| From: Bill Wolf | 12/22/2023 8:08:52 AM | | | | | | How Putin’s Right-Hand Man Took Out Prigozhin
Nikolai Patrushev, a top ally of the Russian leader for decades, put in motion the assassination of the mutinous chief of the Wagner mercenary group
By Thomas Grove, Alan Cullison and Bojan Pancevski
Dec. 22, 2023 12:01 am ET
On the tarmac of a Moscow airport in late August, Yevgeny Prigozhin waited on his Embraer Legacy 600 for a safety check to finish before it could take off. The mercenary army chief was headed home to St. Petersburg with nine others onboard. Through the delay, no one inside the cabin noticed the small explosive device slipped under the wing.
When the jet finally left, it climbed for about 30 minutes to 28,000 feet, before the wing blew apart, sending the aircraft spiraling to the ground. All 10 people were killed, including Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner paramilitary group.
The assassination of the warlord was two months in the making and approved by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s oldest ally and confidant, an ex-spy named Nikolai Patrushev, according to Western intelligence officials and a former Russian intelligence officer. The role of Patrushev as the driver of the plan to kill Prigozhin hasn’t been previously reported.
The Kremlin has denied involvement in Prigozhin’s death, and Putin offered the closest thing to an official explanation for the plane’s fiery crash, suggesting a hand grenade had detonated onboard.
None of that was true.
Hours after the incident, a European involved in intelligence gathering who maintained a backchannel of communication with the Kremlin and saw news of the crash asked an official there what had happened.
“He had to be removed,” the Kremlin official responded without hesitation.
Collision course
Patrushev had warned Putin for a long time that Moscow’s reliance on Wagner in Ukraine was giving Prigozhin too much political and military clout that was increasingly threatening the Kremlin.
With tens of thousands of troops and lucrative gold, timber and diamond operations in Africa, Prigozhin managed a multibillion-dollar empire overseas. But back in Russia and on the battlefield in Ukraine, his public confrontations with the military’s top brass over weapons and supplies had put him on a collision course with the Kremlin.
When that boiled over into an outright mutiny in late June against Russia’s military commanders—with an armed march on Moscow by some of Wagner’s 25,000 fighters and tanks—Patrushev stepped in to ward off the biggest challenge yet to Putin’s more than two-decade rule. He also saw an opportunity to eliminate Prigozhin for good.
The wreckage of the crashed private jet that carried Prigozhin. Photo: Associated Press
In interviews with Western intelligence agencies, former U.S. and Russian security and intelligence officials, and former Kremlin officials, The Wall Street Journal unearthed new details about the mutiny and murder of Russia’s most powerful warlord and the previously unknown role of Patrushev in reasserting Putin’s authority over an increasingly unstable Russia.
Through the power of state-controlled media and his own persona, Putin has unsettled the West with his image as a determined adversary who rules Russia alone. In fact, he is kept in power by a vast bureaucracy that has proven durable through deepening hostilities with the West and rising domestic divisions over the botched invasion of Ukraine.
Controlling the levers of that machine is Patrushev. He has climbed to the top by interpreting Putin’s policies and carrying out his orders. Throughout Putin’s reign, he has expanded Russia’s security services and terrorized its enemies with assassinations at home and abroad. More recently his profile has grown, backing Russia’s invasion, and his son Dmitry, a former banker, has been appointed agriculture minister and is touted by some as a potential successor to Putin.
Patrushev’s handling of Prigozhin has helped Putin claim control ahead of the presidential elections next year.
Former colleagues of Patrushev describe him as a sober bureaucrat who, like Putin, spurns the media, relying on daily readouts about the world from Russia’s security services. Like Putin, he joined the spy services in the 1970s, and stuck with the service through the collapse of the Soviet Union when other officers flocked to more lucrative jobs in Russia’s nascent private sector.
Patrushev, 72, sees Russia locked in a struggle with the U.S., which he has said wants to steal Russia’s oil and minerals. He salts conspiracy theories into speeches and interviews. Earlier this year, he told Russia’s Izvestia newspaper that the U.S. is plotting to take over Russia because a massive volcanic eruption in Wyoming could soon make it uninhabitable.
His role in some of the darker chapters of Putin’s presidency underscores the often deadly consequences for anyone who falls afoul of the Kremlin.
Russian officials and Patrushev didn’t respond to requests for comment.
