Alexander S. Vindman ❎ Retweeted
Michael Kofman @KofmanMichael
I think this video, which just appeared, helps settle some of the confusion on forces involved. That said, the conversation is remarkable. And this is happening barely a day later.

Rob Lee @RALee85 · 41m
Video of Yevgeny Prigozhin meeting with Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov at the Southern Military District HQ.
https://t.me/grey_zone/19270

12:37 AM · Jun 24, 2023

Rob Lee
@RALee85
·
13m
The other official is Deputy Chief of the GRU/GU Vladimir Alekseev who was in charge of forming PMCs and coordinating with them for the MoD. Prigozhin clearly wanted to make a point that he isn't subordinate to a Deputy Defense Minister or Deputy Chief of the GRU. 2/
Rob Lee
@RALee85
·
8m
And Yevkurov is a well-know figure. He was a VDV officer and received the Hero of Russia award for the Dash to Pristina. Prigozhin clearly wants to make clear that he is a higher status than these officials, comparable to Shoigu's level.
3/

max seddon
@maxseddon
·
24m
Replying to @maxseddon and @AndrKolesnikov
In another video posted shortly afterwards, Prigozhin says Wagner controls "the military facilities of Rostov, including the airport," but is not hindering operations in the invasion of Ukraine.

“We do it in such a way that the attack planes do not hit us, but the Ukrainians."
[video]

Alexander S. Vindman ❎
@AVindman
For all of those that have been wondering how the war in Ukraine is going, it’s going insurrection-in-Russia well. To be completely clear: this insurrection is the direct result of Russia’s disastrous military campaign.
9:29 PM · Jun 23, 2023

Alexander S. Vindman ❎
@AVindman
The question of why Prigozhin head to Rostov rather than Moscow is answered by the storming of the SMD HQ. It it the most strategic target in the South of Russia if you’re targeting the Ministry of Defense. Now that Prigozhin has the HQ does he consolidate or move on.
10:28 PM · Jun 23, 2023

Alexander S. Vindman ❎
@AVindman
The seizure of the SMD HQ and the potential consolidation of control over bases in the area has taken the insurrection into very dangerous territory. The SMD/ Operational Command South has slices of every single asset in Russia's arsenal including strategic assets.
10:41 PM · Jun 23, 2023

Alexander S. Vindman ❎
@AVindman
I’ve made the drive from Rostov to Moscow at least a dozen times. Voronezh is more than halfway to Moscow. If reports of Wagner fighting in Voronezh are accurate, then they are hours away from Moscow.
11:16 PM · Jun 23, 2023

Alexander S. Vindman ❎
@AVindman
We will know soon enough what Prigozhins plans are if his forces encounter the same limited resistance they faced in seizing key terrain in Rostov.
11:18 PM · Jun 23, 2023

Garry Kasparov
@Kasparov63
Don't wonder what will happen if Russia collapses. It already did! Years ago. It's not a state, it's a mafia front with factions fighting each other for money, resources, and power.
5:50 PM · Jun 23, 2023 · 1.1M Views

Whatever is happening now, it was already clear Putin wasn't able to control every faction or to keep the infighting quiet or at least non-violent the way he mostly could before.

The pointing fingers among Russian factions will increasingly be on triggers as Ukrainian victories multiply. The towers of lies will collapse and new, smaller ones built. Defeat will be denied, then blamed on rivals, then fake victory declared by the survivors.

Whoever keeps control, Putin or anyone else, will be faced with threats & instability. It is vital for the free world not to offer any lifelines to murderers. We do not expect democracy and liberty to suddenly flourish, but there can be no deals with Russian war criminals.

There will be attempts to use internal conflict as pretext for ceasefires, sanctions relief, and other charades to give Russia time to regroup and reload while occupying Ukrainian territory & continuing the terror. No.

Do not let whatever mafia show that is now out in the open in Russia distract from the goal of Ukrainian victory. It is time to accelerate, not hesitate. If you agree that "let them all lose" in Russia is ideal, the road to that is victory. Glory to Ukraine.

