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Stephen Miller's Latest Loony Claims Of Trump's Immunity From Prosecution

Stephen Miller's Latest Loony Claims Of Trump's Immunity From Prosecution

You’re going to love this: the latest brief in the Mar-a-Lago documents case came from Stephen Miller. Yes, that Stephen Miller, the one who came up with the plan of ripping babies out of the arms of their mothers at the Southern Border. He still defends it as a good idea and has given interviews saying there are plans to repeat the policy of breaking up families if Trump is elected in November.

Miller has another wonderful idea this time -- that it was just fine for Donald Trump to leave the White House in 2021 taking a truckload of top-secret documents with him, because they were Trump’s secrets, not the government’s. Miller’s right-wing legal operation, the America First Legal Foundation – old Stevie just can’t get away from those intimations of the Nazi era, can he? – filed a friend of the court brief with Judge Aileen Cannon down in Florida supporting Trump’s position that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) allows him to do whatever the hell he wants to with his White House papers.

The PRA allows no such thing. The act, passed by Congress after the criminal presidency of Richard Nixon, requires every president to turn over all papers deriving from his time in office to the National Archives. Miller’s little nest of right-wing legal mice say the PRA doesn’t apply to Donald Trump because, well, because Donald Trump says so.

It's a little more complicated than that, but not by much. Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a reply brief to Miller’s 28 pages of legal blatherings. Leaving aside its signature page and certificate of service, Smith’s reply brief is all of five pages long. Smith uses a single word to describe the three contentions of Miller’s legal arguments: Wrong.

Reading the Special Counsel’s brief, you can feel him wearying of replying to Trump’s blizzard of filings in the cases Smith has against him in Washington and Florida. Trump’s basic position, backed up most recently by his loyal underling Miller, is this: Yeah, I did it, but you can’t get me because I’m Donald Trump.

Miller’s brief supporting Trump takes the utterly absurd position that the charges against him in the Mar a Lago case must be dropped because they all derive from a criminal referral by the National Archives, which spent 18 months practically begging Trump to turn over his trove of secrets before they called the FBI. Miller’s legal brief says the National Archives can’t call the FBI because all they are is a records depository and don’t have the statutory authority to report a crime. According to Miller’s MAGA theory, the National Archives needs a “regulation” to be allowed to pick up the phone and report a crime.

Smith, with Job-like patience, points out that if Miller is right, that means if a thief enters the National Archives and starts waving a gun around, it would be impermissible for the Archives to call the cops. Smith’s brief points Judge Cannon to the fact that the National Archives, as an entity of the federal government, has an inspector general on its staff, and by federal regulation, all inspector generals are “required to report expeditiously to the Attorney General whenever the Inspector General has reasonable grounds to believe there has been a violation of Federal criminal law.”

The Special Counsel has had to file response after response to motions made by Donald Trump to dismiss charges against him, and every one of those motions takes the same position. Yeah, he did it, but this is why you can’t go after him. He’s immune from prosecution. The prosecution is “selective and vindictive.” Because everybody else got away with it, so should Trump.

Trump is accused in the Mar-a-Lago case of removing important national security information from the White House and failing to secure it by storing top-secret papers, including some that contained secrets about nuclear weapons, in places like a bathroom and a ballroom. But that’s okay, according to Trump’s lawyers, because according to yet another case against Trump, “the President’s actions do not fall beyond the outer perimeter of official responsibility merely because they are unlawful or taken for a forbidden purpose.”

Judge Tanya Chutkan had it right when she dismissed Trump’s first claim of absolute immunity. What he wants is a get of out jail free card. Reelecting Trump will give him a whole pocketful. Every time he holds a rally, he promises to free “the January 6 hostages” with presidential pardons.

That’s bad enough, but what we’ve really got to be afraid of is his promise to turn around and put his enemies in jail. At his rallies, “lock her up” has turned into a chant of “lock them up.”

Remember, we are them.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Russian Witness Against Biden Received $600K From 'Trump Associates'

Russian Witness Against Biden Received $600K From 'Trump Associates'

I’ll bet you didn’t know that it is possible in this great big world of ours to live a comfortable life being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing basically nothing. Well, not nothing, exactly, but the money you get is unattached to normal stuff we are all familiar with like a job, complete with job-related duties and office hours and a W-2 and maybe even a job title. The money can thus be described by what it is not, which is aboveboard and visible. Instead, this kind of money often ends up in the kinds of accounts said to be “controlled” by you or others, which is to say, accounts which may not, and often do not, have your name on them.

We could describe this kind of money, then, as free floating. It’s just out there. Your function in life, if you are a man like our friend the lying Russian agent and Republican witness Alexander Smirnov, is to make sure that some of it becomes “controlled” by you.

The Guardian published a fascinating story on Thursday in which it connected money paid to Smirnov to firms connected to what the paper called “Trump associates.” It’s not a small amount of free-floating money, either. It’s $600,000, and according to The Guardian, it was paid to Smirnov by a company called Economic Transformation Technologies (ETT) back in 2020, the same year he began his career as a witness against the family of Joe Biden by lying to the FBI.

There’s got to be a whole industry that just has a bunch of people sitting in an office somewhere coming up with company names like Economic Transformation Technologies and selling them to people, almost always men, who are setting up businesses and need something to call them. Note the “ies” on the end of the word “Technology” in the company title. That sort of clever twist – that it isn’t just one technology we’re talking about, but several, maybe even many – is what you’re paying for.

Now why would ETT want to pay $600,000 dollars to a person who has been described as a “criminal, fixer and agent” who has two passports and ends up having connections to Russian intelligence agencies? Six hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money, but in the world of people who traffic in information about, among others, Russian oligarchs, Ukrainian energy companies, and British holding companies with interests in Dubai and elsewhere, maybe it isn’t. Smirnov, when he was arrested recently, was described to the judge considering whether or not to give him bail, as “having access” to as much as $6 million, three million of which was said to be held in accounts “controlled by” his girlfriend.

See where we’re going here? We’re already in the world of accounts “controlled by” people “connected to” other people, and in the case of Smirnov, not by any kind of legal instrument you and I would be familiar with, such as a marriage license that would give you access to the money “controlled” by another person, but simply a “girlfriend” legally unattached to Smirnov but who, according to the Department of Justice, was simply holding as much as $3 million, so Smirnov could have access to it.

Do you live in that world? I’ll bet not. I’ll bet that you have a bank account with your name on it. Maybe it also has your wife’s name on it, and maybe you and she have a joint savings account, or a joint account with a securities brokerage, and I’ll bet you and she have your names on the title and registration of a car – maybe even two cars – and your names are on the title and mortgage of a house or condo or on the lease for an apartment.

But not Smirnov, recipient of $600,000 from a company controlled by people connected to Donald Trump. Smirnov is one of those among us with access to some of the floating-around money that’s out there, money that comes from somewhere and goes somewhere but it isn’t clear why, or how, or through what sort of financial instrument or arrangement.

It would help us if we knew something about the company that arranged to transfer the $600,000 to Smirnov, wouldn’t it? Maybe if we knew what the company does, how it makes money, what its business is, we could better understand why Economic Transformation Technologies decided it would be a good idea to pay, or transfer to, a man who is and has been a fixer and a criminal and an informant and an agent for foreign powers such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. So, let’s ask ETT what kind of company it is.

On its website, ETT tells us this about what the company does: “ETT’s state-of-the-art platform utilizes advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Data Science, Lexicon Management, and many other workflows in an extremely secure environment, the ETT Platform creates the ‘holy grail’ of Real-Time, Predictive, and Meaningful Data through more than 1,600 APIs - making it one the world most momentous and timely platforms. As a final point, ETT set up the chess board to bring in top notch executives from those sectors to help implement its vision of love and social impact to improve the quality of human existence through the application of ‘New Age’ technologies.”

If that sounds like a word-salad put together, complete with misspelled words, by the kind of boiler room that probably generated the name of the company, well, I agree with you. What they appear to have done is watch some cable TV and read a few newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and maybe even paid attention to a technology site or two, and they came up with a list of buzz words describing what others are doing in what we might call the “technology sector,” and then they threw in a phrase approximating a mission statement, the wonderful sounds-like-it-was-written-by-a-speaker-of-a-second-language, “…implement its vision of love and social impact to improve the quality of human existence through the application of ‘New Age’ technologies.”

I mean, really. If this is what passes for corporate-speak today, woe be unto the world of corporations in general and this one, ETT, in particular.

The Guardian describes the man at the helm of ETT, an American by the name of Christopher Condon, as a one-third shareholder in something called ETT Investment Holding Limited in London, because of course he is, London being the epicenter of all things international when it comes to finance and moving money around. The connections go on, to one Farooq Arjomand, described by The Guardian as “a former chairman and current board member of Damac Properties in Dubai who is also listed as an adviser on ETT’s American website.” And from Farooq, and Dubai, it’s just a short hop and a jump and what do you know, we’re in a Trump branded property in Dubai that paid our former president $5 million in 2017, and the only reason we know about the $5 million is because Trump was elected president in 2016 and had to fill out an FEC financial statement for the first year he was in the White House as a federal employee, 2017.

See what happened there? Donald Trump, for all his carefully curated reputation as a billionaire, which we now know is about as solid as a pile of melting snow along a random roadside, was one of those free-floating-money guys, out there in business-world-land, grabbing $5 million here and a few hundred thousand there and making his own private decisions about how, or whether, he would report the money as income. And then, in 2015, he decided to run for president and what do you know, he was elected and had to start filling out stuff like FEC forms, where it’s not so easy to attribute or even hide money.

While in office, Donald Trump became addicted to perks like Air Force One, on which he repeatedly flew down to Mar a Lago or over to Bedminster to play a round of golf and then flew back. So, he decided after losing the White House to Joe Biden in 2020 that he would like to go back to flying around on Air Force One and decided to run for election again. To this end, he enlisted a gaggle of half-wits in the House of Representatives to engender an impeachment of his rival, President Biden, and they began casting about for “evidence” that “the Biden crime family” had committed the same sort of crimes the Trump crime family had committed.

And out of a crack in a condo in Las Vegas slithered a sneaky snake called Alexander Smirnov to whisper in the ear of his FBI handlers – because of course a fixer/criminal/agent like Smirnov would have handlers – that Joe Biden and his son Hunter took bribes from a company called Burisma in Ukraine. The half-wits in Congress, having failed to come up with any other “evidence” of crimes, glommed onto Smirnov’s assertion of criminal wrongdoing by the Bidens, and off they went.