U.S. officials said soon after Prigozhin’s death that preliminary government assessments found the crash was the result of an assassination plot.
Rise of the spy
In photos of him and Putin, Patrushev is a figure in the background, mostly unnoticed in an unremarkable dark suit. Daily, he travels in a Russian-made Aurus limousine to his spartan office in the presidential administration complex, steps away from the Kremlin, said former Kremlin officials. His phone calls are usually encrypted.
Patrushev plunged into the world of spycraft at an early age in the Soviet city of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. Recruited into the KGB after earning a degree in engineering, he attended the spy service’s academy in Minsk. He soon worked in counterespionage and as an officer responsible for security in a region bordering Finland.
With Putin, he suffered the collapse of the Soviet Union and the decline of the security services while the government of President Boris Yeltsin attempted to introduce Western-style economic reforms. When Yeltsin appointed Putin in 1999 to prime minister, Putin recommended Patrushev as his replacement to lead the new version of the KGB, the FSB.
Putin, center, when he was prime minister, spoke to Patrushev, left, then head of the FSB, in 1999. Photo: REUTERS
Putin’s rise to the presidency the following year buttressed Patrushev’s authority. The men were linked by common origins and convictions that only strong security services could make Russia strong.
As head of the spy agency, Patrushev began to reinvent the organization and referred to it in an interview at the time with the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets as Russia’s “new nobility.”
It was a sensitive moment for the new president, and Patrushev showed he was ready to help. In his first year as president, Putin was threatened by revelations that he had served as an adviser to a real-estate company being investigated in Europe for money laundering. Patrushev traveled to Ukraine to take possession of damaging evidence from that country’s security service, according to audiotapes leaked from the Ukraine president’s office. Parts of the tapes were later verified by the U.S. government. Putin denied any wrongdoing, and the scandal later died down.
Patrushev soon signaled that traitors to the Kremlin would suffer. In 2006, Russia passed a law effectively legalizing extrajudicial killings of Russians abroad deemed terrorists or extremists. Months later, a former FSB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, who had fled to London and wrote about Putin and his own work as a spy, was killed by a dose of a radioactive substance in his tea. A British judge said that Patrushev probably approved the murder.
As FSB director, Patrushev had hoped to foster cooperation with the West’s own antiterror efforts, which were then in full bloom in the U.S. after the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. But Litvinenko’s poisoning, which contaminated a sushi restaurant in downtown London, began to sow questions about any cooperation. The assassination was one of the first of more mysterious killings of Russian émigrés in Europe and the Middle East that Western officials suspected were linked to Moscow.
When Russia convened an international counterterrorism conference in the city of Khabarovsk in 2007, the CIA declined to send any high-ranking officials, instead offering a lower-profile group headed by a former CIA station chief, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen. Mowatt-Larssen said Patrushev took him aside to say he was offended. “He said ‘Please take this message back to the CIA,’” Mowatt-Larssen said. “‘You aren’t taking us seriously.’”
In 2008, Putin promoted Patrushev to secretary of Russia’s national security council, a post that confers little formal power. But Patrushev’s personal gravitas, his proximity to Putin and his role as de facto head of its security services for more than two decades has made him the second most powerful person in Russia.
His new role also gave him the mandate to strengthen Russia’s ties abroad. Soon he was acting as a kind of hybrid intelligence official and diplomat, visiting some of the world’s most powerful leaders. The feverish pace of Patrushev’s travel schedule contrasted with how little was actually known about his meetings.
Patrushev and Putin on a helicopter to visit a military outpost in Nalchik, Russia, near Chechnya, in 2008.
One of the few public glimpses into his activities was in 2016 when he went to clean up a mess left after the failure of a political interference operation in the tiny Balkan nation of Montenegro. Russia’s military intelligence had tried to cause unrest to prevent it from joining NATO.
The operation, run from neighboring Serbia, failed, and the Russian agents were publicly exposed, causing fallout for Moscow’s allies in the region. Patrushev traveled to Serbia to reassure the government and brought the operatives home. Montenegro joined NATO a year later.
Most of his work was done in the shadows. His plane was spotted in Oman in 2020 at the same time that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was there, prompting accusations in Ukraine that the two had held a secret meeting. Both Zelensky and the Kremlin denied it.
Separately, in the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Patrushev’s plane also appeared in Jakarta at the same time as a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was rolling out the White House strategy for regulating the contested Indian and Pacific Ocean region. The U.S. and Moscow each issued statements that no meeting took place.
