This week in The Texas Monthly, I read a troubling profile of Tim Dunn, a 68-year-old billionaire Texas oilman and lavish financier for right-wing extremists in the state.
“In the past two years,” Russell Gold writes, “Dunn has become the largest individual source of campaign money in the state by far.” He has spent, through his political action committee, millions of dollars targeting Republicans who don’t meet his ideological litmus tests of opposition to public schools, opposition to renewable energy and support for tax cuts and draconian anti-abortion laws.
A pastor who once said that only Christians should hold leadership positions in government, Dunn sees himself as someone who is on a religious mission of sorts and has devoted his time and wealth to imposing his ultraconservative politics and fundamentalist beliefs on as many Texans as possible.
I highly recommend reading the entire profile, which is a comprehensive look at a very powerful man. I was disturbed. There is his wealth and influence, yes. But there is also his worldview, captured in the opening scene of the piece. Dunn makes an unfavorable comparison between human societies and bee hives:
“When everybody does what they do best for the hive, it prospers,” he said. “If you’re a guard, then be a guard. If you’re a scout, be a scout.” Dunn then contrasted the cooperation of the hive with the inexorable tumult of modern politics. “Why do people hate politics?” he asked. “Everybody’s making it all about themselves,” he said. “Does it create harmony? Are people there trying to serve the body with their gifts? That’s why you hate it. It’s an example of what not to do.”
By itself, this passage reads as fairly innocuous. But when read with Dunn in mind — a straightforward Christian nationalist whose allies in Texas politics are leading the charge to ban books, suppress the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. Texans and restrict reproductive health care — it takes on a more ominous cast.
The passage, in that context, seems to capture the perspective of a man who does not believe in democratic freedom — a freedom rooted in political and social equality — as much as he believes in the freedom of the master, which is to say the freedom to rule and subordinate others. It’s a tyrannical freedom, one that rests on the idea that the world is nothing but a set of overlapping hierarchies, and that if you do not sit at the top of one, then you must be made to serve those who do. You’ll find freedom within your role, and nowhere else.
This is not a new or foreign conception of freedom — it is very much a part of the American political tradition, one of the more dissonant notes in our collective heritage. The issue, today, is twofold. First, we have a powerful political movement, led by Donald Trump, that defines itself in terms of this freedom. And second, we’ve allowed such a grotesque accumulation of wealth that figures like Dunn can wield tremendous influence over the political system.
I’ve written before that the fight to save American democracy will involve more than beating Trump at the ballot box. Finding ways to radically limit the political reach of the super wealthy is part of what I mean.
What I Wrote
My Tuesday column was on Trump’s obvious deficiencies as he runs for another term in the White House.
It’s not that there aren’t legitimate reasons to be concerned about Biden’s age. He is already the oldest person to serve in the Oval Office. The issue here is one of proportion and consequence. Biden may be unable to do the job at some point in the future; Trump, it seems to me, already is. One of those is a lot more concerning than the other.
My Friday column was on what I am calling the Trump mulligan — the extent to which he’s not held responsible for the events of his own presidency.
Why does Trump get this mulligan on his presidency? I think it owes a lot to his celebrity persona. Although Trump has not been on a major screen in Hollywood since 2015, when he was fired from NBC’s “The Apprentice,” he still retains the celebrity status he cultivated over decades in film and television. He is a politician — he was, again, president of the United States — but he’s not perceived as a politician. He is seen, even now, as outside of or somehow transcending traditional politics.
Medical Mysteries: How a sore throat led to life-threatening bleeding
Sandra G. Boodman, The Washington Post – February 17, 2024
(Getty Images) (Dumitru Ochievschi via Getty Images)
For more than a year, Arthur L. Kimbrough had done everything he could think of to find out what was causing the stabbing sensation that radiated from his throat to his neck and down his left shoulder. He had seen anesthesiologists, an ear, nose and throat doctor, a neurologist and neurosurgeons in Florida and Maryland; undergone tests and scans; and taken a variety of drugs that failed to alleviate the intensifying pain that baffled his doctors.
It wasn’t until February 2022, after Kimbrough suffered a life-threatening hemorrhage in a hospital waiting room, that the cause was finally identified.
Two years later, Kimbrough, now 76, attributes his survival to being in the right place at the right time. He says he feels lucky to be alive and is not angry his illness wasn’t diagnosed earlier.
Doctors “missed some things clearly, [but] it wasn’t because they weren’t looking,” said Kimbrough, an executive coach who lives in the Florida Panhandle and owns funeral homes and cemeteries in Florida and Mississippi. “They were very responsive.”
“The blinders we had on was that it turned out to be the fundamentally wrong place to be looking,” he said.
Unusual sore throat
Kimbrough first noticed the pain – a tender spot under the left side of his tongue in the back of his mouth – in mid-December 2020. It didn’t seem like a conventional sore throat: Swallowing wasn’t painful. His family physician found no inflammation and recommended he see his ENT; both doctors are Kimbrough’s close friends. A heavy smoker for 25 years who quit in his early 40s, Kimbrough asked the ENT if he might have throat cancer.
The doctor was reassuring. “Throat cancer doesn’t generate this kind of pain,” Kimbrough remembers him saying. “It’s been so long since you smoked.”
The ENT suspected that a salivary gland might be infected and prescribed an antibiotic. When that failed to alleviate the pain, the doctor examined Kimbrough’s throat with a laryngoscope, an instrument used in office procedures. He told Kimbrough his throat looked healthy and suspected the soreness might reflect a jaw problem, possibly temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMJ), or a pinched nerve in his neck. The latter hypothesis would guide Kimbrough’s 14-month quest.
