Do your job!

The double standard with Hunter Biden's laptop is worse than you think

Opinion by Dean Obeidallah

"Attorney General Garland, do your job -- so that we can do ours," declared an exasperated Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia on Monday night as part of her work as a member of the January 6 House select committee. Luria and others on the committee expressed frustration with Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice still not acting on the December 14, 2021, vote by the House recommending criminal charges against former Donald Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows for defying a congressional subpoena.

But the frustration many have with Garland goes far beyond simply the over three-month silence on Meadows. As I hear frequently from listeners to my SiriusXM show, the fact that we don't hear a peep about Garland investigating Trump for his attempted coup to overturn the 2020 election and potential crimes in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol is beyond frustrating. And those voices demanding Garland to act will be growing louder given a federal court decision Monday where the judge wrote that it was "more likely than not that" Trump committed crimes given his efforts to prevent the certification of Joe Biden's victory.

While the focus of this case was a request by Trump's former lawyer John Eastman to withhold certain documents requested by the January 6 committee based on claims they are protected by attorney-client privilege, US District Court Judge David Carter laid out a damning case against Trump for his conduct surrounding January 6 -- including potential crime.

As the judge wrote, Trump and his lawyer had "launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history," adding, "it was a coup in search of a legal theory." And in a bone-chilling passage, the judge explained that if Trump and Eastman's "plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution."

Judge Carter reminded us that Trump had been informed by people in his inner circle, including his then-Attorney General William Barr, that there was no evidence of election fraud. Yet, Trump continued his unjustified efforts to overturn the election results by pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to not allow Congress to certify the election results on January 6.

The court then, while addressing what is known as the "crime-fraud exception" to attorney-client privilege, analyzed two federal crimes that the January 6 committee alleges Trump may have committed: "Obstruction of an official proceeding" and "Conspiracy to defraud the United States." After a detailed recitation of Trump and Eastman's conduct as applied to these federal crimes, the judge bluntly concluded: "The illegality of the plan was obvious."

Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich responded to the judge's ruling stating "This absurd and baseless ruling by a Clinton-appointed Judge in California is just another example of how the left is weaponizing every branch of government against President Trump." Eastman's lawyer stated his client "respectfully disagrees with the judge's findings" but will comply with the order.

Yes, it's obvious to all of us that what Trump did was wrong -- and potentially illegal -- which begs the question: Where is Garland's DOJ investigation into Trump? Could there be a super secret investigation of Trump? Sure, but common sense says we would have heard something, the same way we hear about the testimony of witnesses after they appear before the House select committee on January 6. Lawyers talk, court clerks see witnesses showing up for a grand jury, etc. All you need is one person to talk to break a story.

Add to that, history tells us that the longer a DOJ investigation continues, the more likely there will be leaks to the media.

On Wednesday, CNN reported that the Justice Department investigation into the business activities of the President's son, Hunter Biden, "has gained steam in recent months, with a flurry of witnesses providing testimony to federal investigators and more expected to provide interviews in the coming weeks, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter."

Investigators are looking into the younger Biden's business dealings internationally during Biden's term as vice president. Hunter Biden has denied wrongdoing and his father is not being investigated as part of this probe, CNN reported, citing sources. The DOJ's investigation, which began in 2018, became known in December 2020 when Hunter Biden revealed it.

And, of course, when the DOJ investigated Hillary Clinton in connection with her emails, the nation first learned about it in August 2015, based on information from two unnamed government officials. While the DOJ refused to comment on the investigation, the media were filled with stories of developments in the investigation -- via leaks -- such as in March 2016 when the DOJ granted immunity to a former Clinton staffer. Clinton eventually was cleared in the investigation. When it comes to Trump, however, we hear nothing.

Garland recently said that he was intent on ensuring the DOJ's decisions about prosecutions "are made on the merits ... the facts and the law," and "they're not based on any kind of partisan considerations." I couldn't agree more. If there's credible evidence that Hunter Biden -- or anyone for that matter, Democrat or Republican -- may have committed a federal crime, there should be a DOJ investigation.

Yet the sense many have is that this DOJ has no problem investigating people named Biden and Clinton but we have seen no signs of investigating Trump despite Garland's promise in January that "The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law." And the longer that apparent double standard continues, the more Americans will question if in fact "partisan considerations" are driving the DOJ's decisions when it comes to Trump.

Judge Carter concluded his opinion with a sentiment I'm sure many agree with, "More than a year after the attack on our Capitol, the public is still searching for accountability." He then added ominously, "If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself."

You don't need a law degree to understand that if Trump is not held accountable for both his attempted coup and the January 6 attack, why would Trump -- or any future president for that matter -- think that they can't do the same? The stakes are too high for timidity given our democratic Republic hangs in the balance. The demand must be made by all who seek to preserve it is this: "Attorney General Garland, do your job."

Deserve what they get..

'He's an embarrassment': Republicans threaten to primary Cawthorn over controversial antics

By Melanie Zanona, Manu Raju and Alex Rogers

Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina is throwing his weight behind a primary opponent to freshman Rep. Madison Cawthorn -- an extraordinary broadside against a fellow Republican from his home state, as internal frustration with the controversial MAGA firebrand reaches a boiling point.

"It comes down to focus on the district, producing results for the district, and in my opinion, Mr. Cawthorn hasn't demonstrated much in the way of results over the last 18 months," Tillis told CNN, describing why he is backing state Sen. Chuck Edwards in his primary against Cawthorn.

And Tillis may not be alone. Other GOP lawmakers who are at their wits' end with Cawthorn are considering endorsing one of his primary foes, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions, amid growing concerns that the North Carolina Republican is dragging down the entire party with his problematic behavior. The two most powerful North Carolina Republicans in the state legislature -- Senate leader Phil Berger and House speaker Tim Moore -- are headlining a fundraiser for Edwards on Thursday, according to the Edwards campaign.

It's the latest sign of turmoil for the 26-year-old, who has angered and annoyed a wide swath of his colleagues with a steady stream of controversial antics and attempts to play political kingmaker in North Carolina and beyond. Most recently, Cawthorn sparked an uproar after claiming on a podcast that people in Washington have invited him to participate in orgies and used cocaine in front of him. Even fellow members of the House Freedom Caucus, a far-right crew with a penchant for controversy, have turned on Cawthorn: They've floated the idea of kicking him out of the group if he didn't clarify his wild accusations, according to GOP sources, though such a step seems unlikely.

Amid complaints from members, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy hauled Cawthorn into his office Wednesday morning and pressed him on the unsettling allegations, which he said Cawthorn admitted were untrue, and told the freshman lawmaker he needs to get his act together or else he could face internal consequences.

"He's got to turn himself around," McCarthy told reporters. "I just told him he's lost my trust, and he's going to have to earn it back. I laid out everything I find that's unbecoming. ... He's got a lot of members upset. You can't just make statements out there."

Cawthorn declined to answer questions from CNN in the Capitol about the meeting or his allegations and said to contact his office. His office did not return multiple requests for comment.

Many Republicans -- who say Cawthorn has rebuffed repeated attempts to show him the ropes -- think he is more interested in generating headlines than serious legislating and has alienated himself in the House GOP as a result. Some Republicans worry that Cawthorn and a handful of other vocal fringe members in the party are hurting the GOP brand and creating an unnecessary and unwelcome distraction in their quest to win back the majority.

Retiring Sen. Richard Burr -- the senior GOP senator from North Carolina -- told CNN he won't be getting involved in Cawthorn's primary, but added: "On any given day, he's an embarrassment."

Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, who represents a district won by President Joe Biden, said Cawthorn's bizarre allegations about sex acts and drug use were "terrible" and that he shares "the anger of my colleagues."

And Rep. Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota told CNN that instead of an angel and devil on Cawthorn's shoulder, "in Madison's case it's Lloyd Christmas on one shoulder and Harry Dunne on the other shoulder" -- a reference to the main characters in the movie "Dumb and Dumber."

"People are flat pissed off," Armstrong added.

The public and private broadsides illustrate how Cawthorn, who was once seen as a rising star inside the GOP, has quickly become persona non grata inside his own party. But McCarthy's past efforts to rein in the fringe members inside his conference haven't worked, and it's unclear if the push to defeat Cawthorn in North Carolina will fare any better. The congressman is facing at least five Republican candidates in his primary, who could split the vote against him, and needs to earn just 30 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff election.

Cawthorn's critics acknowledge that any GOP attempts to defeat or damage Cawthorn in a primary could also backfire: Cawthorn has built a brand as an anti-establishment Republican, and the backlash from his colleagues may only boost his bona fides on the far right. Further complicating things, Cawthorn has the ear of former President Donald Trump, who regrets not backing Cawthorn's initial bid for Congress. (In the 2020 GOP primary runoff election, Trump endorsed Lynda Bennett, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows' pick to take his old House seat.)

Tillis, however, appears unfazed by the prospect of going up against a congressman beloved by Trump.

"I'm gonna do my best to defer to the people in his district to make that choice," Tillis said. But he added that he believes voters will think highly of Edwards compared to Cawthorn, "both in terms of temperament and a focus on getting things done."