Earlier, as indications grew of warming ties between Moscow and Beijing, the U.S. tried to talk the Kremlin back from an alliance with China. During the Trump administration, top White House officials met with Patrushev in Geneva to discuss prisoner exchanges and an extension of an arms control agreement.
A White House specialist on China, Matthew Pottinger, unveiled historical maps of Russian territories claimed by Beijing meant to underscore the threat China posed to Moscow. Patrushev listened patiently and then scoffed. “We know who our enemies are,” he said, according to one U.S. official who attended the meeting.
A former senior White House official said Patrushev has been a key conduit between Moscow and Beijing. “If Putin had been deposed or killed earlier this year by Wagner Group, I suspect Beijing would have made efforts to install Patrushev as Putin’s replacement,” the former official said.
John Bolton, who met with Patrushev numerous times as national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, said that Patrushev was always professional, never raising his voice in negotiations or showing much interest in small talk.
Bolton said he got a taste of anger only once, during a meeting in 2019, when their conversation turned to Ukraine. “We got a 20 minute oration about Ukraine and the history of it,” said Bolton. “It was very emotional and uncharacteristic for him.”
Patrushev would become one the biggest defenders of the Ukraine invasion.
Russian expectations were disappointed in the first days of the conflict in February 2022. By the fall of last year, Russian forces were crumbling in the face of Ukrainian offensives in the south and north of the country, with tens of thousands of casualties.
The Kremlin called on Prigozhin and his Wagner fighters to buttress Russia’s failing war effort with his paramilitary group. Prigozhin’s rapid rise would soon worry Patrushev.
March to Moscow
A former prison convict and hot-dog vendor from Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg, Prigozhin became a caterer for Putin and used his contacts to build a sprawling private military company. Over the past decade it fought wars in Ukraine, Syria and North Africa for the Kremlin.
The group had also gained a foothold in sub-Saharan Africa where it traded timber, gold, cash and diamonds for providing security to leaders—an important channel of geopolitical influence for Russia.
In Ukraine, Prigozhin threw his support behind Putin’s invasion, winning key battles, while hurling public criticism at Russia’s commanders for their military losses.
His social media tirades against Chief of General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu—combined with the successful advances of his troops in eastern Ukraine—got him noticed in Moscow and won him powerful enemies, including Patrushev.
In Prigozhin’s tirades against Shoigu, those inside the Kremlin saw Putin’s longtime tactic of keeping his subordinates divided by allowing feuds. But in the war, the warlord’s accumulation of power had made him a danger to the president.
“Everyone told Putin it was a mistake to have a parallel army,” said one former Kremlin official, who had at times worked with both Putin and Patrushev. “When he spits in the face of the military leadership every day—you have yourself a problem.”
Patrushev began to warn Putin about Prigozhin during the summer months of 2022. But the warnings fell on deaf ears while Wagner made progress on the battlefield.
That changed when Prigozhin called Putin and complained rudely about his lack of supplies, said the former Russian intelligence officer, who maintains ties to people close to Putin and his spy chief. Prigozhin needed guns and bullets and his men were dying in large numbers.
The call happened in October with others in the office, the former agent said, including Patrushev, who heard the former caterer scold the president. Later Patrushev would use the call as a reason Putin should distance himself: The warlord had become dangerous, with no respect for the Kremlin’s authority.
By December it was clear Patrushev had won. Even as Prigozhin publicly railed against the military and his lack of supplies, Putin ignored him. Calls went unanswered. By early June, the Kremlin effectively announced plans to dismantle Wagner as a fighting force in Ukraine, ordering its fighters to register with Russia’s defense ministry.
On Friday June 23, Prigozhin launched a mutiny, taking his 25,000 men and tanks from the battlefield in Ukraine and marched them toward the southern city of Rostov-on-Don to take the Russian armed forces’ southern military district headquarters. The plan, on what he called his “march of justice,” was to confront Gerasimov and Shoigu, who had been there for meetings but escaped before Prigozhin arrived.
Prigozhin during his mutiny on June 24. Photo: alexander ermochenko/Reuters
Prigozhin sent another column of tanks and soldiers toward Moscow.
With Putin at a villa far outside of the city, Patrushev took over, organizing a flurry of phone calls to persuade Prigozhin to stand down, according to Western intelligence assessments and the former Russian intelligence officer.
