Instead of passing a law with President Biden to crack down on illegal crossings of the U.S.-Mexico border, Republicans in Congress are moving quickly to impeach the Cabinet official who oversees it.
This is a highly political act that won’t help the border crisis, and even some conservative legal scholars and Republican senators are skeptical of doing this. Here’s what’s going on and how it’s tied to the broader immigration battle that is dominating U.S. politics right now.
Why so many migrants are coming: More than 6 million migrants have come to the border under the Biden administration; 2.3 million have been released into the country. There’s a debate about whether it’s in reaction to economic forces outside of politicians’ control, or whether migrants are reacting to having a more lenient president in office.
As the U.S. economy recovers more quickly than most nations after the pandemic, there’s a huge labor demand in the United States right now.
But fairly or not, migrants across the globe have also perceived Biden as more willing to let people in than President Donald Trump was.
Those who are desperate enough to leave their homes probably won’t be deterred by policy changes in Washington, argues Cris Ramón, a senior adviser on immigration for UnidosUS, a Hispanic civil rights group. “Once someone makes it across the border, if they’re not expelled … there is a pretty good chance they will be able to stay in the United States at least for several years,” immigration analyst Jessica Bolter said in an interview last year.
What Biden has done at the border: In many significant ways, the president has softened Trump’s immigration and border policies. His administration has cut way back on deporting people who are already in the country illegally, and created more legal pathways for them. Biden also stopped building the wall Trump started, stopped detaining families at the border and stopped deporting minors.
But Biden has also been somewhat Trump-like recently in his approach to migrants. He said the border is not secure, and he is being sued by immigration rights groups for making it harder for people to apply for asylum.
Why Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is on his way to getting impeached: Republicans say he lied to Congress or has mishandled the border crisis. But the reality is that they disagree with the president’s border policies, and Mayorkas is the guy carrying them out.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in November on Capitol Hill. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Congress has the power to impeach presidents, judges and Cabinet officials. But Cabinet officials are rarely impeached because they are often just implementing the president’s policies. “I think it’s the first time an impeachment drive over policy disagreements has gotten this far,” said Josh Chafetz, a constitutional law expert at Georgetown University.
Having committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” is the bar for impeachment of a federal official. By the assessment of even top conservative legal experts, Republicans have not met that threshold. “Bad policy is not a high crime,” writes conservative legal scholar Jonathan Turley.
Politics is playing a huge role: It’s good politics right now for any politician to sound tough about the border. Really tough. Trump is on his way to winning the Republican nomination by demonizing immigrants, saying they are “poisoning the blood of our country.”Biden campaigned four years ago on a more humane approach to the border. But as border crossings surge to record highs, he says the government should be able to block migrants from entering if the border becomes “overwhelmed” — which is what a bipartisan bill being negotiated in the Senate right now would do.“If given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law,” Biden said last week.
Why Biden says the border is a problem: Biden and Republicans say the huge rush of migrants has opened up the border to dangerous people sneaking through — although Trump takes much more liberty by categorizing all border crossers as dangerous. Most are people escaping danger and economic hardship back home. And the vast majority of convicted fentanyl traffickers have been U.S. citizens, said Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration analyst with the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.
The real-world impact of impeaching Mayorkas is minimal: House Republicans will vote next week to impeach him. But he’ll still get to keep his job. The Democratic-controlled Senate is highly unlikely to convict him.But through all of this, Republicans are weaponizing immigration to break the norms of democracy. They are voting to impeach Mayorkas over policy disagreements rather than actual “high crimes and misdemeanors.”It raises the question of what’s to come next in this increasingly heated election-year battle over immigration.
Ukraine Needs American Weapons, Not More GOP Drama
The GOP’s moral collapse threatens global security.
By Tom Nichols – January 31, 2024
Anadolu / Getty
Republicans need to recover their senses about the dire moral and strategic tests Ukraine and the West face in Europe.
A Test of Will and Commitment
Wars test people and weapons on a battlefield, but eventual victory rests on much more than combat. Wars also stress-test political institutions, ideas, and the courage of entire societies. At this moment, the United States is on the verge of failing a challenge of will and commitment, much to the delight of the neo-fascist Russian regime that has turned Ukraine’s fields and homes into an immense abattoir. President Joe Biden, most of NATO, and many other nations recognize the crisis, but the world could face a Russian victory—and an eventual escalation of Russian aggression against Europe—solely because of the ongoing drama and inane bickering within the Republican Party.
The GOP, the party of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, once supported the bipartisan American understanding that U.S. leadership in the world was both a strategic and a moral imperative, especially in the great struggle with the Soviet Union. Reagan, however, supercharged the idea of the Cold War as a moral crusade. When he talked about the need for the West to oppose an “evil empire,” he meant it—and as we found out years later, his words stung Soviet leaders. As one adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev later admitted, Reagan’s rhetorical attack did not change much at the very top in the Kremlin, but for many of the people who worked in Soviet foreign-policy circles, “this term and this propaganda was perceived as punishment for what we did in Afghanistan. In other words, we felt that we deserved it.”
Soviet leaders deserved it then and Russian leaders deserve it now. Reagan’s detractors will point to his policies in Central America and elsewhere as examples of what can happen when righteous fixation on noble ends leads to the justification of bloody and repulsive means. But Reagan—like Jimmy Carter before him—was right to view opposition to the Kremlin as both strategically necessary and morally just, as it is again today. Biden’s policy of steadfast support for Ukraine wisely continues that tradition.
