Why would Vladimir Putin risk a Ukraine invasion? Check his ‘ego,’ analysts suggest.

The Week

Why would Vladimir Putin risk a Ukraine invasion? Check his ‘ego,’ analysts suggest.

Peter Weber, Senior editor – February 18, 2022

Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin Alexey Nikolsky/Sputnik/AFP/Getty Images

President Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and numerous other U.S. officials delivered the same dire message on Thursday: All signs point to Russia invading Ukraine within days.

“Biden and his top aides acknowledge they are risking American credibility” by constantly warning that Russian President Vladimir Putin is about to launch a bloody, “unprovoked land war in Europe,” The New York Times reports. But they say “they would rather be accused of hyperbole and fearmongering than be proven right.”

Russia has maintained it has no plans to invade Ukraine, and Russian journalist Vladimir Pozner told NPR News on Tuesday that the feeling among Russians is that “Russia can win nothing by invading Ukraine,” On the contrary, he said, “it can lose a lot. Not only would it be a drawn-out guerrilla warfare kind of thing, which Russia cannot really bear. It would be total destruction of any kind of respect for Russia. There’s nothing to win and a lot to lose. And there are people who say that’s exactly what the West wants.”

On the Ukraine border, though, “most military indicators are in the red,” a Western intelligence official tells The Washington Post. “It all comes down to a political decision about whether to launch an attack. The Russians are actively fabricating the casus belli.”

“Putin has enough troops in place now to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it,” says Politico national security editor Ben Pauker, and when assessing whether he will invade, “the word we don’t hear often enough is ‘ego.'”

Putin has “played the pressure/escalation game many times before in order to extend the sphere of Moscow’s influence” or just “put himself back in the center of the world stage,” Pauker writes. “But this time, it seems he’s boxed himself into a corner: invade and suffer the consequences of international opprobrium and crippling sanctions, or pull the troops back and return home to a public that might smell weakness. I think ego is a significant part of why observers are so worried that he might actually do this, despite the consequences.”

Putin’s sated ego might help avert an “overt” Russian invasion, too, former U.S. NATO ambassador Douglas Lute suggested Thursday. “He enjoys this position,” Lute told the Times. “Everyone’s paying attention to him, like they haven’t in years. And he feels in control.”

‘What Mr. Putin did not want’: U.S. approves $6B tank deal with Poland

Politico

‘What Mr. Putin did not want’: U.S. approves $6B tank deal with Poland

Paul McLeary – February 18, 2022

Alex Brandon/AP Photo

The State Department on Friday approved a long-awaited $6 billion deal to sell Poland 250 Abrams tanks, an announcement that comes as more U.S. troops and aircraft flood into the country in the face of a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the deal early Friday while in a Warsaw press conference alongside his Polish counterpart Mariusz Blaszczak.

“What Mr. Putin did not want was a stronger NATO on his flank, and that’s exactly what he has today,” Austin said.

The eventual delivery “will also strengthen our interoperability with the Polish armed forces, boosting the credibility of our combined deterrence efforts and those of our other NATO Allies.”

The package is another piece in Poland’s sweeping military modernization effort, coming on top of a $6.5 billion deal Poland forged in 2019 to buy 32 F-35 fighter planes, and other agreements to buy mobile rocket artillery systems from the United States.

In Vienna, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Michael Carpenter, upped Washington’s assessment of the force Russia has built up along Ukraine’s border, saying between 169,000 and 190,000 troops “are in and near Ukraine as compared with about 100,000 on January 30.”

The Biden administration has deployed about 5,000 more troops to Poland over the past two weeks, bolstering the 4,000 troops already there, while dispatching two Stryker brigades based in Germany to Romania and Bulgaria.

A U.S. military official told POLITICO that the American role in Poland is “pretty limited” and focused on training with the Polish military and assisting and processing any American citizens who might flee any fighting in Ukraine.

“I think there are a lot of unknowns about what’s really going to happen,” the official, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss a sensitive issue, adding that any large flood of Ukrainians fleeing the fighting would be up to the Polish government and European Union to handle, and “we would have to be asked to do that.”

Austin addressed the issue in Warsaw on Friday, saying “if Russia further invades Ukraine, Poland could see tens of thousands of displaced Ukrainians and others flowing across its border, trying to save themselves and their families from the scourge of war.”

This week has seen a flurry of new activity as NATO and its allies seek to forestall a fresh Russian push into Ukraine. Vice President Kamala Harris met with NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg and Eastern European heads of state at the Munich Security Conference early Friday. In the afternoon, President Joe Biden will host a call about the Ukraine crisis with the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Britain, the EU and NATO.

While the deal for the Abrams tanks has been approved, the Polish government still has to negotiate a final contract with General Dynamics and other U.S. defense companies that build the tanks and its components. That means it will be months, if not years, before the first tanks arrive in Poland.

Members of the House and Senate have in recent weeks pushed the administration to fast-track the sale.

The timing of the deal can be seen as a piece of a larger U.S. push in Eastern Europe.

This week saw a buildup in American airpower in the region, as eight additional F-15s from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C., arrived at the Lask Air Base in Poland, doubling the number of American F-15s which arrived there this month. Six more F-16s arrived in Estonia this month to help police the Baltic Sea.

This week, an additional eight F-16s based in Germany moved to an air base in Romania, and Utah-based F-35s moved to Germany.

