and last week Congress approved another undisclosed number as part of the additional $1 billion aid package. This is an important first step but four MLRS systems will not make a major impact on the war.
Copyright 2022 Lockheed Martin
To give some idea of scale, Poland just announced it will acquire 500 MLRS systems for its own defense. They know that if Ukraine falls to Russian aggression, they could be next. At least 15 countries have fielded MLRS systems: US, UK, Germany, Bahrain, Egypt, Finland, France, Greece, Israel, Japan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Lithuania. Each of these countries should send rocket launchers and rockets to Ukraine. Most have both current and older versions of the rockets. The original rockets (M26 version) fired 32 kilometers. The newer versions fire 80 kilometers (GMLRS). If every country sends all their older inventory to Ukraine, it could make the difference in the war. The United States, Great Britain and Germany have agreed to send both rocket launchers (M270 and M142) and rockets. From all available data 10 launchers are enroute to Ukraine.
The civilized world is looking for US leadership in the face of this terrible threat to freedom and democracy. We urge Congress to call on all our allies to immediately ship these lifesaving howitzers, MLRS, and their ammunition to Ukraine.
Dan Rice is a Special Advisor to the Ukrainian Commander in Chief General Valeriy Zaluzhnny. Dan is the President of Thayer Leadership at West Point, a West Point graduate, decorated combat veteran and holds three masters degrees and recently completed his doctoral classes in Leadership at University of Pennsylvania.
About the Author(s)
Dan is the President of Thayer Leadership and a 1988 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He served his commitment as an Airborne-Ranger qualified Field Artillery officer. In 2004, he voluntarily re-commissioned in the Infantry to serve in Iraq for 13 months. He has been awarded the Purple Heart, Ranger Tab, Airborne Badge and cited for ‘courage on the field of battle” by his Brigade Commander.
SCHOLARLY WORK/PUBLICATIONS/AWARDS
Dan has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Small Wars Journal, and Chief Executive magazine. In 2013, he published and co-authored his first book, West Point Leadership: Profiles of Courage, which features 200 of West Point graduates who have helped shape our nation, including the authorized biographies of over 100 living graduates.. The book received 3 literary awards from the Independent Book Publishers Association plus an award from the Military Society Writers of America (MSWA). Dan has appeared frequently on various news networks including CNN, FOX News, FOX & Friends, Bloomberg TV, NBC, MSNBC, and The Today Show.
EDUCATION
Ed.D., ABD, Leadership, University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education (graduation expected 2023)
MS.Ed., Leadership & Learning, University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education, 2020
M.S., Integrated Marketing Communications, Medill Graduate School, Northwestern University, 2018
M.B.A., Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, 2000
B.S., National Security, United States Military Academy, 1988
13. How can Multilateral and Bilateral security partnerships coexist, while advancing U.S. strategic goals?
How can Multilateral and Bilateral security partnerships coexist, while advancing U.S. strategic goals?
By Ahmet Ajeti
The United States of America is a unique example in the world’s affairs when it comes to having stretched its influence to every corner of the world. The U.S. has a great number of bilateral defense and security partnerships, as well as membership in many multilateral organizations, such as the United Nations, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, etc. In addition to these partnerships, regional or “coalitions of the willing” are another instrument in United States’ arsenal in advancing its interests worldwide. These Coalitions are generally functional - meaning they deal with a phenomenon, such as terrorism - or regional specific issues, where they tackle a threat from/to a specific country, or region.
While these partnerships bring many advantages, they are not always easy to manage. In many instances, certain countries might be friends and partners with the United States, but they are rivals, or enemies with each other. Such cases make multilateral engagements difficult for the U.S. In some instances, it can damage the United States’ influence over an individual country, as it might be perceived that the U.S. is favoring the country’s enemy.
These challenges are more evident when it comes to the need to bring a bigger coalition together. The animosity between different U.S. partners makes it difficult to have the coalition function without friction. Depending on the operation, the U.S. has been successful in mitigating these differences in certain operations, at least in the theater of operations. Usually, this is done by physically deploying in separate AORs.
The value of bilateral partnerships in the multilateral environment
The United States has quite successfully used multilateral and bilateral partnerships ‘against’ one another, to advance its interests in respective partnerships. In the United Nations, apart from being a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, the U.S. can push its agenda by relying on the support of a close bilateral relationship with individual UN member states.
On the other hand, the weight of multilateral partnerships can be used to advance a bilateral partnership. Among many cases, the use of NATO in support of the Baltic countries and Poland, has advanced bilateral partnerships between the U.S. and the aforementioned countries.
Bilateral partnerships can be both geographically, or regionally constrained (U.S. – Japan, or U.S. – South Korea partnerships), or can be global (United Kingdom, Canada). Among many benefits of such relations is flexibility. The U.S. can adapt a bilateral partnership to address a time or region-specific interest. This adaptation is difficult in a multilateral environment. These partnerships are constrained by the established rules, processes, and treaty agreements and changing them to meet the challenge is either too slow or cannot be done at all.
The best use of bilateral and multilateral partnerships is when they can be ‘dual-use’, or complementary to one another. The case of the U.S.-UK partnership works best for this example. The U.S. ‘uses’ its “special relationship” with the United Kingdom for both bilateral cooperation and action, as well as in the multilateral organizations and partnerships that they are both part of. On the bilateral side, the U.K. has stood by the U.S. in almost all of U.S. global engagement in pursuit of U.S. interests. It does help that the UK’s interests are nearly always aligned with those of the U.S.
Conclusion
The United States needs to try to find a balance between bilateral and multilateral partnerships. While both are important, the bilateral partnerships have been the backbone of the United States’ advance of its strategic interests. Multilateral platforms/partnerships are still relevant, but any success that the U.S. has achieved was mainly due to well-nurtured bilateral partnerships. Aside from Europe - where multilateral partnership through NATO has been a cornerstone for the United States’ ability to project its influence after WWII - in other regions in the world, like the Middle East and all of Asia, there is not yet another credible multilateral alternative for the U.S. to advance its interests, though the QUAD and AUKUS may be effective in the future. Similarly, in Latin America, bilateral partnerships should continue to be the main platform for the U.S. to project its influence and pursue its strategic goals.
While stressing the importance and credibility of the bilateral partnerships and alliances, the same ones should be used to advance the interest of the U.S. in multilateral forums.
About the Author(s)
Colonel Ahmet Ajeti is a graduate of the College of International Security Affairs at National Defense University, in Washington DC.
2014-2021 Colonel Ahmet Ajeti, has served as Kosovo Defense and Security Attaché, at the Embassy of the Republic of Kosovo in Brussels.
While covering NATO political and practical cooperation with the Republic of Kosovo, and its institutions, Colonel Ajeti was the focal point of contact and coordination between all levels of NATO and Kosovo’s key leadership and institutions.
Among key achievements during this period is the advancement of the practical and political cooperation between Kosovo and NATO, including involvement in negotiation and development of the Enhanced Interaction – the current framework of Kosovo-NATO cooperation. He has also developed the plan for further advancement of this cooperation and coordinated with key NATO national delegations to treat at the partner level Kosovo’s cell of the future Delegation to NATO. Colonel Ajeti has coordinated tens of visits and exchanges between Kosovo and NATO leadership.
During his time in Brussels, Colonel Ajeti has also served as prime security and military advisor for the Kosovo Ambassadors to the Kingdom of Belgium and to the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
In addition to NATO cooperation, Colonel Ajeti was tasked with the responsibility to further develop bilateral cooperation with the Belgian MoD and Armed Forces, as well as the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
April 2009-September 2013 Ahmet has worked with the United States Department of Defense as Foreign Military Sales (FMS) and Humanitarian Assistance Program Manager. In this capacity, Ahmet has coordinated and managed millions of USD worth of military equipment and training, and humanitarian assistance.
Before moving to the US Office of Defense Cooperation in 2009, Ahmet served as Deputy Commander, Professional Development Center, TRADOC, Kosovo Security Force.
After moving to a new job with U.S. DoD, he remained part of the Kosovo Security Force Active Reserve component, appointed as Military Advisor to the Land Forces Commander.
2004-2008 He served as the Foreign Languages Branch Chief, Kosovo Protection Corps Training and Doctrine Command. During this period of time, Ahmet has also taught as a part-time lecturer at the New Age Foreign Languages School in Prishtina.
During 2003-2004, as KPC Advisor to Kosovo Protection Corps Coordinator (Major General Andrew Cummings (UK)), Colonel Ajeti advised MG Cummings on a range of issues, from Kosovo security threats and challenges to Kosovo Protection Corps development, its personnel, training, and equipment.
2000-2003 Ahmet served in various positions at Kosovo Protection Corps Zone IV Search and Rescue Units.
Colonel Ajeti holds a degree from the University of Pristina, as well as various certificates and diplomas from the KPC, US Defense Institute of Security Assistance Management, Croatian Defense Academy and holds a Master’s of Arts Degree in Strategic Security Studies, from the U.S. National Defense University.
Ahmet is married with two children. His hobbies are football, hiking, and reading.
14. When 'Fake News' Was a Force for Good
I remember reading A Man Called Intrepid in the late 1970s. It left a mark on me.
When 'Fake News' Was a Force for Good
“Agents of Influence” sets the record straight on the man called Intrepid
Agents of Influence is Henry Hemming’s engagingly reported story about an audacious British clandestine propaganda campaign to draw the United States into World WarTwo.
On one level, it’s a story of the life and times of William Stephenson, a Canadian with no espionage training who becomes Britain’s unlikely key operative in the United States as well as MI6’s direct intermediary with the FBI, including J. Edgar Hoover, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself. At the same time, unseen by the Americans, and disregarding his orders from London to keep a low profile, Stephenson mounts an aggressive secret underground disinformation operation to systematically coax a resolutely neutral America into the fight on Britain’s side. This is a story of manipulating public opinion, producing, and promoting, well, fake news while duping public figures into being useful idiots to get the job done.
Sound familiar? The British author makes the connection quite explicit: While Hemming is concentrating on Hitler and Roosevelt and Churchill, he is thinking all the while about Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
“Strip away the technology involved, the names and the dates, and there are some surprising similarities between the Russian operation which ended in 2016 and the British one which began in 1940,” he says up front.
The British campaign was a matter of survival. The Nazis were at the door in France, assembling an invasion force. And so Stephenson was allowed to disregard orders, it turned out: a desperate Churchill was willing to accept all means necessary to bring the United States into the war—lies and fake news be damned. Or as the British prime minister later said: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
On the Ropes
The story begins in June 1940, a pivotal moment in history. Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Norway have fallen to the Wehrmacht; Britain, at war with Nazi Germany, has just evacuated hundreds of thousands of soldiers at Dunkirk amid fears of an imminent invasion. Churchill knows that Britain cannot survive without help from the United States, but Roosevelt is pinned down from coming to its aid by American isolationists, one of whom was the immensely popular transatlantic pilot Charles Lindbergh.
At that moment, Stephenson, a World War One flying ace, is ordered to open an MI6 information—and disinformation—bureau, disguised as the “British & Overseas Features” agency, which Hemming describes as “a harmless British news agency supplying published articles to foreign newspapers.” With machines and ticker tape clacking in the outer office as an effective façade, the operation “was the pre-internet equivalent of a troll farm,” Hemming writes.
Within months, Stephenson’s fake news purveyors were shipping stories of inflated German losses and Nazi crimes to news outlets around the world, all designed to land back at the place of origin in the United States. All the while, Stephenson was watching public opinion polling on the British cause rising slowly from miserable single digits to the teens and beyond.
Hemming reminds us there is a world of difference between the British operation and Russia’s 21st century campaign to help Donald Trump win the White House. “Whereas the British wanted to defeat one of the most tyrannical and murderous regimes in world history, the Russians were motivated partly by a desire to shore up their own authoritarian kleptocracy.”
Stephenson’s adversaries in Berlin had sent their own propagandists to sway U.S. public opinion and sometimes bribe American politicians. Lindbergh, a Nazi sympathizer, told Americans that Hitler was certain to win the war in Europe. Hemming does not go beyond previous accounts of Lindbergh’s affinity for the Nazis, but he holds the once towering American hero to task. Lindbergh’s isolationist speeches, Hemming writes, were riddled with charges that Jews have too much “influence in Hollywood, the press, the radio and the US government,” and that “Jewish thinking was ‘not American.’” In private, Lindbergh went further. In his diary, he memorialized remarks he made at an election night party on Nov. 5, 1940, with returns showing Roosevelt rolling toward victory over Republican Wendell Willkie and on the cusp of an unprecedented third term in office.
“I said that I did not believe a political system based on universal franchise would work in the United States, and that we would eventually have to restrict our franchise,” Lindbergh wrote.
Restrict from whom? Hemming writes that Lindbergh meant “African Americans. Everyone there agreed.”
Nazi Tools
Lindbergh probably did not know, we are told, but also would not have cared, that “passages of his speeches were being mailed around the country as part of a scheme run from the German Embassy.”
Working closely with Lindbergh was New York Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish III, the latest in a line of a prominent family of politicians. Fish argued in Congress that unnamed “powerful elements” in America were conspiring to drag the country into war. Fish’s and the America First isolationists were recycling an old trope that has also appeared in the Trump years, updated for different circumstances, that American Jews were working with the Soviet Union to take over the United States. Or as Fish dared say on the floor of Congress: “I should a hundredfold rather be enslaved by Nazi Hitler than by Red Stalin.”
