Arizona Gov. Ducey stacks containers on border at term’s end
Anita Snow and Ross D. Franklin – December 11, 2022
A long row of double-stacked shipping contrainers provide a new wall between the United States and Mexico in the remote section area of San Rafael Valley, Ariz., Thursday, Dec. 8, 2022. Work crews are steadily erecting hundreds of double-stacked shipping containers along the rugged east end of Arizona’s boundary with Mexico as Republican Gov. Doug Ducey makes a bold show of border enforcement even as he prepares to step aside next month for Democratic Governor-elect Katie Hobbs. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)Activists sit on newly installed shipping containers along the border creating a wall between the United States and Mexico in San Rafael Valley, Ariz., Thursday, Dec. 8, 2022. Work crews are steadily erecting hundreds of double-stacked shipping containers along the rugged east end of Arizona’s boundary with Mexico as Republican Gov. Doug Ducey makes a bold show of border enforcement even as he prepares to step aside next month for Democratic Governor-elect Katie Hobbs. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
Work crews have steadily erected hundreds of double-stacked shipping containers topped by razor wire along Arizona’s remote eastern boundary with Mexico in a bold show of border enforcement by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey even as he prepares to leave office.
Until protesters slowed, then largely halted the work in recent days, Ducey pressed forward over the objections of the U.S. government, environmentalists and an incoming governor who has called it a poor use of resources.
Democratic Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs said last week she was “looking at all the options” and hasn’t decided what to do about the containers after her Jan. 5. inauguration. She previously suggested the containers be repurposed as affordable housing, an increasingly popular option for homeless and low-income people.
“I don’t know how much it will cost to remove the containers and what the cost will be,” Hobbs told Phoenix PBS TV station KAET in an interview Wednesday.
Federal agencies have told Arizona the construction on U.S. land is unlawful and ordered it to halt. Ducey responded Oct. 21 by suing federal officials over their objections, sending the dispute to court.
Environmental groups say the containers could imperil natural water systems and endanger species.
“A lot of damage could be done here between now and early January,” said Russ McSpadden, a Southwest conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity who has regularly traveled to the site since late October.
Ducey insists Arizona holds sole or shared jurisdiction over the 60-foot (18.2 meter) strip the containers rest on and has a constitutional right to protect residents from “imminent danger of criminal and humanitarian crises.”
“Arizona is going to do the job that Joe Biden refuses to do — secure the border in any way we can.” Ducey said when Arizona sued the U.S. government. “We’re not backing down.”
The federal agencies want Ducey’s complaint dismissed.
Border security was a focus of Donald Trump’s presidency and remains a potent issue for Republican politicians. Hobbs’ GOP rival, Kari Lake, campaigned on a promise to dispatch the National Guard to the border on her first day in office. Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, recently reelected to a third term, has pushed to keep building Trump’s signature wall on the mostly private land along his state’s border with Mexico and has crowdsourced funds to help pay for it. He also has gotten attention for busing migrants to Democratic-led cities far from the southern border, including New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
Ducey’s move comes amid a record flow of migrants arriving at the border. U.S. border officials have stopped migrants 2.38 million times in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, up 37% from the year before. The annual total surpassed 2 million for the first time in August and is more than twice the highest level during Trump’s presidency, in 2019.
Ducey’s container wall effort began in late summer in Yuma in western Arizona, a popular crossing point, with scores of asylum-seekers arriving daily and often finding ways to circumvent the new barriers. The containers filled areas left open when Trump’s 450-mile (724 km) border wall was built. But remote San Rafael Valley — the latest construction site — is not typically used by migrants and was not contemplated in Trump’s wall construction plan. McSpadden said he has not seen migrants or Border Patrol agents there, just hikers and backpacking cyclists.
The construction there stretches from oak forests in the Huachuca foothills southeast of Tucson and across the valley’s grasslands. As of the middle of last week, cranes had transported more than 900 blue or rust-colored metal containers down a dirt road freshly scraped into the landscape, then double stacked them up to 17 feet (5.2 meters) high alongside waist-high vehicle barriers of crisscrossed steel. Workers bolted the containers together and welded sheet metal over gaps.
Still, yawning gaps remain in the new container wall, including an open space of several hundred yards (meters) on terrain far too steep to place the containers. In some low lying wash areas there are gaps nearly three feet (1 meter) wide.
Environmental activists demonstrating at the Cochise County site in the past week largely stopped the work in recent days by standing in front of construction vehicles. One recent day, a dozen demonstrators sat atop stacked containers or in camp chairs near tents and vehicles where they sleep.
The work in Yuma cost about $6 million and wrapped up in 11 days with 130 of the containers covering about 3,800 feet (about 1,160 meters). The Bureau of Reclamation told Arizona it violated U.S. law by building on federal land. The Cocopah Indian Tribe also complained the state did not seek permission to build on its nearby reservation.
The newer project is far larger, costing some $95 million and using up to 3,000 containers to cover 10 miles (16 km), in Arizona’s southeastern Cochise County. The U.S. Forest Service also told Arizona to halt its work in the Coronado National Forest, and recently alerted visitors to potential hazards posed by construction equipment involved in the state’s “unauthorized activities.”
The Center for Biological Diversity has sided with the federal government’s position that the construction violates U.S. law.
While Ducey’s lawsuit does not address environmental concerns, groups like the center say the work in the Coronado National Forest imperils endangered or threatened species like the western yellow-billed cuckoo and the Mexican spotted owl, as well as big cats including the occasional ocelot.
The biologically diverse region of southeastern Arizona is known for its “sky islands,” or isolated mountain ranges rising over 6,000 feet (1,828 meters) above “seas” of desert and grasslands. Wildlife cameras in the region regularly photograph black bears, bobcats, ringtails, spotted skunks, white-nosed coatis and pig-like javelina.
McSpadden said the work has toppled oak and juniper trees and he’s found spools of razor wire and other construction debris on national forest land.