PS Please keep in mind that even more than usual, everything coming out of the Kremlin, and Russian generally, will be lies. It's instinctive and about control. Such people would not admit they were drowning to a lifeguard.

This is a big deal, said Railroad Department Director Al Russo, because the paid-sick-days issue, which nearly caused a nationwide shutdown of freight rail just before Christmas, had consistently been rejected by the carriers. It was not part of last December’s congressionally implemented update of the national collective bargaining agreement between the freight lines and the IBEW and 11 other railroad-related unions.

“We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.

“We know that many of our members weren’t happy with our original agreement,” Russo said, “but through it all, we had faith that our friends in the White House and Congress would keep up the pressure on our railroad employers to get us the sick day benefits we deserve. Until we negotiated these new individual agreements with these carriers, an IBEW member who called out sick was not compensated.” [snip]

That pressure, plus the IBEW’s ongoing efforts, is paying off at last. The IBEW and BNSF Railway reached an agreement April 20 to grant members four short-notice, paid sick days, with the ability to also convert up to three personal days to sick days. The union reached similar understandings with CSX and Union Pacific on March 22, and with Norfolk Southern on March 10. Unused sick time at the end of a year can be paid out or rolled into a worker’s 401(k) retirement account.

The trend is only continuing, according to Whitehouse. What he finds most troubling is an increase in the number of legal briefs, known as amicus briefs, that are filed without any financial disclosure to convince the justices to rule a certain way.

"The rule of the court purports to say that you can't hide behind a front group. There's almost no other situation in court where somebody is allowed to come in and not identify themselves, and yet there is conspicuous non-enforcement of that rule, and it deprives the public of seeing the coordination among the phony front groups," Whitehouse said, adding that he doesn't "understand why the court doesn't clean that up itself."

In the current term, hundreds of briefs tied to a slew of contentious cases have been filed to the Supreme Court. One highly-watched case, concerning a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, has attracted dozens of briefs that express support for or opposition to the law.

The thread running through Whitehouse’s spoken essays is that the current 6-3 conservative majority on the court is no accident but the product of special interests and dark money—hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymous hidden spending.

Whitehouse chose his title carefully. “It implies that this is not random,” he says. “This is not just, ‘Oh, we’re conservatives, and so we’re going to appoint conservative thinking judges,’ which is the veneer. They would like to maintain this is just conservatives being conservatives.”

He suggests that the model of “agency capture,” when an administrative agency is co-opted to serve the interests of a minor constituency, was applied to the supreme court. “Once you’re over that threshold of indecency, it actually turned out to be a pretty easy target. The other construct to bear in mind is covert operations, because essentially what’s happened is that a bunch of fossil fuel billionaires have run a massive covert operation in and against their own country. And that’s a scheme.”

A few months before the midterms, with pollsters spewing red wave predictions and post-Roe conservatives planning to force raped children to give birth, a bit of political news added to progressives’ gloom. A Chicago billionaire had gifted anti-abortion Supreme Court fixer Leonard Leo the largest known tranche of dark money in U.S. history: $1.6 billion. The sum is staggering; it will finance at least a generation of extreme right-wing political proselytizing. And almost no one—except for the conservative cabal that bagged the whale—had heard of him.

Pete Strzok
@petestrzok
Jun 9 • 5 tweets • 2 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
As bad as it is, it's quite possible the indictment does not include the most sensitive documents recovered from MAL. 🧵

The indictment charges 31 distinct classified documents (para 77):

21 Top Secret
9 Secret
1 unmarked

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0_2.pdf

1/
Those documents can be further defined by whether they were produced on June 3, 2022, in response to DOJ's subpoena vs seized during the search warrant on August 8, 2022 (see the ending date of offense for each item in para 77):

TS: 10 subpoena, 11 SW
S: 9 SW
Unmarked: 1 SW

2/
Image
Compare this with the total number seized.

Search (indictment para 75):
17 TS*
55 S
31 C

Subpoena (DOJ Aug 30 filing, link):
17 TS
16 S
5 C

Total classified:
34 TS (21 charged)
71 S (9 charged)
36 C (0 charged)

https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/government-response-to-motion-for-special-master-august-30-2022.pdf

* DOJ claimed 18 TS in a 9/26 filing

3/
DOJ recovered 13 TS documents which weren't charged.