Step by step, meanwhile, Stephenson was finding the means to counteract the isolationists. While his team worked to discredit the likes of Lindbergh and Fish, their disinformation teams were in hyperdrive on other fronts. One of the most successful efforts was a phony document that showed Germany planned to foment a coup in Bolivia as part of a plot to gain influence in South America and isolate the United States. Rather than circulate the fake information in the press per usual, Stephenson provided the news as a fact to J. Edgar Hoover, who passed it along to Roosevelt. The resulting document, known as the Belmonte Letter, was reminiscent of World War One’s Zimmerman Telegram, in which Britain coaxed President Woodrow Wilson into the conflict by leaking word of a planned military alliance between Germany and Mexico. The key difference was that the Zimmerman Telegram was genuine. Both had the same function of swaying American opinion.
In the course of his activities, Stephenson’s influence was profound. He encouraged William J. Donovan to establish the OSS and eventually a global espionage and sabotage outfit that became the CIA. Stephenson, meanwhile, who liked his martinis “shaken, not stirred,” may well have inspired a fellow British intelligence officer, Ian Fleming, to create James Bond.
The Natural
Stephenson came naturally to the world of intelligence and deception. Born in Winnipeg, his official biography had him as the son of a British war hero killed in the Boer War. Closer to reality, Stephenson was embarrassed by his humble origins, Hemming writes. His father, who died when William was four, had been a laborer in a mill, his mother, a poor Icelandic immigrant. Stephenson grew up in Winnipeg’s red-light district. By joining the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France in 1917, however, he transformed himself. By the end of the war, he was an ace pilot, having scored 14 kills in his Sopwith Camel, which earned him the Military Cross, the Croix de Guerre, and the Distinguished Flying Cross.
The war hero returned to Winnipeg long enough to earn some money, lose it all, marry an American heiress and become a millionaire in the 1930s marketing radio sets. When he returned to England a few years before World War II, he had a fateful encounter with no less than author Henry Hemming’s father.
In September 1938 Stephenson and the Hemming family were visiting mutual friends at a house outside London. Hemming’s father, then a child of three, had wandered off toward a pond. Stephenson raced to look for the child. “Bill arrives at the pond out of breath to find three-year-old Dad either walking into the water, drowning, or, in the most colorful version, he has disappeared beneath the waterlilies,” Hemming writes. “Bill then wades, jumps or dives into the pond in his clothes, before staggering out with a spluttering child in his arms.”
Hemming, of course, felt “a tacit bond to the hero of this tale, Bill, who went on to become Dad’s godfather.” The author, then, has every reason to repair the story of William Stephenson for all history. Stephenson’s story of derring-do—spy master, propagandist, participant in the creation of the OSS and the CIA—had been known to the public mostly through a 1976 best seller, A Man Called Intrepid, and a subsequent TV miniseries of the same name, starring David Niven, Michael York, and Barbara Hershey. The problem, Hemming tells us quite convincingly, was that the book (written confusingly by a man named William Stevenson) gets most things wrong, starting with the fact that Stephenson was neither called Intrepid, nor was it his code name. The book, writes Hemming, “was popular, pacey, and so inaccurate that allegedly its US publisher later had it reissued as a work of fiction.”
All wrong.
Agents of Influence (subtitle: A British Campaign, a Canadian Spy, and the Secret Plot to Bring America into World War II, newly released in paperback, succeeds in setting the record straight. Hemming is telling the real story of the real man who saved his father’s life.
“My favourite part of the story….” he writes, is “hearing that Dad had survived, and could go on to meet Mum, and my sister and I could be born.” Second, by clarifying the story of William Stephenson, Hemming is adding to our understanding of the establishment of the U.S. intelligence apparatus and its dirty tricks pioneered by others, in the 20th century. Finally, though, his celebration of Stephenson’s successes in creating the British disinformation operation, in finding willing co-conspirators and swaying public opinion through black propaganda, are confounding and ironic at the same time.
We should be “more vigilant, to consider where our news has come from,” Hemming warns, and “scrutinize the business dealings and contacts of those who represent us politically.”
All too true In the era of Donald J. Trump and the threat he and his followers represent to American democracy.
Yet here we cheerfully accept British fakery to lure America into war and eventually defeat Nazism. Should we equally accept the CIA’s employment of such techniques to combat Soviet-backed communists in postwar Italy or overthrow governments in Guatemala, Iran and Chile? Should we also give Ukraine a pass when it employs propaganda and disinformation in its lopsided battle against the Russian invasion of Ukraine? In the end, deception has always been a part of warfare. It is a moral judgment for all of us, to decide when the ends justify the means.
15. Ukrainian troops are deserting battle and Russian troops have 'troubled' morale as the war is expected to last years, NATO chief says
I have not seen other reports of Ukrainian desertions.
Ukrainian troops are deserting battle and Russian troops have 'troubled' morale as the war is expected to last years, NATO chief says
Ukrainian soldiers ride a self-propelled artillery vehicle Gvozdika in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, Friday, June 17, 2022.
- Ukrainian forces have had "desertions" on the combat field, the British defense ministry said.
- Meanwhile, Russian forces have dealt with "especially troubled" morale with infighting and armed stand-offs.
- NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned Sunday that "nobody knows" how long the war could last.
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Ukrainian troops are deserting battle while Russian troops are facing "troubled" morale as Russia's invasion of Ukraine could drag on for "years," officials said.
"Combat units from both sides are committed to intense combat in the Donbas and are likely experiencing variable morale," the British defense ministry said, per a Sunday report from The Associated Press.
The defense ministry said that "Ukrainian forces have likely suffered desertions in recent weeks," but that "Russian morale highly likely remains especially troubled."
The ministry also reported that there have been "cases of whole Russian units refusing orders and armed stand-offs between officers and their troops continue to occur."
The intel comes as NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned that "nobody knows" how long the war could last, per The AP.
"We need to be prepared for it to last for years," Stoltenberg said, urging allies "not to weaken support for Ukraine, even if the costs are high, not only in terms of military aid but also because of the increase in energy and food goods prices."
Germany reduced its military support to Ukraine in May as Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Germany and France against sending arms to Ukraine, saying it would risk "further destabilization of the situation."
16. New NATO Strategic Concept Will Broaden Vision of Deterrence
Excerpt:
While the strategic concept will bring new emphasis to non-military threats, it won’t short-change military deterrence, a need dramatically demonstrated by the ongoing Russian war on Ukraine.
New NATO Strategic Concept Will Broaden Vision of Deterrence
An interconnected era requires looking at security through economic, technological, and logistics lenses.
The new NATO Strategic Concept set to be unveiled later this month will press alliance members to envision deterrence as a matter not just of tanks and bombs but of supply chain security, cyberattacks, climate change, innovation, and more.
“The strategic concept needs to be able to live for the next decade, so it looks far beyond the current crisis in Ukraine. It looks at the implications for our security of…climate change, innovation, the use of…hybrid warfare, cyber war and the role of cyber in our societies. But also resilience. How resilient are our Western societies to these kind of attacks and what do we need to do in order to tackle that?” David van Weel, NATO’s assistant secretary general for emerging security challenges, said on Friday during the Defense One Tech Summit.
Much has changed since NATO’s most recent strategic concept document came out in 2010, Van Weel said. Even before Russia launched a brutal war on the alliance’s doorstep, its members had growing concern about China’s rise, its influence over emerging technology, and its outsized share of the world’s electronics supply. The new concept will reflect the fact that future threats to alliance members won’t be purely military.
“Supply chain was not an issue 10 years ago. We were still globalizing. We were working on the basis of just-in-time, just-enough logistic routes. And now we've seen with the pandemic, with the economic vision that China tends to use against countries or the fact that a simple container vessel can get stuck in the Suez Canal for two weeks, how fragile we are,” he said. “Safety and security is much more than building a border and having soldiers behind it. It's also about being able to…look after yourself and be independent.”
While the strategic concept will bring new emphasis to non-military threats, it won’t short-change military deterrence, a need dramatically demonstrated by the ongoing Russian war on Ukraine.
“I don't think it's either/or. We see now in Ukraine that what they need, mostly, now in order to stop the advancements of Russia in the Donbas is heavy artillery. And I think many people would have said two years ago that heavy artillery is probably not something we'll see in a conflict in the near future in Europe,” Van Weel said. “So we shouldn't be quickly drawing conclusions on what means are obsolete, or needed. But I think it is safe to say that in addition to that classical military deterrence and defense, there is an aspect to deterrence and defense that needs to take into account all these other [things] whether they are in energy supplies, supply chains, cyber, or in innovation and technology that can be used against us.
“I'm pretty confident that all these aspects will feature prominently in the new strategic concept.”
17. He Tried to Reform the Way a Top D.C. Think Tank Gets Money. Now the FBI Is Looking Into Him.
Excerpts:
One observer chalks the current troubles up to an odd combination of a general’s swagger and a career military man’s naivete about the civilian economy. “They go from a world where status is determined by rank and honor to one where it turns out that money matters a lot,” says Tufts University professor Daniel Drezner, the prolific foreign-policy writer and author of a book on the ideas industry. “They feel like they’re making up for lost time. And the problem is because they’ve been in the military world, they have no idea what the rules are.”
Whatever the ultimate legal consequences for Allen, one immediate cost is another round of bad headlines for the Washington think tank industry, an unregulated world where standards about donor influence are all over the place, especially at institutions without Brookings’ deep pockets or gold-plated reputation, and where history gives people few reasons to afford even the most venerable establishment the benefit of the doubt. Bad faith begets bad faith, and allegations about Allen’s trip to Qatar, in turn, beget skepticism about all sorts of other things he’s done — even those efforts to distance Brookings from autocratic money.
Meanwhile, the current Brookings annual report still lists Qatar as one of six donors in the top $2 million-plus category. According to a spokesperson, the money was part of a funding commitment dating back to before Allen’s tenure. The forthcoming 2022 report will be the first one not to include Qatari money.
He Tried to Reform the Way a Top D.C. Think Tank Gets Money. Now the FBI Is Looking Into Him.
Magazine
The Brookings Institution gets a Qatar-shaped black eye.
Politico illustration / AP Photo / iStock
06/17/2022 07:32 AM EDT
Michael Schaffer is a senior editor at POLITICO. His Capital City column runs weekly in POLITICO Magazine.
The establishing documents for the Brookings Doha Center may be uncomfortable reading for advocates of academic freedom.
Inked in 2007, the deal between the storied Washington think tank and Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs laid out the financial terms under which Brookings established a groundbreaking outpost in the Persian Gulf. The fantastically rich, autocratic emirate would put up $5 million, bankrolling the groundbreaking research facility — but also got a notable degree of contractual prerogatives for a government over a proudly independent organization. The center’s director, the heretofore unreported document read, would “engage in regular consultation with [the foreign ministry],” submitting an annual budget and “agenda for programs that will be developed by the Center.” Any changes would require the ministry’s OK. (The document was obtained from Qatar by a U.S. source; a Brookings spokesperson did not dispute its validity.)
Brookings’s Doha presence was mothballed last year, but the history of chumminess between a Washington liberal bastion and a Middle Eastern monarchy is suddenly relevant again this week due to the abrupt resignation of Brookings’ president in a classic Beltway scandal involving allegations of improper lobbying for that very same country.
Ironically, the now-former president, retired Marine General John Allen, had worked during his four-year tenure to unwind the relationship, under which Qatar had become one of Brookings’ top donors, netting the institution millions of dollars — and no shortage of flak from critics of Qatar’s human-rights record and its friendships towards groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2019, Allen announced that Brookings would phase out money from non-democracies. In 2021, the Doha facility was quietly disaffiliated from Brookings.
And yet it now turns out that Allen’s entire run atop the capital’s leading liberal think tank was shadowed by a trip he took to the emirate just months before ascending to the presidency.
The alleged details of that journey, which leaked out via a federal search warrant application that was inadvertently made public last week, have cost Allen his $1-million-a-year job, upended Brookings, and infuriated scholars who worry that they’ll again face suggestions that their work has been tarnished by unseemly foreign influence.
According to the warrant application the FBI used to access Allen’s electronic data, the general, then a Brookings fellow, flew to Doha in June of 2017 to advise the Qatari government about how to win favor in Washington. At the time, the emirate was locked in a tense standoff with fellow U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Allen’s advice to the Qataris allegedly ranged from anodyne (they should place an open letter in the New York Times) to stuff that looks awfully ugly when attached to a high-minded think tank (they should pursue a “full spectrum of info ops — black to white”). The application, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, claims that Allen sought a $20,000 speaker’s fee for his meetings and that he also pitched business ideas involving two firms for which he sat on the board.
In Washington, according to the warrant application, Allen made the case to U.S. officials that the Trump administration ought to call on all parties to de-escalate the standoff rather than rallying to the Saudi side, not disclosing his alleged request for payment. And later, the document says, he tried to obstruct federal officials looking into possible violations of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Allen has not been charged with any crime, though a former U.S. ambassador identified as working with Allen pleaded guilty to related charges last month, and a Pakistani-American businessman who also allegedly worked with them is serving a 12-year sentence for unrelated foreign-lobbying and corruption charges. His team maintains that there was nothing improper about the trip to Doha, which they say was taken with the blessing (and even the staff assistance) of top administration officials and was driven by the distinctly non-nefarious goal of using a decorated general’s relationships in order to avoid a shooting war in a country that happened to host a crucial American base. Allies suggest the supposedly inadvertent release of the warrant application was designed to embarrass him.
“General Allen has never acted as an agent of the Qatari government,” says Allen’s spokesman Beau Phillips in a statement. “He never had an agreement (written or oral) with Qatar or any other Qatar-related individual or entity. Neither General Allen nor any entity with which he was or is affiliated ever received fees (directly or indirectly) from the Qatari government for his efforts. Brookings never received a contribution from Qatar or any Qatari government-related entities or individuals in connection with General Allen’s activities. General Allen took these actions because he believed it was in the U.S. military’s and U.S. government’s interest to help avoid a war breaking out in a region with thousands of U.S. troops potentially at risk. His entire involvement in this matter lasted less than three weeks.”
