Secret document says Iran security forces molested and killed teen protester

BBC News

Secret document says Iran security forces molested and killed teen protester

Bertram Hill, Aida Miller and Michael Simkin – BBC Investigations April 29, 2024

An Iranian teenager was sexually assaulted and killed by three men working for Iran’s security forces, a leaked document understood to have been written by those forces says.

It has let us map what happened to 16-year-old Nika Shakarami who vanished from an anti-regime protest in 2022.

Her body was found nine days later. The government claimed she killed herself.

We put the report’s allegations to Iran’s government and its Revolutionary Guards. They did not respond.

Marked “Highly Confidential”, the report summarises a hearing on Nika’s case held by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – the security force that defends the country’s Islamic establishment. It includes what it says are the names of her killers and the senior commanders who tried to hide the truth.

It contains disturbing details of events in the back of an undercover van in which security forces were restraining Nika. These include:

One of the men molested her while he was sitting on her
Despite being handcuffed and restrained, she fought back, kicking and swearing
An admission that this provoked the men to beat her with batons

There are numerous fake Iranian official documents in circulation, so the BBC spent months checking every detail with multiple sources.

Our extensive investigations indicate the papers we obtained do chronicle the teenager’s last movements.

Nika Shakarami’s disappearance and death were widely reported, and her picture has become synonymous with the fight by women in Iran for greater freedoms. As street protests spread across Iran in the autumn of 2022, her name was shouted by crowds furious at the country’s strict rules on the compulsory veil [hijab].

The Woman, Life, Freedom movement had been sparked just days earlier by the death of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini. She died from injuries sustained in police custody according to a UN fact-finding mission after being accused of not wearing her hijab properly.

In Nika’s case, her family found her body in a mortuary more than a week after she disappeared from a protest. But Iran’s authorities denied Nika’s death was connected to the demonstration and, after conducting their own investigation, said that she had died by suicide.

Just before she vanished, Nika was filmed on the evening of 20 September near Laleh Park in central Tehran, standing on a dumpster setting fire to hijabs.

Others around her chanted “death to the dictator” – referring to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

What she could not have known at the time is that she was being watched, as the classified report makes clear.

Map of Nika's last movements, according to the document — [BBC]

Addressed to the IRGC’s commander-in-chief, it says it is based on extensive talks with its teams that policed that protest.

Monitoring the demonstration were several undercover security units, the document’s account begins.

It says one of these – Team 12 – suspected the teenager “of leadership, due to her unconventional behaviour and repeated calls with her mobile phone”.

The team sent one of its operatives into the crowd, posing as a protester, to confirm Nika was indeed one of the demonstration’s leaders. Then, according to the report, he called in his team to arrest her. But she fled.

Her aunt had previously told BBC Persian that Nika rang a friend that night to say she was being chased by security forces.

Almost an hour passed before she was spotted again, says the report, when she was detained and put in the team’s vehicle – an unmarked freezer van.

Graphic of the inside of the van Nika was beaten in, according to the document — [BBC]

Nika was in the rear compartment with three Team 12 members – Arash Kalhor, Sadegh Monjazy, and Behrooz Sadeghy.

Their team leader Morteza Jalil was up front with the driver.

The group then attempted to find somewhere to take her, the report says.

They tried a temporary police camp nearby but were turned away because it was overcrowded.

So they continued to a detention centre, a 35-minute drive away, whose commander initially agreed to admit Nika. But then he changed his mind.

“The accused [Nika] was constantly swearing and chanting,” he told investigators for the report.

“At that time, there were 14 other female detainees at the station and my perception was that she could agitate the others.

“I was worried she would cause a riot”.

Morteza Jalil once again contacted his IRGC HQ for advice, says the report, and was told to head to Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison.

En route, he said he began to hear crashing noises behind him coming from the pitch-dark rear compartment of the van.

We know what he was hearing, from the testimony outlined in the document from the men guarding Nika in the back.

Excerpt from the document passed to the BBC — [BBC]

One of them, Behrooz Sadeghy, said as soon as she had been put back into the van after being rejected by the detention centre, Nika had started to swear and shout.

“Arash Kalhor gagged her mouth with his socks but she started struggling. Then Sadegh [Monjazy] laid her on the chest freezer and sat on her. The situation calmed,” he told investigators.

“I don’t know what happened, but after a few minutes she started swearing. I couldn’t see anything, I could only hear fighting and bashing.”

But Arash Kalhor gave further chilling details.

He says he briefly turned on his phone torch and saw Sadegh Monjazy “[has] put his hand inside her trousers”.

Arash Kalhor said after that they lost control.

“He doesn’t know… who [was doing it], but he could hear… the baton hitting the accused [Nika]… ‘I started to kick and punch but really didn’t know if I was hitting our guys or the accused.'”

But Sadegh Monjazy contradicted Arash Kalhor’s statement, which he said was motivated by professional jealousy. He denied putting his hand in her trousers – but said he could not deny that he became “aroused” while sitting on her and touched Nika’s buttocks.

He said this provoked Nika – despite the fact her hands were tied behind her back – to scratch him and jolt so that he fell over.

“She kicked at my face, so I had to defend myself.”

From the van’s cabin, Morteza Jalil ordered the driver to pull over.

He opened the rear door to discover Nika’s lifeless body.

He said he cleaned the blood from her face and head – “which were not in a good condition”.

This echoes the state in which Nika’s mother says she eventually found her daughter in the mortuary, and Nika’s death certificate – obtained by BBC Persian in October 2022 – which states she was killed by “multiple injuries caused by blows with a hard object”.

Team leader Morteza Jalil admitted he didn’t try to find out what had happened.

“I was only thinking about how to transfer her and didn’t ask any questions of anyone. I only asked: ‘Is she breathing?’ I think it was Behrooz Sadeghy who answered, ‘no, she is dead’.”

With a killing on his hands, Jalil called the IRGC’s HQ for a third time.

On this occasion, he spoke to a more senior officer, codenamed “Naeem 16”.

“We already had deaths in our stations, and I didn’t want the number to rise to 20,” Naeem 16 told the investigation. “Bringing her to the base wouldn’t have solved any problems.”

He told Jalil to simply “dump her on the street”. Jalil said they left Nika’s body in a quiet street under Tehran’s Yadegar-e-Emam highway.

The report concludes that a sexual assault caused the fight in the rear compartment of the van, and that strikes from Team 12 had caused Nika’s death.

“Three batons and three Tasers were all used. It is not clear which one of the blows was the fatal one,” it says.

The report contradicts the government’s narrative of what happened to Nika. Nearly a month after her funeral, state television broadcast the results of the official investigation, which said Nika had jumped to her death from a building.

It showed CCTV of a person it claimed was Nika entering an apartment block, but Nika’s mother told BBC Persian in a phone interview that she could not “under any circumstances, confirm that person is Nika”.

“We all know that they are lying,” Nasrin Shakarami later told a BBC documentary, discussing authorities’ claims about the deaths of protesters.

The BBC Eye investigation was not just concerned with the content of the report, but whether it could be trusted as an artefact.

Sometimes, what appear to be official Iranian documents and other materials circulating on the internet are found to have been faked.

Most of these counterfeit documents, however, are easy to spot because they clearly diverge from official formatting – showing erroneous spacing and letter headings, or containing significant grammatical or spelling errors.