At least until it emerged that the FBI discovered they had been lied to by Smirnov and charged him with committing several serious crimes, and the whole house of cards of the impeachment investigation began to crumble.

The problem with houses of cards when they fall is that they have to land somewhere, and where the particular card with Smirnov’s name on it landed is a connection right back to Donald Trump, who in 2020 with a tightly contested race against Joe Biden on his mind was looking around for “dirt” on Joe Biden. Friends of Trump’s found Alexander Smirnov slithering out of cracks in Las Vegas, so they threw six hundred grand his way and thus began his years-long construction of the Burisma lie that has now landed him in pre-trial detention awaiting trial on charges of lying to the FBI and generally being a criminal/fixer/agent for foreign powers, including Putin’s Russia.

Funny how that keeps happening with Donald Trump, isn’t it? In 2016, it was yet another itinerant floating-money Russian intelligence-connected guy named Joseph Mifsud, who in Rome spied an eager-beaver young “adviser” to Donald Trump’s campaign named George Papadopoulos and started romancing him by coming up with a Russian honeypot he introduced to young George as “Putin’s niece,” and a Russian think tank executive who was actually an agent for the FSB, and bingo! All of a sudden there is dirt on offer in the form of Hillary’s emails!

The emails, once revealed by the Russian FSB through WikiLeaks, contained nothing criminal or even mildly interesting, but that didn’t matter. They gave Trump something he could yell at his rallies, along with “lock her up,” and that beat Hillary in November, and he won the presidency.

Now, please take your seats and fasten your seat belts because we’re coming in for a landing. The Guardian story delves deeper and deeper into the connections between Smirnov and Dubai guys and a Pakistani-American and a bunch of companies that include a “blank check company” called BurTech Acquisition Group which is connected to Digital World, another “blank check company” that becomes associated with Donald Trump’s Truth Social in a merger that, after problems with the SEC are resolved, may “garner Trump as much as $4 billion in shares.”

The whole thing circles back to ETT and the $600,000 it paid to Smirnov in 2020, which the Wall Street Journal discovered was “in exchange for a stake in an Israel-based crypto trading platform, called Bitoftrade, [that] Smirnov was working on launching.”

You just knew crypto had to be in there somewhere, didn’t you?

But still we’re stuck with the mystery of ETT, the company we’re told is in the business of “implement[ing] its vision of love and social impact to improve the quality of human existence through the application of ‘New Age’ technologies.” Where the hell did ETT come from in the first place, you may ask?

The Guardian figured that out, too. Turns out ETT used to be called Pandora Venture Capital Corp, which was registered in Florida by a Ukrainian-American called Boris Nayflish, who is – you’re going to love this – the ex-husband of Alexander Smirnov’s current “partner,” Diana Lavrenyuk, she of the $3 million that the Department of Justice told a judge that Smirnov “has access to,” because of course he does.

The old hippie phrase comes to mind: what goes around comes around. In the world of free-floating money and blank-check companies and outfits that describe themselves as implementing visions of love and social impact through “new age” technologies, one of the truths of this particular new age is that when it comes to Donald Trump, what goes around keeps coming around to Russian intelligence and fixer/criminals like Alexander Smirnov.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have now landed. Feel free to use your electronic devices, and welcome to the world of sneaky snakey Donald Trump’s America.

Georgia Judge: Trump Did It, But That's OK Because Oaths Don't Really Matter

Georgia Judge: Trump Did It, But That's OK Because Oaths Don't Really Matter

As if we had not been reminded before, the dismissal of six charges against defendants in the Georgia RICO case reminds us once again that the whole notion of taking an oath to support and defend the Constitution, including state constitutions, has apparently become a nullity in modern times. According to the judge in Georgia, if you’re required to take an oath, it’s just a ceremony, not an actual requirement to uphold the law – the law being the Constitution of the United States or the Constitution of Georgia.

Defendants in the Georgia racketeering case, who include Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Mark Meadows among others, were charged with 41 counts of violating Georgia’s law in that they “knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Donald Trump.” The judge in the case, Scott McAfee of Fulton Superior Court, has now dismissed six of those counts, not because the defendants didn’t take the actions they are charged with, but because those actions were not illegal enough. The judge found that the charges filed by the grand jury in Georgia did not spell out with adequate specificity why those actions were illegal.

All six charges relate to actions taken by the defendants to “solicit” various Georgia officials to violate their oaths of office. For example, Trump and Meadows called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and solicited him to “unlawfully influence the certified election returns.” Multiple defendants “solicited elected members of the Georgia Senate to violate their oaths of office on December 30, 2020, by requesting or importuning them to unlawfully appoint presidential electors.” Giuliani solicited members of the Georgia House of Representatives by “requesting or importuning them to unlawfully appoint presidential electors.”

You will note in the quotes from the indictment that the word “unlawfully” appears in each count of the indictment the judge dismissed. He’s not saying that what the defendants asked the Georgia officials to do was lawful, therefore the charges must be dismissed. No, he’s figured out a clever way around that. The judge is saying the charges must be dismissed because they don’t spell out how the illegal acts they were being asked to commit violated their oaths.

The law in Georgia prohibits any public officer from “willfully and intentionally violating the terms of his or her oath as prescribed by law.” The judge is saying that all the Georgia officials took their oaths of office, but Fani Willis’ grand jury has failed to spell out how what they were being asked to do violated those oaths. To illustrate the problem, as he sees it, the judge even favorably cites a case in Georgia where a conviction of a police officer was reversed “when a police officer’s oath did not expressly include a provision to uphold state law.” In another case, charges were dismissed in a drug possession case because the specific drug and its quantity were not specified.

Got that? In Georgia, you can swear to defend and protect the state Constitution, but that oath, at least in the case of the police officer in question, does not require you to “uphold state law.”

That this would utterly negate the whole idea of taking an oath doesn’t seem to have occurred to Judge McAfee, but moving on…

To sum up as briefly and bluntly as I can, the charges against Trump and the rest of them have been dismissed because the indictment against them does not spell out precisely how “unlawfully” doing something like appointing fake electors or “finding” enough votes for Trump to overturn the election violates the oaths of the Georgia officials being asked to commit those acts, even though the acts themselves are, as per the judge’s order dismissing the indictments, “unlawful.”

The judge took pains to point out that the United States Constitution “contains hundreds of clauses, any one of which can be the subject of a lifetime’s study,” so his message to Fani Willis is, get studying. If you want a new charge against Trump and his pals to stick, you’re going to have to find a clause they urged a Georgia official to violate.

The Supreme Court has been up to the same sort of thing in the series of decisions it has handed down eviscerating laws against the bribery of public officials. Their theory is that bribery hasn’t taken place, and thus the law hasn’t been broken, unless the person soliciting the public official to favor their interests by giving them a bribe spelled out in complete sentences what it is they want the official to do. For example, if a gangster is buying off a judge to find someone not guilty, it’s not enough for you to be the brother of the defendant and sit down with the judge and hand him money across the table. You’ve got to open your mouth and say the words: here’s some money to let my brother off.

This is the kind of double-reverse triple-salchow legal squiggling Donald Trump wants to use to beat the charges against him in Georgia. He’s not saying that he didn’t do it. He did. He’s not saying that what he did wasn't illegal. It was. He’s saying that it didn’t amount to causing others to violate their oaths in the exact same manner he was violating his.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Revealed: Boxes Of Documents We Didn't Know Trump Took To Bedminster

Revealed: Boxes Of Documents We Didn't Know Trump Took To Bedminster

It was a big night for CNN, out with a story about document boxes being loaded onto a Trump plane bound for Bedminster, New Jersey, on the same day the Department of Justice showed up to receive a folder of top secret documents from a Trump lawyer who certified they were the only secret documents she and lawyer Evan Corcoran could find.

According to an interview by CNN with former Trump valet Brian Butler, referred to six times in the classified documents indictment as “Trump Employee #5,” the boxes were loaded onto the Trump plane on June 3, 2022, as Trump’s lawyers, Christina Bobb and Evan Corcoran, were meeting with Jay Bratt, the prosecutor from the Department of Justice in charge of the classified documents case. Christina Bobb famously signed a certification to the DOJ that a “diligent search” had been conducted at Mar-a-Lago, and that the 31 documents being handed over that day were the sum total of all the classified documents that had been found.

Two months later, in August, FBI agents would execute a search warrant and discover more than 100 additional top secret documents in Trump’s private office, including several marked with the highest classification, “Top Secret/SCI,” or “Top Secret – Secure Compartmented Information.”

Former valet Butler told CNN that he was surprised to get a phone call from Trump’s “body man,” Walt Nauta, on June 3, asking if he could borrow one of Butler’s Cadillac Escalade SUV’s to help carry material to the West Palm Beach airport to be loaded onto a Trump airplane. Butler was told that Trump and his family were flying to Bedminster for the summer that day. Butler told CNN he was not usually called upon to move luggage to the private Trump jet and thought it was also unusual that Nauta asked for the favor “in a guarded way,” CNN reported.

Butler used his own SUV to carry Trump family luggage to the airport, while Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, both of whom were indicted with Trump, used the Escalade he had loaned to Nauta to move the rest of the material. “They were the boxes that were in the indictment, the white bankers boxes. That’s what I remember loading,” Butler told CNN.

Butler described his relationship with Nauta as “best friends,” at least until questions about the classified documents found by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago began coming up. Butler told CNN that on one of the frequent “nightly walks” he took with Nauta around their neighborhood in West Palm Beach, Nauta told him that he, Nauta, Butler, and De Oliveira were “all dirty” when it came to the boxes they had moved around inside of Mar-a-Lago and to the Trump airplane on June 3. De Oliveira repeatedly urged Butler to sign up with the same attorney Trump had provided to himself and Nauta, but Butler demurred, choosing instead to hire a former U.S. Attorney in Florida, Jeffrey Sloman. Butler met “repeatedly” with prosecutors for the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith, according to CNN.

In one interview, Butler told prosecutors about a time he was driving Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt and his chief of staff in the Spring of 2021 when he heard Pratt talking about secrets of U.S. and Russian nuclear submarines he had heard from Trump while he was visiting Mar-a-Lago. Pratt was a paid member of the Trump club at the time. It was on May 6, 2021, that the National Archives first formally requested that Trump turn over any and all classified and non-classified documents Trump had removed from the White House when he left office. On May 8, the British newspaper, the Daily Mail, had a photographer at the West Palm Beach airport who took photographs of Trump boarding a private jet to fly to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. The photographs show several Trump aides loading a half dozen or more bankers boxes of documents into the jet.