Controversies in Congress

Cawthorn's cocaine and orgy allegations sparked a furor during a closed-door party meeting Tuesday, according to sources in the room, though he was not present during the gathering. Several enraged Republicans stood up and raised concern over Cawthorn's inflammatory remarks, saying that if his allegations are true, then he needs to name names because otherwise it unfairly stains the entire institution.

Others complained that they are getting questions from concerned constituents -- and worried spouses -- about whether members of Congress were indeed participating in orgies and hard-core drug use.

In response to the string of closed-door complaints, McCarthy, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise and Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana -- who was formally assigned to mentor Cawthorn at the start of Congress -- huddled with Cawthorn for 30 minutes in the GOP leader's office Wednesday morning. During that meeting, sources said McCarthy explained to Cawthorn that he can't just be a social media influencer, implored him to take his job as a congressman seriously, pressed him to issue a public apology for his most recent remarks, and warned Cawthorn that if he didn't change his behavior, there could be consequences. They ended the meeting by telling Cawthorn the ball is now in his court.

When pressed by reporters on whether Cawthorn might lose his committee assignments, McCarthy said: "There's a lot of different things that can happen." Aside from losing his committee seats, he could also be assigned to less desirable ones next year, sources said.

Just two weeks ago, GOP lawmakers were furious with Cawthorn for a different reason: he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a "thug" and the Ukrainian government "evil" -- comments that were picked up by Russian state media amid its brutal assault on Ukraine.

During his short tenure, Cawthorn has racked up a remarkably long list of eye-popping controversies: he brought a congressional candidate onto the House floor, which is against the rules, and falsely told people that the candidate was a staffer; he was seen cleaning his gun in the middle of a virtual hearing on veterans' health; he got busted for driving on a suspended license; and he was hit with an ethics complaint after getting into a verbal altercation with GOP Rep. David McKinley on the House floor, to name a few.

"We were shocked and disappointed that he yet again made some bizarre comment," said Michele Woodhouse, another GOP primary candidate against Cawthorn, about her opponent's remarks regarding cocaine and orgies in Washington. "It's yet again another reason why he's unelectable in the 11th congressional district."

Aside from Johnson, other members who came to Congress with big platforms have tried to informally mentor Cawthorn about turning that notoriety into success, sources said. Cawthorn was also purposely placed on the House Education and Labor Committee with the hopes that ranking member Rep. Virginia Foxx, a veteran North Carolina Republican, would take him under her wings. But those entreaties haven't worked.

Of course, Cawthorn isn't the only controversial member in the GOP ranks: Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona, for example, both recently addressed a conference organized by a White nationalist, and received little more than a verbal rebuke from their leaders and colleagues.

But the House GOP appears the most fed up with Cawthorn, who has a knack for snatching up the spotlight and drawing unwanted attention to his party. Republicans were especially disturbed by the cocaine and orgy allegations because it implicated themselves.

Other Republicans, however, said they have some level of sympathy for Cawthorn, who was paralyzed in a car accident and is getting divorced after a short marriage, and worry about the 26-year-old's well-being.

But McCarthy, who got his start in politics at a young age and once chaired the Young Republican National Federation, said Cawthorn's age is no excuse for bad behavior.

"It doesn't matter. The Constitution gives you the age when you can serve in Congress," McCarthy told reporters. "But when you're in Congress, you should respect the institution, and you should focus on the work that you should do."

Backlash back home

Cawthorn is facing a number of GOP candidates including Edwards, Woodhouse, Bruce O'Connell, Rod Honeycutt, Matthew Burril and Wendy Nevarez. His opponents are trying to take advantage of his numerous controversies, including his speech on January 6, 2021, urging those at Trump's "Save America" rally to contest the election.

Retired Henderson County sheriff George Erwin Jr., a former early supporter of Cawthorn's, dropped the congressman after the pro-Trump mob's attack on the Capitol. Erwin has since thrown his support behind Honeycutt, a retired Army colonel.

Republican challengers are also lambasting his decision to leave the district in November, before changing his mind once the final maps were created. Woodhouse, the former GOP chair of the district, said that Cawthorn "abandoned" the district and now is asking his constituents to "settle for being his second choice."

But some Republicans in the state say that if they don't coalesce behind one candidate, Cawthorn will be able to clear the primary field and win reelection.

"That's the problem right now," said unaffiliated North Carolina GOP strategist Jim Blaine, a former top staffer for state Senate president Phil Berger. "I think if the election was a binary choice between Chuck Edwards and Madison Cawthorn, Chuck Edwards would beat Madison Cawthorn."

"The problem is there are six other candidates ... in that race who are trying to be the anti-Cawthorn," he added.

Twisted appeal

This may be Trump's most twisted appeal to Putin yet

Analysis by Stephen Collinson

Donald Trump is doing it again -- putting his personal goals and burning zeal for revenge above the national interest -- as he once more appeals for Russian President Vladimir Putin's political help in the midst of the brutality in Ukraine.

Trump's call on the Kremlin strongman to dig up dirt on President Joe Biden is no surprise. He's called on Russia and China before to interfere in US elections to boost his chances and got impeached for trying to blackmail Ukraine to do the same.

But this may be the ex-President's most twisted and pathological attempt yet to corruptly advance his own political career ahead of a possible 2024 White House bid. His thinking seems to be clear. Putin might be raining atrocities on Ukrainian citizens, bombing hospitals, apartment blocks, razing entire cities and sending 4 million refugees west into Europe. But Trump seems willing to overlook all of that in service of his own perceived interests.

Not only is Trump seeking to cook up a self-serving conspiracy with a Russian President much of the world now regards as a war criminal. He's also asking an enemy of the United States, who has threatened nuclear war, to damage the American commander-in-chief who is leading the West in an effort to aid an innocent, invaded nation and to save democracy.

Trump's latest appeal offers a window into his twisted morality as he lines up again alongside Putin, whom he called a "genius" earlier in the Ukraine crisis even as much of his own party condemned the invasion. And it raises fundamental questions about the patriotism of an ex-President who sometimes hugs the stars and stripes at his rallies but who often showed while in office that he cared only for his own interests.

Trump issued his public appeal to Putin in an interview with sympathetic conservative news network Just the News. He pushed an unproven claim about Hunter Biden's potential business dealings in Russia, and asked Putin to release any information that he might have about the situation. "I would think Putin would know the answer to that," Trump said. "I think he should release it. I think we should know that answer."

It's not clear that any material exists, or if the Kremlin has access to it.

A Justice Department investigation into the President's son is gathering steam, CNN reported Wednesday citing multiple sources. Investigators have examined whether Hunter Biden and some of his associates violated money laundering, tax and foreign lobbying laws, as well as firearm and other regulations, multiple sources said. But Hunter Biden has not been charged with any crimes and has denied any wrongdoing. His father is not being investigated as part of the probe of his son's business activities, according to sources who have been briefed.

Some will argue that Trump's latest outrageous comments should be ignored, to deprive him of the political oxygen that he craves. Republicans will no doubt accuse Trump critics of taking his words too literally.

But the words of an ex-President, especially at a time of war, carry weight. Trump remains the effective leader of the Republican Party. He's a hot favorite for the GOP nomination in 2024, won nearly 47% of the popular vote in 2020 and could have a reasonable chance in a presidential rematch against Biden. Therefore the ex-President has enormous political power, and his behavior and rhetoric must be examined by voters as they consider whether to return him to the Oval Office.

There is every reason, especially in the light of his latest comments, to suppose a second Trump term would turn into an even greater quest for personal power and enrichment than the first. After all, he was willing to destroy American democracy by inciting an insurrection against a free and fair election to stay in power. The ex-President is also playing a huge role in November's midterm elections, endorsing candidates who back his democracy-threatening claims of electoral fraud.

Trump was emboldened by impeachment acquittals

Trump's latest appeal to Putin also offers another possible preview of the future. It shows he still thinks he can gain political advantage by siding with the Russian leader, who was assessed by US intelligence to have meddled in the 2016 election in a bid to help him win. There's no sense that the Russian leader's brutality makes him radioactive to Trump.

This episode is also a reminder that while much of the world has been transfixed by Volodymyr Zelensky's fight for his country, Trump chose to try to extort the Ukrainian President over the kind of military aid Ukraine is now using to fend off the Russian offensive. Trump had hoped to force Zelensky to announce a probe into the Bidens before the 2020 election. Trump's newest comments will also fuel concerns of European leaders standing alongside the US in supporting Ukraine that a return to office by the former President could buckle NATO. Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah expressed exactly those fears in an interview Tuesday on CNN+ with Kasie Hunt.

When Trump was impeached for a second time, for inciting a coup attempt based on his lies about a stolen election, most Senate Republicans backed off convicting him. Their reasoning was that as an ex-President, stripped of power, Trump could do no more harm. His latest appeal to Putin exposes the cowardice of that decision. It also suggests Trump has realized that there is no cost to be paid for calling on America's most sworn enemies to help his own political career. His bet on impunity is so brazen that as usual, he's performing the corruption out loud.