(One of Carter’s speechwriters told me years ago that, as you might expect, Carter never liked being compared to Reagan. But Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was as much a Cold War hawk as almost anyone in the Reagan administration, and Carter infuriated the Soviets so badly that by 1980 the Kremlin, according to the former Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, was rooting for Reagan to win because it thought Carter and Brzezinski were so dangerously bellicose.)
Reagan understood the Cold War as a moral issue, but today’s GOP is incapable of understanding anything as a moral issue. Indeed, the Republican Party is defined now almost entirely by its dedication to a cult of personality, the relentless quest for raw power, and the ongoing effort to institutionalize minority rule. It functions not as a political party but as an amoral claque whose members are dedicated only to their mutual protection.
Ukraine, of course, is an object of special hostility for Republicans because that besieged nation is inextricably bound up in Trump’s first impeachment. Some in the GOP also admire Russian President Vladimir Putin; Trump speaks of the Kremlin dictator in terms that would have made Reagan furious and disgusted. But nothing, it seems, can get through the Republican deflector shields powered by two of the strongest forces in the world: resentment and self-interest.
Money to help Ukraine is, for now, still tied to legislation regarding the situation on the U.S. southern border, but Biden has already surrendered on that issue: He said on Saturday that, if Congress sent him the bill that Republicans have been working on, “I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly.” (He is also cleverly using his legal authority to send surplus American weapons to allies—in this case, Greece—who can use these surplus U.S. arms to replenish their stocks while they send their older weapons to Ukraine.) But Republicans aren’t interested in fixing the border or helping Ukraine—not if any of it helps Joe Biden, a detestable position that abandons millions of people to slaughter under Russian guns simply for the sake of good press from the GOP’s infotainment system.
To their credit, some Republicans are trying to do the right thing. I was critical of Oklahoma Senator James Lankford on Monday for answering a question about Trump’s fitness to be president with a mouthful of mush that was, if I may paraphrase a Bible verse I’m sure the senator knows well, neither hot nor cold but lukewarm. But when it comes to the border and Ukraine, Lankford (along with some of his Senate GOP colleagues) is on the right side of both policy and history.
What, however, does a GOP senator gain by being on the right side of anything? In Lankford’s case, it earned him censure from his own state’s Republican Party. For others, it means facing an electorate that is now being flooded with news about Deep State Agent Taylor Swift instead of whether America and Europe can hold back a savage—and nuclear-armed—enemy.
The Republicans now wallowing in conspiracy weirdness and jumping at Trump’s commands are risking a mistake, in the words of CIA Director William Burns, “of historic proportions.” As the GOP plays games, the Russians continue blowing apart homes and shredding human beings, including their own hapless conscripts. The killing goes on every day, driven by a cruel and petty paranoid in Moscow and supported by a coterie of cowards who issue unhinged threats from behind the safety of the Kremlin’s walls.
Changes are afoot in the Ukrainian high command; TheWashington Post reported today that the top Ukrainian commander, General Valery Zaluzhny, is about to be replaced because of his ongoing disagreements with President Volodymyr Zelensky about strategy, mobilization, and other issues. Such moments, as retired Australian Major General Mick Ryan explained in a cogent thread on X yesterday, are a normal part of the civil-military tensions that inevitably arise in wartime.
Some Republicans, driven by their hatred of Zelensky, will no doubt seize on any news from Kyiv as an excuse to hold back aid, but the Ukrainians don’t need more drama from the self-absorbed GOP. They need brave and clear-eyed friends in the West who understand what is at stake, both for the security of the world and the defense of freedom. They need more than our good wishes: They need ammunition, and they need it now.
Rock band critical of Putin is detained in Thailand, fearful of deportation to Russia
Grant Pecku – January 30, 2024
FILE – Aleksandr “Shura” Uman, left, and Yegor “Lyova” Bortnik perform during the Bi-2 rock band concert in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Dec. 1, 2011. Members of a rock band that has been critical of Moscow’s war in Ukraine remain locked up in a Thai immigration jail, fearful that they could be deported to Russia as a reported plan to let them fly to safety in Israel was apparently suspended. (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)More
BANGKOK (AP) — Members of a rock band that has been critical of Moscow’s war in Ukraine remained locked up Tuesday in a Thai immigration jail, fearful that they could be deported to Russia as a reported plan to let them fly to safety in Israel was apparently suspended.
The progressive rock band Bi-2 said on Facebook that it had information that intervention from Russian diplomats caused the plan to be scuttled, even though tickets had already been purchased for their flight.
“The group participants remain detained at the immigration center in a shared cell with 80 people,” the post said. It said they declined to meet with the Russian consul. The Russian press agency RIA Novosti said the refusal was confirmed by Ilya Ilyin, head of the Russian Embassy’s consular section.
The group later said on the Telegram messaging app that its singer Yegor Bortnik, whose stage name is Lyova, was at the airport awaiting a flight to Israel but the other members remained in the jail.
The seven band members were arrested last Thursday after playing a concert on the southern resort island of Phuket, reportedly for not having proper working papers. On Facebook, they said all their concerts “are held in accordance with local laws and practices.” Phuket is a popular destination for Russian expats and tourists. After paying a fine, the band members were sent to the Immigration Detention Center in Bangkok.
The detained musicians “include Russian citizens as well as dual nationals of Russia and other countries, including Israel and Australia,” the group Human Rights Watch said in a statement Tuesday. Those holding only Russian citizenship are thought to be most at risk.