But to Brookings critics — and to crestfallen colleagues — the key fact has nothing to do with whether the general personally profited from his work: In sitting down with Qatar’s royal family, he would have been taking a meeting with some of the most important financial benefactors of an institution for which he was serving as a distinguished fellow and whose presidency he’d soon be granted. That Allen would be tapped to run the place just months after helping a crucial donor navigate Washington is the sort of thing that looks bad, no matter how pure the motives. “It just creates terrible optics, and creates this opportunity for people to attack in bad faith,” says one longtime scholar at Brookings, where staff have been asked not to speak publicly about Allen’s departure.
Sure enough, within a couple days of Allen’s suspension last week, GOP Rep. Jack Bergman of Michigan fired off a letter to the Attorney General pushing for an investigation of Brookings itself, asserting that “there is substantial evidence suggesting that his alleged assistance to Qatar is merely part of a much larger pattern of the Brookings Institution advancing Qatar’s interests.” Among other claims, Bergman said it was suspicious that Brookings fellow Benjamin Wittes’ Lawfare blog, a source of vociferous criticism of alleged foreign influence during the Trump years, had “conspicuously avoided any meaningful criticism of Qatar” and “attacked” a Bergman-sponsored bill that would make it easier to sue foreign governments including the one in Doha.
“The insinuation that somehow Lawfare represents the Qatari government is utterly false,” says Wittes, who says the independent blog has “never had any support of any kind from the Qatari government,” and whose Brookings work is not part of the foreign-policy wing where Qatar’s donations have gone.
That’s the problem with allegations of improper dealings: They make it easier to discredit any work product, no matter how bureaucratically siloed.
Brookings maintains that there was nothing untoward about its relationship with Qatar, before or after Allen’s arrival. A spokesperson says any nonprofit’s funding agreements with donors, like the 2007 agreement involving the Doha center, commonly involve boilerplate regarding the sharing of information about how the money is to be spent. “Brookings has strong independence policies in place to ensure donors do not influence Brookings’s research findings or the policy recommendations of its experts,” the spokesperson says. The institution’s ethics policies specifically prohibit lobbying or anything that could trigger FARA.
Martin Indyk, the former Brookings vice president who championed the establishment of the Doha center, says Qatar’s government never impinged on the work or applied pressure. “They never showed any interest in what we wrote, the content,” Indyk says. “What they were interested in was the cachet.” At the time, Qatar was in the midst of a frenzy of deals to brand their energy-rich ministate as something more than another glitzy Gulf playground: An outpost of Georgetown University, a vast art museum designed by I.M. Pei.
Whatever reputational boost Qatar got from Brookings, they paid handsomely. Beyond building the Doha facility, the emirate became a top funder of the main, Washington-based Brookings.
As the home of the media company Al Jazeera and with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood — in addition to squelching domestic dissent — Qatar was not without U.S. critics, many of whom lamented Brookings’ dance with the emirate. The criticism was hypercharged by a bombshell 2014 New York Times report detailing the ways various foreign governments wielded influence over American policy via donations to Washington think tanks. The investigation name-checked governments from Norway to Taiwan, but the biggest dollar figure involved Qatar, from which Brookings had taken nearly $18 million in the prior four years, with agreements in place for still more.
“The fascinating thing is John is the one who ended that relationship because he decided that we shouldn’t take money from nondemocratic governments because it was too high a risk of perception problems,” says a second Brookings scholar, who also was asked not to speak publicly. “Most people are still confused and sad.”
Adds a non-resident fellow: “It’s obviously a black eye for the organization, but it doesn’t strike me as a systemic problem as much as it was a leadership problem. Whereas the Qatar thing before was more of a, ‘Hold on a second, how is this place paying for itself?’ ... I’m less bothered by the Allen case than the suggestion that there might be Qatar money going towards programming because that strikes me as the death of a think tank.”
While staff gathered for Zoom meetings following Allen’s suspension last week and his resignation a few days later, some also wondered how someone smart enough to earn four stars could have wound up in such a public predicament. Allen, 68, had served in top jobs including as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. It’s actually not his first public imbroglio: In 2012, in one of the stranger national security scandals in memory, it emerged that Allen, then posted in Kabul, had traded some 20,000 pages of emails with Tampa socialite Jill Kelley, which became public as part of the dust-up that led to David Petraeus’ resignation as CIA director. The controversy led the Defense Secretary to temporarily put on hold his nomination as commander of U.S. forces in Europe. The Defense Department later cleared him of wrongdoing, but Allen retired rather than revive the nomination, a weird end to a storied career.
One observer chalks the current troubles up to an odd combination of a general’s swagger and a career military man’s naivete about the civilian economy. “They go from a world where status is determined by rank and honor to one where it turns out that money matters a lot,” says Tufts University professor Daniel Drezner, the prolific foreign-policy writer and author of a book on the ideas industry. “They feel like they’re making up for lost time. And the problem is because they’ve been in the military world, they have no idea what the rules are.”
Whatever the ultimate legal consequences for Allen, one immediate cost is another round of bad headlines for the Washington think tank industry, an unregulated world where standards about donor influence are all over the place, especially at institutions without Brookings’ deep pockets or gold-plated reputation, and where history gives people few reasons to afford even the most venerable establishment the benefit of the doubt. Bad faith begets bad faith, and allegations about Allen’s trip to Qatar, in turn, beget skepticism about all sorts of other things he’s done — even those efforts to distance Brookings from autocratic money.
Meanwhile, the current Brookings annual report still lists Qatar as one of six donors in the top $2 million-plus category. According to a spokesperson, the money was part of a funding commitment dating back to before Allen’s tenure. The forthcoming 2022 report will be the first one not to include Qatari money.
Daniel Lippman contributed reporting.
18. Authoritarian regimes are a health threat to the world - analysis
By definition an authoritarian regime puts the regime first and not the people or the country and certainly not the international community.
Authoritarian regimes are a health threat to the world - analysis
There may be an increased risk of health emergencies that could affect the entire world when authoritarian countries are not transparent with their data
Updated: JUNE 19, 2022 16:11
More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, many authoritarian regimes continue to provide misleading or unclear information to the world about how they have handled the pandemic, as well as continuing to withhold information about other health emergencies.
“At least 800 families suffering from what North Korea has only called an ‘acute enteric epidemic’ have received aid in South Hwanghae Province so far,” Reuters reported.
“Enteric refers to the gastrointestinal tract, and South Korean officials say it may be cholera or typhoid,” the report said.
The reports from North Korea come in the wake of warnings about the potential for a cholera outbreak in Mariupol, the Ukrainian port city that was attacked by Russia and partially destroyed in fighting in recent months.
A resident gets tested for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) behind barriers of a sealed area, amid new lockdown measures in parts of the city to curb the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Shanghai, China June 9, 2022. (credit: ALY SONG/REUTERS)
“Researchers who predicted a 2017 cholera outbreak in Yemen now say conditions are growing ripe in Mariupol,” Voice of America reported. “The city is at elevated risk because water and sewage systems were damaged in the fighting.”
These stories are also linked to ongoing coverage of the lockdowns in China, which claims it is trying to get COVID-19 under control. Beijing uses policies that are often secretive in its drive for “zero COVID,” its policy for fighting the pandemic.
Overall, the issues involved illustrate that in secretive regimes and countries that are not transparent with their data, there may be an increased risk of health emergencies that could affect the entire world.
China’s role in the spread of COVID-19
The initial outbreak of the pandemic in late 2019 is still clouded in mystery. Despite investigations, the lack of complete data and limited access to information for researchers has meant that various joint studies with China leave scientists with more questions than answers.
The democratic world must therefore be concerned about how future health emergencies could arrive from places such as North Korea. The issue of monitoring those future threats is important. If authoritarian regimes pose a greater threat to world health than other countries, questions must be asked about how to monitor the threat.
The tragedy of the pandemic shows that relying only on Western scientific experts to warn the global community is likely not enough. This is because Western partnerships in Wuhan, China, where COVID-19 was first identified, should have resulted in increased knowledge about exactly what was taking place during the early stages of the virus’s spread.
Yet this wasn’t the case, and it doesn’t appear that Western democracies were sufficiently prepared or knowledgeable about the threat. Instead, they waited until late February and early March to put in place any kind of response, by which time COVID had already spread to dozens of countries.
This failure to act was likely due, at least in part, to their concerns being minimized by China through a joint study of what was happening in Wuhan that began in January and wrapped up in February. That study, and the resulting joint WHO press conference on February 24, gave a false sense of optimism.
This points to the need for national security and intelligence experts to look at how the spread of potentially dangerous outbreaks in authoritarian regimes may pose a threat. The current report from North Korea is only one example of partial reports with crucial details missing.
It appears that there have been more and more of these “potential” health-outbreak emergencies since the pandemic, since we are more sensitive now to these reports than before. It is crucial that we assess the potential health threat posed by authoritarian regimes, whose policies do not serve the best interests of Western democracies.
19. Meet the legendary ‘father of Special Forces’ who helped establish the Green Berets
His book From OSS to Green Berets also left a mark on me.
Meet the legendary ‘father of Special Forces’ who helped establish the Green Berets
Happy Father’s Day to Col. Aaron Bank
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More than seven decades ago, Aaron Bank had an idea. He decided that after years killing Nazis, almost leading a manhunt for Hitler, and then working alongside Ho Chi Min to liberate Vietnam from imperial Japan, the United States Army needed some special fighters. A force versed in irregular warfare, who could mess up an enemy from behind their lines, working with local resistance. A special forces, if you will. Seventy years ago Aaron Bank got his wish.
June 19 is celebrated as Juneteenth, now a federally recognized holiday. June 19 is also the 70th anniversary of the creation of the U.S. Army Special Forces, better known as the Green Berets. And since Father’s Day also falls today, it feels apt to honor Col. Aaron Bank, who’s known as the “father of special forces.”
Col. Aaron Bank. (photo courtesy U.S. Army)
Bank was born in 1902 in New York City. He grew up working as a life guard, where work took him from New York to France and the Bahamas. At 39 he joined the Army after Pearl Harbor, with his level of fitness helping him overcome doubts about his age. He joined the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services, immediately going into work on sabotage, guerilla warfare and recruiting partisans to help fight the Nazis in Europe. His work peaked when he was a part of Operation Iron Cross, a plan for the OSS and Bank to, using a cadre of German Jews, communists and defectors, parachute into the German-Austrian border and capture or kill Adolf Hitler if he fled Berlin. Hitler hid in a bunker and never left the city, leading to the cancellation of the operation and denying Bank of what surely would have been a movie-inspiring military action. After the war in Europe ended he found himself in southeast Asia and supported Ho Chi Minh as the head of a future coalition government. American policy went against Bank’s recommendations. Still in the service, he pushed for a formal Army force dedicated to the kind of irregular warfare Bank had made his trade.
This month, Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC) introduced a motion in the House of Representatives to honor both the Special Forces and Aaron Bank himself, who retired as a colonel. Rep. Hudson’s resolution notes that the Green Berets “encouraged the incorporation of principles of force multiplication into the military doctrine of the United States and paved the way for the revitalization of special operations forces in the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps” and “helped revolutionize the conduct of modern warfare.” It’s hard not to see how.
Since the creation of the Army Special Forces in 1952, the force has been an instrumental tool in the Army. Originally just one group, the 10th Special Forces Group, it expanded into several units. They were deployed to South Vietnam as advisors for that country’s army and were a part of U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, an unconventional warfare group fighting against the forces of Bank’s former compatriot Ho Chi Minh. Missions also included covert actions in Laos and Cambodia. Other deployments included several conflicts in Latin America and the Persian Gulf War. Special Forces were part of the initial U.S. assault on the Taliban in fall 2001 in Afghanistan.
As the premiere special operations forces in the public for years, the Green Berets got a lot of attention. In the world of fiction, there was a less than stellar film about them starring John Wayne. Col. Kurtz and Capt. Willard both counted themselves among the ranks in Apocalypse Now.
In the 21st century they’ve been somewhat eclipsed in the public eye by various “tier one” special operations forces such as Delta Force and Navy SEALs, but they remain a key part of the military, deployed in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere doing the irregular warfare they have been doing for the last seven decades.
Rep Hudson’s resolution is, as of press time, in the hands of the House’s Armed Services Committee.
As for Bank himself, he had another major contribution after leaving the Army in 1958. Relocating to California, he became concerned with what he saw as poor security at nuclear power plants. Working with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists he shed light on the concerns and helped spur plants to overhaul how they protected nuclear installations. He died in 2004 at the age of 101. Not bad for a guy who was robbed of the chance to kill Hitler.
The latest on Task & Purpose
20. Awakened to Putin’s Threat, Biden and the West Nod Off Again
This is a key point. It is counterintuitive: the more we try to prevent escalation the more we are likely to see it happen.
The escalation Mr. Biden and other Western leaders say they fear if they take stronger action to support Ukraine is guaranteed by their caution. Ukraine is the frontline now, but if Mr. Putin succeeds, he won’t stop there. A direct confrontation with North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces will become inevitable. If the goal is Ukrainian victory, the White House must say so clearly and everything Ukraine needs must be sent now.