Column: The latest conservative to join the resistance? Ted Cruz’s mentor

Los Angeles Times

Column: The latest conservative to join the resistance? Ted Cruz’s mentor

Jackie Calmes – February 18, 2022

This undated photo provided by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals shows Judge J. Michael Luttig who is considered one of the candidates to replace U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist who died at his home Saturday, Sept. 3, 2005. (AP Photo/4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals) ORG XMIT: WX103
Judge J. Michael Luttig (Associated Press)

It’s been a measure of former federal Judge J. Michael Luttig’s stature in the conservative legal movement that Supreme Court justices hired so many of his law clerks — 40 over 15 years. Then two of those proteges became (in)famous: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Trump lawyer John C. Eastman, lead actors in the plot to overturn Joe Biden’s election.

Now Luttig is doing penance of a sort: He’s joined the Resistance — against former President Trump, certainly, but also against his erstwhile mentees.

Early on, Luttig did so only by invitation: Two days before Jan. 6, 2021, then-Vice President Mike Pence sought Luttig’s counsel to counter Trump’s demands that Pence, in presiding over Congress’ count of Biden’s electoral votes, reject the votes of six states. Pence, in his letter to Congress ahead of the proceedings, name-checked Luttig to argue that a vice president has no such power.

For Pence, the opinion of a jurist so revered on the right was “armor” against the inevitable slings and arrows from the MAGA army, as conservative lawyer George Conway put it to me. Luttig told me he’s testified behind closed doors about his role to investigators for the House committee probing the Jan. 6 insurrection.-

Lately, however, events have provoked him to go public about his concerns about “the existential threat” to the Republican Party, and by extension our democracy. Many conservative readers tell me to get over Trump, forget Jan. 6 and quit fretting about democracy. I won’t, but neither will Luttig, a protege of former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, law clerk to Antonin Scalia, a judge for 15 years on the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals and a contender on George W. Bush’s shortlist of Supreme Court candidates.

Here’s Luttig’s lament about Trump’s Republican Party this week to a group of conservative lawyers:

“For the past six years, I have watched and listened in disgust that not one single leader of ours with the moral authority, the courage and the will to stand up and say, ‘No, this is not who we are, this is not what America is and it’s not what we want to be,’ has done so.”

The final straws for Luttig were the Republican National Committee’s recent resolution that censured Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating on the Jan. 6 committee and called the insurrection “legitimate political discourse,” and Trump’s attacks on Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell for criticizing the RNC and of Pence for publicly stating “Trump is wrong” to say Pence could overturn the election.

Luttig elaborated by email: “This feels like a seminal moment in America when all of what the country has witnessed and endured for these years seems to be building to volcanic crescendo…. We are in political war to the death — with each other,” and “American democracy hangs in the balance.”

That more Republicans aren’t standing up to “this nonsense, this utter madness,” he said, is “the definition of failed leadership.”

That brings us back to Cruz and Eastman. They not only haven’t stood up to the madness, but they also exemplify it — Cruz by leading a cabal of Republicans who opposed certification of Biden votes on Jan. 6, and by his general Trump toadyism, and Eastman by his authorship of the memo giving a false constitutional gloss to Trump’s coup strategy.

The 67-year-old Luttig, relatively new to Twitter, has trolled his former clerks like a pro. Anyone familiar with the bonds typical between a judge and his or her clerks — Luttig’s call themselves “Luttigators” — knows that his public chastisements have to bother Eastman and even the seemingly impervious-to-criticism Cruz, who once described Luttig as “like a father to me.”

In threaded tweets, Luttig flayed Eastman’s legal analysis, calling it “incorrect at every turn.” He pounced after Cruz tweeted a photo of the removal of a 50-ton slab etched with the 1st Amendment from the defunct Newseum near the Capitol; Cruz snarkily suggested it was a metaphor for the wreckage ahead from the Biden administration. Turns out the slab was simply being relocated, partly at the expense of Luttig and his wife, Elizabeth.

“Had he asked,” Luttig tweeted, “I would have told [Cruz] once again that the facts matter and it was foolish of him to demagogue the Constitution by mocking the removal of the iconic First Amendment tablet for reinstallation at its new home at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.”

Ouch.

Luttig is now working with members of Congress and their aides to rewrite the flawed 1887 Electoral Count Act to prevent demagogues like Cruz and Eastman from potentially using it again to threaten democracy after the 2024 election.

He has been asked whether the Constitution empowers the states or Congress to disqualify Trump and others from seeking federal office if they are found to have participated in an insurrection. Luttig thinks federal courts would be willing to take such cases, but that it’s unlikely the states or Congress would press the matter.

It’s beyond sad that Trump has forced such questions. But, as Luttig told me, “that is because he was pushing the Constitution and the laws to their limits more than any president in history.”

Take it from the Judge.

Vladimir Putin: Crafty Strategist or Aggrieved and Reckless Leader?

New York Times

Vladimir Putin: Crafty Strategist or Aggrieved and Reckless Leader?

Anton Troianovski – February 18, 2022

A Ukrainian military tank exercise in Donetsk Oblast is abruptly cancelled on Thursday, Feb. 17, 2022, amid jitters about an impending Russian attack. (Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)
A Ukrainian military tank exercise in Donetsk Oblast is abruptly cancelled on Thursday, Feb. 17, 2022, amid jitters about an impending Russian attack. (Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)

MOSCOW — At this moment of crescendo for the Ukraine crisis, it all comes down to what kind of leader President Vladimir Putin is.