“The Thai authorities should immediately release the detained members of Bi-2 and allow them to go on their way,” said Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Under no circumstances should they be deported to Russia, where they could face arrest or worse for their outspoken criticisms of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s war in Ukraine.”
“It is not known if the Russian authorities have sought the band members’ forcible return to Russia,” Human Rights Watch said. “However, amid repression in Russia reaching new heights, Russian authorities have used transnational repression — abuses committed against nationals beyond a government’s jurisdiction — to target activists and government critics abroad with violence and other unlawful actions.”
Self-exiled Russian opposition politician and a friend of Bi-2, Dmitry Gudkov, told the AP that he had been in touch with lawyers and diplomats in an attempt to secure the band’s release and suggested that pressure to detain and deport them came directly from the Kremlin and the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Russia, Gudkov said, needs an “evocative story to show that they will catch any critic abroad. This is all happening in the run-up to (Russia’s presidential election), and it’s clear that they want to shut everyone up, and that’s why there’s intense pressure going on.”
Russia’s ambassador to Thailand Yevgeny Tomikhin said Russian diplomats were not responsible for the group’s detention.
“It’s not our practice to dictate to anyone. Americans can do this. We don’t behave like that and don’t make such requests,” Tomikhin was quoted as telling the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.
There have been no public statements from Thai officials on the situation.
Bi-2 has 1.01 million subscribers to its YouTube channel and 376,000 monthly listeners on Spotify.
Andrei Lugovoi, a member of the lower house of Russia’s parliament, called the band members “scum” for their criticism of Russia’s military operations in Ukraine.
“Let the guys get ready: soon they will be playing and singing on spoons and on metal plates, tap dancing in front of their cellmates,” Lugovoi said on Telegram. “Personally, I would be very happy to see this.”
Britain has accused Lugovoi of involvement in the death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London in 2006 after being poisoned with tea laced with radioactive polonium-210.
Associated Press writers Emma Burrows and Jim Heintz in Tallinn, Estonia, contributed.
‘Smoking gun proof’: fossil fuel industry knew of climate danger as early as 1954, documents show
Oliver Milman – January 30, 2024
Composite: The Guardian/Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego/Lyndon B Johnson Library
The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called “Keeling curve” that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels.
A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.
Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This “Keeling curve” has tracked the steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.
The fossil fuel interests backed a group, known as the Air Pollution Foundation, that issued funding to Keeling to measure CO2 alongside a related effort to research the smog that regularly blighted Los Angeles at the time. This is earlier than any previously known climate research funded by oil companies.
In the research proposal for the money – uncovered by Rebecca John, a researcher at the Climate Investigations Center, and published by the climate website DeSmog – Keeling’s research director, Samuel Epstein, wrote about a new carbon isotope analysis that could identify “changes in the atmosphere” caused by the burning of coal and petroleum.
“The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization,” Epstein, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology (or Caltech), wrote to the group in November 1954.
Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the severe harm climate change will wreak, only to then publicly deny this science for decades and fund ongoing efforts to delay action on the climate crisis.
“They contain smoking gun proof that by at least 1954, the fossil fuel industry was on notice about the potential for its products to disrupt Earth’s climate on a scale significant to human civilization,” said Geoffrey Supran, an expert in historic climate disinformation at the University of Miami.
“These findings are a startling confirmation that big oil has had its finger on the pulse of academic climate science for 70 years – for twice my lifetime – and a reminder that it continues to do so to this day. They make a mockery of the oil industry’s denial of basic climate science decades later.”
Previous investigations of public and private records have found that major oil companies spent decades conducting their own research into the consequences of burning their product, often to an uncannily accurate degree – a study last year found that Exxon scientists made “breathtakingly” accurate predictions of global heating in the 1970s and 1980s.
The newly discovered documents now show the industry knew of CO2’s potential climate impact as early as 1954 via, strikingly, the work of Keeling, then a 26-year-old Caltech researcher conducting formative work measuring CO2 levels across California and the waters of the Pacific ocean. There is no suggestion that oil and gas funding distorted his research in any way.
The findings of this work would lead the US scientist to further experiments upon the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii that were to provide a continual status report of the world’s dangerously-rising carbon dioxide composition.
Keeling died in 2005 but his seminal work lives on. Currently, the Earth’s atmospheric CO2 level is 422 parts per million, which is nearly a third higher than the first reading taken in 1958, and a 50% jump on pre-industrial levels.
A total of 18 automotive companies, including Ford, Chrysler and General Motors, gave money to the foundation. Other entities, including banks and retailers, also contributed funding.
Separately, a 1959 memo identifies the American Petroleum Institute (API), the US’s leading oil and gas lobbying body, and the Western Oil and Gas Association, now known as the Western States Petroleum Association, as “major contributors to the funds of the Air Pollution Foundation”. It’s not clear exactly when API started funding the foundation but it had a representative on a research committee from mid-1955 onwards.
A policy statement of the Air Pollution Foundation from 1955 calls the problem of air pollution, which is caused by the emissions of cars, trucks and industrial facilities, “one of the most serious confronting urban areas in California and elsewhere” and that the issue will be addressed via “diligent and honest fact finding, by wise and effective action”.
The unearthed documents come from the Caltech archives, the US National Archives, the University of California at San Diego and Los Angeles newspapers from the 1950s, and represent what may be the first instance of the fossil fuel industry being informed of the potentially dire consequences of its business model.