During World War II, the American lend-lease program delivered millions of tons of materiel to the Soviet Union. I refuse to believe that it’s harder to get a few hundred howitzers into Ukraine today than it was to ship trucks and tanks past Nazi U-boats. Ukraine is running out of everything, even bullets. The U.S. has the way but not the will.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced another formidable Ukrainian military aid program at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany on Wednesday. The package includes some of the longer-range weapons Ukraine desperately needs. That’s good, but more is needed. Stop talking about negotiated outcomes that will only give Mr. Putin time to prepare his next attack. Helping Ukraine isn’t charity. Democracy can’t be defended on the cheap. The high cost of inflation will be nothing compared with the price Vladimir Putin will exact if he isn’t stopped now.
Awakened to Putin’s Threat, Biden and the West Nod Off Again
The president appeared on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ and didn’t mention Russia’s war against Ukraine in a 23-minute interview.
By
Garry Kasparov
June 17, 2022 6:53 pm ET
President Joe Biden appears on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" in Los Angeles, June 8.
Photo: KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS
Earlier this month President Biden addressed the nation. Rather than do so from behind the Resolute Desk, he went on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” In a 23-minute interview, Russia’s war on Ukraine wasn’t mentioned once. With domestic issues such as inflation, the Jan. 6 hearings, abortion and gun control on the president’s plate, the war in Ukraine may seem less of a priority. But it isn’t. Providing Ukraine with everything it needs to fight the Russians is the right—and popular—thing to do.
Yet Mr. Biden seems as if he’d rather pass the buck than act. During remarks at a Democratic fundraiser two days after the Kimmel interview, he said that President Volodymyr Zelensky “didn’t want to hear it” when warned about Russia’s imminent invasion. The Ukrainians deny this, but even if it were true, what of the U.S. ignoring its own warnings? No sanctions or aid was deployed to deter Mr. Putin’s invasion. Mr. Zelensky was surely skeptical that any U.S. support would be forthcoming after the fighting started.
Now we know the high cost of that failure to act—the slaughter, destruction and war crimes in Ukraine, and the food and fuel crises around the world. Instead of working to contain Mr. Putin in the eight years since he first invaded Ukraine, instead of insulating themselves against blackmail by becoming less dependent on Russian exports, American and European governments kicked the can down the road.
They also kept the door open to Mr. Putin, giving him confidence along with the hundreds of billions of dollars in oil and gas revenues he used to arm his war machine. Mr. Biden had a summit and several calls with Mr. Putin, and for what? Mr. Putin has stayed in power for 22 years by ignoring what weak Western leaders say and watching what they do. He took note as U.S. intelligence correctly predicted his long-planned invasion but did nothing to stop it. He watched as the first U.S. offer of help to Ukraine was to evacuate Mr. Zelensky under the assumption that Kyiv would fall within hours. Ukrainian courage and skill proved that assumption wrong.
Mr. Biden may be besieged politically, but Mr. Zelensky is besieged literally, as Ukraine suffers great loss of life in its defense of the eastern Donbas region. The only way to end the war is by helping Ukraine regain its territory and sovereignty and destroying Mr. Putin’s war machine. Anything less would allow Russia to consolidate and rearm, while Ukrainians under occupation suffer.
Mr. Putin made his intentions clear in a televised appearance on June 9, birthday of Peter the Great. Like Peter, Mr. Putin said he plans to “reclaim” lost lands. Unlike Peter, who modernized Russia and brought it closer to Europe, Mr. Putin is isolating Russia and moving it into a dark age. While dictators usually lie about everything they do, they are often candid about what they would like to do. Mr. Putin has long talked about rebuilding his beloved Soviet Empire. This week’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum featured the presentation of a map of “former Ukraine,” from Kyiv to Odessa. Colonialism is not a Western European invention, despite what some progressives seem to think.
The escalation Mr. Biden and other Western leaders say they fear if they take stronger action to support Ukraine is guaranteed by their caution. Ukraine is the frontline now, but if Mr. Putin succeeds, he won’t stop there. A direct confrontation with North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces will become inevitable. If the goal is Ukrainian victory, the White House must say so clearly and everything Ukraine needs must be sent now.
During World War II, the American lend-lease program delivered millions of tons of materiel to the Soviet Union. I refuse to believe that it’s harder to get a few hundred howitzers into Ukraine today than it was to ship trucks and tanks past Nazi U-boats. Ukraine is running out of everything, even bullets. The U.S. has the way but not the will.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced another formidable Ukrainian military aid program at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany on Wednesday. The package includes some of the longer-range weapons Ukraine desperately needs. That’s good, but more is needed. Stop talking about negotiated outcomes that will only give Mr. Putin time to prepare his next attack. Helping Ukraine isn’t charity. Democracy can’t be defended on the cheap. The high cost of inflation will be nothing compared with the price Vladimir Putin will exact if he isn’t stopped now.
Mr. Kasparov is chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative.
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Appeared in the June 18, 2022, print edition.
21. The Frontline Interview: J. Michael Luttig (January 6th)
This is an interview from a conservative republican judge on the January 6th investigation. I watched him testify and his presentation was painful (so slow and halting deliberate pauses in his speech). However, his analysis is the most detailed and based on a thorough constitutional interpretation that it is worth considering by those on both sides of the issues. I recommend an objective reading of the transcript below. Or you can watch the interview at the link: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/j-michael-luttig/?utm_campaign=frontline&utm
The Frontline Interview: J. Michael Luttig
J. Michael Luttig served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006. Prior to his time on the bench, Luttig was assistant counsel to the president under Ronald Reagan and clerked for then-judge Antonin Scalia and for Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger. He also served as assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice under George H.W. Bush. After leaving government service in 2006, he entered the private sector, where he has worked for both Boeing and Coca-Cola. He is currently retired.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on May 25, 2022. It was filmed for a forthcoming documentary looking at challenges to American democracy.
VIDEO INTERVIEW: The transcript below is interactive. Select any sentence to play the video. Highlight text to share it.
Rising Concern During the 2016 Elections
I mostly want to talk to you about 2020 and what you saw, what concerned you, and your role. But first, was there anything that was concerning to you about American democracy before 2020, before we get to the campaign, before we get to the election?
Yes, although I didn't frame it in that way at all. I had been concerned about our democracy, American democracy, beginning during the primaries in 2016, because I saw what everyone else saw, which was the—at that point, the bombast and the language, if you will, of politics that represented to me an assault on American democracy.
Which parts of that—which parts of what you were hearing were the things that really stood out to you?
Well, you know, I'm talking now about the Republican primary. It started off with 14 or 15 candidates. And you can recall those primary debates and then the campaigning during the primary itself. And the politicians, who I believe are at the root of all evil, they were beginning to talk the language of assault and attack on America herself, and the institutions of American democracy, which I consider to be the Congress of the United States, the executive office of the presidency and the federal judiciary. And those words sounded to me an assault or attack on democracy itself.
And then of course, much later—well, no, actually, now that I think of it, during the primaries, the moderator asked of the candidates in one primary debate whether they would accept the results of an election. And I don't remember how many, if any more than Donald Trump, said that they would not necessarily accept the results of the election. 1
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And you know, to me—as it was, I think, to many people—was a stunning answer to that question. I think probably because I am a lawyer and a judge, I heard that response even differently than most people who were concerned about it.
I mean, during that period, you were a judge and stayed out of politics, and presumably when you're hearing something like that at that point, you must have a question of, you know, what do you do? How are the politicians going to respond? Are you talking to any of them at that point, to leaders inside the party or expressing your concerns?
I was actually not a judge on the bench at that point. I had gone off into the private sector. And I've never, to my knowledge, uttered publicly a partisan word or thought. And so back at the time, I would've been expressing this view almost exclusively probably to my wife, my wife of 40 years with whom I share everything. But I was profoundly concerned, even during the primaries, about the direction that the Republican Party seemed to be taking the country, though unwittingly.
What do you mean by that, by the Republican Party?
I don't think that any of the candidates, let alone the entire party, let alone the nation, had any concept that the primary, the Republican primary could lead to what it has led to today. And that's not to be critical of the public at all. I'm not one who believes that the public has any responsibility to understand and appreciate all of the nuance and all of the processes that underlay our democratic system of government. I believe that that's the responsibility of our elected representatives.
Now, as I hear myself say that, I was profoundly critical of our political leaders. So, for instance, I was actually angry that, in my view, not one single leader in America who had the moral authority, the courage and the will to speak up and say, "This has to stop," did so. Now, I put particular emphasis on the word "moral authority," by which I mean the moral authority to reach across the aisle to American citizens of all political stripes and be heard and listened to. I say that because I don't believe that there is any such political person or leader in America today, and I didn't think there was back in 2016.
The Trump Presidency
As you watched the Trump presidency and watched it take place, did it confirm fears that you had going back to 2016? What did you see in that period between 2017 leading up to 2020?
What I saw was a straight line from the Republican primaries to and through the Trump administration, straight through to Jan. 6 and continuing until this moment.
… I mean, how are you evaluating how the party leaders were responding during the presidency? I mean, we talked to a lot of people back in 2016, and a lot of them said they went along because they thought he wasn't going to win and that there wasn't a harm that would come from it. And by 2017, he is the president. As you're going towards, as you say, on a trajectory towards Jan. 6, how did you evaluate the response of the country's leaders, other leaders besides the president, during—through that period?
To the person, I didn't—I thought that the political response by our leaders was abysmal and inexcusable. And of course I'm familiar with what you say, that then and even now, there are whispers everywhere that the politicians wish they had not performed their public office and service in the way that they did. But to this day, they are still just whispers. Now, was I—did I become disenchanted and disillusioned with our political leaders? No, because that's exactly what I would've expected of them.
But the argument that some of them make that may be more personal to you is they say there was flaws with Donald Trump, but, you know, the threat of a Clinton presidency—but in particular judges and the Supreme Court nominations and you know, that there was a trade-off that was made, and it was almost an explicit trade-off for somebody like a Mitch McConnell. How do you evaluate that balancing?
Of course this is a subject I'm intimately familiar with. And the way I evaluate it as to the politicians is in this way: I understand and appreciate very well the focus on the judiciary and ultimately on the Supreme Court. That was a war that had been going on in the country and between and among the politicians for literally half a century. And as that unfolded across that half a century, the whole country and all of the politicians knew exactly what was going on at every moment, up to and including the last three appointments and confirmations to the Supreme Court leading up to the victory for the Republicans and the conservatives in the war for the court. Now, I understand that, but against the larger backdrop of all of politics and the Trump administration, I don't excuse their larger and other behavior because of their insistence upon their different positions about the judiciary and the court.
That was really just a single issue, political issue, and not even the political issue of the greatest import to the nation or the country. So to the politicians who say, "Well, look, we did this in the name of the Supreme Court," I say, "Fine. That doesn't excuse your abysmal public service."
… As you watch the first impeachment, what do you take from that, from the moment from the result, from what President Trump at the time seems to take from being acquitted, and what it said about whether there were checks on him?
Well, without regard to former President Trump's view or any other political figure for that matter, the impeachment is a constitutional process that's provided for by the Constitution itself. And that's not a legal process. It is, by design of the Constitution, a political process. It's for that reason that a president or any other official subject to impeachment can be impeached for conduct or behavior that does not entail criminal violation of the law at all. It's to say even that impeachment is available for even purely political offenses to the nation as determined by the politicians themselves. Now, during the first and the second impeachment, I was greatly interested in the impeachment not just as a constitutional matter, though that was the preponderance of my interest, but I was also interested in it as the political process as well. But I've never done politics and don't care to.
So I know that's just to say that I understand all the political issues surrounding it, and I have a view on the—I wouldn’t say the appropriateness of the impeachment, but neither would I say the legal appropriateness of it. I have a view on whether as a political matter the Democrats should or should not have attempted the impeachment.
What is your view on whether they should have?
Well, my political view is neither here nor there, and I don't really care to give it to you.
I mean, but there is a larger question about it, which is in a—which is about whether the constitutional checks function in a highly polarized government and a highly polarized society. Do these institutions that the founders put into the Constitution work if you have not three separate branches of government, but really two parties that are polarized, that are united? I mean, did you sense any feeling of stress on those constitutional checks in that process?
No, zero. In my view, the constitutional process functioned throughout the entire Trump administration despite the pressure that was put on that constitutional process by the president, at many points deliberately and intentionally. But as to the impeachment process, that was really a perfect functioning of the impeachment process under the Constitution.
The 2020 Election
… So as we get to 2020—and this is in the run-up to the election period—what are you seeing that is concerning you?
Of course, in the run-up, defined to be, let's say, the fall and the fall leading up to the November election, that's when the former president began to suggest, if not more, that he was not prepared to willingly leave the White House were he to lose the election. That's the period in which, you know, some journalists began to write lengthier pieces about just that. And I was reading those pieces because that becomes a constitutional legal matter that is of great interest to me and has been my whole life. It was around that time that my wife, who, by the way, is also a lawyer and has worked in the White House previously, she said—began to say to me that she didn't think that the former president would leave the White House if he were to lose the election.
And in the early weeks and months when she was saying that, I was dismissing it, saying that that's just not really a possibility, and it's not an option to a president who loses the election to remain in the White House. And about that time, to her credit, some very respected journalists were writing longer pieces and asking me for comment, frankly, as to what would happen if the president didn't leave the White House. And so that moved my own thinking to the next phase. And then the third phase was I would pin around several weeks before the election, when the president came full circle to his—what was going to be his final position, that he would challenge the election no matter what if he were to lose. At that point, my wife came to me again and said, as wives are wont to do, "I told you so." And as husbands are not wont to do, I said at that point, "I think you might be right."
