…after what happened to nancy’s other half you’d think some things might be obvious

Joe Biden has issued a rallying cry for the preservation of democracy and a dark warning that America could face political violence as it barrels toward next week’s midterm elections.

…but apparently that would be underestimating some things

Behind him were eight US flags and a blue curtain – a less dramatic backdrop than the red and blue lights of his “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall two months ago, where he spoke on similar themes.

But just as that address was framed by Republicans as an attack on their voters, his latest remarks found little unity. The conservative Fox News channel ran captions such as “Biden ignores crime & inflation to talk about ‘threat to democracy’” and “Divider in chief”.
[…]
Pointing to mounting concerns over political violence as well as threats of America’s long tradition of peaceful and accurate elections, he argued these Republicans are “trying to succeed where they failed in 2020 to suppress the rights of voters and subvert the electoral system itself”.

Biden added: “There’s an alarming rise in the number of people in this country condoning political violence or simply remaining silent. The silence is complicity.”

He described those who are willing to use violence to achieve political ends as a “distinct minority” in America, “but they are loud and they are determined”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/02/joe-biden-speech-political-violence-preserve-democracy-midterm-election

[the NYT offered a complete transcript…if you can get it to load]

…but to say some people are turning a blind eye would be a grievous understatement

The First Amendment’s free speech clause grants a lot of protection for false and odious speech. It also protects freedom of association. So if a group of people want to get together to protest the results of the 2020 election and falsely claim that Donald J. Trump won that election over Joe Biden, that is their right. Depending on the state, they may even have the right to do so openly carrying firearms. What they don’t have the right to do is to interfere with others’ constitutionally protected voting rights, such as by standing around ballot drop boxes in military gear with weapons intimidating voters against casting their ballots.

…I’ve admitted more than once that at some level the view some folks have about guns in the US is beyond me to entirely follow…& I don’t think I’ll ever get my head around how you could be so used to toting an object whose sole purpose is to be lethal that you’d fail to consider it when, say, heading to the airport to catch a flight…but seriously…how in the ever-loving fuck do you conclude that going strapped to “observe” people dropping off ballots at what is essentially a dedicated post box is anything but an unambiguous effort to intimidate?

Yet, citing the First Amendment, a federal judge in Arizona last week refused to grant a preliminary injunction that would have stopped the groups of people carrying out these menacing activities in Maricopa and Yavapai counties as voters participate in the midterm election. The Ninth Circuit court of appeals is currently considering an emergency request for an order to overturn that decision and put the injunction in place. The court should grant it and protect the right to vote, recognizing that First Amendment rights do not extend to threats of violence and voter intimidation.

…no, really

There has been no indication of any widespread fraud through the use of ballot drop boxes. Nonetheless, conspiracy theories about the drop boxes have continued to circulate, fueled in part by a widely debunked film by Dinesh D’Souza, “2000 Mules,” which uses false and unproven claims to try to show drop boxes being used for fraud. Reporting by NBC News shows that ballot drop box conspiracies have flooded Trump’s social media website, Truth Social, and that has led to organizing on the ground, including in places like Arizona.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/arizona-early-voting-marred-ballot-box-intimidation-courts

…even if any of the bullshit pretextual nonsense had a grain of truth to it…what fucking scenario do these assholes supposedly think they’re gearing up appropriately for? …am I supposed to believe there’s a dude out there with a pick up bed filled with fraudulent postal ballots he’s going to fill a drop box with while his buddy holds off the intrepid observers with covering fire from an AR-15? …because I don’t know about whatever excuse the judge in arizona offered up for taking seriously the idea that there’s anything involved in that which isn’t explicitly all about intimidation…but to me you have to be delusional on a scale that implies imminent need for a mental health intervention in order to get there…presumably these folks also think it’s perfectly legitimate for vlad to keep using the n-word

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia began ramping up his nuclear rhetoric this fall, raising the specter that he could use such a weapon in Ukraine. As Mr. Putin was making threats, senior Russian generals were discussing the circumstances when they might possibly use a tactical nuclear weapon, The New York Times reported.
[…]
The likelihood that Mr. Putin will use a nuclear weapon remains exceedingly low. But the prospect of even a small nuclear device going off is so terrible that officials in the United States and elsewhere are concerned. Thousands of people could be killed, and millions sickened.
[…]
“When the leader of a modern nuclear power, as Mr. Putin is, talks as recklessly and irresponsibly, as he has been doing, about the potential use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, you’ve got to take it seriously,” John F. Kirby, a National Security Council official, told reporters on Wednesday. “And we’ve been taking this seriously since the very beginning.”

