Trump and Putin Both Had a Bad Week (with Benjamin Wittes)

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Welcome to BED TO DIFER, the Bulwark’s weekly roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I’m Mona, Sharon, syndicated columnist and policy editor, The Bulwark, and I’m joined by our regulars Linda Chavez of The Nescannon Center and Damon Linker who writes the Substack newsletter eyes on the right. Bill Galston had a travel snafu today, so the Bulwark’s own will salatine is sitting in for him, and our special guest is Benjamin Wiss, cofounder of the Law Fair Site and also a senior fellow at the Bookings Institute, among many other titles. So welcome one and all.

This was a week in which you could say that two reckless sociopaths on the world stage were backed into corners and responded with dark threats. One was Vladimir Putin, and we’ll get to him. And the other was, of course, Donald Trump. So let’s begin with Trump. He had three major legal setbacks this week.

First, having requested a special master in the case of his having absconded with classified documents tomorrowago. The special master, Judge Raymond Deary, put matters on a fast track, which is exactly what the Trump team was hoping would not happen, and also demanded that Trump’s lawyers show proof that he had declassified documents in his possession, which they had not done. Second setback, a three judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the eleventh circuit, including two Trump appointed judges, overruled judge Cannon on a key matter. And third, the attorney general of New York sued Trump, three of his adult children, his organization and so on for a massive fraud. Bandwidth is I’m gonna start with you.

Let’s begin with the New York AG’s action because it really made for some amazing reading. I mean, for those of us who’ve been following Trump all these years, closely for the last six, none of this is at all surprising. In fact, it would have been surprising if she had found any sort of integrity in the way he conducted his business affairs. But you have to just be gobsmacked by some of the details For example, Trump valued his Triple X apartment in Trump Tower at three hundred and twenty seven million dollars. Based on the idea that it was thirty thousand square feet.

In fact, said the attorney general, Leticia James, it’s ten thousand nine hundred and ninety six square feet. Furthermore, no apartment in New York has ever sold for as much as a hundred million dollars. Your response to any and all of this

Well,

I guess the first point to make about this is that it is a civil case, not a criminal case. And for those who are you know, concerned about the ultimate accountability for Trump’s behavior and are thinking about the criminal for that. This is a bit of an ancillary gesture in that regard. That said, it is a really important one because it goes to the long standing business practices and behaviors of the Trump organization and of its leadership and could actually go a long way to putting this group of people out of business. This is an investigation that had criminal dimensions.

The attorney general of New York, Leticia James, doesn’t have jurisdiction over that. Those parts of it have mostly fizzled out at least as pertains to Trump himself, but the result could be a massive judgment in the civil liability department, which is no small thing. Damon, the Trump

you

know, acolytes have been riding to his rescue, of course. And they’re making a number of objections. So one thing they are saying, and Trump is saying, is, well, I mean, the only people who were defrotted, if anybody, were big banks and insurance companies, and they’re big boys, and they have to do their own due diligence. And Trump says, and besides, they never lost a penny on me. So who was hurt?

Why did these banks make these loans to somebody who was so obviously misrepresenting as well? Don’t you wonder about that?

Well, I I’ve I’ve wondered that for a long time, but the the long arc of Trump’s career shows that the the number of banks that would loan him money dwindled over the years. And by the end, you are left pretty much with Deutsche Bank, which has all kinds of other legal problems. Sure. Around the globe with the people it does business with. So that might explain why they were the last one standing.

We haven’t gotten to the bottom of that yet. It’s gonna take an international investigation a long time to figure it out if it ever gets unraveled entirely. I mean, of course, Trump and his acolytes are gonna say anything and everything to muddy waters and score what’s really going on here. I mean, as you sort of indicated in your opening comments before talking to Ben, I mean, I I grew up in the New York area. I mean, Donald Trump has been on my radar as someone in the news for, like, pretty much my whole life.

I mean, I guess I probably first started seeing stories about him when I was in my late teens, the late eighties. And then just all the way through. And from the very first moment, I, my father, my brother, everyone else, and my extended family, just knew intuitively. This guy is just a con man. He’s a crook.

He’s and this was long before, you know, as the decades of world buy, this has become clearer and clearer. But if anyone with any kind of, like, radar about these things, you know, we’ll run the other way from this guys. So I have to say, you know, I’m I’m well known on the podcast for being a bit of a skeptic about the legal approach to to Trump. I think these investigations are all very important. They turn up information that needs to be in the public realm for people to make political decisions about whether or not they’re going to support him.