And I said to her, "If you're right, we will be facing a grave constitutional crisis." During that time, though, I would never go on the record as saying that ever, but I was being asked by many journalists and reporters in the media to say that we were in a constitutional crisis. And I did not believe, even at that point, that we were in a constitutional crisis, and I refused to tell the country through the reporters that I believed that we were.
… And the response that you were seeing to what the president was saying—what you were doing, what you were learning as you were researching and reading about the process of how the president is confirmed after the election—and what do you think of the response of especially Republican leaders, but of everybody else who's watching this? Do they seem to share your concern?
Yes. I was not reading or studying the Constitution or the law. I knew that. I was studying the public reaction of not just the public writ large, but in particular, our elected officials. And what I witnessed, I believed, was failed leadership in the form of knowing acquiescence in what was about to happen, reprehensible acquiescence.
And then it comes to the moment in the early hours after the election, and the president comes out—you'd been concerned about this already. And the president comes out and says, "Frankly, I did win this election." The counting is not done at that point. What are you thinking as you're watching that?
I thought the moment had arrived, the moment that would bring us into a constitutional crisis for what I believe then would've been the first constitutional crisis in American history. So maybe a word of explanation. I don't believe that the country's ever had a constitutional crisis unless and until we are confronting circumstances that were never contemplated by the Constitution. That view leads me to the conclusion that we're never in a constitutional crisis unless or until the attack on America and her democracy is from within, not from without. I believe that the Constitution provides the process and the mechanisms by which we can withstand any attack or assault on our country or our democracy from without.
But I believe that the Constitution never contemplated and therefore didn't ever provide for process and mechanisms to withstand an attack on America and her democratic processes from within. And that's what I believed was happening at that point.
Initial Response to the 2020 Election Results
… I want to just ask you about a couple of stops along the way and responses people had to that moment, and see where you think that they fit into this. And one of them is that the president comes out and says this, and it's Don Jr. and Alex Jones and some others are pushing the conspiracy theories. But by the end of the week, there are some senior Republicans who, if they're not saying the election was 100% stolen, are raising questions about the election by that weekend. How do you evaluate those responses from Republican leaders as they were coming out and saying, you know, it seems like there was fraud here; we need to be fighting on this?
The statements from political leaders merely that there was or might have been fraud in an election is contemplated in the Constitution and eventually in the statutes of the United States through the likes of the Electoral Count Act of 1887. And so those words, you know, alone are not offensive words. Now, in 2020, for me, it was the specific claims of fraud that were problematic, the conspiracy theories, if you will. They didn't even sound plausible or colorable to me, just as they didn't sound plausible or colorable to many people. They were—this was wacky stuff, right, that foreign powers had infiltrated the process down to the individual voting machines and the like. That's the stuff of science fiction to me.
Could that happen in today's world? Yes. But I wasn't willing to believe it for a second during the 2020 election. I had—of course we all knew at that point that Donald Trump had received, I believe—and you can correct me if I'm wrong—the largest number of votes in the country of not only any Republican president to that date, but I think any president of either party to that date due to the turnout in the 2020 election of course, which was massive. It turned out that now-President Biden did receive a greater number of votes than Trump did, and I believe than any other president has ever garnered in history. 2
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But again, I'm out of my depth. But directionally, that's the way I saw the election. And so I thought that was enough for me to believe that Trump had lost the election. And so these farfetched claims by Sidney Powell and [Rudy] Giuliani, to say the least, did not resonate with me.
I mean, when you watch those moments—the Four Seasons Total Landscaping, the press conference at the Republican National Committee where Giuliani has the hair dye running down and the, as you say, conspiracy theories about the election, what are you thinking as you're watching that? Is that concerning to you? Is it reassuring because it almost seemed like a joke to some people at the time? What were you thinking as you were watching that?
Instances like that one and including that one were farcical. They were comedy to me, though tragicomedy. But there were many such moments and many such claims, again, against my worldview of politics and politicians. It was amusing at first, and then gradually, over a relatively short period of time, became disturbing as I believed we were nearing that moment of constitutional crisis that in fact occurred.
I mean, it does seem like, as we've talked to people, that there's really two periods, that there's a period of court cases and up to the Electoral College, and then there's a period after the Electoral College is voted in the middle of December. One of the questions—maybe the last question I want to ask you about in that first period is there was, as we've talked to people, there was a faith among a lot of Republicans that there wasn't too much harm that could be done; that the court system was going to take care of the claims that somebody like Mitch McConnell made a decision that he would recognize Joe Biden's election after the Electoral College certified in the middle of December and that there was no real harm in waiting to do that. There was no real harm in waiting to speak up against the claims of fraud during that period because the system was strong enough to handle it. What do you think of that argument, of that position of those who didn't believe the claims, but who felt we'll just let the system play out?
Well, of course it should be apparent by now, I don't think much of it at all. That's exactly what politicians do every day all the time. They wait and they wait before they ever take a position of any import to the country, and they wait until they no longer have to. And then they figure out what they need to say in the aftermath to protect themselves from their failures earlier to speak out.
Now, as to that view of, I'm sure, many—actually, of everyone, because the president resorted to the courts himself, as well as other Republicans who do not consider themselves supporters of the former president. And so all of the Republicans, and then of course by necessity the Democrats, turned to the courts. They were more than happy to do that. For the moment, it meant that they didn't ever have to make any decisions.
That's failed leadership. But that's what happens every day. So yes, they waited on the court. Now, the tragedy, the political tragedy in this instance was that the politicians understood what was at issue in the federal courts. They understood that the federal courts were being called upon to decide some of the most momentous constitutional issues possible in the context of that two- or three-month litigation of the election cases. In particular, what I'm focusing on and talking about is what's known as the independent state legislature theory. That theory is a theory of constitutional law that has been embraced—seemingly embraced now by at least seven Supreme Court justices, including two who are no longer on the Supreme Court. And the predicate, the foundation of these constitutional challenges to the election was built around the independent state legislature doctrine or theory. And the Republicans in particular had reason to believe after Justice Barrett was confirmed to the court that there were five votes on the Supreme Court to embrace that independent state legislature theory, making it a constitutional doctrine.
Now, what would that have meant? Under the theory, under what's known as the Electors Clause of the Constitution, the state legislatures have what's known as plenary and, under the theory, exclusive authority over the appointment of state electors who vote as part of the Electoral College, send those votes to the Congress to be counted to determine who the next president of the United States is. The significance, the momentous significance of this theory, if embraced by the Supreme Court, would be that the legislatures could never be second-guessed by, in particular, the state Supreme Courts. So in this context in 2020, if the legislatures wanted to send in alternative electoral slates to the official electoral slates that had been sent in under the laws of the states, they could do so, and it could not be second-guessed by either the state Supreme Courts or, eventually, even the federal courts.
And the state legislature theory applies both to the state electors for the purposes of electing the president and vice president of the United States, but also to congressional redistricting in every state. I go so far in that explanation so that I can say that right now, in 2022, literally in the past week or two, the various parties in a redistricting case out of North Carolina have filed their briefs in the United States Supreme Court variously asking the Supreme Court to either embrace the independent state legislature doctrine or reject it. And on this Supreme Court, as of—I think fair to say, as of only a few months ago, when the Supreme Court denied cert—denied an emergency application of the parties to decide this case, there are four justices on the current court who expressed an interest in deciding the independent state legislature doctrine theory, and even gone so far as to say this is a matter of great national importance that we, the Supreme Court, must decide before the 2024 election.
And four being enough to bring it to the court.
Four being enough to bring the case before the Supreme Court for decision, but not the requisite votes to uphold, you know, the doctrine. That takes five.
And as you evaluated that argument, where did you land?
At the time that I did my last writing, which was the CNN piece, which I titled "The Republican Blueprint to Steal the 2024 Election," I had not done the research and the thinking that would be necessary for me to come to a conclusion on that historic a question. 3
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Since the publication of the CNN piece, I've been asked by seemingly everyone on both sides of the issue to join them in various amicus and other briefs before the Supreme Court on the issue. And so as I sit here today, I haven’t come to a conclusion on my view of the constitutionality of that theory.
But even if it is constitutional, I mean, at its heart what the theory means is even if the majority of the population—more a majority of voters voted for the electoral slate of one candidate that the legislature could overturn it. I mean, what are the implications of adopting that, even if it is actually constitutional and that's what the law should be? What are the implications—what are the implications of the political choice of a legislature to decide to exercise that power?
Well, I of course will leave to others the political implications and consequences of that, though I think we can stipulate that the political consequences for the politicians is enormous politically. But what I won't hesitate to say is that the implications and consequences for the Supreme Court's embrace of the independent state legislature theory are immensely consequential for democracy in America. And maybe that's the point at which I should say, you know, we are talking about American democracy. There's no subject of higher importance than that in America. And so we need to understand what we're talking about when we throw around the term "American democracy."
The dictionary definition of "democracy," and therefore of American democracy, would be something like this: Democracy is a system of government and governance by which the rules of government, of governance, and the policy of the citizens—that is, the will of the people—is expressed through the elected representatives of the people. That would be a textbook definition of democracy. And for sure, you can understand that what we are talking about when we are talking about the electoral processes in the United States is—would be fairly considered the core of the democracy and of the democratic process in the United States of America. Now, I personally distinguish all of these relevant terms in this way—that's what I consider to be American democracy itself.
Then I think that you have to—I distinguish out of American democracy as a whole the subset of the institutions of democracy that the Constitution created to protect and preserve that democracy, and that would be the Congress of the United States, the executive office of the president and the presidency, and the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court. Those are what I think of as the institutions of our democracy. And then I think of the constitutional processes that secure our democracy and the corresponding laws of the United States that protect and further our democracy as instruments or instrumentalities of our democracy. And so, in my view, I'll say for the moment over the past six years, there has been an unprecedented attack and assault not only on American democracy but also on the institutions of our democracy, but also on the instrumentalities or instruments of that democracy.
That's why I'm of the view that we're in a constitutional crisis, because those three assaults or attacks, if you will, on those three organs of American democracy have occurred from within, not from without. In other words, I think we are right now in a war with each other. We're not in a war against a foreign power. We're in a war with each other, and it's an immoral war over morality in America. And this is a war that America cannot win. This is one war that America can never win.
… That's a very useful explanation of where we are in the big picture of all this, because I think we do sometimes get lost in the details of the legal claims inside it, what's going on.
And I don't believe that the public has a responsibility at all to understand any of this. The responsibility, you know, rests with our public officials, our elected representatives. And that's where the blame lies for their failure to preserve and protect our country's democracy.
Growing Concern of a Constitutional Crisis
So as we get to this period where the cases have been dismissed, the Electoral College has voted, and they're starting to be—this is before you get a phone call from the vice president's attorney. But in that period, there's starting to be talk about Jan. 6; there's starting to be talk about the Electoral College. Are you growing more concerned in this period?
Yes, without any question. But not just concerned—I was gravely concerned.
Why?
Because I was beginning to see and witness the deliberate course that would lead to the crisis that occurred, whereas I could understand—just as a lawyer, I understood all of the pieces, and I could understand how they interlocked, and I could understand in those later weeks how they were going to interlock and to what you might tritely call a perfect storm that would lead the country into the constitutional crisis. … I have a very well-informed and well-considered view at this point in my life of the institutions of democracy, of American democracy, the institutions of democracy, and even now, the instruments and instrumentalities of democracy that I described.
And those interlocking pieces that you see where it's headed, and you see a constitutional crisis. But what was the goal of those pieces? What was the goal of those operating around the president as they were putting those pieces together?
I didn't have any idea of the precise goal in the lead-up to the election itself. It was not until after Jan. 6, and then even so, after the memos and emails and conversations became public—began to become public so that I could analyze them, if you will, and understand exactly what the plan was. I suspected the plan, and I understood what they were doing very well. I didn't want to believe that there was anyone behind it who was knowledgeable enough, intelligent enough to execute the plan successfully, and I didn't think there was any such persons until long after Jan. 6. And to complete the thought, now I think we all know that there were such people, and they were in fact executing the plan that we all saw.
I just want to be really clear about what that plan was. I mean, was that plan to raise questions about the future elections and change voting laws, or did that plan have a more concrete goal of what they wanted to accomplish on Jan. 6 and in the run-up to Jan. 20?
No, it was not about the future at all. It was about the immediate, the moment. The plan was to overturn the election through the exploitation of what I've called the institutions of democracy and the instruments and instrumentalities of our democracy. And we know now there's no question about it. They knew exactly what they were doing. And they believed it. They believed in the rightness of that, at least legally and constitutionally. Whether they believed it writ large was right, I'll leave for someone else to assess.
I want to ask you about how you got involved with Pence. But first, one thing I forgot to ask you about earlier, which was Bill Barr. You know, we've talked about people who didn't say anything. And he, you know, as we know, planted—didn't just plant, said on the record to the Associated Press, said to the president that there was no fraud allegations. I know you know Barr, and you were at least watching that happen as it was publicly announced. What was the signal that was sent when that report came out that the Justice Department looked into it and that Barr was going on the record on the fraud allegations? 4
4
Well, Bill Barr, then-attorney general, is a longtime friend of mine. In fact—well, two things: Bill and I went into the Department of Justice together in 1989, he as assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, and then he prevailed upon me to come in as his deputy. … And long story short, I agreed. So Bill and I went into the Department of Justice in the George H. W. Bush administration, and we were at the department under the leadership of then-Attorney General Dick Thornburgh from Pennsylvania. So then fast-forward. As has been publicly reported, Bill and I were both under consideration to succeed [Jeff] Sessions as Trump's attorney general. And then of course the president eventually called Bill. So that's a long way to bring me to your question. I knew Bill well, and the day that he first publicly said that there was not—there was insufficient evidence of fraud nationwide to call into question the final electoral—popular vote of the people for President Biden, I knew at that point—I hadn’t thought a bit about this until right now, but that's the moment at which I knew that we were heading into the constitutional crisis.
