Faces fresh headaches

A more disciplined Trump operation faces fresh headaches from outside allies and the candidate himself

By Kristen Holmes and Alayna Treene

When news broke that a top aide to Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was joining former President Donald Trump’s campaign last month, Trump advisers were livid, believing the aide was promoting himself, without permission of the campaign’s top brass.

Senior Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita called the newest team member, Brian Swenson, and “ripped into him,” according to two sources familiar with the conversation. The message was clear: If you want to keep your job, stop running your mouth, the source said. Swenson did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

The episode was indicative of how Trump’s 2024 team has sought to focus the messaging and the media that surrounds the chaotic world of the front-runner for the GOP nomination. His team is viewed by both outside political operatives and current and former Trump officials as his most disciplined to date. Led by seasoned Republican strategists LaCivita and Susie Wiles, the team has sought to prevent the kinds of internal leaks that were ever-present during 2016 and throughout Trump’s presidency from damaging the former president as he seeks to regain the White House.

“They know they aren’t able to control him, he will always say and do what he wants,” one source familiar with the team’s dynamic told CNN, noting that Trump is known to ignore prepared remarks and solicit outside advice from a wide net of allies, often without the knowledge of his closest advisers. “But they can try to control everyone around him.”

The advisers who have spent the last year working to streamline his campaign’s messaging, however, have recently found themselves fighting an uphill battle. They’re attempting to navigate the wide span of Trump allies all itching to be a part of the action and leverage their ties to the former president in hopes of bolstering their influence in the months before the 2024 election.

As Trump’s primary lead has grown, so has the interest in what a second Trump administration would look like – in both policy and personnel. A slew of recent media reports have speculated on potential vice presidential picks and Cabinet members, citing anonymous sources.

“Nobody came out of the woodwork to say they wanted to be a Cabinet secretary 12 months ago when things were really dire and no one wanted to be associated with us,” a senior Trump campaign adviser told CNN, adding that the recent shift in the narrative around the former president has brought with it a surge in outside parties interested in joining a potential administration.

Trump’s senior advisers were recently surprised and annoyed when they learned Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official, was telling Trump allies he was part of the vetting effort for a potential vice presidential pick, according to three senior advisers who adamantly denied his involvement.

Patel, a Trump loyalist who climbed the ranks while Trump was in office, continues to hold sway with the former president and is widely viewed as someone who would likely serve in a national security capacity in a second administration.

“I am not nor have I ever been involved with any vetting process. President Trump and the campaign are solely in charge,” Patel said in a statement to CNN.

The frustration runs deep in the campaign.

“When you’re trying to be disciplined and run a sophisticated campaign, it gets annoying when people who aren’t working on the campaign are creating headaches for the team,” a person close to Trump said. “They’re pissed people are running to reporters saying they’re in line for jobs that the Trump team hasn’t even discussed.”

However, some of those headaches come from Trump himself.

During a recent fundraiser, Trump began tossing names around for vice president, a source familiar with the conversations said.

“Who do we like for VP?” the former president asked donors and allies before batting around names with the crowd — a story that was eventually shared with reporters.

Trump 2025: Credit grabbing and calling out

Since Trump left office, former administration officials created several organizations in Washington to continue the work of the administration and prepare for a potential second term — including vetting future Trump administration officials, writing policy proposals and drafting executive orders with the intention of putting them in front of Trump to sign on the day he would enter office.

Additionally, Trump allies have also begun preparing for a possible Republican presidential transition through a collaboration of right-wing think tanks led by the Heritage Foundation — dubbed “Project 2025.”

The groups recently entered the spotlight through a series of media stories on Trump’s agenda for a second term. Internal frustration over the coverage has grown within Trump’s inner circle, which has stressed that any official policy or personnel decisions will come from the campaign directly. One group in particular — the America First Policy Institute led by Brooke Rollins, the acting director of the US Domestic Policy Council under Trump — has drawn the team’s ire.

Members of Trump’s campaign were furious when they learned the group had been touting their relationship with the former president and their efforts to build out his possible future administration, two sources familiar with the situation told CNN. Not only is the work not authorized by the campaign, these campaign team members argued, but they believe it is premature and did not appreciate AFPI quietly taking credit for something that was not in their purview.

One senior Trump adviser took particular issue with AFPI’s personnel efforts.

“They’re vetting people for a future Trump administration? Who? We have no insight into these people,” the campaign official said.

Senior members of Trump’s campaign team made it clear to Rollins they did not appreciate the group exaggerating their ties to the campaign, three sources familiar with the exchange said.

Shortly afterward, Wiles and LaCivita issued a rare statement that read: “reports about personnel and policies that are specific to a second Trump Administration are purely speculative and theoretical.”

“Any personnel lists, policy agendas, or government plans published anywhere are merely suggestions,” the statement read, arguing that no outside groups have the authority to speak on behalf of Trump or his campaign.

One source disputed this statement was directed at AFPI, insisting their officials were assured by multiple campaign officials the statement was not about that group.

Marc Lotter, the chief communications officer for America First Policy Institute, pushed back on the existence of any friction between the former president and AFPI, calling it “fake news.” Lotter noted that Trump has “headlined a half dozen events for AFPI including our Hispanic leadership conference in Miami, his first return trip to Washington, DC, the big tech lawsuit, and three fundraising events at Mar-a-Lago, as recently as last month.”

A source close to the former president made clear that Trump is still in touch with several members of AFPI’s team and routinely seeks their counsel. This includes Larry Kudlow, who served as his director of the National Economic Council, and retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who serviced as a national security adviser to Mike Pence and whom Trump has recently consulted on foreign policy. Another source said Rollins herself still routinely talks to Trump.

The statement from Wiles and LaCivita did little to prevent other outside entities and allies from leaking potential administration positions.

A few weeks later, the pair fired off another warning shot: “Despite our being crystal clear, some ‘allies’ haven’t gotten the hint,” they wrote in a second statement. “Let us be even more specific, and blunt: People publicly discussing potential administration jobs for themselves or their friends are, in fact, hurting President Trump … and themselves. These are an unwelcomed distraction.”

A senior Trump campaign adviser told CNN the second statement was in response to an Axios story published the previous day laying out the names of people who could serve in a potential Trump Cabinet.

It also followed an interview that Patel gave to Steve Bannon asserting that a future Trump administration would target journalists and attempt to “prosecute them for crimes” should Trump win the 2024 election.

“Idiotic comments like this have nothing to do with our campaign,” a Trump campaign official told CNN after the Patel interview.

Campaign officials have also downplayed how many outside voices Trump listens to.

Earlier this month, Ric Grenell, Trump’s former ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence, met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. A senior adviser to Trump attempted to discredit Grenell’s influence on the former president. However, a source familiar with the recent visit said that afterwards, Trump praised Grenell as someone he hoped would serve again in a future administration.

Campaign takes grievances to Trump

Trump himself has been irked with how some of his outside allies and aligned groups have been using his name, multiple sources said. Trump has long loathed when people are perceived to be profiting off him or using their ties to bolster their own careers.

Last year, he was angry after dining with a major donor at his Mar-a-Lago club, when he learned that they had given roughly $1 million to AFPI. The donor told Trump at the time that they believed they were donating directly to a super PAC associated with Trump’s reelection campaign, according to two sources familiar with the meeting.

Following that dinner, Trump complained to several of his closest aides that the money should’ve gone to the campaign directly, and he remained annoyed about the encounter for several days, the sources said.

In an effort to keep a lid on some of the growing speculation that now surrounds a possible second administration, the campaign has taken some of their concerns directly to the former president.

“The campaign, we’re briefing him on the people who are doing this stuff on the outside. So do they want to risk playing games and having their name tarnished internally? Or do they want to sort of play by the rules and not mess around and try to actually help win a election,” a campaign adviser told CNN.

However, one complication the campaign is grappling with is Trump’s innate preference to seek outside counsel from his friends and allies.

As president, Trump often called up Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson to take their temperature on ideas he was eager to roll out. As a candidate, Trump continues to call allies and former administration officials on topics ranging from how the campaign is doing to what he wants a possible second term to look like.

The former president dines frequently with such allies — including those whose names have appeared in stories about serving in a future Trump Cabinet.

Insurrectionist ban

Michigan Supreme Court rejects ‘insurrectionist ban’ case and keeps Trump on 2024 primary ballot

By Marshall Cohen

The Michigan Supreme Court has rejected an attempt to remove former President Donald Trump from the 2024 primary ballot based on the US Constitution’s “insurrectionist ban.”

The outcome, which was generally expected, is a victory for the former president, though an effort to remove him could be renewed for the general election. Wednesday’s decision contrasts with the recent ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court, which kicked Trump off its primary ballot because of his role in the January 6 Capitol riot. That decision has been paused pending an appeal.

With these dueling decisions, the expected appeals to the US Supreme Court become even more critical, especially as the nation races toward the start of the 2024 primaries. Unlike in Colorado, the Michigan lawsuit never reached a trial and was dismissed early on in the process. An intermediate appeals court upheld the decision to toss the case on procedural grounds.

The Michigan Court of Claims judge who first got the case said state law doesn’t give election officials any leeway to police the eligibility of presidential primary candidates. He also said the case raised a political question that shouldn’t be decided in the courts.

His decision was upheld by the Michigan Court of Appeals, which said: “At the moment, the only event about to occur is the presidential primary election. But as explained, whether Trump is disqualified is irrelevant to his placement on that particular ballot.”

The order from the Michigan Supreme Court was unsigned, and the court did not release a vote count.

Unlike in Colorado, the Michigan courts rejected the case wholly on procedural grounds. They never reached the questions of whether January 6 was an insurrection and whether Trump engaged in it.

