Day: December 24, 2023

An NFT collection with different scenarios of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s death was posted on OpenSea. A Putin Huilo collection features 18 cartoons, which portray the dictator’s death by a grenade or a bullet, by hanging or electrocution.

The cartoons were created by independent illustrators from Ukraine and Belarus, who condemn Russian and Belarusian aggression against Ukraine. All the money raised from NFT sales will go to support the Ukrainian army, medical and humanitarian assistance to the Ukrainians affected by the war.

With 10,000 copies in each edition, the price for one illustration ranges between $25 and $1000. In case of selling out the collection, illustrators plan to raise $1.5 millions. The final sum will be shared among various charity funds.

WASHINGTON (TND) — FBI director Christopher Wray urged lawmakers to renew a law that allows the agency to conduct warrantless surveillance outside the U.S. amid bipartisan calls for reform due to concerns about privacy violations of U.S. citizens.

Wray appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday for the top law enforcement agency’s regular oversight hearing. His appearance comes as Congress has a series of issues connected to the FBI before it and limited time or partisan divisions presenting obstacles to finding a solution.

Along with renewing the authorization of the surveillance tool, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, some Republican lawmakers have also called for cutting the agency’s funding, blocking the construction of a new headquarters to replace its dilapidated Washington location amid complaints about the handling of the investigation into the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and investigation of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

Tuesday’s hearing also comes as the U.S. is facing a heightened level of threats at home and abroad amid the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Wray told a separate Senate committee last month that the threat of international terrorism targeting the U.S. has spiked since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

“What I would say that is unique about the environment that we’re in right now in my career is that while there may have been times over the years where individual threats could have been higher here or there than where they may be right now, I’ve never seen a time where all the threats or so many of the threats are all elevated, all at exactly the same time,” Wray said.

One of the most pressing issues facing lawmakers in a busy finish to the year is deciding whether to renew Section 702, which will expire on Dec. 31 without congressional action.

Wray told lawmakers that allowing it to lapse would be dangerous to national security and would be “devastating” to its ability to counter threats.

“Blinding ourselves through either allowing 702 to lapse or amending it in a way that guts its effectiveness would be reckless at best and dangerous and irresponsible at worst,” Wray said. “The reality is the whole reason we have 702 focused on foreign threats from overseas is to protect America from those threats. It’s not to admire foreign threats from afar and study them and think about them. It’s to know what they are and to make sure they don’t hurt Americans here.”

There are several bills with potential reforms up for debate in the House and Senate, some of which include a new requirement for agents to obtain a warrant before running a search on digital communications for information on U.S. citizens. National security officials in support of renewing Section 702 argue that a warrant requirement would make the powerful surveillance tool much less useful and effective.

“What if there were a terrorist attack that we had a shot to prevent, but couldn’t take it, because the FBI was deprived of the ability under 702 to look at key information already sitting in our holdings?” Wray said during Tuesday’s hearing.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle said they supported the FBI’s ability to combat terrorism by using information obtained from Section 702, but still had concerns about innocent Americans getting wrapped up in the searches.

Also at issue for Wray was accusations the FBI and broader justice system has been politicized against conservative Americans and former President Donald Trump, who is facing multiple federal indictments.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, accused Wray of allowing the bureau to become overcome by partisan political preferences by career officials.

“You’re simply sitting blindly by while career partisans in your agency allow it to be weaponized, and you are damaging the FBI and you are damaging the Department of Justice,” Cruz said.

Other Republicans at the hearing also asked Wray about the bureau’s involvement in an investigation into Hunter Biden, a yearslong affair that dates back to the Trump administration. A pair of IRS whistleblowers have alleged that the probe into his overseas business dealings and tax violations was slow-walked due to political influence.

Wray declined to directly answer most questions about Hunter Biden or Trump because both investigations remain ongoing, a longstanding DOJ policy. He did say that his agency was directed to follow the facts in any investigation regardless of the subject or political consequences.

“My instructions to our people on this and on every other investigation are that we’re to follow the facts wherever they lead, no matter who likes it, no matter what political influence,” he said.

Vladimir Putin was annoyed – or maybe just bored. The Russian leader had been patiently fielding questions from a small group of international journalists in the restaurant of a modest hotel in Davos. Then one of the queries seemed to irritate him. He stared back at the questioner, an American, and said slowly, through an interpreter: “I’ll answer that question in a minute. But first let me ask you about the extraordinary ring you have on your finger.”

All heads in the room swivelled. “Why is the stone so large?” Putin continued. A few of the audience began to giggle and the journalist looked uncomfortable. Putin took on a tone of mock sympathy and continued: “You surely don’t mind me asking, because you wouldn’t be wearing something like that unless you were trying to draw attention to yourself?” There was more laughter. By now, the original question had been forgotten. It was a masterclass in distraction and bullying.

The year was 2009, and Putin had already been in power for almost a decade. But this was my first encounter with him in the flesh, during his visit to the World Economic Forum. Putin’s ability to radiate menace, without raising his voice, was striking. But so was the laughter of his audience. Despite the violence of his Russian government – as demonstrated in Chechnya and Georgia – western opinion-formers were still inclined to treat him as a pantomime villain.

I was reminded of this just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In a televised meeting at the Kremlin with his closest advisers, Putin toyed with Sergei Naryshkin, the head of his foreign intelligence service – making the feared securocrat look like a stuttering fool. The pleasure he took in humiliating somebody in front of an audience was once again on display. But this time, nobody was laughing. Putin was about to plunge Europe into its biggest land war since 1945. Russian troops launched a full-scale invasion on 24 February. Within a month, more than 10 million Ukrainians had fled their homes, thousands of troops and civilians had been killed and the coastal city of Mariupol had been destroyed.

Even though western intelligence services had warned for months that Russia was poised to attack, many experienced Putin-watchers, both in Russia and the west, refused to believe it. After more than 20 years of his leadership, they felt that they understood Putin. He was ruthless and violent, no doubt, but he was also believed to be rational, calculating and committed to Russia’s integration into the world economy. Few believed he was capable of such a reckless gamble.

Looking back, however, it is clear that the outside world has consistently misread him. From the moment he took power, outsiders too often saw what they wanted and played down the darkest sides of Putinism.

In fact, the outside world’s indulgence of Putin went much further than simply turning a blind eye to his excesses. For a rising generation of strongman leaders and cultural conservatives outside Russia, Putin became something of a hero and a role model. As his admirers saw it, the Russian leader had inherited a country humiliated by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Through strength and cunning, he had restored its status and global power, and even regained some of the territory lost when the USSR broke up. And he had delighted nationalists and populists the world over by successfully defying self-righteous American liberals such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, was not simply spouting propaganda when he said in 2018: “There’s a demand in the world for special, sovereign leaders, for decisive ones … Putin’s Russia was the starting point.”

Xi Jinping admires Putin’s strongman leadership style

The Putin fanclub has had numerous members in the west over the years. Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s close adviser and lawyer, expressed admiration for Putin’s annexation of Crimea, remarking: “He makes a decision and he executes it, quickly. That’s what you call a leader.” Nigel Farage, the former leader of Ukip and the Brexit party, and a friend of Donald Trump, once named Putin the world leader he most admired, adding: “The way he played the whole Syria thing. Brilliant. Not that I approve of him politically.” Matteo Salvini, the leader of the populist right Northern League party and a former deputy prime minister of Italy, flaunted his admiration for the Russian leader by being photographed in a Putin T-shirt in Red Square. Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, has said, “My favourite hero is Putin.”