…realistically it seems like a major component of taking something seriously would be to try to be realistic about it

The discussions, according to current and former officials, could be less about real planning and more about deterring the West from expanding its help to Ukraine.
[…]
But Russia might partly be trying to discourage the United States from sending Ukraine advanced weapons like the Army Tactical Missile System, a longer-range weapon known as ATACMS. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine wants the weapons, and some former U.S. military officials think supplying them would dramatically help the Ukrainian army put Russian targets and supply depots at risk.

…but…you know…not all audiences are equal

It is incredibly unlikely that Russia would use a tactical nuclear weapon, said Frederick B. Hodges, a retired lieutenant general and former top U.S. Army commander in Europe. While the Soviet Red Army had war plans that involved using nuclear weapons on a battlefield and exploiting the results, Russia does not have trained troops who could take advantage of such a strike.

“Their nuclear weapons are most useful to them when they don’t use them,” General Hodges said. “There’s just no battlefield advantage at all to use any nuclear weapon.”

Instead, Russian leaders hope nuclear threats will be enough to force Ukraine into diplomatic talks and to make concessions that Russia has failed to win on the battlefield.
[…]
“Since the dirty bomb narrative, we have detected a significant increase in support for using nuclear weapons if necessary,” Mr. Teubner said.

Russian support for conscription flagged after the mobilization was announced in September, but Mr. Putin’s rhetoric about dirty bombs created a “rally-around-the-flag effect,” [Jonathan] Teubner [the chief executive of FilterLabs, a company that has been tracking public sentiment in Russia] said.

Most disturbing, he said, the biggest shift his firm had detected by tracking discussions on online forums and social media was in the sentiment toward using a nuclear weapon.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/us/politics/putin-russia-nuclear-weapons.html

…& even vlad seems to get the part where anyone hitting that button pretty much guarantees nobody getting to be happy in the aftermath

After weeks of apocalyptic atomic innuendo, Russia issued a bland statement Wednesday reaffirming its long-standing policies on the use of nuclear weapons — a possible sign that the Kremlin is trying to cool the escalatory rhetoric it used throughout October.

“Russia is strictly and consistently guided by the tenet that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” said the statement on the Russian Foreign Ministry website.

The statement added that Russian nuclear doctrine was unambiguous and did not allow for “expansive interpretation,” indicating Moscow may be trying to walk back a number of statements calling the doctrine into question.
[…]
Throughout October, Russian state television hosts — and even some officials, such as former President Dmitry Medvedev — openly called for the use of nuclear weapons to defend four recently claimed regions of Ukraine: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
[…]
Russian military leaders last month discussed the possible use of nuclear warheads and the conditions under which they would be acceptable, said two U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russias-vladimir-putin-nuclear-invasion-ukraine-war

…hmm…probably a bit wishy washy for those brave boys cosplaying as militant defenders of “democracy”…maybe they’d feel more kinship with…say…that guy?

North Korea fired more than 20 ballistic missiles on Wednesday, a record, sending residents of a South Korean island to underground shelters as the rivals engaged in a series of launches around their tense sea border.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s military began the exchange by test-firing multiple ballistic missiles, one of which landed south of the buffer zone in the sea border between the two countries for the first time since the Korean Peninsula was divided in 1948. South Korea responded by firing three air-to-surface missiles toward the northern side of the border, which North Korea followed with 100 rounds of artillery and additional missile launches that lasted into the evening.

The exchange marked the latest significant escalation between the two neighbors after months of provocations from Pyongyang. Analysts said they were likely a sign of Kim’s desire to ratchet up tensions as he seeks to develop his regime’s nuclear arsenal, pressure the United States to ease crippling sanctions and challenge the South’s new conservative leader.

As his repeated weapons tests make less of a splash internationally, Kim is “salami slicing the escalation ladder,” searching for new ways to grab the world’s attention, said Christopher Green, a senior consultant on the Korean Peninsula for the International Crisis Group.