After Kimbrough’s dentist ruled out TMJ, he began seeing a chiropractor who recommended spinal X-rays. They showed age-related arthritis in the C3 vertebrae near his jaw.
For the next two months, the chiropractor performed neck “adjustments.” At first, they provided some relief, but by the end of March, Kimbrough’s pain was worse. The chiropractor sent him to an anesthesiologist who specializes in pain management. He administered a nerve block, an injection consisting of a painkiller and a steroid to reduce inflammation. It didn’t help.
The anesthesiologist ordered an MRI of Kimbrough’s cervical spine, which showed spondylosis, abnormal wear on the neck cartilage and vertebrae that may be more common in very active people. He told Kimbrough he might have spinal stenosis, a common problem that increases with age and is caused by a narrowing of vertebrae that can affect nerves. But there was no sign of nerve compression that could explain his pain.
In June, six months after the throat pain started, Kimbrough consulted a friend who is a vascular surgeon to informally review his care. The surgeon told him it sounded appropriate.
Kimbrough, who pays close attention to his health, is a fitness devotee and regularly worked out with a group of former Army Rangers. At that time, in addition to his family physician, he consulted an “anti-aging” doctor every four months who ordered blood tests and prescribed supplements to enhance his health and fitness. Kimbrough took 50 pills per day.
‘Like a hot spear’
By July, the pain, which had spread to his left ear and eye socket, had worsened, disrupting his sleep. Kimbrough managed to maintain his busy work schedule and trained for a short-distance triathlon, his 20th, which he completed July 4. Exercise, he found, seemed to blunt what “felt like a hot spear stabbing me from my jawline, encasing my head like a vise and then radiating to my left shoulder blade.”
Kimbrough decided he needed to expand his search for an answer beyond north Florida. Through business contacts he obtained an August 2021 appointment with an expert in spinal neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
The neurosurgeon reviewed the results of his MRI and confirmed that it showed degenerative changes in his neck. But he told Kimbrough that the pain on the left side of his head was perplexing; according to the scan, it should have been on the right. He suggested that Kimbrough try wearing a cervical collar to immobilize his neck for 20 minutes every day to see if it helped. Neither the collar nor the acupuncture sessions Kimbrough decided on his own to try made a difference.
Over dinner one night in October 2021, Kimbrough’s ENT, noting the severity of his pain and his difficulty swallowing, suggested his spine wasn’t the problem. He thought Kimbrough might have trigeminal neuralgia (TN), chronic debilitating facial pain caused by a nerve injury.
He immediately changed Kimbrough’s medication to a drug used to treat TN. The pain “exploded,” Kimbrough said. “For the first time, I began to understand why some people commit suicide.” He called his primary care doctor who put him back on the previous drug and made a next-day appointment for Kimbrough with a neurosurgeon in Tallahassee.
The neurosurgeon couldn’t find anything and referred Kimbrough to a neurologist who was equally baffled. He sent Kimbrough to a second pain specialist who administered epidural spinal injections that didn’t help. Meanwhile the Baltimore neurosurgeon recommended he see a nerve pain specialist at Hopkins; his appointment was scheduled for late February 2022.
In December, Kimbrough underwent a CT scan of his neck and another test to determine why he was having trouble swallowing. The scan found “mild asymmetry” on his left tonsil but no visible mass. The radiologist suggested that an ENT perform a throat exam that can involve a biopsy; the procedure was never performed.
By mid-February 2022, Kimbrough was in bad shape. He had lost more than 20 pounds and was unable to swallow anything other than clear liquids. His pain varied from tolerable to “like a blowtorch” and was barely controllable despite the maximum dose of the prescription painkiller OxyContin. And none of his doctors seemed to have a clue about what might be wrong.
Kimbrough worried he had a brain tumor. “I was just wandering around the morass of doomsday scenarios,” he recalled.
A few days before his appointment with the Hopkins pain specialist, he and his wife flew to Arizona for a family celebration. The night before their flight, Kimbrough experienced a nose bleed that stopped quickly. It was a harbinger of what would happen the next day.
Drowning in blood
The Baltimore appointment began with a neurological exam. The anesthesiologist asked Kimbrough to stick out his tongue, then requested that he stick it straight out. When he said he had, she handed him a mirror. It revealed that his tongue curved markedly to the left.
The doctor told him that pressure on a nerve or a mass in his throat might be causing the deviation and asked if he could stay in Baltimore for more tests. When he said he’d stay as long as necessary, she left to schedule an urgent MRI.
Sitting in the waiting room, Kimbrough started sipping a Coke. Without warning, blood began gushing out of his mouth and nose. Someone handed him a stack of napkins; it was drenched in seconds. As he coughed and spat out some of the blood and blood clots that were cascading down his throat, Kimbrough remembers thinking, “I’m drowning in my own blood.” For years, he had taken a blood thinner to treat an irregular heartbeat; the drug can exacerbate bleeding.
Kimbrough was quickly surrounded by doctors and nurses and hustled off to the emergency department. “They were so calm I never felt any real fear,” he recalled.
“The worry was that he could die of asphyxiation” by aspirating his own blood, said otolaryngologist R. Alex Harbison, the head and neck surgeon who met him in the ER. Harbison examined Kimbrough and saw a huge six-centimeter mass – at its widest point, the height of an egg – extending from the roof of his mouth over his tonsils to the back of his tongue.
He suspected the mass was cancerous and that it was caused by the human papilloma virus (HPV). The mass, which had been growing for more than a year, had become entwined with a nerve and had irritated the left lingual artery in the throat until it ruptured, triggering the bleed. Pathologists would soon determine that Kimbrough had Stage 3 squamous cell throat cancer caused by HPV-16, the most common type.