Most important of all, Xi Jinping is also a confirmed admirer. A week after being appointed as president of China in early 2013, Xi made his first state visit overseas – choosing to visit Putin in Moscow. On 4 February 2022, just 20 days before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin met Xi in Beijing for their 38th summit meeting. Shortly afterwards, Russia and China announced a “no limits” partnership. As the joint Russian-Chinese statement made clear, the two leaders are united in their hostility to American global power and to the pro-democracy “colour revolutions” they accuse Washington of stirring up around the world – from Ukraine to Hong Kong. Putin and Xi are both strongman rulers who have centralised power around themselves and encouraged a cult of personality. They are, as Alexander Gabuev, a Russian academic, puts it, “the tsar and the emperor”. Whether this partnership of strongmen will survive the Russian invasion of Ukraine is now one of the most important questions in international politics.

Putin was sworn into office as president of Russia on 31 December 1999. But at first it was not obvious that he would last very long in the job, let alone that he would emerge as the most aggressive challenger to the western liberal order and the pioneer of a new model of authoritarian leadership. As the chaotic Yeltsin era of the 1990s drew to a close, Putin’s ascent to the top job was eased by his former colleagues in the KGB. But he also had the approval of Russia’s richest and most powerful people, the oligarchs, who saw him as a capable administrator and “safe pair of hands” who would not threaten established interests.

Viewed from the west, Putin looked relatively reassuring. In his first televised speech from the Kremlin, given on New Year’s Eve 1999, just a few hours after taking over from Yeltsin, Putin promised to “protect freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the mass media, ownership rights, these fundamental elements of a civilised society”. In March 2000, he won his first presidential election and proudly asserted: “We have proved that Russia is becoming a modern democratic state.” When Bill Clinton met Putin in the Kremlin for the first time, in June 2000, he declared his Russian counterpart “fully capable of building a prosperous, strong Russia, while preserving freedom and pluralism and the rule of law”.

In his first year in office, he moved to assert the authority of the state and to use warfare to bolster his personal position

Yet while Putin may initially have found it convenient to use the rhetoric of liberal democracy, his early actions as president told a different story. In his first year in office, he moved immediately to rein in independent sources of power, to assert the central authority of the state and to use warfare to bolster his own personal position – all actions that were to become hallmarks of Putinism. The escalation of the war in Chechnya made Putin seem like a nationalist hero, standing up for Russian interests and protecting the ordinary citizen from terrorism. In an early move that alarmed liberals, the new president reinstated the old Soviet national anthem. His promises to protect media freedom turned out to be empty: Russia’s few independent television networks were brought under government control.

As Putin established himself in office, the image-makers got to work crafting a strongman persona for him. Gleb Pavlovsky, one of Putin’s first spin doctors, later described him as a “quick learner” and a “talented actor”. Key images were placed in the Russian media and around the world: Putin on horseback, Putin practising judo, Putin arm-wrestling or strolling bare-chested by a river in Siberia. These photographs attracted mockery from intellectuals and cynics. But the president’s handlers were clear-eyed. As Pavlovsky later told the Washington Post, the goal was to ensure that “Putin corresponds ideally to the Hollywood image of a saviour-hero”.

In any case, Russians were more than ready for a strongman to ride to their rescue. The collapse of the Soviet system in 1991 had allowed for the emergence of democracy and freedom of speech. But as the economy atrophied and then fell apart, many experienced a severe drop in living standards and personal security. By 1999, life expectancy for Russian men had fallen by three and a half years to below 60. A UN report attributed this to a “rise in self-destructive behaviour”, which it linked to “rising poverty rates, unemployment and financial insecurity”. Under those circumstances, a decisive leader who promised to turn back the clock had real appeal.

Long before Trump promised to “make America great again”, Putin was promising to bring back the stability and pride of the Soviet era to those Russians who had lost out in the 1990s. But his nostalgia was not restricted to the social cohesion of Soviet times. Putin also yearned to restore some of the USSR’s lost international clout. In a speech in 2005, Putin labelled the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. As the years have passed, he has become increasingly preoccupied by Russian history. In the summer of 2021, he published a long essay entitled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians – which, even at the time, some saw as a manifesto for invasion. Delving through centuries of history, Putin attempted to prove that Ukraine was an artificial state and that “Russia was robbed, indeed” when Ukraine gained independence in 1991.

Fyodor Lukyanov, an academic who is close to the Russian leader, told me in 2019 that one of Putin’s enduring fears was the loss of Russia’s status as one of the world’s great powers for the first time in centuries. His resentment at what he regarded as American slights and betrayals set Putin on a collision course with the west. A landmark moment came with a speech he gave at the Munich Security Conference in 2007.

The Russian president had put the west on notice that he intended to fight back against the US-led world order

That speech was a direct challenge to the west and an expression of cold fury. He accused the US of an “almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts”. The Putin of 2000, who had expressed pride at Russia’s transformation into a modern democracy, had given way to a man who denounced western talk of freedom and democracy as a hypocritical front for power politics.

The Munich speech was not just an angry reflection on the past. It also pointed the way to the future. The Russian president had put the west on notice that he intended to fight back against the US-led world order. It foreshadowed a lot of what was to come: Russia’s military intervention in Georgia in 2008, its annexation of Crimea in 2014, its dispatch of troops to Syria in 2015, its meddling in the US presidential election of 2016. All of these actions burnished Putin’s reputation as a nationalist and a strong leader. They also made him an icon for strongmen throughout the world who rejected western leadership and the “liberal international order”.

This indictment of the west goes back to the 1990s. It is argued repeatedly in Moscow that the expansion of Nato to take in countries of the former Soviet empire (including Poland and the Baltic states) was a direct contradiction of promises made after the end of the cold war. Nato’s intervention in the Kosovo war of 1998‑9 added to the list of grievances proving, in the Kremlin’s eyes, both that Nato is an aggressor and that western talk of respecting sovereignty and state borders was nothing but hypocrisy. Russians were not reassured by the western riposte that Nato was acting in response to ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses by Serbia. As one liberal Russian politician put it to me in 2008, in a moment of frankness: “We know we have committed human rights abuses in Chechnya. If Nato can bomb Belgrade for that, why could they not bomb Moscow?”

Putin’s case against Nato also takes in the Iraq war launched by the US and many of its allies in 2003. For him, the massive bloodshed in Iraq was proof that the west’s self-proclaimed pursuit of “democracy and freedom” only brings instability and suffering in its wake. If you mention the brutal behaviour of Russian forces in Chechnya or Syria in Moscow, you will always have the Iraq war thrown back in your face.

Crucially, the west’s promotion of democracy has posed a direct threat to Putin’s own political and personal survival. From 2003 to 2005, pro-democracy “colour revolutions” broke out in many of the states of the former Soviet Union – including Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. If demonstrators in Independence Square in Kyiv could bring down an autocratic government in Ukraine, what was to stop the same happening in Red Square? In Russia, many believed it was a “fairytale” that these were spontaneous uprisings. As a former intelligence operative whose entire professional career had involved running “black operations”, Putin was particularly inclined to see the CIA as pulling the strings. The goal, as the Kremlin saw it, was to install pro-western puppet regimes. Russia itself could be next.

