Browsed by
Category: Politics

Leaked texts reveal Marjorie Taylor Greene’s private push to overturn 2020 election

Leaked texts reveal Marjorie Taylor Greene’s private push to overturn 2020 election

Rolling Stone reports: Marjorie Taylor Greene was privately pressuring former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler to get on board with the effort to overturn the 2020 election, text messages obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reveal. The leaked trove of texts show that before losing to current Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock in a Jan. 5, 2021 runoff, Loeffler was repeatedly pressured by Republicans to join Trump’s efforts to manipulate the certification of Electoral College votes that would finalize President Joe Biden’s election….

Read More Read More

U.S. busts network providing military technology to Russia

U.S. busts network providing military technology to Russia

The Associated Press reports: The Biden administration on Wednesday announced a round of criminal charges and sanctions related to a complicated scheme to procure military technologies from U.S. manufacturers and illegally supply them to Russia for its war in Ukraine. Some of the equipment was recovered on battlefields in Ukraine, the Justice Department said, and other nuclear proliferation technology was intercepted in Latvia before it could be shipped to Russia. The Justice Department charged nearly a dozen people in separate…

Read More Read More

With GOP skeptics of Ukraine aid poised to gain seats in Congress, lawmakers look to lock in a huge military assistance package

With GOP skeptics of Ukraine aid poised to gain seats in Congress, lawmakers look to lock in a huge military assistance package

NBC News reports: Amid concerns that a new Congress could take a more skeptical view of aid to Ukraine, lawmakers from both parties are looking to lock in billions of dollars in military assistance to Kyiv before newly elected members are sworn in in January, according to a lawmaker and congressional staffers. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, who is poised to take over as speaker if the GOP wins a majority in the House in the November midterm…

Read More Read More

EU media and leaders blame Brexit for UK political ‘insanity’ as Truss quits

EU media and leaders blame Brexit for UK political ‘insanity’ as Truss quits

The Guardian reports: Six years on from the Brexit referendum, continental observers have become used to Westminster meltdowns – but many see in the latest cataclysm the inevitable finale of a project that was always divorced from reality. “Listened to, perhaps; understood, not really,” said Le Monde of Liz Truss on the news of her resignation. “A terrible orator who could do little more than repeat ‘growth, growth, growth’, seemingly impervious to criticism … she was rejected by both the…

Read More Read More

Russia ramps up deportations, as Putin imposes martial law in illegally annexed regions of Ukraine

Russia ramps up deportations, as Putin imposes martial law in illegally annexed regions of Ukraine

Politico reports: Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday imposed martial law in the four regions of Ukraine illegally annexed by the Kremlin’s forces, against the backdrop of mass deportations of Ukrainians to Russia and as Moscow lays the ground for further losses of territory. Kremlin-backed authorities in the Ukrainian city of Kherson are planning to “relocate” about 50,000 to 60,000 people to Russian territory, the Moscow-installed regional governor Vladimir Saldo said in a television interview Tuesday. Ivan Fedorov, the Ukrainian…

Read More Read More

Where have all the men in Moscow gone?

Where have all the men in Moscow gone?

The New York Times reports: Friday afternoons at the Chop-Chop Barbershop in central Moscow used to be busy, but at the beginning of a recent weekend, only one of the four chairs was occupied. “We would usually be full right now, but about half of our customers have gone,” said the manager, a woman named Olya. Many of the clients — along with half of the barbers, too — have fled Russia to avoid President Vladimir V. Putin’s campaign to…

Read More Read More

The mercenary lawyers defending the founder of Russia’s Wagner Group

The mercenary lawyers defending the founder of Russia’s Wagner Group

The Intercept reports: In September, a video surfaced online apparently showing Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy businessman and close associate of Vladimir Putin, speaking to a group of incarcerated men in the yard of a Russian prison. Prigozhin was encouraging them to join the Wagner Group, the infamous mercenary organization he founded, and fight in Ukraine as a way out of prison. The video signaled Prigozhin’s first apparent confirmation that he does, in fact, control Wagner. While Prigozhin had been known…

Read More Read More

Judge: Trump signed court document that knowingly included false voter fraud numbers

Judge: Trump signed court document that knowingly included false voter fraud numbers

Politico reports: Former President Donald Trump signed legal documents describing evidence of election fraud that he knew were false, a federal judge indicated on Wednesday. U.S. District Court Judge David Carter wrote in an 18-page opinion that emails from attorney John Eastman, an architect of Trump’s last-ditch effort to subvert the 2020 election, needed to be turned over to the Jan. 6 select committee. Those emails, Carter wrote, “show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud…