They might also include the wrong official slogan or logo for the year they purport to originate from, or an anachronistic title for a government agency or department, for example.

Another indicator is language that does not match the very specific style that tends to be used by Iranian official bodies.

The document our investigation centred on contained a few such inconsistencies. For instance, the “Naja” police force quoted in the report was known as “Faraja” at the time.

Therefore, to further test the document’s veracity, we gave it to a former Iranian intelligence officer who has seen hundreds of legitimate ones.

He rang the IRGC archive – using an official code issued each day to senior intelligence officers in Iran – to check if the case file this report was allegedly part of really existed and what it was about.

He received confirmation that it did, and that the report’s number showed it was part of a 322-page case file on anti-government protesters in 2022.

While we can never be 100% certain, this gave us confidence that it is genuine.

His unique access to the IRGC also helped us iron out another mystery – the identity of “Naeem 16”, the man who told the team to dump Nika’s body.

The former intelligence officer did this by making another call – this time to someone inside Iran’s military apparatus. He was told Naeem 16 is the call sign for a Captain Mohammad Zamani, serving in the IRGC.

That name is listed as one of the attendees at the five-hour hearing into Nika’s death that the report summarises.

We put the allegations to the IRGC and the Iranian government. They did not respond.

The men responsible for Nika’s death were not punished, so far as we know.

Undated photo showing Nika Shakarami (L), who was killed during protests in Iran in September 2022, and her sister Aida Shakarami (R) — Nika with her sister Aida (R) who has herself now been arrested [Social media]

A clue as to why that might be the case can be found in the document itself. All of Team 12 – who were at the hearing – are listed in the report and to the right of their names is the group to which they belong: “Hezbollah”.

This refers to an Iranian paramilitary group, Hezbollah, unrelated to the Lebanese group of the same name. Its members are used by the IRGC but sometimes operate outside its jurisdiction, as the report seems to acknowledge:

“Since the above persons belonged to the forces of Hezbollah, following up this case beyond obtaining the necessary commitments and security guarantees has not been possible,” it says.

IRGC officer Naeem 16, on the other hand, was given a written reprimand, it adds.

As many as 551 protesters were killed by security forces during Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom movement, most of them by gunfire, according to the UN’s fact-finding mission.

The protests subsided after a few months due to the bloody crackdown by security forces. There followed a lull in activity by Iran’s morality police, but a new crackdown on breaches of the Islamic dress code began earlier this month.

Among those to have been arrested is Nika’s elder sister, Aida..

Many Ukrainian Prisoners of War Show Signs of Trauma and Sexual Violence

The New York Times

Many Ukrainian Prisoners of War Show Signs of Trauma and Sexual Violence

Carlotta Gall and Oleksandr Chubko – April 28, 2024

Family members of Ukrainian soldiers who are prisoners of war meet with Lyudmila Denisova, left, the country’s former human rights ombudsman, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Oct. 16, 2023. (Brendan Hoffman/The New York Times)

KYIV, Ukraine — The Ukrainian marine infantryman endured nine months of physical and psychological torture as a Russian prisoner of war, but was allotted only three months of rest and rehabilitation before being ordered back to his unit.

The infantryman, who asked to be identified only by his call sign, Smiley, returned to duty willingly. But it was only when he underwent intensive combat training in the weeks after that the depth and range of his injuries, both psychological and physical, began to surface.

“I started having flashbacks, and nightmares,” he said. “I would only sleep for two hours and wake up with my sleeping bag soaking wet.” He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and referred for psychological care, and is still receiving treatment.

Ukraine is just beginning to understand the lasting effects of the traumas its prisoners of war experienced in Russian captivity, but it has been failing to treat them properly and returning them to duty too early, say former prisoners, officials and psychologists familiar with individual cases.

Nearly 3,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war have been released from Russia in prisoner exchanges since the 2022 invasion began. More than 10,000 remain in Russian custody, some of whom have endured two years of conditions that a United Nations expert described as horrific.

The Ukrainian government’s rehabilitation program, which has usually involved two months in a sanitarium and a month at home, is inadequate, critics say, and the traumas suffered by Ukrainian prisoners are growing with the length and severity of the abuse they are being subjected to as the war drags on.

Russia’s torture of prisoners of war has been well documented by the United Nations, with former inmates speaking of relentless beatings, electric shocks, rape, sexual violence and mock executions, so much so that one expert described it as a systematic, state-endorsed policy. Many detainees have also reported lingering symptoms such as blackouts and fainting spells stemming from repeated blows to the head that were severe enough to cause concussions.

Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Andriy Kostin, said in September that “about 90% of Ukrainian prisoners of war have been subjected to torture, rape, threats of sexual violence or other forms of ill-treatment.”

The Russian military did not answer a request for comment on the allegations of mistreatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war.

Most of the released prisoners have returned to active duty after about three months of rest and rehabilitation, as the Ukrainian military, short of troops on the front line, has given relatively few medical exemptions to former prisoners of war.

A law passed this month will allow former prisoners of war the choice of returning to service or being discharged from the military, recognition that many have been subjected to severe mental and physical torture and need prolonged rehabilitation. Ukrainian officials acknowledged that there have been problems in providing sufficient care for former prisoners, but said they had now developed special centers for them using best international practices.

Ukrainian prosecutors have identified 3,000 former military and civilian prisoners who can serve as witnesses for a case they are building for the Ukrainian courts to charge Russian individuals and officials with mistreatment of prisoners. The prosecutors encouraged two of the former prisoners to speak to The New York Times.

One of them was Smiley, 22, who was captured at the beginning of the war when the Russian navy seized Ukrainian positions on Snake Island in the Black Sea. He spoke a year after his release, saying he hoped that shedding light on the conditions of Russian prisons would help not only his own rehabilitation, but also the thousands of prisoners of war still in captivity.

“My sister persuaded me to give my first interview,” he said. “‘You need to tell,’ she said. Maybe if we speak, it will help the treatment of our guys.”

A second Ukrainian serviceman made available by the prosecutors gave a lengthy interview but declined to give his name or call sign, because of the stigma surrounding the abuses he suffered.

The serviceman, 36, said he was taken prisoner along with several thousand soldiers and marines after a long siege at the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works in Mariupol in May 2022. He spent nine months in Russian captivity before being released in a prisoner exchange in early 2023.

He spent most of his time in three detention facilities in the Russian towns of Taganrog, Kamensk-Shakhtinsky and Kursk. He returned critically underweight and suffering from an injured spine and, like many others, blackouts, dizziness and ringing in the ears from frequent beatings on the head.

“I am not fainting any longer,” the serviceman said, “but I have difficulties with my back and concussion, and a squeezing all the time of the area around my heart.” Despite his injuries, he was ordered to return to light duty as a guard after only two months’ rest in a sanitarium.

“I don’t know if I could run a kilometer,” he said.

Prisoners were subjected to brutal daily beatings on their legs, backs and fingers, and mental and physical torture during interrogations, as well as hunger, cold and a lack of medical care, he said. Three men died in custody during his imprisonment, including one who died in the communal cell they shared, he said.

Some of the Russian units guarding or interrogating the prisoners were worse than others, the two former prisoners said, but there were consistent beatings every morning at roll call and torture at most detention facilities. Interrogations would last 40 minutes and often consisted of electric shocks, blows to the head and sexual abuse, real or threatened.

