"We'd Take Apart the Black Sea Fleet"
Plus: The politics of petulance
A few stories you’ll want to keep an eye on today:
It’s the coverup, stupid: “Jan. 6 texts missing for Trump Homeland Security’s Wolf and Cuccinelli.” Via the Wapo:
This discovery of missing records for the senior-most homeland security officials, which has not been previously reported, increases the volume of potential evidence that has vanished regarding the time around the Capitol attack.
The politics of petulance.
Veterans are seriously pissed.
Blindsided veterans erupted in anger and indignation Thursday after Senate Republicans suddenly tanked a widely supported bipartisan measure that would have expanded medical coverage for millions of combatants exposed to toxic burn pits during their service.
Jon Stewart isn’t holding anything back:
Susan Collins also has some concerns.
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine suggested the surprise climate deal struck by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin this week on a skinnier version of the president's economic agenda could tank bipartisan efforts to pass a bill protecting same-sex marriage.
"I just think the timing could not have been worse and it came totally out of the blue," Collins told HuffPost.
Or, as my colleague summarized her position:
Happy Friday!
Avoiding a Global Food Catastrophe
On Thursday’s podcast, I talked with Admiral James Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Commander about the state of play in Ukraine. Here’s an edited portion of our conversation:
Charlie: Let's talk about the global crisis created by the shutdown or the slowdown of grain shipments from Ukraine. There was a U.N. brokered deal. … Within a day or two of this deal to keep the grain flowing, the Russians were back firing missiles at Odessa. So where are we at in terms of keeping the flow of grain moving?
Stavridis: Yeah, let's start by simply observing something that's bad news in the current context, which is that Ukraine and Russia collectively provide about 30% of the world's grain, wheat, calories, however you want to articulate it.
So with Russia being sanctioned, and Ukraine effectively knocked out, because their grain is bottled up, it is a significant blow to global food supplies. It's going to create food insecurity and, unfortunately, it will be targeted at the places where Ukrainian grains dominate and that would be North Africa and the Middle East, regions of the world that are already somewhat unstable.
So the bad news is, this is a significant global food crisis. One of my other positions is I'm chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation, and we're spending a lot of time looking at food scarcity and food insecurity. So that's kind of the problem we're trying to solve.
The good news is that, as you mentioned, about 10 days ago, Russia and Ukraine, under the auspices of Turkey as a convening power, and under the umbrella, if you will, of the United Nations, with significantly, the presence of the U.N. Secretary General Guterres, were able to hammer out a deal.
It's a complicated deal, Charlie. It sets up a operations center. It puts in place a convoy system for the grain shipments to come out under escort and to be inspected on their way in so that no weapons can come in on these presumably empty grain ships. Very complicated. And if that weren't hard enough, all these waters in the northern Black Sea are full of mines, put there by the Ukrainians defensively and the Russians, essentially offensively, to create this blockade.
So, we've got to find a way to create a safe passage zone through these minefields. NATO can help do that.
Ukrainians know, generally, where they put the mines, the Russians know generally where they put the mines. So that can be worked over a matter of weeks. Then you've got to get commercial grain shippers comfortable with insurance and the idea of taking this kind of risk, then you've got to coordinate all this. So it's a very complicated problem.
I'll close with this. Russia in the immediate aftermath of signing this agreement launched several caliber missiles at Odessa, damaging those port facilities, kind of a one step forward two steps back kind of thing. Overall, however, I would assess that this deal will go through, mainly because Putin knows if he doesn't fulfill the terms of this agreement and get that grain out, there is a high probability in my view, that U.S., NATO, the West will simply crack the blockade and escort those ships in and out.
Charlie: Okay, that's what I wanted to ask you about. Before this deal was brokered by the UN, you proposed naval escorts to protect the vessels that are transporting the agricultural products. And you suggested, that could be under the auspices of the U.N., or NATO or a coalition of nations led by the United States, maybe including France, Britain and perhaps some of the other Black Sea nations like Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria. And I guess the big question there is why that hasn't happened so far. And would it be a military action? Because when this has been raised in the past, people have said, well, that's going to lead to conflict… if you had these ships going into the Black Sea. So talk to me about that. And whether or not you think [naval escort] is a real prospect.
Stavridis: It is a real prospect and we need only look at history to help us think about this.
In the 1980s, young lieutenant Stavridis was assigned to a guided missile cruiser. Our mission was to escort tankers full of oil out of Iraq, in Kuwait, generally, Kuwaiti oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, which the Iranians sought to close. They put mines in the water. They harassed the civilian chippers. We solved that problem by re-flagging those Kuwaiti tankers put a U.S. flag on them and parked guided missile frigate, destroyer or cruiser alongside every one of them. Took them in and out. There wasn't, frankly anything the Iranians effectively could do against that.
So there is certainly precedent for doing this. Now your point Charlie is a good one, which is risk. And as you mentioned, my latest book, "To Risk It All," is an assessment of making hard, complex decisions under time pressure. That's what we have right now.
My own assessment, and it's arguable proposition, my own assessment is that, while risky, it is highly unlikely that Vladimir Putin's Russia would actively attack a U.S. Naval warship, NATO warship, a U.N.-flagged a warship, while it was conducting humanitarian operations, taking grain out of Ukraine. It's possible, but I think it's highly unlikely.
It would put him into a conflict that he couldn't handle at sea. We would, frankly, take apart the Black Sea Fleet in a matter of days. He knows that.
You can listen to our whole conversation here.