In Moscow, many analysts remain convinced that the Russian president is essentially rational, and that the risks of invading Ukraine would be so great that his huge troop buildup makes sense only as a very convincing bluff. But some also leave the door open to the idea that he has fundamentally changed amid the pandemic, a shift that may have left him more paranoid, more aggrieved and more reckless.

The 20-foot-long table Putin has used to socially distance himself this month from European leaders flying in for crisis talks symbolizes, to some longtime observers, his detachment from the rest of the world. For almost two years, Putin has ensconced himself in a virus-free cocoon unlike that of any Western leader, with state television showing him holding most key meetings by teleconference alone in a room and keeping even his own ministers at a distance on the rare occasions that he summons them in person.

Speculation over a leader’s mental state is always fraught, but as Putin’s momentous decision approaches, Moscow commentators puzzling over what he might do next in Ukraine are finding some degree of armchair psychology hard to avoid.

“There’s this impression of irritation, of a lack of interest, of an unwillingness to delve into anything new,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist and former member of Putin’s human rights council, said of the president’s recent public appearances. “The public is being shown that he has been in practical isolation, with ever fewer breaks, since the spring of 2020.”

A large-scale invasion of Ukraine, many analysts point out, would be an enormous escalation compared with any of the actions Putin has taken before. In 2014, the Kremlin’s subterfuge allowed Russian forces stripped of identifying markings to capture Crimea without firing a single shot. The proxy war Putin fomented in Ukraine’s east allowed him to deny being a party to the conflict.

“Starting a full-scale war is completely not in Putin’s interest,” said Anastasia Likhacheva, the dean of world economy and international affairs at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. “It is very difficult for me to find any rational explanation for a desire to carry out such a campaign.”

Even if Putin were able to take control of Ukraine, she noted, such a war would accomplish the opposite of what the president says he wants: rolling back the NATO presence in Eastern Europe. In the case of a war, the NATO allies would be “more unified than ever,” Likhacheva said, and they would be likely to deploy powerful new weaponry along Russia’s western frontiers.

At home, Putin has always been keen to project the aura of a sober statesman, overruling the nationalist firebrands on prime-time talk shows and in parliament who have been urging him for years to annex more of Ukraine.

And while he casts himself as Russia’s guarantor of stability, he could face stark economic headwinds from Western sanctions and social upheaval if there are casualties on the battlefield and among civilians. Millions of Russians have relatives in Ukraine.

For the moment, Russians largely appear to subscribe to the Kremlin narrative that the West is the aggressor in the Ukraine crisis, said Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, an independent pollster in Moscow. The alarmist messaging out of Washington about an imminent Russian invasion has only bolstered that view, he said, because it makes the West seem to be the one that is “exerting pressure and escalating tensions.”

If Putin were to carry out a short and limited military operation along the lines of the five-day war against Georgia in 2008, he said, Russians could be expected to support it.

But “if this is a lengthy, bloody war, we get to a situation where it’s impossible to forecast,” Volkov said. “Stability ends.”

Given that such a war still seems unthinkable and irrational to so many in Moscow, Russian foreign policy experts generally see the standoff over Ukraine as the latest stage in Putin’s yearslong effort to compel the West to accept what he sees as fundamental Russian security concerns. In the 1990s, that thinking goes, the West forced a new European order upon a weak Russia that disregarded its historical need for a geopolitical buffer zone to its west. And now that Russia is stronger, these experts say, it would be reasonable for any Kremlin leader to try to redraw that map.

Fyodor Lukyanov, a prominent Moscow foreign policy analyst who advises the Kremlin, said Putin’s goal now was “to force the outcome of the Cold War to be partially revised.” But he still believes Putin will stop short of full-scale invasion, instead using “special, asymmetric or hybrid means” — including making the West believe that he is truly prepared to attack.

“A bluff has to be very convincing,” Lukyanov said. And the United States, he went on, with its robust portrayals of an aggressive Russia poised for invasion, “is playing along at 200%.”

By this line of thinking, Russian analysts say, U.S. officials are falling for an exaggerated image of Putin as an evil genius. Since Putin’s past attempts to negotiate with the West over arms control and NATO expansion failed, they say, the Kremlin chose to raise the stakes to a point at which its interests became impossible to ignore.

“He is very successful at using the negative image that has been created of him as a demon,” said Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, describing Putin as capitalizing on fears that he was prepared to unleash a horrific war. “The plan was to create a threat, to create the sense that a war could happen.”

But the experts have been wrong before. In 2014, Putin seized Crimea, even as few Moscow analysts were predicting a military intervention. And skeptics of the view that Putin is bluffing point out that during the pandemic, he has already taken actions that earlier seemed unlikely. His harsh crackdown against the network of Alexei Navalny, for example, has contradicted what had been a widely held view that Putin was happy to allow some domestic dissent as an escape valve to manage discontent.

“Putin, in the last year, has crossed a lot of Rubicons,” Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at CNA, a research institute based in Arlington, Virginia, said last week. “Folks who believe that something this dramatic is unlikely or improbable may not have observed that qualitative shift in the last two years.”

‘The Bloody Czar’: Did a False-Flag Operation Fuel Putin’s Rise?

National Review

‘The Bloody Czar’: Did a False-Flag Operation Fuel Putin’s Rise?