Why? Because I knew all too well what the former president's reaction would be to that. And knowing Bill, I knew what his reaction would be to it. And so I appreciated that that was the defining moment and that it would be the defining moment, and it was.
Not long after the election, the secretary of defense is pushed out. Bill Barr resigns before Christmas. I mean, how concerned, just watching that and knowing Bill Barr is not the attorney general as we're going into Jan. 6, how concerning was that for you?
Enormously concerning. Bill's successor was to be Bill's deputy, Jeff Rosen, who I knew of but did not know personally. But I knew that Jeff Rosen could not possibly stand his ground against Donald Trump. 5
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By the same token, I understood well that if there was one person who could, it was Bill Barr. And he did. And his penalty, or his sentence, was exactly what he would have expected and the country would have expected: He was fired. But to your question, I became increasingly worried, if that was even possible, once Bill left, knowing that in my view, there was no one left who could stand against Donald Trump or who would stand against Donald Trump. At that point, I was utterly convinced that we were heading to Jan. 6. And so at that point, again, I don't even have a job at that point. I've been out of public service and the public sector for 15, 16, 17 years. And for the 15 years before that, I was a sitting federal judge. So I had not been in public life, much less in politics, for 30-plus years at that point, which is just a long way of saying that all I could do, I did, which was to think about what was happening and what was about to happen, which was not to belittle that enterprise. It was the most serious thing I've ever had to think about. But I did do that.
A Call From Richard Cullen
And then you get a call from Richard Cullen. Can you tell me about that?
Yes. On Jan. 4 in the night, certainly in the middle of the evening in Colorado, which is where my wife and I were, Richard called. Richard Cullen is a longtime and dear friend of mine, and had been Vice President Pence's outside counsel for several years at that point. … I knew on Jan. 4 that Richard was very close to the vice president. So my wife and I were having dinner, and Richard calls. It was nothing at all because Richard and I had been talking multiple times every day or two for two-plus years over everything that was going on in Washington, just because we're that close friends. So the call itself was nothing.
He called, and he said—he calls me "Judge," which is fine. And he said, "Judge, what are you doing?" I said, "Well, Elizabeth and I are having dinner. What's up?" And he said, "Do you know John Eastman?" And I said, "Yes." And he says, "Well, what can you tell me about John?" And I said, "Well, John was one of my law clerks perhaps 20, 25 years ago. He's a professor, an academic," I think I said, "at Chapman Law School in California." And I said, "Why are you asking?" And he said, "You don't have any idea, do you?" And I said no.
And he said, "Well, John Eastman is advising the president and the vice president that the vice president on Jan. 6 can essentially overturn the 2020 election unilaterally." I said to Richard, "Well, Richard, you can tell the vice president that I said that he has no such authority at all and that he must accept and the Congress must count the Electoral College votes as they have been cast, and that he is not free to not count any of the votes, count other votes, or otherwise discount any of the votes that have been cast. If that's to be done at all, that's an authority and a power that's vested in the Congress of the United States, and certainly not in the single person of the presiding officer of the Senate, which is the vice president of the United States."
And Richard said, "He knows that that's your view." And I said, "OK, OK." And I said, "Well, look, Richard, of course I understand the gravity of this. I'd be willing to help the vice president in any way I can, and please tell him that." And we hung up. My wife, having heard only one side of that conversation, said something like, "Oh, my God, what was that?"
And I said, "Well, that was Richard, and he said that John Eastman is advising the president and the vice president that the vice president can unilaterally—in effect, unilaterally overturn the election. And Richard just called to ask me about John." And my wife, who had been gravely concerned about this even for a longer period than I had been gravely concerned about it, was just deeply, deeply troubled and said that I had to do something. And I said to her—this is my wife of 40 years—I said, "Look, hon, I'm just not part of this. Jan. 6 is 24 hours away, essentially, and I'm not even part of this in any way at all." And as the wonderful wife that she is, she pled with me to do something. And then we later went to bed that night with my having told her that I was willing to do anything, but there was nothing that I could do, and this was in the hands of other people. So we went to bed on the night of Jan. 4.
Before we go on, we will come back to the story and pick up the second phone call, but I want to ask, just unpack some things that are going on inside that moment. I mean, the first is that you are getting a call from the vice president's personal lawyer to weigh in on this legal matter. I mean, you've worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, the White House. I mean, there's lawyers, there's institutions inside the executive branch. There's a Senate parliamentarian who you would think would be activated at this moment. What does it mean that you are being called?
I understood immediately why I was being called, because I understood everything about the process and the individuals involved. But at that point, none of that was relevant. I mean, we are at Jan. 5, and I had been following the lead-up to that day intensely for three or four days. And as I remember, the vice president was going to meet for lunch with the president in the Oval Office. And at that time, we now know the vice president was going to tell the president one last time that he was not going to do what the president wanted and that he was going to accept and count the Electoral College votes as they had been cast. So I understood from my life in all of those offices, including the White House and Department of Justice and the Supreme Court, I understood all too well that this was the final moment and this was a matter solely between the president of the United States and his vice president.
And when you hear the name John Eastman—because we've talked about Sidney Powell, about Rudy Giuliani, about the lawyers who are public, the public face of this—when you hear that John Eastman is involved, does that signal a change in the danger of the moment?
I didn't perceive it as a change in the danger, but I did know as of that moment—which for me, remember, was the night of Jan. 4 for the first time—that the president was being advised by a constitutional scholar and a constitutional historian of the highest order, which is to say that John Eastman, I'm confident at that moment, knew more about the Constitution, the constitutional history that informs the constitutional questions involved and the laws of the United States than probably anyone in the country. John's a brilliant scholar/academic with a particular interest in the Constitution and constitutional history. And the reason I emphasize that latter point is that for conversational purposes, there was little or no law on the several questions that were being pursued in those final days, and specifically the power under the Constitution that resides in the presiding officer of the Senate on Jan. 6.
There's just really little law in the past 235 years to inform us, the country, on the role of the vice president on that day. I knew that John knew everything that there was to know and had thought through the possible authority and power of the vice president in acting as presiding officer of the Senate on Jan. 6, so it did not increase the danger. The danger was upon us, and it was imminent. And from my standpoint, I knew to a certainty that I had—there was nothing I could do about it.
Were you surprised that he was involved? Were you surprised at the conclusion that he reached, somebody who you knew personally?
Well, we'll have to unpack those two questions. I suppose I was not surprised that he was involved, although I'd been around the White House and the presidency for enough years now to know, you know, it's a surprise when any person, you know, has access to the president of the United States at any time, let alone at a significant moment in history. But that said, John—I knew John had this background. I knew that he had access to a lot of high-ranking people in the legal community and also in the public community. So I was not surprised except in the one sense I mentioned, which is I would be surprised at any person at all, but I'd be especially surprised for any person that I knew personally to learn that they were advising the president of the United States in the Oval Office at such a moment.
Now, your second question. Before Jan. 6, and not until long after, did I have the understanding of exactly what John had been advising at each step along the way. And I gather now that his advice, you know, changed frequently during that short period of time in response to developing circumstances. His advice did not change. You understand what I'm saying, it's just that as circumstances changed, his specific counsel and advice changed to accommodate the circumstances that the president was confronting at that moment as opposed to the previous moment. But it was not until long after Jan. 6 when several of his memos came out in the [Bob] Woodward-[Robert] Costa book, Peril, that I could lay eyes on the specific legal reasoning that John was using to advise the president. And you know, as a lawyer and as a judge, that's the first and only time at which I could comment on anyone's legal analysis, and especially John's.
What did you think when you read those memos later?
I read them the first day that they were available from the Woodward-Costa book. I read them very, very carefully. I understood every word, and I understood the legal thinking behind every word. But I was greatly concerned that John had given the advice that he had given at every turn, and at every turn of his analysis, as I subsequently wrote. I subsequently wrote, I diagrammed his legal analysis from beginning to end and concluded and said that he was wrong at every turn of his analysis, every turn of his thinking.
I read the memos just in the run-up to this interview, and one thing that stood out in one of them, which wasn't a legal argument, it was the phrase, "We're no longer playing by the Queensbury rules." … Tell me when you read, when you see him say something like that, and what do you make of it?
Yeah, so that was certainly one—a troubling statement. That, to me, was a recognition by him to his client, the president of the United States, that they were not going to play by the—at least by the letter of the law from that point forward. That's not to say that what they did from that point forward was not within the law. I'm not commenting on that. I'm just saying when I read those words, they told me as a judge and a lawyer that John and the president, or anyone for that matter, had decided at that point that they were not going to play at least by the spirit of the law, if not worse. Those are the—of course I could be mistaken on this, but I'm 68 years old; I was a federal judge for 15 years; I've worked at the Supreme Court for a handful of years, and I've been a quasi-public figure for 40 years now. To my knowledge, or to my recollection as I sit here today, I've not uttered a single partisan or political word in public or in writing, and I've pledged to myself that I never would. And again, I don't believe I ever have. That's not to suggest in any way at all that I'm holier-than-thou. That's just to say really how I view myself and my—the privilege that I've had to work in the places that I've worked, and especially as a United States Court of Appeals judge. But every other lawyer is certainly free to make that decision for him- or herself, though I don't believe that any lawyer is permitted to say those kinds of words to a client in writing ever, let alone to the president of the United States of America at that particular moment. Those were ill-advised words.
“We need to help the vice president.”
… So let's go to the second phone call that you get the next day from Richard Cullen.
So I'm still in Colorado with my wife. I get up very early in the mornings, typically between 4:30 and 4:45, and that day was no exception. And we have a guesthouse in Colorado. My wife was over in the guesthouse, and I was up early having breakfast and having my coffee. I had had my breakfast, and I was having my cup of coffee probably around 6:00, I think no later than 6:30 Colorado time, and Richard called, and he said, "Judge, we need to help the vice president." And I said, "OK, what do we need? What does he need?"
And Richard, this longtime friend of mine, very seriously says, "Well, he and we don't know." And I said, "Well, we have to decide then what this even means. What are we dealing with? What are we talking about?" I believe in that first call, Richard told me that the vice president was going to meet with the president for lunch that day, that afternoon of Jan. 5. And my understanding, I think then, but I know subsequently, was that the vice president was going to tell the president one last time that he was not going to do what the president wanted him to do the next day.
And Richard said, "We have to do something very quickly." I understood that to mean before the vice president met with the president in the noontime hour. And again, it would have been 8:30, 8:00, 8:30 East Coast time. And I said, "Richard, I understand the momentous nature of the moment and the gravity of the moment, but I don't have any idea even what you're talking about." And Richard said, "Well, Judge, I don't really either." And then he said, "Somehow we need to get your voice out to the country." And I said, "OK. On what?," believing I knew what, but I just wanted to hear him say it.
And he said, you know, "On what the vice president must do tomorrow." And I said, "OK." I literally said, "Richard, as you know, I don't even have a job right now. I'm unemployed. I'm retired. I haven’t been in public life for, you know, 17 years, and I haven’t been in political life for 35 years. I don't have a fax machine. There's no possible way that I can, you know, get my voice out to the country. And besides," I said to Richard, "I'm a nobody. Nobody cares what I think anyway. So what's this all about?" And Richard said, "We need to get your voice out to the country very, very quickly somehow." And I said, "OK." And he said, "I'll call you back in 10 minutes." So I continued drinking my coffee and brainstorming and thinking as seriously as I can think about anything. And he calls back in 10 minutes, and he says, "So what are you going to do?"
And I said, "I have no idea, Richard. I haven’t had a single thought. Just think yourself about what you're asking me to do: get my voice out to the country. How is that even possible? And you want this done immediately." I said, "Richard, I honestly don't even have a thought as to what to do." And he said, "I'll call you back in five minutes." So he calls back in five minutes, and he said, "So, you thought of anything yet?" And I said, "Well, I've had one thought." I said, "I just opened a Twitter account within the past week or two or three. I guess I could tweet something. But, Richard, I don't know how to tweet something." And he said, "This is perfect." He says, "You have to do this right now."
And I said, "Richard, I don't know how to tweet something." And he said, "You just have to do it." He said, "I'll call you right back." So I'm sitting there, still in my dining room having my cup of coffee, and all I had there with me was my iPhone. So I typed out the words that I ended up tweeting and that everyone knows right now. And I typed them out essentially verbatim as I tweeted them. And then I go downstairs to my office to try to figure out how to tweet this. I had just learned how to tweet 100-and-whatever characters you're allowed, but no more. And I obviously had a lot more to say than 140 characters, or however many. And so I was panicked about all of this, but specifically about that.
You know, my wife and kids had always said that there's no way I could be on Twitter because it's not possible for me to say less than 140 characters, you know? But there I was on the morning of Jan. 5, and I had to do this. So I did the best I could. And what that meant was I copied and pasted from my iPhone an email that I sent to myself on the iPhone that included the text of the tweet. Then I copied and pasted that on my laptop into a Word document because a Word document was the only thing I knew how to do. So then I'm sitting there, and I'm nervous, right? I don't get stressed, but that's the word that would communicate, you know, to others. I was stressed out, not just because of the moment but because I didn't know how to do this. So I just thought, OK, the first thing I’ve got to do is divide this long Word document into 140- or 180-character individual tweets.