And if they do exactly how much garbage they’re having to swallow in that process, but you know, the the Latusia James business doesn’t strike me as the biggest problem for him. Part of it is as as Ben mentioned, it’s a civil issue, not a criminal one. Secondly, this is gonna come down to I kind of he said she said battle of, like, you overestimated the value of your assets. And he said, yeah. But at the moment, I thought that’s what it was.

Prove I was wrong. And then, you know, when it comes to the size of his apartment, if he lies and triples the the literal square footage of it. That’s a that’s a gotcha case, obviously. But Wait.

But Liam, what if he genuinely believed that it was thirty thousand square Well, there are a lot of other areas in his

in his portfolio where I think he will be able to claim. Well, I thought that my skyscraper and low Manhattan actually could fetch the following amount of money — Mhmm. — proving that he knowingly lied about it is gonna be very difficult.

Actually, no. I’m gonna push back on you here, Damon. I read the whole complaint. I gotta tell you some of these things. You read the whole thing.

It was, like, two hundred pages. I didn’t read the whole sentence. I read big chunks. And so for example, he would say that that a particular property or or apartment building or whatever had a certain value even though, for example, it was a rent stabilized building. But he would say that he could get, you know, these sky high rents out of a building where legally he was not allowed to charge more than a certain amount.

So you can’t say, oh, I honestly thought I was a dreamer. No. He’s

a dreamer. He’s imagining when they repeal the rent control regulations. This is not a smoking gun situation where, like, ah, we got you. It’s going to be a mud fest and it’s gonna go on for years

— Yeah. —

and be a mess. And in the end, he might have to pay a an enormous fine and might be put out of business in New York City, but he’s already relocated to Florida. And he and the rest of his croak family can kind of set up shop down there. And by the way, last point, we’re all very well aware that Donald Trump’s primary way of making money at this point is securing donations for his political ambitions. And so

he’s seeing the rubrics.

Exactly. So, like, this is all about the past. Donald Trump’s future is breaking in hundreds of millions of dollars of donations for his various ambitions and projects. That’s

totally right. So, Linda, you know, Ben points out that this is a this is civil case, not criminal. But there are certain advantages for the government here because for one thing, the standard of proof is lower she only has to prove this by preponderance of the evidence, not beyond a reasonable doubt. And then also, under the civil standard, because this is a tort, All of those like, I don’t know how many occasions when he was deposed and he plead the fifth, all of that comes in. Through the jury can draw conclusions about that.

Whereas in a criminal case, that would not be allowed in. So that’s

you

know, not nothing. You’re

you’re absolutely right about that, but I wanna push back a little against my friend Damon because I do think Yes, you can be off maybe even by a factor of, you know, double digit percentage in in your valuations. But we’re talking about a man who sometimes valued his property at ten times what it was worth. And by the way, it was that he used different figures when he was trying to get a loan than he used when he was about to have to pay taxes. And that’s the kind of fraudulent activity. That I think will do him in.

And I’m not absolutely certain that we’ve seen the end of the criminal investigation. In New York. Now, Alvin Bragg, for whatever reason, decided to pull back, but he’s got a lot of problems. And you have to remember, what does Donald Trump care about more than anything in the world other than himself. His money and this poses a threat to his wealth It is a civil suit and it will drag on for some time.

But, you know, it’s not likely to help him in business. And I think Damon is right when he says that, you know, his business now is no longer, you know, making money in real estate. It is of fleecing the rubs. But he does owe a lot of money. He owes about a billion dollars, and that money is going to come due probably not till twenty twenty eight.

He was able to offload a couple of his most troublesome loans, including one to Deutsche Bank. Which was for almost three hundred million dollars. But he has trouble borrowing money, and that’s one of the reasons I think he stays so active. Politically. I think this is a problem for him.

I’m not willing to just say, well, you know, this is just a pin Eric or whatever. He’s he’s gonna have to deal with the consequences. And more importantly, Ivanka and Donald Jr. And Eric are also gonna have to deal with the consequences because they are being accused of fraud as well. And we know that Eric invoked his fifth amendment right against self incrimination hundreds of times in his deposition as well.

By

the way, just to tidy up what I had said in our opening, you know, about making dark threats. One of the things we saw from Trump this week was an interview in which echoing Lindsey Graham. He said that America wouldn’t stand for it if he were indicted. And that there would be problems like we’ve never seen before in this country if he were indicted. So plus cozying up to QAnon.

He now wears a cue in his lapel and plays QAnon music at his very increasingly bizarre rallies. But let’s leave that aside for a second or commented on if you wish. But I want to get to the eleventh circuit. So will the eleventh circuit very rapidly heard this appeal of a judge Cannon’s order and slapped her down really hard. They reversed her ruling in part where the one where she had said that the government could not continue its examination of the classified documents that had been recovered from Mar a Lago, pending the special master’s examination of everything, and The appeals court was very, very tough.