Mark Antonio Wright – February 18, 2022

As a (further) Russian invasion of Ukraine grows more and more likely, last night I decided to re-read David Satter’s August 2016 cover story in the magazine, “The Bloody Czar.”

Satter, an American journalist with extensive experience in Russia and the former Soviet Union, detailed the rise of Vladimir Putin from obscurity to the pinnacle of power in Moscow — and how it all could have been catalyzed by a murderous false-flag operation.

“I believe,” Satter wrote, “that Vladimir Putin came to power as the result of an act of terror committed against his own people.”

The evidence is overwhelming that the apartment-house bombings in 1999 in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk, which provided a pretext for the second Chechen war and catapulted Putin into the presidency, were carried out by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Yet, to this day, an indifferent world has made little attempt to grasp the significance of what was the greatest political provocation since the burning of the Reichstag.

“I have been trying,” Satter continued, “to call attention to the facts behind the bombings since 1999. I consider this a moral obligation, because ignoring the fact that a man in charge of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal came to power through an act of terror is highly dangerous in itself.”

The apartment bombings — which were quickly blamed on Islamist Chechen rebels — killed hundreds of Russian civilians. Putin, newly named as the political successor to then-president Boris Yeltsin, vowed revenge and was shot into power. He then proceeded to prosecute the war in the breakaway province of Chechnya and crushed the rebels. Combined with a general economic boom, Putin become the undisputed and, for a time, extremely popular, ruler of Russia.

But, Satter writes, “Almost from the start . . . there were doubts about the provenance of the bombings, which could not have been better calculated to rescue the fortunes of Yeltsin and his entourage.”

Suspicions deepened when a fifth bomb was discovered in the basement of a building in Ryazan, a city southeast of Moscow, and those who had placed it turned out to be not Chechen terrorists but agents of the FSB. After these agents were arrested by local police, Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB, said that the bomb had been a fake and that it had been planted in Ryazan as part of a training exercise. The bomb, however, tested positive for hexogen, the explosive used in the four successful apartment bombings. An investigation of the Ryazan incident was published in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and the public’s misgivings grew so widespread that the FSB agreed to a televised meeting between its top officials and residents of the affected building. The FSB in this way tried to demonstrate its openness, but the meeting was a disaster: It left the overwhelming impression that the incident in Ryazan was a failed political provocation.

Three days after the broadcast, Putin was elected. Attention to the Ryazan incident faded, and it began to appear that the bombings would become just the latest in the long list of Russia’s unsolved crimes.

It’s sober reading. If you want to understand the roots of what’s going on in the Donbas, read the whole thing here.

We Finally Know What Putin Planned for a False Flag Op Against Ukraine

Daily Beast

We Finally Know What Putin Planned for a False Flag Op Against Ukraine

Shannon Vavra – February 18, 2022

(Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)
(Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

Russian news agencies are amplifying claims that they have prevented an attempt from Ukraine to explode a chlorine gas tank in separatist territory, Horlivka, in what experts say appears to be the latest attempt from Russia to claim Ukraine is the aggressor and create a pretext to invade.

Ukrainian intelligence warned last month of this very prospect. Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency warned that Russia was preparing to use the presence of chemicals in the same location, Horlivka, as a pretense to attack or advance its aggression against Ukraine.

The news comes just as fears around the world mount that Russia might claim a pretext—and even fabricate one—to invade Ukraine. And at this hour, concerns appear higher than ever that Russia might be poised to launch an all-out assault on Ukraine. Russian media has claimed in recent hours there was an explosion in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), in what could be the long-awaited false flag operation from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Claims are circulating that the explosion was a car bomb targeting the head of Donbas regional security, Denis Sinenkov.

Pro-Putin Kingpin Declares War Is Coming for Ukraine on Live TV

In just the last several hours, the cadence of bad news coming from Russia has picked up. Russian-backed forces have been shelling targets in Eastern Ukraine and there is little evidence Russia is pulling back forces as it has claimed. The news of the car bomb comes just after the DNR in Eastern Ukraine announced an evacuation due to an alleged imminent attack coming. The Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) has also ordered an evacuation, according to Reuters.

The head of the DNR Denis Pushilin claims the reason for the evacuation is that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelesnky is plotting an offensive soon. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said in an address that claims Ukraine is planning an attack are false. Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said in a statement, “we categorically refute Russian disinformation reports on Ukraine’s alleged offensive operations or acts of sabotage in chemical production facilities.”

U.S. officials have been warning for weeks that Russian leadership is seeking out some kind of pretext for invasion, and in some cases will use its own saboteurs to create a justification to pull the trigger and attack, a senior administration official told The Daily Beast.

And this looks like it fits the bill, as it could create the perfect justification Putin can bring back home to justify an attack, Doug London, a former Senior Operations Officer in the CIA’s Clandestine Service, told The Daily Beast.

On some level, Putin “needs to show the Russian people that he’s standing up for their security, fighting evil, that the threat is genuine, that everything Russia’s doing is not to start a war, but because ‘we’re the victims here and we’ve got to protect ourselves,’” London said.

In recent days the Biden administration has been working to expose just exactly how Russia is planning to create a pretext to invade, according to U.S. intelligence agencies’ collection, in an attempt to destabilize Putin’s plans for invasion. In one case, the Biden administration released information alleging Russia was plotting to produce propaganda videos with graphic images of corpses.