“They start with maximum violence,” the serviceman said. “They say ‘You are lying, you are not telling us everything.’ They put a knife to your ear or offer to cut off one of your fingers.”

Others would beat them on the back of the head so regularly that they lost consciousness, he said.

“If one gets tired, another takes over,” he recalled. “When you fall, they make you stand again. It can last 30 to 40 minutes. At the end they say, ‘Why did you not tell us everything immediately?’”

Smiley said much of the violence was of a sexual nature. One prison unit repeatedly struck the prisoners all over their bodies, including on the genitals, with batons that gave electric shocks, he said. On another occasion, he said, a cellmate was repeatedly kicked in the genitals during roll call, where the prisoners were lined up with their legs spread, facing a wall in a corridor. Smiley suffered permanent injury from an untreated broken pelvis from a truncheon blow and could not bend or lie down without assistance for two weeks.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which has very limited access to prisoners of war held in Russia, was not permitted to visit him during his nine months of imprisonment, he added.

The second serviceman said he was forced to strip and place his genitals on a stool as his interrogators hit them with a ruler and lay a knife on them, threatening to castrate him.

Interrogators put him through a mock execution, firing a volley of gunfire beside him while he was blindfolded. They threatened him with rape, the serviceman said, making him choose what they should use — a mop handle or the leg of a chair. “Do you want to do it yourself or do you want us to help you?” they taunted him.

He said he was never actually penetrated, but others were raped. “After that you cannot walk normally,” he said. “You suffer for weeks. Other guys had the same treatment.”

“I think they had such an order to break us psychologically and physically so that we would not want anything else in life,” he said, adding that there were suicides in the Taganrog jail.

“You could hear the screams all day,” the serviceman said. “Impossible screams.” Sometimes during a lull, the prisoners could hear the voices of children playing outside, he said.

The ordeal for the former prisoners is by no means over once back home.

“The most difficult thing is having too many people around,” the serviceman said. “Everyone is peacefully walking in the park and you are still afraid that someone is listening, or that you might get shoved or say the wrong thing.”

Maj. Valeria Subotina, a military press officer and a former journalist who was also taken prisoner at Azovstal and who spent a year in women’s prisons in Russia, recently opened a meeting space in Kyiv called YOUkraine, for former prisoners.

“There are many triggers and people do not realize they still need care,” she said.

She returned to service three months after her release in April 2023, but found it hard to sit in an office. “I cannot bear someone approaching me from behind or standing behind me,” she said.

The government psychologists were not of much use, she said. “They often don’t know how to help us,” she said, and civilians often ask careless questions.

As a result, many former prisoners find returning to the front line easier than rejoining civilian life, she said, and only fellow survivors really understand what they are going through.

“We don’t want to feel pity,” she said, “because we are proud that we survived and we overcame this.”

Farmers warn food aisles will soon be empty because of crushing conditions: ‘We are not in a good position’

The Cool Down

Farmers warn food aisles will soon be empty because of crushing conditions: ‘We are not in a good position’

Nick Paschal – April 28, 2024

The United Kingdom is facing dire food shortages, forcing prices to skyrocket, and experts predict this is only the beginning.

What’s happening?

According to a report by The Guardian, extreme weather is wreaking havoc on crops across the region. England experienced more rainfall during the past 18 months than it has over any 18-month period since record-keeping began in 1836.

Because the rain hasn’t stopped, many farmers have been unable to get crops such as potatoes, carrots, and wheat into the ground. “Usually, you get rain but there will be pockets of dry weather for two or three weeks at a time to do the planting. That simply hasn’t happened,” farmer Tom Allen-Stevens told The Guardian.

Farmers have also planted fewer potatoes, opting for less weather-dependent and financially secure crops. At the same time, many of the potatoes that have been planted are rotting in the ground.

“There is a concern that we won’t ever have the volumes [of potatoes] we had in the past in the future,” British Growers Association CEO Jack Ward told The Guardian. “We are not in a good position and it is 100% not sustainable,” Ward added.

Why is it important?

English farmers aren’t alone — people are struggling to grow crops worldwide because of extreme weather.

Dry weather in Brazil and heavy rain in Vietnam have farmers concerned about pepper production. Severe drought in Spain and record-breaking rain and snowfall in California have made it difficult for farmers to cultivate olives for olive oil. El Niño and rising temperatures cut Peru’s blueberry yield in half last year. Everyone’s favorite drinks — coffee, beer, and wine — have all been impacted by extreme weather.

According to an ABC News report, the strain on the agriculture industry will likely continue to cause food prices to soar.

If these were just isolated events, farmers could more easily adapt — bad growing seasons are nothing new. The problem is that rising temperatures are directly linked to the increasing amount of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere.

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, humans have burned dirty energy sources such as coal, oil, and gas, which release a significant amount of those gases. Our climate is changing so drastically that the 10 warmest years since 1850 have all occurred in the last decade.

“As climate change worsens, the threat to our food supply chains — both at home and overseas — will grow,” Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit analyst Amber Sawyer told The Guardian.

What can we do about it?

“Fortunately, we know many ways we can make the food system more resilient while reducing food emissions. The biggest opportunity in high-income nations is a reduction in meat consumption and exploration of more plants in our diets,” said Dr. Paul Behrens, an associate professor of environmental change at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

If we replace a quarter of our meat consumption with vegetables, we could cut around 100 million tons of air pollution yearly. It may seem strange to suggest eating more vegetables with the decline in crop production. However, reducing the land and water used for animal agriculture and diverting those resources to growing more produce would drastically help the declining food supply.

Growing our own food is also a great way to reduce our reliance on store-bought produce, and it can save you hundreds of dollars a year at the grocery store.

Underestimating Alvin Bragg’s case against Donald Trump is a historic mistake

Salon – Opinion

Underestimating Alvin Bragg’s case against Donald Trump is a historic mistake

Dennis Aftergut, Robert C. Gottlieb, Gerald B. Lefcourt – April 25, 2024

Donald Trump; Alvin Bragg Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images

Prosecutors are off to a strong start in the Manhattan trial of Donald Trump. Their evidence is aimed at proving that the former president committed crimes by falsifying business records to cover up a pre-election payoff in 2016 meant to keep women who would have otherwise revealed some of his sexual scandals ahead of that presidential election silent.

Some critics, including some very smart legal minds who have no love for Trump, don’t like the case. Boston University Law School Professor Jed Shugerman — who previously described to Salon “Trump abuses” at the Department of Justice as “using the system of prosecution to reward your political allies and to punish your opponents” — took major issue with the first criminal case against Trump to reach trial in an April 23 New York Times guest essay:

After listening to Monday’s opening statement by prosecutors, I still think the Manhattan D.A. has made a historic mistake. Their vague allegation about “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election” has me more concerned than ever about their unprecedented use of state law and their persistent avoidance of specifying an election crime or a valid theory of fraud.

Shugerman went on to publicly accuse prosecutors of engaging in “an embarrassment of prosecutorial ethics and apparent selective prosecution.” But if you are to call the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump for election interference a “historic mistake,” you ought to have arguments that are as close to airtight as humanly possible. The ones in Professor Shugerman’s essay, lamentably, are not even legally persuasive.

Let’s put aside his description of the prosecution’s opening statement as “vague.” That’s not how former Trump impeachment counsel Norm Eisen reported it from the courtroom for CNN, or how reporters for The New York Times and the Washington Post described it.