On July 21, 2021, just two months later, Trump showed a top secret military “plan of attack” on Iran to an interviewer who was working on a book with Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows. The interview took place at the Trump golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Before Butler signed with his own private attorney, he was witness to two conversations between Trump and De Oliveira when Trump asked De Oliveira, “Are we good?” After one conversation De Oliveira had with Trump on the phone in the presence of Butler, he said Trump had promised to get him a lawyer. In another conversation Butler recounted to prosecutors, Nauta asked him “to make sure Carlos (De Oliveira) is good.” Butler told CNN that he twice assured Nauta that De Oliveira was “loyal and wouldn’t do anything to hurt his relationship with Trump.” It was after that conversation that Butler decided to get his own lawyer and broke contact with the two men who ended up being indicted with Trump.

Based on the new CNN report, we now know that boxes of documents were moved from Mar-a-Lago to Bedminster twice – once in May of 2021 immediately after the National Archives had requested that Trump turn over documents he took from the White House, and again in June of 2022, on the very day the DOJ had shown up at Mar-a-Lago to take possession of what they were told were all the classified documents being held there.

What happened to the classified documents Trump took with him to Bedminster is not known. It is also unknown why the FBI never searched the Trump New Jersey golf club.

Trump has recently filed motions to dismiss the Mar-a-Lago indictments based on spurious claims of “absolute immunity” and an entire made-up claim that the Presidential Records Act permitted him to possess classified documents. Special Counsel Smith has opposed both motions. The judge in the case, whose previous decisions in the case have been overturned twice by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, has yet to rule on the Trump motions to dismiss.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Trump's Supreme Court States The Obvious: He Owns Them

Trump's Supreme Court States The Obvious: He Owns Them

Yesterday morning the Supreme Court ruled on the Colorado case striking Donald Trump from its election ballot because, as the Colorado Supreme Court held, he is an insurrectionist as defined under paragraph 3 of the 14th Amendment. As expected, they threw the case out, effectively deciding for Trump and against Colorado. The decision was interpreted as a huge win for Trump practically everywhere: “A massive victory for Trump” screamed CNN; “The U.S. Supreme Court handed Donald Trump a major victory,” chorused Reuters.

Donald Trump himself, like the megalomaniac he is, cruised over to his social media lie-factory and yelled from whatever rooftop it’s under, “BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!!”

The vote on the court was 9-0, meaning that all nine justices voted for Trump’s position that a single state, Colorado, cannot throw a candidate off its ballot under the 14th Amendment. The decision for the court as a whole was unsigned, but there were two concurrences disagreeing with the decision on a somewhat less than subtle ground we’ll get to in a moment.

One of them, written by Justice Amy Comey Barrett of all people, uttered the quiet part out loud. She openly said what the whole court wouldn’t – that the case was so terrifying, they just pushed it off their desks. “In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency. The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.”

She may as well have begun with “Oh, my goodness!”

You have to wonder what it would take to shock this Supreme Court into taking action -- maybe a decision by a court in a state like Alabama ruling that in some circumstances it’s okay to murder Black people in cold blood?

I guess what Justice Barrett said was a version of Bush v. Gore, another “politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election,” when the Supreme Court told the world they didn’t really mean it as they installed George W. Bush as president even though Al Gore was ahead in the vote count. Remember how, having injected themselves into the election, the Supreme Court said that’s not what they were doing by trying to limit the damage when it held that the case was not to set a precedent? That was like saying, “Oh, that body over there with democracy on its forehead? Whatever you do, don’t pay attention to that.” Barrett’s concurrence did something of the same thing. She said she agreed with the result of the decision – her favorite president gets to stay on the ballot – but not with the, uh, methodology of how the majority got there.

What the five justices in the majority did was this: they, and the rest of the court for that matter, utterly ignored the finding by the Colorado Supreme Court that Donald Trump had committed insurrection. How could they do that when the whole purpose of paragraph 3 of the 14th Amendment was to deal with the results of the insurrection which had just taken place, namely the Civil War? Well, the Supreme Court said it’s not our job to enforce the 14th Amendment. That’s up to Congress.

Which is like saying, oh, we’ll just leave that problem up to the snarling pack of rabid dogs over there. They’ll get together and do it for us.

To call this position taken by the court bullshit isn’t sufficient. It’s a gigantic, muciferous, glob of a lie. Besides dealing with the scourge of insurrection, the 14th Amendment was written after the Civil War to confer citizenship rights on former slaves and to ensure that the Southern states, which had treated them like property, afforded former slaves and every other citizen “equal protection under the laws.” Brown v. Board of Ed is just one example of when the Supreme Court enforced the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal rights under the law, and many, many other similar cases have addressed the rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment without the help, if it could be called that, of Congress.

So, why is the court at this juncture pointing over there across First Street on Capitol Hill and saying, in effect, “it’s their problem"? Because they know the Congress can’t get itself together to keep the fucking government open by passing a budget, much less address the issue of the damn insurrection that took place right there in front of them and forced them from their offices and chambers and left five dead.

Donald Trump did that, and the three justices on the court appointed by him, along with the other three Republican justices in his thrall, will not be the ones who uphold the law in the Constitution which so clearly disqualifies him from holding a federal office. They’re scared of offending Trump and his violent followers. Why, if they did that, it might interrupt the vacation they’re planning this summer at one billionaire’s Adirondack camp or another billionaire’s salmon fishing stream.

I have become accustomed to reading these appeals court decisions. Hell, it has become a major part of my job. But I have trouble finding the words to describe what a profile in cowardice this Supreme Court decision is. If they use this decision as precedent and continue washing their hands of enforcing the 14th Amendment, it spells the end of equal enforcement of the laws in this country. To leave enforcement of basic rights up to the Congress is to disavow the responsibility the Supreme Court took upon itself in Marbury v. Madison to be the final arbiter of what the Constitution says and what the law means. Leaving those decisions up to the band of yahoos who are running things in the nation’s legislature is like asking the thieves who just robbed the bank to toss us a few pennies as they divide up their ill-gotten gains.

This decision negating the insurrection clause in the 14th Amendment, raises the question of whether the three post-Civil War amendments -- ending slavery, conferring the right to vote, and ensuring equal protection of the laws without regard to race, creed, or national origin -- will have any force at all in the coming years. The Supreme Court already eviscerated the rights of Black people to vote with Shelby County v. Holder. What is next on the right-wing agenda? Allowing segregated schools? Enforced labor for immigrants seeking citizenship?

Steel yourselves. I’m afraid this is just the beginning.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Joe Biden

To Win, Democrats Should Stop Talking Down -- And Start Speaking Up

Schmaltz. That, and generosity, and a dollop of out loud love for the good old U.S.A. That’s what the Democrats should use this year as we campaign for offices from the White House to the Senate and House to positions in state and local governments around the country.

People are sick and tired of being depressed about everything from you-know-who – we’ll get to him in a minute – to the wars overseas to the “situation at the border” as it is referred to euphemistically these days, to what many of us see as the ongoing threat to our democracy. I’m not saying we should put it all aside and paste smiles on our faces and push feelgoodism as a platform, but I have to tell you that I sure do wish that “It’s morning in America” wasn’t already taken, because that’s exactly the kind of schmaltz I’m talking about.

I agree that this is the most important election in our lifetimes. I just don’t think we need to hear that every five minutes between now and November. What we need to do is start acting like it is and not use that phrase with each other so much. I think independents and undecideds – there are more than a few of them out there – understand that they’re being talked down to by that kind of rhetoric. It sounds like we think they don’t know the election is important, and even if some of them don’t think the situation is as desperate as we do, we shouldn’t act like they need to be led to water to get a drink. Frantic is not a good look for a political party that got 80 million votes in the last presidential election and won the popular vote in three of the last four.

It doesn’t work for us to sound as negative and pessimistic as the other side. Trump’s rally speeches are filled with the words “carnage” and “chaos.” He talks about crime as a scourge at a time when violent crime is going down everywhere, especially in big cities, and blames it on Democrats when the one place violent crime is actually increasing is in rural, mostly red parts of the country. On Saturday, he gave yet another unhinged speech at a rally in North Carolina telling his crowd that Biden is the one who is “engaged in a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America.” He is pushing the idea that Biden is “the real threat to democracy” as a major theme of his campaign.

Here's the problem we face: Sure, he has flipped the script. He’s doing that thing of accusing the other side of exactly what he’s guilty of. But it doesn’t work for us to constantly be making the case that he is the one who’s guilty, even though he is. He is cranking up the paranoia of the right-wing, as if it needed to be any higher, but we can’t counter with paranoia of our own.

It doesn’t work to sound like him, to say the things he’s saying. We have to be different. We need to draw distinctions between Republicans and us, not sound like them. Donald Trump and Republicans are running as the party of pessimism. We need to be positive. We need to affirm the essential goodness of people.

Americans want to think better of themselves and of each other. That includes our own base voters, but I think it’s especially true of independents and swing voters who are looking for a reason to vote for rather than against all the time. Teagan Goddard of Political Wire dug an interesting number out of the depths of that New York Times/Siena poll that had Trump ahead of Biden that everyone is flapping their hands about. Among the 19 percent of voters polled who disapprove of both candidates, pressed to pick one or the other, Biden beat Trump 45 to 33 percent.

See? They are the pox-on-both-your-houses people who are mad at both parties because the choice this time is the same as it was in 2020. But why is Biden more appealing to them than Trump by such a wide margin? I think they’re tired of Trump’s pessimism and negativity. Say what you will about Joe Biden, but that man does not come across as down on everything the way Trump does, and that aspect of him comes across clearly. Trump is angry about everything. Biden just isn’t.

If anything, Joe Biden comes across as calm and collected. The way he responded to that disaster with the aid convoy in Gaza is a perfect example. He ordered food and other supplies to be airdropped into Gaza, and 24 hours later, it was happening. It’s decisive. It’s positive. And it’s working.

Every other day, there’s another story about the trouble the Biden campaign has had with convincing people that he has accomplished more than any president in 20 years. You know the drill. All the good numbers are up. All the bad ones are down. The infrastructure bill. Student loan forgiveness. On and on.

If specifics aren’t working, then I say promote pride. America is the greatest country in the world. As a people, we are generous and outgoing and forgiving. We work hard. We love our families. When disaster strikes, we take care of each other.