One of the Michigan justices on Wednesday wrote why Michigan is different from Colorado.

The anti-Trump challengers “have identified no analogous provision in the Michigan Election Law that requires someone seeking the office of President of the United States to attest to their legal qualification to hold the office,” Justice Elizabeth Welch wrote, comparing Michigan law to Colorado’s election code.

The lower-court rulings in Michigan kept the door open to future 14th Amendment challenges if Trump wins the Republican nomination. Welch specifically noted this dynamic in the separate opinion she wrote Wednesday.

“I would affirm the Court of Appeals’ ruling on this issue, which still allows appellants to renew their legal efforts as to the Michigan general election later in 2024 should Trump become the Republican nominee for President of the United States or seek such office as an independent candidate,” Welch wrote.

The Minnesota Supreme Court reached a similar conclusion last month, finding that an “insurrectionist ban” case involving Trump should be dismissed with regards to the GOP primary, but that the challengers could try again if he wins the nomination.

On Truth Social, Trump denounced what he said was a “pathetic gambit” to keep him off the ballot and repeated his unfounded warnings that the 2024 was at risk of being “rigged and stolen.”

Ron Fein, the legal director of Free Speech For People, which filed the Michigan case, said the decision was “disappointing” but noted that it “isn’t binding on any court outside Michigan.” Another attorney for the challengers, Mark Brewer, said they would continue the efforts in Michigan.

“The Court’s decision is disappointing but we will continue, at a later stage, to seek to uphold this critical constitutional provision designed to protect our republic,” Brewer said in the statement.

Ratified after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment says officials who take an oath to support the Constitution are banned from future office if they “engaged in insurrection.” The provision was used to disqualify thousands of ex-Confederates. But it has only been applied twice since 1919, and the vague wording doesn’t mention the presidency.

The Michigan lawsuit was filed in September by Free Speech For People on behalf of a group of voters. It also pursued an unsuccessful 14th Amendment challenge against Trump in Minnesota, and recently filed a new case in Oregon. The Colorado lawsuit was initiated by a separate liberal-leaning group.

Also on Wednesday, Trump’s lawyers asked Maine’s secretary of state to recuse herself from deciding whether he should be removed from the 2024 ballot because of the “insurrectionist ban.” Maine is different from other states: ballot challenges are first heard by the secretary of state, not in the courts.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, an elected Democrat, presided over an administrative hearing earlier this month about Trump’s eligibility for office. Her ruling is expected this week, and her decision can be appealed in Maine state courts.

The secretary’s office declined to comment on the Wednesday request, but it’s unlikely that she’ll agree to recuse. Trump made a similar request with the trial judge in the Colorado case, but the judge there rejected his motion.

No.. No damage... Just keeping crew warm....

Satellite images show Russian navy ship burning after Ukrainian strike in Crimea

By Paul P. Murphy, Rob Picheta and Radina Gigova

Satellite images have revealed severe damage caused to the Russian tank landing ship Novocherkassk following Ukrainian strikes on a port in Crimea on Tuesday.

In images taken by Maxar, the ship can be seen burnt out and detached from the port, seemingly partially submerged, with smoke billowing from the vessel.

Ukraine claimed to have destroyed the ship in its attack on the port of Feodosia in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula illegally annexed by Russia in 2014. Moscow claimed the ship had been “damaged.”

The image, when compared with a previous image showing the ship before the strike, suggests a successful Ukrainian operation targeting the port.

The number of those who may have been killed in the strike may become more clear over time as the peninsula is currently under Russian control, a Ukrainian Navy spokesperson said Wednesday.

“This territory, unfortunately, is occupied now, and it’s not an easy thing to do the relevant intelligence. And I think that over time, we will get at least approximate figures [of casualties] of what happened in reality,” Ukrainian Navy Spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk said in an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

“Nevertheless, these ships are usually not left without a crew. And, accordingly, even though it was in port at the time, a fairly large part of the crew had to be on board, and the total crew there is about 80 people,” he said.

According to a US military fact sheet on the Novocherkassk and the other vessels in its Ropucha class, the 369-foot (112.5-meter) vessel displaces about 3,450 tons, making about the same size as a US Navy littoral combat ship.

The Novocherkassk carries a crew of around 87 with capacity for 237 troops, according to the US military. It was not known how many personnel may have been aboard in the alleged Ukrainian attack.

The ship is designed for beach landings with bow and stern doors and the ability to accommodate up to 25 armored personnel carriers on its vehicle deck.

Ukrainian Air Force commander Mykola Oleshchuk, who said in a Telegram post after the attack that the ship had been destroyed, also claimed the vessel had been carrying Iran-made Shahed attack drones.

He said the Novocherkassk had “followed” the Moskva, the guided-missile cruiser that was the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet before it sank in April 2022 after being struck by Ukrainian missiles.

The Russian Defense Ministry meanwhile said the Novocherkassk had been “damaged” in a Ukrainian attack in a statement reported by the state-run TASS news agency.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu reported the strike and the damage to Novocherkask to President Vladimir Putin, according to TASS, quoting Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

In an update on Wednesday, the Crimea Health Ministry said that one person died and four were injured as a result of the attack, according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.

CNN is not able to independently verify the claims by either side but videos posted on social media showed large explosions in the Feodosia port.

If confirmed, the Novocherkask alleged destruction would be the third instance of major losses of Russian military hardware in less than a week. In September, Ukraine also claimed that the Novocherkask’s sister ship, the Minsk, had been destroyed in an attack on the Sevastopol naval base in Crimea.

The strike comes as Ukrainian encounters difficulties in its ground campaign in the country’s east.

Ukraine’s top general Valery Zaluzhnyi warned on Tuesday that the city of Avdiivka could suffer the same fate as the decimated city of Bakhmut in the next two to three months, while Ukrainian forces have “now withdrawn to the outskirts” of the village of Marinka after fighting with Russian troops.

Loses 8 Fighter Jets in 3 Weeks

Ukraine F-16 Speculation Mounts as Russia Loses 8 Fighter Jets in 3 Weeks

Story by Ellie Cook

Western-provided F-16 fighter jets could already be in Ukraine, Newsweek has been told, after Kyiv claimed a host of high-profile victories against Russian assets in the air and in the sea.

Ukraine's Western allies promised Kyiv the advanced U.S.-made F-16 jets months ago, but questions remained about exactly when the aircraft would take to Ukraine's skies.

Kyiv had clamored for the jets, which would boost Ukraine's ability to contest Russia's dominance in the skies and launch more strikes on key Russian targets. The F-16s are equipped with more modern avionics and radars and are designed to launch the NATO-standard weapons Ukraine has been using with its older, Soviet-era jets.

In recent days, Russian-aligned or anti-Ukrainian Telegram channels have speculated that Ukraine may have made use of the advanced jets to take out key Russian assets, although there has been no confirmation that Ukraine has received the jets.

A U.S. source told Newsweek on Wednesday that it was likely Ukraine had indeed received the first of the promised F-16s.

Newsweek has reached out to the Ukrainian military for comment via email.

In the past three weeks, Russia is reported to have lost eight jets—a blow to Moscow's air force.

On December 5, the Ukrainian military said it had shot down a Russian jet around Snake Island, a Black Sea outpost around 30 miles from Ukraine's coastline close to Romania.

Twelve days later, Ukrainian media reported that Moscow had lost an Su-34 fighter-bomber aircraft after Kyiv attacked a Russian air base. Separately, Ukraine's air force said Moscow had shot down one of its own Su-25 tactical bomber jets on the same day.

On December 22, Ukraine said it had downed three more Russian Su-34 bombers, before Kyiv said on Christmas Eve that it had taken out a Russian Su-30 and an Su-34.

In the early hours of December 26, a Ukrainian missile strike damaged Russia's Novocherkassk landing ship in Crimea. Russian-aligned or anti-Ukrainian Telegram channels have since speculated that an F-16 was used to fire the cruise missiles at the Russian vessel, and what threat the jets in Ukraine's hands could pose to the Kremlin.

"This aircraft is integrated into the NATO command and control system, and that is the danger," one prominent Russian military blogger said on Tuesday.

Although not officially announced, it is not impossible that Ukraine has received at least an initial batch of F-16s. In mid-October, Ukraine debuted its ATACMS missiles in eye-catching assaults on Russian airbases that wiped out a slew of Russian helicopters. The attacks are thought to have caught Moscow by surprise, with the weapons confirmed after Ukraine first fired the missiles.

The same could be true of the long-awaited fast jets, and could offer Ukraine a much-needed advantage as the frontlines stagnate in the biting winter months.

"I hope the West has learned NOT to announce new weapons systems, as was done for the most part for the first 20 months of the war," said Daniel Rice, former special adviser to Ukraine's lead commander, General Valery Zaluzhny.

"Russian forces should learn 'the hard way' when Ukraine fields a new weapon," Rice, who is now president of American University Kyiv, told Newsweek.

On December 22, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the Dutch government was starting preparations to deliver an initial batch of 18 F-16 jets for delivery to Ukraine.

The Dutch Defense Ministry separately said that Ukraine's personnel must be properly trained before the jets are transferred, as well as having "suitable infrastructure" in place. The jets may be modified, and "some of the aircraft require an overhaul," the Dutch government said.

The U.K. Defense Ministry said on Tuesday that the "first cohort" of Ukrainian pilots being trained by the U.K. military have completed basic training in the country, and are "now learning to fly F-16 fighter jets in Denmark, having completed a basic programme of training in the UK."

In early November, a number of F-16s arrived at a Romanian facility designed to train Ukrainian pilots, with others being trained at an air base in Arizona.