Patrushev asked officers sympathetic to Prigozhin to try to get through to him. Five calls to Prigozhin from the Kremlin went unanswered. He also looked for mediators, and calls were made to the governments of Kazakhstan and Belarus, both members of a Russian-led military alliance made up of former Soviet states.
The call to Kazakhstan was insurance against a worst-case scenario. The year before, Russia had sent it troops to restore order after violent riots broke out. The hope now was Kazakhstan would return the favor if the Russian military couldn’t hold the rogue army back, said a Western intelligence official and the former Russian intelligence officer. But president Kassym Jomart Tokayev declined, having distanced himself after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In the end, the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, said in a public statement at the time he agreed to help, calling Prigozhin multiple times over the course of more than six hours and ferrying messages between the warlord and Moscow. Ultimately, he delivered an offer hashed out by Patrushev: If Prigozhin turned his troops around, his men would be allowed to decamp to Belarus.
Lukashenko had several rounds of talks with Prigozhin, as well as Putin, his press service said in a statement to the Journal. “The talks delivered success,” the statement said.
In a late morning television appearance, Putin called Prigozhin and the Wagner leadership traitors, helping persuade him to take the offer, which included retaining control of his overseas operations, such as those in Africa.
While Prigozhin and his fighters hadn’t encountered active resistance from the military, most units they encountered weren’t joining them either. By early Saturday evening, Prigozhin’s mutiny had come to an end.
Prigozhin’s fighters who were heading toward Moscow stopped and some began marching toward camps putatively prepared for them in Belarus. Prigozhin himself disappeared from social media.
For the rest of the summer, an uneasiness settled on Moscow. Few in the Kremlin believed that Prigozhin would get away with an armed mutiny with no consequences.
The killing
After the mutiny, the Kremlin did little publicly to limit Prigozhin’s life. He traveled to Africa to check in on his operations there. He was also allowed to continue working in St. Petersburg and around Russia, said Maksim Shugaley, who worked for Prigozhin at a think tank. But, he said, Prigozhin was wary.
“He knew he had enemies and that something could happen to him, but as far as he was concerned he was abiding by the deal,” Shugaley said.
Mowatt-Larssen, the former CIA station chief, said that Prigozhin might have appeared to be free, when in fact he was being closely watched. His mutiny had exposed a deep rift in Putin’s system of running the country, as well as dissatisfaction in the military, which had done little to oppose his march, he said.
“You can see what Putin’s plan was—to keep the dead man walking so they could continue to find out what happened,” he said, meaning the Kremlin was looking for Prigozhin’s collaborators.
In the beginning of August, as most of Moscow went on vacation, Patrushev, in his office in central Moscow, gave orders to his assistant to proceed in shaping an operation to dispose of Prigozhin, said the former Russian intelligence officer. Putin was later shown the plans and didn’t object, Western intelligence agencies said.
Several weeks later, following his tour through Africa, Prigozhin was waiting at a Moscow airport while safety inspectors finished a check on the plane. It was during this delay that a small bomb was placed under the wing, said Western intelligence officials.
The jet departed after 5 p.m. and reached an altitude of 28,000 feet. But after more than half an hour, the aircraft swiftly lost altitude and crashed near the village of Kuzhenkino. Witness videos show that after an explosion, a jet with a detached wing fell from the sky.
Within days, Russian media reported that DNA tests confirmed Prigozhin had died in the crash. Nine others were killed with him, including the Wagner group’s commander, Dmitry Utkin, another Wagner associate, two pilots and a 39-year-old flight attendant.
Warren P. Strobel and Max Colchester contributed to this article.
Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com, Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com and Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com
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| From: Bill Wolf | 2/1/2024 6:59:38 PM | | | | | | Harvard Professor’s Papers Contain Copied Images, Says Science Sleuth
Khalid Shah’s work is the latest tranche of papers to come under review
By Nidhi SubbaramanFollow
Feb. 1, 2024 at 2:10 pm ET
A Harvard Medical School scientist who studies deadly brain tumors is facing accusations that more than two dozen papers he co-authored contain scientific images that appear doctored or copied.
Khalid Shah is vice chair for research at the Department of Neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School. Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and science image expert, this week sent accusations about 28 studies Shah co-authored to research integrity officials at both institutions and the journals that published them.