Americans don’t want to wake up every day and be told how terrible things are, how insoluble problems like immigration and the border are, and I don’t think they want to be told over and over how evil those on the other side are. Sure, we have our problems – poverty and racism and xenophobia and sexism – but on the whole, we are a good people. This is a good country. Americans want to feel good about ourselves and each other. I’m not saying if they go low, we go high. We’re going to have to fight and fight hard to win this year. But part of our job is to give people a reason to vote for us as much as against the other side. If that means vote for the nice guy, not the asshole, then we should say it.

Nice is better than nasty. Positive is better than negative. Sanity is better than crazy. Pride is better than paranoia. It’s a clear choice, and we should run on it.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

What Biden Must Do Now To Curb Israel In Gaza And Protect Innocent Civilians

What Biden Must Do Now To Curb Israel In Gaza And Protect Innocent Civilians

If there is one military phrase I have gotten tired of over the last 20 years or so it is “boots on the ground.” Foreign policy poo-bahs call for boots on the ground every time they want to flap their hawk wings over a conflict they want us engaged in or an area of the world they think we should pay more attention to…as if having more than 140 separate American military installations and outposts around the world, each full of boots on the ground, isn’t enough.

But the truth is, we don’t need to order up a military response to flex our foreign policy muscles. We don’t need boots on the ground when we’ve got the kind of power that allows us to bigfoot problems we see a solution to when everything else isn’t working.

President Joe Biden has apparently finally had enough of Israel’s increasingly callous disregard for the lives of Gazan civilians. Today he announced that the U.S. will soon begin air-dropping food aid and medical supplies to starving Palestinians in Gaza. Biden should have airdropped aid back when we were trying to get Israel to go along with the opening of the border checkpoint between Gaza and Egypt early in the war. He should have done the same thing when stories began to come out of Gaza that hospitals were running out of basic supplies like saline drips, oxygen, bandages, painkillers and antibiotics.

What set Biden off was the still unfolding story of the incident around a small convoy of aid trucks in Gaza City. Early Thursday morning, while it was still dark, a crowd described as in the thousands mobbed several aid trucks even before the trucks came to a stop. Gazan health officials reported that more than 100 civilians were killed. How those deaths occurred is disputed, with Gazan officials saying that several Israeli tanks opened fire on the crowd, and Israeli military officials saying the deaths occurred when the crowd surged toward the trucks as they came to a stop.

Late on Friday, the New York Times released drone footage of part of the incident obtained from the Israeli military. The footage appears to have been shot with an infrared camera, so it is blurry, and the images of human beings appear as dark figures against a bright background, as in a photo negative. The Times reported that the drone videos “do not fully explain the sequence of events. Videos show panic, including people ducking for cover and taking food from trucks.”

The trucks arrive in a line, well-spaced from one another. On a road running parallel to the trucks are several Israeli armored vehicles. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of figures rush toward the trucks and gather around them in thick knots of people. Then something happens, and people begin to scatter. A few can be seen falling to the ground and crawling toward cover.

Reporting by the Times from inside Gaza quoted witnesses saying they had not seen anyone trampled to death by the crowd but had seen multiple people with gunshot wounds. The Times reported from Israel that “Israeli military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, acknowledged that Israeli troops had opened fire ‘when a mob moved in a manner which endangered them’ without giving details.”

The drone video footage does not show the crowd attacking the Israeli armored vehicles. It is worth noting that had the armored vehicles come under fire, their armor would have protected them from bullets fired by small arms.

A doctor at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza City said 150 wounded and 12 who had died were brought to the hospital. He said 95 percent of them had gunshot wounds. A doctor interviewed on the scene in Gaza said he had seen “dozens of people with gunshot wounds but also people who appeared to have died in a stampede or to have been hit by aid trucks,” according to the Times.

This is another incident that has happened in the fog of war since Israel began its attacks in Gaza in October. The bombing of a Gaza hospital early in the war was another example, with Israeli and Gazan officials disputing whether the bomb that hit a parking lot on hospital grounds was an Israeli missile or a Hamas missile that was shot out of the sky by Israeli air defenses.

Unless there is better drone footage that Israel has not released, or somehow reports of wounded and dead in Gazan hospitals can be confirmed independently, we’ll probably never know the exact details of what happened on Thursday in Gaza City, but from what we know right now, it doesn’t look good for Israel. That part of Gaza was said to be cleared of Hamas fighters and demilitarized two or three months ago. It seems unlikely that Israeli armored vehicles could have come under an attack sufficiently threatening that they would have the need to shoot into a crowd of civilians trying to get food supplies from aid trucks.

This is why Biden’s announcement of air drops of food and medical aid is absolutely the right thing to do at this point. The U.S. has been trying to get Israel to open points along its border with Gaza so that aid could be trucked in from inside Israel in addition to the aid that has come in through Egypt, but Israel has resisted these U.S. efforts.

But what is Netanyahu going to do? Have his air force shoot down U.S. C-130’s dropping pallets of food and medical supplies into Gaza? The other thing the U.S. could do that we haven’t done is move aid directly into Gaza from the sea. The Times reported that creating a makeshift port on the Gaza coast has been considered, but “setting up such a facility in a secure way presents a challenge, officials said. The United States would not use American troops to build the temporary facility or use American amphibious landing craft.”

The reason for this sort of equivocation is Pentagon fears of having U.S. troops in an active combat zone even if they are only engaged in work that would help to supply humanitarian aid. But this is where bigfooting comes in. Biden could tell Netanyahu that’s what we’re going to do and threaten to withdraw military aid and the U.S. vote in the U.N. Security Council if Israel will not agree to allow the construction of a temporary supply port on the Gazan coast without Israeli interference.

Biden is going to have to bring the situation in Gaza under control sooner rather than later. He needs to take strong action to bring about a cease fire, and even before that happens, he should be seen making decisive moves to help Gaza’s civilian population with food and medical aid.

We are the biggest, most powerful country in the world, and we are Israel’s strongest ally. That gives us power that we have not yet brought to bear to end the war in Gaza. Air drops of aid to Gazan civilians is a good first step, but that’s all it is.

We need to do more, and we need to do it now. If President Biden wants to draw a bright line between his foreign policy goals and Trump’s avowed isolationism and support of Russia, now is the time, and the disaster in Gaza is the place.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

We Have No Choice But Beating Trump On Election Day -- And We Surely Can

We Have No Choice But Beating Trump On Election Day -- And We Surely Can

Well, the big news is that after a couple of days of even more expert analysis, nothing’s going to save us. Certainly not the Supreme Court. They’re in the tank for Donald Trump, full stop. It doesn’t matter which way they will eventually rule on his claim of absolute immunity, hell, it doesn’t even matter whether they’ll rule at all. They’re going to toss the 14th Amendment’s insurrectionist ban in the garbage, and then they’re going to dilly dally until presidential immunity is a moot point.

But even if the Supreme Court were to hurry up the case and rule against Trump’s claim of immunity, that wouldn’t save us, either. Even Jack Smith getting a conviction before Election Day wouldn’t save us.

Donald Trump has to be beaten at the ballot box, and beaten badly, and we can do it.

Trump’s performance in the Republican primaries so far has been abysmal. In three of the primaries, 40 percent of the voters in his own party didn’t vote for him. In the fourth, about 30 percent didn’t want him. Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, and significant numbers of Republican voters have rejected him every chance they’ve gotten. This can’t be emphasized enough. Those were Republican votes he didn’t get.

Every time you read a story about Trump, the political pundits are saying he has remade the Republican Party in his own image, he’s turned it into the MAGA party, he owns the party’s base. Really? Trump wasn’t running against Joe Biden in those primaries. With the likes of Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley on the primary ballot, Trump didn’t have an opponent that anybody in his party thought could actually win the nomination. Those weren’t votes for DeSantis or Haley as much as they were protest votes against Trump.

I’m not making an argument that those Republicans who voted against Trump in the primaries are going to vote for Biden in November. A few of them might, and most of them will vote for the Republican nominee, who will be Donald Trump, because that’s what Republicans do. But some of them are going to stay home.

That means Donald Trump is beatable. It won’t be easy, it will be closer than it should be, but he is not going to get as large a share of the popular vote as he got last time.

Sure, the MAGA people love him, they buy the red hats and they fly the flags from their pickup trucks and some of them turn out for his rallies. But not as many as in 2020, and certainly not as many as in 2016.

He’s bleeding. His fund raising is in the basement. A massive percentage of the money he’s raised through Super Pacs has gone to pay for his legal defense in the trials he has already faced and lost in New York and will face again in three weeks, and to the lawyers he’s hired to file the flurry of appeals briefs they’ve been cranking out. The New York Times reported last week that Trump committees had spent $50 million on legal expenses last year, “and those costs are likely to balloon as he prepares for potential trials this year.”

Why isn’t this a bigger story? Why has so much of the political coverage of Trump emphasized how he “trounced” his opponents in the primaries, when he lost between 30 and 40 percent of the vote in each of them? Reading the coverage of Joe Biden’s win in Michigan, you’d have thought that 80 percent of the vote was a loss, and a 13 percent vote for “uncommitted” was a disaster. President Obama got an 11 percent uncommitted vote when he was running for reelection. Where was that number in the mainstream coverage of the Michigan primary?

The Washington Post reported on Thursday that an analysis of Republican primary results showed that “voters 65 or older were the age group most likely to support Trump in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. They made up more than a third of his voters, increasing from a quarter eight years ago.” How is that good news for Donald Trump? It’s not.

I’m going to keep reporting on Trump’s legal woes because it’s an important story and because I just love it that he is finally being held to account for at least some of the crimes he has committed. But what I’m going to be paying the most attention to is the nuts and bolts of beating his sorry ass in November.

We can do it. The first thing we’ve got to do is get over the idea that this is somehow a different country than it has been because Donald Trump is running for president again. It’s not. He’s not a superman. Owning a corrupt Supreme Court does not give him the political power to win an election that depends on the votes of American citizens.

With abortion and IVF scaring the shit out of voters all over the country, we know we’ve got the issues. We know there are more of us than there are of them. What we’ve got to do is turn out and vote.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

The Supreme Court's 'Immunity Club' And The Advent Of Fascist Jurisprudence

The Supreme Court's 'Immunity Club' And The Advent Of Fascist Jurisprudence

I just watched a full hour of some very, very smart legal eagles analyzing what it means that the Supreme Court has decided to hear Donald Trump’s immunity appeal. Six experts were interviewed by Nicole Wallace on MSNBC. She’s good. Every one of the experts was good. The whole show did an excellent job of running through all the permutations and combinations of what it could mean that the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments of the Trump appeal on April 22, and what that could mean in terms of when they might issue a decision, and what that would mean about when the case before Judge Tanya Chutkan might come to trial.