North Korea’s provocations on Wednesday, while highly symbolic, are “more for show than for military escalation,” he told NBC News.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/north-korea-south-air-raid-alert-missiles

…more for show…see…they’d feel right at home…it’s not like they actually expect to have to pull those guns to…I don’t know…protect the drop box from the incipient threat of people using it for its intended…& indeed sole…purpose…although if you metaphorically stand on your head & try to squint at it maybe you could corkscrew your way from them feeling like the result of untrammeled voting poses an existential threat to these poor terrified bigots to their being just too scared to go anywhere without a bargain-basement flack jacket & something semi-automatic…delicate little snowflakes that they are…mind you…by their logic you’d think jewish people & native americans wouldn’t go anywhere without heavy artillery

Historians consider it the worst massacre of Native Americans in U.S. history. Yet few have ever heard of it.

The Bear River Massacre of 1863 near what’s now Preston, Idaho, left roughly 350 members of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation dead, making it the bloodiest — and most deadly — slaying of Native Americans by the U.S. military, according to historians and tribal leaders. The Indians were slain after soldiers came into a valley where they were camping for the winter and attacked, leaving about 90 women and children among the dead.

The death toll, historians say, exceeded some of the country’s most horrific Indian slayings, including the 1864 slaying at Colorado’s Sand Creek, where 130 Cheyennes were killed. And the death count was nearly double the roughly 150 Sioux killed at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, four days after Christmas in 1890.

Some accounts put the Bear River death toll even higher than 350.

In one account of the brutality, Danish immigrant Hans Jasperson in his 1911 autobiography, said he walked among the bodies, counting 493 Shoshone Indians dead, according to a 2008 article in the Salt Lake Tribune. Jasperson wrote, “I turned around and counted them back and counted just the same.”
[…]
“It almost annihilated us as a people,” said Darren B. Parry, former chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation. “But it’s largely been forgotten.”
[…]
Jonathan Deiss, a military historian based in Washington, compared the slaying of Native Americans in the 1800s to mass shootings in the 21st century. “People became numb to them,” Deiss said.

“People considered Indians not really humans,” Deiss added, “so it was easy to justify killing them or mistreating them.”
[…]
Ever since the 1863 massacre, the land where the massacre happened has been privately owned. At one point decades ago, landowners said they tried to plow the land for farming but too often found human remains believed to be those of Indians.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/09/26/bear-river-massacre-native-americans-shoshone/

…shit…you’d think some of these folks would be trading in the suburbans for shermans

On the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, let's acknowledge that what happened in Greenwood was not a spontaneous eruption of hatred.

That's the narrative that America likes to portray but what happened on May 31, 1921, is an example of systemic racism.

A thread

— Michael Harriot (@michaelharriot) May 30, 2021

If you think this was bad, Georgia was even worse.

Ga. holds the distinction of being the only state that was so racist that we had to kick the ENTIRE STATE out of America.

Seriously, that happened. And it was partly because of the Camilla Massacre.

— Michael Harriot (@michaelharriot) May 3, 2020

The Camilla Massacre got Georgia kicked BACK OUT of the Union and the state had to be readmitted for a second time in 1870 after it seated SOME of the Original 33.

Why not all?

Well, 1/4 of the Original 33 were murdered or attacked.

— Michael Harriot (@michaelharriot) May 3, 2020

A white judge told the Red Shirts that they could take the black NATIONAL GUARDSMEN's guns, they found the black militia and began opening fire.

94 white men were indicted.
0 were convicted

The leader of the Hamburg Massacre?

He went on to serve 24 years in the US Senate

— Michael Harriot (@michaelharriot) May 3, 2020

The day after the families moved in, on August13, the whites attacked

For 3 days, as many as 5,000 white rioters pulled Black people out of cars and beat them. They threw rocks at the homes and smashed windows. Then they started setting fires.

The police did nothing.

— Michael Harriot (@michaelharriot) May 3, 2020

One section of town was bombed so often it's still called "Dynamite Hill."

Of course, the KKK marched anyway.

Oh, and that bombed house belonged to A.D. King, Martin Luther King's brother.

King had left town a few hours earlier…

After checking out of the AG Gaston Hotel

— Michael Harriot (@michaelharriot) May 3, 2020

So when white people show up to protests angry and outspoken, and nothing happens, you don't have to wonder what would happen if black people did that,

Just remember what happened when black people just SHOWED UP

Not if…

WHEN.