"Everything is going according to plan," Ukrainian air force spokesperson, Colonel Yuriy Ihnat said on Saturday, according to Ukrainian media.

Yes that is a Boom..... Ship blown to bits...

Russia confirms damage to warship in Black Sea

By Kathryn Armstrong & James Waterhouse

Russia has confirmed one of its warships has been damaged in a Ukrainian attack on a Black Sea port.

The airstrike took place at Feodosiya in Russian-occupied Crimea early on Tuesday morning.

Russia's Ministry of Defence said the large landing ship Novocherkassk was struck by Ukrainian aircraft carrying guided missiles.

The head of the Ukrainian Air Force said earlier its warplanes had destroyed the ship.

One person was killed in the attack, (More are likely, they are just lying) according to the Russian-installed head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov. Several others were reportedly hurt.

Six buildings were damaged and a small number of people had to be taken to temporary accommodation centres, Mr Aksyonov added.

The port's transport operations are said to be functioning as normal after the area was cordoned off, while a fire caused by the attack was contained.

Footage purportedly showing a huge explosion in the port was shared by Ukrainian air force commander Lt Gen Mykola Oleshchuk.

The images have not been independently verified. However, satellite imagery from 24 December shows a ship at port in Feodosiya that appears to be the same length as the Novocherkassk - a landing ship designed to transport troops, weapons and cargo to shore.

Any significant damage to the ship will be a welcome bit of good news for Ukraine, with waning Western support now affecting its front-line operations. Given that the Novocherkassk was in dock, it is highly likely it was being loaded with soldiers, equipment or both.

Patrick Bury, a security and defence expert and former Nato analyst, told the BBC News Channel there was speculation that the ship was carrying Iranian-made Shahed drones, which Russia has been using in its attacks on Ukrainian targets.

Speaking on Ukrainian TV, the head of the press centre for Ukraine's southern command, Nataliya Humenyuk, said it was "clear that such a large detonation was caused by more than just the fuel or ammunition of the ship itself".

Ms Humenyuk added that Russia had been facing difficulties with transporting "important cargo" due to the Kerch Bridge, which links Russia to the Crimean Peninsula, being damaged.

"So, it is quite likely that it [the Novocherkassk's cargo] was a kind of "Christmas present, completely wrapped," she said.

Taking the ship out of action, even if only temporarily, will no doubt hamper Russia's ability to supply troops in territory it occupies further north.

What is less clear is how long its operations will be disrupted for and what impact this strike will have on the front lines.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Ukraine's air force has denied that Russia shot down two of its Su-24 bombers about 125km (77 miles) from the Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv.

And Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said that his troops had seized the key town of Mariinka in eastern Ukraine.

Kyiv initially denied the claim, but in a news conference on Tuesday Ukrainian Armed Forces commander Valerii Zaluzhnyi said his troops had withdrawn to the outskirts of the town and beyond.

The area has been used by Ukraine as a defensive barrier since 2014, when Russian-backed fighters seized large swathes of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Tuesday's attack on Feodosiya is not the first time that the Novocherkassk has been targeted by Ukrainian forces.

In March 2022, Ukraine's defence ministry reported that the ship had been damaged in an attack on the occupied Ukrainian port of Berdyansk in which another amphibious assault ship, the Saratov, was sunk.

In a post on Telegram, Lt Gen Oleshchuk wrote that the Novocherkassk had gone the way of the Moskva - the flagship of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, which sank in the Black Sea last year.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky quipped that he was "grateful" to the country's air force "for the impressive replenishment of the Russian submarine Black Sea fleet with another vessel," in reference to other Russian ships that have been sunk during the war.

"The occupiers will not have a single peaceful place in Ukraine," he said.

Russia seized and annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and its forces based there played a key part in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Russian forces in Crimea have since come under repeated Ukrainian attack. Last month, Ukraine's military said it had destroyed 15 Russian navy ships and damaged another 12 in the Black Sea since the start of Russia's war.

After a missile strike on the headquarters of the Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol last September, satellite images showed that the Russian navy had moved much of its Black Sea fleet away from Crimea to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.

The dominance of the Russian navy has been diminished to an extent as result of such attacks, but this year has seen Moscow keep hold of the territory it occupies, despite a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Inflation

Inflation is nearly back to normal. But high prices have changed Americans’ lives

By Alicia Wallace

The winter holidays typically make for busier times at The Open Door Pantry food shelf here in this Twin Cities suburb.

And sure enough, on the Monday before Christmas, the day’s food appointments were chock-full. In the back warehouse, nearly 100 volunteers quickly and methodically sifted through thousands of pounds of freshly donated food.

But the activity isn’t simply a seasonal surge: The daily appointments are booked solid through the end of January, and demand has been overwhelming for The Open Door’s other community-based food distribution events.

While 2023 was the year that meaningful progress was made on slowing down painfully high inflation, 33 months’ worth of fast-rising prices took their toll on many Americans, especially those with lower incomes.

To that point, this year also marks a record year for food pantry visits in Minnesota and beyond — in many cases, by a country mile.

“The years of inflation, they stacked on top of each other,” said Jason Viana, The Open Door’s executive director. “We were seeing the impact of [rising wages], but inflation wiped all that out.”

Turning the corner?

In 2022, the US saw inflation spike to levels not seen in four decades, and the Federal Reserve was in the throes of a historic rate-hiking campaign to cool it back down.

At the start of this year, inflation had moderated some — the Consumer Price Index had cooled to 6.5% in January 2023 from its 9.1% peak in June 2022. However, the US economic outlook was clouded by ongoing fears that the aggressive Fed campaign would lead to a downturn.

Those dire predictions did not materialize.

It currently appears that the Fed has turned the corner on its lengthy battle to bring down inflation without the economy careening into a recession.

The labor market remains strong, which has helped to fuel consumer spending and keep the broader economic engine churning. The housing refinancing boom of previous years and the resurgent stock market have made many — but certainly not all — households wealthier.

“It’s been a difficult few years, but I do think that in 2023, the situation is improving for households as inflation has slowed and as wage growth has remained above the pre-pandemic trend,” said Gus Faucher, senior vice president and chief economist of the PNC Financial Services Group.

But he also noted that many lower-income Americans are still struggling.

“The types of prices that went up in 2021 and 2022, they tend to carry more weight for lower-income households, and they obviously had less of a cushion to start with.”

The latest reads on inflation show that the pace of price hikes has cooled substantially.

The Consumer Price Index measured 3.1% annually in November, and the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index not only came in even lower at 2.6%, but also declined monthly for the first time since April 2020.

But there’s still a long way to go before inflation is where the Fed wants it.

The earlier price increases became pervasive and “sticky,” meaning that once prices go up, they don’t easily go down. That’s making it that much more difficult to bring consumer costs back to their levels before recent jumps.

For much of this year, Fed Chair Jerome Powell cautioned that the return of inflation to the central bank’s 2% target could be long and bumpy. To that end, the Fed’s latest economic projections don’t have the core Personal Consumption Expenditures price index settling in at 2% until 2026.

Soaring fuel costs, surging food prices

Although the speed of price hikes has gotten better, that’s not to say it’s been pleasant by any means.

“Consumers remember a couple of years ago when they could buy something for quite a bit less,” said Kayla Bruun, senior economist with market research and analytics company Morning Consult. “Food prices are a very visible [piece] and something you’re buying very frequently, and there’s a lot of awareness of what those prices are, maybe second only to gas prices.”

She added: “That’s what sticks in their mind the most and what they cite as what bothers them the most. Housing is the other thing I would point to that is a continued strain.”

More than 90% of the items tracked in the Consumer Price Index are more expensive than they were in February 2020, with most price increases landing north of 20% and some (fuel and margarine) approaching 55%, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows.

Food prices are nearly 25% higher.

However, audio-visual buffs might be the only ones rejoicing as televisions and electronics hardware are among the scant few categories that have actually seen prices decrease since before the pandemic.

“Even as your inflation rates slow, prices are still well above where they were ahead of the pandemic,” said Shannon Seery, an economist with Wells Fargo. “Households are still grappling with that. Obviously, a slowing price growth environment is beneficial, but when you have the price growth we’ve had over the past few years, it kind of compounds on itself.”

That layering effect of inflation compounded with decades-high interest rates as well as the expiration of pandemic emergency measures further squeezed households’ budgets and forced many to rely on food donations, Merissa Piazza, a senior policy analyst for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, wrote in a November blog post.

“Low-income households are particularly vulnerable to these increases because they spend a greater share of their income on food,” she wrote.

As such, food banks have seen spikes in demand, Piazza wrote, using the Greater Cleveland Food Bank as an example. Pandemic-era visits peaked in August 2020 and bottomed out in January 2022, then ratcheted higher to surpass the pandemic total in August 2023.

‘Absolute hope’ for relief

Minnesota food shelves are on track to log a record 7 million visitors this year, said Colleen Moriarty, executive director of Minnesota Hunger Solutions. In 2022, there were 5.5 million food shelf visits across the North Star State.

Among those visitors were Apple Valley, Minnesota, residents Paul Mentzos and Abbella DiNoto, who were put in contact with CNN Business through The Open Door Pantry.

“I’ve been barely getting by, by the skin of my teeth, for the last three years since Covid,” said DiNoto, 50, who said she is a disabled veteran on a fixed income. “With the cost of food, the cost of everything going up, I’m getting to the point where I have zero money left over at the end of the month.”

DiNoto said she has racked up credit card debt to cover unexpected expenses.