The shock of the Iraq war and the colour revolutions were the recent experiences that informed Putin’s Munich speech in 2007. And, as the Kremlin saw it, this pattern of western misdeeds continued. Putin points to the western powers’ 2011 intervention in Libya that resulted in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi – something he believes they had promised they would not do.

The overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi is a particularly sore point for Putin

That episode is a particularly sore spot for Putin, since it took place during the four years from 2008 to 2012 when he was serving in the lesser job of prime minister, having stepped aside as president in favour of his acolyte Dmitry Medvedev. As Putin’s supporters see it, a naive Medvedev was duped into supporting a UN resolution that allowed for a limited intervention, only for western powers to exceed their mandate in order to overthrow and kill Gaddafi. They have no time for the response that the Libyan intervention was made on human rights grounds, but that events then took on a life of their own, as the Libyan rebellion gained steam.

Medvedev’s alleged naivety in allowing the Libyan intervention proved useful for Putin, however: it established the idea that he was indispensable as Russia’s leader. Any substitute, even one chosen by Putin, would leave the country vulnerable to a scheming and ruthless west. In 2011, Putin announced that he intended to return as president, after the potential presidential term had been extended to two consecutive periods of six years. This announcement provoked rare public demonstrations in Moscow and other cities, which again fanned Putin’s fears about western schemes to undermine his power. I was in Moscow in January 2012 and witnessed the marches and banners, some of which carried pointed references to Gaddafi’s fate. Putin understood the parallels. He commented publicly about how disgusted he had been by the footage of Gaddafi’s murder – which perhaps reflected a certain concern about his own potential fate. The fact that Hillary Clinton, then America’s Secretary of State, expressed public support for the 2012 demonstrations was deeply resented by Putin and may have justified, in his mind, Russia’s efforts to undermine Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016.

Putin secured his re-election, but his sense that the west remained a threat to Russia was further stoked by events in Ukraine in 2013-14. The prospect of that country signing an association agreement with the European Union was seen as a serious threat in the Kremlin, since it would pull Russia’s most important neighbour – once an integral part of the USSR – into the west’s sphere of influence. Under pressure from Moscow, the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych reversed course. But this provoked another popular uprising in Kyiv, forcing Yanukovych to flee. The loss of a compliant ally in Kyiv was a major geopolitical reverse for the Kremlin.

Putin’s response was to dramatically raise the stakes, by crossing the line into the use of military force. In February 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, a region that was part of Ukraine but had belonged to Russia until 1954 and was populated largely by Russian-speakers. It was also, by agreement with the Ukrainians, the home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. In the west, the annexation of Crimea, along with Russian military intervention in eastern Ukraine, was seen as a flagrant violation of international law that many feared could be the prelude to further acts of aggression.

But in Russia, the annexation was widely greeted as a triumph – it represented the nation’s fightback. Putin’s approval ratings in independent opinion polls soared to over 80%. In the immediate afterglow, he came closer to achieving the ultimate goal of the strongman ruler: the complete identification of the nation with the leader. Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian parliament, exulted: “If there’s Putin, there’s Russia. If there’s no Putin, there’s no Russia.” Putin himself crowed that Crimea had been taken without a shot being fired.

The west’s response was to slap economic sanctions on Russia. But western indignation did not last long. Four years later, Russia hosted a successful World Cup. At the final, Putin sat with the presidents of France and Croatia, two EU nations, in the VIP box in Moscow.

The ease with which Putin annexed Crimea – and the swiftness with which the west seemed prepared to forgive – may have laid the ground for an unjustified confidence that led to the invasion of Ukraine. His overreach is also a reminder of the flaws in the strongman model of leadership. Decades in office can cause a leader to succumb to megalomania or paranoia. The elimination of checks and balances, the centralisation of power and the promotion of a cult of personality make it more likely that a leader will make a disastrous mistake. For all these reasons, strongman rule is an inherently flawed and dangerous model of government.

Tragically, that lesson is being learned all over again – in Russia and Ukraine. An invasion that was meant to secure Russia’s place as a great power and Putin’s place in history has clearly gone wrong. Putin is now involved in a brutal war of attrition. Western sanctions will see the Russian economy shrink dramatically this year, and the Russian middle-class is witnessing the disappearance of many of the consumer goods and travel opportunities that emerged with the end of the cold war.

The unofficial goal of western policy is clearly to force Putin from power. But the endgame may not come as swiftly as we would like. Deeply entrenched in his decades-long mission, Putin is now even less likely to give up power voluntarily, since his successors might repudiate his policies, or even put him on trial.

The prospects for popular uprising are equally poor, despite the many brave Russians who have indicated their disgust over the war. Any protests are likely to be swiftly crushed with violence and imprisonment, as they were in neighbouring Belarus in 2020 and 2021. A third scenario – the possibility of an enlightened group within the elite seizing power – seems out of reach, too. Organising a palace coup against Putin will be very difficult: all dissenters were purged from the Kremlin long ago. Putin also takes his personal security very seriously: several of his former bodyguards have become rich in their own right. While there will be many within Russia who are dismayed by the course that events have taken, orchestrating that diffuse discontent into a coherent plot looks like a formidable challenge.

The difficult truth is that Putin’s strongman style has defined his rule over Russia – and despite his many crimes and misdemeanours, those same strongman tactics may preserve him in power for years to come.

Gideon Rachman is chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times. His new book, The Age of the Strongman, is published by Vintage (£20). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

A former FBI special agent who led a counterintelligence division was sentenced to more than four years in prison on Thursday for providing information to a Russian oligarch, in violation of US sanctions.

Charles McGonigal, 55, is one of the highest-ranking FBI officials to ever be convicted of a crime. He spent 22 years at the FBI before retiring in September 2018, leading investigations into the 2010 release of state department classified cables by WikiLeaks, and a hunt for a suspected Chinese spy working as a mole in the CIA.

But in 2021, after he had retired, McGonigal supplied information to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to help him sink a business rival. Deripaska had been placed on a US sanctions list in 2018, and was attempting to gather information to get a competitor placed on the sanctions list as well.

McGonigal received a payment of $17,500 for doing so, laundered from a Russian bank to Cyprus to a business bank account in New Jersey and then to McGonigal’s private account.

McGonigal was arrested in January 2023 and indicted on nine charges. In August, he pleaded guilty to one charge to avoid the other eight – namely, conspiring to violate US sanctions and laundering payments.

On Thursday he was sentenced to 50 months in prison and fined $40,000. The judge for the southern district of New York, Jennifer H Rearden, said her sentence was meant to balance McGonigal’s 22 years of FBI service with the “extremely serious” nature of his crimes, which she said imperiled national security.

“Charles McGonigal violated the trust his country placed in him by using his high-level position at the FBI to prepare for his future in business. Once he left public service, he jeopardized our national security by providing services to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian tycoon who acts as Vladimir Putin’s agent,” said Damian Williams, a US attorney, in a statement on the sentencing.

“Today’s sentence is a reminder that anyone who violates United States sanctions – particularly those in whom this country has placed its trust – will pay a heavy penalty.”

McGonigal also faces a second sentencing in Washington DC early next year, after he also pleaded guilty to hiding $225,000 in payments from a former Albanian intelligence officer.