Ukraine’s earlier attempt to call out Russia’s plans in Horlivka in advance of Russian claims about Horlivka and chemicals fit right into that playbook, experts say.

This Surprise ‘Mystery Bridge’ Could Be Putin’s Secret Path to War

“Everything that we’re seeing … is part of a scenario that is already in play of creating false provocations, of then having to respond to those provocations, and ultimately committing new aggression against Ukraine,” Secretary of State Tony Blinken said Friday at the Munich Security Conference of the recent escalations.

Western attempts to quickly declassify intelligence information on Russia’s internal plans and make them public might not prevent Putin from invading, but the efforts could alter Putin’s game plans, putting him back on his haunches and at a disadvantage, London said.

“It certainly puts them in a difficult position because basically we’re calling the shots. If we’re putting out predictive material that’s borne out by Russian actions or statements,” it shows ”we’re anticipating and acting to shape events through insight, and now the Russians are deliberating, ‘well do we still go through with it or not, and if we do can we control escalation and the narrative, and if we don’t, have we lost credibility?’”

The ultimate outcome would be to set Putin back and trip him up just as he’s going in for the jugular, said London.

“Then we may be impacting Putin’s timeline and undermining his credibility,” said London, who recently published a memoir on his time in the CIA, The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence. “It forces him to respond, seizing the initiative, so he’s becoming more reactive, adding pressure to Russian decision making.”

For now, Pushilin seems convinced war is here. When asked Friday if a war is beginning, his answer?

“Unfortunately, yes.”

The ‘Clown Car’ of Reasons That Trump Could Go Down

Daily Beast

The ‘Clown Car’ of Reasons That Trump Could Go Down

The Daily Beast – February 18, 2022

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty

Donald Trump is closer to wearing an orange jumpsuit than he’s ever been.

That’s what TrumpNation author Tim O’Brien thinks anyway. It’s been three years since the investigation into the Trump Organization began and no Trump has been arrested. But with the news this Thursday that Donald has been court-ordered to testify and last week’s bombshell that his accounting firm Mazars USA was dropping him, O’Brien believes that could change.

He tells Molly Jong-Fast in this episode of The New Abnormal that jail time is a real possibility for the Trumps and the signs are there.

“Donald Trump has never been under the microscope with well-resourced, aggressive law enforcement officials like he is right now in the state of New York,” he says. “The prosecutors believe they have extremely compelling evidence against the former president. They’re not gonna bring a case against a former president unless they feel they’re on solid ground. So this is gonna become quite a legal showdown.”

Mazars jumping ship is one of the most “gigantic red flags that could be waved in front of your face”—especially because they “had a clown car” of reasons to do it, says O’Brien, who gives a rundown of them in the episode.

Later on the show, Molly asks former Biden White House senior adviser Andy Slavitt if COVID will ever go away, what the new Pfizer COVID-19 pills will be able to do, and if we should try to stay cautious or just live as normally as possible (Spoiler: He says a little bit of both).

Truckers Resurrect Bananas Theory About Trudeau’s Real Dad

And Daily Beast politics reporter Ursula Perano breaks down the restrictive Texas voting law, SB1, that’s ironically hurting rural districts, including red ones with Republican politicians.

Plus! Molly and co-host Andy Levy discuss the forgotten Trump child, Eric, and why Barron has a better chance of becoming president before him. Also, does Sean Hannity hate cops now?

‘Irreversible’: No easy fix for water fouled by gas driller

Associated Press

‘Irreversible’: No easy fix for water fouled by gas driller

Michael Rubinkam – February 18, 2022

Gas Drilling Water Pollution 9/9
Ray Kemble talks about his water issues in his home in Dimock, Pa., Feb. 14, 2022. Kemble recently met with officials in the Pennsylvania attorney general's office regarding the criminal case against a gas driller charged with polluting Dimock's groundwater with methane. Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock, in one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. (AP Photo/Mike Rubinkam)

Ray Kemble talks about his water issues in his home in Dimock, Pa., Feb. 14, 2022. Kemble recently met with officials in the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office regarding the criminal case against a gas driller charged with polluting Dimock’s groundwater with methane. Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock, in one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. (AP Photo/Mike Rubinkam)

In this Jan. 4, 2022, photo a portion of a water treatment system for homeowners Tim and Deb Maye is shown in Dimock, Pa. They assert the system never worked properly to remove contaminants from their well water. Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock, in one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. The attorney general's office recently floated the idea of treatment systems as a way to resolve its criminal environmental case against Cabot, prompting pushback from some residents who want to be connected to public water. (AP Photo/Mike Rubinkam)

In this Jan. 4, 2022, photo a portion of a water treatment system for homeowners Tim and Deb Maye is shown in Dimock, Pa. They assert the system never worked properly to remove contaminants from their well water. Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock, in one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. The attorney general’s office recently floated the idea of treatment systems as a way to resolve its criminal environmental case against Cabot, prompting pushback from some residents who want to be connected to public water. (AP Photo/Mike Rubinkam)

In this Jan. 4, 2022, photo the control panel for a water treatment system for homeowners Tim and Deb Maye is shown in Dimock, Pa. They assert the system never worked properly to remove contaminants from their well water. Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock, in one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. In 2010, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection negotiated a settlement with Cabot to install water treatment systems at residents' homes, but some say the systems did not work well. (AP Photo/Mike Rubinkam)