I don’t care how you cut it, this is the terrifying result you get when you elect a raving fascist lunatic like Donald Trump and he gets the opportunity – aided and abetted by right wing puppets in the Senate and their right-wing corporate puppeteers – to appoint a gaggle of starry-eyed authoritarian moonies to the highest court in the land. It takes only four justices for the Supreme Court to agree to hear a case. We learned today that four of the justices who went through the authoritarian training camp run by the Federalist Society, which is backed by a small group of fascist billionaires, got together and decided to hear Trump’s case, which makes the absurdly authoritarian claim that he, and he alone, is above the law.

Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife participated in Trump’s conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, has been supported monetarily by one of the right-wing billionaires that funds the Federalist Society. Although the court didn’t announce the names of the justices who voted to take the Trump case, it is a certainty that Thomas was one of them. The other three are no better, because all six of the Republican appointed justices attend Federalist Society private functions, they give speeches to Federalist Society gatherings, they hire clerks approved by the Federalist Society.

It's almost like it wasn’t the Supreme Court, it was the fucking Federalist Society that voted today to hear Donald Trump’s appeal.

The details of the arguments the court will hear in April are almost too depressing to go through. Trump’s lawyers told the D.C. Court of Appeals that his claim of immunity would cover him if while president, he had ordered Seal Team Six to assassinate a political opponent, because that would have amounted to an “official act,” and thus it would come under his immunity from prosecution. If that isn’t enough for you, Trump’s lawyers told both the D.C. Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court that anything Trump did to overturn the election, such as interfering with the counting and certification of electoral ballots, would fall under his claim of immunity, because what he did was an official act.

In fact, at least two of the legal experts on MSNBC this afternoon said the argument before the Supreme Court in April will come down to the court deciding what is an official act, and what isn’t.

The same Donald Trump who is claiming absolute immunity for anything he did as president is yapping at his campaign rallies that the first thing he will do if they elect him president is prosecute Joe Biden for pretty much everything he has done as president since the day he took office, even though unlike Trump, he has been charged with no crimes.

Do you think that incredibly obvious contradiction – that Trump has immunity, but Biden doesn’t -- will be argued at the Supreme Court on April 22? Do you think it will even be mentioned?

Not at the Supreme Court immunity club, it won’t

One of Clarence Thomas’ close friends bribed him with a “loan” of about $250,000 to buy a luxury motor home. The “loan” was never paid back. Another of his close friends, Harlan Crow, bribed Thomas by buying his mother’s house, renovating it, and then allowing her to continue living in it rent-free. Thomas never paid a dime of taxes on what was, on its face, a gift from Crow.

Clarence Thomas has been allowed to live a life of bribery and corruption. But nothing has been done to him because the lack of a Supreme Court code of ethics makes him effectively immune from prosecution.

How do you think he will vote after the Trump immunity case is heard on April 22? How about Brett Kavanaugh, who got away with sexually harassing a young woman while he was in high school and then perjured himself about it before the Senate? He’s in the immunity club. How do you figure he’ll vote?

How about Justice Samuel Alito, who flew for free on a billionaire’s private jet and stayed in a $1000-a-night luxury fishing lodge and whooped it up with his billionaire benefactor and his billionaire pals and drank their expensive liquor and then flew home on the private jet – all without spending even a dime of his own money to pay for his luxury vacation? He’s a paid-up member of the immunity club. Got any guesses how he’ll vote?

Amy Comey Barrett hasn’t taken any billionaire bucks that we’ve heard about, but she doesn’t need to, because her immunity comes from the same place her instructions do – from God himself. Amy believes the United States is a “Christian nation,” and wishes fervently that its laws adhered to the laws of the Bible, which of course immunizes all kinds of people from punishment for all sorts of things. Hers is an immunity club membership with a special dispensation. She’ll just follow God’s will. That’s immunity enough.

There are four votes to hear the Trump appeal.

All they need is one more. And even if they don’t end up endorsing Trump’s arguments that he can commit murder and get away with it, and all this other stuff is just chicken feed, all they’ve got to do is dick around deciding the case until the end of their term on July 1, and that alone will make it nearly impossible for Judge Chutkan to start the Trump trial before October 1, and what do you know, but that’s within the DOJ window before an election when no prosecutions or investigations of a candidate for election can begin.

Is the fix in? Not completely, but it’s just terrifying how close we’re getting to having a country run by a small club of billionaire fascists who of course are all paid-in-full members of the same immunity club their paid-for Supreme Court justices are members of.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Mike Johnson

With IVF Ban, Fakery On Abortion Rights Is Biting Republicans Hard

The Life at Conception Act is the legal jewel in the anti-abortion crown, a federal law that would recognize a fertilized egg – Alabama’s so-called extrauterine child – as a human being with all the rights and protections provided to the rest of us under the 14th Amendment. The Life at Conception Act, which has no exceptions for IVF or any other fertility treatments, would amount to an automatic nationwide ban on abortions with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the mother.

The law would override state laws permitting abortion. In states with limits on abortion, such as a ban after six or 15 weeks, the law would cancel those time limits as well.

It’s an extreme anti-abortion law that would take the end of Roe v. Wade to the next level, completely taking away a woman’s right to control her own reproductive life in every state in the Union.

For 125 House Republicans who have co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, and the 19 Senators who signed onto an identical bill in the last Congress, the act was a no-brainer. If you were a Republican and you called yourself pro-life, you were for the Life at Conception Act, no questions asked.

Until now.

This week the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision declaring every fertilized egg a person immediately called into question the status of all the fertilized eggs at fertility clinics in the state and caused the closing of several, among them, the state’s most prominent. The Alabama decision flipped the anti-abortion script. The question became, “do you support in vitro fertilization?”, and Republican hands started popping up all over. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, an avowed Christian Nationalist who made his sponsorship of the Life at Conception Act a signature part of his agenda which includes support for the establishment of a national religion – Christianity, natch – raised his hand along with all the other Republicans who have found “Reverse” on their gear shifts.

On Thursday, Johnson was still pushing for co-mingling of Biblical principles in our system of secular laws and supporting overturning laws legalizing homosexual acts and same-sex marriage. If asked he thought frozen embryos were children as the Life at Conception Act says they are, he would have high-fived you. But by Friday evening, Johnson was fulsomely praising the very thing Alabama had just banned. “I believe the life of every single child has inestimable dignity and value,” Johnson squeaked. “That is why I support I.V.F. treatment, which has been a blessing for many moms and dads who have struggled with fertility.”

You will note that Mike limited his support of IVF to “moms and dads.” Gay and lesbian couples who want children using IVF? Not so much.

The days that Republicans could say they were pro-life and forget about the details are over. It turns out that being anti-abortion wasn’t about the fetus as much as it was about the votes. Today, the anti-abortion movement is all about trying to find a way through the minefield the issue has become for them. Laws about abortion in red states have turned into a pick-your-timeframe smorgasbord.

Republicans who used to say they are pro-life are all of a sudden for abortion but with caveats. Take Donald Trump, who this week was exposed trying to carve out a new position for himself that split the difference and as he put it, “make everyone happy.” Trump is all for aborting fetuses up to 16 weeks of pregnancy. Then he’s against abortion. In Florida, they’re pro-abortion up to 15 weeks, but only for the time being, while a new law works its way through the courts making abortion illegal after six weeks. Some red states, like Arkansas and Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana, have banned abortion completely, without exceptions for rape or incest. Other states have limits. In Arizona, abortion is legal up to 15 weeks; in Georgia, it’s legal up to six weeks; in Nebraska it's legal up to 12 weeks; in Ohio, aborting a fetus is legal up to 22 weeks, but after that it’s illegal with no exceptions for rape or incest; same with Wisconsin, where abortion is legal up to 22 weeks, and after that, it’s illegal except to save the life of the mother, but not for reasons of rape or incest.

Do you see what’s going on here? Republicans are against abortion except when they’re not. When the vote wind is being blown by suburban woman, some Republicans find a way to legalize abortion up to some arbitrary number of weeks. Republicans appear to be out there like fishermen, casting their lines for votes: Hey, I got a bite at 12 weeks! The Republican down the river hooks his votes at 15 weeks!

They’re all looking for a sweet spot with the abortion issue, and where they land depends, as ever, on what state we’re in. Trump seems to be betting he can con women by making abortion legal up to 16 weeks, a new number Trump pulled out of the air. But give him some time, and he’ll find another number, once he’s stuck his finger in the air and checked which way the votes are blowing.

Whatever they pick – and by “they,” I mean Republican state legislators and governors and candidates like Trump – at the tick of the clock past midnight on the last day of that arbitrary number, the fetus magically becomes a child and you can’t abort it, because…well, because Republicans say so, that’s why.

It's going to be fun watching Republicans running for the exits from the Life at Conception Act, because last week Alabama started a fire and anyone clinging to it is going to get burned. You’d like to think, wouldn’t you, that somehow Republicans are coming to their senses on the issue of reproductive rights, but that is not what’s happening. Instead, they’ve got their metal detectors out and they’re waving them across the ground in front of them trying to find their way through the minefield they’ve created for themselves.

Yesterday, Republicans thought they could moderate their anti-abortion position by giving an inch on exceptions for rape or incest. Today, it’s IVF. But the truth is, they don’t believe anything they say about when life begins, or when a fetus becomes a child, or when a legal abortion should suddenly become illegal. Despite the best efforts of Republicans like Mike Johnson to yap about abortion out of one side of their mouths and Jesus out of the other, abortion isn’t about morality, it’s about votes.

Watch these shapeshifters. IVF bit them in the ass, and they don’t want to get bitten again. We’re going to need X-ray vision to find our way through the fog of Republican obfuscation and quick-change reversals and outright red-in-the-face lies ahead of us.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

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Nancy Mace

Let's Watch The Making Of An 'Extrauterine Child'!

This week, the Alabama Supreme Court surprised absolutely no one with a ruling that frozen embryos created through the process of in vitro fertilization are children. Somewhere in its blizzard of references to Biblical verses, Christian theologians, even something called “The Manhattan Declaration,” the court essentially confirmed the long-time anti-abortion ideology that life begins at conception and no matter the method of conception, even a flash-frozen fertilized egg is alive. The Alabama Supreme Court found that frozen embryos are protected under the state’s wrongful death statutes. The decision even went to the trouble of coining a word for these new living beings: extrauterine children.

