Stick Around, Nikki

Plus: The Alexander Smirnov farce takes a sinister turn.

Nikki Haley speaks during a campaign event in Greenville, South Carolina, on February 20, 2024. (Photo by Julia Nikhinson / AFP via Getty Images.)

Note to Nikki: Keep on Keeping On

She’s getting under their skin.

Yesterday in South Carolina, Nikki Haley said: “I feel no need to kiss the ring. And I have no fear of Trump’s retribution. I’m not looking for anything from him.” The reaction of Trump’s spokesperson to this was too vulgar to be quoted in a tasteful morning missive like this one. (But here’s a link!)

This was just one of countless instances of creepy Trumpist misogynists lashing out at Nikki Haley. And while one knows these gross comments further pollute our public discourse, one has to welcome them. The more close-ups voters see of Trumpist garbage, the more offensive Trump and his followers are to Haley, the more Trumpists alienate those Republicans and independents who respect Haley—the less likely these individuals are to end up supporting Trump in the general election.

Trump and the Trumpists are annoyed. They feel entitled. After all, no other Republican has been nominated for president in twelve years, and no other Republican has been elected president in twenty. Who is Nikki Haley to get in the Orange Man’s way?

But there she is. In the way. An annoyance. Someone who will not kiss the ring.

Haley is very unlikely to defeat Trump. But she’s won about 40 percent to Trump’s 60 percent of their combined primary vote so far. And the polls in South Carolina suggest she’ll be in the 35 percent range there as well.

If Haley can keep getting a respectable share of the vote against Trump—if she can perhaps even win a couple of primaries on Super Tuesday (Hey, fellow Virginians, time to step up!)—she can keep going. Which will increase the number of Americans who’ll hear her increasingly strong and trenchant criticisms of Trump, who’ll observe the disgusting behavior of Trumpists and Trump in response, and who’ll recoil from Trump in November.

Haley’s political career has had its more and less admirable moments. But what she is doing now is a far, far better thing than she has ever done before.

—William Kristol

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A Helping Hand for the Election Meddlers

Here’s a headline to make you sit up straight: “Indicted ex-FBI informant told investigators he got Hunter Biden dirt from Russian officials.” From CNN:

The former FBI informant charged with lying about the Bidens’ dealings in Ukraine told investigators after his arrest that Russian intelligence officials were involved in passing information to him about Hunter Biden, prosecutors said Tuesday in a new court filing, noting that the information was false.

Prosecutors also said Alexander Smirnov has been “actively peddling new lies that could impact US elections” after meeting with Russian spies late last year and that the fallout from his previous false bribery accusations about the Bidens “continue[s] to be felt to this day.”

Smirnov claims to have “extensive and extremely recent” contacts with foreign intelligence officials, prosecutors said in the filing. They said he previously told the FBI that he has longstanding and extensive contacts with Russian spies, including individuals he said were high-level intelligence officers or command Russian assassins abroad.

Prosecutors with special counsel David Weiss’ team said Tuesday that Smirnov has maintained those ties and noted that, in a post-arrest interview last week, “Smirnov admitted that officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story about Businessperson 1,” referring to President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

The farcical implosion of Smirnov’s claims—that he’d heard executives at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma discuss paying $5 million bribes to Joe and Hunter Biden while the latter sat on their board and the former was vice president—has been an enormous embarrassment to the congressional Republicans who had made his allegations a tentpole of their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.

Republicans had played hardball to get their hands on those claims. The FBI initially resisted GOP attempts to view a document containing Smirnov’s allegations last year, protesting that they had been unable to validate their truthfulness. But Republicans twisted their arm to get it, with Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer threatening to hold FBI Director Chris Wray in contempt.

When they ultimately did see the file, Republicans quickly pronounced it a smoking gun: “To me, this is really the heart of this matter,” Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jim Jordan said last month of Smirnov’s allegations. “The most corroborating evidence we have is the 1023 form from this highly credible confidential human source.”