“This month, I could not pay any of my bills,” she said. “And my debts and my bills are mounting, and now I’ve got late payments hitting me and all these credit card fees, and now my minimum payments have gone up, and I’m hurting bad.”

Mentzos, 71, spent 43 years of his life driving a taxi around the Twin Cities and raised four children, two of them as a single father, he said.

“I’m very accustomed to being, well, the word would be ‘poor,’” he said. “I’ve been there where I had to cut corners just to eat, and rob Peter to pay Paul.”

He added: “You’ve got to watch every dollar you spend. You’re going to the store with a calculator and watch out so you’re not embarrassed at the checkout because you have overrun [your money.]”

With the expiration of additional Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and the rising prices, Mentzos has had to rely on food shelves more lately.

Inflation is expected to let up further through 2024, a year that could see some relief as well on the interest rate front.

Such a combination could give Americans more breathing room and hopefully be enough to bring those who are struggling the most back from the brink, said The Open Door’s Viana.

“If inflation can stay down, and wages can continue to grow, there is absolute hope that families will be able to get back on their feet and require less support,” he said.

Incompetent dumpster fire says it all.....

‘Incompetent dumpster fire’: Michigan GOP rocked by financial turmoil and infighting

By Curt Devine, Audrey Ash, Allison Gordon, Daniel Strauss and Jason Carroll

The Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference often lures a who’s who of GOP power players to Michigan. Wealthy donors shake hands with presidential candidates, who give rousing speeches to packed audiences in hopes of winning the conference’s straw poll.

The event is typically a money-maker for its sponsor – the Michigan Republican Party – helping to fund get-out-the-vote efforts and support campaigns to get Republicans elected throughout the state.

But this year’s conference was decidedly different.

The only presidential candidate to show up was Vivek Ramaswamy, who was mostly polling in the single digits. The line-up of speakers included failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake; Zuby, a British rapper who occasionally appears on Fox News; and, conservative provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, who ultimately did not show up.

The biggest draw was actor Jim Caviezel, a promoter of QAnon conspiracy theories, who had a hit movie this summer but is perhaps best known for playing Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ” movie 20 years ago. He was paid a $110,000 fee to attend and give a 25-minute speech.

The event, simply put, was “a disaster,” said Warren Carpenter, an active party member and former district chair.

And, it was emblematic of deeper problems within the Michigan state party.

A CNN review of documents and interviews with more than 20 current and former party officials shows the Republican Party in this key battleground state has become entangled in financial turmoil, infighting and calls for new leadership less than a year before the 2024 presidential election.

Kristina Karamo – a former community college professor with limited political experience – became the head of the state party in February after pushing far-right election conspiracy theories and promising to end the party’s reliance on traditional wealthy donors.

Now, some of the pro-Trump party members who voted Karamo into office have soured on her leadership and accuse her administration of working to destroy the party by failing to fundraise and sparking division among the party rank-and-file.

Dozens of the party’s state committee members signed a petition calling for a meeting at the end of the month to consider the removal of Karamo and some of her deputies.

“If I would have known that Kristina Karamo would have turned out to be such a tyrannical incompetent dumpster fire I would never have worked so hard to get her elected. For that I apologize,” wrote Dawn Beattie, a state committee member, in an email sent last month to fellow Republicans and obtained by CNN.

The dire state of the party’s finances, which has generated negative headlines in local outlets including The Detroit News for months, was recently summarized in a report that concluded Karamo had pushed the organization to “the brink of bankruptcy.” The report, commissioned by Carpenter, a former party district chair, and shared with CNN, included internal records that suggest the party had a net income of just $71,000 between March and November and had more than $600,000 in debt as of last month.

Karamo, who did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment, has said she is “course correcting” the party, which she has argued had hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt when she assumed leadership and lost multiple prior elections under old leadership despite then having millions of dollars on hand.

Still, political consultants argue effective state parties – which organize voting drives and other local efforts – are often essential to win close elections. Former President Donald Trump won Michigan in 2016 but lost to Joe Biden in 2020. A recent CNN poll found Trump has 50% support in the state to Biden’s 40%.

“You want a state party that is firing on all cylinders, and then you want a strong candidate who can win,” said Doug Heye, a GOP strategist and former communications director for the Republican National Committee. “If you have an issue with either of those two, that can be one of the things that tips the scales for a race.”

A source close to the Trump campaign described the current Michigan GOP as a mess and did not indicate any sort of loyalty to Karamo, noting that most of the Michigan Republicans who could replace her were also pro-Trump.

‘The real deal’

Karamo gained political clout in Michigan by repeatedly claiming she witnessed fraud in the 2020 election when she served as a poll challenger. A Republican-led Michigan Senate investigation concluded the following year that there was “no evidence” of widespread fraud in that election, but that didn’t deter Karamo.

She appeared at MAGA rallies and ran a failed campaign for Michigan’s secretary of state in 2022 with false claims such as the notion that “authoritarians” inside the US believe “that if they can corrupt battleground election systems, they can control America. This nefarious plot is real and it’s happening.”

She then ran for chair of the Michigan Republican Party on a platform of election reform and a pledge to buck the party’s top donors.

“You are required to do their bidding in order to get their funds, and so we just simply wind up destroying the country slower than Democrats,” she said at a debate with fellow Michigan GOP chair candidates in January when she pitched a plan to instead rely on donations from small business owners and encourage local activism.

In February, after a reported three rounds of voting at a party convention that spanned 11 hours, Karamo was elected chair. Her election meant both the chair of the Michigan Republican Party and the Michigan Democratic Party were Black women.

Many conservatives in the state celebrated Karamo’s ascent as a breath of fresh air.

“She seemed like the real deal,” Mark Forton, the chairman of the Macomb County Republican Party, told CNN.

But following her election, the party has been rocked by financial woes and finger-pointing.

The former budget chair issued a statement in June that said the party’s “spending was so far out of proportion with income as to put us on the path to bankruptcy” and that “efforts to implement responsible spending limits were met with adamant opposition from Chair Karamo and the small circle of operatives around her.”

Another budget committee member, who resigned, wrote in a statement to Karamo that the party faced “imminent default on the Line of Credit.”

That concern appears to have been justified. Last month, a lawyer for Comerica Bank sent a “Notice of Default” to the party for failure to pay interest on a principal of $509,009, records show.

Karamo and local party leaders have now plunged into a web of bitter conspiracy theories aimed at one another. Some of her detractors allege Karamo is part of a malicious plot, while her defenders make such allegations about her critics.

“Simply put, we have been had. We are dealing with a group of people who are working to destroy the MIGOP prior to the super important 2024 election year. This is not happening, this year, by coincidence,” Forton of Macomb County said in a statement with his vice chair in which they called for Karamo’s ouster in November.

Ken Beyer, the chair of the party’s fourth district, defended Karamo and argued the party’s establishment has refused to support her from the beginning of her term. He claimed he heard from someone involved in the party’s prior administration, whom he declined to name, that leadership allowed Karamo to become chair “because they feel they can make her fail sooner” than another grassroots candidate.

“It’s like they are pulling the rug out from under Kristina and then they are going, ‘Look, she fell,’” Beyer told CNN. “They caused the problem and then blamed Kristina.”

Karamo, when questioned about some of the party’s obstacles at a meeting in October, said, “Again this whole deep state thing is very real,” according to a recording of the event.

Ron Weiser, former chair of the Michigan GOP, told CNN why he thinks traditional donors have largely not financially supported the party under Karamo.

“One, I don’t think she’s asking, which is the fundamental thing, and two even if she did, I don’t think people would have confidence in giving,” Weiser said. “You need someone with experience who can be a CEO and who can raise the funds necessary to do what the party does best.”

Conference controversy

To many longtime state party members, the Mackinac conference – set on an island in northern Michigan – is seen as a consistent boost to party morale and finances, driven in part by high-profile attendees. In 2015, for instance, five Republican presidential candidates attended the conference, including Sen. Ted Cruz and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

“The closest thing to it is the Iowa State Fair, so it is a jewel for our state,” Carpenter said. He described this year’s event as a “disaster” because, among other reasons, outside speakers like actor Caviezel were paid even though presidential candidates traditionally have given speeches for free or even helped cover costs.

That Ramaswamy was the only presidential candidate to attend this year seemed to be a disappointment. Hassan Nehme, a current vice chair for the party, said during a recorded panel after the conference that other presidential candidates expressed desires to attend but Karamo and another colleague rejected those offers. “They wanted this conference to be different, so … we weren’t setting it up right,” he said.

During a separate meeting, Karamo said it was “not true” that her administration didn’t reach out to candidates, and she called the conference a “net benefit” but added, “Would we have liked to have made a lot more off of it? Yes,” according to a recording.

In the wake of the conference, another controversy emerged. A spreadsheet that ranked hundreds of potential conference volunteers on a scale of one-to-four began circulating among party members. The number one on the chart stood for “Patriot” while the number four stood for “Me First or RINO…,” an acronym for “Republican in name only.”

Karamo said in October she had nothing to do with those rankings and blamed a “temporary volunteer” for creating them. In a separate interview last week, she called her critics “me-firsters” and derided the “RINO” faction of the party.

State committee member Bree Moeggenberg – who was ranked a four – said that chart is part of a broader culture of division under Karamo.

“She’s disenfranchised us,” Moeggenberg told CNN. “She has pushed the RINO’s per se away. She has pushed all sides of establishment away. She has pushed grassroots away.”

Joel Studebaker, the party’s deputy chief of staff, conceded in an interview that fundraising has been a challenge and said he believes the party has raised less than $1 million this year. Asked about the payment to actor Caviezel, he said, “Would I pay him $110,000 personally? Probably not. I think it would be something of a lower number, but I also know that we were struggling to get speakers.”