One interesting question is whether Trump is making a political error in seeking assistance from Putin despite his recent atrocities. Only 6% of Republicans in a February Quinnipiac University poll had a favorable impression of the Russian leader. Since the invasion, Trump has struggled to balance his fixation with Putin with the outrage of Americans about Ukraine's fate. He has taken to insisting that Putin would never have dared to invade had he still been President, despite his long record of advancing Russia's foreign policy goals while he was in the White House. House Republicans, who lost the last two elections because of Trump's unpopularity in the suburbs, will hardly welcome the ex-President's pro-Putin slant as the midterms approach, though Democrats found out in Virginia's gubernatorial race last year that running an anti-Trump campaign at a time of high gas prices and inflation didn't work.

One of the ironies of Trump's latest attempt to enlist Putin's help was that it would have been easy for him to take a swipe over his successor over Hunter Biden without invoking a Russian leader he has always hero-worshipped.

Republican equivocating

As usual, Trump's call out to Putin led to uncomfortable moments for Republican senators when confronted by journalists on Capitol Hill this week. And as is often the case, some of their reactions suggested that much of the party would follow him yet again in order to secure power, or at least would not actively thwart his dangerous impulses.

North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer seemed to endorse Trump's suggestion for Putin to publicize any information he has that might be damaging to the current President.

"I don't know if he has dirt on Biden. If he does, he should reveal it, but he is a war criminal so I don't expect that he's right now sitting around thinking about ways that he can reveal other information," Cramer told CNN's Manu Raju.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has called for Russians to assassinate Putin, was also offered the chance to condemn Trump for seeking to conspire with a US enemy.

"My message to Putin is he needs to go," Graham told Raju. Asked about Trump's comments, he replied, "It's not something I would do."

Senate Republican Whip John Thune, against whom Trump unsuccessfully encouraged the South Dakota governor to run in a primary, bemoaned the fact that "we have very little control over what the former President says."

But the question that will face Republicans in the event of a likely Trump presidential run is whether the things that he says and does will make him an unacceptable choice to become the GOP nominee again. On past form, the answer will be a clear no.

On the other side of Capitol Hill, Republicans were in the mood for doling out accountability. But not to Trump. GOP leaders were fuming at Rep. Madison Cawthorn, the North Carolina Republican who had embarrassed his colleagues by bizarrely claiming he was invited to an orgy and saw leaders in the effort to curb drug addiction using cocaine.

"I'm very disappointed. I told him he's lost my trust," House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said. "He did not tell the truth, that's unacceptable."

But the California Republican has rarely defended truth as a standard of public life while dealing with Trump. As he seeks to become the next speaker in a House GOP conference that is the ex-President's most potent Washington power base, McCarthy has sought to whitewash Trump's conduct during the Capitol insurrection, even though he said at the time the ex-President "bears responsibility" for the riot.

And while he came down hard on Cawthorn, McCarthy has also been reluctant to discipline other pro-Trump members of the party like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona, whose recent attendance at a White supremacist conference adds to their long list of extremist outbursts. And he's backing a primary challenge to Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, who lost her leadership position in the House GOP for telling the truth about Trump's lies about a stolen election and threats to democratic institutions.

Cheney's plight shows why Trump will continue to pay no price for courting favors from America's enemies -- even from Putin.

He should

Yes, Merrick Garland can prosecute Mark Meadows (and Peter Navarro, and Dan Scavino)

He should, too.

By Ian Millhiser

The US House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the Trump White House’s role in it is charging ahead. But — thanks in part to the limited power of congressional inquiries — the success of their next steps depends on the Justice Department.

And at least right now, the committee appears to be losing faith in that department, and specifically in Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has thus far been reluctant to prosecute high-ranking Trump administration officials who’ve stonewalled the committee. Several members of the committee criticized Garland for failing to prosecute at least one former top Trump aide whom Congress voted to hold in contempt. In the words of Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA), “Attorney General Garland, do your job so we can do ours.”

The committee also voted unanimously on Monday to hold two former Trump White House aides in contempt of Congress. The former aides, trade adviser Peter Navarro and social media director Dan Scavino, both refused to comply with a subpoena seeking documents and testimony.

In the likely event that the full House agrees that the two men should be held in contempt, both could be fined and face up to a year of incarceration — though the decision whether to prosecute the two former White House aides will be made by the Justice Department and not by Congress.

Based on what we already know about how the Justice Department has handled other referrals, it’s unclear whether it will decide to act.

Last November, the Justice Department indicted Stephen Bannon, another former top Trump aide, because Bannon also refused to comply with a subpoena from the January 6 committee. About a month later, Congress voted to hold former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in contempt, but Meadows has not yet been indicted.

If DOJ does eventually prosecute Meadows, Navarro, and Scavino, their cases could potentially raise distinct legal issues because all three were still White House employees and members of Trump’s inner circle during the January 6 attack, while Bannon was a private citizen.

Indeed, Navarro is openly hoping that his status as a former consigliere to a sitting president will rescue him from contempt charges. The subpoena, he misleadingly claimed, is “predicated on the ridiculous legal premise that Joe Biden can waive Donald Trump’s Executive Privilege,” before predicting that “the Supreme Court will say otherwise when the time comes.”

There are several reasons to doubt that Navarro’s prediction will prove accurate. While the GOP-controlled Supreme Court was quite protective of Trump while the former president was in office, effectively thwarting a House-led investigation that sought his financial records until after Trump left office, the Court broke with Trump in a January 6-related case after he left office.

That case, Trump v. Thompson, permitted the January 6 committee to obtain hundreds of pages of Trump White House records that were held by the National Archives.

Navarro is also wrong that President Biden’s views are irrelevant to whether Navarro can hide behind executive privilege. Though the Supreme Court held in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services (GSA) (1977) that this privilege “survives the individual President’s tenure,” the GSA case also held that a former president’s power to keep their staff’s deliberations secret is much less potent than a sitting president’s power to do so. And it is especially weak when the sitting president believes that a former administration’s deliberations should not remain secret.

So, while Biden doesn’t have the authority to completely override Trump’s assertions of executive privilege, courts typically afford considerable deference to a sitting president’s determination that a past president should not be allowed to claim the privilege.

On top of these two problems for Navarro, it’s far from clear that Navarro’s actions are even covered by the executive privilege. Though communications between a president and their top aides are often privileged, according to a federal appeals court, that privilege only applies to communications concerning “official government matters.” Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election fall outside of a president’s official duties.

So it is likely, if not entirely certain, that if the Justice Department decided to prosecute Meadows, Navarro, and Scavino, the courts would not bail out these three former officials.

The biggest obstacle facing prosecutors would most likely be the potential for jury nullification — a jury that includes staunch Trump supporters may refuse to convict, potentially hanging the jury, no matter how strong the evidence against former Trump aides. Perhaps that explains Garland’s caution, because case law strongly supports allowing such a prosecution to move forward.

The Supreme Court does have a Republican majority that could still bend the law to thwart an investigation into the former GOP president. But the Thompson case suggests that even this Supreme Court may be reluctant to do so.

Executive privilege, briefly explained

Executive privilege permits presidents — both sitting and former — to keep certain communications among their subordinates confidential. As the Court explained in United States v. Nixon (1974), the privilege exists to ensure that presidents receive candid advice. “Those who expect public dissemination of their remarks,” the 1974 Nixon case explained, “may well temper candor with a concern for appearances and for their own interests to the detriment of the decisionmaking process.”

But Nixon also held that the privilege is neither “absolute” nor “unqualified.” In that case, the Supreme Court ordered then-sitting President Richard Nixon to turn over tape recordings that incriminated him and eventually led to his resignation. “Absent a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets,” the Nixon case held, the justice system’s need to conduct a full investigation into the Watergate scandal, and to prosecute any crimes committed during the course of that scandal, overcame the presidency’s interest in keeping Nixon’s communications secret.

A few years later, in the GSA case, the Court added that executive privilege “is not for the benefit of the President as an individual, but for the benefit of the Republic.” Thus, if a president seeks to keep secret their own efforts to harm the republic, the privilege should not apply.

GSA also explains how courts should treat executive privilege claims by a former president. The current president, the Court reasoned in GSA, is the best caretaker of the presidency’s institutional interests. And “it must be presumed that the incumbent President is vitally concerned with and in the best position to assess the present and future needs of the Executive Branch, and to support invocation of the privilege accordingly.”

Earlier this year, President Biden determined that “an assertion of executive privilege is not in the national interest, and therefore is not justified, with respect to particular subjects within the purview of the Select Committee” investigating the January 6 attack. So, even if Trump attempts to rescue Navarro and Scavino by asserting executive privilege, his ability to do so is weakened significantly because he is at odds with the sitting president.

The judiciary’s leading authority on Trump’s ability to resist subpoenas may be Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson

As noted above, the Supreme Court effectively prevented House investigators — and the voters more broadly — from learning about Trump’s personal finances in Trump v. Mazars (2020). After Trump left office, however, the Court appeared to reverse course and allow House investigations into Trump to proceed in the Thompson case.

By sheer coincidence — appellate judges are typically randomly assigned to cases — one of the lower court judges who ruled against Trump in Thompson was Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Jackson also ruled in an earlier case, Committee on the Judiciary v. McGahn, that top presidential aides are not immune from congressional subpoenas. Both decisions offer some insight into how the courts might approach a prosecution of Navarro and Scavino.