Vladimir Putin has had Donald Trump’s “number for some time … knows how to manipulate him” and still sees him “as an asset”, the former White House Russia expert Fiona Hill said, discussing the Russian leader and the Republican presidential frontrunner.

“That’s literally [Putin’s] trump card,” Hill told the One Decision Podcast, hosted by the reporter Jane Ferguson and Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6, when asked if she thought the Russian president, bogged down in war in Ukraine, was betting on Trump beating Joe Biden next year and returning to power.

Hill added: “The anticipation that Trump’s going to come back is something for Putin of a boon … he can play with that. He can use it as kind of a warning … scare the Ukrainians, the Europeans, the rest of the world. Putin is pretty confident, given his experiences with Trump in the past, that Trump will be quick to try to resolve the … war in Ukraine in his favor.

“And, you know, obviously, Putin has had Trump’s number for some time, he knows how to manipulate him … he has been very good at the art of flattery with Trump. He sees Trump as an asset in many respects.”

From 2017 to 2019 Hill was a senior national security aide in the Trump White House, eventually coming under the spotlight as a witness in Trump’s first impeachment, for seeking to blackmail Ukraine for dirt on political rivals. In 2013, she published Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, a widely praised study.

Though Hill made her name in Washington foreign policy circles she was born and raised in the north-east of England, attending St Andrews University in Scotland before studying at Harvard.

Joe Biden has led a global coalition in support of Ukraine but US funding for Kyiv is currently held up in Congress, Republicans loyal to Trump demanding hardline immigration measures in return for more aid. On Wednesday Punchbowl News, which reports on Capitol Hill, noted the “growing isolationist wing” of the Republican party, notably including the installation of a Trump ally, Mike Johnson, as House speaker.

“Washington has cooled on Ukraine,” it said.

Hill said Putin increasingly sensed a chance to end the war in his favour.

“Myself and many other colleagues are already getting little feelers being sent out to see whether the United States and the west are ready to negotiate,” Hill said, adding that this “suggests that Russia would like to see this ended, but … completely on Putin’s terms: no return of territory, the opportunity to put pressure on Ukraine over the longer term and certainly no reparations.”

Now chancellor of Durham University, Hill is also a member of the board of overseers at Harvard and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. On the One Decision Podcast, she also discussed her well-received memoir, There Is Nothing For You Here, which was published two years ago, famously prompting Trump to call her “a deep state stiff with a nice accent”.

Trump and Putin have been entangled on the world stage ever since Trump entered US politics in 2015, amid warnings of Russian interference in American elections. In 2018, Trump was widely criticised for a subservient display at a summit with Putin in Helsinki. In 2019 a special counsel investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow ended with multiple indictments and extensive evidence of attempted obstruction by Trump but no proof of collusion.

Widely seen as an aspiring autocrat, Trump regularly praises Putin and other authoritarian leaders.

In New Hampshire last week, Trump told supporters: “Putin of Russia says that Biden’s … ‘politically motivated persecution of his political rival’ is very good for Russia because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy.’ So we talk about democracy, but the whole world is watching the persecution of a political opponent that’s kicking [Biden’s] ass.”

Trump has pleaded not guilty to 91 criminal charges under four indictments and also faces assorted civil cases and a ruling in Colorado kicking him off the ballot for inciting the January 6 insurrection. Regardless, he leads Republican polling by vast margins and is competitive or leads Biden in general election polls.

Hill told One Decision that because Trump “can be extraordinary, unpredictable … Putin probably has to tread very carefully, in fact, not to insult him, and not to kind of cross lines [because] Trump … lives for himself”.

But, she said, “Putin is pretty confident that he can stoke up the culture wars here, there and everywhere. And just with a little bit of deft use of political influence operations and propaganda, he can keep things that are moving in his direction already, moving in his direction.

“In any case, everything that Trump surrogates or Trump himself says about Nato [he has threatened to withdraw the US], about Europe and European security, about world and global affairs, about Ukraine, everything that’s happening on Capitol Hill … for Putin, this is just for him a sign that again, everything is going to rapidly switch in in his direction, his favor.”

KYIV — Ukraine’s spies aim to intensify intelligence operations and conduct sabotage strikes deep in Russian-controlled territory next year to bring the war as close to the Kremlin as possible, the head of Ukraine’s SBU security service told POLITICO.

“We cannot disclose our plans. They should remain a shocker for the enemy. We prepare surprises,” Major General Vasyl Malyuk said in written responses to questions. “The occupiers must understand that it will not be possible to hide. We will find the enemy everywhere.”

While he dodged specifics, Malyuk did give some hints. Logistics targets and military assets in occupied Ukrainian territory are likely to continue to be a focus. And then there are strikes that hit the enemy across the border.

“We are always looking for new solutions. So, cotton will continue to burn,” Malyuk joked.

Ukrainians use the word “cotton” to describe explosions in Russia and the occupied territories of Ukraine organized by Ukrainian special services. It came from Russian media and officials describing the growing number of such incidents with the word khlopok, which means both “blast” and “cotton” in Russian.

With combat along hundreds of kilometers of front lines essentially stalled for much of this year, the exploits of the SBU both boost Ukrainian morale and also hurt Russia’s war fighting abilities.

“The SBU carries out targeted point strikes. We stab the enemy with a needle right in the heart. Each of our special operations pursues a specific goal and gives its result. All this in a complex complicates the capabilities of the Russian Federation for waging war and brings our victory closer,” Malyuk said.

One area of focus will be Crimea and the Black Sea, building on this year’s operations.

Malyuk’s pet project is the Sea Baby drone, called malyuk in Ukrainian, which means “little guy.” The drone carries about 850 kilograms of explosives and is able to operate in stormy conditions, making it difficult to detect.

“With the help of those little guys we are gradually pushing the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation out of Crimea,” Malyuk said.

It’s been used to attack the Kerch Bridge that links occupied Crimea to mainland Russia in July as well as to hammer Russian ships.

In October 2022 the SBU’s marine drones attacked Sevastopol Bay damaging four Russian warships. This year, the drones hit two missile carriers, a tanker, an amphibious assault ship and also damaged a large military tugboat and Russia’s newest reconnaissance and hydrographic ship.

Malyuk’s pet project is the Sea Baby drone, called malyuk in Ukrainian, which means “little guy.” The drone carries about 850 kilograms of explosives and is able to operate in stormy conditions, making it difficult to detect | Courtesy of the Security Service of Ukraine

That forced Moscow to shift much of the fleet away from its base in occupied Sevastopol in Crimea, leaving the west of the sea free of Russian vessels and allowing Ukraine to resume use of its ports for shipping.

The Kerch Bridge is still standing after a 2022 truck bomb attack and this year’s strike, but is only partially open, Malyuk said.

“It is a legitimate target for us, according to international law and the rules of war. Ukrainian law also allows us to attack this object. And we have to destroy the logistics of our enemy,” Malyuk added.

Malyuk said that Kyiv carefully considers its targets before striking — an effort to stay within the rules of war in contrast with Russia, which has fired missiles, artillery and drones at both military and civilian targets.

“When planning and preparing its special operations, the SBU carefully selects its targets. We work on military facilities or on those that the enemy uses to carry out their military tasks. We act fully by the norms of international law,” Malyuk said.

The SBU conducts most of its operations on Ukraine’s territory — in Donbas, Crimea and the Black Sea.