Read More Read More

Inside Steve Bannon’s ‘disturbing’ quest to radically rewrite the U.S. constitution

Inside Steve Bannon’s ‘disturbing’ quest to radically rewrite the U.S. constitution

The Guardian reports: Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist in the Trump White House who is at the forefront of the Republican march toward hard-right populism, is throwing his weight behind a movement to radically rewrite the US constitution. Bannon has devoted recent episodes of his online show the War Room to a well-funded operation which has stealthily gained ground over the past two years. Backed by billionaire donors and corporate interests, it aims to persuade state legislatures to call…

Read More Read More

John Durham failed because the anti-Trump ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy never happened

John Durham failed because the anti-Trump ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy never happened

Jonathan Chait writes: John Durham’s latest, and presumably final, humiliation is the capstone of his failed attempt to prove a conspiracy theory that has long been accepted as settled fact in the conservative universe. This theory holds that, in 2016, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or James Comey (or maybe all of them — the mastermind changes in different iterations) devised a plot to smear Donald Trump by ginning up an FBI investigation into his completely innocent and superficial connections to…

Read More Read More

Russia destroys power and water infrastructure across Ukraine

Russia destroys power and water infrastructure across Ukraine

Reuters reports: Ukraine said Russia had destroyed almost a third of its power stations over the past week as Moscow stepped up a pre-winter campaign to strike infrastructure, a move the West says is a calculated attempt to disrupt and demoralise. Missiles struck power generating facilities in a clutch of Ukrainian cities home to millions of people and several people were killed. Moscow acknowledged targeting energy plants, while Ukraine said water infrastructure had also been hit. “The situation is critical…

Read More Read More

Drones embody an Iran-Russia alliance built on hostility toward the U.S.

Drones embody an Iran-Russia alliance built on hostility toward the U.S.

The New York Times reports: The Iranian-made drones that Russia sent on Monday to divebomb Ukraine’s capital delivered the most emphatic proof yet that Tehran has become a rare, increasingly close ally to the Kremlin, offering both weapons and international support that Russia sorely lacks. There is no deep love between Russia, newly a pariah for attacking another country, and Iran, for decades one of the most strategically isolated nations in the world. But the two authoritarian governments, both chafing…

Read More Read More

German cybersecurity chief sacked following reports of Russia ties

German cybersecurity chief sacked following reports of Russia ties

The Guardian reports: Germany’s interior minister has sacked the country’s cybersecurity chief, after allegations he had turned a blind eye to a firm with links to Russian security circles. Arne Schönbohm, the president of the German Federal Office for Information Security, was released from his duties with immediate effect on Tuesday, the news magazine Der Spiegel reported, citing security sources. A spokesperson for the interior minister, Nancy Faeser, confirmed that Schönbohm would be barred from his office, as “necessary public…

Read More Read More

Retired U.S. generals, admirals take top jobs with Saudi crown prince

Retired U.S. generals, admirals take top jobs with Saudi crown prince

The Washington Post reports: More than 500 retired U.S. military personnel — including scores of generals and admirals — have taken lucrative jobs since 2015 working for foreign governments, mostly in countries known for human rights abuses and political repression, according to a Washington Post investigation. In Saudi Arabia, for example, 15 retired U.S. generals and admirals have worked as paid consultants for the Defense Ministry since 2016. The ministry is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s…

Read More Read More

Saudi Arabia sentences U.S. citizen to 16 years in prison for tweets

Saudi Arabia sentences U.S. citizen to 16 years in prison for tweets

Josh Rogin writes: The Saudi government has sentenced a 72-year-old U.S. citizen to 16 years in prison for tweets he posted while inside the United States, some of which were critical of the Saudi regime. His son, speaking publicly for the first time, alleges that the Saudi government has tortured his father in prison and says that the State Department mishandled the case. Many dictatorships unjustly imprison Americans. But while the Biden administration has gone to considerable effort to secure…

Read More Read More

Fiona Hill: ‘Elon Musk is transmitting a message for Putin’

Fiona Hill: ‘Elon Musk is transmitting a message for Putin’

Politico‘s Maura Reynolds: We’ve recently had Elon Musk step into this conflict trying to promote discussion of peace settlements. What do you make of the role that he’s playing? Hill: It’s very clear that Elon Musk is transmitting a message for Putin. There was a conference in Aspen in late September when Musk offered a version of what was in his tweet — including the recognition of Crimea as Russian because it’s been mostly Russian since the 1780s — and…

Read More Read More