Environmentalists warn of the dangers of placing the containers atop a watershed of the San Pedro River that floods during the monsoon season each summer. Just south of the border lies a protected area called Rancho Los Fresnos, home to the beaver, a threatened species in Mexico.
Biologist Myles Traphagen of Wildlands Network told a briefing on border issues last month that much damage caused during the Trump administration’s border wall construction was never fixed. Last year, he mapped the Arizona and New Mexico sections of that border wall to highlight damaged areas. A report this year highlights areas the group considers priorities for reconstruction.
Dynamite blasts forever reshaped the remote Guadalupe Canyon in Arizona’s southeast corner. Towering steel bollards closed off wildlife corridors, preventing animals like tiny elf owls, pronghorns and big cats from Mexico to cross into the U.S. to hunt and mate.
‘The party’s on fire’: Florida GOP roiled by far right takeover efforts despite 2022 wins
Zac Anderson, Sarasota Herald-Tribune – December 10, 2022
Urged on by prominent far right figures such as Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, ultra conservative GOP activists are seeking to take over county parties across Florida during leadership elections this month.
Some have failed, such as the recent effort to install a Flynn acolyte as county party chair in Sarasota County.
Some already have been successful. Candidates backed by far-right businessman Alfie Oakes, who was at the U.S. Capitol when it was overrun by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, took over the Collier County GOP.
Other leadership battles are still playing out. Whatever happens, the wave of far right activity across Florida shows how former President Donald Trump continues to reshape the party.
A Facebook post by Michael Thompson shows him with Michael Flynn, left, and Collier County businessman Alfie Oakes, right. Thompson, who is wearing the light blue blazer in both photos, is running for Lee County GOP chair.
‘America First’ candidates
Many of the activists seeking control of local parties have been motivated by Trump’s stolen election claims and his battles with the GOP establishment. They often identity as “America First” candidates, a slogan with a long history in American politics that Trump popularized again.
In Lee County, an activist backed by Flynn who worked for an affiliate of The America Project, a nonprofit Flynn is involved with that promotes Trump’s unfounded election fraud allegations, won the county GOP chair job. The Lee activist, Michael Thompson, posted on Facebook recently that the Arizona election “was stolen” from Kari Lake, the failed far-right candidate for governor. Thompson wants to create a committee within the Lee GOP focused on “election integrity.”
In Pinellas County, activist and conservative author Cathi Chamberlain, who worked as campaign manager for a Jan. 6 defendant who ran for Congress from jail, is running for county party chair. Chamberlain emphasized “the stolen election in 2020” when she announced her campaign at a Pinellas GOP meeting last month.
In Lake County, far right former state House member Anthony Sabatini is running for county party chair amid speculation he might use the post to run for state party chair. Sabatini is an ardent Trump supporter who has frequently battled with members of his own party. He recently tweeted — without any evidence — that “2022 may have even MORE election fraud than 2020.”
Far right former Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini is running for Lake County GOP chair amid speculation he may use the post to run for Florida GOP chair.
Fizzled red wave
The focus on 2020 was a problem for the GOP this election cycle. Candidates such as Lake, Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and others who embraced Trump’s election denialism lost key races, causing a predicted red wave to fizzle.
Florida was a different story. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has avoided directly answering questions about whether he believes the 2020 election was stolen, won big.
Yet the 2020 election continues to motivate many on the far right, even in Florida, a state Trump carried by three points over President Joe Biden. Trump’s national loss to Biden left many in the GOP frustrated and searching for ways to have influence on the political process.
“The party’s on fire, people want to see change and there’s not change happening, and they look at the party as a way to change,” said state Sen. Joe Gruters, R-Sarasota, chairman of the Florida Republican Party.
Florida GOP Chair Joe Gruters says “the party’s on fire.” Encouraged by far right figures such as Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, ultra conservative GOP activists are seeking to seize control of county GOP leadership positions across Florida.
Trump’s unwillingness to accept defeat shaped how the GOP responded to 2020, prompting many in the party to channel their energy into the stolen election narrative. Flynn was at the forefront of that effort nationally. He was deeply involved in trying to overturn the 2020 election. His nonprofit helped fund a controversial recount in Arizona.
In Florida, Flynn — briefly Trump’s national security adviser in 2017 — has been allied with Defend Florida, a loosely organized group that gathered thousands of “affidavits” that the organization implies are possible instances of voter fraud, claims law enforcement and election authorities have dismissed.
Chamberlain has been heavily involved with Defend Florida, and Thompson also is aligned with the group.
‘RINO’ attacks
In Manatee County, GOP Chair Steve Vernon said he’s also being challenged by a Defend Florida volunteer.
The group of activists trying to unseat Vernon has called him a RINO — which stands for “Republican in Name Only” — even though he once led a tea party group and once challenged Gruters, a prominent Trump ally, from the right for a state House seat.
“I’m the ex-president of the tea party, yet they’re calling me a RINO and I’m thinking what world are you in?” Vernon said. “I’m no more RINO than the man on the moon. That’s how bad it is.”
Vernon identifies as a staunch conservative, but he said the people challenging him are “so far right” they’re “off the planet.”
“I am conservative; however, they want to take it to the stratosphere. They have a 100% purity test,” Vernon said.
Vernon said he blames Bannon, a former Trump adviser, for all the pressure on county GOP leaders from the right. Bannon, who was sentenced last year to four months in prison after being found guilty of contempt of Congress, uses his “War Room” program to promote a takeover of the GOP at the local level and build from there, until the party has been transformed statewide and nationally.
Manatee GOP Chair Steve Vernon is facing a challenge for the top county party job from a right wing activist. Vernon identifies as a staunch conservative, but he said the people challenging him are “so far right” they’re “off the planet”
Flynn has pushed a similar message. After failing to overturn the 2020 election, he bought a home in Englewood in Southwest Florida and launched a series of initiatives aimed at engaging the GOP base. Flynn’s motto is “Local Action = National Impact.” He has demonstrated his commitment by joining the Sarasota GOP executive committee and volunteering as a precinct captain.