Judge Jackson’s decision in McGahn, which was handed down while she was still a federal trial judge, was fairly measured. Although she rejected the Trump administration's claim that “a President’s senior-level aides have absolute testimonial immunity” from a congressional subpoena, she also determined that executive privilege might allow them to refuse to answer certain questions.

Under Jackson’s approach, which is the same approach taken by the January 6 committee, a top presidential aide subpoenaed by Congress must physically show up to testify. But “the specific information that high-level presidential aides may be asked to provide in the context of such questioning can be withheld from the committee on the basis of a valid privilege.” (The correctness of Jackson’s McGahn opinion was never fully resolved on appeal, in part because of competing appeals court decisions, and in part because McGahn agreed to voluntarily testify after Trump left office.)

So, if Navarro and Scavino had complied with the subpoena, it is possible that some of the information sought by the committee might be protected by executive privilege. But, at least under Jackson’s approach, they cannot simply refuse to show up — and can be held in contempt of Congress for their refusal.

In Thompson, meanwhile, the Supreme Court handed down a brief, one-paragraph order that offers only limited insight into why the Court ruled against Trump. But the justices’ brief order in Thompson seemed to credit the lower appeals court’s decision — the decision that was joined by Judge Jackson — which determined that “President Trump’s claims would have failed even if he were the incumbent.”

Among other things, the appeals court ruled that Congress has a “uniquely weighty interest in investigating the causes and circumstances of the January 6th attack so that it can adopt measures to better protect the Capitol Complex, prevent similar harm in the future, and ensure the peaceful transfer of power.” The House, that court explained, “is investigating the single most deadly attack on the Capitol by domestic forces in the history of the United States.”

Thus, the country’s overriding interest in fully understanding how this attack happened is strong enough to overcome even a sitting president’s claim of executive privilege.

So, while it remains to be seen whether Navarro and Scavino will be indicted, and while it is always possible that the Supreme Court’s Republican majority will intervene on their behalf, such an outcome seems unlikely. The Court broke with Trump on the January 6 attack in Thompson, and the same factors that guided the Court’s decision in Thompson should also control any claim by Navarro and Scavino that they cannot be prosecuted due to executive privilege.

Doing the Bare Minimum

Good on Susan Collins for Doing the Bare Minimum

Her announcement today likely ensures that Ketanji Brown Jackson will be confirmed with bipartisan support.

NOAH Y. KIM

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) announced today that she’ll vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson as a Supreme Court justice, becoming the first Republican to do so and securing a victory for Joe Biden, who can now brag that his court pick garnered support from across the aisle. 

Collins’s statement, along with a similar commitment from Sen. Joe Manchin, all but guarantees that Jackson will ascend to the court and likely means that Vice President Kamala Harris will not have to cast a tie-breaking vote. 

The Democrats have been trying to get a Republican in their corner to create the appearance of a bipartisan confirmation for awhile, with a particular eye to Collins and her fellow moderates Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney. Along with Lindsay Graham (now a probable no-vote), Murkowski and Collins were the only Republicans to support Jackson’s appointment to the appeals court, and Romney has signaled that he’ll keep an open mind about her nomination. 

In an interview with the New York Times explaining her decision, Collins bemoaned the way that the confirmation process has become politicized. 

“In my view, the role under the Constitution assigned to the Senate is to look at the credentials, experience and qualifications of the nominee,” she said. “It is not to assess whether a nominee reflects the individual ideology of a senator or would vote exactly as an individual senator would want.”

The statement was in line with Collins’ broader efforts to cast herself as one of the “reasonable” conservatives. Over her quarter-century tenure in the Senate, she has tried to cultivate a brand as a Republican moderate coasting above petty partisan divides and willing to buck her party’s consensus. On certain issues, she has, in fact, gone against the GOP grain—voting to convict Donald Trump following his second impeachment, pushing for a doomed independent commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol riot, and opposing the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett. But in 2018, she traumatized Democrats by casting a crucial vote in support of Justice Brett Kavanaugh (but only after a great deal of handwringing to let everybody know that it was a tough decision). At the time, Collins, rather credulously, scoffed at warnings that Kavanaugh would help roll back reproductive rights, a possibility that now seems quite likely.

Tax Bites the Dust

Another Billionaire Tax Bites the Dust

We know what’s needed to curb runaway wealth equality. But Congress’ will to act lies twitching on the floor.

MICHAEL MECHANIC

Another day, another foiled billionaire tax.

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin wasted little time signaling his lack of support for Joe Biden’s new proposal to tax the richest of the rich. 

To help fund his agenda, Biden wants to impose a minimum 20 percent tax on the total incomes of Americans (not just billionaires) with a net worth of $100 million-plus. Twenty percent may not sound like much, given the current 37 percent marginal tax rate on incomes north of $647,850 for a couple. But because dudes like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and even Warren Buffett structure their finances to avoid taxable income, the administration is redefining income here to include the paper profits on unsold stocks and other assets.

The administration aimed to avoid a straight wealth tax like those previously introduced by Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren—and which, as the Wall Street Journal’s Richard Rubin explained, are constitutionally complicated. To be fair, even this Biden plan would face legal challenges.  

It’s the taxing of paper profits that Manchin claims he opposes—”[y]ou can’t tax something that’s not earned,” he told The Hill—and he posits that there are better ways to make the rich pay their fair share. For example, Manchin has previously said he would support higher rates on individual and corporate earnings.

But that’s just virtue-signaling; Biden, too, wants to raise the top marginal tax rate and boost the corporate income tax from 21 percent to 28 percent. (It was 35 percent before Trump came along.) Manchin knows his Democratic partner in spoilage, Sen. Krysten Sinema, opposes any such rate increases. So he gets to sound like a man of the people without risking the wrath of his golf buddies and coal-industry partners.

Timothy Noah, writing for The New Republic, makes that case that Biden’s “billionaire” tax also amounts to virtue-signaling. Biden had to know it would never fly, Noah argues, but supporting a DOA stick-it-to-the-moguls plan gives political cover to Democrats who would rather not offend wealthy constituents by boosting their taxes before the midterms. I agree with Noah that the effort was doomed from the start, and that, as I’ve previously written, such a tax, as popular as it may be with the public, isn’t the best way to tackle wealth inequality, if that’s your goal.

One of the best ways to narrow the wealth gap (an idea Biden’s budget revives for households with incomes of $1 million or more) is to tax the profits from sales of stock and other assets—a.k.a. capital  gains—at the same rate as ordinary work income. The proposed $1 million cutoff is generous—too generous, really. A family with taxable income of $500,000 in 2021 paid 35 percent on the highest tranche of their work earnings but only 20 percent on capital gains. A household with $400,000 in income paid a maximum of 32 percent on wages, but only 15 percent on capital gains.

It’s clear how this two-tiered tax treatment favors America’s most affluent, who own most of, well, everything! As of late 2019, according to a Goldman Sachs analysis I came across while researching my recent book about wealth in America, the richest 1 percent of the population owned 56 percent of all US equities, public and private, totaling $21.4 trillion. Further down the economic ladder, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zuckman calculate that the least-wealthy 40 percent of the population, collectively speaking, own no assets at all—zero, nada. That’s only possible because the lowest quintile has negative wealth. Just debt.

Biden’s budget plan recycles a bunch of proposals from the reconciliation bill that were intended to curb the insane tax perks of the super-rich, including eliminating the “step-up” rule that lets wealthy heirs avoid paying capital gains taxes on stocks and other assets they inherit from mommy and daddy (or daddy and daddy, etc.)

Biden also hopes to neuter grantor-retained annuity trusts, or GRATs, the vehicle of choice for dynasties to get around gift and estate taxes. The most popular version is known as a “Walton GRAT” because it was battle-tested in a case pitting the IRS vs Alice Walton, the late sister-in-law of Walmart founder Sam Walton. She lost her case in tax court, but won on appeal.

GRATs and related charitable vehicles known as CLATs, or “Jackie-O” trusts, are the key tools by which super-wealthy families transfer epic sums to their offspring without paying Uncle Sam a dime. When Congress enabled GRATs circa 1990, it did so by accident. Lawmakers were trying to curb the use of another trust (the GRIT) as a tax-avoidance scheme. But clever lawyers, including Alice Walton’s, quickly realized the cure was worse than the disease.

That lawyer was Richard Covey, who admitted to me that Congress “completely blew it.” When you put assets in a GRAT, the trust pays you back the initial value of those assets (plus interest) as annual installments. Any assets remaining in the trust at the end of its designated term—which can be as little as two years—go to your heirs tax-free. If those assets—say, shares of stock—decline in value, hey, it’s a wash. You get the shares back. But if they take off, your kids get a huge, tax-free windfall, one that doesn’t even count toward your generous lifetime gift/estate tax exemption, now $23.4 million for a married couple.

For GRATs, most people use assets that are worth little now, but are likely to explode in value, like shares of a pre-IPO stock or an interest in a new private-equity partnership. Super-volatile stocks work well, too. A common strategy is to parlay whatever assets the trust pays you back each year into a new GRAT. People set up a series of interlocking two-year GRATs as a way to catch volatile assets when they’re on the upside. You don’t always win, but you can’t lose.