“This is our land and we will use all possible methods to free it from the occupiers,” Malyuk said.

When it comes to planning something in Russia, SBU says it focuses only on targets used for military purposes like logistical corridors for supplying weapons — like the rail tunnel in Siberia hit with two explosions (the SBU hasn’t claimed responsibility) as well as warships, military bases and similar targets.

“All SBU operations you hear about are exclusively our work and our unique technical development,” Malyuk said. “These operations became possible, in particular, because we develop and implement our technical solutions.”

Russia should prepare to be hit.

Image source, Reuters

Image caption,

One of the court challenges to Donald Trump’s eligibility to run for president in 2024 has finally struck gold.

The Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling to disqualify the former president from the Republican Party’s upcoming primary ballot is yet another unprecedented moment in US politics.

It’s a decision that further blurs the lines between America’s political and judicial systems, setting up a fresh collision between the election campaign and the courts.

However, this latest legal setback is unlikely to seriously damage Mr Trump’s bid to return to the White House – and he is already using it to his political advantage.

The activists who brought the case in Colorado – a liberal watchdog group and collection of anti-Trump Republican and independent voters – may be celebrating their victory.

But the response so far by Democratic politicians – the ones who will stand before voters next year and are working to defeat Mr Trump at the ballot box – tells a different story.

This isn’t a fight they want.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold – who had declined to act unilaterally to block Mr Trump from the state’s primary – issued a response to the court’s decision on Wednesday that didn’t exactly drip with enthusiasm.

“This decision may be appealed,” she said. “I will follow the court decision that is in place at the time of ballot certification.”

Part of the reason for her seeming reluctance to weigh in – and the relative silence of other Democrats – is that the ultimate outlook for the Colorado challenge isn’t bright.

Mr Trump’s campaign is already promising to appeal the decision – directly to the US Supreme Court. According to Samuel Issacharoff, a professor of constitutional law at New York University, the appeal will almost certainly be granted, particularly given that other state courts have considered, and rejected, similar lawsuits.

“It cannot be that the national candidacy for presidency is determined on a state by state basis,” he said. “That would be a breakdown of the democratic order.”

The Supreme Court currently has a six-to-three conservative majority. And while the justices, even the three appointed by Mr Trump, have shown a willingness to rule against the former president in previous cases, Mr Issacharoff believed they would be extremely reluctant to be seen as limiting voters’ options at the ballot box.

Democrats may also be concerned that the legal challenges – and the Colorado ruling – plays into one of the central messages of Mr Trump’s campaign, that the ruling elite is threatened by his political movement and are willing to subvert the will of the people to keep him from power.

Trump Campaign Spokesman Steven Cheung called the Colorado ruling “completely flawed”. He said it was a sign that Democrats had lost faith in President Joe Biden and “are now doing everything they can to stop the American voters from throwing them out of office next November”.

Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s Republican rivals are largely rallying around him, as they have during all of the former president’s legal battles this year.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called the Colorado decision an abuse of power. Vivek Ramaswamy said he would remove his own name from the state’s primary ballot. The Republican Party of Colorado has threatened to cancel the primary entirely and pick their choice for a nominee through a caucus process.

“We’re going to win this the right way,” said former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who may be Mr Trump’s closest challenger. “The last thing we want is judges telling us who can and can’t be on the ballot.”

Democrats may be frustrated that, at least so far, Mr Trump seems to have avoided any price – political or legal – for the role he played in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol.

The former president has been indicted on charges related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election twice – by federal prosecutors and by a district attorney in Georgia. But those trials, which will be decided by citizen juries and not judges, are still months away, if not longer. And it may be telling that special counsel Jack Smith, who is heading the federal case, has brought narrow charges that don’t rely on directly proving that Mr Trump led an insurrection.

The decision by the Colorado Supreme Court may have offered a dramatic moment of accountability that some Trump critics are craving, but it also is likely to be a temporary one. And, in the end, it may make it more likely the former president returns to power, not less.

• Colorado
• US election 2024
• Donald Trump
• United States

WASHINGTON — The Colorado voters who sought to disqualify Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 Republican primary ballot ran the table on eight distinct legal issues on Tuesday. To ultimately keep him off the ballot, though, they almost certainly will have to do so again — in the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a 4-3 decision that set off a political and legal earthquake, the Colorado Supreme Court said that Trump had engaged in insurrection and therefore was barred by the 14th Amendment from holding federal office.

“This is a major and extraordinary holding from a state supreme court,” Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, wrote on the Election Law Blog. “Never in history has a presidential candidate been excluded from the ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. United States Supreme Court review seems inevitable, and it exerts major pressure on the court.”

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The majority on Tuesday said every key legal issue came out against Trump.

“The sum of these parts is this: President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of president,” the majority said in an unsigned opinion, saying that his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results amounted to engaging in an insurrection and that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, bars insurrectionists from federal office, including the presidency.

The majority added: “We do not reach these conclusions lightly. We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”

But the court gave Trump a provisional escape route. It put its ruling on hold through Jan. 4, and if he seeks review in the U.S. Supreme Court, as he said he will, the state court said his name would remain on the primary ballot.

It could take some time for the justices to act, and the Colorado Republican primary, scheduled for March, could proceed unaffected. The justices may have to grapple with the case’s many interlocking legal issues, which are novel, complex and extraordinarily consequential. Indeed, courts in other states have come to differing conclusions on some of the questions.

The justices may also be reluctant to withdraw from the voters the decision of how to assess Trump’s conduct after the 2020 election.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

Congress can remove the prohibition, the provision says, but only by a two-thirds vote in each chamber.

Though the provision was devised to address the aftermath of the Civil War, it was written in general terms and, most scholars say, continues to have force. Congress granted broad amnesties in 1872 and 1898. But those acts were retrospective, scholars say, and did not limit Section 3’s prospective force.

A Colorado trial judge had ruled that Trump had engaged in insurrection but accepted his argument that Section 3 did not apply to him, reasoning that Trump had not sworn the right kind of oath that the provision did not apply to the office of the presidency.

The Colorado Supreme Court affirmed the first part of the trial judge’s ruling — that Trump engaged in an insurrection, including by setting out to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election; trying to alter vote counts; encouraging bogus slates of competing electors; pressuring the vice president to violate the Constitution; and calling for the march on the Capitol.

But the majority reversed the part of the trial judge’s decision that said the Section 3 provision did not bar Trump from seeking reelection.

That view has its critics. In an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal in September, Michael B. Mukasey, who served as attorney general under President George W. Bush, wrote that Section 3 is limited to people who had taken an oath to support the Constitution “as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state.”

The only category that even arguably applies to Trump is “an officer of the United States,” Mukasey wrote. But that phrase, he asserted, “refers only to appointed officials, not to elected ones.”

In a law review article first published in August, William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas, disagree with Mukasey.

Their article concluded that “the ordinary sense of the text” of the Constitution, “the structure and logic of its provisions,” “the evident design to be comprehensive,” “the seeming absurdity of the prospect of exclusion of the offices of president and vice president from triggering the disqualification” and other factors “all convince us that the natural conclusion is the correct one: Section 3 includes in its coverage, or ‘triggering’ language, insurrectionists who once served as president and vice president.”

They added that “a reading that renders the document a ‘secret code’ loaded with hidden meanings discernible only by a select priesthood of illuminati is generally an unlikely one.”