The January 6 Hearings Are Changing Republicans’ Minds
Must-read from my colleague Sarah Longwell in The Atlantic:
[{Unlike] the impeachment hearings, which in some ways made GOP voters more defensive of Trump, the accumulating drama of the January 6 hearings—which they can’t avoid in social-media feeds—seems to be facilitating not a wholesale collapse of support, but a soft permission to move on.
Meanwhile, back in Wisconsin:
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A Wisconsin judge said Thursday that a Republican-ordered, taxpayer-funded investigation into the 2020 election found “absolutely no evidence of election fraud,” but did reveal contempt for the state’s open records law by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and a former state Supreme Court justice he hired.
Dane County Circuit Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn awarded about $98,000 in attorneys' fees to the liberal watchdog group American Oversight, bringing an end in circuit court to one of four lawsuits the group filed. Vos's attorney, Ron Stadler, said he was recommending that Vos appeal the ruling.
And, in Pennsylvania
Speaking of Oz, Tara Palmeri reports: “Oz spent part of his time in Pennsylvania and the other part of the time in Palm Beach until at least June 9, waiting it out and doing some fundraising. His first post-primary event was June 10. Then, at the end of June, Oz flew off to Europe, specifically to Ireland, to see family until early July.
“That, apparently, was one vacation too many. Indeed, it was a move that greatly annoyed the National Republican Senatorial Committee.”
**
The GOP candidate for governor also has some issues. Via Jonathan Chait: Mastriano, “has maintained ties to an undisguised anti-Semite.”
Mastriano has paid Gab, a white-nationalist site, for “consulting.” Gab’s founder and CEO, Andrew Torba, has responded to reporters who exposed his ties to Mastriano with a series of anti-Semitic diatribes.
On MSNBC, he ranted:
“We don’t want people who are atheists. We don’t want people who are Jewish. We don’t want people who are, you know, nonbelievers, agnostic, whatever. This is an explicitly Christian movement because this is an explicitly Christian country.”
Amazingly, this seems to matter:
Glad to do my part
A reader sends along this scene from Alex Jones’s trial yesterday.
It appears to be a clip from an interview I did back in 2017 with Megyn Kelly during her brief stint at NBC:
CHARLIE SYKES: What he has done is he has injected this sort of toxic paranoia into the mainstream of conservative thought in a way that would have been inconceivable a couple of decades ago. We're talking about somebody who traffics in some of the sickest, most offensive types of theories.
MEGYN KELLY: AT THE TOP OF THAT LIST IS JONES' OUTRAGEOUS STATEMENT THAT THE SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENT CHILDREN AND TEACHERS AT SANDY HOOK ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, ONE OF THE DARKEST CHAPTERS IN AMERICAN HISTORY, WAS A HOAX.
Never Trumpers on DeSantis
ICYMI: Vanity Fair has a long discussion of the split in anti-Trump ranks: “NATIONAL REVIEW IS BASICALLY A FANZINE FOR RON DESANTIS”: DESANTIS SPLINTERS NEVER TRUMPERS
Several Bulwark folks weighed in:
“A case can be made that Donald Trump and his complete contempt for the rule of law is uniquely dangerous, so anyone who is not Donald Trump is marginally less horrific,” said Charlie Sykes, cofounder and editor-at-large at the conservative outlet The Bulwark, in an interview with Vanity Fair. “But is that going to be the standard for Republican primary voters—less horrific than Trump?”
Sykes noted that he can “certainly understand” why some conservative pundits see the rise of DeSantis as “a relief,” adding, “I expect a lot of the anti anti-Trump media to embrace DeSantis. I mean, National Review is basically a fanzine for Ron DeSantis at this point.” In March, National Review columnist Rich Lowry praised DeSantis for not giving an inch after Disney criticized Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay bill, writing that the governor is giving conservatives a “glimpse at what Trumpism without Trump can look like.” Additionally, National Review’s Kyle Smith wrote last month that DeSantis is “smart, serious, hard-working, focused, honest, and apparently incorruptible.” …
Former GOP strategist Tim Miller weighed this calculus, writing, “Gun to my head, I’d side with the people saying DeSantis would be less of an existential threat. To be clear—saying someone is less of an existential threat to democracy than Donald Trump might be the faintest praise ever uttered in American politics,” in a recent piece for The Bulwark. His qualms with DeSantis include the governor’s support for some of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” efforts and DeSantis’s implicit suggestion that the FBI may have instigated the Capitol riot on January 6….
Jim Swift, an editor at The Bulwark, also hearkened back to 2016 when theorizing what might happen in the next GOP primary. “A lot of conservatives want DeSantis to challenge Trump because they say he has the same policies but is a smarter politician. I’m not so sure he has the wherewithal for it,” said Swift. “Some of those same people thought that about Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Look how well that worked out.”
Cheap Shots
This really needs no comment. And, no it is NOT a parody.
I hope the good senator gives Donald Trump a copy of the book so that he can hold Senator Hawley’s manhood. I mean, again.
The vote by senate republicans against the burn pit bill is especially galling as at least 4 of them are Iraq/Afghanistan veterans themselves. I hope people from their old units are contacting them in droves and nailing them to the wall over this. Jon Stewart is right in his criticism. He fought the same fight over funding for 9/11 first responders' medical treatment. It's beyond shameful that sick veterans and first responders have to fight at all to get the care they've earned.
On another subject, is it me or do MAGA world men have an obsession with their lack of manhood? It seems the least 'manly' men in that sphere spend the most time talking and now writing about it. But then, these people think Donald Trump is the epitome of manliness, so......