The oil and gas industry was initially concerned with research related to smog and other direct air pollutants before branching out into related climate change impacts, according to Carroll Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International Environmental Law.
“You just come back to the oil and gas industry again and again, they were omnipresent in this space,” he said. “The industry was not just on notice but deeply aware of the potential climate implications of its products for going on 70 years.”
Muffett said the documents add further impetus to efforts in various jurisdictions to hold oil and gas firms legally liable for the damages caused by the climate crisis.
“These documents talk about CO2 emissions having planetary implications, meaning this industry understood extraordinarily early on that fossil fuel combustion was profound on a planetary scale,” he said.
“There is overwhelming evidence the oil and gas industry has been misleading the public and regulators around the climate risks of their product for 70 years. Trusting them to be part of the solutions is foolhardy. We’ve now moved into an era of accountability.”
API and Ralph Keeling, Charles’s son who is also a scientist, were contacted for comment about the documents but did not respond.
Iconic lake once known for its crystal-clear waters is on the verge of extinction: ‘The damage done … cannot be compensated’
Jeremiah Budin – January 30, 2024
Anchar Lake, located in the Kashmir region, is on the verge of disappearing entirely, despite calls for action from environmentalists that have been going unheeded for more than a decade.
What is happening?
Once a major tourist destination, Anchar Lake has fallen victim to the same forces that have negatively impacted so many bodies of water and parts of nature throughout the world — pollution, overdevelopment, and governments that prioritize protecting profits over the environment.
“The lake was once a beautiful tourist attraction, but over the past many years, it has turned into a polluted wasteland,” one nearby resident told Rising Kashmir.
Why is this concerning?
A century ago, the lake encompassed 7.5 square miles. Today, it has been reduced to 2.6 square miles, with more than half of that area comprised of marshland. Contributing factors include unregulated development around the area that has pushed silt and sediment into the lake.
Improper sewage and drainage systems have filtered waste into the lake, making its waters toxic and inhospitable to the bird and fish species that once thrived there.
“The lake is under tremendous anthropogenic pressures, which have resulted in deterioration of its water quality. The entire liquid and solid wastes generated on the peripheral areas situated at higher contours where people live find its way into the lake. Even the agricultural waste of the above area is disposed of in it,” Ajaz Rasool, an environmentalist and hydraulic engineer, told Greater Kashmir.
What is being done about it?
Greater Kashmir laid out several steps that need to be taken to ensure that Anchar Lake does not become extinct, which would be devastating for local wildlife that has already seen its habitat harmed dramatically.
These steps include officially making the conservation of the lake the responsibility of the Lake Conservation and Management Authority, erecting fences around the area to prevent further development and encroachment, plugging drains that filter waste into the lake, and rebuilding the sewage system.
“It is the responsibility of the Government and people to join hands to restore the glory of Anchar, as both are responsible for its deterioration. Damage done to the environment is irreparable and cannot be compensated in any form,” the piece concluded.
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Trump Was Accused of Calling Fallen US Soldiers ‘Suckers’ and ‘Losers.’ We Examined the Evidence
Nur Ibrahim – January 30, 2024
Liam Enea/Wikimedia Commons
In January 2024, U.S. President Joe Bidencalled former President Donald Trump a “loser,” resurrecting a years-old accusation against Trump that allegedly revealed his true opinion of U.S. military service members. According to alleged eyewitnesses, Trump had called veterans and fallen U.S. soldiers “suckers” and “losers.”
At about the same time, a liberal veterans group launched an advertisement targeting Trump over those alleged past comments. In the ad, a mother who lost her son to war said, “My son is not a loser.”
Trump and his allies have denied the accusation since it first emerged in 2020, shortly before the election between Trump and Biden. Whether performative or authentic, Trump’s apparent support for soldiers in the U.S. military, both active and veteran members, has been part of his presidential campaigns.
Following a story by The Atlantic, a number of reputable news outlets reported on the alleged comments in 2020, relying entirely on anonymous sources from his administration.
However, there appeared to be no evidence of an audio or video recording of the remarks in question, nor was there any documentation, such as transcripts or presidential notes, to independently confirm or deny the alleged quotes’ authenticity. Moreover, since Snopes did not witness the in-question comments firsthand, we can’t say for certain whether Trump called fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers.”
We reached out to Trump’s representatives to see if they had any supplemental evidence to help substantiate their denial, as well as for a response to renewed attention on the comments in 2023. We will update this story when, or if, we receive a response.
How the Accusations Emerged
Citing anonymous officials from the administration, the 2020 article by The Atlantic, titled, “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’,” unpacked Trump’s trip to Paris in 2018 when he allegedly did not want to visit a cemetery of American war dead. The visit was cancelled.
Trump did not want to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery — which is home to the graves of Americans who fought and died in World War I — for two reasons, according to The Atlantic: He feared the rain would dishevel his hair, and “because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day.” The Atlantic continued (emphasis ours):
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
Shortly after the publication of The Atlantic report, one unnamed senior official with the U.S. Department of Defense and one senior U.S. Marine Corps officer confirmed the 2018 cemetery remarks from the above report in interviews with The Associated Press (AP). According to the AP, the official had firsthand knowledge of Trump’s remarks, and the officer had been told about them.
Trump Allies Deny the Claims
The White House blamed the canceled cemetery visit on poor weather. Responding to The Atlantic’s reporting, Trump said the accusation was “a disgraceful situation” by a “terrible magazine.”