Bannon talks about taking over the GOP “precinct by precinct.”
Flynn and other far-right individuals backed GOP activist Conni Brunni for Sarasota GOP chair but she fell short by 33 votes to Jack Brill, who was endorsed by the vast majority of GOP elected officials in the county.
Sarasota GOP activist Conni Brunni tried to win control of the county party with backing from Michael Flynn, but came up short by 33 votes.
Chamberlain also likely faces an uphill battle against Adam Ross, a prosecutor who works as executive director of the state attorney’s office covering Pinellas County and has a long list of endorsements from local GOP leaders.
Republicans were hugely successful in Pinellas this cycle, and Ross says he wants to continue the “professional leadership” that has proven effective.
“I think it’s good to have a spirited debate, but I don’t want to see it turn negative where we start using terms like RINO and that,” Ross said. “We all need to work together, we’re all part of the big tent. When I’m chairman everybody will be welcome, but it has to stay professional.”
Chamberlain is critical of Ross, the current vice chair of the Pinellas GOP, saying he hasn’t been aggressive enough in investigating claims of voter fraud. The fraud issue drove her decision to run for party chair. Nationwide, nearly 60 federal judges, including those appointed by Trump, dismissed lawsuits filed by the former president and his allies challenging the 2020 election or its outcome.
“When the establishment was going around telling everybody to keep quiet about the 2020 election my question was why? Why aren’t we hitting this head-on?” Chamberlain said of Trump’s fraud allegations. “I’m a former building contractor and I can tell you if the foundation of a building I was working on wasn’t solid I wouldn’t take one step forward until it was fixed.”
Ross says the local party has taken “election integrity very seriously.”
With Trump running for president again, questions about the 2020 election are likely to continue dividing the party.
“The Republican Party, there’s no question about it is split in half right now,” Chamberlain said. “And the establishment rules currently and the America Firsters… are fighting to regain the values our party stands for.”
Op-Ed: Democrats should use their Senate majority to expose Republican corruption
Kurt Bardella – December 8, 2022
With Sen. Raphael Warnock, left, reelected, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has a majority to lead. (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)
With Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia winning reelection, Democrats now have a 51-49 majority heading into the next Congress. Under a 50-50 Senate, each party seats the same number of members on committees. With a 51-seat majority, Democrats will now outnumber Republicans at the committee level for the first time in the Biden presidency. Most important, this means Senate Democrats can now exercise the reins of their oversight authority unilaterally. They don’t need Republican votes to issue subpoenas or conduct depositions.
Republicans in the House of Representatives have been downright boastful about their intentions to use their new majority, narrow as it is, to initiate an oversight tsunami targeting the Biden administration and Biden’s family. On Tuesday, Republican Leader (at least for the moment) Kevin McCarthy released an exhaustive list of oversight targets including Hunter Biden, the Justice Department, the FBI and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
The Republican playbook is a simple one: They will use their oversight authority to initiate actions and confrontations that will captivate media attention and keep the Biden administration and Democrats on the defensive. Republicans in Congress are betting the House on the idea that the media will do their dirty work and will chronicle their oversight overreaches as legitimate instead of what they are: taxpayer-financed witch hunts.
That is why it is crucial that Democrats in the Senate embrace their newfound majority margins and exercise their oversight authority as well. Giving Republicans a clear field to dominate the oversight conversation would be a huge mistake that could cost Democrats dearly by the time we get to 2024. Through the extraordinary work of the Jan. 6 Select Committee, we have seen how effective oversight, when done right, can affect public opinion. This committee, incidentally, is about to be disbanded and then investigated by House Republicans.
Republicans like Rep. James Comer, the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, plan on employing a “make accusations first, get the evidence second” crusade against the president and his family. There is no reason Senate Democrats should not turn the tables on Republicans by finally investigating the conflicts of interest created by Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner during their time in the White House.
Documents recently released by Congress reveal that foreign nations were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at President Trump’s hotel at the same time they were trying to influence our foreign policy.
Records obtained by Congress exposed that when agents had to stay in Trump hotels, Trump’s companies charged the Secret Service as much as five times more than the government rate, costing taxpayers more than $1.4 million.
Six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner received a $2 billion “investment” from a fund controlled by the Saudi crown prince.
The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington released a report detailing 3,400 examples of Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest.
Let’s be very clear here: This is not a “both sides” situation.
If Democrats in the Senate pursue this kind of oversight agenda, it would be based on facts, building on investigative work that has already produced volumes of documents, testimony and indisputable examples of conflicts of interest by Trump and his family at the time. It’s worth noting that unlike Ivanka Trump and Kushner, Hunter Biden never served in the federal government in any capacity. The investigations Republicans are about to launch are conspiracy-theory-driven nonsense designed to smear their political adversaries.
I understand the impulse Democrats may have to not want to engage in this kind of oversight battle, but they should know that the battle is coming for them anyway. It would be a costly tactical mistake to allow Republicans to have an open field. Trump’s flagrant corruption has given Democrats more than enough ammunition for fruitful oversight inquiries, which should force Republicans to answer for their hypocrisy.
The only question is: Are Senate Democrats willing to step up, or will they yield to House Republicans?
Kurt Bardella is a contributing writer to Opinion. He is a Democratic strategist and a former senior advisor for Republicans on the House Oversight Committee.
Who is Viktor Bout? Infamous arms dealer swapped for Brittney Griner
Michael Weiss, Sr. Correspondent – December 8, 2022
Alleged Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout sits in a temporary cell ahead of a hearing at the Criminal Court in Bangkok on Aug. 20, 2010. (Christophe Archambault/AFP via Getty Images)
“She’s on her way home after months of being unjustly detained in Russia, held in intolerable circumstances.” So President Biden announced today from the Roosevelt Room of the White House, alerting the press to the news that Brittney Griner has finally been released from a Mordovian penal colony. Biden spoke next to Cherelle Griner, the American WNBA basketball player’s visibly affected wife.