And it included it’s a three judge panel. It included two Trump appointees. So quite a vindication of the rule of law, didn’t you think? I think

this

is a great decision by the eleventh Circuit, and it’s a kind of a vindication of Trump judges. Mitch McConnell and the Republicans shut through as many of these judges as they could. Onto the federal bench, onto the appeals courts, onto the supreme court, and people said, oh my god. He’s they’re packing a judiciary with Trumpists. But it turns out that Trump judges are not monolithic and they are not necessarily Trump loyalists.

So we have at the district level in this case Aileen Cannon, and she is a manifestly incompetent or corrupt or something judge who obviously violated all kinds of a precedent in the way that she handled this case. And but however, two judges that Donald Trump put on the eleventh circuit clearly voted correctly overruling her. And I would remind everyone that the, you know, the judges on the Supreme Court also did not go with Trump in his corrupt attempts to overturn the election. So there’s a difference between loyalist Trump judges or incompetent Trump judges and plain old federalist society judges who when push comes to shove. Uphold the constitution and uphold precedent, and that’s what these judges on the eleventh circuit did.

Howard Bauchner:

Ben, what is one more question about Leticia James, and then and then we’ll move on. But just anticipating what may happen and maybe to guard against disappointment. Couple things. One is that she’s demanding disgorgement of two fifty million dollars, but a hundred million of that is based on the profit that Trump made from selling his hotel in DC. And the profit is nothing like a hundred million dollars.

And so some people think that she was she was really reaching with that number. Further, you know, a couple more things. I mean, she did campaign saying that she was going to sue Trump. She she campaigned that way. Which again can cast a little bit of a cloud over the case because it looks like she had already made up her mind.

And also the use of that term, the art of the steel. Maybe it’s a good line, but it can, you know, a little less than perfectly professional and cool and detached. Do

you make of those things? So I was a critic of Leticia James at the time of her campaign. I thought her campaign on the basis of a promise to target a particular person was inappropriate frankly, and raised some of the same issues in a pale sort of way that Trump’s own abuses of law enforcement and prejudgment of cases raised. I thought it was bad. I do think it taints the current case.

And at the same time, the case has to stand or fall on its own merits and you know, I I am not actually qualified to discern under New York law or for that matter as a matter of accounting and economics how one should count the profits from sales of Trump hotels or whether they count as fraudulently gained assets for purposes of disgorgement. I do think the volume of fraud involved in running the Trump organization over a long period of time probably has given rise to a great deal of ill gotten profits that will probably be recoverable through a litigation like this. The one caution that I would give other than that Tish James, you know, has, to some degree, played in a somewhat lumpy fashion. Is that civil litigation takes a very long time. And the appeals associated with civil litigation also take a very long time.

And so nobody should delude themselves that this is any kind of quick resolution even if it ultimately does lead to a good place. On the eleventh circuit matter, I would just add a note of caution to Will’s enthusiasm for federalist society judges. Judge Cannon’s ruling that this stay was slapped on was so outrageously wrong that it actually is a simple matter of professionalism to put a stay on at the Justice Department’s request, which was a stay as to only a hundred of the documents, is so manifestly reasonable and called for. So in a law fair piece a week and a half ago or so, I and a couple colleagues essentially wrote the eleventh Circuit opinion, not that they were copying it from us, but that the answer to these questions was so clear that I think anybody who was not playing an overtly bad faith. Would have come to something very similar to the conclusion that the eleventh circuit came to.

And while I very much agree with Will that people shouldn’t assume that no federalist society judges can do their jobs because in fact, they do every day and, you know, people of diverse politics can get together on legal issues and sort them out a lot of the time I I do think that’s a very low bar to clear before we celebrate the mainstreamness of the Trump judicial appointments. Howard Bauchner: Yeah,

but Ben, the era in which we live is one where we have seen again and again people that we thought were institutionalists retray those those norms and jump onto, you know, the populace trumpy bandwagon. And, you know, I remember thinking that Bill Barr, for example, was going to be Well, I

do know. And and and on a, you know, and there are people who remind me of that literally every day on Twitter that I quote vouched for Bill Barr and Brett Kavanaugh. So I look, I I I take your point I do think if we ever come to the place where you can’t count on article three judges to, in an apolitical fashion, reverse an opinion as outrageously wrong as Judge Cannon’s was I think we we will be in a worse place than we are. And I I do think it is a great thing that the eleventh circuit acted in a completely non partisan fashion, acted extremely quickly within twenty four hours of getting the government’s last brief wrote the opinion as a per Curium, that is as an opinion of the court, not in the name of any judge. And also, and quite deliciously I hope everybody noticed that the opinion is captioned Donald Trump, the United States of America.