Trump strongly denied calling fallen soldiers “losers” and “suckers.” Speaking to reporters on Sept. 3, 2020, upon returning from a campaign rally to Washington, D.C., just after the report came out, Trump said: “I would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes. There is nobody that respects them more. No animal — nobody — what animal would say such a thing?”
Just days later, Zach Fuentes, a former White House aide who left the administration in early 2019 and was with the president on the Paris trip and presumably near him during the in-question conversations about the cemetery visit, stood up for Trump in an interview with Breitbart.
Referring to Gen. John Kelly, who was with Trump during the trip as his chief of staff, he said, “I did not hear POTUS call anyone losers when I told him about the weather. Honestly, do you think General Kelly would have stood by and let ANYONE call fallen Marines losers?”
Reporting on Fuentes’ interview with Breitbart, The Washington Post noted that the phrase “I did not hear…” is not the same as “it didn’t happen.” Furthermore, there was no evidence of Kelly being around Trump to hear the alleged comments.
Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, who said he was on the trip, also issued a denial to Fox News, days after the article came out, saying it was “simply false.”
Then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also denied the claims in an interview with Fox News in September 2020. He said, “I was with him for a good part of that trip, if I’m thinking about this visit and the timing right, and I never heard him use the words that are described in that article. Just, I never saw it.”
How the Claims Resurfaced in 2023
On Oct. 2, 2023, Biden’s official account on X resurfaced the accusation, saying Trump once allegedly “referred to American service members as ‘suckers’ and ‘losers.'” The post (displayed above) included video footage of Biden speaking at a September 2023 event to honor the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, who was a military veteran and prisoner of war. (In that speech, Biden referenced the 2020 story by The Atlantic.)
The day after Biden’s post on X, Kelly repeated the claim, as well. Speaking to CNN story, he said (emphasis, ours):
What can I add that has not already been said? A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.‘ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.
In other words, Kelly, who was with Trump in Paris, confirmed that Trump did call American troops “losers” and “suckers,” though it was unclear whether he witnessed the comments firsthand or heard about them from someone else, or from news reports. (The 2020 Atlantic story detailed a separate incident of Trump visiting the grave of Kelly’s son who was killed in action in Afghanistan, for which Kelly was supposedly present. In that case, Trump allegedly asked of military personnel who volunteered to join the service, “What was in it for them?”)
Responding to the CNN interview, a Trump official issued a statement to CNN, saying, “John Kelly has totally clowned himself with these debunked stories he’s made up because he didn’t serve his president well while working as chief of staff.”
In addition to the alleged statements about service members generally, Trump has publicly insulted McCain, in particular, by calling him “not a war hero,” and “I like people who weren’t captured,” according to footage on C-SPAN. Also, for The Atlantic story, anonymous sources said he called former President George H.W. Bush a “loser” for getting shot down by the Japanese while a Navy pilot during World War II.
In sum, the claim stemmed from a story by The Atlantic, which relied on anonymous, second-hand reports of Trump’s alleged words; there was no independent footage or documented proof to substantiate the in-question comments; and Trump vehemently denies that he once called service members “losers” and “suckers.” While it was certainly possible that he said those things, Snopes was unable to independently verify the claim.
Sources:
Baker, Peter, and Maggie Haberman. “Trump Faces Uproar Over Reported Remarks Disparaging Fallen Soldiers.” The New York Times, 4 Sept. 2020. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/us/politics/trump-veterans-losers.html. Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.
Blake, Aaron. “Analysis | What Trump Officials Really Say — and Don’t Say — in Denying That He Disparaged Fallen Troops.” Washington Post, 8 Sept. 2020. www.washingtonpost.com, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/08/trump-officials-military-disparagement-denials/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.
Goldberg, Jeffrey. “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.'” The Atlantic, 3 Sept. 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.
Mason, Jeff, et al. “Biden Warns Trump, ‘MAGA’ Movement Threaten American Democracy.” Reuters, 29 Sept. 2023. www.reuters.com, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-warn-threat-democracy-trump-honor-mccain-2023-09-28/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.
“Report: Trump Disparaged US War Dead as ‘Losers,’ ‘Suckers.'” AP News, 4 Sept. 2020, https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-ap-top-news-politics-b823f2c285641a4a09a96a0b195636ed. Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.
Tapper, Jake. “Exclusive: John Kelly Goes on the Record to Confirm Several Disturbing Stories about Trump | CNN Politics.” CNN, 2 Oct. 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/02/politics/john-kelly-donald-trump-us-service-members-veterans/index.html. Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.
“Trump: “He’s a War Hero Because He Was Captured. I like People That Weren’t Captured.”” C-SPAN. www.youtube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=541Cg2Jnb8s. Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.
In Biden’s pledge to ‘shut down’ border, a stunning political shift
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN – January 29, 2024
President Joe Biden’s evolution on the key election issue of immigration entered a new phase when he promised to “shut down the border right now” if given new powers by Congress.
The deeper policy context of the comments, delivered at a campaign event in South Carolina Saturday and in a statement from the White House on Friday, is that Biden wants to resuscitate a bipartisan deal to pair new border powers with additional military aid for Ukraine and Israel.
But the Trump-like rhetoric from the Democratic president – and the fact that Democrats are not even talking about a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants currently in the country – is also an important political admission as immigration-focused Donald Trump zeroes in on the Republican presidential nomination and the border crisis reverberates through the country and into Washington, DC.