But Studebaker added that Caviezel injected energy into the conference and spoke to a packed house. More broadly, he compared the current state of the party to that of a start-up organization, in which his team started with debts and limited assets.

“We come to the table with almost no political experience and we don’t view that as a bad thing, but it does increase the learning curve in terms of politics,” said Studebaker, who said Karamo’s critics within the party also share responsibility for its current state.

“Everybody wants to make it about Karamo. We have a mentality in this state, in this country, of top down. And the reality is, it’s a we-the-people discussion,” he said.

“If they would stand down and take the energy that they’re using to try to destroy us and try to help us with their experience that they have we’d be unstoppable,” added Beyer, the party’s fourth district chair, who joined Studebaker for a CNN interview.

Election on the line

Republican strategists believe winning Michigan is essential for winning the White House, and therefore an organized state party that can provide voter outreach, donor support, and logistical help is crucial.

“Michigan has moved increasingly in the battleground-leaning column, even the Trump column, and Republicans desperately need to find a roadmap to win,” said Michigan Republican strategist Dennis Lennox.

Karamo’s critics believe a change in leadership is necessary for that to happen.

“It’s not that I don’t like her. What she’s doing, on the other hand, is rather insidious,” said Andy Sebolt, chair of the party’s second district who also chaired the state party’s policy committee until recently when Karamo had him removed after he said he pushed for more transparency.

“We should have a fighting chance in the state of Michigan to award our electors to a Republican. … With this chaos and alienation of other Republicans, we don’t stand that chance,” he said.

Methane

Everything You Think You Know About Methane is Wrong

It’s not the “super-pollutant” everyone claims it is; “it’s just that’s such a small part of the total.”

JESSICA MCKENZIE

Have you heard about the miracle quick fix for our climate ills?

The greenhouse gas methane is responsible for roughly 30 percent of the increase in global temperature since the Industrial Revolution and is often described as 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Sometimes news outlets remember to qualify that with “over 20 years,” and sometimes they don’t.

In a press call during the 28th Conference of Parties, the annual United Nations climate conference, US Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said methane was his “number one” priority at the conference. Shortly after, the Biden administration announced a new EPA rule targeting methane emissions. The press release announcing the rule stated, “Sharp cuts in methane emissions are among the most critical actions the United States can take in the short term to slow the rate of climate change.”

“[T]he U.S. is turbocharging the speed and scale of climate action, at home and abroad, including our collective efforts to tackle super-pollutants like methane,” said US National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi.

The popular narrative suggests that tackling methane emissions is the “low-hanging fruit” in the climate-solutions toolbox. The belief that turning off the taps on this “super-pollutant” could “buy us time” to address the climate crisis is widespread, shared by politicians, journalists, and even some scientists.

But this is a dangerous fallacy, according to Raymond Pierrehumbert, a professor of physics at the University of Oxford and a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board.

In an in-depth interview with Bulletin climate editor Jessica McKenzie, Pierrehumbert dissects the Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter—the voluntary pledge made at COP28 by some oil and gas companies to slash operational emissions of greenhouse gases, including bringing methane emissions to “near-zero.” He goes on to explain why describing methane as “80 times as potent as carbon dioxide” is inaccurate and misleading and why the widespread hope that sharp cuts to methane emissions will bring about immediate and significant reductions in global temperatures is both wrong and distressing.

I was wondering if we could start just by talking about the Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter and what it is and what it isn’t.

Altogether this Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter is very small potatoes. It refers only to the decarbonization of the operations of the oil companies, which means that they’re not counting the much bigger carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of their product, just the operation, which is really a small part of the total, especially in the Middle Eastern countries where the cost of oil production is actually very low compared to the US and not very energy intensive to begin with. It’s less energy-intensive than fracking; you don’t have to redrill the wells as often. But no matter what the country, the carbon emissions from operations are a small part of the total compared to actually burning the fossil fuels.

A second part is putting money into carbon dioxide removal, Carbon Dioxide Capture, and Storage. Just about everybody agrees we’ll need a certain amount of that, once we’ve gotten carbon dioxide emissions down to nearly zero, but right now, as Pierre Friedlingstein has said recently, the existing air capture projects are capturing one-one-millionth of what they would need to, and even under outrageously optimistic projections, where they improve by a factor of 1,000, or even 10,000, that’s still not going to do the job of decarbonization.

The role of carbon dioxide air capture, or capture and sequestration, is in dealing with the last 10 percent or so of emissions that we can’t easily avoid. That would include things like hard-to-decarbonize sectors, maybe aircraft, it would include rogue nations; you know, North Korea isn’t likely to sign on to emission reductions. Whether you call it a phase-down or a phase-out, the fact is that we have to get emissions down by about 90 percent before we can even think about a possible role of air capture in sopping up the rest. So while it is useful to have another entity putting money in to develop the technology, because we will need some of it, it’s not the game changer. It only becomes an important part of the strategy once we get down to within shouting distance of net zero.

And it should also be noted that a lot of the existing air capture and what is being talked about actually uses this captured carbon dioxide to produce more oil. They call that low carbon fuel, but it’s a kind of a dodge because right now, oil companies are already using carbon dioxide injection that they buy commercially to produce oil. And if you just switch that commercially purchased carbon dioxide from say, leftovers from the Haber process [the process used to produce ammonia, of which carbon dioxide is a by-product], and switch that for air capture, it’s just a wash, it doesn’t actually change anything. Except that they [the fossil fuel companies] get to look greener.

If companies can reduce their operational emissions, that’s a good thing. It’s just that’s such a small part of the total. It’s not a game-changer. These are baby steps. And we’re at a time in the climate crisis when baby steps are not going to cut it.

Now as far as methane goes—that’s where we get into the subtler issue of just what is carbon dioxide equivalent, or just all the fallacies associated with the term carbon dioxide equivalent, because the standard way that companies claim credit for their methane emissions reductions is to use a carbon dioxide equivalent number. And what’s come into favor is this figure based on 20 years, which is what gets you methane is 80 times [as potent as carbon dioxide].

Could you explain a little bit more about where that comparison came from and why that is a flawed descriptor?

The 80 times figure comes from the standard Global Warming Potential framework, which was introduced in the very first IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report, but what everybody forgot was that it was introduced as an example of how to do a comparison, and not as something people should actually use to make decisions. Nonetheless, it stuck.

The main thing is that there is no true equivalence between carbon dioxide emissions and methane emissions because the climate responds in different ways to a short-lived gas than to a long-lived gas. If you put a kilogram of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere it has a warming effect that lasts millennia. You put a kilogram of methane in the atmosphere, the warming effect will disappear almost entirely after 20 years. So the amount of warming you get depends on the emission rate of methane, not the amount of emissions you put in the atmosphere. A kilogram per year gives you a certain amount of warming because it doesn’t accumulate in the atmosphere beyond about 20 years. Whereas a kilogram per year of carbon dioxide will mount up to a certain amount of warming in the first 20 years. But if you keep emitting that kilogram per year, the amount of warming you get continues to increase indefinitely, which does not happen with methane. So any equivalence that says that a certain mass of methane is equivalent to this other mass of carbon dioxide, one megaton of methane is worth a certain number of megatons of carbon dioxide, anything like that is going to distort the climate response.

There is a way to compare them, which is to compare the actual amount of warming produced by different strategies.

That’s not what the 80 times of warming comparison does?

No, it’s not really what the 80 times does. Or it does it in a very flawed way that only looks at what happens in the first 20 years and doesn’t look at the way carbon dioxide outstrips the effect of methane, eventually. Also, these equivalences compare the wrong quantities. The thing that’s wrong about these equivalences is that the methane warming is determined by a rate—megatons per year—where the carbon dioxide warming is determined by a number of megatons of cumulative emissions over any period of time. So it literally is comparing apples and oranges, because to do an actual equivalence between carbon dioxide and methane requires something that compares a rate to a mass.

It’s like comparing a distance traveled to the speed at which your car is going. These are two different things. Carbon dioxide is like the total distance your car has gone, so it’s the cumulative progress toward your destination, and our destination, in this case, is making the world too hot to be livable. Whereas methane is just like the speed at which the car is going. That’s not a good analogy, really—it’s a fair analogy mathematically, but in terms of people getting their heads around it, it’s maybe not so good.

But the basic thing is that the standard 80 times figure, which is used in many attempts to say what the value is of methane and in avoided warming—that 80 times figure does not take into account the fact that after about 20 years, methane essentially stops causing further warming.

Well, humans are flawed animals who think in very short timescales, so it is kind of understandable how sharp methane reductions would appeal to us in a sort of get-rich-quick scheme. And why do we think we can you know, halt global warming in its tracks if we cut all this off?

Yeah, it’s a cognitive flaw. It’s what is called a stock versus flow problem. So methane is a flow pollutant; it doesn’t accumulate in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a stock pollutant—the harm is determined by the cumulative stock of it in the atmosphere. And people are seduced by this 80 times worse over 20 years, because they think, you know, 20 years, that’s the time scale we have to do something about. But what they’re failing to understand—and even the economists fell in this trap—is that over that first 20 years, there’s very little warming involved. So the total amount of warming that you can avoid by huge reductions in methane, it’s a significant number. But it’s not significant compared to how much warming we’re going to get in 100 years if we don’t decarbonize.

And what’s more, if you happen to delay your action on methane, since the methane effect disappears in about 20 years, there’s relatively little harm in delaying, because it’s still valuable [when it happens]. But if you delay action on carbon dioxide, the carbon dioxide keeps accumulating in the atmosphere, and it never goes away. So decarbonization, actual carbon dioxide reductions, are the biggest priority.