Shah’s work is the latest tranche of papers to come under review by sleuths who are scrutinizing the scientific record for errors or fabricated data. In cases like Shah’s, the former scientists are taking advantage of advanced image analysis tools to spot copied images or scientific images that appear manipulated.
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| From: Bill Wolf | 2/25/2024 11:13:26 AM | | | | | | Trump's demographic problem
If America were dominated by old, white, election-denying Christians who didn't go to college, former President Trump would win the general election in as big of a landslide as his sweep of the first four GOP contests.
Why it matters: It's not. That's why some top Republicans are worried about the general election in November, despite Trump's back-to-back-to-back-to-back wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.
Trump was declared the winner of Saturday's South Carolina's Republican Party the second that polls closed, trouncing Nikki Haley by 20 points (60% to 40%) in the state where she was governor.
By the numbers: Trump dominates with older white voters without college diplomas who believe the last election was rigged, according to network exit polls and AP VoteCast, which interviewed 2,440 South Carolina primary voters over five days.
Where he won: Two-thirds of Trump voters were white and didn't go to college. ( VoteCast)
- Three-quarters of those without a college degree went for Trump. ( CNN)
- 83% of "angry" voters backed Trump. ( ABC)
Where he lost: 75% of Haley supporters correctly said Biden was legitimately elected president in 2020 (about 40% of them voted for Biden). ( VoteCast)
- A stunning 62% of Republican primary voters said Biden wasn't legitimately elected. ( NBC)
Those who went to the polls reflected Trump's strengths:
- This was the oldest South Carolina GOP electorate this century. ( Chuck Todd)
- 60% of primary voters were white evangelical or born-again Christians. ( CNN)
Reality check: That group isn't remotely big enough to win a presidential election. He would need to attract voters who are more diverse, more educated and believe his first loss was legit. South Carolina exit polls show he didn't do that.
- That's why Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate's only Black Republican, remains on Trump's short list for V.P.
- A bigger problem yet: Polls show these skeptics would be even less likely to swing his way if he's convicted of a crime — a real possibility among his four ongoing cases, insiders tell us.
The strategy: Trump's campaign says that in the battleground states where the election will be decided, his message will appeal far beyond the GOP base that propelled him to the nomination.
- "This is going to be a referendum against Joe Biden and his policies," a top Trump adviser tells us. "As long as Trump can tap into voter disillusion about the economy, out-of-control immigration, and more foreign entanglements, those are issues that affect people from all backgrounds."
Between the lines: Trump can't scare off swing voters as he works to scare them away from Biden by warning of bloodshed, tyranny, crime and violence if the president is re-elected.
- "For hardworking Americans, November 5th will be our new Liberation Day," Trump said yesterday at CPAC in National Harbor, Md.
- Trump called himself a "proud political dissident" in that speech, focused on the general election and never mentioned Haley.
"But for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and imposters who have commandeered our government, it will be Judgment Day."
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| From: Bill Wolf | 3/18/2024 8:50:05 AM | | | | | | Opinion / Commentary
Reagan Would Never Vote for Trump
He also didn’t care much for Biden. Like me, he’d be looking for a strong third-party candidate to support.
By John Lehman
March 17, 2024 4:12 pm ET
 Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill in 1982. Photo: Getty Images
As one of the last senior national-security officials of the Reagan administration still vertical, I must speak.
It was an honor to serve as Navy secretary. The lessons I learned from the Gipper are still my political North Star. He taught his staff that we must be clear-eyed about our enemies, and especially our friends. He showed us how to speak to what makes America great, as well as what needs improvement, but not to tear America down. Most of all, he implored us to remember that strong relationships across the political divide are a great asset. Americans may disagree, he believed, but the true enemy lies beyond our shores.
Reagan’s 11th Commandment was “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican,” but Donald Trump is no heir to Reagan’s legacy. He is an insult to it. The Reagan I knew would be appalled that someone as unfit as Mr. Trump had become the GOP’s standard-bearer. Reagan would also deeply oppose President Biden’s agenda, and he never trusted or cared much for then-Sen. Biden.
The most fundamental difference between Reagan and Mr. Trump is that Reagan knew America’s friends from its enemies. He would be horrified by the Republican Party’s abandonment of Ukraine at Mr. Trump’s behest. He would recognize Russia’s invasion for what it is: a brutal attempt to reassert its old Soviet dominance on a free people, no matter how many innocents die. Reagan would recognize that supporting Ukraine is both morally correct and good realpolitik, a chance to bog an adversary down. He would find Mr. Trump’s naked admiration of our enemies incomprehensible and dangerous. The man who told Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” wouldn’t understand how an American president could congratulate a Russian dictator for “winning” a sham election.