Biden is willing to offer concessions so he can make deals, and Trump wants to keep this as a campaign issue.
Trump wants to kill bipartisan deal
“As the leader of our party, there is zero chance I will support this horrible, open-borders betrayal of America,” Trump said in Nevada on Saturday, although future Republican presidents would also benefit from the new power Biden is seeking.
Trump doesn’t think the president needs new power to shut the border. He has promised that, if elected, he will act as “dictator for one day” to do it, and he’s actively working against the bipartisan effort even though parts of it are straight out of his policy playbook.
“The reality is that this includes many provisions that when Donald Trump was president, he hoped would be made into law,” said CNN’s Lauren Fox, appearing Monday on “Inside Politics.” These Trump-friendly priorities, she said, include making it much more difficult for migrants to seek asylum in the US and increasing the speed at which asylum cases can be processed in immigration courts.
Biden’s acknowledgment
CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, a White House reporter who is also an expert on the issue of immigration, documents Biden’s shift.
“Biden took office pledging to restore asylum and manage the border in a ‘humane’ way,” Alvarez writes. “But his administration has faced the harsh realities and challenges at the US-Mexico border amid record migration across the Western Hemisphere — making it a political vulnerability seized on by Republicans.”
A man crosses the Rio Grande River from Mexico to collect clothing and other items left on the Texas banks of Shelby Park at the US-Mexico border in Eagle Pass, Texas, on January 12, 2024. – Kaylee Greenlee Beal/Reuters
Permanent power for the president
The new permanent power pushed by Biden and Senate negotiators is in line with temporary, Covid-era restrictions originally put in place during Trump’s administration, but which lapsed last year on Biden’s watch.
Following Trump’s lead, rather than work with the president to secure the border, House Republicans have rejected even the idea of a Senate compromise and are gearing up to impeach Biden’s secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, for not applying current law to turn away more people at the border.
Still no deal in writing
The framing of this issue may end up being more important than the policy itself. The bipartisan group of senators has not released text for their compromise, but they insist it does exist.
“We do have a bipartisan deal. We’re finishing the text right now,” Sen. Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat who is a key negotiator on the deal, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
“The question is whether Republicans are going to listen to Donald Trump, who wants to preserve chaos at the border because he thinks that it’s a winning political issue for him,” said Murphy, adding the proposal would give the president, Republican or Democrat, permanent new emergency powers.
What we know
While the text of the bill has not been finalized, Biden ticked off the major points during that appearance in South Carolina:
“It includes an additional 1,300 Border Patrols — we need more agents on the border;
375 immigration judges to judge whether or not someone can come or not come and be fair about it;
1,600 asylum officers;
and over 100 cutting-edge inspection machines to help detect and stop fentanyl coming in.”
GOP negotiator censured by his own party
Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, the top Republican negotiator, is already facing blowback even though the deal has not been publicly released.
The Oklahoma Republican Party voted over the weekend to censure Lankford and demanded that he abandon the bipartisan talks.
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Lankford was pressed about the new authority for Biden, which would be triggered if there’s an average of 5,000 migrant crossings per day over the course of a full week. Lankford said this would not normalize 5,000 migrant crossings per day. And for context, border officials were dealing with more than 10,000 crossings per day for most of December.
“This is set up for if you have a rush of people coming at the border, the border closes down – no one gets in,” he said. “This is not someone standing at the border with a little clicker, saying, ‘I’m going to let one more in, we’re at 4,999 and then it has to stop.’ It is a shutdown of the border, and everyone actually gets turned around.”
Democrats waiting for details too
Rank-and-file Democrats would surely be frustrated with such a compromise, which does not address their long-term immigration priorities, like giving permanent legal status to the children of undocumented immigrants who were raised in the US or paving a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have built lives and paid taxes in the US.
“We have milestones and we have a path to get there, but we were never going to get a path to citizenship in this bill,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday.
Frustration in US cities
Meanwhile, mayors of Democratic cities continue to raise the alarm about an untenable wave of migrants bused north from border states and draining their infrastructure.
The public view of the current immigration situation has shifted
Nearly half – 45% of Americans in a CBS News poll released early this month – said the situation at the border is a crisis.
And a strong majority of the public – 63% now compared with 55% in September – said the Biden administration should be tougher on immigrants crossing at the border. More than two-thirds, 68%, said they disapproved of Biden’s handling of the border, although that does not translate into support for Republicans. Sixty-five percent of Americans said they disapproved of congressional Republicans’ handling of the issue.
Americans are still broadly supportive of immigration, however. In a Gallup poll released last July, 68% said the overall effect of immigration was a good thing for the US, compared with just 27% who said it was a bad thing.
After publication, White House spokesperson Angelo Fernandez Hernandez provided this statement:
“The American people overwhelmingly agree with what President Biden underlined in his Day One reform plan: that our immigration system is broken and we have an imperative to secure the border and treat migrants with dignity,” Fernandez Hernandez said in an email. “After opposing the record border security funding President Biden has delivered every year of his administration, House Republicans are blocking the border security resources President Biden is fighting for in order to hire more Border Patrol officers and invest in cutting edge technology to detect fentanyl.”
Republicans tried to hammer Biden on immigration. But they turned into a circular firing squad
Eric Garcia – January 29, 2024
(Getty Images)
President Joe Biden might finally be running out of patience with Republicans when it comes to negotiations surrounding an agreement to restrict immigration in exchange for aid to Ukraine.