Beautiful.

This

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So this week, Vladimir Putin did something that he has done before, namely engaged in rattling the nuclear saber, but I’m not sure he’s ever quite done it this explicitly. I will just read a section of the speech that he delivered to the Russian people. He accused NATO and the west and specifically Brussels. He said Washington and Brussels. He says, they are engaging in nuclear blackmail.

And then he says, quote, those who make such statements will be reminded that our country also has various weapons of destruction. And with regard to certain components, they are even more modern than the NATO ones. And he says Russian citizens can be certain that the territorial integrity of our motherland, our independence and security, will be assured I shall stress by all means available to us, and those trying to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the tables can turn on them and then he said, this is not a bluff. So, Linda, this was in response to the fact that he’s losing the war on the ground. He also announced the call up of reserves.

First of all, what do you make of this threat? And what do you think the proper response from the US and and the West should be? Well, I

think the threat is becoming more real. And I think you’re absolutely right. There was something a little different about this. There have actually been suggestions sites that could be hit in Ukraine that the Russians might target. And presumably, these would be with tactical nuclear weapons.

But as we all know, that would be a line that NATO could not see crossed that the United States could not see crossed and would take us to the brink of of an international war. That would involve NATO and the US. And so I think it is a little scary, but it does indicate to me how cornered. Putin is. I think I said it on this podcast a week or two ago.

He’s like a cornered rat and one of ratters cornered flashes out, it becomes more dangerous than at any other time. And Putin has seen that he has lost territory to be European military. He sees that his support within Russia is diminishing. One of the things that happened after he announced that he was going to mobilize the reserves in Russia and its been a little unclear exactly who he was mobilizing and how many he was mobilizing, but it seemed to be a pretty major announcement is that all of the flights where people could get on a plane without a visa leaving Russia were sold out within hours. People are fleeing.

Men don’t want to be called up. There were demonstrations in the

street. There were literally thousands of arrests that were made following this. So, Linda, can I just interrupt real quick about those demonstrations? Yeah. I heard someone saying, I think it was from BBC.

Saying that many of the demonstrators are women and children because what happened was that the men who participated were immediately grabbed and and conscripted into the army.

Right. Well, you know, that’s that’s the old tactic. I mean, they’re acting like caustics now. You know, they’re rounding up any male, I guess, above the age of sixteen, and I’m gonna try to conscript them into serving. Because the fact is, they’re not doing well.

And so, you know, it’s an act of desperation. But the nuclear threat changes. And I think you asked what the response should be. I think the response has to be very clear that we will respond in kind. Doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll drop nuclear bombs, but it does mean that the United States and NATO will become directly involved in this conflict.

That we cannot sit by and watch nuclear weapons use on European soil. Damon,

one of the other things that Cooten said he’s going to do is hold referendum in four of the regions of Ukraine that Russia controls and then declare them to be Russian territory, which raises the possibility that if he does that, that then when Ukrainians fire on their own land that Russia now claims is Russian territory, that this will be construed as as attacking Russia’s homeland, and therefore Putin will feel entitled to to respond with a nuclear weapon?

Yeah. That really is the the real risk here. Like, you know, what Putin said in, like, literal terms, the passages that you quoted don’t really worry me very much because if they literally mean, you know, if NATO militaries actually cross the the border into Russia and start driving toward Moscow, he’d start using nukes. Well, yeah, no kidding. We we knew that.

And that isn’t anything that we would be doing anyway. So It did sound to me like a bluff, but but what you have now given us has the minor premise of this little syllogism. It it really that does strike me as the most dangerous scenario that they they put on some some fake election to to make it seem as if the people living in these regions on the border of Russia are actually choosing to join with Russia so that potent can try to hold those territories from Ukraine, take them absorb them into Russia proper and then any attempt by Ukraine to take them back will be seen as then an attack on Russia, which then would justify the use of news. I still think you know, again, you know, who am I? I’m going to play a, you know, nuclear poker here with, you know, the very, very high stakes here, but I’m going to say, I don’t believe he would do that.

In this case, I do think this is the behavior of a wounded and cornered animal, which can be indeed very dangerous. But I doubt very much that he’s become, the Putin has become suicidal. And he has to understand that if he can’t even do better than he is in this little war then he is absolutely no match to the combined forces of NATO and that he would very likely end up dead one way or another, whether it’s from NATO weaponry or, you know, being stabbed in the back by one of his aides as they get rid of him in order to try to stop the annihilation of their country. So, you know, it is a dangerous situation, and I worry about it, but I frankly don’t think I mean, the the scenario in which it would make sense for him to reach for nukes would be one in which the west actively invaded Russia I mean, what what is he gonna do? Is he really going to, like, nuke and radiate these territories within Ukraine?