Following months of intense negotiations, the United States managed to secure Briner’s freedom in a one-to-one swap for Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer. Not included in the deal was another American prisoner of the Kremlin, Paul Whelan, who had been rumored to have been included in the high-profile negotiations over Griner.
Whelan, a former U.S. Marine and Michigan police officer, was arrested in Russia in December 2018 on espionage charges, which he denied; he was sentenced to 16 years in June 2020. Griner, an Olympic gold medalist, was detained in February at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, exactly one week before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on charges that she was trafficking cannabis oil — a banned substance in Russia — inside vape canisters. She pleaded guilty on July 7 and was sentenced to 9 years in prison.
US Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) basketball player Brittney Griner, who was detained at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport and later charged with illegal possession of cannabis, leaves the courtroom after the court’s verdict in Khimki outside Moscow, on August 4, 2022. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images)
Few U.S. officials take the Russian prosecutors’ allegations at face value; the prevailing view is that both Whelan and Griner were snatched as hostages for exactly the kind of swap now under consideration, or as bargaining chips for lifting U.S. sanctions on Russia. “The Russian security services watched Griner closely and knew they could compromise her,” a former U.S. intelligence officer told Yahoo News earlier this year. “She’s a Black gay woman who could be portrayed as carrying drugs, and they waited until she departed. This was not legitimate law enforcement but cynical power games by the Kremlin.” John Sipher, the former deputy head of “Russia House” at the CIA, said Whelan would have been unlikely to be recruited by any U.S. intelligence service owing to his compromised history: He was given a bad-conduct discharge from the Marine Corps after being court-martialed on larceny-related offenses in 2008.
Even by the Kremlin’s suspect characterization of Whelan and Griner, the allegations against Bout are far worse.
“In the late 1990s,” Jonathan Winer, a senior official in the State Department during the Clinton administration who tracked Bout’s movements, told Yahoo News, “Bout was the No. 2 target for the United States, after Osama bin Laden.” In fact, the infamous arms dealer, widely known as the “merchant of death,” has even been accused of arming al-Qaida.
Paul Whelan, a former US marine accused of espionage and arrested in Russia in December 2018, stands inside a defendants’ cage as he waits to hear his verdict in Moscow on June 15, 2020. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images)
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union until his capture in a 2008 Drug Enforcement Administration sting operation in Bangkok, Bout supplied a rogue’s gallery of governments and militias with guns, ammunition and aircraft. Nicolas Cage played a thinly veiled version of him in the 2005 film “Lord of War,” although the real-life version’s antics were more cinematically uncanny. Even Bout’s aliases — “Viktor Budd,” “Viktor Butt” and, simply, “Boris” —might have stretched credulity for a Bond villain.
Bout was chummy with a succession of African dictators, including Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, the latter of whom paid him in conflict diamonds and whose child soldiers operated the antique Antonov cargo planes that Bout sold him. Warlord Sam “Mosquito” Bockarie committed crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone with Bout-proffered weapons. Some of these clients would object to Bout’s apparent racism and peremptory behavior: a pushy Russian in the midst of anticolonial (or postcolonial) leaders. But that hardly affected his bottom line or their willingness to enrich it.
The Tajikistan-born weapons merchant could play both sides of any war to his advantage. He equipped the Taliban with an air force before 9/11 and also sent weapons to their mortal enemy, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of the Northern Alliance and onetime Afghan defense minister, with whom he liked to hunt the finely horned Marco Polo sheep of the Pamir Mountains. Both the Taliban and Massoud evidently knew their broker was double-dealing, but they put up with it because they had no choice, as one Bout associate later recounted to his biographers: “No one else would deliver the packages.”
Ahmad Massoud, leader of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, speaks to journalists at Concordia Press Club, on the occasion of the intra-Afghanistan conference, in Vienna, Austria, on September 16, 2022. (Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty Images)
Astonishingly, even after being hunted by the U.S. government for years, Bout’s flagship company Irbis (“snow leopard” in Russian) even secretly acted as a private airlift courier for supplies intended for the U.S. military and contractors in occupied Iraq in 2004.
For all Bout’s blood-boltered infamy, some former national security officials think the Biden administration made the right call. “It’s a trade that has to be made, despite all the pitfalls,” according to Marc Polymeropoulos, who oversaw the CIA’s clandestine operations in Europe and Eurasia. “The pressure from the families on the White House is immense.” Polymeropoulos acknowledged that the trade would amount to “rewarding terrible Russian behavior” — equating an international arms trafficker with Whelan and Griner — but that the cost would be worth it. “Make no mistake, the Americans have no hope of release save for this swap. Also, let’s not forget that the Israelis have for decades swapped Palestinian terrorists for their imprisoned soldiers, and sometimes just their remains.”
Sipher agrees. “First, it’s a hard policy call, and I’m glad that Americans that were wrongly held as hostages will be freed. I understand why an American president makes such a deal. However, we should admit that we played Vladimir Putin’s game. He got what he wanted in his typical bullying manner. He knows he can push the West around and will do it until he is stopped.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) speaks with Delovaya Rossiya Public Organisation’s President, during a meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, on December 6, 2022. (Mikhail Metzel/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images)
The U.S. sanctioned Bout in 2004 due to his gunrunning to Liberia; a year later, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned four of his associates and 30 of his companies.
According to the 2008 sealed indictment against Bout, filed in the Southern District of New York, he agreed to provide advanced weapons systems to FARC, the Colombian terrorist organization, knowing that they would be used to target Americans and U.S. military personnel.