Maybe the easiest way of looking at the reason that methane has significant but very limited leverage over future warming is to just look at the maximum amount of warming you could eliminate.

It’s estimated that the methane increase since the Industrial Revolution has accounted for between 25 to 30 percent of warming. We have about 1.3 degrees Celsius of warming, maybe it’s 1.4 degrees Celsius, depending on exactly how you do the computation. So 30 percent of that is .4 degrees. If you could eliminate half of the methane emissions—which would be pretty ambitious—but if you can eliminate half of the methane emissions, you could shave two-tenths of a degree.

But if we don’t get to net zero carbon dioxide emissions, under current trajectories, we’re heading for a whole degree of warming in the next century. I think it’s actually pretty optimistic to get the methane warming down by .2 degrees because you have to recognize that not all of that methane increase since the beginning of the industrial revolution is due to human activities. NASA thinks it’s only about 60 percent.

So the rest is from peat bogs, melting permafrost, cows—or would cows count as human activity?

Cows count as human activity. The increase in livestock due to agriculture counts as human activity. But that other 40 percent of emissions that NASA talks about, some of that was baseline emissions. But some of that is due to feedbacks in natural systems. So as the world gets warmer and wetter, you can get more methane emissions from natural sources. And that’s a feedback that we can only control by controlling our warming.

So this is not to say that eliminating methane emissions is bad, because it does help. But what’s really damaging is fooling yourself into thinking that eliminating methane has as big an impact as eliminating carbon dioxide.

This becomes materially bad if you have a trading scheme that actually allows a company to trade carbon dioxide for methane on this 80 times figure, because then that winds up being a nightmare scenario, where some company will abate a certain amount of methane and then claim huge credits.

It’s good to reduce methane. But we shouldn’t exaggerate how big a part of the problem this is. Because if you use this 80 times figure, it completely exaggerates the amount of avoided warming that’s possible with even the most aggressive action on methane.

The second part of the message is yes, there’s no real reason for oil companies to let all that methane into the atmosphere, they should capture it and use it. But that needs to be handled in a way that doesn’t allow trading of methane abatement against carbon dioxide (emissions).

It’s important to reiterate that this decarbonization charter we’ve been talking about is a voluntary measure.

Exactly. And it involves companies, not countries. So 50 companies, representing 40 percent of global oil production, have signed on. And it’s a pledge, right? Nothing happens to them if they don’t do this.

And there are so many alarming phrases that stuck out to me, like eliminating routine flaring, means that they can keep flaring for non-routine reasons. And it seems like there’s a lot of potential there for that to be incredibly broad.

Yes. In fact, already, The Guardian has reported that state-run companies in the Emirates are cheating on the commitments they’ve made already, where satellite monitoring suggests there’s a lot more flaring (of methane) than they say. So yeah, there are all sorts of ways this methane charter could be dodged, but my main message is, even if we take it at face value, and even if they do everything they say, this is not a major step forward.

The other sort of thing where I felt that they were already building in excuses for not doing things was this caveat about adjusting ambitions for companies and countries, depending on their circumstances. That also sounds like a loophole.

That’s all very true; they’re giving themselves a lot of ways out. And this point about energy security and affordability—the fossil fuel industry is always saying we have to provide cheap fossil fuel energy in the developing world. But there’s a good argument that actually the developing world would do better if they had money to accelerate the transition to renewables, which would make them independent of the fossil fuel hostage situation that they’ve got now.

I sat in on a press call with some of the congressional representatives who have gone to COP, and Sheldon Whitehouse said his number one priority was methane. What’s your message for the politicians who have taken methane as their guiding star, and the journalists who are supporting this narrative, that methane is the big thing that we should be focusing on?

It’s a mass delusion and wishful thinking, based on a fundamental failure to understand the different ways that a short-lived gas like methane affects the climate versus a long-lived gas like carbon dioxide. The basis of the fallacy is the total amount of warming you can avoid by any likely amount of methane reduction is small, compared to what needs to be done. And it just comes from a fundamental lack of understanding of basic climate physics.

It is useful to reduce methane, but it’s not going to really help us towards net zero. The only real solution to the climate crisis is to get carbon dioxide emissions down to as close to zero as we can.

This fallacy about methane being the big priority, it’s something that is not just created by journalists and politicians. There are a lot of scientists, who—for reasons that are very perplexing to me—have been pushing the idea of methane very, very aggressively, like the Climate and Clean Air Coalition. Politicians like it because it sounds less disruptive. And a lot of politicians have fallen for the false notion that we can have a big impact on warming by reducing methane emissions. But what they just don’t see is the amount of warming you actually avoid by doing this is actually pretty small in the big scheme of things.

They can easily be seduced by statistics like methane is responsible for 30 percent of the warming now, which implies that we can get rid of that much warming by aggressively acting on methane. But that ignores how much methane is due to natural sources we can’t control.

It is a mass delusion. Even the IPCC has been very resistant to moving away from this false global warming potential equivalence, which goes back to the very first IPCC report. Myles Allen and I have been fighting this fight with IPCC. Myles is my colleague at Oxford and goes to COP meetings, and he couldn’t even get our improved ways of putting methane valuation on the agenda or mentioned in the reports. The IPCC is a very conservative organization, and because they—and policymakers—have gotten so used to these global warming equivalents, they seem very reluctant to change. It’s very distressing. And reporters have just been completely taken in by the notion that methane is the important thing.

I feel like it’s quite easy to do, given that the figures that are bandied about, as you said, by scientists, sound very convincing. It’s a compelling narrative that methane has going.

Part of it is people don’t realize how much warming we’re in for due to carbon dioxide if we continue emitting the way we’ve been doing. The amount of warming we can plausibly avoid, by even very aggressive action on methane, is a useful contribution, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to how much warming we’re going to be saddled with if we don’t get carbon dioxide emissions down to net zero.

It’s difficult messaging, in the sense that I don’t want to say that controlling methane emissions is unimportant, especially some of the projections of how much methane emissions might increase if the whole world starts eating beef at the rate that America does—those are big numbers. They’re not as big numbers as carbon dioxide, but they’re significant. Although it’s important, it doesn’t really help you buy time to get the carbon dioxide down, because any carbon dioxide you emit is stuck in the atmosphere for thousands of years. Much of it anyway—enough of it to cause severe warming. So there are all sorts of cognitive and messaging problems associated with methane. And I’ve been trying to figure out how to get these things across.

I’ve written to Guardian reporters over and over again, and they say, “oh, yeah, well, that sounds plausible,” but then I look at the paper the next day and there’s some other reporter pushing the exact same methane messaging, it’s like Whack a Mole. But when even The Economist, which is usually very careful, has cottoned on to this 80-times-worse figure, that’s really seriously distressing.

It’s worth mentioning that UN Secretary-General António Guterres put out a statement that said the pledges by oil companies were insufficient. He didn’t specifically call them out for greenwashing, but he said we must avoid greenwashing, and that the focus should be reducing fossil fuels.

That is good. I’m glad someone picked up on that. And one thing I forgot to say is that a lot of these methane emissions reductions that are being promised would happen automatically if they just stopped producing fossil fuels. The argument for a separate, targeted methane reduction program in the oil industry is just an end run, when what we need is accelerated reduction in fossil fuel production. And that would take care of it.

Eye-Popping

The Eye-Popping Details of Rudy Giuliani’s Bankruptcy Filing

Trump’s former lawyer may be liable for up to $500 million in unpaid debts.

DAN FRIEDMAN

Rudy Giuliani filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, a step he said was unavoidable after he was ordered to pay $148 million to two former Georgia election workers he defamed by falsely accusing them of election fraud. The former New York mayor’s Chapter 11 filing was no surprise. It came the day after federal district court judge Beryl Howell ordered Giuliani to immediately pay Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss before entering an appeal regarding the award.

A Giuliani spokesperson, Ted Goodman, cast the filing as a tactical move. “No person could have reasonably believed that Mayor Rudy Giuliani would be able to pay such a high punitive amount,” Goodman said in a statement Thursday. “Chapter 11 will afford Mayor Giuliani the opportunity and time to pursue an appeal, while providing transparency for his finances under the supervision of the bankruptcy court, to ensure all creditors are treated equally and fairly throughout the process.” 

The man once known as “America’s mayor” has now become arguably the country’s best-known debtor. Among the debts cited in Giuliani’s filing today are legal bills going back to his role as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, in the former president’s first impeachment, along with mounting legal fees from his involvement in Trump’s effort to use election fraud lies to steal the 2020 election. Obviously, Giuliani is unable to pay Moss and Freeman $148 million. His personal lawyer and friend, Robert Costello, is suing Giuliani for $1.4 million in unpaid legal fees. Giuliani also reports about $3.5 million in additional debts to lawyers.

Giuliani faces substantial additional expenses from his Georgia indictment for trying to interfere in the counting of votes during the 2020 election. He’s also an unindicted co-conspirator in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Despite Trump’s assurance in August that he would help his former lawyer pay off additional legal debts, Trump’s Save America PAC only has helped Giuliani pay some $340,000 in legal expenses.

The IRS in August filed a $549,435 tax lien against Giuliani for the 2021 tax year, and his bankruptcy petition says he now owes a total of about $989,000 in unpaid taxes. He also cites “unknown potential obligations” to Dominion and Smartmatic voting machine companies who have sued him for defamation, and to Hunter Biden, who has sued Giuliani for violating his privacy by “hacking into, tampering with, manipulating, copying, disseminating, and generally obsessing over” material on Hunter’s laptop. He also cites potential obligations to Noelle Dunphy, a former employee who has sued Giuliani for “sexual assault and harassment, wage theft,” and “rape.”He denies those allegations and well as claims in other suits against him.