— Michael Harriot (@michaelharriot) May 3, 2020

Speaking of white vigilantes, I bet your history teacher didn’t tell you about this 1968 incident that is still swept under the rug.

Don’t worry, the Orangeburg Massacre is only known as the “most violent incident of the civil rights era.” https://t.co/g99OHtncUU

— Michael Harriot (@michaelharriot) March 7, 2022

…& the sad & sorry truth is that there’s literally more where that came from…literally…that run between the first tweet (which is a whole thread of its own) & the last one is literally a fraction of another whole thread…& that’s just touching on stuff one man posted on a short-form platform…while giving me a tenuous excuse for a title for today’s effort…for the record “extracting the michael” is not about selectively quoting mr harriot…it’s an exaggeratedly polite way of saying “taking the mickey”…which at least some people maintain is a contraction of a a bit of rhyming slang about “taking the mickey bliss”…though a few like to argue the contraction is from the term “micturation”…either way…the point is about (to put it in modern parlance) taking the fucking piss

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed lawmakers to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory not only in Arizona, as previously reported, but also in a second battleground state, Wisconsin, according to emails obtained under state public-records law.

…arizona…the same arizona with the judge that thinks guns are appropriate “election watching” accessories? …well, there’s a fucking surprise

The Washington Post reported this year that Ginni Thomas emailed 29 Arizona state lawmakers, some of them twice, in November and December 2020. She urged them to set aside Biden’s popular-vote victory and “choose” their own presidential electors, despite the fact that the responsibility for choosing electors rests with voters under Arizona state law.

The new emails show that Thomas also messaged two Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin: state Sen. Kathy Bernier, then chair of the Senate elections committee, and state Rep. Gary Tauchen. Bernier and Tauchen received the email at 10:47 a.m. on Nov. 9, virtually the same time the Arizona lawmakers received a verbatim copy of the message from Thomas. The Bernier email was obtained by The Post, and the Tauchen email was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and provided to The Post.

Thomas sent all of the emails via FreeRoots, an online platform that allowed people to send pre-written emails to multiple elected officials.

[…] scrutiny of the Thomases intensified this year after The Post and CBS News obtained copies of text messages that Ginni Thomas exchanged with Mark Meadows, then President Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, in the weeks following the 2020 election. Thomas repeatedly urged Meadows to keep fighting to overturn the election results. After Congress certified Biden’s victory Jan. 6, 2021, she expressed anger at Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused to intervene to keep Trump in office. “We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Thomas wrote to Meadows four days later.

Thomas was also in touch during the post-election period with John Eastman, the pro-Trump lawyer who once clerked for her husband, and whose role in the effort to overturn Biden’s win has drawn scrutiny from both the Justice Department and the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot. In early December 2020, Thomas invited Eastman to speak at a meeting of Frontliners for Liberty, which she described as a group of grass-roots activists, according to an email that Eastman published online.

The agenda for the meeting has not been publicly disclosed. But a federal judge ruling on which records had to be turned over in response to a subpoena from the committee wrote that the agenda shows Eastman discussed “State legislative actions that can reverse the media-called election for Joe Biden.” U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered Eastman to give congressional investigators emails related to Thomas and meetings of her Frontliners group, finding that the meetings “furthered a critical objective of the January 6 plan: to have contested states certify alternate slates of electors for President Trump.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/09/01/ginni-thomas-wisconsin-bernier-tauchen/

Ginni Thomas’s efforts — emailing former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows about legal challenges to the election results, lobbying members of the Arizona legislature to similar ends — have prompted repeated calls for her husband to recuse himself from any election-related case that comes before the court.

The Supreme Court did not entertain any of the challenges filed by Trump’s lawyers and advocates. But Thomas alone dissented when the court turned down Trump’s request to shield some White House documents from the Jan. 6 committee.
[…]
The outcry over the court comes at the precise moment it wants to project a unified, or at least collegial, front. Instead, the court appears “deeply unsettled,” in the words of Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe.

In the coming weeks, it will be handing down decisions in one of the most controversial terms in years. As a result of a conservative supermajority of six justices, it could make major moves.
[…]
“It has a discretionary docket, yet in its first complete term as a new court it agreed to rule on abortion, carrying guns in public, climate change, and state support of religion,” [ACLU legal director David] Cole said. “At least thus far, caution has not been the court’s watchword. It has instead chosen to flex its newfound conservative muscle — and very possibly to make good on Trump’s promise to overturn Roe v. Wade. That can only contribute to the appearance and reality of a politicized court.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/16/ginni-thomas-john-eastman-supreme-court/

Lawyers for President Donald Trump saw Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as key to overturning the results of the 2020 election, according to a set of emails provided to congressional investigators.