The Russian “assembled a fleet of cargo airplanes capable of transporting weapons and military equipment to various parts of the world, including Africa, South America and the Middle East,” the indictment read. Everything from AK-47s to attack helicopters wound up in the holds of Bout’s cargo planes, of which there were scores, under different national flaggings. He maintained the largest private fleet of post-Soviet cargo aircraft in the world at one point, administering it under a veneer of legitimacy by transporting food, medicine and other licit goods along with lethal contraband.
Bout was found guilty in 2011 on all four counts of the indictment: conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, conspiracy to kill officers and employees of the U.S., conspiracy to acquire and use antiaircraft missiles, and conspiracy to provide material support or resources to a terrorist organization. He is now in the 10th year of a 25-year sentence.
Thai commandos escort back hand-cuffed Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout (C), known as the “Merchant of Death” for his role arming rebels from Africa to South America, after a press conference at Thai police headquarters in Bangkok on March 7, 2008. (Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images)
Peter Hain, the former minister of state for Africa at the British Foreign Office, told the London Sunday Telegraph in 2002 that Bout was “supplying the Taliban and al-Qaida,” an allegation that Bout always denied, portraying himself as an honest businessman toting innocent wares such as textiles and furniture to places like Afghanistan. (It was Hain who coined Bout’s unshakable moniker, the “merchant of death.”)
Bout has for years also loudly denied any connection to the Russian government or its military intelligence service, still known by its Soviet-era acronym, the GRU.
However, in “Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possibile,” a 2007 chronicle of Bout’s malign activities, authors Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun quote one of his associates: “The GRU gave him three airplanes to start the business. The planes, countless numbers of them, were sitting there doing nothing. They decided, let’s make this commercial. They gave Viktor the aircraft and in exchange collected a part of the charter money. It was a setup from the beginning.” An unnamed analyst who worked with British intelligence also told the authors that MI6, the U.K.’s foreign intelligence service, “never had any doubt Bout was GRU material.”
U.N. officials placed Bout’s earlier career as that of an interpreter for Russian peacekeepers in Angola; he had trained at the Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, a favored stalking ground for GRU recruitment. Military translators are often GRU officers stationed under diplomatic cover owing to the spy service’s polyglot job requirement. Bout has said he speaks six languages. His bodyguards in his heyday were also reportedly all veterans from GRU Spetsnaz, or special forces.
Russian Spetsnaz march during the military parade at Red Square, on May 9,2021, in Moscow, Russia. (Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)
Russia’s military intelligence agency has come under international scrutiny in the last several years, particularly after U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller concluded that a team of now-indicted GRU officers in Moscow were responsible for the hack-and-leak operation against the Democratic Party email servers in 2016, with the express intent of influencing the outcome of that year’s presidential contest.
GRU operatives have been busy outside the digital domain too.
Operatives attached to an elite assassination-and-sabotage cell known as Unit 29155 were sent to Salisbury, England, in 2018 to poison a GRU defector, Sergei Skripal, along with his daughter, Yulia, with a Russian-manufactured nerve agent.
Unit 29155 has also lately been linked to a string of earlier mysterious poisonings over the last decade, including that of another arms dealer, the Bulgarian Emilian Gebrev, who succumbed to Skripal-like symptoms in 2015 along with his son and his factory manager near his office in central Sofia. A series of explosions of factories and depots elsewhere in Bulgaria and also the Czech Republic, both of them NATO and EU member states, have been attributed to Unit 29155 operatives, leading to expulsions of Russian intelligence officers from embassies in both countries. Tellingly, these sites are believed to have contained Soviet-era ammunition bound for Ukraine.
Given the unprecedented access Bout had to surplus weapons and ammunition stocks, not to mention the enormous Antonov freighters scattered like metal carcasses across airfields of the fallen Soviet empire, it beggars belief that he was not in some way linked to Russian intelligence.
A Russian Antonov 124 condor freighter, one of the worlds largest aircraft on the tarmac at RAF Kinloss, today (Fri) where it is being prepared to fly one of the three Nimord fusealages to Bournemouth, where they will undergo a major re-fit and modification. (Chris Bacon/PA Images via Getty Images)
That would certainly account for why Vladimir Putin’s regime has so desperately sought for his repatriation to Russia and why the U.S. side apparently believes Bout would be a tempting trade amid caustic tensions between the two countries. The Kremlin, said Winer, the former State Department official, “moved heaven and earth” to first prevent Bout’s extradition to the U.S. from Thailand and then to secure his release from prison. The Russian Foreign Ministry has classed him as a political prisoner and, for more than a decade after his capture, serially raised his release with Washington in some kind of exchange. “The big question was whether he was basically state-sponsored or a rogue operator whom the Russian government found useful,” Winer told Yahoo News. “Was he an agent of the GRU when we caught him?”
Given Bout’s conviction in a U.S. court for aiding and abetting FARC, it’s a slightly awkward question for the Biden administration, now facing a mounting chorus to label Russia itself a state sponsor of terrorism. On Thursday, the Senate unanimously adopted a nonbinding resolution urging Secretary of State Antony Blinken to designate Moscow as such.
US President Joe Biden, with (L-R) Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Vice President Kamala Harris and Cherelle Griner, spouse of US women’s basketball player Brittney Griner, speaks about the release of Brittney Griner, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on December 8, 2022. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
The text of the resolution not only cites Russian military atrocities against civilians in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and Ukraine but also names the Wagner Group, a U.S. sanctioned Russian mercenary outfit. Financed by the U.S.- and EU-sanctioned oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin — a catering magnate and architect of the St. Petersburg “troll farm” implicated by Mueller in the 2016 U.S. election interference scheme — the Wagner Group has committed “serious human rights abuses in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan and Mozambique,” according to the European Union. The allegations include torture and extrajudicial killings. The Senate also accuses the group of having tried to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the start of Russia’s invasion in February.