I mean, what good is that? What What is he left with then? I mean, all all of it would blow into Russian territory anyway and end up eradicating his own country. It just doesn’t make any sense. So the incorrigible rationalist that I am, I I can’t help but trying to think in somewhat rational terms about these calculations.

And it just doesn’t add up to me. I’m much more concerned with seeing the Ukrainians continue their push forward so that all of this becomes a moot point.

So Ben, with a First of all, Zelensky and the Ukrainians don’t seem cowed or intimidated by this talk. And the truth is that This is not the first time that Putin has threatened nuclear war. He’s actually been doing this quite a bit over the years. I mean, more than his predecessor Right? Very much so.

He has been occasionally making nuclear blackmail threats since

the beginning of the conflict. And he used such threats to try to prevent Western governments particularly the United States, but not only from supporting Ukraine militarily, and you know, the part of the problem for Putin is that if you think about it from a purely military point of view, nuclear escalation is the wrong kind of escalation for him. What you actually want to be able to do since you’re outnumbered on the ground and the West is providing Ukraine better weapons than you have. You wanna be able to throw better troops, better weapons, and more bodies at the problem. And that is exactly what he can’t do.

He’s having very serious supply problems. They have very serious manpower problems, and their troops are at a very low level of quality. Which has come as something of a surprise to lots of people in the west. And so the the type of escalation that would actually make sense would be a type of escalation that involves more troops performing better with better weapons. But that is what he can’t do So you’re left with the threat of escalation of a type that actually makes very little sense for you to do because, you know, you don’t control which way the winds blow.

And by the way, any use of nuclear forces would bring Western power to bear in a way that we have actually restrained ourselves from doing so far. And it risks as Damon says, a kind of suicidal escalation. And so, you know, part of the problem for Putin is that the one form of correlation that’s really available to him is actually not very useful from a practical point of view. The big thing that nuclear weapons are useful for is preventing the other side from using nuclear weapons. And of course, the Ukrainians don’t have nuclear weapons and nobody else is threatening to use them, so it’s not really that useful for this situation.

The other thing that he’s done, as you mentioned, is a partial mobilization, which is very unpopular in Russia as you can see from the amount of street protests that it has yielded. But in addition, that has this other problem, which is that while it does involve being able to throw more troops at the problem. They are of gonna be of a very low quality and they really don’t want to be there. Since a bunch of them seem to have been yesterday anti war protesters. And so I I think, you know, The posture is a real reflection of the degree of weakness that Putin finds himself in.

It’s a it’s a reflection of the degree of strength that the Ukrainians have shown. And it is also a a reflection of the degree of incoherence of Russian policy and sort of fumbling for what to do next. And one of the oddities of that, you know, when you’re really in control of the government, when you’re really in control of the situation and your policy makes sense and you know what you’re doing, You don’t announce that you’re gonna give a speech and then not show up. Yeah. I didn’t mention that.

Just explain that. Well, so Putin, you know, announced that there was gonna be a major speech and and then just didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen in fact until the next morning And I think it, you know, reflects a degree of chaos in the actual running of the Russian government

And, you know, one thing that fascist strong men really don’t like to project is chaos. So will the Russian Duma has been rushing to pass certain laws that mandate very harsh penalties for deserters, looters, and mutineers in the army. So that gives you a little window into what’s going on on the ground, the fact that they feel the need to do that. And as Ben was suggesting, even authoritarians do have to worry, they have to watch their back, and they have to worry about public opinion at a certain point and about morale. And it sounds as I mean, there are people in in Russia who are very pro war and who buy the whole, you know, this was an aggression by NATO using Ukraine’s a cat’s paw and so forth, and therefore they’re for the war, but they’re not happy about the way it’s going.

So the right wing hard liners are not happy. And then, of course, there’s what I presume to be, you know, a significant portion of the population based on the number of people who are willing to brave the law and arrest to come out on the streets who are posed and the number of people who are trying to escape country, etcetera, etcetera. And so he really does have to be concerned, doesn’t he about how this is playing out. And that’s one of the reasons people keep telling us that if he were to declare a general mobilization, he’s always called this special military operation. He has not yet said it’s a war.

But if he did say it were a war, you know, that would be tremendously unpopular, and he’s worried about that.

Yeah.

Putin has two problems. He has a military problem and he has a political problem. And the political problem is about the war. That that calling up all these troops will not solve his military problem, and it it has already exacerbated his political problem. To Ben’s point about the low quality of the troops.