And so, you know, I won't digress to explain how one does that, but everybody knows how. But it's a Herculean task, because you don't want to break up the individual tweet except at the right point, but that's invariably more than the 180 characters that you have. So I go through all that rigmarole, and I have now what I think are 180 or 140 characters fewer than—for each individual tweet in the thread. So now I'm stuck. So my son sends me—my son's in the tech world and knows all things tech, and especially computer tech and all. So he sends me the instructions, the official instructions from Twitter on how to tweet a thread, which to a normal person, the instructions are very simple, but to me, they were not. But in any event, I followed those instructions over the next 30 minutes or 45 minutes and finally came up with the tweet thread. And I proofread it like I've never proofread anything in my life, which is not to say that there are not typos in it as I tweeted them. It's just that I gave it all I had.
And then I took a deep breath, and I tweeted it. At that moment, I had not a single thought in the world that anyone would ever even see the tweet. That's how little I knew about what was afoot in Washington, D.C. And I went about my business that whole day until about noon Eastern time Jan. 6 not knowing anything about what the vice president intended to do until then. But before I get to that, I will say that shortly after the tweet I tweeted, Richard called me. Actually, I should have included this part of the story. When I finally told Richard that I could tweet something, I said to Richard, I said, "Richard, I will never speak a single word on this subject unless every single word is personally approved by Vice President Pence." And I said, "Richard, I swear to you, I mean this: I will never say a single word unless he has personally approved it."
And Richard said, "Well, he doesn't need to approve it." I said, "Richard, I don't really care what he thinks. I will not do it unless he approves it." And Richard said, "Oh, OK, Judge. I'll call you right back." And he calls right back within five minutes, and he says, "The vice president will be comfortable and pleased with anything at all that you say." And I said, "Richard, I'm not doing it." And he said, "You really have to at this point, Judge. I've told you the vice president will be fine with anything you tweet, and that's the case. And we need to get this done now." And I said, "Richard, I don't like this one bit, but I'm going to do it."
So again, that exchange between Richard Cullen and myself occurred on the morning of Jan. 5. That would be—probably have occurred around maybe as late as 9:00 Eastern time.
It's an amazing story.
I'm sorry. So let me pick up now where I had left off previously. So within a few minutes, maybe 10, I've now tweeted. And, you know, I'm done. And Richard calls me back and says, "The New York Times has your tweet, and they're going to be running it on the front page momentarily." And I said, "Good grief, Richard. What on earth?" And he just said, "I just wanted to give you a heads-up." And I said, "Thanks a lot," you know? And I now know what I didn't know then, which is the vice president's team, all-inclusive, because I don't know who in particular, had The New York Times holding for what turned out to be my tweet. And for what purpose, the vice president or his team would have to explain that to you.
I mean, it's an amazing moment, and you're trying to figure out how to tweet. I saw in one detail of the story that you sort of had to convince your son to help you, that he was reluctant.
Well, yeah, I mean, as all millennials are toward their parents on all things tech, you know, both of my kids for years and have always—parents call their kids and go, "Can you help me do this on the computer?," and the kids say, "I don't have time for this. You're prehistoric; you're a dinosaur, and I'm busy," you know? And so for my son at that moment, I said, "Look, John, this is serious business. I don't have time to play around. You either tell me how to do this right now or I'll cut you out of the will." And that drew the typical millennial response, you can be sure. But we got the job done.
What was at risk in the vice president's decision? I mean, he's getting competing legal advice from John Eastman, from you, in whether they could have successfully overturned the election or not. But what was at risk if the vice president did decide that he had that legal authority to reject certain votes to follow one of the plans that's outlined in the Eastman memo?
You could not overstate what was at risk. And I'm not even sure that I can conjure up the words to describe what was at risk and what would've happened had the vice president gone along with the plan, if you will, and rejected the swing-state electoral slates and, God forbid, awarded the presidency to Donald Trump over Joe Biden, who had won the popular vote. And I'm careful about stating that while I think about the answer to your question. The first words are it would've thrown the country into a constitutional crisis of a kind that the Constitution doesn't contemplate and therefore provide for. And then if you want to begin to explain what would've happened, you know, I would say the first thing is no one in the world knows what would've happened next. No one in the world knows what should've happened next. And therefore, no one in the world knows what could’ve happened next.
The short and immediate answer is that all of this would be put before the Supreme Court of the United States for a final decision. That's under my view of the Supreme Court and the justiciability of a claim like this. Prior to Jan. 6, I believe many if not most scholars and knowledgeable people would suggest that perhaps the Supreme Court would not take that case. For technical reasons, they would argue that it's nonjusticiable. Either it's a political question or the answers are committed to a different branch of the government. In this case, those scholars would say the legislatures and the states or Congress have the final authority, not the courts. Again, I disagree with that. And the advice that I gave was premised on that understanding of mine that the Supreme Court would decide the several questions that would get the country out of the constitutional crisis that it would then have been in. I'm just making the point that I don't have any corner on the market as to that jurisprudential understanding of the Constitution, OK?
And many, many people, including John Eastman and the other scholars who assisted him, they, for instance, did believe that the Supreme Court would not decide the cases because the court would conclude that it, the court, did not have jurisdiction to decide the cases. And their plan was grounded, ultimately, in that belief as to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. But I digress too much. But that's to say that in the end, I believe the Supreme Court would intervene, but it's possible that I hold the minority view on that. I don't know. If the court had not intervened—and that really goes to your question—first, it would've meant that we would not have had a president on Inauguration Day, and likely for a considerable time thereafter while the political process figured out the answer to it.
That political process would've, of necessity, been one of utter chaos, utter chaos in America and consequently in the world. I mean, America cannot be without its leader of the free world for even a single moment, and that is contemplated in the Constitution itself. I mean, the Constitution provides for the next president to assume office at a date and time certain, and the then-incumbent president to leave office at that same date and time in order that there not be a single moment when there is not a president of the United States of America. Had the vice president not done what he did, there is no way that we would've had a president on Inauguration Day, and I don't believe we would've had a president on Inauguration Day even if the Supreme Court had to decide these issues, because these are enormously consequential constitutional questions that, of necessity, require some amount of briefing and deliberation by the Supreme Court. And at that moment, we would've been just weeks away from the inauguration. I don't think the Supreme Court could've decided it.
But the ultimate point is that, you know, at any moment where the United States does not have a president of the United States, the world is in danger and at risk. And needless to say, the United States is in danger and at risk literally including from a national security standpoint. So that's the short answer of the much, much longer, exceedingly complicated constitutional and legal answer to the question of what would we have been confronted with had the vice president not done what he did.
Thank you, I mean I think that really sets the stakes well, and it's hard to imagine that level of chaos—not just legal chaos, but political and America's place in the world that would've ensued. Let me ask you about —
I would just say the stakes could not have been any higher under our form of republican democracy than they would've been had Vice President Pence not done what he did. It's not possible for the stakes to be any higher under our form of government.
An “Assault From Within”
I mean, it's amazing, and it's amazing as we've made this film to realize you have a constitution, you have institutions, you have courts, and yet decisions made by one person, by multiple people throughout this story have real consequences; that the system depends on a level of goodwill or norms.
Yes, I would put it this way: The institutions and instruments and instrumentalities of our democracy, it is necessary that we have them, but it's not sufficient. Without leaders acting in good faith in the interest of the country as opposed to their partisan political interests, the country could not long exist. It's literally that significant. And what we saw play out on Jan. 6 was the assault or attack from within on our institutions of democracy and the American political process and the American political experiment, the attack and assault from within by our public officials who were acting themselves not in the interest of the country, but out of their own personal political interests. That is something that—that's the war that—the one war that America can never win.
Let me ask you about one other moment before we get to Jan. 6, which maybe didn't represent an existential threat in the way the vice president's decision did, but was the decision of Ted Cruz, who had clerked for you and a number of other senators, that they were going to try to—11 senators—that they were going to try to somehow delay the voting of the Electoral College to send things back to the state. It's not entirely clear to me what the goal—how they saw it playing out, but how did you evaluate his role, the efforts that they were making?
The role played by any senator or congressman, in my view unfortunately, is authorized by the Electoral Count Act of 1887. That's the act that explicitly gives Congress the authority to overturn a presidential election in a host of different circumstances. Those circumstances are circumscribed by design, but in actual effect are little circumscribed because of the ambiguity in the terms that permit Congress to overturn an election. Nonetheless, the law permits objections to electoral states. In the technical legal sense, that's what Sen. Cruz and other senators and other congressmen did. That's a frightening thought to me. But before Jan. 6, I suspect it was not a frightening thought to many people at all. My hope is that today, it's a frightening thought to everyone. But regrettably, I know it's not an especially frightening thought to anyone on Capitol Hill, because at this point, I don't believe that Congress will amend the Electoral Count Act in order to minimize to the greatest extent possible a repeat of Jan. 6, [2021].
And even if it was legal, what responsibility—or how do you evaluate those efforts?
Well, as I've said, the institutions of our democracy and the instruments of our democracy are necessary but insufficient for America to function. In some ways, the most important of those two ingredients of the process are the people, the individuals, the leaders of our country. That's where we as the people who are represented, we the people who have given the power to our elected representatives, are entitled to insist upon good faith and good judgment. In my own personal view, that expectation, you know, is ill-founded and ill-conceived at this point in our political world.
Another way that I have put it is that our political leaders face choices every day between country and politics, personal and partisan politics. Every day they are faced with a choice between those two, but they rarely believe that they're faced with that choice on anything. And in my personal view—admittedly, a cynical political view—they never act as if they believe that their choice was between country and politics. And that's a failure of the political process in America—political with a capital-P process. That's the failed leadership that I've referred to repeatedly over the past six months.
Is it disappointing personally? I mean, Ted Cruz has said you were like a father figure to him.
Well, I'm not going to speak to my view of what Ted did because that's neither here nor there. He's an elected senator of the United States. He has to live with the consequences of his decisions, just like every other elected official did. But am I disappointed with the entire political process and specifically our elected representatives? Yes, I'm beyond disappointed, as I believe all Americans should be. I don't want to believe that there's a single citizen in the United States who can look at what's going on in politics today and in Washington, D.C., and believe for one moment that this is even acceptable, let alone that this is what it ought to be. Again, we're at war with each other. And I don't see today any catalyst, any intervention, any off-ramp to this war on the horizon. To begin to walk ourselves off the ledge, even to begin, you have to have conversation with and among each other.
Today, there's no such thing as conversation. Conversation—we don't talk to each other. We don't talk to each other. We scream at each other; you know, we cast aspersions; we criticize with one-liners and sound bites and refuse to discuss any issue at all. As long as that's the case, the country's in a spiral—spiraling decline from which it can never recover. And this is just common sense.
Rhetorically, I would just ask, how can any person at all disagree with what I just said? All I said was, look, look at where we are. This is not where we want to be. This is not what America is. This is not where we want to go. Let's stop. Just stop. Right now, let's stop and begin talking to each other about how we go forward from here and eventually how we solve the problems that beset the country now. The reason why at this moment I don't believe that anyone even wants that conversation is because we're locked in this vicious political war, and there's no agreement among us on even the fundamental values and principles on which America was founded and has become the greatest nation in the world, and on the basis of which our—not just our freedom, but our hopes and dreams for America are entirely dependent. Not only do we not have agreement on even those most basic principles and values, we have fundamental disagreement as to those values and principles. It is almost like we are—we find ourselves back at the founding of the republic, the creation of this great nation, but with vastly different, antagonistic views of how to re-create the nation that we all created 235 years ago.
The Jan. 6 Attack on the Capitol
When we get to Jan. 6, the president and his lawyers and advocates, they’ve tried to overturn the election in the courts. They’ve tried state legislatures. They’ve put pressure on Mike Pence. He issues the statement that you mentioned quoting you. And by that point, John Eastman must know, if you have read his memos without Pence onboard, that there's not a legal route or a plausibly legal route to change the outcome of the election. And they have this rally, and the president goes out and speaks, and he mentions Pence, and he singles him out. And others at the rally are talking about fighting. What do you think when you look at that moment? What are you thinking as you watch it? What does it say about the story of American democracy?
So on Jan. 6, I was working in my office in Colorado up until around the noontime Eastern time. At that point, I went over to have lunch with my wife, not knowing anything about what was happening in real time at that moment in Washington, D.C. When I walked in the door, my wife was just—fear and terror in her eyes, and she said, "Have you been watching?" And I said, "No. Watching what?" And she said whatever words she used—I don't remember—but the U.S. Capitol's under attack. And, you know, just tingling went down my spine, just like everyone else. And I said, "Oh, my God, no. What's going on?" And she said, "Well, look, you have to see it," she said. "But first, I've got to tell you that there are—they’ve erected gallows on the grounds of the Capitol, and they're chanting to hang Mike Pence. And across the bottom of some screens, it is running that you advised the vice president that he should—to do what he has now told the world that he is going to do at the Capitol." And my wife said, "Look, Mike, I'm scared for us and for our safety."
And I said, "OK, I understand. I haven’t seen any of this." I said, "Let's talk about this. This is serious." And I said, "Look, no one knows where we are. No one knows we're in Colorado. No one really knows where we are at all. But if they wanted to do something to us, they would go to our home in Chicago. So if you want, I'll get some kind of security at our home in Chicago." And that's what we did.
So then we don't even know how to turn the television on, but we tried to turn the television on to watch it and couldn’t. And then I said, "Well, can you pull it up on the computer laptop?" And she said, "Maybe." So she pulls it up on the computer laptop. We set it on the mantel next to the dining room table, and we're watching the events at the Capitol. And my wife was in tears. And in a very short time, I told her that I couldn’t watch it and I was going to go back to work, and I left.