After weeks of negotiations, Republicans hit a snag last week as former president Donald Trump came out swinging against any agreement. That forced Senate GOP leadership to recalibrate. On top of that, House Speaker Mike Johnson — who leads a far more rabidly anti-immigrant and anti-Ukraine conference than Mitch McConnell leads in the Senate — wrote in a letter to colleagues that the agreement “would have been dead on arrival in the House anyway.”
On Friday evening, Biden released a statement saying that the proposed legislation would give him the ability to “shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed” and that he would invoke the authority the day he signs the bill into law.
Of course, being able to “shut down the border” is an amorphous term and the definition of shutting it down lies in the eye of the beholder. Nevertheless, Biden wants to have some kind of agreement not only because he wants to free up dollars to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia: A Harvard CAPS-Harris poll from last week showed that more voters consider immigration their top policy concern than the economy.
Republicans have battered Biden on the border ever since he took office, essentially flipping the dynamic after Donald Trump faced numerous negative headlines about family separation and the infamous Mexican border wall. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has even bused migrants to cities with Democratic mayors. That particular move led New York’s mayor Eric Adams to openly criticize Biden.
But Republicans might have gotten high on their own supply when it comes to immigration. As Inside Washingtonexplained last week, Republicans delaying passing an immigration bill to allow Trump to benefit makes it hard for them to argue that the influx of migrants is a crisis that requires immediate addressing. If passing a bill can wait 12 months, then it’s hardly urgent.
Right-wing opposition to the immigration legislation also means that Republicans are turning against each other.
On Sunday, Fox News host Shannon Bream asked Senator James Lankford, the chief Republican negotiator, why he would give Biden the “cover of this deal” which she said would allow people into the United States. Lankford responded by saying four months ago, Republicans united to say they would demand changes in policy “and now it’s interesting a few months later, when we’re finally getting to the end, they’re like, just kidding. We actually don’t want a change in law because of a presidential election year.”
Lankford, a hardline conservative from Oklahoma, has staked much of his credibility on the legislation. So he’s understandably frustrated to see opposition. And shortly after making his case, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, a Trump ally, said on the same Fox program that Lankford was on a “suicide mission.” That also gives Scott the added benefit of knifing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, with whom he has a tenuous relationship.
Republicans likely had a chance to pass the legislation before Trump returned to his role of being the de facto nominee. But his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire — as well as the coalescing of the GOP around him — has meant that they have to defer to what he dictates.
The ultimate sign that Republicans might be overconfident is their plan to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Why? It’s not entirely clear. But what is apparent is that Johnson, who is a little more than three months into the job, has chosen to appeal to the most far-right factions of his conference.
Holding a series of sideshow hearings for a secretary most people have never heard of will do little to shed light on whether laws are being enforced at the border. But it will allow figures like committee member Marjorie Taylor Greene to pontificate and get more television air time. Indeed, Greene came out strongly against the bipartisan bill in the Senate, despite the fact no text exists.
It appears that Biden is attempting to create a foil to the feud. By saying he would willingly close the border if given the means to do so, he wants to put the pressure on Republicans to pass the bill. If not, he hopes to hammer them for not giving him the power to curb immigration into the US.
Trump and his allies are wielding immigration as a political weapon against Biden, and Ukraine is paying the price
Chris Panella – January 29, 2024
Negotiations on a deal on the border and aid could collapse thanks to Trump.
He put pressure on the bipartisan deal he called “meaningless,” leaving Republicans scrambling on what’s next.
The chaos hurts Ukraine in particular, as its troops fight Russia without new US aid.
Republicans and Democrats have spent weeks carefully negotiating a massive, bipartisan immigration and foreign aid deal, leaving Ukraine in a wait-and-see position on critical support.
As both sides moved closer toward a possible agreement, former President Donald Trump stepped in to torpedo attempts at a compromise.
His opposition to the deal, which some have said may be in hopes of keeping the border as a key campaign issue going into the election this year, has left some Republicans wary of crossing him and others frustrated.
Failure to reach a deal is likely to leave multiple parties feeling aggrieved, but it would especially hurt Ukraine. Its troops are scraping the bottom of the barrel for ammunition to defend themselves and their cities against intensifying assaults, and the country is increasingly nervous about fighting off Russia with little help from its biggest single supporter in the West.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week in a closed-door meeting with other Republicans that Trump’s pushback against the border deal had forced them into a pickle. The comments were first reported by Punchbowl News.
“When we started this, the border united us and Ukraine divided us,” McConnell said. “The politics on this have changed.”
“We don’t want to do anything to undermine him,” McConnell added, talking about Trump as the former president moves closer to clinching the Republican presidential nomination after successes in Iowa and New Hampshire earlier this month.
The next day, at another closed-door meeting, McConnell said that his comments had been misinterpreted and that he was committed to getting the deal passed.
President Donald Trump watches a video of President Joe Biden playing during a rally for Sen. Marco Rubio at the Miami-Dade Country Fair and Exposition on November 6, 2022, in Miami, Florida.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Trump’s opposition to the bill comes as he campaigns on fixing the border crisis. Last week, he called the deal “meaningless” and asserted that the “ONLY HOPE” for a secure border is voting for him.
Senator Mitt Romney slammed Trump’s response, saying, “I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump. And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is … really appalling.”
“But the reality is that, that we have a crisis at the border, the American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border, he said, noting that someone running for president should want to solve the problem as opposed to saying, ‘Hey, save that problem. Don’t solve it. Let me take credit for solving it later.'”