In this Jan. 4, 2022, photo the control panel for a water treatment system for homeowners Tim and Deb Maye is shown in Dimock, Pa. They assert the system never worked properly to remove contaminants from their well water. Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock, in one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. In 2010, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection negotiated a settlement with Cabot to install water treatment systems at residents’ homes, but some say the systems did not work well. (AP Photo/Mike Rubinkam)

In this Jan. 4, 2022, Tim Maye stands next to the shed outside his home with a water treatment system in Dimock, Pa. Maye says his system, designed to remove gas drilling-related contaminants from his well water, never seemed to work properly. Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock, in one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. (AP Photo/Mike Rubinkam)

In this Jan. 4, 2022, Tim Maye stands next to the shed outside his home with a water treatment system in Dimock, Pa. Maye says his system, designed to remove gas drilling-related contaminants from his well water, never seemed to work properly. Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock, in one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. (AP Photo/Mike Rubinkam)

In this Jan. 4, 2022, photo Tim Maye holds a log sheet showing some of the maintenance visits for his water treatment system in Dimock, Pa. Maye says his system, designed to remove gas drilling-related contaminants from his well water, never seemed to work properly. Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock, in one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. In 2010, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection negotiated a settlement with Cabot to install water treatment systems at residents' homes, but some say the systems did not work well. (AP Photo/Mike Rubinkam)

In this Jan. 4, 2022, photo Tim Maye holds a log sheet showing some of the maintenance visits for his water treatment system in Dimock, Pa. Maye says his system, designed to remove gas drilling-related contaminants from his well water, never seemed to work properly. Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock, in one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. In 2010, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection negotiated a settlement with Cabot to install water treatment systems at residents’ homes, but some say the systems did not work well. (AP Photo/Mike Rubinkam)

In this Jan. 4, 2022, photo Tim Maye shows a water treatment system in a shed outside his home in Dimock, Pa. Maye says his system, designed to remove gas drilling-related contaminants from his well water, never seemed to work properly. Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock, in one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. (AP Photo/Mike Rubinkam)

In this Jan. 4, 2022, photo Tim Maye shows a water treatment system in a shed outside his home in Dimock, Pa. Maye says his system, designed to remove gas drilling-related contaminants from his well water, never seemed to work properly. Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock, in one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. (AP Photo/Mike Rubinkam)

FILE - Ray Kemble of Dimock, Pa., protests hydraulic fracturing outside a Marcellus Shale industry conference as he holds a jug of what he says is his well water, Sept. 20, 2012, in Philadelphia. Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock, in one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. It has now entered a difficult new phase as prosecutors pursue criminal charges against Pennsylvania's most prolific gas driller — and push for a settlement they say could yield more significant benefits for affected homeowners than a conviction. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Ray Kemble of Dimock, Pa., protests hydraulic fracturing outside a Marcellus Shale industry conference as he holds a jug of what he says is his well water, Sept. 20, 2012, in Philadelphia. Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock, in one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. It has now entered a difficult new phase as prosecutors pursue criminal charges against Pennsylvania’s most prolific gas driller — and push for a settlement they say could yield more significant benefits for affected homeowners than a conviction. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

FILE - In this Feb. 13, 2012, photo, Ray Kemble pumps water from a truck into his neighbor's tank in Dimock, Pa. Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock, in one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. The attorney general's office recently floated the idea of treatment systems as a way to resolve its criminal environmental case against Cabot, prompting pushback from some residents who want to be connected to public water. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

In this Feb. 13, 2012, photo, Ray Kemble pumps water from a truck into his neighbor’s tank in Dimock, Pa. Faulty gas wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas were blamed for leaking methane into the groundwater in Dimock, in one of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. The attorney general’s office recently floated the idea of treatment systems as a way to resolve its criminal environmental case against Cabot, prompting pushback from some residents who want to be connected to public water. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

FILE - In this file photo from Oct. 14, 2011, a drilling rig is seen in Springville, Pa. State regulators blamed faulty gas wells drilled for leaking methane into the groundwater in nearby Dimock, Pa. One of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom has entered a difficult new phase as prosecutors pursue criminal charges against Pennsylvania’s busiest gas driller. The attorney general’s office is pushing for a settlement they say could yield more significant benefits for affected homeowners than a conviction. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

FILE – In this file photo from Oct. 14, 2011, a drilling rig is seen in Springville, Pa. State regulators blamed faulty gas wells drilled for leaking methane into the groundwater in nearby Dimock, Pa. One of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom has entered a difficult new phase as prosecutors pursue criminal charges against Pennsylvania’s busiest gas driller. The attorney general’s office is pushing for a settlement they say could yield more significant benefits for affected homeowners than a conviction. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

DIMOCK, Pa. (AP) — Meeting with a man whose well water has been polluted for years, officials in the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office asked him whether he’d consider accepting a treatment system from the gas driller charged with fouling his aquifer.

Not a chance, Ray Kemble told them.

“Are you going to drink and bathe in it?” Kemble asked the prosecutor and her colleague, a special agent, according to a recording of the conversation obtained by The Associated Press. “Are you two going to come here and live in this house on that system for a month and use that water?”

The officials demurred.

One of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom has entered a difficult new phase as prosecutors pursue criminal charges against the state’s most prolific gas driller — and push for a settlement they say could yield more significant benefits for homeowners than a conviction.