The Alabama decision has caused several of the state’s in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics to close their doors for fear that if a frozen embryo is destroyed, discarded or even lost during the IVF procedure, it would leave the doctors and the clinics and even the patients vulnerable to prosecution for killing extrauterine children.

People like husbands, lovers, parents, even older children of pregnant women attend the live births of children all the time, so, if Alabama is now saying that any embryo is a child, whether fresh, frozen, or in the process of being used in an IVF, why don’t we attend the medical procedure that amounts to the creation of one of these brand new microscopic children!

The process begins with a woman, although not necessarily the woman who, if the IVF is successful, will actually give birth to a living, breathing child. In vitro fertilization involves what is euphemistically called harvesting a woman’s eggs. It begins with the production of a woman’s eggs being chemically encouraged using something called “ovarian hyperstimulation.” Adequately stimulating the ovaries isn’t enough, however. In order to be able to retrieve eggs, the time of ovulation must be predictable, and that’s where the “trigger shot” comes in. Once the ovarian follicles are developed enough, a shot of hormones is administered, setting the ovulation schedule for 38 to 40 hours after the shot.

Now comes the time for harvesting the eggs via “transvaginal oocyte retrieval.” The woman, who throughout the process is referred to as “the patient,” is taken to an operating room and usually put under general anesthesia so that a fine needle guided by transvaginal ultrasound can be inserted through the vaginal wall into her ovarian follicles, from which multiple eggs, usually somewhere between 10 and 30, are aspirated. The eggs come out in a solution of follicular fluid and are quickly removed to another room where they are cleansed of cumulus cells and prepared for fertilization.

Meanwhile, a man’s sperm has been similarly prepared in a process called “sperm washing,” which removes seminal fluid and inactive, or dead, sperm cells.

Any eggs or sperm that are not to be used can at this point be separately frozen. It should be noted that either of these two necessary elements in the creation of life that are not chosen to be used can be destroyed. That’s okay with the state of Alabama, because it takes the next step for them to become “extrauterine children.”

Now the eggs and the sperm are introduced in a liquid medium, the proverbial “test tube” or “petri dish,” although neither is actually used in the process. In certain cases involving low sperm count, a single sperm can be injected into a single egg by intracytoplasmic injection. This is done under a microscope.

Once the eggs are fertilized, they are put into a so-called growth medium and allowed to grow for two to four days, through the cleavage stage, when the embryo splits into two cells, to the blastocyst stage of six to eight cells.

Get this: At this point, the embryos are “graded,” to determine the quality of the embryo and its likelihood of resulting in a live birth. By removing one or two cells from the blastocyst stage, embryos can be genetically analyzed for birth defects or inherited diseases, and depending on who’s doing the grading and what the criteria are, one or more of the embryos can be chosen over the others. An embryo at this point can even be chosen to provide embryonic cells that can be used to cure a sick child the woman has previously given birth to.

Now the embryo, or more often, embryos, can be inserted into the woman’s uterus through a thin catheter. If one or more of the implanted embryos attaches to the wall of the uterus and grows into a fetus, they can become actual, live, breathing children.

Or they can be frozen and become extrauterine children.

Amazing, isn’t it? The Alabama Supreme Court decision was made by nine Republican justices because there are no justices appointed by Democratic governors and confirmed by the state Senate. The vote was 8 to 1. Alabama is one of the states that has a law declaring that life begins at conception, the holy grail of the anti-abortion movement.

There are two other states with laws declaring that life begins at conception: Missouri and Mississippi. Legislatures in at least 14 more states have introduced so-called fetal personhood bills this year alone. But when the IVF clinics in Alabama began to shut down on Wednesday and the shutdowns continued yesterday and today, all of a sudden it occurred to the geniuses in the Republican Party who have been pushing for religion to be a determining factor in our government and laws, and for laws to be passed declaring that life begins at conception, that maybe this whole blastocyst-is-a-kid thing isn’t such a good idea.

Suddenly it occurred to Republicans that all those couples out there who have problems having children, or single women who want to give birth via IVF, won’t be able to do it because the process by its very nature involves the destruction of some of what Alabama called extrauterine children.

Republican presidential candidate Niki Haley, whose initial response to the Alabama ruling was, “Embryos, to me, are babies,” was described as “walking back” her comment.

South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace, who is a sponsor of the federal Life at Conception Act, which would write into law that life begins when an egg is fertilized, was on Twitter-X today saying, “We should do everything we can to protect IVF for women everywhere.”

There is going to be a lot of Republican shifting into reverse in the coming days and months. When you mix politics and religion, bad things can happen. And when you take away the rights of more than 50 percent of the population to make their own healthcare decisions and turn those decisions over to a bunch of state legislatures and governors and state courts, worse things happen.

One of the major reasons that the anti-abortion movement has been squeamish about IVF for decades is that fundamentalist Christians don’t like the idea of messing around with nature, which introducing needles and drugs and operating rooms and all that medical gear certainly amounts to.

They are not squeamish about telling women what to do with their bodies, however. The result that is emerging from this political shitstorm is that Republicans are fine with prodding and poking and injecting and inserting things into women’s uteruses so long as it results in the birth of a baby, or as the Alabama Supreme Court has proven, the creation of an extrauterine child.

But prod her and poke her and give her shots and insert things in her uterus because she doesn’t want a child? That’s a no-no.

There is an essential contradiction Republicans have constructed: if you’re pregnant and don’t want to have the baby, you can’t stop your pregnancy. But if you’re infertile and you want to start a pregnancy, you can’t do that, either. Either way, if you are a woman, you are not in control of your own body. Laws, and court decisions written by Republicans are.

Despite their attempts to back and fill and shift into reverse and obfuscate and tell outright lies to solve this contradiction, it is about to come home for Republicans at the ballot box.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

New Impeachment Committee Spokeswoman Says 'Never Mind!'

New Impeachment Committee Spokeswoman Says 'Never Mind!'

Alexander Smirnov, the Russian intelligence-connected disinformation agent the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees have relied on as their chief witness in the impeachment investigation of President Joe Biden, was arrested at his lawyer’s office on a warrant from the Central Federal Judicial District of California declaring him a flight risk from prosecution on multiple counts of lying to the FBI.

Smirnov had been spreading the years-old lie that the Bidens, both father and son, had each taken five million dollar bribes to protect a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, from being charged by a Ukrainian prosecutor who had already been fired for corruption unrelated to either Burisma or the Bidens. In other words, Smirnov’s allegation was that the Bidens were bribed by Burisma for exactly nothing.

Committee chairmen Rep. James Comer (R-KY) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) made statements on Wednesday that their impeachment investigation will proceed because the lies told by Smirnov to the FBI about the Bidens had no bearing on the “facts” of their inquiry.

Yesterday, the FBI document with Smirnov’s lies about the Bidens that House Republicans have had on their list of evidence supporting Biden’s impeachment disappeared from the committee’s website.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s brother James appeared before staff impeachment investigators from the Oversight and Judiciary Committees on Wednesday. Here is what he told them: “I have had a 50-year career in a variety of business ventures. Joe Biden has never had any involvement or any direct or indirect financial interest in those activities. None. I never asked my brother to take any official action on behalf of me, my business associates, or anyone else.”

As new House impeachment committee spokesperson Emily Litella put it to the press late yesterday afternoon, “Never mind.”

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

What Is The Deal With Republicans And All These Russian Spies?

What Is The Deal With Republicans And All These Russian Spies?

Guess what: A Russian spy has been spreading lies about the Democratic candidate for president through his connections with senior Republican officials. Oh, my goodness, can that be true? Where did I put my fainting couch?

This time the Russian spy is Alexander Smirnov, a serial liar and fabricator who has been making up stories on behalf of Russian intelligence about Democrats, chiefly Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and feeding them to senior Republican Party government officials. Last week, he was charged with just that – lying to the FBI that Joe Biden and his son Hunter each sought $5 million bribes from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma to fix an investigation into the company by Ukraine’s corrupt prosecutor general.

Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that this tired lie about the Bidens and Burisma and bribes was shopped around way back in 2018 and 2019 in the run-up to the 2020 election. Those were the days when the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Konstantin Kilimnik and Dmytro Firtash were running around trying to get “dirt” on the Bidens, and the infamous “perfect phone call” was made to Volodymyr Zelenskyy when Donald Trump, then the President of the United States, tried to extort the Ukrainian president into opening an investigation into the very thing that Smirnov is charged with lying about these five or six years later.

Oh goodness, I’m barely three paragraphs into this piece about what happened with Russian spies just yesterday and already I’m spinning down a rabbit hole we’ve been going down ever since a certain New York real estate magnate decided he would run for president as a Republican in 2015.

Here’s a handy-dandy flashback with a few of the players we’ve met along the way:

Remember Marina Butina? She was the Russian FSG bombshell who infiltrated the National Rifle Association on behalf of Russian intelligence and spread money around and had a wild affair with a Republican political operative named Paul Erikson and took a bunch of NRA officials and Republican politicians to Moscow to meet with her phony “gun rights” organization called “Right to Bear Arms” that she established in a country where there is no right to bear arms.

Remember George Papadopoulos? He was the Trump campaign “foreign policy adviser” who was running around London in 2016 meeting with a Russian intelligence agent named Joseph Mifsud, who was setting him up with meetings with another Russian intelligence agent, Leonid Reshetnikov, who ran some kind of Russian intelligence front called the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies. Mifsud, who disappeared and has never been seen or heard from again, was the guy that Papadopoulos met in Rome, or somewhere, who out of the blue told him that Russian intelligence had “dirt” on Hilary Clinton, including “thousands of emails” that belonged to her.

The name Konstantin Kilimnik ring a bell? I know it gets confusing, because I already mentioned him about the whole Burisma thing, but Konstantin was the Russian intelligence guy who had worked with Paul Manafort in Ukraine when Manafort was running campaigns for Ukraine’s pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, who after being deposed by the 2014 Ukrainian revolution fled back to – you guessed it – Russia. Anyway, Konstantin was the guy connected to a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, to whom Manafort owed something like $14 million. The minute Manafort was appointed manager of Trump’s campaign, he emailed his pal Konstantin asking him how they could use the Trump campaign to “get whole” with Deripaska. So, Manafort ends up meeting with Konstantin in New York City while he was running Trump’s campaign and shared campaign information and polling data with him. Why Manafort was giving this highly secret political information to a Russian intelligence agent, well, that was never explained, but it does kind of bring up what “get whole” could have meant. Manafort went on to be indicted for various financial crimes, for which Trump pardoned him. Konstantin was indicted for obstruction of justice, and hell, even little honey-pot Marina Butina was indicted and spent a year behind bars in the U.S. before she was deported back to Russia and greeted as a returning hero by Russian intelligence.