The Treasury Department sanctioned the Wagner Group as a “Russian Ministry of Defense proxy force.” The mercenaries maintain a camp in the Russian region of Krasnodar, right next door to a well-guarded training facility for GRU Spetsnaz, of whichWagner’s leader, Dmitry Utkin, was once a brigade commander. According to Polymeropoulos, the former CIA officer, “there was never any doubt that Wagner functions as an arm of the GRU.”
Might the same be said of the man now sitting in a medium-security penitentiary in Marion, Ill., awaiting his plane back to Moscow?
“They will try to lock me up for life,” the then-45-year-old Bout told the New Yorker before his sentencing. “But I’ll get back to Russia. I don’t know when. But I’m still young. Your empire will collapse and I’ll get out of here.”
Paul Whelan ‘greatly disappointed’ Biden administration has not done more to free him
Dylan Stableford, Senior Writer – December 8, 2022
Former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan has been jailed in Russia since 2018 on espionage charges. (Sofia Sandurskaya, Moscow News Agency photo via AP, File)
Detained American Paul Whelan says he is happy that the Biden administration was able to secure WNBA player Brittney Griner’s release from Russia in a prisoner swap but is “greatly disappointed” that it hasn’t been able to secure his.
“I am greatly disappointed that more has not been done to secure my release, especially as the four-year anniversary of my arrest is coming up,” Whelan said in a phone interview with CNN from the penal colony where he is being held in a remote part of Russia. “I don’t understand why I’m still sitting here.”
Whelan said he “was led to believe that things were moving in the right direction, and that the governments were negotiating and that something would happen fairly soon.”
The Biden administration announced Thursday that Griner was freed in exchange for Viktor Bout, a convicted arms dealer who had been serving a 25-year prison sentence in the United States.
Brittney Griner was released from Russian custody on Thursday in a prisoner exchange with convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout. (Rick Scuteri/AP File)
Whelan’s brother, David, said Thursday that the Biden administration “made the right decision” in agreeing to the prisoner swap that freed Griner.
“I am so glad that Brittney Griner is on her way home,” David Whelan said in a lengthy statement. “As the family member of a Russian hostage, I can literally only imagine the joy she will have, being reunited with her loved ones, and in time for the holidays.
“There is no greater success than for a wrongful detainee to be freed and for them to go home,” David Whelan continued. “The Biden Administration made the right decision to bring Ms. Griner home, and to make the deal that was possible, rather than waiting for one that wasn’t going to happen.”
Earlier this year, the White House reportedly offered to exchange Bout as part of a potential deal to secure the release of Griner and Whelan.
Griner was detained in Moscow on drug-related charges in February and later sentenced to nine years in prison. Paul Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive and former U.S. Marine, has been jailed in Russia since 2018 on espionage charges.
David Whelan said that U.S. officials let the family know in advance that Paul would not be part of the Griner-Bout swap.
President Biden announced Griner’s release on Thursday morning, saying the WNBA player is in “good spirits.” (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“That early warning meant that our family has been able to mentally prepare for what is now a public disappointment for us,” David Whelan said. “And a catastrophe for Paul.”
Griner is the second American to be released in a prisoner swap with Russia this year. Trevor Reed, a 30-year-old U.S. Marine veteran, was released in a prisoner swap with Moscow in April.
“We did not forget about Brittney, and we have not forgotten about Paul,” Biden said. “This was not a choice of which American to bring home.”
“We brought home Trevor Reed when we had a chance earlier this year,” the president continued. “Sadly, for illegitimate reasons, Russia is treating Paul’s case differently than Brittney’s. And while we have not yet succeeded in securing Paul’s release, we are not giving up.”
Short man syndrome really is a thing, scientists say
Joe Pinkstone – December 7, 2022
Russian president Vladimir Putin is reported to be 5 foot 7 inches tall – AP
Short man syndrome is a real thing and the hot tempers of small men may actually be evolutionarily hard-wired into them to make up for their lack of inches, scientists believe.
Polish researchers investigating the so-called Napoleon complex — where vertically challenged men are angrier and more confrontational than their lengthier peers — found the myth was grounded in truth.
Short men have often sought power, from the reportedly 5’ 2” Napoleon through to the UK’s current diminutive Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who stands just 5’ 5” tall.
Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are all world leaders who are reported to be 5 foot 7 inches tall, significantly below the average height for a man in the modern world.
Scientists investigating short man syndrome surveyed 367 people and looked for evidence of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism which make up the Dark Triad personality traits and are associated with more confrontational behaviour.
Link between rowdy behavior and height only seen in men
Data revealed that shorter men are more likely to behave in an antagonistic manner towards others.
The researchers theorise that when a person is not physically formidable and does not have an intimidating presence then they have to impose themselves in other ways.
This, they say, has led to men employing this tactic to “acquire resources and impress romantic partners”, in what modern pop culture calls the “short king” phenomenon.
“Shorter women,” the scientists add, “can use deception to appear more desirable or to gain protection and resources”.
But in the study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, the link between rowdy behaviour and height was only seen for men, and not for women.
‘They may become psychologically formidable instead’
Lead author Monika Kozłowska, from the University of Wrocław in Poland, said: “When people cannot be physically formidable, they may become psychologically formidable instead.
“Appearing more powerful may in turn make other people perceive them as taller than they really are.”
The team looked at the impact of actual height and of how a person felt about their height and found that both played a role.
They believe shorter people are not only angry that they are short, but are evolutionarily wired to be angry to compensate for being disadvantaged by being small.
“Our study provides the first assessment (we know of) of how the Dark Triad traits relate to height and height attitudes,” the scientists write.
“We showed that not only are people high on the Dark Triad traits less satisfied with their height, but this may be because they are actually shorter.
“This leads us to believe that the behavioral syndromes of the Dark Triad traits may be part of a suite of psychological systems designed by natural selection to better enable those of shorter stature a way to still compete in life’s great challenges.”