HPV, which infects virtually everyone, is spread through sex. Most infections clear on their own, but high-risk HPV, including HPV-16, can cause several cancers later in life, including cervical and throat cancer. A vaccine approved in 2006, and usually administered in childhood before a person is sexually active, can prevent the vast majority of HPV-related cancers that account for more than 37,000 cases annually in the United States. Doctors recommend the vaccine for some adults up to age 45.
HPV oral cancer, which is growing rapidly among men, is the most common head and neck cancer in the United States. (Non-HPV oral cancer is typically caused by smoking and alcohol use.) It often responds to chemoradiation, radiation combined with concurrent chemotherapy, particularly if detected early.
Harbison told Kimbrough what doctors had found and ticked off the steps they would take to try to stop the bleeding. The doctor spoke frankly: If anything went wrong, Kimbrough was unlikely to survive. How aggressive did he want doctors to be? Harbison asked.
Kimbrough was intubated, received blood transfusions and underwent an embolization, a procedure that plugged the artery with a coil to stop the hemorrhage. “After that, it’s pretty much hold your breath and wait,” Harbison said. “The level of anxiety was very high” because of the chance of another bleed.
Because Kimbrough was severely malnourished, doctors also inserted a feeding tube in his stomach. A few days later, a tracheostomy tube in his neck was inserted to protect his airway. Within a week of his emergency admission, his condition appeared to have stabilized.
The Hopkins team recommended chemoradiation. Because Kimbrough and his wife knew no one in Baltimore, they opted for treatment at Washington University in St. Louis. They had lived in the city for 20 years and one of their sons still did.
Kimbrough arrived in St. Louis on March 10 with feeding and tracheostomy tubes in place. The medical team there told Kimbrough they believed chemoradiation had a 60 percent chance of eradicating his cancer. But even if they succeeded, they warned him he might always need a feeding tube.
Playing the trombone
On that, he proved them wrong: The feeding tube was removed at the end of July, a month after he finished cancer treatment and a month before he went home to Florida. Kimbrough remains unable to swallow more than a few bites of very soft food; his diet is mostly liquid. So far, his scans have shown no sign of cancer. He has returned to work and is able to speak normally and can play his trombone.
Harbison, who is now an assistant professor of otolaryngology at Washington University (he left Hopkins to return to his native St. Louis eight months ago), noted that the characteristics and location of Kimbrough’s tumor made it harder to spot, which may have helped delay his diagnosis.
Kimbrough said his ENT recently told him that as a result of Kimbrough’s experience, he is more aggressive about performing biopsies on patients with similar symptoms and recently diagnosed another man with HPV-related cancer whose throat pain radiated to his shoulder.
“Art’s presentation is extremely rare,” said Harbison, who has treated about 200 patients with HPV-related oral cancer, which often appears as a neck lump.
But someone with “persistent throat or ear pain should be investigated by an expert,” he said. It’s possible, he added, that the cancer was missed on the 2021 MRI.
Kimbrough says he wants other men to benefit from his ordeal by learning about HPV, vaccinating their children and questioning assumptions that may turn out to be erroneous, as they were in his case.
Although he now regards it as crucial, Kimbrough said it simply didn’t occur to him to get a second ENT opinion for his sore throat, partly because the focus had been on his spine.
“Everyone was doing their best with the best of intentions,” he said. “There was a fork in the road and we didn’t go down that other path.”
Tucker Carlson Condemns Alexei Navalny’s Death As “Barbaric” Days After Trumpeting Vladimir Putin’s Russia
Ted Johnson – February 16, 2024
The news of the death of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny very quickly put a focus on Tucker Carlson, the right-wing talk host who recently trekked to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin.
Carlson told the Daily Mail today that “it’s horrifying what happened to Navalny. The whole thing is barbaric and awful. No decent person would defend it.”
In the wake of reports of Navalny’s death, Carlson faced another round of backlash after interviewing Putin last week and for subsequent social media posts. In them, Carlson trumpeted a Moscow subway station and a grocery store.
Former congresswoman Liz Cheney wrote on X/Twitter earlier today, “This is what Putin’s Russia is, Tucker Carlson. And you are Putin’s useful idiot. Same with you J.D. Vance and other Putin-wing Republicans who are working to defeat Ukraine in its struggle for freedom.”
Carlson posted his interview with Putin on X/Twitter on Feb. 8, and in X/Twitter videos, he talked of the virtues of Moscow’s subway station and a supermarket, where he pointed out lower prices than in the United States. He said, “If you take people’s standard of living and you tank it, through filth and crime and inflation, you literally can’t buy the groceries you want, maybe it matters less what you say, whether you are a good person or a bad person, you are wrecking people’s lives and their country, and that is what are leaders have done to us. And coming to a Russian grocery store — the heart of evil — and seeing what things cost now, people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders. That’s how I feel anyway.”
At the World Governments Summit this week, Carlson was asked why he didn’t talk about Navalny, about freedom of speech, about assassinations or about restrictions on opposition in the upcoming election.
“I didn’t talk about the things that every media outlet talks about because those are covered, and I have spent my life talking to people who run countries, in various countries, and have concluded the following: That every leader kills people, including my leader. Leadership requires killing people,” Carlson said. “That is why I wouldn’t want to be a leader. That press restriction is universal in the United States. I know because I have lived it…. There is more censorship in Russia that there is in the United States, but there is a great deal in the United States.”
Those comments drew some comparisons to Donald Trump’s interview with then-Fox News host Bill O’Reilly in 2017. Less than a month after taking office, Trump was asked about Putin and O’Reilly noted, “He’s a killer.”