But the option prosecutors recently discussed has put them at odds with some residents who reject individual water treatment systems as inadequate and unworkable. These residents want to be hooked up to public water — itself a controversial idea in their rural community, one that state environmental officials talked up more than a decade ago but ultimately abandoned under legal threat from the driller and local officials.

The residents’ opposition to treatment systems illustrates the delicacy of the attorney general’s task in Dimock, a place synonymous with the fracking debate, where acrimony and distrust are the default after nearly 14 years of bad water and broken promises to fix it.

It was an exploding water well that first aroused public attention in the previously anonymous patchwork of homes and farms about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Philadelphia. Around that time, residents began reporting their well water was making them sick with symptoms including vomiting, dizziness and rashes.

Anti-drilling celebrities and documentary filmmakers descended, holding Dimock up as an example of natural gas industry malfeasance in the nation’s No. 2 gas-producing state. Industry backers, meanwhile, touted the economic benefits of cheap gas and accused green groups of greatly exaggerating the threat, even as state regulators concluded that Texas-based Cabot Oil & Gas had fouled Dimock’s groundwater.

The hoopla eventually died down, but Dimock’s water remained polluted. Fresh contamination cases have been reported as recently as December.

The state’s criminal case against the driller dates to 2020, when Attorney General Josh Shapiro — a Democrat now running for governor — charged Cabot with violating the law by allowing methane from the company’s faulty gas wells to escape into drinking-water aquifers in Dimock and nearby communities.

Shapiro’s spokesperson, Jacklin Rhoads, declined to answer questions about the “existence or substance of any discussions” with the company regarding a settlement.

But she said the state’s criminal environmental laws offer “limited tools” for holding polluters accountable. The penalty for a conviction under the state’s Clean Streams Law is a maximum $50,000 fine for each violation.

“While a settlement has the potential to deliver more for victims than the penalties of a guilty verdict, our goal is to resolve the case — through trial or through settlement — in a way that maximizes the restoration and protection of clean water for residents,” Rhoads said.

A company spokesperson declined to comment, citing the “active legal matter.” The company has long defended its record and denied responsibility for the contamination of Dimock’s groundwater.

It’s not clear if treatment systems remain under consideration, given the pushback from residents, but Kemble has his reasons for being skeptical.

In 2010, after discarding their plan to connect residents to public water, state environmental officials entered into a settlement with the company. Cabot offered to install individual water filtration systems, as well as a monetary award equal to twice the tax value of each resident’s home.

The agreement, struck without residents’ input or consent, infuriated those who had made it clear they did not trust Cabot with their water. But many residents took the money — and the treatment systems.

Some worked well, others were prone to breaking down, and all required costly upkeep, according to Joe Nally, who installed and maintained dozens of the systems for Cabot and other drilling companies.

“It was absolutely a maintenance issue with them,” said Nally, who left the industry years ago.

The system Cabot installed at Tim and Deb Maye’s house now sits, disused, in a shed outside their home.

Handwritten logs show hundreds of visits by contractors over the years as the elaborate setup of tanks, filters and control panels broke down, leaked and failed to remove bacteria.

Eventually, the DEP allowed Cabot to hand financial responsibility for repairs and maintenance to the Mayes. The couple said they never agreed to that. The system never worked right, they said.

The Mayes now use their untreated well water for bathing and flushing toilets, and bottled water for everything else.

“This was supposed to be our forever home,” said Deb Maye, who had moved with her family to Dimock to escape the bustle of the Philadelphia suburbs. “And the DEP and the gas company ruined it.”

Until Feb. 11, when he left state employment, Scott Perry was a DEP deputy secretary and longtime head of the agency’s oil and gas division. He acknowledged in a late January interview that treatment systems “did not work perfectly right out of the gate.” But he said they “absolutely do work,” adding some residents are satisfied.

“All of the homeowners were provided with two times the value of their home so that they could attend to their drinking water needs in the matter they best see fit. And several of them have chosen to not maintain their systems, and that’s unfortunate,” Perry said.

He said the water line his agency once touted as a permanent fix couldn’t have been built, given the political, logistical and legal realities of the day, and asserted that Dimock’s aquifer is healing even as Coterra remains banned from drilling in a part of the township.

“We will not allow the oil and gas industry to leave a legacy of polluted groundwater,” he said.

Ukraine, Poland and UK agree on accord to combat Russian aggression

The Hill

Ukraine, Poland and UK agree on accord to combat Russian aggression

February 17, 2022

British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and her counterparts in Poland and Ukraine issued a joint statement on Thursday saying that the three nations would be developing a “trilateral memorandum of co-operation” to support Ukraine and combat Russian aggression amid rising tensions between the two Eastern European nations.

“This will demonstrate our commitment to further strengthening the strategic cooperation and engagement between our 3 nations on the highest priority issues in support of Ukraine,” the three said.

“We will work together to advance our cooperation, which includes but not limited to co-ordinating support to the International Crimea Platform, increasing our collaboration on cyber security, energy security, and boosting strategic communications to counter disinformation,” they added.

The three said that the United Kingdom and Poland stood in solidarity with Ukraine in helping the former Soviet state defend its independence and sovereignty and would provide Ukraine with support.