But as last week’s indictment made clear, Smirnov’s claims were full of holes, so much so that catching him in lies was almost comically easy for special counsel David Weiss’ investigators. He claimed to have had meetings and calls during the Obama administration in which senior Burisma officials talked openly about their bribes to Joe and Hunter Biden—only for investigators to discover records of his first meeting those officials years later, in 2017. And he confidently told investigators that he’d seen video of Hunter Biden entering a specific Ukrainian hotel—despite the fact that, as investigators knew, the younger Biden had never been to Ukraine at all.

But if Smirnov’s buffoonish allegations and Republicans’ credulousness toward them initially seemed comical, the revelation that they may have been planted by Russian agents makes the whole thing far more sinister. Russia has had enough success meddling in our elections on their own—do they really need the help of the entire congressional GOP?

“This is the biggest political corruption scandal, not only in my lifetime, but I would say the past 100 years,” Rep. Elise Stefanik said last year. And you know what—maybe she was right.

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Catching up …

• Nikki Haley vows to stay in 2024 race after South Carolina primary: NBC News

• NY AG warns she may seize Trump’s assets if he doesn’t pay $354M civil fraud fine: Axios

• Biden fundraising outpaces Trump, whose legal bills are weighing him down: New York Times

• Biden administration weighs action to make it harder for migrants to get asylum and easier to deport them faster: NBC News

• Shock, anger, confusion grip Alabama after court ruling on embryos: Washington Post

• Haley attracts Biden donors as she tries to chase down Trump: Politico

• More Republicans now want climate action. But Trump could derail everything: Politico

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Quick Hits  

1. J.D. Vance (R-Moscow)

Leading The Bulwark today, Cathy Young takes “MAGAer-than-thou” senator J.D. Vance to task for both his ghoulish views on the war in Ukraine—which should be defunded, he says, for Ukraine’s own good—and his preposterous equivocations about the moral equivalence of Russia’s legal system and our own. Cathy breaks down a trollish tweet from Vance in which the senator spuriously chided Vladimir Putin for arresting “independent journalist Duglas Makki for making memes in the run up to an election,” which he clucked was “just a flagrant violation of human rights”:

THERE IS NO “DUGLAS MAKKI.” The reference is to Douglass Mackey, whose alter ego “Ricky Vaughn” was a notorious alt-right social media figure during the 2016 presidential campaign. In January 2021, shortly after Joe Biden’s inauguration, Mackey was prosecuted for election interference. The charges stemmed from posts on Twitter . . . urging Hillary Clinton supporters to vote by text message. (There is, of course, no such option.) What’s more, the tweets were specifically geared to black and Latino voters. In March of last year, Mackey was convicted by a federal jury in Brooklyn.

Why does Vance know or care about Mackey? Because he’s a cause célèbre on the right. The narrative pushed by Tucker Carlson, erstwhile presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and many others is that Mackey’s prosecution was not only a dangerous assault on free speech but an outrageous demonstration of double standards.

Cathy goes on:

The tweet was presumably a sarcastic rejoinder to those who criticized Carlson for failing to bring up Russian political prisoners, including journalists, during his two-hour interview with Putin. See, Vance is saying, here’s a case of a journalist being persecuted for speech in an outrageous way that you’d think happens only under a dictatorship like the one in Russia—but actually, it’s right here in the USA, he’s being persecuted by the “Biden regime,” and none of the journalists dismissing Carlson as not being a “real journalist” are interested.

But to see how despicable the moral equivalency is, one need only look at some of the real cases of people persecuted and imprisoned in Russia for speech critical of the war against Ukraine or of the Putin regime.

Read the whole thing.

2. Topography of a Broken House

“Just over three months into his speakership,” Politico reports, Speaker Mike Johnson "is “already caught in the same swamp that eventually drowned Kevin McCarthy. A few firebrands are threatening to force a vote to boot him from the mob, conservatives are publicly griping about his decisions, and battleground centrists have indicated they’re fed up with walking the plank on tough votes.”

Johnson’s main difficulty is that any given one of his legislative priorities could face a rebellion from any one of a number of splinter GOP factions, each with its own motivations and dealbreakers. In this useful piece, Politico breaks down the five main pain-point groups: Read it to get a better, more granular sense of all the different ways House governance is currently breaking down. Or just read it for the schadenfreude.

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