Ben is exactly right. You you have a numbers problem in the Russian military. They don’t have enough troops in Ukraine to with clearly to withstand Ukrainian offensive. But they also have clearly a quality problem. And that is evidence by throughout this wharf to begin with.

Russian tanks and equipment have just been left behind. Lots of evidence of Russian soldiers just abandoning their equipment. And in this latest defense of our own car chief, we just saw flight. Right? We just saw Russian troops fleeing getting out of there.

There there is a very low will to fight in Ukraine among the Russians. And, of course, it’s not their country. Right? So that’s natural. But in addition to that, when putting starts constructing these guys, as you point out, the most absurd example is taking people out of anti war protests and putting them in to fight.

Right? But there’s but beyond that, just generally putting transcripts in instead of people who signed up to be in the Russian military, Now you’re gonna have soldiers who are standing there in Russian uniforms and they have weapons, but are they gonna fight? If I’m a Ukrainian, I’m not treating an army full of conscripts the same way. And I don’t believe that those soldiers if they go in Ukraine will be able to, for example, hold the line against the southern offensive around your son to the degree that the current Russian forces have. So he’s not solving the military problem.

On the political side, you’re exactly right, Mona. Even dictators or semi dictators or whatever we’re gonna call Putin, need public opinion on their side. And what he has done by extending this mass conscription is he’s ripped the cover off of this so called special military operation as you rightly point out. It is now or whether he calls it that or not. And we have first of all, you know, three hundred thousand to a million people who are gonna be subject to this.

But in addition, all of these young men who are who think they might be eligible for this are fleeing the country their lives are being left albine with their kids. We have a minimum of thirteen hundred protesters that have been arrested despite previous arrests. So there is the beginning of a groundswell against Putin. And I will just add one thing about the delay that Ben pointed out in the speech not happening when it was supposed to. To me, that doesn’t just say chaos.

That says that there is dissension within Putin’s government to a degree that held him back. At least briefly. And it is possible, just possible that if this thing gets worse and Putin refuses to bend, somebody inside the Kremlin, somebody with some military cloud behind them will, you know, as Lindsey Graham once said, take him out.

And with that, we will turn to our third topic, which is the electoral count reform act So for months and months, it looked like, you know, we weren’t getting the reform of the electoral count act that we’d so desperately needed and now we have two bills. So we have an embarrassment of riches in a way. Now I wanna get through this fairly quickly, not everybody has a comment. So I’ll just ask you if you if you have strong feelings and something a point you want to make, please raise your hand. I will go to Damon on this.

Damon, the House voted on a bipartisan bill introduced by Liz Cheney and Zolofgren that is, in my humble opinion, a better reform than the one that was proposed and that has, by the way, a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. So the Senate version has got ten Republican co sponsors, which means that it can pass over a filibuster. So even though the house version is better, I’m wondering if you think maybe the safer course is just to go with whatever we can get. And if that means, not quite as good Senate version go with that or or have you heard anything about possibly melding the two, which would which would be good too? Normally, I would think that that

kind of a reconciliation would be in order. I might not be required by the rules of the legislative game, but some kind of compromise, I suspectfully hemhed out. But frankly, I’ll take either of these bills. I mean, I agree that the house one is a little better, but It’s very good news that actually Patumi, one of my two Pennsylvania senators, came out for that tenth co sponsor among the Republicans giving it the filibuster proof super majority, which is very, very good news. And makes me, you know, very pleased about Patumi, although it does give further evidence for the thesis that Republicans can still be very admirable office holders provided they’re not seeking reelection.

Because, of course, Tumi is leaving. Is That is It’s it’s

heading for

the exit because because he knew that it was no longer his party. And so it looks like one of his last acts as a legislator is going to be the co sponsorship of this bill, which is a good legacy because this is a big important far reaching Bill. So and that the other quick thing I’ll just note is that the House Bill, you had, I believe, what did seven Republicans flipped to vote

for something, like,

at nine. Alright. And two hundred and seven again, I believe. And I I made a comment on Twitter about this, the, like, well, you know, the interest question here is, how many of them actually hate this bill and don’t wanna vote for it? And how many of them simply are afraid to support it because then all the the Trumpy voters will come and and punish them for it, to which some people on Twitter responded.

Well, really doesn’t matter. Does it you

know, that’s a Really? Who

cares in politics with the the with the person that has in his or her?

In their deep heart. Yeah. No. Exactly. Exactly.

And so that’s where we are in the House GOP. Yeah.