How big a fiasco is this? Well, the federal government imposes a 40 percent tax on inheritances exceeding $24.4 million—the lifetime exemption plus another $1 million, which is taxed at a lower rate. Yet according to a 2020 paper by Lily Bachelder, now the Treasury Department’s top tax policy official, the effective tax rate paid on US inheritances is a scant 2 percent.

Which means GRATs, beyond the bad optics, cost taxpayers a lot of money. They are very widely used. In 2008, according to SEC documents, Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moscovitz, and Sheryl Sandberg placed millions of cheap, pre-IPO Facebook shares in annuity trusts. In 2013, Bloomberg reporter Zachary Mider revealed how billionaire GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson used a series of GRATs to funnel nearly $8 billion to his offspring, circumventing billions in federal gift taxes. This past September, ProPublica reported that more than half of America’s wealthiest people, including Michael Bloomberg, had used GRATs. And why not? Dynasties don’t get to be dynasties by rejecting free money from the government.

I asked Covey, shortly before the 2020 election, why Congress had never fixed its blunder? You’d need a Democratic trifecta, he said. And now we have one—kind of.

Indeed, the Biden administration now proposes to “impose some downside risk” so that GRATs “are less likely to be used purely for tax avoidance purposes.” (Zach Mider found this framing hilarious: “Has anyone EVER used a GRAT for anything but pure tax avoidance?” he commented to one of my tweets.)

But even with a trifecta, such things are a low legislative priority. Tax law is so arcane and boring that the public tunes out—perhaps that’s the point—whereas the tax lawyers, accountants, and investment managers who comprise the wealth defense industry lobby like hell to retain regressive dynastic perks like GRATs and carried interest and generous tax rates on corporate income and investment profits, not to mention expensive savings subsidies, popular with both parties, that help the rich retire richer. (A bill that would further expand these subsidies just passed the House, 414-5.)

Given that the Democrats failed to enact any of the proposed changes when they first came up last year, the notion that they’ll succeed now, before the midterms, seems far fetched. Policymakers have long known what’s needed to curb runaway wealth equality. But the political will to act upon those things lies twitching on the floor, as the band plays on.

NGC 4038 and NGC 4039

Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus, two large galaxies are colliding. Stars in the two galaxies, cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, very rarely collide in the course of the ponderous cataclysm that lasts for hundreds of millions of years. But the galaxies' large clouds of molecular gas and dust often do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near the center of the cosmic wreckage. Spanning over 500 thousand light-years, this stunning view also reveals new star clusters and matter flung far from the scene of the accident by gravitational tidal forces. The remarkably sharp ground-based image, an accumulation of 88 hours of exposure captured during 2012-2021, follows the faint tidal tails and distant background galaxies in the field of view. The suggestive overall visual appearance of the extended arcing structures gives the galaxy pair, also known as Arp 244, its popular name - The Antennae.

Following orgy and cocaine comments....

McCarthy: Cawthorn's 'lost my trust' following orgy and cocaine comments

The GOP leader is not yet revoking the North Carolina Republican's committee spots, but he signaled he's lost patience with the freshman lawmaker.

By OLIVIA BEAVERS

.

Kevin McCarthy is fed up with Madison Cawthorn.

The GOP leader said Wednesday — after meeting with the North Carolina Republican that morning — that Cawthorn has “lost my trust” due to his repeated actions that were “not becoming” for a congressman. And McCarthy warned the freshman he could face punishment if he doesn’t take certain steps to turn himself around, which could include losing his committee spots.

Cawthorn enraged wide swaths of his own conference when he recently claimed on a podcast that his colleagues have seemingly invited him to an orgy and that he watched at least one fellow lawmaker consume cocaine, claiming that the same member was involved in the anti-addiction efforts. And it’s just the latest episode in a series of controversial remarks Cawthorn has made.

“There’s a lot of different things that can happen. But I just told him he’s lost my trust. He’s going to have to earn it back,” McCarthy said when asked if Cawthorn could face consequences for his actions, including losing his committee positions. “I mean, he’s got a lot of members very upset.”

McCarthy said that, during their private talk, he pointed to “certain things” Cawthorn needed to start doing professionally and in “his own life as well.” And he isn’t discounting more meetings with the freshman lawmaker, saying there “very well could be” more conversations with Cawthorn as GOP leaders assess “what actions are taken” by him.

“You can’t make statements like that as a member of Congress, it affects everybody else and the country as a whole,” McCarthy added.

House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said in an interview that, during their meeting with Cawthorn, the House GOP’s top two leaders “expressed real concern with some of the things that he’s done recently. And obviously, the ball’s in his court in terms of how to respond. But we were very clear with the concerns we had — and a lot of other members too.”

McCarthy had vowed to GOP members behind closed doors that he would have a talk with the freshman about his remarks, POLITICO first reported Tuesday. Scalise also attended the Wednesday morning meeting.

It was a notable dressing down from a Republican leader who at other times has seemed content to leave troublesome members alone. McCarthy was pressured to address another controversy within his ranks just weeks ago, when Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) attended an event led by a known white nationalist. McCarthy was less critical about Greene’s behavior, saying he met with the Georgia firebrand on the matter and that she wouldn’t do it again. It is unclear if he met with Gosar.

In addition to the orgy-cocaine claims, McCarthy also cited Cawthorn’s calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “thug” as problematic. Plus, Cawthorn had caused another controversy when he lied to an officer in the Capitol, saying GOP congressional candidate Robby Starbuck was one of his staffers to bring him onto the House floor. Additionally, McCarthy said it’s unacceptable for a member of Congress to be caught driving without a license after failing to show up to court.

And McCarthy had some information for Republican lawmakers who have called on Cawthorn to name names, too. The GOP leader said Cawthorn described the cocaine incident differently than he did in the podcast. Instead of a lawmaker, Cawthorn told McCarthy he believes “he thinks he saw maybe a staffer in a parking garage maybe 100 yards away,” and that Cawthorn told him “he doesn’t know what cocaine is.”

“It is just frustrating. There is no evidence behind his statements,” McCarthy said.

It may not be Cawthorn’s last meeting on the topic. House Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry (R-Pa.) told POLITICO in an interview Wednesday that he plans to discuss the matter with Cawthorn, as more than one of the ultra-conservative members in the group rattle about kicking him out of the caucus. His ouster is still seen as unlikely.

The remarks earned Cawthorn anger and opprobrium across the House GOP, including rank-and-file members who often stay quiet amid big political firestorms.

Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) suggested he won’t be satisfied if the conversation with the GOP leaders ended with a simple promise from Cawthorn that he won’t make comments or suggestions like this again, noting that he has repeatedly caused headaches for the GOP conference.

“Depends on what the outcome of the meeting was,” Womack said in an interview. “If it’s: ‘Hey, don’t do that, again.’ We’ve been there. That hasn’t worked. Frankly, if western North Carolina is not going to fix the problem, then leadership will have to.”

They call him "Douchebag"...

Alex Jones faces hefty fines for skipping Sandy Hook deposition

He will be fined $25,000 to $50,000 per weekday.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS

A Connecticut judge on Wednesday said Infowars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones will be fined $25,000 to $50,000 per weekday until he appears for a deposition in a lawsuit brought by relatives of some victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

Jones’ testimony is being sought ahead of a trial to determine how much he should pay in damages to the families for pushing a conspiracy theory that the massacre never happened.

Jones cited a health problem last week when he defied an order by Judge Barbara Bellis to attend a deposition. Bellis said there wasn’t enough evidence that Jones was too ill to attend and found him in contempt of court.

Bellis also ruled that the deposition will now be held at the office of the families’ lawyers in Bridgeport, Connecticut, instead of Texas, where Jones lives.

Jones’ lawyers said he only missed the depositions because of his doctors’ advice and had always planned on attending the proceeding. They said he would next be available for a deposition on April 11.

Twenty first-graders and six educators were killed in the December 2012 shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. The gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, killed his mother at their Newtown home before the shooting, and killed himself at the school as police arrived, officials said.

The families of eight of the victims and an FBI agent who responded to the school sued Jones, Infowars and others in Connecticut over the hoax conspiracy. Jones has since said he believes the shooting did occur.

The plaintiffs on Tuesday rejected an offer from Jones to settle with them for $120,000 each.

Bombards areas

Russia bombards areas where it pledged to scale back

The shelling tempered optimism about negotiations meant to end the war.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS

Russian forces bombarded areas around Kyiv and another city just hours after pledging to scale back operations in those zones to promote trust between the two sides, Ukrainian authorities said Wednesday.

The shelling — and intensified Russian attacks on other parts of the country — tempered optimism about any progress in the talks aimed at ending the punishing war.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he stressed to President Joe Biden that the war is at a “turning point.” He thanked the U.S. for an additional $500 million in aid announced Wednesday, but also said Ukraine needs more help to resist the Russian invasion.

“If we really are fighting for freedom and in defense of democracy together, then we have a right to demand help in this difficult turning point. Tanks, aircraft, artillery systems. Freedom should be armed no worse than tyranny,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address to the nation, which he delivered standing in the dark outside the dimly lit presidential offices in Kyiv.

