The Party of Putin
Alexei Navalny’s murder prompts America’s new conservatism to show itself. Again.
Pretty good TNB last night with Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Heath Mayo. You can catch it here if you missed it.
1. Navalny
We wake to news that Alexei Navalny, the leader of the only meaningful opposition to Vladimir Putin’s regime, was murdered has died.
Just a quick thumbnail sketch for anyone who isn’t familiar:
In 2020 Navalny was poisoned with Novichok by agents of the Russian government in an attempted assassination.
When he voluntarily returned to Russia, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
In December 2023 he was transferred from a prison outside of Moscow, where he was able to have some contact with his team, to Russia’s highest-security prison—which is located north of the Arctic Circle.
Three of Navalny’s lawyers are currently imprisoned in Russia. Two others have fled the country and had arrest warrants issued in absentia.
Now Navalny is dead, a few days after Donald Trump declared that he would “encourage” Putin to invade NATO allies who were “delinquent” in their “payments” to America1 and Tucker Carlson visited Russia, participated in a sham “interview” of Putin, and then embarked on a tour to praise Russia as being superior in many ways to America. But that’s probably just a coincidence.
Prepare yourself for the grotesqueries.
Here is Dinesh D’Souza calmly explaining that Joe Biden is exactly like Vladimir Putin.
For starters, the claim that the Biden presidency is a “regime” is morally and intellectually offensive. Political scientists use that word in a neutral sense, but in ordinary American usage, especially since the start of the Cold War, it has been a derogatory term, usually shorthand for despotism. If we live under a despotic “regime,” then how did Donald Trump become president in 2016? And why is Trump leading in the polls today? Wouldn’t any administration worthy of the label “regime” have made it impossible for Trump to become president again?
And this “Biden regime” is doing a very bad job of trying to imprison Trump. The attorney general waited a long while to begin the process of investigating Trump. He then turned over the investigations to an independent prosecutor. The federal judge tasked with overseeing the most open-and-shut of these prosecutions is so in the tank for Trump that the trial may never begin. The Supreme Court has so far found in Trump’s favor in his attempts to gain access to ballots and delay his trials.
What sort of madman would contend that the Biden administration and the American justice system are indistinguishable from state-sponsored assassinations, kangaroo courts, and Arctic gulags?
But wait, it gets worse.
Because while we have Dinesh D’Souza claiming that Putin is only as bad as Biden, we have Tucker Carlson claiming that Putin hasn’t done anything out of bounds.
Vladimir Putin isn’t doing anything wrong by killing Navalny.
And if Putin was wrong to kill Navalny, Joe Biden is just as bad.
The final step, of course, will be for these same people to blame Biden for Navalny’s death: “Navalny is only dead because of Biden’s weakness; when Trump was president, Navalny was alive.”
This is the cycle of Trumpism, a dynamic we have seen play out over and over—with the Charlottesville white nationalist riots; with the COVID bungling; with the January 6th insurrection.
And Americans keep falling for it. Not all Americans. But enough of them to give Trump a reasonable chance to become president again.
But are Americans really “falling for it”?
That’s my big question. Are the 35 percent or so of Americans who go along with this stuff foolish, or uninformed, or easily bamboozled? Or do they know what they’re about? Do they understand exactly what these argument are and agree with them?
I don’t know. What I do know is that in a rational society, the party of Putin would be getting blown out at the ballot box, every single time. And yet we live in a world where every election is a coin-flip.
Final point: Navalny wasn’t the only Russian dissident in jail. Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza remain imprisoned and probably have the same fate awaiting them. Pray for them.
Reminder: Be your best selves in the comments. I’m pretty hot today and I’m sure many of you are, too. But that doesn’t mean we let up on our standards. No name-calling. No venting. Be productive.
And if you aren’t a member of Bulwark+, I hope you’ll consider joining our community. It’s different here. It’s not like anywhere else on the internet, actually.
This is where people come to have substantive conversations, offered in good faith, secure in the understanding that we’re all on #TeamDemocracy, but without the assumption that we all agree with one another on everything else.
We are blessed to live in a country where a forum like this is possible. Come join us.
2. Informants
It’s always the ones you’d most suspect:
An FBI informant has been charged with fabricating a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden, his son Hunter and a Ukrainian energy company, a claim that is central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.
Alexander Smirnov falsely reported to the FBI in June 2020 that executives associated with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden $5 million each in 2015 or 2016, prosecutors said in an indictment. Smirnov told his handler that an executive claimed to have hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” according to court documents.
Prosecutors say Smirnov in fact had only routine business dealings with the company in 2017 and made the bribery allegations after he “expressed bias” against Joe Biden while he was a presidential candidate.
Because it’s crazy: The Republicans built their narrative about Joe Biden’s corruption around the fabricated testimony of a guy who could not possibly have known what he claimed to know.