That’s just a smattering of Russian intelligence agents with connections to prominent Republicans over the last eight to ten years, and what do you know? Here comes Alexander Smirnov peddling tired old lies about the Bidens and Burisma, and this time who’s listening to him? Oh, nobody but the two House Republican goofs in charge of the so-called impeachment investigation of President Biden, James Comer and Jim Jordan. And what are they investigating Biden for? Oh, let’s see…taking bribes from Burisma!

Now, having read all that history about the other Russian spies Republicans were listening to, involved with, giving information to, getting information from, and committing financial crimes with, what kind of a guy is Smirnov? Let’s just let the DOJ motion tell us in their explanation to the court in Nevada about why Smirnov needs to be in pretrial detention:

“First, he claims to have contacts with multiple foreign intelligence agencies and had plans to leave the United States two days after he was arrested last week for a months-long, multi-country foreign trip. During this trip, the defendant claimed to be meeting with foreign intelligence contacts. Those foreign intelligence agencies could resettle Smirnov outside the United States if he were released.”

Oh, by the way, Smirnov was arrested as he got off the flight from his multi-country trip “meeting with foreign intelligence contacts.”

But it gets better. Smirnov has lived in Las Vegas but has no business there. “Instead, he claims to have a ‘security business,’ that is registered in California,” according to the DOJ memo. He lives with a girlfriend “who does not appear to even know what he does.” What does he do for money? His bank records do not “reflect that he is in the ‘security business,’ as he claims.” Instead, his bank records “show large wire transfers from what appear to be venture capital firms and individuals.”

That gives him enough money to escape the country any time he wants to, according to the DOJ. How much money, you may ask? Oh, not too much. Smirnov “has access to more than $2.9 million, and his wife/girlfriend (he refers to her both ways) (hereafter 'DL') has access to more than $3.8 million.” According to the DOJ, those “funds are available to him because most of the money in DL’s account originated with Smirnov and she pays his personal expenses out of her account.”

Because most guys running around making international trips to multiple countries who have no visible means of support besides large money transfers from “venture capital firms and individuals” have millions of dollars in bank accounts in their names and in the names of their wife/girlfriends.

Are you able to follow this insane narrative? This is the guy the House Republicans have been relying on as their chief source of information about supposed $5 million bribes to both Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. This is the crap they want to impeach Biden for? Smirnov, the star of his own private season of the old spy sitcom Get Smart, has been telling Comer and his buddies that Hunter Biden was taped making phone calls about the bribes in a hotel in Kyiv that was “wired” by Russian intelligence and “under control of the Russians.”

Only one problem: Hunter Biden not only has never been in that hotel, he has never been in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Prosecutors told the judge in Nevada that Russian intelligence is still using the Kyiv hotel to record “prominent Americans” in order to provide “kompromat” in the 2024 election. “Thus, Smirnov’s efforts to spread misinformation about a candidate of one of the two major parties in the United States continues,” the DOJ memo concludes.

Ummmmm…isn’t this the kind of stuff that was happening back in 2016 in London and Rome and even Moscow when “operatives” for Trump’s campaign were meeting with Russian intelligence agents who were peddling “dirt” on Hillary Clinton? And Marina Butina was gamboling around with NRA officers and escorting them to Moscow and shacking up with Republican campaign operatives while she was employed as “special assistant” to Aleksandr Torshin, who was acting chairman of the Senate of the Russian Federation and a close pal of Putin.

With all the Russians and all the intelligence agents and all the meetings with Republican officials of one kind or anotherand all the secrets and lies passed between them all the way up to and including the campaign chairman of the Republican nominee for president, here is a simple way to understand it.

It’s the same playbook Trump has used his entire life. Get caught doing something, anything, and immediately accuse your opponents of the same thing or worse. Charge after charge of sexual harassment and assault? Hmmm, let’s see…how about a pizza joint where pedophile Democrats are trafficking children out of the basement? In business up to your neck with Russians and taking money from foreign governments? Find some goofball with two or three foreign passports and bank accounts full of funny money traveling around the world meeting with Russian intelligence officials and get him to accuse the Bidens of taking bribes.

What Donald Trump has always called the “Russia hoax” was never a hoax at all. It was real, and it is continuing, and it now reaches into the United States Congress and is driving the movement there to impeach President Biden for things he never did, but ironically, for stuff Republicans have been doing for at least a decade.

So where is the big Biden impeachment investigation right now, after the fourth or fifth witness they’ve advertised as “the one” falls apart in a spectacular hail of indictments and DOJ memos alleging all kinds of Russian hanky-panky? Well, Comer and Jordan have their committee staffers purging the name “Smirnov” from anything with their fingerprints on it. Seems like they’ve got their work cut out for them.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Why Avdiivka's Fall Matters So Much To Ukraine -- And To Us

Why Avdiivka's Fall Matters So Much To Ukraine -- And To Us

At the very moment Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was speaking to European and American allies at the Munich Security Conference on February 16, the last Ukrainian soldiers withdrew in defeat from Avdiivka, an industrial city in coal country in Eastern Ukraine that has been under Russian siege for months. It was a profound loss for Ukraine engineered by Vladimir Putin with his costly win in Avdiivka after a month’s long campaign of attrition and utter destruction of the town.

The win in Avdiivka was incredibly brutal for the Russian army, which racked up tens of thousands of casualties over the months they laid siege to the town. Avdiivka has been contested since 2014, when Russian-backed separatists began their years-long campaign to occupy parts of eastern Ukraine that have large populations of Russian speaking citizens. After staging its invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, Russia held so-called referendums in the parts of the East and South they had occupied, wherein local citizens “voted” to be annexed by Russia.

On September 30, 2022, Putin addressed both houses of Russia’s Parliament, announcing the annexation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kershon, and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts (regions). With the exception of Belarus, no countries recognized the annexation, and fighting has continued in all four regions ever since.

Russia began a full-on effort to take control of Avdiivka in October, moving large numbers of its soldiers into the area and effectively surrounding the town on three sides, leaving open only a narrow corridor to the east which Ukraine was able to use for resupply and reinforcement until early this year. In January, Russia began a new tactic, launching a massive campaign of aerial bombing that continued through last weekend.

Aerial bombardment has not been a tactic widely used in the war so far by Russia because they were reluctant to send their combat aircraft into airspace defended by Ukrainian anti-aircraft batteries. Russia lost enough of its combat aircraft early in the war that it depended largely on artillery and ground-to-ground rockets in the campaign it waged to take the areas of Ukraine in the east and south it now holds.

According to British intelligence sources reached by the New York Times, Russia dropped as many as 800 guided bombs on Avdiivka since January 1. Ukrainian sources told the Times that the bombs ranged in size between 500 and 3,300 pounds. Aerial bombardment was not even used in the Russian assault on Bakhmut, the other contested town Russia was able to take after a long siege last year.

This new twist in Russian tactics is not good on any level. Bombs dropped from aircraft can be much larger and more powerful than the warheads on ground-to-ground or cruise missiles, and they are more powerful than artillery rounds by an exponential factor. A thousand pound or 1500-pound bomb can destroy an entire house and leave a crater twenty or thirty feet deep. Ukrainian forces that had been using underground bunkers to defend themselves from Russian artillery and ground-to-ground missiles were defenseless against Russian aerial bombardment. One estimate I saw put the total amount of bombs dropped since New Years at over a million pounds.

I can’t figure out why Ukrainian air defenses appear to have been ineffective against Russia’s deployment of its airpower unless Russia was using some sort of “stand-off” bombs that could be dropped from high altitude far back from their targets and guided into Avdiivka, putting the aircraft that dropped them out of the range of Ukrainian air defenses. Another possibility is that Russia was able to hit and destroy Ukrainian air defense batteries before the aerial assault began, and Ukraine lacked new batteries to replace them because Western support has slowed and even stopped in the case of the U.S.

There is also the possibility that Ukraine is using so much of its air defense capability to defend its large population centers that the front-line defenses are being starved. This possibility looms larger the longer it takes for the United States to pass the multi-billion Ukraine aid package that sits moldering in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, mainly at the urging of Donald Trump, friend of Putin and enemy of democracy here and abroad.

There are tactical consequences that will derive from the fall of Avdiivka. Ukraine has been forced to withdraw from the town to the west and establish new defensive lines to deal with any follow-on offensive that Russia is able to launch. Ukraine spent years on the defenses they built around and in Avdiivka, but they will have only days or weeks to build new defensive lines to the west of the town.

Strategically, taking Avdiivka opens the door for Russia to move on other targets along the 600-mile front lines of the war. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which has been excellent in its analysis of both Russian and Ukrainian strengths and weaknesses since February of 2022, reports that “several Ukrainian and Western sources assessed that delays in Western security assistance, namely artillery ammunition and critical air defense systems, inhibited Ukrainian troops from defending against Russian advances in Avdiivka.” ISW goes on to report that Russia is already “conducting at least three offensive efforts—along the Kharkiv-Luhansk Oblast border, particularly in the directions of Kupyansk and Lyman; in and around Avdiivka; and near Robotyne in western Zaporizhia Oblast.”

The problem Ukraine had before they lost Avdiivka was a lack of manpower on the front lines and severely diminished ammunition supplies due to inaction on Ukraine aid by the U.S. The tiny country of Denmark recently announced that they are turning over to Ukraine their entire stock of artillery ammunition to defend against Russia. How House Republicans can get up in the morning and look at themselves in the mirror is beyond me, unless the image they see in their mind’s eye is the Crème Brulee-colored face of Donald Trump.

Even more important than the tactical or strategic implications of Avdiivka is the symbol of a Russian victory at this specific moment. President Zelenskyy was in Munich literally begging NATO countries for more weapons and ammunition while his troops were in retreat in Avdiivka, underscoring the dire situation of a country fighting for its existence.

Putin’s army is fighting a war of attrition against a country beleaguered by its lack of political support by its biggest ally, the United States, at a time when Ukraine is trying to rebuild its military manpower and stave off new Russian offensives along a 600-mile border that they just don’t have the soldiers to adequately defend. All Putin has to do is turn on CNN International to watch his allies in the Republican Party fight the third front in his war in Ukraine – the front on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and in Trump’s “America First” campaign for president.