Eight emails, ordered released by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter of California, include correspondence between Trump lawyers Kenneth Chesebro, John Eastman and others discussing various legal strategies to convince Republican members of Congress to object to the official certification of electoral votes in a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.

In an email from Chesebro to Eastman and several others sent on Dec. 31, 2020, Chesebro argued that Thomas would “end up being key” to asking the high court to overturn then-President-elect Joe Biden’s win in contested states, and that they should “frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt.”
[…]
In an email sent hours later, Chesebro reiterated that he viewed “the best shot at holding up the count of a state in Congress” would be to get a case “pending before the Supreme Court by Jan. 5, ideally with something positive written by a judge or justice, hopefully Thomas.”
[…]
Politico first reported on the contents of the new emails.

It’s unclear what litigation the lawyers are referencing in their correspondence. Lawyers for Trump were involved in four ongoing election cases in Georgia during the same period as the emails.

These challenges were a federal case that was ultimately denied at a hearing on Jan. 5, 2021; a case that had been appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court; another being litigated in the superior court of Georgia’s largest county; and a pending case by the campaign that had not yet received a court date. Those cases came after the Georgia Supreme Court dismissed a case brought by the chair of the Georgia Republican Party on behalf of Trump in mid-December 2020. All the remaining cases were withdrawn from court Jan. 7, 2021, after the attack on the Capitol and Biden’s win being affirmed in Congress.

Eastman has argued that the disputed emails were protected by attorney-client privilege — a bedrock principle of U.S. legal practice that says a lawyer must keep confidential what they are told by their clients, and work product related to their representation. Carter cited a “crime-fraud exception” — including instances in which communications were part of a crime — ruling that “the emails are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/02/trump-clarence-thomas-emails/

…speaking of fraud & conspiracy…if you’ve got a spare 45mins or so…which is certainly a lot less than it would take to listen your way through the mueller she wrote podcast archive…there’s always this to consider

Putin’s assault on Ukraine and his attack on American democracy have until now been treated largely as two distinct story lines. Across the intervening years, Russia’s election meddling has been viewed essentially as a closed chapter in America’s political history — a perilous moment in which a foreign leader sought to set the United States against itself by exploiting and exacerbating its political divides.

Yet those two narratives came together that summer night at the Grand Havana Room. And the lesson of that meeting is that Putin’s American adventure might be best understood as advance payment for a geopolitical grail closer to home: a vassal Ukrainian state. Thrumming beneath the whole election saga was another story — about Ukraine’s efforts to establish a modern democracy and, as a result, its position as a hot zone of the new Cold War between Russia and the West, autocracy and democracy. To a remarkable degree, the long struggle for Ukraine was a bass note to the upheavals and scandals of the Trump years, from the earliest days of the 2016 campaign and then the presidential transition, through Trump’s first impeachment and into the final days of the 2020 election. Even now, some influential voices in American politics, mostly but not entirely on the right, are suggesting that Ukraine make concessions of sovereignty similar to those contained in Kilimnik’s plan, which the nation’s leaders categorically reject.

This second draft of history emerges from a review of the hundreds of pages of documents produced by investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and for the Republican-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; from impeachment-hearing transcripts and the recent crop of Russiagate memoirs; and from interviews with nearly 50 people in the United States and Ukraine, including four hourlong conversations with Manafort himself.

For Trump — who today is facing legal challenges involving the cache of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, his finances and his role in efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat — the Russia investigation was the original sin, the first of many politically motivated “witch hunts,” since repurposed into weapons in his expansive arsenal of grievance. The Russia investigation and its offshoots never did prove coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow, though they did document numerous connections. But to view the record left behind through the blood-filtered lens of Putin’s war, now in its ninth month, is to discover a trail of underappreciated signals telegraphing the depth of his Ukrainian obsession — and the life-or-death stakes that America’s domestic travails would have for some 45 million people nearly 5,000 miles away.
[…]
Manafort went to great lengths to get the job with the Trump campaign, according to the Senate intelligence report. He lobbied Roger Stone and the fund-raiser Tom Barrack and clinched the deal, Barrack told prosecutors, by saying “the magic words” — he would work without pay. After all, Manafort reasoned, the job could be a way to get his back pay from Akhmetov and patch things up with Deripaska, who would no doubt see value in Manafort’s association with a potential president. “How do we use to get whole,” Manafort wrote to Kilimnik. Manafort told me he believed he would have greater influence with Trump as a supportive volunteer than as a member of his staff.