The best part is that James Comer now says that it’s all the FBI’s fault. From the NYT’s report:
Mr. Comer, in a statement released after the charges against Mr. Smirnov became public, took no responsibility for spreading a claim that prosecutors suggested was a smear intended to hurt Mr. Biden politically.
Instead, he blamed bureau officials for privately telling the committee their “source was credible and trusted, had worked with the F.B.I. for over a decade and had been paid six figures.”
But F.B.I. officials did not seem to think much of Mr. Smirnov’s allegations from the start, and requested he provide travel receipts to prove he attended meetings cited in his report. In 2020, they concluded that his claims did not merit continued investigation, and told senior Trump administration officials in the Justice Department of that decision, prosecutors wrote.
That’s right: This all took place during the Trump years and the Trump DOJ knew about it.
You hear a lot about “overreach” when Democrats do anything and then people blame Democratic losses on the Dems having done something unwise. The student loan forgiveness order! The shenanigans at NHTSA!
Somehow, though, Republicans never seem to have to worry about overreach. Even when they attempt to impeach a president based on fraudulent testimony from an informant now facing criminal prosecution for said fraudulent testimony.
Nope: Our standards only have electoral consequences for one of our political parties.
3. Who Killed Twitter?
Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer interviewed Kurt Wagner (the tech reporter, not the Nightcrawler), who was in the middle of writing a book about Twitter when Elon Musk bought the company.
Zoë Schiffer: When you started writing this book, it was a biography of Jack Dorsey. Did your life fall apart after Musk bought Twitter? Or did it end up feeling like an incredible gift?
Kurt Wagner: It took me a while to appreciate the incredible gift part, although I think at the end of the day, that's exactly what it was. I got very lucky with my timing. I was planning to do a Twitter-Jack book, essentially. And I was literally pitching publishers with a book proposal the week that Elon showed up as the largest shareholder at Twitter. I remember being frustrated in the moment, because a lot of the publishers were asking me, “well, where does Elon fit into this book?” And I kept being like, “He doesn't! This is a Jack-Twitter book! He literally just showed up.”
As the story unfolded, I kept being like, “okay, I'll just add a chapter about that. Okay, I'll add a chapter about that.” And then at a certain point, and I'm embarrassed to say it probably took me all the way until late summer, I finally just was like, “okay, this can't just be a Twitter-Jack book with Elon tacked onto the end.”
Schiffer: How much material did you have to walk away from?
Wagner: A decent amount? I did a lot of condensing. The first chapter of my book now is a Jack Dorsey history chapter. In my proposal, that was maybe three chapters. I originally thought I was going to do a full chapter on Vine, which I didn't end up doing. I thought I was going to do a lot more about Square (now called Block), which I didn't end up doing. But again, I think it was for the best. It kept me more focused than I would have been otherwise, and as we both know, oftentimes when you're forced to condense stuff, it actually makes it stronger. . . .
Wagner: How did you decide when to end it? I struggled with this. This is a company that has a seemingly endless amount of news and intrigue, right? So how'd you say, “here's where my version of this story stops?”
Schiffer: When Musk named Linda Yaccarino as CEO, at first I thought that was kind of a neat ending. But then it didn't feel like that was actually that big of a change at the company. So by last October, Twitter had become X, it had been a year since the acquisition, and violence broke out in the Middle East. It felt like all of Musk’s product and policy decisions from the last year were culminating in this disinformation disaster on the platform. At that point, I felt like I was able to say, this company is fundamentally different from what it used to be, and the place that it holds in culture and society is not what it once was.
Trump’s description of NATO is not at all how the alliance works, but it is precisely how mafia protection rackets work. The fact that a former and possibly future president believes these two arrangements to be interchangeable is somehow less important than Joe Biden’s age.
I'm just sounding off here in the comments to raise my hand and say that I have a mighty anger running through me today. If you feel the same after waking up to the news about Alexei Navalny passing away know you aren't alone. Let your reaction to the news and the expressing of your anger say something about your character. Show those around you that your character is far different than those who would side with Putin. Being our best selves isn't easy, but it matters. It's a choice we have to make on hard days.
God love ya all, Bulwark Community. It's been a tough week, but hey, at least Manchin isn't running.
A week ago, Robert Hur released his decision not to prosecute Joe Biden. The Washington Post minimally covered the fact that a Republican special counsel had found no cause for bringing charges, while running multiple simultaneous stories sbout the gratuitous swipe at Biden’s memory.
Yesterday, another special counsel brought charges of lying under oath against the man whose testimony is the basis for the Republican House’s absurd attempt to impeach President Biden. This morning there is one headline story, “Former FBI Informant Charged With Lying About Biden Business.” Where are the separate stories and headlines saying, “Impeachment Inquiry Undermined by Arrest of Key Witness?” Or “House GOP Forced to Scramble As Key Testimony Found To Be False?” Absent, of course.
I guess at least they haven’t yet run the story about why it’s bad for Joe Biden that he was targeted with false testimony by a lying FBI informant. I will be watching for that story. I’m sure Hugh Hewitt is working on it.