Further, Reagan wouldn’t be able to fathom a president going out of his way to insult the leaders of North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies by suggesting that Russia could have its way with them if they didn’t spend more on defense.
Reagan would consider Mr. Trump’s praise for Hezbollah—calling the terrorist organization “very smart” in the wake of Hamas’s massacre of innocent Israeli civilians—unforgivable. Hezbollah is responsible for the most murderous attack on our peacetime military, Oct. 23, 1983, when its jihadists blew up a Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers. Mr. Trump’s praise demonstrates that he has no idea with whom he is dealing, let alone the effect of his words.
Mr. Trump’s praise of adversaries is particularly egregious considering the insults he throws at his own country. In his 2017 inauguration speech Mr. Trump spoke of “American carnage.” It is hard to imagine a phrase more out of sync with Reagan’s “morning in America.” Mr. Trump has spent his entire political career deriding the nation he wants to lead. He called America a “Third World country” and a “laughingstock.” He declared that “the American dream is dead.”
Reagan’s optimism wasn’t merely stylistic. It was substantive. He recognized that a nation that had lost its confidence during the Carter administration needed to be reminded of its greatness. Mr. Trump, it seems, has no understanding of the importance of speaking to the better angels of our nature.
Nor does he understand the importance of speaking with the opposing party. He treats Democrats as villains to vanquish, not as countrymen to be persuaded or outvoted. Reagan’s ability to negotiate—and have genuinely close relationships—with leading Democrats was one of his most underappreciated skills. In partnership with House Speaker Tip O’Neill, Reagan negotiated excellent legislation that defined his administration’s domestic policy. The 1986 Tax Reform Act, the 1987 Surface Transportation and Uniform Relocation Assistance Act, and a Social Security compromise of 1983 are three examples among dozens.
Reagan and O’Neill genuinely liked each other. Reagan once thanked Tip for a Valentine’s Day card he’d received, telling him he knew it was from the speaker because “the heart was still bleeding.” On another occasion, when Tip publicly criticized Reagan for sleeping through the Achille Lauro hijacking, Reagan responded to the press that he would promise Tip he would make sure he was awakened immediately for any crisis in the future—“even if it was in the middle of a cabinet meeting.” It was only thanks to Reagan’s close relationship with O’Neill and other country-first Democrats like Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson that I could get the large, steady budgets that allowed America to build the vaunted 600-ship Navy that checkmated the Soviet Union and kept peace on the seas for a generation.
One doesn’t see Reagan’s—or Jackson’s, or O’Neill’s—approach in Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden. Neither man has demonstrated a commitment to peace through strength, as both submitted budgets and proposals that forced the military to disarm while America’s enemies built their capabilities. Nor does one see unity or bipartisanship in their approaches. Gen. Jim Mattis was right when he described Mr. Trump as “the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.” Mr. Biden is the second such president.
I am a conservative, however, and the Republican Party has been my philosophical home. With Mr. Trump, it has suffered a break-in from a vandal who refuses to leave. And since Mr. Biden has turned his platform over to socialist Bernie Sanders, I am wrapped in the No Labels flag.
Mr. Lehman served as Navy secretary, 1981-87. He is an elector and delegate for No Labels and author of “Oceans Ventured: Winning the Cold War at Sea.”
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| From: waitwatchwander | 3/22/2024 9:46:37 PM | | | | | |
What are the white blobs floating in the tail draft and exploding ever once in a while.
How much earth bound CO2 does this produce? |
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| From: Bill Wolf | 5/31/2024 7:24:38 AM | | | | | | Trump Fought the Law and the Law Finally Won
The former president faced the reckoning he has long deserved, but the more critical verdict will come on Election Day.
May 30, 2024 at 7:06 PM EDT
Corrected May 30, 2024 at 7:33 PM EDT
By Timothy L. O'Brien
Timothy L. O'Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”
No American is above the law, a jury reminded the former president emphatically.
Donald Trump, who turns 78 in June, has spent decades circumventing and flouting civil and civic society. He spent his presidency and the years since going well out of his way to undermine the rule of law. And the law finally caught up to him.