Ben

Wittus, just real quick. So the nine Republicans who voted for this very necessary reform, none of them will be in Congress next year for a variety of reasons. Either they were retiring or they were defeated in their primaries. So there you go. And representative Jim Banks who is is the voice of the typical house Republican said to political that he was against this bill because it was a political weapon to beat up on Donald Trump and not about preventing a January sixth from ever happening again.

Any comment? Well,

yes. So a couple things about this. The first is It’s a very important piece of legislation to get done because while Congress can try to do almost anything it wants, when it receives electoral votes. The electoral count act actually sets the baseline for what happens unless something extraordinary is done. And the baseline rules tend to get followed.

And so setting a reasonable good baseline is actually really important. Second point is that it is a remarkable failure on the part of Congress, and I would say the Biden administration, that this is actually the first really significant post Trump reform to pass legislatively. That’s a good point. You know, you think about all of the people who wrote books about necessary reforms. We published one of them at law fair by Jack Old Smith and Bob Bower.

There have been a lot there was a lot of great thought that went into the question of what legislative and executive reform looks like. And while we’ve had a one sixth committee and we’ve had a very active DOJ criminal investigation, The amount of actual reform energy at the policy level is has been really minimal and I think that’s a regrettable omission. And I hope this marks a change in it. Unfortunately, I worry that the absence of any capacity for bipartisanship in this area at least in the house. And the numbers that you cite are a reflection of that.

Every Republican who’s ordered this is not going to be there next year, is going to mean that any continued momentum or progress in this regard is going to be impossible if Republicans control the the chamber and very difficult if you are counting on any Republican votes. For it. The final thing I will say is the utility of this bill is to some degree contingent on what the supreme court does in a case that’s coming up this coming term involving the so called independent state legislate. Your doctrine. And, you know, you could imagine a situation in which what Congress does through a a bill like this or reform like this can get functionally undone by the supreme court announcing that state legislatures can kind of give their electoral votes to whomever they want under whatever rules and actions they might wanna take.

And so I would say this is a very important step, but it is a contingent step and not an adequate one

on its own. Thank you very much, and now we will turn to our final segment. Highlight or lowlight of the week. Will Sullivan, I’ll start with you. Well,

my low light has to do with the war in Ukraine, but it’s not specifically about Russia. A couple of weeks ago, the United States released some intelligence designed to expose a what they said were efforts by Russia to buy weapons from a certain country in Asia. And that country this week, issued a statement, angrily denying that it was selling the weapons. It said, quote, we have this is the official statement. We have never exported weapons or ammunition to Russia before, and we will not plan to export them.

We warned the US to stop making reckless remarks. The country that issued that statement is North Korea. So what one of the things that Vladimir Putin has managed to achieve in the half year or so of this war is that he has managed to make Russia such a pariah that even the pariahs of the world have ostracized it. Excellent.

Yeah.

Actually, we we didn’t get into it in that segment, but it has been I have say a little bit of shot in Troy to see him being schooled and lectured by the leaders of India and China and others who in the beginning of the war were certainly unwilling to criticize him. So so that’s that’s good. Okay. Benjamin Wettest.

As some listeners may know, I have spent a lot of time over the past six months since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Doing something that’s quite unusual for me, which is, I guess, a form of activism. I’ve been projecting images on walls of Russian diplomatic facilities, generally involving war crimes committed by Russian troops. And I have been doing things like planting sunflowers in front of the Russian embassy, which the Russians really don’t like. And they actually come out of the embassy to destroy the sunflowers.

And so these are all all fun and games, but I want to as a low light of the week point to something that happened in Montreal where This is stuff I know about only because people who conduct actions against the Russian embassies and diplomatic facilities all keep in touch with each other. In Montreal, this is in a western democracy. The Russians have seems like hired people to rough up people who are protesting at the embassy. And in the case of the Montreal consulate, they took a ninety one year old man’s speaker and hurled it to the ground. And this is not the first instance in which Russian embassy personnel have engaged in, I would say, something approaching violence you know, in my case, we had an incident where one of the people that I was working with a Ukrainian woman had presence of mine to video tape.

And so it became a bit of a viral video when I released it. But we had two young Ukrainian American girls lay sunflowers on the driveway of the embassy, and a member of the embassy staff drives up gets out of his car, kicks the sunflowers into the street, and stops on them. So I My low light of the week is Russian embassy personnel and their sometimes local hires who don’t seem to understand that the bullying tactics that are routine in Moscow are not okay in Montreal or in Washington. And that when you are a diplomat in a country, you are expected to respect the local laws even though we cannot hold you to them. Thank

you for that, Ben. Also, I have to say, you described it as finding games, but it really isn’t. It’s dead serious and one of the things that you did that I was so impressed with is that you superimpose somehow you shot the the colors of the Ukrainian flags shown them onto the Russian embassy here in in DC, which which is just just beautiful. So thank you for that.