Trump responded, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”
During comments on reports of Navalny’s death, President Joe Biden called on Congress to pass a $95 billion aid package that includes a new infusion of money to help Ukraine in its war with Russia. Biden also blasted Trump’s recent comment encouraging Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that don’t pay their due. Trump’s comments reflect a strain in the Republican party that admires Putin and his posturing, a reversal of Reagan-era conservatism.
Stuart Stevens, who was lead strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, wrote, “The world will be pointing to the murder of Navalny and trying to shame Trump’s party for supporting Putin. It won’t work. Trump wants Putin’s power. He is in court demanding immunity to murder opponents. Violence is at the core of Trumpism. As Tucker Carlson makes clear, Trump supporters look at Russia and ask, ‘Why can’t America be Russia?’ They hate the America we love. They must be defeated.”
Putin critic Alexei Navalny, 47, dies in Arctic Circle jail
Paul Kirby – BBC News – February 16, 2024
Alexei Navalny was Russia’s most prominent opposition leader of recent times
Russia’s most significant opposition leader for the past decade, Alexei Navalny, has died in an Arctic Circle jail, the prison service has said.
President Vladimir Putin‘s most vociferous critic, he was serving 19 years on extremism charges that were widely seen as politically motivated.
Navalny was moved to one of Russia’s toughest penal colonies late last year.
His wife Yulia has appealed to the international community “to help punish this regime”.
The prison service in Russia’s Yamalo-Nenets district where Navalny was being held said he had “felt unwell” after a walk on Friday.
He had “almost immediately lost consciousness”, it said in a statement, adding that an emergency medical team had immediately been called and tried to resuscitate him but without success.
“The emergency doctors declared the prisoner dead. Cause of death is being established.”
Navalny, 47, was last seen only one day before his death, looking well and laughing during a court hearing via video link.
Yulia Navalnaya took to the stage at the Munich Security conference on the verge of tears, with a warning that the news had only come from unreliable state sources.
“But if it’s true, I know Putin, all his allies, all his friends, all his government know they will be held responsible for what they’ve done… and this day will come sooner than you think.”
His mother Lyudmila Navalnaya was quoted as saying: “I don’t want to hear any condolences. We saw him in prison on the 12th [February], in a meeting. He was alive, healthy and happy.”
Navalny’s close aide Leonid Volkov cautioned that there was no way to confirm what had happened but said the prison authorities’ statement amounted to a confession that they had killed him.
Alexei Navalny was seen on Thursday during a court hearing via video link
There was minimal coverage on Russia’s state TV channels, although one report by RT suggested Navalny had suffered a blood clot. But that was ridiculed by Moscow specialist Alexander Polupan, who treated Navalny in the past, who said that kind of diagnosis could only be made from a post-mortem examination.
Within minutes of Navalny’s death being announced by the prison service, the international community hailed the courage of Vladimir Putin’s biggest domestic adversary.
France said he had paid with his life for resisting Russian “oppression”, while Norway’s foreign minister said Russian authorities bore a great responsibility for his death.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Munich that if the reports were accurate “his death in a Russian prison and the fixation and fear of one man only underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built”, adding that “Russia is responsible for this”.
Mr Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said merely that Navalny’s death had been “reported to the president”, who was on a visit to the city of Chelyabinsk. “Medics must somehow figure this out,” Mr Peskov said.
UK Foreign Minister David Cameron said “no-one should be in any doubt about the dreadful nature of Putin’s regime in Russia after what has just happened”.
Most of the Russian president’s critics have fled Russia, but Alexei Navalny returned in January 2021, after months of medical treatment. In August 2020 he was poisoned at the end of a trip to Siberia with a Novichok nerve agent.
His team succeeded in flying him out to Germany for specialist treatment and on his return to Moscow he was immediately taken into custody. He had been accompanied on the flight from Germany by his wife Yulia Navalnaya, embracing her at passport control before being led away.
He would never leave jail again in the next 37 months.
Yulia Navalnaya last saw her husband at liberty at Moscow airport in January 2021
His last Instagram post to his wife two days ago said there were thousands of kilometres between them “but I feel that you are near every second”. He leaves two children, Dasha, who is studying in the US and Zakhar, who is still at school.
Navalny, who was 47, had long sought to challenge Vladimir Putin at the ballot box, but he was barred from running in the 2018 presidential election. Next month, Russia’s leader will stand unchallenged by any meaningful opposition.
Anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin was banned from standing in the election because of supposed irregularities found in the thousands of signatures submitted in support of his candidacy.
Navalny, whose opposition began in the form of an anti-corruption campaign, is the latest in a string of prominent Russian figures who have died while challenging Vladimir Putin’s rule.
Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot dead on a Moscow bridge a stone’s throw from the Kremlin in 2015, and Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in August 2023 in an unexplained plane crash weeks after leading his mercenaries in an armed mutiny.The British Broadcasting Corporation
Yet Navalny repeatedly laughed off his friends’ concerns for his health. He was moved from a penal colony east of Moscow in December and was not seen for weeks until he reappeared in a penal colony in the Arctic town of Kharp.
Navalny said he had been taken on a 20-day trip around Russia, telling reporters during a court appearance by video that his conditions were “much better” than in his previous penal colony in Vladimir.
However, he was repeatedly punished by his prisons with solitary confinement. His spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said last month he had spent more than 280 days in isolation.
Navalny had not been due to leave prison until his 70s, because of his most recent conviction for extremism last August. It was his third jail sentence and supporters accused the Kremlin of trying to silence him for good.
Russian human rights activist and journalist Eva Merkacheva said on Friday that he had been placed in solitary confinement at least 27 times, saying it “could not but play a role” in his death.