Why? For each of the charged documents, DOJ has received authority from the agency owning the information (para 21 lists CIA, DOD, NSA, NGA, NRO, DOE, and State/INR) to use the material in criminal proceedings.

4/
Image
It's possible the remaining 13 were too sensitive: the risk to sources and methods and/or other damage to national security outweighed allowing their use and possible disclosure at trial.

So as you assess how damaging Trump's actions were, keep in mind it's probably worse.

/end

These bills are particularly salient to transgender people, who are twice as likely to serve in the military as cisgender people. According to the 2015 US Transgender Survey, one in five transgender people have reported serving in the military. Issues that target transgender people in the military and transgender veterans are especially harmful due to the large impact they have on the community.

THREAD: 1 of 6. Trump’s comparison of his case with Bill Clinton’s sock drawer is not only incorrect, it is nonsensical. Here’s why.

The Presidential Records Act says presidential records belong to the government, not the individual who served as president. …

2. Presidential records in general are those made by or for the president for use in official business. The statute contains detailed definitions of what is and is not a presidential record. …

3. Bill Clinton’s recordings were from his own interviews, qualifying as diaries, which the Presidential Records Act says are not presidential records. No law precluded Clinton from keeping them. …

4. Trump is charged not with violating the Presidential Records Act, but instead with violating the Espionage Act. The records Trump is alleged to have illegally retained are agency records, such as records of the CIA, NSA, and Department of Defense, not presidential records. …

5. Moreover, these records are covered by the Espionage Act because of their content—information about the national defense, which could be used to the injury of the United States or advantage of a foreign nation—US nuclear program, military capabilities of US & allies, etc. 😱…

6. And Trump is being charged not only because he kept them, but because he obstructed the investigation and lied about what he still retained. This is evidence of consciousness of guilt. If he really believed he could keep them, he would not have needed to lie about it. END.

According to the plaintiffs, President Bill Clinton “enlisted historian Taylor Branch to assist him in creating ‘an oral history of his eight years in office,'” the court decision said. “In 2009, Branch published a book entitled, ‘The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President,’ based upon extensive conversations with President Clinton during his tenure in the White House and the events Branch observed when he was in the President’s office.” [snip]

The judge found, “I am of the opinion that the audio tapes created by Taylor Branch are personal records of President Clinton as defined by the PRA.” [more - worth the long read]

Cannon assumed her position in November 2020 shortly after Trump lost the presidential election. Before her lifetime appointment, she had not served as a judge and had very few opportunities to preside over federal criminal cases because the overwhelming majority of them — 98 percent — resolve with plea deals.

A Times analysis found that only four of the 224 criminal cases assigned to Cannon had gone to trial. The four cases, largely comprised of routine matters including assaulting a prosecutor, amounted to just 14 total days of trial. [snip]

Several lawyers who have appeared before Cannon described her as "generally competent and straightforward" — as well as "someone who does not otherwise have a reputation of being unusually sympathetic to defendants." However, the sources, speaking anonymously to keep from publicly criticizing a judge before whom they may appear again, added that Cannon is "demonstrably inexperienced," particularly when unexpected issues arise or her actions are questioned.

Aileen M. Cannon, the Federal District Court judge assigned to preside over former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case, has scant experience running criminal trials, calling into question her readiness to handle what is likely to be an extraordinarily complex and high-profile courtroom clash.

Judge Cannon, 42, has been on the bench since November 2020, when Mr. Trump gave her a lifetime appointment shortly after he lost re-election. She had not previously served as any kind of judge, and because about 98 percent of federal criminal cases are resolved with plea deals, she has had only a limited opportunity to learn how to preside over a trial.[snip]

At the same time, they said, she is demonstrably inexperienced and can bristle when her actions are questioned or unexpected issues arise. The lawyers declined to speak publicly because they did not want to be identified criticizing a judge who has a lifetime appointment and before whom they will likely appear again.