New York prosecutors said he and his co-conspirators cooked the Trump Organization’s books to mask payments to former lovers to prevent tales of their trysts from derailing his 2016 presidential bid. A jury of Trump’s peers (two of whom were lawyers) agreed and found him guilty of criminal fraud on Thursday afternoon.
Trump, predictably, remained unbowed.
“This was a disgrace. This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt,” he said outside the courtroom after the verdict was read. “The real verdict is gonna be Nov. 5, by the people.”
“Our country’s gone to hell,” he added, in case you needed a bit of cheering up. “We don’t have the same country anymore. We have a divided mess.”
Trump, who has been a primary architect of the divided mess that is the United States, knows of what he speaks. He has routinely deployed lies, racism and us-versus-them paranoia to help undermine Americans’ faith in one another, in our institutions and in the world around us. He has romped along, merrily stoking conflagrations wherever he could, unchecked.
Congress impeached Trump twice, but Republican allies put the acquisition and retention of power ahead of civic duty and let him elude accountability. Three other criminal trials are still in motion against him, but they’ve been bogged down by a blend of judicial malfeasance and ineptitude and prosecutorial lapses. But a handful of New York law enforcement officials, in a prosecution that was fated from its very beginnings to be labeled a witch hunt, finally brought Trump to heel.
This was long overdue. There may be violence in the streets in response to this verdict. But it was long overdue. There may be political fissures that take years to mend. But it was long overdue. There may be a generation of voters and citizens permanently soured on the courts and their neighbors. But it was long overdue.
As the Supreme Court, which has been a weak ally to justice in the Trump years, has noted in Trump rulings, no American, including presidents, is above the rule of law. Holding on to the rule of law during times of chaos and fear is when holding on to the rule of law matters most. It was important that Trump be fairly tried in New York, which he was. It was important that the jury found him guilty of his crimes, which he was.
All of this is hardly over. Trump, a presidential candidate who is now a convicted felon, still faces a sentencing hearing on July 11 with Justice Juan Merchan, who has overseen a trial that Trump tried to turn into a circus. Merchan, a meticulous and courageous jurist who went out of his way to treat Trump fairly, will still have to decide how severe a penalty he wants to impose. He has latitude. He could sentence Trump to as much as four years in prison or let him avoid that nightmare with less weighty sanctions.
Trump will surely appeal that sentence and this verdict all the way to the US Supreme Court if he has to, so there may still be a long and winding judicial road ahead — one that will possibly not reach its end before the presidential election in November.
Trump’s supporters will continue to savage the courts, prosecutors and Merchan, of course. Cultists have a hard time absorbing stark reckonings. Legal scholars will disagree on the merits and weaknesses of the New York case. Trump himself will do whatever he can to portray himself as a martyr for a cause that has never really transcended his own self-aggrandizement and self-preservation.
Even so, Trump did put his finger on an important thing when he found himself shell-shocked, humbled and moaning outside Courtroom 1530 at 100 Centre Street in lower Manhattan, just miles away from where he was born and where his father began assembling the family fortune about a century ago.
And it bears repeating: “The real verdict is gonna be Nov. 5, by the people.”
This is certainly true. Trump can run for president and execute the office’s powers from prison, if it comes to that. The ultimate verdict that would prevent this particular and peculiar outlaw from continuing to wield political power and fracture his country’s well-being would be rejecting him for a second stay in the White House.
It will all be in voters’ hands, as it always has been — ever since Trump rolled down a Trump Tower escalator to declare his presidential bid nine long years ago.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
(Corrects Donald Trump’s age in the first paragraph.)
bloomberg.com
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| To: Bill Wolf who wrote (12074) | 6/7/2024 7:56:52 AM | | From: Bill Wolf | | | | By Invitation | Business and Trump
American business should not empower a criminal, says Reid HoffmanNo rational CEO would want a capricious strongman in the White House, argues the entrepreneur
 Illustration: Dan Williams
Jun 6th 2024
WOULD NEW YORK be a global financial capital, or even a prosperous city, if markets had no basis for trusting the transactions that happen there? Obviously not.
Businesses and investors rely on a robust legal system—especially courts of law and impartial, fact-based trials by jury—to enforce contracts and punish fraud. That’s why, in the past decade alone, New York City prosecutors have brought thousands of felony charges for falsifying business records. It’s a crime because it strikes at American prosperity.