Manafort’s new job also held promise for Putin. The inner circle of the leading Republican candidate for the American presidency now included an adviser who was the mastermind behind Ukraine’s most successful Russia-friendly party and was close to a man, Kilimnik, whom American officials have identified as a Russian agent.

The day after the Trump campaign announced his appointment as chief convention strategist, Manafort worked with Gates and Kilimnik to send copies of the announcement to his main patrons in Ukraine, along with personal letters promising to keep them in the loop throughout the campaign. The recipients included Deripaska, Akhmetov and another wealthy Ukrainian, a former Yanukovych chief of staff named Sergiy Lyovochkin. A conduit for oligarchs’ money to Manafort during the Party of Regions years, Lyovochkin also had a close working relationship with Kilimnik, according to Senate investigators.
[…]
The Ukrainians would have reason to be upset, and the Russians pleased, all over again a few days later, on July 27, when Trump, at a news conference, said he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian territory, effectively ending Obama-administration sanctions and normalizing relations that had been strained since the illegal annexation. He also, famously, invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.
[…]
In the Russia investigation, the meeting at the Grand Havana Room would become better known for the other piece of business conducted that night: the discussion of polling data that traced how Trump might achieve the position of power to make that momentous diplomatic break. Manafort and Gates had been passing that data to Kilimnik since the spring; produced by Manafort’s go-to pollster, Tony Fabrizio, it was among the campaign’s more closely held assets, according to the Senate intelligence report. Manafort and Gates have insisted that the data was only of the most basic sort, some of it publicly available. But it also showed exactly what the campaign was looking at as it formed its strategy and spread its message in new ways across social media. And as Manafort told Kilimnik at the club, according to testimony from Gates and another witness briefed on the meeting, the polling was picking up something that Clinton pollsters and mainstream prognosticators were not — a path to the White House through traditionally blue states like Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Of course, Manafort explained, that would require a relentless assault on Clinton’s public image.

By the end of summer, vicious anti-Clinton social-media operations were intensifying, not only by the Trump campaign and its American allies but also by Russian trolls posing as Americans, who spread a raft of conspiracy theories about Clinton’s health and alleged criminality. The operations included the states that Manafort had identified as key, investigators found.
[…]
Kilimnik’s best connection to the Trump campaign would not be around as that operation came into full flower. Less than three weeks after the Grand Havana Room meeting, Manafort was out of a job. In mid-August, The New York Times had reported that a new Ukrainian anti-corruption agency had obtained a Party of Regions “black ledger,” listing earmarked, off-the-books payments to Ukrainian officials — and to Manafort. A few days later, at a news conference in Kyiv, a former journalist turned reformist parliamentarian, Serhiy Leshchenko, highlighted 22 handwritten ledger entries listing $12.7 million in payments designated for Manafort. With Clinton’s campaign calling the ledger evidence of ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, Manafort resigned.
[…]
Speaking with reporters, Leshchenko used similar rhetoric when discussing why he helped publicize the real-world ledger. He had another reason too. “The more exposure there is of Trump and Trump’s circle,” he told Tablet magazine several months later, “the more difficult it will be for Trump to conclude a separate deal with Putin, thereby selling out both Ukraine and the whole of Europe.”
[…]
Manafort was hardly the only figure in the Trump orbit engaging with people who knew people in Moscow. The early months of the administration brought a head-spinning procession of disclosures. Flynn, the national security adviser, was fired over his back-channel conversations with the Russian ambassador. There was the revelation that a foreign-policy adviser to the campaign named George Papadopoulos, at a bar in London, had told an Australian diplomat that Russia had dirt on Clinton, weeks before Russia’s hacking of Clinton’s emails was publicly known. His loose talk sparked the first meddling investigation, which evolved into the Mueller inquiry. There was the news that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Manafort met at Trump Tower in June 2016 with a well-connected Russian lawyer who, they were told, wanted to pass along incriminating information about Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” By all accounts, the lawyer, more interested in the lifting of sanctions, failed to deliver. And there was the Mueller team’s disclosure in court papers in the fall of 2017 that Kilimnik was “assessed to have ties to a Russian intelligence service.”
[…]
In August 2018, a Virginia jury found Manafort guilty of eight of 18 counts, including tax and bank fraud. With his second trial, for money laundering, looming in Washington, Manafort struck a deal to plead guilty and cooperate with the government, in hopes of receiving leniency at sentencing. (Manafort now says he did not believe his sworn admission of guilt, and entered it only because he did not think he would face a fair jury and wanted to protect family financial assets.) But at the last minute, the lead prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, scuttled the deal. Manafort, he learned, had consistently lied “about one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik, the Russian intelligence officer,” as the Senate report put it. Among those interactions: the maneuverings for the Mariupol plan.
[…]
For Weissmann, the revelations made for an aha! moment. The partition plan, he realized, was the “quo” Putin wanted for the “quid” of helping Trump’s campaign. “On August 2, if not earlier,” he wrote in his 2020 memoir, “Russia had clearly revealed to Manafort — and, by extension, to the Trump campaign — what it wanted out of the United States: ‘a wink,’ a nod of approval from a President Donald Trump, as it took over Ukraine’s richest region.”
[…]
That same month, prosecutors reported to a federal judge that Manafort had breached his plea deal by lying. The judge later sentenced him to a prison term of seven and a half years, to be served at the Federal Correctional Institution Loretto, in Pennsylvania, as Inmate No. 35207-016. What might have been Putin’s best hope for a Trump-approved plan for a weakened and divided Ukraine seemed to have gone away with him. But in ways that played to the Russian leader’s designs, Trump’s festering grievance toward Ukraine would shape the next major scandal of his presidency.