Other scholars, notably Josh Blackman of South Texas College of Law Houston and Seth Barrett Tillman of Maynooth University in Ireland, say that Section 3 does not cover Trump. There is, they wrote, “substantial evidence that the president is not an ‘officer of the United States’ for purposes of Section 3.”

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the presidency is covered by the provision. “President Trump asks us to hold that Section 3 disqualifies every oath-breaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land. Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3.”

The state Supreme Court addressed several other issues. Congress does not need to act to disqualify candidates, it said. Trump’s eligibility is not the sort of political question that is outside the competence of courts. The House’s Jan. 6 report was properly admitted into evidence. Trump’s speech that day was not protected by the First Amendment, it said.

The court added that states are authorized under the Constitution to assess the qualifications of presidential candidates. “Were we to adopt President Trump’s view,” the majority wrote, “Colorado could not exclude from the ballot even candidates who plainly do not satisfy the age, residency and citizenship requirements” of the Constitution.

The case reminded some election law scholars of Bush v. Gore, the 2000 decision that handed the presidency to Bush.

“Once again the Supreme Court is being thrust into the center of a U.S. presidential election,” said Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But, unlike in 2000, the general political instability in the United States makes the situation now much more precarious.”

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It was in early October when Donald Trump first started using anti-immigrant rhetoric that echoed Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” The former president told a conservative outlet, in reference to migrants entering the United States, “Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from. … It’s poisoning the blood of our country.”

The rhetoric, not surprisingly, sparked immediate pushback, but the Republican front-runner, confident that the GOP base would embrace such rhetoric, quickly added the phrasing to his repertoire. Indeed, he spent the weekend repeating the line, both at rallies and by way of his social media platform.

Trump apparently came to realize that he was echoing notorious fascists, so at his last Iowa rally, the former president offered new reassurances. NBC News reported:

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday doubled down on his widely criticized comments about immigration by suggesting that people crossing the border illegally into the United States are “destroying the blood of our country.” … Trump brushed off the comparison to Hitler during Tuesday’s event in Iowa, saying that he “never read Mein Kampf,” and that Hitler made the comment “in a much different way.”

The way the candidate delivered the line, he apparently thought his audience would feel better about him using Nazi-like rhetoric if he dismissed the idea that he’d read Hitler’s book.

There are a few angles to this that are worth keeping in mind.

First, it’s very easy to believe that Trump hasn’t read “Mein Kampf,” given that the former president isn’t much of a reader. I’m hard-pressed to imagine him reading any book from cover to cover. But it’s also irrelevant: Nearly a century later, it’s not difficult to know the core elements of the book without having read it.

Indeed, Trump apparently has some familiarity with the text: He told his Iowa audience that when Hitler referenced immigrants poisoning German blood, the monster made the comment “in a much different way” — suggesting some familiarity with the text.

Second, in 1990, Trump told Vanity Fair his “friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew,” adding that his friend thought he’d find it “interesting.” (For his part, Davis said he wasn’t Jewish and he’d given Trump a book about Hitler, not “Mein Kampf.”)

But even if we put those relevant details aside, let’s not miss the forest for the trees. As 2023 comes to a close, American politics has reached the point at which the Republican Party’s likely presidential nominee echoes Adolf Hitler with such frequency that he felt the need to deny publicly that he’d read “Mein Kampf.”

This is where we find ourselves as a nation. This is what the GOP has come to.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but when an American presidential candidate finds it necessary to tell the public that he hasn’t read Hitler’s book, that ought to be a flashing red light that there’s something fundamentally wrong with his candidacy for national office.

It was roughly 24 hours ago when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke on the chamber’s floor about what the final steps members would take before leaving for the holidays. Near the top of the list: Confirming the remaining military nominees who’d been subjected to Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s blockade.

“We’re not quite done yet,” the New York Democrat said. “There are still 11 nominees that are awaiting confirmation. We will not leave town until every last one of these delayed nominees is finally confirmed. I hope we can do so quickly.”

Soon after, the far-right Alabaman, who largely abandoned his radical scheme a couple of weeks ago, suggested to Politico that he was prepared to drop the remainder of his holds. By the end of the day, Tuberville’s blockade was finally and completely over. NBC News reported:

The Senate on Tuesday unanimously confirmed the remaining service members whose promotions had been held up by Sen. Tommy Tuberville as part of his protest against the Defense Department’s abortion policy. “These 11 flag officers have now been approved, joining the rest of their colleagues who we approved a few weeks ago. That’s good news,” said Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on the Senate floor.

When the Alabama Republican backed off his blockade earlier this month, he narrowed the focus of his tactic: Tuberville said he would only maintain holds on military officers up for four-star positions. It was never altogether clear why, exactly, he wanted to delay these highly decorated servicemembers, but the GOP senator apparently thought he might be able to leverage their nominations for some kind of concessions.

That didn’t happen.

Indeed, as the entire fiasco comes to an ignominious end, this remains one of the most important takeaways of the unnecessary ordeal: Tuberville spent 10 months undermining his own country’s armed forces, and he has nothing to show for it.

In early December, the Republican was asked whether he had any regrets. “It was pretty much a draw,” Tuberville said. “I mean, they didn’t get what they wanted. We didn’t get what we wanted.”

That didn’t make any sense. The whole point of Tuberville’s tantrum was opposition to the Pentagon providing travel reimbursements to U.S. troops who need reproductive care in red states. The GOP lawmaker said he’d continue to hurt the military until the Pentagon changed its policy.

The Pentagon never changed its policy. On the contrary, the Defense Department refused to pay a ransom, and Tuberville ultimately backed down. “Draw” isn’t the first word that comes to mind.

As the dust settles on the debacle, some might want to see this as an all’s-well-that-ends-well story, but it’s not. For one thing, it’s going to take time for the armed forces to recover from the effects of Tuberville’s blockade.

But reiterating a point we discussed a couple of weeks ago, no one should be surprised if there are lasting effects for Tuberville personally. The Alabama Republican’s reputation on Capitol Hill wasn’t great headed in 2023, and after spending a year hurting the U.S. military during international crises, he shouldn’t expect to end up on any “Most Respected Members of Congress” lists anytime soon.

Indeed, it was just last month when several Senate Republicans decided they’d seen enough of Tuberville’s blockade, and they publicly accused the coach-turned-politician of, among other things, being dishonest, damaging the military during international crises, assisting U.S. adversaries abroad, and relying on tactics that were “ridiculous” and “dumb.”

Or put another way, the Alabaman didn’t just needlessly hurt the military, he also did lasting harm to his own credibility and stature, in exchange for nothing.

For his part, when President Joe Biden issued a written statement celebrating the end of the blockade, the Democrat said, “In the end, this was all pointless. Senator Tuberville, and the Republicans who stood with him, needlessly hurt hundreds of servicemembers and military families and threatened our national security — all to push a partisan agenda. I hope no one forgets what he did.”

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

DENVER (AP) — A divided Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday declared former President Donald Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot, setting up a likely showdown in the nation’s highest court to decide whether the front-runner for the GOP nomination can remain in the race.

The decision from a court whose justices were all appointed by Democratic governors marks the first time in history that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate.

“A majority of the court holds that Trump is disqualified from holding the office of president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,” the court wrote in its 4-3 decision.