For American business, the rule of law is essential. It is the soil in which commerce can take root and grow. Without this stable, predictable, rules-based environment, New York, and America, would not have become the hubs of innovation, investment, profit and progress that they are.
Unfortunately, many American business leaders have recently developed a kind of myopia, miscalculating what politics, and which political leaders, will truly support their long-term success. Perhaps this stems from their having lived their entire lives in a stable legal regime that they now take for granted. But a robust, reliable legal system is not a given. It is a necessity we can ill afford to live without. We trade it away at our peril.
Which makes it all the more lamentable that a growing number of America’s corporate and financial leaders are opening their wallets for Donald Trump.
Of course, few of these leaders would do actual business with Mr Trump. Even fewer would trust him to pay his bills. Long before the Electoral College made him president in 2016, Mr Trump was known as a liar and grifter who would browbeat vendors and debtors. More recently, American courts—including two unanimous juries—have found him to have engaged in sexual assault, defamation, fraud (including misuse of charitable funds) and—by a unanimous Colorado Supreme Court—insurrection.
So why are so many of my business-leader peers writing cheques to give nearly unchecked power to a man with whom they wouldn’t sign a condominium contract? There are a few explanations.
Some kid themselves, or pretend, that Mr Trump can be normal and controlled. Never mind the striking refusal by his former vice-president, Mike Pence, to endorse him as the Republican nominee. Or the stinging words of John Kelly, Mr Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, who has called him “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our constitution, and the rule of law”. Dozens of other former Trump officials, military leaders and campaign operatives echo this analysis.
Others of Mr Trump’s business-class supporters claim that President Joe Biden is somehow more dangerous than the convicted felon and pathological liar. The laziest cite the actions of far-left figures who play no role in Mr Biden’s administration. Relatively more serious critics mention disagreeable Democratic economic policies. When they manage to get specific with their criticisms, I sometimes agree. But if economics is their metric, it seems not just irrational but deeply irresponsible for them to ignore some clear financial truths. Under Mr Biden America has hit record after record: in stockmarkets, oil and gas production, employment and more. And its GDP growth is the envy of most of the world’s economies.
Sadly, the true motives of some in Mr Trump’s camp are even uglier. He and his ideological allies have been quite explicit: upon regaining power, they intend to corrupt the legal system to use the state against political opponents. Some American elites support this autocratic agenda because in such a Trumpist regime they expect to be the new oligarchs. Others fear that opposing Mr Trump will bring retaliation, so seek safety by pledging loyalty.
Most conventionally, of course, there is the simple siren promise of a second Trump term’s lower corporate-tax rates and softer regulatory enforcement. But it’s all penny-wise at best, when stacked against the likelihood of, say, Justice, State and Defence Departments purged and restaffed with MAGA cronies, loyal not to the USA but to DJT.
There is a historical pattern to the collapse of the rule of law in advanced countries: it happens when powerful groups naively judge that a strongman will stay contained. Today’s pro-Trump business elites are making the same crucial mistake as any other influential group choosing to empower an autocrat. To paraphrase Tim Snyder, a Yale historian: “He is not your strongman—he is his own strongman.”
Mr Trump’s felony convictions in the Stormy Daniels election-interference case, and the subsequent Republican attack on the American judicial system, have clarified this election’s epochal stakes: the systemic rule of law versus the capricious rule of a strongman.
America’s rules-based system, with its stability and continuity, has delivered enormous gains to the country—and to humanity. America saw its first peaceful transfer of political power in 1801. This proud tradition went unbroken until the Capitol attack of January 6th 2021. And the man who broke with it, a criminal, is dead-set on scuttling the system that really did make America great.
When the courts go against him, as they so often have, Mr Trump claims—just like every other “wrongly” convicted felon—that the system is rigged. Meanwhile his lawyers have argued at the Supreme Court that as president he should be permitted any use of state violence. And Mr Trump’s party is now committed to delegitimising, rejecting and attacking juries, courts, elections and any other mechanisms that might hold the leader legally or electorally accountable. The danger speaks for itself.
In short, the rule of law is on the line in this election. Americans who prize respect for the law, stability and prosperity—including even business leaders who might value the last of these most highly—should take Mr Trump literally and seriously, and do everything they can to prevent his return to the White House. ¦
Reid Hoffman is a tech entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist and co-founder of LinkedIn. He provided third-party financial support for E. Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuits, which led to two unanimous guilty verdicts against Donald Trump.
economist.com |
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