Well,

thank you. And and I I feel very upfronted by what happened in Montreal. And I guess, I will say that the next we call them special military operations for obvious reasons. The next special military operation were in honor of the Canadian filmmaker whose speaker was thrown to the ground and will be in Ottawa. Okay.

Excellent. Linda Chavez, First,

let me just compliment Ben. I’m not much of a Twitter follower as listeners know, but I have followed Ben on Twitter and seen the wonderful films of all of his direct action against the Russian embassy. I’m gonna point to a new newsletter, which has been announced and started this week that listeners can sign up for. It’s by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and it’s called Pulettica with a k. And it will have in it all you need to know about what’s happening in Russia, in Ukraine, and the various politics of that region.

It is headed up by Alexander Baumov. I think it’s the way you pronounce the name, not sure. And I just recommend it because it has the kind of in-depth articles that you won’t necessarily find at least on a daily basis in your newspapers, so people should go to Carnegie Politica and sign up. Okay. Is it free?

It is free as far as I know. Well, I didn’t have to pay for it.

Excellent. Okay. Damon Linker. My highlight

of the week is a pretty lengthy but lively essay in the New York Times by David Lienhart, who is one of their very best writers. It’s titled in, quotes, a crisis coming than Colin the Twin threats to American democracy. The two threats are, first of all, the Trumpian refusal to accept the results of Democratic elections we’re all very much aware of that one. The other one is the somewhat subtler and more, in some ways, more troubling cause it more difficult to respond to. The problem of the way that America’s array of either counter majoritarian institutions or just plain old somewhat quirky institutions.

Are interacting with the shape of the two party’s electoral coalitions. This is the phenomenon where as recently as two thousand eight and to the in twenty twelve, Obama actually had a very efficient electoral coalition of for the Senate, for instance, whereas now that is not the case. And of course, in our system, the electoral college is partly a function of the way the senate breakdown happens. And so what you have now is that the electoral college for the president see is working out that, you know, Trump won the election in twenty sixteen while losing the popular vote by two point nine million. Four years later in twenty twenty, he lost the electoral the electoral college, but he came within really only about seventy thousand votes and four states of winning it despite coming seven million votes short in the popular vote nationally.

This is a situation that is very troubling because it leads Democrats to kind of consistently across those institutions, which is the senate and the presidency plus you know, great, very strong partisan jerrymandering in the house so that it is possible, it is sometimes happening and is going to become more more likely in the coming years that Democrats are going to win majority votes and yet lose power. And that, of course, is is very destabilizing for any democracy. So this is something that a lot of activists on the left talk about and and sort of, I think, somewhat recklessly impug all of our institutions. We need to scrap the electoral college scrap the Senate, and we have to do all these other things. Some of which I support other things which are both futile because the the senate is written into the constitution in such a way that it is it is inconceivable to get rid of it unless you had a constitutional convention.

And started from scratch was the last thing we should be trying to do. And so I think Lanehart’s piece is very very useful because it’s sober and smart while recognizing the the risks of these things. He goes through and walks through with data very carefully explaining how yes these things are bad, but they are a function of our institutions plus these more contingent things about the two party’s coalitions. And that’s exactly the right way in which it needs to be understood and thought about by citizens as we try to figure out in some way how to get out of the messes we seem to be finding ourselves in these days. Thank

you so much. Okay. I would like to praise the new documentary that’s on PBS by Ken Burns, Lynn Novak and Sarah Boststein, the United States and the Holocaust. Obviously, the grimace of grim subjects, but it is a really a astounding piece of work by these documentarians and I’m a big fan of Ken Burns’ work, but I have to say this is the greatest thing that he has done since the civil war. Maybe definitely, you know, on that on that level and very, very sobering.

Look, there’s just no way to watch this documentary without drawing parallels to our current time and to the degree that it causes people to do so, that’s all to the good with obvious distinctions. But a brilliant piece of work and it’s available on PBS. And with that, I would like to thank Benjamin Willis for joining us and Will Sullivan for sitting in for Bill this week. And I want to thank our sound engineer, Jason Brown, and our producer, Kate Cooper. We also, of course, thank our listeners.

And if you’re so inclined, if you think this is the kind of conversation that the world needs more of, then, you know, we don’t ask you to pay. This is available free, but we only ask that you spread the word and that means by leaving a review or comment and and just get the word out there on iTunes and elsewhere. Whatever platform you listen to this on recommended to other people because same, you know, non tribal conversation that really grapples with ideas is is the only answer to the problems that we face. So thank you for that. Thank you for listening, and we will return next week as

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