In such extreme conditions doctors knew that such punishment was very harmful to the human body, so under the law no-one could be given more than 15 days in isolation, she said.
Navalny, who survived an assassination attempt with a nerve agent in 2020, had been imprisoned since returning to Russia in 2021. He was being held in a Russian jail about 40 miles north of the arctic circle.
🔊 How was his death announced?
A view of the entrance of the Arctic penal colony in Kharp, Russia, where Navalny had been jailed. (AP Photo, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service said in a statement that Navalny lost consciousness and died after taking a walk and could not be resuscitated.
“The facility’s medical staff immediately arrived and an ambulance brigade was called,” the statement said. “All necessary resuscitation measures were taken, which did not lead to positive results. The ambulance doctors confirmed the death of the convict.”
🔎 Who was Alexei Navalny?
Navalny speaks from a prison via a video link in January 2022. (Denis Kaminev/AP) (AP)
Navalny was born on June 4, 1976, near Moscow.
A former lawyer, he rose to prominence in the early 2000s and 2010s for leading nationalist marches and exposing what he called corruption among the Russian elite, describing Kremlin leaders as “crooks and thieves.”
As Reuters put it, Navalny “exposed some of the opulence of the lifestyles of senior officials, using the internet and even drones to illustrate what he described as their vast holdings and luxury property.”
Among them: a palace built on the Black Sea for Putin’s personal use; mansions and yachts used by ex-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev; and “a sex worker who linked a top foreign policy official with a well-known oligarch,” per the Guardian.
🇷🇺 A thorn in Putin’s side
Alexei Navalny, with his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, leads a protest in Moscow in 2013. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Navalny had long been considered Putin’s top political foe. He led protests in Russia against election fraud and government corruption and was arrested and jailed for 15 days in late 2011 for “defying a government official” amid demonstrations against Russia’s parliamentary election.
In 2020, Navalny fell into a coma after a suspected poisoning while on a flight and was evacuated to Germany for treatment. He recovered and in 2021 returned to Russia, where he was promptly arrested on a parole violation charge and sentenced to his first of several jail terms totaling more than 30 years.
🗓️ Navalny’s final days
Navalny appears via a video link from an Arctic prison on Jan. 11. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP) (AP)
In December 2023, Navalny was quietly moved from a prison east of Moscow to a penal colony, nicknamed “Polar Wolf,” in the town of Kharp, some 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow.
The day after Christmas, he posted a string of messages on X joking that he was the “new Santa Claus” and telling his supporters, “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”
📢 An activist until the end
Navalny gives the peace sign during a court appearance in Moscow in February 2021. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP) (AP)
Navalny recently urged Russians to protest against Putin by turning out to vote at noon on election day next month.
“This can be a powerful demonstration of the mood of the country,” Navalny wrote on his Telegram channel, according to Reuters. “This will be a nationwide protest against Putin that takes place near your home. It’s available to everyone, everywhere. Millions will be able to take part. And tens of millions will witness it.”
Putin, the longest-serving Russian leader since Joseph Stalin, is running for a fifth term in office.
Navalny’s last public appearance was Thursday, when he appeared, via video link, to be in good spirits while laughing and cracking jokes during a court hearing.
↘️ Who is Navalny’s wife?
Yulia Navalnaya, wife of Alexei Navalny, speaks in Munich on Friday. (Kai Pfaffenbach/AP) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Yulia Navalnaya, also 47, is a former economist, banker and prominent public figure in Russia, where she is often described as the “first lady” of Putin’s opposition. She and Navalny met in the summer of 1998 in Turkey and were married two years later. They have two children.
On Friday, Navalnaya learned of Navalny’s death Friday in Munich, while attending the Munich Security Conference.
“I don’t know if we should believe the terrible news,” Navalnaya said. “But if it’s true, I want Putin, his entourage, Putin’s friends and his government to know they will be held responsible for what they have done to our country, my family, and my husband. And that day will come very soon.”
The Biden administration’s reaction to Navalny’s death
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Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who are also in Munich, responded to the reports of Navalny’s death Friday.
Harris said the administration was working to confirm his death.
“If confirmed, this would be a further sign of Putin’s brutality,” Harris said. “Whatever story they tell, let us be clear, Russia is responsible.”
“If these reports are accurate, our hearts go out to his wife and to his family,” Blinken said. “Beyond that, his death in a Russian prison and the fixation and fear of one man only underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built. Russia is responsible for this.”
Speaking to reporters at the White House early Friday afternoon, President Biden praised Navalny for his bravery — and put the blame for his death squarely on Putin.
“Make no mistake,” Biden said. “Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death.”
Harris says reports of Navalny’s death are another sign of Putin’s brutality
Priscilla Alvarez, CNN – February 16, 2024
Matthias Schrader/AP
US Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday called reports Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in a Russian prison “terrible news,” and that “Russia is responsible.”
“We’ve all just received reports that Alexey Navalny has died in Russia. This is, of course, terrible news, which we are working to confirm,” Harris said as she began her remarks.
She added, “If confirmed this, would be a further sign of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s brutality. Whatever story they tell, let us be clear: Russia is responsible.”
The Russian prison service said Friday morning that Navalny died. He had been serving multiple lengthy prison sentences for crimes that he had denied. He faced those charges after returning to Russia following treatment in Germany after being poisoned in August 2020. Navalny returned to Russia after that treatment concluded in 2021, and he was quickly arrested.
Navalny had long been a point of contention between the US and Russia. President Joe Biden previously told reporters in 2021 that he warned Putin that the consequences would be “devastating for Russia,” if Navalny died in prison.