So, I mean, it would take me hours to explain everything that was going on in my mind. But it was everything going on in my mind was what was going on in everyone else's mind; that in the moment, the mental process is receiving so many, you know, inputs that the only output is just incomprehensibility of this and the bewilderment as to what's going on, and finally, if at all, what on earth does this mean for the United States of America?
A Call from the Vice President
… You got a call from the vice president the next day?
I got a call from the vice president, I believe, the morning of Jan. 7. My wife and I had gone down to the UPS Store there in Colorado because she had to mail something. I was standing inside because it was cold, and I got a call that registered as spam, S-P-A-M. And just like everyone else, I never answer a call from spam. I don't even answer calls that I don't recognize, let alone spam calls. But I was just standing there doing nothing, and I don't even know why; I answered the call. Whenever I answer a call like that, I say nothing at all, usually for the duration of the call because most typically, it's a recording that cuts off unless or until you say something. So I say nothing. So I said nothing for what seemed to me to be, you know, longer than I usually say nothing. And then a voice came on; it said, "Is this Judge Luttig?" And I said, guardedly, "Yes, it is." And the voice said, "Please hold for the vice president of the United States."
And so I scurried outside to get into our car so I would have some privacy. And as I was getting into the car, the vice president came on the phone, you know, and said, "Judge, Mike Pence." And that's how the conversation began. The vice president was as gracious and kind as any person could ever be under any circumstance at all, let alone the circumstance under which he was calling me. I couldn’t even—I couldn’t and I could never have imagined that the vice president would've called me, ever. But he did.
I think I forgot to ask you. When you find out you're quoted in the statement, was that—how surprised were you that that was? I mean, that was a very important statement when he issued it. Was it a relief to you to know that he was now on the record about what he was going to do? How did you react?
No, that was not my—I was not relieved to know that that's what the vice president was going to do at all, and I never even had that thought. You must remember that I had no idea even that anyone would see the tweet the day before. I had zero thought that the vice president would use it even if he saw it, which is to say I didn't really know, think or believe that the vice president would ever see the tweet. I know people can say, well, that's kind of naïve in light of what actually happened, but the way I would, in my defense, explain it is that no one knew that the vice president was going to issue that letter to the Congress and to the nation, nobody. And to the extent I even thought about it, I just assumed—and I think to 100% certainty—that the vice president would never mention anybody or anything from the podium in the chamber at noon on Jan. 6, [2021].
So I wasn't expecting anything at all. And then on the afternoon of the 5th, I believe now, as the vice president was on his way to the Capitol, he released the letter, and a couple of my clerks from years ago saw it for some reason. I now know it's because it was carried in the news. And they emailed to me, and characteristically for clerks and children, it was something—each of them separately said something like, "Judge, what on earth are you doing?" So I just responded and said, "What do you mean? Elizabeth and I are just out here in Colorado, and we're about to have lunch." And they both wrote back immediately and said, "Don't be coy with us." And I said, "Guys, I'm not being coy. I don't even know what you're talking about."
And then they wrote back immediately and said, "The vice president of the United States has just released his letter to the nation, and he cites you and some statement that you gave." And I wrote back to them and literally said, "Guys, I still don't even know what you're talking about. You know, if the vice president issued some letter that refers to a statement by me, do you have it? And if you do, send it to me." And they both sent it, and that was the first that I knew or ever expected or even imagined that the tweet would find its way into the public domain.
The Response to the Events of Jan. 6
After Jan. 6, there's a lot of criticism of the president's conduct, of what went on before. It feels like maybe there's going to be a turning point, especially inside the Republican Party. But the farther that it moves beyond Jan. 6, the less of the condemnation of Jan. 6, of what happened after 2020, the quieter the voices are. And you describe the Republican Party as fallen through a rabbit's hole in Alice in Wonderland. What do you mean by that? What happens after Jan. 6th as you're watching the party?
Well, the allusion to Alice in Wonderland I think people generally understand. But the short explanation is that, you know, Alice finds herself in a subterranean world where nothing makes sense and everything is upside down, and there is, therefore, intellectual and rational chaos. That's what I meant to convey because that's where I believe the Republican Party, to the person, was at that time and is essentially today, a year and a half later. We've begun to see some cracks in the Republican Party recently, but only begun and only recently. And I believe that even those cracks are only due to the opportunity that's been presented, the convenience opportunity that's been presented to our Republican leaders to consider distancing themselves from the former president, the opportunity being the recent primaries.
But as I would've expected of all politicians, including the Republicans, you know, at best they're waiting for an opportunity that they can avail themselves of. They're not about to seize the opportunity and make it themselves by speaking out.
I mean, and when they make an active decision, say, to take Liz Cheney out of the leadership, for example, how important are those decisions that they're making on the way in the wake of Jan. 6?
I don't do politics and I never have, and I don't want to ever do politics, or even for that matter speak a word about politics. But the day that I read with the rest of the country that the Republican Party had censured Liz Cheney was the final straw for me to the extent that I had a straw in the wind for Republican politics. Why? Because I don't believe that you have a political party at all if the putative members of that party would censure Liz Cheney simply and merely for wanting to investigate as a member of Congress the events of Jan. 6. It's unimaginable to me and my worldview of politics that any person in America would not favor an investigation of Jan. 6.
I'm not naïve. I understand the politics involved just in that investigation. In my view, notwithstanding the politics, every single American citizen and every single member of Congress should have urged an investigation of the events of Jan. 6, which leads me to my pessimism at the moment. If the country's reaction to Jan. 6 had been what it ought to have been, I would not have especially any concerns today for the country and for our democracy. On the one-year anniversary of Jan. 6, [2021], The New York Times asked me to comment on where I thought the country was a year later, and I did. And I think I said something like, "On Jan. 6, [2021], I was gravely concerned for America and for our democracy." I said a year later for The New York Times that I was more concerned then than I was Jan. 6, [2021]. That's all I said. The reason I said that was that the reaction to Jan. 6, [2021], was the polar opposite of what it should have been, what it ought to have been by the country.
And if we can't agree that what occurred on Jan. 6 was wrong, and to digress, in the view of the Republican Party was, quote, "legitimate political discourse"—if we can't agree as a nation as to the wrongness of the event and that statement by the Republican Party, we'll never agree on anything.
You know that Judge [David O.] Carter has written about, and I think in the Eastman lawsuit, possible theories of criminal liability. Do you think there's a role for a criminal investigation or potential crimes in the run-up to Jan. 6?
I have studiously and scrupulously avoided comment on that, and many, many have asked me that. And I wouldn’t comment on that today. What I'll say as to the former president and to John Eastman is this: It's exceedingly difficult to bring criminal charges against a lawyer for his or her advice to a client. That's not to say that it's not—that it's impossible or that it's not at times appropriate, but it's exceedingly difficult, and it's rare. The only way that that could ever happen is if the lawyer was advising his or her client as to the law in bad faith, purposely advising the client as to the law when the lawyer did not believe that that was the law. From that, you can understand it's rare, and it should be rare, though it's not impossible.
As to the president, because he's not exercising a professional service in the way that a lawyer does—it's a political service to the nation—different rules apply to him, criminal rules. And those rules cut in both directions at the same time. No one believes that a president of the United States should be criminally prosecuted except in the most extraordinary circumstances possible under our system of government. By the same token, most people would agree that even a president could and should be prosecuted for the most egregious criminal acts that a president might commit. So the question for the country, and most immediately for the Department of Justice as to the former president, is the latter; namely, does the president's behavior and conduct first constitute a criminal offense under the United States code?
That's an awesome decision to have to make, a decision that only the attorney general of the United States can make, Merrick Garland. If he makes that decision, he must then decide the even more awesome decision of whether the United States should prosecute the former president, even assuming he had committed a criminal offense. So those two layers of decision for—as to the decision whether to prosecute former President Trump is to tell you how exceedingly difficult that decision is, how rare it will always be, and how rare it ought always be.
A “Clear and Present Danger”
You write that in your New York Times editorial that there's a "clear and present danger to our democracy now," which is very strong language, language you didn't—you're borrowing that language. 6
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What did you mean to convey when you said that, and why were you issuing such a strong warning?
Yes, I of course borrowed that phrase. It's one of the most famous phrases in the law. And in the context, the question was, does free speech present a clear and present danger to our society? Yes, I borrowed that phrase. What I meant by it was exactly what the phrase intended to impart originally and is meant to impart today. It's clear. That's a legal term. It's clear that this—everyone understands it. Everyone sees it. There's no issue. It's not ambiguous; it's clear. Second, it is a present danger. It is a danger right now that's occurring in front of our eyes, a clear danger that's occurring in front of our eyes in plain view to all. So that's why I introduced that piece in The New York Times with that statement.
So what was the clear and present danger I was talking about? There I was talking about the—well, I was talking about even there in that piece the danger that President Trump and his allies in Congress and in the states were preparing to exploit the Electoral Count Act of 1887 in 2024 in the same way that they had exploited it in 2020.
But I was also saying in that New York Times piece a couple of months before the CNN piece that I wrote that this is the blueprint for Republicans in 2024, the blueprint to do exactly in 2024 what they attempted but did not succeed in doing in 2020. Now, in my own thinking, why was that a clear and present danger? It was easy to me, as I said in the New York Times piece. They are not only doing it in plain view; they're boasting that that's what they're doing, and they're telling us in complete transparency that that's what they're going to do. …
Because you've written a lot about ways to change the Electoral Count Act, ways to change the law where you could potentially prevent these abuses, and as you've said, they've run into a roadblock, which leaves us with the—as we've just been talking about it—the goodwill, the norms, the commitment not to the letter of the law but to democracy as a value. How important now is that? How much danger is there on that front, on the goodwill front, on the commitment to democracy?
That is the danger, and that is the threat. And that is the only danger and threat. It is the people. It is our elected representatives of we the people. If they are not willing to do their job, then democracy can't be saved, but neither can America. It's that simple. You could have America and American democracy without any rules at all if you could rely upon the good faith of our elected representatives. But our founders understood the folly in that, and that's why they created the constitutional system of governance that we have today in the Constitution. But they were—in fact, I just recently was reading and having this thought: The founders were political figures themselves.
But what I was reading recently convinced me where I had not been convinced before that they totally understood that a nation cannot be entrusted with its public officials and public representatives, and it's for that reason that the framers built and created the constitutional structure for our governance, which they believed, rightly, would protect America even from its public politicians. That's why today, I believe that America, and for sure American democracy, is at risk, because those representatives whom the founders completely understood would tend to act in their own self-political interest rather than the interest of the country, the founders believed that the system would constrain them. Today proves that the founders, as wise as they were as to that, were mistaken.
Thank you. Let me see first if Michael has a follow-up or anything that we missed. Did Vanessa have anything?
The Twitter Thread
… You mentioned the tweet, the Twitter thread that you wrote on Jan. 5. I was wondering, would you be willing to read some of it—I have it right here if you don’t mind?
What I'd say as background for all of you is that words are the most important thing in my life. Every single word that I've ever spoken or written I've measured and calculated for at least minutes, every single word. I look up every word, even though I know the definition perfectly well and could recite it. I look up every important word. And then I look up the synonyms and the definitions of the synonyms before I choose the word that I use. And that's my whole life. And so just imagine Jan. 5, and I'm told to write something for the country on the biggest constitutional issue of our times, and to do it immediately. And what I'm going to read you is what came out.
And I'll tell you that my whole life, at many moments like that, I've literally prayed for the words to come, and not one single time in my life have the words not come when I needed them. That's where my mind was while I was preparing that tweet, I was more than conscious, even though I had no idea that I was writing for history. And I did the very best I could to choose the words that I wanted to be remembered in history. So that's a complete digression and a very personal one, but since she wants me to read it, I just wanted you all to have that backstory, as you call it.
The most important words to me, by the way, were the loyalty words because those were the words in which I understood that I was speaking to the personal relationship between the two men. As tortured as it was at that moment, I wanted to speak to that. So, relatively speaking, the first words were not as important to me as the latter. And of course, I don't think I've ever even seen the latter words quoted anywhere. But just in terms of your personal interest, those were the words that I summoned and asked for.
"The only responsibility and power of the vice president under the Constitution is to faithfully count the Electoral College votes as they have been cast. The Constitution does not empower the vice president to alter in any way the votes that have been cast, either by rejecting certain of them or otherwise. How the vice president discharges this constitutional obligation is not a question of his loyalty to the president any more than it would be a test of a president's loyalty to his vice president whether the president assented to the impeachment and prosecution of his vice president for the commission of high crimes while in office. No president and no vice president would—or should—consider either event as a test of political loyalty of one to the other. And if either did, he would have to accept that political loyalty must yield to constitutional obligation. Neither the president nor the vice president has any higher loyalty than to the Constitution of the United States."
Thank you so much for doing this. One of the things that comes through from your story is how you've guarded your credibility throughout your career—every word that you issue, not weighing in on every moment of things, not getting involved in politics. And then this monumentous [sic] moment happens where the vice president's personal lawyer is calling you in a moment of constitutional crisis, and that reputation, that carefulness that you'd built up before, was part of the reason you were—probably was the reason you were in that position at that crucial moment in history.
Yeah, that's the whole story, and that's the whole story for me personally, too. I've never said a word about the rather lengthy conversation the vice president and I had on Jan. 7. And of course, he's not said anything about it publicly as to the pressure he was under and why he came to me. You know, I'll have to take that to my grave. But it was probably the most meaningful moment in my life because it brought my life full circle, you know, from where I began and to that historic moment that was like about as serendipitous as could ever be, you know? I'm just sitting there going, oh, my God. Look, I personally believe that that was divinely inspired, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the vice president thought the same. But whatever it was, for me, it was a big deal.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