Colorado’s highest court overturned a ruling from a district court judge who found that Trump incited an insurrection for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but said he could not be barred from the ballot because it was unclear that the provision was intended to cover the presidency.

The court stayed its decision until Jan. 4, or until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the case. Colorado officials say the issue must be settled by Jan. 5, the deadline for the state to print its presidential primary ballots.

“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” wrote the court’s majority. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”

Trump’s attorneys had promised to appeal any disqualification immediately to the nation’s highest court, which has the final say about constitutional matters.

Trump’s legal spokeswoman Alina Habba said in a statement Tuesday night: “This ruling, issued by the Colorado Supreme Court, attacks the very heart of this nation’s democracy. It will not stand, and we trust that the Supreme Court will reverse this unconstitutional order.”

Trump didn’t mention the decision during a rally Tuesday evening in Waterloo, Iowa, but his campaign sent out a fundraising email citing what it called a “tyrannical ruling.”

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel labeled the decision “Election interference” and said the RNC’s legal team intends to help Trump fight the ruling.

Trump lost Colorado by 13 percentage points in 2020 and doesn’t need the state to win next year’s presidential election. But the danger for the former president is that more courts and election officials will follow Colorado’s lead and exclude Trump from must-win states.

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed nationally to disqualify Trump under Section 3, which was designed to keep former Confederates from returning to government after the Civil War. It bars from office anyone who swore an oath to “support” the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it, and has been used only a handful of times since the decade after the Civil War.

“I think it may embolden other state courts or secretaries to act now that the bandage has been ripped off,” Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor who has closely followed the Section 3 cases, said after Tuesday’s ruling. “This is a major threat to Trump’s candidacy.”

The Colorado case is the first where the plaintiffs succeeded. After a weeklong hearing in November, District Judge Sarah B. Wallace found that Trump indeed had “engaged in insurrection” by inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and her ruling that kept him on the ballot was a fairly technical one.

Trump’s attorneys convinced Wallace that, because the language in Section 3 refers to “officers of the United States” who take an oath to “support” the Constitution, it must not apply to the president, who is not included as an “officer of the United States” elsewhere in the document and whose oath is to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution.

The provision also says offices covered include senator, representative, electors of the president and vice president, and all others “under the United States,” but doesn’t name the presidency.

The state’s highest court didn’t agree, siding with attorneys for six Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters who argued that it was nonsensical to imagine that the framers of the amendment, fearful of former confederates returning to power, would bar them from low-level offices but not the highest one in the land.

“President Trump asks us to hold that Section 3 disqualifies every oathbreaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath-breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land,” the court’s majority opinion said. “Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3.”

The left-leaning group that brought the Colorado case, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, hailed the ruling.

“Our Constitution clearly states that those who violate their oath by attacking our democracy are barred from serving in government,” its president, Noah Bookbinder, said in a statement.

Trump’s attorneys also had urged the Colorado high court to reverse Wallace’s ruling that Trump incited the Jan. 6 attack. His lawyers argued the then-president had simply been using his free speech rights and hadn’t called for violence. Trump attorney Scott Gessler also argued the attack was more of a “riot” than an insurrection.

That met skepticism from several of the justices.

“Why isn’t it enough that a violent mob breached the Capitol when Congress was performing a core constitutional function?” Justice William W. Hood III said during the Dec. 6 arguments. “In some ways, that seems like a poster child for insurrection.”

In the ruling issued Tuesday, the court’s majority dismissed the arguments that Trump wasn’t responsible for his supporters’ violent attack, which was intended to halt Congress’ certification of the presidential vote: “President Trump then gave a speech in which he literally exhorted his supporters to fight at the Capitol,” they wrote.

Colorado Supreme Court Justices Richard L. Gabriel, Melissa Hart, Monica Márquez and Hood ruled for the petitioners. Chief Justice Brian D. Boatright dissented, arguing the constitutional questions were too complex to be solved in a state hearing. Justices Maria E. Berkenkotter and Carlos Samour also dissented.

“Our government cannot deprive someone of the right to hold public office without due process of law,” Samour wrote in his dissent. “Even if we are convinced that a candidate committed horrible acts in the past — dare I say, engaged in insurrection — there must be procedural due process before we can declare that individual disqualified from holding public office.”

The Colorado ruling stands in contrast with the Minnesota Supreme Court, which last month decided that the state party can put anyone it wants on its primary ballot. It dismissed a Section 3 lawsuit but said the plaintiffs could try again during the general election.

In another 14th Amendment case, a Michigan judge ruled that Congress, not the judiciary, should decide whether Trump can stay on the ballot. That ruling is being appealed. The liberal group behind those cases, Free Speech For People, also filed another lawsuit in Oregon seeking to bounce Trump from the ballot there.

Both groups are financed by liberal donors who also support President Joe Biden. Trump has blamed the president for the lawsuits against him, even though Biden has no role in them, saying his rival is “defacing the constitution” to try to end his campaign.

Trump’s allies rushed to his defense, slamming the decision as “un-American” and “insane” and part of a politically-motivated effort to destroy his candidacy.

“Four partisan Democrat operatives on the Colorado Supreme Court think they get to decide for all Coloradans and Americans the next presidential election,” House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik said in a statement.

___

Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.

The only question is whether American citizens today can uphold that commitment.

By J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe

Illustration by Jared Bartman / The Atlantic. Sources: Chip Somodevilla / Getty; U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

As students of the United States Constitution for many decades—one of us as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, the other as a professor of constitutional law, and both as constitutional advocates, scholars, and practitioners—we long ago came to the conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment, the amendment ratified in 1868 that represents our nation’s second founding and a new birth of freedom, contains within it a protection against the dissolution of the republic by a treasonous president.

This protection, embodied in the amendment’s often-overlooked Section 3, automatically excludes from future office and position of power in the United States government—and also from any equivalent office and position of power in the sovereign states and their subdivisions—any person who has taken an oath to support and defend our Constitution and thereafter rebels against that sacred charter, either through overt insurrection or by giving aid or comfort to the Constitution’s enemies.

The historically unprecedented federal and state indictments of former President Donald Trump have prompted many to ask whether his conviction pursuant to any or all of these indictments would be either necessary or sufficient to deny him the office of the presidency in 2024.

Quinta Jurecic: Trump discovers that some things are actually illegal

Having thought long and deeply about the text, history, and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause for much of our professional careers, both of us concluded some years ago that, in fact, a conviction would be beside the point. The disqualification clause operates independently of any such criminal proceedings and, indeed, also independently of impeachment proceedings and of congressional legislation. The clause was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government or by waging war on our government by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup.

The former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol, place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause, and he is therefore ineligible to serve as president ever again. The most pressing constitutional question facing our country at this moment, then, is whether we will abide by this clear command of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause.

We were immensely gratified to see that a richly researched article soon to be published in an academic journal has recently come to the same conclusion that we had and is attracting well-deserved attention outside a small circle of scholars—including Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Anjani Jain of the Yale School of Management, whose encouragement inspired us to write this piece. The evidence laid out by the legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen in “The Sweep and Force of Section Three,” available as a preprint, is momentous. Sooner or later, it will influence, if not determine, the course of American constitutional history—and American history itself.