The core of Shugerman’s faulty argument is that he sees “three red flags raising concerns about selective prosecution upon appeal” because of the “unprecedented” way in which the grand jury used the statute at issue – New York Penal Code §175.10 – to charge Trump with a felony. That offense – falsifying business records – becomes a felony only when committed with an “intent to commit or conceal another crime.”

As former prosecutors and as current defense lawyers, we know that the claim of selective prosecution is notoriously difficult for defendants to prove. Justice Juan Merchan, the seasoned judge presiding over the trial, rejected Trump’s claim, finding that he did not carry his burden of showing that the DA had discriminated against him by not prosecuting any other similarly situated individual.

The reasoning is not mentioned in Shugerman’s Times essay yet it is a necessary element of proving selective prosecution in New York. Merchan also found that prosecutors had demonstrated that they had brought many other actions charging defendants with “falsifying business records with the intent to commit or conceal the commission of another crime.”

But, Shugerman writes, there’s “no previous case of any state prosecutor relying on the Federal Election Campaign Act either as a direct crime or a predicate crime.” That, he says, is a “sign of overreach.”

Wait! The case is unprecedented? Now there’s an understatement!

Have we ever had a presidential candidate from New York against whom prosecutors have assembled strong evidence of falsifying information in business records to cover up a scandal on his way to winning election? Have we ever had such a man now seeking the voters’ approval for a return White House run?

Rather than overreach, a novel use of the statute here is the sign of a prosecutor willing to extend the law to a new fact situation that society has a right and a duty to protect itself against. That is especially so when the case is brought to hold accountable someone whose company a different jury already found guilty of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records, and who has been found to have committed massive civil fraud against the state.

Shugerman also emphasizes that there’s not even any other New York case that sustains the use of another jurisdiction’s statute – federal law in this case – as the “other crime” in. It’s not enough, he says, that prosecutors have cited multiple parallel New York appellate court decisions – ones sustaining the use of crimes from other jurisdictions to satisfy the “other crime” element in different New York criminal statutes.

Why not? The extension of parallel situations is precisely the kind of reasoning on which the law is built. Whenever new fact patterns arise, the law operates by analogy from contexts where it is established. That’s why Justice Merchan has endorsed it.

Next, Shugerman says that a jury instruction endorsing the use of federal law violation as the “other crime” in another §175.10 case “doesn’t count” as precedent. Technically correct, but what that instruction shows is that another New York trial judge in a different case reached the same result that Justice Merchan reached here. That sounds like support for his decision and guidance for others in analyzing whether the prosecutors are making “an historic mistake.”

The Boston University professor also takes issue with the Manhattan DA’s use of federal election law because, he says, the reliance on Trump’s alleged violation of state election law is flawed. He argues that state election law applies only to “public officers,” and “state statutory definitions of “public office” seem to limit those statutes to state and local races.”

But the essay omits the basis on which Justice Merchan rejected this argument. New York election law, he wrote, explicitly states it “shall govern the conduct of all elections at which voters of the state of New York may cast a ballot for the purpose of electing any individual to any party position or nominating or electing any individual to any federal, state, [or local] office . . . .”

Further, Shugerman attacks the prosecutor’s election interference theory. He argues there is no precedent for satisfying the law’s “intent to defraud” requirement with an allegation that the defendant intended to defraud the general public. Shugerman says that “a conviction based on it may not survive a state appeal.”

Again, one is left to wonder why not. In the universe of threats to democracy, a candidate’s intent to defraud voters, if proven, is perhaps the most serious intent to defraud one can imagine. Trump is accused of seeking to deprive Americans, through deceit, of information most would have wanted to know about a candidate before deciding whether to make him president. The law is wise enough to take account of this element of a crime against democracy.

U.S. Supreme Court floats return to trial court for Trump in presidential immunity case

Minnesota Reformer

U.S. Supreme Court floats return to trial court for Trump in presidential immunity case

Jacob Fischler – April 25, 2024

Dozens of anti-Trump protesters gathered outside the U.S. Supreme Court on April 25, 2024, while the justices heard arguments about whether former President Donald Trump has immunity from prosecution on criminal charges related to his actions while in office. Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court appeared skeptical Thursday of former President Donald Trump’s argument he is immune from criminal charges that he tried to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.

But conservatives who dominate the court appeared open to returning key questions to a trial court, possibly delaying Trump’s prosecution beyond the November election — and essentially assisting the former president as he fights legal challenges on multiple fronts.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has argued in a federal trial court and in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that his actions following the 2020 election and leading up to the violent Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, were “official acts” conducted while still in office and therefore are not subject to criminal prosecution.

While court precedent establishes that U.S. presidents are immune to civil damages for their official acts, and to criminal prosecution while in office, the justices now must decide the unanswered question of whether former presidents are absolutely immune from criminal law.

At oral arguments Thursday in Trump v. United States, much of the discussion centered on what should be considered an official presidential act.

Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, of St. Louis, argued that nearly everything a president does in office — including hypotheticals about ordering a military coup or assassinating a political rival — could be considered official acts.

While much of the court appeared skeptical of that broad view of official acts, several justices on the conservative wing asked about having the trial court determine what acts should be considered official. They also suggested prosecutors could drop sections of the four-count indictment against Trump that dealt with official acts.

The court’s three liberal justices voiced serious concerns about Trump’s immunity argument, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wondering aloud if the court accepting a broad view of criminal immunity for the president would make the Oval Office “the seat of criminal activity.”

The case is one of four in state and federal courts in which criminal charges have been made against Trump. On Thursday, he was in a New York state courtroom where he faces charges in an ongoing hush-money trial; the judge there did not allow him to attend the Supreme Court arguments.

Trial court determination

Conservative justices asked if they could avoid the constitutional question by having the trial court, presided over by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, determine which parts of the allegations could be considered official or unofficial acts.

Special counsel Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors have indicated that prosecuting only Trump’s private conduct would be sufficient, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said.

“The normal process, what Mr. Sauer asked, would be for us to remand if we decided that there were some official acts immunity, and to let that be sorted out below,” Barrett said, referring to a process in which a case is sent back to a lower court. “It is another option for the special counsel to just proceed based on the private conduct and drop the official conduct.”

‘Absolute immunity’

Sauer argued, as he has for months, for “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for presidents acting in their official capacity.

No president who has not been impeached and removed from office can be prosecuted for official actions, Sauer said, broadly interpreting the meaning of official acts.

Liberal justices questioned Sauer about how far his definition of official acts would stretch. Trump’s attorney was reluctant to list any exceptions.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked a hypothetical that arose in a lower court: Would it be an official act for the president to order the assassination of a political rival?

“That could well be an official act,” Sauer answered.

He also answered Justice Elena Kagan that it could be an official act for a president to order a military coup, though Sauer said “it would depend on the circumstances.”

Michael R. Dreeben, representing the U.S. Department of Justice, argued that Trump’s broad view of presidential immunity would break a fundamental element of U.S. democracy, that no one is above the law.

“His novel theory would immunize former presidents for criminal liability for bribery, treason, sedition, murder, and here, conspiring to use fraud to overturn the results of an election and perpetuate himself in power,” Dreeben said.

Jackson, questioning Sauer, appeared to agree with that argument.

She said Sauer appeared worried that the president would be “chilled” by potential criminal prosecution, but she said there would be “a really significant opposite problem if the president wasn’t chilled.”