Volodymyr Zelensky and ‘the spirit of Ukraine’ named Time’s 2022 ‘Person of the Year’
Rebecca Corey, Writer and Reporter – December 7, 2022
Illustration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by Neil Jamieson on the cover of Time magazine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and “the spirit of Ukraine” have been named Time’s 2022 “Person of the Year,” the magazine announced Wednesday.
The 44-year-old leader became a symbol of Ukrainian resiliency and resistance in the weeks and months after Russia began bombing the former Soviet country, on Feb. 24
“This year’s choice was the most clear-cut in memory. Whether the battle for Ukraine fills one with hope or with fear, the world marched to Volodymyr Zelensky’s beat in 2022,” Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal wrote.
“For proving that courage can be as contagious as fear, for stirring people and nations to come together in defense of freedom, for reminding the world of the fragility of democracy — and of peace, Volodymyr Zelensky and the spirit of Ukraine are Time’s 2022 Person of the Year.”
Zelensky speaks to the U.S. Congress by video to plead for support as his country is besieged by Russian forces in March 2022. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo/Pool)
Contenders for this year’s Person of the Year included several people or entities who have made waves in U.S. politics this year, including outgoing Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision this summer, and possible 2024 presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Zelensky became a household name in 2022 following a meteoric rise from comedian to president in 2019 to global icon in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine early this year. With his regularly broadcast messages to everyone from global leaders to regular people — from videos on Twitter to a remote appearance at the Grammys — Zelensky defied Western expectations, holding Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv from Russian forces and inspiring earnest interest in a country that, as Felsenthal says, some people “might not be able to find on a map.”
Time’s cover story by Simon Shuster, who spent nine months reporting on Zelensky and the invasion while being granted “unparalleled access” to the presidential compound, features an exclusive interview with Zelensky on his private train en route to the newly liberated city of Kherson. During the interview, Zelensky described how the only way to defeat Russia is to convince the rest of the free world to pull Ukraine in the other direction toward sovereignty.
“I don’t want to weigh who has more tanks and armies. … We are dealing with a powerful state that is pathologically unwilling to let Ukraine go,” Zelensky said. “They see the democracy and freedom of Ukraine as a question of their own survival.”
Zelensky visits service members at a hospital on the Day of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Kharkiv on Tuesday. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Handout via Reuters)
Reflecting on his time covering Zelensky, Shuster described how Russia’s invasion and the weight of Zelensky’s new role as a defender of democracy has changed the president.
“In April, less than two months into the invasion, Zelensky told me he had aged and changed ‘from all this wisdom that I never wanted,’” Shuster said. “Now, half a year later, the transformation was starker. Aides who once saw him as a lightweight now praise his toughness. Slights that might once have upset him now elicit no more than a shrug. Some of his allies miss the old Zelensky, the practical joker with the boyish smile. But they realize he needs to be different now, much harder and deaf to distractions, or else his country might not survive.”
Previous Time Persons of the Year include Elon Musk in 2021, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020 and Donald Trump in 2016. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is currently leading the country’s military assault against Ukraine, was named Time Person of the Year in 2007.
It was close, but not too close. At night’s end, Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, bested opponent Herschel Walker, the Republican, by a margin of almost 3%.
Warnock adds to the Democrats’ majority in the Senate, 51 seats to 49. That will help the party in some ways, although faced with a Republican House majority and the filibuster, real legislative progress over the next two years will be difficult.
No. America’s deep breath wasn’t based on blue versus red politics, but on a firm understanding that Walker should never have been anywhere near a U.S. Senate seat. He may have been the worst major party Senate candidate in modern history.
The former football star repeatedly demonstrated a lack of understanding of the basics of American constitutional government, committing gaffe after gaffe that revealed his utter lack of preparation for public office.
Not even the most Walker-friendly Georgians could have believed that a U.S. Senate seat was the highest and best use of Walker’s abilities. Yet he still earned more than 1.7 million votes, an astonishing number. How did that happen?
Part of the answer may be Walker’s celebrity — college football is a pretty big part of many Georgians’ lives. The more disturbing answer is the hundreds of thousands of Georgians who apparently cared more about the R next to Walker’s name than his character, experience or preparation for the job.
He may be a disaster, those voters seemed to be saying, but he’s our disaster.
The nation’s founders would be aghast. They believed character was immensely more important than party, which they resisted and feared. They believed in a government of wise men (and, of course, it was only men at the time).
That idea has been turned on its head. Donald Trump is the worst example of partisanship overwhelming character and personal integrity, but Walker — endorsed by Trump — was in the running for the same trophy.
Of course, Walker lost. And Trump, for all his bluster, has never won a popular vote. We can take some comfort in that.
Perhaps Tuesday’s results offer a reassuring sign that a majority of voters, albeit a slim majority, still believe that quality trumps party — whether it’s in Kansas, where Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly won a second term in a state dominated by Republicans, or in Deep South Georgia, where many Republicans crossed party lines to vote for Warnock, the Democrat.
Certainly, Republicans around the country should engage in rethinking its approach to these races, and others. That’s true in purely political terms: Republicans are losing voters in suburban places (see, for example, Johnson County, Kansas) precisely because residents have grown tired of Trumpesque bluster, or Walker-like incompetence.
It’s also true morally. Republicans had to have known of Walker’s problems, yet they nominated him anyway. It was deeply cynical, and dangerous. This nation has serious problems, and Walker was never a serious candidate.
Congratulations to Sen. Warnock, whose election night promise to serve all Georgians was eloquent and welcome. The nation could use more people like him, and if Republicans push more people like Herschel Walker, the nation will get them.
Trump Had Hidden $19.8 Million Loan From North Korea-Linked Company As President: Report
Mary Papenfuss – December 5, 2022
Donald Trump failed to disclose a $19.8 million loan from a company with ties to North Korea while he was president, Forbes reported Sunday, citing documents uncovered by the New York attorney general’s office.