Giuliani’s overall liabilities? An estimated $100 million to $500 million. He says his assets total between $1 million and $10 million.

The bankruptcy proceedings will allow Giuliani to avoid paying most of what he owes. That means Freeman and Moss, though they won a symbolic victory, likely will get only a small fraction of what jurors said Giuliani owes them. The former mayor has been trying to sell his Upper East apartment in Manhattan to raise funds. He’s seeking $6.1 million.

Fucking crazy....

The Far-Right Pushes a New Conspiracy Theory to Discredit Jack Smith

DAVID CORN and DAN FRIEDMAN

A new conspiracy theory rising on the right is being deployed to help Donald Trump.

It claims that Jack Smith, the special counsel who is prosecuting Trump for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election and for his alleged swiping of classified documents, was part of a multimillion dollar extortion scheme when he was the chief prosecutor investigating and prosecuting war crimes in Kosovo. In the past two weeks, this unsubstantiated narrative has started popping up on fringe right-wing sites and social media posts. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser and QAnonish MAGA champion, has promoted this tale. These allegations appear to be in the early phase of the right-wing transmission belt that propels false stories and conspiracy theories from less prominent platforms to more established conservative media and toward the mainstream—often facilitated by Republican members of Congress. 

The participants in this current effort include a former DEA official who not long ago claimed to have evidence showing the Clinton Foundation was a criminal enterprise, a lawyer who represents the computer repair shop owner who obtained and passed along Hunter Biden’s laptop, and one of the most prominent election deniers of 2020. And this allegation is mostly based on a wild account provided by a Kosovo businessman who was twice arrested in Spain for extortion, who has disputed rumors that he was tied to Russian intelligence, and who has been linked to a Russian mobster.

This campaign against Smith is based on documents circulated by John Moynihan, a onetime DEA employee who says he handled money laundering investigations for the agency. Last month, he submitted to the inspector general of the Justice Department—as well as the IGs of the State Department and CIA—what he termed a “whistleblower complaint” (though he no longer works for the DEA) that charges that a blackmail ring was set up within the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, a European Union judicial initiative based in The Hague to prosecute war crimes committed during the Kosovo war of independence in the late 1990s. This criminal enterprise, Moynihan claims, “extorted millions of dollars from wealthy individuals targeted for investigation and/or prosecution by the Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor’s Office” (known as the SPO), which brings the cases tried by the chambers. Smith was the chief prosecutor for the SPO from 2018 to 2022, and Moynihan alleges that witnesses he spoke to said Smith was an “active participant” in this conspiracy. 

It’s an explosive charge: the prosecutor pursuing Trump being a power-abusing crook himself. But the sources for these unconfirmed allegations have told outlandish stories, and some of the promoters of this tale have track records of involvement in squirrelly endeavors to tar Trump’s political opponents. 

This is not Moynihan’s first rodeo. In December 2018, he and an associate, Larry Doyle, appeared before the House Oversight Committee, chaired by then-Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), and claimed they had evidence that the Clinton Foundation had engaged in serious financial crimes. The pair asserted that the Clinton Foundation was operating as an agent of a foreign government and that Bill Clinton had used its funds for personal business. But they refused GOP entreaties to turn over the 6,000-plus pages of evidence they said they had amassed, noting they had passed the material to the FBI and the IRS. “If you’re not going to share [the documents] with the committee and cut to the chase, my patience is running out,” Meadows groused.

Meadows pointed out the IRS had told him it would be fine for Moynihan and Doyle to share their files. “I don’t find how [refusing to turn over information] provides a good foundation for truth and transparency,” the congressman told them. Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) slammed the duo: “I feel like you’re using us for your own benefit.” He added there was a “little game going on here.” The Washington Examiner called the hearing a “fiasco.”

Moynihan and Doyle certainly had an agenda. They had sued the IRS in 2017 alleging improprieties related to how that agency handled the Clinton Foundation. They maintained that the foundation had underpaid its taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars. If they prevailed in court, they could be entitled to tens of millions of dollars for exposing an underpayment. That case is still pending. 

Moynihan did not respond to requests for comment.

Brian Della Rocca, the lawyer representing Moynihan in his crusade against Jack Smith, has played an important role in another MAGA project. He is representing John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the Delaware computer shop who came into possession of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop and turned it over to Rudy Giuliani. Hunter Biden has sued Mac Isaac and others for disseminating material from his laptop. And Mac Isaac has sued Hunter Biden and others for defamation. 

Della Rocca says has “no comment at this time” about Moynihan’s complaint, adding he wants “to give the government the opportunity to review the complaint and take action.”

Patrick Byrne, a prominent 2020 election denier and ardent conspiracy theorist, has claimed credit for helping to launch Moynihan’s allegations against Smith. The former CEO of Overstock, Byrne tweeted a link to a story on the Moynihan charges that appeared on Gateway Pundit, a fringe-right site, and he declared, “I DID THAT. Well, the extraordinary federal John Moynihan and I.” He added laughing emojis. A website he created called Deep Capture was among the first to post the Moynihan complaint. Weeks prior to that, Byrne repeatedly declared on his Telegram account that he was involved in arranging a “liver punch.” He then used that term to describe the Moynihan complaint.

Mother Jones sent Byrne emails asking him to explain how he was responsible for the Moynihan complaint. He did not reply.

Byrne resigned as head of Overstock in 2019 after he admitted publicly that he had an intimate affair with Maria Butina, a Russian agent. He claimed the Deep State encouraged his relationship with her and that he “was being used in some sort of soft coup” against Trump. A year later, he was one of the loudest voices spreading assorted conspiracy theories and asserting the election had been stolen from Donald Trump. In December 2020, he participated in an unscheduled White House meeting with Trump, Flynn, and attorney Sidney Powell, during which they considered various schemes to overturn the election results, including Trump seizing voting machines. Weeks earlier, Byrne paid for a private jet to fly a group of Proud Boys to Washington, DC, to attend a protest supporting Trump and his false claim that the election had been rigged against him.

The heart of Moynihan’s case is an account from a 57-year-old Kosovar businessman named Halit Sahitaj, who lives in Spain and travels on a Serbian passport. A statement from Sahitaj dated October 3, 2023, is attached to Moynihan’s complaint. The statement doesn’t indicate who collected it from Sahitaj, but in his filing, Moynihan says he spoke with the witnesses he cites.

Sahitaj offers a wild and seemingly implausible account. He claims that in February 2020 he was contacted by a man who called himself Florian and who said he worked for the US State Department. Florian told Sahitaj that Kosovo intelligence suspected Sahitaj was a Russian spy and that he could help Sahitaj with this situation. Florian eventually revealed that he worked for the CIA. He noted he was interested in Sahitaj’s connections in Russia. According to Sahitaj, he officially recruited Sahitaj as a CIA informant. But Sahitaj doesn’t say whether he was able to confirm Florian worked for the intelligence agency.

Florian instructed Sahitaj to meet him at a safe house in Belgium and to bring watches worn by him, his wife, and their son. These watches and his car would be modified with tracking technology. All Sahitaj had to do was pay Florian 75,000 euros for these modifications and 12,000 euros for a training course and wire an additional 6,000 eruos to a colleague of Florian in the United States to cover expense for the training course. Sahitaj claims he did all this. Florian supposedly showed him a badge that said “Special Agent” and bore the initials “CIA.” 

This recruitment story does not match with what’s known about CIA procedures.

Months later, in June 2020, when Sahitaj was with Florian, the supposed CIA officer received a call from a man Florian identified as Jack Smith. On speaker, the man said to Sahitaj, “Hello, it’s nice to meet you.” Later Florian told Sahitaj that Smith wanted Sahitaj to assist his investigations. Then an assignment came: Sahitaj should contact people in Kosovo and ask them for money to be dropped from war crime investigations. If they actually paid Sahitaj, he could keep 10 percent and the rest would go into a “black account” to finance future operations run by Smith’s office.

Sahitaj says he approached three people with this offer, and they each angrily told him to get lost. Florian subsequently informed Sahitaj that he was mad at Sahitaj for blowing this job. But, he said, Sahitaj could demonstrate his “value” to the CIA by voluntarily donating 400,000 to 500,000 euros to Smith’s “black funds.” Sahitaj reports that he made a 400,000 euro payment, and Florian put Sahitaj on the phone with the fellow who supposedly was Smith. That man thanked Sahitaj. So by now, Sahitaj, at Florian’s instruction, had supposedly handed the CIA and this “black account” 493,000 euros of his own funds. He had not met Smith in person. At one point, while he was traveling with Florian, he saw Florian flash an identification card with the name Faik Imeri. 

The story continues. Sahitaj says that Florian arranged for him to provide false and incriminating testimony to Smith’s investigators during an October 1, 2020 interview. This was being done, he was told, at Smith’s behest. Florian also “tasked” Sahitaj with locating Russian oligarchs on the US sanctions list and offering to remove them from the list if they would sign a contract to work with the CIA, provide the agency information on Vladimir Putin, and pay into the “black fund.” Sahitaj maintains that Florian told him “during this operation I would be working directly for Jack Smith.” He says he found one Russian oligarch for this scheme. Then on December 15, 2020, according to his statement, Sahitaj was arrested in Spain for extortion and money laundering. He was imprisoned for ten months before he was released on bail.

Once again he heard from the man who Florian claimed was Jack Smith—via phone—and this fellow urged him to continue pursuing that Russian oligarch. Sahitaj says that he used this oligarch to cut a deal with another oligarch.