It was another high-profile moment for Harris to address the Munich Security Conference Friday amid a consequential moment in US foreign policy, as ongoing conflicts overseas have roiled domestic politics. It came at a delicate time for the White House, which continues to grapple with the fallout of the special counsel report that called into question President Joe Biden’s mental acuity and has placed renewed focus on the vice president.
But it suddenly became an opportunity for Harris to be the most prominent American voice to offer a reaction to the reports of Navalny’s death.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said on NPR earlier Friday that the US was working to confirm Navalny’s death.
“If it’s confirmed, it is a terrible tragedy, and given the Russian government’s long and sordid history of doing harm to its opponents, it raises real and obvious questions about what happened here,” Sullivan said.
The administration had repeatedly called for Navalny’s immediate release, and CNN has reported Biden called for Navalny’s release in his first phone call with Putin after taking office in 2021.
After her opening comment on Navalny, Harris transitioned into her prepared remarks that were meant to reassure American allies over the future of US foreign policy.
Chief among the worries from the US’ top allies is Trump’s statement last weekend that he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that doesn’t meet spending guidelines on defense.
After the Biden administration helped strengthen the bonds of the NATO alliance following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Trump’s statement is sparking real concern that he would not abide by the collective-defense clause at the heart of the alliance if reelected.
During her speech, Harris launched a veiled attack against Trump, describing his foreign policy approach as “dangerous” and issuing a stark warning if the US cedes ground to Russia.
“They suggest it’s in the best interest of the American people to isolate ourselves from the world, to flout common understandings among nations, to embrace dictators, and adopt the repressive tactics and abandon commitments to our allies in favor of unilateral action,” Harris said.
“Let me be clear – that worldview is dangerous, destabilizing and indeed shortsighted,” she said.
Trump had drawn immediate consternation last weekend for saying he would encourage Russia to invade countries who don’t meet their NATO obligations. The comment concerned not only the American foreign policy establishment but from American NATO allies, who have watched warily as Russia proceeds with its invasion of Ukraine. The former president on Wednesday said he wouldn’t defend NATO nations who don’t spend enough on defense but did not repeat his comment about encouraging Russia to do whatever they wante
“I’ve been saying look, if they’re not going to pay, we’re not going to protect, OK. And Biden said, ‘Oh this is so bad, this is so terrible that he would say that.’ No, if they’re not paying their bills, and most of them weren’t when I got there,” Trump said at a campaign event in North Charleston, South Carolina.
Harris maintained Friday that US commitment to NATO remains “ironclad” in the wake of Trump’s comments.
It’s a similar message to the one that has been promoted by her boss this week. Biden took direct aim at his predecessor on Tuesday, pointedly accusing Trump of “bowing down” to Putin in some of his harshest criticism of his likely rival on foreign policy to date.
Trump, Biden claimed, sent a “dangerous and shocking” signal with his comments, delivered during a weekend campaign rally.
Concern is also rising over the ability of Washington to send more aid to Ukraine. For months, the White House’s national security supplemental request that includes billions in funding for Ukraine and Israel, among other priorities, has remained stalled in Congress over GOP infighting.
The White House has repeatedly stressed the need to deliver additional funds to Ukraine, framing it as a matter of national security. Harris will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday.
Harris called Putin’s war in Ukraine an “utter failure” and stressed the consequences of ceding any ground to Russia, reaffirming US support for Ukraine.
“Imagine if America turned our back on Ukraine and abandoned our NATO allies and abandoned our treaty commitments. Imagine if we went easy on Putin. Let alone encouraged him,” Harris said.
“History offers a clue. If we stand by while an aggressor invades its neighbor with impunity, they will keep going. In the case of Putin, that means all of Europe would be threatened. If we fail to impose severe consequences on Russia, other authoritarians across the globe would be emboldened,” Harris said.
This story has been updated with additional developments on Friday.
“First of all, there is no nuclear threat to the people of America or anywhere else in the world with what Russia is doing at the moment, No. 1,” Biden said in remarks from the White House when asked if he was concerned about Russia’s potential anti-satellite capability.
“No. 2, anything they’re doing or they will do relates to satellites in space and damaging those satellites potentially,” he added. “No. 3, there’s no evidence they’ve made a decision to go forward with anything in space either.”
The question came after Biden spoke about the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of being responsible for Navalny’s death in a Siberian prison Friday.
President Joe Biden at the White House on Feb. 16, 2024. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, briefed top House leaders behind closed doors Thursday on Capitol Hill about the Russian threat. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby also confirmed Thursday at the White House briefing that the threat is “related to an anti-satellite capability that Russia is developing.”
“First, this is not an active capability that’s been deployed, and though Russia’s pursuit of this particular capability is troubling, there is no immediate threat to anyone’s safety,” Kirby told reporters. “We are not talking about a weapon that can be used to attack human beings or cause physical destruction here on Earth. That said, we’ve been closely monitoring this Russian activity and we will continue to take it very seriously.”
In response, Biden has directed a series of actions, Kirby said, including additional briefings to members of Congress and direct diplomatic engagement with Russia as well as with U.S. allies and other countries.
A U.S. official and congressional official familiar with the intelligence told NBC News on Thursday that the threat is a Russian nuclear-powered space asset that could be weaponized rather than a nuclear bomb that Russia is trying to send into space. Russia is making headway, although it has not fielded the capability, officials said.
NBC News has reported that arms experts believe the threat is likely a nuclear-powered satellite that might be able to carry a high-powered jammer that could block satellite communications for long periods, according to a 2019 essay in The Space Review, an online publication, that was widely shared among experts following this week’s news.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov characterized the U.S. information as a “malicious fabrication,” according to Russian state-run news agency Tass.