Written with precision and thoroughness, the article makes the compelling case that the relevance of Section 3 did not lapse with the passing of the generation of Confederate rebels, whose treasonous designs for the country inspired the provision; that the provision was not and could not have been repealed by the Amnesty Act of 1872 or by subsequent legislative enactments; and that Section 3 has not been relegated by any judicial precedent to a mere source of potential legislative authority, but continues to this day by its own force to automatically render ineligible for future public office all “former office holders who then participate in insurrection or rebellion,” as Baude and Paulsen put it.

Among the profound conclusions that follow are that all officials who ever swore to support the Constitution—as every officer, state or federal, in every branch of government, must—and who thereafter either “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution or gave “aid and comfort to the enemies” of that Constitution (and not just of the United States as a sovereign nation) are automatically disqualified from holding future office and must therefore be barred from election to any office.

Regardless of partisan leaning or training in the law, all U.S. citizens should read and consider these two simple sentences from Section 3:

The Fourteenth Amendment was promulgated and ratified in the context of postbellum America when, even after losing the Civil War, southern states were sending men to Congress who had held prominent roles in the Confederacy or otherwise supported acts of rebellion or insurrection against the United States.

The two of us have long believed, and Baude and Paulsen have now convincingly demonstrated, that notwithstanding its specific historical origin, Section 3 is no anachronism or relic from the past; rather, it applies with the same force and effect today as it did the day it was ratified—as does every other provision, clause, and word of the Constitution that has not been repealed or revised by amendment.

Baude and Paulsen also conclude that Section 3 requires no legislation, criminal conviction, or other judicial action in order to effectuate its command. That is, Section 3 is “self-executing.” (Other scholars have relied on Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase’s poorly reasoned opinion in an 1869 case called In Re Griffin to support the contrary view. Baude and Paulsen decisively dismantle Griffin as a precedent.)

They conclude further that disqualification pursuant to Section 3 is not a punishment or a deprivation of any “liberty” or “right” inasmuch as one who fails to satisfy the Constitution’s qualifications does not have a constitutional “right” or “entitlement” to serve in a public office, much less the presidency. (For that reason, they argue that the section, although it does not entirely override preexisting limits on governmental power, such as the First Amendment’s ban on abridgments of the freedom of speech, powerfully affects their application.) Finally, the authors conclude that Section 3 is “expansive and encompassing” in what it regards as “insurrection or rebellion” against the constitutional order and “aid and comfort to the enemies” of the United States.

Baude and Paulsen are two of the most prominent conservative constitutional scholars in America, and both are affiliated with the Federalist Society, making it more difficult for them to be dismissed as political partisans. Thus it is all the more significant and sobering that they do not hesitate to draw from their long study of the Fourteenth Amendment’s text and history the shattering conclusion that the attempted overturning of the 2020 presidential election and the attack on the Capitol, intended to prevent the joint session from counting the electoral votes for the presidency, together can be fairly characterized as an “insurrection” or “rebellion.” They write:

At the time of the January 6 attack, most Democrats and key Republicans described it as an insurrection for which Trump bore responsibility. We believe that any disinterested observer who witnessed that bloody assault on the temple of our democracy, and anyone who learns about the many failed schemes to bloodlessly overturn the election before that, would have to come to the same conclusion. The only intellectually honest way to disagree is not to deny that the event is what the Constitution refers to as “insurrection” or “rebellion,” but to deny that the insurrection or rebellion matters. Such is to treat the Constitution of the United States as unworthy of preservation and protection.

Baude and Paulsen embrace the “idea that men and women who swore an oath to support the Constitution as government officials, but who betrayed that oath by engaging in or abetting acts of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, should be disqualified from important positions of government power in the future (unless forgiven by supermajorities of both houses of Congress).” To them, as to us, this will forever “remain a valid, valuable,” and “vital precept” for America.

Section 3’s disqualification clause has by no means outlived its contemplated necessity, nor will it ever, as the post–Civil War Framers presciently foresaw. To the contrary, this provision of our Constitution continues to protect the republic from those bent on its dissolution. Every official who takes an oath to uphold the Constitution, as Article VI provides every public official must, is obligated to enforce this very provision.

The Baude-Paulsen article has already inspired a national debate over its correctness and implications for the former president. The former federal judge and Stanford law professor Michael McConnell cautions that “we are talking about empowering partisan politicians such as state Secretaries of State to disqualify their political opponents from the ballot … If abused, this is profoundly anti-democratic.” He also believes, as we do, that insurrection and rebellion are “demanding terms, connoting only the most serious of uprisings against the government,” and that Section 3 “should not be defined down to include mere riots or civil disturbances.” McConnell worries that broad definitions of insurrection and rebellion, with the “lack of concern about enforcement procedure … could empower partisans to seek disqualification every time a politician supports or speaks in support of the objectives of a political riot.”

We share these concerns, and we concur that the answer to them lies in the wisdom of judicial decisions as to what constitutes “insurrection,” “rebellion,” or “aid or comfort to the enemies” of the Constitution under Section 3.

As a practical matter, the processes of adversary hearing and appeal will be invoked almost immediately upon the execution and enforcement of Section 3 by a responsible election officer—or, for that matter, upon the failure to enforce Section 3 as required. When a secretary of state or other state official charged with the responsibility of approving the placement of a candidate’s name on an official ballot either disqualifies Trump from appearing on a ballot or declares him eligible, that determination will assuredly be challenged in court by someone with the standing to do so, whether another candidate or an eligible voter in the relevant jurisdiction. Given the urgent importance of the question, such a case will inevitably land before the Supreme Court, where it will in turn test the judiciary’s ability to disentangle constitutional interpretation from political temptation. (Additionally, with or without court action, the second sentence of Section 3 contains a protection against abuse of this extraordinary power by these elections officers: Congress’s ability to remove an egregious disqualification by a supermajority of each House.)

The entire process, with all its sometimes frail but thus far essentially effective constitutional guardrails, will frame the effort to determine whether the threshold of “insurrection” or “rebellion” was reached and which officials, executive or legislative, were responsible for the January 6 insurrection and the broader efforts to reverse the election’s results.

The process that will play out over the coming year could give rise to momentary social unrest and even violence. But so could the failure to engage in this constitutionally mandated process. For our part, we would pray for neither unrest nor violence from the American people during a process of faithful application and enforcement of their Constitution.

If Donald Trump were to be reelected, how could any citizen trust that he would uphold the oath of office he would take upon his inauguration? As recently as last December, the former president posted on Truth Social his persistent view that the last presidential election was a “Massive Fraud,” one that “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

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No person who sought to overthrow our Constitution and thereafter declared that it should be “terminated” and that he be immediately returned to the presidency can in good faith take the oath that Article II, Section 1 demands of any president-elect “before he enter on the Execution of his Office.”

We will not attempt to express this constitutional injunction better than did George Washington himself in his “Farewell Address” to the nation, in 1796:

Our first president may well have been our most prescient. His fears about “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” have, over the centuries, proved all too well founded. But his even stronger hopes for the republic were not misplaced. Still today, the Constitution, through its Reconstruction Amendments, contains a safeguard that it originally lacked—a safeguard against the undermining of our constitutional democracy and the rule of law at the hands of those whose lust for power knows no bounds.

The men who framed and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment entrusted to us, “the People of the United States,” the means to vigilantly protect against those who would make a mockery of American democracy, the Constitution, the rule of law—and of America itself. It fell to the generations that followed to enforce our hallowed Constitution and ensure that our Union endures. Today, that responsibility falls to us.