“Once we say, ‘No criminal liability, Mr. President, you can do whatever you want,’ I’m worried that we would have a worse problem than the problem of the president feeling constrained to follow the law while he’s in office,” Jackson said.

‘A special, peculiarly precarious position’

But other members of the court appeared more amenable to Sauer’s argument that subjecting presidents to criminal prosecution would constrain them.

Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court’s conservatives, asked Dreeben about Trump’s argument that a president’s duties require a broad view of immunity.

The president has to make difficult decisions, sometimes in areas of law that are unsettled, Alito said.

“I understand you to say, ‘If he makes a mistake, he makes a mistake, he’s subject to the criminal laws just like anybody else,’” Alito said. “You don’t think he’s in a special, peculiarly precarious position?”

Dreeben answered that the president has access to highly qualified legal advice and that making a mistake is not what generally leads to criminal prosecution.

He also noted that the allegations against Trump involve him going beyond his powers as president to interfere with the certification of an election, which is not a presidential power in the Constitution.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warns of the Oval Office turning into a ‘crime center’ if Trump gets the sweeping immunity he wants

Business Insider

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warns of the Oval Office turning into a ‘crime center’ if Trump gets the sweeping immunity he wants

Brent D. Griffiths – April 25, 2024

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson seemed alarmed about Trump‘s ask for sweeping immunity for presidents.
Jackson wanted to know how future presidents would be disincentivized to commit crimes.
She expressed fear it could turn the Oval Office into “the seat of criminal activity in this country.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was animated on Thursday when she discussed the potential of what could happen to the presidency if the Supreme Court were to grant presidents the sweeping immunity former President Donald Trump is seeking.

“The most powerful person in the world with the greatest amount of authority could go into office knowing there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes,” Jackson said during oral arguments. “I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is from turning the Oval Office into, you know, the seat of criminal activity in this country.”

Trump’s lawyer, John Sauer, argued for sweeping absolute immunity for former presidents that would shield Trump from special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution related to efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. As multiple justices outlined during oral arguments, the issues in the case could have major implications for the future of the presidency.

Jackson appeared alarmed that some of her colleagues, especially some of the court’s conservatives, seemed more afraid of limiting presidential immunity the court would neuter by the presidency by forcing future leaders to question if a political rival would try to prosecute them after they left office.

Instead, Jackson said there should be at least equal consideration given to the possibility that by granting sweeping immunity, the nation’s highest court would give a green light to presidential criminality if a future president could even tangentially tie criminal actions to carrying out the job of leading the nation.

“Presidents from the beginning of time have understood that that’s a possibility,” Jackson said later of how past leaders understood they could be prosecuted after leaving office. “That might be what has kept this office from turning into the kind of crime center that I’m envisioning.”

Jackson repeatedly underlined her points when questioning Sauer, underlining how far future presidents could push the envelope. She seemed particularly drawn to a brief filed by Georgetown Law School professor Martin Lederman that outlined how presidents with immunity could commit perjury, destroy or conceal documents, or bribe other public officials.

Jackson’s concerns are based on another element of Trump’s arguments, which propose that a president could not be charged with a crime unless the law they are accused of violating specifically mentions that it applies to the presidency.

The court’s newest justice has considered Trump’s conduct and the power of the presidency before. As a Circuit Court judge, Jackson torched the Trump White House for arguing that former White House counsel Don McGahn didn’t have to cooperate with Congress’ investigation.

“Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings,” Jackson wrote in 2019. “Rather, in this land of liberty, it is indisputable that current and former employees of the White House work for the People of the United States, and that they take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Manhattan prosecutors reveal election crime driving Trump’s hush money case

Independent

Manhattan prosecutors reveal election crime driving Trump’s hush money case

Alex Woodward – April 24, 2024

Donald Trump claims Joe Biden has 'abandoned' Israel

A critical question hovering over Donald Trump’s criminal case in New York is whether prosecutors can convince a jury that the former president’s alleged falsification of business records can be tied to a “primary” crime.

Mr Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records, which – on their own – are misdemeanor offences.

But Manhattan prosecutors have elevated those charges to felonies by tying them to another offence – one that involves a conspiracy to manipulate an election.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his office believe the case is relatively straightforward when it comes to the so-called hush money scheme – there are cheques, business ledgers, emails and text messages that allegedly point to a cover-up to classify payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels as “legal expenses”.

Those charges are bumped up to felonies if they are done with the intent to “commit another crime or to aid or conceal” one.

The crimes at the heart of the case stem from an alleged scheme to bury politically compromising stories involving then-candidate Mr Trump and his alleged affairs in order to protect his chances of winning the 2016 presidential election.

On Tuesday, prosecutors suggested that Mr Trump falsified those business records with the intent to commit or conceal a conspiracy to “promote” his election through “unlawful means”.

Under section 17-152 of New York election law, “any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor”.

Prosecutors began outlining those “other” crimes in court filings one month after Mr Trump was indicted last year. Justice Juan Merchan allowed them to move forward on three of them – including section 17-152, as well as crimes involving tax fraud and campaign finance violations.

During witness testimony this week, Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass hinted that his challenged line of questioning was relevant to the “primary” underlying crime under section 17-152.

A courtroom sketch depicts Manhattan prosecutor Joshua Steinglass questioning David Pecker during Donald Trump’s hush money trial on 23 April (REUTERS)

While questioning former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker about the “catch and kill” scheme arranged with Mr Trump and his then-personal attorney and “fixer” Michael Cohen, Mr Steinglass asked about Mr Pecker’s meetings with Steve Bannon, one of Mr Trump’s chief advisers.

Mr Bannon told Mr Pecker that they would “work very, very well together” during Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign, the former tabloid chief testified.

Defence attorney Emil Bove objected to the questions, alleging hearsay. But Mr Steinglass argued that questions tying Mr Pecker’s work with the campaign struck at the heart of the “primary” election crime that is driving the prosecution’s case.

During opening statements on Monday, Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo also underscored the stakes of the case against the former president.

“This case is about a criminal conspiracy and a cover-up,” he said. “The defendant Donald Trump orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election. Then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his business records, over and over and over again.”

Hush money, non-disclosure agreements and “catch-and-kill” arrangements aren’t illegal, per se, and “no politician wants bad press,” as Mr Colangelo said.

“But the evidence at trial will show that this was not spin or communications strategy,” he added. “This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy … It was election fraud. Pure and simple.”

Mr Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges and has accused the district attorney’s office of running an election interference campaign against him.

In Ukraine’s old imperial city, pastel palaces are in jeopardy, but black humor survives

Los Angeles Times

In Ukraine’s old imperial city, pastel palaces are in jeopardy, but black humor survives

Laura King – April 21, 2024

Church personnel inspect damages inside the Odesa Transfiguration Cathedral in Odesa, Ukraine, Sunday, July 23, 2023, following Russian missile attacks. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong) — Church personnel inspect damage from Russian missile attacks at the Transfiguration Cathedral in Odesa, Ukraine. The cathedral is in the historic city center, a UNESCO-designated site. (Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)

On a cool spring morning, as water-washed light bathed pastel palaces in the old imperial city of Odesa, the thunder of yet another Russian missile strike filled the air.

That March 6 blast came within a few hundred yards of a convoy carrying Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who was touring the country’s principal shipyard with the visiting Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotaki.