Information about the threat surfaced after House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio, released a cryptic statement Wednesday that called on the White House to declassify information about an unnamed “serious national security threat.”
Sullivan later said he had already planned on briefing top leaders in the House on Thursday.
Trump has one trick up his sleeve to dodge crushing NY fraud judgment
Thomas G. Moukawsher – February 16, 2024
Donald Trump Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Donald Trump’s whole life has prepared him, not for the presidency, but for this moment—beset by lawsuits and criminal charges in court. Some calculations show he filed over 3,500 lawsuits over the years. He knows the vulnerabilities of our legal system and is having no trouble exploiting them.
He hasn’t needed much help in Florida. He appears to have a willing ally in Judge Aileen Cannon in the secret documents case who, so far, has either ruled in Trump’s favor or, in ruling against him, has left the door open to giving Trump what he wants later. What Trump wants is delay. Judge Cannon is likely to give it to him.
In Washington, Trump claims that he is so immune from criminal responsibility that he could have used Seal Team Six to assassinate his political opponents without consequences. Trump has bought himself time with this issue, including asking for more time to petition the Supreme Court. If he fails on this issue, you can expect a series of other claims—each one holding things up.
In Georgia, Trump’s seedy collaboration with the National Enquirer has combined with his connoisseurship of the courtroom to deliver us a Jerry Springer Show moment with Trump and his allies examining the love life of District Attorney Fani Willis on live television. Once again, Trump has come out a winner, smothering the main event and making Willis, Judge Scott McAfee, and the judicial system look ridiculous.
And most ridiculous of all, the first criminal case against Trump going to trial is the case about his payoff to a porn star. Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg claims Trump falsified business records and disguised a campaign contribution by paying hush money about an affair. More silliness, more salaciousness. More distraction from what matters: the allegation that Donald Trump, president of the United States, attempted by fraud, coercion, and a violent attack on the United States Capitol to overthrow the democratically elected government of our country.
And if you think Trump at least faced the music in his New York civil fraud case with Justice Arthur Engoron’s ruling ordering Trump to pay $355 million in penalties, think again. The case is far from over. Trump will stall the case, diddle the docket, drag out the appeal, appeal from the appeals court, and, if he becomes cornered resort to another trick he has considerable experience with—he will declare bankruptcy.
It doesn’t have to be this way, but deeply engrained formalism in court plays right into Trump’s hands. When in doubt, judges delay. When there is a claim, however frivolous and intentionally dilatory, it must receive the same slow service as every other claim at the courthouse window. While the idea of due process is the constitutional promise of a meaningful hearing at a meaningful time, too many judges prefer the appearance of fairness that long delays promise but don’t deliver. Too many times, justice delayed is justice denied, but judges in our contemporary system simply aren’t set up to do it any other way, and Trump and other courthouse cognoscenti know how to exploit it.
Instead of exalting form over substance, courts should recognize the humanism of legal dilemmas and focus on it. That is, every case in court has a human heart. A value against lying, cheating, stealing, violence or what have you is in play and the fate of real people are on the line. When the parties’ claims and not the process is the focus, courts can push aside obstacles and achieve substantial justice. Parties can be ordered to make all their legal challenges to a case at the same time to keep them from dribbling out and causing long delays. Judge McAfee should have ruled on whether a hypothetical relationship between prosecutors would have anything to do with Donald Trump before allowing a circus about it. The upper courts should see Donald Trump coming and rule fairly and quickly on his claims in New York. The courts should try Trump’s attempted takedown of democracy before they put on a show about a payoff to a porn star.
American courts are in the spotlight. Trump’s opponents can be grateful that he may face justice someday, but not one of the cases against him will be over before the election.
“Trump is out of money”: Republicans fear Trump will drain RNC funds to pay his own legal bills
Tatyana Tandanpolie – February 15, 2024
Lara Trump NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images
A crop of senior GOP officials fear that Donald Trump‘s effort to pack the Republican National Committee with his preferred picks could give way to the former president using the RNC to cover his legal bills — again. Their worries come on the heels of Trump’s endorsements earlier this week of his daughter-in-law, among other allies, to assume leadership roles at the committee. “While those endorsements have been well-received by many committee members — who note that it is customary for a presidential candidate to put his imprint on the party’s main campaign apparatus — others fear a potential misallocation of party resources,” Politico reports.
Henry Barbour, a Mississippi committee member, told the outlet that he thinks “most RNC members will go along” with Trump’s committee lineup “unless there is a play to use RNC funds for President Trump’s legal bills.” Another member who has been critical of the former president, Oscar Brock, told Politico that the RNC’s recently passed budget did not allot any money for Trump’s legal fees. Brock did recognize, however, the potential for the committee to reconfigure its financial plan to do so upon request, which the Tennessee committeeman said he’d be against. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for the committee to pay the legal bills for things done outside the work of the committee,” Brock told Politico.
Chris LaCivita, a senior Trump campaign strategist, called the concerns about the committee paying Trump’s legal fees “manufactured.” Instead, the money would come from other avenues, including Trump’s Save America PAC and his own pocket, senior campaign advisors told Politico. In 2021 and 2022, the RNC forked over nearly $2 million to two legal firms working on the former president’s cases but stopped once Trump launched his current presidential campaign. It will still have a legal fund intended to handle lawsuits, recount efforts and typical legal business for the party.
Lara Trump this week vowed that “every penny” at the RNC would go toward helping Trump.
Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that Trump is on pace to drain his war chest for his legal fees this summer after already spending more than $50 million on legal bills.
“Trump is out of money which is why he is going hard at Ronna Romney so he can take over the RNC treasury,” tweeted former Trump White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci.