The Russian military announced Tuesday that it would de-escalate near the capital and the northern city of Chernihiv in order to “increase mutual trust and create conditions for further negotiations.” But the announcement was met with deep suspicion from Zelenskyy and the West.

Soon after, Ukrainian officials reported that Russian shelling hit homes, stores, libraries and other civilian sites in and around Chernihiv and on the outskirts of Kyiv. Russian troops also stepped up their attacks on the Donbas region in the east and around the city of Izyum, which lies on a key route to the Donbas, after redeploying units from other areas, the Ukrainian side said.

Olexander Lomako, secretary of the Chernihiv city council, said the Russian announcement turned out to be “a complete lie.”

“At night they didn’t decrease, but vice versa increased the intensity of military action,” Lomako said.

Five weeks into the invasion that has left thousands dead on both sides, the number of Ukrainians fleeing the country topped a staggering 4 million, half of them children, according to the United Nations.

“I do not know if we can still believe the Russians,” Nikolay Nazarov, a refugee from Ukraine, said as he pushed his father’s wheelchair at a border crossing into Poland. “I think more escalation will occur in eastern Ukraine. That is why we cannot go back to Kharkiv.”

Zelenskyy said negotiations with Russia were continuing, but for now they were only “words without specifics.”

“We know that this is not a withdrawal but the consequences of being driven out,” Zelenskyy said of Russia’s pledge. “But we also are seeing that Russia is now concentrating its forces for new strikes on Donbas, and we are preparing for this.”

Zelenskyy also said he had recalled Ukraine’s ambassadors to Georgia and Morocco, suggesting they had not done enough to persuade those countries to support Ukraine and punish Russia for the invasion.

“With all due respect, if there won’t be weapons, won’t be sanctions, won’t be restrictions for Russian business, then please look for other work,” he said.

Zelenskyy has rarely gone a day without addressing the parliament of another country and speaking to a number of world leaders.

At a round of talks held Tuesday in Istanbul, the faint outlines of a possible peace agreement seemed to emerge when the Ukrainian delegation offered a framework under which the country would declare itself neutral — dropping its bid to join NATO, as Moscow has long demanded — in return for security guarantees from a group of other nations.

Top Russian officials responded positively, with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov saying Wednesday that Ukraine’s willingness to accept neutrality and look outside NATO for security represents “significant progress,” according to Russian news agencies.

After the Kremlin’s announcement that it would scale back some of its military operations, Zelenskyy reacted by saying that when dealing with the Russians, “you can trust only concrete results.” That assessment was echoed by Biden and by British Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab, who noted suspicions that Russia intends to regroup and attack again.

The skepticism seemed well-founded on Wednesday.

Oleksandr Pavliuk, head of the Kyiv region military administration, said Russian shells targeted residential areas and civilian infrastructure in the Bucha, Brovary and Vyshhorod regions around the capital.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said the military also targeted fuel depots in two towns in central Ukraine with air-launched long-range cruise missiles. And Russian forces hit a Ukrainian special forces headquarters in the southern Mykolaiv region, he said, and two ammunition depots in the Donetsk region, which is part of the Donbas.

In southern Ukraine, a Russian missile destroyed a fuel depot in Dnipro, the country’s fourth-largest city, regional officials said.

The U.S. said that over the last 24 hours, Russia had begun to reposition less than 20% of its troops that had been arrayed around Kyiv.

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said that troops from there and some other zones have begun moving largely to the north, and some have gone into Belarus. Kirby said it appears Russia intends to resupply them and send them back into Ukraine, but it is not clear where.

Fires back

White House fires back at Trump's request that Putin release dirt on Hunter Biden

“What kind of American, let alone an ex-president, thinks that this is the right time to enter into a scheme with Vladimir Putin...?” Communications Director Kate Bedingfield said.

By MYAH WARD

The White House on Wednesday fired back at former President Donald Trump after he called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to release dirt on Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son.

The White House has mostly dodged questions about Hunter Biden’s alleged business dealings with east European oligarchs, noting that he does not work for the government. But during Wednesday’s press briefing, Communications Director Kate Bedingfield faced the Trump question head-on.

“What kind of American, let alone an ex-president, thinks that this is the right time to enter into a scheme with Vladimir Putin and brag about his connections to Vladimir Putin?” Bedingfield said. “There is only one, and it’s Donald Trump.”

Trump’s latest request comes after he described Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as “genius” and “savvy” in February, rhetoric that falls in line with his tendency to speak favorably of the Russian leader. His latest request for Putin sparked more backlash this week, as Trump leaned into dubious claims about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, alleging that he received millions of dollars from the wife of Moscow’s late mayor Yury Luzhkov, and that Putin could confirm this information.

When leveling the allegations, Trump cited the findings of a report by Senate Republicans, a politicized investigation released before the 2020 election that mainly rehashed public information and added little new to the discussion.

“She gave him $3.5 million, so now I would think Putin would know the answer to that. I think he should release it,” Trump said in the interview with discredited far-right journalist John Solomon. “I think we should know that answer.”

Hunter Biden, who announced in 2020 that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware had launched an investigation into his tax affairs, has been in headlines this week. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that a federal tax investigation was gaining steam as prosecutors gather information about the sources of his foreign income, and The Washington Post on Wednesday published a detailed report about Hunter Biden’s interactions with a Chinese energy company and its executives. The report noted that the newspaper did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from the dealings, which took place after he was vice president and before he launched his bid for the White House in 2020.

Trump’s public request for Putin’s help politically isn’t a first. He asked the Russian government in 2016 to hack then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s email server that she used while serving as secretary of State. And the former president was impeached in 2019 over allegations that he withheld military aid from Ukraine unless President Volodymyr Zelenskyy agreed to “look into” Biden and his son Hunter.

Oil tankers are vanishing

Russian oil tankers are vanishing off the map

By Matt Egan

Russia's invasion of Ukraine made the country a pariah in the global energy market. Since the war started, a de facto embargo on Russian oil has emerged, with oil companies, trading houses, shippers and banks backing away, all at the same time.

Now, however, there are signs that Russian energy is drawing interest from potential buyers, at least in the shadows.

As the war in Ukraine drags on, Russian tankers carrying crude oil and petroleum products are increasingly disappearing from tracking systems.

So-called dark activity, where ships' transponders are turned off for hours at a time, has in the past been viewed by US officials as a deceptive shipping practice that is often used to evade sanctions.

Dark activity among Russian-affiliated crude oil tankers is up by 600% compared with before the war began, predictive intelligence company Windward, told CNN.

"We're seeing a spike in Russian tankers turning off transmissions deliberately to circumvent sanctions," Windward CEO Ami Daniel said in an interview. "The Russian fleet is starting to hide its whereabouts and its exports."

And this is not just happening with crude oil. Similar trends are playing out with other petroleum products, too.

During the week of March 12, there were 33 occurrences of dark activity by Russian oil-chemical and oil-product tankers, according to Windward, which uses artificial intelligence to track the maritime industry. That's 236% higher than the weekly average of the prior 12 months.

'These vessels want to disappear'

International regulations require vessels like oil tankers keep their transponders on almost all the time.

In May 2020, the US Department of the Treasury sent a sanctions advisory to the maritime, energy and metals industries to address "illicit shipping and sanctions evasions practices."

The first example listed was "disabling or manipulating" automatic identification systems (AIS) on vessels to "mask their movement."

"AIS manipulation and disruption may indicate potential illicit or sanctionable activities," Treasury warned.

Ships may also go dark for safety reasons, including when traveling through pirate-infested waters. But Daniel, the Windward CEO, said that is not the reason ships are going dark now.

"These vessels want to disappear from radar. From a compliance perspective, it's a red flag," he said.

In a statement to CNN, a Treasury spokesperson said the agency is "aware of these reports" and works with partners and through a "variety of methods" to not solely rely on transponder broadcasts to monitor vessels of interest.

Taking a page from Iran's playbook

Similar behavior was observed last decade when the United States leveled sanctions against Venezuela and Iran, making it illegal to buy oil from those nations.

"Russia is following the Venezuelan and Iranian playbook, with a slight twist," said Andy Lipow, president of consulting firm Lipow Oil Associates.

The twist is that, unlike with Venezuela and Iran, the West has not imposed sanctions directly on Russia's oil.

Yes, the White House banned imports of Russian oil into the United States. But that does not prohibit other countries from buying Russian energy.

'Public relations disaster'

Still, the mere stigma of doing business with Russia, along with sanctions uncertainty, has created a de facto embargo. Analysts say that helps explain the spike in dark activity among Russian-flagged ships. Buyers don't want to be outed as the ones scooping up Russian oil during the deadly war in Ukraine.

"It's a public relations disaster," said Robert Yawger, vice president of energy futures at Mizuho Securities.

Likewise, shipping companies may want to avoid the scrutiny that comes from handling Russian crude.

"The ships are going dark because they are afraid if they take on Russian business, they will be blacklisted for a period of time and unable to get future business," said Lipow.