The joint statement also offered a thinly veiled rebuke at Russia, without naming the country specifically, for its efforts at trying to dictate whether Ukraine should be a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

“We reiterate that each European State is free to choose or change its security arrangements, including treaties of alliance, and no State can consider any part of Europe as its sphere of influence,” the three said.

The prime ministers of Poland and Ukraine signaled earlier this month that a trilateral cooperation was in the works.

“I hope that in the near future we will be able to officially launch a new regional format of cooperation Ukraine-Poland-UK, in the context of ongoing Russian aggression, we should sign a trilateral document on cooperation to strengthen regional security,” Ukrainain Prime Minister Denys Shmygal said during a joint news conference with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, according to Reuters.

The development comes as Russia has amassed around 150,000 troops near Ukraine, though Moscow claims that it has pulled back some of those troops – statements that have been met with scrutiny by U.S. officials and others.

President Biden said on Thursday that Russia could invade Ukraine “within the next several days.”

Nearly 4 million children fall into poverty as expanded child tax credit ends

Yahoo! News

Nearly 4 million children fall into poverty as expanded child tax credit ends

Christopher Wilson, Senior Writer – February 18, 2022

Nearly 4 million American children fell into poverty in the month of January, due to the expiration of the expanded child tax credit at the end of last year. According to new data released Thursday by Columbia University, there was a 41 percent increase in child poverty between December and January, as millions of families stopped receiving the extra $300 per month. The Columbia release noted that “Latino and Black children experienced the largest percentage-point increases in poverty.”

Democrats passed the expanded child tax credit as part of their pandemic relief bill in March of last year, which resulted in payments beginning last July worth up to $250 per child ages 6 to 17 and up to $300 per child under 6. The last of those payments went out in December, as opposition from Republican senators and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., stopped an extension of the program. A November poll from Yahoo News and YouGov found that 49 percent of U.S. adults support extending the credit for an additional year, with 31 percent in opposition.

A mother and child on a sidewalk covered with protest signs, including a large one representing a government check made out to American families with the word cancelled emblazoned across it.
Parents and their children participate in a demonstration in support of the child tax credit outside the U.S. Capitol on Dec. 13, 2021. (Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Studies last year from Columbia and the left-leaning think tank Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that the expanded tax credit cut childhood poverty in the country by at least 40 percent. Due to the extension’s failure to pass, 61 million children in 36 million households who received the payment in December were affected.

While President Biden pushed for an extension of the credit, passage in the Senate required either the support of all 50 Democrats or votes from at least 10 Republicans — none of whom voted for the American Rescue Plan, which contained the expanded credits, in March 2021.

While nearly every other Democrat was on board, Manchin didn’t support a continuation of the plan as it was originally passed, calling for work requirements and a lower income cap on the families eligible to receive it. An analysis last fall found that Manchin’s proposed changes would have resulted in nearly 190,000 West Virginia children, and 37 million nationwide, no longer receiving the aid. In December, ABC News reported that Manchin had expressed concerns to colleagues that parents would use the payments to buy drugs.

Following the release of the Columbia data, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., blasted Manchin in a series of tweets citing the uptick in child poverty.

President Biden speaks at a podium bearing the Presidential Seal in front of Kamala Harris, who stands next to an American flag.
President Biden delivers remarks about child tax credit payments at the White House on July 15, 2021. (Tom Brenner/Reuters)

“One US Senator ‘heard stories’ about people allegedly using the Child Tax Credit ‘for drugs’ without any evidence or data to back it up,” the progressive congresswoman wrote, citing Manchin. “He then used that as justification to nuke the entire national program, causing millions of kids to fall into poverty in weeks. Horrifying.

“Meanwhile the press talks about it like it’s some beltway drama without ever showing the people who are sleeping in bubble jackets with no heat or the kids going hungry waiting for some guy in a yacht to decide if they are fully human or not,” she continued, referring to Manchin’s boat in Washington, D.C., where protesters gathered to urge him to support Biden’s full domestic agenda. “It’s just shameful, all of it.”

Manchin met with White House chief of staff Ron Klain on Thursday, afterward telling reporters there was no talk of reviving elements of Biden’s agenda, which includes the child tax credit. Some Democratic leaders expressed an openness to reducing the eligibility for the program, while Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, has continued to push for his own plan, which would administer a similar payment through the Social Security Administration, hoping for bipartisan buy-in.

Democratic lawmakers expressed hope during a press conference last week that Manchin might eventually come around on the program.

Sen. Joe Manchin, looking down and holding a cup of Starbucks coffee, is followed by reporters holding cellphones out toward him.
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., is followed by reporters as he walks through the Senate subway on Feb. 16. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

“Sen. Manchin has not slammed the door on this,” said Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo. “We know over the last six months that people have spent the money the way we said they were going to spend the money, which was to buy groceries, to pay for rent, really importantly to pay for child care so they could stay at work.”

Republicans have argued that the child tax credit disincentivizes work, while proponents rebut that raising children itself is work. Speaking about Biden’s broader Build Back Better agenda, which would include paid family leave and subsidies for child care, Manchin had said he did not want America to become an “entitlement society.”

In September, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that pandemic relief programs that were passed in 2020, such as expanded unemployment benefits, prevented more than 5 million people from falling into poverty. Meanwhile, direct stimulus payments pulled more than 11 million Americans above the line, dropping the overall poverty rate 3 percent. Those programs, however, were temporary, with the expanded unemployment ending last September and Congress not issuing any further stimulus payments.