New documents underscore why the Supreme Court must let Jack Smith’s Trump case move forward
Amanda Marcotte – February 14, 2024
Jack Smith; US Supreme Court Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images
Despite taking their own sweet time to render what should have been a five-minute decision ruling that Donald Trump is not immune from criminal prosecution, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals did do Americans one big favor: They removed most of Trump’s avenues to continue delaying what has become known as the “January 6” criminal case against him. I’ll spare readers the tedium of recounting the legal maneuvering that was avoided, and sum it up as this: The court gave Trump a Monday deadline to appeal to the Supreme Court. He, as usual, put it off until the last minute but did indeed make that appeal by the end of the day.
Now there is only one question: Will the six Republican justices on the court sabotage the case brought by special prosecutor Jack Smith?
Almost no legal experts think that the justices, despite being partisan hacks, will humiliate themselves by upholding Trump’s asinine claims of total license to commit as many crimes as he wishes. But, as Ian Millhiser at Vox explains, “the Court could simply sit on his request for a very long time without taking any action on it.” Doing so would destroy the chance that Trump’s criminal trial for his attempted coup would occur this year. If he wins the election, it would destroy the case completely. There is no doubt that Trump would appoint a corrupt crony to head the Justice Department, and that stooge would kill the case.
On the same day that Trump filed his appeal, Talking Points Memo released a blockbuster report that underscores what a devastating blow to democracy it would be if the Supreme Court derailed this criminal case against Trump. As Josh Kovensky writes, Kenneth Chesebro, one of the unindicted (so far) co-conspirators in Smith’s D.C. case, provided “a trove of documents” to Michigan prosecutors as part of a cooperation agreement to avoid charges of efforts to steal the election in that state. (Chesebro has already pled guilty in a similar case in Georgia.) The documents show how Trump and his conspirators hatched a plan to steal the election by interrupting, delaying, filibustering or otherwise blocking the congressional certification of electoral votes. The idea was to sow chaos for days, if not weeks, in hopes the Supreme Court would step in and simply nullify the election, declaring Trump president.
The full plan never came to fruition, in large part because the conspirators didn’t get enough buy-in from then-Vice President Mike Pence and other key Republican leaders to pull it off. But the documents are a chilling reminder that the violence of the Capitol insurrection was just a small part of what was a vast, sweeping conspiracy to steal the 2020 election from President Joe Biden and the voters who elected him. This matters, because “January 6” has become a shorthand for an attempted coup that, in actuality, lasted for two months and across multiple states. No doubt, the Capitol riot was the flashiest part of this effort. But there’s a real danger that the violence that day is eclipsing the public’s understanding of all the events — and crimes — that led up to QAnon idiots storming the Capitol.
Worse, focusing on the Capitol riot at the expense of talking about Trump’s larger attempted coup allows Republicans to gaslight voters about how serious Trump’s efforts to overthrow democracy really were. One of the favorite tactics of Republicans is to pretend the riot was just a protest that got “out of hand” and deny that Trump was deliberately instigating it with his “fight like hell” speech.
That lie is harder to pull off when one looks at the larger context. Trump and his conspirators had been plotting for months to derail the electoral vote count, creating what they hoped would be a pretext to nullify the election. The attack on the Capitol was part of this larger plan. That’s why it’s ridiculous to pretend Trump didn’t deliberately instigate the riot. Taken together with all his other actions to derail the electoral vote-counting, it’s clear that the riot was part of the larger scheme to keep the election from being certified.
It’s worth revisiting the indictments that Smith filed against Trump last summer. While journalists tend to call this the “January 6” case, the indicting document refers to a conspiracy that stretched from “November 14, 2020 through on or about January 20, 2021.” The evidence is extensive, but only a fraction of it involves the efforts to bring followers to the Capitol to be foot soldiers in the insurrection. Mostly it’s about the various efforts to persuade officials on all levels of government to certify fraudulent electors in the place of the real ones, or to fabricate enough votes for Trump to throw the election, or to get the Justice Department to declare the election fraudulent as a pretext to throw out the results. It’s only when all that failed that Trump turned to violence to create the chaos that Chesebro and his associates thought could be used as cover to declare Trump the victor.
It’s crucial that Smith get to present this evidence to a jury — and to the nation — before the election, and ideally, before the official party nominations are secured at the conventions this summer. Republican voters will probably pick Trump as their nominee anyway, but it’s only fair that they have a chance to be reminded of how central he was to his own coup before they decide to move forward. Trump is more than a guy who gave an ill-advised speech on a single day. He spent every day for weeks scheming to overthrow democracy. Voters really are owed a full accounting of the attempted coup, and not this reductive view that it was just one bad day at the Capitol on January 6.
The new Chesebro documents are a strong reminder that the plot to steal the election really hinged on whether the Supreme Court would, as Trump hoped, use the Trump-created chaos as an excuse to simply declare the election null and claim Trump can retain power indefinitely. There’s some reason to believe the justices, like Pence, wouldn’t have played along it if came to that, because they knocked down Trump’s other lawsuits asking for the courts to nullify the election.
But if they slow-walk this case so that Smith doesn’t get to try it before this year, the court has proved themselves just as corrupt as Trump believed them to be when he asked them to steal an election for him. The case presented to them is a lay-up. There’s no legitimate cause to argue that Trump gets forever immunity for his crimes. All they need to do is put out a one-sentence response upholding the D.C. opinion. That can be done this week. Frankly, that could have been done within minutes of Trump filing his appeal. It’s rare that matters of law are as black-and-white as this, but here we are. If the Supreme Court slow-walks this, the only reason would be to help a man who tried to overthrow the government get away with his crimes.