And yet there is a financial reason to buy Russian oil right now. Demand for energy is very high and -- in great measure because of the sanctions -- Russian crude is trading roughly $30 cheaper than Brent crude, the world benchmark.

"You're getting a deep discount," said Michael Tran, managing director of global energy strategy at RBC Capital Markets. "The economic incentive is there, if you're not concerned about sanctions."

Where is the oil going?

Research firm Rystad Energy estimates that between 1.2 million and 1.5 million barrels per day of Russian crude oil exports have vanished in the five weeks since the start of war.

"The destination of the remaining crude exports from Russia... is increasingly 'unknown,'" Rystad Energy wrote in a report this week, noting that this mystery oil totals about 4.5 million barrels per day.

So who is buying Russian oil?

Analysts said there is evidence that refineries in China and India, two of the world's largest oil consumers and fastest-growing economies, are stealthily buying Russian energy.

Tran said trading houses may be buying Russian oil and putting the barrels in storage, including "floating storage" on tankers that remain at sea.

Beyond dark activity, Windward found that some vessels and companies are still dealing with Russian-affiliated tankers and engaging in ship-to-ship transfers.

In 2020, Treasury warned that ship-to-ship transfers, especially at night or in areas deemed high-risk for sanctions evasion, are "frequently used to evade sanctions by concealing the origin or destination" of oil, coal and other material.

Despite the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia, the number of ship-to-ship meetings that lasted at least three hours between Russian-affiliated oil tankers and other vessels is "relatively normal," Windward said.

Banned anti-personnel landmines

Russia has used banned anti-personnel landmines in Ukraine, according to Human Rights Watch

From CNN's Chris Liakos

Russian forces fighting in Ukraine have used banned anti-personnel mines in the eastern Kharkiv region of the country, according to Human Rights Watch.

The international organization said that the anti-personnel mines were located by Ukrainian explosive ordnance disposal technicians on March 28.

“Russia is known to possess these newly deployed landmines, which can indiscriminately kill and maim people within an apparent 16-meter (52 feet) range,” HRW said, adding that Ukraine does not possess this type of landmine or its delivery system.

“Countries around the world should forcefully condemn Russia’s use of banned antipersonnel landmines in Ukraine,” said Steve Goose, the arms director of Human Rights Watch. “These weapons do not differentiate between combatants and civilians and leave a deadly legacy for years to come.”

The 1997 international Mine Ban Treaty comprehensively bans the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of anti-personnel mines. Russia is not among the 164 countries that have joined the treaty, said HRW.

“Russia’s use of antipersonnel mines in Ukraine deliberately flouts the international norm against use of these horrid weapons,” Goose added.

CNN cannot independently verify this information. CNN has asked the Russian Ministry of Defence for a response to the report.

Misinformed

"We believe that Putin is being misinformed" about Russian military performance

From CNN's Jeremy Diamond

The US believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin is being "misinformed" by his advisers about how badly the Russian military is performing in Ukraine and the impact of sanctions on Russia's economy, a US official tells CNN.

"We believe that Putin is being misinformed by his advisers about how badly the Russian military is performing and how the Russian economy is being crippled by sanctions, because his senior advisers are too afraid to tell him the truth," a US official said.

The official said the assessment is based on declassified US intelligence findings.

The official added that the US has information indicating that Putin has become aware of the misinformation, leading to a rift between Putin and his top defense officials.

“We have information that Putin felt misled by the Russian military. There is now persistent tension between Putin and the (Ministry of Defence), stemming from Putin’s mistrust in MOD leadership," the US official said.

The official said Putin did not know his military was "using and losing conscripts in Ukraine, showing a clear breakdown in the flow of accurate information to the Russian president."

Breaking the Law

Dakota Access Pipeline Operator Breaking the Law, a New Report Claims

Authors say the findings could be pivotal in shutting the pipeline down.

JOSEPH LEE

The federal government and the Dakota Access Pipeline’s parent company, Energy Transfer Partners, misled the public, used substandard science, utilized poor technology, and broke the law by not cooperating with impacted Indigenous Nations. That’s according to a new report that also criticizes the Army Corp of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency for not completing a realistic analysis of the environmental damage the pipeline could cause.

The report, written by NDN Collective, an Indigenous nonprofit, provides the first comprehensive timeline of the controversial pipeline’s legal and environmental violations. Working with a team of engineers, the report’s authors included new information about oil quality, spills, leakage, and faulty infrastructure that NDN Collective says could be pivotal in the ongoing battle to stop the pipeline. 

“If the tribes were equipped with this information back in 2015, we could have won the fight.”

The report comes as tribes await the Army Corps of Engineers to complete a new, court-mandated Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on a section of pipeline under Lake Oahe, a reservoir on the Missouri River to which tribes have treaty rights. The EIS is expected to be released in September, after which a public comment period will open. NDN Collective, tribes, and other environmental groups are also calling on the Biden administration to shut down the pipeline. Meanwhile, the pipeline remains operational, carrying 750,000 barrels of oil a day. 

“This report shows how the Army Corps of Engineers violated their own processes, and continues to violate our human rights for the benefit of a destructive, violent, and extractive energy company,” said Nick Tilsen, Oglala Lakota and CEO of NDN Collective. “We cannot sit on the sidelines with this information. It’s time for accountability and it’s time to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline, once and for all.”

Since 2016, the pipeline has been the focus of an international effort by Indigenous people and environmental activists to stop it. Construction began in 2016 and was completed in 2017. 

“If the tribes were equipped with this information back in 2015, we could have won the fight. The fight for DAPL would have been very different,” said Jade Begay, Diné and Tesuque Pueblo of New Mexico, Climate Justice Campaign Director at NDN Collective. 

Begay said that the report can complement the work of activists on the ground and serve as a tool to fight the pipeline on a policy level but stresses that the responsibility lies with the company, agencies, and federal government to complete accurate studies and share the information with stakeholders. 

“Infrastructure should be done right from the beginning,” she said. “Vulnerable communities that are often Black, brown and Indigenous should not have to bear the burden of doing the work for these entities and agencies.”

Bat-Shit Crazy....

Why You Should Care That Ginni Thomas Is Bonkers

Justice Clarence Thomas is literally in bed with a conspiracy theory nutter.

DAVID CORN

Imagine a Supreme Court justice influenced by QAnon. We’re not there yet—as far as we know—but the recent revelations about Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, notable far-right agitator, tea partier, and spouse of Justice Clarence Thomas, do render that possibility not too far a stretch.

Last week, the Washington Post and CBS News published text messages exchanged between Ginni Thomas and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the wake of the November 2020 election, in which Thomas fervently urged Meadows to overturn the results to keep Donald Trump in power. The disclosure of these texts has revived a long-running debate over Justice Thomas’ potential conflicts of interest related to his wife’s political work and his steadfast refusal to recuse himself from cases to which she might possess a connection. One recent example: in January Clarence Thomas was the only justice to dissent in a case in which the Supreme Court declined to support Donald Trump’s effort to block the House committee investigating the January 6 assault from obtaining White House documents related to his attempt to undermine the election. Given his wife’s role in the so-called Stop the Steal movement and her communications with the Trump White House about this matter, Justice Thomas might not have been an impartial arbiter in this dispute. Legal ethics experts have plenty to dissect here. But as serious as that topic is, the texts raise another troubling prospect: Ginni Thomas is absolutely bonkers.

The texts show that she was a true-blue believer in Trump’s Big Lie conspiracy theory about the election. “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” she texted Meadows a few days after the election, when there was no proof of any such theft (as there would never be) and when no opinion polls showed most Americans concluding the election had been rigged against Trump. In another text, she claimed the dispute over the election (which Trump and his cult had ginned up) was a “a fight of good versus evil.” Her texts indicated she believed the nonsense grifter-attorney Sidney Powell was peddling about foreign states (China! Venezuela!) manipulating voting machines to change the vote count.

One Thomas text to Meadows shared a video promoting a QAnonish conspiracy theory claiming watermarks on ballots would show that Biden received millions of fraudulently cast votes. This baseless assertion was being pushed on InfoWars, the conspiracy theory site of blowhard nutter Alex Jones, by a fellow named Steve Pieczenik, a longtime disinformation purveyor who claimed the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, was a staged “false flag” operation. Related to this particular BS, Thomas texted Meadows a quote she had pulled off a right-wing website: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.” Uh, no.

Ginni Thomas has long been one of the leaders of the right, and it turns out she’s a loon. This is not entirely a newsflash. Nine years ago, I revealed the existence of a new and secretive conservative outfit that Thomas had helped pull together. Called Groundswell, it assembled a collection of right-wingers in Washington, DC, for weekly meetings to concoct talking points, coordinate messaging, and hatch plans for “a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation,” according to a trove of its documents I obtained. The group included a host of far-right extremists, including Frank Gaffney (who had claimed Barack Obama was a secret Muslim); Ken Blackwell and Jerry Boykin of the Family Research Council; Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch; tea party fanatic Allen West, a former member of Congress; Steve Bannon, then the executive chairman of Breitbart News Network; Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who would become a Fox News presence; Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the influential Federalist Society; a handful of conservative journalists; and others. A top aide to Sen. Ted Cruz was a Groundsweller.