Manafort might have been in prison, but, in search of a pardon, he still had something of value for the transactional president — his unparalleled knowledge of Ukrainian politics and government. He would effectively pass the baton to Trump’s personal lawyer, the former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who in the fall of 2018 was preparing an offensive to definitively cast the special-counsel investigation as a political hit job after its final report failed to prove “collusion.”
[…]
What happened from there is already exhaustively litigated Trump history, as Giuliani adventured across Europe spinning that original counternarrative into an ornate conspiracy theory that roped in the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, its ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, and Joe and Hunter Biden. In its simplest version, the impeachment case that followed was about presidential abuse of power — a scheme to condition essential military aid on a Ukrainian investigation into CrowdStrike, the “hidden servers” and the Bidens’ purportedly corrupt dealings with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. What was lost on the American audience, though, was the way Trump’s pressure campaign and Giuliani’s freelance diplomacy were buffeting a country that, whether it knew it or not, was careening toward war. Their machinations were playing directly into a soft-power contest over whether Ukraine would lay the true foundations of an independent Western-style democracy or remain in thrall to Moscow and its proxies.
[…]
“Americans were playing a basic game — ‘Trump wants dirt on Biden,’” says Suriya Jayanti, chief of energy policy at the American Embassy in Kyiv at the time. “What was actually going on in Ukraine was this crazy web of shifting alliances and oligarch pockets and horse trading and back-stabbing, and in our American myopia we had limited understanding that if a tree falls in the forest and America is not there to hear it, it still falls.”
[…]
In March 2021, U.S. intelligence services declassified a report detailing their consensus view that Kilimnik and others associated with Russian intelligence had used various Americans — among them, it strongly suggested, Giuliani — to promote the idea of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine to influence the 2020 campaign. The report assessed that Russian leaders viewed Biden’s potential election as “disadvantageous to Russian interests” — especially as it pertained to Ukraine.
[…]
Trump pardoned Manafort before leaving the White House. Had he remained in office, the former president said in a statement earlier this year, “the Ukraine desecration would not be happening.” But with Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, Putin was now facing a new American president who promised a tough line against his imperial designs on Ukraine — and with no obvious back channels through which to manipulate him or his policy.

Thirteen months later, Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian frontier.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html

…tell me again how these nutless wonders need a gun to protect democracy…because I’m starting to think maybe I have a religious obligation to go around setting a lot of pants on fire…as I’m sure they’d agree is my constitutional right under their extremely generous definition of freedom of expression…it’s an article of faith for members of the church of who-the-fuck-do-you-think-you’re-kidding-with-this-bullshit?