Trump owed the money to L/P Daewoo while he was campaigning in 2016 and into his presidency, according to records. He didn’t list the debt in financial disclosure filings, as candidates and presidents are expected to do, Forbes reported.
The loan was paid off just over five months into his presidency. Forbes said the documents don’t specify who satisfied it.
Daewoo is a South Korean conglomerate that partnered with Trump on a development project near the United Nations headquarters in New York City and on several other projects over the years. The company has ties to North Korea, Forbes reported, and was the only South Korean company allowed to operate a business in North Korea in the mid-1990s.
Trump may have skirted disclosure laws and not committed an outright violation because the loan was on the books of his company, the Trump Organization, and not identified as a personal loan, Forbes noted.
The debt would have sparked conflict of interest concerns over an American president’s indebtedness to a foreign operation vulnerable to influence by North Korea’s rogue government. Trump often gushed about his close relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Such loans are largely reported on an honor system because the U.S. Office of Government Ethics has neither the resources nor the power to delve into a president’s assets.
“If someone does not disclose a loan, OGE has no way to know,” said Walter Shaub, who ran that agency when Trump took office.
Don Fox, who once also headed the office, told Forbes:“The system is kind of predicated upon people actually following a law because they want to follow the law.”
Appeals court orders end to special master review process in Trump documents case
Robert Legare – December 1, 2022
Washington – A three-judge federal appeals court panel in Atlanta ruled that the special master review process that oversaw the Justice Department’s use of non-classified evidence collected earlier this year at former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence must end.
The unanimous decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit reversed the decision of Judge Aileen Cannon, a federal judge from Florida who granted Trump’s request for the review and appointed semi-retired federal Judge Raymond Dearie of New York as an independent arbiter, or special master, to sift through the documents for any that may be subject to claims of privilege by the former president.
That decision also barred investigators from using the roughly 13,000 documents taken from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s resort, during the execution of a search warrant on Aug. 8 for investigative purposes. A separate appeals court decision from September permitted the Justice Department to use more than 100 documents with classified markings it seized for its investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of sensitive documents, and Thursday’s subsequent decision grants the government full access to the evidentiary record.
Trump can now ask the full 11th Circuit to rehear the case or appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.
In a statement, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said the former president called the panel’s decision “procedural and based only on jurisdiction.”
“The decision does not address the merits that clearly demonstrate the impropriety of the unprecedented, illegal, and unwarranted raid on Mar-a-Lago,” Cheung’s statement said.
But in fact, the 11th Circuit’s opinion made clear that the execution of the search warrant — the “raid” — was legal.
The Justice Department “presented an FBI agent’s sworn affidavit to a Florida magistrate judge, who agreed that probable cause existed to believe that evidence of criminal violations would likely be found at Mar-a-Lago,” the opinion stated.
“President Donald J. Trump will continue to fight against the weaponized Department of ‘Justice,’ while standing for America and Americans,” Cheung added.
Trump and his allies have frequently accused Attorney General Merrick Garland of weaponizing the Justice Department against Republicans, although no court has found any evidence of that.
Former President Donald Trump applauds while speaking at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Nov. 15, 2022. / Credit: ALON SKUY/AFP via Getty Images
“The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so,” Chief Judge William Pryor and Judges Britt Grant and Andrew Brasher said in their 23-page opinion. “Either approach would be a radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations. And both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”
Pryor was appointed to the 11th Circuit by former President George W. Bush, while Grant and Brasher were named by Trump.
The opinion from the 11th Circuit wipes away Cannon’s order appointing the special master and sends the case back to the lower court with instructions for it to be dismissed.
“This appeal requires us to consider whether the district court had jurisdiction to block the United States from using lawfully seized records in a criminal investigation,” the judges wrote. “The answer is no.”
Trump first asked Cannon to appoint a special master to review the seized documents in late August, two weeks after the FBI conducted the search of his office and storage room at Mar-a-Lago. Prosecutors say they are conducting a national security investigation into those and other sensitive documents retrieved from the Florida resort after Trump left office, and possible obstruction of that probe.
When issuing her original order appointing the special master, Cannon wrote that Trump faced an “unequitable potential harm by way of improper disclosure of sensitive information to the public,” but criminal investigators rarely — if ever — release seized evidence to the public unless criminal charges are filed. The Justice Department has repeatedly argued the entire process was premature and unnecessary.
The former president’s legal team has said Cannon’s order appointing a special master was not appealable and claimed that Trump deemed the records he brought to Mar-a-Lago as “personal” while he was still in office, a designation allowed under the Presidential Records Act (PRA).
“It is simply untenable to conclude any president may be subject to a criminal charge for exercising the unfettered rights set forth in the PRA to categorize certain documents as ‘personal’ during that president’s term of office,” they told the 11th Circuit in filings.
But the 11th Circuit noted that even if Trump did designate the document as “personal,” search warrants authorize the seizure of such records.
“As we have said, the status of a document as personal or presidential does not alter the authority of the government to seize it under a warrant supported by probable cause,” the judges wrote.
Claims of attorney-client privilege have mostly been resolved by the two parties, but Trump argued some of the seized records belong to him in a personal capacity as the former president. His legal team has said the documents he brought to Mar-a-Lago must be considered “presumptively privileged” by the courts and shielded from the criminal investigation until the independent review concludes.
Throughout the appeal, prosecutors remained opposed to Trump’s reading of the law, writing in part that he cannot assert executive privilege to preclude review of executive branch documents by the executive branch itself. The Justice Department also argued that Cannon overstepped when she issued her September injunction barring the FBI from using the seized material for investigative purposes.
A three-judge panel heard oral arguments in the dispute last week, during which they appeared open to the Justice Department’s position that Cannon wrongly appointed the special master to review the seized documents and erred when she issued her injunction.
Thursday’s ruling comes after Attorney General Merrick Garland last month appointed a special counsel to oversee the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump’s handling of government records, as well as the department’s probe into his efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election.