Groundswell appeared to be set up as competition to the well-known Wednesday morning gatherings of conservative advocates hosted by Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform. That collective included a broad spectrum of Republicans, including conservatives opposed to gay rights and abortion rights and those who favor them, as well as GOPers on different sides of the immigration reform debate. Groundswell, which met at the same time as Norquist’s group, was a more ideologically pure and extreme version of the Norquist confab. The group devised strategies for killing immigration reform, hyping the Benghazi controversy, and countering the impression that the GOP exploits racism. On a Google group page, Groundswellers often griped that the GOP’s inside-the-Beltway crowd was trying to marginalize the conservative die-hards and recruit, promote, and support political candidates deemed less strident and more electable. Their Number One enemy in this regard was Republican strategist Karl Rove, and Groundswell mounted an effort to discredit him.

The documents indicated that Ginni Thomas was a guiding force for Groundswell, setting agendas for its meetings and actively coordinating messaging among its participants, and that the group had a dark, paranoid, and Manichean view of American politics. One Groundswell memo stated that an “active radical left is dedicated to destroy [sic] those who oppose them” with “vicious and unprecedented tactics. We are in a real war; most conservatives are not prepared to fight.” At one meeting a participant claimed that many government agencies (the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, the EPA, and others) were conspiring with “far left wing groups” to undermine conservatives in the media.

In a post on a Google group page, Ginni Thomas encouraged Groundswell members to watch Agenda: Grinding America Down, a purported documentary that claims progressives (including Obama) seek “a brave new world” based on the “failed policies and ideologies of communism” and that an evil left is purposefully “destroying the greatest country in all of world history.” This film could have been produced by the John Birch Society. Dredging up the Alger Hiss and Rosenberg atomic spying cases, it compares liberalism to communism and Hitler’s Nazism. The film alleges that the left is deliberately seeking to impose communism on the United States and to eradicate the “American family.” It’s that old bugaboo of the subversive foe within: “America has an enemy that is getting very close to accomplishing its plan of destroying the greatest country in all world history.” The website for the film features a wire diagram of the leftist conspiracy to exterminate the United States that is worthy of a tinfoil hat award.

Ginni Thomas was endorsing this claptrap. To see this film as an accurate depiction of reality, one would have to be a paranoid nutcase incapable of effectively and somberly evaluating the world. And there’s this: a person who believes that such a sinister plot is afoot could likely justify almost anything.  As that one Groundswell memo suggests, this is a war, yet only Groundswellers are prepared for this battle. In such circumstances—if you were combatting an evil force bent on annihilating the land you love—would you really care about such niceties as avoiding judicial conflicts of interest?

In one of her texts to Meadows, Thomas sent a dire message: “the most important thing you can realize right now is that there are no rules in war.” That text also said, “This war is psychological. PSYOP.” That means that the fight is over defining reality—something to which Ginni Thomas is not strongly tethered—and that in this clash she feels no need to abide by rules or, perhaps, even laws.

There’s much to the Ginni Thomas story. The House 1/6 committee has requested she come by for a chat. And for so many years now, she and her husband have created the appearance of a serious conflict of interest. (A decade ago she was lobbying against Obamacare when her spouse was clearly going to have to rule on the constitutionality of the healthcare law.) But she has now certainly demonstrated she’s a conspiratorial crackpot. What does it say about the tea party and the far right that they have been steered by a zealous lunatic? No doubt, many Stop-the-Stealers do not drink Trump’s Kool-Aid. They use the false claims of a fraudulent election as a cudgel against Joe Biden and the libs. Or perhaps they suspect there was some chicanery, but they do not buy the full My Pillow Guy nuttiness. (The CIA used Italian military satellites to swipe votes from Tump!) Ginni Thomas, though, is all in. She is unhinged. Though it may be unfair to judge a judge by his or her spouse, it is hardly reassuring that a Supreme Court justice is literally in bed with a quasi-QAnon conspiracist—and ruling on cases related to her passions.

“We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Thomas texted Meadows. In the Thomas household, it’s more like the end of rationality.

The cup...

Yeah, but where’s the cup really going?

From Sailing Anarchy

OK, fair point. Having lambasted current America’s Cup rules and regulations as unhinged from the realities of the sport I should at least have the courage to propose some sensible alternatives. Challenge accepted.

First, let’s get a threshold pedantry out of the way. The “America’s Cup” is not named in honour of the Land of The Free. It is, in truth, a presumptuous invention. The cup itself – the “auld mug” – was originally the Royal Yacht Squadron £100 Cup.

But six years after the schooner America won that first challenge race around the Isle of White, the US syndicate, lead by George Lee Schuyler, donated the cup to the New York Yacht Club under a Deed of Gift, blithely re-naming it the “America’s Cup”.

That rather arrogant act of appropriation was not appreciated by the British. Forty years later their yachting magazines still insisted on naming the event the “America Cup”, with no possessive apostrophe “s” and the yacht’s name in italics. But I digress.

What is clear from the letter and spirit of the original 1857 Deed of Gift (and its subsequent amendments and additions) is that the Cup competition was meant to be a fair and balanced sporting contest that combined sailing skill with yacht design.

Easy to say, difficult to achieve. What the mid-19th Century lawyers who drafted the Deed failed to foresee was that technology would eventually come to dominate the event and relegate the sailors to a minor supporting role.

To my mind, that is the imbalance a revised America’s Cup must correct if it is to retain any relevance to the broader yachting community.

First, the boats. Swing-foil monomarans aren’t really boats at all; they’re more like low-flying aircraft. They can only attain their intended performance levels using stored power, and when their hulls are clear of the water.

There’s no doubt foiling is here to stay in some specialised classes but the vast majority of sailors still enjoy their sport in conventional centre-board dinghies and displacement yachts.

The event needs to be contested in craft that even your elderly maiden aunt would recognize as a “yacht”. Yet the AC elite has imposed such intensely tight class rules and regulations that there is now only limited opportunity for major design innovations or development from the swing-foil model.

Some of the key components are so complex that they must be supplied and are therefore common to all participants. Thus, the magic ingredients of creativity and flair – expressed so well through the design genius of Herreshoff, Watson, Fife, Nicholson, Burgess, Payne, Stephens, Lexcen and Farr – are largely lost.

What’s the solution? Well, there is much to commend a box (or sphere) rule with minimal restrictions, an LOA of around 80-90 feet, a mast (not wing) and single-skin sails, including spinnakers.

We would end up with a fast, attractive style of monohull that responds to a broad range of conditions and rewards good sailing. Upper limits on crew numbers and sail area, along with a minimum limit on displacement, would test the designers while delivering yachts that should be very close in performance.

To restore the contest to its sporting origins on-board technology would be limited to basic performance instrumentation: TWS, AWS, TWA, APA, boat speed and SOG. Tactical software and any ship-to-shore communications or data flow would be forbidden. There would be no use of stored power to trim sails, adjust rigging or move appendages. The boats would be sailed by human energy and skill alone.

Next, the nationality rules should be made simpler, and absolute.

The Deed of Gift describes the Cup as a “friendly competition between foreign countries”. The challenging and defending yachts should truly represent a nation, and be designed and made by those nations. Further, their crews should be citizens of those same nations (not just “residents” or “passport holders”). This seems an obvious reform to rekindle broader public interest in the event.

The current mode of AC sailing is so dangerous the crews need to wear crash helmets and survival vests, and so noisy that they must communicate through intercom. The racing itself should be returned to a format that corresponds with the open, visible style of competitive sailing understood and enjoyed by amateurs around the world.

The challenge series itself should be the best of seven or nine matches, one race per day of at least two hours elapsed time. This would not only provide an opportunity for yachts to recover from any early setbacks but also put a premium on the crucial sporting elements of stamina and sustained concentration.

All courses should include reaching, running and windward legs to guarantee a genuine test of crew-work. The pre-start period should be long enough – a minimum of five minutes – for the after-guards to engage in a substantial battle of tactics.

Finally, biddable venue choice should be taken out of the equation.

The defenders would be required to always stage the next Cup series in their own home waters. This would put an end to the grotesque situation where the defenders now attempt to shake down any city in the world prepared to waste hundreds of millions of their taxpayers’ dollars on the dubious honour of hosting a boat race.

In my submission, the cost for intending syndicates to compete in a reformed Cup along these proposed lines would be a fraction of the outrageous $200m budgets required today. This would have the welcome effect of removing the need for the current extremes of crass commercialism that blight the event.

We might even see the end of the sponsor’s logos and advertising on hulls, spars and sails. If the Liptons, Sopwiths, Vanderbilts and Bonds were happy to fund their challenges and defenses without turning the Cup into a marketing opportunity, why do the equally wealthy moguls behind Prada, Rolex and Emirates feel the need to exploit their boats as billboards?

In summary: surely it’s time for us to stand back and make a dispassionate assessment of what the America’s Cup has been allowed to become. We are forever being told it is the absolute “pinnacle” of sailing, yet today it is a frantic made-for-TV, short-attention-span scramble utterly at odds with the fundamental principles of the sport.

That may be all well and good for the hired gunslingers of SailGP, but not for a unique competition we’ve treasured for the past 170 years.

– anarchist David