It was a close call, but Ukrainian officials said that in all likelihood the two leaders were not the target. Like so many other strikes during what Ukrainians call the “big war” — ignited by Russia’s all-out invasion in February 2022 — the attack was aimed at Odesa’s port, a strategic prize of centuries’ standing.

The Black Sea harbor and its docklands — Ukraine’s commercial lifeline and a prime military asset — have been the object of intensifying Russian drone and missile attacks in recent weeks, as Ukraine’s dwindling air defenses leave critical infrastructure vulnerable across the country.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis walk near trees in Odesa, Ukraine. — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, center left, and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, center right, walk in Odesa, Ukraine, on March 6. The sound of a Russian airstrike a few hundred yards away reverberated around the port city as they ended their tour. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP)

In Odesa, the deadly campaign of airstrikes has brought sharply renewed peril to nearly a million inhabitants of one of Ukraine’s most eclectic and cosmopolitan cities, known in equal measures for its people’s mordancy and joie de vivre. And it poses a heightened threat to a world-renowned cultural treasure: the jewel-box grid of streets making up Odesa’s UNESCO-designated historic center, which abuts the port.

After a string of attacks on Odesa and its environs, those who watch over the city’s landmark structures are braced for the worst. On many ornate facades in the city center, full-length windows topped with curlicued pediments are boarded over. Inside, as periodic power cuts permit, workers sweep up shattered masonry and painstakingly restore ruined grand staircases.

“It’s very, very difficult work to safeguard these beautiful old buildings,” said Oleksei Duryagin, who heads a firefighting team that works out of a headquarters dating back to the city’s days of horse-drawn fire wagons. “Whenever they try to hit the port, which is what they try to hit, everything here is in danger.”

Because of the building materials used — wood, flammable insulation within the walls — the 19th century buildings that line Odesa’s cobblestone, tree-lined central streets are especially susceptible to fire or collapse. First responders undergo special training in how to fight blazes in structures like Odesa’s sumptuous opera house, perched on a promontory above the seafront.

“From basement to ceiling, I know these buildings like my old friends,” said Duryagin, 52, who has more than three decades of firefighting experience. “I know their mysteries.”

Falling debris from airborne interceptions, rather than direct drone or missile strikes, has caused some of the most serious destruction. Some sites, like the city’s Fine Arts Museum, which is housed in a reconstructed palace, were hit again before they could be cleaned up after an initial attack.

The boarded-up windows on Odesa's Museum of Western and Eastern Art. — The windows on Odesa’s Museum of Western and Eastern Art are boarded up as Russian forces continue to target the port city. (Laura King / Los Angeles Times)

Early in the war, the museum whisked most of its art treasures into hiding. Some display areas are closed off for repairs, and big niches that once held priceless artworks are starkly blank. But the museum remains open to culture-hungry visitors, who must periodically be hustled into its underground shelter when air alerts sound.

Most of the exhibits now have a somber martial theme, including a striking collection of botanical watercolors by a 48-year-old Ukrainian army captain, Borys Eisenberg, an artist and landscape architect who volunteered on the first day of Russia’s invasion and was killed last year on the front lines. His delicate, violet-veined works on paper are mounted on the wooden lids of ammunition boxes.

“You can see that even looking out from the trenches, he found beauty,” said Irina Kulabina, 66, a retired engineer who helps out at the museum. “It’s really important. We should believe in life more than death.”

At Odesa’s Transfiguration Cathedral, the city’s largest Orthodox Christian church, a young priest named Father Alexei gazed out at blue sky through a gaping hole punched in an outer wall during a missile attack last July. He wondered aloud if fresh attacks would outpace rebuilding.

Rubble lies on the floor and walls are charred and blackened inside Odesa's Transfiguration Cathedral. — The blackened interior of the Transfiguration Cathedral in Odesa. (Laura King / Los Angeles Times)

“We just don’t know what else is to come,” said the 28-year-old cleric, who came to Odesa as a refugee from a front-line town in the eastern province of Luhansk.

While repairs slowly progress, services are held in a cavernous, basement-level secondary space, lighted only by flickering candles and lanterns whenever the electricity goes out. After the July strike, congregants converged on the landmark church, helping to gather artifacts scattered by the blast.

“It was really shocking for everyone,” said Father Alexei. Zelensky said at the time that hitting the cathedral amounted to targeting “the foundations of our entire European culture.”

Last month was a particularly deadly one for the city and its outskirts.

A March 2 drone attack wrecked a nine-story building, killing a dozen people. Five more perished in the strike four days later that narrowly missed Zelensky and the Greek leader. A missile and drone barrage on March 15 left 21 dead, including a paramedic killed in a dreaded “double tap,” in which first responders are targeted, seemingly deliberately, by strikes aimed at the same site a few moments apart to give rescuers time to arrive.

Buildings are seen through a damaged greenhouse roof. — The roof of a greenhouse damaged by a Russian missile attack in the botanical garden of Odesa I.I. Mechnikov National University. (Future Publishing via Getty Images)

More recently, on April 10, six people, including a 10-year-old girl, were killed in a strike on an outlying district of Odesa. That attack came on the 80th anniversary of Odesa’s liberation from Nazi forces during World War II.

The Odesa port and two others on the nearby seacoast have been a particular target of Russian wrath for the last eight months, since Ukraine managed to open a coast-hugging 350-mile Black Sea grain corridor to the Bosporus strait.

At the war’s outset, world grain prices jumped as Ukraine exports slumped, causing hardship in some of the world’s most impoverished countries. Now, though, almost 40 million tons of cargo have been shipped since August 2023, port officials said.

“Sometimes we spend all night in a shelter, then take a coffee and go straight to work — this is our reality,” said Dmytro Barinov, the deputy head of the state-owned Ukrainian Sea Ports Authority. “We feel responsibility not only for the Ukraine economy, to our farmers, but to the whole world that relies on our grain exports.”

As attacks continue and the overall war outlook grows grimmer, the city veers between a sense of relative safety and an acute awareness of peril.

Central cafes are full, and people linger at ice cream stands on the promenade. In flat green fields less than half an hour to the east, though, crews scatter pyramid-shaped reinforced cement antitank obstacles known as “dragon’s teeth.”

An ice cream stand on a public promenade — An ice cream stand on the promenade near the Potemkin Stairs, Odesa’s most famous landmark. Disused “tank traps” on the corner of a main boulevard in Odesa’s center. Laura King / Los Angeles Times

Odessa’s most famous landmark, the Potemkin Stairs — best known for the harrowing tumbling-baby-carriage scene in the 1925 film “Battleship Potemkin” — are topped with a roll of barbed wire. But a military checkpoint a few blocks away has been removed, and pedestrians can draw close enough to gaze down the 192 steps leading to the seafront.

The source of the city’s splendor is now the principal cause of its jeopardy. Odesa’s free port status financed its extraordinary architectural flowering in the 1800s and helped build its vibrant multiethnic society.

Russian warships have been driven back from Ukraine’s Black Sea coast — “when the big war started, we could see them from our palaces,” said naval spokesman Dytro Pletenchuk — but only 150 nautical miles to the east-southeast lies the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula, from which many strikes are launched.

At that range, there is little time for people in Odesa to get to shelter once missiles are in the air.

Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and its fomenting of a separatist conflict in Ukraine’s east were a precursor to the current invasion. Many here harbor ardent hopes of someday recapturing the peninsula, and are heartened by Ukrainian strikes on Russian forces there, including a damaging attack Wednesday on a large Russian airfield.