Trump gets huge cheers and applause at his rallies every time he tells his crowds that we have to “take care of our border before we take care of other countries.” He and Putin know they’ve got Ukraine in a hammerlock with his damned if you do, damned if you don’t political strategy linking support for Ukraine with immigration. They demanded a right-wing dream package on immigration in return for support for Ukraine, and when they got it, they followed the Trump-Putin lead and said no deal.

Trump and Putin don’t even have to talk on the phone to be in perfect sync on the issue of Ukraine. The danger we are facing is that those two authoritarians don’t have to talk on the phone to be in sync on our domestic politics, either. Putin is whispering disinformation to “sources” that he would rather see Biden elected at the same time he’s probably readying the biggest aid package of them all – political support for Donald Trump the way he did in 2016 and 2020.

God help Ukraine, and God help us.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

A Black Thing: What We Learned From The Father Of Fani Willis

A Black Thing: What We Learned From The Father Of Fani Willis

What did we learn from the testimony of John C. Floyd III at last Friday's hearing in Georgia? Floyd, the father of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, was called by prosecutors defending Willis from charges that she has a conflict of interest in her prosecution of 19 defendants, including Donald Trump, that he led a “criminal racketeering enterprise” to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

One of Trump’s co-defendants, Michael Roman, a campaign aide to Trump, alleged that Willis had a personal relationship with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor Willis had hired to help in the prosecution of Trump and his co-defendants. Roman charged that Willis benefitted financially from the personal relationship with Wade and should be disqualified from prosecuting the case against them.

Floyd was called to testify about what he knew of his daughter’s relationship with Wade, which wasn’t much, and to knock down insinuations by Roman and others that the fact Willis repaid her paramour Wade in cash for her part of several trips they shared, including travel to Belize and the Caribbean island of Aruba, was suspect. Willis and Wade were questioned skeptically about the arrangement yesterday by lawyers for defendants who seemed to be implying that their use of cash, rather than checks, implied a coverup of an illicit arrangement that benefitted Willis.

Floyd finally put an end to the insinuations that Willis could not possibly have had enough cash to repay Wade for luxury travel. He explained that he had counseled his daughter to always keep a good deal of cash on hand and turned to address the judge and said, “I’m not trying to be racist, your honor, but it’s a Black thing. I was trained, and most Black folks, they hide cash or they keep cash, and I was trained you always keep some cash. I gave my daughter her first cash box and told her, ‘Always keep some cash.’”

Floyd went on to tell a story about being out to lunch with his wife and young daughter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while he was taking a course at Harvard, and having a restaurant refuse to accept his American Express card, another credit card, or the American Express Travelers Checks he offered to pay with. He said he had to pay the $9.51 check with a ten dollar bill from his wallet. He explained that he told his daughter to always take cash with her when she went out on a date with a man in case something happened and she wanted to leave.

Lawyers for Roman and other defendants pressed Floyd on the time he spent living in his daughter’s new house in the Atlanta area. They seemed to be implying that because he lived alone in the house, Willis’ absence was evidence that she was “co-habiting” with Wade, an allegation that defendant Roman has made publicly.

Floyd told the lawyers that his daughter moved out of the house because of protests against her at the home that began shortly after she was sworn in as district attorney in 2021. He said he had called police to Willis’ house in February of 2021 because protesters were standing outside shouting “the B-word and the N-word.” He said racist graffiti had been sprayed on the house, which he cleaned off before Willis could see it. He said Willis had had to move at least four times because of death threats. He was asked if he knew where she was living each time she moved, and he said no, that he didn’t want to know “in case somebody held a gun to my head and asked me.”

It bears noting that the questioning of Willis and Wade yesterday about what in any other circumstance would be considered an office romance, and the questioning of Floyd today about the relationship between a Black father and a Black daughter who followed him into the practice of law, racism wasn’t the subtext, it was the text. At one point, when Floyd was asked why he had moved out of a house he owned, the lawyer questioning him pursued the line of inquiry until Floyd was forced to explain that he had “lost” his house in a dispute with a reverse mortgage company.

The questions were clearly an attempt to humiliate Floyd, as were other questions about why he had lived in his daughter’s house while not owning a home of his own. At one point, Roman’s lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, asked if he was in Georgia “every day” of the years 2019 and 2020. That question, and many others she asked, had no bearing on the allegations that gave rise to the hearing.

The allegation that Willis had somehow benefitted financially from her private relationship with a lawyer she had hired to work in her office was a page right out of the Donald Trump playbook, that everything in life is transactional and performative, because there is no such thing as acting on real feelings.

It is a measure of how pathetic and meanspirited and racist our politics has become that the hearing in Georgia even took place.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

How Biden Can Drive Trump Even Further Around The Bend

How Biden Can Drive Trump Even Further Around The Bend

Please, Mr. President, more of this!

In a speech at the White House yesterday, President Biden said this about Donald Trump’s threat not to defend NATO allies: “For God’s sake, it’s dumb. It’s shameful. It’s dangerous. It’s un-American. When America gives its word, it means something. When we make a commitment, we keep it.”

Biden urged the House of Representatives to take up and pass the Senate’s $95 billion national security and foreign aid bill. He lit into Trump in a way he should be lighting into him every day. Biden’s words got quoted. Film of the speech has been played on cable television. People are talking about the way he put down his unhinged Republican opponent.

After quoting Trump saying he would “encourage Russia to do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies who are “delinquent” in their defense spending, Biden said, “Can you imagine a former president of the United States saying that? The whole world heard it. No other president in our history has ever bowed down to a Russian dictator. Well, let me say this as clearly as I can: I never will.”

The president went on to remind everyone that Article 5 of the NATO treaty, pledging every nation to defend other nations if they are attacked, has been invoked only once -- in support of the United States of America after al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11. “NATO is a sacred commitment. The greatest hope of all those who wish America harm is for NATO to fall apart. You can be sure that they all cheered when they heard what Donald Trump said. I know this. I will not walk away. For as long as I am president, if Putin attacks a NATO ally, the United States will defend every inch of NATO territory.”

This is the way to beat Trump. Americans like presidents who live up to commitments, who stand up to bullies, who don’t just talk tough, but are tough. Biden needs to point out these differences between himself and Trump as often as he can. The Biden campaign should have T-shirts and lawn signs made up with Trump’s photograph and the words, dumb, shameful, dangerous and un-American.

Biden should make a statement from the White House every day that Donald Trump makes an appearance in court. He can start today, when Trump will be in court in New York’s criminal case against him for illegally concealing his payment to Stormy Daniels. Tell the world that while Trump is cleaning up after his mistress pay-offs, Biden is standing up for tax payers and saving them money on prescription drugs and pushing for middle class tax cuts.

Put out a “Trump schedule” and note every time he is in court and what the charges are. Have President Biden get up at the White House and make a statement like, “Here is what we are doing at the White House while Donald Trump is in court today,” followed by a list of Democrats’ accomplishments, the unemployment numbers, the fact that a state just raised the minimum wage with Democratic support, Democrats’ support for women’s reproductive rights, for teaching American history accurately rather than whitewashing the past.

Biden should take advantage of the White House and use it the way Trump uses his rallies: Stand there in the White House and tell the truth about Trump. Use his own words to make him look like the fool he is. Point out his cowardice every time he insults American soldiers. Poke fun at him. Somebody on the Biden campaign should be retweeting photos like the one above, just to drive him crazy.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Let Us Now Celebrate E. Jean Carroll, The Woman Who Exposed Trump

Let Us Now Celebrate E. Jean Carroll, The Woman Who Exposed Trump

Can you believe the courage of this woman? E. Jean Carroll has received so many death threats that she began deleting them from her email account. She has been a daily recipient of Donald Trump’s lies and invective not just for days, but for years. Every day during her first trial, which she won when the judge found Trump liable for sexually assaulting her, and during her current trial, for Trump having defamed her, she has endured reliving the experience of being raped by Donald Trump and defamed for having told the truth about it, and she has not given up.

Can you believe the cowardice of this man? He knows that he raped her. He knows that he lied when he said it never happened. He knows that he has met her and lied when he denied it. There is photographic evidence that he met her. He knows he lied when he said in a deposition that “she is not my type.” He mistook her in the photograph for his second wife, Marla Maples, the mother of one of his children, and for a number of years, very definitely his “type.”

Can you believe that he thinks continuing to defame E. Jean Carroll and showing his disgust with her and with the trial proceedings is a good strategy in his campaign for the Republican nomination for the presidency? Even if we accept the death grip he has on what we call the MAGA base of Republican voters, his attitude about facing justice in court and E. Jean Carroll herself worked against him in New Hampshire. He carried male Republican voters by 20 points, but he carried female Republicans by only 4 points. Women know what sexual assault and rape are. According to the CDC, over half of women have experienced sexual assault in their lifetimes, and one in four women have experienced attempted or completed rape.

More than 50 percent of voters are women. That means at least a quarter of all the voters who will walk into a polling place in November of this year and cast a vote will have personal knowledge of the sexual violence Donald Trump committed on E. Jean Carroll.

I don’t know how Donald Trump squares that political reality with the way he has treated E. Jean Carroll ever since she revealed to the world that he raped her in a department store dressing room. The fact is, he doesn’t square it. His political instincts, which have been shown to be pretty effective when it comes to motivating a certain group of people to turn out and vote for him, are failing when it comes to a single woman who has stood up and told the truth to the world about his proclivity for sexual violence.

We have known before about what he has done to women. In 2016, the Access Hollywood tape exposed the fact that he is proud of his ability to sexually assault women and get away with it. E. Jean Carroll told her story about Trump raping her, and when he called her a liar, she shot back and sued him. She won a large money judgement against him, and she’s going to win another.

But the judgement that’s going to count will be the one he faces in November when women go to the polls and cast their votes in the presidential election. He has given them plenty of reasons to vote against him, most recently taking sole credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade. That took away women’s rights to control their reproductive health.

E. Jean Carroll’s case proves that Donald Trump does not believe women have a right to walk into a store and go shopping safely. Donald Trump thinks that women should submit to random men who want to commit sexual violence against them. E. Jean Carroll took Donald Trump to court to prove that he is wrong.

There are many E. Jean Carrolls out there. In continuing to tell lies about her, in showing his contempt for her and for the legal process of the lawsuit against him, Donald Trump is going to discover that the price he will pay will not only be financial, it will be political. There is not enough thanks in the world to reward E. Jean Carroll for doing what she has done to Donald Trump. She has shown him to be the coward that he is.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.