Not surprisingly, there is a supposed Hillary Clinton angle in Sahitaj’s account. He claims that in January 2022 Florian told him that Smith wanted to know if the second oligarch “was still in possession of evidence of corruption by Hillary Clinton” and that Sahitaj learned through an intermediary that the second oligarch “does still have the evidence and had not shared it with anyone.” Sahitaj’s statement does not provide any details regarding this alleged material. 

Then, Sahitaj recounts, he had a falling out with Florian, who abruptly dumped him as an operative. He says in the statement that he felt he “had been used by Florian and Prosecutor Jack Smith.” Sahitaj adds that he learned that Florian had swindled $16 million from the two Russian oligarchs, and one was demanding that Sahitaj pay him back for that.  

It’s a bizarre account from a fellow who says he handed a self-proclaimed CIA officer half a million euros to become his operative without ever ascertaining this man was truly connected to the agency and who was arrested for extortion and money laundering, not once but twice. In his statement, he acknowledges his first arrest. And according to El Confidencial, a Spanish outlet, Sahitaj was arrested in Spain in August. It reported he had allegedly “contacted various individuals and threatened to file false complaints against them in Russia or Spain to involve them in criminal cases if they did not agree to pay him large sums of money.” Spanish news outlets have described Sahitaj as an associate of a convicted Russian mobster. 

In a 2019 interview with a Kosovo outlet, Sahitaj said, “Anyone who thinks I’m a spy for Russia is a spy for Serbia.” He noted, “I know the Russian oligarchs, even those who hang out with Putin.” He maintained in this interview that Interpol files stated that he was not suspected of criminal activities such as espionage and money laundering.

It’s tough to confirm the key—and most outlandish—parts of Sahitaj’s story. But he did interact with the SPO. On April 22, 2022, he had an interview via phone with with Alan Tieger, a prominent lawyer who was a senior prosecutor in the Specialist Prosecutor’s Office. According to a transcript of the conversation—which Moynihan attached to his complaint—Sahitaj had indeed been interviewed by the SPO in October 2020. That was when, according to Sahitaj’s statement, he presented false testimony to the war crime prosecutors at Florian’s urging.

The SPO declined to comment regarding Sahitaj’s allegations or Tieger’s interview with Sahitaj. But in a court filing the SPO submitted last year—in which Sahitaj was identified not by name but by a witness number, W04730—the prosecutors asserted that Sahitaj has been spreading “fanciful allegations” and a “fantastical” account regarding his own actions and that the SPO possessed no material “suggesting that [Sahitaj] has a relationship with any intelligence agency.” 

Sahitaj could not be reached for comment.

Another statement attached to Moynihan’s complaint comes from Milaim Zeka, a 61-year-old, Kosovo-born Swedish citizen who is a journalist and a former member of the Kosovo parliament. Zeka is a controversial figure in Kosovo, with a history of arrests and acquittals. He was arrested in 2013 and charged for broadcasting a show in which protected witnesses against a group of former fighters for the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)—an ethnic Albanian militia that fought for Kosovo independence and has faced accusations it committed war crimes—could be identified. Prosecutors said this was an effort at witness intimidation. He was later acquitted. Zeka was charged in 2018 with fraud and money laundering and subsequently indicted for threatening a prosecutor in the case. He was acquitted this year of some of those charges. Others are pending before an appeals court. He was charged in 2021 with illegally recording and photographing subjects of a story, but again acquitted.

Moynihan’s complaint does not mention Zeka’s arrests or his ties to lawmakers Smith prosecuted. It describes Zeka as a “well known journalist in Kosovo.”

In the Zeka statement Moynihan cites—dated September 26, 2023 and titled “Statement for the American Congress (not to be disclosed with media)”—Zeka recalls his own interactions with the self-purported CIA officer who Sahitaj knew as Florian. Zeka’s statement says that this man told him he had participated in the assassination of Osama bin Laden and that he said that Smith had been part of an attempt to extort 10 million euros from a Kosovo businessmen. Zeka maintains this fellow claimed that Smith worked with Serbian intelligence to create a “criminal group” in Kosovo that involved Halit Sahitaj. Zeka notes that he came to the conclusion that the this supposed CIA operative had “nothing to do with the CIA.”

Edlira Qefalija, Zeka’s wife, also submitted a “Statement for the American Congress” attached to Moynihan’s complaint. She says that she witnessed Zeka’s conversations with the man who claimed to be a CIA officer and that this person “on behalf of Jack Smith” told her husband that he could be arrested due to a 2003 real estate transaction and sent to prison for 10 years. But if Zeka paid 320,000 euros he could be cleared. She notes that Sahitaj loaned her and Zeka 100,000 euros for this payment but “it was [Sahitaj] who actually gave…the whole sum of money.” She also says, “I heard [the man who claimed to be with the CIA] was asking for money on behalf of Jack Smith in order for other people not to face possible charges.” 

Mother Jones sent Zeka messages asking who took his statement and whether he possessed any firsthand information implicating Smith in any wrongdoing. We also requested comment regarding his arrests. He replied, “You have read my statement. I have nothing more to add.” Qefalija, his wife, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

The statements from Sahitaj, Zeka, and Qefalija contain a whirl of allegations that are difficult to follow and assess. They appear tied to political disputes and intrigues related to the prosecution of war crimes in Kosovo. Bota Sot, a newspaper in Kosovo, reported in September that both Sahitaj and Zeka were involved in a wiretapping scandal related to Serbian intelligence and persons accused of war crimes. (Sahitaj has also been tied to a separate wiretapping controversy in Spain.) 

Neither Sahitaj nor Zeka, in their statements, present direct evidence of wrongdoing by Smith. His name only came up when mentioned by the man Sahitaj knew as Florian, whose credibility they each ended up questioning. Was Florian really a CIA officer? Or was something else afoot? Zeka’s statement also claims that this person was somehow connected to Charles McGonigal, the FBI official who pleaded guilty to money laundering, violating US sanctions on Russia, and accepting $225,000 from an Albanian American named Agron Nezaj, a former Albanian intelligence employee. 

Dibran Hoxha, a political analyst and activist in Kosovo, says Zeka appears to be part of an opposition to the SPO that has developed in Kosovo since prosecutors began targeting former members of the KLA, in addition to Serbs, for war crimes in the 1990s. “They want to delegitimize the functioning and the role of the court,” Hoxha explains. He adds that these critics, with their grudges against Smith, have seemingly found “a common interest” with Trump supporters in the United States.

The Justice Department did not reply to a request for comment regarding Moynihan’s allegations. 

The MAGA right has seized on Sahitaj’s uncorroborated story to disparage Smith. And there’s an interesting piece of history to this episode. In June 2020, the SPO announced the indictment of Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi. This came three days before he was to travel to the United States for a special summit with Serbia at the Trump White House. Thaçi had been one of the top commanders of the KLA during Kosovo’s war for independence. The SPO said that after a “lengthy investigation,” it could demonstrate “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Thaçi, who denied committing war crimes, and others had perpetrated “murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture.” It alleged the victims numbered nearly 100. 

In response to the indictment, Thaçi canceled his trip to Washington, and the summit was scuttled. This meeting, promoted as a step toward a final peace settlement between Kosovo and Serbia, was touted by the Trump administration as a major accomplishment. The talks had been brokered by Ric Grenell, a Trump-appointed special envoy. Some European diplomats feared Grenell had rushed the negotiations, which included dicey land swaps that had the potential to rekindle the fighting. Several months later, Thaçi resigned. (The Thaçi case is pending. He has pleaded not guilty.) 

Smith’s decision to indict Thaçi before the summit has long rankled Trump and his crew. Earlier this year, Trump, apparently referencing Thaçi, put up a social media post that accused Smith of seeking to put “a high government official in prison because he was a Trump positive person.” After Smith was appointed special counsel to investigate Trump, Grenell, a fierce Trump cheerleader and potential top national security official if Trump regains the White House, claimed that Smith had indicted Thaci purely for Smith’s own benefit. He tweeted, “Jack Smith’s actions to indict and imprison [based on] a 20 year old accusation simply because President Thaçi was negotiating a big agreement that would end Jack’s cushy job is a scandal.”

After Smith in June indicted Trump for mishandling sensitive government documents, Grenell declared, “He has always overplayed his hand in the cases he’s handled because he’s an emotional partisan activist. His Kosovo case is falling apart and his own witnesses there are now claiming he and his team at The Hague faked CIA officials to intimidate them.” Earlier this month, Grenell in an interview with America’s Future, a group led by Mike Flynn, slammed Smith as “willing to do anything, including manipulating the rule of law, to indict his political opponents and put them in jail. What Smith did to Kosovo President Hashim Thaci was purely political. It was designed to ruin President Trump’s negotiations to normalize relations between Kosovo and Serbia.”

This latest effort to undermine Smith echoes the Trump gang’s attempt to tar Joe Biden with allegations from Ukraine. Prior to the 2020 election, Giuliani, on Trump’s behalf, went hunting for dirt on Biden and his son Hunter Biden in Ukraine and ended up collaborating with Ukraine officials who have been cited by the US government as Russian disinformation agents. To concoct a scandal, Giuliani and right-wing media disseminated allegations from unreliable sources that emerged from the cauldron of Ukraine politics and that were unsupported or debunked. The made-in-Kosovo Smith allegations have a similar ring. Moynihan states in his complaint that he is unable to “corroborate” these “serious allegations,” insisting the Justice Department and other US agencies must investigate them. This lack of corroboration is unlikely to keep these allegations from spreading. For the moment, they are percolating within far-right circles. But if the past is any guide, they could soon be coming to a cable news show or congressional hearing.