At the National Academic Opera and Ballet Theater — where April offerings include the ballet “Giselle” and Verdi’s opera “Nabucco” — the show goes on, as it has almost continuously since the start of the conflict. The neo-Baroque opera house is no longer sandbagged, but the war still feels ever present.

Odesa's opera house, formerly protected with sandbags. — Odesa’s opera house, formerly protected with sandbags. Performances and rehearsals are often interrupted by air alerts. (Laura King / Los Angeles Times)

“After night bombings come the most difficult days: Actors, singers and dancers are just physically tired, and it’s hard to deliver the emotional spectrum in their performances,” said Oksana Ternenko, 50, a stage director.

“Sometimes it’s like a theater of the absurd,” she said. “We are starting to rehearse, and a singer is showing photos on the phone: ‘Look, here’s a piece of my house that fell on my car.’ ”

Despite all, Odesa maintains an irrepressible offbeat humor.

A man dances on a brick path as musicians play. — A man dances during the Festival of Humor, which has been taking place in Odesa on and around April Fools’ Day since 1973. (Nina Liashonok / Getty Images)

“My parents and I, we’re very happy that Granny is deaf, so the explosions don’t scare her,” said 14-year-old Alina Kulik, who lives in an outlying district that has been hit repeatedly.

“Right now, we’re in a place that’s a little dangerous,” said her 15-year-old friend Anastasia Jelonkina, as the two girls perched on a promenade bench overlooking the seaport. “We know that. But here we are!”

Odesa’s beaches, beloved by tourists before the war and by locals all along, are full again as spring temperatures rise. During much of the last two years, danger from mines and debris from destruction of a massive dam on the Dnipro River kept the shoreline largely closed.

Sunbathers flock to an Odesa city beach. De-mining efforts allowed the reopening of the seashore. (Laura King / Los Angeles Times)

But intensive de-mining efforts have rendered the sea off Odesa relatively safe for swimming again, and a tousle-haired Irina Khosovana, a 62-year-old doctor who is a fifth-generation Odesan, said nothing — not even periodic air alerts — could keep her away.

“The sea is our comfort,” she said, gesturing toward the blue expanse. “Coming here is as important as life.”

A largely Russian-speaking city at the start of the war, Odesa still has deep cultural roots in common with the enemy now battering its shores. The poet Pushkin is still revered, with a grand boulevard named for him and a big statue taking pride of place in front of the city council building.

But another prominent piece of statuary near the opera house was deemed a symbol of colonialist oppression — that of the Russian empress known as Catherine the Great. Her likeness, hauled down in the war’s first year, is now boxed up in a black lean-to outside the damaged art museum.

Atop the empty plinth where the statue once stood flies a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag.

Has Russian Propaganda “Infected” Republicans? The Truth Is More Sinister.

Slate

Has Russian Propaganda “Infected” Republicans? The Truth Is More Sinister.

Molly Olmstead – April 20, 2024

Earlier this month, Republican Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, the head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Puck News that Russian propaganda had “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” Several days later, another Republican, Rep. Michael Turner of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said he agreed. “Anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” Turner told CNN, are “directly coming from Russia.”

It was a notable moment—and a telling one, as the House gets ready for a contentious vote on aid to Ukraine. The vote is being loudly protested by far-right politicians including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is pushing to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson from his role over the issue.

It’s not the first time Republican lawmakers have accused their colleagues of essentially being Russian pawns. But as far-right rabble-rousers in the Republican Party have increasingly advocated against continued support of Ukraine—and even some mainstream Republicans no longer interpret Russian aggression as a ruthless threat to democracy and the international order—the most extreme lawmakers appear to be mirroring the Kremlin’s own propaganda.

Last Monday, Greene told Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast that Ukraine was waging a “war against Christianity” and Russians “seem to be protecting” the religion. The idea of Russia as a great (white) Christian nation has been percolating in right-wing thinking for more than a decade, despite Russia’s history of suppressing non-Orthodox Christianity and exerting power over the Russian Orthodox Church.

But Greene didn’t limit herself to praising Russia’s religious nationalism on Bannon’s show: She cited, as fact, anti-Ukraine disinformation that “the Ukrainian government is attacking Christians” and “executing priests.” This prompted former Rep. Ken Buck, another Republican, to call Greene “Moscow Marjorie” on CNN.

And indeed, this assertion does mirror Russia’s own talking points about Ukraine. (In actuality, the crimes Greene accused Ukraine of committing are crimes Russian forces have perpetrated.) But whether the Kremlin’s own talking points are being piped into the brains of right-wing American politicians—or just bear a striking similarity to the new isolationist rhetoric of the far right—is a matter of interesting debate.

Russian propaganda operations have evolved somewhat from the infamous social media campaigns that influenced the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Take the case of a false narrative about Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky using U.S. aid money to buy himself two yachts. This rumor—which is demonstrably false, given that the ownership of ships can be easily tracked—has been swirling in right-wing social media circles for months and popping up in American politicians’ talking points. It’s such an effective fabrication that North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis told CNN in December that the debate over aid to Ukraine had been halted on the Hill in part because some lawmakers were concerned that “people will buy yachts with this money.”

But where did that idea come from? According to the BBC, the assertion that Zelensky had purchased two luxury yachts with U.S. aid money originated in November on a YouTube channel with just a handful of followers. The day after the video was posted, a site called DC Weekly published the claim as news, and that report was then picked up by other websites.

DC Weekly is not some kind of alternative newspaper or community blog; Clemson University researchers Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren argued in a report in December that the website was likely created to share fake news created by Russian state actors. The site is populated with A.I. content, has clearly fake authors, and has been partially hosted on a server in Moscow.

Russian disinformation that is packaged as news, Linvill said in a phone interview, often follows a similar pattern of dissemination. “I would bet my retirement on the fact that the Russians create the videos, plant the videos, write the stories, plant the stories, and distribute the stories,” Linvill wrote in an email.

“It’s the logic of the thing,” he said, “but also the fact that it happens repeatedly.” He pointed to a dozen other instances of disinformation narratives that started as assertions in obscure YouTube videos and were then picked up by publications with similarly legitimate-sounding names.

From 2016 through 2020, Linvill said, Russian propagandists focused on creating social media accounts to promote divisive ideas within the existing American discourse. That is still happening. But today, Linvill said, resources are more likely to be directed toward creating entire fake platforms, including websites that look like news sites. The stories tend to be sensationalized in a way that encourages organic sharing.

According to the Washington Post, Kremlin materials “obtained by a European intelligence service” show Moscow-linked strategists also stoke division in the U.S. by amplifying stories based in reality—including about migrants overwhelming the border, poverty and inflation, and reasons not to trust mainstream media.

But the story of the yacht shows how a fabricated rumor, likely originating in Russia, can start circulating in American politics. On Bannon’s War Room in December, Sen. J.D. Vance said, of his fellow politicians, “there are people who would cut Social Security, throw our grandparents into poverty, why? So that one of Zelensky’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht?”

The yacht story had a specific origin, but the growing anti-Ukraine sentiment among right-wing circles is harder to trace. After years of warfare and many millions of dollars in American aid, it makes sense that American enthusiasm for the Ukrainian cause might organically ebb.

And there is one man whose personal grudge against Ukraine could also cause Republicans to sour on a U.S. ally: Donald Trump.