Other Republicans, like Senator Todd Young, have suggested Trump is purposefully disrupting negotiations for his campaign. One Republican Senator told CNN on background: “This proposal would have had almost unanimous Republican support if it weren’t for Donald Trump.”
At a Las Vegas rally on Saturday, Trump doubled-down on his message. “As leader of our party, there is zero chance I will support this horrible open borders betrayal of America,” Trump said. “I’ll fight it all the way. A lot of the senators are trying to say, respectfully, they’re blaming it on me. I say, that’s OK. Please blame it on me. Please.”
Former President Donald Trump grins as he signs an autograph after a rally in New Hampshire a day before winning the state’s primary.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Despite the border deal being notably to the right of the Biden administration’s stances on immigration, the bipartisan bill could be a win for Biden ahead of the election. Immigration is a top concern for many voters going into November, a potentially jeopardizing problem for Democrats amid spikes in migrant encounters, and a marquee issue for Trump to campaign on.
Both Republicans and Democrats have said they’ve been painstakingly negotiating this deal, which is focused on foreign aid but includes compromises on the border, for weeks, and Biden has shown clear desire to sign it.
In October 2023, Biden originally requested a roughly $111 billion aid package for both Ukraine and Israel. Republicans in Congress blocked it, hoping to force Democrats to agree to stricter immigration and border control policies.
At first, it appeared to result in a stalemate between the two sides, but Biden publicly signaled in December that he was willing to “make significant compromises on the border.” This move ultimately prompted careful discussions on a deal that would meet GOP negotiators’ demands on immigration, while still giving Biden a win.
The deal would also have been a win for Ukraine, which relies on Western security assistance to fuel its war efforts.
But now, as House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote Friday, it appears the deal may be dead before it’s even finished. According to Johnson, “the Senate appears unable to reach any agreement. If rumors about the contents of the draft proposal are true, it would have been dead on arrival in the House anyway.”
But Johnson could also be buckling under the weight of political pressure from Trump’s allies in the House. Earlier this month, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said she wouldn’t support any deal and threatened Johnson with a motion to vacate him from the Speaker position if he brought the deal to the House floor. It’s unclear whether such a move would have enough support and what role House Democrats would play, but there’s a risk.
The looming question here is whether Republicans want to do anything to make progress on their issues with immigration and the US border with Mexico at all, or if they hope to continue to weaponize it against Biden and Democrats into the 2024 election. As Texas Governor Greg Abbott showed last week in defying the Supreme Court’s decision to remove the razor wire installed in the Rio Grande, tensions around the issue may only continue to get worse.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Warsaw, Poland, on April 5, 2023.Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The biggest loser in all of this though is probably Ukraine, which has been pleading for more US aid for months.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with US lawmakers back in December in Washington, DC to advocate for more aid, warning that Russian aggression would only increase should Ukraine fall, further endangering other nations, including NATO.
Further Russian aggression could demand more aid and assistance from the US, which would further strain America’s already depleted ammunition and weapons stockpiles.
Earlier this month, Zelenskyy said that some “radical voices from the Republican Party,” which have politicized aid for Ukraine, “are straining Ukrainian society” and leaving his people terrified. He appeared to be referring to a contingent of GOP lawmakers who have loudly denounced future US support for Ukraine. The US is by far the largest single contributor of security assistance to Ukraine.
The reality for Ukraine right now on the battlefield is a perilous one. Russian forces are conducting offensive operations along multiple sectors of the front, forcing Ukraine to fight on defense.
Ukraine likely doesn’t have the resources, particularly ammunition, to launch an offensive anytime soon, but with adequate support, it could hold off Russian forces and prepare for the possibility of new operational opportunities later. Without that support though, it is in for a tough defensive fight, which one expert has said it may not be able to survive.
Waterfall, trout and marble beef farms: Media reveals Putin’s luxurious residence in Karelia – Video
The New Voice of Ukraine – January 29, 2024
During Putin’s visits, the object is covered by air defense equipment
Highlighting the hypocrisy of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who urges Russian citizens to “fight” to avoid poverty, journalists have released a video showing his luxurious residence near Lake Ladoga in Karelia.
The media learned about the existence of the complex back in 2016, but few people had ever seen it up close.
Screenshot of the Dossier Center video
The most detailed video of Putin’s “possessions” near Maryalakhta Bay was released by the Dossier Center, which is linked to an exiled Russian businessman and opposition activist Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
It shows that the head of the Kremlin regime, whom Russian propaganda portrays as “ascetic” and “silver-less,” ordered the construction of three modern-style mansions on the shore, two helicopter landing pads, several yacht docks, and even a special elevation for the air defense system.
Screenshot of the Dossier Center videoScreenshot of the Dossier Center videoScreenshot of the Dossier Center video
“The Barn looks more like a reception house. Inside there is a living room and its own brewery. On the second floor there is a tea room… The interior is decorated with precious stones. Nearby, there is a water bath and a secluded gazebo with a breathtaking view of the lake,” the investigators said.
The residence also has a trout farm and a farm with cows for the production of marble beef.
Another feature of the property is a four-meter waterfall.
Screenshot of the Dossier Center video
“It is supposed to be part of the national park, but access to it is restricted. There is a fence, barbed wire and round-the-clock security. And in front of it is a gazebo for the only person who can steal the waterfall. For the president of Russia,” the Dossier Center journalists wrote.