“When American journalists and congresspeople use Russian talking points, they’re quoting Trump,” said Sarah Oates, a professor who studies disinformation and propaganda at the University of Maryland. “They are broadcasting Russian propaganda, but the conduit is Trump.”

Trump has several reasons to dismiss Russia’s threat to the international order. For starters, he openly admires authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin and has shown an interest in modeling himself after them. More importantly, the association of his 2016 election with Russian election-meddling caused some on the left to question the legitimacy of his victory.

For legitimacy reasons, then, Republicans have an incentive to downplay the potency of Russian propaganda. Not to mention: The basis of much of the Republican Party’s attacks on President Biden relies on a misleading assertion that his son Hunter Biden colluded with corrupt Ukrainian officials. Portraying Ukraine as a corruption-riddled country bolsters right-wing conspiracy theories about Biden’s family.

In other words, shared talking points between Republicans and the Russian propaganda machine don’t necessarily mean Russia is effective in seeding its influence; it’s a mutually beneficial swirl of conspiracy theories. “I think this is just a highly useful convergence of goals for Putin and Trump,” Oates said.

“Trump does not care; he literally is not thinking about it,” Oates said, referring to the possibility that many of Trump’s talking points could come from Russia. “His calculus is, ‘How can I win?’ ”

Because it’s quite possible that Americans who want the U.S. to abandon Ukraine may have arrived at that opinion on their own, Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins, has warned against giving the Russians too much credit for swaying American public opinion.

Rid’s argument is: We shouldn’t help Russian strategists by assuming they’ve succeeded. Russia wants to undermine Americans’ trust in our systems and in our democracy. Believing that another country has the capability to, say, sway an election, serves that goal. “If we exaggerate the impact, we make the operations more successful than they would be otherwise,” he said, “and undermine trust in our own democracy, which is the goal of this game.”

It’s important, he argued, not to blame misinformation, isolationism, and other factors that led to changing views of the war on external actors alone. Americans, Rid said, are “perfectly capable of coming up with crazy ideas.”

Take Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s claim about why Putin needed to invade Ukraine. Speaking to a right-wing Alabama website, Tuberville said: “It’s a communist country, so he can’t feed his people, so they need more farmland.”

The claim—coming from a man who couldn’t name the three branches of American government and who thought World War II was fought over socialism—seems to be pure, homegrown nonsense.

“It’s blaming our own problems on others,” Rid said. “That’s the problem I find worrying.”

To be clear, Russian propaganda should be taken seriously: The country’s plans for deepening existing societal conflicts in the U.S. are not a secret. Given the various motivations at play and the inherent vagaries of how information and belief travel, though, it’s hard to know just how much the Republican Party has been “infected” by Russian propaganda, as Rep. McCaul put it.

What we can say with certainty is that there’s an alliance of interests. In his bizarre interview with Tucker Carlson in February, Putin laid out his several invented justifications for the invasion and said that he was interested in “peace.” The next day, Tuberville said he opposed sending aid to Ukraine because the Carlson interview “shows that Russia is open to a peace agreement.”

In her work, Oates found that researchers often couldn’t tell the difference between media pulled from Fox News and Russia Today, a Russian news network and propaganda arm; “identical” talking points don’t mean Russia is pulling the strings.

But there is still something to be gleaned from the coherence between Republicans and Russian strategists—and it’s probably a warning about our own news-media ecosystems. Rep. McCaul seemed to note this, telling Puck News that he saw “nighttime entertainment shows” in the U.S airing content that was “almost identical” to what was playing on Russian state TV.

US can send fresh weapons to Ukraine ‘within days’

The Telegraph

US can send fresh weapons to Ukraine ‘within days’

Tony Diver – April 20, 2024

Speaker Mike Johnson talks to reporters after the House voted to approve the aid to Ukraine – J. Scott Applewhite/AP

US weapons could be sent to Ukraine within days, after the House of Representatives voted to approve more than $60 billion (£48.5 billion) in military aid.

Kyiv’s army has resorted to increasingly desperate measures amid dwindling supplies of key missiles and relentless Russian bombardment that has translated into frontline advances.

Some troops have had to rely on civil society donations of items like drones or have started using decoy air defence systems to draw away enemy fire.

The Pentagon has already moved stockpiles of the most-needed arms closer to Ukraine’s borders in anticipation of the bill passing so that they could be sent to Kyiv at short notice.

Joe Biden’s “supplemental” bill on foreign aid funding has been held up for months in Congress amid opposition from Republicans.

On Saturday night the House voted to approve the package, sending it on to the Senate, where it is expected to pass early this week.

Chuck Shumer, the Democrat majority leader in the Senate, has suggested it could be approved as early as Tuesday. Mr Biden has said he will sign the bill as soon as it reaches his desk.

The aid package replenishes a Pentagon budget that can be accessed by Mr Biden through the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), a power used for foreign aid purchases.

It allows the White House to send existing US military stockpiles to another country. More than $40 billion worth of equipment has been sent to Ukraine using this method since the start of the war in February 2022.

Maj Gen Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s press secretary, said this week that the US had already moved weapons closer to Ukraine in the hope the bill would pass, allowing them to be moved more quickly.

“We have a very robust logistics network that enables us to move material very quickly,” he said. “We can move within days.”

The main aid requests from Ukraine to other allies in recent months have been for air defence missiles to protect the country’s cities from Russian attacks, and shells to use on the front lines in the East.

Ukraine's front line has been feeling the strain — Ukraine’s front line has been feeling the strain – ANATOLII STEPANOV/AFP

The next package is likely to include ATACMS missiles, which have already been sent in limited quantities to the front line, and Patriot missiles for Ukraine’s air defence systems.

The most recent round of aid, which was drawn from savings in the existing Pentagon budget, included munitions for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).

The US stores some 155 million howitzer rounds in Europe, and could send them to Ukraine within days.

The global supply of rounds began to fall in recent months after the US budget for Ukraine aid dwindled and European manufacturers were unable to keep up with demand.

William Burns, the director of the CIA, has said that without speedy assistance from the US, Ukraine could lose the war against Russia this year.

Despite initial plans for a spring offensive this year, Ukraine has resorted to defending its existing front lines against Russian troops, without the weapons or personnel to launch a new push into Crimea.

The military draft in Ukraine was this week lowered to include men aged over 25, from its previous level of 27.

As the war in Ukraine has progressed, the US has agreed to send increasingly expensive military systems to Kyiv, including the Abrams tank.

An Abrams tank in Ukraine — An Abrams tank, which have been provided by the US, in Ukraine – X

Russia has also stepped up its defence procurement since February 2022, and has received drones from Iran and missile technology from China, according to US officials.

The Pentagon hopes that the package approved in the House on Saturday will be enough to meet America’s defence commitments to Ukraine until the presidential election, which will be held in November.

Republican efforts to stall the aid ramped up in recent months amid pressure from Donald Trump, the GOP’s nominee, who has opposed further spending and promised to end the war “in one day” if he wins the election.

Despite Mr Zelensky’s requests for advanced fighter jets from the US, planes are unlikely to be approved from the US.

Last year, Mr Biden approved some F-16 fighter jets to be sent to Ukraine from Denmark, under a rule that allows the US government to determine which countries can use planes that American manufacturers have produced.

The Pentagon has also agreed to train Ukrainian pilots to fly the planes, including at the Morris Air Force Base in Arizona.